No One Will Hear

by Joel Hames

  The kind of extraordinary institution that got itself on the front pages for all the right reasons, but worked hard to hide the bullying and viciousness that went on within its own four walls. I wondered if Blennard knew all that, knew about my own personal history at and after Mauriers. He’d gone silent, and I looked up, wondering whether it was my turn to speak. He was staring at me, a look of concern on his face, and I realised I was frowning as thoughts of those final days at Mauriers coursed through me.

  “I think I’ll have the sole,” I said, and Blennard nodded approvingly. He might have nodded at me and said Yes to himself, but he hadn’t taken me up on the subject of the memoirs.

  “Excellent choice. You are a man of taste, I see. Elizabeth never mentioned that, even though she spoke of you often.”

  Here we go, I thought. Another one trying the same line. With Lizzy it had been plausible, just about; she at least knew me, my name might have cropped up. But Blennard? Why on earth would my name have reached his noble ears? Lizzy had wanted something out of me, my cooperation on her mother’s memoirs. Blennard, I realised, wanted something too. I wondered if it would come out over lunch. I looked past Blennard, around the room, men reading newspapers and tucking into their lunches and leaning back with glasses of expensive wine, all men, all content in their own little corner of the nineteenth century, and realised that if it did come out, it would be on Blennard’s terms. And it would come slowly. I’d have to wait.

  I’d had enough of waiting.

  “So really,” I asked, dodging the compliment. “Why did you want to see me, now? What can I do for you?”

  He smiled.

  “You’re a man who gets to the point, Sam. I like that.”

  I returned the smile, but stayed silent. After a moment he continued.

  “The fact is, Elizabeth Maurier played a huge role in my life. As did you in hers – don’t deny it, Sam, you must have done, for her to have entrusted such a significant task to you after her death. I needed to meet you. That’s all.”

  It was convincing. It explained why he’d chosen now, of all times, to meet me; he wouldn’t have realised how important I was to Elizabeth until he’d heard about the memoirs. I hadn’t realised myself. Yes, convincing enough, and almost the whole story. Almost. I’d given him the chance to tell me everything, and all I’d got was almost. If I was going to find out what was missing, I might, I realised, have to wait after all.

  We drifted into reminiscence, nothing surprising, nothing to give any of us away. Elizabeth’s travels, her work, her husband (“fine man,” said Blennard, and then moved onto more interesting topics). Her daughter.

  “Ah, yes, poor Lizzy,” he said, when I mentioned that we were working on the memoirs together. I saw him catch Trawden’s eye, and frown, slightly, and then change the subject again, to a party he had been at with Elizabeth at which the Foreign Secretary had drunk too much port and engaged in a highly public and remarkably colourful argument with his wife. I’d tried to force things, and Blennard wouldn’t have that. His place. His time. His terms.

  “Dorothy was with me then,” he said, and fell silent, and I remembered her then, his wife, dead in her fifties from breast cancer while Blennard was at the height of his power. Elizabeth Maurier had missed a court appearance for the funeral – had sent Brooks-Powell in her place, to my disgust. I wondered whether there had been children – I couldn’t recall any, but I’d had little reason to keep track of Charlie Blennard’s personal life even while I’d been working for his friend.

  The silence lasted just a second or two, and was followed by more reminiscence. He worked hard, Blennard, choosing topics I could engage in and people I either knew or would have heard of. And he was brilliant, too; charming and witty, with a modesty that seemed genuine underpinning it all. Another person might have played on his success, and I’d have bristled, but he was too clever for that. Instead he twisted things, put himself in our shoes, Trawden and I, gave the impression that he was privileged to have met and worked with so many fascinating people and done so many fascinating things, that luck had put him in the right places at the right times, and those places and times were no more his than ours. He radiated charisma, and I could see how influential people might fall under his spell. I was falling under it even as the food arrived.

  He was right, of course; the sole was excellent, as were the wine and the pudding. The conversation continued, hardly blunted by the food, both Trawden and I adding our own asides and anecdotes from time to time. The time we’d hit a pothole on the way to Oxfordshire, her chauffeur unable to change the tyre, her refusing to let me so much as look at it but instead insisting I stay there with her, in the back of the car, drinking port until someone arrived to rescue us. The time she’d stood outside court and waited patiently while a journalist fired question after question at her, each ruder and more objectionable that the last, and finally replied by quoting his own editor back at him in terms that put her firmly in the right. I had my stories. Trawden had his, too. But there was no doubt who was running the show. Back and forth we went, Prime Ministers and criminals, judges and warlords. And the Mauriers. Always the Mauriers, Elizabeth, her parents, her daughter. Poor Lizzy, again and again, and I found myself agreeing and then wondering why. It wasn’t Lizzy who’d been brutally murdered. Again, Blennard must have noticed my frown; “She did rather grow up in her mother’s shadow,” he pointed out. I couldn’t disagree.

  As our plates were removed he sat back and favoured us both with one of those enormous smiles.

  “I hope you’ve enjoyed the meal, Sam.”

  I nodded and thanked him for his hospitality.

  “I just wanted to tell you that if there’s anything I can do to help, if I can be of assistance in any way, do let me know. Here’s my card. Alas, I have to be at Westminster in twenty minutes, so I must leave you. But please, feel free to contact me at any time.”

  He stood and walked away. The Man Who Would Be King. The press had come up with that, one of the broadsheets, but it wasn’t quite right. He’d never been Chancellor or Home Secretary, Defence or Foreign Secretary. He’d had a seat at the table, but halfway down, in among the Under Secretaries and Ministers. He’d made it to Attorney General, but he’d never have risen any higher, and from an hour or two in the man’s company I didn’t think he’d have wanted to. It wasn’t entirely false, that repositioning, that notion that he’d had it all thrust upon him. He was too much of an outsider for anything else.

  And now he’d gone, and I’d failed to get anything out of him, anything real, and he’d left me sitting at a table with Edward Trawden, talking quietly, a man who made my stomach turn, but who had been surprisingly good company over lunch. I turned Blennard’s card over and over in my hand, and finished my coffee. I was drained of conversation, and Trawden seemed almost as lost for words as I was, which suited me just fine.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said. I didn’t bother making up an excuse. Everyone seemed to know my business as well as I did, anyway.

  Trawden extended his hand, and after a moment’s hesitation, I took it. Perhaps he wasn’t so bad. He was an innocent man, after all. He didn’t deserve the taint of a crime he hadn’t committed.

  But why, if that was the case, did I still feel so uneasy?

  PART 2: TAPESTRY

  11: Notorious

  GETTING TO SLEEP that night was harder than it had been for a while. Claire lay beside me, snoring gently – there had been no repeat of our earlier activities, but she’d seemed pleased enough to see me and keen as a greyhound to know what had happened at lunch. I had the feeling she was slightly disappointed by what I had to tell her, but Blennard would do, his presence, his buying me lunch, his inviting me into the hallowed halls of the Reform Club. At least she wasn’t obsessing over her story, her girls. She’d taken my advice. She’d built some distance.

  I hadn’t, though. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t get Trawden out of my head.

  What was the man really lik
e? He’d greeted me like an old friend, comfortable and in control, but at The Reform, after Blennard had left, he’d seemed as awkward and unsure of himself as I was. Was that real? Was he just moulding himself to the image he was presented with, the feelings I was projecting? He had, I reflected, grudgingly, always been open and honest, but that was in his interest: he’d wanted the truth, and all of it, because that was his route out of jail. I’d met him a handful of times before his release, always with Elizabeth, sitting beside her, taking notes and interjecting only occasionally with a question of my own. She’d seen him without me more frequently, but had rarely come back with any information of interest. And when it came to getting him out, it wasn’t anything Trawden had said or done that had provided the key. It had been the files on Evans, it had been my photographic memory and doggedness and refusal to give up on the lost cause that Robbie Evans’ second-hand confession was said to be. I’d asked Trawden, before I’d left, why Elizabeth had called him, but he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t been able to speak to her before her death, a source, as he put it, of unending regret. When I’d first mentioned the memoirs during lunch he’d nodded, as if everything were falling into place; it made sense, he told me afterwards. Elizabeth Maurier wanted to set everything down, wanted her life documented. The fact that she had died shortly afterwards was nothing more than coincidence, of course, but the fact that she had tried to speak to Trawden was an entirely logical piece of the whole. She wanted his recollections, to test them against her own, to probe for gaps and ensure everything was known. That was all.

  And this had drawn us together, Trawden and I. This search for the whole. He was probably right, I decided.

  My thoughts drifted onto Blennard. He’d dazzled me over lunch, on his home ground; I wondered whether he’d have had the same effect elsewhere. Hours later, at home and in the dark, the notion returned to me that he had wanted something, that he hadn’t just summoned me to offer some vague assistance and ply me with wine and Dover sole. Whatever it was he was after, it hadn’t come out. There was more to Blennard than met the eye, I decided.

  I lifted my head and glanced past Claire’s sleeping form to the luminous green digits on the clock radio. It was a relic from the nineties but seemed older, a seventies vision of the future with numbers ticking inexorably on to the moment of doom. I couldn’t see any doom coming my way. The trouble was, I couldn’t see much else, either.

  It was 1am.

  By half past I’d given up, crept delicately from the bed, and set to work on the Maurier files I’d looked at earlier that day. This time I started at the beginning – there must have been earlier files, but the ones I’d grabbed happened to open with my own tenure at the firm.

  The Little Bill case brought back some memories. I’d been with an unusual girl at the time, a beauty with a history of domestic violence and, it turned out, an addiction to it as well. It hadn’t lasted. It might not have stuck in my memory at all, Little Bill or the girl, were it not for the fact that Trawden had followed straight after.

  The files were light on Trawden, which surprised me given how important he’d been to Elizabeth’s reputation. The barest facts, and not even them when it came to how we actually found the truth. I. How I actually found the truth.

  Robbie Evans had been dismissed as a solid lead because a tired lawyer or police officer had sorted through his history – Evans was dead by then, his claim to Maxine Grimshaw hadn’t come to light until long after he’d bled out his last in the prison showers – and misplaced a date. Evans had spent a short stint as a glazier for a local firm in Bangor. I could see the words on the page even as I recalled them twelve years later. I could see the witness statement from Casey Donohue, who worked at the Ford showroom at the end of the Warrington street the Grimshaw house backed onto. She’d been interviewed by the police because she’d come running to the house when she heard Eileen Grimshaw screaming. She’d heard the scream because she’d taken a long walk that afternoon, and she’d taken a long walk because she was having an extended lunch break, and she was having an extended lunch break because the whole showroom was shut for three hours while some Welsh bastards (her words) fitted a massive new glass front and no one had bothered telling her a bloody thing about it or she’d have organised a lift home.

  According to the records, Evans’ time as a glazier had ended a year before the murder, but I didn’t believe in coincidence, and I was right. The records weren’t. Casey Donohue put Evans on the spot, and the rest fell smoothly into place.

  None of this figured in Elizabeth’s notes on the case. She mentioned Evans; without him there was almost nothing to say. She mentioned my assistance, which was putting it mildly, but there’d been little point in seeking recognition for a job well done even when she’d been alive. Trawden was exonerated; Trawden was freed; onto the next. If Trawden meant so little to her, why had she tried to speak to him before she died?

  That thought took me back to the phone call and the sudden realisation that perhaps she hadn’t. If the whole point of the day’s machinations was to get me in front of Blennard, for reasons I still hadn’t established, then it was entirely feasible that Trawden had made that phone call up. He’d claimed that Martins had been on his case, but that could just as easily be another corroborating detail without a basis in reality. Everything he’d told me might well be one hundred per cent bullshit, and I knew how to find out.

  I glanced at the clock before I made the call. Half past two. But Colman had wanted my help, had said any time of day or night, I remembered the exact words and how I’d been thinking, as she uttered them, that she might come to regret them. I felt a sudden surge of energy that decided it for me – there was no way I was sleeping before I’d spoken to her, and there was no way I was sitting around till dawn, searching through Elizabeth’s files for a hidden unicorn until it was safe to call.

  Colman answered on the eighth ring, by which time I’d normally have given up, but I’d decided I was speaking to her now come hell or high water and we were still a long way short of that. She sounded breathless, which suggested she’d had to run for the telephone.

  “Who’s this?” she asked.

  “It’s Sam. Sam Williams.”

  “Oh, right.” She was still breathing heavily. I heard some muttered words, faint, too far away from the phone to be the person who’d just answered it, and it occurred to me that most people keep the phone close at hand, at night, if they’ve any intention of answering it at all.

  “Sorry I woke you,” I said, deciding then and there that I hadn’t.

  “Don’t worry about it. I wasn’t asleep.”

  “Have I interrupted something?”

  “Yes,” she laughed, “but I wouldn’t worry about it. He’s not exactly Don Juan.”

  “Hey,” said the voice I’d heard in the background, now clearer and closer. “I can hear you, you know.”

  “Shut up and keep yourself ready,” replied Colman, to her unseen lover, but still audible enough. “I haven’t finished with you yet, sir. Now then, Sam, what can I do for you in the middle of the dark and gloomy fucking night?”

  “Trawden.”

  I waited. Sir, she’d said. DS Larkin. Tommy. He hadn’t wasted his time. Neither had Colman.

  “Name rings a bell,” she replied. “Child killer, right?”

  “He was exonerated. I worked on it, with Elizabeth. Says she tried to call him before she died. Says Martins spoke to him about it. Is he making this stuff up?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied, after a moment’s silence. I had no idea what was going on at the other end of the line, but I doubted it was considered reflection. “But I can find out. Think it might be helpful?”

  I paused in the instant of thinking “Yes” and realised that whatever came of it, even if Trawden had made the whole thing up, it would probably come to nothing. I doubted it had anything to do with Elizabeth’s murder and I doubted Trawden’s motives, or Blennard’s, would be interesting enough to justify th
e lack of sleep on my side or interrupted pleasure on hers.

  “Possibly,” I said. “I’m not sure.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out, then. Speak tomorrow.”

  I set the phone down and looked up to find Claire looking down at me and shaking her head.

  “Bit late for making calls, isn’t it?”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but she continued before I could get a word out.

  “Don’t worry. Really. You’ve got calls to make, make ‘em. Just keep the noise down. Don’t wake me up, OK?”

  “OK,” I said, and watched her stumble back into the bedroom, still half asleep. I sat there staring after her for a minute, and then went to the kitchen and made myself a coffee. It was, I realised, going to be a long, dull night, just me and Elizabeth Maurier’s files.

  I woke to the sound of the kettle and lifted my head slowly and painfully to see into the kitchen. Claire was up. She was washed and dressed, and she was whistling. She turned and saw me, and walked over with a smile.

  “Coffee’s coming. Looks like you’re going to need it.”

  I gaped at her.

  “It’s eleven o’ clock, Sam. When did you finally get to sleep?”

  I shook my head. “Not sure. I was looking through the files.”

  “I know. You must have dropped off midway through, because there were papers all over the floor.”

  I looked down. Nothing there, nothing on the sofa, either, except an unpleasant-looking patch of drool I must have left there overnight. She saw me searching the room from my semi-supine position, and pointed to the kitchen counter.

  “I tidied them up. Spent half an hour creeping around you like a cat, but I reckon I could have let off a bomb and you wouldn’t have noticed.”

  She smiled again. I joined her.

  “Thanks.”

  She returned to the kitchen and I watched her, the thud in my head slowly dropping gear until it was a ghost of the pain I’d woken with. I’d slept with my neck twisted into the side of the sofa, I realised, and this was the result. It hadn’t been worth it. Nothing useful in the files. I reached for my phone. Nothing interesting there, either. A voicemail from Brooks-Powell reminding me about tonight, the time, his address.