All the Lonely People (2 page)

Soon she re-emerged, a towel wrapped round her hair. She had stripped off the jeans; her bare legs were as smooth as ever. “I'd forgotten what a mess you make of the toothpaste,” she said. “You need a woman to take charge.”

“My trouble is, I attract the wrong type.”

She laughed. “I deserved that.”

“You deserve much worse.” He couldn't help grinning. For all her faults, Liz had always been able to make fun of herself, as well as of those around her.

“I like this flat,” she said gently, “but it's lonely. You don't have anyone special?”

Only you, he wanted to say.

“No.”

“That's ridiculous. You're not a bad-looking feller in a poor light.”

Reaching for an ashtray, Harry said dryly, “My next door neighbour thinks all I need is a little female company. She keeps inviting me round for coffee and I'm running out of excuses.”

Liz beamed encouragement. “Get together with her. It'll do you good. The bachelor life is fine, but if you don't relax, you'll never make it to thirty-three.” Her left arm reached out and stroked the heavy stubble on his chin. For a short while, neither of them spoke, but at last she said, “Goodnight, Harry.” Her tone was soft, almost tender, and the words hung in the airless emptiness of the room as the bedroom door shut behind her.

Harry remained motionless, staring through the picture window into the darkness outside. Despite the heat of the room, a chill of fear had suddenly touched him for when he had looked down at her slender wrist, he had seen the angry red stitch marks which criss-crossed it - marks that he recognised as the stigmata of a failed suicide.

Chapter Two

Sleep eluded him for hours. The sofa was too narrow to allow him the insomniac's self-indulgence of tossing and turning as he raked over the conversation with Liz. His mind was a junkyard of discarded emotions and he could not be sure if he was glad or angry that she had returned to him, merely to say goodbye. As consciousness drifted away, he had a fuzzy recollection of a question he had forgotten to ask.

When he awoke, the wall clock reminded him that he hadn't retrieved his alarm from his bedroom. Eight o'clock already and he was supposed to be back at the Bridewell by half-past to complete his stint of twenty-four hours as the city's Duty Solicitor, as confidant of the thieves and muggers, drunks and vandals who were picked up by the police and had no one else to turn to. Cursing, Harry struggled to his feet. He yearned to stay and talk to Liz; even if she was no longer his, he could think of no one with whom he would rather be. For a moment he contemplated phoning in to say he was sick and unable to come in today. But the work instinct won and he shambled to the bathroom instead.

After a hasty wash and shave he looked in on Liz. So many times, waking first, he had watched her exactly like this. With the duvet tucked beneath her chin, her face seemed as peaceful as a child's, and as innocent. No make up, no worry lines, no hint of any suffering. Why should she want to cut her own wrist?

Shaking her, he said, “I must go. There's food and drink in the kitchen for breakfast. Okay?”

In a slow ceremonial way, like a monarch bestowing attention on a humble subject, she opened her eyes. It took a second for them to focus on him and then she smiled. “Thanks for looking after me.”

Harry wasn't sure if she was teasing him. “You might call me,” he said, trying to be off-hand about it. “We could have lunch.”

“I'd love to be your honoured guest. No, seriously.”

He could feel himself tense as her fingers touched his hand.

“You all right, Liz?”

“Fine.” The green eyes widened. “I feel safe here.” Her arms dangled negligently by the side of the bed and once more he saw the damaged wrist.

Flinching, he turned to go. “See you later.”

Outside, rain smacked the pavements with sadistic fury. For once it was worth taking his car the short distance into the city centre. He drove an M.G. convertible, twenty years old and still lively beneath a rusting exterior. The only car he had ever owned; he was comfortable with it and didn't believe in change for the sake of it. Glancing every so often at his watch, he weaved through sodden one-way streets, squeezing past roadworks and imperilling pedestrians who took a chance.

The riddle of why Liz might want to kill herself continued to nag at him. Might he have been mistaken in interpreting the marks on her wrist as the legacy of a failed suicide bid? He didn't think so. In the past he had seen similar scars disfiguring his clients. One had been the victim of a messy divorce, another a kleptomaniac with a heroin habit: both had tried to kill themselves. Could Coghlan's vicious streak have caused Liz comparable despair? Anything was possible - and yet the Liz he knew loved life, would never bring it to an end a moment too soon.

He arrived with less than a minute to spare. The Magistrate's Court was not yet open but he turned into Cheapside and banged on the heavy black door round the corner. A taciturn constable let him in, jangling keys in his pocket as if to taunt any sharp-eared ruffians incarcerated in the holding cell with the sound of freedom. He unlocked the iron gate leading to the cell and motioned Harry through.

The Bridewell sergeant was perched on his high chair like a pre-war schoolmaster, while a pack of his subordinates lolled on a bench opposite the holding cell, engrossed in the racing pages of the
Sun
and
Mirror.
On an oblong of white card suspended by string from a hook in the wall, someone had written: please do not ask for bail, as a REFUSAL MIGHT OFFEND.

“All right, mate?” enquired the sergeant. He peered at Harry's shiny-elbowed suit and scuffed Hush Puppies. “You really must give me the name of your tailor some time.”

“Piss off, Bert,” he said without malice.

No matter how many times he came here, it always took him a moment to adjust to the Bridewell's purgatorial atmosphere. He blinked in an effort to adjust to the harshness of the artificial light before striding over to the other side of the room, where Ronald Sou was waiting for him.

“How are you, Mr. Devlin?”

Harry said he was fine. Almost every day he tried to persuade his clerk to call him by his first name. But Ronald Sou, the son of a Chinese seaman who had married a girl from Toxteth, remained inscrutable as if, like his forefathers, he had been born in Canton rather than Liverpool Eight, and when speaking to his employer he always maintained the respectful distance appropriate to a bygone age.

“An interesting night?” enquired Ronald politely.

Harry pursed his lips. “You could say that.” After a moment he added, “One call out, nothing more.”

One of the constables coughed and said, “Been busy since you left, Harry. Must be a score of customers for you inside.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the holding cell and said, “Junkies, an arsonist, two blokes we picked up in Sefton Park wearing skirts and suspender belts. You name it, all human life is there.”

Harry went to the cell door and peered through the spy-hole at the bleary faces of the captive men. Most were slumped on the bench that ran around the walls. Several wore suspects' space suits, the off-white, thin as paper, all-in-one garments which the police supplied to those whose clothing was taken away for forensic tests. The interior of the cell was dimly lit, its gloom matching its occupants. Harry settled himself in the first interview alcove while Ronald Sou went into an identical cubicle next door.

The job took an hour and a quarter. As each detainee's surname was called out in alphabetical order by one of the constables, the individual concerned shuffled over so that Harry could log the details of the offence and the name of the miscreant's lawyer in the ruled lines of the large red diary that was the Liverpool Duty Solicitor's book.

Every now and then the atmosphere of grudging resignation was poisoned by incoherent screams of rage from within the holding cell - drug addicts growing restless as they came to end of their latest fix. Occasionally someone would beat a tattoo on the metal door that set them apart from the outside world, prompting the youngest policeman on the bench to wander over and mutter a few warning words beneath his breath. His colleagues had seen it all before and continued to read undisturbed.

When the last detainee returned to captivity Ronald was still ringing round the city's criminal advocates to inform then of their clients' latest misdemeanours. Harry yawned and went back upstairs.

The room set aside for the Duty Solicitor was off the main hall of the court building. There would be another ten minutes or so to wait until the first of the morning's clients arrived. Idly, he leafed through the newspaper. Trouble everywhere, of course. Renewed fighting in Beirut. The I.R.A. expressing its regret to the family of a child killed in Belfast when a bomb had gone off an hour early by mistake. A Cabinet minister denying a homosexual affair with his constituency agent. A big bullion raid in Leytonstone and three people dead after a gas explosion in Leeds. Harry kept turning the pages.

With the task of sifting through the morning's crooks finished, he could not keep his mind off Liz. Why, if Coghlan's behaviour had caused her to attempt suicide, had she failed to mention it to him? Liz always found it hard to resist ending any story with a histrionic flourish. He would have expected her to play for more sympathy, to point to her wrist and exclaim. “Look, this is what he drove me to!” Even if she had taken good care not to injure herself too severely, even if it was nothing more than a half-hearted cry for help of some kind, it would be unlike her not to exploit the drama of a brush with death. The inconsistency bothered him more than that nonsense about Coghlan wanting to kill her. Provided, he thought with a pang of unease, that it was nonsense . . .

Ronald Sou poked his head around the door, scattering the litter of Harry's speculations. “Have you seen the listing details, Mr. Devlin?”

“What? No, I was just about to.”

“I had a word with the court clerk,” said the Chinese man. “You're on in five minutes. The Benjamin case.”

They had jumped to the head of the queue. “Ronnie, how do you manage it?”

The clerk smiled and held the door open. The hall outside had become congested with people and more were flooding through the main doors with every minute that passed. Everyone was talking at once. Newly arrived solicitors elbowed their way towards the notice board on which was pinned the computer print-out with its list of the morning's defendants and the times of their cases. Mutterings of disgust came from those facing a long wait as they turned to complain to anyone within earshot. There were no chairs anywhere, just wooden benches like those downstairs, screwed into the walls so as to deny souvenirs to the city's cheekier thieves. All around, lawyers were interviewing their clients, bellowing so as to be heard above the hullabaloo.

The sour smell of failure and decay was everywhere. The building reeked of it, with plaster flaking from green-grey walls and cobwebs spiralling down from the ceiling. Solicitors bustled this way and that, directing helpers laden down with files, seeking out the courts where they were supposed to appear, checking to see if their clients had arrived, calling out names, arguing with anyone who got in the way.

“Mr. O'Shaughnessy?” piped a clerk from Windaybanks in Harry's ear.

The youth's boss, Quentin Pike, put a clammy hand on Harry's shoulder before he could reply. “Sorry, old chap. You're a dead ringer for my unlawful sexual intercourse. Wouldn't happen to have a twin with a penchant for schoolgirls, would you?”

“Pike, you utter shit.” The rich bass belonged to Reuben Fingall, doyen of the local legal fraternity, who had appeared behind them. He smelled as if he had bathed in after shave. “You touted a rapist from my clerk on Monday.” Flicking back into place a single errant strand of grey hair, he raised his eyebrows in contempt. “Is business so bad that . . . .”

Harry caught sight of a tall West Indian wearing a suede full-length coat and standing at the other side of the hall. He raised a hand in greeting and left his colleagues to their professional bickering.

“Peanuts, there you are.”

The black man showed shark's teeth in a lazy grin and drawled, “Man, this place give me the heebie-jeebies. Shouldn' regular customers get preference? A chair, maybe even a private changing room?”

In fact Peanuts Benjamin looked as if he had already devoted a couple of hours to dressing for the occasion. Beneath the unbuttoned coat he wore a pale fawn suit with matching silk tie and handkerchief, as well as a white shirt that one of his ladies had ironed to perfection. Jewellery glinted from his cuffs and Harry could see his reflection in the shine of the Italian leather shoes. Peanuts had been bailed twenty-eight days previously to appear today on a charge of living off immoral earnings. The prosecution evidence was so strong that not even the time-honoured option of asking for a trial in the Crown Court and relying on a Liverpool jury's narrow conception of criminal guilt could be expected to result in an acquittal. Peanuts' best hope of avoiding imprisonment rested on the Home Office's directive to magistrates not to add to prison overcrowding.

They went into court number three and as they waited their turn, Harry's mind obstinately drifted back to Liz. He kept telling himself that it was pointless to worry about her and absurd to put any credence in the idea that Coghlan would care enough about his mistress's infidelities to want her dead. All the same, he was glad when Peanuts' case was called, robbing him of any further chance to dwell on what his wife had said the previous night.

The trial, as ever, proved less of an exercise in nerve and temperament than in the hassle of coping with bureacratic routine. The plea of mitigation was no different from hundreds of others. Harry explained that his client had obtained a new job with prospects, starting Monday. To jail Peanuts, he suggested, would serve no useful purpose to society; the man had learned his lesson.

“Judging by the number of people who come before us claiming they will be starting work the day after their trial,” said the chairman of the bench, a middle-class sceptic, “unemployment in this city ought to be a minus figure.”

But the result was what mattered. The three magistrates conferred briefly and announced the sentence, without bothering to adjourn and ask for further assessment reports on the accused. Twelve months' imprisonment, suspended for two years, and a fine. Harry didn't tempt fate by making the customary request for time to pay.

When they got outside, Peanuts punched the air in jubilation. “Man, my girls can earn that much in a night!”

Harry winced. Sometimes he wanted to forget he was a defence lawyer, paid to protect his clients, not to sit in judgment.

Peanuts responded with a shameless wink. “Yeah, yeah, I know. But if you can't be good, be careful. Don' worry, man. I learned a lot from this. I'll watch my step. They won' catch me again.”

They said goodbye. Harry watched the tall black man push through the crowd, heading back to Toxteth and his twilight world. Again he thought of Liz and his anxieties flooded back. She was someone else who couldn't be good. The trouble was, she never managed to be careful either.