A Poisoned Mind (22 page)

That would teach sodding Robert.

The phone rang.

‘Trish Maguire.’

‘Hi, it’s me,’ George said. ‘Thanks for your message. It went OK with the police. Jay was clear enough about where he was yesterday and last night, and convincing enough in his ignorance of the attack on his mother. And they’ve checked with Pizza Express and we didn’t leave until after they think the attack happened.’

‘Thank God for that.’

‘But he wouldn’t tell them why he fled at the sight of the uniformed cops on his doorstep.’ George hesitated, then sounded worried as he added: ‘I didn’t think it was my place to do it if he didn’t want to.’

‘You’re probably right,’ Trish said when she’d had a moment to think through the consequences. ‘You never know where that kind of announcement can take an over-excitable cop with targets to meet.’

‘Anyway, Jay’s back in school now. There’s no question of any kind of charge, and the police are still doing some local house-to-house, so they may get an eyewitness. Which should confirm his innocence.’

‘Fingers crossed.’

‘In the meantime, I’ve got an enormous favour to ask, Trish.’

‘Go ahead. I owe you plenty after the last couple of weeks.’

‘It’s my mother. She’s just phoned about some plumber, who’s cocked up the work he was doing but won’t reduce
his bill and has told her he’ll be round at half past twelve to collect a cheque. Or else.’

‘Oh, poor woman.’ Trish had had plenty of experience with emergency plumbers, making leaks worse and leaving a terrible mess behind them.

‘I know.’ George sounded surprisingly impatient. ‘I tried to phone him to remonstrate, but he’s not answering. So I told her to make him ring me the minute he arrives. She got quite hysterical and said any right-thinking son would drive down to be with her and sort it out himself. But I can’t possibly go today. She slammed the phone down on me and hangs up now every time she hears my voice.’

‘I can understand. That kind of thing is scary enough for anyone, but when you’re in your late seventies … d’you want me to go down there and sort him out for her?’

‘Good God no. It’s ninety miles each way. I just hoped you’d ring her for me and get her to see reason.’

‘I can certainly try.’

‘You’re a star, Trish. Thanks. You’ll do it far better than I could. She listens to you.’

Trish laughed. ‘Only because she and I have no history. I’ll email to let you know how I get on.’

‘Great. See you later.’

Having fetched herself a double espresso, Trish came back to her desk and picked up the phone.

She had always got on reasonably well with Selina Henton, but they’d never become intimate. Accustomed to her own mother’s bottomless wells of warmth and emotional openness, Trish had found Selina’s chilly stiff-upper-lippery offputting. Maybe this would be an opportunity to get to know her better.

‘Hello?’ Selina said with extreme caution when she picked up Trish’s call. ‘Who is that?’

‘It’s me. Trish. I was phoning to see if I could help with your plumber.’

‘You are kind. George has just told me to pull myself together and stop being so silly. But you have no idea what the plumber’s like. He—’ Selina’s voice hesitated. There was even a suspicion of a sob before she added in a rush, ‘he’s started threatening me now, Trish. And he’s huge and young, and I’m alone here, and I’m … I’m—’ She couldn’t bring herself to say it.

‘You’re frightened.’ Trish didn’t make it a question. There was no need.

She looked out towards the Embankment. She couldn’t actually see the road from here, but the traffic sounds were relatively light for once.

‘Look, why don’t I come and sort him out for you?’

‘Oh, Trish, I couldn’t ask you—’

‘You’re not, and I’ve got an unexpectedly free day. It shouldn’t take me too long. Hang on, Selina, and if he gets to you before I do, just tell him I’m on my way. OK?’

‘I don’t know what to say, except thank you. I’ll see you in a couple of hours or so.’

Trish sent a quick explanatory email to George, collected her belongings and set off across the bridge to the lock-up where she kept her Audi. There were many times when she’d thought it absurd to pay so much to keep a car she rarely drove. But today wasn’t one of them. Selina lived near the Suffolk coast, which might be only ninety miles from London but took much longer than any other journey of the same length.

As Trish bleeped up the locks of her soft-topped Audi, she
tried to decide whether to head out of London through the City or Docklands.

Whichever way you chose, it was always wrong and you’d be clogged in jams. Then, inevitably, you’d meet someone who told you how amazingly little traffic there’d been on the other route.

Still, it felt surprisingly good to be behind the wheel again, picking her way through the tangled streets of the City. At least here in the car she was in charge. She switched on the radio and smiled as Mozart’s clarinet concerto swelled into the empty spaces all around her.

Today the gods of road management were generous, and she was through the City, out of the suburbs and speeding on to the motorway in record time, which meant she arrived at Selina’s house in a reasonable mood.

The place looked as good as ever in the autumn sunshine: a long, low farmhouse of red brick, which had mellowed over the four centuries since it had been built. Set in a comfortably contoured landscape of green hills and old trees, it had a grace about it that came, Trish had always thought, from the honesty of its construction and lack of showiness. There had been no design involved; it had simply been built of the available materials to shelter people who worked the land and felled the trees and nurtured their animals.

The garden wasn’t quite as manicured as it had been when Trish had first seen it, as though Selina’s energy for hard physical work had waned since her husband’s death, but its lines were as elegant as ever. And there were enough evergreens and shrubs with interestingly coloured or patterned bark to stop it looking bleak now most of the flowers were over.

Trish locked the car and made her way round to the back,
where the kitchen door was always left open. In spite of everything she and George had said over the years, his mother insisted that life in the country was still safe and she wasn’t going to yield to their scaremongering with bolts and alarms.

‘Selina?’ Trish called. ‘Are you there?’

She emerged from the drawing room, as immaculate as ever, with her white hair drawn back in a velvet scrunchie and her tall figure dressed in the familar straight tweed skirt and cashmere twin set.

‘It’s sweet of you to come,’ Selina said, offering a softly powdered cheek for Trish to kiss. ‘But George shouldn’t take advantage of you. Just because he thinks his work is so much more important than anything else; even yours.’

‘It’s all a question of whose clients’ needs are more urgent on any one day,’ Trish said without aggression.

There was no point trying to make Selina understand George’s standing in his profession. To her, he would always be the small boy in grey-flannel shorts with scabby knees and bottle-bottom glasses.

‘D’you want to show me what the plumber did before he gets here?’ Trish went on. ‘Where are the leaks?’

 

The problem wasn’t complicated and the plumber himself turned out to be reasonably amenable, so Trish had the whole thing settled within half an hour.

‘I just don’t like being taken for a silly old fool,’ Selina said when he’d gone. ‘I was sure he was cheating me.’

‘He told me he’s worked for you for a long time. And apparently he comes out at all hours when you need him. I’d have thought that alone would have told you it was safe to trust him.’

Selina snorted. The sound was extraordinary coming from a woman who had always presented such a dignified front to the world.

‘Now,’ she said, smiling again and straightening her back, ‘you’ve had no lunch, Trish. You can’t possibly drive back without anything. I have some smoked salmon in the fridge and a nice brown loaf. Come along and sit down.’

Watching Selina manoeuvre her arthritic fingers around the knives and food, Trish lost the last of her impatience. This woman had managed the transformation from pampered wife of a powerful man to woman-on-her-own with real courage.

It couldn’t be easy to find yourself widowed in your seventies when you’d gone straight from your father’s house to your husband’s. You’d have to learn to deal with solitude as well as all the practicalities of house maintenance, tax and bills you’d never tackled, just at the time when your body was starting to punish you with slowness and pain, and your mind with a whole new set of fears and forgetfulness. Her own have-it-all-generation might complain about being permanently exhausted, but they’d had too much experience ever to face a challenge like Selina’s.

‘There,’ she said, laying out her prettiest plates and putting a white dish of smoked salmon in front of Trish. ‘Help yourself. And give me your news. How are you?’

‘I’m fine, although we’ve been having a rather dramatic time recently with David’s latest school friend. He’s a magnet for trouble, and his family is so fractured and hopeless they can’t help. Poor George even had to go to the police with him today.’

‘No wonder there wasn’t any time left to come here and
help me. Why is he taking so much trouble for a criminal youth?’

‘They get on surprisingly well. In fact,’ Trish said, seizing the opportunity, ‘George confides in Jay. It wasn’t until I heard them talking one day that I knew Henry even existed, let alone how badly—’

‘Please stop there, Trish. I really don’t want to know what George told some unsavoury child about his brother.’ Selina’s voice was icy and her face looked as though she’d had far too much Botox.

‘I don’t understand. What—?’

‘It was all over a long time ago, but it was extraordinarily painful at the time, and I don’t wish to think about it.’

‘It’s not over for George.’ Trish ate a corner of brown bread, then looked up at the other woman, whose eyes were like grey pebbles in her rigid face. ‘I want to help him, and I can’t unless I know what happened. What did Henry do to him?’

‘Henry?
’ Selina’s protest was unnaturally loud, almost raucous. ‘Henry wasn’t the problem. That was George, who insisted on trumpeting his every success and rubbing his brother’s nose in his less satisfactory academic record.’

Trish frowned, trying to understand, but Selina was still talking.

‘We should have sent them to different schools to give Henry a free run, but my husband wanted them both to go where he had been, so there we were.’ She blinked and Trish saw astonishing tears hovering on the edge of her eyelids.

‘Was Henry your favourite?’ she asked more gently than she felt. How could any mother have so misunderstood what she saw?

‘I love and loved both my sons equally.’ Selina had quickly dried her eyes, and her back was even more upright than usual. ‘Henry just needed more help and protection. Life has always been so easy for George.’

That’s all you know, Trish thought, as Selina smoothed back her impeccable silver hair, looking as beautiful as ever. Beautiful and as emotionally blind as the day her younger son first battled with his brother’s jealousy.

‘Could you maybe give me a phone number for Henry?’ Trish said. ‘I’d like to try to broker some kind of peace, let George—’

‘Please don’t interfere. I know you mean well, but it’s been beyond mending for decades. Leave it alone.’

 

Later, driving back to London, Trish wondered whether to talk to George about different ways of looking at his past.

‘Hating anyone is such a waste of time,’ she said aloud, checking her mirror before overtaking an enormous car transporter. ‘And energy.’

Safely past the transporter, she turned on the radio and found herself listening to the local BBC news.

’Mrs Eleanor Lawrence, who was injured when her four-wheel drive crashed into a lorry carrying caustic sludge to a waste-treatment plant, has now had both feet amputated above the ankle. The hospital say she is in a stable condition and they believe they have stopped the damage spreading through her body.

‘The driver and the company that own the lorry are cooperating fully with the police and accident investigators. They have expressed their sincere regret for Mrs Lawrence’s injuries and relief that all three children who were travelling with her remain in good health. But they say their driver
saw her in his rear-view mirror using her mobile phone, which was not hands-free, and turning to talk to her children moments before she crashed into the back of his lorry. Her husband, on the other hand, says that his wife was so worried by the lorry driver’s erratic behaviour she was phoning to alert his company and get help.’

This cannot be coincidence, Trish thought. Someone is sabotaging the safe disposal of toxic waste. And not caring who gets hurt in the process. This is John Fortwell all over again. Whether it’s Greg Waverly or not, whoever’s doing it has got to be stopped.

Back in London in mid afternoon, aching with sympathy for the unknown woman who’d been so excruciatingly injured, Trish returned her car to its expensive but secure space under the old railway arches and took the familiar route across the bridge to chambers.

Apart from the now leafless trees, the only natural thing she could see was the Thames, mud-brown and moving sluggishly between the great masonry bulwarks of Bazalgette’s embankments. She breathed in dust and exhaust fumes and wondered why she felt so much happier with them than the clean Suffolk air and its ravishing landscape.

Only a few people strolled along the pavements as she crossed the road and walked through the grey stone arch into the Temple. She heard her name called and looked to her right to see Sarah Fortescue, a solicitor who had often briefed her while she was still a junior. Sarah was waving from one of the benches in the garden.

Trish waved back and was about to carry on to chambers when she remembered her need for new work. Then she noticed the man sitting on the bench beside Sarah and walked quickly across the crisp grass.

Sarah stood up, smiling, and Trish leaned forwards,
presenting first her right cheek, then her left, for the kind of professionals’ kissing ritual that was as stylised as any dominance display in the animal kingdom.

‘How
are
you?’ Sarah said. ‘It’s been ages.’

‘I know. There’s always so much stuff going on that none of us has enough time for anything except work. How’s everything with you?’

‘Absolutely fine.’ Sarah turned suddenly, as though belatedly remembering her companion.

Ben Givens rose to his feet slowly enough to look reluctant. Trish had recognised him at once and she could see her knew her too, but there wasn’t even the faintest hint of a polite smile on his square face. She noticed the scars of ancient acne on his broad cheeks.

‘Trish, d’you know Ben Givens?’ Sarah said. ‘Ben, this is Trish Maguire.’

‘I know your name, of course, but I’m not sure we’ve ever met,’ she said, holding out her hand and pretending she didn’t hate every single thing about him.

‘No, I don’t think we have.’ He shook her hand briefly, dropping it as soon as he decently could.

She didn’t mind that. His palm had been clammy, which seemed odd in such an apparently confident man. She thought of Robert’s explanation of the chalk bag and the fear that made climbers’ hands sweat.

‘Although your name came up somewhere recently,’ she added, putting her hand up to her forehead as though its pressure on her skull could help her think. ‘Only I can’t remember in what context.’

‘Never mind,’ Sarah said briskly, looking from one to the other. ‘You’ll remember in due course. One always does.’

‘Usually in the middle of the night,’ Trish agreed, laughing.

‘And you’re bound to run into each other. In a world as small as ours, I’m surprised this is your first meeting.’

Ben Givens hadn’t said anything, apart from the graceless greeting. Trish heard some angry dogs scrapping on the far side of the hedge, followed by a human shriek and some sharp protest. It didn’t stop the dogs. She decided to see what would happen if she goaded him.

‘But then my mind’s all over the place at the moment,’ she said. ‘I was just driving back from Suffolk and listening to the local news: some poor unfortunate woman has had both feet amputated after they were covered with toxic gunk when she crashed into the back of a chemical-waste lorry and its contents burst out.’

She was watching Givens carefully. He looked as though he might be sick. Good.

‘You’d never believe anyone could be so vilely irresponsible, would you?’ she went on, pushing and pushing, and wondering whether his hands would feel even wetter now. ‘Crippling someone because they couldn’t be bothered to provide properly secure containers for their dangerous chemicals. It’s despicable.’

Sarah was murmuring some generic kind of sympathetic outrage. But Givens turned his back on Trish.

‘Sarah, I must go,’ he said with a rasp in his voice. ‘There’s a call I’m expecting in chambers. My clerk’ll never forgive me if I’m late. Good to see you.’

‘Of course,’ Trish said clearly, ‘the toxic spill might not have been the company’s fault. It could have been the result of some kind of sabotage.’

Givens stopped and turned back to look at her again. For
a second he didn’t even breathe. Only his eyes moved, blazing out of a face that still looked yellow with nausea. Had she gone too far?

‘I’d be careful flinging around irresponsible accusations like that, if I were you,’ he said.

‘Of course!’ Trish smiled as though someone had given her a magnificent present. ‘You do defamation, don’t you? Now I remember. Someone was telling me only the other day about that completely astounding sum you won for GlobWasMan. Well done, you.’

His lips clamped together and whitened as the blood was forced out of them. The expression in his hot-looking eyes offered a tougher warning than anything he could have said. After a moment he stalked away.

Sarah looked after him with astonishment; Trish, with acute interest.

‘What’s up with him?’ she asked. ‘Was it something I said?’

‘I’ve no idea, Trish. We were just settling in to an important post-mortem about a con with a big client. There was no talk of phone calls then. Weird. I’m sorry about that.’

‘Not to worry. What about some coffee? I could do with it after my journey.’ Trish mentally crossed her fingers. Clearly Sarah knew Givens quite well. She could be very useful.

‘I’d better not. There’s a mountain of work waiting for me. If I can’t have my post-mortem, I’d better get on with it.’ Sarah smiled again, a lot more naturally than Givens had. ‘But I’ll be in touch with you – and with your clerk, of course.’

‘I look forward to it. See you then.’

 

 

Trish’s shoes clacked against the stone stairs of 1 Plough Court. Steve nodded as she walked past the open door of the clerks’ room, but he didn’t call her in to tell her any more about the new brief.

One of the other silks, who was checking his pigeon hole, turned to ask whether she’d seen Antony recently. She passed on the news of his physical recovery and encouraging signs of intense boredom.

In her own room, she dumped her bag on the windowsill and stood looking out at the black branches of the plane trees. They made intricate patterns against the grey-white sky, changing with each new gust of wind. Winter was definitely on its way. Her mind wove in and out of ideas that were almost as intricate and quite as changeable.

At last she abandoned the view. Until there was some reaction from Givens – or Greg Waverly – there was no more she could do. The morning’s newspaper was lying on her desk, with the business section still unread. But she ought to send George a reassuring email about Selina and the plumber first.

Pushing away her laptop when the message had gone through, Trish scoured the financial news, trying to be interested in petroleum futures and fluctuations in the short-term money markets. An interview with a psychopathic-sounding tycoon was more alluring, but the diary beckoned. The style was nearly always witty in a mildly malicious way, and the stories usually showed more human interest than everything in the rest of the section put together.

Today the diary paragraphs were duller than sometimes, but her eye was caught by a reference to GlobWasMan. She wasn’t surprised. You could go months, years even,
never noticing a name or an idea, then have it brought to your attention once and subsequently find yourself tripping over references to it wherever you went.

This was certainly an odd time for such a crucial figure to leave any company. Even if the company secretary’s wife was ill, surely he could have hung on for a month or so until the shares had been sold in the Alternative Investment Market. Anyone who owned a slice of the business would reap a big profit then. Even if this bloke didn’t, he could expect a pretty big bonus. Why would anyone willingly forgo that kind of money?

Or was this sabotage, too, but of a financial rather than a physical kind?

Somewhere Trish had the GlobWasMan Pathfinder prospectus Fred Hoffman had suggested she read. So far she hadn’t even opened it. Shuffling through her papers, she eventually found the thick brown envelope tucked under a heap of old briefs in one of the drawers.

She was impressed by the lavishness of the glossy brochure. GlobWasMan – or their backers – must have
spent a fortune in their attempt to persuade institutions and individuals to buy the shares they were offering. The manifesto at the front began:

Blah, blah, blah, Trish thought, uninterested in any of the sums. The overconfident tone would have put her off investing, even if she hadn’t renounced equities after listening to too much hopeless advice in the past.

There was no mention of last year’s successful libel case anywhere in the prospectus, of course, and no reference to Givens. Turning the pages for something about the decamping Carl Bianchini, she found a double-page spread devoted to photographs and biographical details of all the directors and officers.

The chairman, Ken Shankley, the managing director, Leo Cray, and the finance director, Jed Shaw, were still only in their late twenties, which surprised her. They’d worked together before, setting up one of the fountain of small Internet companies that had sprung up just after the millennium. Unlike most of their rivals, these three, only a year or two out of university, had sold their business just in
time and emerged with a fortune, some of which they had invested in buying the tiny chemical-waste company they’d now built into a considerable force.

Bianchini looked quite a bit older, and it didn’t sound as though he had been part of their inner circle or had any stake in the original company. Interestingly, though, he was also described as the head of the legal department, which meant he must have worked with Givens over the libel trial.

Had they cooked up this plot as soon as the jury’s record-breaking verdict was announced? Or had Givens waited until the initial public offering was launched before trying to suborn Bianchini and so wreck it?

Most heads of legal departments had trained as solicitors. If Bianchini were one of them, he shouldn’t be too hard to find. A few keystrokes on her laptop brought up the Law Society’s website, but there was no reference to him. Surprised and rather annoyed, Trish checked with the latest legal directory in her bookshelves, and there he was.

When she telephoned the Law Society for an explanation, she was told he had voluntarily taken himself off the roll and they had no other information to give out.

‘That must have been pretty quick,’ Trish said. ‘When did it happen? And why?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the voice at the other end of the phone. ‘We have details of solicitors who’ve been struck off, but not the ones who choose to go.’

‘Thanks,’ Trish said.

Her next call was to Fred Hoffman, who sounded preoccupied but as friendly as usual.

‘Pity about Angie’s illness screwing up our timetable, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘What can I do for you, Trish?’

‘I’m going against all the client’s orders and pursuing sabotage, now there’s time to spare. You see, I don’t think he’s the only victim. Someone’s going after GlobWasMan, too, and trying to scupper their IPO. If we find out more, we may be able to get some proof of what they’ve been doing to our client.’

‘Trish!’ Fred’s voice was vigorous with protest. But she was not giving up now.

‘It has to be worthwhile, Fred. Come on. Do you know anything about a onetime solicitor called Carl Bianchini who worked for GlobWasMan?’

‘Can’t say I do.’

‘Could you ask around? See if anyone knows him?’

‘Should I be encouraging you in speculation directly contrary to the client’s wishes? Indeed contrary to his orders?’

She thought she heard a hint of the familiar good nature somewhere in his growly voice and decided to trust it.

‘I take it that’s a rhetorical question. Do your best for me, Fred.’

‘Don’t I always? Got to go. Good bye.’

She hadn’t paid much attention to any of Don Bates’s disasters except the explosion at the Fortwells’ farm, but he had talked about environmental protesters in the States.

Could they be linked to Greg Waverly and Givens? Even though corruption of planning officials in one of the old Soviet states wasn’t likely to be within their scope, environmental protest in America might well be. FADE looked too homespun to have transatlantic reach, but maybe that was just the way Greg wanted them to be seen. After all, Trish had never been convinced by his unkempt beard and grubby jeans, his sandals and shuffly manner.

She was reaching for the phone as her mind suggested the ever more devastating forms of eco-terrorism they might try next. She flicked through her address book with the other hand as she looked for Anna Grayling, the friend whose intervention had stopped her joining Antony on the crossing the day he was knocked down.