A Poisoned Mind Read online

  Dear Trish,

  Many thanks for your generous offer to pay some of Jay’s fees. We may take you up on it in due course, but we have yet to see any signs that he could guarantee the self-discipline and effort necessary to justify our taking him into the school on a long-term basis. He knows he still has to prove himself.

  I think it only fair to warn you of some of the things he’s done in the past before you commit yourself. You see, it’s not just theft and antisocial behaviour – you might expect that. There’s arson, too. He did a year in secure accommodation for setting fire to his old school. And his behaviour was even worse before he reached the age of criminal responsibility; when he was three, he was seen to do some quite serious damage to his baby sister – hands round her throat, squeezing; a few years later he set light to his mother’s clothes when she was lying insensible with drink in the kitchen. There was a stepfather at that stage. Later on, Jay was several times found to be carrying a knife into lessons.

  It is, of course, a risk to have taken him into Blackfriars, but so far we have seen signs that he may have outgrown such behaviour, and he is searched each morning and evening – something he very much dislikes but accepts. There have been no knives. We are in close touch with his social worker, who is relatively optimistic. But what we now need is hard, i.e. written, evidence of the brains we as well as you have discerned in him, and some proof that he is prepared to apply them.

  I’ll keep you in touch with details of his progress and of our deliberations.

  Thank you, once again, for your most generous offer.

  Yours ever, Jeremy

  PS I have absolute confidence in your discretion and good sense, Trish, so I know I don’t have to ask you not to pass any of this on to David.

  ‘So why did you?’ she muttered, pausing at the crossing for the traffic lights to change. She folded the letter and slipped it back into its envelope, before carefully tucking it into her handbag. It had better go into the safe in her bedroom for complete security, she thought. Not that David ever went through her handbag, but she couldn’t leave something like this anywhere accessible to Jay.

  What a relief to know he wouldn’t be there tonight! Quite apart from needing some peace after a day of cramming her brain with chemistry, she wanted time to get rid of the mental pictures of Jay’s drunken mother lying at his mercy on the kitchen floor.

  Trish had reached the foot of the iron staircase that led up to her flat. She knew the big airy loft still felt soulless to George, just as his cosy Fulham house stifled her, which was why they’d kept both. He spent most weekends in Southwark with her and David and sometimes week nights too. But he liked to be able to retreat to his much-loved cottagey refuge sometimes.

  She no longer fretted over the eccentricity of running two expensive places within a few miles of each other. They could afford it these days and their relationship worked so much better than many of their friends’ marriages that they were both reluctant to take any risks with it.

  In the end they’d probably pool their resources and buy somewhere in a more conventional area of London than this dark narrow street of redundant warehouses and industrial buildings. But the time hadn’t come yet.

  Still, she wouldn’t have minded changing the approach to her eyrie. The iron staircase, more like a fire escape than anything else, seemed much steeper than usual and the thought of getting herself up it was daunting. She hadn’t been this tired for years. It must be a result of the lax way she’d lived over the months since taking silk. Once she’d been able to work all night and still skip up these stairs for a bath and breakfast before turning round to go straight into court.

  She’d soon be back in training, she told herself, as she set one foot on the first step and pushed herself up off the ground. All her muscles shrieked in protest. A foretaste of middle age. She made sure she didn’t cling to the handrail or actually pull herself up.

  Wafts of delicious smells surrounded her when she eventually reached the front door. Inside, firelight flickered on the high walls. David was stretched out on one of the black sofas near the great open fireplace, wearing his navy towelling dressing gown over the red pyjamas, reading, with the earpieces of his iPod firmly stuck in his ears. He must have decided to have his shower before eating, to compensate for her late return.

  Conscience-stricken at the thought of keeping him hungry, she could still smile at the sight of his hairy legs and envy him his lifetime’s freedom from waxing and razoring. Maybe one day genetic engineering – or even evolution – would result in perfectly hairless female bodies.

  Yes, she thought, and maybe there’ll be self-cleaning houses too and no-calorie clotted cream.

  She closed the front door and double locked it, kicking off her slouchy boots and draping her coat over the back of a chair. She couldn’t face another climb to put them away in her bedroom yet. The sounds of an earnest arts discussion on Radio 4 issued from the kitchen until the voices were suddenly muted.

  ‘That you, Trish?’ called George.

  ‘Safe and sound. What’s cooking? It smells great.’

  ‘Sauce for the fillet steaks: mush, dried mush, butter, wine, garlic and a soupçon of thyme. We went to Borough Market today and loaded up. Now you’re back I’ll cook the steaks.’

  ‘At last!’ said David, pulling out his iPod with a theatrical sigh.

  He looked up at Trish and gave her the wary smile that was reserved for days when he felt he ought to apologise for something but didn’t want to lower himself by putting it into words.

  She ruffled his shaggy hair and bent down to kiss his head. To her distress he winced, as though she’d actually hurt him, then shuddered:

  ‘Ugh, Trish! I’m not a baby.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, feeling better. ‘But I need comfort after the kind of day I’ve had while you’ve been swanning about having fun. Borough Market indeed! I suppose you ate lots of those fab sandwiches.’

  ‘Course we did.’

  ‘How did Jay take to it?’ She was careful to avoid any suggestion of a comment.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ David said, looking self-conscious. ‘He doesn’t understand food the way George thinks about it.’ He cheered up. ‘But he liked the sandwiches.’

  ‘Good. What did you do then?’ Trish lowered herself on to the opposite sofa, closing her eyes and letting the clanging information in her brain settle a little. ‘I’m not going to sleep; I’m listening.’

  She heard him laugh, a low, spluttering sound that was new. ‘Homework. He can’t do it at his flat because they’re all always making a noise and there isn’t any space, so we did it here, while George watched the match upstairs. Then we played Scrabble for a bit.’

  Back to Scrabble, Trish thought sleepily, noticing that David’s chatter had stopped.

  He and George had moved on to chess as their preferred battleground, but you can’t play chess with three.

  ‘And the wretched Jay was showing signs of beating me hollow,’ George called into the silence, ‘when it got so late I thought I’d better run him home, so we’ll never know if I’d have pulled back. Steaks’ll be ready in about half a second, so if anybody’s going to wash—’

  Trish’s eyelids flew open and she exchanged an openmouthed glance of wildly exaggerated horror with David, before they both dashed for their respective bathrooms. Of all the things that set off George’s tight-lipped irritation, letting his freshly cooked food get cold was just about the worst.

  David was back first, and Trish hurried down the spiral stairs as she saw George bringing the third plate to the table.

  ‘Just in time,’ she said, flinging herself into her chair.

  ‘You’re mad, Trish. You could have done yourself a serious mischief pounding down the stairs like that. I’d rather the food got cold than you broke your neck.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ she said, making David laugh and George pretend to cuff her around the head.

  She was home. It was time to let facts and f
ears about leukaemia-inducing benzene and blazing tanks sink to the very bottom of her mind.

  The steaks were perfect, soft to the teeth, but much better flavoured than any mass-produced supermarket meat, and the sauce George had invented intensified the taste rather than masking it. There was a baked potato with butter for David, while the adults made do with an austere dressing-less green salad. George had struggled to lose weight a couple of years ago and was determined not to regain it. Trish carried no spare flesh, but disliked feeling full and was usually happy to keep her fat and carbohydrate intake as low as his.

  Afterwards, while she stacked the dishwasher and George put his feet up with the day’s newspaper, David took himself to bed. House rules allowed him to read for as long as he liked on Saturday nights, but he had to be in bed by ten-thirty. So far, Trish hadn’t had any trouble with him, but she wasn’t sanguine enough to believe it would never come. Exposure to drugs, binge drinking, sex, fights and worse hovered just out of sight in the inevitable future, but she wasn’t going to waste time worrying until she had cause.

  By the time she’d scoured the grill and saucepans and cleaned the kitchen surfaces, George was asleep on the sofa. She carefully pulled apart the glowing embers in the fireplace, dragged the mesh safety curtain across it, and went to have her shower. She’d wake him later and get him upstairs to bed.

  When she emerged, the back of her dark hair damp and her whole long body glowing with heat, she saw him sitting in the spoon-backed chair in the corner of the bedroom, wearing nothing but striped pyjama trousers, cutting his toenails. There was only the smallest bulge of flesh under the lowest ribs and a little mottling of his upper arms.

  ‘So romantic,’ she said, unwinding the red towel that was doing temporary duty as a dressing gown and draping it over the radiator. Today’s extra-large T-shirt was new, a present from David, with great red letters across the chest, saying: ‘World Beater’. She pulled it over her head.

  George looked up from his task, one ankle balanced on the other knee, like a classical statue.

  ‘About as romantic as your negligee.’

  Trish squinted down at the slogan and laughed with him.

  ‘What really happened over the Scrabble, George?’

  He put down the scissors and laid a neat piece of big toe nail beside them. ‘I wondered whether you’d picked it up. There was a bit of a spat. David was already doing well when he bunged the x down on a triple he could use in both directions to make ox and ax and therefore got fifty points, which put him right out of Jay’s reach. Jay lost it. He started swearing in the filthiest language I’ve ever heard – really gross – then grabbed the board and cracked it down on David’s head before I could stop him, scattering tiles everywhere.’

  ‘Oh, shit.’ The actual assault didn’t sound at all serious, but Jay’s overreaction to an ordinary bit of frustration was exactly what Trish had always feared.

  If David had been on his own with him and retaliated, anything could have happened. Thank God for George’s generosity in giving up his afternoon at Twickenham.

  ‘I thought it best to take it casually,’ he said, ‘so I asked David to clear up while I drove Jay home. And I said I’d pick him up again tomorrow at ten.’

  ‘Why this enthusiasm for the wretched Jay’s company?’ Trish disliked her reluctance to have him here quite as much as the proof that she’d been right to be cautious in the first place.

  ‘I feel sorry for him, I suppose.’ George went back to his nails. ‘And I like the fact he’s not a wimp. With a drunk for a mother, no father, brutal elder brother, he could easily be a victim. But he isn’t; he fights back.’

  Trish stared at his bent head, and at the capable fingers shaving more and more off his toenails.

  ‘He certainly does,’ she said, knowing she sounded as dry as the most stick-in-the-mud kind of judge. She took the head teacher’s letter out of her bag. ‘You ought to read this.’

  He took the letter in silence, tilting it towards the light. ‘Doesn’t surprise me too much. And he’s never shown signs of that sort of thing here. All he did was whack David over the head with the Scrabble board. There’ve been times when I wouldn’t have minded doing it myself.’ Pausing, he looked up at her worried face and added: ‘Come on, Trish; it was hardly life-threatening.’

  ‘No.’ She shuffled through all the things she wanted to say, then abandoned them. ‘Coming to bed?’

  ‘Soon.’ He bent back to his task of reducing his toenails to the smallest possible size.

  What was he not telling her? She knew him well enough to be sure there was something; but she also knew asking too many questions too soon would act on him like a hermetic seal. If she could be patient, she’d get it in the end, whatever it was.

  Chapter 5

  Angie raised herself on one elbow so she could smooth the deep ridges in the sheet beneath her body. Her eyes burned and the blood thumped hard enough in her head to make it ache.

  She wished she’d never challenged Fran, never suggested living on benefit was in any way wrong, or that it was FADE’s fault she was facing destitution. Somehow she’d have to explain that whatever happened in the case she wasn’t going to start dishing out blame. The whole thing was her own responsibility and, whatever her terrors and regrets, she was genuinely grateful to Fran and Greg. Still. And to the other FADE volunteers who’d given up their time to research old cases as well as all the latest scientific reports about groundwater contamination, and the way benzene particles could increase the risk of all kinds of cancer, and everything else she was going to have to quote in court.

  The sheet was smooth again. She made herself lie flat on her back and pulled the light hollow-fibre duvet up over her shoulders, closing her puffy eyelids.

  Could she do it? Could she keep all the facts in her head when the other side started to interrupt and question and accuse her of misunderstanding the legal system or bringing in evidence that wasn’t allowed or generally showing herself to be ignorant and amateurish?

  Years ago she’d felt like this during takeovers. Her back ached and she turned on her side. In those days, she’d been one of the youngest on the bank’s team and merely had to scurry about doing what she was told. It hadn’t stopped her worrying, though, or hating everything about the life and most of her imperviously confident rivals.

  All the squash she’d eaten had given her dreadful wind. Trying to laugh away her angst, she thought of the old-fashioned shepherd’s remedy she’d seen in the film of Far from the Madding Crowd. If she’d been a ewe, someone could have jammed a spike into her stomach to let out the gas. She pulled down one of the pillows and hugged it against herself. That was better.

  You couldn’t see the moonlight here in Kentish Town, only the yellow glare of the streetlamps, and the elongated triangles of light that swept across the ceiling every time a car turned into the street.

  John would still be alive if they hadn’t left London twenty-six years ago. Adam might not have abandoned them. She might have had a proper family instead of having to make do with Fran and Greg.

  A rumbling sound was clearly audible through the wall, then a series of softer, almost tearing whispers as though someone was pulling bedclothes and plumping pillows. Air clonked in pipes, probably from the flat next door. She hadn’t felt as hemmed in by other people since she’d been a child at boarding school, and she longed for the isolation of the farm.

  ‘You’re never happy anywhere,’ she muttered to herself. Lonely at home, fretted by lack of freedom in London, too cold or too hot, furiously angry with the rest of the world, she was horrified by her own failings. ‘Get a grip, for heaven’s sake, and if you can’t rest, take a pill.’

  If sleep was this hard now, with the whole of Sunday to come, what on earth would tomorrow night be like? She’d better save the pill till then.

  Trish was at her desk in chambers by half-past six on Sunday morning, with two huge cardboard cups of extra strong coffee in front of her and two gia
nt chocolate-chip cookies to give her energy. She thought she deserved the extra carbs for all the work she’d be doing today.

  Her first task was to check her memory, scribbling notes of the main facts she’d learned yesterday. Only when she was sure she’d got the chemistry right, and the basic design of the tanks and all their safety features, did she put those documents to one side and embark on learning about life as it had been lived on the Fortwells’ farm.

  The most obvious thing was how hard it had been. The intensity of their struggle rose from the formally worded documents like a smell. They’d earned no more than ten thousand pounds from the sheep in each of the last five years, which was a lot less than she’d be earning for this one case. It certainly wasn’t much to feed and clothe two adults, as well as run the necessary tractors and Land Rover and maintain their ancient buildings. Fees from bed-and-breakfasters added another fifteen hundred pounds in the better years. The surprisingly generous ground rent and salary CWWM paid them for the tank enclave made all the difference. With it, they could manage; without it, they would have been sunk.

  As Trish scrutinised the financial statement Angie had provided to support her claim, she thought back to the interview she’d read with all the details of the careers the Fortwells had abandoned more than a quarter of a century ago. She and George had plenty of friends working in the City who were all earning six-figure salaries with even bigger bonuses. If the Fortwells had stayed …

  ‘Don’t go there,’ Trish said aloud.

  If she were to act in Antony’s stead for the next two or three weeks, she couldn’t allow her brain to be distracted with sympathy. She broke off a large piece of chocolate-chip cookie, dipped it briefly in the coffee, and chewed as she read the draft he’d left for his opening speech.

  The facts were fine and the inferences, too, but the style was all wrong. If she tried to learn this by heart to spout tomorrow, it would sound artificial, unconvincing. She picked up her pen to create her own version.