‘Then why were you reading it?’ She looked up from yet another big photograph of the victim, trying to understand. ‘Why are you so interested?’
‘Kara Huggate was a colleague,’ he said, turning away. ‘I need to know what’s happening in the case.’
‘A colleague?’ Sandra was amazed. ‘She couldn’t have been, Michael. She was a social worker, nothing to do with the planning department.’
‘We’re both employed by the council. That makes her a colleague. And we’re working with social services at the moment.’
Sandra looked at the photograph again and then up at Michael. ‘D’you mean you knew her?’
He nodded, still not looking up.
‘Did you know her well?’
‘Not really.’
‘Then why are you in such a state?’
He didn’t answer.
Sandra looked at the picture of Kara Huggate in the paper, wondering if the incredible suspicion that had just occurred to her could possibly be true. There was nothing glamorous about Kara Huggate, in fact she looked quite old; but perhaps some people might find her attractive, if they weren’t bothered about her awful thighs.
‘How long have you known her?’
Michael shrugged, staring down at his boots. ‘Two months? Three? It must be about that.’
In other words, Sandra thought, just about the length of time you’ve been extra specially sulky and difficult. You must have met at the same time as you stopped wanting to touch me. She’d never been particularly good at maths, but the sums in front of her weren’t exactly difficult to add up. ‘You must have thought me very stupid,’ she said slowly. He did look up then, surprised. ‘What were you planning to do, the two of you? Just have an affair till you got bored? Or were you thinking of something more permanent? When were you going to tell me – and the kids?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Sandra.’
The fat man, who was looking ill with embarrassment, at last managed to get out of his chair so that he could leave them alone.
‘I’ve been wondering for weeks why you’ve been so difficult,’ she went on, feeling as though her mouth was full of cotton-wool, ‘but I never thought it could be something like this. I believed every lying word you said, all those evenings about how you’d been working late or having a drink with Barry Spinel and the lads. And all the time you were with her. How could you?’
‘Sandra, don’t be ridiculous. Kara Huggate was a colleague, an acquaintance, no more than that, but she’s been killed in horrible circumstances. Anyone who’d met her even for an instant would be upset.’
‘Not like this,’ she said, staring at his lying face. ‘I’ve been married to you for nineteen years, Michael, I know you. This is more than just being sorry a colleague’s dead. You’re feeling really guilty. And so you bloody well should.’
‘What’s the matter?’ said Katie, from behind her parents. Her voice was shaking.
Sandra wondered how much she’d heard. ‘Hello, Katie,’ she said brightly, trying to ignore the frozen expression on her daughter’s face. ‘Good ski school? Where did you have lunch?’
‘It was OK, but what’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. Don’t you worry. Your dad and I were just having a disagreement.’
‘No, we weren’t,’ said Michael, coming back to life. ‘Your mother’s gone mad. Temporarily, I hope. What are you doing with all that makeup on your face, Katie? You look revolting. Go and wash it off at once and put some sunscreen on.’
Katie burst into tears. ‘I hate you, Dad.’
Sandra did not try to stop her rushing off. Instead she rounded on Michael. ‘So, not content with ruining our marriage, you have to go and upset Katie, too. Why do you always have to spoil everything?’
Like the good mother she’d always tried to be, Sandra didn’t wait for an answer but followed her daughter, knowing that she would have to spend the next half-hour calming Katie and reassuring her that everything between her parents was fine. Sandra’s own pain, the real searing hurt at what Michael had done, would have to wait.
Chapter Ten
Trish was not in court on Monday and had long ago booked a rare lunch with a friend, Anna Grayling, who had recently set up her own small television production company. Living on opposite sides of London and moving in very different circles, they did not often meet, but they kept up with each other’s news on the phone and lunched on the few occasions when they were both free in London on the same day. Anna always gave Trish the feeling that she swam in a sea much wider – and sometimes even rougher – than the legal one Trish knew so well.
As they sat down at a small table in the Chancery Lane wine bar Trish favoured, she was tempted to ask Anna’s advice about Blair Collons, not about her legal and ethical obligations to him as a client, but about his likely mental state and what she could – or ought – to do about that.
If Kara were still alive and had seen him as he was in the Waterloo pub on Friday, Trish was sure she would have done something to help him. Even though he must have invented the story of a police and council conspiracy as a way of dealing with the shame of being sacked for gross misconduct, it had run away with him now. He was definitely frightened. Trish had the uncomfortable feeling that Kara would have taken him home with her and allowed him to believe that she understood him, perhaps even shared his fears, so that she could have guided him towards the right kind of psychiatric specialist. But Kara was dead and Trish couldn’t pretend to be her, or even to be like her.
Collons’s idea that she should start poking around in Kingsford looking for evidence to back up his claims was absurd. Even if she had believed his story, she was far too busy and, in any case, it wasn’t her job. On the other hand, she found she couldn’t forget his bitter little question at the end. Was it really the least she could do for Kara?
If Kara hadn’t begged Trish to do her best for Collons, she’d have sent him packing without the slightest hesitation. As it was, she thought she might have to go a bit further than the usual duties of counsel to a client, even if it was only as far as making sure that his suspicions of his solicitor were as unfounded as they seemed.
Eventually, half listening to Anna and making all the right noises to keep her talking, Trish decided that if she spoke to James Bletchley and got some idea of what he thought about Collons, then pumped a few reasonably accessible sources for background information on Bletchley himself and some of the other targets of Collons’s suspicion, she would have done enough. She might even pick up something that would prove to Collons that his fears were groundless, which would help them both.
‘So, Trish, how are things with you? You seem a bit preoccupied,’ Anna said, as she looked up from the menu.
‘Oh, work, you know. A tricky case I can’t quite see my way through.’
‘Oh, God, don’t I know what that feels like?’ The waitress appeared with her pad at the ready. ‘I’ll have the goat’s cheese salad. Trish?’
‘What? No, I think it’s too cold for that. I’ll have penne al arrabbiata. Thank you. And we’ll have a bottle of the Chianti. So, Anna, what is it you can’t see your way through?’
‘The financing of my bloody company. But I’ll get there.’
Trish smiled. Anna’s vivid face, which only the most charitable would have described as anything but pudgy, took on an expression of almost pantomime horror as she started to tell Trish about the struggles she had had to raise the money she needed to keep afloat. As she talked it became clear that she was so full of her own affairs that she wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on anything much else, even if Trish had decided to raise it.
Trish, who admired her guts in going it alone, asked all the right questions. But even as she listened, throughout the hour and a half they spent together, part of Trish’s mind kept reverting to Kara and Collons.
‘So I think we’d better get the bill,’ Anna said, breaking into Trish’s thoughts. ‘Alas.’
‘It’s on me,’ Tri
sh said, hoping that Anna had not realised quite how distracted she was. ‘No, no, honestly. I haven’t got any huge debts to all those smoothly sexist venture capitalists.’
‘Well, I have, so I’ll accept with pleasure – if you’re sure. It’s sweet of you, Trish.’
‘Not at all. Look, it’s been great seeing you, Anna. It always is. An inhabitant of another world. I love hearing about it, and I can’t tell you how impressed I am with what you’ve achieved.’
‘Then that makes two of us.’ Anna’s round freckled face was alight with the kind of affection no one could doubt or question. ‘I don’t know how you keep going, having to spend all your days with child abusers and murderers.’
Trish handed her credit card to the waitress, laughing and fully back in the present. ‘It’s not quite as bad as that, you know. What I actually do is spend my days with like-minded friends, most of whom I’ve known ever since I was called to the bar. Sure, we’re often dealing with some pretty unsavoury – or desperate – clients, and occasionally it all gets too much, but for a lot of the time it’s really stimulating, fun, too.’
Anna looked at her with the kind of speculation a judge might show towards a defendant who had just changed a not-guilty plea at the last possible moment and at great cost to the public purse.
‘What?’ Trish asked warily.
‘I’m just thinking that George Henton must have some amazing secret. I can see I shall have to pay much closer attention when we next meet.’
‘George? What do you mean, Anna?’
‘Well, when you and I last had lunch on our own – what is it? Nearly two years ago? – you spent most of the time telling me how ill it made you to be dealing all the time in human misery and watching children being punished for their parents’inadequacies and angers. George is the only thing that’s different in your life now, as far as I can see, so it must be him.’
‘I suppose you’re right in a way,’ Trish said. ‘Being happy these days, it is easier to keep a space between me and what happens to my clients.’ She was struck all over again by how much she owed George and made a mental note to tell him so. ‘And Seb, Anna? How’re things with him? You haven’t said a word about him.’
‘There’s nothing very interesting to say.’ Trish frowned in quick concern. Anna noticed and smiled as she shook her head. Then she shrugged. ‘Honestly. We’re OK.’
‘I’m glad.’ Being five inches taller, Trish had to stoop to kiss Anna goodbye. ‘Really glad. Good luck with the big series.’
‘And you with the next case. It’s been great, Trish. Thank you for lunch.’
‘See you soon.’
Back at her desk, feeling better and more decisive for the distraction, Trish rang the clerks’room to ask for Blair Collons’s solicitor’s phone number. She got through without trouble.
‘Mr Bletchley? It’s Trish Maguire here. Look, I’ve been thinking about our client, and I realise I need to know a bit more about his background.’
‘I see. What exactly is it that you wish to know?’
There was something extra-careful in his voice that made Trish’s antennae twitch. ‘Whatever there is.’
‘I don’t think I quite understand.’
‘Oh, I think you do,’ Trish said, hoping she sounded lightly amused instead of intensely curious. ‘I’ve heard that tone from solicitors before, and I know what it means. Look, you badgered my clerk to get me to represent your client in a case that, on the face of it, does not require the attentions of counsel. I want to know why. And I think the least you can do is give me everything you know about him. What is it you’ve been hiding?’
‘Hiding? Ms Maguire, what can you be thinking of?’
‘Oh, come on. What’s the snag? Has he got a record?’
There was a pause and then a dry cough.
Now we’re getting somewhere, she thought. Perhaps that explains Collons’s peculiarities – and his terrors.
‘In a way. But please do not think, Ms Maguire, that I have been concealing anything. It is simply irrelevant and I didn’t want to bother you with it. His past difficulties have no bearing on this case. There was no question of fraud or dishonesty, you see. Naturally I’d have told you if there had been.’
‘So what was there, then?’ Trish was feeling for a pen so that she could take proper notes.
‘A few years ago he had a rather unfortunate experience with a young woman,’ Bletchley said, his voice taking on a distant tone Trish had not heard from him before. It made him sound self-conscious, almost guilty, which couldn’t have been his intention. ‘Not so young, in fact, now I come to think of it.’
‘What kind of experience?’ In the long silence, she remembered Collons’s exaggerated reaction to her question about satisfying Kara. ‘Something sexual? Assault of some kind?’
‘It wasn’t exactly assault.’
‘So something like flashing then? Or was there physical contact?’
‘Some. Not much. And it was all a mistake.’
‘Oh, come on, Mr Bletchley, for heaven’s sake. This is like drawing teeth. And it only makes him sound worse. Why not just spit it out?’
‘He once formed an affection for a woman he hardly knew. She lived in the same block of flats as he in Balham. It was a genuine misunderstanding. He believed that she cared for him, although they had never been introduced and had hardly ever spoken to each other. You see, they travelled on the same tube to work every single morning and after the first year or so, she tended to smile at him and occasionally greeted him or commented on the weather. No more than that.’
‘The kind of thing most commuters do,’ Trish agreed, remembering with a shudder the daily trauma of being squashed between other people’s bodies in a dirty train that sat in airless tunnels for minutes at a time. Living within walking distance of chambers was worth an incalculable amount. How George could stick with his Fulham house, she couldn’t imagine.
‘Yes. Unfortunately, our client, who – as you will have realised – is a little short on social skills, built up the relationship in his mind into rather more than it actually was. He, er, took the woman’s friendly courtesy as a sign that she had fallen in love with him.’
‘I see. And what did he do?’
‘To begin with he just followed her through the block of flats to her front door whenever they returned from work at the same time, and once or twice he loitered outside her windows to catch a glimpse of her. She had a ground-floor flat. I have talked to him at some length about all this, you see, and realised how innocent he was.’
‘There’s innocence and innocence, of course,’ Trish commented drily.
‘Indeed. Every time the young woman left a gap in her curtains, he was sure it meant that she knew he was there and wanted him to see her … well, undressing. And so he occasionally, er, took down his trousers to show that he “understood” her messages. Either she did not see him or she did not realise who he was. Having interpreted her actions or lack of them as encouragement, he began to touch her surreptitiously in the underground, during the rush-hour, and when she did not protest, he took it as another signal that she knew what he was doing and enjoyed it.’
‘Poor woman. She was presumably either too embarrassed or thought it was just the crowd pressing in on her.’
‘I fear so. But our client deserves sympathy, too. One day on the underground, she smiled particularly kindly at him over her shoulder and all his inhibitions were overcome. He put both hands on her hips and dragged her back against him, grinding himself into her and whispering something lewd into her ear.’
Described in the solicitor’s precise, chilly voice, the scene seemed almost funny, but Trish could well imagine how the unknown woman must have felt at the time. ‘So presumably she went to the police,’ she said, as a tadpole of suspicion wiggled into her mind.
‘She did. At first they did not believe her because she was not exactly a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.’ The solicitor sounded regretful rather than contempt
uous. ‘But there was very little doubt that she was still unravished.’
What is it about solicitors, Trish wondered, that makes them bring poetry into their everyday conversation? George did it, too. She quite liked it from him in their private lives, but in Bletchley, talking about a case, it irritated her.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said stiffly, as though she had never read ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.
‘She was in her late thirties, unmarried, rather plump and very dowdy. This was some time ago, don’t forget, and they assumed in their misogynist way that it was she who was fantasising. That is, until they interviewed our client.’
‘He confessed, did he?’
‘Immediately. As soon as they asked him about the incident, he poured out the whole story. He was so puzzled by her reaction that he wanted them to understand and told them everything he had done and why. There had been more, you see, silent telephone calls and so on.’
‘Pretty much a classic stalker, in fact.’
‘That is what it sounds like, isn’t it? But in those days no one knew about the forces that drive such men. He was merely cautioned for the indecency.’
‘You mean he wasn’t prosecuted?’ The tadpole in Trish’s mind was growing legs.
‘That’s correct. If he had been, I should have told you. Naturally. But the whole episode rocked what little confidence he had. He had genuinely believed the woman thought of him in the terms in which he had been dreaming of her. He became very depressed, started drinking, lost his job, stopped paying his mortgage, and ended up on the streets.’
‘I see.’ Trish was beginning to see quite how unfair Collons had been to his solicitor. James Bletchley sounded remarkably tolerant and very much on his client’s side.
‘I hope you do. He’s been quite a hero in his way. You see, he pulled himself together, found his way to a Salvation Army hostel, kicked the drink and eventually he began to look for a job again. And then a flat.’
‘Which is why he’s been working as a lowly bookkeeper despite having been a chartered accountant.’
‘Precisely, Ms Maguire. I do not suppose he would ever have set the world on fire, even the world of accountancy, but if he had been able to talk to that unfortunate young woman in the ordinary way and invite her to eat with him, go to the cinema perhaps, enjoy some normal social intercourse with her, he might well have behaved acceptably and none of it would have happened.’
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