A Poisoned Mind (13 page)

’Anyway, he stomped off and I went back to heating bottles for the lambs whose mothers had died. The Land Rover’s engine sputtered a few minutes later and I rushed out. There he was, in our only means of transport, heading out of the farmyard. I got to the open gate ahead of him and stood in the way, so he had to stop.

‘That was brave, Angie.’

‘Or foolhardy.’ Greg’s voice had none of the admiration in Fran’s. Angie ignored him.

‘I waited and Adam eventually got out and came towards me, both hands stretched out, palms up. They were shaking, as though
he’
d been the victim.’

Angie picked up her fork again. She couldn’t tell them quite how badly she’d lost her temper.

‘Then what?’ Fran said when the pause had gone on too long.

Angie heard echoes of some of the things she thought she might have said to Adam and hoped she hadn’t.

‘I more or less told him to grow up and learn how to behave like a human being. He … he yelled back at me.’

‘Saying what?’ Fran’s voice was gentle, but far too interested for comfort.

Angie couldn’t bear even to try to remember. She just shook her head, then found her voice again to finish the story so she could push it all to the back of her memory again:

‘He got back into the Land Rover, slammed the door, revved the engine and drove straight at me. If I hadn’t moved, I’d have been dogmeat. That’s the last time I ever saw him.’

Her face was hot and she could feel the blood thudding in her veins, exactly as it had done that day.

She’d stormed about the yard for a full five minutes, stubbing her toes on the inside of her boots with almost every angry step. Then she’d gone indoors to phone Polly, who’d listened in silence to a highly edited version of what had happened, before offering not only her usual laconic sympathy but also practical help. She’d driven over to Low Topps at the end of her hard day and taken Angie to the station so she could pick up the Land Rover Adam had dumped there.

Hold on to the thought of Polly, Angie told herself, and you’ll be able to keep going.

Polly had often called her ‘pet’ in the Northumbrian way, but it had never sounded sentimental. Anything but. Polly’s sympathy had been the kind intended to stiffen the victim’s sinews, not make her softer and needier than ever. Angie missed her horribly.

‘It sounds,’ Fran started, then stopped. For the first time Angie saw her blush.

‘You can say it. I give you permission. Whatever it is, I can take it.’

‘I just thought it sounded as if Adam had inherited your temper.’ Fran’s smile was carefully judged: kind and twinkly but edged with criticism.

It’s not only the temper, Angie wanted to say. He got my paranoia, too.

But that was an admission she couldn’t make to anyone now that John was dead. Oh, God, how she missed him!

‘Not that I’ve ever seen you angry,’ Fran said quickly. ‘But you’ve talked about it quite often. Maybe Adam’s been regretting everything he said and trying to find a way to
come back all along and not known how. Couldn’t that be why his letter’s a bit cold … out of kind of shame, don’t you think?’

Angie put down the fork again and took hold of Fran’s big hand between both of hers.

‘I think you are the most generous person I have ever met, and the best bridge-builder. But I don’t think you have a clue what you’re talking about.’

 

‘You were pretty angry with me, weren’t you, Trish?’ Antony’s voice was spookily normal as it issued from between the struts of his cage. ‘That note you left last week could have sent me into a decline.’

‘Sorry.’ She barely brushed his hand, but he grabbed hers and gave it a good squeeze.

His grip felt infinitely stronger than the soft clasp he’d managed on his first day in here, when she’d been so afraid of long-term damage to his spine. Now he had a better colour than anyone else in the ward. If it hadn’t been for the cage and the almost healed cut on his face, he’d have looked his usual self again.

‘I thought—’

‘You thought I was encouraging Robert to squeal on you. I know. How’s it going, Trish?’

‘Not too bad, but I still wish I wasn’t up against Angie Fortwell.’

‘Because you’re agonised by her suffering?’ Antony’s smile was more benevolent than usual.

‘Not exactly.’ She hadn’t analysed any of her feelings about this, let alone told anyone else, so the words came out unplanned: ‘It’s more what she represents. She could have been a power in the City by now.’

‘So? It was her choice to throw it all up for sheep farming. All choices have consequences.’

‘That’s why I’m so twitchy.’ Trish rubbed her head, letting herself understand the ideas that had been building up for days now.

The familiar squeak of a nurse’s shoes was followed by a brisk question about the workings of someone’s bowels. Trish glanced round and saw the man in the bed opposite Antony’s blushing as he met her eyes. She quickly looked back at Antony.

‘Angie Fortwell made one wrong decision and look at her now.’

‘True. But so what?’ he said, ignoring the nurse and her questions with an irritable scowl that told Trish how much he hated being in this place, powerless over everyone except his visitors.

‘If you hadn’t persuaded me to come back to the Bar after my sabbatical,’ she said, feeling all the old gratitude, ‘the same thing could’ve happened to me.’

‘I doubt it. Whatever you’d chosen to do, it wouldn’t have left you in a polluted mudpatch. Wherever you’d gone, you’d have ended up in a position to wear a suit that fits like a miracle and cost—’ Antony broke off to examine her, his eyes making all the moves his neck and head could not. ‘A thousand quid?’

‘Not quite. Antony, forget my twitchiness. Tell me: did you never think the explosion in CWWM’s tanks could have been sabotage, some kind of environmental terrorism?’

‘It’s a non-starter, Trish.’ His tone was that of the head of chambers again, brisk and not prepared to waste any time. ‘Even if someone did bugger about with the tanks, there’s no way you’d get any evidence at this stage.’

‘Although,’ she said with a wistfulness that made his smile kinder, ‘given it’s a civil trial we’d need only to establish the balance of probabilities.’

‘Forget it. Sabotage is a forlorn hope over which you’d break your heart and waste time you haven’t got,
and
the client’s money. Concentrate on mitigating the damages. That’s all you need to do. But we shouldn’t be talking about work. It makes me even more aware of this bloody cage.’ He put both hands on the side struts and for a moment looked as though he was about to wrench them apart.

‘Antony, don’t—’

‘Don’t worry: I won’t. In any case, I can’t. They’re absolutely unbendable.’ He forced himself to relax, letting his arms fall by his sides and producing a grin like a corpse’s rictus. ‘So entertain me. How’s the glamorous George?’

She manufactured a laugh at the adjective he’d chosen. The smell of disinfectant caught in her throat as she inhaled. Turning away from him to cough it clear, she caught the eye of a new visitor, an elderly woman in a tightly buttoned overcoat, sitting in silence beside the man with the bowel problem. What was their story? Why had the woman come if they had nothing to say to each other? Did it help the patient? Did it help her? Or was it just duty?

‘Not a good topic, I see,’ Antony said. ‘David? No; not him either. So what
is
good in your life?’

‘At the moment? The sight of you itching with boredom because it means you’re mending and I don’t have to let dark nightmares of fatal outcomes terrify me any longer.’

‘Ah, Trish. My Trish.’

‘Sabotage,’ she repeated, ignoring the hand he was holding out to her. She pointed to the contraption holding his broken neck together. ‘I don’t know that it is such a
non-starter. Have you never wondered whether someone could have wanted you off the case so CWWM had less chance of winning?’

His lean, lined face creased even more as his lips parted, and his eyes could have belonged to a big cat seeing a juicy wildebeest within easy reach.

‘Your imagination is as entrancing as your idea of my importance. But you’re quite mad, you know. Even if someone had wanted me off the case, they’d never have done it like this.’

‘Why not?’

‘Use your brain. One: you and I had been walking through the pedestrianised part of Covent Garden so we could hardly have been followed by a murderous biker. Two: no one’s going to have an assassin waiting on the off-chance that I’m likely to be crossing the road outside the RCJ on a Friday when I’m not due to be in court. Three: the biker and I both misjudged it; I was almost across the zebra and even had one foot on the island so he was within his rights to gauge my speed as he did. It’s just that I turned back to find out why you hadn’t answered my question. There you were, still on the pavement, and there was I under his wheels. It’s what they call an accident.’

‘Right.’

‘Now, that’s enough of that. I told you: you’re here to entertain me. Make me laugh.’

Every funny anecdote had been sucked out of her brain. She couldn’t even remember the playground jokes that had once reduced David to heaving giggles.

‘What happens to Angie if I win?’

‘Don’t be a baby. She’s not your problem.’

‘But she has no one, Antony. Imagine being absolutely alone.’

‘Bollocks. She’s got a successful grown-up son, hasn’t she?’

‘He’s abandoned her.’

‘Why?’ A taunting note in Antony’s voice made her look more closely at him. ‘What did she do to
him
?’

‘Why should she have done anything?’ Even Trish could hear the outrage in her voice. ‘Maybe it was his fault, whatever it was that went wrong.’

‘Oh, come on! What’s that mantra of yours, Trish? It’s never the child’s fault. I’ve often wondered at what age in your private world someone becomes an adult and loses that kind of get-out-of-jail-free pass. Can you tell me?’

Thinking of Jay’s brutal brother, Darren, only three or four years older than Jay himself, she couldn’t.

 

Back in chambers a couple of hours later, she dealt with the twenty or so emails that had built up during her absence, then reread her notes for the next day’s evidence, wishing she hadn’t let herself get so bound up in Angie Fortwell’s problems. As Antony said, they were not her business. Just as it wasn’t her business to find out what had really happened to trigger the tanks’ explosion. All she had to do was make her client’s case as irresistible to the judge as she possibly could.

But she couldn’t stop herself thinking of sabotage and who might have had a motive. She was sure Angie Fortwell was innocent, and her husband too. No one who knew what he was doing would have blocked the vents and then risked his own life by going into the tank enclosure before they exploded. But the unconvincing Greg Waverly was a different matter.

Was there more to his involvement than helping Angie manage her case against CWWM? Could he have taken some kind of active role in blowing up the tanks? Would his loathing of CWWM and its global success have made him angry enough to do something so potentially dangerous to the environment he’d sworn to protect?

Trish had always thought most terrorism was driven by a need to hurt people who had something the terrorist desired so strongly he had to make himself believe he hated it. Maybe CWWM’s efficiency in generating money from toxic chemicals had been too much for Greg Waverly to bear after he’d made such a cock-up of his own tiny, environmentally friendly, organic-food business.

And maybe she was complicating a perfectly simple case with absurdly dramatic speculation.

A beep from her screen told her another email was coming through, but it was only some spammer wanting to entice her into buying counterfeit watches. She deleted it without looking, then clicked on to Google. Antony was almost certainly right in telling her she’d be wasting time if she looked for evidence of sabotage, so she might as well clear all the speculation out of her mind by doing something useful instead. Like finding out about George’s mysterious brother.

As she typed the name Henry Henton into the search box, she didn’t know what she expected to see. There was hardly going to be an account of where in the family pecking order he came vis-a-vis George, or what he’d done to George, or what age they’d been at the time.

It wasn’t hard to isolate the right Henry from all the other thousands of entries. He lived in Shropshire now and worked as a carpenter, specialising in making tables from
old railway sleepers, disused pallets and other waste timber. He was divorced and had three sons. There was even a photograph of him, looking remarkably like George except for his thinner greyer hair and more ruddy complexion.

Parents, Trish thought, usually go grey younger than the childless. So maybe Antony’s right and I’ve never faced up to the burden children can be. Maybe Angie Fortwell
was
the victim of her son, not the aggressor.

She substituted Angie’s name for Henry’s on the Google home page and began to click her way through the entries that appeared.

One website listing bed-and-breakfast operations in Northumberland still had details of the Fortwells’ farm and the prices they charged, along with chatty recommendations from past visitors. No one had been allowed to stay there since the explosion nearly eighteen months ago. Why hadn’t a note been added to the website to say the farmhouse was now closed? How out-of-date could the Internet be?

‘Robert!’ Trish shouted.

There was no answer. She ran down the corridor to his room. A strip of light underlined the door. She pushed it open.

‘Robert!’

‘He’s gone,’ said his red-headed pupil, pushing himself to his feet. ‘Can I help?’

‘Sure, Hal,’ Trish said, surprised by the old-fashioned courtesy. ‘If you’re not too busy. What I need is someone to find out whether there are any blogs by ramblers who walked through the Fortwells’ bit of Northumberland around the time of the explosion.’