Out of the Dark Read online

  ‘Don’t cry,’ said a quiet voice in front of her.

  A blonde woman in her twenties, holding a grubby toy duck to her chest, gazed at Trish with excoriating sympathy.

  ‘He’s going to be all right, I’m sure. He looks so much better than he did last night when they brought him up. I was here then, too. Honestly, I’m sure he’ll be fine.’

  Trish felt her forehead tightening. She couldn’t make herself say anything.

  ‘I’m not surprised you’re so shocked,’ the woman said kindly. ‘It must have been terrible when you heard what had happened. But at least you weren’t driving. I can’t think of anything worse, can you? For a mother to half-kill her own child, I mean.’

  ‘He’s not mine,’ Trish said, but it came out as a croak. Suddenly she needed to be on her own, away from even the kindest of strangers. But when she’d pushed her way out of the swing doors and reached the lift, she realised how rude she’d been and rushed back to apologise.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said the woman. ‘We all go a bit mad when our kids are in here. Mine’s doing so well now that I’m functioning again, but it took me at least ten days. Try to get some sleep. You won’t do him any good if you give in to it. Better to dope yourself and get some rest than lie worrying all night. I’ll probably see you tomorrow, won’t I?’

  Trish abandoned the effort to explain. She didn’t know enough to make it convincing, so she just left the woman believing David was her son and she distraught with anxiety for him.

  Walking back to the flat, she was glad to find the streets as unthreatening as usual. Angry with the policeman for putting unnecessary fears into her mind last night, she went upstairs for her usual post-work shower. Even before she’d taken off her clothes, she stared at her face in the bathroom mirror. It was impossible not to see the similarities with David’s.

  ‘Who the hell is he?’ she asked her reflection.

  Getting no answer, she had her shower. Then, with wet hair sleeked back and dressed in floppy shorts and T-shirt, she poured herself a glass of wine and tried to think instead of feel.

  The most obvious source of help was Caroline Lyalt, a sergeant in the Met, whose advice was always worth more than most people’s. She was also absolutely trustworthy and could be relied on to keep anything Trish said to herself. The two of them had met on a murder case in the past, when Caro had been working with AMIP, and they’d become something more than acquaintances if less than friends. Recently, Caro had been posted to an East London police station, while she worked for her next promotion.

  Trish refilled her glass with icy New Zealand Sauvignon and rang Caro’s mobile.

  ‘Caroline Lyalt,’ said a crisp voice that wasn’t actually rude but made it clear that the call had better be important. It was a tone Trish knew well. She used it herself whenever the demands of clients, colleagues and emails got too much.

  ‘Hi, Caro. It’s Trish Maguire,’ she said very fast, to take up as little time as possible. ‘I need to talk to you. Are you very busy, or might we be able to meet?’

  ‘I’m frantic. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. OK? Sorry. Bye.’

  Sympathising, Trish took another mouthful of wine, letting the cool sharpness prickle against her tongue and slide down her throat. She thought of David’s relaxing as the apple juice eased into his mouth and knew she had to do everything in her power to help. The trouble was that she couldn’t think of anything useful to do.

  Her mobile was ringing. She hoped it was Caro, but heard her father’s voice as soon as she answered it.

  ‘Trish? ’Tis Paddy here. How are you, now?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she lied because they still weren’t on the kind of terms that would allow her to tell him about the miscarriage.

  She’d pretty much forgiven him now for abandoning her and her mother soon after her seventh birthday, but it had been hard to get over the huge barrier of mistrust. Paddy hadn’t even bothered to try to make contact again until she’d established a reputation at the Bar. Then, each time one of her cases figured in the law reports or her name was mentioned in any article about successful women, there would be another letter or phone call from him.

  Knowing how he’d thrown all emotional and financial responsibility for her on to his deserted wife, Trish had thought it outrageous that he’d then tried to claim some kind of credit for what she’d become, which was what the timing of his approaches seemed to imply. Everything she’d achieved was thanks to Meg, her mother, who’d fought to make her feel as secure as anyone could. Meg had used her few formal skills to get a job as a doctor’s receptionist so that she could be at home when Trish got back from school, even though it had meant going out again to supervise late-evening surgeries. She’d never mentioned Paddy, except to say that he’d loved Trish and had gone only because of his own problems. And she’d encouraged Trish to work and pass every available exam so that she could go anywhere and be anything she wanted.

  Grateful for all of it, admiring, devoted and absolutely on Meg’s side, Trish had felt it would be disloyal to have anything to do with her father. Only when Meg herself had heard of his approaches and had made it clear that she positively wanted Trish to get to know him, had she felt free to answer one of his letters. Eventually they’d met and slowly found a way to like each other. Then last year, when Paddy had had a heart attack and Trish had been afraid he would die, she’d let herself admit that she loved him.

  Trusting him at last, she’d asked why he’d abandoned them, hoping to make sense of the old betrayal and the anger that had propelled her into her career and out of a lot of relationships of her own. He’d told her that had seen it as the only way of controlling his urge to batter Meg. That second betrayal might not have hurt as much as the first, but the shock of it was with Trish still.

  ‘What about you, Paddy?’ she asked, fighting it back as she always did. After all, Meg had forgiven him, even for the time when he’d failed to control his violence and had put her in hospital.

  ‘Fine, too. Now, be a good child and don’t ask questions about me heart. ’Tis as good as new. Better than ever since the bypass.’

  Child? she thought in a mixture of amusement and irritation. I haven’t been your child since you walked out thirty years ago.

  ‘Now, Bella and I were after taking you out to dinner. You will come, won’t you? With that fat boyfriend of yours out of the way, I’ll bet you’re not eating properly, and I don’t want my only child starving herself.’

  ‘He’s not fat,’ she said automatically and without emphasis. She wasn’t concentrating on either Paddy or George. Instead, running her fingers over her face, she counted up all the features she shared with David – and with Paddy.

  But he’s sixty-three, she thought absurdly. Old enough to be David’s grandfather.

  ‘Trish? Are you there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here. I was distracted by something. Sorry. Yes, I’d like to have dinner. When?’

  ‘Tonight? We’ve found a nice little old-fashioned Italian restaurant just round the corner from Cottesmore Court. They still flame things in front of you and there are bottles in straw and Alpine soldiers’ boots and hats on the walls. You will come, won’t you? Bella’s still working, but she said she could get to the restaurant by nine.’

  Reeling from the idea that David could be his son – and that she might well have loads of half-siblings she knew nothing about – Trish agreed.

  ‘But why don’t you and I meet at half past eight so that we can have a quiet father-and-daughter drink together first?’

  ‘That’d be great, Trish.’ He sounded surprised. ‘I’ll see you there at half eight, then.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, before putting down the mobile.

  The light on her answering machine was flashing. Even though she knew there wouldn’t be one from George – the time difference made that thoroughly unlikely – she played the messages.

  There was one from her mother, two from friends just back from holiday and w
anting to see her, and one from Anna:

  ‘Trish, are you feeling any better? I felt very guilty after lunch, when I realised quite how much pressure I’d been putting on you when you were feeling frag. I hadn’t meant to. Do ring when you’ve got a minute.’

  Trish picked up the phone. An apology from Anna was rare enough to need encouraging. Besides, it would be good to be distracted from Paddy and the idea that he might be responsible for David’s existence. Somehow Trish was going to have to find out, and she just couldn’t see herself asking him a direct question.

  ‘Anna?’ she said when her call was picked up. ‘Hi. It’s Trish. Thanks for your message. I’m fine. But you’re right, I was feeling fragile. I’m sorry I ran out on you.’

  ‘God, I’m glad. I had a sudden ghastly feeling that you might have … you know, when I talked about children. Trish, you looked so pale, you hadn’t just had a you know … Had you?’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about, Anna?’

  ‘An abortion. You hadn’t just had one, had you?’

  ‘No, Anna. Nothing like that.’ Intrusive questions Trish could take, even though she didn’t like them. Sympathy would be impossible just now, so she wasn’t going to admit to the miscarriage.

  ‘Thank God for that.’ Anna’s sigh was deep enough to have come from one of the great whales. ‘I know I’m tactless, but I’d never have forgiven myself for that. Now, there’s a terrific film by a new Polish director on at the NFT next week. I’ve got a couple of tickets for Wednesday. Would you like to come?’

  ‘Why not? Thank you, Anna. I’ve got to dash now, so let’s talk on Wednesday morning about when to meet. Thanks for ringing. Bye.’

  Chapter 4

  The restaurant was all Paddy had promised, with red-and-white gingham cloths and candles stuck in straw-basketed chianti bottles, and packets of grissini criss-crossed between the waterlily-shaped pink napkins. Trish and her father were both drinking Campari-soda to fit in with their surroundings. She liked the fact that he shared the joke so easily. He snapped another breadstick as she asked him when he’d met Bella. It wasn’t a very subtle way into the discussion she hoped would lead to information about David’s parentage, but it was the best she could do.

  ‘About seven years ago. Why?’

  ‘I just wondered who you were with before that, say nine or ten years ago.’ Trish was glad Antony Shelley couldn’t hear her clumsy questions. After all her years at the Bar she should have been better at cross-examination than this.

  ‘Why?’ Paddy’s face was tight with suspicion.

  ‘It was about then that you started trying to get in touch with me,’ she said casually.

  Oddly enough, it was the truth, although she hadn’t been conscious of it until he’d asked his question. Was it a significant connection or a trivial coincidence? His first letters and phone messages had seemed creepy and self-serving at the time. But what if they’d been prompted by his discovery that he was about to have another child? Could that have so shocked him that he’d needed to see how his first had turned out?

  ‘I’m trying to fill in the lost years, get to know you retrospectively,’ she said. Paddy was frowning now, but in cynical calculation, Trish thought, not anxiety, so she quickly improvised, adding: ‘What were you doing then – for work, I mean?’

  ‘Advising on personal development within corporate structures, just as I am now, but freelance, not as well, and not for nearly as much money. Trish, what is all this?’

  ‘And you had a girlfriend?’

  ‘Sure, and wasn’t I the broth of a boy, even if I was in my fifties?’

  ‘Don’t go stage Irish on me,’ she said, hating the way he used the fake brogue to deflect questions he didn’t want to answer. She still wasn’t sure whether it was a subconscious response to threat or a deliberately evasive tactic, but then she knew so little about him, in spite of a scary number of shared characteristics.

  ‘So who was she? Or they, if you were really such a broth of a boy?’

  ‘You mean you want a list? Leporello, eat your heart out.’

  Who the hell’s Leporello, Trish wondered, until she remembered an uncomfortable evening at Glyndebourne, helping George with some client entertaining. As senior partner in his firm of solicitors, he had to do a lot of that, and Trish joined in whenever she could.

  She wasn’t particularly musical, but she’d enjoyed Don Giovanni itself. What she’d passionately disliked about the evening was the pomposity of the other guests, the achingly long journey back into London afterwards, and the whole silliness of putting on evening dress at half-past two in the afternoon to flog out to deepest Sussex. If the weather had been good, it might have seemed less absurd as an entertainment for the kind of people who usually gave the impression that they would be too busy to go to their own mother’s funeral. In the rain, the whole self-congratulatory pantomime had made her think of Thomas Aquinas’ gruesome theory that the pleasure of those in heaven would be greatly increased by the sight of the agony of those in hell.

  ‘I hope your list is fewer than mille-tre,’ she said, then despised herself for needing to prove she’d picked up his reference. From the glint in his black eyes, he knew exactly what she was doing – and what she felt about it.

  ‘By one or two.’ He smashed two grissini at once and sprayed crumbs all over the cloth.

  ‘So, who were they? Come on, Paddy. Stop being so coy.’

  ‘But why do you want to know?’

  ‘I told you. I want to fill in the lost years, get to know you as you were all the time I was being so silly and inventing all sorts of weird, unfair ideas about what kind of man you must be.’ That was better. That really might get him talking.

  The glint dimmed in his eyes. Disappointment or reassurance? She couldn’t tell.

  ‘For God’s sake, Trish,’ he said, looking at something over her shoulder.

  ‘Please, Paddy. It’s very important to me to know the truth about how you lived while I might have known you but didn’t.’

  ‘Look, I had only one girlfriend at the time. If I give you her name, will you shut up about it now?’

  ‘So long as you add her address.’

  ‘Why? I warn you, Trish, I will not have you banging on her door, badgering her with questions.’

  ‘D’you really suppose she still lives in the same place after ten years?’ Trish said, refusing to offer a direct lie about her intentions. She might not go banging on the door, but she was definitely intending to pursue the woman.

  Expecting Paddy to refuse, she was surprised when he took an old envelope out of his pocket and began to write fast and untidily, muttering, ‘See to Bella, will you?’

  Trish glanced over her shoulder, to see her father’s current partner in the doorway of the restaurant, looking around for him. No wonder he’d suddenly turned cooperative. The last thing he’d want would be Bella catching him discussing one of her many predecessors. Happy enough to fulfil her part of the bargain, Trish waited until the head waiter had stopped kissing Bella, then took his place.

  Bella looked surprised but pleased, saying when they’d both straightened up, ‘You’re looking very well, Trish. Paddy was sure you’d be starving yourself into a knitting needle with George away.’

  ‘I may not be nearly such a good cook as George,’ Trish said, as she stood between Bella and the table, ‘but even I can boil a cauliflower and open a pot of yoghurt. Shall we order your drink while we’re here, to save time? They spend so long kissing new arrivals that it takes ages to get them to bring anything to the table.’

  Bella turned to the waiter and said she’d like a glass of prosecco, please. Then she and Trish joined Paddy. Trish saw the folded envelope in her place and discreetly put it in her bag while Paddy gave Bella a quite unnecessarily theatrical kiss. Trish wondered whether he was giving her time to get the envelope out of sight or punishing her for digging into his past. She knew her mother wouldn’t have minded the evidence of his passion for Bella, bu
t that didn’t make it any easier for his daughter to watch.

  This business of treating your parents as one adult to another was tough, Trish had found long ago. Ashamed of her truculence, she set out to be entertaining. It was worth the effort. Bella stopped talking to her as though she were a potentially temperamental invalid that night, and they discovered a lot of shared ground. At one moment, Paddy even told them to stop excluding him. They both laughed then, and agreed to order zabaglione all round, even though the menu and the waiter both warned that they’d have to wait twenty minutes for it.

  Trish drove home at the end of the long evening understanding both her parents better than she ever had. If a woman like Bella could have spent seven years with Paddy, it was no longer so surprising that Trish’s mother, Meg, had once loved him enough to marry him and have a child – and even to make light of his drinking and the violence that had followed it. Meg had always claimed that Paddy had only hit her once, but Trish’s professional experience of domestic assaults made that hard to believe.

  It was far too late to do anything about contacting his old girlfriend tonight, but Trish couldn’t resist seeing where she’d lived. Unfolding the envelope Paddy had given her, she saw that he’d added a note at the bottom. Don’t go stirring up trouble now, Trish.

  She knew she couldn’t promise that. If David turned out to be the product of one of Paddy’s affairs, bringing the information to light would do a lot more than cause trouble. But she couldn’t leave the boy unclaimed in hospital without being sure she’d done everything she could to establish his identity. He’d had her name and address in his fleece, so someone close to him knew all about her. She had to do what she could to find out who he was, however damaging that might be.

  To her surprise, Sylvia Bantell was still listed in the phone book above the same address Paddy had known. Trish rang her next morning from chambers. She answered the phone briskly, giving her name rather than her number, which suggested both confidence and recklessness.