Blood From Stone

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘Have you anything here? Anything I could look at now?’

  Thomas found the question deeply impertinent, as well as touching a nerve. There was so little to look at.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘But her things will come to you?’

  ‘I live in hope, Mr Boyd. We lawyers do. She’d just moved house, you see, so certain items seem to have gone astray. All I can tell you is that when I get them and go through them as I must, should I come across anything unduly personal which refers to you, I’ll be sure to let you know if you leave me your number. Other people’s lives really aren’t my business, you know, only hers. I’ve no wish to withhold anything. And,’ he added in a moment of mischief, ‘perhaps I could put you in touch with her brother? I’m sure you’d like to share your grief and he knows more than I.’

  ‘Oh yes. Her heir, you said? The only one? How sad she had no children.’

  Thomas wrote Frank’s address busily, then beamed, gravely, getting up and going towards the door while Boyd wrote down his own number and left it on the desk, muttering thanks, suddenly humble and charming all over again. Thomas remembered to keep his hands on the door to avoid another crushing grasp and listened while the Defendant went downstairs, taking his awful coat and moving very quietly. Thomas shut the door and found himself leaning against it. That had not gone well, no, it hadn’t gone well at all. He was short of breath.

  The files in the corner of the room were all he had of Ms Shearer’s personal effects, sent from her chambers. They consisted of pens, pencils and otherwise entirely of that box labelled R v Boyd. It contained nothing but a transcript in six volumes. There was nothing of the usual, untidy detritus of a trial, no old notebooks, photos, bits of paper. Just the transcript, as if she was begging him to read it. Marianne had talked about it. She always talked about her triumphs, but he had never seen her in action. Idly, he began to read, picking passages at random.

  After an hour he was thinking what a bitch, and wondering why he had ever liked her at all. Then another parcel arrived. It was more than he could handle. Thomas phoned Peter Friel, expecting, and receiving, an immediate reply.

  ‘Get over here, Peter. Don’t argue. I know you’re unemployed with nothing better to do. Need to discuss. What the hell was she playing at? I can’t open this. I need you. Get here NOW.’

  EXTRACT FROM TRANSCRIPT: R v BOYD

  Cross-examination of Angel Joyce by Marianne Shearer, QC

  MS. So, Mz Joyce. Are you Ms or Miss? Speak up. No? OK, I’ll call you Missy, if you like.

  You’ve told the court that the Defendant, my client, kidnapped you. That’s a charge which has been argued away, but I take it you know what it means. You made it. Basically it means you were taken away against your will, but you went willingly, didn’t you?

  AJ. Whispers. Yes.

  MS. In fact, it was your suggestion, was it not?

  AJ. NO.

  MS. Oh, come on, Angel. I know you aren’t very bright, but can’t you at least concede that it was a joint idea, perhaps? Unless you’re saying you never have any ideas of your own? Clearly not. Speak up, Miss Angel Joyce, otherwise the Court can’t hear you.

  AJ. It wasn’t my suggestion, but yes, I went along willingly with it at first. Rick said he had a business opportunity in Birmingham, provided we got some money, it was there for the taking. That was part of the reason why I went. I got some money.

  MS. You tried to seduce him with the prospect of money, didn’t you, Miss Angel? Sorry, I mean Ms Joyce. I do apologise, but I simply can’t call you Angel, it’s such a silly name for a woman of your age, but I don’t want to get you confused with the other Ms Joyce when I come to repeat suggestions she’s already made in her evidence. Anyway, Miss Angel, you wanted to get him away from the temptation of students far prettier than you.

  AJ. No.

  MS. There must have been plenty of those. He wanted nothing to do with the money your parents were willing to give you both just to get rid of you, did he? It was you who offered it, wasn’t it?’

  AJ. Long pause. He . . . asked me about money the first time we were together.

  MS. Slept together, you mean? The first time you fucked? Interruption: Ms Shearer explains to HHJ McD that it is important to use plain language.

  MS. All right. The first time you were together, in a manner of speaking, he expressed concern for you because you didn’t look like a person who took care of herself, a bit of a fat slob. If he mentioned money to you then, it was to offer it to you, wasn’t it? Don’t just shake your head, please. The shorthand writer can’t record a movement.

  AJ. I don’t remember.

  MS. What do you mean, you don’t remember? You’ve just said you did. Oh come on, Miss Angelic, it wasn’t your first time with drink, drugs or sex, was it?

  AJ. No.

  MS. But it was the first time you’d been with any man who was good-looking and cared for you and wanted a future with you?

  AJ. Yes.

  MS. And you would have done anything for him?

  AJ. Yes. No. Yes. Anything. Not anything, yes, no yes.

  MS. Which is it, no or yes? Please stop this pathetic whispering. You were loud enough when you complained. Speak up, the jury can’t hear you.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It was dark by the time Peter arrived. People scurried across the Fields like lemmings, towards the underground station at Holborn. He had to push his way between them out into the cold air. On his way to Thomas’s office, he noticed that the museum he had never yet managed to visit was closed. One day he would get there.

  ‘Rick Boyd said what? He came here?’ Peter Friel said. ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘I thought you might be able to tell me. I was rather caught short, if you see what I mean. He revealed all my inadequacies in one fell swoop. First I fancied him, then I loathed him, then I put him in touch with Frank Shearer, ha ha! Interesting to see if those two touch base, they’re as awful as one another. I forgot, you haven’t met Frank yet, have you? Ah well, a pleasure best postponed. I’ve had a horrible day, then that parcel arrived.’ He pointed in the direction of a large paper sack in the corner. The office looked positively littered. There was the sense of an inner sanctum being invaded, quite different from when Peter had visited the day after the death.

  ‘Then I started reading bits of paper from that awful trial you’ve got to tell me more about, and got to thinking nastiness might run in the Shearer family. Marianne was quite a clever brute in court, wasn’t she? I’ve got to read the whole thing, I suppose. There’s nowhere else to look for clues. It’s absolutely all I have got of hers. That’s why I feel so bloody inadequate. She left me to deal with her estate, but nothing else. No will, no explanations, all her personal possessions disappeared or stolen. Do you know the most despicable fact about sudden death is the opportunities it creates for theft? Especially a well-publicised death. Someone’s got her stuff and can’t see why they should give it back. Someone’s nicked it.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ Peter objected, always wanting proof of an allegation before it was made. ‘It’s probably shipped off to a friend, held up in a queue somewhere, a mix-up . . .’

  ‘Yes, but where? She’s not given us a hint, no records, no receipts, damn her eyes. I was relying on the stuff they sent me over from chambers, but all they had in her office was that.’ Again he pointed, this time to volumes of paper spilling out of a box, ‘Nothing else, she hadn’t been in there over Christmas. Bugger, bugger, bugger. I hate being given a job without the tools.’

  The best description for Thomas at the moment was of a man not quite himself. His sangfroid was sinking in alcohol; he was smoking cigarettes as if his life depended on it in a littered room overlooking dark Lincoln’s Inn Fields with the window open and a bottle of whisky on the table, his nerves shot. His language was all over the place, words scattered like spat-out crumbs, a frightened man. They were talking in non sequiturs.

  ‘So what is it exact
ly that Rick Boyd did?’ Thomas said crossly. ‘Only he’s got these bloody great big hands and I can feel them round my neck.’

  ‘Rick Boyd is a fantasist and a serial abductor of young women,’ Peter said crisply. ‘He got them to fall for him, spun them a yarn about being a poor orphan or poor man on the run, extracted as much money as he could, took them out of their own environment, and then, once the money ran out and he was tired of them, kept them, or persuaded them to keep themselves, like spiders keep dead flies in a web. He had a woman in Peterborough, one in Milton Keynes and the last one, Angel Joyce, in Birmingham. Three in a year, provided a generous income.’

  Thomas snorted.

  ‘I don’t believe it. In this day and age? What rubbish. What the hell kind of female would allow that? Women rule the world and they know it.’

  ‘Not his kind of woman.’

  ‘Where the hell has Marianne deposited her bloody goods?’ Thomas yelled.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know her, haven’t got a clue,’ Peter said. ‘I keep telling you I didn’t really know her. I worked with her, and latterly against her. I don’t rightly know why I’m here, except for the fact that in some funny way, she may have quite liked me.’

  Thomas pushed the window open wider. Even with the fire, it was freezing in the room.

  ‘You’re here because you’re a clueless failure and she knew you might be available for whatever fucking game she wants to play, and you’re going to find out where the stuff is. I don’t know. If I were to think of a single reason why you’re here, it’s because there’s obviously a connection between that last big case and her suicide. That brute coming in here today, gotta connect, hasn’t it? Anyway, that aside, I wanted you here at this precise moment because they sent along her clothes from the mortuary and I don’t like being alone with them. What’s she wearing now, sunny boy, what the hell is she wearing now, poor soul? High heels in hell?’

  Thomas took a slug of whisky and shuddered. He flexed his fingers as if trying to restore his own circulation.

  ‘You’re here, dear boy, because while you’re otherwise useless, I want someone present. They bagged up her clothes and sent them on. I know it’s not usual. They probably wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t been a lawyer and I hadn’t demanded it. I must have been out of my mind, and they may have to go back, but I had the crazy notion she might have hidden something about her person and I wanted someone there when I opened them.’

  It was hardly the time to feel offended by Thomas’s version of why Marianne Shearer had elected him to assist her friend and executor in the sorting out of the aftermath of her death, although he did pause to find the reasons unflattering. She had named him not because he was honest and doggedly curious, or because she had flirted with him a long time ago, like a glamorous aunt to an innocent nephew when she had been his pupil master. Pupil mistress, darling, she had said, please. I’m not here to teach you anything; you’re here to carry my bags. He had been elected only because she knew he would be available, but that could have applied to any number of younger men with whom she had had contact over the years and he still did not quite understand. Why me? It was humiliating to think she had chosen him simply because he was idle and penniless enough to say yes, and to know that when she was alive, that was the way Ms Shearer had described him. He could hear her strident voice, discussing him over a drink with Thomas Noble. He’s so wet, my dear; he actually believes in Justice and Truth; he wastes so much time and energy being sorry for people. Ah yes, she had seen him coming, but still, she was way too canny for there not to be something else on her mind, such as him knowing all about R v Boyd and what she had done with it. Alternatively, she might have thought she owed him something for getting him drunk a dozen years ago.

  ‘Is that what she said about me?’ he asked Thomas humbly. ‘That I was so useless I’d be up for any humdrum task? That I might otherwise be sweeping the streets and glad of any old job?’

  ‘Not in so many words, no,’ Thomas said, irritated and ready to move on. ‘That’s simply what I surmise. Yes, all right you’ve worked with her before that last big case and she talked about you, like she did about everyone. We loved mutual gossip about people we didn’t know. She said you were way too soft and you were never going to make it.’

  ‘There are other ways of making it than her ways,’ Peter said.

  ‘Not as far as she was concerned. The only way to win she said, was wanting to win at all costs, and people like you don’t want it enough, have never been hungry enough, so you lose every time. Oh, for God’s sake, I can’t even remember what she said. Except she also said that if she’d ever had a son, she’d have liked him to be something like you. Now, can we get on?’

  Peter had an uncomfortable memory of being twenty-one and assigned to Ms Shearer as pupil mistress, to follow her round from court to conference, doing her research, until at the end of six months, that drunken evening to celebrate his fitness to take a case all by himself. He could remember waking up at three in the morning in a back alley behind the pub, covered in filth, with the sound of her laughter in his ears, and the note pinned to his chest in her cool hand. CLAPHAM COURT, 9pm TOMORROW. That was Shearer’s kind of training, otherwise known as learning how to function with a hangover, no money, and with the contempt of the court and the client oozing out of every pore. He shook his head. She had been kinder then: perhaps she meant to be kind now. She had taught him his own incompetence by reverse example and in R v Boyd she had been at her utterly competent, dreadful best.

  ‘Pooh,’ Thomas said, settling into the wheeled office chair he used to propel himself around his small office space. ‘Pooh, pooh, pooh, everything smells of that awful man. Perhaps Mr Handsome Boyd and dear Frank Shearer will go off into some glorious sunset together now I’ve introduced them, but meantime the business in hand is looking at these blasted clothes. Will they smell, too? Here goes . . . No, I can’t, I absolutely can’t. You do it.’

  He had trailed his chair towards the pile in the corner, where the R v Boyd transcript spilled out in disarray from where Thomas had selected the afternoon’s reading material. Next to this mess which Peter had an automatic desire to tidy, there stood the lopsided brown paper sack with labels on that Thomas had pointed towards earlier, securely fastened with staples.

  ‘I think,’ Peter said, ‘it can wait for a minute. First, I’m going to tell you about Marianne’s last trial. Save you the reading. You really shouldn’t judge her by it, you know.’

  Thomas winced.

  ‘Be brief, dear. Please be brief. I’ve read enough and it sounds unpleasant. I only want to know why she might have been ashamed of it.’

  ‘As I said, Boyd’s a fantasist, and I suspect a revengeful one. Basically, a no-hoper without much education but plenty of high life dreams. Not much going for him but the looks and charisma you noticed, plus an enormous amount of perverted cunning. He’s plausible because he believes himself. Always on a power kick and full of injured innocence. He’d probably been robbing women for years, believed his own fantasy of life owing him a living. Basically, he got jobs in clubs or colleges where he could meet the right kind of girl. He’d pick the dumbest or the most vulnerable, overwhelm them, persuade them to run away from home with him, and he knew how to pick. I should tell you about the trial, rather than him. Originally there were three sets of counts on the indictment. Three victims. The identities of the first two only came to light through correspondence taken from a flat in Birmingham by Angel Joyce and her sister. Three women, kidnapped by deception. Boyd persuaded the first that he was on the run from the Mafia and not only did he love her, but he needed her protective cover and her money to stay in hiding. Then he put her on the game to finance him. The second believed there was a price on his head because he had informed on the Mafia; she too was besotted and agreed to move cities and live with him. The deceit with Angel Joyce was less dramatic. Angel had money from her parents that she gave to Boyd on the understanding that they were
going to resurrect a business he had inherited and already owned. In fact it was a disused factory where he had a squat. God alone knows why any of them believed him, but his plausibility and sexual prowess, perhaps, made them credulous slaves. They were overwhelmed. They went to work for him. If they questioned him, he beat them, or worse. All three had scars. All three of them were going to give evidence. It was going to be a sensational trial, tales of sex slavery and cruelty, plus fascinating psychological insights. Scenes of torture and two lost fingers.’

  ‘What?’

  Thomas had been looking sceptical. Now he looked faint. The whisky had gone to his head.

  ‘What happened next?’ he said.

  ‘Marianne happened, but the texture of this extraordinary evidence was already wearing thin before she did. The first trial began. Then Boyd sacked his Counsel and the whole thing was postponed for months. That happened twice. No one else wanted to defend him. There was this overwhelming similarity of evidence and despite the whole scenario being unbelievable, it had to be believed. He frightened people. The next defence team withdrew. Then Marianne took up the baton. She would always take on the untouchable. Remember? That brutal paedophile, the robber, the rapist? That’s what she wanted. Anyway, the witnesses were dreading their turn in the witness box long before Marianne appeared. What woman is going to look forward to admitting being brainwashed and duped? Especially when terrified of the Defendant. They got weaker with every delay. Then Shearer got started.’

  Thomas groaned.

  ‘She’d managed to draw the weakest and most nervous of judges on some political basis. He couldn’t cope and he wouldn’t withstand her. Then she claimed Boyd had a heart murmur. More delay. He looked like butter wouldn’t melt. He was groomed to look like a waif. Then she sprang legal arguments at the last moment and got away with it. The jury would be sent away again and the witnesses left waiting. She got the Judge to agree that the screens used in court to protect vulnerable witnesses should be dispensed with. They were all grown-ups, she said. The first two victims received mysterious, intimidating letters, hinting at knowledge of their sexual preferences. Shearer denied these could possibly have come from Boyd, saying they must have made them up. She argued away some of the charges. She argued away kidnap; she argued away the law on similar fact.’