‘What are you making?’ he asked. ‘It’s a beautiful colour.’
She looked at him warily, poised for flight. Of course she recognised him. The features and the roles of every person involved in that case were etched in her memory, wigs or no wigs. She had watched them come and go and despised them.
‘I was junior counsel for the Crown, last May, and…’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘And what?’
‘I wanted to apologise. I wanted to say how sorry I was.’
The train was pulling into the station. They were standing by the door, with her clutching the bag and refusing to listen. He found himself talking to her urgently. The doors opened: in a moment she would be able to run.
‘Look Ms Joyce, please listen to me. Can I buy you a drink?’
She took off down the platform, hoisting the bag, and he caught her at the ticket barrier when she stopped, cursing, and started fishing in the pockets of her long coat for the damn ticket. No bloody ticket. A second chance, then, as she crouched by the bag and began to search through it. The ticket was wrapped up with the material she had been sewing. Fate intervening again. It had to be right.
‘Can I buy you a drink? Please?’
She suddenly looked weary, her hand holding the ticket shaking as she went through the barrier and turned to face him, some instinct either of manners or tiredness making her stop. She had no energy to run any more.
‘Why the hell should I talk to you?’
What was there to say?
‘Because it isn’t all over,’ he said. ‘And because I need you.’
He did not know the magic in those final words, more particularly the word need. Plus the fact that he had eyes like a dog pleading for food and he was as thin as a rail, and she did not want to go towards her own, empty, complicated home just yet. She shrugged.
‘OK.’
Why not? Someone had said they needed her. After all, Hen thought to herself, I’m a makeshift daughter whose parents have at long last told me to fuck off, and I’ve been waiting all my life for that to happen. I’ve got nothing to lose.
And he’s right. It can’t be all over, because that bitch jumped.
CHAPTER FOUR
She had been in almost silence, trying to talk for the last ten days and then she had been told to go. Later, Henrietta Joyce used that as her excuse for why she agreed to go for a drink with a virtual stranger she had met by unhappy accident on a train. It was the sight of crowds which did it, the prospect of remaining in a place full of chattering people, instead of the view of the sea from an upstairs window and a house full of silent recrimination. Also, the knowledge that if she had not found the ticket, the man with the Labrador eyes would have paid the fine, all for the privilege of sitting with her. She must have something he wanted, and if she was not wanted for herself, this was a good substitute.
She did not trust him as far as she could have thrown him, but that did not matter. This wasn’t personal. Whatever else was on his agenda, it did not include flirtation.
‘It may seem strange to you,’ he said, far more composed after he had done his manly thing and steered her towards empty seats in a pub within fifty yards of the station and bought a bottle of red wine, ‘but I’ve dreamt of meeting you. To say sorry.’
She let him do the talking and did not acknowledge the apology. It was, as a lawyer would say, irrelevant. Hen had never blamed the secondary people for the debacle of the trial that featured her sister as victim, even though their powerlessness amazed her. They were not the enemy. The Defendant was the foe, along with his Defence Counsel, Marianne Shearer, QC. She shook her head, dismissing his words. She was here, she told herself, because it was cold out there and warmer in here, and a part of her was back with her mother on the seafront, instead of being vaguely, indeterminately, needed, which was one step away from rejection. It clarified the mind. Let him talk first. She was starved of chat, with a head full of things she wanted to articulate: she would have talked to a dog.
‘But the other reason for seizing the opportunity to talk to you… well there are many. I keep thinking of it all, you see, especially now. And then Marianne Shearer… well, she died. Did you know that?’
‘Jumped. Yes. She was in the paper. Front pages, too, I expect she would have liked that.’
He nodded vigorously, ignoring the bitchy note in her voice.
‘It set me thinking all over again – as if I’d ever stopped – because it means it isn’t all over, is it? I can’t help wondering why she died. I know that the officer in the case thinks Rick Boyd may have something to do with it. Maybe he got to her somehow. May even have seduced her, too. Heaven knows, he wasn’t fussy about looks. Oh God, what an awful thing to say, I shouldn’t have said it.’
He seemed like a man who frequently said things he should not have said and that reassured her. Not such a careful lawyer as he had seemed six months before, nodding and bowing in Marianne Shearer’s wake like a dinghy behind a yacht. They had all done that, even the Judge.
‘Yes, you should. There’s no point pretending that my sister was beautiful, but she did have youth on her side, and naivety, and lack of confidence. Sorry, Mr Friel, but I can’t see that bastard having a crack at a dried-up old walnut like Shearer, she’d have seen him coming a mile off. You mean he might have seduced her after he was acquitted, but why bother? He specialised in the insecure, didn’t he? She wasn’t one of those. And what would be the point? She’d served her purpose brilliantly. Although you might be right, and he manipulated her, too.’
That was the greatest number of words she had said so far and at least it proved that he had her attention. He sat back and sighed; most of him consisted of legs and arms, with a concave torso, a bad haircut and amazing colouring. Pale skin, red hair, freckles, and casual clothes that appeared, on a second glance, to be spattered with egg. Not a man who noticed his own appearance.
‘Boyd might have put pressure on Shearer because she knew so much about him. Maybe she was going to have a word with the police about all the other things she knew. Join up all the dots so they had a proper profile of him for next time. No, she wouldn’t do that. It would be like being human and socially responsible. Maybe she was simply influenced by that other woman, Mrs Ward, who also jumped and got a headline.’
He was thinking aloud, talking to himself as if he had known her for ever, as if they had something instantly in common simply because they were discussing a subject about which they knew more than anyone else. Hen had noticed the same syndrome when she was working; the rapport of otherwise isolated experts, fascinated by an obscure book or a design, ready to gnaw at ideas forever with complete strangers made instant friends by rare, shared knowledge, but still she bristled. She did not want to talk about Ms Shearer, QC, except venomously.
‘Mrs Ward was sad and depressed, pour soul,’ Hen said. ‘She’d tried to kill herself before, hadn’t she? It was spontaneous desperation in her case and it’s insulting to her to equate her with Marianne Shearer in any way. She was a good woman, for a start. Not like Shearer at all. It looks to me as if Shearer staged it all for effect, probably hired the bloke who filmed it. It would be nice to think she killed herself for shame,’ Hen continued. ‘After all, what had she done with her life but defend scumbags and get them off?’
‘I think the earlier suicide might have influenced her in some way,’ Peter said. ‘She copied it in certain respects, but I very much doubt if shame had anything to do with it. She regarded defending people as a mission, a good use of talents, a fight for justice for the underdog. Shame doesn’t come into it. Probably not part of her psyche at all, and why she couldn’t understand its existence in your sister, except for something to be exploited. It would have to be a far worse sort of shame than getting someone wicked released – she revelled in that. It’s what’s known as winning; it’s the opposite of losing. Look, I’m sorry. It’s hardly kind of me to talk to you like this, but the reason it was such a lucky chance for me to meet you is because the whole thing haunts me and I can’t let go of it, very unprofessional, I know. It’s as if he won out over everybody. Infected every life he touched, you know. Even Shearer’s.’