A Poisoned Mind

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘Course not.’ He looked up, having arrived at eight for the number of different patterns. ‘I told you I gave them to him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I wanted him to have them.’

  ‘Is your sister happy about it?’

  ‘She doesn’t know yet. She’s busy at the moment. She’s got a big case. But I’ll tell her soon.’

  ‘That’s not good enough, David. I’ve been teaching boys of your age for twenty-five years now, and I know when there’s more to a story than they’re telling me. Things haven’t been right between you and Jay all week. Now here he is wearing your best trainers. What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Now he was counting the lines of different lengths. There were patterns there too.

  ‘I’m going to have to send a note to your sister to alert her to what’s going on.’

  ‘Don’t do that.’ There were three sorts of short lines and six longer ones. They could probably be subdivided even more. ‘She’s busy.’

  ‘You leave me no alternative. I’m too worried to let this go.’

  He went back to counting the shapes. He could’ve missed one the first time.

  ‘David?’

  ‘Oh, OK. I’ll tell her tomorrow or Sunday, when she’s not working all the time.’

  ‘Good. Make sure you actually do it. You’d better get going now. You’ve got English next, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Which was good. He liked English.

  ‘Right. Well, don’t go giving Jay anything else. If I see any sign of him in possession of anything that belongs to you, I’m phoning your sister’s chambers right away, however busy she is.’

  David didn’t answer. There wasn’t anything to say. He thought of the jeans Jay wanted. They were still hanging in the cupboard at home because David liked them too much to let them go. But if he had, he wouldn’t be in this mess now: Jay wouldn’t have worn the jeans at school, so no one would’ve known. Maybe he’d talk to George tonight and get him to sort Trish out. Maybe. It would depend what mood George was in when he got home.

  Now Trish was so busy, George stayed in Southwark every night instead of only sometimes, and he was always there first, ready to cook supper. But he usually had a briefcase full of papers to work on afterwards and worrying about them could make him irritable and uncooperative. You always had to pick your moments with George, even when Jay was making him laugh.

  When Trish got back to her room in chambers after the day’s session, she recognised the head teacher’s writing on the hand-delivered envelope at once. Her mind lurched. What had Jay made David do now? She longed to rip the letter open right away, but it would have to wait until she’d dealt with Robert and CWWM’s solicitor, Fred Hoffman.

  ‘I still don’t understand, Trish,’ he said in his agreeably relaxed voice.

  She’d always liked him for his brains and his determination to cooperate whenever he could. He must have been in his mid-fifties and there were plenty of solicitors of his generation whose first reaction to any request was to explain why they couldn’t provide what you wanted. Not Fred.

  ‘Have a seat,’ she said, waving towards the better of the visitors’ armchairs and leaving Robert to the one with the broken spring.

  ‘Run it past me again.’ Unusually Fred was frowning, which made his eyebrows protrude and hang over his brown eyes like a gorilla’s.

  ‘Evidence from the surveillance photographs suggests Angie Fortwell is being secretly coached by Benjamin Givens,’ she said, trying to banish the ludicrous image of Fred as a vast primate thundering through the damp Rwandan forest. ‘There’s no obvious reason for the secrecy so I need to know what he’s up to.’

  ‘How d’you suggest I find that out?’ Fred’s tone was sarcastic but even now he wasn’t refusing to try.

  ‘I’ve no idea, not being a detective,’ she said, smiling. ‘But you and CWWM employed plenty of those in the run-up to the case, and whoever you’ve got now produced these helpful photographs from Wednesday night. I have every faith in them – and in you, dear Fred.’

  He produced a sharp, humourless crack of laughter, then drummed his broad fingers on the edge of her desk. ‘Far be it from me to turn away a compliment from any silk, Trish, but I’m not sure how—’

  ‘“Find the money,”’ she quoted. ‘Find out if there is any and, if so, follow it. There must be ways.’

  ‘Probably none you could use in court.’ The dark eyes lit with amusement, which made her think he must be fantasising about wicked schemes of burglary and intimidation.

  ‘Maybe not. But there’s still time to settle this thing. Just.’ She put her elbows on the desk and leaned towards him.

  He moved forwards too, hunching his broad shoulders, as though trying not to overwhelm her with his size.

  ‘Look, Fred, what I most want is to avoid CWWM being forced to pay big damages and only later finding out that FADE and Angie Fortwell have been up to something illegal all along. With such an impoverished bunch, we’d never get the money back for CWWM even if we won on appeal. So it’s pretty urgent.’

  He leaned back and dug a hand in his pocket to extract a small leather folder with gold edges. He peeled one card away from the rest and wrote himself a note. Trish thought of her huge legal pads and wondered why anyone, but particularly a man as burly as Fred, would confine himself to such an affected, shopping-list kind of jotter.

  ‘How long d’you think you’ll take with our witnesses?’ he said, looking up again.

  ‘Not much more than a week.’

  ‘But we could spin it out a bit,’ Robert said from the sidelines. ‘Quite legitimately.’

  ‘“Quite” meaning partly,’ said Trish with unusual dryness, ‘rather than absolutely. What a useful word that is. Will you get it under way, Fred?’

  ‘Will do. Now, d’you need me for anything else tonight? I’ve got to go to Heathrow to meet CWWM’s managing director. He’s on his way back from sorting out some disaster in the States and wants a first-hand report on how things are going here.’

  ‘I’d heard they were having a run of bad luck, but I hadn’t realised it extended across the Atlantic,’ Robert said. ‘What’s been happening there?’

  ‘Too complicated to go into now.’ Fred kept checking his watch and was visibly itching to be off. Trish nodded to him.

  ‘You get on, Fred. Robert and I can manage here. Thanks.’

  He extracted himself from the deep chair with surprising ease for such a big man and ambled out. Trish and Robert worked their way through the other questions thrown up by the day’s proceedings.

  Only when Robert had eventually followed Fred out of the room could she at last pick up the head’s letter. Trying to think of the worst it might contain, she tore open the envelope.

  Dear Trish,

  I’m sorry to trouble you when, as David tells me, you’re in the middle of a large and important case, but I’m worried about what is going on between him and Jay. Already Jay is having a deleterious effect on David’s language and behaviour. I’ve never known your brother so obstinate, even obstructive, and his homework is slapdash in a way none of us has ever seen from him before.

  This is of concern in itself.

  Worse, however, is the discovery that he has just given Jay his new trainers. His motive may have been purely altruistic, as he claims, but I fear that Jay may be exerting undesirable pressure on David. If this is true, it needs to be dealt with before it escalates, as I’m sure you will agree.

  I told David I wouldn’t bother you with this while you’re so busy, but I’ve decided it’s too urgent to wait, so I do hope that you will be able to take the time to talk to him over the weekend. I would appreciate a discussion – by telephone if necessary.

  I look forward to hearing from you.

  Yours ever, Jeremy

  Trish put down the letter, wondering what on earth to do about Jay. She still admired his courage, and his brains, and she wanted to help. But if he was going to make
David miserable and screw up his time at school, she’d have to separate them. If Jeremy Black was right and the pressure on David did escalate …

  ‘Shit!’ she said aloud, trying to block out pictures of all sorts of horrors that might never happen.

  ‘Really, Trish.’ Robert’s voice came from just outside the door. He pushed it open and she saw he was already kitted out in overcoat and scarf, with his briefcase in his hand. ‘Aren’t you too grand now to use language like that?’

  ‘Sod off,’ she said lightly and was relieved to hear him laugh. ‘Have a good weekend. See you Monday.’

  ‘Sure. Same to you.’

  Hearing him run down the stone stairs and bang the front door behind him, she cleared her desk completely, locking up every scrap of paper. If Greg Waverly and FADE were as devious as she was beginning to believe, she didn’t want to take any risks with her confidential documents.

  As she walked home, she tried to put him and the case right out of her mind so she could concentrate on David.

  Somehow she’d have to protect him from his own generous impulse to include Jay in everything he had and did. She owed George time, too. They’d had no more than a few minutes’ sleepy chat for days, and he’d been carrying the whole domestic load for her.

  Better eat first, she decided. I can talk to David after supper, see him safely in bed and reading, and then focus on George.

  That would be easier if there weren’t still a residue of the constraint she’d noticed on the evening he’d cut his toenails in her bedroom. He hadn’t volunteered an explanation of what had been bothering him, and she hadn’t had time to winkle it out of him.

  Once again the iron staircase felt like Everest and she wished she could be somewhere else, anywhere, even arguing with Robert about the best way of dealing with CWWM’s difficulties.

  ‘Stop it,’ she muttered, shoving her key into the front-door lock.

  The door seemed extra stiff, as though the wood had swollen in all the rain that had emptied itself from the clouds in the last few days. She put her shoulder to it and pushed hard, only to feel it yield so fast she was propelled into the room by her own force.

  ‘How very flattering!’ George said, looking up from the newspaper. ‘I knew you missed us, but not that much.’

  ‘Hi,’ she said, leaning over his shoulder and bending her head so she could kiss him under the chin, just where his skin was most sensitive. ‘Good day?’

  ‘Not bad.’ He moved a little, like a cat stroking itself against a friendly body. Maybe she’d imagined the constraint. ‘You?’

  ‘We’re making progress with the case, but I can’t quite see my way through to a win or even satisfactorily limited damages.’ She sighed in frustration. ‘Still, it’s the weekend now, and I’m not going to think about any of it tonight. What are your plans?’

  ‘We’re going to train in the pool tomorrow morning,’ David said from the other sofa. ‘Me and George. d’you want to come?’

  ‘I’d only feel inadequate as I flap about like a water-boatman on the surface and you two do your otter thing slicing through the water. My time would be better used cooking some delicious kind of lunch so it’s hot and ready when you get back.’

  ‘Great,’ David said with a smile that looked forced to her oversensitive eye. He lowered his lids, looking away. ‘Can we have that chicken thing with the ciabatta and Parmesan crust top?’

  She had to smile at his tact. He’d just picked the easiest of all the dishes George had taught her.

  ‘Sure. d’you think Jay will like it?’

  David dropped his book.

  ‘I doubt if he’ll be here this weekend,’ George said, with a warning expression on his face. ‘I’ll get supper on the table now. Can you manage without a shower tonight? It’s a bit late already.’

  ‘I’ll just wash my hands,’ she said, letting her eyes put the question she couldn’t ask aloud.

  George very slightly shook his head and looked upwards. Long experience told her this meant the news would be better kept until they were upstairs in bed and out of David’s earshot. A little reassured, because it was clear George already knew something, Trish asked David if she could use his bathroom to wash and so save time going upstairs.

  ‘After all, mustn’t keep George’s food waiting,’ she said, grinning.

  David’s answering smile was only the palest version of his usual one. She abandoned the attempt to get through to him and went to clean the London smuts off her hands.

  ‘So what’s been happening?’ she asked when she and George were alone. ‘I had a letter from Jeremy Black, telling me David’s given Jay his best trainers and asking me to intervene, but I’d better have the full story before I try.’

  ‘You know most of it then, and I wouldn’t have thought there was anything you could do. Apparently Jay’s wanted those trainers ever since he first saw them. At that stage David refused to hand them over. He changed his mind only after he beat Jay up the other day.’

  Trish made an inarticulate protest. Before she could organise her ideas, George said:

  ‘Didn’t you hear about that? Jay’s split lip and all the blood? David told me he’d confessed.’

  ‘He did talk a bit about the fight, but he didn’t say a word about feeling he had to give Jay a lavish present as a penance.’

  ‘He was afraid you’d tell him to ask for them back and he wants me to make sure you don’t.’

  ‘I suppose I might have, although it’s a bit unlikely. Why didn’t he tell me himself?’

  ‘What he said to me,’ George said in a deliberately casual voice that worried her all over again, ‘is that he didn’t want to bother you when you’re so fraught.’

  You never have time, she quoted to herself in silence.

  ‘Apparently when he apologised for losing his temper and drawing blood,’ George went on, ‘Jay just looked at him in a “yeah, yeah” kind of way that made it clear he didn’t believe a word of it. David said he had to do something to show he wished he hadn’t hit him. Hence the trainers.’

  ‘Oh, bugger it all!’ Trish said, sighing. ‘For some idiotically naive reason, I thought we’d be able to help Jay without it costing anything but money. d’you think we ought to try to cool the friendship now?’

  ‘David’s tougher than you think,’ George said, settling his wide shoulders against the pillows. ‘And it’s no bad thing for him to have to deal with rage and guilt and a bit of anxiety about someone else. Only children can get very self-absorbed, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she said, quick amusement lightening her voice.

  George patted her thigh. ‘I didn’t mean you.’

  ‘I bet you did really.’ She kissed him. ‘So maybe I should ask the question that’s been nagging at me for days: what is it about Jay that makes you talk as though we all owe him something?’

  ‘He needs help,’ he said quickly, as though he wanted to stop her asking anything else. ‘David had a rough enough start, but his day-to-day life was nothing to what Jay has to put up with all the time. If we can do something to mitigate it, I think we should. That’s all.’

  ‘How do you know what Jay goes through? Does he tell you? He’s never given me any details.’

  ‘It doesn’t take much imagination to fill in the gaps,’ George said.

  Yellow light from the streetlamps leaked in at the edges of the blinds and lit up the few grey strands in the thick tufts of his brown hair. There was a strange half smile on his lips, which didn’t look happy, or even familiar.

  ‘And I admire the way he comes out fighting, instead of pretending everything’s fine and fantasising about violence in silence as … as lots of people would.’

  Trish opened her mouth to ask for more and he propped himself up on one elbow so he could trace her lips with the other hand, saying: ‘Let’s talk about something else.’

  Next morning, Trish made herself lie in bed after George and David had left for the pool. Long experience had taught her that,
although work was the only sure way of fighting off worry, there were also times when she had to slow herself down and make the effort to clear her mind of everything. Otherwise contradictory ideas could generate so much stress they acted on her brain like dirt in an engine’s carburettor, making it cough and slow and eventually stop altogether.

  George and David had already done the supermarket run on Friday evening, so the ingredients she would need for lunch were in the fridge. She had no need to hurry. Eventually, she put the newspaper on the floor and slid out of bed, to give herself the luxury of an extra-long, very hot shower.

  All week she’d had tight knots in all the connections between her arms and shoulders, legs and groin, neck and trunk. As the hot water powered down on her, needling and soothing at the same time, they began to loosen and at last to untie.

  Flexible again, and feeling as though her mind was more or less free of everything except trivialities, she turned off the water and wrapped a huge scarlet towel around her body. The towel was old, with much less pile than it had once had and edges already shredded. She ought to buy more and wondered whether she had grown out of the need for scarlet. Running through the more grown-up possibilities of colours like beige and mushroom, she decided she was still some way off that stage.

  The idea of spending the whole day in a dressing gown was tempting, but impractical with everything she’d have to do in the kitchen, so she pulled on her softest, oldest jeans and layered three different tops over them, taking perverse pleasure in the clashing orange, pink and purple. With the central heating turned luxuriously high, she could leave her feet bare and pattered downstairs to make a start on the chopping.

  Tears were still pouring down her face, even after the onions were safely in their pan, and she was running her hands and the large chef’s knife under the cold tap in a vain attempt to clear the burning in her eyes. A loud knocking on the front door made her curse in terms that would probably have made Robert blench.