A Poisoned Mind

by Natasha Cooper

  She stiffened at the insult.

  ‘You know, like … Oh, sod it! I was an academic, supposed to be articulate. It’s like a kind of vertigo. I don’t know if the ground’s solid beneath me any more, whether it’s me or the world that’s shifting.’

  ‘You’re safely sitting on a leather banquette in a three-quarters empty bar, with polished wood all around you and about to drink a glass of wine,’ she said, feeling better for his explanation.

  The waiter appeared with their bottle and glasses.

  ‘Tell me about being an academic. Did you stick with Eng. Lit?’

  ‘No.’ Adam gulped the tasting sample of wine and nodded his approval. The waiter poured two full glasses and left them. ‘After … after a while, I realised I couldn’t deal with all those washy, amorphous concepts and feelings. I wanted rigour and discipline and facts.’

  He looked straight at her and she thought she could see shadows of the chubby toddler kicking his ball at her. She wondered what he saw and thought of the last time she’d faced her reflection in a mirror: dry patches of reddened skin on a face that was almost cadaverous; dark eyes sunk into sockets like bruises; and cracked lips with flaky patches.

  ‘Facts are a lot less uncomfortable than ideas,’ he added.

  ‘I can believe that.’ She forced a smile and tried to forget how awful she must look. ‘So what did you pick? Maths? You were always rather good at sums.’

  ‘Chemistry. Which turned out to be not such a good idea when the university axed the department.’

  ‘Where are you now?’ She pushed down the thought of all the years when he’d existed quite apart from her.

  Once she’d known everything about him. Now he’d had years of experience, friends and probably lovers too, of which she hadn’t been allowed to know anything. She understood what he meant about vertigo.

  ‘I’m working in a commercial lab, but still publishing with an academic press.’

  ‘That’s great.’ Smiling was an effort, but she had to do it. She was this unknown man’s mother. ‘But why chemistry? Although of course you did get a good chemistry A level, didn’t you?’

  ‘I’m surprised you remember,’ he said with an unbelievably nasty tone in his voice, then he pulled back. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. Getting up to speed after the subject switch was hard work. But it gave me my facts and I clung to them.’ He put down his glass. ‘They were all I had that was safe. Bugger it! I didn’t mean to get into all this.’

  ‘Nor did I, but here we are.’ She wondered how far to go, whether the two of them were strong enough to deal with wherever their words and feelings took them, whether she might make the gap between them wider if she spoke clumsily now. In the end, she decided she had to try.

  ‘Adam, I’ve gone over and over the things that happened that last morning and wished I’d kept my wretched mouth shut. But—’

  Faced with him, seeing through his adult face to the beloved baby for whom she’d given up so much, she couldn’t go on. Why should she take it all on herself?

  ‘But you couldn’t forgive me for what I’d said, so you couldn’t see why you should apologise first,’ he said, like an echo of her own thoughts.

  ‘If I hadn’t moved,’ she said, not looking at him, ‘would you have mown me down with my own Land Rover?’

  ‘Of course not. How could you think that?’

  There was enough passion in his voice to make her glance up again. More people had come into the restaurant but they were just a blur as she concentrated on her son’s face.

  ‘I felt the tyres practically graze my legs. It would take a saint to be the first to apologise after that, and I’m no saint.’

  ‘No,’ he said with such emphasis that she stiffened up all over again.

  She looked around, hoping for any kind of distraction.

  ‘But you were always a martyr,’ he went on, ‘wallowing in all that unnecessary misery. Why did you try to make me buy into it too? I’d rather have eaten sheep shit every day for a month than have my life devoured like yours was.’

  She covered her face with both hands, propping her elbows on the table and pushing the wine aside.

  ‘I don’t want to do this,’ she said from behind her hands.

  His fingers closed about her wrists, amazingly strong for someone who had never picked up anything heavier than a book or a test tube, and pulled her hands away from her face.

  ‘Look at me, M … No; I can’t call you that again. Not yet anyway. Look at me.’

  She’d fought harder enemies than this so she kept her eyes directed at the table’s glossy surface.

  ‘OK, don’t look at me.’ He dropped her wrists. ‘But listen. We should do it. I came today, hoping to see signs that we might be able to. And you were you again in court; your voice was yours; your mind was operating at full throttle; you were back to being a real person, not a skivvy.’

  He picked up his glass and swirled the wine around in it. She watched him from under her lashes. He didn’t drink. At last he looked up again.

  ‘Which is why I thought I’d be able to talk to you. But now I realise you’re still stuck.’

  She rubbed one wrist with the other hand. His grip had been painful, but in a way it was a relief to have a physical hurt to manage.

  ‘Stuck?’

  ‘In denial. Pretending you didn’t hate the fucking farm; pretending you didn’t resent what he’d done to you, the way he’d gobbled your real self and spat out only the rubbish bits he was prepared to let you keep. Sticking with the fiction that you shared his tastes mattered more than anything else, didn’t it?’

  A familiar sensation surged up in her brain. Anger, hot and terrifying, like magma spouting from a volcano, destroying everything in its path. This time, she had to keep it in.

  ‘It wasn’t a fiction.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake stop lying. Anyone could see how much you hated it. It used to drive me mad. Didn’t you ever wonder what all those lies did to me?’

  Holding in her feelings, controlling the boiling, burning, poisonous words was getting harder.

  ‘Presumably not,’ he said and sipped his wine. Then he put down the glass and looked at her again. ‘After all, you never cared about me.’

  She clasped her hands on the tabletop. It was the only way she could stop herself reaching out to grab him by the neck and shake some sense into him.

  ‘You were the most important thing in my whole life, Adam,’ she said when it was safe to speak. ‘You must have known that.’

  He gaped at her. She thought of the rest, the confession she might never be able to make: but I knew I’d have to let you go one day, so I had to make the rest of my life work. I had to pretend to like working on the farm if I was to keep John more or less happy. There was no other way of making our hellish existence bearable.

  ‘How the hell could I have known?’ His eyes were narrowing into accusing pinpoints she recognised from ancient photographs of herself in childhood. His voice was rising too, as he accused her. ‘You never said anything kind or encouraging to me in my whole life. Not ever.’

  ‘This is a joke,’ she muttered, feeling the anger rising again in spite of everything she did to hold it down. ‘A sick joke.’

  Grabbing the wine glass, she took too big a swallow and choked. With her throat in spasm and her nose and eyes pouring with humiliating quantities of mucus, she had to run for the ladies.

  By the time she got back, mopped and clean, the waiter had wiped the table and brought new nuts and olives. Adam had gone, leaving a wad of money on the table beside the half-empty bottle. In his absence, the money was like a slap.

  A sentence in the middle of a long, waffly weblog by someone calling himself Peterthewalk caught Trish’s drowsy attention and she whipped back into full wakefulness:

  Adam warned me off going to Low Topps farm, said the people there aren’t half as welcoming as the ones in another farm six miles to the west, within the national park. He knows the ar
ea well, so I believed him. And I had the best pork pie ever with the Greens at Manor Farm. Polly Green is just the best cook and breakfast was to die for. I ate double the other couple there – Sal and Chris – and had to have a little lie down before I set out, which means I was in a rush to get to my next stopping point before dark. So I cheated. I wasn’t going to say so, but what’s the point of a blog if you tell lies?

  I came over the hill near Rushy Knowe and found a biggish road. I was tired and I’d run out of water, so I was scared of dehydrating before I got to the Handwells at Dark Edge Farm. Well a milk lorry came along and I stuck my thumb out. He gave me a lift and I made it to Dark Edge before Sal and Chris had eaten all the food. It wasn’t as good as Polly Green’s, but they were making up for missing out on some of her breakfast. They were a bit weird about where they’d been and how I couldn’t have seen any trace of them all day. Then Sal blushed and said she’d got them lost. They’d hitched a lift too. I didn’t feel such a fraud then. She said they were going to Low Topps next day, so I passed on what I’d heard from Adam.

  In the morning I …

  Trish’s eyes were beginning to close again. Talk about parish pump gossip, she thought. How odd that something as hi-tech as the Internet should be encouraging this kind of garrulous sharing of unimportant information.

  But the mention of Adam in the context of the Fortwells’ farm was interesting. She woke herself up properly and made a note. Adam was hardly a rare first name, but the possibility of a useful coincidence sharpened her mind. She’d get Robert’s permission to put Hal on to the blogger tomorrow and find out if he’d ever known Adam’s surname.

  ‘Ms Maguire?’

  Her head shot up at the sound of the man’s voice. Its owner was a perfect stranger, standing silhouetted against the brighter light in the corridor outside her room. It was good to hear sounds of other people walking, talking and working all over the building.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don Bates.’

  My client, the managing director of CWWM, she thought, as she stood up and held out her hand. ‘We shouldn’t really be meeting without—’

  ‘It’s fine. I’m only a few minutes ahead of Fred Hoffman. He’ll be here any time now.’

  ‘Good,’ Trish said, trying to think of something she could say that wouldn’t impinge on the case. ‘How was your trip to the States? He said you’d been to sort out some problem.’

  Bates moved away from the door, unbuttoning his cashmere overcoat as he did so. He flung it over the back of the better visitor’s chair and Trish saw the superfine navy cloth was lined with heavy satin. His suit was just as impressive and, now she could see him clearly, so was his face: a craggy slab of well-shaped handsomeness with warmth in his smile and intelligence in his blue eyes. He kept them fixed on her with an intensity she found disturbing. Even when she looked away, she could feel his attention. When she glanced back, he was still staring at her.

  ‘Did you manage to sort it?’ she asked, as a way of defusing the tension.

  ‘Not entirely. We’re being targeted by a whole new generation of eco-activists over in the States. It’s a right bugger, and it’s one reason why I don’t want this case dragging on any longer than it has to. I have to stop the bad publicity fast. So, Ms Maguire—’

  Trish held up one hand, like a traffic cop. ‘We can’t discuss it till Fred’s with us.’

  ‘He is,’ said the solicitor, lumbering into her room. He grinned at her, panting from the doorway.

  Trish relaxed. But Bates’s gaze hadn’t moved away from her. What was he looking for?

  ‘Sit down, both of you,’ she said. ‘Would you like a drink? I’ve got some whisky.’

  ‘No, thank you. What I want is an assessment from you of how we’re doing. What are our chances?’

  ‘Impossible to quantify for sure,’ she said, picking up a pen. She always thought better when she could write notes. ‘They never are, even at this stage. We’re on fairly firm ground with the fact that John Fortwell was on your land when the explosion happened, so that will mitigate the damages. We’re on absolutely solid rock with the fact that it was his job to keep the filters clear and he obviously hadn’t, probably because he was suffering from depression, which means contributory negligence. But—’

  ‘I don’t like indecision,’ he said, forgetting to smile but not to keep his attention on her. ‘Tell me without shilly-shallying or protecting yourself.’

  Trish suppressed her instinct to shrug. ‘I can’t help believing we should be looking at sabotage. To be fair, Antony told me to have nothing to do with the idea because there’s no way we could prove it, but if you’re after a way to silence bad publicity and environmental activists, I can’t think of a better one.’

  At last she was released from his obsessive stare. He turned to Fred. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘She’s right on all counts,’ he said, smiling out from under his heavy brows, like an old silverback approving a promising young member of his troop. ‘Particularly the impossibility of getting any evidence of sabotage at this stage. Everything was burned in the fireball, so there are no fibres, fingerprints, DNA. Nothing.’

  Bates was on his feet now and swinging his overcoat back over his shoulders.

  ‘Now I know where I am. Don’t mess about with sabotage. Waste of time and money. Stick with contributory negligence and get it done fast.’

  ‘All right,’ Trish said, feeling a rebellious bubble she had to hide.

  ‘How is Angie?’ he said, sounding still more abrupt.

  ‘D’you know Mrs Fortwell?’

  ‘The papers call her that. How’s she doing as a litigant in person?’

  ‘Astonishingly well,’ Trish said with a dryness that made him smile. She wondered whether to tell him about Benjamin Givens and the secret help he was giving, then saw Fred Hoffman very slightly shaking his great head.

  ‘Good. I can’t be seen to be bullying fragile widows and orphans. Bad for the image. Glad to have met you. I’ll try to come to court tomorrow. I must go now. Fred?’

  Hoffman hadn’t bothered to take off his coat, merely unbuttoned it, presumably having plenty of experience of his client’s impatience. He waved in Trish’s direction and hurried out.

  She wondered whether Don Bates’s use of Angela Fortwell’s nickname had really come from nothing but reading the papers. But she’d had her orders: get the case finished as quickly as possible and don’t look for evidence of third-party intervention.

  Her screen was blank, saving power, until she moved and joggled it. The blog came back, pointlessly now. She put a finger on the delete button but couldn’t make herself press it.

  I want to know, she thought and heard a voice in her head that sounded remarkably like Antony’s: don’t be such a baby.

  She filed the document and reached for her coat.

  Passing the clerks’ room, she looked towards the pigeonholes. There was something sticking out of hers so she made a detour to fetch it. The envelope had Hoffman’s address printed on the top right-hand corner, and there was no stamp.

  Intrigued, she opened it to find photocopied pages from Angie Fortwell’s visitors’ book. The note clipped to the top sheet was written in Hoffman’s tangled scrawl. He must think she had all the time in the world to decipher the letters he’d jumbled up into an incomprehensible web of ink across the page. Eventually she made out the message:

  ‘Trish, I think these lists and pages from the Fortwells’ visitors’ book are all we have. FH.’

  She took the pile of paper back to her room, switched on the light again and fired up the computer, still wearing her coat.

  The comments in the visitors’ book were all much easier to read than Hoffman’s note. One or two had been quoted in the visitors’ blogs. Some were straightforward dryly worded advice to other walkers, warning of difficult weather or faults in guidebook descriptions of the hardness of chosen routes. Others were sentimentally lyrical about the landscape around the Fortwel
ls’ farm, the magnificent straightness of the old Roman road, the amazing survival of parts of Hadrian’s Wall, and the charm of the kitchen where they’d eaten, or the deliciousness of the mutton stew.

  That dish featured in several of the entries. Had Angie ever cooked anything else for her paying guests?

  Most of the visitors had scribbled an address, sometimes only for email, after their entries. And a few had added details of their blogs. Trish compared them with Hal’s list. There were two mentioned in the visitors’ book that didn’t appear on the list. She clicked on to the Internet, downloaded the relevant sections, and started to read.

  One mentioned Peter, the discursive blogger who had met Adam and been warned off the Fortwells’ farm. Another offered tips for all the best b & bs on the most obscure routes and referred to another farm to be avoided, where there was an uncontrollably savage dog. ‘And you’d do well to bypass the witch at Bothwell’s if you can; she turns off the heating at 6.30 p.m. and keeps the boiler so low only the first person gets even a warm bath.’

  There was obviously a protective kind of family-feeling among the regular ramblers. Wide awake now, and looking for anything that could hint at some kind of disapproval of CWWM for their use of such amazing countryside to house their chemical-waste tanks, Trish read on and on. But she found nothing.

  None of the bloggers so much as mentioned the tanks. And nowhere was there even the slightest mention of Greg Waverly or any dangerous waste or environmental protest or anything whatsoever that could have had even the remotest possible bearing on the case in hand.

  Trish smiled. In her tiredness and frustration she was falling into the ways of the traditional silks she’d listened to in her earliest working years, who would allow their voices to swing with the rhythm of their dramatic sentences and add wholly unnecessary words and emphasis to perfectly ordinary questions. Now she was at it. Time to go home. She turned off the laptop once again and shuffled the papers into neat heaps.