Читать книгу Babyface - Elizabeth Woodcraft - Страница 11

SEVENFriday – Chambers

I had to go into chambers. I had rung Gavin about the paperwork immediately after breakfast, about ten thirty. As soon as he mentioned the name of the solicitor I remembered with sickening clarity what the cases were. Both had started out with different solicitors and counsel. One case involved a mother who had conceded residence of her children a year before when she really shouldn’t have, and now the father was refusing to allow her contact. She wanted to know if she could go back to vary the order. The other was a father who wanted to appeal against his children being taken into care by raising Human Rights Act arguments, saying that he hadn’t had a fair trial. I’d had them on my desk for two weeks and I knew I needed to look things up. I also needed to find the book on social work practice I had bought to prepare my cross-examination of the social workers at the inquiry. And I needed to catch up on chambers news.

It was a hot day and I put on black linen trousers and a loose, black silk shirt for the barristerial but casual look.

There was no one in the clerks’ room but clerks and they were all busy and didn’t want to chat. I was forced to go to my room, which was small and filled with an Ikea desk and chair and pine shelves holding briefs and old notebooks. It looked out over a patch of grass and if I stood up I could see the river. From my bag I pulled out Danny Richards’ brief which I still had not endorsed. I was looking at the faxed, smudged back sheet wrapped around the nine pages, which had been the source of all my problems with Judge Norman, and wondering how much of what had gone on I should actually put in writing, when the phone warbled.

Jenna said, ‘I’ve got – em – Orlando on the phone to speak to you.’

‘Orlando who?’

‘I don’t know.’

Jenna sounded stressed, so I said, ‘OK, put him through, but if it’s someone selling insurance you might find yourself with a thirty-year premium round your neck.’

‘No thank you,’ she said primly, ‘I’m already fully covered.’

‘Get you,’ I said. ‘OK, put him through.’ The phone clicked. ‘Frances Richmond speaking,’ I murmured cautiously.

‘Mmm,’ said a husky voice, ‘what a nice telephone manner you have.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Who am I speaking to?’

‘Didn’t she tell you? It’s Yolande.’

My heart fluttered. I did not want to speak to this woman, it meant grief all the way down the line, I knew it. ‘So, Yolande, how are you?’

‘I’m fine. How’s the inquiry going?’

‘As well as can be expected.’

‘I saw you on TV. You looked very nice.’

I snorted. But perhaps I had looked nice.

‘Compared to the others,’ she continued, with a short laugh. ‘Come and have lunch with me.’

‘Where are you?’ I said.

‘I’m on Fleet Street,’ she said. ‘It’s a lovely day, we could get a cab across the river. We could sit and look at the water.’

It sounded rather nice, with or without Yolande. But I couldn’t. She was blonde and left-handed and she was the girlfriend of a very dangerous man, if his record was to be believed. Which it was. Plus there were professional issues. They were in the grey area of murky to say the least. On the one hand neither Danny nor Yolande was my client, but on the other, in a way I still was Danny’s counsel, since I hadn’t endorsed my brief or told Simon what had happened. Or even rung Kay, my instructing solicitor, I realised with a lurch of guilt. And Yolande was bound to want to talk about him, and Yolande was his girlfriend.

‘I’m really busy,’ I said, half-heartedly. ‘I’ve only just got into chambers.’

‘Why don’t I come to you then?’ she said. ‘I’ll bring some sandwiches.’ Even over the phone I could tell she was left-handed. And there was that item on my list of things to do. Solve the mystery of Danny’s case. I hate leaving things undone. ‘Everybody has to eat lunch,’ she whispered. That was just so true. I was starving I realised. It was at least an hour and a half since I’d had toast. What else could I do? And somehow if she came to chambers I was … containing things. But what if Simon saw her? That might mean trouble. I remembered that Simon wasn’t in today. He was at the hospital, having his foot seen to, which is why it was all his fault anyway.

‘OK,’ I said.

‘I’ll be there in ten minutes,’ she cooed. ‘We’ll need a few plates and two glasses.’

I shivered with anticipation.

She was sitting on a sofa in the waiting room, reading a copy of the Financial Times, one of the papers Jenna spread out daily on a small coffee table. She was wearing more of those clothes that only blonde, lightly tanned women can get away with. Today it was a gold-beige, probably cashmere, sweater; a gold-beige straight skirt that revealed her long legs, but only discreetly from the knees down; slim beige high-heeled shoes. And a thin gold chain around her neck. They were very expensive clothes and I wondered who had paid for them, Danny or her unhappy husband. Or maybe she had bought them herself, I could hear Lena sternly asserting, from her wages from the shop. Remembering her relaxed approach to opening hours and the absence of any customers during the two hours that I was there, I doubted that the shop could fund that level of sumptuousness.

Yolande stood up, swayed towards me and I leaned to kiss her on the cheek.

I had found some dusty, non-matching plates at the back of the cupboard in the small kitchen area at the far end of the clerks’ room and, optimistically, had taken two matching glasses from the chambers box of champagne glasses. Now the plates were spread across my desk, piled with sandwiches made of interesting bread. ‘I like picnics,’ she said. ‘And this is almost a picnic.’ She gestured at the food with her left hand, the diamonds glinting heavily. ‘There’s a BLT, something with houmous and peppers, and a chicken thing. Oh and water.’ She pulled a blue bottle out of her plastic bag, twisted the lid and poured out two glasses of fizzing mineral water.

‘Sometimes you don’t need alcohol to get a buzz,’ I would have said, but couldn’t summon enough enthusiasm.

As I ate seriously through every flavour, she nibbled at a triangle of chicken salad. She made conversation about Somerset House and the Courtauld Gallery, which she had just visited, she talked about fountains and cobble stones and ice rinks. I talked about Somerset House when it was part of the Family Division, and the hours I had spent sitting in narrow corridors, proposing compromises to angry people who thought they were preserving their dignity when their sadness was blinding them to an easier way forward.

‘Coffee?’ I asked, screwing up my serviette and putting it on the empty plate in front of me.

‘How nice,’ she smiled. ‘I’ll amuse myself looking out of your window.’

I flew along the corridor to the kitchen.

As I returned with two unchipped mugs of coffee, I could hear voices in my room. My heart shrank. Simon must have limped bravely back from the hospital and Jenna must have told him Yolande (or someone like that) was here. He would be furious that I was entertaining a defence witness in chambers. I wondered if I could leave the coffee outside the door, just give a tap to let her know it was there – Simon could have mine, I thought generously – and then I could leave the country and start a new life with a new identity.

‘Courage,’ I said to myself, and then I said it again, with a French accent. A new life in France was an option. I would think about it later. I could say she had come to see how Simon’s foot was, to wish him luck for the trial. She was just sitting in my room to wait.

But it wasn’t Simon, it was Marcus. I would much rather it had been Simon. Marcus was another member of chambers and he and I didn’t get on. And it wasn’t just because, unaccountably, he earned a lot of money and had a very nice new car. It was deeper than that. He was a slimeball. You only had to look at his hair.

And there was the smell of cigarette smoke in the room. Bastard. I hate smoking, I won’t have it in my room. Yolande stood by the window, her arm half hanging out. She was the smoker. Oh. OK. But, I noticed, Marcus was chewing. He was eating our picnic.

‘Hello Frankie,’ he said, as if we were the greatest friends in the world. ‘I just came in for a word, but I see you’re … in conference?’ His eyes flicked mockingly over the half-empty plates.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘absolutely.’

‘Catch you later then,’ he said with an easy smile. ‘Great sandwiches.’ He picked up half a BLT which I had been looking forward to taking home. He bit deeply into it. Even Marcus wouldn’t eat the sandwiches if he thought he was interrupting a conference. ‘Very nice meeting you … ?’

I wasn’t going to tell him Yolande’s name and nor was she, so Marcus backed out of the room, grinning and chewing.

Yolande flicked her cigarette out of the window. I worried briefly about the dry greensward outside while she moved plates to make room for the coffee. ‘Friend of yours?’ she asked.

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘He seemed very interested in Danny’s case.’ She indicated the thin brief now lying on top of a pile of back copies of Family Law. I thought I’d thrown it onto the shelf with my notebooks when I had brought the plates in.

‘Did he?’ I said cautiously. Marcus must be annoyed that Simon had got the case. Corpseless murders were considered rather exotic in the world of the criminal barrister.

‘He seemed a bit disappointed when he saw it was so thin.’

Silently, I moved the brief to a higher shelf and sat down.

I still wasn’t sure why she was here. It didn’t feel as if she was here for me, there was something else. Silence stretched between us. I yearned for a small personal activity to fill in the space. Smoking for example: I could lean across the table, take a cigarette from her packet, look round the room tapping the cigarette on the box, strike a match, inhale, look at the cigarette, look attractive. But I don’t smoke and she did.

‘You weren’t smoking at the shop, were you?’ I said.

‘We’re not supposed to smoke in the shop. It burns holes in the stock.’ She took another cigarette out of the packet. ‘Do you mind?’

‘No.’

She sat smoking, relaxed, at ease, her arm draped along the window sill. As if she was just there for a pleasant lunch, a ‘picnic couvert’. While I jittered, fiddling with a piece of cellophane.

I shook my head. Sod it, why not? ‘Did you know Terry Fleming?’ I wasn’t sure if this was helping her or me.

‘Vaguely.’

‘Do you think he’s dead?’

‘Are you interested or are you just making conversation?’

‘I thought you were interested.’

‘I’m not particularly interested in Terry Fleming.’

‘I thought he was the cause of all your problems.’

‘My problem is to stop Danny pleading guilty to this charge.’

‘Well if Simon knew more about Terry Fleming, he wouldn’t have to.’

‘Tell Danny that.’

‘I just wondered if Terry Fleming had taken off.’

‘Good point,’ she said, and I had that ridiculous glow of pleasure again. ‘He has disappeared before.’

‘When?’

‘When things got hot. When he fell out with people or had trouble with business deals, that kind of stuff. They all do. They all have their little places. Danny does.’

‘Like prison you mean?’

She raised her eyebrows at me. ‘They go and wait for things to calm down, for a new deal to be done.’

‘I didn’t get the sense that Terry Fleming was a businessman.’

‘He had his car business,’ she said. She looked round. I had no ashtrays. I had a small dish containing paper clips, which I now emptied into a drawer, and gave to her. ‘But I meant more generally, Effo’s business.’

‘Who’s Effo?’ The question was out before I could stop it.

She looked at me with her eyebrows very slightly raised. This was obviously information that was in the papers I hadn’t had. But I didn’t try to explain that. And apparently she wanted to tell me.

Edward Farnigan was known as Effo to his friends, of whom there were, apparently, many and in high places. He was a well-known local businessman, a property developer, an entrepreneur, with a hand in a lot of pies. He had a number of people who worked for him, including Terry Fleming and Ronald Catcher. He owned the Lambada Casino and Hombre, the menswear shop, where Terry Fleming had bought that last fabulous suit. And Effo was successful in his work, he had a number of big cars (‘A Roller,’ Yolande said, ‘and a really nice Jag’) and a large mock-Georgian house with a swimming pool in Solihull to prove it. I wanted to say obviously not that successful, because who would choose to live in Solihull, but it was her story, so I said nothing.

‘So, Terry might be lying low while some deal of Effo’s gets sorted out. Where does he go? Can’t we get hold of him?’

She shrugged, jutting her lower lip to exhale, relaxed, casual.

‘Who knows about this? Effo? Should someone be talking to him?’

She shook her head. I felt as if I was missing the point. Perhaps all of this was clearly set out in Simon’s brief.

‘I don’t think anyone wants Effo to be involved, if at all possible. Certainly not Sandra.’

I waited. If I showed I didn’t know what she was talking about it might look as if Kay hadn’t briefed me properly, and that Kay wasn’t up to the job. If Kay wasn’t up to the job, she might think Simon wasn’t up to it either.

‘Sandra, Effo?’ she said, mildly irritated. ‘Yolande, Danny?’

‘I’m sorry, there are so many names.’

‘Sandra is the one who eventually drew the short straw and got Effo.’ She tapped her cigarette into the paper clip dish. ‘Sandra’s a natural blonde, you know. Unlike me. Effo likes the natural look. And he pays for it. All Sandra wants these days is a quiet life. I think the excitement of being with Mr Big has worn off. She’s spending a lot of time in the London flat at the moment, till the heat dies down. She’s always been a bit independent.’

I wasn’t sure where this conversation was going, although an independent woman and a flat in London made it more interesting. ‘Had Sandra and Terry Fleming been getting close?’

‘If they had, then she’d be the dead one, wouldn’t she?’

The easy way she said it stunned me. ‘For goodness’ sake, who would have killed her?’

She smiled at me and I felt like Miss Prim the Sunday school teacher. Perhaps I would be better off in the library, looking up the meaning of the term ‘equality of arms’.

‘So, in the past, when Terry Fleming has laid low for a bit, how long has it taken for things to calm down?’

‘Depends. Depends what they’ve done. Effo has various people to sort things. Sometimes that’s Terry, occasionally it’s Danny. Depends who’s in his good books. People get a call, they do a job. Could take a couple of weeks, a couple of months.’

‘Well, Fleming’s been missing for a lot longer than that. But what’s your point?’ I was thinking aloud. ‘Is Effo a respectable businessman, or a member of the Birmingham … underworld? What’s he doing using the services of someone like Danny?’

Smoke curled round her nostrils.

‘I’m just playing Devil’s Advocate,’ I said.

‘In Birmingham,’ she said slowly, tapping her cigarette unnecessarily over the paper clip dish, ‘people do things for Effo. And if they don’t, people – other people – disappear.’ She looked at the tip of her cigarette for a second. ‘It’s not just London where people end up in concrete pillars.’ She laughed. ‘That’s a joke.’

I didn’t smile. ‘So who’s in a concrete pillar? Fleming?’

‘Maybe. Do you want another sandwich?’ she said.

I shook my head. ‘I want you to tell me why you’re here. All this is very interesting, but I don’t represent Danny and I can’t really have anything to do with this.’

She tilted her head and smiled at me. ‘You started this conversation.’

‘You rang me, you brought the sandwiches.’ Was this our first argument?

‘You seem friendly. It’s nice to have someone to talk to.’ She gestured at the plates spread over the table. ‘Someone to have lunch with.’ She gazed at me.

I looked away first. ‘This may sound crass but why don’t you talk to Effo, or Sandra? You seem to know them quite well.’

She shook her head and inhaled deeply on her cigarette. ‘I think it goes a bit further than that. Something happened twenty years ago.’ She gestured her head towards the thin brief on the shelf.

I didn’t know what happened, I didn’t have all the papers, I wanted to say, but I was still protecting everyone’s professional probity.

My face must have said it anyway. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I doubt Danny’s told this new solicitor about spats.’

‘Fights?’

‘In a funny kind of way.’

I waited but she said nothing more, concentrating on crushing her cigarette into the paper clip dish. Then she looked up at me and gave me that smile.

I walked out of chambers with her. The air was hot and dry as we crunched in the gravel towards the main road. It was almost two o’clock. People were hurrying back to work along Fleet Street. Men in stiff white collars and grey, pinstriped trousers and women in black suits and sensible shoes, all with briefs tucked under their arms, walked briskly towards the High Court.

‘Spats?’ I repeated, rolling the word round on my tongue.

‘I have to go,’ she said, and turned and waved her arm in the air. A taxi with its orange light glowing careered wildly towards us. She wrenched open the door, climbed in and fell into the seat, then leaned forward, as if to say something, but pulling the door shut she simply called, ‘Bye!’ and she and the taxi drove away.

I wondered if my frustration showed on my face as I slunk back up the stairs to chambers. All that effort, all those sandwiches. For what? For nothing. I really knew nothing new about Danny, just some confusing information about this man Effo. Her and her gold jewellery and her left-handedness. Well, that was it. That was it. I would just ring Kay and tell her I had done the hearing, with the merest hint of professional difficulty, leave a note for Simon, mentioning the page 213 point, and that would be the end of my involvement in the case of Danny Richards.

Firmly, I turned the handle of the front door.

Marcus was standing in front of the shelves of Halsbury’s Statutes which lined the walls of the corridor leading to the clerks’ room. ‘I suppose you’ve heard,’ he murmured, pulling out a grey and red volume, his desire to impart gossip obviously transcending his personal antipathy to me.

‘What?’ My desire to know transcending everything.

‘He’s going to sit.’

‘Who? Tony? That’s great.’ Anthony Garforth QC was our head of chambers. And he was becoming a judge. It was always useful to have a judge in chambers. So this was very good news, for Tony and for the rest of us. And it meant that Tony’s hard work had paid off, all the talking to judges, becoming a Bencher at his Inn, attending Criminal Bar Association dinners. ‘Tony must be thrilled, where’s he sitting?’

‘Our head of chambers is to sit as a Mental Health Appeal Tribunal Chair.’ Marcus’ mouth puckered in distaste, which is what stopped me from saying, ‘But Tony doesn’t know anything about mental health.’

Marcus wanted to be a judge himself, and he couldn’t work out why he wasn’t a QC. Plus he despised Tony. He watched my face, but I didn’t want to give him the pleasure of thinking I agreed with him about the strangeness of Tony’s appointment. That irritated him but there was more to tell and he didn’t want to lose the chance of informing the uninformed, even if it was only me. He leaned back against volumes twenty-five – twenty-seven of Halsbury. ‘It has been decided to have a chambers party.’ He was examining his fingernails. ‘To congratulate Tony, and also, of course, to remind solicitors of our existence. Not that my solicitors need that kind of reminder.’

‘There are solicitors who actually instruct you?’ I asked. ‘I thought your briefs appeared through parthenogenesis.’

He wasn’t sure whether that was an insult. But he gave me the benefit of the doubt. ‘Who was the attractive number in your room just now?’ he asked.

I blinked at him. I couldn’t be bothered to question his terminology. ‘A friend,’ I said, ‘a concept which may be foreign to you.’

‘A friend,’ he mused. ‘You should choose your friends more carefully. She was flicking through your briefs as I came into your room.’

‘I expect she was looking for a needle in a haystack,’ I said, ‘searching for the story of a good man.’ My heart was racing. She said he’d been the one looking, hadn’t she? Oh God, which one of them was telling the truth?

‘The party is in three weeks,’ Marcus droned on, not certain whether his barb had hit the target. ‘There’s a three line whip on all members of chambers attending. Including you.’ His voice lifted in surprise. ‘Crime’s a bit slow at the moment and apparently you still know some of the old criminal solicitors.’

Kay was the only criminal solicitor I really knew but she got a lot of very good cases. High profile political activists – the cases that got noticed, the ones where the barristers were filmed walking into court because there were no other action shots available.

‘I’ll have to see if I can clear my diary and fit it in,’ I said. I put my shoulder against the door of the clerks’ room and pushed.

‘We’re sending out the invitations on Monday,’ Gavin said, as I stood by the printer waiting for an updated version of my diary to appear. ‘Kay never comes to these things normally, and Tony’s trying to do his paternal bit for the members he leaves behind, making sure the work is still coming in. I think he thought she might come if you said you’d be there.’

‘All lesbians together, you mean, the lesbian Mafia? The trouble with Tony is he thinks we go round in packs, walking in step, wearing slinky clothes. If only that were true.’ Something he’d said struck me. ‘Tony’s not leaving chambers is he? I thought you were a member for life till you went to another set.’

‘Oh, his name will still be on the door, but he won’t be around so much and he’s stepping down as head of chambers.’

So that was the reason Marcus was trying to be friendly. He wanted to be the new head of chambers and he was on the campaign trail. Sharing gossip was his equivalent of kissing babies.

‘So will you ask her?’ Gavin was saying.

‘I’m not sure that it’s a good idea for me to be schmoozing round Kay at the moment.’

Gavin gave me a quizzical look. ‘Do I need to know what that means?’ He was a great clerk, but I could see him hoping he wasn’t going to have to deal with my personal problems, which might take a lot of time.

‘No, not at all,’ I said. ‘In fact there’s no reason why I shouldn’t invite her myself. When I ring her up to tell her about Wednesday, I’ll ask her. I have nothing to be ashamed of, nothing at all.’

‘Now you’ve really got me worried,’ he said.