Fault Lines (15 page)

George looked at her. His eyes had none of the warmth or the amusement she was used to. They looked hard and very dark. ‘It’s difficult for some men to apologise, Trish. It goes against everything they’ve learned since the nursery. But it doesn’t mean they don’t feel apologetic.’

‘Well, they should have the guts to come out and say so. Like the Japanese.’

He did not comment, so she silently picked up her fork. They both started to eat and later made polite conversation, as though they had only just met. They commented on the food they were trying to swallow, and asked each other questions about the day’s work. Trish almost expected one of them to ask whether the other had been abroad recently or seen any good films.

She gave up eating when she was only a quarter of the way through her naan and there was more than half the lamb untouched.

‘Is something wrong?’ George asked, putting down his own fork.

Surprised by his choice of words, because he must have known precisely what was wrong and why, Trish answered coolly that she had found she was not particularly hungry after all.

‘Nor me,’ he said, wiping his mouth on the napkin she had provided. ‘In fact, I think I’d better be getting home.’

Trish, who was longing for him to tell her he understood how he had made her feel and was sorry for it and would not infringe again, nodded. ‘Yes, that might be best.’

‘Thank you for my supper,’ he said, getting up.

‘Not at all.’ She stayed sitting at the big, pale wood table.

When he had let himself out, closing the front door with scrupulous care, Trish put her head in her hands. How could he not have understood?

She had told him all about her father soon after they had first made love and he had seemed to understand then. She could not remember the precise words he had used, but she could re-create the warm safety she had felt as she listened to him.

In an unprecedented orgy of talking it all out, she’d told George everything about how hard it had been to pretend not to mind her father’s desertion so that she did not add to her mother’s burdens. George had said then that he could see why she had grown up determined never to be at any man’s mercy. Why couldn’t he remember that now?

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.

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.

‘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 Drakeshill’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.