Keep Me Alive (17 page)

Years ago, the whole family had come to stay in a big white hotel not far from here, and it had been hell. His mother had been nagging for years about needing a proper foreign holiday
but his father had always refused to contemplate the expense. No farmer could happily take two weeks off in high summer, but in the end he’d given in for the sake of peace and hauled them off to France for a week at the beginning of July. Everything that could have gone wrong had done: it had rained every single day; the food in the hotel hadn’t been excitingly foreign, just dull and tough; there’d been no one to talk to except each other, and nothing to do except go for rainy walks along the beach or play bar football in a leaky outhouse.

Will would probably have been happy enough dreaming of the girl he’d chatted up at the school’s end of term dance, except that Susannah, bad tempered as ever, had spent the whole time telling him no girl with a working brain would ever fancy a lout like him.

Someone crunched over the gravel. Will looked up, glad to be relieved of the memories, and smiled at the waiter who dumped his beer on the thin green table. He summoned up his schoolboy French to thank the man and ask whether there were many English people in the area. For extra verisimilitude, he added the usual excuse that he was thinking of moving over here himself.

The waiter sneered, shrugged like the hammiest English amateur actor playing a French rake, then said, ‘Only at Jeannot le Fou’s farm off the Rouen road. They say some English fools bought it for
gîtes.
Even if they get planning permission, which they will not, Jeannot was a terrible farmer and the place is one vast pile of
merde. Merde des cochons, des vaches, et des hommes.
The smell that comes from there when the wind is from the south!
Affreux!’
He shuddered with the artistry of long practice.

That’s definitely the place I want, Will thought.

He hadn’t understood all the waiter’s words, but the general drift was easy to grasp. He said clumsily in French that it sounded terrible and not at all the sort of place a man like him
would want to go. Then he asked where it was, to make sure he avoided finding himself in such a stinking heap of ordure. The waiter, no longer sneering, told him, then added that there were said to be some nice chateaux being built further along the coast. His mother-in-law’s cousin was the estate agent and could no doubt furnish monsieur with the necessary details.

In the interests of cover, Will took down the address of the estate agency, paid for his beer and drank it slowly. It was the last he was going to get until he was on his way back to the train and sure that his funds would see him safely home, so he made the most of it.

Not as good as the brew in the Smarden pub, he decided, and altogether too cold and too thin, but it slipped down easily enough. A quick trip to the gents came next, then he was back in his rattly little tortoise of a car, bucketing out of the village towards the piles of steaming
merde
the waiter had so graphically described.

Could the story of Mad Jeannot’s legacy be no more than a cover to keep nosy locals and interested visitors out of the way?

 

Trish half expected to have to fight Antony for time to go to El Vino with Colin and his friend, but he said nothing more about a final private dinner before his wife returned; he didn’t want even the usual post-mortem of the day’s evidence. When they emerged from court at half past four, he asked Colin to drop his wig and gown back in chambers with the documents, and said he’d see them both at eight o’clock on Monday morning. Trish felt surprisingly short-changed.

‘The treat’s well and truly over now, isn’t it, Trish?’

She turned to see Ferdy Aldham leering at her from the shadows thrown by the pointed stone arch over the door to the street.

‘Sorry?’

‘So you should be, playing around with a man like Antony. I’d thought better of you.’

‘Oh, grow up,’ she said, forgetting that it had been Antony who had first thrown that insult at their opponent. ‘Coming, Colin?’

‘Sure.’ He walked beside her in silence as Ferdy’s giggles echoed after them. Once they were striding down between the plane trees towards Plough Court, he asked if he’d been missing something.

‘Only some idiotic, sub-primary-school joke of Ferdy’s, that isn’t at all funny.’

‘No. Right.’ Colin’s face split into a cheerful smile. ‘It’s so damn hard to decode all the legalese, let alone the in-jokes, that I usually feel particularly dim when I’m around you and Antony.’

‘No need,’ Trish said. They reached the door to chambers and swept in past the cream-coloured board with all the tenants’ names in black. ‘You’re shaping up a treat, Colin. You’ll be there soon enough; don’t worry about it.’

‘Unless I piss Antony off and he votes against me when the time comes for you all to decide which pupils get tenancies,’ he said. ‘That’s why I watch him all the time to work out what he’s thinking. By the way, have you seen how he
loathes
Ferdy Aldham? Far more than you do.’

‘Does he?’ Trish wasn’t very interested. ‘Look, I want to check my emails, Colin, in case your mate has responded. Then once we’ve had our drink, I ought to visit a friend in hospital. Will you be OK for a few minutes?’

‘Sure,’ he said, but he didn’t leave her room. She looked up, puzzled, from the laptop. This time his smile was more tentative, almost pleading.

‘I just thought it might be useful for you to know that I asked someone whether there was any history between them, and he said they’ve hated each other since Bar school, when Ferdy got the top marks and Antony only came second. Then Antony got pupillage first, started winning cases first and took silk first.
Even so, it’s not thought to be enough to make up for the exam rage.’

Trish stared at him, fitting the news into the jigsaw in her mind. Might this at last explain why Antony had accepted the brief? And why he hadn’t challenged Ferdy when he was leading Will to make a fool of himself in the witness box?

‘Where did you get this choice titbit, Colin?’

He flushed. ‘My godfather was there with them. I asked him.’

Trish looked at him with new respect. It would have taken more confidence than she’d had at his age to avoid dropping names that might be useful, particularly in a world like theirs, where so much old-boy stuff still went on. She couldn’t remember ever having heard Colin mention that he had a godfather at the Bar, and she was certain it hadn’t come up at any of his interviews before he was offered a pupillage at Plough Court.

‘Who is he?’ she asked and was even more impressed when he just shook his head.

‘There’s an email here with all the answers from your friend because he says he can’t meet us tonight,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we go and have a quick drink anyway?’

‘I’d love it.’ He was blushing. ‘But what about your hospital visit?’

‘There’ll be time for both. Dump that lot and let’s go.’

 

She came back to chambers to read the email properly after she’d despatched Colin to his basement flat in Tooting. His friend had done an admirably thorough job. He’d found out that Jamie Maxden’s next of kin was a sister, Clare Blake, with whom he’d had no contact for years. She lived in Twickenham. Colin’s friend had even provided a phone number.

In answering the rest of her questions, he’d also offered the interesting fact that the police had found a suicide note in Maxden’s car. Apart from the note, they’d found nothing
except his mobile phone and his laptop computer, which had slid under the passenger seat as he drove. The police had obviously checked that and found copies of letters and emails to editors all over the country, begging for work. Some of them went back years and they’d have shown evidence of suicidal depression even without the note. The lack of luggage had been thought to confirm that he hadn’t been planning to live out the night. The last three emails he’d sent on the night he’d died had been despatched to suicide websites on the Internet.

He’d had £33.67 in his pockets, along with two credit cards and his driving licence, which was how they’d identified him, but nothing else. He had enormous debts and the mortgage company was about to throw him out of his flat. The inquest verdict was no surprise to anyone.

‘You might be interested to know,’ the email ended, ‘that Maxden’s sister arranged to have the body cremated.’

As soon as she had printed out the email, Trish raced to the hospital.

 

There was no sign of Jess in the Intensive Care unit, but Caro was looking more alert. There was even a trace of colour in her cheeks. At the sight of Trish treading carefully across the polished floor, Caro stretched out her hand. There was still a drip trailing from it.

‘Thank you, Trish,’ she said. ‘Andrew told me what you’ve done for Kim. What a triumph!’

‘It all seems to be coming right, doesn’t it? You look better, too. That must mean they’ve found the right antibiotic at last.’

‘They have, and my temperature’s coming down. My kidneys aren’t quite sorted yet, which is why I’m still up here.’ Caro’s light voice was at odds with her face, which was as blank as a mask before she forced the smile back. Even then it didn’t touch her eyes.

Trish knew that Caro had to be facing the possibility that her
kidneys would never recover fully. She was far too well informed not to know what that meant: a lifetime of dialysis until her veins were so damaged by needles that even that ceased to be possible. Then a transplant would be the only way of saving her life, and there was a terrible shortage of kidneys, now that road accidents were rarer and victims cared for more efficiently.

Roll on the day when transgenic pigs can be bred to provide organs for transplant, Trish thought. At least until stem-cell research gets to the point where they can be grown in a lab rather than in another body. Anything would be better than the destruction of a life like Caro’s.

Her frightened brown eyes warned Trish not to say anything sympathetic, so she smiled instead, and asked whether Caro had had many visitors.

‘Jess.’ Her face softened. ‘She comes every day with clean pyjamas and tiny amounts of pristine food I can eat.’

‘Meat?’ Trish couldn’t stop the question, in spite of her new appreciation of Jess.

‘Of course. She’d never impose her own diet on me. And Cynthia comes sometimes, and Pete Hartland.’

‘Has he accepted that Crossman didn’t poison you? I couldn’t make him talk to me for long enough to find out whether I’d convinced him.’

‘I think he does believe it now. Luckily. He could have caused a lot of trouble. By the way, is your friend still trying to track down the source of the E. coli? Jess told me he’d found the deli where I bought the sausages. She’s dead grateful for all the work he’s putting in.’

Trish remembered the antipathy that had burgeoned between the two of them and said lightly, ‘Even though she didn’t like him?’

Caro laughed, which was all the acknowledgement Trish needed.

‘His charms are a little unusual,’ she added, ‘but once you get to know him you realize they’re real. There isn’t much I can tell you. He’s borrowed some money off me and gone to ground.’

‘Why does that worry you?’ Caro sounded so much stronger, and so like her usual self, that for a moment Trish was tempted to ask for the advice she needed. But until she knew for certain what Will was doing, she couldn’t risk bringing the police anywhere near him.

‘No reason,’ she said and hoped she sounded confident. ‘I was just thinking about the sausages and wondering whether anyone else suffered from them. Have you heard of any other cases?’

‘No. And each time I ask, the nurses tell me not to worry, love. If there’d been a big outbreak, the authorities would have made enquiries, but there hasn’t. So you just lie back and relax. We’re looking after you.’ Caro said this in a deliberately syrupy voice. Reverting to her own astringent tones she added, ‘It’s enough to send my temperature back to the top of the scale without any infection whatsoever. If your friend does find anything out, you will bring him to see me, won’t you?’

‘Of course,’ Trish said, then added in silence to herself: if it’s safe.

 

On her way out of the unit later, Trish felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned, expecting to see one of the nurses. In fact it was a man almost as young as Andrew Stane’s captain, but much less sturdy. She looked enquiringly at him.

‘Are you Inspector Lyalt’s friend who was ill, too?’ he asked. ‘The one who’s been talking to Kim?’

‘Yes, Trish Maguire.’

‘I work with her. My name’s Pete Hartland. You phoned me. Can I talk to you? Outside, I mean. I don’t want to disturb her.’

‘Sure.’

Beyond the swing doors to the ward there was a dingy cream-painted
corridor with a bench about halfway along. Trish led the way there and sat down.

‘How can I help?’

‘When are you going to see Kim again?’

‘I’m not. I did the last interview yesterday, and she said enough to enable the social workers to extend the care order. They’re going to take it from here. Haven’t they told you?’

Hartland leaped up from the bench, then came back, looming over her. Trish blinked and leaned back.

‘Yeah, but it’s not enough, is it?’ The words burst out of him. ‘We can’t do him for cruelty on what you’ve got. OK, Kim may be taken safely into care. But nothing will happen to Dan Crossman. He’ll be glad to be rid of her. It’ll look like winning to him, and he’s got to be made to see he didn’t win. Otherwise he’ll do the same sort of thing again and again.’

Trish watched him pacing about like an animal in too small a cage. Anyone who had ever seen Kim would have been driven to help her, but this passion seemed excessive.

‘What’s your particular interest in him?’ she asked.

‘He doesn’t remind me of my dad, if that’s what you’re thinking.’ He spat out the words. ‘I wasn’t abused by anyone else either. I had a great family life.’