A Poisoned Mind

by Natasha Cooper

  No, you watch, she thought, as always loathing this kind of contemptuous dismissal. She might have come to the dangerous-waste business late, but human motives and behaviour were her core subjects, and they didn’t change with the place in which you found them.

  ‘You should know these overgrown schoolboys of yours paid £5K to a couple who did not provide the service for which they were ostensibly charging, and who were within five minutes’ walk of the Fortwells’ tanks exactly seventy-two hours before the explosion. Which is the time specified by our expert for the blocking of the vents. d’you really think that’s a coincidence?’

  ‘If they’d put something in there, Fortwell would’ve seen it and picked it out.’ Bates looked as though he was fighting to keep his irritation under control. ‘It’s what we paid him for, and he was a conscientious bugger.’

  ‘He may have been once. But, as we’ve shown in court, he’d been slapdash and dilatory in many different situations in the months leading up to his death.’

  Trish waited for some acknowledgement but it didn’t come. Fred was staring at the table so that he didn’t have to react. She told herself not to let them get to her and bared her teeth at Bates in what she hoped would be a reasonably convincing smile.

  ‘OK, so forget the tanks for the moment. Was it by any chance your drums of waste that were involved in the crash in Suffolk, when a woman had to have both feet amputated?’

  His face told her all she needed to know, but he surprised her by saying:

  ‘Are you going to hit me with the girl on the Scottish beach next?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about a Scottish beach,’ Trish said. ‘What happened there?’

  He shrugged. ‘Another inexplicable accident with some of our worst waste. I must say, in the context of these spillages, it would be convenient if you were right about those clowns at GlobWasMan. How d’you expect to prove it?’

  ‘I doubt if there’s enough hard evidence left anywhere for real proof. But more than enough of the circumstantial sort to persuade Angie Fortwell to withdraw her claim. May I try?’

  ‘Fred? What do you think?’

  ‘Makes sense to me, Don. Whether Trish is right about GlobWasMan or not, she can present a convincing argument. And Angie was looking as though she hated being in court the last time I saw her. She might jump at an offer to settle now.’

  Bates stood up and marched to the far end of the room, helped himself to another cup of coffee, which he then dumped on the table and ignored. Obviously a man who preferred to make decisions on his feet, Trish decided. Even the slight signs of tiredness had gone from his eyes and skin. He looked powerful and ready to take on the world.

  ‘OK. Let’s do it.’

  ‘Would you want to be there at the settlement meeting?’ Fred asked, which made Trish frown all over again.

  She couldn’t think of anything less helpful than having a client like this in a delicate negotiation with someone as emotional and unpractised as Angie Fortwell.

  ‘No. Better she and I don’t meet.’ Bates looked at Trish from under his eyelashes, almost like a flirting girl, which disconcerted her. ‘I might not be able to keep my temper after the grief she’s given me. And I don’t suppose you’ll be able to get my costs back.’

  ‘Probably not. She hasn’t any money. But at least you won’t be stung for damages.’

  ‘True.’ Bates picked up his heavy overcoat, swung it around his shoulders and said he had a lunch to go to. He didn’t wait to shake hands. But he stopped at the doorway and turned his head back to look at Fred.

  ‘What do we do then? If there is anything in this story, the police should be told and get those clowns closed down before they do any more harm.’

  ‘We can lay information, yes.’ Fred made another note.

  ‘Get it done fast, then,’ Bates said and left without another word.

  Trish and Fred were left to slump in their chairs and agree that he was just about the most exhausting man either of them had ever met. Fred then said he would phone her clerk as soon as he’d been able to set up the meeting with Angie, and Trish walked the short distance back to the Temple.

  She was so absorbed in trying to decide whether Don Bates’s humiliation of Ken Shankley was enough to explain what he’d been trying to do or whether there were yet more layers of conspiracy to find that she almost walked into Steve, who was hanging about in the corridor.

  ‘What’s happened? You look like hell,’ she said, stepping back and registering the greyish tinge of his skin and the way it seemed to hang more loosely than usual under his narrow chin.

  ‘It’s Mr Shelley. He’s had an embolism.’

  ‘What? But I saw him only yesterday.’ Trish felt as though someone had hit her in the face. ‘He was fine. Ready to go home. Is he—?’

  ‘He’s going to be all right, they think. But it’s set him back, probably by weeks. I don’t know when we’ll see him here in chambers again.’

  Angie emptied the last bucket of water down the scullery sink. It was clean enough to show her that she had, at last, scoured all the dirt from all the floors in Polly’s house. She’d scrub the sink itself now. Once that was done, there was nothing but making the beds and, given they had duvets instead of blankets, it would take little more than five minutes.

  She hadn’t expected to want more. Loathing housework and cooking as she had in the bad years at Low Topps, it seemed perverse to go looking for extra tasks now. But she didn’t want time to think.

  Some days she was sure she ought to go down to Brighton and face Adam and ask outright whether he was responsible for killing his father and mutilating the woman in Essex whom Greg had mentioned. And the child in Scotland.

  Then there were other days when all she wanted to do was hide from Adam for ever. If she knew for certain he was guilty, she wouldn’t be able to ignore it. If she told anyone else, the police would get involved and she’d find herself back in court, giving evidence against her own son. She could just imagine the awful Trish Maguire haranguing her as she stood in the witness box.

  ‘Are you really trying to persuade His Lordship that your son did not intend to cause fatal harm to you and your husband, and the land itself, when he blocked the vents of your chemical tanks? Can you deny that if he knew enough to do it, he knew what effect it would have? Have you not testified to his post-graduate degrees in chemistry? Are you trying to suggest he didn’t know precisely what effect the benzene would have on your land and streams?’

  She saw Maguire’s beaky face in her nightmares now and when she woke in the mornings. There were times when she felt as though the woman was sucking truth out of her even at this distance of hundreds of miles. She tried to keep Adam right out of her mind to avoid doing anything that might make anyone else suspect. But she was sure Polly knew.

  Polly still wouldn’t talk, but ever since the first evening when she’d told Angie that Adam had stayed here, there’d been odd looks and even more wordless sympathy than simple widowhood and a failing claim for damages should arouse.

  The terrors and regrets had built up in Angie’s mind until she felt as though she had to let them out somehow if they weren’t to burst her skull apart.

  ‘Are you ill, pet?’ Polly’s voice shocked her and she turned so fast she sprayed scouring powder all over the draining board.

  ‘No. No. I’m fine. You surprised me; that’s all. Sorry. I’ll clear this up. And I’m late with lunch. I don’t know what I was thinking. I—’

  ‘Shhh.’ Polly’s voice was as soft as it could be with a dead ewe’s lamb. ‘Shhh now. It doesn’t matter about lunch. But you were keening. What is it that’s troubling you so?’

  Angie put her hand over her face and then cursed as she felt the biting sharpness of the scouring powder in her eyes. That helped, distracting them both, as she first washed her hands, then rinsed out her eyes with cold, fresh water. Any tears she might have been shedding got mixed up with the water, so they didn’t count.

&nbs
p; ‘Come and sit down.’

  ‘I can’t, Polly. Bill will be here any minute now, needing food. I hadn’t realised it was so late.’

  ‘We can have cheese and apples. Come and sit down and stop being so silly.’

  Angie backed away from Polly’s criticism. Her whole face felt cold.

  ‘Good,’ said Polly, apparently not noticing the withdrawal. ‘Now, tell me what this is about. You’ve not been sleeping and you’re not happy. I need to know what the problem is.’

  ‘It’s John,’ she said, looking away and hoping that would be enough to stop the questions. In the old days it would have been. ‘I can’t stop thinking about him.’

  ‘I know what mourning is like and it’s not this. This is anger. Fear too. What’s eating you, Angie? At first I thought it was the damage to Low Topps, or the cancer-risk, or the pollution, but it’s none of those. I think it’s a person. Are you trying to run away from someone by hiding up here with us?’

  ‘Polly, I can’t—’ She put her head in her hands.

  ‘Don’t you trust me, child?’

  I haven’t been a child for nearly forty years, she thought as a way of fending off the sad question, and you can’t be much more than twelve or fifteen years older than me, in spite of your wild white hair. When we first came to live up here, I was the one with all the knowledge and the drive to find out how you could get at all the European money you needed. You wouldn’t have called me ‘child’ then. And you couldn’t have managed if it hadn’t been for the grants we organised for you.

  ‘Angie!’ This time there was urgency in Polly’s voice, as well as sadness.

  ‘It isn’t you,’ she said, remembering her gratitude and her need, and hating the way the ever-threatening rage could make her resent even Polly. ‘I’d trust you with my life. But I can’t talk about this. I have to—’

  The phone rang, a harshly unfamiliar sound in this quiet place. Polly would never leave it to ring unanswered. To her, such a summons meant either someone wanting to spend much-needed money by booking in for bed and breakfast, or that there was an urgent problem to which only she could provide a solution. She pushed herself up from the table and walked with obvious pain to the phone on the dresser.

  Angie began to lay the table as quietly as she could. It wasn’t possible to avoid listening to Polly’s anxious voice.

  ‘Yes. Yes, she’s here. Would you like to speak to her?’

  Bracing herself, Angie put down the plates she was holding. ‘Is it Adam?’

  Polly shook her head and held out the receiver. ‘A man called Greg.’

  Angie took it from her, and tried to think herself back into London and the case as it had been before Adam.

  ‘Greg? What’s the news?’

  ‘They want to settle, Ange. I’ve had Hoffman, the solicitor, on the phone this morning. He wants to arrange a meeting with Maguire and you and me to discuss a settlement.’

  ‘But we’ve already told them we won’t,’ she said, sounding as dazed as she felt.

  ‘I know. Which must mean they’ve found some information or a witness or something that tells them they can’t win, so they’re ready to offer more than last time. Ange, you’ve had your chance to tell the judge and the world what they did, so you’ve done the main thing you wanted. Why not let them pay you off now? We can make sure it’s a proper sum, and we can refuse any confidentiality agreements because they’re obviously desperate to make an end of it now. That way we can make an enormous public splash with the way they’ve caved in and admitted their part in killing John.’ He broke off, realising that she hadn’t said anything for some time. ‘Ange! Ange, are you still there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here. Are you sure it isn’t that they’ve found something that proves we can’t win?’

  ‘Don’t you think they’d wallow in that and string us along until they could make fools of us in court?’

  ‘Would they?’ She felt more uncertain than ever.

  ‘Of course. You must see it makes sense, Ange.’

  ‘What would I have to do?’

  ‘Come south again. They want to meet as soon as possible and have suggested either Thursday at 4 p.m. or Friday at 9 a.m. You can make one or other, can’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose … Hang on a minute.’ She put her hand over the receiver and looked at Polly: ‘There aren’t any walkers coming before the weekend, are there?’

  ‘No. Not even at the weekend. The next lot are due on Monday.’

  ‘So, would you mind if I went to London again for a meeting on Thursday?’

  ‘If it helps you, Angie, you must go as soon as you want.’

  ‘OK. I’ll come.’

  ‘Great. Take an early train on Thursday so we can swot up all the facts we need to really rub their noses in it. Fran’ll be pleased. She’s been missing you.’

  Angie put down the phone, trying to remember how much money she had left. ‘Polly, may I ring to book a taxi for the train?’

  ‘I’ll take you. Now, there’s Bill coming. Lunch. Go and get the cheese from the larder.’

  Chapter 19

  Trish couldn’t find any website for Goforthebrains.com. The Internet wasn’t that out-of-date. But her search did turn up a reference to the company in an old financial report illustrated with photographs of some of the main players in the dotcom boom. There were the few real winners, whose businesses had survived and prospered, and there were the rest, including the Goforthebrains.com four. Unfortunately the caption didn’t give their names, only that of the company.

  She sent an email to Fred asking him to get hold of their details.

  Too impatient to do nothing while she waited, she stared at the photograph of the last member of the team, the one who didn’t appear in the Pathfinder prospectus for GlobWasMan. He had very short hair, which did nothing to improve a long face with a lantern jaw, oddly set eyes and an ugly nose. He certainly had not transmogrified into Ben Givens. But he could have grown a wild and woolly beard and be Greg Waverly.

  The photograph was only eight years old but a young man could change a lot in that time. Trish copied it and moved it to a temporary file on her desktop. Then she scanned in one of the photographs of Greg from the report submitted by Fred Hoffman’s enquiry agents.

  With the two pictures side by side, she still couldn’t be certain they were of the same man, although the setting of the eyes looked similar, as did the large noses with their bulbous nostrils. But the wild hair and woolly beard in the more recent photograph were a dreadful distraction. Trish struggled with the photo-editing software that had come bundled with the computer when she bought it. In the end, she had to send for Hal, who was young enough to find computers as easy to understand as his own body.

  He had the beard and most of the hair off Greg’s face in no time, then he hovered the cursor over the younger face and dragged it over the older.

  ‘That’s it,’ Trish said with satisfaction making her feel wrapped in success. ‘They are the same man.’

  ‘So d’you think he’s been working for GlobWasMan all along?’

  ‘Actually I don’t. The failed organic food business Fred’s investigators found must have been genuine. Bankruptcy’s a matter of public record. But once Greg had gone bust the clowns at GlobWasMan must have realised he’d be open to offers to infiltrate FADE for money.’

  ‘They’re great ones for that, aren’t they?’ said Hal, scratching his head. ‘D’you think they’re all in it? All three of the others, I mean?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue,’ Trish said. She pointed to the photograph of Ken Shankley. ‘But I’d put my money on him as the leader of the plot. He’s the one who threatened poor Carl Bianchini, and he headed up the dotcom company as well as Glob Was Man. Fancies himself, too, if you read the blurb in the Pathfinder. I think he’s the type who doesn’t see why he shouldn’t have anything he wants and will think more and more creatively until he gets it. And screw anyone who gets in his way.’

  The phone in Tr
ish’s pocket bleeped. A text was coming through. She pulled out the phone and saw that David wanted to talk to her before the end of his lunch break.

  ‘I must deal with this, Hal. Thanks. I couldn’t have done it without you.’

  He blushed a little and found it hard to get out of her room, first backing and then turning round, and at last giving a cross between a salute and a wave from the doorway.

  ‘Hi,’ she said when David answered her call. ‘I got your text. What’s happened?’

  ‘Jay got an A+.’ His voice was shrill with triumph. Trish lurched between delight in his enjoyment of someone else’s success and gloom at the discovery that Jay was still so important to him.

  ‘That’s absolutely brilliant,’ she said trying to sound as generous herself. ‘I’m really pleased. What did he get it for?’

  ‘Henry V. We had essays to do on the responsibilities of the king and what it must have felt like. And he got an A+.’ There was a strange sound down the phone, a grunt or a laugh; perhaps even a sigh. ‘He must’ve stayed in the cinema on Friday after all, whatever that manager said to George. Maybe he hid when they were searching.’

  ‘He must have. It’s a pity you had to miss the film. How did you do with the essay?’

  This time the sound was unmistakably a laugh. ‘Oh, I got an A+ too. It was only me and Jay out of the whole year. So we can celebrate tonight. Will you be home in time to see him?’

  ‘That’s fantastic. Well done,’ she said, trying to keep her voice enthusiastic.

  ‘Will you be home in time?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Great. Got to go. See you later.’

  She put the phone back in her pocket, as pleasure in his excitement fought with her reluctance to have Jay as a fixture in the flat any longer. There had been many times when she’d been brought up short by David’s guts in tackling what had happened to him, so she shouldn’t have been surprised at the way he was hanging on to the friendship. She felt even more ashamed of her own self-protective instincts, but she couldn’t shift them.