‘Did she tell you his name?’
Gillian shook her head. ‘All she ever said was that he was married and didn’t want his wife to know. He would give her enough cash to keep her through the pregnancy but that was going to be the end of it for him.’
‘What about your husband? Didn’t he want to know whose baby he was taking in?’
‘He wasn’t keen on the idea at all; not at first. But he’s a good man, and he saw how much I wanted it. After a week’s thought – he always likes to take his time – he said “yes” and we made the agreement. I’d go to the country with Sally to look after her until she had her baby, and she would pretend to her parents that she was travelling round Australia.’
‘And they just let her go, without question?’ Trish said, forgetting her reasons for being here. ‘Without checking where she’d be living? At seventeen?’
‘Sally had a friend out there, who took a great batch of postcards from her to be sent back to her parents at intervals. It worked like a charm. They were satisfied she was safe and they never knew the true story.’
‘What happened when the time came for her to give you her baby?’ Trish asked, and was glad to see a wider smile than usual lighting Gillian’s face.
‘I’d been worried about that all along. You know, how she’d take actually going before the magistrate and signing the adoption papers and handing him over, but it was fine. She told me she felt as if a huge weight had been lifted off her. All she wanted, she said, was to go back to her own life, as a single, childless woman, and pretend she’d never met the baby’s father or any of his friends.’
Gillian wiped her eyes with a folded Kleenex from her pocket. ‘I’ve never forgotten how she said goodbye. We’d ordered a taxi to take her to the station. It was sitting in the road, just beyond the garden gate. She stood there in her neat little blue coat, with her silk headscarf tied in a great big knot on her chin, and her little blue leather suitcase by her feet, looking at the taxi, then back at me. I had the baby in my arms. She didn’t even look at him. She leaned right over him to kiss me and said she knew he’d be all right with me. She waited for a minute, then added all in a rush that she wished her own mother had been more like me.’
‘I’m glad,’ Trish said truthfully. ‘It sounds as though you did nearly as much for her as you’ve done for John. No wonder he’s been such a success. Did she ever try to make contact with you or him again?’
‘Never. That was the deal, and she stuck to it. Just as the father did.’
‘Good for them. Do you see much of John and his wife now?’ Trish asked, determined to get on to the subject of Stephanie Taft before Gillian had had enough of her.
‘About as much as any mother of a grown-up son with a demanding job.’
‘I’ve known several adults who were adopted as children, who’ve had real difficulty forming and sustaining relationships. I know that John and Lulu have been married only a year. Did he have many girlfriends before her?’
‘You’d have to ask him that,’ Gillian said, standing up and smoothing the pleats in her skirt.
Trish had to get up too, wishing she had another hour or two in which to explore everything about John Crayley’s past, as well as his present loyalties.
‘You’ve been very helpful,’ she said. ‘And I do think you’ve done a wonderful job. The thought of the life he might’ve had in care if you hadn’t adopted him doesn’t bear thinking of.’
‘He’s done far more for me than I could ever do for him. You could say he saved my life.’
Trish thought of David, whom she loved, and knew she could never say the same of him. She told Gillian so.
‘I wasn’t like you. I had no profession. John opened up my whole world. I’d never have trained as a teacher if it hadn’t been for helping him with his schoolwork and finding out how much I liked it. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I really do have to get on.’
‘I’m sorry to have taken up so much time. If I have more questions later, when I’ve finished the research and actually start writing the book, may I come back to you?’
‘Of course.’ Gillian’s smile took on a knowing gleam, which surprised Trish. It was as though they were conspirators. ‘I’m glad you think I’ve done a good job with him. I really am.’
‘Oh, definitely. He has everything,’ Trish said, even more puzzled. ‘Brains, looks, drive. And charm.’
Gillian Crayley glowed. Trish had never seen such a clear example of an old-fashioned cliché; she really looked as though a light had been switched on inside her: her eyes shone and her skin gleamed. She led the way back into the hall. Opening the front door, she was distracted for a second by a speck of dirt on one of the sections of stained-glass.
When Trish looked back as she clicked the wrought-iron gate shut, she saw Gillian still standing in the open doorway, polishing the glass with a paper handkerchief.
Battling through much heavier traffic than the morning’s, Trish hoped she’d be back in time to take her pupil out to lunch, as she’d promised. She phoned chambers to say she was on her way, but might be late.
‘No problem,’ Nessa said. ‘By the way, Bee Bowman phoned you again this morning. She didn’t sound quite as hysterical as last time, but she wants to talk to you as soon as you’ve got some free time. She said she didn’t want to interrupt whatever you were doing by phoning your mobile. Have you got her number?’
‘Thanks. Yes, I have. I’ll do that now. See you later.’
‘Oh, hi, Trish. Thanks for ringing back,’ Bee said as soon as they were connected. ‘I’ve got details of the unpublished organised-crime book you were interested in. You were right: Motcomb and Winter destroyed all the copies of the typescript after the lawyers put the boot in. The journalist who wrote it was called Benedict Wallsford, and I made my editor give me his phone number. D’you want it?’
Leave it alone, Trish told herself. Don’t let yourself get any deeper into Caro’s problems. You know it’s dangerous. You told her so. Why can’t you leave it alone?
‘Could you text it, Bee?’ she said, unable to obey her own orders or even answer her own question. ‘I’m in the car.’
‘All right. Have you got anything on Simon Tick yet? I’ve spent hours on the internet and found nothing we could use. He’s got a website, but there’s nothing there; it’s just like an advertisement. Even though his name crops up all over the place on other people’s sites, there’s no hint of anything discreditable.’
‘I haven’t had any luck yet either,’ Trish said, tasting guilt on her tongue.
She knew she should have spent the last week on that instead of asking dangerous questions about the Slabbs and John Crayley. But Stephanie Taft’s struggle to make someone listen to her, and then being killed for it, had made Bee’s problems seem a lot less urgent.
Maybe Jeremy Marton had been lucky to live so long, Trish thought, recognising for the first time the similarity between his fight to make people pay attention and Stephanie’s.
‘Try not to worry too much, Bee.’
Her only response was a sigh, which kept echoing in Trish’s mind all the way back to chambers. When she got there, only a little late, she found nothing urgent on her desk or in her voicemail. Antony had dropped in earlier, looking for her, Nessa said, but he hadn’t seemed worried when he heard Trish wouldn’t be back till the afternoon. And Steve, the chief clerk, wanted to talk to her about a new brief when she had time.
‘Great. You’re a pupil in a million, Nessa. Thanks. Let’s go and find something to eat.’
Gillian Crayley peeled carrots and grated them over the egg mayonnaise salad, hugging the good news to herself. She longed to phone John and tell him he must have moved up the shortlist, now the authorities had started on another round of discreet positive vetting, but she thought she’d better not. He’d warned her about the possibility of being overheard on the phone, and she didn’t want to ruin his chances by giving the impression that he had an indiscreet mother. She hoped she’d
said all the right things and none of the wrong ones. But you could never be sure.
It was a pity she couldn’t tell him. The news would have cheered him up and he needed something to distract him from poor Stephanie’s death.
If only he’d married her in the first place! She’d have made him so much happier than Lulu. He’d begun to miss Stephanie almost as soon as he’d moved out, but it wasn’t until after he’d married Lulu that he’d begun to display the tiny little signs of misery Gillian had learned to watch for in his childhood. No one else would have noticed them, but she could always tell when he was distressed from a particular way he breathed and a very slight tic in his left cheek. When it was really bad, there could be a roughening of some of his vowel sounds, too.
All the signs had been there last week, when he’d come round in the middle of the afternoon to tell her that Stephanie had been killed, but there’d been more too. If Gillian had been a drama queen like Lulu, she’d have said he’d looked like a man on the point of death. Standing on her hearthrug, shivering like someone with malaria, he’d said, ‘Stephanie’s dead, Mum. She’s been shot.’
Gillian had put her arms round him. For a second she’d thought he might relax and let her hold him as she’d done when he was a little boy woken out of a nightmare, but he’d pulled himself away, then patted her shoulder to make up for it. He’d gone into the kitchen to brew her a cup of tea, and sat with her while she drank it, as though she’d been the sufferer.
There hadn’t been anything she could say to comfort him then, and there was nothing she could do to make him feel less bad now. However much she loved him – and she would have died for him if it would have helped – she couldn’t bring Stephanie back.
All she could do was hang on to her discretion, cook his favourite food for Sunday lunch, and be as nice to Lulu as anyone could be, whatever the provocation. John would know what that meant without her having to say any of it. And he’d approve of the reticence. Neither of them had ever gone in for sentimental chatter.
Maybe she could give him the news about Ms Maguire after all. If she pretended she believed in the cover story about research for a book on adopted children, it might be all right. John would see the truth straight away, but no one who overheard them would guess she knew it too.
As she ate her salad, taking very small bites and chewing each mouthful to pulp, Gillian planned her shopping list and her announcement.
Steve and Antony between them mopped up most of Trish’s time after lunch. Antony had a gap between conferences and wanted an update on Bee’s state of mind and health. As soon as Trish had satisfied him and got back to her room, she was faced with Steve, wanting her to agree to write six separate opinions for clients who needed advice about potential litigation. He’d obviously taken her agreement for granted because he was carrying a tower of papers, which he thumped down on her desk even before he’d told her what they were.
There would be hours of reading, with all that lot to get through, but she needed fee-paying work too much to turn any of them down. As Steve talked, she realised four would turn on aspects of law that particularly interested her, which was a bonus. Reading up the case law would be a positive pleasure. She listened more carefully.
It would be such a relief to get back to her own work that she was tempted to start straight away. But she knew she’d do it better if she could get Bee and Caro sorted out first and clear her mind of their problems. As soon as Steve had left her room and Nessa had nipped out to the loo, Trish phoned Benedict Wallsford and gave him a plausible excuse for her interest in organised crime in general and the Slabbs in particular.
He said he would have plenty of information to share if she were prepared to keep its source to herself and why didn’t they meet for lunch tomorrow? When Trish agreed in spite of her dread of yet another bout of eating he suggested Sheeky’s. She recognised that all information had to be paid for in one way or another, and told him to go ahead and book a table in her name.
Putting down the phone, she considered various sources of information and decided to head off to a library where she had reading rights and would be able to access all the major newspaper archives online.
The library was due to close at six, which concentrated her mind once she’d found a free computer terminal. She started with The Times and found plenty of index entries for Simon Tick. The first was from 1973, when he appeared as one of the signatories to a letter to the editor, supporting the National Union of Mineworkers and objecting to the imposition of the three-day week.
He didn’t appear again until the early 1980s, when he was running the housing department of a famously left-wing London local authority. Most of the articles about him and his colleagues were scandalised accounts of homelessness in the borough, which nevertheless charged higher rates than any others, except places like Mayfair, where the richest of the rich lived. Apparently Tick’s council also had the worst record for the time taken to re-let their properties after they’d been vacated and among the worst for rent arrears. There was also an appalling amount of dilapidated housing that the council’s own workforce was supposed to repair but had not touched.
Maybe that’s why he was so angry with my daring to ask questions about homelessness, Trish thought. But it still doesn’t excuse the threats.
She stared at the screen again. Nowhere was there anything to suggest any connection with bombs, pharmaceutical companies, or Jeremy Marton. And nowhere was the nickname Baiborn mentioned. She read the whole of each entry under Tick’s name and found nothing of any use. The bell rang to warn readers the library would close in fifteen minutes. Frustrated, she thought she might as well see what she could find on the Slabbs while she was here. She typed the name into the search box.
There were just over one hundred results listed. It wasn’t nearly as many as she’d expected, but she knew she wouldn’t have time to read them all now. Still she might as well make a start until she was thrown out.
The current head of the family was believed to be Jack Slabb, a nephew of the previous boss, who had died in 1998. She found a photograph, which showed a thick-set man with a shock of grey hair, not altogether different from Bill Femur in shape and size but with much better clothes. Dressed in a suit and tie, Jack Slabb looked to be in his sixties and could have been the managing director of any big company.
Someone tapped Trish on the shoulder and she turned so quickly that she made her head swim. She could hardly have advertised her curiosity about the Slabbs more clearly than by staring at a screen full of information and pictures of them somewhere as public as this.
‘Library’s closing now,’ said a quiet voice, which made her heart beat a little more slowly. There was no reason to think the Slabbs had informants in such places, whatever Femur had suggested. ‘You’ll have to log off.’
‘Sure,’ she said, turning to smile at the librarian who had admitted her. ‘Thanks. I’m sorry if I’ve kept you late. The links to new websites kept pulling me on like a will o’the wisp.’
Derision twisted his lips. He looked pointedly over her shoulder at the photograph of Jack Slabb. She wished she’d kept her mouth shut. Why draw attention to her search?
There was no way of hiding what she’d been doing, so she simply turned back and clicked her way out of the website. The keys slipped a little under her fingers. She could still feel the librarian behind her. Why hadn’t he moved away? There were readers at some of the other terminals. Why hadn’t he told them to log off?
‘Thank you,’ she said, turning to face the librarian and waiting until he’d moved away.
Five minutes later, when she’d collected her papers and was walking out of the building, she caught him looking at her again. He was on the phone, talking quietly, with one hand cupped around the receiver, as he kept watch on her every move.
Thinking of the depths of misery to which Bee had reduced herself by unnecessary angst, Trish told herself to stop being so paranoid. She flashed the librarian a brilliant s
mile and saw him blush. That was better.
Caro Lyalt was having a drink with Fred Walley, who had once done some time with the department that dealt with undercover work. Because she didn’t want to risk being overheard by any of their colleagues, she’d picked the Redan, a pub none of them used. It had a bad reputation at the local nick, but it would suit her purpose tonight.
Only when she’d recognised at least three well-known ‘faces’, hard men who’d been involved in serious crime in the past, did she regret her choice. Trish’s warning rang in her ears, but she ignored it. There was too much at stake.
‘I’d hate going under cover,’ she said quietly, still watching the men at the bar, ‘never being able to relax, never able to forget you’re playing a game. How did you manage, Fred?’
‘I shouldn’t have thought that would be too tough for you,’ he said, sniffing his beer suspiciously, before tasting it and then taking a large mouthful. ‘You keep your guard high. You always did.’
‘That’s different.’
‘Not really. You get used to it. You have to tell yourself the story of who you’re pretending to be so often it becomes your life.’ He put down the glass and said lightly, ‘It used to worry me that I found it so easy to feel like a criminal.’
‘That would be scary.’ Caro laughed, hoping to make the next question sound casual. ‘Did you ever get involved with the Slabbs?’
‘Why d’you ask?’
‘They’re on my mind at the moment. Someone suggested it was they who had Stephanie Taft killed, but there’s no evidence and unless someone catches the lad who ran off over the roofs – and gets him to talk – there never will be any. That riles me.’
‘She a friend of yours?’
‘No. But I liked the little I’d seen of her, and I admired what she tried to do.’
‘The one-woman cleaning of the sewers, you mean?’ Fred drank some more beer, then put the glass down with a bang. ‘Trouble was, she often saw sewage where there was only shadows.’
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