Courting Trouble (37 page)

I dressed with the intention of walking to the office, to tell my mother I was quitting Britain’s first two-person, mother–daughter, solicitor–barrister, boutique feminist law firm. But, halfway there, I lost my nerve. Could I really just leave my dear mum in the legal lurch? Roxy was evangelical about our purpose – liberating the world’s female underdogs from their kennels. I detoured left to Regent’s Park to think it through. It was a crisp morning. The air seemed freshly laundered, but everything about me felt stale. I lay on my back on a grassy bank, looking past the interlaced limbs of the trees, with their russet-red and gold leaves, into a sky where grey and white clouds sloshed about like jumbled washing. Black crows were like bullets in the blue sky. A vigilante’s bullets . . . My stomach curdled once more. My mind was made up. I was going to leave Pandora’s. From now on, I really was going to think outside the box, as I never, ever intended to set foot back inside it.

Roxy was on her mobile when I slunk into the office. She rang off and chortled. When Roxy laughed, she shook all over, as though a seismic tremor were coming up from her core. ‘This would be funny if it weren’t so tragically pathetic.’ She slapped her knee, which was encased in a pair of lime-green lizard-print stretch pants which left nothing to the imagination. It was teamed, naturally, with a cobalt cashmere jumper and pink go-go boots.

‘That call was from a British woman in Kuwait. Her husband and daughter drove over the border to Saudi Arabia in their British car to visit a mate. They were pulled over by the police, who presumed the daughter was driving, which, as you know, is illegal for women there. When the daughter pointed out that their car was a right-hand drive, she was accused of
driving without a steering wheel
. She’s been bloody well arrested.’

‘Roxy, I need to talk to you . . .’

‘
Apparently
, one imam has declared that women can only drive wearing a full burka, which completely covers the face – talk about the blind leading the blind.’ My mother guffawed again.

‘Mum . . . listen, I have something to say . . .’

‘Plus, we have a poor woman who’s being sued by her husband because she gave birth to an ugly baby.’

‘
Roxy
! . . . Listen to me for a moment . . .’

‘Wait, you’ll love this.
Apparently
, the father fell in love with his wife because of her beautiful looks, not realizing that she’d paid for them. Nose, eyes, boobs, botox, lipo, collagen, fillers . . . When she squeezed out an ugly baby, he went snooping through her childhood photos. She had no choice but to confess to her enhancements, and now he’s suing her for false advertising. Think of the bloody fun we’re going to have with
this
one!’

‘Roxanne!’ Using my mother’s full name, which I’d never, ever, done in my whole life, won her full attention. ‘I think it’s best if Portia and I move back to our old house and I find a job with a more . . . conventional clientele.’

‘Don’t be silly.’ She waved away my comment with a flutter of pink varnished nails.

‘I mean it, Mum. It’s time I lived an independent life . . . just as soon as you wash my clothes so I can pack them,’ I joshed, to soften the blow.

Roxy swivelled around to face me and peered over the tops of her diamante, cat’s-eye specs. ‘We’ve had an unusual few days. You’re just shell-shocked, possum.’

‘My God, Mum! We kidnapped and tortured a man. What we did was wrong.’

‘Maybe, but it achieved the right result. Look.’ My mother turned up the volume on the BBC lunchtime news. The screen was filled with the Darth Vader outfits of the riot police, who had launched a morning raid on Nathaniel’s drug ring, and the reporter was saying:

Hundreds of Met police officers swooped on suspected drug dealers in a mass raid across London today. Nearly 100 people were arrested, 10 guns were recovered and more than 60 crack cocaine rocks and 57kg of heroin were seized, according to officers from the Serious Organized Crime Agency. More than 300 officers took part in the Operation Hawk initiative against street-level drug dealing, using tip-offs from the community.

‘The “community”? That’s Nathaniel the Nark to you and me, kid. And look who’s there.’ My mother vaulted from her seat with the speed of a teenage gymnast and jabbed a nail at the screen. A group of men were being hounded out of a block of council flats on the Tony Benn Estate. Amongst the hoodied throng I glimpsed Stretch and Bash being taken into custody.

‘What’s not to be happy about, darl? Your reputation’s saved, those rapist bastards are going down and that posh, lying git is now a police informer. I’m so happy I feel I should – I don’t know – dance a jig, or run naked through the streets, or slaughter a cow, or something.’

‘Roxy, what we did was immoral.’

‘Oh, Tilly, if you want a moral, go look in an Aesop’s fable.’

‘I’ve made my mind up. I’m leaving.’

‘You can’t resign. Especially not today. It’s Pandora’s anniversary party. Two years and still standing. Phyllis is coming over to help me cook up a feast.’

‘I’m still resigning, though I’m not sure where I’ll work. Jack always said he’d take me into his Chambers. But I haven’t just burnt bridges with the man, I’ve kinda demolished both riverbanks.’

A Skype call buzzed insistently on Roxy’s computer. She pressed the green phone icon and the Countess’s lugubrious face came into full view.

‘Shhh! I can’t speak!’

‘That’s a first. Why?’ Roxy asked.

‘I’m at a Buddhist retreat,’ she whispered. ‘I took a vow of silence.’

‘Gee, that’s working well for you, possum.’

‘Yes, it’s killing me! Because guess who I ran into in the Indian Sweat Yert? . . . Stephen!’

‘I hope he’s got a third-eye infection,’ I said, nonplussed. The man was so far off my radar he barely registered a blip.

‘Apparently, Petronella caught him slathering his scalp in Regaine and popping Propecia pills to turn back the tide of hair loss and, repulsed, immediately hit the relationship ejector button. He told me to tell you that he’s ready to come back home.’

Roxy gave a rich chuckle. ‘The only way we want that bastard back is in a box.’

But the way I was feeling, it would be
me
not him, to turn up my toes. If I were in hospital, the wavy line on my terminal monitor would be fading to black. No doubt the French would have a name for this flattened, empty feeling of crushed expectations and self-loathing. But the best I could come up with in English was ‘I mean it, Mum. I want out.’

Exhaustion suddenly overwhelmed me. I trudged home and collapsed into a coma. I was woken, hours later, by nostril-tickling aromas wafting up from the kitchen below. I hadn’t eaten in what felt like days. Not even a chocolate bar – which proved how discombobulated I was. Hunger propelled me to pull on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. I bunched my hair in an elastic band and padded barefoot down the stairs. Through the stained-glass panel of the front door I could see the outline of a person on the landing. Thinking it might be Portia, home from her enforced sleep-over at Amelia’s, I opened the door.

The man leaning nonchalantly on the stair rail was immaculately dressed, a cashmere jumper casually knotted around his broad shoulders. He was all sanguine charm and sardonic eyebrows and was pulling decadently on a cigar.

‘I don’t want you to presume for one minute that I’m here for any other reason than your mother’s cooking. In fact, I’ve only been pretending to like you all this time to get a taste of Roxy’s legendary Thai curry – a curry so strong I’m told it would send a South American chilli chef screaming from the room with his tongue in flames.’

‘Who invited you?’ I asked, perplexed.

‘You did,’ he said, breezing inside, unasked and kicking the door shut behind him with a suede loafer.

‘Well, I must have been writing in invisible ink again.’

Jack extracted his iPhone from a hip pocket and scrolled down through emails. He angled the phone screen towards my face.

Please come to dinner tonight. My mother’s cooking her famous Thai curry. For those who don’t like chilli, there’s a gratin dauphinois and duck à l’orange in the oven too. My exonerated murderess prepared it, so if it’s laced with poison, you can tell everyone that you were the very last person to hear from me and that I send them greetings.

Love, Tilly.

‘Well, yes, it does sound like me, but obviously I didn’t write this. I have never ended a correspondence to you with the word “love”.’

‘I invited him this morning, after our little chat.’ Roxy’s voice thundered behind me. ‘Ulterior motive. Once you spend time with each other, you’ll realize that you couldn’t possibly work together. One or other of you would be up on a murder charge by lunchtime.’

Jack hitched a brow and looked my way. ‘Work together?’

The door rat-a-tatted before I could reply. This time, Roxy answered it.

‘Thanks for asking me for dinner, Rox.’

‘I didn’t bloody well ask you,’ Roxy snapped at Danny, who was all freshly showered and shaved and looking a little ill at ease in his ironed jeans and best shirt, from which his big, bulging muscles were trying hard to escape.

‘No, I did. I texted him this morning. It’s time you two made up,’ I said.

The four of us stood in silence in the hall, absorbing the situation. Portia turned her key in the lock and entered. Seeing her grandfather, she vaulted into his arms and hugged him hard. Roxy couldn’t eject Danny now, not after this display of granddaughterly devotion. When nobody took out a restraining order or rang the police, or even spoke, Portia immediately read the situation and threw us a conversational life raft.

‘I’m sorry I worried you all. I have been acting a bit teenagery lately. But none of you has been behaving much better. So, may I suggest that the tableware-throwing resumes after a brief truce and a drink or two, because dinner does smell yummy,’ she said, all poise and precocity.

In desperate need of alcoholic fortification, we four adults practically stampeded our way to the drinks trolley in the living room, steeplechasing over any furniture in our path. While Portia cleverly involved her grandparents in a complicated conversation to do with homework matters, I decided it was best to take the stand and make a full confession to Jack, and hope he showed me more clemency than I’d afforded him.

‘At least we now know I’ll never have to pen a long and complicated speech after winning the Nobel Peace Prize . . .’ I gulped at my drink.

Jack canted a mocking brow. ‘Is that your way of saying sorry?’

‘No. But this is. You’d better guzzle that down, then get another drink. You’re going to need it by the time you hear the evidence in this immorality tale . . . I know
I
do.’

After Jack had topped up our champagne, he settled back on the couch while I explained how Nathaniel’s mask had slipped, literally. His vampire mask.

When the whole gruesome story concluded, Jack feigned huge astonishment. Rising to refresh his drink, he said, ‘Nathaniel turned out to be a lying, deceitful, grade-A arsehole?? No. I’m shocked.’ He put his hand on his forehead and staggered backwards a few feet.

‘What can I say? One of these days I’ll be out of therapy.’

‘I knew the toffee-nosed twit was a charlatan. I help a charity called Connect, which really does help ex-offenders go on the straight and narrow. I checked with them. They’d never heard of him.’

‘You help a charity?’ I marvelled.

‘I’m on the board. But don’t tell anyone. I don’t ever want it to get around that I’m not as evil as you’ve led people to believe. You’ll ruin my bad-boy reputation.’

He gave me a warm, wry, mischievous smile, which I reciprocated. The French would no doubt have a word for this, too – the secret kindness you don’t want the world to see but which gives your ex-girlfriend the urge to lick you all over. ‘This is worrying. The way things are going I’ll soon have to remove the word “bastard” from your resumé.’

‘So . . .’ An amused but sceptical line furrowed his brow. ‘Nathaniel told you all about the DVDs of the girls’ rapes and the drug deal coming in from Turkey because he was intimidated by your moral indignation and superior reasoning powers?’

‘Well, yes . . . and also Danny’s Glock 500 . . .’

‘Ah, I see.’

‘Plus the added incentive of a testicle-devouring South American pacu fish and the blackmail potential of a mock-paedophilia photo shoot involving simulated masturbation to an episode of the
Teletubbies
.’

Jack, who was draining his second glass of champagne, spluttered so hard, Veuve Clicquot came out of his nostrils. He then gave me a look of profound, if baffled, admiration. ‘The compromising film footage of Nathaniel in mock-paedophile pose does appeal from a karmic point of view . . . But couldn’t you have just taken the traditional Pandora’s approved route and shot him in the nuts? And . . . what happened to the fish?’

‘We’re eating it tonight. It’s in the curry, apparently.’

Jack laughed. ‘Well, I suppose it’s wiser to eat
it
before it eats
you.
Dieting from the inside . . . But tell me, how did Nathaniel, um, cope with the stress of the evening?’

‘The big hard man cried like a baby.’

Jack’s smiling mouth stretched even wider. ‘So is this private and confidential, or must I keep it to myself?’ he teased.

‘In fairness, Jack, who’d believe you?’

Jack reappraised me. ‘Well, Miss Inhabiter of the Upper Slopes of the High Moral High Ground, what a turn-up. If this is your idea of law enforcement, it’s just as well that you’re friends with a top criminal-law practitioner.’

‘So . . . are we friends?’ I asked tentatively.

‘I’m feeling quite friendly towards you right now actually,’ Jack said. ‘In fact, my offer still stands,’ he entendre-ed, smirking flirtatiously. ‘To join my Chambers.’

I swallowed hard. ‘Really?’

‘For the comedic value alone, it would be worth it. Are you interested?’

I nodded so hard I’m surprised my neck didn’t snap and my head fall to the floor.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘It’s agreed then. You can move in right away. Monday. I’ll pay your first few months’ rent, gratis. I’ll send one of my clerks over to help you with your boxes.’ To seal the deal, he tossed his cherished cigars into the bin.