Out of the Dark Page 24

  Trish had had trouble imagining her father in search of romance at the Mull Estate in Southwark, but she couldn’t see him here either. Her own perfectly tidy jeans and linen jacket made her feel clumsy and out of place amid the silk lampshades, and the cool blue-and-yellow femininity of the room. Everywhere she looked there was a highly polished antique table covered with gleaming silver bits and pieces and little porcelain boxes or plants in highly decorated, gilded cache-pots.

  Lakeshaw had given her a brutal description of the state of Jeannie Nest’s body. Surely no one capable of that kind of frenzy could hide all signs of it for so long. How could a man capable of beating a dead woman like that ever have fitted into a room like this? Or made love with a woman like Sylvia Bantell? Or been the occasionally exasperating but often funny and sometimes lovable father Trish knew?

  ‘I’d never been anybody’s rough trade before,’ Paddy had said. Had it been his fake brogue, his hairy wrists and hints of physical aggression that had excited Mrs Bantell? Was her rich, breakable, Kensington lifestyle so boring that she’d had to import some danger? Had Paddy ever threatened her?

  ‘It might help, even after so long.’ Trish heard her voice hoarsen as her throat tensed. ‘And I can’t think of anything else that could. I’m … desperate, you know.’

  ‘I can’t see how my detective’s report could possibly soothe your fears.’

  ‘It might give a reason for what happened between him and Jeannie Nest, and so make it clear that their relationship could not have ended with his killing her.’

  Distaste blew across Sylvia’s face like litter across a velvety lawn. ‘My dear girl, I’ve already given you the reason. He went to her for the kind of sleazy paid sex that would allow him to indulge himself without having to bother about the other person’s feelings.’

  ‘But she was a teacher,’ Trish protested. ‘Not a prostitute.’

  ‘So the story went. But you know how badly paid teachers are.’

  ‘Are you suggesting she supplemented her income generally? I mean, did the report mention other men?’ That would help, Trish thought, and bring in lots more possible suspects.

  ‘Leave it, Trish. It’s old history. It’s also rather unpleasant to think of Paddy’s beloved daughter picking through his sex life like this.’

  ‘You said you’d kept the report.’ Trish was determined to drive through the distaste to whatever facts there were. ‘That doesn’t sound like such very old history.’

  A faint blush warmed the lifted skin over Sylvia’s perfect cheekbones. ‘If you must know, I shredded it after your first telephone call.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ Trish said. Seeing the distaste ruffling Sylvia’s calm again, she apologised, but her mind was spinning.

  Could the report, perhaps re-read for the first time in years after she’d phoned, have contained something dangerous to Paddy after all? Or had it served its purpose as punishment, if not of Paddy himself then of someone who cared about him? Or maybe the report made no suggestion that Jeannie was a prostitute and did not show him in such a bad light after all. Maybe Sylvia had destroyed it as a way of preserving her picture of his supposed failings.

  And maybe, Trish told herself with savage sarcasm, all really is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

  ‘Now, given that there’s really nothing I can do to help …’ Sylvia let her voice drift into silence as she glanced down at the delicate watch that hung loosely around her fragile wrist.

  Trish obeyed the signals and got to her feet. ‘Thank you for seeing me.’

  So that was the perfect Trish, Sylvia thought as she carried the coffee tray back to the kitchen. Not much like Paddy – except in the scruffiness. She could have been quite a pretty girl if she’d let her hair grow and dressed in something more becoming. Although that nose might have looked even more ferocious in a more feminine setting. What was her mother thinking of, to let her grow up without having it corrected?

  Running hot water into the delicate Worcester cups, Sylvia wondered if the Paddy Maguire she had known could really have whacked a woman to death. It didn’t seem very likely. On the other hand, he had always had a shocking temper. And if the wretched Jeannie had had a child – perhaps put the Child Support Agency on to him after all these years – it wasn’t impossible that her whining might have triggered a thrashing. And if that had got out of hand … Perhaps one ought to talk to the police, just in case.

  Outside Sylvia’s house, Trish stood on the top step of the pillared portico, breathing in warm air. After the pot-pourri and tuberose scent, the dust and petrol fumes came as a relief. Trish walked down the three broad steps and out on the pavement.

  Once she felt herself right off Sylvia’s territory, Trish phoned Lakeshaw and had to leave a message, as usual. A sudden gust of wind blew dust into her face and she turned her back, while still talking into her phone. Through her sore, bleary eyes, she thought she saw a face staring at her and blinked to clear her vision. By the time she’d got rid of the grit, everyone around her looked quite uninterested, but she was sure there had been someone watching her. Searching for the familiar slight, blond young man, all she could see were strangers. Could one of them be working for Lakeshaw, hoping to catch her giving away something that would incriminate her father? Or was it Jeannie Nest’s killer, tracking her to find out what she knew?

  Trish felt as she sometimes did in nightmares, with her brain screaming at her to run and her limbs refusing to obey the order. Breathe, she told herself. Breathe and move.

  It worked. Still feeling unsafe but once more with some control over herself, she walked on towards Hornton Street. She’d left her car in the car park there, but she thought she’d take an extra half hour to drop into the nursing home to see David. As she caught sight of Waterstone’s on the opposite side of the road, she remembered her promise to buy him the latest Harry Potter. She waited at the crossing for the lights to change.

  There was a man walking down Allen Street, pausing to look in the bookshop’s window. His backview looked extraordinarily like Nick Gurles’s. He had the same confident, almost swaggering, walk, and the same beautifully cut suit.

  It couldn’t possibly be Nick, Trish thought. Not on a weekday morning. Unless Henry Buxford had already sacked him. But in that case, Antony would have told her; let her off the hook.

  Tomorrow was the deadline he’d set for her to give him her decision about her whole future in chambers. In the old days, if she’d been faced with a dilemma like this, she’d have been flogging her mind up and down and all round every important question, but for some time now she’d had enough confidence in herself to wait for the right answer to emerge from her subconscious. So far, this time, nothing had happened. But she was still hoping.

  The lights changed and she crossed the road. The man who looked like Nick had disappeared, so she walked on into Waterstone’s. There was a tall pile of copies of the new Harry Potter near the till. She grabbed one and flipped her credit card on to the glossy jacket as she joined the queue to pay.

  Holding the book against herself like a breastplate, she went to see David. But when she gave her name to the nursing home’s receptionist over the intercom, she was told that he’d been moved yet again.

  ‘Oh, sod it. And sod Lakeshaw, too,’ she said aloud. The intercom crackled as though the receptionist had only just stifled some kind of protest. Trish couldn’t be certain that she’d been told the truth, but it was obvious that she wasn’t going to get through the door.

  She retreated to the pavement, wishing she had something urgent to do. Antony had said he didn’t want her in chambers until tomorrow and she couldn’t do anything for David if he kept being whisked away from her. Caro had made it clear she didn’t want any contact until Jeannie Nest’s killer had been arrested, Lakeshaw wouldn’t answer calls, and Paddy didn’t want her either. George would be hard at work catching up with the backlog that had accumulated while he was in the States, and the last thing she wanted to do was dump
yet more of her angst on him.

  Anna Grayling had left another message on her mobile yesterday, suggesting lunch, but Trish didn’t feel strong enough for that yet. She wanted to do something useful, and the only thing left was to follow up David’s information about his mother’s friends from the teacher-training college. Trish wasn’t sure what they’d be able to tell her, but something useful might come of it. She picked about in her memory until it produced one of the names David had given her, then set about finding out where in North London there were teacher-training colleges. It didn’t take long to find the one that employed Frances Mason.

  The switchboard operator asked if she’d like to be put through, but Trish didn’t want to be rejected before she’d even started to ask questions, so she said she merely had a letter to send and needed the full address and postcode. Equipped with those, she went to collect her car from the gloomy concrete car park under the public library.

  She had her usual moment of doubt about the level on which she’d left the car, but found it without too much difficulty and bleeped up the locks from twenty yards away. Nothing happened, no electronic squeak and no flash from the indicators. She pressed the button again, checking that the tiny red light flashed. So the battery was working. Her hand was already on the door when she saw the mess on the back seat.

  Some bastard had broken in through the back quarter light and found the briefcase that had been well hidden in the shadows under the seat. Now it was lying open, with all the papers strewn around it.

  ‘Oh, fucking hell!’ Trish’s voice boomed and echoed from pillar to pillar.

  Luckily there was no one around to respond. When she’d got her temper under control, she pulled the driver’s seat forward and bent to collect all the papers between her hands. It took nearly ten minutes to sort them out on the car’s soft roof, and clip the various bits and pieces together. As far as she could remember, everything was still here, and none of it was particularly confidential. There’d been no money in the briefcase or credit cards. But there had been her own private photocopy of Nick Gurles’s treacherous note.

  With her head buzzing and her insides lurching as though she was on some appalling fairground ride, she scrabbled through the piles of paper, searching for the copy. One bundle slipped off the edge of the roof and landed in a patch of oil.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ she muttered. She could feel her mind revving up even more, and her heart was bouncing.

  She bent to pick up the papers, cleaned the tacky oil off them as well as she could with an old tissue from her pocket, then put them back with the rest of their heap and stacked each neat pile back in the briefcase. As she reached the last, a clutch of bills she had yet to pay, she saw a greyish corner of photocopy paper peeking out.

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ she breathed, parting the bills to see Nick’s note. She leaned against the car, trying not to feel sick with relief.

  I must have been mad, she thought. What on earth would Antony have said if I’d let it get out like this?

  She ripped the copy into tiny pieces, determined to feed them down the nearest drain.

  Her head felt thick and soupy, as though she might be about to get a cold. Or worse. She could almost see the black birds flapping in the sleet. Refusing to give in to them, she finished tidying the papers, snapped them back into the briefcase, and drove out of the car park, taking extra care not to brush any of the inconveniently sited concrete pillars. She’d once been in such a bad temper that she’d reversed smartly into one, denting the boot of her first decent car. Never again.

  It took her nearly forty minutes to drive to Frankie Mason’s college, but twenty of those were spent stuck in the almost stationary traffic along Kensington High Street. After that, once she’d left the streets she knew well, she had to stop twice to check her route on the map.

  There was no one in the hall of the big redbrick building when she reached it, and no one to ask her business as she walked past the empty reception desk. The first person she saw was a woman in her twenties, dressed in jeans and T-shirt, coming down the wide staircase. She smiled at Trish as they passed in the hall, their shoes clattering on the old encaustic tiles.

  ‘Hi, Trish said before she lost the opportunity.

  ‘Hi?’ said the younger woman, coming to a halt.

  ‘My name’s Trish Maguire. I’m looking for Frankie Mason. Is she in today, or is she still recovering … ?’

  ‘Isn’t it ghastly?’

  ‘Awful,’ Trish said, glad of the opening. She might not have to betray her ignorance of the name under which Jeannie Nest had been living. ‘And they’re no nearer finding who did it, I gather.’

  ‘No. The police have been round here, asking millions of questions, but we were all gobsmacked. I mean, everyone admired her. Loved her, too. She’s …’ The woman’s eyes were filling, rather as David’s had done. ‘She was just the best, you know. I wish she’d told us about the stalker and how scared she was. She could have. Anyone would have given her and David a refuge while the police dealt with it.’

  ‘I know,’ Trish said soothingly. ‘But I really need to talk to Frankie now. D’you know where I could find her?’

  ‘In her office, I think. It’s the first door on the right as you get to the top of the stairs. But I don’t know whether she’s …’

  ‘Thanks,’ Trish said, already halfway up the first flight.

  She knocked on the door at the top of the stairs, and a weary voice invited her to come in. Pushing open the plain door, made even heavier than the Shelleys’ by the fire-protecting spring closure, Trish saw a small woman dressed in long, droopy plum-coloured cotton with an acid-pink Indian shawl around her shoulders. She had untidy dark-red hair, almost covering long gilded earings, and a face that had been a battleground between warmth and cynicism for a long, long time.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Frankie Mason?’

  ‘Yes.’ Suspicion was tightening every muscle in her face, making her look like a shrivelled old cat. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Thank heavens I’ve found you,’ Trish said, surprised to hear her voice shaking. ‘My name’s Trish Maguire.’

  Frankie’s amber-coloured eyes widened just enough to tell Trish a lot of what she needed to know. She hurried on.

  ‘I’m so sorry to bother you, but you’re my only hope now. I need to know more about David. And why she sent him to me. No one else can – or will – tell me anything. I know you were her friend. Please help.’

  ‘Do the police know you’re here?’

  ‘No. It’s private enterprise.’

  ‘So how did you find me?’

  ‘David told me your name. I worked out the rest. It wasn’t that difficult.’

  Frankie got up. Trish saw she was lame, pivoting on her left leg while she swung the whole of her right hip, as though she had to kick the whole world along with every step. Was this why Jeannie hadn’t thought her capable of looking after David?

  ‘I tried to get her to talk to you herself years ago,’ Frankie said, pulling herself along the long window sill so that she could remove a pile of books from the only spare chair. ‘Have a seat. I told her it was mad not to get in touch with you. But she said she couldn’t. She said she knew you’d protect David in an emergency, but she didn’t want to have anything to do with you herself.’

  Frankie looked embarrassedly around her room, as though trying to think of something that might soften the rudeness. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  Trish nodded and thanked her. Boiling the kettle took a while, but eventually they were both sitting holding thick white mugs, waiting for the tea to cool enough for drinking.

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ Trish said, having burned her tongue, ‘why she was prepared to trust me with David if she felt like that about meeting me herself.’

  ‘All she’d ever say was that she knew your father wouldn’t harm you, and therefore David would be safe with you. There wasn’t anyone else who’d be able to guarantee that.’

&
nbsp; ‘What?’ Trish felt the chair sway beneath her. ‘Are you telling me she thought my father might have done something to David?’

  ‘That’s what she said, and it was hard enough to get even that much out of her. She was far too terrified of him to say any more.’

  ‘She couldn’t have been. Not recently. They hadn’t had any contact for years; not since before David was born. My father didn’t even know David existed.’

  Frankie Mason looked at her in pity. Pretend it’s a brief, Trish instructed herself as she fought to hold on to reality. There has to be something in all this that makes sense.

  ‘Did she actually tell you in so many words that she was terrified of Paddy Maguire?’

  ‘Of course. As I said, it wasn’t at all easy to get it out of her. She was too scared to volunteer anything. But, you see, I knew something was terribly wrong. Her migraines were getting worse and worse, and she was losing more weight every week. It got so that she was scared, of her own shadow; any sudden noise would make her sweat. And she couldn’t bear strangers. I told her I had to know what the problem was if she was to go on working here. Eventually, she poured out the whole story.’

  ‘Look, how much did she tell you about the trial?’

  Frankie had the bunched-up end of her pink scarf pressed against her mouth. Over the bright cloth, her eyes looked blank.

  ‘What trial?’ she asked, letting the scarf fall. ‘There wasn’t ever a trial. Your father wasn’t prosecuted. You can get an injunction without that, thank God.’

  ‘This wasn’t anything to do with my father. She was the chief prosecution witness in a murder trial just before she moved up here.’

  ‘No, you’ve got that wrong. She never said anything about that. And she would have told me. I’m sorry.’