Read A Place of Safety Online

Authors: Natasha Cooper

Tags: #UK

A Place of Safety (20 page)

‘Come on, Peter.’
Somewhere outside a church poured out a cascade of bells, jangling yet satisfying to Trish, who had always loved the rippling, triumphant sound.
‘Those wretched bellringers,’ Martin Chanting said, covering his ears. ‘It’s a new craze round here and they make the evenings hell with their clatter. I wouldn’t mind if it was part of an unbroken tradition, but it’s not. They’d do better to weave baskets. Quieter and much more useful. Goodbye. We won’t meet again.’
Trish went obediently back to her car. She had the key already in the ignition when she started to think properly about the name he’d bestowed on his Labrador. Elderly though it was, it couldn’t have been as old as seventeen. Which meant that it had been named after Peter Chanting disappeared.
Would any man have called his dog after his estranged son if he cared as little for the son as Martin Chanting had claimed? Sentimental or not, she just couldn’t believe it. And if he cared, he must at least have tried to find him.
Running after him and the dog, she tripped and crashed down on the edge of the pavement, ripping her tights and the skin of her left leg. She was amazed at how much it hurt. As a child she’d regularly grazed both knees, tripping while roller-skating or falling out of trees, and she did not remember feeling anything like this.
She thought of poor Mer and his arm. It must have been agony. She hoped, with a passion she hadn’t felt for some time, that the giant had been a fantasy. By the time she had caught up with her quarry, she could feel the warm blood running down her leg. Soon it would clot and stick disgustingly to her skin.
‘Yes?’ he said, turning when she called his name.
‘I accept the fact that you have had no contact with your son,’ she said, standing as straight as her bleeding knee would allow, ‘and that you do not know where he is at this precise moment.’
She saw the start of a smile playing about his thin lips and knew she was on the right track.
‘But I believe you must know more than you suggested about his general whereabouts. Is he still based in Kathmandu?’
‘You are a sharp little thing, aren’t you?’
She couldn’t tell from his tone whether he approved or not. ‘I hope so. It’s an important skill in my job. Does he still live in Nepal?’
‘I don’t know. But it is true that he does come back to this country at intervals.’
‘How do you know?’
‘If it’s any of your business, he writes to me occasionally.’
‘Ah. Good. Where does he stay when he comes back? With you?’
‘Certainly not.’ His expression suggested that he had just trodden on a slug. ‘He has an interest in a small shop in London, selling imported rubbish from the subcontinent. I imagine there is some kind of accommodation over the shop.’
At last, she thought. ‘How can I find it?’
‘It is in Clerkenwell, I believe, and he has called it The Chantry.’ Chanting’s face creased into the kind of contempt that made her throat ache. ‘That, of course, is typical of his feckless stupidity. Anyone who knows the English language will assume that it is a shop selling Christian paraphernalia and eschew it on those grounds, or go there in search of hymnals and leave in disgust at the glitter and incense sticks.’
That’s easily worth a bruised and bloody knee, Trish thought as she thanked him and limped back to the car.
 
 
David was writing up his latest contribution to the school project on war when Trish got back to the flat, while Nicky was in the kitchen, preparing supper. The air of busyness and the scent of frying onions made the flat seem quite different from the echoing, brick-walled, art-filled refuge it had been for so long. Trish looked at the small dark head, bent over the wide spread of papers and photographs, heard him sigh, and didn’t regret the old emptiness. Particularly not now that he seemed more serene and she and George were back on track with each other.
Determined not to disturb the peace, Trish crept up the spiral stairs to her room, where she showered and covered the still oozing graze on her knee with extra-wide Elastoplast. Her jeans felt comfortably tight over it, and she pulled on the thick red cashmere tunic George had given her one Christmas, before reaching for the London Business Telephone Directory.
The Chantry was listed, even though there was no entry with its owner’s name. Someone must have records of that somewhere, unless Peter Chanting had been operating it under a false name. Trish padded down the spiral staircase to pull boots on over her thick socks and slipped out of the flat to hail the first cab she saw.
The driver took her to a charming little street near Exmouth Market on the edge of Clerkenwell. It was lined on both sides with small Georgian cottages, some of which had been converted into shops. They had none of the fashionable glamour of their Exmouth Market equivalents, and they looked dustier. There was a newsagent and a small, slightly dingy greengrocer’s. Both were still open. Trish didn’t think she would want to buy any of the limp, grimy vegetables in the greengrocer’s. The potatoes were all sprouting and the bananas looked almost as black as those she’d bought as an impoverished law student.
Two doors along from the greengrocer’s was The Chantry, with a squared-off bay window. There were no display lights in
the shop, but she could see the mirrored plaques on a Rajasthani shawl glinting in the light of the overhead street lamp. Moving closer, she saw a ravishing brown silk box, embroidered in gold and amber colours with pearls set here and there among the stitchery, and a set of beautiful brass temple bells.
There was a ‘Closed’ sign on the shop door. Trish peered in through the grimy glass of the window, moving her head, first this way then that, to try to penetrate the gloom of the room beyond the gleaming wares in the window. There seemed to be heaps of fabric and paper lying all over the floor.
She rubbed the window with her sleeve, hoping to get a clearer view, but all she could see was the mess. It looked as though someone had emptied a filing drawer over the floor and then pulled down racks of clothes. She rang the bell beside the shop door, leaning on it for a full thirty seconds, but no one came, so she went into both the other shops in search of information.
Neither the greengrocer nor the newsagent could help. They couldn’t remember when the shop had last been open or when they’d seen the owner, but they said it was often closed for days at a time and never had many customers.
Back in the street, Trish tried The Chantry’s bell again, then took out her mobile to phone the local police.
‘I see,’ said the man who had taken her call when she had explained herself, ‘so you have never been to this shop before and you have no idea of its normal opening hours. You do not know anything about the owner or any staff he may have. There is no sign of a break-in or any kind of trouble, apart from some mess you think you could see at the back of the shop. And yet you are sure that something serious is going down. Have I got that right?’
‘Yes,’ Trish said, hanging on to her patience like a lifebelt. Could it have been the expectation of a reception like this that had made Henry Buxford wary of going to the police in the first place, rather than a determination to manipulate
any evidence there might be that his godson was involved in something criminal? ‘But there’s—’
‘Never you mind. I have taken a note of everything you have told me and I will pass it on to the Home Beat Officer. Goodbye.’
‘Shit!’ Trish shouted to the surprise of a straggly-looking stray cat, which slid away under a parked car. She scuffled in her bag for her diary and then phoned Martin Chanting, who did not sound any more concerned by her story than the police officer had been.
‘There could be any number of explanations for what you have seen,’ he said at last. ‘I have to go, Miss Maguire. Goodbye. Please do not telephone again.’
Feeling a fool in three different dimensions, Trish plodded back to St John Street, down through Smithfield with its gaudily painted ironwork and huge refrigerated meat lorries ready for the morning’s market, and on towards the bridge and home.
Both legs were aching by the time she’d reached the bridge and her neck felt as though it had sunk two inches into her shoulders. She saw that the police had taken away their yellow signs. Had they found out enough about the body in the river now? Or had they just given up expecting any information?
 
Much later, after David had gone to bed, Trish settled down to draft a letter to Henry. It took her almost an hour to come up with a version that covered everything she wanted to tell him without sounding absurd. With each word she keyed in to her computer, she saw herself in court defending a charge of libel, and knew that she could not send this as an email.
Dear Henry,
You may already have persuaded Toby to tell you what is going on. I very much hope that you have because I am
convinced that there is nothing else I can do for you. And something must be done.
If you are still not prepared to go to the police, or Customs & Excise, I think you should seriously consider employing a genuine investigator. I have come to the end of my always limited usefulness and I can see nowhere else to go.
All I have managed to discover is that, irrespective of whatever he may be doing now, Toby has definitely been involved in art fraud in the past. This afternoon I met Martin Chanting (the father of Toby’s Cambridge friend), who virtually confirmed my suspicions that the Clouet drawings Toby identified at Cambridge were in fact fakes, deliberately produced for the purpose.
As you know, Toby and Peter Chanting sold the drawings through Goode & Floore’s and achieved a record price. I have reason to believe that Peter’s father bought them from the purchaser so that he could destroy them and therefore the evidence they represented. Which means, obviously, that we will never be able to prove anything. But I don’t think Toby knows this.
I can only imagine the rows that must have taken place between Martin Chanting, his son and Toby, but they ended with Peter’s exile to Nepal. His father says they have not spoken since, even though Peter now owns a shop in Clerkenwell and must therefore spend at least some of his time in the UK.
Given that, I imagine that he and Toby must have been in touch again and could be up to their old tricks. The Gregory Bequest is relatively close to Clerkenwell. I’d have thought they could easily have met in the street, even if they hadn’t actually planned an encounter.
For a while I thought that Martin Chanting could be behind what has been happening to Toby, taking revenge
on him for the loss of his son by forcing Toby to create another fake to sell through Goode & Floore’s. I imagined that it wouldn’t be hard to expose the modern fake and so ruin Toby’s reputation or even have him arrested and tried for fraud.
However, I am now almost sure that his son must be involved in Toby’s current problems. Peter seems to have disappeared, leaving his shop in a state of chaos. Whether he went back to Nepal of his own volition, having done what he wanted, or whether someone (?Toby) could have got rid of him in some other way, I do not know. And, once again, I do not have the resources to gather the evidence that would prove anything.
But I am concerned because, as I told you, Toby has recently been showing signs of violence. We know he has been hitting his wife. I have also discovered that his son, Mer, has a broken arm. He’s been telling his schoolfriends that a giant attacked him. If his father assaulted him, I can understand why he should have made up the story of the giant to make it seem bearable. A lot of children would rather create a mythical bogeyman than blame one of their parents for hurting them. Of course, the so-called giant could be real and working with whoever has been making Toby himself so afraid. Either way, the child’s broken arm seems to me a most serious danger signal.
I ought to have been firmer when we last talked, Henry, but I have to say now that I think the policy of terrifying Toby into making a confession is too dangerous to pursue. I cannot take any further part in it.
Please let me know, however, if there is anything I can ever do for you – in my professional capacity.
With best wishes,
Trish Maguire
Almost satisfied and definitely certain that she couldn’t do any better, she added ‘Strictly Private & Confidential’ at the top of the letter, along with Henry’s name and the address of his bank. She printed off a single copy for herself and filed the original on her hard disk and on a floppy, which she added to the others in her small fireproof safe.
‘It’s Jay here,’ said the junior clerk’s voice over the phone later that morning. ‘Sir Henry Buxford’s on the line. Can you speak to him?’
Trish had been rereading her copy of the letter she had dropped in at Grunschwig’s offices on her way into chambers and wondering whether she should pre-empt trouble by telling Antony what she had done or leave it to Henry.
‘Yes. Put him through.’
‘I have your envelope, Trish. And I wanted to assure you that I will tackle the matter now. I should also like to say how grateful I am for everything you’ve done, and for the discretion with which you have done it. But I do think your suggestion that Toby might have got rid of his old friend is more than a little Jacobean. As is the idea that he could have deliberately broken his son’s arm.’
Thank God he’s taking it so calmly, she thought. ‘I shall be very relieved if I am wrong,’ she said. ‘But I know there’s something serious going on.’
‘I think you’re right about that. But I’ll handle it from here. I was wondering, though, whether I could persuade you to meet me this evening so that I can thank you in person for what you’ve done. Will you have one more drink with me?’
It would be pretty graceless to refuse to let him thank me
in whatever way he wants, Trish thought, as she agreed to meet him.
‘Good. Then what about the Cork & Bottle again at seven o’clock?’
When she put down the phone, Trish saw that another email had come in from Ivan Gregory.
My dear Miss Maguire,
I have remembered the first time my mother told me about the paintings. I said, I think, that I’d grown up hearing about them, but that’s not quite true. I had grown up hearing about my amazing father, the love of her life and great connoisseur, but not that we had his collection in our house. That news came one night in the Blitz.
I had come off duty from fire-watching. I was dog-tired. Up half of every night during the bombing and trying to do two or three men’s work at the bank all day took it out of me, even when my asthma wasn’t bad. Some bombs were still falling when I got back home, so I filled one flask with tea and another with whisky and soda, collected my novel – Dickens, I think – and took them with some blankets to the cellar.
My mother was already there, and in the kind of state I’d never seen. She’d always been so brave, but that night something had happened. I didn’t know until later that one of her favourite patients had killed himself. He had long left the nursing home where she worked, but she visited him in his tiny flat whenever she could. It seemed that the sound of the bombing night after night had brought back all his old shell shock and he had hanged himself. She’d found him that day and had had to organize the removal of the body and so on.
The shock had made her very shaky herself and she was talking much more freely than she ever had before about
the trenches and the men she had nursed, and her meeting with my father. She talked about her fear and her horror of some of the wounds she had to deal with and the bliss of being clean and warm and loved by a man like him.
Then she began to tell me how he’d first told her about his paintings, about how they had become lovers and she had become pregnant and they had been married by a French priest in a small village behind the front line.
That was the first occasion, incidentally, that I had heard about their marriage postdating her pregnancy. It didn’t seem to matter much then. So I asked what happened to the paintings.
‘They are here,’ she said, pointing upwards. ‘In the attic.’
I took my lantern (it all sounds very primitive, doesn’t it?) and climbed up into the roof space. There, stacked under the eaves, were these tubes. Piles and piles of them. Some had brown stains on the outside, which made me think someone must have bled all over them. My father, perhaps. Or some of the wounded men in her care. Then I decided I was being fanciful. The marks could equally have been some form of mould.
When I got down to the cellar again, I asked her why she had never unpacked them. She told me she had never felt she had the right to touch them. They were his and it was her duty to keep them for him. But she also admitted that night that she had lost her faith that she would see him again.
In her distress, she poured out her hatred of the paintings, telling me that they were worth nothing to her without him, that she would willingly set fire to them if that could bring him back. She also confessed that she had been praying the house would receive a direct hit that night so that she would not have to go on without him any longer.
Later in the night, when she was calmer, she apologized and asked if she had hurt me by talking of the destruction of my unknown father’s life’s work. I told her that I was too busy and too tired at that point to care one way or the other about any damned paintings that belonged to a man I had never known.
I wish I hadn’t done that. She turned away, very hurt herself. But when the asthma sewed my lungs together again later that night, she tended me as gently as she always had during my childhood. She was truly a great lady, and she did not have the life she deserved.
Yours etc.
Ivan Gregory
There’s a whole network of us, Trish thought, who grew up without fathers. Was it that shared experience that made me like Ivan Gregory as soon as I read his first email? Has he had the same kind of thoughts about his father as I’ve had about Paddy? And how much has he understood about the significance of his mother’s fruitless search for his father’s family?
 
Henry had arrived, once again, before her at the wine bar. This time he had a bottle of Alsatian
pinot gris
in a cooler in front of him, with a plate of smoked-salmon wrapped fish and two forks. She approved of his determined provision of food to go with the wine he chose, but she wasn’t hungry.
‘I’ve just had another email from Ivan Gregory. Why didn’t you tell me his mother was pregnant before she married Jean-Pierre?’ she said as she sat down.
‘Because there is no way that could possibly be relevant to Toby’s problems,’ Henry said, looking surprised. ‘And because one of my preoccupations in all this has been to guard Ivan’s privacy. I didn’t want any gossip in the papers. He might not
have read it, but his carers could have, and they might have said something to upset him.’
‘You care far more about him than your godson, don’t you?’
Henry hesitated. ‘My affection for each of them is quite different,’ he said stiffly. ‘But, of course, I care for Toby, as well as for Margaret and the boys. By the way, you can let yourself off all that anxiety about Mer’s arm.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I’ve been in touch with his mother, who tells me that Mer makes up stories like this one about the giant to get himself out of trouble. She says the accident happened while he was playing alone in the garden of the house in Chelsea where they’re staying. Apparently there’s an old Victorian cast-iron roller behind a tree, which the boys have been forbidden to touch. It seems likely that Mer was messing about on it and the handle sprang back and caught his arm. Apparently the pattern of bruising is consistent with that.’
‘Thank God.’ Trish brushed her hand across her forehead and was surprised to find it damp. ‘I was worried.’
‘I know, but I was sure it was unnecessary. I knew Toby couldn’t have done anything like that to his own son.’
‘No. Good. Tell me, how did you come to be his godfather?’
‘His father was one of my oldest friends.’ Henry’s voice was still stiff, and it carried no warmth at all. That was so unlike him, that Trish was certain he was hiding something.
She knew enough about the containment of unbearable emotion to watch his hands. His right thumb was stuck deep into his left fist, as it might once have been stuck in the mouth of the child who needed comfort.
‘Was?’ She made her voice gentle.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, watching pain drag down the corners of
his eyes and remembering how much she had once liked him. ‘What about Toby’s mother? Is she still alive?’
‘Yes.’ This time the single word made a sound like a drop of water hitting red-hot metal. His hands separated. He picked up his wineglass.
‘Then why did you ever need me? Couldn’t you have gone to her for information about Toby and his past and what he could be doing now?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’ This was like trying to make a stone talk. ‘You know, if you’d told me more about them all in the first place, I might have come up with something more useful, and more quickly, too.’
Henry took a moment to speak, playing with his glass. At last he looked up at Trish. Her eyes widened at the sight of the held-in loathing in his expression. How like him to be able to show hatred so much more easily than distress!
‘Toby’s father used to talk about his wife’s distorted view of their son’s capabilities and potential. I’m sure that has something to do with his emotional fragility now. I wouldn’t trust a single thing she said about him.’
Trish remembered Martin Chanting’s contempt for his son and wondered if that had provided the link that had made the two undergraduates friends at Cambridge. ‘Poor Toby.’
‘Yes. His father did his best to help, but he told me once that intervening on the boy’s behalf only made his wife more aggressive towards the pair of them. It wasn’t – it wasn’t a tolerable existence. He stuck it for as long as Toby depended on him, then killed himself just after Toby left university. I have felt as though I was
in loco parentis
ever since.’
Trish wondered whether her own anxieties had been affecting her judgement. All her more extravagant ideas about what Toby could be doing or suffering returned to her mind. Margaret had said she had always had to bolster Toby’s confidence and make
him believe he was worth something in spite of all his hated mother’s bitter criticism, which fitted in with Henry’s belated honesty.
Perhaps there never had been anything odd about the sale of the Pieter de Hooch. Perhaps all Toby’s fear had come from nothing more than his own lifelong sense of inadequacy.
‘Why didn’t you warn me that there was a history of suicide in Toby’s family,’ she asked, ‘when you set me on to terrify him?’
‘Because it’s not relevant. Suicide isn’t catching,’ Buxford said. His face gave her no clues to what he was thinking. ‘Or genetic.’
‘I hope you’re right.’ Trish realized that she wanted Toby’s fear to be about something real and criminal, not a hangover from old parental cruelties. She didn’t want to be told again that adults never got over what happened to them before they were ten. And she definitely didn’t want to discover that she was still so tightly imprisoned in her own past that she could not trust her judgement of other people – or evidence.
‘What’s upsetting you so much?’ Buxford asked.
‘Nothing,’ she said, fighting to get back some sensation of control over her life and mind. ‘You know I’ve become very suspicious of your Jean-Pierre Gregoire.’
Henry put down the glass he had been nursing between his hands and pushed back the silver wings of hair at his temples.
‘Don’t go there, Trish.’ His voice was unusually rough. ‘All you need to know is that he was a collector so affected by a truly horrific war that he wanted his most cherished possessions out of the way of the fighting. Any suggestion to the contrary could do irreparable damage.’ Buxford hesitated for a second, then added, pushing an envelope towards her across the table: ‘Damage to Ivan’s last years, I mean. I am really grateful for the effort you’ve put into this. Now, drink up, and have some of the fish. It goes well with this particular
pinot gris.’
Trish ate and drank only enough to be polite.
As Henry made friendly conversation about his early years in the law before he went to the city, she battled with ironic curiosity about the investigation she’d been so keen to drop. There was no reason, of course, why she shouldn’t continue her email correspondence with Ivan Gregory. And even though David would not tell her anything about Mer, their head teacher would probably pass on any important news of him. Trish might even hear it from Margaret.
‘Trish?’ Henry’s voice broke through her preoccupations. She had no idea what he’d been talking about or what he wanted.
‘I’m so sorry. My mind had slid off on a frolic of its own. What did you say?’
‘Nothing of any importance. I was obviously talking too much.’
‘Not a word too much. I was just thinking how much I’m going to miss them all. You will tell me what happens in the end, won’t you?’
He smiled, and looked friendlier than at almost any time since they’d first met here, before she’d heard anything about Jean-Pierre Gregoire, or met Toby.
‘Antony’s right about you.’
Trish thought of Antony’s complete withdrawal of approval, affection and even ordinary courtesy. He had brushed right past her this morning, refusing even to answer a casual question about the progress of his money-laundering case.
‘In what way?’
‘Along with the fact that you have this rare ability to mix imaginative perception with solid analytical reasoning,’ Henry said, ‘he believes you can make yourself care about the most hopeless people. As a misanthrope, he admires that.’
What member of Antony’s chambers could want more? Trish asked herself. It would have been reassuring, though, if he’d been able to tell her himself.
‘And he can’t think why he didn’t notice you for so long
while you were being wasted in family law.’ Henry pushed himself up from his chair with both hands flat on the table. He leaned over the bottle and glasses to kiss her cheek. ‘Good luck, Trish. I know we’ll meet again. I hope it’s soon.’
When he’d gone, she poured a little more wine into her glass and opened the envelope he’d left her. The size of the cheque made her eyes widen all over again. She didn’t see how she could take any money, let alone this much, for what she’d helped to do to Toby Fullwell.

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