A Poisoned Mind Page 2

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ Antony asked, pushing open the door of the restaurant so that she could precede him.

  ‘The menu,’ she said and knew from his familiar snort that he didn’t believe her for a second.

  Angie was standing in the kitchen of Fran and Greg’s first-floor flat in Kentish Town, gaping at the heaps of files they’d filled as they’d worked to prepare her case against the people responsible for John’s death.

  ‘What’s the matter, love?’ Fran said, tossing a swathe of silky red-blonde hair over her ample shoulder. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  Angie shook her head and rubbed a hand over her eyes, feeling the edge of an ancient callus snag on her eyelid. Next to Fran’s magnificence, she felt dried-up and old.

  ‘I just don’t know what I’ve done to deserve all this,’ she said, waving at the files before she remembered her ugly hands. She stuffed them in her pockets. ‘Without you two, I’d be stuck up there on the farm, writing my useless letters to people who couldn’t care less about John or the farm or me, and wondering whether I’d starve before the cancer got me.’

  The temperature in the heart of the fireball had been high enough to destroy the carcinogenic benzene there, but plenty had been left on the fringes of the explosion to leach into the ground and poison the watercourses. And the rain that had seemed like a godsend at the time had actually made everything far worse, diluting the fire crew’s foam and spreading the pollution far and wide.

  Fran leaned over to give her a kiss. ‘And without you, I’d still be handing out our leaflets in shopping centres, knowing hardly anyone would bother to read them or understand why companies like CWWM have to be stopped before they destroy the whole world with their filthy chemicals.’

  ‘She’s right, you know,’ Greg said, pushing a stoneware mug towards Angie. ‘If you hadn’t been brave enough to risk everything by being a litigant in person, we’d never have got them into court.’

  Angie nodded her thanks for the tea and he beamed before returning to the cooker to stir his pan of bean stew. Steam billowed out, scented with onions and herbs, which made her realise how hungry she was.

  Enough to enjoy another compost heap of vegetables? she asked herself with a disloyal spurt of silent laughter.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Fran asked, sounding hurt enough to need an answer.

  ‘I was just thinking how much John would have liked you.’ These days Angie could usually say his name aloud without crying or feeling as though someone had her guts on a hook and was slowly pulling them out of her, but it had taken a long time. ‘And yet how hard he’d have had to work to stop himself quarrelling with you.’

  ‘Quarrelling? Why? He sounds like such a good man.’

  ‘He was, and he’d have loved your generosity, and the way you care so much.’ Angie enjoyed Fran’s smile and hoped it would last. ‘But he would have had difficulties with some of your principles.’

  Greg stopped stirring and turned to look over his shoulder again. His brown eyes were oddly set, with one apparently higher than the other, which often made it hard to read his expression.

  ‘Like what?’ he said.

  ‘He claimed that if everyone went back to eating meat we’d get our farm in profit again and save the planet.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Greg’s eyes looked as vulnerable as a new lamb’s and his voice was puzzled. Angie wished she didn’t have to spell it out.

  ‘Well, one of the chief causes of global warning is methane. And you know how a diet of beans—’

  Fran managed to laugh, but Greg didn’t. Angie wondered if he was about to explain that cows produce more methane than any other living creature.

  ‘Was money so very tight?’ he said after a short tricky silence.

  ‘It gave us nightmares for years.’ Angie had lost all desire to laugh. ‘That’s why John cancelled all the insurance policies, which is why I have to win this case if I’m ever to get enough money to make the farm habitable again.’

  ‘You will win,’ Fran said, stroking Angie’s bony wrist. ‘And you’ll get justice for John. When it’s over no one will ever again be able to say his death was an accident.’

  ‘I hope to God you’re right.’

  In the first terrible aftermath of the fire, Angie had assumed the police would charge the directors of CWWM with murder, or manslaughter at the very least. When she’d heard nothing from them, she’d written to everyone with any kind of power, from the local Chief Constable to the head of the Crown Prosecution Service, her MP and the Prime Minister, begging them to help. No one had done anything except tell her to wait until after the official investigation.

  None of the lawyers she’d approached had been prepared to help either. All of them had wanted to know the results of the official inquiries before they decided whether to act for her without money up front. Legal Aid hadn’t been available. She was too asset-rich to get that, which would have been funny if it hadn’t been so cruel. The fire had made the farm and the land even less saleable than they’d been when she and John had first tried to find a buyer for the wreck of their broken dream.

  Close to despair, she’d started to look up the friendlier of her old City contacts, most of whom were now chairing multinationals and quangos. Some had been sympathetic but none had seen a way to help. One had even written to criticise her ‘vindictive attempt to pillory CWWM’, adding:

  It really won’t help to use emotive words like ‘murder’. Whatever happened to the tanks, John was not murdered. Stick with reality and you’ll do better.

  I know you, Angie. You let your temper ride you at the slightest possible opportunity. Give yourself a chance this time and ignore it. Wait for the official report, not least because you could get far more compensation then than if you push for a sum now.

  In case your financial situation is too parlous to wait, I’m enclosing a cheque to tide you over.

  If he hadn’t reminded her about the past consequences of her awful temper she might have seen the generosity in his cheque. As it was all she’d noticed was how patronisingly he’d phrased his letter. She’d torn up both and sent the pieces back, telling him charity was no good to her; she wanted justice.

  Only the next day she’d had the first approach from Fran, offering both sympathy and the practical help of her small pressure group, Friends Against the Destruction of the Environment, which she’d explained was known as FADE. Angie could still remember how she’d leaned back against the cold Aga, reading and rereading Fran’s letter, looking for the trick in it because by then she’d learned never to rely on anyone, except her best friend Polly Green.

  But it had been genuine. Over the next months, Fran had become a real friend. Greg was kind too, although he didn’t have Fran’s lovely powerful warmth or her ability to laugh at all the right moments, and their flat had turned into far more of a home than the empty farmhouse with its agonising echoes of John.

  Angie looked round the bright kitchen now, watching them work, occasionally turning to smile at her or say something easy and unimportant she could answer without thinking.

  In the far-off days of her City career, when she and John had been high-spending young stars of corporate finance, she would have looked down on this Housing Association two-bedroom, first-floor flat in one of the grottier areas of Kentish Town. Now, with the laborious years stretching out behind her, she felt cradled in luxury at the very thought of the shabby refuge, with its hot water on demand, bus stop right outside the front door and tube station an easy walk away.

  Chapter 2

  ‘Stop looking like Oliver Cromwell,’ Antony said as he poured a generous slug of garnet-coloured wine into Trish’s glass. ‘I know you disapprove of my extravagance, but I’ve been working like a dog on preparation for CWWM and I deserve my treat before we embark on the actual fight.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to spoil it.’

  She took a mouthful of wine and let its rich flavours distin
guish themselves against her tongue. Writers who used words like tobacco and leather and chocolate to describe wine often irritated her, but with a complex, exciting mouthful like this, she could understand why they did it. Swallowing, she smiled.

  ‘Delectable. And if I was frowning, it was nothing to do with the wine. I just can’t stop thinking of that poor woman and everything she’s been through. She’s got nothing left. If you do your usual stuff, she won’t even have the satisfaction of seeing CWWM beaten.’

  Antony’s lean face creased. His turquoise eyes glittered. She waited for the tease.

  ‘I don’t know how you’ve survived at the Bar this long,’ he said. ‘Caring for your clients to the point of derangement is bad enough; but to start fretting over the opposition …’

  ‘Not being involved in this case means she’s not my opposition.’

  Antony was drinking as she spoke. Anyone watching his face would have thought there was something wrong with the wine.

  ‘A Freudian slip,’ he said. ‘If you hadn’t managed to get silk, you’d be my junior this time too, and I’d be a lot happier.’

  Memories of all the cases they’d fought together and the fun they’d had, as well as the bitter desperate arguments, made her eyes go fuzzy. Had she been stupid to give up all that, and the pleasure involved in being the admired second-in-command to a brilliant and hugely successful man, for the dubious satisfactions of becoming a so-far unemployable QC?

  ‘Robert’s a fine lawyer,’ he said, watching her with an unreadable expression in his eyes. ‘And he’s done a good job on the preparation; but he’s not you. I’ve always felt more comfortable with you behind me than anyone else. And with a case like this we can’t possibly win, I’d—’ His eyelids fell, hiding whatever message they might have carried. ‘I have to be glad you got silk – for you – but for myself I’m seriously pissed off.’

  ‘That’s like kicking a girl when she’s down, you know. I’ve been wondering how I could have taken such a risk, whether I’ll ever rebuild my practice.’

  ‘Of course you will. Don’t be a clot. Good: here’s the grub, at last.’

  The waiter put down their plates. On each was a plump partridge, sitting on its little cushion of cabbage, belly pork and chipolata. Thin aromatic gravy was offered in a silver sauceboat. This was exactly the kind of grand, old-fashioned, British food Antony enjoyed. Trish, who’d grown up on baked beans and mince, ate it only in his company.

  She began to dismember the small bird, asking him as she did it why he didn’t believe he could win the case for CWWM. He outlined his reasons with his usual incisiveness, making her wonder whether she would ever find this kind of satisfaction from working with anyone else.

  By the time he’d paid the enormous bill and their coats had been retrieved from the waiters’ cupboard, Trish felt like going home to sleep. It wasn’t so much her small share of the wine as the quantity of food that made her feel flattened. The shock of cold air helped a bit as they emerged on to the pavement, and the brilliant sunshine made her blink herself back into full awareness.

  ‘Shall we get a cab?’ he said.

  ‘I ought to walk. Otherwise I’ll never shift the calories.’

  ‘Women! OK.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘But it’ll have to be briskish; I need to sort out a few things and get home by four. We’re away this weekend.’

  Her legs were almost as long as his and she had no trouble keeping up. They walked through Covent Garden, dodging all the street entertainers, shoppers and dawdling tourists, and made their way through the Aldwych to the Strand.

  ‘Hey, Trish!’ came a confident female voice just as they were stepping on to the zebra crossing that would take them down into the Temple. She turned, recognised an old friend and stopped to talk.

  ‘Great to see you, Anna. How’ve you been? And what are you doing here? Not another legal film?’

  ‘Absolutely. And this is a real corker with huge implications. It’s an environmental case. We—’

  The air was suddenly filled with the stench of burning rubber. A simultaneous mechanical shriek was chased by a human scream, tinkling glass, and then a silence more sinister than all the rest. Only a few seconds could have passed, but Trish felt as though her whole life was unreeling at one thousandth of its normal speed. She turned away from Anna to face the crossing again.

  A motorbike lay with its front wheel still spinning as a stocky figure in leathers and huge beetle-like helmet limped forward. Thrown a little way from the bike lay a figure wearing Antony’s clothes, with blood spurting from his leg in a bright scarlet arc. The blood was the only thing about his crumpled body that moved. Trish watched the small crowd pressing towards him. A young black man detached himself and bent over the body.

  ‘Don’t touch him,’ she yelled, her ever-ready imagination drawing pictures of broken vertebrae pulled out of alignment, torturing pain and lifelong paralysis.

  She was on her knees beside Antony an instant later, ancient, half-remembered instructions from school first-aid lessons stuttering in her brain.

  ‘We’ve got to stop the bleeding,’ said the young man, who’d been leaning over him. ‘It’s all I was going to do.’

  ‘Great. You’re right. Can you hold his leg, just above where it’s coming from? Both thumbs hard down on the leg without pulling at the joint? Oh, have you got a scarf or something? Belt? Tie?’

  ‘No.’

  She couldn’t waste any time waiting for the rest of the gawpers to come to their senses, so she ripped off her coat. Too thick to tear or twist. The silk tweed of the jacket was no better. But her shirt would do. Thin striped poplin, it would make a bandage. Not absorbent, but better than nothing. Half the buttons sprang off as she wrenched it away from her body. She twisted it into a rope. The cold puckered the skin of her small breasts, but she couldn’t think about that now. Her helper’s strong black hands had reduced the bleeding to a trickle.

  Moving with terrified care, she slid her shirt-rope under Antony’s leg, trying not to joggle the rest of his body. At last she had enough cloth to use and drew both ends up and round his thigh. She twisted them as tightly as she could but knew it wasn’t enough.

  More memories trickled back and she tied a knot, then grabbed a tough biro from her bag and used it to turn her improvised bandage tighter and tighter, praying the plastic casing wouldn’t crack before it had done its work. At last, she could turn it no further, looked at the young man and said:

  ‘I think it’s safe to take your hands away.’

  She’d forgotten about breathing and couldn’t understand why she felt so light-headed. Then as he removed his thumbs she saw the tourniquet was holding and let out the pent-up breath in a single gust.

  ‘Yeah! It works.’ His tense face split in a triumphant smile.

  The crowd started to clap. Trish ignored them, knowing there was more to be done and scuffled through her bag again. There were no other pens and she didn’t carry anything useful like a lipstick. A shadow fell between her and the sun and a woman with an American accent said:

  ‘Use this.’

  Squinting upwards, she saw a small gold cylinder being held out, took it, uncapped it and scrawled a large scarlet T on Antony’s forehead, checked the time and added that: 2.55. Now no paramedic or doctor would miss the tourniquet or leave it on too long.

  ‘And you might care to borrow my jacket,’ said the owner of the lipstick.

  Trish put a hand to her thin chest, looked down and realised that she was squatting, half-naked in the middle of the street right outside the Royal Courts of Justice. Thank God she’d put on a reasonably respectable bra this morning.

  ‘Oh, shit!’ she said, grabbing the chestnut jacket she’d flung off, and the thicker, darker overcoat. ‘It’s OK actually. I’ve got my own here. Thank you very much.’

  A siren in the distance made her look up. The crowd hadn’t been as useless as she feared. Someone had done the sensible thing and called for an ambulance. She tried to st
and and found she couldn’t get up. The young black man came to her side. With the American woman on the other, he helped Trish to her feet.

  ‘Thank you both so much.’

  ‘Trish, I don’t … I couldn’t … You were so quick,’ said Anna Grayling, at last coming to join her.

  ‘It’s fine. I—’ Trish wiped her hand across her forehead. It came away sweaty. Red, too. She must have just smeared Antony’s blood all over her face.

  The ambulance pulled up, and blessedly knowledgeable people took over all responsibility for him. Trish turned away from Anna to tell them what had happened and who she was, aware all the time of the biker, now sitting on the kerb with his head in his hands and his helmet by his side. Two uniformed police officers strode towards him. Trish clutched her overcoat more tightly around her and looked back at Anna.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said, recognising her friend’s impatient need to be elsewhere. ‘I know you’re busy. Don’t hang about. I’ll go with him in the ambulance.’

  Anna looked embarrassed but relieved as she backed obediently away. Trish peered around her, searching the crowd for the young man who’d helped her with the tourniquet. She wanted to thank him, but when she found him she lost all sense of what she wanted to say and just took his bloody hands and looked up into his face, letting the coat flap.

  “s OK,’ he said. ‘You did great.’

  ‘What’s your name? And your address. I know he’ll want—’

  ‘No worries. They want me now. See you later.’ He walked towards the beckoning police. Trish felt something hard in her hand, she glanced down and saw the gold lipstick case with its mashed red stick. Its owner was standing close by, smiling with amazing benevolence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Trish said. ‘I think it’s ruined.’

  ‘That’s fine. It was in a good cause.’