A Poisoned Mind (16 page)

‘I don’t like indecision,’ he said, forgetting to smile but not to keep his attention on her. ‘Tell me without shilly-shallying or protecting yourself.’

Trish suppressed her instinct to shrug. ‘I can’t help believing we should be looking at sabotage. To be fair, Antony told me to have nothing to do with the idea because there’s no way we could prove it, but if you’re after a way to silence bad publicity and environmental activists, I can’t think of a better one.’

At last she was released from his obsessive stare. He turned to Fred. ‘What do you think?’

‘She’s right on all counts,’ he said, smiling out from under his heavy brows, like an old silverback approving a promising young member of his troop. ‘Particularly the impossibility of getting any evidence of sabotage at this stage. Everything was burned in the fireball, so there are no fibres, fingerprints, DNA. Nothing.’

Bates was on his feet now and swinging his overcoat back over his shoulders.

‘Now I know where I am. Don’t mess about with sabotage. Waste of time and money. Stick with contributory negligence and get it done fast.’

‘All right,’ Trish said, feeling a rebellious bubble she had to hide.

‘How is Angie?’ he said, sounding still more abrupt.

‘D’you know Mrs Fortwell?’

‘The papers call her that. How’s she doing as a litigant in person?’

‘Astonishingly well,’ Trish said with a dryness that made him smile. She wondered whether to tell him about Benjamin Givens and the secret help he was giving, then saw Fred Hoffman very slightly shaking his great head.

‘Good. I can’t be seen to be bullying fragile widows and orphans. Bad for the image. Glad to have met you. I’ll try to come to court tomorrow. I must go now. Fred?’

Hoffman hadn’t bothered to take off his coat, merely unbuttoned it, presumably having plenty of experience of his client’s impatience. He waved in Trish’s direction and hurried out.

She wondered whether Don Bates’s use of Angela Fortwell’s nickname had really come from nothing but
reading the papers. But she’d had her orders: get the case finished as quickly as possible and don’t look for evidence of third-party intervention.

Her screen was blank, saving power, until she moved and joggled it. The blog came back, pointlessly now. She put a finger on the delete button but couldn’t make herself press it.

I want to
know,
she thought and heard a voice in her head that sounded remarkably like Antony’s: don’t be such a baby.

She filed the document and reached for her coat.

Passing the clerks’ room, she looked towards the pigeonholes. There was something sticking out of hers so she made a detour to fetch it. The envelope had Hoffman’s address printed on the top right-hand corner, and there was no stamp.

Intrigued, she opened it to find photocopied pages from Angie Fortwell’s visitors’ book. The note clipped to the top sheet was written in Hoffman’s tangled scrawl. He must think she had all the time in the world to decipher the letters he’d jumbled up into an incomprehensible web of ink across the page. Eventually she made out the message:

‘Trish, I think these lists and pages from the Fortwells’ visitors’ book are all we have. FH.’

She took the pile of paper back to her room, switched on the light again and fired up the computer, still wearing her coat.

The comments in the visitors’ book were all much easier to read than Hoffman’s note. One or two had been quoted in the visitors’ blogs. Some were straightforward dryly worded advice to other walkers, warning of difficult weather or faults in guidebook descriptions of the hardness
of chosen routes. Others were sentimentally lyrical about the landscape around the Fortwells’ farm, the magnificent straightness of the old Roman road, the amazing survival of parts of Hadrian’s Wall, and the charm of the kitchen where they’d eaten, or the deliciousness of the mutton stew.

That dish featured in several of the entries. Had Angie ever cooked anything else for her paying guests?

Most of the visitors had scribbled an address, sometimes only for email, after their entries. And a few had added details of their blogs. Trish compared them with Hal’s list. There were two mentioned in the visitors’ book that didn’t appear on the list. She clicked on to the Internet, downloaded the relevant sections, and started to read.

One mentioned Peter, the discursive blogger who had met Adam and been warned off the Fortwells’ farm. Another offered tips for all the best b & bs on the most obscure routes and referred to another farm to be avoided, where there was an uncontrollably savage dog. ‘And you’d do well to bypass the witch at Bothwell’s if you can; she turns off the heating at 6.30 p.m. and keeps the boiler so low only the first person gets even a warm bath.’

There was obviously a protective kind of family-feeling among the regular ramblers. Wide awake now, and looking for anything that could hint at some kind of disapproval of CWWM for their use of such amazing countryside to house their chemical-waste tanks, Trish read on and on. But she found nothing.

None of the bloggers so much as mentioned the tanks. And nowhere was there even the slightest mention of Greg Waverly or any dangerous waste or environmental protest or anything whatsoever that could have had even the remotest possible bearing on the case in hand.

Trish smiled. In her tiredness and frustration she was falling into the ways of the traditional silks she’d listened to in her earliest working years, who would allow their voices to swing with the rhythm of their dramatic sentences and add wholly unnecessary words and emphasis to perfectly ordinary questions. Now she was at it. Time to go home. She turned off the laptop once again and shuffled the papers into neat heaps.

Only then did she notice the schedule of Angie Fortwell’s income from the bed-and-breakfasters at the back of the pile of visitors’ book pages Fred had sent. Pinned to the schedule was a list of the names and addresses of everyone who had stayed the night, with a note beside each saying what they had paid and how. Just what Trish had wanted.

No sign of any Adam, she noticed, but the Chris and Sal mentioned in Peterthewalk’s blog were there. They’d obviously ignored his repetition of the advice to avoid the Fortwells. Interestingly they were the only people in the whole list who had used cash, rather than cheque or credit card.

Forty-five pounds for two of them to stay the night and eat not only a full English breakfast but also a three-course dinner was pretty cheap, Trish thought. Even if the bulk of dinner was the mutton stew. But why use cash? The price of one night wasn’t going to weigh anyone down, but if they’d used real money for a whole holiday they must have lugged around a wodge of notes and a tidy weight of coins. Why bother in these days of debit and credit cards?

She pushed the schedule through the photocopier, found a red pen and wrote on the top of the copy:

If Robert got to hear of this, his reaction would be fury, and she was tempted – just for a second – to ask Hal to keep the request to himself. But that would hardly be dignified, so she dropped the note on his desk, unfolded, and went home.

George greeted her with a sleepy smile as she crept into her bedroom.

‘Sorry to wake you,’ she whispered as though there were someone else she might disturb.

He pushed himself up and bunched the pillows behind him, blinking.

‘I’ve missed you,’ he said. ‘It’s worth being disturbed for a chance to chat. Have you eaten?’

‘No. But the moment’s passed.’

‘What did you have for lunch?’

‘Yoghurt, I think. Too long ago to be sure. Don’t worry about it.’

‘You get snappy if you don’t eat properly for more than a day or two,’ he said, now feeling around with his bare feet for his slippers. He pulled on his dressing gown. ‘And I don’t like that. I’ll bring you up something. Have a shower and get comfortable. It’s not that late. There’s time to eat and talk and still get enough sleep.’

She blew him a kiss, feeling easier with him than at any time since the evening he’d been so tense that he’d cut his toenails to the barest stumps, and went to wash the day away under the hot shower.

 

Later, when they’d made love and she’d felt all the crumbs she’d spilled grinding into the skin of her back, he grabbed hold of her hand.

‘I should’ve said something about Henry before I told Jay about him. I’m sorry.’

Trish leaned sideways to stroke his shoulder with her cheek. ‘Don’t worry about it. I was taken aback, but so what? It’s your story to do what you want with.’

‘I don’t think about him these days. So there was no point telling you. But Jay needed to know because of the way Darren makes him feel.’

They’d turned out the lights a while ago, so she had only the faint yellow glow cast by the streetlamp outside and it wasn’t enough tonight to show her anything helpful in his face. She lay back against the pillows and waited, with her hand still tightly held in his.

‘I can understand why Henry did it,’ George said into the dimness, sounding formal and detached, like the lawyer he was. ‘A natural reaction to the appearance of an interloper. He’d been the only child for three years, then I appeared and – presumably – looked like grabbing all the attention, food, love, whatever. You could put it down to evolutionary psychology or sibling rivalry. I
can
understand, but I can’t forgive. Not him; nor myself for letting it happen.’

‘But—’

‘Don’t say it, Trish. You don’t need to. It happened forty years ago and it’s not relevant any more.’

‘But what did he do?’

‘Nothing much.’ He turned his head a little so that he could smile at her in reassurance. ‘This isn’t a story of torture or anything like that. He just told me, and showed me in every possible way, that I was a—’ Something clicked in his throat and he rolled his head back so that he was looking across at the far wall again. He took a moment longer, licked his lips, then brought out a single word: ‘failure’.

She had heard the tiny catch in his voice, understood it as easily as the power of his understatement, and wanted to help. His grip on her hand was tight enough to warn her not to move.

‘Perhaps if it had only happened at home, I’d have managed better,’ he went on, sounding more like himself. ‘But we were at the same prep school and he carried it on there. Made the rest of them join in until it felt as though the whole world had permission to wipe its feet on me.’

‘The prep school, the boarding prep school you were sent to when you were eight years old?’ Trish said, trying not to let out any of her old outrage at the savage custom of the old British upper classes. She could hear her accent slipping back into the one she’d used at her own state school.

‘Mmm.’ The unarticulated sound suggested agreement. For a moment she couldn’t think for fury on his behalf. Once, years ago, he’d mentioned in passing the difficulty of being a short, fat, bespectacled, clever chess-player in a school of sports freaks, but he’d never mentioned this extra, unbearable cruelty. She felt him move, push himself further up the pillows, as though he couldn’t manage the rest of the story lying down.

‘I don’t need you to feel sorry for me, Trish. In fact it’s
the last thing I want, which is probably why I’ve never told you.’

‘But—’

‘I need you to know me as the man I am now, not the miserable boy I was. We’re two different beings. It doesn’t affect me any more. It’s only relevant because it’s what makes me respect Jay so much for fighting back. OK?’

But it does still affect you, she thought, looking back at some of the trickier moments of their past together.

Questions banged about in her brain, butting up against his warning that he wouldn’t say any more.

Only if you know everything can you be safe, she thought, and make everyone around you safe.

But there were other ways to find out and she cared too much about him to make him go any further tonight, so she kissed his chin and asked if he wanted a cup of tea, late though it was.

Angie sat in court, listening to Robert Anstey re-examining the scientific expert, as he gave evidence about the weather conditions in the week before the explosion.

She could have told them about the weather herself. After all, she wasn’t going to forget that week. It had been beastly: cold and wet and horrible. No wonder Trish Maguire hadn’t bothered to turn up for this morning’s session. Questions like these would be much too boring for a woman so pleased with herself. And so successful. And so glossy.

‘How, in your opinion, Doctor Jonas,’ Anstey said, sounding as detached and uncaring as a robot, ‘would the weather conditions have affected the activated charcoal in the tank’s filter system?’

‘In itself the weather wouldn’t have had any effect. Charcoal like this heats up during the day and cools at night. With temperatures such as these tanks experienced before the explosion, there is no chance they could have spontaneously heated to the point of ignition.’

‘And so how can you explain what happened?’

‘The only possibility is some kind of blockage of the air inlet valves.’

The judge looked as bored and irritated as Angie felt. They’d been here so often before.

‘How long would such a blockage have had to be in place before it caused the fire that led to the explosion?’ asked Robert Anstey.

The expert, a weaselly little man with tiny glasses and bad skin, looked at the judge:

‘My assessment, given the relative temperature of the days and nights preceding the explosion, is about seventy-two hours.’ He smiled, a nasty little smirk, in Angie’s direction. ‘I cannot be specific to the minute, My Lord.’

‘Thank you, Doctor Jonas,’ said Robert, sitting down.

Angie got to her feet, wishing she’d bought more than one suit. It was beginning to feel painfully tight around the waistband after all the carbohydrates she’d been eating. And the jacket was too short to disguise the fact that she’d undone the top of the zip. As Marty had promised during the party, members of FADE filled the spectators’ seats behind her. At least they wouldn’t mind that she was bursting out of her skirt, or mock her for it. Suddenly gratitude gushed through her and she turned to the expert like a conqueror.

‘Doctor Jonas, are you seriously telling this court that a man who had successfully monitored the filters on these tanks for three years, during heat waves and blizzards, would have failed to spot a blockage for seventy-two hours? That’s three whole days and nights.’

‘Mrs Fortwell,’ said the judge, leaning towards her and looking over his half-moon spectacles. ‘Please remember you have already cross-examined this witness. You do not get a second chance. In any case, you may not ask a witness to speculate about facts of which he can know nothing.’

Hearing a stifled giggle from one of the lawyers, Angie felt a child’s blush making her cheeks boil. The conqueror-feeling oozed away. She tried to get it back, bowed a little, and said: ‘I am grateful for Your Lordship’s reminder.’

The judge nodded in return, then told Doctor Jonas he could go. Angie heard the doors behind her open and someone walk in and move into one of the benches. Was it Adam? She’d been so relieved this morning to see no sign of him in court that the thought of facing him when she turned round made her feel absolutely stony.

 

Trish looked at the map with the five differently coloured routes she’d plotted from the blogs Hal had found and the others she’d traced herself. There were dotted lines here and there, where she’d had to guess, but enough of the routes were firm to make it seem worth the exercise. The orange line was Peter’s, the purple Adam’s, the pink James and Clare’s, the yellow Chris and Sal’s, and the green Ron’s. They all intersected at different points within a day’s walk of the Fortwells’ farm on different dates in the week before the explosion.

With Antony’s advice and Bates’s orders to ignore the possibility of sabotage at the tanks, she shouldn’t have been doing this, but Robert was more than capable of conducting the day’s session in court. She had proved to him, her clerk and anyone else who might be interested that she hadn’t hesitated to pick up the case at no notice; now she could take a day away to try to find the answers she wanted without sacrificing anything. It was fairer to do it herself than make Hal steal more time from his pupil-master’s tasks.

 

 

Forty miles away, in a village on the far side of Chelmsford, a harassed woman was trying to make her 3-year-old daughter and her friend’s son get in the back of the car. She’d been late collecting them from their morning nursery and they were playing up to punish her. Minnie, the baby, was already strapped into her seat and screaming. Charlotte and Jake were messing about with damp sticks they’d picked out of the gutter.

‘Pah!’ shouted Jake, jamming one end into Charlotte’s chest. ‘Gotcha!’

Charlotte grabbed the stick in one plump powerful fist and wrenched it away from him, before whacking him on the side of his head, dancing out of reach and chanting: ‘Silly boy. Silly boy. Silly boy.’

Jake promptly burst into tears. Charlotte’s mother, Ellie, whose head already felt as though it had three drills powering through it, grabbed her daughter and almost flung her into the high back seat of the Grand Cherokee Jeep her husband insisted she drive to keep them all safe.

‘Sit there and do up your seat belt,’ she shouted. ‘And don’t touch Minnie.’

Charlotte promptly started to grizzle. Ellie slammed the door on her and went to fetch Jake, who was hiding his shame behind the nearest tree.

‘Come on out, Jake,’ Ellie said, moderating her voice. You shouldn’t yell at your own children, of course, but everyone did. Other people’s were different. You had to be kinder, however you felt about wimpy little boys who couldn’t stand up to your daughter. ‘We have to get back so we can have lunch and be ready when your mummy comes to pick you up. Come along, Jake.’

‘Don’t want to.’ But he emerged from behind the tree, knuckling his eyes and dragging his expensive shoes in the mud.

At last Ellie persuaded him back to the car and wiped the worst of the sticky mud off his shoes with a pile of leaves. Charlotte was playing peek-a-boo with her little sister, both as happy as they could be.

Be pleased, Ellie told herself, while she absorbed the knowledge that they’d never be so cooperative if she’d actually asked them to play together. She helped Jake into the car and did up his seat belt for him, before heaving herself into the driving seat. She took extra care to check the traffic before leaving the parking space because this was the kind of mood that caused accidents. A shabby dark-blue lorry was a bit too close for safety, so she waited until he’d passed, then pulled out behind him.

He took her turning at the roundabout, which was a nuisance. She had only eight miles to drive, but stuck behind something as big as this could mean all kinds of hold-ups. And he wouldn’t keep a steady speed. For some reason he kept accelerating then reining back, almost as though he was trying to wind her up.

The road was narrow and twisty here, so maybe he just didn’t know it well and slowed down to take each bend with extra care, but the changes were jerkier than she’d have expected for something as simple as that. She kept finding her front bumper only inches from his back wheels. And then the bastard went and stopped dead. She jammed her foot on the brake and managed to stop in time, with her hand on the horn.

You shouldn’t use your horn as a rebuke, she remembered
from the Highway Code. But how else were you supposed to tell people to stop playing silly buggers and let you get the children home?

Ellie thought of the shepherd’s pie she’d put in the oven before she set out. It would soon be dried out and inedible. The lorry hadn’t moved, although its engine was running again, and puffing out smelly exhaust that was blowing in through her ventilators. It shouldn’t have been on the road at all in this condition.

She put her hand on the horn again and gave the lorry driver an even louder blast. But the noise made Minnie start whimpering, so Ellie had to turn round to console her.

By the time all three children were quiet, the lorry had moved a good fifty yards ahead, which at least meant Ellie could put her foot down for a little while. She got up to thirty before she caught up. Then the lorry driver braked sharply once more, making her swear.

‘What’s that man
doing
?’ Jake asked.

There was a damp popping sound, which meant Charlotte had taken her thumb out of her mouth. ‘What man?’

‘I don’t know, Jake,’ Ellie said, reaching for her mobile. ‘But he’s driving really stupidly.’

There was a phone number at the bottom of all the advertising stuff on the double doors at the back of the lorry and above the diamond-shaped orange HazChem signs. Flicking her eyes between the road ahead and the numbers on her phone, Ellie rang it, silently rehearsing her complaint as she waited for an answer. The baby’s wails rose to an earsplitting shriek.

‘Charlotte’s hitting Minnie,’ Jake said in an interested voice.

Ellie glanced back, to see Charlotte’s thumbs bearing
down on the baby’s eyes. She dropped the phone and flung back one hand to grab her elder daughter’s arm and pull her away.

‘Leave her alone, Charlotte. For once in your life, leave your sister alone.’

‘Stop!’ shouted Jake, just as the jeep hit the back of the lorry with a noise like the end of the world.

Ellie felt a sickening wrench in the arm that was stretched out behind her and her neck cracked as her head whipped back and forth. She could see the lorry driver’s door opening. It was his sodding fault for messing about so if he tried to pin the blame on her, she’d fight back.

But it would be easier if she wasn’t actually attached to the back doors of his vehicle. She put the car into reverse and moved back a couple of feet or so, before hauling up the handbrake and switching off her engine. With her hand on the key, she saw the lorry’s dark-blue double doors swing open. Inside, were rows and rows of large, rusting oil drums. Most were standing, but a few were lying on their sides. As Ellie watched in horror, one rolled forwards and hovered on the edge of the lorry. She reached for the key and turned on the ignition, pumping her accelerator, but she couldn’t get the Jeep moving before the drum fell, crashing down on to bonnet. The bung flew out and a thick, oily greenish sludge oozed out.

The drum bounced down on to the road, spraying its filthy contents as it went, but all Ellie could see was the Jeep’s paint, lifting and blistering into great wet bubbles under the sludge. Then she smelled it, coming in through the ventilators as the exhaust had done. But this was sharply acrid. Choking. Dangerous.

She had to get the children out before the stench triggered
asthma attacks. Or worse. The lorry driver was coming towards her yelling something, but her ears weren’t working. His mouth moved and it was easy to see some of the words were ‘bitch’ and ‘stupid cow’. But she couldn’t hear. The children were making a noise too, shouting more words that meant nothing.

It took her whole weight to get the driver’s door open and she felt as though she was moving like a snail, but she did eventually reach the baby’s door and fumbled to get it unlatched. There was no point telling the others to move yet because the child locks meant they couldn’t open their door from the inside.

At last, the latch gave way and the door opened. But then there were the buckles of Minnie’s straps to deal with, and Ellie’s fingers felt like unbending iron bars.

‘Undo your seat belts,’ she shouted to the others, who were both crying. At last she had the baby’s straps free and could grab her hot little body. Ellie’s ears started to work again and Minnie’s screams bit into her brain. She could hear the driver too, and none of what he said was an insult any more. Her brain was still sluggish, but slowly she made out what he wanted her to do.

‘Give her to me and get out of this and get your shoes off.’ The terror in his hoarse voice was as bad as anything except the smell. ‘Don’t touch your feet. Get away to the far bank and kick off your shoes. Don’t touch them with your hands or feet. Just kick them off. Quick as you can. Come on now. It’s important.’

As the weight of her child was pulled away, Ellie fled to the far side of the car. He was shouting at her now, the same words in the same order all over again. But she had to get the children out first. She pulled open the door.

‘Mummy, your feet,’ Charlotte said, whimpering. ‘Your feet, Mummy, your feet.’

Ellie looked down.

Her shoes were melting in the stinking green ooze that covered them. And so was her skin. She began to feel again and everything the driver said made sense.

This time the screams were hers.

 

The driver knew he couldn’t vomit. He had to hold himself together until the ambulance came. There wasn’t anyone else to keep these children away from the chemical filth that had spilled out of his lorry.

As soon as the ambulance crew had taken over here, he was going to phone his fucking boss and ask why the fuck he’d not only landed him with this load of toxic crap but also sent him out in a death trap of a vehicle with spongy brakes and a criminally dodgy clutch. And then he was going to the cops.

CWWM, he thought, staring at the letters stencilled on one of the drums. What the fuck’s CWWM? Is it going to kill this poor woman? And what’s breathing it in done to
me
?

 

The judge rose for lunch and Angie had to turn round. The late arrival had been Adam. Now he was glaring at her from behind his unfashionably huge spectacles and looking exactly like her own younger self. His hair was chopped off like hers, too, and much the same washed-out brown hers had been before the coarse grey streaks had appeared.

She made herself smile and saw a minute reflection of the movement in his lips.