Gagged & Bound

by Natasha Cooper

  Trish tried the landline at home and soon heard her own voice inviting messages.

  ‘Hi, David,’ she said after the beep. ‘It’s me. You must still be with Julian. I just wanted to tell you that the traffic’s awful, so I’ll be much later than I said. I hope you had a good day. Bye.’

  Then she tried George’s mobile. He answered it after three rings sounding distracted and busy.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ she said. ‘It’s me. I’m stuck in traffic, so I won’t be home till probably about six.’

  ‘Fine. I won’t make it by then. I don’t know when I’ll get out of here. See you when I see you. Sorry to be so brisk. Bye.’

  Smiling, she clicked off her phone. She knew exactly how he must have felt being dragged out of whatever he’d been concentrating on. Compared with her in the same situation, he’d been a miracle of politeness.

  Forty minutes later, she reached Southwark and parked in the street, trying to forget the ache in her head and the way she saw the imprint of lines of cars inside her eyelids each time she closed them.

  David was sitting at the table, reading. His head, propped up on his clenched fists, hung over the book. He didn’t look round. Puzzled, Trish dropped her keys in her bag and walked to his side.

  ‘David?’ she said gently. ‘David, what’s happened?’

  He let one hand slip so that he could wipe his nose, but he still didn’t look up. Trish needed to see his face. She took a chair opposite his, which gave her a better view. He had been crying, but there were no signs of injury. Breathing a little more easily, she said, ‘David, whatever it is, I’m sure I can help. Let me try.’

  He did look up then, more tears gathering in his eyes and spilling out. ‘My phone’s been taken. I’m sorry, Trish. I left it in my jacket pocket when I changed for rowing club, and it was just hanging on the peg.’

  Relief swelled in her. ‘Don’t worry so—’

  ‘I forgot to put it in my locker. It was my fault. We’re always being told not to leave valuables around at school because things often get nicked. I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Don’t worry so much. It’s not important.’ She walked round the table and pulled his head towards her, holding it lightly against her middle and stroking his silky black hair.

  ‘It’s OK, David. It really is.’

  ‘But there was still nearly twenty quid left on it.’ His voice was muffled by her clothes. ‘So it’s not just the cost of the phone.’

  How to reassure him without pretending that money didn’t matter? She felt his arms coming round her waist as he pressed himself against her. There was more to this than just the theft of his phone.

  ‘D’you know who took it?’

  He moved against her. She couldn’t be sure whether he was shaking his head or shuddering. He didn’t say anything. Pushing him to talk had never worked. She thought she’d better have a word with the head teacher first thing on Monday morning to find out what was going on, whether there’d been any signs of bullying in his class.

  ‘Look,’ she said, rubbing his head, ‘we’ll get you another one tomorrow. And I know you’ll use the locker every time now. You never make the same mistake twice; not about anything. You can paint another red enamel D on the new one and forget the old. In a week or two you won’t even think about it. Now, let’s decide what to do for supper. Would you like to go out? We could go to the pizza place, or the little French restaurant where we had pancakes.’

  He pulled away from her, shaking his head. ‘Couldn’t we just stay here? Please. I don’t want to go out. Or would you be bored?’

  ‘No. I’d love it. What would you like to eat? There’s lots in the freezer, or we could have a takeaway. You choose. Whatever you want.’

  ‘Will George be coming?’

  ‘He’s planning to, but he said he might be late. He’s been working today. Why?’

  ‘It’s just he loves curry and we haven’t had one for ages,’ David said, sounding a little more confident.

  ‘Good idea. The menus are all in the kitchen drawer. Why don’t you go and decide which one we should use and choose what we’re going to have while I change. OK?’

  ‘Sure. Great,’ he said with a ghost of his familiar smile.

  Dealing with the real problems wasn’t going to be half so easy.

  Chapter 8

  Saturday evening and Sunday 17 and 18 March

  ‘What a good idea, Caro,’ John Crayley said down the phone. ‘Lulu and I would love to come to dinner. And how civilised of you to invite us, when you and I are in such a tight competition!’

  Caro managed to laugh, she hoped convincingly, and said, ‘When I found myself wishing you at the bottom of the sea, I thought it was time to grow up. Then I remembered what good company you and Lulu are, and how we haven’t seen you for far too long.’

  ‘Great. It’ll be fun. We’ll see you on Friday. Oh, what colour wine shall I bring?’

  ‘You don’t need to bring any. But if you wanted to, then red probably. Whatever.’

  ‘OK. Red it’ll be. See you then.’

  Caro hastily dialled Trish’s number at home, and heard about the theft of David’s phone and how there was no point alerting the phone company, because it had been an unregistered pay-as-you-go one, and not much point reporting the theft to the local police, who wouldn’t be able to do anything anyway.

  ‘Poor lad,’ Caro said at once. ‘But it happens all the time. You’d better let the school know, but I agree there’s nothing much else you can do. I phoned because I’ve got my rival and his wife coming to dinner next Friday. I was hoping you and George might come too.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit risky?’

  ‘Probably. But I need to know if he’s real or not, so I’m prepared to take the risk for myself. That doesn’t mean you have to. We both know that Stephanie’s death may be – probably is – connected with what she’d been saying about him. I don’t want you to come if you’re afraid it could—’

  ‘That wasn’t the kind of risk I meant,’ Trish said quickly. ‘I was thinking about your chances of getting the job. I expect I can act innocent, and he’ll have no reason to fear me.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll find someone to have David to stay overnight. And I’ll have to check with George. He’s frantic at the moment, but I know he’d like to come if it’s possible. I’ll phone back as soon as I can.’

  ‘Great,’ Caro said, relieved that she wouldn’t have to make a judgement on John alone. ‘We won’t dress up; wear whatever’s comfortable.’

  ‘OK. But, Caro, I’ve been thinking. Didn’t you say that all the relevant agencies have the Slabbs under surveillance all the time?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then if there were any trace of a connection between your bloke and the Slabbs, wouldn’t they have found it?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘So isn’t it possible that poor Stephanie Taft was merely misreading his perfectly ordinary infidelity as something much more dramatic and dangerous?’

  ‘If I knew that, I could sleep at night. See what you think when you’ve met him. Bye.’

  Putting down the phone, Trish went back to the fat pile of Saturday newspapers, all of which were full of pieces about Stephanie Taft, the ever-growing violence on London’s streets, and the spread of guns. Pundits from both sides of the drug-policy argument inveighed against the other.

  One of the most fuddy-duddy of the right-wing male columnists had written a piece about women’s proper place in the world and the monstrous outrage of sending them to face armed criminals. Why men’s anatomy should make them any less vulnerable to the criminals’ bullets than women’s was not a question he addressed. Trish read to the end, fulminating about the silliness of traditional sexism.

  Only one piece suggested that Stephanie had brought disaster on herself, but there were bound to be more to come. Taking a contrary line and stirring up outrage were requirements for any successful columnist, and blaming the v
ictim of a crime like this always provided a cheap and easy means of getting noticed.

  Disgusted, Trish shovelled all the papers into a recycling bag and slung it down the iron staircase to rest beside the bins. Her hands were black with printers’ ink. As she washed them, she felt as though she was scrubbing off the self-interest and malice of the journalist’s piece.

  She went to check on David, who seemed happier and was playing one of his favourite computer games. Trish left him and fetched a doodling pad and pencil so she could work on ideas for rescuing Bee from Lord Tick.

  They hadn’t learned as much from Mrs Marton as Trish had hoped, not even how Jeremy had hooked up with his Baiborn in the first place. And there was nothing in any of the diaries to give her any clues. As Bee had suggested in the book, Baiborn, or someone working for him, must have heard of Jeremy’s hopeless attempt to publicise what X8 Pharmaceuticals had been doing in Africa and seen in it an opportunity to cause anti-capitalist mayhem. Baiborn must have engineered a supposedly chance encounter somewhere and found a way to make friends with Jeremy.

  It would be harder to do these days, with television cameras recording almost everything that happened everywhere except the deepest countryside. But at the beginning of the 1970s there’d been hardly any CCTV.

  Remembering other barristers’ stories of Oxford life, Trish decided the first pass had probably been made in a pub or at the Union, or even in one of the libraries. Plenty of undergraduates had made eyes at each other over their books in the Bodleian and achieved spectacular pick-ups. There was no reason why a terrorist shouldn’t have used the same means to recruit a new member of a cell.

  An apparently random encounter could explain why the police had found no trace of their meetings, but it was still strange that none of Jeremy’s fellow students had noticed anything. With the amount of gossip people like Robert Anstey still remembered and happily relayed from their days at Oxford, it seemed extraordinary that any friendship had escaped attention, yet no one had told the police anything about Baiborn.

  Footsteps on the iron staircase outside made her hope that George had beaten the Indian restaurant’s delivery. Otherwise, his share of the food David had selected with such care could be glutinously unpleasant by the time he ate it.

  ‘George?’ she called as she heard the door opening. ‘How was it?’

  She saw from his tightly frowning face that whatever he’d been doing had caused real problems. Presumably it was the young partner’s difficult deal. He looked as though he was going to be irritable for at least the next hour. Avoiding any more questions that might trigger an outburst, she merely smiled and told him she’d ordered a takeaway but that he might have time for a bath if he wanted one.

  He kept several sets of clothes in her flat, just as she kept some of hers in his house in Fulham. This evening, he shook his head and padded into the kitchen like a bear heading home after a fruitless hunting trip. Trish knew from long experience that all he wanted now was to forget his professional responsibilities and the spikes in his mind by chopping and mixing food to cook. Tonight, he couldn’t. David’s needs had had to take priority. She left George to sort himself out, while she went to make sure David knew he too would have to tread carefully for a while.

  George was slumped on one of the long black sofas when she returned. Normally glowing with health, his skin was yellowish, and his thick brown hair was unusually rumpled, as though he’d been tugging at it while he wrestled with some insoluble problem. A bottle of Rioja stood beside him, along with a small ceramic bowl of black olives. An empty glass awaited her. He had his, still three-quarters full, balanced against his chest, with both his hands loosely resting on the base.

  ‘I know it doesn’t go with curry,’ he said, without looking at her, ‘but I don’t feel like beer. And there it was in the kitchen looking at me. How was your day?’

  ‘Interesting,’ she said, decoding the question as a plea to make the evening ordinary and easy. She decided to suppress the loss of David’s phone and the possibility that he was being bullied at school. For the moment, the best way of avoiding an outburst of stressed-out bad temper would be to offer George nothing but soothing prattle so he didn’t have to think about anything.

  ‘I was chasing up this business of Jeremy Marton, talking to his mother and so on. She’s an impressive woman.’

  George grunted and lowered his head so he could take another gulp of wine without moving his arms. Trish hadn’t seen him as tired as this for a long time. She wished he’d tell her about whatever was bothering him, but she knew there was no point asking yet. Neither of them ever demanded information about the other’s work. It was a shared anxiety that one day they’d find themselves on the opposite sides of the same case and have to choose which of them would withdraw and risk losing a lucrative client.

  ‘And the name Slabb came up,’ she added. ‘I’m beginning to feel shockingly ignorant. Nearly everyone I talk to has heard about them, but I never have.’

  ‘Just what you’ve always hated most,’ George said with his eyes closed.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘It’s the one thing that can still really get you going.’ He lowered his lips to the glass again and sucked up some more wine. ‘As though you think there’s a conspiracy to keep you out of the loop.’

  ‘I don’t,’ she said, feeling an outrage that told her he couldn’t be completely wrong.

  ‘Don’t let’s argue about it now. Are you talking about the South London crime family?’ George said, showing the first signs of a return to his normal engagement with the world outside his head. He opened his eyes to look at her. She was glad to see the affection in their dark-brown depths. He smiled and some of the colour returned to his cheeks.

  It was a good face, she thought all over again, and thoroughly safe-looking with the squareness of the chin softened a little by its shallow dimple.

  ‘What do you know about the Slabbs?’ she said. Long ago, she’d understood how easy it was to ignore the most obvious sources of information. These days, she tended to ask questions of everyone around her whenever she was researching anything. She saw it as much the same technique as the police’s house-to-house enquiries. You’d gather a vast load of irrelevant information, but within it might well be the crucial fact that would lead you to the bigger truth you needed.

  It might also, she reminded herself, thinking of William Femur’s warning, land you in serious trouble. But not from George.

  ‘All I know about them, and the other families like them,’ he said, ‘is that I have to make damn sure the firm doesn’t take on work that involves them. It’s been a constant worry ever since I became senior partner.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen, is it? You do almost as little criminal work as we do these days.’

  ‘They have interests that shade into quasi-legitimate business. The men sell used cars and run scrap-yards and taxi firms, that sort of thing, while the women own nail parlours and tanning salons.’

  ‘Handy cash businesses for money-laundering,’ Trish said.

  ‘Precisely. And however many checks you make on new clients, you never really know where all their money comes from. It’s a nightmare.’

  Is that what’s making you so exhausted and irritable now? she wondered, as she said aloud, ‘So what kind of crime are the Slabbs involved in? Drug importing, presumably.’

  ‘That’s only part of it.’ His body was straightening as he talked. Soon, Trish thought, his skin would stop looking so yellow, and he’d be able to smile again. ‘They’re a nasty bunch, into everything that offers big money for minimal risk. Not like the old days when their forebears ran round with sawn-off shotguns and robbed post offices and security vans in the intervals between organising local protection rackets and a spot of illegal betting. They’re a lot more dangerous now. Where’s this food coming from? The North Pole?’

  ‘Should be here any minute,’ Trish said, just as David appeared from the bathroom, his black hai
r damp and clumped into points that stuck up all round his head.

  ‘Hi, George. I ordered you meat samosas, onion bhajis, lamb khybari and a peshwari naan. I hope that’s OK.’

  George dredged up a smile for David too. ‘Sounds great. Good, here they are at last.’

  ‘Don’t move, Trish,’ David said. ‘I’ll get the door.’

  ‘You’ll need money. My bag’s on my desk. Help yourself.’

  On Sunday morning Trish woke to see David staggering into her bedroom with a tray.

  ‘Breakfast in bed,’ he whispered, jerking his chin towards George’s sleeping form. ‘I’ll fetch the papers now.’

  George was awake by the time David came back with three heavy broadsheets in his arms.

  ‘Now, I don’t want to see either of you for at least two hours,’ he said severely, dumping the papers at the bottom of the bed.

  ‘Good man,’ George said, managing to sound serious as Trish hid her laughing face against his shoulder. ‘Have fun.’

  David slipped out of the room with a backwards wave. As soon as the door was shut, George let himself laugh too.

  ‘I haven’t felt so much under anyone’s thumb since I was about six,’ he said before he kissed her.

  ‘Look!’ Trish said a few seconds later. ‘He’s cooked us bacon sandwiches. What a little miracle he is!’

  ‘I never realised there was a gene for looking after people until David started doing it too,’ George said, reaching for a sandwich. ‘There are times when he’s so like you I find it hard to believe he isn’t a clone.’

  ‘I’m flattered,’ Trish said truthfully as she poured herself a big cup of coffee. ‘D’you want some?’

  ‘Not yet.’ George’s voice was muffled until he’d swallowed his mouthful of bacon. ‘You know, I feel a lot happier about our old age. If we both lose all our clients and our pension funds crash even further, we can put David to work in a sandwich bar. This is great.’

  ‘Exploiting monster,’ she said, leaning forwards to pull the papers further up the bed. ‘Which d’you want?’