Bold Counsel (The Trials of Sarah Newby) (32 page)

O
N MONDAY morning Sarah put her house on the market. It was a straightforward process - absurdly simple, she thought, for such a momentous decision. She chose the estate agent who had given her the highest valuation, and that was it. The family home that had once been the pinnacle of her and Bob’s shared ambitions, the symbol of their joint success, was to become a commodity, an advert in a window, a photo on a website, a signboard in the garden. She shouldn’t expect an immediate sale, the estate agent warned - this was the dead season, after all, between autumn and spring - but even so he had a few clients on his books who had expressed interest in that sort of property. He would ring them today, if she had no objection.

And so it began. Another change - where would it lead? She picked up a few brochures, of smaller houses and flats which she might afford if the sale went through. But none seemed quite real to her yet. She walked back towards her chambers feeling strange, light-headed, slightly scared. How easy it was to change your life! You just walked into a room, took a decision, and bang, everything was different.

She stopped on Ouse Bridge, and leaned on the parapet, gazing down river. It was a crisp sunny day, a few degrees above freezing. An icy breeze froze her face, blowing dark strands of hair across her eyes. She looked at the old warehouses beside the river, converted into modern luxury apartments, and imagined herself living in one. It seemed an attractive idea. It would be simple, modern, convenient, close to the court and her chambers.

I could walk everywhere, she thought - to the court, the station, the shops. I’d have no need for the bike. I could drink and walk home. I could lie in bed late in the morning. I’d be young again without responsibilities. I’d be a totally different person.

But then I’m a different person already. Aren’t I?

A boat came upstream, and passed under the bridge. Two tourists, wrapped up against the cold, waved to her from the upper deck. Sarah waved back. She felt the smile on her face broaden, and let it. Why not? She felt happy - she’d felt happy all morning. Or at least I think that’s what it is, she thought, still smiling as she walked on, hands thrust deep into her coat, collar turned up against the cold.

If I’m not happy, what am I? Scared? Losing control, behaving like a piece of flotsam on the water? A prey to unstable emotions, acting like a crazy teenager? In
love?

No
, Sarah told herself firmly, not that. Saturday night was an experiment, that’s all. A liberating one, certainly - it puts another barrier between me and Bob. I don’t need him any more, not for company, not for sex. I’ve found another man already - look, it’s easy! This must be how other people behave, all those young girls in magazines who hop from one bed to another, trying on a new man for size! She giggled to herself. Well, exactly, to see if they fit. It’s an important point, after all. Michael had fit nicely, as far as that went. And his body - the rest of it - had been satisfactory too, in fact she’d enjoyed looking at it and touching it as much as the actual sex. He was quite strong, fitter and more muscular than Bob, with less of a belly. Unlike Bob his chest and back were hairless, and most exciting of all his buttocks were smooth too - she had loved the bunched powerful feel of them in her hands and his sudden cry and jerk as she’d drawn her nails across them at his climax.

He’d enjoyed that all right - she hunched her head inside her collar, letting her hair blow forward across her face to hide her smile from two businessmen walking towards her. She half-recognized one of them, and thought
no please, not now
, deliberately avoiding his eyes and hurrying past. She didn’t want to meet anyone with this silly smile on her face. She was convinced they’d see right through into her mind - a mind which was entirely, shamelessly occupied with replaying this bedroom movie.

It hadn’t been all perfect. There’d been some clumsy, embarrassing moments as well. She’d been surprised when he’d insisted on showering first - it would prolong the excitement, he said, and make them smell beautiful for each other. Sarah had just wanted to get on with it. They’d almost done it in the shower itself, but somehow made it to the bed, where he’d delayed again, spreading a towel to avoid getting the sheets wet. Then he’d come too quickly and she’d begun to feel cold and damp before he’d worked himself up to doing it again.

But she guessed that sort of surprise was to be expected with a stranger - she and Bob had been together so long they knew each movement by heart. This man hadn’t kissed her as much as she’d expected, or let her take charge as Bob often had. At times he’d been quite rough and forceful. But that, she found, she’d enjoyed - she’d felt nothing quite like it since Kevin. She remembered the moment when he’d lifted her onto the counter in the hotel bathroom, doing it with her back pressed against the mirror and her legs wrapped round his waist. Bob had never done anything like that. Afterwards they’d showered together, their skins smooth and slippery with the soap. The memories made her feel quite warm and damp between the legs, so that she had to take another turn around the park before she felt cool enough to enter her chambers.

So is this love? She asked herself, settling at her desk and kicking off her shoes as she unwrapped the red ribbons round the papers of the case she was to present tomorrow. No, surely not, she told herself sternly - just a one-night stand, a brief liberating affair. The trouble was, unlike the young people and celebrities in magazines, Sarah had very little experience of such affairs. Her heart, she felt, with delightful, guilty panic, was for once in danger of ruling her head. And that wasn’t the way she ran her life, never had been. Not since she was a teenager, anyway, and the wonderful sexy catastrophe of Kevin had swept into her life and almost ruined it for ever. That couldn’t surely, be happening again.

Could it?

When she’d met Emily for lunch on Sunday she’d given her a brief, carefully edited version of her date. It was a curious role reversal; she felt like a teenager hiding the most important part under a mass of spurious detail. So she told Emily about Michael’s job, his divorce, his character - even a little about his appearance, but only when he was fully clothed. Nothing about how small and brown his nipples were and how she had bitten one and sucked it to make him cry out. None of that - but she felt herself blushing all the same so that Emily laughed and said: ‘Mum! You’ve fallen for this guy, haven’t you?’

‘No, he’s just a friend, darling,’ she’d protested earnestly. ‘It probably won’t come to anything but at least it’s a change.’

‘From Dad, you mean?’

‘Yes. No, just from being lonely and abandoned, out of date, on the shelf. It’s nice to feel ... someone thinks you’re attractive.’

‘Yes, well, that’s good, Mum.’ Emily had studied her thoughtfully. ‘But you will be careful, won’t you? I mean ...’

‘Careful how, Emily?’ Sarah laughed. ‘I do know about contraception, if that’s what you mean, darling, I ...’

‘Mother!’
Emily’s eyes widened. ‘You haven’t, have you?’ Their eyes met. When Sarah didn’t answer, her daughter’s eyes widened still further. ‘My God, you have!’

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘You haven’t stopped smiling and blushing since you came in here. Oh my God, Mum - what’s going on?’

‘Do you mind, Emily? I don’t want to hurt you. That’s the last thing I want.’

The warm pleasurable memories in Sarah’s mind shrank beneath an icy douche of fear.
If I lose Emily because of this I’ll never forgive myself - never!

‘No, Mum, why should I be hurt? It’s your life, not mine.’

‘Yes, but I want you in it, darling. More than anything - much more than any man.’

‘Yes, well - I’m not going away. After all you’re a free woman - it’s not as if you’re betraying Dad or anything.’ A slow smile spread across Emily’s face. ‘My God, Mum, you did it! You really went to bed with this guy!’

‘Yes.’ Sarah smiled shyly, like a child forgiven. ‘I didn’t mean to, it just happened.’

‘Was it good? What was it like?’

‘Oh Emily, I’m not going to tell you that. I can’t.’

‘No.’ Emily nodded sagely, as though on reflection she didn’t want to know either. ‘But it was good, anyway, was it?’

‘On the whole it was a good experience, yes.’

‘Well, good for you, Mum. This deserves a toast.’ Emily pulled a bottle of port out of a cupboard, with two glasses.

‘I didn’t know you drank port, Emily.’

‘Adrian gave it to me.’ They clinked their glasses together. ‘There is one thing, though, Mum, and I know it’s a cheek of me to say it. I mean, you’re a lot older than me and all that but ... you
are
in the middle of a divorce, and this guy ... it would be easy to fall for him on the rebound and ... I mean he may seem fine
today
...’

‘But not tomorrow, you mean, when I’ve had time to think? Yes, darling, I do realise that, of course. Just because I went to bed with him once, it doesn’t make him the love of my life or anything like that. Who knows, it may all fizzle out. It’s just that, right now - it may seem callous to say it, but he’s just what I need.’

‘After what Dad did, you mean?’

‘Yes. To make me feel like a woman again, and not some shrivelled old husk. A kind of therapy, I suppose.’

Emily laughed. ‘You didn’t tell him that, did you? That you were using him as a sort of health cure?’

‘No.’ But Sarah wondered, later, whether Michael had realised all along. She turned down his offer of a lift, and travelled home on the train - ostensibly so that she could spend more time with Emily, but the real reason was to give herself time to think. Had she been wise, or incredibly foolish? She didn’t know. She might be a mother and a successful barrister, but she had little experience of love affairs. The clear mental focus that brought her such success in the law normally kept her clear of such messy entanglements. She worked with logic, not emotion.

The nearest she had come to anything like this was with that detective, Terry Bateson, and that had ended awkwardly. Nonetheless she caught herself wondering, in the train, what Terry might have been like in bed. Would he have been brusque and masterful, like Michael? Was that what she wanted in a man? At the moment, she decided, she did. She must do - she couldn’t get him out of her mind.

Entering her chambers, she spoke briefly to her clerk before closing her office door behind her. But at her desk she found herself, for the first time in years, reading whole pages of her brief without understanding a single word.
Come on woman
, she told herself,
get a grip
. Or you’ll look a complete idiot in court tomorrow.

She returned to the first page and started again. In the matter of the Crown vs Hartson the muscles of his thighs were ...
stop it!
Concentrate.
Her witness, a shopkeeper, confronted an intruder in his shop when - Sarah’s phone rang.
Is it him?
She picked it up nervously.

‘Good morning, my love.’

‘Oh.’ Sarah let her breath out slowly. It wasn’t a man’s voice, as she had expected. It was a woman’s. ‘Lucy, it’s you!’

‘Of course. Who’d you think it was - King Kong?’ Lucy Parsons laughed. ‘Are you okay? Did you have a good weekend?’

‘Yes, quite eventful, thanks. I saw Emily in Cambridge. She was in a play -
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. It was excellent - I saw it twice. Emily was Titania.’

‘Well, good for her. Isn’t she the hussy who marries a mule?’

‘More or less. Puck sprinkles dust on her eyelids, and when she wakes up she falls for the first man she sees.’

‘Never happens to me. Each morning I wake up and see Derek, snoring and farting like a pig, and I think - whatever happened to love’s young dream?’

Sarah laughed. ‘I’ll get Emily to send you some fairy dust, shall I?’

‘Do that. Ask her to post it first class.’ Lucy paused awkwardly, remembering Sarah’s divorce. ‘How are you, anyway?’

‘Not so bad. I put the house on the market this morning.’

‘Really? I wish you luck. Listen, Sarah, I’ve been talking to the police again. DCI Churchill - remember him? Every girl’s dream escort.’

‘I bet he was pleased to hear from you.’

‘Oh, he was, he was. I really made his day. But even so, I managed to squeeze a few more facts out of him about Brenda Stokes - you know, the poor girl they found under the motorway. They’ve finished the post mortem and the good news is that they’ve no plans to bring any further charges against Jason Barnes. Not at this stage, anyway.’

‘That’s tremendous,’ Sarah said. ‘You mean they’re actually beginning to think that someone else killed her after all?’

‘They didn’t quite go that far, no. But they admit that the evidence isn’t conclusive, which is something. Obviously the fact that she was throttled with a scarf came as a surprise to them - they’ve released that to the press, and they’ve got a slot on Crimewatch next month about it. So our man Churchill gets his fifteen minutes of fame - he’ll love that. But there’s no evidence that Jason had anything to do with it, no more than before. None of his DNA on the scarf, for instance. And the injuries to her arm, they’re a puzzle too. They look like crush injuries, apparently. One theory is that her arm was run over by a car. But here’s the big thing. It seems a couple of her fingernails had still survived, and they examined the dirt still attached to them, in the hope that they’d find microscopic traces of Jason’s DNA there from when she scratched him. A long shot, but you know that stuff takes centuries to decay, so it was worth a try, they thought.’

‘It wouldn’t prove much, would it? He admits they had a fight.’

‘Well, that’s what I thought, but they did it anyway. And hey presto, guess what they found?’

‘What? DNA from a fox?’

‘Close, but no. They found human DNA all right, but not from Jason! So the last person whose face she scratched was
someone else
. Not him at all!’

‘Goodness! Whose was it?’

‘There’s the mystery. They checked the national DNA database but didn’t come up with anyone. So of course it doesn’t prove Jason was innocent but it certainly helps his case. Especially if you put it together with the evidence of that girl Amanda whatshername - Carr - who says she saw Brenda an hour or more after she ran away from Jason by the river. It begins to look more and more as if someone else killed her, not him. Even your pin-up Will Churchill is beginning to accept that, it seems. Grudgingly of course, with the worst possible grace.’