Fault Lines

by Natasha Cooper

  Trish looked at the sticky remains of the highly spiced Indian food in disgust and leaped up to take it all out to the kitchen bin. Scraping plates, running them under the almost boiling water from the tap before putting them in the dishwasher, she couldn’t understand what had made George think he had the right to tell her what to do.

  The flat felt very empty without him, and cold with memories of the anger that had spread between them, like water from a melting iceberg.

  But there was nothing she could do about it until George apologised.

  Kara would have understood, she thought, having been through much worse with Jed Thomplon. But Kara was dead.

  ‘Oh, fucking hell!’ Trish shouted, to the echoing space around her.

  Lonelier than she had ever expected to be, she reminded herself that there had been seven more messages on her answering-machine and that she did have other friends besides George and Kara.

  As soon as she had finished clearing up, she opened some of the big windows to get the smell of curry out of the flat. She hoped it was just the smell that was making her feel sick. Then she went back to the phone and rang Emma Gnatche, who had left the first message.

  ‘Hi. It’s Trish,’ she said, when Emma answered. ‘Look, I’m sorry to be ringing so late. Did you get your pizza?’

  ‘No.’ Emma’s voice was warm with laughter. ‘No, I thought of my expanding waistline and made do with cottage cheese instead. It was a good thing you weren’t in or I’d be a thousand calories fatter. Were you working?’

  ‘No. I had George here.’ Trish’s voice wobbled on his name, but Emma did not comment. ‘We had a bit of a fight and he’s gone early. I …’

  ‘Shall I come round?’

  ‘Oh, no need for that. It’s not that serious. In fact I’m fine, Emma. I just thought …’

  ‘No, you’re not. Let me come, Trish. You’ve scraped me off the floor over and over again. It’s my turn to be solidaritous. I’ve got a smashing bottle of wine here, which I could bring to cheer us both up. I could be with you in about twenty minutes. Let me come.’

  It was irresistible.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Blair was sleeping badly. He and Kara had had the nearest thing to a quarrel since her death. She was still smiling at him off the wall, but she wanted him to tell Trish Maguire everything.

  ‘It’s not safe, Kara,’ he kept saying, as she refused to touch him. ‘You thought she’d be on our side, but I don’t think she is. I’ve told you over and over that she’s hard, but you won’t believe me. She’s not like you, not like you when you’re kind. You’re loving, but she isn’t. She’s so full of anger that I can’t trust her.’

  Kara told him in her softest, most adoring voice that she knew he wanted to tell Trish everything, that she understood how badly he needed to tell someone.

  ‘Yes, because it’s too much to carry on my own, now that you’re… now that you can’t help me any more. But I don’t think she’s safe.’

  Kara told him that nothing was ever absolutely safe and no one completely trustworthy. She reminded him that she had once thought she could trust him and then discovered that she could not.

  Crying, Blair turned away from her picture. That night he couldn’t come. So he couldn’t sleep. It was all Trish Maguire’s fault.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘Oh, Ms Maguire!’

  ‘What is it, Dave? I’m in a rush.’ Trish’s arms were full of papers. Her red brocade bag had somehow swung round and got itself caught up with her suit jacket as she halted in her dash for the door. She tried to straighten it and ricked her neck. If Dave didn’t hurry up, she was going to be seriously late. One day she might have enough time to do everything without running anywhere. In her dreams.

  ‘I just wanted to let you know that your client’s solicitor has come up smelling of roses,’ Dave said. ‘James Bletchley has some criminal clients, but why shouldn’t he? Most of his work is protecting the interests of people who have been arrested. Nothing odd there.‘

  ‘It sounds as though you’re telling me there is something odd somewhere else,’ Trish said, well aware of Dave’s pleasure in making his employers wait. She still didn’t know what they did – or had done – to him to make him need to take such an exasperating kind of revenge.

  ‘Well, there is just a suggestion that one of his other clients, the one whose name you mentioned to me in point of fact, Martin Drakeshill, might have some interesting friends.’

  ‘Interesting how?’ asked Trish, almost forgetting the risk of being late as she thought of the terror in Collons’s face when she had asked him about Drakeshill. ‘Mafia? Money-launderers? Drug-dealers? What?’

  Dave looked as though someone had just farted in court. ‘Of course not. Nothing like that. Just people who can make inconvenient cases disappear.’

  ‘Is that all? Dave, you know as well as I do that it doesn’t even take friends to make files disappear, just sloppiness.’

  He looked so pissed off that, mindful of her likely need for future favours, she added quickly, ‘Did your source have any idea who the friends might be? If you can, tell me fast. I haven’t much time.’

  ‘I’m coming to that. A year or two ago this Mr Drakeshill was arrested for GBH, along with a much younger man who was probably employed by him in his used-car business. It was a baseball-bat job, debt-chasing I should think, but I didn’t hear any details. The CPS were up in arms about it …’

  Trish looked at her watch and ran, muttering an apology to Dave. She put him, Drakeshill and even Kara right out of her mind as she set about the day’s work, proving that her client deserved at least fifty per cent of the profits her ex-husband had made out of her ideas and groundwork in the business they had started together. Trish was rewarded for her careful preparation almost as soon as she embarked on her opening remarks.

  The husband began to look uncomfortable and later started whispering to his solicitor. He shook his elegantly brushed grey head and calmly turned back to face the judge, but Trish knew enough about him and opposing counsel to read what lay behind their air of confidence. She completed her remarks and sat back to wait for Charles Bishop to unpick the damaging information she had stitched together.

  He did it quite well but things got stickier and stickier for him, and when the court rose for the day, Trish was not surprised when Charles strolled towards her and asked if she and her instructing solicitor would mind waiting while he had a word with his client. She smiled understandingly, which she was pleased to see annoyed him, and settled down to wait.

  In the end it was an hour and a half before an acceptable settlement had been hammered out. She and her late opponent parted from their respective clients and went down the stairs together on reasonably good terms, swapping all the usual stories about impossible briefs and pompous judges, only to find that the main hall of the Royal Courts of Justice had been turned into a badminton court. Trish stopped on the stairs, amazed. She did vaguely know that it happened, but she had never seen it in use before.

  ‘Energetic little buggers, aren’t they?’ said Charles Bishop.

  ‘Aren’t they just? Who are they?’

  ‘No idea. Staff here, I should imagine. I don’t think counsel use it much. I must dash. See you around, Trish. El Vino’s sometime?’

  ‘Probably,’ she said, without thinking. ‘It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, Charles.’ She skirted the badminton court, amused at the unexpected frivolity, and walked back to the Temple, huddling in her Burberry as a few clammy snowflakes flopped on to her face and melted down her chin.

  Dave was still in his room. When she stopped by his desk, she became aware that the leather soles of her neat black court shoes had let in the wet. She wiggled her toes to warm them, but it didn’t help. There was a tiny toaster-like electric fire in her room. As soon as she had finished with Dave, she could hang her feet over it and watch the steam rise as they dried out.

  ‘You were going to tell me about Martin Dr
akeshill’s magic friends,’ she said.

  ‘So I was, but you ran off before I had a chance to finish what I was saying.’

  ‘I could hardly be late for court.’

  ‘You need to leave yourself longer to get there.’ Trish narrowed her eyes at that typical example of clerkly sanctimoniousness. ‘Yes, well, as I was saying, Drakeshill’s friends are said to be in the police. I got the impression that the lost files might have been a reward for information received.’ Dave sounded disapproving, but Trish was interested.

  Minor cases, and sometimes even relatively important ones, could be dropped as being ‘not in the public interest’if the defendant were in a position to give the police good-value information. If that were known to have applied to Drakeshill, it might explain a lot. To Trish, the idea of a violent second-hand-car salesman being a police snout was a lot more convincing than Collons’s hints of a player in a major conspiracy that encompassed not only council building plans and the local police, but also rape and murder.

  ‘Thanks, Dave. You’ve been a help. I owe you one.’

  ‘I’ll remember that.’

  As he spoke, looking much more cheerful, Trish grimaced. Dave’s way of collecting debts tended to include unwinnable legal-aid cases that involved inordinate amounts of work at no notice and took you to courts so remote that the brief fee hardly paid for the train fares. She told him that her debt extended only as far as Bristol.

  ‘We must fight them in the Old Bailey, Miss Maguire; we must fight them in the provinces, we must fight them wherever they appear.’

  Trish glanced back to see him standing even straighter than usual and laying his right hand on his lamp.

  ‘I know, Dave, and we must never surrender.’ She laughed. ‘I do my best, but I draw the line at North Wales.’

  She did not wait to see his reaction to her teasing but dumped her papers in her room, decided to ignore the fire and wait to dry her feet at home. Half-way across Blackfriars Bridge, she remembered how empty the flat was going to be without George.

  Hesitating, she looked back at St Paul’s and then on down towards Southwark. It seemed even darker than usual and bleakly uninviting. On the other hand her feet were wet and cold. But she needed friends that night even more than dry shoes. She turned back to walk up Fleet Street to E1 Vino’s.

  As she had expected, plenty of people she knew were drinking there. She was hailed at once by Simon Hogwell, and joined the table he was sharing with five others.

  ‘So! Not cooking tonight, Trish?’

  ‘Not tonight. And my case settled, so I thought I might celebrate.’

  ‘Did you indeed? Careful, chaps. Sounds like Trish is going to be an expensive drinker tonight.’

  ‘Bugger off, Simon. I always buy my fair share of bottles, as you very well know.’

  ‘You could’ve changed. We haven’t seen you here for years.’

  Trish turned round to look for someone from whom she could order another bottle and a basket of biscuits. It was true, she thought: since she and George had taken up with each other, she hadn’t spent many of the long, shop-talking, wine-drinking evenings that had once provided most of her social life.

  The bottle was brought and poured, and she sank back into her comfortable leather armchair to enjoy herself. As always the jokes were good and the stories around her grew wilder and wilder as more bottles were opened. Some of her group drifted off, but their chairs were always refilled by newcomers, a few of whom she had almost forgotten. Lots of people commented on how long it had been, and Trish began to feel as though she were Rip van Winkle, coming alive again to a world she had not seen for decades. Her feet were drying out, too.

  It wasn’t, she told herself, as she sipped her claret, that George had trapped her or deliberately prevented her seeing her friends, it was just that she had chosen to spend her evenings with him. Finding that her colleagues bore her no malice and that she could pick up her friendships where she had left them eighteen months earlier was cheering.

  ‘Trish, my only love,’ called a rich voice from the door.

  She turned to see Jeremy Platen, a criminal silk who had once been one of her pupil masters. There was the usual mocking smile on his otherwise cherubic face. She had enjoyed her six months with him and been sorry when he left chambers to join a different set.

  ‘Where have you been hiding yourself?’

  ‘Jerry,’ she said, getting to her feet. He enfolded her in a huge and affectionate but in no way passionate embrace. ‘Lovely to see you. How are you?’

  ‘Flourishing. But what about you? What have you been doing to yourself?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘You’re all pale and miserable-looking. Trish, quite frankly you look as though you’ve crawled out from a dripping, rat-ridden cellar somewhere. Has someone been horrible to you? Not that fat solicitor of yours? I always said you should never sleep with the enemy. Why did you spurn me? Didn’t I tell you you were missing out on a good thing?’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Jerry. Of course he hasn’t done anything to me. And he’s not fat, anyway. He’s a big man, in every sense of the word.’

  ‘Fat!’

  ‘No, he isn’t. And he hasn’t done anything to me. I’ve been a bit busy, that’s all. And one of my witnesses was murdered the other day.’

  ‘Ah, yes, I can see how that might take the edge off your pleasure.’ For a moment Jeremy’s bright black eyes softened with concern, but then he grinned again, buffeted her shoulder and asked why she hadn’t offered him a drink yet. She made sure that he knew all the other people around her table then turned away to order yet another bottle.

  ‘By the way, Jerry,’ she said, when he had commented on the generosity of her choice and said how sensible she had been to spend some of her time on chancery cases instead of slogging away with the criminals as he had been doing, ‘have you ever heard of a man called Martin Drakeshill, who operates somewhere in south-west London?’

  ‘Drakeshill? No, can’t say I have. But have you heard the story about the drake who went to a grand hotel with his best beloved duck and asked room service for a condom?’

  ‘No,’ said Trish, dragging out the vowel into an auntly sound of disapproval and resignation. She could vividly remember Jeremy’s laughing himself into choking fits over the most childish jokes, most of them involving smut or lavatories, and sometimes both. For a man as sophisticated and clever as he, it was an odd quirk.

  He understood her tone and stuck out his tongue. ‘Well, all right then, Smarty-pants. I won’t tell you.’

  ‘Oh, go on. How could I resist?’

  Like most barristers, he was an excellent raconteur, playing the part of each character in his mildly grubby story and giving them all the appropriate voices and gestures. In the end it was quite funny. Trish gave in and laughed with the rest. ‘Did that come from your junior clerk?’ she asked.

  ‘No. My son. He’s eight now, and the funniest thing ever.’ Jeremy looked preposterously proud, and Trish had a moment’s knife-like envy. ‘He collects jokes for me from the school playground. I thought that was nearly as good as Napoleon and his armies.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ve all heard that one,’ said Rosie Boxwell, a hard-faced woman from the commercial bar, whom Trish had never much liked.

  ‘But what about the man who was dying of thirst in the desert and met a genie?’ called somebody’s pupil, a young man Trish had never met before and whose name she had not heard properly.

  Jeremy said, with tremendous dignity, that he’d heard that story long ago and that it was quite as old as his Napoleon joke, and not nearly as funny, besides being racist. The challenge proved too much for everyone and soon they were all at it, offering strings of madder and madder stories, as though they, too, were showing off in a school playground.

  It was all very silly and great fun. Trish eventually reeled home across the bridge, as usual stopping halfway to look down the river, which was particularly romantic in the moonlight
. Leaning on the edge of the bridge, unaware of the cold, she gazed at the piled buildings on either side of the river. White and silver with the black water rushing down to the sea between them, they made her wish she could paint – or even take good photographs.

  Her elbow slipped off the metal and fading common sense told her she had better get herself home while she was still on her feet and drink at least a pint of water before she went to bed.

  The water seemed to have had no effect when she woke at three-thirty in the morning with a dry mouth, boiling eyeballs and a thudding in her head as though devils in football boots were prancing about inside her skull. Getting up felt like a serious mistake as the floor swayed under her, but she needed some Nurofen.

  She thought of Rosie Boxwell and the moment at which she had become just too irritating to bear. Trish had drunk enough by then to let her feelings show and she had roused a gale of laughter from everyone except Rosie with her neatly aimed insult.

  Oh, shit! What a mistake! A woman like that wouldn’t forget.

  Trish closed her eyes and laid her hand across her aching forehead, wishing she could forget her idiocy. Later on, she had even started talking about SWAB. It was clear enough that hard-faced Rosie hadn’t been invited to join yet either, but it had been mad to make it seem as though she herself had. Rosie must know some of the members quite well and she was enough of a cow to check whether Trish was a member. Oh, hell! That was probably the end of her chances there.

  God, she was thirsty! Two pills and more water might help. But she didn’t deserve to feel better. What a fool! And she wouldn’t sleep for hours. Not now that the drink had tickled up her liver and made her brain think it was daybreak. Shit.

  It was at that particularly awful moment that she remembered George telling her that in his experience just about every barrister in London was incapable of keeping his or her mouth shut. Trish had furiously denied it at the time. Now she put her hands over her hot face and groaned. What a fool she’d been! Rosie would tell everyone what she’d said and they’d all laugh at her. Oh, shit.