A Poisoned Mind (5 page)

‘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 fears 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.

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 giant 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.

 

Angie was sitting at the kitchen table, rereading CWWM’s witness statements for the twentieth time, trying to drill their lying hints so deep into her mind that she would be able to ask the right questions, however cleverly they tried to twist the true facts. She felt a large, gentle hand on the back of her head.

‘Time to knock off, Angie,’ Fran said, stroking her rough hair. ‘You know it all now. You need to relax. We’ve asked some friends round for a party to cheer you up.’

‘I can’t. I mean, it’s really kind of you; I just don’t feel like socialising.’ She closed her eyes. How could anyone who knew what she was going through expect her to be polite to a bunch of strangers at a moment like this?

‘There’s method in it,’ Greg said from behind Fran.

Angie looked round over her shoulder and past Fran’s wide hips to see Greg carrying an armful of two-litre bottles of wine. At least it’s the real thing, she noted, instead of that disgusting apple stuff. She smiled at him to make up for the silent ingratitude. He didn’t notice because he was lining up his old-fashioned corkscrew for an assault on the bottles.

‘You need to have a kind of line between all this prep and real life; otherwise you’ll go mad,’ Fran said. D’you feel up to helping make some eats? I’ve got some dips to go with carrots and cucumber and celery. They’ll need cutting up into sticks. OK?’

‘Sure.’ Angie pushed the hair away from her eyes and smiled properly. ‘I can do that. Peeled as well?’

‘Don’t bother with peeling,’ Fran said. ‘Such a waste of good fibre.’

They all laughed. Angie realised they were trying to cheer her up and tried to join in. It was the least she could do after all their efforts on her behalf. And they might be right: she had got herself into a rut of manic rereading and self-doubt. This unwanted party would provide distraction, if nothing else.

While she surreptitiously pulled the strings from the celery and cut off the most discoloured of the carrot skins, Fran tidied up the files and carted them out to the narrow hallway, where a small trolley waited.

‘So who’s coming?’ Angie asked as she breathed in the sweetness of the carrots.

‘Mainly members of FADE,’ Greg said, scratching one bulbous nostril. He bent down to pull a recalcitrant plastic cork from the third huge bottle.

Looking at his narrow shoulders and squidgy biceps,
Angie thought he’d have done better with the sort of corkscrew that had arms to act as levers.

‘Ouf. That’s better. And a few neighbours. You’ll like them. There are some bags of breadsticks in the cupboard; you can put them in glasses and dot them about the room.’

Angie did everything she was told, then retreated to the spare room to try to make herself look less like a downtrodden ghost. She’d found a neat black suit that didn’t cost too much in one of the West End’s Oxfam shops. Its label would have impressed her even in the old days, and it was more or less the right size. But it had to be kept for court, hanging on the back of the bedroom door safely shrouded in plastic. Apart from that, she hadn’t any clothes except jeans or the last few pairs of John’s corduroy trousers.

She did her best, picking the least shabby pair of black cords and adding a white T-shirt. The effect was fairly bleak, though, so she stuck her head round the kitchen door and asked Fran if she had any kind of bright scarf to spare.

‘Of course. Hang on a sec.’

Only moments later, Fran emerged from her room with a handful of old Indian silk scarves. They were very soft, and age had thinned them almost to transparency, but they were still beautiful. One was red with gold lozenges on it; another deep green and blue, like the snake tattoo on her arm. There were purple, yellow and orange: more colour than Angie had seen anywhere but a shop window for years and years. She picked the red-and-gold one, added the yellow, and twisted them together, threading the result through the belt loops in her cords.

‘Hey, Angie! You look great.’ As she spoke, Fran bowed, which made her straight red-blonde hair swing like a waterfall.

Fran looked more than great, Angie thought; magnificent really, in a long gipsy skirt of purple cotton and a tight black velvet jacket threaded with silver. She was wearing make-up, too: lots of kohl around her eyes and some smoky pink lipstick. She gave Angie a box of matches.

‘Will you light the joss sticks?’

Angie was soon inhaling the scents from a sand-filled bowl holding several different sorts of incense stick and remembering wild university parties that had smelled just like this.

What would she think now if she met the girl she’d been, with the long ungovernable hair, anarchic humour and tiny skirts? She wasn’t sure, but she could easily see how the girl would pity the dried-up, bad-tempered old ratbag she’d become, and that was awful.

Luckily there was no time to think. The front-door bell rang and Greg went to answer it, bringing back the first batch of guests. Three were women who worked for FADE. Angie had met them several times now and they shook hands in a friendly enough way, although they obviously couldn’t be bothered to talk to her. They were off to the far end of the room in no time to enjoy what was obviously a riveting gossip.

The fourth guest was a stranger: a tall man with thick greying hair and an aura of money and confidence that set him apart from the rest.

‘This is Ben,’ Greg said. ‘He lives round the corner and wanted to come and wish you luck in court.’

‘That’s kind,’ she said, shaking his hand. ‘Are you involved with FADE, too?’

‘Absolutely not.’ Ben’s voice was much grander than any of the others, whose accents varied from Fran’s tight north
London twang and Greg’s looser, all-purpose Estuary to the soft Irish lilt of the prettiest of the women. ‘Not my kind of thing. Although of course I admire what they do.’

‘Have a drink, Ben.’ Greg held up one of the bottles.

‘Better not. I’m driving. Water would be great, if you’ve got some.’

While Greg went off to fetch it, Angie lifted her own glass. The thin red wine was sour but distinctly better than the peculiar home-made version of the previous few days.

‘I also admire your courage,’ Ben said. ‘It’s not easy to be a litigant in person. How are you feeling about the case?’

‘Terrified,’ she said and thought again of the girl she’d been, who would never have admitted any of her innumerable fears.

Most of them had been about being a failure or not popular enough. Or being found out. The people she’d called her friends had been so pleased with themselves and so contemptuous of everyone else she’d felt sure they’d turn on her if they knew what she was really like. Maybe there was something to be said for middle age after all. Even if it did shrivel you up and make you angrier with every passing year, at least it took away the need to pretend to be something you weren’t.

Ben laughed as though she’d been joking, but she was fairly sure he knew she hadn’t. She waited for him to say something else. In the silence beween them, she heard the three women chattering excitedly about someone else who’d just fallen in love. Ben grimaced in their direction, but he didn’t say anything, so Angie had to spin out the conversation herself.

‘But I do feel a bit better than when I thought I was
going to be facing Antony Shelley. Ever since we had some preliminary discussions about the actual ownership of the land where the tanks were, I’ve had nightmares about him. Now the other side’s solicitor have told us about this woman who’s taking his place, I feel better. She has to be an improvement.’

‘Trish Maguire won’t be any kind of walkover,’ Ben said, now watching her with a beadiness she found unnerving. She’d seen job interviewers look at her like this, and spies for the Inland Revenue.

‘D’you know her?’ she asked to distract him from whichever of her failings he was trying to assess.

‘Not personally. But I know all about her: wrong side of the tracks made good. Some people can’t stick her; others think she’s a bit of hero. She’s very tough in court, however gentle she may seem outside.’

Angie put a hand against her chest, feeling her heartbeat speed up. ‘Don’t. Please. I’m scared enough as it is.’

‘You should be fine, so long as you stick to the point,’ he said with a slight doubt in his drawly voice, as though he didn’t have half as much confidence in her as he had in himself. ‘You must press the other side all the time on all their weak arguments and
always
address the judge with respect. Whatever else you let slip, never lose hold of that. Respect for the bench is essential.’