A Place of Safety Read online

  ‘But yes,’ Angelique said. ‘They picked it out at seven-thirty this morning. I heard the police boats coming, so I watched them to see what was happening.’ She waved to a beautiful antique brass telescope, which provided the only ornament on a deep window seat that ran under the windows. ‘I couldn’t see anything, but later I heard it on the news.’

  ‘I saw the boats myself,’ Trish admitted, thinking so much had happened since this morning’s walk with David that it could have taken place a week ago. ‘But that was later. About half-past eight. If they’d already found the body, what were they looking for then?’

  Angelique shrugged. ‘Evidence to identify it – it was naked, you see – and for the gun.’

  ‘I wish I’d had time to listen to the radio this evening.’ Trish thought of everything she knew about the shortage of police officers and about all the incident rooms that were dealing with three or four murders at once. How could they have spared all those officers and boats and divers to look for something to identify a single body? They must believe this death was part of something much bigger than that.

  She saw both Carfields looking at her in surprise, so she quickly said: ‘How awful!’

  ‘Except that if they were searching for a gun it sounds much more like suicide than murder,’ Carfield said, returning with a glass of champagne for Trish. ‘No killer would throw away a useful weapon.’

  ‘How could it possibly have been suicide?’ Trish said without thinking about the effect of her sharp question on George’s client. ‘No one’s going to be able to walk naked through London to shoot himself on the edge of a bridge without being stopped – or at least seen on a security camera. No, no. This is murder. It has to be.’

  Her imagination sent pictures of what might have happened flashing through her brain. Even the least brutal of them was so shocking it made Toby Fullwell’s reported fear over his five-million-pound sale seem ludicrously trivial. As Buxford had said, that was only money. At the very least, this story of the naked body must have involved real terror. The thought of it turned the residual taste of champagne nauseatingly metallic on Trish’s tongue.

  ‘It must have been suicide,’ Carfield said with an edge that told her to keep quiet. ‘So none of us needs worry. The mad and miserable have always used rivers for release, in Paris just as much as London. There’s the bell, Angelique darling. Why don’t you let the others in?’ When his wife had gone, he turned back to Trish. ‘You must be local if you were crossing the bridge this morning.’

  She told him obediently where she lived, gazing out at the ravishing black-and-gold spectacle in front of them and trying to deal with the fact that someone had committed murder within ten minutes of her front door. A barge pushed its way up river, thrusting the water away from the bows in two fans that looked brilliantly white against the blackness of the river.

  ‘Was the body male or female?’ she asked.

  ‘Male,’ Carfield said, watching her over the rim of his champagne glass. ‘Why?’

  ‘I was thinking of the suicide figures,’ she said at random. ‘Statistics show that far more men than women kill themselves these days.’

  Carfield said coldly that he supposed she must come across that kind of information in her work. Remembering her duty to him as George’s client, Trish forced the thought of the body to the back of her mind and tried to ask intelligent questions about the future of software until Angelique introduced her to the new guests.

  They were a couple who owned a company that made pop videos. Their whippy bodies told Trish that they must spend a long time in the gym, and their superconfident aura that their company was successful. It wasn’t their fault that they didn’t share her horror of the story about the body, but she found their imperviousness unpleasant.

  Failing to find any points of contact with them, Trish soon abandoned the idea of a real conversation and asked about their skiing plans. She had already forgotten their names and thought of them as the He-producer and the She-producer. Luckily they were flying off just after Christmas and had an elaborate programme of off-piste skiing already arranged. Telling her about it lasted right through George’s appearance and the much later arrival of the last two guests. At last, Angelique announced that dinner was ready.

  The food was good, and conversation soon became less laboured. No one said anything more about the body in the river, although Trish thought, looking from one face to the next, that she wasn’t the only one who found it hard to forget.

  Carfield talked well, and eventually Trish made everyone laugh with an account of one of her more eccentric cases. The main-course plates had just been collected when the front-door bell rang.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Carfield asked sharply, as though his wife had X-ray vision.

  She shrugged elegantly and turned away to consult one of the two young Asian women who were distributing pudding plates among her guests. Trish noticed that the video producers were exchanging complicit glances.

  ‘It should be our contribution to the evening,’ the She-producer said. ‘I knew we mustn’t bring flowers because of Angelique’s hay fever, and chocolates are so suburban. One of us had better answer the door or they won’t make the delivery.’

  ‘How very generous of you,’ Carfield said. ‘Go ahead. Hold the pudding Angelique.’ He went to a concealed cupboard below the window seat and took out a small stack of mirrored-glass squares.

  Trish understood the video producers’ sly smiles and felt more uncomfortable than ever. How was she going to get out of this without offending George’s client? Inspiration struck her as she remembered the last dinner she had given, when three of the guests had refused to eat one or other course because of their allergies and food intolerances.

  ‘Not for me, Jeremy,’ she said, fixing him with the same kind of sadly accusing stare she’d seen on their faces. ‘The awful thing is I’m allergic. I just can’t take cocaine.’

  ‘You can’t be,’ said the He-producer, laughing at her. ‘You’re probably just inexperienced and afraid. Have a go. I’ll talk you through the process. You’ll enjoy it, believe me.’

  Trish smiled at him and saw even more complacency in his pale eyes, and enough arrogance and contempt to make her hate him.

  ‘No, thank you,’ she said sweetly. ‘I’ve met too many of the mules who have to swallow the stuff before they smuggle it in. If you thought about how they excrete it and then pick it out of their own shit, you might be allergic, too.’

  The She-producer looked at Trish with as much disgust as though she had just expelled a fart. Trish turned in apology to her host.

  ‘I don’t want to be a party-pooper,’ she said, ‘but I’ve got to get into chambers early tomorrow, so I should probably leave you to it.’

  George was getting to his feet, too. Trish frowned at him, slightly shaking her head. He ignored the gesture, thanked Angelique for a superb evening and made his own excuses.

  ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ Trish said as they reached the marble and glass atrium at the foot of the building. ‘I’d hate to cause trouble with one of your best clients.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ve said worse things to Jeremy in my time, and I was glad of the excuse to get out.’ He put his arm around her shoulders. ‘I’ve had a hell of a day. What about you?’

  This was clearly not the moment to tell him about David’s fight. She didn’t think she’d bother him with Buxford’s peculiar little enquiry either. Not yet anyway.

  ‘Not too bad. I must say I was amused by the delivery,’ she said, leaning against him. ‘I thought that was a kind of urban myth.’

  ‘Or a wish-fulfilment fantasy.’ He sounded more like himself. ‘I’m sorry it had to happen when you were there. I know how strongly you feel about coke.’

  ‘Only because of the number of people whose whole lives have been wrecked in order to produce a momentary pleasure for self-indulgent tossers like that.’ Trish shook herself like a wet dog. ‘You know, I hate the snobbishness of cool almo
st more than the sort that comes from owning the same five thousand acres for four hundred years.’

  ‘I know you do. It’s one of the reasons I love you. May I stay tonight?’

  They’d reached the glass doors out into the street. A uniformed doorman let them out. The cold was like a fist punching into their faces. Trish revelled in it, breathing so deeply that she had a moment of dizziness and had to lean against him.

  ‘Of course. It would be mad to go back to Fulham now.’

  ‘Yes, and David will be asleep.’

  Next morning, she had a difficult time with David at breakfast, dealing with more questions about what the divers had really been doing in the river. It turned out that he’d known all about the naked body when they were walking home yesterday, and about the bullet, because he’d heard about them at school. Now all he wanted to know was when the murderer would be caught.

  His voice wobbled on the word ‘murderer’. Aching for him, trying to make him feel even a little safer, Trish talked gently about the way the police ran their investigations, and the kind of evidence they would be trying to find now. She wished she had some facts she could use to reassure him and did her best with generalities.

  It didn’t work, and he soon stopped talking altogether. The walk to school felt twice as long as usual. Today he kept to the very edge of the pavement, even when lorries thundered past, as though he was afraid to get anywhere near the parapet or look over at the river.

  When they reached the school gates, he ran straight in, and didn’t even produce his usual wave when he reached the door into the juniors’ part of the building. Trish decided to phone his godmother, Caro Lyalt, who was an inspector in the Met, as soon as soon as she got to chambers. If anyone could help now, it would be Caro.

  But she found Robert Anstey blocking her way. He smiled at her with an expression of such self-satisfaction that he looked like a camel. She knew he wanted her to ask what he was looking so pleased about, so she smiled at him and kept her mouth shut. Clearly disappointed, he sauntered into Antony’s room and shut the door behind him.

  Trish went straight to the clerks’ room to find out what was going on.

  ‘Nothing to worry you,’ Steve said, pursing his mouth to show that he was going to tell no secrets.

  ‘Come on. It’s obviously a big case. Tell me about it.’

  ‘It’s crime.’ He bared his teeth in what might have passed for a smile. ‘And you keep telling me you don’t do crime any more, so it can’t be of any interest to you.’

  ‘What sort of crime?’

  ‘A solicitor’s been charged with laundering money for a client,’ Steve said, casually shuffling some papers on his desk. ‘We’re for the defence.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like Antony,’ Trish said, remembering the disdain with which he had once talked about the lower end of the legal and accountancy professions, where he’d claimed money-laundering was rife. ‘Who’s the solicitor?’

  ‘Monica Carrell, the youngest partner at Flyte Wilson. They only made her an equity partner last year. Must be regretting it now, mustn’t they?’

  That explained it. Flyte Wilson was a huge international firm with a great reputation and a vast list of commercial clients. But it didn’t explain why Antony had picked Robert to be his junior.

  Trish thought furiously of the hours she’d put in on Antony’s cases over the past year, sacrificing huge amounts of time she could have spent with her family to do it. They hadn’t lost a single one of those cases and yet Antony had still dumped her for Robert. Presumably he’d had this planned when he’d thrown her Henry Buxford’s trivial little job as a kind of sop. Bastard!

  Hating him and Robert, and Buxford too, Trish stomped off to her own room to get hold of Caro. The phone rang for nearly a minute before she answered, sounding breathless and harassed.

  ‘Trish,’ she said. ‘What’s up? I haven’t got long to talk.’

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m worried about David. He’s heard all about the body your colleagues fished out of the Thames. Not surprisingly, he’s in a great state about it, and I want to reassure him, but I’ve nothing to do it with.’

  ‘Nor have I.’ Caro’s voice was brisker than usual. ‘All I know is what I’ve read in the papers, just like you, and so far there’s been nothing to suggest they have any idea who did it. What exactly is David afraid of? A killer coming for him in the night?’

  ‘Probably. I think if I were his age and my mother had been bludgeoned to death, I’d find any hint of another killer near where I lived pretty terrifying. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Almost certainly. And not just at David’s age. How is the fear taking him?’

  ‘It’s making him aggressive.’

  ‘David? You’re joking.’

  ‘No.’ Trish told her about yesterday’s fight, adding: ‘There has to be a connection, but I can’t get him to talk about it. You would probably do better. He’s so much easier with you. I suppose you wouldn’t like to come for an early supper with us, would you? You and Jess, obviously, if she isn’t working.’

  ‘She is, but it’s television, so she’s often free in the evenings. We’d love to come. When?’

  ‘Tonight or tomorrow? It’s only pasta today, cooked by me, but tomorrow George is doing his famous fish pie. If you’re both free then, I’ll tell him to get enough for all of us.’

  ‘I’d go a long way for George’s cooking.’ Caro’s voice relaxed a little. ‘And I am free tomorrow. I’ll get Jess to phone you if she’s got a problem.’

  ‘Good. I’ll tell him. See you then. As early as you can make it.’

  Trish felt a little more optimistic. David adored Caro, and she had spent enough time in the child protection unit to know how to deal with children far more damaged than he was.

  Accepting the fact that there was nothing more she could do for him now, Trish pulled Buxford’s papers out of her desk, hoping she would find something she could use to satisfy him. When Robert’s unmistakable footsteps slowed down outside her open door, she arranged her face with care and looked up with a brilliant smile, as though he’d just given her a stunning present.

  ‘Congratulations, Robert. I gather you’re about to star in a huge case with Antony.’

  ‘Cow,’ Robert said, before sticking out his tongue at her. ‘You might at least sound jealous.’

  Trish laughed. ‘I am, of course. Money-laundering is a huge gap on my c.v. I know virtually nothing about it, and—’ She stopped suddenly, distracted by the thought of Toby Fullwell’s unneeded five million pounds.

  ‘And you’re planning to augment your pathetic fee income with a little cleaning-up of criminals’ money yourself, are you?’ Robert suggested with an evil grin.

  ‘It’s true, isn’t it,’ Trish went on, not bothering to answer, ‘that you can get seven years in prison for just not reporting your suspicions that money you’ve been paid might have come from drug dealing? Even if you yourself weren’t involved in any crime whatsoever?’

  ‘Absolutely. You have to file what they call an STR with the police, a Suspicious Transaction Report. Of course, you can get twice that for actually doing the laundering. Which is why all bankers and solicitors are so paranoid about checking where their clients’ money comes from these days. But it’s one of the few things you won’t have to worry about as you struggle on at the Bar, Trish. None of us ever has to handle clients’ money.’

  ‘What?’ she said vaguely, pretending she hadn’t been listening to him.

  He looked so disappointed that she nearly laughed again. Despairing of a good fight to get his cerebral juices flowing, he gave up and ambled off to his own room.

  Trish went back to the papers Buxford had sent her. There was nothing to suggest that any of the trustees had even raised a question about the source of the money Toby had received for the de Hooch. Maybe there was no reason for them to worry about it. But Henry must have questioned it once he’d become so suspicious of the sale itself.
/>   She had always thought better with a pen in her hand, so she started to doodle. Pictures of sacks of money appeared in a circle on the paper in front of her, with arrows joining one to the next. She wished she’d thought of all this before she’d talked to Robert so that she could have sucked out everything he knew about money-laundering while he’d been in her room.

  All she knew was the obvious stuff: that the profits of drug dealing had to be disguised. After all, if you had no obvious source of income and yet were seen to be spending – or investing – a fortune, people would start wondering where you’d got it. Pretty soon the police would be round asking inconvenient questions; as, in due course, would the Inland Revenue and Customs & Excise.

  The easiest answer would be that you’d been gambling, but you might have to show some proof. If so, you might persuade the owner of a dodgy casino to take in a suitcase of your ill-gotten cash and give you back a cheque, which you could wave at the police as evidence of legitimate winnings at the table. Casino owners paid cash into their banks all the time, so no one would bother to ask one of them where he’d got a particular bundle. You’d have to pay him a commission, of course, but no business was ever without its costs, so you’d wear that. Then you’d start putting your relatively clean money through a whole variety of other transactions to make it even harder to trace back to the original crime.

  Could the art market provide an alternative to the casino? Trish asked herself, drawing a stack of framed paintings beside her money bags.

  As far as she could see, the answer had to be ‘yes’. You could spend the profits of your latest crime on a painting, bidding through an intermediary and insisting on the kind of anonymity common in the art world. When you later chose to sell the picture, you would get back a cheque from the auctioneers, which would make your money look perfectly respectable to anyone who wasn’t actively tracking it from transaction to transaction.

  A clumsy picture of a club-like implement appeared on the paper in front of Trish as she tried to draw an auctioneer’s gavel. Then she added a huge question mark as her mind produced an objection: what would happen if you’d bought a dud? No one else would want it and so, instead of nice clean money, you’d be left with a worthless piece of painted canvas on your hands.