‘I was. And do you know what he said to me?’
‘You should drink Armagnac here, not cider, mademoiselle,’ the kids chorused in unison.
‘Ah, and he bought you a drink. It’s so romantic.’
‘It was.’
‘Look!’ Tom cried, glad to change the subject away from his parents’ romance. ‘The bus.’
‘Your parents, though,’ Carys said, suddenly. ‘Didn’t they ever meet Dad? Did you ever take him back there?’
‘No,’ said Catherine. ‘Never.’
There was a pause. ‘What was the house called, where you grew up?’ said Carys.
‘Do you know, I can’t remember,’ said Catherine. ‘Isn’t that dreadful?’
‘You can’t remember the name of the house where you grew up?’
‘Well, it was changed. When we moved there it was called something else. And we changed the name back to the original one, but I can’t for the life of me tell you what it was.’ She glanced ahead. A woman, walking towards her. ‘We should go there, some time. Go to Exmoor. Get in touch with my roots. All we hear about is Daddy’s family. You’d like to know more about mine, I expect.’
‘Yes,’ said Carys. ‘I would. Just – I have loads of questions.’ She blinked. ‘Sure, it’s your right to not talk about it, but . . . And you’ve never really told us why you left.’
‘I know. I know. Now’s not the time.’ There was a crack in her voice; she hid it. ‘I’ve always thought we’d have to have a talk about it. Just not at the bus stop at eight ten in the morning.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Carys, nodding at her. Tom shrugged.
‘I love you both, my darlings,’ she said, dread at the day ahead flooding her, fearful now of everything, her empty stomach clenching with acid. ‘Have a – good day. I’ll be back late tonight.’
‘I hope it rains all weekend in pissing Paris,’ Carys said, cheerfully, as the bus drew up. ‘When you come back and we are literally starving to death and the house has burned down.’ She paused. ‘Where are you going today?’ she said, with actual, genuine curiosity.
I’m going to see a murderer.
‘Work,’ she said. ‘Boring insurance cases again. I love you! Bye!’ called Catherine, smiling, then turning so they couldn’t see her expression. She arranged her face, then looked back. She saw them climb up onto the top deck as they did every morning, to be greeted by their friends, Carys at the back, Tom at the front. Which was strange given they were allegedly the only people at the whole damn school to get the bus.
The moment the bus pulled away her expression collapsed, the muscles in her face falling slackly back into place. You’re Catherine Christophe. You’re forty-seven. You’re married to Davide, you have two children. You are a barrister.
All of this is true in the eyes of the law. No one can say it isn’t.
On the other side of the road stood a woman. Catherine told herself not to look; that it would be bad either way, feeding the beast. She’d read up on OCD once for a case, that you keep throwing the ball for the puppy, and the puppy keeps bringing it back, and you have to train yourself not to throw the ball in the first place.
She’d thought that was rubbish; the puppy needed to have the ball thrown, now and then. And she needed to experience these terrors she had, the weight of concealment that was sometimes, on a morning like this, too hard to bear.
So she looked.
And she was there. Standing, watching.
Catherine noted the way her hair was worn like a younger woman’s, long and flowing, pinned back with those round tortoiseshell hairclips she’d worn as a girl.
She had the same dress on – was it the same? Or was it darker? The boots were the same.
‘Hey, Catherine!’ she said, in a perfectly normal voice. She didn’t yell, or draw attention to herself. ‘Can’t we talk? Why don’t you want to see me? It’s me, Catherine. It’s me.’
The boots had mud on them.
Her eyes, her beautiful, huge eyes. She was so lovely.
‘When are we going back, Catherine? Don’t you think we should talk about it?’
More than anything, Catherine wanted to cross the road. To hold her. Smell her. Lean on her. To say: You understand. No one else does. And I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry. That idea, of putting her head on her shoulder, of feeling the embrace of the only other person in the world who understood.
But she couldn’t do it. So she kept on walking and, when she could, picked up the pace, though, even a couple of weeks on, the damned toe caused her to hobble very slightly. She darted down a narrow alleyway, which led up to the Heath, where she could, if necessary, hide until she was sure danger was past. It did not occur to her that this was not normal.
Chapter Six
Grant Doyle was in HMP/YOI Tarnmoor, a Category A prison an hour’s train ride from London, just outside Rochester. Catherine had been there before but not for years, and it was pleasant to arrive somewhere else, to walk from the train station through the pretty Kentish town with its gabled shops on the high street, to peer into Satis House, where Miss Havisham had lived in Great Expectations, to stare up at the castle, lowering and bleak on this strangely cloudy April day.
At the prison, Catherine requested a locker for her phone and laptop, and her jewellery. She stood motionless as they patted her down, as a dog came out to sniff her.
‘Sorry, ma’am,’ the prison guard said. ‘Won’t take long.’
He said it in a chummy, we’re-on-the-same-side way.
The dog was an Alsatian. Catherine closed her eyes, hearing its snuffling, hot breath moving over her. ‘You all right?’ said one of the prison officers, who was waiting by.
‘I don’t like dogs,’ she told them.
She was wearing a shift dress with a collar and pockets, and a navy jacket, as smart as possible to offset the trainers. How stupid she’d been, she’d tell everyone who commented. Just a silly toe, ridiculous letting it get so bad. ‘It was the bump on the head,’ she’d joked to Jake, who kept popping in to see how she was, and to whom she kept having to say, with the appearance of regret, that she was so sorry but she couldn’t come for lunch.
At work Catherine felt more and more like a ghost. She crept in and out of the building, hoping to move unseen. But every time she left and arrived she’d pause in the spot at the top of the stairs where she’d seen her first of all, a week ago. Checking Lincoln’s Inn Fields, checking down, on the ground below the stairs. Checking.
They walked her through the Victorian, warren-like building, eerily quiet. Rain from last night dripped through iron girders onto the floor just past the entrance. She was with two other women, one small, slight with lank hair in a straight central parting and drooping shoulders, dressed in sweat pants and a crop top, not meeting anyone’s eye, and an older woman, handbag under her arm, in a smart jacket and court shoes, back straight, nodding at everyone.
In the month since the trial Catherine had often wondered where she’d gone wrong with Grant Doyle. Early on in her career she’d have got him off, no question. She was able to get inside the jury’s heads, to make them see what she wanted and ignore what was inconvenient. She never troubled herself with the ethics of whether keeping a guilty person out of jail was the right thing to do. People asked for her by name. On the earliest version of the Fulton Chambers website, she’d been on the top fold. She’d won Barrister of the Year but had turned it down. She didn’t want publicity.
Then they’d moved, to a larger house, when Tom was born, and there were holidays and things like new boilers and new shoes and it all added up, and when she decided to specialise in fraud and negligence instead her income doubled, and she wasn’t dealing with the depth of human misery she’d had to wade through, nor the nagging fear when, as once happened, she successfully prosecuted the son of an Islington gangster for assault, and the father had pointed at her in court. ‘I’m coming for you, love,’ he’d said, the finger like an arrow. ‘I know where you live.’
&
nbsp; She’d reported it, and apparently he’d been spoken to, but she was terrified, not for herself, but for these blameless people who depended on her, Davide and Carys and Tom. Defending Grant had reminded her how much she disliked criminal practice, and yet how much she craved the thrill of it, the sense of justice being served at its sharpest point. Winning cases for these indolent shipping magnates and sharp-eyed insurers, the billionaires who needed hand-holding and flattery, was not her purpose in life, but it was safe. It had to be.
As she walked into the visiting room and saw him waiting for her, Catherine remembered with a jolt how small Grant Doyle was. He didn’t look like the boy one tabloid had called ‘the most dangerous teenager in Britain’.
In March, he had been sentenced to twelve years. Twelve was the longest term he’d get, though he’d be on licence for the rest of his life and his sentence could be extended if it was deemed necessary. He had been seventeen when he was arrested, and he might not get out till he was thirty. His peers would have careers, relationships, lives with clear blue water between them and school. Not him.
Grant Doyle had been a scholarship pupil at Jolyons, the highly competitive and exclusive public school in South London. Grant had fallen in with a crowd of rich boys, sons of bankers, record executives, a celebrity chef, a Russian oligarch. The king of this crowd was Dan Hammersley, whose father was a hedge fund manager with a large stake in a football club. From Dan Hammersley’s Instagram feed you could see the combination of money, access to footballers and a swaggering sense of entitlement which, mixed with – Catherine thought – a staggering lack of self-awareness, had made him a peculiarly unpleasant kind of schoolfellow.
Everyone agreed Dan had it in for Grant from the moment Grant started at Jolyons, aged thirteen. What was disputed was the extent to which his victimisation of Grant and his exhortations to his friends to do the same ultimately led to his own death, the previous year, at a summer house party.
‘Flushing my head down the toilet,’ Grant had told Catherine, the first time they’d met. ‘Three, five times in a row, I had to go to hospital once. Check with the school. Punching me, over and over, every time they passed me in the corridor. Leaving shit on my front doorstep. My sister stepped in it. My sister’s twelve. Tai, he was Dan’s best friend, he sends messages to me, to Poppy, my mum, my friends. Pictures of aborted foetuses. That’s what should have happened to you. That’s what they say.’
‘I know –’
‘Telling everyone in the school I lived on an estate. Them all believing that’s something bad. Instead of something to be proud of. Telling everyone my dad was a postman. Like that’s something bad too. Dan’s girlfriend Talia, do you know what her dad does? Do you?’
‘N-no.’ She remembered the name from the list of witnesses.
‘Her dad’s a millionaire from towing cars. He owns those trucks that go around taking them off the street so you have to pay, like, three hundred quid to get it back. Imagine that. Would you be proud of making money from that? None of you know what it’s like.’ He had raised his head again and looked at her and Ashok, the solicitor. ‘You’re living with it every single day. And if you call it out then they’ve won.’
In court, Catherine had, slowly but surely, built up a picture of Grant – a shy boy, not great at making friends, bullied by classmates at his primary school for working too hard, close to his mother and sister. The pride in the family when he went for, and was offered, a scholarship at such a good school. The piece in the local paper about it. (Catherine mentally noted, with irony, the chance remark by the headmaster that Grant lived closer to the school than any of the other boys, who were ferried across South London by their mothers in vast black Range Rovers and Mercedes SUVs every day.) She had appealed to the jury, going over and over the treatment meted out by Dan and his mates. The danger Grant felt all the time. How he’d stopped sleeping. How the school had called it ‘high jinks’ and refused to bring in Dan Hammersley’s parents, Catherine managing to hint this might be because they didn’t want to offend one of their most lucrative donors.
But the jury hadn’t liked Grant Doyle. They’d heard it all and taken it all in and they’d found him guilty. And she knew why. It was more comforting to believe that the handsome, rich, blond boy wasn’t bad, and that the poor boy, who throughout the trial stared unnervingly at each of them in turn, and who’d stabbed someone to death, was.
‘How are you, Grant?’ Catherine said, sitting down in the brightly lit, chilly room. At the other end of the room, the lank-haired, sad woman looked up as a huge bear of a man about three times her age appeared. He was almost too big for the door frame. ‘Morning,’ he said, too loudly, too cheerfully. ‘All right, love?’
The woman waiting for him didn’t say anything, just shrugged. He sat down. In the far corner, a small, slight, elderly man was brought in, and was greeted by his wife, the dignified one with the handbag. Who were all these people? Catherine found herself thinking, as ever. What were their stories?
‘I’m OK, thanks, Catherine,’ said Grant, meeting her eye, and he smiled. He looked like a Botticelli angel when he smiled. His dark blonde hair, his large, guileless green eyes. ‘Thanks for coming to see me.’
Catherine nodded at him. ‘I always try to.’
‘Does this happen to you a lot then, Catherine? Your client gets found guilty?’
‘No.’
Grant leaned forward, and the prison officer behind, her hands on the back of another chair, said sharply: ‘Keep a distance, Doyle.’
‘Has your mum been in?’
Grant looked around, nodding, smiling at the officer. ‘No, Catherine, she hasn’t. She finds it too upsetting. Poppy can’t visit, she’s too young. My dad’s been, but he wasn’t really very well equipped to handle having a son in prison. He couldn’t make eye contact with me, Catherine. Imagine that.’ His huge eyes held her gaze.
‘I’ve got the papers through on the appeal,’ said Catherine. ‘I think there’s grounds for it. I’m going to discuss it with Ashok and then get back to you. See what the situation is, test the lie of the land.’
‘Would you handle me again, Catherine?’
‘I – would,’ she lied. ‘All being well.’
‘I hope so. That’d be great, Catherine.’ She looked up, unsure whether he was mocking her or not.
He had a light, crisp voice, with a little hiss at the edge of some words. It reminded her of Ka, in The Jungle Book. Always slightly self-conscious: a kid, playing at being a criminal mastermind. She glanced at the tall, Gothic windows covered with double glazing and bars. The windows faced an inner courtyard into which no light seemed to permeate.
‘How are you settling in? Have you got to know anyone yet?’
‘This isn’t a nice posh boarding school like the one you went to, Catherine. You’re making it sound like Hogwarts. It’s not, is it?’ He turned to the prison officer and smiled.
‘Shut up, Doyle. I won’t tell you again. Ten minutes.’
She had a baton dangling off her belt loop. Catherine wondered if she’d ever hit anyone with it. What it was like. If it made her feel safer. When Catherine had once been incredibly angry about something, when the children were small and she was very tired, and she had been passed over for a case by Graeme, the head clerk, she’d gone into her office, shut the door and kicked the filing cabinets, really hard, and the harder she kicked the more she wanted to carry on doing it. She’d picked up a mug and thrown it across the room, but it wasn’t the same – it bounced onto the floor, a slime of cold black coffee dregs leaking out as the mug rolled on the plastic carpet tiles. She remembered the violence of the metal drawers, crashing into the frame, the astonishing rush of release, the rage that was so near the surface. Barbara Fiennes, the older, well-respected barrister next door, had banged loudly on the door. ‘Good Lord, what’s happening in there? You all right?’
‘Stuck drawer,’ Catherine had called, looking at the dented, crumpled front of the liver-coloured
metal. ‘Sorry for the noise.’
She had told herself she would never do it again. But she had known it would happen again. The cortisol and adrenaline meeting, coursing through her body.
‘Anyway, no, I haven’t made any friends, Catherine. As you may recall, I wasn’t very good at it at school, so I don’t see myself palling up with a nice gang here, either. Thanks for your concern. How have you been? How is Tom, your son? Do you remember, I know someone who knows him? And Carys, your daughter? And this reminds me, Catherine!’ He clapped his hands together, gently. ‘How could I forget? I had a letter from someone who knows you.’
‘What?’
Grant folded his arms, looking amused. ‘It was sent via Ashok. Asking me to cease and desist from harassment of you and your family. Which I thought was rather unfair. Very embarrassing, in front of my new boarding school chums, Catherine.’
His voice was too loud and the couple on the other side of the room paused their silent misery, turning round together to stare at him.
‘What did you say? A cease and desist?’
‘Sent from your husband, I believe.’
‘I – I don’t know what you mean,’ said Catherine. But she was remembering the conversation in the kitchen, the other morning, Davide’s anger. ‘That can’t be right.’
‘Oh but it is.’ The angelic eyes lit up, he had seen a weakness, a crack. ‘So you didn’t know? That’s funny. It says I got someone to come and smash up your study. Me.’
He leaned towards her, and the officer stirred again.
‘Who’s been coming into your house and doing something horrible like that? ’Cause it wasn’t me, Catherine. I had nothing to do with it.’ He narrowed his eyes, his calculating brain getting to work as he scanned her face. ‘Oh, this is good. So you didn’t report it to the police. Why? Because you didn’t want them to investigate. But . . .’ He lowered his voice, staring off into the distance. ‘OK, I get it. You didn’t tell your husband. You want him to believe it was me. So you know who did it, because if you didn’t you’d want it cleared up too. I’m right, aren’t I?’
The Beloved Girls Page 7
