A Poisoned Mind

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘Oh, yes?’ said Robert in a voice that meant: what are you going to waste my time with now?

  ‘I think the other side are hiding something.’

  ‘What on earth d’you mean?’ No one could have sounded wearier at that moment than Robert. He dropped into a chair and began to unlace his shoes. ‘You don’t mind, do you? I’ve got a blister on my heel. Sodding new shoes. Handmade, too, and bloody expensive.’

  Trish’s eyebrows met as she frowned. A moment later, she ducked down behind her desk to pull open the bottom drawer, where she kept spare tights, needle and thread and a rudimentary first-aid kit.

  ‘Here’s some plaster. And scissors.’

  He looked up from the nasty red mess above his wrinkled sock. At last his face eased out of the snootiness she’d always hated. ‘Thanks, Mummy.’

  Trish felt her jaw muscles relax. ‘I’ve even got an antiseptic wipe, if you’d like it.’

  ‘I think I can manage without.’ He applied the dressing, pulled his sock up and his trouser leg down. ‘I’m myself again. What d’you think Angie Fortwell’s hiding.’

  ‘Not sure yet. But think of the change in her over lunch. Remember how she was by the door of the court … crying, hurt, angry and hating us.’

  ‘Hating you, certainly. OK, I’ll give you that.’

  ‘Then this afternoon, as she unpicked what I’d got the doctor to say, point by point, she could have been a pro. It was all so … cool. Effective. Quite different. I think she – or more likely the unsavoury Greg – must have reported to someone by phone, who told them what to do.’

  ‘Aren’t you being a bit snobbish here, Trish?’

  She had to laugh. Robert of all people to accuse her of that!

  ‘I mean it, Trish. Angie Fortwell’s an intelligent woman, even if she has spent the last couple of decades tilling the earth. She must be more than capable of reading a few student law books and working out what she’s got to do to spike your guns.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Trish checked her memory again and was determined to push Robert to see things her way. ‘But look at these.’

  She slid three of the photographs towards him and pointed to a tall man standing on the edge of the crowd in one. He was dressed in a long dark overcoat that looked smoothly expensive, and a hat, and he was turned away from the camera. Almost nothing could be seen of his face or head except a suggestion of full greying hair between the hat brim and the coat collar. His shoulders and back were straight. Everything about him was different from the comfortably slouching FADE supporters in their jeans and beanies and sweatshirts.

  ‘There’s the same figure somewhere in each of these shots,’ Trish said. ‘But the investigators haven’t identified him once.’

  ‘What makes you think he’s anything to do with FADE?’ Robert was back into his preferred mode of patrician disdain. ‘Or that it’s even the same person in each photograph?’

  ‘I’ve been measuring him against the others, and I think it’s him each time. Given that these three photographs were taken on quite different dates and in quite different places, that’s too much of a coincidence. So I want you to phone the solicitors first thing tomorrow to get the investigators to find out who he is.’

  ‘Trish, for God’s sake.’ Robert sighed in exasperation and she wondered how his many girlfriends had put up with him since his marriage collapsed. ‘Even if it were possible at this juncture, what would it tell us?’

  ‘If someone’s behind Angie and FADE, we need to know who he is. And why he’s involved.’

  ‘Is there any reason someone shouldn’t give them a spot of pro-bono legal advice?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Trish said, wishing she didn’t have to spend the evening arguing as well as the working day. ‘So there’d be no need for this kind of secrecy.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but—’

  ‘Before you go,’ she said, not prepared to waste any more of her own time, ‘have you ever seen anything in the documents that identifies the bed-and-breakfasters who stayed at the Fortwells’ farm?’

  ‘Can’t remember.’

  ‘Check it out, please.’ The crispness of her voice made him look at her with a new expression. Could it be respect? Or impatience like her own? ‘And can you bring me all the stuff about the tank design again? I need to have another go at it.’

  ‘Trish—’

  ‘Get on with it.’

  Much later she walked back across Blackfriars Bridge. She was halfway over before she realised that all the tiredness she’d felt at the weekend had gone. With her brain properly engaged, adrenaline fizzing through her body, she was herself again. There was a huge moon tonight, hanging over the black water of the Thames and making her think of a book she’d had as a very young child: something about a character seeing the moon in a bucket of water and trying to get it out.

  She must have been three or four, she thought, and unable to read for herself. So it would have been in the time of ordinary family life, before her father dumped her and her mother. In those days he would come back from the insurance office where he worked to read her bed-time stories and let her play with his cufflinks. She used to lie back on her single pillow, smelling the dinner her mother was cooking downstairs, and listen to his voice reading from one of the small thin hardback books from her collection. Most evenings, he embellished the text as only he could. Smiling at the memory, she felt almost as though she could hear his voice, very Irish as it still was when he was telling stories:

  ‘And to be sure, Trish-my-dear, aren’t we all chasing for the moon and pouring it down the drain at the selfsame time?’

  Had she made it up, or had he really said something like that? She ought to phone him as soon as this case was over and make an effort to see him. She’d got over her rage about what he’d done to her long ago, but she still couldn’t forgive the way he’d ignored David’s existence after the break-up with his mother, Jeannie.

  Trish had known nothing about either of them until six years ago, when Jeannie had sent David to her for sanctuary. Jeannie was being terrorised by a crime family against whom she’d given evidence. Later, after her death, David had had nowhere else to go, and Trish had adopted him.

  Thinking about that terrifying time, she rounded the corner of her street and climbed the iron staircase as quietly as possible. If you caught your toe at the wrong place on the treads, you could set up a vibrating clang that would wake anyone in the flat.

  Inside, she double-locked the door, laid her keys in the bowl with the barest chink and turned to climb up to bed, only to see a line of light under David’s door. Frowning, she held up her wrist to see from the faintly illuminated figures of her watch that it was past one o’clock.

  She pushed open his door to see that he’d fallen asleep as he read. He was lying flat on his back with the book just touching his chin. With her hand on the switch of his bedside light, she looked down at his sleeping face and winced. His eyelids were red and swollen and there were sticky streaks under them.

  Never once in their life together had she seen him cry. Even in the early days when he must have lived every hour in loneliness and terror, he had never broken down in front of her. Occasionally, when George had shouted at him before they’d sorted out how to work round each other, he’d been a bit sniffly, but that was all. Could she wake George now to find out what had happened?

  When she pushed open the door of her own bedroom, she looked down at George’s face and saw all the customary strain smoothed out by sleep. He was lying on his back, with one arm crooked above his head and the duvet pushed down to waist level. She touched his cheek, which made him turn towards her in his sleep and move his face against her hand, more trusting and vulnerable than he’d ever allow himself to be in the daytime. She couldn’t disturb him now.

  Chapter 7

  Antony’s sleeping face was very thin inside the cage that was keeping his neck vertebrae together while they healed, and his skin looked like fine white modelling clay. Trish wound th
e strap of her shoulder bag round and round her fingers, wishing she hadn’t allowed herself to be so angry when she read the message he’d left for her at chambers on Wednesday morning.

  Her feelings couldn’t hurt him, but they had shaken her. The thought of Robert scurrying over here to the hospital at the end of each day’s proceedings and revving up Antony’s anxieties about how she was performing made her feel like a giant turtle being gawped at as it went endlessly back and forth in a tiny tank instead of ranging the seas in freedom.

  ‘He’s not likely to wake,’ said a passing nurse. ‘The pain was so bad we had to give him a pretty big dose of morphine. d’you want to leave a message for him?’

  Trish scuffled in her bag for a pen and accepted a piece of scrap paper from the nurse. After a moment’s thought, she wrote:

  Antony, I came flying to answer your summons, but you were out of it and not expected to wake in the foreseeable future. (It’s nearly 8.30 and visiting will end in a few minutes.) Don’t worry. Whatever Robert has told you, I’m in control of my material – and of the case. Forget about it and concentrate on letting your bones knit. Must get back to work. I’ll come back when it’s all over. Love Trish.

  She folded the paper in half and left it on his table, tucked between the two narrow glass vases that held rare-looking orchids, asking the nurse to tell him where it was. It seemed safer to leave it there than to risk losing it amid all the forms and charts at the reception desk.

  As if I didn’t have enough to worry about without chambers politics, she thought as she walked out of the quiet, dimly lit ward.

  The most important thing was making space to talk to David and find out what Monday’s tears were about.

  She switched her phone back on as soon as she’d left the hospital’s main doors and felt it buzz to alert her to her voicemails. There was the expected clutch from Steve, her clerk, and Robert, but there was one from David, too.

  ‘Hi. It’s me. George says you want to talk to me. We’ve had supper; he’s put yours in the oven. He’s working upstairs and I’m about to go on the computer. So if you want me, can you ring soon?’

  Ah, David, she thought: so practical.

  She rang him and apologised for interrupting, adding: ‘I just wanted to say how sorry I am that work’s overtaken me. I’ve been to the hospital to talk to Antony Shelley and now I’m free for a bit. I thought I might come home. We could talk while I eat. But if you’re stuck into the computer, I—’

  ‘OK,’ he said casually, as though he didn’t mind either way. She remembered the morning he’d kicked the sofa and complained that she never had time. It seemed astonishing to think it was only four days ago. ‘Whatever. I’ll be here.’

  ‘Great.’

  She hailed a passing taxi and was deposited at the foot of the iron staircase only ten minutes later.

  George had laid her a place at the table, with a clean napkin and a highly polished wine glass. A bottle of Chilean Merlot, with about a glass and a half left in it, stood in front of her place.

  ‘That was quick,’ David said.

  She waited for him to offer to fetch her food from the oven, as he would have done a couple of years ago. Nothing came, so she went to the kitchen and helped herself to a plateful of sausage and lentil stew from the dish in the oven.

  When she came back, she put it down and had a good look at David’s face. There were no signs of tears today and she couldn’t feel any tension when she ruffled his head. He didn’t wince this time, either, which suggested the bruise left by Jay’s assault with the Scrabble board had healed.

  ‘You’d better eat or it’ll get cold.’

  Trish picked up her fork and took a mouthful. As made by any ordinarily careless cook like herself, this stew could have been claggy with fat and stodgy too. But George had used all-meat sausages from his favourite butcher in Borough Market and the finest of Puy lentils, a good dose of the Merlot and careful seasoning. The result was a rich, earthy, yet subtle-tasting mouthful of comfort.

  ‘Did Jay like it?’ she asked as she swallowed.

  David’s face barely altered, but she was watching carefully enough to see the faint quiver of his nostrils and a tiny clenching in the corners of his eyes. His newly protuberant Adam’s apple moved too, as though he was trying to swallow something unpalatable. He turned away and took a real apple from the bowl, biting into it, which meant his voice was barely audible as he said:

  ‘He didn’t come today.’

  ‘I thought he was always going to come now to do his homework.’

  ‘Not any more.’ He swallowed too much apple at once and choked. It could’ve been the spasm in his larynx that made his eyes water.

  Trish looked away, so that he would not think she was prying, and said in the kind of casual voice he so often used, ‘D’you want to say why? Or should I just ignore it and talk about … oh, I don’t know: ballet?’

  ‘Ballet.’ In spite of loving Billy Elliot, he sounded disgusted enough to reassure her. ‘No, thanks.’

  But he couldn’t find a way to tell her, so she had to go on with her questions.

  ‘Did you have a fight?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘So someone said something. Was it you?’

  He was staring down at the half-eaten apple in his hand, so all she could see was hair. That shifted like a curtain as he shook his head.

  ‘I hate him already,’ Trish said lightly.

  ‘You mustn’t. It’s … pro’ly my fault.’ He was picking the pips out of the exposed core and arranging them at the edge of his plate as he’d done when he first came here to the flat.

  ‘I doubt that, David.’ How much should she say? ‘It often feels easier to blame ourselves for things people we care about do to us; but, you know, in a way it doesn’t do them any more favours than it does us. Sorry; that’s getting a bit complicated.’

  ‘Yeah, but I know what you mean.’

  Now he was looking at her again, and his black eyes were lighting up with interest. Had she known in the beginning how easily he would come to share her curiosity about the mysteries of human behaviour, she would have been a lot less worried about taking him on. But even at her most anxious, she’d never had the feeling she had with Jay all the time: that he was dangerous and anything might trigger disaster.

  ‘Blaming him means all sorts of trouble, so I didn’t,’ David said. ‘But the things he said was … were, I mean—’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

  He rearranged the apple pips for a long time. Then, still without looking at her, said: ‘I do. It’s just it’s hard. He was angry because I’d tried to stop him getting into trouble at school, and he said he wasn’t surprised my mother was … was killed, if she was anything like me because I’m a fucking waste of space and no use to anyone and I stink.’

  She longed to take him in her arms and knew she couldn’t. At fourteen and taller than her, he was way beyond that kind of simple consolation.

  ‘Taking the silliest bit first: you do not stink. OK, David?’

  He shot a shy smile at her.

  ‘And your mother was killed because she was the very opposite of a waste of space. The few people who are allowed to know anything about her know she died because she’d had the courage to give evidence against the most brutal kind of villain.’

  Should she go on? His bottom lip was already tucked between his teeth and they must be biting hard because there was no colour in the surrounding flesh.

  ‘You know why Jay said it, don’t you?’

  David didn’t look away, but he shook his head.

  ‘Because he’s jealous. His own mother drinks too much and behaves so weirdly he can never rely on her. Not to protect him or to be the kind of person he could look up to. He must be very angry with her. Your mother was different. She was a hero and she did everything she could to keep you safe. Never forget that.’

  There was no choking to explain away these few tears that we
re slipping out of his eyes. He sniffed.

  ‘You’d better get yourself a bit of kitchen paper, David,’ she said with all the tenderness she’d have loved to express physically.

  She gave him a minute or two of privacy, then carried her dirty dishes out to the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t do anything with these. I’ll wash them up later, but I really ought to go back to chambers soon, unless you need—’

  ‘I’m OK.’ He didn’t smile.

  ‘Will you tell George for me? And say I thought the sausages were great.’

  ‘Don’t you want to see him?’ He sounded amazed.

  ‘Not now. I only wanted to see you.’ She risked kissing his forehead and didn’t wait for a response.

  His voice caught her on the threshold and held her back.

  ‘Trish.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘After he said it … Jay, I mean. Afterwards, I—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I hit him. Twice. His lip kind-of burst. There was a lot of blood. He ran off.’

  Angie was walking off her feelings. Trish Maguire had been vile all day in court; even worse than she’d been on the first two days. These streets couldn’t give Angie the freedom of the hills, and tonight all she could see was the peeling paint and the narrowness of the grey-and-cream façades instead of the cosiness they’d once suggested, but at least she didn’t have to talk to anyone. She could let her hatred of Maguire’s insinuating questions sink down into the nastiest muck at the bottom of her mind, and with luck she’d soon be able to stop feeling as though Greg was her jailer.

  Having him beside her all day was more and more difficult. This afternoon, she’d wanted to slap his hand away when he held out yet another document she didn’t need. And his ghastly beard was really getting to her.

  Do stop it, she told herself, well able to understand that none of it was Greg’s fault, that he was merely the convenient symbol of everything she couldn’t let herself feel about the case. About John. About herself and her horrible temper.