A Poisoned Mind (6 page)

Angie had never enjoyed being told what to do, even in the old uncertain days, even by people she knew well.

‘You sound as though you know a lot about it,’ she said coldly, glad to see more guests arriving. As soon as she’d found a way to get rid of this one, she’d find somebody less arrogant.

‘Don’t forget you’ll have Greg with you,’ he said, ignoring
her comment, ‘dealing with your papers and reminding you of anything you may have forgotten, so—’

‘Not Fran?’ Angie was so shocked she didn’t even notice she’d interrupted him. Her hand suddenly felt slippery on the thick glass.

‘Didn’t Greg tell you? I warned him that the combination of you and Fran could look too female. The courts are still a traditional sort of place, and you don’t want your case imprinted on the judge’s mind as a bit of girly froth. If you have a bloke with you, you’ll avoid that. I must go in a minute, but I’ll send Fran over with another drink for you. Give me your glass.’

She handed it over obediently and watched him cross the room to Fran, saying something that made her laugh and blow him a kiss. Then he moved on to Greg, who left the little knot of people he’d been entertaining to talk privately to Ben. They had their heads together and it looked as though Ben was asking for something. Greg shook his head and Ben appeared disappointed but almost deferential, which seemed odd.

Someone behind Angie was telling a joke, which aroused gales of laughter and made her feel excluded from everything. What was she was doing with all these cheerful people, who all knew each other so well and treated her as a cross between a museum exhibit and an inadequate entry for an agricultural show? Ben stuck out his hand and Greg shook it, then opened the door and ushered him out.

‘Here, love,’ Fran said, bringing a full glass of wine. Angie grabbed her opportunity.

‘Who is Ben?’

‘Just a neighbour.’ Fran looked worried. ‘Why?’

‘He seemed to know an awful lot about me and my case.’

‘Greg found out that he’s a lawyer, so we started to ask him things whenever we got stuck. You don’t mind, do you?’

Angie rubbed her forehead, wishing she’d grown out of paranoia as well as the need to hide her fears.

‘I suppose not. I was just shocked when he casually told me you wouldn’t be sitting with me in court, as though I ought to know. When did you decide?’

‘Only this evening, love.’ Fran smoothed Angie’s hair back from her forehead. ‘When Greg phoned Ben to invite him to the party at the last minute and they were chatting about the case, Ben pointed out how it might look if you and I were sitting together in front of the judge. Greg and I talked it over – you were changing at the time, I think – and decided he was probably right.’

‘Angie! Remember me?’ The bright attractive American voice came as a welcome distraction.

She turned away from Fran, to see the plump smiling young man who’d done the preliminary research into the dangers of benzene.

‘Hi, Marty,’ she said, kissing him. ‘Lovely to see you! You know, your notes are the clearest anybody provided. You must be a proper scientist.’

‘I haven’t done any seriously since school,’ he said, thrusting a plate of crudités at her. ‘Have some of these. Keep up your strength for tomorrow.’

Trish prepared as methodically as she always did before court. Her dark hair was blown dry to the flat neatness that would make her wig sit well, and her make-up was discreet. Her black suit was as well pressed as her gown, and her bands were crisply starched. She had the whole case mapped in her mind and could see several different routes to take if Angie Fortwell’s cross-examination enticed any of her witnesses away from the line she’d planned for them.

When facing other barristers you’d know more or less what they were going to say. You did sometimes get surprises, but usually you’d worked out every possible argument so you could counter any one of them. With an amateur, a litigant in person, you were on much wobblier ground.

‘Feeling OK?’ Robert said as he came into her room to collect her.

‘Absolutely fine.’ She resisted the temptation to brush the shoulders of her jacket or tweak her hair. ‘Have you got the documents?’

‘My pupil’s already gone ahead with two trolleys. Let’s go.’

Trish slowly got to her feet, testing her reactions. She’d expected to be nervous and was glad to notice nothing out of the ordinary. You needed some apprehension to get the adrenaline flowing and keep your mind sharp.

She stepped out beside Robert, feeling her ribs expand with every breath she took. He knew better than to talk or offer advice just before a court appearance, and she was grateful for that.

 

Angie waited by the security guards as Greg fed their bags of documents through the scanner. They rattled towards her over the narrow metal rollers and she hauled them off one by one. Her black suit felt odd: tight around her stomach and yet much less heavy than her usual clothes. She felt exposed, too, with her legs out of trousers for the first time in years.

Greg, who hadn’t bothered to dress up for court and was wearing his usual saggy jeans and sweater, followed the bags. There were no embarrassing bleeps or hold-ups. He was waved through and they made their way to Court 14.

The building was intimidatingly churchy, with high gothic arches in the main hall and a floor of inlaid coloured marble. But the court itself was a plain room, not nearly as large as the exterior suggested, with a slightly shabby red carpet, cream-painted walls and mid-brown wooden furniture. In a way it was a bit like a meeting room for hire in a not-very-expensive hotel.

Greg showed her where to sit and explained who else would be in the room with them. Most of yesterday’s resentment had been overtaken by gratitude. Without him and Fran, she’d have found it hard to get this far, and, if she had, she’d have been fainting with the anxiety by now.

The double doors from the corridor burst open and a small party fluttered in, with their black gowns streaming out behind them. They looked frighteningly clean. And rich.

Angie felt her hands brushing down her lapels and forced herself to stop. Unlike Greg’s jeans, her clothes were perfectly clean, and she’d never suffered from dandruff. There was no need to feel at such a disadvantage, even if she didn’t have a wig and gown like theirs. The first was a tall thin woman with glossy black hair, who must be Trish Maguire. Her face was pale but not entirely natural.

Looking closely as she approached, Angie saw she’d shaped her eyebrows with a dark-brown pencil and smoothed them over with something, maybe hair gel, and she’d lengthened her lashes with mascara. There was a faint apricot coloured stain over her cheekbones and her lips were a little richer than seemed likely to be their natural colour. From far away she wouldn’t look made-up, just defined in a way Angie had failed to achieve. Women barristers were probably taught to do this when they had their first lessons in advocacy.

‘Good morning,’ she said in a voice that made sense of Ben Givens’s comment about the wrong side of the tracks. There was none of his pomposity and it wouldn’t have sounded out of place anywhere. ‘You must be Mrs Fortwell. I’m Trish Maguire. How do you do?’

Angie’s knees felt insecure, as though they might give way and dump her on the floor. The other woman’s gentle dark eyes held all the compassion she’d longed for since John’s death and not found anywhere. Angie tried to think of something to say as they shook hands.

A moment later the kindness might never have existed. Maguire’s expression retreated into cool formality and she
turned her back to talk to the men who’d come in with her. One was about her own age, even taller, broad-shouldered, and very good looking in a smooth kind of way. The other, much younger, was a bustly little fellow with freckles and an engaging grin.

He busied himself opening his document cases and laying papers and folders out in what was obviously a preordained pattern, while the elder stared at Angie with all the arrogance she’d expected from the lot of them.

She couldn’t bear it, so she introduced Greg as a way of shifting his disdain from herself. He gave his name as Robert Anstey and didn’t bother to shake hands.

The next few minutes were like being blindfolded and whirled round and round in a cement-mixer. People came and went and said things Angie couldn’t hear or understand. There was a roaring in her ears. Only Greg’s hand on her wrist kept her together. He explained the significance of each new arrival until a door behind the judge’s throne opened and an usher brought in the judge, a tall man with a calm and empty face, wearing robes not all that different from the barristers’.

Everybody stood until Mr Justice Flambard had lowered himself to the bench, then they all sat.

‘No, no,’ Greg whispered. ‘You stand now, Ange. And you begin. Remember?’

She remembered all right; she just wasn’t sure she could do it. The words should be easy enough to say. She fumbled about in her mind for the sense of outrage, for the idea of justice denied, for John. This was her one chance to establish the truth about his murder.

He’d been the best of men, she reminded herself: honest, hard-working, faithful, kind. So kind. And he’d been
rubbed out of life by the very people who were paying Trish Maguire a fortune to fight her now.

A faint sensation of something that might be courage made Angie raise her chin. She looked at the judge, who peered at her over his half-moon glasses, and smiled encouragingly, nodding to get her started.

 

Trish listened to the laboured formalities and wished she could lean over and advise Angie to soften her neck muscles, which would help her vocal cords relax. Her voice sounded as though she was being strangled, and it was clear she was more or less holding her breath as she gabbled her way to the end of each sentence. She’d lose concentration if she went on like this, and the wear and tear on both her mind and body would be tremendous.

‘And so my husband was killed, My Lord,’ she said at the end of her opening speech, ‘and the farm to which we gave over twenty years of our lives was contaminated, all because of the dangerously polluting chemicals the defendants allowed to escape from their land on to ours.’

Trish waited until the judge had finished writing his notes, then rose and in an easy persuasive voice outlined the ways in which she proposed to defend her clients. She chose much less formal language than Angie and felt herself entirely at home. Reaching the end of her speech, she smiled first at the judge, then at her opponent and sat down again, ignoring Robert’s whispered congratulations.

She watched Angie lick her narrow lips and heard her breathe heavily. The judge completed his notes, then nodded to her. Her unsuitably dressed friend had dropped the papers he’d been holding out to her and muttered ‘sorry’. She bent down and was raising her head at just the moment he
reached for them. They banged their skulls together and Angie gasped. For a moment she stood, ignoring the notes as she rubbed her head and wiped the back of her bony hand across her eyes.

‘Ange, pull yourself together.’

The snap in the man’s hissing voice would have made Trish want to hit him, but it seemed to help Angie, who took the notes, turned back to the judge and called her first witness.

He was a doctor, the local GP, who had been the first on the scene after her desperate calls to the emergency services. He had seen the blaze from his house ten miles away and phoned 999 himself. The operator told him the fire had already been reported and the electricity shut down. With the ambulance likely to take about forty minutes to reach the farm, he was asked to go straight there. Trish thought of the statement she’d read over the weekend.

There hadn’t been anything the doctor could do for John Fortwell, but he was able to deal with Angie’s shock and advise her about minimising the likely risks to her current and future health from the fumes. He’d also been able to describe the scene in his statement with a vividness untainted by the kind of understandable hysteria Angie herself must still feel.

She asked him to give his name and address to the court and confirm that the statement was his own and that he stood by it. The words she used weren’t precisely the ones Trish expected, but they were near enough. She rose for her cross-examination, met the judge’s gaze and was impressed that he showed absolutely no sign of fellow-feeling or amusement at Angie’s throttled formality.

‘Doctor Jenkins, in your statement you have given
evidence about the claimant’s mental and physical condition after the explosion and fire at her property, Low Topps; did you know anything about her state of health before that night?’

‘Yes. She had several times come to consult me in the months leading up the explosion, and so I had given her various checks. Her general health was excellent then.’

‘In which case, what were the symptoms that had led her to consult you?’

‘She was suffering hot flushes and sleeplessness. She wanted to discuss the possibility of taking HRT.’

‘Were there any psychological symptoms associated with the condition?’

He seemed to hesitate for a moment, then looked towards the judge to give an uncomfortable-sounding answer:
‘She
did not mention any psychological symptoms, My Lord, nor did she show any signs of them in my surgery.’

Trish considered his hesitation, and the emphasis he’d given to the pronoun he’d used, then she said: ‘Nevertheless, Doctor Jenkins, did you have any reason to suspect such symptoms?’

This time the pause was longer. The judge looked over the top of his glasses first at Trish, then at the witness, and reminded him that he had to answer.

‘Her husband had come to see me twice, once in the week before her last appointment and once after it, to ask me to prescribe anti-depressants for her. I told him I couldn’t do so unless she consulted me about depression and reported symptoms consonant with the condition.’

‘What did he say then?’

Trish could feel Robert tensing behind her and ignored it. She knew what she was doing.

‘He gave me a list of her symptoms as he had observed them.’

‘Which were?’

‘Sleeplessness, which, as I said, she later ascribed to the hot flushes; anxiety; lack of concentration and lack of appetite.’

Trish glanced at Angie Fortwell and saw an expression of outrage, which gave her exactly what she wanted.

‘Did you believe him?’

She felt a tug on her gown, nodded briefly to the judge and turned to glare at Robert, who was holding out a small piece of paper. He looked so anxious she took it and opened it to read: ‘Not part of Antony’s plan. Where are you going with this? Fatal to ask questions not knowing answers.’

Hiding a smile at the reminder of one of the first rules any baby barrister learned, Trish looked at the witness once more.

‘Did you believe him, Doctor?’ she said again.

‘Not entirely.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because Angela Fortwell was entirely capable of consulting me if she had those feelings, and she had never mentioned them.’

‘To what extent do you believe he could have been describing his own feelings?’ Trish was careful not to let her voice betray how much she cared what his answer would be.

‘I have to say quite a great extent. It definitely did seem the likeliest explanation for his coming to see me.’ The doctor’s reluctance was as clear as the apology in his expression. He no longer looked at Angie Fortwell.

Trish paused for a moment, then smiled at him. ‘Would it
be true to say that among the commonest symptoms of depression are forgetfulness, an inability to complete planned tasks, lying about the consequences of that, and …’ She paused for emphasis: ‘And suicidal thoughts?’

‘It would.’

‘Did Mr Fortwell mention those, either in connection with his wife or with himself?’

‘No.’ Doctor Jenkins was firm. ‘Absolutely not. Never.’

‘And did he make any further appointments to return to your surgery?’

‘He did make one more, which he failed to keep. When my receptionist phoned him, he said he had forgotten.’

‘What inference did you make then?’

The doctor glared at Trish, then looked more politely towards the judge: ‘That he had forgotten.’

The judge didn’t bother to hide a smile.

‘Thank you, doctor.’ Having got exactly what she wanted, Trish sat and left him to be re-examined by Angie Fortwell.

She had just risen to her feet for her next stint when the judge said he thought this would be a good moment to adjourn, inviting them all to return to court at two o’clock. Angie looked puzzled, then made to sit down again. The bearded man with the worryingly loose red lips shook his head and stood up beside her, pulling down the cuffs of his hand-knitted sludge-green jersey.

The judge also got to his feet, everyone else followed suit and bowed. He left by the door behind the bench and the others collected their bags. Trish overheard Angie muttering, but couldn’t distinguish any words.

She felt Robert twitching her gown and turned her head, leaning back to hear him hiss: