Keep Me Alive (23 page)

Antony waited, as though for a comment, but Trish had nothing to say through the swirling mixture of anxiety and rage that was choking her.

‘The other bloke isn’t conscious yet,’ he went on after a moment. ‘They’re both in hospital, under police guard. In due course one of them will almost certainly be charged with the woman’s murder.’

There was no expletive fierce enough to deal with this. Trish waited for more.

‘The last thing we need in the middle of the case is one of our clients getting himself charged with something like this, so I’ve got Petra to agree to act for Applewood.’

Petra Knighton was a legend in legal circles. At more than sixty, she was still known to be one of the toughest solicitors working in crime. She was almost equally dreaded and admired. There was a famous, possibly apocryphal, story of an ill-prepared barrister actually fainting when he saw her swinging towards him outside court one morning.

‘She knows it’ll have to be Legal Aid, and she’s ready to go down to the hospital now to take instructions. Are you still there, Trish?’

‘Yes. So Will’s conscious, is he?’ It was funny how you could talk even when your head was boiling and your throat clenched as though someone had his hands round it.

‘Apparently. But before Petra talks to him, I thought you might brief her. I get the feeling you know rather more about Applewood and his recent activities than L’ There was a pause, as though Antony was waiting for a confession. ‘You do, don’t you, Trish?’

‘Some. OK, I’ll see her. When do you want us to meet?’

‘Right away. She’s here now and could be with you in ten minutes. OK?’

The grip on Trish’s throat was easing as her mind began to work again. ‘Antony, how do
you
know about this?’

‘Applewood asked the police to inform chambers, rather than his family, or you, interestingly. I happened to be here and took the call.’

Yes, thought Trish, I can see why you might want to take refuge in chambers today. But it’s rough on Liz.

‘I see,’ she said aloud. ‘OK. Yes, do send Petra round.’

 

Petra Knighton had short straight white hair cut very blunt, round brown eyes, and a complexion any twenty-year-old would envy. She was shorter than Trish, but just as slight, and she was wearing casually elegant dark-grey silk trousers and a loose collarless jacket the colour and texture of old-fashioned string. Her narrow feet were bare inside flat taupe-leather loafers.

‘So let me get this right,’ she said, putting down her whisky. ‘This over-emotional, virtually destitute man, whose professional and economic life is hanging in the balance until the end of the action against Furbishers Foods, took time off court to track down the source of some sausages that made you and a friend of yours ill?’

‘That’s right.’ Trish was drinking yet more coffee. She needed a clear head to deal with her own confusion as much as the questions. ‘After he’d given all his evidence. I mean, obviously I didn’t see him outside court while he was doing that.’

Petra just looked at her with chilly disapproval.

‘Anyway, the hunt for the infected sausages was how it all started,’ Trish said. ‘Then he latched on to something bigger; more dramatic, anyway.’

She described the video and the news that Jamie Maxden had apparently committed suicide under the wheels of a pantechnicon parked outside the abattoir she had visited with Will.

‘It was his death that first upped the stakes,’ she said. ‘Will couldn’t accept that the man he’d known would ever have committed suicide. Then we recognized in the video one of the men we’d seen when we toured the abattoir itself. He’d seemed short fused then, and potentially violent. I have since discovered that he has done time for assault.’

Trish realized she hadn’t been entirely honest and admitted a moment later that it had been she who had recognized Bob Flesker, not Will.

‘Before you go on,’ Petra said, making a note on her pale-blue lined pad, ‘why did you go to this abattoir?’

Why do I feel as though I’m being interviewed in a police station? Trish wondered. What has Antony said to this woman to make her treat me like a suspect?

‘There’s a whole chain of reasons,’ she said, before recapping them all.

‘That’s all very well,’ Petra said, not making any notes, ‘but why did
you
go, rather than just Applewood?’

Trish explained about Will’s lack of confidence and her urge to help in any way she could. Hoping she didn’t sound like a complete pushover, and wondering all over again how much he had not told her, she added a comment about her dislike of trotting around the country with one of her clients before the end of the case.

‘That figures,’ Petra said. ‘Then what?’

Trish had never been briefed by Petra’s firm, so she had no idea whether this hectoring attitude was typical. The one thing she could be sure of was that Petra was the best available. Antony only ever dealt with the best.

‘Then he borrowed two hundred quid off me. I didn’t know why he wanted it until he phoned me from France last night. He rang to tell me what he’d seen there, in case something happened to him.’

Trish looked at the solicitor, knowing she would think this casual loan to a man in Will’s state quite irresponsible. It probably had been. But Trish couldn’t grovel for absolution or comfort now. It wasn’t dignified, and in any case there wasn’t time for self-indulgence with Will under police guard in hospital. Instead, she described what he’d told her of his adventures at the French farm.

‘Oh, yes, the only other thing was that right at the beginning he sent another sample of the doubtful sausages to some food-testing lab and the results came back negative. All they found were faint traces of a growth-promoting drug and bleach. I didn’t understand the significance of the bleach at the time, but it excited Will.’

Petra nodded, pushed her rimless spectacles further up her small nose, and wrote a few notes. Laying down the pad and balancing her fountain pen on top, she said, ‘And so is it your analysis that today’s episode is part of his quixotic quest into the origins of the infected sausages, or some other, private, fight?’

Trish shrugged, not out of carelessness but because she had no answer.

‘I wish I knew. At first I thought he was a vulnerable man, so open that he told me everything. That’s clearly not true. I have no idea who this woman could be or what he was doing in her bedroom.’ Trish shut her eyes and pressed her fingers into the lids. ‘I wouldn’t have thought him capable of killing anyone. But how do I know?’

‘Indeed.’

Trish opened her eyes again. Petra’s expression hadn’t changed. ‘I’m sorry I can’t be more help.’

‘Yes, it’s a pity. As this stands, I don’t think it’s a story to share with the plods.’

‘Probably not,’ Trish said, fighting for her proper professional detachment. ‘I can’t see some hard-pressed DI wanting to delve into a closed suicide case and a possible international trade in contaminated meat at this juncture.’

Petra produced a small dry cough of laughter. ‘I don’t care about that. All I want to avoid is some over-dramatic DI deciding that you gave my client money and sent him charging down to Kent on a mission to wipe out the makers of the sausages you thought might kill your best friend. A story like
that would screw up the case you’re doing with Antony. It wouldn’t help your reputation much either. And if that’s tarnished, Antony’s going to look a fool for putting so much faith in you.’

Trish was beyond comment.

‘The police have got plenty to work on without that,’ Petra went on. ‘A sexy young woman wearing nothing but a negligee is found lying dead, while two strong young men tried to beat each other to death over her corpse. But it helps me to have the background. At least I’ll know what I’m dealing with if Applewood starts to launch into any of this meat farrago.’

‘Don’t you think there’s anything in his story?’

Petra stretched her face into a dolorous mask. ‘Happily I don’t have to decide. It could be true. I’d have thought it more likely to be a fantasy made up to impress you. That’s the kind of thing a certain type of young man does.’

‘Not often when he’s dealing with counsel.’ Trish thought her dry delivery would have made even Antony proud. She was glad to see that Petra did not really suspect her of sending Will off on his mission.

‘Be that as it may,’ Petra said, unimpressed, ‘the only facts you have are that you visited an abattoir, in which there works a man who looks like one of the figures in a grainy film William Applewood sent you by email. He told you the film had been made by another man, who apparently committed suicide outside that same abattoir, but you have no proof of who shot the film. And Applewood provided the video only after news reports of the death were published in the local papers. It wouldn’t be hard to make up the whole thing, would it? Particularly not when your own illness must have made you receptive to food-based scare stories.’ She looked at Trish over slipping spectacles, then pushed them up her short nose again. ‘As you’d have seen in an instant if this were your case and you were not emotionally involved with one of the participants.’

‘May I get you some more whisky?’ Trish asked coldly. She was not emotionally involved with Will. Nor could he have been trying to impress her. ‘I did check the story about Jamie Maxden being found under the wheels of a meat lorry. It was true.’

‘Of course it was. But Applewood had plenty of time to read it and work his fantasies around it before he offered them to you, hadn’t he?’

‘I’ll be interested to hear whether you feel the same once you’ve met and talked to him,’ Trish said. ‘I’m sure he’s more trustworthy than you think.’

To herself she added silently: at least, I hope he is.

‘Let’s hope you’re right,’ Petra said. ‘Even if you are, this will definitely run better as a straightforward account of a summer afternoon’s dalliance interrupted by a jealous rival.’ Once more the glasses had slipped. The eyes that looked out over the top of them seemed colder than ever. ‘The question is: which man was the rival?’

‘I know,’ said Trish, as she recovered from a sudden sinking sensation in her gut. ‘Now,
would
you like more whisky?’

‘Thank you, no. I have to drive into Kent.’ Petra drained the glass Trish had given her when she arrived and stood up, fitting the fountain pen neatly into the inside pocket of her jacket. ‘For what it’s worth, I shan’t pass this story on to Antony, and I’d advise you to keep it quiet too.’

Trish stood, waiting by the front door.

‘He has a very high opinion of you,’ said Petra, in a voice that suggested she did not share it.

A moment later she was out of the front door, leaving Trish to wrestle her way out of the outrage and fear that had dropped over her like a gladiator’s net. When Petra was halfway down the iron staircase, Trish remembered Will’s running down them himself. She called the older woman’s name. Petra paused, then turned her head.

‘You
will
let me know how it goes, won’t you?’ Trish said.

‘Emotionally involved.’ Petra beckoned. ‘I knew it.’

Trish put the door on the latch and walked down ten steps to join her.

‘You have to face it.’ Petra’s eyes were no longer quite so cold. There even seemed to be some pity in them. She put a hand on Trish’s shoulder. ‘Applewood could be a killer.’

On Sunday morning Trish wasn’t even tempted to lounge around having breakfast in bed. Feeling like death, she was up by eight and had to force herself to wait until ten before phoning Jamie Maxden’s sister.

When the phone was answered, Trish introduced herself, then tried to make her questions seem legitimate by saying, ‘I hadn’t realized your brother was dead. I didn’t see anything in the papers.’

‘I don’t know why not. I put an expensive notice in
The Times
with details of the service at the crematorium.’ Mrs Blake’s voice was jagged with grievance. ‘Although I can’t think why I bothered. There was only me there and the one editor left with any moral courage.’

That was a phrase Trish hadn’t heard for a long time. She could sympathize with the bitterness in it.

‘I’m sorry to rake over such painful ground, but …’ she left a pause for the other woman to fill with polite reassurance. None came. ‘But I wanted to ask whether you ever had any doubts about the inquest’s verdict.’

‘Why?’

There was music in the background, something disciplined and austere: Bach, probably, Trish thought.

‘Because suicide seems so unlike Jamie,’ she said, needing to be sure Will had been wrong about this.

‘No. I meant why are
you
asking questions about it? What’s your interest here?’

‘Oh, I see.’ For once Trish thought about lying, then decided only a version of the truth would get her what she needed. ‘A friend of mine has been looking into a meat scandal he wanted Jamie to write up, and I need to be sure there isn’t some kind of connection.’

‘You can forget that.’ Mrs Blake’s voice hadn’t softened.

‘Why?’

‘Because there’s no doubt Jamie killed himself, and set the scene to ram home to all of us why he was doing it. That was typical. He always wanted everyone to know how much he suffered.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Think about it. What happens in a slaughterhouse? Animals are driven to their death, just as Jamie felt he’d been driven to his.’

‘But …’

‘Listen! He goes to that abattoir in his own car and parks it in full view of everyone. Then he writes a suicide note. Then he fills his pockets with anti-cruelty literature and lies down under the wheels of a lorry easily big enough to kill anyone. You can’t twist any of that to mean anything other than suicide.’

‘Who did he write to?’ Trish said, thinking she could easily produce a counter-argument, but then that was her training. ‘You?’

‘No. Jamie hadn’t communicated with me for years.’ There was a gulping sound, quickly stifled, and followed by a pause-filling cough. ‘We … we weren’t close. No, the letter was addressed to Nick Wellbeck, the news editor of the
Daily Mercury
, the one who came to the funeral.’

‘Did Jamie type it?’

‘Of course not. Who types a suicide note? It was handwritten
in proper ink. That was typical too. Jamie made a fetish of loathing biros.’

‘What did the note say?’

‘I haven’t got it. The police probably hung on to it. It went something like: “Didn’t it occur to you that I’ve been phoning and emailing every day for weeks because I
needed
you, Nick? Couldn’t you have spared me two minutes? Did I imagine it, or were we once friends? Well, I’ve had enough now. You’ll regret refusing to take my calls.”’

‘I see what you mean about moral courage. I am so sorry, Mrs Blake.’

There was another gulp, then a sob, as though the sympathy had cut through her defensive bitterness.

‘Why didn’t he tell me it was that bad? He must have known I’d help, in spite of … Sorry. I haven’t … There hasn’t been anyone to …’ Mrs Blake took a loud deep breath, then said more steadily, ‘You’re the first person who knew Jamie who’s wanted to talk about what happened. Sorry.’

‘Please don’t be. It’s always hard to deal with the things one did or didn’t do when someone’s dead,’ Trish said, aching for her. It seemed awful to be taking advantage of her distress. But there were questions that had to be asked. ‘And suicide must make that even worse. What happened between you to cause the split?’

‘The usual story. We’d been very close as children, and it went on like that for longer than with most siblings. Then I fell in love with someone he loathed.’ Mrs Blake was still fighting to get her voice in order. ‘In the early days I used to try to build bridges between them, but when I had to choose I opted for my husband. Jamie didn’t forgive me. I wish …’

Trish couldn’t imagine doing something like that, but then she’d never had a brother anywhere near her own age.

‘What was the problem between them?’ she asked, forgetting the real quest.

‘My husband is a civil servant, so he’s constitutionally against any kind of freedom of information.’

And presumably, Trish thought with sympathy, against any discussion of powerful feelings like yours. What else could make you share all this with a stranger?

Mrs Blake sniffed. ‘He thinks men like him should be allowed to get on with running the country in the best interests of the people, without having journalists causing panic and upset every time something goes wrong. He says they don’t save any lives or put anything right. They just cause trouble.’

‘It’s a legitimate point of view, I suppose,’ Trish said, ‘but I can’t see Jamie agreeing.’

‘No. Where Miles sees a little disinformation as a small price to pay for public serenity, Jamie wanted every cover-up exposed and every perpetrator, however well-intentioned, vilified in the press.’

‘You must have had a hell of a time between them.’

‘By God I did.’ Suddenly Mrs Blake sounded tougher. Maybe it wasn’t only Jamie Maxden who couldn’t forgive. ‘I must go. Goodbye.’

She cut the connection at once, leaving Trish with a lot of unanswered questions: only some were about Jamie Maxden.

Sitting down at her desk, determined to do something to stop herself thinking about all the others, she started to search the Internet for his name. Soon she’d have to decide what, if anything, to do about the letter Ferdy had sent to Liz, and about the misery Liz had revealed when she’d come to the flat. But not yet.

To her surprise, there wasn’t much to read about Maxden on the Net, although she was offered links to newspapers that had printed some of his old articles. Waiting for one to download, and watching the sunlight glinting on her stapler, she thought she couldn’t bear to stay indoors. She printed off all the articles and took them out to read on the Jubilee Walk beside the river.

The tone of Jamie’s work pleased her, with its passionate anger backed up by coldly reported fact. It wasn’t only meat that obsessed him. He’d been able to produce diatribes on almost everything to do with the food trade, including farm pesticides and other chemicals. But his greatest fury had been expended on the BSE scandal. She found one article from the early 1990s, which ended:

In spite of everything Trish knew about the steps taken to deal with BSE since Jamie Maxden had written his article, and the relatively small numbers of people who appeared to be at risk, she still found it frightening. George particularly liked braised steak, and he’d cooked it for her every winter since
they’d met. Had they eaten the flesh of elderly cows riddled with an incurable, utterly devastating disease?

Trish read on, becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

On another occasion Jamie Maxden had produced a rant about the systematic closure of small local abattoirs, just like the one the Flesker family had owned.

It was easy to see why his civil service brother-in-law had loathed him. But Trish still had doubts about the rest of what she’d heard from his sister.

Would anyone choose to kill himself outside an abattoir for the reasons Clare Blake had offered? Could anyone as angry as the writer of these articles ever have become so demoralized and unhappy that dying seemed a better option than fighting on? There was a school of thought that held suicide to be an expression of rage rather than fear or despair. Never having felt the urge to kill herself for more than a moment or two, even when the claws of depression had been at their tightest, Trish hadn’t enough experience to help her judge. Maybe you could feel so hard done by that you believed only your death would get you the revenge you wanted, she thought.

For her, a victory like that would have been so Pyrrhic it wouldn’t have been worth having. She’d have wanted to be
alive to see her tormentors grovel in shame at what they’d done to her. Her reading of Jamie Maxden’s work suggested that would have been his choice too.

Could the note to Nick Wellbeck have been a taunt rather than an expression of despair? A suggestion that Jamie had found an explosive – and provable – story he would be offering to some other paper because Wellbeck had refused to take his calls?

That would make sense of both the letter and the email he’d sent to Will. After all, he’d promised ‘more later’, which had never come. Would anyone write that if he were intending to kill himself in the way Clare Blake had described? Of course not.

One of Petra Knighton’s warnings came crashing into Trish’s mind. Had there been any proof that the film or the email had come from Jamie Maxden in the first place?

‘Oh, stop it,’ she said aloud. ‘Why would Will bother to fake something like this? And how would he do it? I’m sure the film was real. And I’m sure it came from Jamie Maxden.’

A man walking his dog looked curiously at her. She realized she must seem mad, sitting in the sun with a heap of paper on her lap, muttering. She gave him a blinding smile. He looked even more worried and hustled his huge Dalmatian ahead of him.

Back in the flat, Trish searched for more information about the discovery of Jamie’s body. The local paper that must have reported it and the inquest turned out to be the
Smarden Runner
, and that was not available on line. She let more questions well up in her mind. Who had planted the vegetarian leaflets on Jamie’s body and why? They had proved highly successful decoys, completely misleading the police as well as his family. Jamie’s articles had shown no interest in the animals that were slaughtered for food, only in the human beings who ate them, just as Will had suggested they would. Were there
perhaps some militant animal rightists, who disapproved of Jamie so much they wanted to make an example of him?

No, Trish thought. That’s absurd, too.

But she couldn’t get it out of her mind. After half an hour, she reached for the phone and dialled the number of Jess and Caro’s flat. The voice that answered was much slower and deeper than the one Trish expected.

‘Is Jess there?’

‘No. She’s at the hospital. Who’s speaking?’

‘It’s Trish Maguire.’

‘Oh, hello, Trish. This is Cynthia Flag.’

‘Hi.’ She couldn’t help the coldness of her voice. ‘You might be able to help me if Jess isn’t there.’

‘If I can, of course I will.’

‘What do you know about an industrial abattoir called Smarden Meats?’

‘Nothing. Why?’ Cynthia sounded quite untroubled.

‘I just wondered whether there have ever been any vegetarian protests there, or any kind of rioting by animal rights activists. Sabotage. That sort of thing.’

‘I wouldn’t know. I’m not a campaigner.’

‘Aren’t you? I thought it was you who persuaded Jess to turn vegetarian?’

‘What makes you think that?’ The deep voice dripped with a mixture of sweetness and mockery.

‘She turns to you whenever anyone asks a question about her dietary habits,’ Trish said. ‘You’re practically living in the flat. She thinks you’re wonderful. And you’re a vegetarian. One doesn’t have to be Einstein to make a connection like that.’

Cynthia laughed irritatingly. ‘Come off it, Trish. I’m only here to give the poor woman some support while Caro’s so ill. I suppose it could have been listening to me talk about what animals suffer that originally made Jess think she might prefer to stop eating them. What difference does it make?’

Trish wasn’t sure, but she didn’t trust Cynthia enough to explain why she was asking questions.

‘None. I just thought if it had been you who’d done it, you might be able to explain why anyone who enjoyed food like steak tartare could change so quickly.’

‘I think …’ Cynthia paused, then began again, with a great deal less artifice in her voice. ‘I know you’re a good friend of Caro’s, so it’s fair to tell you. And safe. I think Jess felt in danger of being taken over by Caro’s determination to make the whole world bend to her will. Becoming vegetarian gave Jess a chance to rebuild her faith in herself as a separate person.’