At six o’clock on Friday evening, the House of Commons terrace was emptier than usual. The country MPs were mostly on the way to their constituencies, but there were enough Londoners glad of the faint breeze off the river to fill most of the tables.
Malcolm Chaze stood out among the rest, as he would have stood out anywhere. Tall and well dressed, he had the kind of smooth, old-fashioned good looks that appeal most to powerful post-menopausal women. They didn’t do much for Trish, she was glad to find.
‘Debbie was very sweet,’ he said, allowing a dreamy note into his voice. ‘And thoroughly efficient. I wish my current secretary were as good.’
Trish put down her spritzer, afraid the condensation on the outside of the glass would make it slip out of her hand. ‘Deborah was your secretary?’
‘No. No. The dean’s.’ His voice was sharp – irritated – quite different from the one he used in public performances. ‘Hasn’t anyone told you all this?’
Trish blinked at his impatience and shook her head. ‘But then I haven’t been on the case very long. Which dean?’
‘At Queen’s, London. I was a philosophy tutor there and Deb was typing for the dean, which is how we met. I liked her at once.’ He laughed, switching easily back into charm mode. The ease made Trish extremely wary.
‘Debbie was older than most of the other secretaries there, but she was what at the time we used to call a
bon oeuf.’
Trish smiled, keeping her teeth together. Childish franglais didn’t often make her laugh; and smoothly good-looking, successful men who thought of women in subordinate positions as good eggs made her flesh creep. In her experience it meant the women in question never answered back or thought their own talents or needs as important as those of the men who handed down the tasks and the compliments.
If so, it sounded as though Deb Gibbert had changed since those days. Good for her!
Trish noticed that Chaze was looking closely at her. She relaxed her jaw. ‘How nice,’ she said, smiling. ‘And did you keep up the friendship? I mean, had you seen much of her before her father died?’
‘No, we didn’t really keep up at all.’ Sadness made his voice throb, but Trish wasn’t convinced. It wouldn’t have been difficult for him to pick up the phone. ‘You know how it is, Trish. Or was. She left to get married – most girls of Debbie’s type still did in those days – and I went in for politics. Our ways parted and we moved in different worlds. But I’ll always be glad she remembered how close we’d been and still trusted me enough to call on me when she found herself in this hellish mess. I went straight down to see her.’
He brushed one finger over his left eyebrow. In anyone else the gesture would have meant that he was removing some sweat, but Chaze wasn’t sweating. Too much perfect confidence and self-control. Trish wished she had the trick of it: the air felt like oily flannel against her skin and she could feel the sweat trickling down her spine.
‘I wish there was something I could do for her,’ Chaze said wistfully.
‘Isn’t there?’ Trish was surprised by her continuing,
instinctive, mistrust of him. It was years since she had had this kind of reaction to a man who was a trifle more pleased with himself than seemed quite justified. No woman at the Bar could survive if she minded a little thing like that. It was almost a qualification in the Temple.
‘Only appearing on this film of Anna Grayling’s as a kind of character witness for Debbie,’ Chaze was saying, with an apparently rueful smile that he must have practised. It was very good. Even Hugh Grant would have been hard pushed to better it.
Stop it, Trish, she ordered herself. You’re turning into a bad-tempered old bag. Smoothness and good looks aren’t a sign of dishonesty. And self-deprecation can sometimes be real, even in a man like this.
‘And writing the article about her case,’ Chaze added, keeping the smile going. ‘It’s all ready, so as soon as Anna gives me the word Debbie will be splashed all over the
Sunday Review.
For my part, I’d have got it in as soon as I’d written it, but Anna wants it out in the same week as the programme. I’m going along with that.’
‘It makes sense.’
‘And I am, of course, keeping an eye on Debbie’s treatment.’ He gazed out across the river towards St Thomas’s Hospital.
‘Really? How?’
‘One of the few benefits of being an MP is that people worry about your good opinion.’ He grinned again, but this time he looked less smooth and a lot more real in his satisfaction. ‘I’ve made sure the prison governor knows I take an interest. How did she seem when you saw her?’
‘Not too bad,’ Trish said. ‘She had prison skin and a prison figure, and she was worried about her cell-mate, who’d just OD’d on heroin.’
‘What?’ Chaze’s face was in shadow so she couldn’t see
much, but bursts of tension came off him like radio waves pulsating out from a broadcasting mast.
‘It does happen, you know, even in prison,’ Trish said, wondering why he was quite so angry. Drugs in prison were a fact of life.
‘It’s a fucking disgrace.’ The perfectly ordinary expletive she heard fifty times a day, and often used herself, sounded shocking from someone whose language had seemed so artificial until then. He looked at his watch. ‘Damn. Too late to catch the Chief Inspector of Prisons tonight, but I’ll put him on to it on Monday. It’s outrageous if that quantity of drugs is still getting through to inmates. I’ll get it stopped if it’s the last thing I do.’
Trish was fascinated by his passion, so much hotter than anything he’d shown for Deb.
‘Sorry,’ he said after a while, once more smiling at Trish with all the deliberate charm of a thirties film star. Any minute now he was going to tell her he didn’t
give
a damn. ‘I detest the thought of her being exposed to that kind of filthy danger. In her own cell, too!’
Trish wished she could see his eyes more clearly, but the low sun was right behind him. That might have been chance, but she decided it was unlikely. With no light falling on the lines around his mouth and eyes, and his hand elegantly propping up his head, coincidentally hiding any double-chin, he could have been her own age. And he
was
a good-looking man.
‘May I ask a very impertinent question?’
As he looked at her, his full mouth thinned. He took away his hand. Trish saw he didn’t actually have a double chin and felt mean.
‘Debbie and I did have a brief affair,’ he said, as though admitting he’d once shaken her hand. ‘If that’s what you wanted to know.’
‘It was, in fact.’
‘I thought so.’ He laughed lightly, unconvincingly. ‘I’d be glad if you could keep it under your
chapeau.
Not that it’s particularly important. I mean, it was donkey’s years ago, neither of us was married or even attached at the time, so there’s no scandal.’
‘It’s all right,’ Trish said at once. ‘I’m not about to leak your past to the tabloids. Why would I? I just want to know where I am.’ She smiled a little. ‘It helps when assessing evidence.’
‘I’ll bet. Debbie was lovely then – not beautiful, mind, and a bit, well …’ He laughed. ‘Stocky is the word that comes to mind. But kind and very gentle. I’d been going through a tough time, and she did a lot for me.’
What could the woman he’d described have offered a man like him, Trish wondered, other than the obvious sexual satisfaction?
‘I’ve always known I owed her for that. If I can help her now, it’ll do something to settle my debt.’ His smile was even better this time, more grown-up and less yearning. ‘Hence this meeting with one of the sharpest lawyers of her generation.’
‘Tell me what she was like then,’ Trish said, discounting the flattery.
She watched him as he talked, liking him better as he forgot to pose, losing himself in a description of a warm, friendly woman, not obviously attractive and clearly rather lonely. Trish wondered if Deb’s appeal for him could have had anything to do with the way her uncertainties boosted his own confidence. It seemed pretty unassailable these days, but there was something about him, something about the way he obviously liked to collect admiration, that made her suspicious.
‘What do you know about her family?’ Trish asked, when he paused.
‘Not a lot. I never met the parents. It wasn’t that kind of
affair. They were stuck in the depths of wherever it was – Suffolk?’
‘Norfolk.’
‘Of course. And they never came to London. Her awful father didn’t approve of the expense or something like that. But I did meet the sister once or twice.’
‘The perfect Cordelia? Good. I want to know about her. How did she strike you?’
‘A hard-faced cow, to be frank. But rather beautiful.’
‘Not an Ugly Sister, then?’
‘No. But, if you ask me, Goneril or Regan would have suited her better than Cordelia. I’ve always thought it was she, rather than the father, who was the cause of most of Debbie’s problems.’
Trish wasn’t sure she agreed. Deb’s own account of her father made him sound unbearable to live with, and she’d been surprisingly unvitriolic about her sister, considering what Cordelia had said about her in court.
Even her name had caused Deb problems there, Trish was sure. Deb herself probably hadn’t realised it, but Trish was well aware of the way the lawyers and the judge would have reacted to the thought of a father-loving woman called Cordelia. Everything in their subconscious minds would have made them long to believe her.
‘It sounds to me,’ she said, teasing him to see how he reacted, ‘as though Cordelia didn’t succumb to your charm.’
‘You could say that. She had a lot of offers then, of course. Even so, it was a blow.’ Chaze’s laugh was friendly and it sounded honest. It smoothed away the edges of Trish’s earlier dislike.
She wasn’t surprised that Deb had fallen for him. Bruised by her father’s contempt, she must have been wonderfully reassured by the discovery that she could attract a university tutor, and a philosopher at that.
‘And what about her husband? Did you ever come across him?’
‘One or twice. Not an enormously prepossessing bloke, I thought.’ Chaze’s voice had a seasoning of bitterness now. ‘But then I would say that, wouldn’t I? He took her off me.’
Good for him! thought Trish.
‘He’s an engineer of some kind, I believe. She met him when he came to lecture to one of our post-graduate courses.
Malheureusement
for Debbie, I’d have said. I mean, you know how badly engineers are paid.’ Chaze laughed again. ‘The poor girl has had a very hard time, trying to bring up four children on just about what I pay my current secretary. I’ve often wondered if that’s what soured her.’
Ah, thought Trish, catching a glimpse of nasty pleasure. So perhaps her first reaction to him hadn’t been as unfair as she’d thought, and perhaps Deb’s preference for her engineer was understandable.
‘Soured?’ Trish lifted her eyebrows to invite more detail.
‘Yes. A lot of witnesses at her trial gave evidence about her verbal violence. When I knew her, she was never even impatient, let alone violent. Now, would you like another drink?’ Chaze pulled back the sleeve of his immaculate suit to check his watch: a gold Rolex. ‘I’ll have to go in a minute or two – I need to get down to the constituency for dinner – but there’s time to order you another drink if you’d like one.’
‘It’s sweet of you, but no thanks. Before you go, are you saying you think she was unhappy in her marriage?’
He shrugged. ‘D’you know anyone who isn’t?’
Cynic though she was, Trish still believed it was possible for two people to be happy together, if they tried hard enough and were kind to each other. She told him she had several married friends, all of whom were an excellent advertisement for the state.
‘I’m not sure I have,’ Chaze said bleakly, getting to his feet.
‘One last thing,’ Trish said. He waited. ‘Is there anyone you think might have killed the old man in a way they’d know would implicate Deb?’
As he shook his head, his hair hardly moved. Trish tried not to let the thought of gel and spray add to her prejudice against him. MPs had to take care of their image.
‘I take the Phil Redstone line myself,’ he said. ‘It must have been the mother, at the end of her tether and wanting her husband to be free of pain. After all, that’s what she confessed to.’
‘But what about the pillow and bag discrepancy?’
‘Oh, that’s easy. I should think when she told them she’d smothered him, they said something like, “What, with a pillow?” and she would have agreed at once. I expect she was a great agree-er,’ Chaze said, looking wisely tolerant. ‘Everyone says Debbie’s exactly like her, and darling Debbie always did her very best to agree with anything anyone said, however difficult it was for her.’
Trish didn’t believe him and knew he saw it in her face. He looked enormously tall as she squinted up at him, the sun making her screw up her eyes. It burst out from behind him, glittering all round his elegant silhouette.
‘Now, I’m afraid I really do have to go. It’s been
such
a pleasure meeting you.’
Trish didn’t get up, but she smiled at him as she thanked him for the drink and the information.
‘I feel more optimistic about Debbie’s chances than I have for some time,’ he said. ‘Let me know as soon as there’s anything I can do.’
‘I will. Thank you.’
As Trish sipped the last of her spritzer, weak and warm now that the ice had melted, she thought about her next move.
The terrace was pleasant with the faint wind off the river,
and Trish never minded sitting alone in a public place, even in the middle of a self-conscious crowd like this one. Several of the other drinkers glanced at her every now and then to make sure she recognised them. A few were clearly wondering whether they should have known who she was. It amused her to meet their half-doubtful smiles with a broad grin and see them rack their brains for her name.