Patchwork Man: What would you do if your past could kill you? A mystery and suspense thriller. (Patchwork People series Book 1)

by D. B. Martin

  The bulging cabinet I’d forced the case notes behind grumbled at being disturbed and the creaking spooked me. I made the stairs two at a time, feeling the nip of rat teeth and the shiver of pursuit clutching at my spine until I was able to turn on myself at the head of the stairs and see nothing but my own long shadow trickling down into the gloom at the bottom. I clicked the lights off and stepped backwards into the reception area, closing the door securely on the terrors of childhood, basement and imagination. The rats could stay down there in the dark. I intended living in the light.

  I went more casually back to my office and flicked the desk lamp on as a precaution against the dusk. It was now past seven and although it would probably stay daylight until almost ten, I couldn’t quite shake the sensation of not being alone. I put the folder and the letter side by side on the desk and rummaged in the left-hand drawer for my letter opener. Damn! I’d forgotten I hadn’t been able to find it since Margaret had died. I slammed the door shut with irritation, making the desk shudder. The envelope bounced lightly on its surface, demanding my attention ahead of the case notes. I didn’t really want to have to read some gushing invitation from a grateful charity begging Margaret to grace their party/soirée/dinner with her presence. I was tempted to ignore it and leave it in Gregory’s pigeon hole as I left but there was an air of officialdom in the grandiose flourish of the logo across the franking stamp of the post mark.

  Finding Futures for Families it proclaimed. FFF. I remembered the initials. It was emblazoned on the banner Margaret had posed in front of for the portrait shot on my desk at home, wearing the red and black road-kill dress. It struck me then how many of her charitable pursuits revolved around families – MADU – Mums and Dads Unite, a charity dedicated to family reunion, Children Without Boundaries – adoption resources for couples adopting foreign children, FFF of course, and Casualties of War, which until then I’d assumed was to do with forces families. I soon found otherwise. Inside the envelope was a full explanation of what both FFF and Casualties of War did – one I assumed that Margaret wouldn’t have intended me to have become acquainted with until quite some time later if she’d had the chance. FFF was essentially an adoption agency. Casualties of War not dissimilar in a way, other than that it sourced the potential goods to supply for adoption whereas FFF located the potential customers and put the product and purchaser together. Margaret supported both not only as a patron, but also as a potential client it seemed, from the paperwork that lay underneath the covering letter.

  I remembered our exchange over Danny Hewson’s case when I’d first attempted to reject it without even looking through the folder.

  ‘Do I have a choice?’ She hadn’t replied, just tapped the headed paper meaningfully. She’d had me there. Of course I didn’t. Grease the palms, lick the arses, climb the slippery pole. I’d done it all my life to get to here. One last push and I’d be at the top. Didn’t I want to appear the right man for the job to the LCD, she’d pointed out coolly.

  ‘You can’t simply be a money machine all your life, Lawrence. One day you have to be more than that. A presence – a force. A person with a purpose.’

  I’d looked hard at her at that, but it seemed to be no more than a way of pushing me onwards in my career, not a personal judgement. Prove my subscription to the cause of justice for all, and earn valuable points with my political masters who were the real arbiters of how justice was meted out and by whom, she’d concluded. But a legal aid case, and now? She simply raised her eyebrows meaningfully and as she was generally right I’d bowed to her judgement, read the summary – and then recoiled in horror.

  Now I realised I should have paid more attention to her intense interest in the cause she was championing even though I said no, absolutely, finally and irrevocably. She never did anything for nothing, unless it was for me, but this time, it didn’t seem to be for me at all – quite the reverse. Now I could see who it had been intended for, just still not why.

  The thin set of papers, carefully bound together under the covering letter – and intended to be inserted in the case folder where the post-it beckoned – were the preliminaries to adoption. The boy’s name had already been inserted, but the space for the adoptive parents names had been left blank. In the case notes the fluorescent blood-orange post-it note waved at me like a red flag, and I the bull it was aggravating. I turned the notes on their side and read the instruction on the post-it.

  ‘Insert adoption papers here.’

  I flipped the notes open to the page before the post-it. It was a summary of the boy’s defence, identifying the fact that he had little or no chance of him pleading not guilty and it sticking, unless some other mug confessed, or an alternative culprit identified. I had to reluctantly agree, but that was what Kat and I were going to work on, wasn’t it? Underneath was a summary of the family background, and the mother’s statement that she found it difficult to cope with her large family, especially Danny, who was a law unto himself. There little about the father, other than his general air of absence. There was a large red ink star cross-hatched next to the mother’s statement and a c.f. note. I hadn’t checked up on the c.f. note yet. It had been going to be my next task – to track the references and weave in the other statements to check for inconsistencies or leads. It seemed it might be wise to track this particular note and see where the trail led right now.

  At the back of the folder was a list of c.f. notes and this one – number five – related to a proposal from FFF, but not what it was. It said ‘see additional papers being obtained by MJ. Counter proposal when defence fails’. Margaret Juste, obviously. And I was probably holding the papers in my hand right now. So Danny was up for adoption because he was beyond parental control. More fairly, he was also unduly disadvantaged by his inappropriate parenting. The reasoning was clear, though. If – or when – all else failed, this was his get-out. Find Danny a new home with adoptive parents prepared to be bound over as responsible for his future good behaviour whilst a minor and he would probably be given his second chance, or at the least, a considerably reduced sentence.

  A clever ruse, but who were the prospective parents? I puzzled over it as there were no other notes. Margaret clearly had a clever plan in mind – the hidden agenda. What – or who – the hell was it? And why saddle me with the problem? Then it struck me. I was such a fool. More devastating than the hit and run which had crushed the life from her, more dismal than the childhood nightmare that had crushed the love from me, was the plan Margaret had been steadily putting in place. The plan to create her own family for the future. How the hell she’d been going to do it and get away with it, I had yet to work out, but the names intended to be inserted into the blank spaces were most probably hers and mine.

  12: The Case for the Defence

  It wasn’t a plan. Not one I would ever follow anyway. A small ungracious part of me congratulated myself on escaping it as a result of Margaret’s death, and then was disgusted. No matter how much I abhorred the idea of fatherhood or facing a child who was more a ghost from the past than myself, it could never be worth another’s death. I slung the case folder and the papers from FFF onto my desk and slumped back in my chair again, sinking into the same sense of depression and pointlessness as had plagued me so many times as a child. I’d not felt so low in a long time – not even straight after Margaret’s death. The need to keep going then had made the adrenaline pump and ironically, if anything, I’d been on a high – glibly fielding press and personal enquiries and soaking up the sympathy that had been lavished on me whilst it was fashionable to do so. Dealing with the boy’s case had also distracted my attention from the reality of the event.

  Maybe this was grief, then? Grief, they say catches up with you later – like secrets. Maybe I was grieving for Margaret, annoyed as I was with her for the mess she’d deliberately landed me in. I allowed the idea to sink in, exploring what grieving might feel like. It was difficult to decide since I wasn’t sure I’d ever grieved before. I wasn’t even sure I�
��d even felt before.

  Feelings. Everyone talked about them all the time – you’ve hurt my feelings, I feel you don’t like me, how do you feel? That one had been sent my way a lot recently. How do you feel, Lawrence? Are you feeling OK? Don’t deny your feelings ... I hadn’t a clue what mine were. The only person who hadn’t bombarded me with questions about feelings was Kat. Indeed, she’d been more concerned about her feelings than mine, but she was probably the only person who had engendered feelings in me. And that was it. As soon as I thought about her, my mind was full again and I had the uncomfortable feeling that I wasn’t going to be able to eject her easily. So had I felt the same way about Margaret? The only possible answer was ‘I didn’t know’. When I thought about her the mix was of regret, anger, betrayal and bewilderment. This couldn’t be grief for losing one I loved, it was shock; shock, dismay, confusion and most of all, at the moment – defiance. I would not be walked into the trap she had laid for me – the parent trap. I couldn’t avoid concluding the case for the boy, and I couldn’t avoid my responsibility to do the best job possible for him – which unfortunately would include examining Win’s role in the proceedings more closely. But I would conclude it my way.

  If I was going to face Win for a second time, I knew it couldn’t be Kenny who faced him. It had to be Lawrence – and a Lawrence who’d faced his demons. I’d surprised myself by facing him the first time, but it had drained me and I knew I couldn’t have faced him again if he’d walked back through the door minutes after he’d left. The little rat teeth in the cellar couldn’t be allowed to gnaw away at my foundations any longer. I had to finally and irrevocably grow up and leave the past I thought I’d left behind with my childhood fears. I allowed the insidious creeping dark of the past into full view and there, with only the shadows for company, I took a long look at the man Kenny had become – and the child he’d grown out of.

  He was a strange mix, that man – pieced together from a ragbag of life – the feelings I’d avoided and the outward trappings I’d adopted. Maybe we’re all patchworks, slowly adding to the pattern, piece by piece – some frayed, some neatly sewn, some brightly coloured and some dull and faded from over-use. I’d shied away from the unravelling edges of part of my patchwork – the tattered sense of loss and failure in childhood – and focused only on the pristine right-angled squares; the years of control and success being the man I wanted to be. Lawrence Juste, QC. But those symmetrical squares nevertheless bordered the rough and ragged. One day, without firmer sutures, they would become unstitched and lost, and the needlework had already been unravelling for decades.

  I filed the FFF papers where Margaret had indicated they should go, and stuck my own post-it across them. ‘NFA’ it said. No further action. Oh, no, my dear. This patchwork man has his own design – maybe haphazard and uncertain as yet, but being added to all the time, and the first square is right now.

  The odd thing about finally facing yourself is that whilst it’s humiliating to own your failings and accept your weaknesses, it also ultimately makes you more confirmed in your convictions. I wasn’t just Lawrence, I was still also Kenny – and it was no bad thing that Kenny had been afraid, had betrayed and had escaped, because Kenny also understood. Ironically, whilst Lawrence didn’t, he did have those feelings everyone talked about and never displayed. I stayed in Chambers all night, gradually fleshing out what I needed to know to determine what had engendered that uneasy feeling I’d had when I’d first read the case notes and thought that there was something I was missing. I now suspected it was something Win had in my patchwork design, but without talking to him again, I couldn’t see what it was.

  I spent half the night cross-referencing all the c.f. notes until I’d placed FFF, Casualties of War and Margaret into their structural positions. Her hidden agenda remained what I’d thought it to be when I’d first inserted the FFF documentation into the file. It was a very feminine one, and try as I might, I couldn’t hate her for my part in it. All those charitable works, all those subtle steers in favour of children’s organisations, all that kudos as the ‘caring wife’ of Lawrence Juste had all been to get her to the position she was in just before the joy-rider trampled her into the dust. She was at the pinnacle of her plan, cleverly balancing my respectability and position in the news as the lawman of the people with her persona as the Madonna of the abandoned. I was to have been manoeuvred into taking Danny’s case. He couldn’t win – there was too much evidence against him – and the great Lawrence Juste would have knowingly accepted a case he had no chance but to fail miserably with. My partners would fume at me for ruining our straight win record over recent years when his ever-loving wife privately came up with a triumphant solution to solve both professional and personal failings; the adoption ruse. The support of public opinion would have been immense. The childless couple saving a child. Both she and I would be heralded as saints. If I didn’t agree, there was always the little matter of all those names and dates and places to ruin me with ...

  And if that didn’t persuade me, then there was still Win – and perhaps something more that lurking just behind him.

  It was so neat I wanted to laugh out loud. Margaret was certainly a good pupil. She’d obviously listened carefully to everything I’d told her over the years – how the evidence had to stack up, the witnesses dovetail, the public applaud. Oh, she’d orchestrated it all perfectly and I would have been played like a hapless sap if she’d still been alive. I had to admire her, but now with so much of it already in place and me having heedlessly followed the gingerbread trail she’d left so far, I also had to foil her. Danny’s odd response when Kat let slip that my wife had just died drifted back to me as my mind feverishly turned over the possibilities. ‘She were nice.’ It implied he’d met Margaret. When? As part of the lead-in to the adoption process? If so had it been an informal meeting, or one engineered by Margaret without admitting the reason why? In fact how far along was the process? I rummaged through the case papers again until I found the FFF paperwork I’d so dismissively filed away. There was no intimation of how far things had progressed in real terms in the accompanying letter, just thanks to Margaret and the social worker for making so much progress on the case.

  The social worker.

  It was close to 6.30am by then – too early to reasonably ring anyone on business, unless it was personal business. I made myself a strong black coffee before the hyperactive hum of office girls and last night’s dates filled the poky staffroom on the ground floor behind the clerks’ office, and slunk back to my office. Gregory would be the first one in and I certainly wanted to avoid his hawk eyes, with my five o’clock shadow and greyed complexion. I drank the coffee whilst it was still too hot, letting the bitter burn fire up the antagonist in me, rehearsing over and over what I was going to say. The numerals of the clock on the desk slowly slipped round to 9.00 and I picked up the phone to Kat and called the direct-dial number she’d given me.

  ‘Mid-West Social Services, Katrina Roumelia speaking – how can I help you?’ It was early-morning sing-song and I knew my attack would take her completely off-guard.

  ‘Probably more than you’ve been doing so far.’ The sound of a sharp intake of breath was followed by silence at the other end of the phone so I followed through. ‘Perhaps you can fill me in with the progress on Danny’s adoption so far?’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Is that all you have to say?’ I offered no mercy. ‘Your case notes seem to have an awful lot more in than mine, Miss Roumelia.’ I could sense her flinch at the formality.

  ‘Lawrence ... Mr Juste,’ she stumbled, ‘Um, oh dear – I don’t know what to say. Can we talk?’

  ‘I thought that’s what we are doing right now?’

  ‘I mean, face to face.’

  ‘Would it make a difference to the amount of facts I am given – as opposed to the fairy-tales?’

  ‘I haven’t made anything up, really.’

  ‘Maybe not – but you have left an awful lot out and that
makes for a different kind of fiction, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sorry. With your wife dying like that, it seemed as if it would all come to nothing anyway, so it didn’t seem worth saying anything to you. I thought it would just make it all worse ...’

  ‘The truth rarely makes things worse,’ but even as I said it I knew it was a lie.

  ‘Can we talk about it, please? I’ve got no appointments until this afternoon. I could slip out whenever it suited you.’

  I suppose I could have continued the game. The old Lawrence Juste would have – toying with the target until they snapped under the strain; but this was more than a target. No, this was something other than a target. This was a woman who did strangely incredible things to my sense of self, whilst also withholding information that could crucify me.

  We met at the coffee shop down the road from her office. I didn’t want to be seen with her near Chambers, and definitely not in the state I was in, but I’d forgotten that by the time I was sitting at the shabby table with another overly-strong and unappetising coffee in front of me. She slipped in opposite and gave me a rueful grin.

  ‘You look awful.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve caused that.’

  ‘You and Margaret. What was going on?’

  ‘It was the back-up plan – just in case, although Margaret was certain you’d take the case and win it. You’re the best.’

  ‘So you keep saying.’ It sounded more like a grunt than a comment.

  ‘You are! Whatever you look like,’ she winked cheekily. I just stared back ice-faced, distilling the kind of cheek that encouraged her to flirt even when she should have felt at a disadvantage –and liking it.