Judicial Whispers (33 page)

‘Oh, Fliss, it was marvellous!’ Nora’s eyes rolled heavenwards at the recollection. ‘Hold on a tick.’ She flipped a switch. ‘Hello, Nichols and Co. How can I help? No, he’s not in this morning. Yes, I will. Right. Goodbye.’ She flipped the switch back and gazed expectantly at Felicity. ‘Anyway, what do you think Mr Lamb’s going to do? Does he know who it was that thumped him?’

‘Well, he should do,’ replied Felicity. ‘Unless he’s had his hand up everyone else’s skirt as well, that is.’ They both giggled, and the switchboard flashed again. Felicity headed for the lift, fluttering her fingers at Nora, each mouthing ‘See you!’ conspiratorially to the other.

Nothing happened until after lunch. By that time, Felicity had grown quite used to the idea of being sacked, and when John Parr called her to his office she felt only slight trepidation. She hoped he wouldn’t make heavy weather of it. He could be a right pompous arse at times.

John Parr was pacing round his room when Felicity came in, mustering all his authority as second-in-command. He had been highly disturbed by what Mr Lamb had told him, but not entirely surprised. He had never had a high opinion of Felicity. She might be a bright enough girl, but her secretarial skills left
much to be desired and he wasn’t sure that he found her manner sufficiently deferential to himself and the other partners.

‘Please take a seat, Felicity,’ he said. Felicity sat down, tugging the hem of her red skirt down on her thighs, taking a deep breath of anticipation and trying not to stick out her chest. She looked up at Mr Parr from beneath her curly fringe, watching him pace around the room.

‘Felicity,’ John Parr began, ‘I had Mr Lamb in my room this morning. It is his first day back in the office since he was attacked before Christmas. You remember that, I suppose?’

Felicity nodded.

‘I understand from Mr Lamb that you know something about that attack, and the person who carried it out.’ Felicity dropped her eyes and said nothing. John Parr sat down. ‘Mr Lamb tells us that you’ve had some kind of grudge against him since he had occasion to warn you over the standard of your work. Isn’t that right?’

‘I never had any grudge against him, Mr Parr—’

‘But he did warn you that you might have to leave if your work didn’t improve, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘And he even went to some lengths to have you transferred, without informing the partnership, so that you would still be able to carry on working here, didn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘And yet you still, according to Mr Lamb, held such a grievance against him that you actually got a friend to come to these offices and assault him. Isn’t that so?’ Mr Parr was, by now, in an exalted state of sorrowful indignation.

‘I didn’t tell him to do it, Mr Parr! I simply told him about what Mr Lamb had been doing—’

‘So you
were
nursing a grudge against him?’

Felicity was close to tears. She might not mind being sacked,
but she objected to having the truth distorted in this way. Mr Parr’s censorious attitude made her feel bullied. ‘I didn’t know he would do anything like that! Honestly!’

‘Felicity, the facts speak for themselves. Mr Lamb, as office manager, warned you about your lack of efficiency, and that was something which you held against him. So much so that you went to this friend of yours with stories of how unfairly you had been treated by Mr Lamb – who, I might add, was actually prepared to transfer you to another department and give you another chance – with the result that Mr Lamb was seriously assaulted at a party on these very premises. By your friend.’

‘But Mr Lamb had been harassing me!’ exclaimed Felicity, unable to hold back the tears now.

Mr Parr sat back in his chair with a look of cynical disappointment. ‘Felicity, I think you have been reading too many tabloid newspapers. I imagine every secretary in Britain who feels victimised through complaints regarding her own inefficiency complains of “harassment”. But I’m afraid I, for one, will not wear that kind of nonsense.’

Felicity stared at him helplessly, her eyes blurred with tears. Her nose had begun to run and she didn’t have a tissue. She sniffed and wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. What was the point? How could she possibly begin to catalogue the list of humiliations to which Mr Lamb had subjected her? And what difference would it make, anyway? The blokes in this office would always stick up for each other. The business with Vince was what this was all about. Parr was glad of an excuse as juicy as this to get rid of her.

‘No, I’m sorry, Felicity,’ went on Mr Parr, clasping his hands before him on the desk, ‘this incident is something which I view most seriously. You do realise,’ he added, ‘that this could result in a police prosecution for your friend?’

Felicity looked at him in horror. ‘Oh, no!’ she pleaded. ‘You don’t need to do that, do you?’

Mr Parr relished the pleading tone of her voice as much as he relished the sight of her, her pretty face streaked with mascara, reduced by his authority to a state of wretchedness.

‘I can make no promises, Felicity. That is something which we shall leave to Mr Lamb. But you must understand that we cannot allow you to continue working for Nichols and Co after an incident such as this. It is not the kind of behaviour which we expect from our secretaries. The terms of your employment permit you four weeks’ notice. I hope you will be able to find employment elsewhere in that time. But I’m afraid I cannot give you any kind of suitable reference. Now, that is all.’

Felicity sniffed back the last of her tears and left Mr Parr’s office without another word. There was no point in saying anything else. She’d had enough of them all. She didn’t even think she could bear another four weeks in the place, though she’d have to stick it out. She needed the money, and she needed to be able to look for another job.

Felicity made her way to the Ladies and gazed at her reflection. What a mess. She couldn’t go and get her handbag and her make-up without attracting the attention of the Menopausals, and she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing her tear-stained face. She cleaned away the mascara streaks with soap and lavatory paper, then splashed her face with water. Leaning back against the washbasin, she wished she had a fag.

So, what was she to do now? How was she going to get a job without a reference? Oh, well, that would take care of itself. She might as well go and tell Rachel that she
was
being transferred – right out of the building.

When Felicity went into Rachel’s room, Rachel was staring at her desk calendar and going over the dates in her head. She 
was sure she had counted properly. She looked up distractedly at Felicity.

‘Can I have a word, Rachel?’

‘Of course. What’s up?’ Either it had been the twelfth or the fourteenth. She was sure it had been an even number. In which case, it might have been the sixteenth. Why hadn’t she written it down?

‘Well, actually, I’ve been given the boot. By Mr Parr. This morning. I thought I’d tell you. I’m off in four weeks.’

Rachel sat back, forgetting her own problems for the moment. ‘But why? I thought Mr Lamb was arranging for you to go to another department?’

‘It’s because of Mr Lamb I’m leaving,’ replied Felicity, not without bitterness. ‘You remember someone had a go at him at the Christmas party?’

‘I heard about it. I’d left before it happened.’

‘Well, it was Vince. I’d told him that Mr Lamb had been – well, touching me up, making suggestions, and that. And he decided he was going to – sort him out. I didn’t have any idea. Anyway, Mr Lamb came back to the office today and he told Mr Parr it was my boyfriend, said I’d had some sort of grudge against him. And that was that. Out on my ear.’

‘But you say Mr Lamb had been molesting you?’ asked Rachel.

‘Yeah. You know the sort of thing. Feeling me up, saying he’d have me sacked if I wasn’t – nice to him.’

‘But didn’t you tell Mr Parr that?’

‘I tried, but he wasn’t having any of it. Said I’d been reading too many newspapers, that I had a cheek to accuse Mr Lamb of harassing me.’

Rachel was outraged. ‘They can’t sack you like that, when you’ve been sexually harassed by a senior member of staff!’ she exclaimed, reaching for her phone. ‘I’m going to have a word with John Parr.’

Felicity stretched out a hand to stop her. ‘No, don’t. There’s
no point. I should have made a fuss a long time ago. It just seemed so stupid. And I really didn’t want to lose my job. My getting sacked has nothing to do with that. It’s all about this thing between Vince and Mr Lamb. It doesn’t matter what you say to Mr Parr, I’ll still be given the push. They don’t want me here. They’ve been looking for an excuse for a while. I’m not the world’s most brilliant secretary, after all.’

‘Look, Felicity, whether you lose your job or not, I can still make things very unpleasant for Mr Lamb. He deserves it!’

‘Rachel,’ said Felicity wearily, ‘I couldn’t care bleeding less about him. I’ll be glad to get out of here. All I care about is getting another job. Not that I want to go on doing secretarial work. I’m so rotten at it, and I hate big offices. But it’s the only thing I’ve been trained to do. And we need the money.’

Rachel sighed. ‘It’s your decision, of course. I still think you’re wrong not to make an issue out of it. There are too many men getting away with that kind of thing.’

‘The way things are in this place, who’s going to believe me? They’ll think I’m just getting back at Lamb. I know them. MCPs, the lot of them. And that’s being kind.’

‘Well …’ Rachel paused. ‘I’ll give you a reference, if you need one.’

‘Thanks. No one else will. You’ll have to bend the truth a bit, mind. I tell you,’ she added, tossing back her curly head and grinning, ‘I’m going to have a bloody good piss-up when I leave!’

Rachel smiled. ‘Why don’t you let me buy you a drink after work, and we’ll talk about it? I’ve got a client in ten minutes.’

‘Yeah, OK,’ said Felicity.

‘But don’t go slipping me anything this evening, please,’ added Rachel.

Rachel was still pondering Felicity’s problems when she got back to her flat later that evening, but when she reached the front
door they fled in an instant. The door was slightly ajar, its lock smashed, the wood frayed and cracked. Gingerly, Rachel pushed it wide open. The hall was in half-darkness, but the living room light was on. Why hadn’t she noticed that from the street? She hesitated, then stepped into the hallway, feeling for the light switch. The hall sprang into brightness, and she gasped.

A trail of hideous destruction spread throughout the flat. She walked from room to room, numb. Drawers had been thrown around, their contents strewn everywhere. Pictures were smashed, sofas slashed, spilling their stuffing, and the curtains had been wrenched down and ripped, the wooden curtain poles hanging pathetically askew where they had been torn from the plaster. The energy of the violence stunned her. In the kitchen every drawer and cupboard had been flung open and the contents hurled around. Sugar crunched under her feet, mingling with broken glass and the contents of jars and packets. The glass fronts of the cupboards had been systematically smashed. Even the kitchen table had been gouged and smeared with – what? She stepped forward and then drew back in revulsion. The stench of excrement hit her. In the bedroom, the same thing had happened. She could not bring herself to touch the soaking and stinking duvet. All her ornaments and pictures had been broken, the canvases of the watercolours crumpled and slashed. Her computer, television, video, radio – everything was gone. Everything else wrecked. She went back slowly into the miserable carnage of the living room, looking around for the telephone, and realised she was trembling from head to foot.

She began the painful exploration for the phone, lifting up tattered cushions and ripped books, trying to shut out from her sight the deep, disfiguring scratches on the drinks cabinet, on which nothing now stood, pulling back the ruined fabric of her curtains. With each step she could feel the snapping of shards of glass from her precious pictures. When at last she found the
phone beneath an overturned chair, its flex had been wrenched from the wall. Rachel straightened up, breathing deeply, and wondered if she was going to faint.

She stood very still for a moment, feeling the horrible thudding of her heart and the uncontrollable shivering of her icy limbs. Then she walked back through the flat and across the landing to the neighbouring flat. There was no answer when she pressed the bell. They were out, as they always seemed to be. Her chest heaved and sobs began to rise. She tried to quell her tears. She had to tell the police. But first she wanted Leo. She wanted someone to take away the horrible sense of violation that she felt. It was as though someone had raped her again, soiling and fouling her, dragging her through some dark swamp. Her private, pretty world, the one where she had sought to make herself secure, had been torn open and desecrated. She would never feel safe there again.

She retrieved her handbag from the hall where she had dropped it and searched with trembling fingers for her car keys, wiping away her tears, pushing her hair back from her face. As she left the flat, she automatically pulled the front door behind her, then stopped. There was no point in that. There was nothing left to steal or destroy.

It was not until she reached Leo’s house that the shock properly hit her. The effort of concentrating on driving there cushioned her against it until then. She dissolved into hysteria as she told him. He soothed her, gave her brandy, rang the police, and then sat, holding her to him.

‘Come on, come on,’ he said at last, wondering why her tears did not subside. ‘Everyone gets burgled once in a while, you know.’ He stroked her hair. ‘Look,’ he said after a pause, ‘I’d better go round while the police are still there. I’ll ring a locksmith and we’ll at least get the place secure for the night.’

‘I don’t care!’ she wailed. ‘I’m never going back there again. I couldn’t! Not ever! Oh, Leo! When you see what they’ve done!’ A fresh bout of sobbing racked her.

Leo sighed. This was all very tiresome. Wretched for her, of course, but she did seem to be reacting somewhat hysterically. ‘All right. All right. Calm down,’ he murmured. Then he stood up and fetched his coat. He stood looking down at her. ‘Will you be all right here?’

She nodded, but did not look up, hugging herself, torn with misery. He sighed and left.

Two policemen were already at the flat when Leo arrived, one making an inspection of all the rooms, the other standing amid the debris of Rachel’s living room, looking around. Leo winced as he surveyed the devastation. He had never seen any place quite so ruthlessly destroyed before.

‘Evening, sir,’ said the policeman. The radio at his shoulder crackled. ‘You the gentleman who rang us earlier?’

‘That’s right. Mr Davies. This is my – my girlfriend’s flat. She’s back at my place.’

‘I see. Pity she didn’t come with you. We’ll need details of everything that’s been taken.’

‘Well,’ said Leo evenly, ‘it was rather a shock for her, as you can imagine. I don’t think she felt like returning straight away. I’m sure she can help you tomorrow.’

‘Mmm.’ The policeman surveyed the room impassively. ‘Yes. It is a bit of a mess.’

Bit of a mess? thought Leo, astonished. Still, they must see this kind of thing every day of the week. The policeman took a few steps towards the door, glass snapping, and Leo followed him along the hallway to where his colleague was inspecting the bedroom. The stench was pungent and Leo grimaced as he looked around. He went through to the shambles of the kitchen and sighed. Oh God, he could not think of a worse thing that could happen to someone like Rachel. The atmosphere of hate and hostile violation was palpable. All Rachel’s neat femininity had been despoiled, her sanctuary torn to pieces. No wonder she had reacted as she did. When she said she could not come back here, she probably meant it.

Leo wondered fleetingly whether there might not be something in Rachel which brought this kind of destructive catastrophe upon her. Then he told himself that was absurd.
This was just another burglary, with a bit of wanton destruction thrown in.

‘She had a television and a video,’ he said to the policemen. ‘Stereo, computer, all that kind of thing.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s a pretty thorough job, all right,’ replied one of them. ‘Doesn’t look like kids to me. No sign of damage to the outside door downstairs. Perhaps they got in when someone was making a delivery.’

‘Well,’ said Leo, ‘I wouldn’t have thought there’s much point in getting a locksmith. I’ll get a cleaning firm in tomorrow.’

‘Would you mind ringing us first before you do that, sir? Just to make sure our forensic boys have finished here.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Right. We’d better go and have a word with the people downstairs. I assume they must have been at work all day, or they’d have heard something. You ready, Ralph?’

Leo drove back to Mayfair. He found Rachel in the kitchen, sipping a mug of coffee, her shoulders hunched over as she leant against the cooker. He went up to her and put his arms around her; she felt tense and rigid. He took the mug from her hands, then pushed her dark hair back from her face, which was pale and drawn. Her body relaxed and she laid her head against his shoulder.

‘Poor old you,’ he murmured. ‘They certainly made one hell of a mess.’ She said nothing, merely leant against him, breathing in the scent of him. ‘The police want a list of everything that’s been taken. I said you would do that tomorrow.’

She nodded and then drew away from him. ‘Thank you for going round. I don’t think I can ever bear to go back there again.’

‘Of course you will,’ said Leo robustly. ‘Everything’s insured, isn’t it? They’re only things. Possessions. They can be replaced.
God, I need a drink.’ He went over to the cupboard and poured himself a whisky.

‘It’s not that,’ replied Rachel. ‘It’s that sense of intrusion. Like being raped all over again.’ She shuddered.

‘Come on,’ he said, and led her through to the living room, sitting her down on a sofa. She glanced across at the table, where some papers lay, Leo’s spectacles and pen on top of them.

‘I’m sorry. You were working. I’ve messed up your evening.’

‘Don’t be absurd,’ he said, and sat down next to her. ‘I’m going to put you to bed in a moment with a Valium, and then I’ll carry on. I have to finish this before my con tomorrow.’

She leant back and closed her eyes. Leo sipped his whisky and looked at her meditatively.

‘All this has been a bit of an ordeal for you,’ he said after a moment’s thought. ‘I’m going to suggest that you tell your office what’s happened, and say that you’re taking a few days off. You can go to my place in the country. I’ll come down at the weekend.’ She opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘It’s a nice place,’ he went on. ‘You’ll like it. Very peaceful. There’s a woman who comes in once a week from the village, waters the plants, moves the rugs around. I’ll give you the keys and you can drive down.’ He finished his whisky.

She dwelt on this, her gaze tired and far away. Then she nodded. ‘Yes. I’d like that. Thank you.’ The thought of Leo’s country home appealed to her, somewhere safe, away from London.

An hour later she was fast asleep in Leo’s bed, while he sat at the table in the living room, Rachel and her burgled flat driven from his mind, his attention and energy entirely fastened on the work in front of him.

When Rachel woke the next morning, she still felt slightly weak from the shock of the previous evening, but in the light of a new day matters began to fall into perspective. She had been burgled,
her flat ransacked, most of what she owned destroyed; that was bad luck, but it could be repaired. Even so, she was grateful for the prospect of some time away from the immediate reality of the thing. Thank God for Leo, wonderful, protective, dependable Leo. She felt herself unspeakably lucky to have such a man.

Leo had already left for chambers, but there was a note in the kitchen reminding her to ring the police and to call her office, and saying that he would be back at lunchtime.

When he returned, Leo was weighed down by an array of carrier bags from a variety of expensive shops. He set them down in the middle of the living-room floor.

‘I thought you would need a new wardrobe,’ he remarked, taking off his coat. He watched with a faint smile as she delved into the bags, pulling out sweaters, trousers, dresses, pairs of shoes, underwear, reams of tissue paper spilling onto the floor.

‘Leo! All this must have cost a fortune!’ she exclaimed, looking up at him from where she knelt. She drew four cashmere sweaters in muted pastel shades from a Scotch House carrier bag. ‘I can’t afford these!’ She didn’t even dare to investigate the contents of the enormous Harvey Nichols bag.

‘You don’t have to,’ said Leo. ‘They’re a present – not very inspired, I’m afraid, but I did it in a rush. It’s to make up for last night.’

‘Oh, Leo, you’ve already made up for last night simply by looking after me. You didn’t have to do this.’ She couldn’t help noticing, looking at the dresses and silk blouses, that he had got her size right. More observant than most men, she guessed.

‘Well, what were you going to wear? Most of your things are in rather a mess, from what I could see last night.’ Before she could dwell on this, he added, ‘Anyway, I enjoyed it. I think my taste is rather good, don’t you?’

‘It’s wonderful,’ she replied, and rose to kiss him.

She set off for Leo’s house in the early afternoon. The day was raw and blustery; hail spattered the windscreen occasionally from a leaden sky. But the car was warm, the drone of Radio 4 soothing, and with each mile Rachel felt safer, moving away from the horror and destruction she had witnessed the previous evening. She did not dwell on any of her losses, refused to let the image of her ransacked home into her mind. Leo was taking care of everything, and she could look forward to peace and seclusion for a few days in his home, and have him with her for the entire weekend.

In spite of her calm frame of mind, she was surprised by how spent and shaky she felt when she reached the village in which Leo’s house stood. Eventually she found the narrow lane that led to the house, and drove up with a sense of excitement and curiosity. Every new revelation concerning Leo, every clue to her enigmatic lover, whom she felt she knew and yet did not know, was fascinating to her.

The house was old and pretty, of reddish brick, set in a large garden bordered by trees, fields on the other side. It was L-shaped, with sloping roofs and gabled upper windows. She parked the car and sat for a moment, fingering the keys which she had taken from her bag. She let herself into the low-beamed hallway and looked around. Then she went through to the large living room, lined with books, furnished in a comfortable, haphazard fashion. It was, she thought, quite unlike his house in London. That had an anonymous, stark quality, whereas this was a friendly room, filled with pieces of old furniture, high-backed sofas and armchairs heaped with cushions, faded rugs scattered about the dark, polished floor, lamps set on tables and bookshelves. She walked over to the windows which looked out across the garden, and sat for a few moments on the bumpy cushioning of the window seat, fingering the soft, rust-coloured plush of the curtains, which were thin and pleasantly old.

This was his. There were more of his secrets here. She looked around, trying to feel his presence in the room, imagining him sitting here alone – or perhaps not alone … That didn’t matter. She was here now, and in two days’ time he would be here with her. The prospect had a settled, domestic quality which their transitory stays at one another’s London homes did not. She stood up and walked over to the large fireplace, with its oak mantel. A fire was neatly laid in the grate. Realising that the air in the house was chilly, despite her thick overcoat, she searched around for some matches, found them on the bookcase and knelt down. The scrape and sputter of the match sounded friendly, and there was something cosy and safe about the way the flames licked at the paper spills, then at the wood, which made crackling sounds as it took. She straightened up and put the matchbox on the mantelpiece, and realised she was smiling. Being in this room gave her the same sense of being tucked up and protected when ill as a child. I am being looked after, she thought.

But it was in the nature of an adventure, too. Still with her coat on, she went through to the kitchen. This, like the hallway, was low-ceilinged, but airy and light. She opened cupboards, looked in the near-empty fridge and fiddled with the central-heating thermostat on the wall by the door. She would have to ask Leo about the boiler when he rang. Then she glanced at her watch. It was twenty past four. She’d have to unload her things from the car and go out to the shop in the village before it closed, if she was to have any supper. She was looking forward to that little expedition, too, anxious to explore more of Leo’s private world.

She took the suitcase which Leo had lent her upstairs and set it down on the landing, then went on a tour of inspection. There were two small bedrooms with single beds on either side of the bathroom, and one larger bedroom with a vast bed.
Adjoining this was a dressing-room-cum-study, and next to this a smaller bathroom with a shower. Rachel paced around the little dressing room, which felt to her very much like a place belonging to Leo, then went back into the bedroom. She stared at the bed, then remembered the girl at Sir Basil’s party. Sarah. Just last summer … She could not, would not comprehend any of it. She went back out, closed the door, refusing to think about it, and took her case into one of the smaller rooms.

It was a curious feeling, stowing away in drawers and wardrobes these new, unknown garments bought for her by Leo. It heightened her sense of detachment from London and the flat. She smiled at the thought of Leo dashing round Knightsbridge, buying all these things. He’d done very well, really.

At that moment the telephone rang. Slightly startled by the sound in the empty house, she hurried downstairs and located the phone beside one of the sofas.

‘Hello?’ Her voice was hesitant.

‘Rachel?’ It was Leo. She smiled, relieved to hear his voice. ‘I thought you should have got there by now. Everything OK?’

‘Yes. Yes, fine. I got a little lost in the village, but I found it at last. It’s a beautiful house.’

‘Good, glad you like it.’ His voice sounded slightly absent, preoccupied.

‘I’m just unpacking, and then I’m going into the village to get some food.’

‘Right you are. I forgot to tell you that there’s a freezer out in the garage. I don’t know what’s in it. You might like to have a look. Hold on.’ He must have put his hand over the mouthpiece and she could hear a muffled exchange of voices in the background. ‘Sorry. What was I saying?’ he resumed.

‘About the freezer. By the way, how do I do the central heating?’

‘Oh, yes. Good point. There’s a cupboard in the bathroom, where the hot water tank is, and there’s a timer switch in there. It’s fairly simple – just set it to whatever you want. You shouldn’t have any problems.’

‘All right.’ She hesitated. ‘This is very sweet of you, you know,’ she added. ‘I’m beginning to feel the therapeutic effects already.’

‘Good.’ He hesitated, too. He had been about to tell her that some people were cleaning up the flat, but decided against it. She probably wanted to put it right out of her mind at present.