Gagged & Bound

by Natasha Cooper

  The problem was she had no contacts within MI5. Antony was her best hope of a way in.

  ‘I hope you’re not still in chambers,’ he said with his mouth full, ‘after all the energy I put into making you see life more sensibly today.’

  ‘I’ve dragged you away from dinner,’ she said in a tacit apology. Her need to find the truth was too urgent to worry much about Antony’s digestion.

  ‘That’s OK, but make it quick. What d’you want?’

  ‘The name of the silk who prosecuted that MI5 whistle-blower two or three years ago. I can’t remember who it was, but I’m sure you can.’

  ‘Wasn’t it Roland Benting?’

  ‘Could be. You don’t happen to know him, do you?’

  ‘Of course I do. D’you want to meet him?’

  ‘Yes. But not formally.’ He would be her best chance to reach the people who might be able to make the world safe for David again.

  ‘Is this to do with Simon Tick and Bee Bowman?’ Antony asked.

  ‘In a way,’ Trish said, salving her conscience with the knowledge that she could ask questions about Tick too, once she’d got an introduction to someone in MI5.

  ‘All right. I’ll see if he’s in London this weekend and ask him to drop in for a drink tomorrow. I’ll let you know. Night.’

  ‘Thank you, Antony. Tell Liz I’m sorry I disturbed her dinner. Bye.’

  That done, she made a cup of tea and sat down to phone Bee and press the idea of offering Lord Tick the chance to go to mediation as a way of settling his claim.

  ‘Motcomb and Winter don’t want to do that yet,’ Bee said. ‘They’re so impressed with the way you’ve established that the two Baiborns could be the same they think you’d be able to make him withdraw the claim altogether, which would suit them better than mediation. They’ve asked me to fix up a meeting with you and someone from the insurance company to discuss the possibility.’

  Trish fought the impulse to say that all Motcomb and Winter or Bee should be discussing now was which of the three defamation specialists she’d recommended they were going to brief.

  ‘They’ve given me three times next week,’ Bee went on, oblivious to everything Trish was thinking, ‘so you can chose which would be most convenient for you.’

  ‘I can’t do next week,’ Trish said. ‘I have to take David to Center Parcs. It’s important that I have some time with him. And if I’m to start providing legal services to your publishers and their insurers, it really would have to go through a solicitor and my clerk.’

  ‘Trish, I …’ Bee paused, then started again. ‘I know how much I owe you and that you have no reason to do anything for me, but is there any way you could leave David in someone else’s care, just for a day, so we could get this settled?’

  Trish forced herself to remember some of what must be churning around in Bee’s mind, and the mental precipice over which she lived.

  ‘I will go on doing everything I can,’ Trish said, as a compromise, ‘but it has to wait until Monday week. My clerk can fix a meeting at the first possible opportunity after that, but I owe next week to David.’

  ‘I understand.’ Bee’s voice was tightly controlled. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Trish.’

  A little heartened, she embarked on the next call she had to make. There was no answer from the number of George’s house in Fulham. She tried his mobile. It rang and rang. She was about to cancel the call, not wanting to leave another message on his voicemail, when she heard him, sounding breathless.

  ‘Trish? Where are you?’

  ‘Southwark. Why?’

  ‘Great. I was hoping I could come round.’

  ‘That would be fine, George. Look,’ she said, hastily trying to remember what there was in the fridge, ‘I’ll rustle up something to eat. David’s at my mother’s still, so we’ll have space and time.’

  ‘I’m on my way. With you in ten minutes.’

  He doesn’t sound angry any more, she thought. Thank God. But what can I cook? He won’t eat a tin of cold sardines with a teaspoon.

  The kitchen seemed unwelcoming in its emptiness, and somehow stale, even though it was only a day since the cleaner had been. But there were onions, rice, dried mushrooms, garlic and Parmesan, so there could be a mushroom risotto: the ultimate comfort food.

  Trish took three onions from the bowl and started to peel them. Sharper than any she’d touched for weeks, they made her eyes burn as soon as she started to chop. Tears were still streaming down her face when George let himself in.

  ‘You should have waited for me to do that,’ he said stiffly, but he kissed the back of her neck. ‘D’you want me to take over?’

  ‘No. It’s fine. I can manage. There’s a half-open bottle of wine somewhere I could use for this. I don’t want to waste it, and it’s probably not drinkable any longer.’

  ‘I’ll search,’ he said, sounding more natural. ‘Any idea where you left it?’

  ‘None, I’m afraid. Oh, yes, I took it upstairs.’ Luckily she’d brought the empty sardine tin down and chucked it in the bin on her way out of the flat yesterday morning.

  He was back with the bottle just as her phone started to ring.

  ‘You answer. I’ll deal with the rice,’ he said.

  It was Antony, telling her that his old friend Roland Benting was in the country for the weekend, but would be more than happy to talk to her over the phone. He dictated the number, then wished her a good holiday.

  ‘I won’t be a minute,’ she called to George and went upstairs to make her next call in private. They would have to talk about the row at some stage, but not now. She was only beginning to heal; she couldn’t risk the scars ripping apart again.

  ‘Ah, Trish Maguire,’ said Roland Benting. ‘Antony told me to expect your call. What can I do for you? He was most mysterious.’

  ‘It’s just that some information has come my way that I need to get into the hands of someone in MI5 who deals with organised crime, and I don’t know how to go about it. Remembering that you’d been involved with them when you prosecuted a whistle-blower a while back, I thought you might still have contacts there. I hoped you could put me in touch with one.’

  ‘Ah, I see. And I take it that this information is too … sensitive to be handled by any more conventional means?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What form does it take?’

  ‘An audio cassette.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll make a couple of calls and get back to you. Where will you be over the next, say, couple of days?’

  Trish explained her plans and heard him promise that he would get in touch with her as soon as possible.

  Back in the kitchen she was given the job of grating the Parmesan. As she watched George cooking, she felt a reassuring sense of familiarity. They’d often stood like this in the pre-David days, when nothing had mattered nearly as much as it did now.

  ‘How are the opinions going?’ George’s voice was much too polite for the stage they’d reached in each other’s life.

  Trish scraped some skin off her knuckle with the grater and had to suck the blood off it.

  ‘Well enough, but I’ve been behaving badly.’

  ‘That’s not like you.’

  ‘Antony rescued me and fed me at lunch time,’ she said and set about entertaining George with an account of the way the great man had wrestled with the lobster claws. George smiled in all the right places, and offered her some stories of his own when hers dried up.

  This is how grown-ups do it, she told herself, as the evening progressed slowly towards normality. We both know we need to look after this thing, this bond, between us. We may disagree with each other, disapprove of all the things the other isn’t saying, but we’re looking after the thing. Maybe it’s the best way. Maybe we’ll never know exactly what we thought and felt during the row. Maybe it doesn’t matter. There are no points to score, after all. Not for us.

  Listening to his account of the past week and asking what she hop
ed were the right questions, she longed for the moment when they could both forget to test each word before they spoke it in case it launched them back into the rage. It was going to be difficult to share a bed tonight, she thought. But with the effort they were both making, she couldn’t possibly tell him to go home.

  ‘And so I’ve decided that I am going to stand down as senior partner,’ he said, making her sit up and listen. ‘Will you mind, Trish?’

  ‘Me?’ she said, surprised into an unguarded word. ‘No, of course not. Unless you kill yourself with overwork. I’d mind that. A lot.’

  His careful friendliness broke into a proper smile. He didn’t move, but she felt almost as if he’d hugged her.

  ‘That’s pretty rich, coming from a woman who’s been in chambers until the small hours every day for a week,’ he said. ‘And one who’s planning to spend the entire weekend working before buggering off for another five days without me.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. But David deserves his holiday.’

  ‘I was joking, as you very well know. You’re beginning to look more human, Trish. Are you sure you don’t want any of this wine? It’s fantastic.’

  ‘Antony made me drink at least half a bottle at lunchtime. That’s more than enough for one day.’

  ‘OK. I’ll finish this and then leave you to sleep. You look as though you could do with a solid twelve hours.’

  We’re all right, Trish thought, blowing him a kiss. We don’t have to put everything into words. It’s all still there. It can still work.

  Roland Benting phoned at half past eleven on Saturday morning, just as Trish was getting properly stuck into the final edit of her penultimate opinion.

  ‘If you’ll give me your address, I can arrange for them to send a messenger to collect your tape,’ he said.

  ‘How will I know who they are? I mean, will the messenger have some kind of identification.’

  ‘That’s not how it works.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’d feel confident enough to hand over the evidence without some security. Couldn’t I take it to that green and yellow building on the river?’

  He laughed. ‘That’s Six, not Five. What do you want, a password?’

  Trish felt remarkably stupid, but she’d rather feel stupid than irresponsible.

  ‘I need to see this into the hands of someone trustworthy, identified by someone else I recognise.’

  ‘You mean me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m in Wiltshire,’ he said irritably. ‘I suppose I could try to arrange for you to be seen in Millbank, where their offices are. Unless what you have is of instant importance, it would probably have to be Monday morning. Would that do you?’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, dreading the thought of telling David she’d be late.

  ‘I’ll ring you back if I can manage to sort something out. I’ll do my best, but I can’t promise anything. These people are a law unto themselves. They have to be.’

  Chapter 24

  Tuesday 17 April

  Trish was lying beside a sub-tropical pool, with palm fronds all around her, watching David frolicking in the water with his new friends. She’d been impressed with the ease of his assimilation into the group of three boys and two girls, and thoroughly amused to hear him telling them about the exploring game he’d invented. The pool was apparently the Amazon River, and half of them were to be a raiding party from one of Francis Drake’s ships in search of El Dorado. The others were to be indigenous inhabitants, hiding gold bars and secrets from them.

  From where she was sitting, it looked as though he’d persuaded them to carry out all his plans. Every so often he would glance back at her, as though to make sure she was still there, but she’d never seen him enjoying himself with such abandon.

  She was dressed in a plain black tankini in case she found the temptation of the water overmastering, but so far she’d resisted it. There was a small stack of paperback novels beside her long chair. None had caught her imagination yet. Instead, she’d been running through everything that had happened since Roland Benting had phoned back to say he had managed to arrange an appointment for her with the duty officer in Millbank at five thirty on Saturday.

  ‘Take your passport with you,’ had been his final instruction.

  Hey ho, Valparaiso, Trish had sung to herself in a tension-busting attempt at frivolity.

  She still wasn’t sure what she’d expected when she penetrated the big pale-grey building on the north bank of the Thames, but all she’d found was a conventional, slightly old-fashioned office. She’d had to show her passport to several different people, and walk through a metal detector, while her bag went through an X-ray machine. Not knowing enough about its likely effect on the audio tape, she’d insisted on handing that to the security officer separately from the rest. Then the uniformed woman had led her to a bank of lifts and accompanied her to the third floor, where she handed Trish over to another woman, in plain clothes.

  In her early thirties, the woman had introduced herself as Margaret Cousins. Trish didn’t suppose that was really her name, but what did it matter? She escorted Trish to a small office with windows overlooking the river and invited her to sit down and explain what it was she had to hand over.

  Trish told the story of her meeting with John Crayley and their discussion of the possibilities of adopted children ever being as happy as those brought up with their natural parents. She watched Margaret’s face but saw nothing beyond conventional courtesy.

  ‘And I wanted to know more, so I went to call on his adoptive mother.’

  ‘Why did you want to know more?’

  ‘For a book I’m thinking of writing. A companion to this one.’ Trish had taken the precaution of bringing with her the trade paperback edition of her book about children and crime.

  ‘May I?’ Margaret reached for the book, as one who had the right to anything brought into her building. ‘Thank you.’

  She didn’t even open it, merely put it on the desk beside her.

  ‘Carry on.’

  ‘And I was surprised at the frankness with which she talked to me about him and the way she’d brought him up. Eventually it became clear to me she believed I was part of some positive vetting operation, even though I had explained that I am a barrister.’

  ‘Did she tell you what kind of vetting operation?’

  ‘No. But I assumed – since she clearly expected to be asked questions and was so cooperative in answering them – that it must be for a job he wanted, rather than for some kind of hostile investigation.’

  ‘Then why have you come to us? Wouldn’t the police have been more suitable?’ There was no sign of suspicion, just detached curiosity. Trish was impressed and tried to look just as detached when she said. ‘Possibly. But I have read too much in the last few years about corruption in the Met to be confident of finding a safe person to talk to there.’

  The other woman raised her eyebrows in polite surprise, murmuring, ‘Corruption in the Metropolitan Police?’

  ‘Wasn’t it one of the commissioners who said publicly that he had a minority of officers who betrayed police operations to criminals?’

  ‘I see. And so you talked to a colleague of your own, knowing that he had had professional contact with us, hoping for an introduction?’

  ‘That’s right. It seemed the safest way.’ Trish remembered she was supposed to know nothing of MI5’s interest in John Crayley and tried to look innocent, as she added, ‘I assume you do still have an involvement with organised crime? I mean, in spite of all these reports about the new agency that’s taking over the main responsibility from the police and Customs and Excise.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What bearing does your interviewing this police officer’s mother have on organised crime?’ Margaret’s voice was still measured and her face pleasantly interested.

  ‘It was the name she gave me for his natural father.’ Trish put the tape on the table and laid Gillian’s letter open beside it. Margaret didn’t touch
the letter herself, but she did read it. Trish was glad to see that even she hesitated for an instant after that. Then she looked up, the same smile just slightly widening her lips and crinkling the corners of her brown eyes.

  ‘I see. Thank you for the responsible attitude you have taken. I shall make sure that the information reaches the right people.’ She got to her feet, displaying a litheness at odds with her frumpy clothes and middle-aged hair style. ‘And now I’ll take you back to the lift.’

  ‘Don’t you want me to sign something?’ Trish asked, which made Margaret laugh.

  ‘The Official Secrets Act, you mean? I don’t think we need go that far. I’m sure you won’t turn this into a witty anecdote to entertain your next legal dinner.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Why are you sure I won’t chatter about it?’

  Margaret’s smile was more human now. ‘Your record speaks for itself.’

  The uniformed guard was still waiting by the lift. Trish was handed over, feeling like a prisoner about to be exchanged at some foreign checkpoint. She looked all round the high-ceilinged hall and out towards the great well in the middle of the building, detesting the thought of anyone’s talking of her ‘record’ in a place like this.

  Who had talked about her? she wondered now. And when? And why had the security services wanted to know anything about her?

  ‘You must try the flume, Trish,’ David’s excited voice broke into her uncomfortable thoughts and she dredged up a smile for him. He stood in front of her, dripping with water and grinning. ‘It’s brilliant. Come on. Leave those books. It’s really really warm, too. You’ll like it. Come on and join us.’

  John Crayley sat in the pub with a half pint and a cheese roll, waiting for his controller. With the job in the bag, they shouldn’t have had to meet like this. It irritated him because he’d worked for years to be able to come and go openly into Millbank or even one of the outstations. The grimmest of those would be preferable to the performance required to meet out in the open.