‘Me, actually; in between finding studios, trying to persuade camera crews, grips—’
‘I don’t need the full list again,’ Trish said, holding on to her irritation. ‘I know you’ve got difficulties, too. Fine. But I don’t have time to do everything. I’ve got a demanding job and a convalescent father. Get me the medical information now or I’m off the case. Understood?’
‘You sound very cross.’
‘And you sound like a child. Anna, why couldn’t you have been honest with me? I’ve put in hours on this thing. If it had been a case, you’d be paying me tens of thousands of pounds.’ The lava tide was surging so powerfully that Trish knew she had to break off the conversation. Anna was desperate; it wouldn’t help to swear at her now.
‘I don’t know why you’re sounding so holy. You haven’t even talked to Cordelia yet, and she has to be the key.’
Trish counted three. ‘You’re right, Anna. But I’ve go to go now. ’Bye.’
She snapped her phone shut and stuffed it in the pocket of her black suit under the flapping gown. Her jaw felt as though it would never relax, and she suspected her face was white. All the blood seemed to drain away from her head when she was as angry as this. She hoped she’d get at least ten minutes before she had to go into court. Starting out in this state would not augur well for her client.
Luckily the ushers were still loitering happily where she’d last seen them, and everyone else was reading their papers. Trish sat down again on the hard bench and went back to Malcolm’s article.
He had set out the little real evidence the prosecution had had, then followed it with everything he knew of Deb, along with testimonials from all sorts of people who’d known her.
The article ended with a passionate denunciation of the injustice that had locked her up for life and risked the ruination of her children’s lives. It was a powerful piece.
A hand tapped her on the shoulder. She looked up quickly.
‘We’re on, Trish. You OK?’
‘Sure. Why d’you ask?’
‘You look shaky.’
She smiled and saw the solicitor breathe more easily. ‘I’m just in a rage about something else. Don’t worry.’ She stood up, shook out her gown, and slotted into her professional persona. This was something she could do. She knew the brief backwards. She’d see her client right.
Five hours later, she was back in the flat, lying on her sofa with a long glass of mineral water, wondering if she’d ever be cool again. The case had gone reasonably well, but something had been wrong with the air-conditioning and the court had been unbearably stuffy. Even though her suit was made of thin linen, the gown had meant she was wearing two layers of black cloth. In this weather, that alone, even without the constricting Lycra tights, would have been an ordeal.
She tried to believe it was the heat that made it impossible to suppress some very uncharitable thoughts about her old friend Anna. Cashing in on murder was a thoroughly nasty business. So was lying to your friends, and exploiting them.
‘Oh, forget it,’ Trish said aloud, weary and dissatisfied with herself. She picked up the newspaper again.
There was a huge glamorous photograph of Malcolm Chaze in the middle of the page beside a much smaller one of Deb, looking dowdy and a most unlikely girlfriend for a man like him. There was something about his face that made Trish curious.
As she looked at it more carefully, she kept seeing another face superimposed on it: younger and infinitely less assured,
but very similar. She shook her head. The idea was absurd. And yet, if you took thirty-odd years off Malcolm Chaze’s face, made it female, added a lot of long hair and removed the fringe, wasn’t it a dead ringer for Kate Gibbert’s?
They had the same shaped forehead and fine dark hair; the same pointed chin; and the same appealing smile.
The dates fitted, too. Trish wondered whether it had ever occurred to Adam Gibbert that Deb might already have been pregnant by someone else when they got engaged. He could hardly have missed the likeness between Kate and Deb’s old lover, even if it had taken Trish far too long to notice it, and he was neither vain nor stupid enough to ignore the obvious reason.
Malcolm’s campaign to get himself on the front pages and the television news hadn’t taken effect until fairly recently. Had Adam belatedly woken up to the fact that ‘his’ beautiful, helpful daughter, the one person who made his impossible life bearable, belonged to someone else?
Trish had seen at once that Adam was a man on the edge, hanging on by his fingernails. It wouldn’t have taken much more to kick him over.
She sat down again with the paper between her damp hands, looking at the dead man’s face. She didn’t know how to get a hitman herself, but it couldn’t be hard to find out. And Adam might not have needed one. Much the easiest way for him to get rid of Malcolm Chaze would have been to dress up in leathers and a helmet and do the job himself. He’d have had to get a gun, of course, but from what Trish had read in the papers that wasn’t particularly difficult.
Tempted to phone Femur and ask if he’d thought to question Adam, Trish knew she couldn’t. She’d already infuriated the police by pointing out one connection with Deb Gibbert; Femur hadn’t listened then. Why should he pay any more attention now?
She thought of writing to Deb to ask for confirmation, but there didn’t seem any point. Now that she’d seen the likeness, she couldn’t think why she hadn’t noticed before, and she had no doubt at all about Kate’s true parentage. She wished she’d known before she had talked to Deb in the first place, but the things she wanted to ask couldn’t be put in a letter. If she went to the prison again, she’d ask them then.
George was due at a Law Society dinner that evening, so she wouldn’t see him. She picked up the phone to find out how Paddy was and whether he needed anything.
He didn’t, but he said he’d like to see her. Trish thought wistfully about a cool shower and a peaceful early night, but got straight into her car to drive along the south side of the river to his Battersea flat.
Cordelia Whatlam’s double-fronted mews house dripped pink geranium petals from terracotta planters on every window-sill. Trish picked her way towards it across painfully knobbly cobbles, avoiding the glossy, expensive cars that took up every possible parking space.
She should have been in chambers still. As it was, she’d been up at five to go through all the papers that were piled on her desk. She’d dealt with a lot and left a huge long note for Dave before she’d left to fulfil her promise to Anna. It stuck in her craw, but she was going to do what she’d agreed, even if Anna had messed her about.
Even so, she’d hoped she wasn’t turning into a woman like Deb herself. What was it Anna had said in the beginning? Something like: ‘Deb tries to do everything for everyone, runs herself ragged, short-changes the lot of them and is foul to the very people she most wants to help.’
Well, if this visit didn’t produce any useful information and Anna didn’t turn up anything on the medical evidence, it would be time to cut loose. If Anna’s business folded and she lost her home, that would be tough, but Trish hadn’t caused the problem and she would have given the solution her best shot. If she failed, she failed. She couldn’t be responsible for everyone. And, she told herself, surprised at the metaphors her brain was spouting, this might be the Last Chance Saloon, but she wasn’t in a Western. But it meant she was smiling
when the glossy black door in front of her opened.
A slender, dark-haired woman stood there, with her eyebrows raised and a polite smile on her neat, pink lips. Trish had been expecting someone menacing, or at least predatory, but this woman looked almost fragile and very much as Deb would if she shed four stone and dressed at Armani.
‘Ms Whatlam?’
‘Yes.’ Cordelia Whatlam’s voice was less than welcoming. Her sleek hair was cut short and tucked behind her ears. Neat globular gold earrings hung from them, looking like little melons. She was wearing beige linen trousers under a loose black shirt-like jacket. She looked cool, in every sense of the word. ‘You must be Trish Maguire. You’d better come in.’
Polite but hostile, Trish thought. Very hostile. Oh, well, it wasn’t that surprising, was it? ‘Thank you,’ she said, stepping across the threshold.
Cordelia led the way through the shady house to a small, flower-splashed courtyard. A highly decorated pottery fountain was playing in the middle, catching the light in each droplet and making what was only a tiny backyard look positively exotic.
‘This is gorgeous, and so unexpected.’ You creep, Trish added to herself. Careful you don’t overdo it.
But it seemed that Cordelia Whatlam wasn’t going to be distracted. Standing beside her fountain, with the same small, polite smile on her face, she said quietly, ‘May I ask why you of all people are involved in this farce?
Me of all people? thought Trish. She doesn’t know anything about me. The hostility was shocking. Trish took a moment to compose her response.
‘How would you feel if someone came to tell you they were trying to get Charles Chompton out of prison and asked your help to do it?’
Trish stiffened. She might have got most of her fears under control, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
‘You must have known I’d check you out before I let you into my house.’
‘Yes,’ Trish said carefully. ‘That would be only sensible.’
‘So, how would you feel if I were digging around for legal tricks that would free the man who raped and killed your friend and nearly did the same to you? Hm?’
‘Frankly, I’d hate it.’ Trish remembered she’d used exactly the same phrase to Phil Redstone and wondered whether he and Cordelia were in touch. He’d have been a good source for this information about her past. The thought of the pair of them cooking up a nasty plot like this to stop her fighting for Deb was unpleasant in the extreme.
‘This is a little different.’ She was determined not to show any weakness. ‘Deb is your sister. Don’t you have any feelings for her at all?’
‘Not many that would help you. I suppose you’d better sit down. I’m prepared to listen to what you have to say, but I can’t give you long.’ Cordelia looked at her watch, a gold Panther that glittered in the sun and showed off her faintly tanned skin. It was so smooth it looked like the shell of a big, old-fashioned brown boiled egg.
‘I hope someone has told you that Debbie was always a fantasist,’ she said casually. ‘As a child she’d tell herself stories so vivid that she’d get muddled between what was real and what was not.’
‘A lot of children do that.’
‘Most of them grow out of it. Debbie hasn’t. Think of that ridiculous story about my father’s false teeth.’
‘I must say I did find that one convincing. And it’s certainly a lot more convincing than some stories that other juries have believed.’
Cordelia raised her eyebrows, but she did not otherwise
question Trish’s capabilities or experience.
‘So you yourself never doubted that she’d deliberately murdered him?’
Cordelia didn’t bother to answer. The scorn in her face was enough, and she knew it.
‘Not even at three in the morning when you can’t sleep? Have you never, ever, wondered whether perhaps your mother’s confession was real?’
‘Never. Not even in my darkest moments.’ Cordelia shivered artistically, even though there was no wind to move the hot air over their skin. ‘And there have been plenty of them.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘My mother was incapable of killing my father. Physically incapable, emotionally incapable, and in any case barred by her faith. She took her religion with total seriousness, however much it cost her. Is that something you can understand, Ms Maguire?’
There was so much aggression in the last question that Trish decided to answer. ‘I was brought up a Protestant myself, and in any case lapsed a long time ago, but I have enough respect for people who haven’t to take their beliefs seriously.’
‘Lucky you.’ Cordelia leaned back against the squidgy cushions in her chair. ‘You must accept that the confession was made to protect Debbie. You see, even my mother, who adored her, knew she’d done it.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Because she told me, just before she died.’
‘Does anyone else know that?’
‘No. She begged me never to tell anyone. She lay in that hospital bed, looking like death, and all she could think about was protecting Debbie.’
‘And telling you the truth about her own confession,’ Trish
said, thinking, The poor woman, trying to do right by her two warring daughters, dying in the knowledge that they hated each other.
‘Did she ask you to look after Deb?’ she asked gently, and watched Cordelia’s face pale under the makeup. She didn’t speak.
‘Is that why you were prepared to talk to me today?’ Trish tried but failed to ignore the difference between Cordelia, sitting so elegantly in her glorious miniature garden, and Deb, miserable and stubbornly fighting her fear in the smelly, noisy prison visiting room.
‘We were close once. When we were children. I always fought her battles, defended her against anyone who was … oh, impatient with her slowness, or bullied her. That was my role.’
Trish thought there ought to have been a speech bubble coming out between Cordelia’s smooth lips, saying, ‘Wasn’t I generous?’
‘And then she kicked me in the teeth. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate her now. I can’t forgive her, but I don’t hate her any more.’
Trish nodded and waited for more. Cordelia recovered her cool and sat in passive elegance, giving nothing more away.
‘What went wrong between you?’ Trish asked, as the silence became too oppressive for her. ‘It wasn’t just your father’s death, was it? It sounds as though it started before that.’
‘Of course it did. It started when she set out to wreck my relationship with him.’ Cordelia’s voice had a hiss in it. ‘She never took the trouble to understand him and she hated the fact that I could.’
‘That doesn’t seem fair, but it does sound as though he made life hard for her.’
‘It didn’t have to be like that,’ Cordelia burst out, sounding
and looking a lot less smooth. ‘That’s what she wouldn’t face. She could have had just as good a relationship with him if she’d tried a bit harder. But she just couldn’t be bothered. She preferred to put her energies into trying to poison my relationship with him – and with my mother. And when she saw she couldn’t do that, she killed him.’
‘She must have been very unhappy,’ Trish said, feeling as though she’d been dumped in the middle of a minefield without a map.
‘I can’t bear it when people use that as an excuse.’ Cordelia’s voice was rock steady and her eyes had hardened to match. ‘So dog-in-the-manger: “I can’t be happy, so I’m going to make damn sure no one else is.”’
‘Perhaps …’ Trish was thinking as she spoke ‘ … it has more to do with having to struggle so hard to deal with their own misery that they just can’t take on anyone else’s. Or maybe even see it.’
‘No. It’s lack of empathy. Debbie had absolutely none. She couldn’t believe anyone else might suffer. It never occurred to her that my father and I might not be trying to do her down, might be unhappy because of what she was doing to
us.’
‘She knew about your father’s pain.’ Trish couldn’t help the quick protest. ‘That was what sent her to the doctor and caused all the trouble with him.’
Cordelia’s eyes flashed. ‘She wasn’t sympathetic. She was angry because it made him difficult to deal with.’ The scorn in her voice ripped into Trish. ‘I’d seen her yelling at him when he was in so much pain that he could hardly breathe, let alone eat or sleep. She had a temper like you’ve never seen.’
‘D’you think—?’
Cordelia had too much to say to wait for the question. The words were bursting out of her now: ‘For Christ’s sake! Half his medical problems were caused by the agitation Deb aroused in him. They were always worse when she was there.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘A lot of his ailments – the ulcer, the angioneurotic oedema, the anxiety – were stress-related,’ Cordelia said more quietly, ‘and, by God, Deb knew how to generate stress.’ Once again she shivered, huddling her body into her arms as though she was cold. She couldn’t have been. In spite of the shade and the fountain, the little courtyard was like an oven. ‘Have you seen her?’ she demanded abruptly.
‘Yes.’
‘How is she?’
Trish tried to decode the intention behind the question. ‘How do you expect?’
Something attracted Cordelia’s attention in the flower-bed beside her chair. She was looking down at it, her face turned almost completely away from her visitor. She picked a small spider off one of the plants, winding its fragile silk thread around her finger and tugging. Then she squashed the minute creature between her finger and thumb and scraped the resulting mess from her skin with a lemon-balm leaf. The sweetly spicy citrus smell was so strong that it reached Trish, who was sitting at least four feet away.
‘You know, my only consolation is that I managed to phone just before she did it. He didn’t die entirely uncomforted, but …’
Trish saw that there was a line of liquid hovering on the edge of Cordelia’s lower lids. It dried in a moment.
‘I have to go out now,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘If you’ve got any more questions, the best thing would be to write to me. OK?’ She led the way towards her front door. Trish had to follow. ‘You know,’ Cordelia said, pausing with her hand on the latch, ‘I can’t forgive her, but we are sisters. One day I might be able to see her again. But not yet.’
Trish didn’t answer. She couldn’t imagine Deb’s reacting well to a request for a visiting order from Cordelia.
‘So she still hates me?’
‘I can’t imagine it’s easy to forgive people whose evidence puts you in prison for life, can you?’
‘It’s a lot harder to forgive someone who’s killed your father.’ Barbed wire couldn’t have been sharper than Cordelia’s voice. ‘Deb will get out one day, even though she hasn’t got Malcolm to fight for her any more. I’ll never have my father back.’
Back in Southwark, Trish wandered about the enormous space of her warehouse flat, trying to shed the feelings Cordelia had aroused in her and fit herself back into her own serenely happy life. Her family hadn’t been perfect by any means, but compared with Deb’s, it wasn’t a bad substitute.
The phone rang. It was Anna, of course, unrepentant and nagging for yet another update. Trish gave her a quick resume of the last meeting, adding, ‘So, even if Cordelia agreed, I don’t think it would be a good idea to get her on the screen. She’s utterly convinced Deb did it. And I think she might have the same effect on the audience as she did on the jury.’ I wonder, Trish thought, if an ability to tell yourself stories so vivid you have to believe in them is a family trait?
‘D’you think she could have killed her father, planted evidence to incriminate Deb, and then had Malcolm Chaze shot because she was afraid he’d turn up the truth?’
‘Does it seem likely to you, Anna?’ Trish didn’t have the patience to take idiotic suggestions seriously.
‘She could have driven down there that night after her visitor left,’ Anna said, with dignity. ‘I’ve been checking her out ever since she refused to see me. I thought if I could get her to agree to be interviewed on camera, I could get the presenter to point that out and see how she behaved. At the very least it would make her angry and that would have to help Deb.’
‘You could shoot yourself in the foot,’ Trish said, recognising the biting anxiety behind Anna’s determined strength. ‘I think you’d do better to see if Adam has any photographs of Deb and Cordelia in childhood. You know, the sort of thing most families have – the two girls fighting over a toy, or hugging each other, something like that. You could get a montage going for the beginning of the film, showing the little darlings as happy sisters, then as angry ones, then – if any – as violent ones. You could have a voiceover quoting some of Cordelia’s evidence, then another with what the Blakemores have said about Deb’s kindness.’