‘Great. Thank you, Trish. I knew we could count on you. We can take it from here. You’ve done great, even if you were wrong about Crossman punishing her for the baby’s noise or vice versa. I never did find that very convincing, I must say.’
Trish nodded and went back into the interview room. Kim was still sitting with her small hands gripping the edge of the table. Trish gave her a wide berth before coming face to face with her, smiling.
‘I haven’t got any more questions now.’
The tight hands relaxed and blood rushed back up under the nailbeds, making the pale-yellow flesh dark red.
‘And you will be safe with Mrs Critch.’
The foster mother caught Trish’s eye and nodded. Andrew had said she was one of their most experienced emergency carers, with an unblemished record and huge reserves of kindness and warmth. If anyone could make Kim feel safe in her bed at night, it would be Mrs Critch.
‘I hope I’ll see you again soon, Kim,’ Trish went on, ‘but I have to say goodbye now. Thank you for being so brave.’
More tears hung on the edge of her eyelids and Trish cursed herself for the choice of words. Terms like bravery, courage, grit would have been part of any retired sergeant’s lexicon, along with their opposites. Had Kim’s stepfather shouted at her for being such a little coward, a noisy snivelling little coward, for crying in her nightmares, before he’d forced her to strip and stand on the box at the end of his bed?
Trish understood just how DC Pete Hartland felt. She wanted Daniel Crossman to pay for what he’d done. Even more, she wanted to whisk Kim away to safety. For a dangerous moment, Trish thought of the sense of security she’d managed to give David and longed to take on Kim, too. But she knew she couldn’t. She had to smile with the easy, uninvolved affection that was all she could safely offer, and back away.
‘Oh, Trish!’ Colin’s voice caught at her two hours later, just as she reached the last of the stone steps out of chambers. She paused and looked back.
‘Yes?’
‘You know you asked me to look up that journalist who died at the slaughterhouse? Jamie Maxden.’
She walked back up the steps to stand with him in the doorway. It wasn’t his fault she was feeling wrung out and longing to be on her own, or that she still had to deal with the video clip Will wanted her to look at tonight.
‘Have you discovered something?’ she asked, trying to sound excited.
‘A bit. You’re right: he was once quite famous for his work on the meat trade. Then he turned in a story that could have landed his paper with a vast libel claim and everything went pear shaped. The editor demanded proof. Maxden refused to name his source or provide any back-up evidence, and—’
‘Why?’
‘He said it was because the whole thing had been given to him off the record. He’d guaranteed anonymity, and he claimed the documents he had would identify the man – or woman, I suppose – who’d given him the information, so he refused to hand them over.’
‘Brave man.’
‘Or foolhardy. The editor promised he’d be backed to the hilt, so long as he could convince the lawyers the story would stand up. When he couldn’t provide a single shred of evidence, the editor decided he’d fabricated the whole thing, including the source. After that he couldn’t sell a report of a local flower show to a parish mag under his own name – hence his despair.’
‘So they really do think he killed himself, do they?’
‘Oh, absolutely. One last stand and a kind of “you’ll be sorry when I’m dead”. Apparently they’d been calling him Mad-Jamie-the-Meat for years. All the editors in London looked away when his name popped up in their email inboxes.’
‘I’m impressed. How on earth did you find all this out?’
‘A mate of mine, who’s a bit ahead of me at the Bar, is already reading The Times overnight for libel, so he’s well placed to ask these sorts of questions.’
‘Handy! D’you think he’d be able to find out why Maxden’s death wasn’t reported? It sounds like a pretty good story to me: crusading anti-meat journalist’s dramatic suicide outside abattoir.’
‘There’s nothing sinister,’ Colin said, looking pleased. ‘I’ve already asked about it.’
Trish could remember the first time she’d done something more than her pupil master had expected. She gave Colin all the approval that had been withheld from her then. He took it with admirable coolness. She was surprised and rather impressed.
‘Apparently,’ he said, ‘the discovery of the body was well reported in the relevant local paper, but none of the nationals picked it up from the press agencies. It was the same day as the Peckham cyanide scare, and that grabbed all the space.’
‘Cyanide?’ Trish felt as though bits of her mind were scattering in all directions, like rabbits startled by the sound of shooting.
‘You must remember,’ Colin said. ‘When they found a minilab, brewing up some ghastly poison-bomb thing for the tube.’
‘Oh yes. Of course.’ The reports had come out just as Trish was embroiled in all the last-minute work for the case. She’d barely had time to listen to the radio and hadn’t read a paper for days.
‘And it happened on a Tuesday.’ Colin looked as though he was enjoying himself now. ‘Apparently that makes a real difference. If it had been a Friday, they’d probably have run the story. For some reason there’s never much news to print on Saturdays.’ He grinned. ‘The whole system sounds weird to me.’
‘Even weirder than the Bar?’ she asked, thinking of the puzzled concentration with which he usually listened to older members of chambers.
‘Maybe not quite.’ He laughed. ‘But what could be?’
‘Not a lot. You’ve been really helpful. Keep that channel open. It could be seriously useful.’
‘To you or to me?’ Colin asked, showing unusual cockiness.
‘Both,’ she said with a smile. ‘I take it you won at squash yesterday.’
‘Yeah. Thrashed the bastard. Made up for my last four defeats.’
Trish laughed. So it was that and not her compliments that had given him this new confidence. ‘Well done.’
‘Thanks. Anything else I can do for you while I’m at it?’
‘I don’t think so. Not at the moment.’
Trish wasn’t accustomed to watching shaky video film, and this had been shot in a peculiar kind of monochrome, with odd shadows and strange gleams. It was a while before she realized it must have been filmed in the dark with some kind of infra-red camera. She could see a small plane standing in the middle of the field. That wasn’t at all hard to decode. The rest was trickier.
There were men running. It took two replayings for her to work out that there were only three of them going backwards and forwards. They didn’t look very different and the camera jumped about so much that they could have been a small army. At one moment the lens would point towards the plane, then sweep around a huddle of buildings, before catching the line of men or focusing on one at a time.
Luckily the tallest had a distinctive gait, lurching sideways with every step, which identified him in each of the six journeys in the film. Another had a tear in the back of his dark shirt. The third moved differently from the other two, as though he’d once been a sprinter. The others leaned forwards, hunched over as they ran, whereas he kept his head up, aiming his body and the force of his running at a fixed point. Someone had once trained him to race.
On every journey towards the plane the men carried something big and heavy. She couldn’t see what it was beyond the fact that each package was slithery. Sometimes one of the men would stop to push his load back, to rebalance it on his shoulder, before tucking his chin over the edge of it. It was hard to judge the length of the packages because of the foreshortening effect of distance. The bundles were wrapped in dark, shiny material. It could be black plastic, like a bin liner, but it was hard to see for certain. All the textures were fuzzy in the film, like the colours. There were really only light or dark. The me
n’s faces, which would definitely have been categorized as ‘white’, must have been different shades of pink or tan in reality. On the film they were a uniform silvery grey.
Something about the man with the tear in his shirt nagged at Trish and she played the film again and again, pausing at the point when he was running, unladen, towards the camera. Her face was almost touching the screen as she peered into it, trying to see his features more clearly. Only as the static sizzled between her nose and the screen did she remember that she had some kind of photographic program in the computer. It had been pre-loaded when she bought the system, and she’d never considered using it until now.
She tried the help key, but couldn’t get any help she could understand. The manuals that had come with the package were stacked in the bottom drawer of her desk. She fumbled around until she’d discarded the ones that explained the computer itself, the printer, the operating system, and the word-processing program. At last she found something that referred to the rest of the software.
The weirdly phrased instructions had her so frustrated that she was whacking her fists on the edge of her desk before she’d learned how to freeze one particular section of the video and then enlarge it. Tapping the keys again and again until the man’s face filled the whole screen, she found she’d gone too far. As she reduced the image, click by click, the face became distinct enough for her to recognize the features – and the aggression.
Without moving her gaze from the screen, she felt for her phone. Then she did have to look away from the man’s face; the number of Will’s sister’s house in Fulham wasn’t familiar enough to dial from memory. She must have it written down somewhere.
‘Oh, hello,’ she said when a woman had answered, brusquely reciting her number. ‘Is that Susannah? It’s Trish Maguire here.’
‘I’ll get him,’ the frosty voice said without any kind of greeting. Trish heard faint voices and the clanging of a heavy pan.
‘I seem to have upset your sister,’ she said when Will eventually came on the line.
‘It’s not you, Trish; it’s me. I woke her in the middle of last night and then today I ran her car dry of petrol, so when she tried to fetch one of the children this evening it wouldn’t start.’
‘Poor woman.’
‘Yes. And then she went to a lot of trouble to cook a special dinner tonight, and we’re only just eating it because her husband was late home from work, and now I’ve left the table in the middle of the main course. She’s pissed off with everyone. But it’s not your problem. Have you looked at the film?’
‘Yes. And I can see why you wanted me to see it. It’s that man from the abattoir, isn’t it? The one with the knife, who nearly stabbed you.’
‘What?’ The sound ripped into her ear and she moved the receiver a little way away. When Will’s voice sounded again, it was tinny with distance. She brought the receiver closer again. ‘Which man?’
‘The one with the rip in the back of his clothes in the video. Wasn’t that why you wanted me to see it?’
‘No. I just wanted you to see that Jamie Maxden had been filming people carrying carcasses to a plane in the middle of the night.’
‘Carcasses?’ she said, feeling sick. She’d managed to bury most of her memories of the slaughterhouse. Now they came rushing back.
‘Yes. Pork, I think, judging from the size.’
Trish started the film again, peering at the screen and using only one hand to hit the proper keys because the other still held the phone clamped to her ear. ‘Are you sure you’re not seeing what you want to see? They’re just long wrapped packages. You can’t possibly tell what’s inside them. Couldn’t they be chemicals of some kind?’ She thought of everything she’d learned during the background research for his case. ‘Illegal farm chemicals? There are a lot that have been banned but are so useful to farmers that they do sometimes buy them on the black market.’
Will laughed with a sound so harsh it reminded her that he’d once been a farmer himself and given up because of the conditions that had made it impossible to make a living from the land.
‘In theory I suppose they could,’ he said, ‘but it’s the shape and the weight that say these are carcasses. Look at the way the men are holding them. And at the way the packages bounce that little bit whenever the men’s right feet hit the ground.’
Maybe Will was right and the mysterious packages were sides of pork. The stance of these men was the same as the ones she’d seen at Smithfield this morning, with their right hands lying on the front of the animal, balancing the load. And the weight did look similar; she recognized the small bounce he’d pointed out too.
‘They’re sides of meat,’ he said. ‘I was always sure of it and now you’ve recognized the slaughterman, that makes it even clearer. He must be stealing from the abattoir and having the meat flown out in the plane you can see in the video. No wonder he looked as if he hated us. He must have thought we were on to him.’
‘Will …’
‘It’s bigger than just a few sausages, Trish. It must be. If Jamie was interested, it’s got to be a proper scam. They’re probably working with slaughterhouses all over the south of England. God, who’d have thought a poxy little sausage hunt would turn into something like this?’
‘Steady on, Will.’ Trish had to stop this fantasy before it did any damage. ‘There’s no evidence of anything like that.’
‘I know. That’s why—’ He broke off. Trish could hear a rumble of voices in the distance. ‘Trish, I’m going to have to go back to eat. But I need … I mean … Listen, you once said you’d do anything you could to help me. I don’t suppose you could lend me some money, could you? I hate asking, but I … Call it a kind of advance against the damages.’
If we get them, she thought. Most no-win no-fee cases involved the clients taking out insurance against losing. Not this one. No insurance company had been prepared to take the risk. If she and Antony didn’t win, she’d have earned nothing for months of work. There’d be no more flights to Australia for David. Even his school fees could be an embarrassment if she didn’t get another paying client quickly.
‘How much do you need?’
There was the hiss of indrawn breath, then Will said, mumbling over the figure, ‘Two hundred pounds, maybe. Is that … ? I mean, I know it’s cheeky, but it’s urgent.
‘No. That’s OK.’ It was a fleabite compared to what she’d thought he might ask. ‘I’ll leave it for you at chambers. Just ask the chief clerk. His name’s Steven Clay. But what—?’
‘I have to go. I’ll report when I get back. Don’t tell anyone about the video, will you?’
‘No. Will, what are you going to do?’
‘I’ll tell you later. Don’t worry, Trish. I know what I’m doing.’
The phone went dead in her hand. If past experiences with matrimonial finance cases hadn’t made her hate people who used money as a weapon, she’d have made her loan conditional on his telling her how he was going to spend it.
There might not be time to get it in the morning, she thought, if the first cash machine she tried had run out of funds. That happened sometimes. She collected her car keys and went out to get the car. There was no way she was going to walk around Southwark in the middle of the night with a couple of hundred pounds in her pocket.
When she got back she could hear the phone ringing from the top of her iron staircase as soon as she opened the door. She slammed it shut behind her and sprinted for the phone.
‘George?’
‘Yes. How are you? You’re panting. Have you been running? You must’ve been working very late.’
‘Yes, and no. Don’t worry about me at the moment. How are you? Is it going all right?’
‘Brilliantly! The weather’s OK, even though it’s winter down here. David’s happy. I don’t know when I last slept so well. In fact, Trish, if it weren’t for missing you, it’d be perfect. This is a wonderful place. We must make time to come out again together one day.’
She
stretched out on her soft black sofa, with a scarlet cushion under her head and a purple one under her feet, and listened to his voice pouring out enthusiasm. Her breathing slowed and her whole body softened.
After they’d shared all the news, he asked if she had yet had Sir Matthew Grant-Furbisher in the witness box.
‘No. Why?’
‘Just that I ran into someone in Sydney, who used to work for him years ago. She said she’d always wanted to play poker with him because it was so easy to tell when he was lying: he’d scratch around his right nostril; not picking his nose, you understand, just scratching away at the skin outside the nostril as though something had got stuck there. She said that if the lies were big enough, he could even draw blood.’
‘That’s exceedingly helpful, George. Thank you.’
‘Thought it might be. Now, David’s here. He wants a word.’
‘Trish? Is that you?’ His voice was light and jaunty, with a distinct Australian twang.
‘Hi, David.’ She squealed in pleasure at the sound of his perkiness. ‘How are you?’
‘Excellent. It’s really great here, Trish. The cousins are great. I like them all. And they like me.’ He sounded surprised.
‘Of course they do. Everyone does. I really miss you, you know.’
‘Me too. But are you all right?’
‘Just about surviving without you,’ she said. He laughed and said they were calling him, so he had to go.
As she put down the receiver, echoes of his new confidence made her think of Colin. Would he mind such a late call? She dialled his number.
He sounded quite wide awake, and untroubled by the interruption.
‘Colin, you know you asked if there was anything else you could find out for me?’
‘Yes. Have you changed your mind?’
‘Actually, yes. That is, if you’re really volunteering.’
‘Of course.’
‘Great. There used to be a craft abattoir in Kent, somewhere near Smarden, run by a family called Flesker. I think it went phut about five years ago. You wouldn’t like to see if you could find out what the problem was, would you?’
Keep Me Alive Page 16