Gagged & Bound Page 10

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember hearing the name Slabb at any time. But, please don’t forget that Jeremy knew nothing about the drugs, and so he would not have had any encounters that might identify them for you. Who is Slabb?’

  ‘It’s the name of someone who might have been supplying the dealers at the shelter. By the way, how did the police find out about the drugs there in the first place?’

  ‘They were watching a particular man. He wasn’t a resident, but he used to drop in for hot soup in the middle of the day. At least that was what Jeremy believed. It turned out that he was a kind of Fagin figure, using the genuinely homeless men to sell his drugs on to regular passers-by. Every day, he would dole out the little packets and collect the previous day’s takings.’

  ‘That sounds unbelievably trusting.’ Trish was more accustomed to dealers having to buy each consignment from their own supplier with cash in advance.

  Mrs Marton looked straight at her and said, as calmly as though she dealt with such things all the time, ‘They all knew that if they handed over less than the expected payment they would pay with a terrible beating.’

  Trish frowned. It seemed odd that such an elderly woman should have such detailed information about the drugs underworld.

  ‘You look surprised,’ said Mrs Marton.

  ‘I was just wondering how you knew about the threats.’

  ‘Jeremy told me the last time I saw him. He came to warn me of what was happening. At that moment he still believed his innocence would protect him, and he wanted me to know everything he had managed to find out from one of his residents so I wouldn’t be troubled by any publicity that might arise.’ She pulled a plain linen handkerchief from the sleeve of her grey jacket and blew her nose. Trish saw there were no rings on her fingers. Had they been sold too?

  ‘He told me he hated himself for his naivety,’ his mother went on. ‘I can still hear the pain in his voice, and the humiliation. After everything he had learned in prison, he said, he should have known better than to be taken in.’

  ‘His second great disillusion,’ Trish murmured, without thinking.

  ‘Second?’ said Mrs Marton.

  Trish glanced up, surprising a look of calculation in the elder woman’s expression. Was her hardness the result of having to protect herself against ever more appalling news? Or had she developed it as a defence against the prurient curiosity of her neighbours?

  ‘I was thinking of that passage in the diary when he faced the fact that Baiborn wasn’t the hero he’d always imagined,’ Trish said, ‘but a self-protective, selfish, threatening coward.’

  A faint tinge of colour seeped into the sallow skin over Mrs Marton’s sharp cheekbones, and her thin lips curled at the edges.

  ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself, Miss Maguire. Thank you for hating him too.’

  ‘It’s impossible not to, having read the diary. You must have wondered so often who he was – is.’

  Bee came in with the tea tray. Trish could have thrown something at her for interrupting at precisely the wrong moment. Fussing with the teapot and milk jug distracted Mrs Marton, but she was determined enough to come back to the unfinished conversation when all three of them were settled with tea and ginger biscuits.

  ‘Miss Maguire, believe me, if I’d had some way of identifying the man who hid behind that stupid codename I would have exposed him long ago, and everyone else in his appalling group. I’d have used every newspaper and influential person I have ever known to ensure that the whole lot of them were arrested, charged, and convicted.’

  Bee leaned forwards and offered Trish the plate of biscuits again, even though she hadn’t yet eaten her first one.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Trish said to Mrs Marton when she’d shaken her head at Bee’s offer. ‘What he did to those children was—’

  ‘Terrible,’ Mrs Marton said, sitting even more rigidly upright. ‘But their fate is not the only reason why I hate him. He is loathsome to me because he took an idealistic boy and made him a criminal, and because, understanding how that boy was devoted to his parents and would protect them against everything, he bought his own safety by threatening to kill them.’

  Trish recognised the formal sound of a long-prepared speech. She imagined Mrs Marton lying sleepless night after night, honing her anger and choosing the words that would best express it.

  ‘Because of that, Jeremy spent at least twice as long in prison as he need have done.’

  ‘I …’

  ‘There is no comfort you can offer me, Miss Maguire. As a lawyer, you must know something of what British prisons are like, and of what a long stretch does to a man. My son suffered that for twenty years, in order to protect my husband and me. Twenty years in which we were eaten up by anger over what he’d done to those children.’

  She paused to take a breath, leaving Trish to wonder why she had sold her house in order to fund Jeremy’s charity if she was so angry with him. Was it some kind of instinctive maternal protectiveness, or had she softened towards him when she began to see how hard he was trying to atone?

  ‘Only after he’d killed himself and left me the diaries did I understand. By then it was too late for me to tell him so. Too late for my husband to know how much we had misjudged him. And too late for both of us to know there had been a kind of heroism in our son, after all.’

  Trish wanted to say something helpful, even though Mrs Marton didn’t look as though she would relish any comment. There were times when even an honest attempt to comfort only made the recipient feel as though you were belittling her pain. Trish thought this was one of those times.

  ‘Presumably Baiborn’s threat still stands,’ she said. ‘Weren’t you afraid of it when you asked Bee to write the true story?’

  ‘No. From everything I’d read, I believed Baiborn to be too much of a coward to try anything now. Besides, what do I have to live for, except to see him exposed?’

  ‘You say Jeremy left you the diaries,’ Trish said, knowing she wasn’t supposed to answer the question. ‘Did you ever find out where he hid them from the police after the bomb?’

  Mrs Marton shook her head. ‘Miss Maguire, I had no spare energy for questions like that. It took everything I had to deal with the fact of my son’s suicide and the revelations I found when I began to read his diaries. Now, would you like some more tea?’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ said Trish. ‘I’m sorry to have raised such hard memories. Getting back to the present, did Jeremy ever mention anyone called Tick? Simon Tick?’

  Mrs Marton shook her head. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard the name before. Is he a drug dealer too?’

  ‘Not that I know of. All I—’

  ‘Trish,’ Bee said, in a warning tone of voice, ‘time’s getting on if you’re to be back in London by five.’

  ‘So it is. Mrs Marton, you’ve been very kind. And I’m grateful for everything you’ve told me.’

  ‘I am afraid none of it can have been remotely useful to you. But it is good to know that one more person is aware of Jeremy’s real character.’ She stood and held out her hand again. Her expression was softer. ‘Thank you for letting me talk about him. And, please, if you ever have the opportunity to mention his name, do pass on the real story. It’s all any of us can do now. I’d hoped the press would pick it up when Beatrice’s book was published, but they didn’t. Perhaps it’s no surprise when there are all these new atrocities to report.’

  She gestured towards the windowsill, where a copy of the newspaper lay, showing the front-page photograph of Stephanie Taft in uniform, under a headline that read:

  HOW MANY MORE HAVE TO DIE?

  Get the guns off our streets

  ‘Sorry to have butted in,’ Bee said later, as her car swept into the drive up to her own house, where Trish had left her Audi. ‘But she’s more than intelligent enough to see your motive for asking about Simon Tick. I had to stop you before you gave her any clues about what’s happening.’

  ‘Are
n’t you exaggerating the need to protect her?’

  ‘No,’ Bee said. ‘But you were brilliantly convincing with your decoy questions about the Slabbs. What on earth made you come up with them?’

  ‘Chance,’ Trish said quickly. ‘I heard about them the other day and I suppose it was the story of how they go about silencing people that made me think of them now Tick is using his own methods to try to silence you. Why d’you ask? You’re not going to tell me you know about the Slabbs, are you?’

  ‘Not really. I just remember hearing they figured in a book about organised crime that my editor commissioned a few years ago.’

  Maybe Femur was right. Maybe Slabb tentacles curled everywhere through lives that had no apparent connection with them, South London, or any kind of crime.

  ‘A book? What’s it called?’

  ‘It was never published. The lawyers said it was too dangerous because it made all kinds of allegations about them and the others like them. Any of them could have sued and—’ Bee broke off, then said in a despairing voice, ‘It’s so much easier when it’s something as obviously libellous as that. My editor, Jenny, and her colleagues at Motcomb and Winter always have that sort of book read for libel, but neither she nor I ever dreamed that quoting those few diary entries about Baiborn would cause all this trouble.’

  She brushed the back of her left hand against her eyes.

  ‘What’s the problem, Bee?’ Trish asked in her gentlest voice. ‘I mean the real problem. Why are you treating what’s a relatively small risk as though it were going to kill someone?’

  ‘Don’t.’ The single word came out in a gasp.

  Bee wrenched up the handbrake as the car slid to a stop on the gravel in front of the house. Trish put her hand on top of Bee’s as it gripped the brake lever. Her skin felt very cold and clammy.

  ‘Bee, you must talk to me. I can’t help you if I don’t know what I’m dealing with. You’ve been a professional writer for years. You’ve been with the same publisher all that time. You know they’re behind you. Why are you so terrified?’

  Bee pulled her hand out from under Trish’s and laid it on the steering wheel with the other one, then leaned forwards and hid her face against them.

  Trish waited. And waited. ‘Bee,’ she said at last, ‘you have to talk. Or I can’t do anything for you.’

  ‘I lied to you,’ she said eventually.

  Oh, shit, Trish thought. Now what’s coming? Holding on to her irritation, she said aloud, ‘What have you lied about?’

  More silence made her push on, a little harder. ‘Did you already know Tick’s nickname was Baiborn? Is it that?’

  ‘God no! I lied when you asked about my motives for writing Terrorist or Victim? I think I said it was because I owed Jane Marton so much, didn’t I?’

  ‘More or less.’ Trish was beginning to feel a little less grim but still quite as puzzled. ‘Wasn’t it true?’

  ‘Only in part.’ Bee lifted her face away from the steering wheel and straightened her back. ‘I thought if I could get to the bottom of why Jeremy kept causing disaster when he was only trying to do good, I might understand more about myself.’

  Trish licked her lips, as though that might help her find the right words. The anguish in Bee’s voice told her how serious this confession was, but it seemed way over the top.

  ‘Can you explain a bit more?’ she said. Bee turned towards her, showing a face that matched the voice.

  ‘Every time I try to help someone, I do appalling damage. Just like Jeremy. You said no one would die over this libel claim, but how do you know?’

  ‘Come off it, Bee.’ Trish wished she’d never said that a libel claim stopped on the death of either the claimant or the defendant. ‘What’s all this talk of dying?’

  ‘You mean Antony didn’t tell you about my sister?’

  ‘No. Tell me now.’

  Bee heaved an enormous sigh. ‘Francesca was four years younger than me. My mother loathed her. I don’t know why, because she was lovely. Sweet. Much nicer than I ever was.’

  Trish thought about all the children she’d ever encountered who had aroused hatred in one parent or the other. There was always a reason for the loathing, but it was often so deeply buried in the parent’s own childhood suffering or sibling battles that it was barely retrievable. At this stage, Bee was unlikely ever to find out what had driven her mother’s behaviour.

  ‘And Cesca was so terrified that I had to do everything I could to protect her. At the end of one summer term, I went in the car with my mother to fetch her from school …’ Bee’s voice failed. She looked at Trish, who could now see where the confession was going.

  ‘Was there a crash?’

  ‘Yes. Ma was ripping her apart over her bad report all the way home, really savaging her. Cesca was crying in the passenger seat. So I waded in from the back to tell Ma to leave off, to let her alone, to stop being so fucking cruel.’ Bee took another deep breath. ‘So she turned to look over her shoulder at me, just as a lorry charged out of a concealed turning. The car smashed into its bonnet. Ma and I were both more or less OK. Cesca was dead.’

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ Trish said. She saw the front door open and a dark-haired man in a wheelchair ease himself forwards between the big glossy magnolias, waving.

  Bee fixed a bright smile on her face and waved back, then turned to Trish.

  ‘And that was only the first time. Look at Silas. That’s my fault too.’

  ‘But he has MS. You can’t have had anything to do with that. It’s not catching.’

  ‘It was my fault.’ Bee sounded despairing. Her fine grey eyes were full of tears again. ‘When he was diagnosed, I heard from someone who knows about the condition that it often follows some terrible emotional trauma and is probably caused by it, even if only by way of switching on dodgy genes.’

  ‘What was the trauma?’ Trish asked when the silence had gone on too long.

  Bee took a breath as deep as though she was about to dive. ‘When he was working in the Ministry of Defence I repeated something he told me, for reasons too complicated to explain now. It got passed on and Silas was sacked, his reputation gone for ever. Six months later the MS was diagnosed.’

  The gravel was crunching under the wheels of the chair as Silas Bowman pushed himself laboriously towards them. His expression was full of affection. No one who looked at his wife like that could possibly blame her for his condition, Trish thought. There was no time to say more than half the things she wanted, and she had to rush those.

  ‘None of this is real, Bee,’ she said, gabbling. ‘And it has nothing to do with Jeremy and his disasters. The horror comes from what your own mind is doing to you. It won’t get better until you recognise that, and accept it. I know what I’m talking about because I’ve been there too. Go and see your doctor and explain what’s happening to you. Don’t castigate yourself. That’s wasted energy. Keep your strength to deal with what’s real. And get yourself out of this state fast with pills or therapy or whatever. Otherwise you really will cause trouble.’

  ‘But it is all real, Trish. Whenever I try to help anyone, I cause terrible trouble. People die. You have to believe it. Oh, God! What if something happens to you? I’ll never forgive myself.’

  Trish thought back to her own near breakdown and knew she’d been like this too, running over and over her supposed appalling sins while her mother or her friends did everything they could to reassure her. No reassurance was ever enough because, as she’d said to Bee, it had been her own mind trying to destroy her. Now she could understand the expression of tight-held patience she’d seen in the faces all round her then, and the occasional snap, even the withdrawal that had hurt so much, as one supporter after another had had enough. But some had stuck with her throughout. She had debts still. Here was a chance to pay some of them.

  ‘None of it was your fault,’ she said again, smiling as freely as she could. ‘In any case, none of it has any bearing on Simon Tick. I will do whatever I can to keep
him off you. I promise. In return, you must fight to keep these ideas out of your head, or you’ll be fit for nothing. OK?’

  Bee opened her door and put one long leg out onto the gravel. ‘I do try. But it’s so hard. I sometimes think that if I can’t stop the thoughts – if I can’t get one full night’s sleep without another nightmare – I’ll lose it completely.’

  ‘Go and see your doctor. As soon as you can, get an appointment.’

  There was no answer.

  ‘Bee, you must promise,’ Trish said aloud, while her mind drummed into her another message: I mustn’t try to make you do it by threatening to give up on you. I’m in this now till the end, whatever happens.

  Driving back to London, her mind ran round and round ways to help Bee get over her self-inflicted torment, which seemed a lot more threatening than Tick’s libel claim. Trish barely noticed the rest of the traffic until it thickened up on the outskirts of London and slowed her to a bare fifteen miles an hour.

  Spotting a gap ahead, she changed lanes, nipping in ahead of a Lotus, whose driver gave her the finger. She resisted the temptation to return the gesture and turned on the radio instead, hoping to catch the news.

  Apart from the announcement that the police had still failed to find the man who had shot Stephanie Taft, there was just the usual depressing mixture of starvation and civil war in Africa, terrorist outrages all over the world and financial doom. She switched to Radio 3 for some classical music instead.

  When the economy was doing well, she thought, as Schubert’s Trout Quintet poured from all four speakers, the news would be about the dangers of its overheating; when it wasn’t, that was problem enough on its own. At the end of the movement, she turned the radio off and used her hands-free phone to call David’s mobile.

  It rang and rang until eventually the electronic voice told her it had been switched to voicemail.