Out of the Dark (22 page)

‘Some people can’t keep themselves to themselves, can they? What d’you think he was doing? He came for money.’

‘D’you give him any?’

‘Yes. Everything I had left of my pension, and the last bit of my last lot of holiday money I never changed back into pounds.’ They might have found the pesetas when they searched his place, so it was just as well to have a story to account for them. ‘Mikey wasn’t here, so I had to give him money. I didn’t dare not, Mr Smith. Gal’s a big lad – you know it as well as I do.’

‘That why you keep Mikey living here, is it, Lil? Like a bodyguard, kind of?’

‘Mikey makes me feel safer when Gal’s drunk.’ She wasn’t going to let them get away with putting that word ‘bodyguard’ into her mouth like that. Concentrating on everything Smith was saying behind his words was making her feel
dizzy
again. Or maybe that was the fag. She stubbed it out and drank some more washy tea. It was still filthy. ‘How did Jeannie die? And when? Was it that Sunday?’

‘
Was
Gary drunk that night?’

‘He seemed like it. Talking ever so wild, he was. Tell me what happened to Jeannie.’

‘I don’t have any details. What was Gary saying that night?’

‘I can’t remember as such. But he wanted tea, and I was afraid he was going to throw the kettle at me. I’ve still got the scars on my chest from when his dad did that, and I couldn’t think of anything else. I had to make the tea, but I put lots of milk in his mug and I threw away the rest of the boiling water so he couldn’t do me a mischief.’

‘That’s tough, Lil.’ Smith looked as if he meant it. ‘But I want you to try to remember what he said.’

‘It was just “gi’s some money, Ma.” I think. And then, you know, all that “hurry up or I’ll do you” kind of thing. What does he say about it?’
‘Nothing. We can’t find him.’

She kept her eyes down, afraid of letting him see her relief. Could it be that her stupid, brutish son had finally done something useful? Had they scared him enough when they questioned him to make him do what he was told and go to Spain?

‘He didn’t say nothing about going away when Mikey and I went round to his place. And I’d have thought there were enough of your boys hanging around to see everything he did after that.’

He grinned at her. ‘They were only there for that one day.’

‘Why? Did they discover evidence to show he couldn’t have killed Jeannie?’

‘You’d like that, would you?’

‘Of course I would. He’s my son.’

‘You’re a good old thing. Mikey about?’

‘No. I told you. He’s prob’ly cabbing. It’s his shift in the evening.’

‘OK. Thanks, Lil. If you remember anything more, let me know, won’t you? Constable! We’re off.’

The girl came out of the kitchen, looking smug. Lil wondered what she’d found.

‘You’ve got mice, you know, Mrs Handsome. You should get the council round. It’s not healthy having them in your kitchen like that. And you shouldn’t leave cake out; that’s what brings them. You get your grandson to buy you a tin for that cake.’

So she hadn’t found the false cupboard back, the cheeky cow. Good. Lil wanted them gone, so she could check whether Mikey’d been at it while she was away with her solicitor.

‘Paddy enjoyed living on the edge – and making other people join him there.’

Trish looked at Sylvia Bantell’s still-handsome face and wondered quite what sort of edge she meant.

‘But he’d never have hurt anyone. Not seriously, I mean.’ Sylvia tucked her perfectly smooth silver hair behind her ear. The gesture revealed a large drop pearl earring, hanging from a discreet diamond stud. ‘What on earth has brought on all this panic, Trish?’

‘I’m not panicking.’ That wasn’t a word or a state of mind Trish allowed herself, but an insidious idea was crawling into her mind like some particularly revolting reptile: what if Paddy had met up again with Jeannie Nest after the conference two months ago, tried to persuade her on to whatever edge Sylvia had meant, and then been frustrated when Jeannie refused? Trish knew all about his temper, but could it ever have been bad enough to push him into the kind of violence that ended with a dead body?

‘Panic is the only thing that could possibly excuse such an aberration. He’s your father, for heaven’s sake.’

‘Oh, God, I know.’

‘Come on, Trish! This is idiotic. Are you sure you’re not making up the whole story as an excuse to come and see what kind of old bat Paddy once knew?’

Amusement surfaced through Trish’s angst for a second, like a spring breaking through rock. ‘No, although
it’s great to get such obvious confirmation of his good taste.’

‘So you’ve inherited his blarney, have you?’

And his propensity for violence? Trish asked herself as the spring dried up abruptly. Aloud, she said, ‘I meant it. But what I really came for was the report you said you’d kept on Paddy’s visits to Jeannie Nest in Southwark.’

‘Now why would you want that?’ Sylvia asked, leaning against the softly padded back of the pale-yellow sofa and crossing her legs. Her pleated Prada skirt lifted over her knee cap as she moved, catching briefly on the clinging Lycra tights. A waft of cloying tuberose scent teased Trish’s nostrils. She’d always disliked that particular smell. ‘It was compiled nine years ago. Nothing in it could give you any clues to his activities now.’

Trish had had trouble imagining her father in search of romance at the Mull Estate in Southwark, but she couldn’t see him here either. Her own perfectly tidy jeans and linen jacket made her feel clumsy and out of place amid the silk lampshades, and the cool blue-and-yellow femininity of the room. Everywhere she looked there was a highly polished antique table covered with gleaming silver bits and pieces and little porcelain boxes or plants in highly decorated, gilded cache-pots.

Lakeshaw had given her a brutal description of the state of Jeannie Nest’s body. Surely no one capable of that kind of frenzy could hide all signs of it for so long. How could a man capable of beating a dead woman like that ever have fitted into a room like this? Or made love with a woman like Sylvia Bantell? Or been the occasionally exasperating but often funny and sometimes lovable father Trish knew?

‘I’d never been anybody’s rough trade before,’ Paddy had said. Had it been his fake brogue, his hairy wrists and hints of physical aggression that had excited Mrs Bantell? Was her rich, breakable, Kensington lifestyle so
boring that she’d had to import some danger? Had Paddy ever threatened
her
?

‘It might help, even after so long.’ Trish heard her voice hoarsen as her throat tensed. ‘And I can’t think of anything else that could. I’m … desperate, you know.’

‘I can’t see how my detective’s report could possibly soothe your fears.’

‘It might give a reason for what happened between him and Jeannie Nest, and so make it clear that their relationship could not have ended with his killing her.’

Distaste blew across Sylvia’s face like litter across a velvety lawn. ‘My dear girl, I’ve already given you the reason. He went to her for the kind of sleazy paid sex that would allow him to indulge himself without having to bother about the other person’s feelings.’

‘But she was a teacher,’ Trish protested. ‘Not a prostitute.’

‘So the story went. But you know how badly paid teachers are.’

‘Are you suggesting she supplemented her income generally? I mean, did the report mention other men?’ That would help, Trish thought, and bring in lots more possible suspects.

‘Leave it, Trish. It’s old history. It’s also rather unpleasant to think of Paddy’s beloved daughter picking through his sex life like this.’

‘You said you’d kept the report.’ Trish was determined to drive through the distaste to whatever facts there were. ‘That doesn’t sound like such very old history.’

A faint blush warmed the lifted skin over Sylvia’s perfect cheekbones. ‘If you must know, I shredded it after your first telephone call.’

‘Oh shit,’ Trish said. Seeing the distaste ruffling Sylvia’s calm again, she apologised, but her mind was spinning.

Could the report, perhaps re-read for the first time in years after she’d phoned, have contained something
dangerous to Paddy after all? Or had it served its purpose as punishment, if not of Paddy himself then of someone who cared about him? Or maybe the report made no suggestion that Jeannie was a prostitute and did not show him in such a bad light after all. Maybe Sylvia had destroyed it as a way of preserving her picture of his supposed failings.

And maybe, Trish told herself with savage sarcasm, all really is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

‘Now, given that there’s really nothing I can do to help …’ Sylvia let her voice drift into silence as she glanced down at the delicate watch that hung loosely around her fragile wrist.

Trish obeyed the signals and got to her feet. ‘Thank you for seeing me.’

 

So that was the perfect Trish, Sylvia thought as she carried the coffee tray back to the kitchen. Not much like Paddy – except in the scruffiness. She could have been quite a pretty girl if she’d let her hair grow and dressed in something more becoming. Although that nose might have looked even more ferocious in a more feminine setting. What was her mother thinking of, to let her grow up without having it corrected?

Running hot water into the delicate Worcester cups, Sylvia wondered if the Paddy Maguire she had known could really have whacked a woman to death. It didn’t seem very likely. On the other hand, he had always had a shocking temper. And if the wretched Jeannie had had a child – perhaps put the Child Support Agency on to him after all these years – it wasn’t impossible that her whining might have triggered a thrashing. And if that had got out of hand … Perhaps one ought to talk to the police, just in case.

 

Outside Sylvia’s house, Trish stood on the top step of
the pillared portico, breathing in warm air. After the pot-pourri and tuberose scent, the dust and petrol fumes came as a relief. Trish walked down the three broad steps and out on the pavement.

Once she felt herself right off Sylvia’s territory, Trish phoned Lakeshaw and had to leave a message, as usual. A sudden gust of wind blew dust into her face and she turned her back, while still talking into her phone. Through her sore, bleary eyes, she thought she saw a face staring at her and blinked to clear her vision. By the time she’d got rid of the grit, everyone around her looked quite uninterested, but she was sure there had been someone watching her. Searching for the familiar slight, blond young man, all she could see were strangers. Could one of them be working for Lakeshaw, hoping to catch her giving away something that would incriminate her father? Or was it Jeannie Nest’s killer, tracking her to find out what she knew?

Trish felt as she sometimes did in nightmares, with her brain screaming at her to run and her limbs refusing to obey the order. Breathe, she told herself. Breathe and move.

It worked. Still feeling unsafe but once more with some control over herself, she walked on towards Hornton Street. She’d left her car in the car park there, but she thought she’d take an extra half hour to drop into the nursing home to see David. As she caught sight of Waterstone’s on the opposite side of the road, she remembered her promise to buy him the latest Harry Potter. She waited at the crossing for the lights to change.

There was a man walking down Allen Street, pausing to look in the bookshop’s window. His backview looked extraordinarily like Nick Gurles’s. He had the same confident, almost swaggering, walk, and the same beautifully cut suit.

It couldn’t possibly be Nick, Trish thought. Not on a weekday morning. Unless Henry Buxford had already
sacked him. But in that case, Antony would have told her; let her off the hook.

Tomorrow was the deadline he’d set for her to give him her decision about her whole future in chambers. In the old days, if she’d been faced with a dilemma like this, she’d have been flogging her mind up and down and all round every important question, but for some time now she’d had enough confidence in herself to wait for the right answer to emerge from her subconscious. So far, this time, nothing had happened. But she was still hoping.

The lights changed and she crossed the road. The man who looked like Nick had disappeared, so she walked on into Waterstone’s. There was a tall pile of copies of the new Harry Potter near the till. She grabbed one and flipped her credit card on to the glossy jacket as she joined the queue to pay.

Holding the book against herself like a breastplate, she went to see David. But when she gave her name to the nursing home’s receptionist over the intercom, she was told that he’d been moved yet again.

‘Oh, sod it. And sod Lakeshaw, too,’ she said aloud. The intercom crackled as though the receptionist had only just stifled some kind of protest. Trish couldn’t be certain that she’d been told the truth, but it was obvious that she wasn’t going to get through the door.

She retreated to the pavement, wishing she had something urgent to do. Antony had said he didn’t want her in chambers until tomorrow and she couldn’t do anything for David if he kept being whisked away from her. Caro had made it clear she didn’t want any contact until Jeannie Nest’s killer had been arrested, Lakeshaw wouldn’t answer calls, and Paddy didn’t want her either. George would be hard at work catching up with the backlog that had accumulated while he was in the States, and the last thing she wanted to do was dump yet more of her angst on him.

Anna Grayling had left another message on her mobile yesterday, suggesting lunch, but Trish didn’t feel strong enough for that yet. She wanted to do something useful, and the only thing left was to follow up David’s information about his mother’s friends from the teacher-training college. Trish wasn’t sure what they’d be able to tell her, but something useful might come of it. She picked about in her memory until it produced one of the names David had given her, then set about finding out where in North London there were teacher-training colleges. It didn’t take long to find the one that employed Frances Mason.

The switchboard operator asked if she’d like to be put through, but Trish didn’t want to be rejected before she’d even started to ask questions, so she said she merely had a letter to send and needed the full address and postcode. Equipped with those, she went to collect her car from the gloomy concrete car park under the public library.

She had her usual moment of doubt about the level on which she’d left the car, but found it without too much difficulty and bleeped up the locks from twenty yards away. Nothing happened, no electronic squeak and no flash from the indicators. She pressed the button again, checking that the tiny red light flashed. So the battery was working. Her hand was already on the door when she saw the mess on the back seat.

Some bastard had broken in through the back quarter light and found the briefcase that had been well hidden in the shadows under the seat. Now it was lying open, with all the papers strewn around it.

‘Oh, fucking hell!’ Trish’s voice boomed and echoed from pillar to pillar.

Luckily there was no one around to respond. When she’d got her temper under control, she pulled the driver’s seat forward and bent to collect all the papers between her hands. It took nearly ten minutes to sort them out on
the car’s soft roof, and clip the various bits and pieces together. As far as she could remember, everything was still here, and none of it was particularly confidential. There’d been no money in the briefcase or credit cards. But there had been her own private photocopy of Nick Gurles’s treacherous note.

With her head buzzing and her insides lurching as though she was on some appalling fairground ride, she scrabbled through the piles of paper, searching for the copy. One bundle slipped off the edge of the roof and landed in a patch of oil.

‘Oh, shit,’ she muttered. She could feel her mind revving up even more, and her heart was bouncing.

She bent to pick up the papers, cleaned the tacky oil off them as well as she could with an old tissue from her pocket, then put them back with the rest of their heap and stacked each neat pile back in the briefcase. As she reached the last, a clutch of bills she had yet to pay, she saw a greyish corner of photocopy paper peeking out.

‘Oh, thank God,’ she breathed, parting the bills to see Nick’s note. She leaned against the car, trying not to feel sick with relief.

I must have been mad, she thought. What on earth would Antony have said if I’d let it get out like this?

She ripped the copy into tiny pieces, determined to feed them down the nearest drain.

Her head felt thick and soupy, as though she might be about to get a cold. Or worse. She could almost see the black birds flapping in the sleet. Refusing to give in to them, she finished tidying the papers, snapped them back into the briefcase, and drove out of the car park, taking extra care not to brush any of the inconveniently sited concrete pillars. She’d once been in such a bad temper that she’d reversed smartly into one, denting the boot of her first decent car. Never again.

It took her nearly forty minutes to drive to Frankie
Mason’s college, but twenty of those were spent stuck in the almost stationary traffic along Kensington High Street. After that, once she’d left the streets she knew well, she had to stop twice to check her route on the map.