She jumped, but not quickly enough. A bee, flying straight for her. First time this year. It was loud – it was always very loud.
Catherine’s head swam. The stairs up to the front door were narrow. Someone brushed past her; she jumped back. There was a charge in the air, suddenly.
Afterwards she realised her body had understood it before her eyes had seen it. She looked back, staring across the road towards Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and there she was.
A woman, standing on the edge of the freshly green lawn a few metres away, surrounded by the red and pink primula beds. She was staring at Catherine, patiently. As if she knew Catherine would eventually spot her. When their eyes met, she walked towards Catherine, and she smiled. It was a slow, curious smile.
‘Hello there,’ she said.
Her slender shoulders were enveloped by long hair, which hung around her like dull gold ropes, softly shining. Her eyes – oh God. Those eyes, unchanged through almost thirty years. Bright blue-green, sea-glass.
She wore a long floral dress, and biker boots. She wore these things, she looked normal. She was real.
Catherine couldn’t say anything. She just stared.
‘I thought I’d come back.’ She folded her arms and smiled. She had a ring through her lip. ‘I wrote you a note. Did you get it? Are you pleased to see me, Catherine?’
Catherine blinked, pressing the palms of her hands into her eye sockets, buying time and then, eyes still closed, she fumbled with one hand for her lanyard in her pocket. Slowly, dragging her foot, she turned and climbed up the steps of the old Georgian mansion that housed the chambers – still she couldn’t look behind her, across to the square.
At the top she held the card up and as the door unlocked, she turned around, blinking as the pain from the toe washed over her.
The woman had gone. Catherine breathed out. She lifted her foot, rotating the ankle, breathing heavily, then put her hand on the door.
Then a slight rustle below her. Catherine looked at the pavement at the bottom of the steps. There she was again, and this time she was staring up.
‘I said hello.’ The voice was the same, a little cracked and lower, but still that lyrical, upper-class cadence. She smiled, turning her face up towards Catherine.
Closer up, Catherine could see her once-dewy teenage skin was freckled and lined, weather-beaten. Her teeth were yellowed. She was not the beauty she had been.
‘H-hello,’ Catherine said, softly, her voice breaking.
‘Catherine!’ From across the square, came the sound of Jake’s voice, calling her. ‘Sorry, Cat. I wandered off. It’s quite nice now, are you sure you don’t want to –’
He was hurrying towards the steps. Catherine looked down.
‘Catherine.’ Another slow smile. ‘That’s what you answer to, then? It’s been nearly thirty years. Is that all you’ve got to say? “Hello?” ’ She put her hand up to the iron staircase. ‘I saw you on the TV, that boy’s murder trial. Aren’t you –’
Jake had almost reached the steps. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Catherine, clutching her handbag and soup close to her body. ‘I have to go now.’
This was the wrong thing to say. The peacock-blue-green eyes shone, almost too brightly. The stripes on her top were waves, as Catherine’s vision swam. Catherine watched her swallow, and blink rapidly, as if she’d been slapped.
‘I know you got the letter, Catherine. Weren’t you pleased to hear from me? After all these years? Shouldn’t we do something?’
‘I have to go now,’ Catherine said again, and as she turned abruptly to jab her security pass on the reader, she felt a jolt of pain. She slipped, her foot folding underneath her like it was suddenly made of rubber, her head hitting the railings. Jake, the girl in the square on her phone and the security guard by the museum all stared at her: Catherine realised she must have screamed, but when she came to, lying on the ground, her foot burning with red-hot pain, and looked down the steps again, there was no one there.
Chapter Three
‘Look, I’m fine,’ said Catherine, as Jake frogmarched her, carefully but firmly, into the doctor’s surgery. (She banged her head on the railings. She fainted. She was screaming.)
‘I’m absolutely fine,’ she told them as they helped her into the waiting room.
‘I’m completely fine,’ she repeated, shaking her head with firm embarrassment as the receptionist nodded, unmoved, and checked her details onscreen. ‘Doctor Jellicoe can see Mrs Christophe in ten minutes, if she’d care to wait. He’s with someone at the moment.’
‘Really, I’m fine. It’s just a problem with –’
‘She’s broken her toe,’ Jake interjected, dramatically. ‘It’s been getting worse and now she can hardly walk. I think it might be infected. I think she’s hallucinating.’
The receptionist did not react but Catherine saw her eyes flicker up towards her.
It’s not a broken toe. It’s not a head injury. I think I just saw a dead woman.
It was a plush, quiet surgery, for private patients, as Catherine and Jake both had ludicrous health insurance through chambers that they resented paying for but which entitled them to register at this practice just around the corner, where rich Arabs, perfectly-turned-out ladies who lunch and plump, striped-suited businessmen made loud phone calls in reception. And where you could walk in when you wanted. Every time Catherine complained at a chambers meeting about the cost of the scheme she’d instantly find reason in the next couple of weeks to be glad of it, ridiculous though it was. It was very dark – dark wood, dark lighting, heavy scented candles. Catherine’s children, who were registered at the local GP in Kentish Town, where everyone and anyone went, found it hilarious that their mother went here for gold-standard cervical smears and other medical procedures and where a man in the waiting room had once tried to advise Catherine on the danger of installing marble staircases in her home. ‘My friend Prince Alberto Gonzaga slipped on his own marble staircase, my dear. He broke his back in three places. Don’t get one, I implore you. I’m telling everyone I know.’
‘I’ll be fine, thanks, now,’ Catherine said to Jake. She spoke too loudly, and the other patients in the waiting room looked up. She glanced at all of them, trying to breathe, trying to tell herself it was nothing.
But it couldn’t be dismissed. Because either way it was bad. The Devil was in the world again. Which was worse: that it was her, that she’d come back, or that she’d imagined her?
She hadn’t imagined her.
Damned Jake. She liked him, loved him like a brother, but now he’d seen too much. Coming to, babbling nonsense with him kneeling over her, his face had been above hers, and it was the first thing she’d thought. ‘It’s OK, Catherine,’ he’d said, flapping away other onlookers. ‘She’s fine. Look, C, we’re blocking the door. Anna, can you call Gray’s Inn Surgery? Tell them I’m bringing Catherine Christophe over, she’s banged her head. Yes, thank you.’
He’d been so kind, that was the thing, and it was mortifying.
Now, as they sat on the slippery leather sofa together, in the heavy silence, he nudged Catherine. ‘This place is hilarious. Look.’
How to Spend It, the Financial Times supplement, was on the coffee table in front of them, and someone had inserted Post-its in various pages. Jake flicked through it. ‘You can buy a Chaumet Mier something watch for only twelve thousand,’ he said. ‘Not on a criminal barrister’s salary. Maybe if you’re a negligence barrister. I wouldn’t know.’ He nudged her, to show he’d made a joke.
Catherine smiled, but it hurt her cheeks. Her neck hurt too. All of her did.
‘What did I say?’ she said, after a pause.
‘When?’
‘When I was out cold.’
‘Say? Oh, you were babbling. It didn’t really make much sense.’
‘Sorry.’
‘You were singing, actually. That old nursery rhyme.’ And Jake started singing. ‘ “Green Grow the Rushes, O” – is that it? Can’t remember the chor
us . . .’ He glanced at her and saw her face, and then, after a moment’s pause, said: ‘So look, Cat, I’d better go. Anything I can do for you back at the office?’
‘No worries.’ Catherine shook her head. ‘Tell Jenny I’ll be back as soon as possible. I’m feeling much better actually.’ She tried to meet his eyes, but couldn’t, quite. ‘I’m fine. This is silly.’
The heavy leather-backed door shut quietly behind Jake, utter silence filling the scented waiting room again. Catherine’s vision was cloudy, her head ached. She took out her phone to do some emails but found the words were blurry, and besides, she wasn’t up to discussing Grant Doyle’s appeal, or his prison visit, or replying to the solicitor on the new marine insurance fraud case she was taking on, a trial lasting several weeks, if not months, involving a vessel that had, the insurers claimed, been deliberately scuttled off the coast near Yemen.
She’d been looking forward to this next trial. She thrived on presenting good work, on long hours, on immersing herself in a case so deeply nothing could surprise her in court. When, ten years ago, she had made the switch away from the underfunded, unpredictable nature of criminal law to the calmer, lucrative waters of fraud and negligence, specialising in marine insurance, she had gone to Greek conversation classes above a pastry shop in Bayswater every Tuesday, so she could talk to the Greek shipping companies directly. Jake had laughed at her, but that was Catherine: it was about control, she knew that, and that was fine.
Catherine leaned forward, as if to quieten her mind. Her head throbbed again. She tried to sift through the story, how she would explain it all to the doctor, but as if in protest her vision grew more cloudy, air escaping from her lungs, her chest. Desperately, she scanned the magazines in front of her, pushing How to Spend It out of the way in irritation and picking up Country Life.
She had not read Country Life for years, since a misrepresentation case where she’d acted for a billionaire who had bought, unseen, a Scottish estate he’d spotted in Country Life whilst he was in the waiting room of his doctor’s surgery. Catherine smiled, wondering if it was this doctor’s surgery.
It had been an enjoyable case: inside, the house the billionaire had bought was not the ancient, wood-panelled manor evoked in the description but a badly built, Edwardian mock-Elizabethan hunting lodge that more resembled Skyfall after the shoot-out, riddled with dry rot. There was no salmon fishing; it was advertised as being ‘on the banks of the River Spey’, which in fact was twenty miles away. The fact of the house apparently being grand enough to be advertised in Country Life formed the basis of Catherine’s argument of fraud, and she and the pupil working with her had spent many hours thumbing through back issues, comparing like for like. Catherine had emerged with a stronger than ever distaste for the idle rich, but a secret addiction to property porn. She’d won the case, of course.
Someone she had been at Cambridge with was something to do with Country Life. What was his name? Tompkins. Gosh, she hadn’t thought about him for a while. A name from the past, swimming out of her fragmented memory. He was an ex-public school boy, a member of the Pitt Club, not her crowd.
‘Mrs Mimi Caterina Bibby?’
A woman in huge sunglasses, a giant patterned scarf tied around her face, got up. The scent of her perfume – old-fashioned, heavy – washed over Catherine, tickling her senses. There was a very, very slight breeze, brushing the nape of her bare neck. The adrenaline of the past hour, the fear, the pain, was fading.
Hugo Tompkins. He had been at the Chelsea Flower Show one year and she’d quite literally bumped into him. ‘Good God,’ he’d said, looking at her in disbelief as she’d pushed herself away from him. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
She was a serious person, but she always enjoyed telling that story. The gasp the listeners always gave. Because it was a reasonable question. She’d been taken to Chelsea as a guest of the head of chambers, Quentin Holyoake, and his wife, Bella. And, of course, she hadn’t thought through how much she would hate it, surrounded by flowers. The bees seemed to follow her everywhere and, eventually, she had had to make an early escape, citing a sudden migraine to Quentin and Bella: mortified, because she was so fond of them both.
The telephone rang in reception; Catherine’s head tingled. It was Quentin who was the reason she’d taken on, and lost so badly, the Grant Doyle case. She could still hear Graeme, the clerk at Fulton Chambers, informing her the case was hers, the Friday a week away from the trial, in late February.
‘Mr Holyoake’s out of intensive care, but he’s not coming back to chambers, not for a while,’ he had said, rubbing his hands. ‘He’s asked for you to take over.’
‘Not Jake?’
‘No, Mrs Christophe. Not Jake,’ Graeme had said, with relish.
‘I’m not a criminal barrister.’
‘Oh but you are, Mrs Christophe. In fact I have a whole file of cases to prove it. Here.’ He had jabbed at the ancient filing cabinet beside him.
‘Not any more –’
‘I’ll ring the hospital and tell Mr Holyoake you said no then, shall I?’
Not for the first time, Catherine felt deep rage towards this red-faced bully of a man who held such sway in chambers. Like all clerks, his position was central to the chambers, and seemingly like all clerks he relished lording it over everyone. He would say it was irrespective of age, sex, position – Catherine and the other female barristers, especially the less experienced ones, knew that was rubbish.
But she had taken the case for Quentin – kind, flamboyant, chaotic Quentin, whose ground-floor office was part of the character of the whole place, stuffed with various different busts of Beethoven, ancient copies of The Times, an old record player, framed photographs and newspaper headlines. He was one of a dying breed, the old-school, prestigious criminal barrister. Younger barristers weren’t interested in criminal practice. It was depressing, backbreaking work, decimated by legal aid cuts, often dealing with people who had no hope. A grammar school boy from York who’d won a scholarship to Cambridge and been in Footlights with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, Quentin believed passionately in justice and representation for all. He remembered what it was like not to be accepted because of your accent and class.
He and Bella had no children. When Catherine had first started at Fulton he had taken her under his wing, and as she was living alone in Primrose Hill, working late most nights, he would often scoop her up and bring her back for dinner with Bella at their messy, rambling house in Lloyd Baker Street.
He had had a stroke, six weeks ago, a week before the trial was due to start, and was only now back at home. Catherine had been to see him. The warm, wood-panelled house, filled with photographs and vases of dried flowers and green and orange Penguin paperbacks in piles everywhere, seemed to have lost its spark, its charm. It was dirty and dark, Bella, totally at sea, aged ten years in only a few weeks, and Quentin still not able to speak. Catherine blinked at the memory, guilt sluicing her. Poor Quentin. She must visit him.
The list of obligations, of people she had to visit. Quentin in his rumpled bed. Grant Doyle, in prison. Eileen, in her care home.
As if from another lifetime she remembered the conversation with Davide, only an hour earlier. She was working too hard. He was taking her away.
Catherine sat up. And then the magazine slid open on the first page and there it was. And it wasn’t the falling over, it wasn’t losing the trial and Grant Doyle’s mother saying to her: ‘They said you were the best, and you couldn’t even remember my boy’s name.’ It wasn’t her study, all smashed up, it wasn’t Carys, about to turn eighteen. She’d known what she’d find when she turned the page. She’d known it because she’d seen it already, in a discarded newspaper at the Eurotunnel café, and before that, on a news website, late at night before they left for France. The sale of Vanes was newsworthy.
Suddenly she was back in the café, the smell of coffee and greasy pastries catching in her throat, making her nauseous. Her fingertips gingerly gripping the
edge of the newspaper, as if it were contaminated. I thought I’d dealt with this already, she’d said to herself. She had shoved the newspaper in the bin. Pushing the whole thing down, down, away, away.
But they were crowding around her, the ghosts, pressing closer and closer. She had no gatekeeper. There was no one. Catherine blinked, wondering if you could faint whilst sitting down, thinking she might just melt into nothing. Aren’t you pleased to see me? she had said. Aren’t you?
VANES, LARCOMBE, SOMERSET
6-BEDROOM 18TH CENTURY DETACHED MANSE ON THE MARKET FOR THE FIRST TIME IN TWO HUNDRED YEARS
A MOST UNUSUAL AND UNIQUE PROPERTY WHICH REQUIRES SOME UPDATING TO BECOME THE PERFECT FAMILY HOME.
AT THE EDGE OF EXMOOR, SITUATED IN AN IDYLLIC POSITION ABOVE PRIVATE WOODLAND TUMBLING TOWARDS THE SEA, GRADE II* LISTED VANES IS AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY HOUSE OF HISTORIC IMPORTANCE WHICH HAS BEEN IN THE SAME FAMILY SINCE 1830. COMPRISING THREE FLOORS AND TWO ACRES OF LAND, IT COMES WITH ITS OWN TWO BEDROOMED LISTED GATEHOUSE WHICH COULD EASILY BE ADAPTED FOR HOLIDAY LETS (SUBJECT TO THE USUAL PERMISSIONS AND APPROVAL), OPEN AIR SWIMMING POOL AND ANCIENT CHAPEL OUTSIDE THE GROUNDS, PARTIALLY DEMOLISHED BUT OF GREAT HISTORIC INTEREST.
SIR JOSS HUNTER, WHOSE FAMILY HAS LIVED AT VANES FOR FIVE GENERATIONS, SAYS: ‘IT IS TIME FOR VANES TO BE ENJOYED BY ANOTHER FAMILY.’
‘Mrs Christophe? Mrs Christophe?’ The receptionist stood up, a few minutes later, looking around her. ‘Where’s she gone? Did anyone see her? Mrs Christophe? Oh dear. How vexing.’
Chapter Four
Catherine paused at the bottom of the steps and then climbed slowly up, holding her pass to the door. Her head still ached where she had banged it, and her foot was still agonising, but she had managed to walk back without falling over.
‘You don’t need a doctor for a broken toe,’ she’d been told firmly. Having hobbled out of the surgery, she’d rung the physio she’d had several years ago when she’d broken a wrist skiing. ‘You need proper tape, and proper anti-inflammatories, and you need to rest it, and it’ll be absolutely fine. Any other side effects?’
The Beloved Girls Page 4