‘So we’re nothing but a mutual self-help society. Is this what you’re telling me?’
‘Can you think of another single reason for us to exist as a couple? I’m not sure I could if I racked my brains for a month.’
There was no audible answer from his wife.
Sally came back with cloths, newspapers and a bucket of Flash. While she mopped up the mess of gin, broken glass and blood, Trish shuddered at the hostility that seeped down through the floorboards. She was tempted to shudder even more violently ten minutes later when Chaze himself appeared in the doorway of the long room, impeccably dressed and apparently quite untroubled.
‘Trish,’ he called. He was holding out his hand as he came towards her, looking as though she was his dearest friend. ‘How lovely to see you! How’ve you been getting on?’
Sally muttered something and slid out of the room with her bucket. He didn’t look at her. All his attention was on Trish.
‘Not too badly,’ she said, getting to her feet to shake hands. There was the sound of feet in high heels running down the stairs, followed almost immediately by the slamming of the front door. A cabinet of antique glasses shook and the walls vibrated in the aftershock.
‘My wife,’ he said easily. ‘She does so much that she’s usually late, and always in a rush. Now, to Debbie’s business.’
As he walked into the light from the double windows overlooking the street, Trish saw that the argument had left its mark after all. There was hurt in his eyes, which she hadn’t seen there before, and his smile seemed more vulnerable. For
the first time she saw the damaged child in him, and that had its usual effect on her.
When he touched her hand and urged her to sit down again, she felt that she knew him much better than their one meeting justified. She liked him. She wanted to comfort him. Warmth filled her, and confidence. She knew her eyes were shining with affection, and she could see his immediate response. She moved closer to him, the warmth increasing, until she realised what she was doing and cut it off at its source.
She knew that her response to other people’s unhappiness was part of her own subconscious need. It had got her into a lot of trouble in the past, and in the end done little good for the people she had tried to help. Slowly she was learning how to use her instinct and channel it into her work so that she didn’t wake expectations in friends and acquaintances that she was never going to meet.
Malcolm Chaze was a source of information, she told herself, and quite possibly PR for Anna’s programme. He was not a hurt child. His unhappiness was no reason to like or trust him.
She controlled her smile and sat at the far end of one of the sofas. He joined her, sitting much closer to her than necessary. She described everything she’d been doing for Anna, censoring only her own anger at Anna’s unreasonable demands. Her professional detachment was clear in her voice and she was glad to see him move back towards the far end of the sofa.
‘It sounds excellent,’ he said, when she finished her account. He was gazing at her as though he had adored her for years and she was the most brilliant, beautiful woman on the planet. Recognising the operation of his own instinctive need to make people respond to him, she felt better about herself. ‘You’ve got much further than you suggested on the phone.’
‘Not nearly far enough. And there’s something that’s really worrying me.’
‘Oh? What’s that?’
‘I detested the doctor.’
‘That seems quite fair,’ Chaze said, laughing. ‘He sounds utterly detestable.’
‘I know. But don’t you see? When Deb encountered him that last time, she was already raw. She needed help and he didn’t give it to her. There was no one else.’
Chaze was still watching her admiringly.
‘If it had been me in her place, his patronising dismissal could have tipped me over the edge, made me do something I’d never—’
‘You mustn’t think like that, Trish. Not ever.’ The words came out very fast. They sounded sincere. But he was a politician: he would be able to turn on sincerity like a tap. ‘I’ve told you already, Trish. I
know
Deb couldn’t have committed murder.’
‘Even though her father was driven to constant verbal cruelty by the pain he was in, and her mother was being broken a little more with every turn of the wheel as she struggled to care for him?’
Chaze shook his elegant head. His hair didn’t move. He got up to pour himself a goblet of wine to match Trish’s.
‘If you can’t accept that she did it deliberately, then how about an accident? Say she was so desperate to relieve his skin condition that she gave him some of the antihistamines that had helped her in the past, unaware of the danger of mixing them with his own?’
‘No, Trish.’ A hint of impatience scratched at his voice. He gulped some wine in a way that made her stare. ‘Not even an accident makes sense to anyone who knows Debbie.’ Chaze drank again, as though to give himself courage. Catching her eye, he deliberately put the glass on a silver coaster on the
table beside the sofa arm. ‘It’s not sentimentality,’ he said, wiping his hands on a large white cotton handkerchief. ‘Or even the vanity of a man who thinks he has only to sleep with a woman to know everything about her.’
She acknowledged that one with a smile, thinking, So he does know something about himself.
‘You see, I know Debbie. Even though it’s years since we were close, I know how she thinks and what moves her; what makes her angry and how she behaves when she loses her temper.’
‘How?’ Trish asked urgently, remembering Adam’s fear.
‘She runs away, and cuts the person who made her angry right out of her life. She doesn’t stay for a confrontation.’
‘She could have changed. You said her marriage had done things to her.’
‘True. But however much she’s changed, I know she couldn’t kill.’
‘But …’
He stretched out a hand and laid it palm upwards on the striped cushion between them. The skin was faintly shiny, but did not look damp. Liars usually sweated buckets. But then he’d have had plenty of practice: politicians were always having to lie – or at least shade the truth, which came to much the same thing.
‘Trish, I believe in Debbie. And I have to see her free. That would—’ He broke off, apparently unable to say any more.
Trish noted the wobble in his voice and the slow moistening under his eyelids. It was years since he’d had anything to do with Debbie. What was going on in his mind? He coughed.
‘It would make up for some of the things I’ve got wrong in the past,’ he said more firmly, hiding behind the big wineglass again. It was empty when he put it down.
‘We all make mistakes when we’re young,’ he told her
seriously, even though she hadn’t asked for any explanation. She wondered how much of his determination to help Deb came from his need to prove his wife wrong about his motives and character. ‘We misjudge people, make the lives of the ones we care about more difficult than they need to be. I’ve done my share of that, God knows. More than my share. If I can help Debbie now, I can … I suppose it would allow me to believe in myself again.’
Trish had to exert considerable will not to look up at the thin ceiling.
‘It must sound very selfish: to want to help Debbie because it would make me feel better.’
She could hear the subtext shrieking at her: reassure me; reassure me; tell me I’m an OK person. She resisted her urge to do exactly that and produced the most austere piece of comfort she could find: ‘Selfishness wouldn’t matter if it got her out.’
‘Thank you,’ he said quietly, still looking vulnerable.
It was time to wind this up and get home. ‘So, as far as I can see,’ she said briskly, ‘our only real hope of getting her out is to come up with another source for the astemizole and a doctor who’ll say that it was enough – in combination with the prescription drugs – to kill him without any suffocation at all.’
‘That’s a terrific idea,’ said Chaze, losing most of his sadness and looking almost energetic again. ‘But
are
there any doctors who’ll do things like that?’
‘Only if it’s true,’ Trish said drily. ‘Anna’s got researchers checking out all the medical details, but nothing’s come through yet.’
She wondered why she hadn’t counter-attacked when Anna complained of her lack of progress. Something must be softening parts of her brain, and Anna’s.
‘And then, of course, there will still be the terfenadine overdose to be explained.’
‘You’ll do it, Trish, if anyone can.’ Chaze settled back into the sofa’s softness, recrossing his long legs. His face was languorously peaceful again and he looked at her out of eyes that seemed full of confidence.
She couldn’t help noticing that his suit was made of superfine wool and that the cut was so good it didn’t ride up anywhere or crumple. She had a feeling she was meant to have noticed.
‘But I’m not surprised you sounded depressed on the phone,’ he said, comfortably re-established now in the master’s role. ‘It’s a tall order. I’m so glad that Debbie’s got you on her side. The one piece of luck the poor girl has ever had.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I hope when it’s all over and we’ve got her home, you and I will be able to work together again.’ He patted the sofa cushion beside him, as though inviting her to cosy up to him. ‘I think we make an excellent team, you and I. You’d be an immense help to me in my war on drugs.’
‘You know, I’ve been thinking that what really needs changing in this country isn’t so much the obvious wickedness of drug-dealers as the everyday mistreatment of the elderly. You could do a lot worse than taking that on.’
‘Trish, Trish! I’ve got more than enough on my plate. I’ve set my hand to the plough; I can’t abandon it now.’
Were clichés and mixed metaphors worse than franglais? she asked herself. Aloud she said, ‘But lots of people are campaigning for that. There’s even a Drugs Tsar. But there isn’t any Elderly Tsar that I’ve ever heard of. No one’s in charge. Look what happened to Deb’s parents: middle-class, articulate and reasonably well-off, but desperate. Think what must happen to people of that age who don’t have resources like theirs.’
‘The state can never take the place of the family,’ he said,
parroting his party’s latest back-to-the-hearth campaign.
‘You mean, Deb should have abandoned husband, children and job to be her parents’ nurse-housekeeper?’ Trish said. ‘Is that what you’re saying? Or do you think Cordelia should have given up her business and become a drain on the benefits budget?’
His face took on the withdrawn but faintly smiling expression every politician learned to use when put on the spot and made to face the real human cost of some piece of spin-doctor’s rhetoric.
‘The welfare state was built on the assumption that women’s domestic labour was free and would be freely available for ever,’ Trish said, recognising the soap box only as she got on to it. ‘Sorry. This isn’t a political meeting. But something needs to be done.’
‘I’m sure you’re right. And if you start a campaign, I’ll lend you my support. But I’m already committed. Now, how are you getting on with Phil Redstone, by the way?’
‘He’s not being co-operative at the moment, which is understandable. Deb’s appeal is mostly based on his incompetence. The idea of being pilloried in a television programme as well must be vile. I keep telling Anna that I won’t be party to a witch hunt, but I know she’d like to see him publicly humiliated.’
‘Professional solidarity,’ Chaze said, with a bitterness that sat oddly with his smooth professional persona. ‘The curse of all miscarriage-of-justice cases. Doctors, lawyers, car dealers, police officers … you’re all the same.’
Trish withheld her defence and got to her feet, holding out her hand. Chaze took it, gripping lightly and pulling her towards him so that he could kiss her cheek. His own was smooth as cream.
‘I’m just worried about Debbie,’ he murmured, his lips moving against her skin. ‘It makes me bad-tempered. Will you
forgive me? As I said, you’re doing a fantastic job and we couldn’t do without you.’
Smooth bugger, Trish thought uncharitably, as she left the house.
Letting her head turn sideways on the pillow, Trish saw that George was still asleep, flat on his back, mouth a little open. He looked comfortable. Safe. He had arrived at the flat a couple of hours after she’d left Malcolm Chaze last night, saying that the legal dinner had been excruciatingly dull and could he stay?
They had made love, avoiding the subject of each other’s broodiness, and Trish had slept better than she had for weeks. She stretched now under the sheets, feeling sleek and serene as her long legs slid luxuriously under the light summer duvet. The flakes of the digital clock flicked over for half past six and the radio burst into sound.
George’s faintly blue eyelids twitched but did not open. His hand reached for her and brushed her thigh. She moved her leg a little closer to him.
‘MP Malcolm Chaze was found shot in the front hall of his house in Pimlico at half past eleven last night,’ said the newsreader.
Trish shot up, the thin coverings falling away from her body. George coughed and muttered a protest, dragging the duvet back. His eyes opened and began to focus.
‘Laura Chaze, the MP’s wife, found him when she returned from the theatre. He was lying, shot in the head, just inside the front door. The couple had no children.’
Trish felt George’s arm round her shoulders, pulling her
back against the pillows. She remembered Chaze’s farewell gesture last night and gripped the edge of the duvet between both hands.
George buried his face in her neck. She felt his lips moving and heard his voice buzzing against her skin.
‘What? I can’t hear.’
‘I was just weak-minded enough to be thanking God that you’d left his house in time,’ George said, moving back and blinking. He reached for his glasses, then his dressing gown. ‘I need coffee. Shall I make you some?’
Trish glanced at the clock, no longer hearing the news-reader’s voice. ‘Why not? There’s just time. But then I’ll have to run.’
Alone, hearing the sound of George’s bare feet slapping against the wrought-iron treads of the spiral staircase, Trish thought about Malcolm Chaze and how he’d died – and why.
‘Did you like him so much?’ George asked, when he brought up her big, white cup almost overflowing with strong coffee.
‘What?’ She stared up at him. ‘What d’you mean? I hardly knew him.’
‘You look horrified,’ he said. ‘Your eyes are huge, and I bet your pulse is racing. I’ve never seen you so stary, except the time they rang to tell you about Paddy’s heart-attack.’
She shook her head, taking the cup from him. When she’d drunk some coffee, she licked her upper lip to get the foamed milk off it. ‘I quite liked Chaze, I suppose, even though I still wasn’t sure I could trust him, but it’s not that.’
In spite of the heat and the coffee, she was shivering and felt very sick. Being pregnant must be like this. She wasn’t sure why she’d ever thought she might like to bring a child into such a world.
‘A lot of it’s probably shock,’ George said, perching on her
side of the bed. He didn’t try to touch her, which was lucky. She felt her face clench.
‘I’m not trying to belittle your feelings, Trish,’ he said, reading her without difficulty, ‘but it is a shock – and to hear it like that, as you burst out of sleep. Not surprising it’s affected you.’
She put down the cup and leaned against him, taking some solace from his warm solidity. ‘I think,’ she said slowly, ‘it’s the thought that this might have something to do with his campaign to free Deb Gibbert.’
George pushed her away from him so that he could look at her face. ‘Are you telling me you think someone out there could be so afraid of what Malcolm Chaze might turn up about the killing of an old man in Norfolk that he had Chaze shot?’
‘Put like that it sounds a bit melodramatic,’ Trish said, reaching for her coffee cup. She was proud of the steadiness of her hand.
‘Come on, Trish. Chaze was a politician. He must have had a million enemies.’
‘Maybe. But it is a bit pat, isn’t it? His death coming just twenty-four hours after he first publicly announced that he was going to prove her innocent. Didn’t he say something about “If it’s the last thing I do”?’
‘I need some of your coffee,’ George said, grabbing the cup. ‘Trish, will—’
‘I will be careful,’ she said, taking the cup back.
‘And will you talk to the police?’
She appreciated his use of a question, knowing how much he wanted to issue instructions. ‘Shit! Look at the time, George! Are you bathing this morning?’
‘If that won’t get in your way.’
‘Great. I can have the shower then. Budge up out of the way.’
Their morning routine was so slick that they moved off in their separate directions, meeting at intervals as they fetched ironed shirts from the hangers in Trish’s long wardrobe and more coffee from the kitchen, but never getting in each other’s way. George’s shaving took about as long as Trish’s makeup, so they met again at the front door, impeccably tidy, briefcases in hand, ready to face their clients.
Dave was hovering in the doorway of the clerks’ room when Trish ran into chambers. He wasn’t holding a stopwatch, but he might have been. She felt like reminding him that she employed him and not vice versa.
‘What, Dave?’ she said, not stopping but merely slowing down as she passed him.
‘I need to talk to you about the Greer case. We—’
‘Not now, Dave. I’m in court this morning.’
‘I know,’ he called bitterly down the passage after her. She closed her ears to the words and their implication and shut the door of her room so that she could gather herself and her papers together in peace.
Trish spent a bruising day in front of a judge who had always been hostile to her and today kept interrupting as she examined her witnesses. Trying to think of her fury as a spoiled lapdog that had to be kept quiet, she smiled at the bench, answered all the irrelevant unnecessary questions, waited patiently while the judge made notes of what she said, then returned to her proper job.
The lapdog had a good run once she was back in the robing room, but even there she tried to keep it on the lead. If she were ever to take up Heather Bonwell’s suggestion of applying for silk, she’d need judges and senior members of the Bar on her side. Slagging off one of them where she could be overheard would be idiotic.
Her opponent rolled up his gown and stuffed it in his red-brocade bag.
‘What about a drink in El Vino?’ he said, slinging the bag over his shoulder with a jauntiness that seemed unlike him. But he didn’t win nearly as often as she. Trish explained that she had to get back to chambers to collect an urgent message and hoped he wasn’t going to tell the assembled barristers in the wine bar that she was a bad loser.
It wasn’t long before she was back at her desk, phoning the Pimlico police. When she asked for the number of the incident room dealing with the Chaze murder, she was put through to a constable, who said he was collecting all information offered by the public. Trish said politely that she wanted to talk to someone actually involved in the investigation.
The young-sounding officer told her patiently that there were three separate incident rooms and that his job was to sift the information that came in and funnel it through to the right people.
‘Who are the officers in charge?’ she asked, hoping that she would know at least one. She’d met quite a few senior members of the Met and it wouldn’t be too much of a coincidence if one of these was known to her.
The constable was determined not to give her any names, but she was persistent and experienced. Eventually he surrendered and told her who they were. Two were superintendents, whose names meant nothing to her, but one was a DCI she knew. He was in command of the smallest of the three incident rooms, and his name was William Femur.
Trish almost cheered when she heard that. He was the man who’d put her attacker behind bars for life. She owed him rather than the other way round, but she had enough faith in him to believe he would listen to her. The constable didn’t agree but reluctantly took her name and asked her to hold on.
‘Trish Maguire? Is it really you?’ asked Femur’s familiar gravelly voice, two minutes later.
‘You remember me, then?’
‘How could I forget?’ There was a sharp edge as well as a smile in his voice, which pretty much summed up their relationship.
‘Good. I want to come and talk to you about Malcolm Chaze.’
‘Don’t tell me, he was a client of yours and you’ve some secret information no one else could possibly know, which will prove he’s been—’
‘No,’ Trish said quickly, picking up Femur’s real annoyance, in spite of the coating of humour. ‘Nothing like that. But I saw him last night. Well, yesterday evening.’
‘So I shouldn’t have been frivolous. OK. I can accept that. I’ll get the relevant incident room to send someone round to chambers to take your statement.’
‘Couldn’t I maybe drop in on my way home and talk to
you?
Presumably you’re working fairly near his house.’
There was a sigh. Then came Femur’s voice, harsh now without the amusement. ‘Is this really necessary?’
‘If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t have bothered to ring you. We’re both busy.’
‘All right.’ He gave her the address. ‘I should be able to give you a few minutes in about half an hour’s time, but I can’t take long.’
‘I’ll be there.’
Femur was much as Trish remembered him: an ordinary-looking bloke in his fifties, untidy in his plain dark-grey suit, with a chewed-up tie knotted askew under his collar. Only when he saw her and his hard-grey eyes turned diamond-shaped as his cheeks pressed upwards in a smile of recognition did he show any individuality.
‘Trish Maguire. You haven’t changed.’
‘Good. I won’t take much of your time,’ she said, very fast, ‘but you need to know—’
‘It’s OK, provided you’re not going to fly any stupid kites. I could do with a short break. Cup of tea?’
‘No, thank you. Look, I went to see Chaze yesterday because we’ve been working together on the background to a campaigning TV programme of Anna Grayling’s about Deborah Gibbert. D’you remember the case?’
The diamond-shaped eyes were shut now. ‘Don’t. This is a standard-issue contract-killing, almost certainly drug-related. Don’t try to complicate it for me.’
‘I’m not here to cause trouble,’ she said at once. ‘Last time you were angry because I withheld information. Now I want to give you all I’ve got, but you don’t want it. Surely you must need to know what had been preoccupying Chaze in the weeks before his death, and who he might have pissed off. Mayn’t I tell you about it?’
‘If you must.’ Weariness showing in every gesture, Femur pulled forward a thick pad of lined paper and pulled off the top of a felt-tip pen. ‘Fire away.’
Trish described the way Anna had embroiled her in the case, the little she had found out, and everything she could remember that Chaze had said about Deb and his campaign for justice. Femur’s expression lightened a little as she talked. ‘You do make a good witness, I’ll give you that,’ he said, when she stopped. ‘But even if your Deborah Gibbert is innocent you can’t expect me to believe that the real killer of her father would put out a contract like this one.’
‘Put like that, it does sound a little unlikely.’ She thought of George and how well the two men would get on. ‘Are you
sure
it was a contract killing?’
‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. We gave a press conference this morning and it’ll be all over the news
tonight. The neighbours saw a motorbike messenger call at Chaze’s house last night at around nine thirty. We have several independent sightings as well as CCTV footage. No one paid any attention. All MPs have deliveries at all times of the day and night. Chaze clearly let the man in and was then shot, in the privacy of the hall, with a silenced gun. The messenger shut the door behind him, retreated to his bike, clipboard in hand – again we have several witnesses – and rode off.’
‘Did anyone get the number?’
Femur frowned. ‘Only the CCTV. But the plates were false. He was wearing a helmet and leathers. There’s nothing to pick him out from a thousand others of his type.’
‘So you haven’t a hope of catching him.’ To Trish’s surprise, the words came out quite steadily.
‘Probably not.’ Femur pushed his hands over his creased face. ‘Christ knows why I’m telling you all this. Except that there’s nothing secret about it.’
‘I’m hardly likely to take advantage of it anyway,’ Trish said, fighting to keep the professional mask in place. It was stupid to be afraid, she told herself. She’d been unlucky enough to be assaulted once. That didn’t mean it would ever happen again. ‘But there is one other thing I came to tell you. Chaze and his wife were having the most terrific row when I arrived at the house last night.’
Femur’s eyelids sank again. His mouth looked different, tight. Trish wished she could see his eyes. She didn’t know whether he was bored, irritated or concerned. He picked up his felt-tip and nodded. At dictation speed, Trish repeated everything she could remember of Mrs Chaze’s diatribe and the fury she’d been showing at the thought of her husband’s campaign to free Deb Gibbert.
‘So, this time you’re suggesting Laura Chaze was so angry with her husband that on her way to a performance by
Fascinating Aida she stopped to phone a handy contract killer to get rid of the husband who’d been bugging her. Have I got that right?’
‘Doesn’t it help you build up a picture of his last hours?’ said Trish, despising herself for her need to hear again that the gunman roaring around London disguised as a motorbike messenger couldn’t be interested in anything she might be doing.
‘Oh, sure,’ Femur was saying.
Trish stopped thinking about the past and the possibly dangerous future and concentrated on the moment.