by Janet Neel
‘Oh yes. I have been since … well, for the last three years. Hoping to make DCI one of these days.’
‘Come and have coffee,’ he said, resolutely ignoring the memories of the past, determined to treat her as a senior colleague.
‘I’d like that.’
‘Right. Well, let’s see if it’s stopped chucking it down.’ He looked round and realised that both women behind the reception desk and seemingly all the floating population on the ground floor were watching them with interest, envy or amusement. It had always been like that around Catherine, he remembered, and whisked her out of the door, regardless of the rain.
Seated opposite her, occupying himself with the business of ordering coffee and biscuits, he recovered his poise and managed to look at her properly. They had a brief but passionate affair, which she had broken off to return to her married lover, leaving him to go to Francesca, whom he had been courting for two years, and to insist that they get married. So in some sense he owed Catherine for the much loved little son he had left behind this morning. He bore her no grudge for the swift slap to his ego she had dealt by leaving him the moment the other man had whistled, but he did observe, with faint smugness, the absence of a wedding ring and the tiny lines around the wide eyes.
‘So tell me, where have you been? What have you been doing?’
‘Well, I did another couple of years in C after you went to Notting Dale. Then I transferred to the Fraud Squad. The hours are better.’
Then perhaps she was living with the bloke, even if not married, he thought, and tried to decide how to ask.
‘It didn’t work out with Dave.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘So I decided to change the job a bit, get some more time for myself. To get a life outside the Met.’
There was something missing in this account, he understood, but it would be wrong and counter-productive to probe. ‘Is fraud interesting? I’ve never been offered but it always looks like good work.’
‘Oh, it’s interesting all right. But dead frustrating a lot of the time.’
‘What are you working on now?’
‘It’s quiet at the moment. Tidying up the Anderson case. I will get him one day, so I want everything in good order. And there’s one we’re watching.’ She looked round casually, making sure that she could not be overheard. ‘One of these blokes who used to be a bent stockbroker, but the Financial Services Act put him out of business. There was a smell over a couple of things he’d done, and he was told he wouldn’t get a licence. So he went into travel and hotels … what … about three years ago.’
‘And people are losing money?’
‘We haven’t found any yet. But the whole thing looks dicey. You must have seen the ads, John? “Your dream holiday, for ever, one payment secures. Ring Price Fleming.”’
‘What, you mean timeshare?’
‘With a twist. You buy your two weeks, or whatever, and you can go to one of eight places in Majorca. That’s all right, or has been so far.’
‘So what’s wrong? The firm not doing well?’ He was only mildly interested, but he would cheerfully listen to her recite the London telephone directory for the pleasure of watching that beautiful face and for the envying looks he was getting.
‘We’ve had two or three complaints that people haven’t been able to get the places they wanted at the time they wanted. All dealt with … you know … apologies, offers of compensation, two weeks in the best hotel or your choice of anything a month later. Nothing really for anyone to moan about.’
‘But?’
‘But my Governor and I both keep thinking Barlow Clowes. And not just because the Price of Price Fleming looks awfully like Mr Clowes – big, burly chap, pleased with himself.’
‘Remind me.’
‘In the bad old days, before all the legislation, they advertised, offering gilt-edged securities at two or three points better than gilt rates. Everybody wanted to invest with them, particularly retired people.’
‘I remember,’ McLeish said, interested. ‘The whole thing went fine for years, as long as they could sell enough new bonds to pay the interest on the old ones. And lots of people who should have known better invested.’
‘That’s it. The music only stopped because too many people wanted interest, or their money out to do things with, at the same time. So the proprietors couldn’t sell new bonds fast enough to fund them. Nor the yachts, aeroplanes and other goodies they had bought with some of the cash. One of the things that put us on to this particular company – apart from the respectable oldie clientele – was the company yacht.’
Just for a moment you could hear the girl from the Liverpool council estate she had once been, John McLeish thought, as he ordered another cup of coffee each without consulting her. She was well capable of getting through three cups at breakfast.
‘You got a couple of complaints, you and your Governor, and started looking. Is that how it works?’
She shovelled sugar into her coffee in exactly the way he remembered, and he felt himself blush as she looked up at him. ‘Almost. We thought we’d got something when Teutens – you know, the solicitors – told us on the quiet about a client who has asked for her money back and it was being a bit slow to come. We were just going to do some work when the money came back. Then the headquarters – it’s in your old patch, in Kensington Church Street – was done over, safe cracked and a real mess. The head man – one William Price – said that nothing had gone, despite the mess. A loyal secretary had banked all the cash the evening before, and so on. Usually in those cases people claim everything and nobody’s been to the bank for weeks. Your old mob at Notting Dale caught it.’
‘I’ve been off in Hull for six months, doing a special,’ he said, apologetically. ‘So what happened in the end?’
‘Since the main victim wasn’t complaining Notting Dale stopped trying. Without us pushing them on, they wouldn’t have bothered at all. But they did look up their records and found that Mr Price’s son, Francis, is a druggie. Conviction for possession of Class A two years ago.’
‘So his father maybe thought it was the kid, and decided to protect him.’
‘It was his father turned him in the time he was done for possession before.’
‘Ah. So the better theory is that Mr Price senior was up to something he didn’t want looked at.’ He was still not overwhelmingly interested in this history but he was thinking about Catherine. She was thinner than she had been three years ago, which didn’t make her any less beautiful, but she had more of an edge, was working closer to her reserves than she had. She looked back at him, and he saw her make a conscious effort to relax, the thin, beautiful, long-fingered hands still clenched round her coffee cup.
‘I suppose you wouldn’t want a druggie son in the business either,’ he speculated helpfully. ‘Is anyone else in with him?’
‘There are three directors, him, Mr Fleming and Mrs Price. His wife – a second wife – but I don’t know how much she does. There’s another son, Antony, a doctor, but he doesn’t seem to be involved.’ She put the cup down and smiled at him. ‘You don’t really want to know all this, John, and it’s time we went back. We could have lunch next week if you like?’
He would indeed, he assured her promptly, and took her back through the chill rain to the Yard, wondering in a corner of his mind when to explain to his wife that Catherine Crane was again working only two floors away from him.
Matthew Sutherland ran up two flights of stairs, and pushed through an open door at the top of the narrow nineteenth-century terraced house. He sank heavily into an ancient, battered chair, whose springs were barely contained by its cover, and tried not to gasp for breath.
‘You’ll have to give up clubbing, Matt,’ the man behind the huge old partner’s desk said, through a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘Spoils the wind.’ He coughed, rackingly, and hunted amid the piles of papers for a cup half full of cooling coffee. ‘How did it go yesterday?’
‘We got the
order. Took twenty minutes but we waited till three thirty for the judge to get back from his country cottage. I came back but you were gone. I left you a note.’ He heaved himself out of the armchair’s massive embrace and peered suspiciously at the littered surface of the desk. ‘There. Silly me, I only pinned it down under the stapler – couldn’t have expected you to see it.’
‘Well, I know now.’ Peter Graebner, the head of the solicitors Graebner and Lewis, smiled at his only articled clerk, amused as always by the way the red hair prickled and stood up when Matthew was annoyed. ‘Any more news?’
‘Got another customer. Girl, Annabelle Brewster, beaten up by her bloke. Can we take her on?’
‘You got her from the Refuge, I take it. What’s the defendant called?’
Matt produced a grubby piece of paper from his coat pocket, stared at it crossly, stuffed it back in and got out of the chair with a sigh, then removed his coat and one jacket and started to search the pockets of the underjacket and waistcoat, unearthing a striking collection of bills and leaflets.
‘Do we need to sub you for a briefcase, Matt?’
‘Don’t be like that, Graebner. This is what I was wearing when I talked to the customer. He we are. Price, Dr Antony. Spelled without the “h” … well it would be, wouldn’t it?’
His senior partner stared at him, cigarette in mouth, eyes narrowed against the drifting smoke. ‘Mm.’ He stubbed the cigarette. ‘Got an uneasy feeling there.’ He had pulled a keyboard towards him and was gazing doubtfully at a computer screen on the extreme corner of the big desk. ‘Price, Beatrice, no, that’s a housing case. Price, Wilhelmina, that’s a deportation.’ He tapped the keyboard. ‘Wait a minute, Price, Mrs Sylvia, here it is. A Dr Antony Price, no h, bloke who brought her in after she’d had a beating. From her husband, one William Price. Father of this Antony. Six months ago. The beating, I mean.’
Matthew tried to look stern and unsurprised, but he was as always taken aback by Peter Graebner’s grasp of his practice. The man was a physical wreck, greying and stooped, with his chest rattling like the timpani section of an orchestra, but he had all his buttons on, as Matthew had instantly recognised when he had come as a trainee two years ago.
‘She got to court?’
‘No. Usual thing, we did all the papers, then she withdrew. Paid our bill though.’ It was indeed a familiar pattern; about sixty per cent of all cases under the Domestic Violence Act do not get to court. Peter Graebner considered the screen. ‘I remember her quite well. Pretty woman.’
‘We can act though, can’t we? It’s this Dr Antony wanker we’re suing, not his father, or his stepmother.’
‘Better not, Matt. Formally it’s just about OK. Bad practice though.’
You didn’t argue with Peter Graebner about things like that; it was his firm, built up over twenty-five years and a good one, its partners respected and feared for their efficiency, and Matt desperately wanted to be part of it.
‘What can I tell her? Dr Brewster, I mean.’
‘Just that we’ve had dealings with some of the Price family, no need to specify. Give her to Russell Marks, he’ll look after her.’ He considered his associate. ‘Fancy her, do you? Then we’re better not acting.’
‘That’s true.’ Matthew cheered up instantly. ‘Just hoped I’d made a contribution to the fee income, that’s all. And I wanted to do another of those cases. Never mind, I’ll give her a call.’
‘Matthew.’
‘Yes?’
‘When you qualify in June, we’re going to buy you a suit. We took a vote. Anything you want up to £70.’
Matthew looked across the awful desk, on which Peter Graebner could without fail find any piece of paper, no matter how old or trivial. ‘Am I going to stay, then?’
‘Yes, Matthew, if you want. Keep off the recreational drugs and you might even be made a partner in due course. Go and dispose of this young woman and come back with the O’Brien papers.’
‘Annabelle.’
She turned slowly, understanding that she had been half expecting him to turn up.
‘Go away.’
‘Annabelle, please.’
‘I’m late for surgery.’
‘It doesn’t start till nine, Annabelle, please. Just come and sit in the car. You’re getting wet.’
‘You must be joking.’
She had had an interesting three days, living in the Refuge. She had taken two days sick leave from her attachment to the GP practice, claiming a nasty case of flu, and refused the visit offered by one of the partners. She had spent much of the first day in the Refuge reassuring spotty children and their harassed mothers, occasionally retreating to her attic to sleep, waking to the noise of female voices, or children quarrelling, or screaming. There was always someone in the house weeping or shouting, she discovered. The women were not unsympathetic to each others’ plight, but they were unwilling to listen to other women deploying the same tactics of denial and rationalisation that they had themselves used. Experienced social workers tried not to interfere, no matter how bruising the dialogue, because a fellow sufferer carried more conviction than anyone else possibly could.
She had also managed to follow Matthew Sutherland’s uncompromising instructions to close the joint account she had had with Antony, open a new one somewhere else with £20 issued to her against a receipt from the Refuge funds and arrange for all future salary to be paid into that. Which had left her with nothing else to do but cope with sick children and listen to the horrifying histories of the other women in the Refuge. And one of the pieces of hard-won advice she had absorbed was the unwisdom of getting into a confined space with the bloke who had beaten you.
‘Sod off, Antony. You’ll be hearing from my solicitor if you haven’t already.’ Another thing she had learned was the pleasure of profanity, and a violent response from a position of safety. She watched him wince, knowing that she should walk through the surgery door and out of this scene but unable to give up the simple joy of being in command. Matthew had told her, somewhere in the course of the long night when they had worked together, that if she really wanted to get out of her situation she would not speak to Antony ever again except through a solicitor. But most women, he had added, couldn’t resist, they wanted to go on arguing the toss so they pushed it, usually getting themselves right back in the shit.
‘Will you at least let me buy you a coffee? Not that there is anywhere here, but …’ He looked helpless and miserable and wet, the dark, nearly black hair flattened to his head, and she hesitated, while he looked wildly round. ‘There’s a café there. I mean, if that’s all right. Please, Annabelle.’
He had said ‘please’ four times in five minutes, or more times than he had used the word in the last two years. Perhaps all it took was for her to stand up for herself.
‘Just for ten minutes then.’ His eyes went wide with relief and he moved towards her. ‘It would be better if I didn’t have to take you to court to get my money out of the joint account, and all my things.’
‘Look, there’s no question of that. Please, Annabelle, I need to talk to you.’
They hastened to the café, Annabelle keeping a careful distance behind him. He stopped at the door, obviously put off by the tiny crowded room with the strong smell of bacon and none too fresh fat against which a very small fan was labouring ineffectually. She watched in malicious pleasure as he opened his mouth to blast her for thinking of bringing him to such a place and then remembered what his situation was.
‘I’m afraid it’s a bit crowded.’
‘Fine by me.’
He made the best of it, she had to concede, finding a table and placing her at it while he quickly cleared the remains of three people’s breakfasts and a clotted ashtray, giving them to the girl at the counter with a quick smile so that her eyes followed him hopefully as he sat down. He looked exotic among the shabby, tired men getting their breakfast down. He was immaculately dressed, pale but shaved, with a clean blue shirt, bringing out the colour in
the dark blue eyes. She was still wearing the tracksuit she had found in the clothing cupboard, but she had a clean white cotton polo neck which Francesca had unearthed for her and she had washed her hair that morning. She was comfortable and she did not care if she was not meeting Antony’s standards of grooming.
‘I cannot tell you how worried I’ve been.’
Now that was typical, she thought, suddenly so angry that she could not speak. His face changed and he seized her hand.
‘Annabelle. I meant how worried for you. I came here on Friday but you’d called in sick. I rang all the hospitals. I rang the Refuge, but they wouldn’t even talk to me.’
‘Why do you think that was?’
‘Well … shit … well, I did think they could have been …’ He stopped, the long mouth tightly compressed, and stared down at his hands.
‘Where I have been,’ she said to the top of his head, ‘men who have beaten women so that they fled for their very lives ring up all the time, wanting to find them so that they can do it again.’ She reached, carefully, for her coffee, shaking with anger.
‘Annabelle,’ he said, hopelessly to the table, and she realised that he was crying. She clenched both hands round her coffee cup and looked over his head. (He always cried, she heard Denise saying wearily, squinting to avoid the smoke from the cigarette stuck to the corner of her mouth, which was never going to look the same since her husband had pushed a broken bottle in her face.) She sat, rigorously ignoring the curious stares, watching Antony find a handkerchief and blow his nose.
‘Sorry, Annabelle. I do understand – I’ve had four days to understand – that I have behaved like a hopeless shit and you’re not going to want to come back to me.’
She was surprised into looking at him properly, and saw that his eyes were red and that he looked suddenly exhausted. He put a hand tentatively on hers. ‘I’ve been under a lot of pressure I couldn’t tell you about – no, Annabelle, please, don’t look like that, it’s not meant as an excuse. It’s family things and I should never have got involved, and I’ve done things I can’t imagine how I came to do. Like clean out the joint account.’