A Perfect Obsession (17 page)

There had been heart-stopping moments. Once, she’d got stuck as a refuse van backed slowly out into the street. The length of time it took the van to reverse, straighten up again, then lumber off, seemed endless, but when she sped past it she could see Leo’s car still up ahead at traffic lights. She’d had to put her foot down to get across before they changed. Two lines of traffic merging at road works
on the M4 had left her many cars behind, but she had been able to keep the Aston Martin in her sights and catch up with it at a discreet distance later on. Later, when he had turned off the motorway on to an A road, she thought everything was going smoothly, until the car in front of her, two behind Leo’s, decided to let a tractor out of a farm gateway. By the time the tractor turned off further up the road, Leo’s car had disappeared. Glancing left and right at the junction of the road, Melissa had no means of knowing which direction he had taken. She turned left, hoping, and put her foot down. A few bends further up, she was rewarded by the sight of the Aston Martin ahead of her. She slowed, followed for another mile, and then the Aston Martin indicated right and turned through a gateway and up a driveway to a house set a hundred yards back from the road. Melissa drove slowly past, parked in a gateway further up, and walked gingerly back to the edge of the stone wall which bounded the garden. With shrubbery for cover, she peeped over the wall. She could see nothing at first, just Leo’s car parked by the house. He must have gone in. She waited, standing in her long raincoat, hair unkempt about her shoulders, eyes fixed on the house.

At last, Leo came out, and he was holding in his arms a toddler, a little boy. Some nameless emotion filled Melissa. This must be his son, the one he had talked about that drunken evening. The humiliating evening which had contained the dark beginnings of her present obsession. She watched greedily. A young woman with long, dark hair handed him a few things. Leo put the boy in the car and, after a few moments’ conversation with the woman, he got
in. Melissa hurried back to her car. She imagined Leo was now going back to London, but she couldn’t be sure. She would have to carry on, keep her distance, and see where he went. This was all beginning to seem very promising.

On Monday morning, first thing, Leo went to Camilla’s room. She had been in since half-eight, and was bent industriously over a bundle of documents. Simon, with whom she shared the room, wasn’t yet in. Leo closed the door. In the moment before she raised her head to look at him, Leo found himself oddly touched by the sight of her, working away. She looked very young and alone in the big, dark room filled with briefs and books.

After a few seconds he said, ‘I came to apologise. You were quite right to behave as you did on Friday evening, and I was entirely wrong.’

Camilla blushed, disconcerted by the idea of Leo coming to her room to apologise for anything. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Well, you worried me when you suggested that perhaps I ought to find another junior. I’ve no wish to do that. So far you’ve been invaluable.’

Camilla made an effort not to betray the pleasure his words gave her. ‘I wasn’t being serious when I said that.’

‘In any event, I wanted to let you know—’ He sat down in a chair opposite her desk and crossed his legs, ‘—that from now on my behaviour will be entirely professional.’

A faint sense of panic struck her. What if he thought she wasn’t interested in him at all? She hadn’t meant that – only that the conduct of the case might suffer. What if he never came near her again?

‘Why on earth are you gazing at me like a frightened rabbit?’ asked Leo in bemusement.

‘I wasn’t. Sorry. OK, whatever,’ she babbled.

‘My conduct will be entirely circumspect for the duration of this case.’ He changed the subject, indicating the papers on her desk. ‘What’s that you’re reading?’

‘The Selikoff report on asbestosis. I got it last week and I’ve nearly finished it.’

‘That thing by the American Surgeon General? Good God. You must be the only person on the planet who’s ever read it all the way through. Apart from Dr Selikoff himself, that is. Everybody kept referring to it in the last Lloyd’s case in tones of great authority, but it turned out no one had a copy. Where did you get it?’

‘I got someone from one of the American Names groups to send it over. I thought I might be able to dig up some useful material from it.’

Leo nodded thoughtfully. The girl was a thorough grafter. ‘And?’

‘I’ve got quite a lot of figures and helpful quotes.’

‘Good. I’ll have a look at them when you’ve finished.’ Leo eased himself out of his chair. ‘See you later.’

When he was gone, Camilla exhaled a long breath and sat back in her chair.
For the duration of this case
… That’s what he’d said. What if he’d lost interest by then? What if several weeks of working together in platonic harmony dispelled any ideas of ever kissing her again? That would probably happen. She guessed she was of momentary interest to him, and that it would pass. Well, that would be the price she’d have to pay for rebuffing him now. At least it
spared her any pain in the long run. She gazed sorrowfully at the seven-hundred-page report on her desk, then, with a sigh, resumed her reading.

At lunchtime, Leo chanced to meet Anthony in the clerks’ room, but beyond saying hello and exchanging a few comments about work, the encounter held no significance. To Leo’s relief, Anthony’s manner was entirely normal. He seemed to expect nothing more from Leo – that, Leo suspected, was just for the moment. At some time soon, Anthony would want to talk, and Leo had no real idea of how he would handle it.

That evening Leo got home feeling tired and jaded. He still had an entire evening’s work ahead of him, reading and rereading statements. When this case was over, he told himself, he would take a holiday. He hadn’t had one in a long time, and the events of the last eighteen months had been gruelling, one way or another. He poured himself a drink and stabbed at the ‘play’ button on the answer phone. The sound of Melissa’s voice made him groan. Without listening to what she had to say, he fast-forwarded to the next message. The one after that was Melissa again. And the next. Jesus, he thought angrily, the woman was out of control. He wiped the tape.

As he was changing in his bedroom, the phone rang. He found himself hesitating before he picked it up. ‘Hello?’

‘Leo, did you get my messages? I thought you might ring back—’ He hung up.

He wasn’t surprised when the phone rang again a few seconds later. He picked it up, slammed it down, then took
it off the hook. After fifteen minutes he replaced it. He couldn’t leave the phone off the hook all evening. The case began next week, and all kinds of people would be trying to contact him. He stared at the phone, willing it to remain silent, but it began to ring, gently, persistently. He left it unanswered. He knew it was her. What was he to do? It might not be her, and he couldn’t just let the damn thing ring all evening. In that case he might as well just leave it off.

But the fact that the phone rang at two-minute intervals for the next hour told him it had to be Melissa. He tried to eat supper and ignore it. He tried to work and ignore it. The persistency of it was maddening. And, though he didn’t like to admit it, frightening. After a while he could stand no more. He sat at his desk in his study and stared at the phone as it began to ring again. Almost beside himself, he picked up the receiver and snarled, ‘Listen, you mad—’

Before he could get the word ‘bitch’ out, he was aware of Conor Grimley’s cultivated Irish tones saying ‘Hello?’ in bewilderment.

Leo took a deep breath. ‘Conor. Sorry. I had no idea. I’ve been getting nuisance calls. I just – anyway … Sorry.’

‘Nuisance calls? Dear me, that’s very distressing. It happened to my sister-in-law. I suggest you get your number changed.’ He paused sympathetically for a second or two. ‘Actually, I wanted a word with you about my opening statement. Have you got a moment?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Leo, and sat back in his chair. At least while he was talking to Conor, he had some respite from that lunatic woman.

When he’d finished talking to Conor, Leo put down the phone and tried to resume his work. But the silence seemed threatening, poised and expectant. It was almost a relief when the ringing began again. Leo reached below his desk and disconnected the plug from the socket. Anyone who wanted to talk to him, apart from the madwoman of Kensington, would have to call him in chambers. He went through to the drawing room and disconnected the phone there. The ringing ceased. Silence settled, and Leo felt the tension in him ease. Tomorrow he’d see about getting his number changed. That wouldn’t be the end of it, he suspected. It was probably only just the beginning. It was intolerable to think that this woman could so insidiously affect his existence, forcing him to the inconvenience of changing his number, then informing friends and colleagues, changing his personal notepaper, and so forth. He would have to see his solicitor, to find out just what steps he could take, before she really began to wreck his life in earnest.

A week later, the case between Sir Stephen Geldard Caradog-Browne and the Society of Lloyd’s opened before the Honourable Mr Justice Olby in Court Seven, Chichester Rents, Chancery Lane. The court itself was a large, low-ceilinged, windowless room of a most depressing aspect. The barristers and solicitors were seated on either side of it at ranks of long, functional tables. All round the room, shelves were filled to the ceiling with documents, which Sarah and many of her kind had spent long hours paginating, marking and filing in endless Lever Arch files. Yet more boxes of documents stood stacked beside
the lawyers’ tables. Rows of chairs were provided at the back of the room for those Names who cared to follow the day-to-day proceedings, and to the side for the press and public. Not that anyone anticipated public interest. The opening of the case was reported only in
The Times, The Telegraph,
and the
Financial Times,
and each devoted only a couple of paragraphs to it. It was generally felt that the Lloyd’s scandal had burnt itself out, and that this action for fraud was something of a no-hoper.

The mood amongst the attendant Names, however, was tense and hopeful – at least, to begin with. They thronged the rows of chairs in the courtroom, and hung avidly on Conor Grimley’s words as he embarked upon his opening statement, listening intently as he set forth their grievances and expounded the iniquitous behaviour of Lloyd’s of London over a twenty-year period. Any hope that the joint satisfaction of hearing their case put at last might improve relations between Lady Henrietta and Sir Stephen Caradog-Browne remained unrealised. If anything, now that the action had begun, their separate factions focused more closely than ever on tactical matters and each day, after the court proceedings had ended, they conducted long and wearisome meetings about disputed points with Rachel and Fred in the offices of Nichols & Co.

Conor Grimley’s opening address lasted throughout the entire first week, and well into the second. The initial tension generated in the first couple of days amongst clients and lawyers alike rapidly died away. By the time Paul Rollason, counsel for Lloyd’s, rose to make his opening
address, things had become positively soporific. Leo and Camilla attended for the first two days, and then absented themselves to attend to more important aspects of the case.

The end of March came, the first buds began to break on the trees in Fountain Court and the gardens of the Inns of Court, and in Court Seven a steady procession of witnesses took the stand, day after day, to be examined by Conor in his patient Irish brogue. Leo took over the examination of a particular few, whose acerbic and indignant tendencies he could best keep in check, but by and large he busied himself with the preparation of his cross-examination. For him, involvement in a case of this kind was like being buried in some grey half-world, where the sights and sounds were those of the sombre courtroom in Chichester Rents and his room in chambers, his preoccupations exclusively those of minimum percentage reserves, stop loss insurance, and reinsurances to close.

Since he had had his number changed, Melissa had ceased to pester him in that way, but she had taken instead to writing him endless letters. These were instantly recognisable, and at first Leo dealt with them by consigning them to the wastepaper basket, unread. He was determined that they should bother him as little as junk mail. Then he realised that if this were to go on, and he found himself obliged to take legal steps against her, he would need the letters as evidence. So he kept them. Similarly with the long, rambling emails she sent him in chambers. It would have been as easy to delete these as to swat flies, but he saved them. If the persistence of her harassment troubled him, he tried not to admit it
to himself. Just so long as the woman kept her distance. Surely even she would begin to get bored eventually.

Over the weeks, Leo and Camilla had developed a certain camaraderie, finding common areas of amusement in the case, developing a shorthand of eye contact and body language which each could read more and more easily as time passed. She was growing familiar to him, but in a pleasurable, tantalizing way which was novel to Leo. He had never in his life desired someone and been unable to make them his lover within a matter of days – a couple of weeks at the outside. Spending so much time in close proximity to her was becoming immensely frustrating.

In the meantime, Sarah provided the perfect occasional diversion – emotionally undemanding, sexually obliging and inventive, and happy in the notion that she had something Camilla wanted, but was never likely to have.

Being able to spend the night with Leo now and again made her feel she was getting back at Camilla in some sweet way for having to run around at Camilla’s beck and call during the case, photocopying, looking up cases, and being treated like a general dogsbody. She could tell from Camilla’s manner in Leo’s company that she still had a crush on him, but it appeared to Sarah that Leo didn’t return her interest in the slightest.

During the third week of the case, when Leo had returned to chambers after a tiresome day spent examining an elderly ex-broker with hearing problems, Anthony came to his room. Leo had just hung up his robing bag
and was taking off his coat. One glance at Anthony’s face told him what he wanted to discuss.