Keep Me Alive (28 page)

‘One of the nurses here suggested stress,’ Trish said lightly and watched Caro’s face close in. For her, stress was tantamount to weakness and she’d never admit to that.

This was clearly not the moment to ask for news of Kim or Pete Hartland.

 

When Trish eventually got back to the flat, she switched on her
mobile in case there were any urgent messages. Will’s voice was the first she heard.

‘Trish, I’m sorry I lost it yesterday and shouted at you. It wasn’t fair. I’d had a hell of a time, but I know it’s not your fault. It was wonderful to see you last night. I’ll never forget … Sorry. Bye.’

The next was Petra Knighton, sounding as dry and aggressive as ever. ‘As I expect you know by now, your protégé and co-investigator has not been charged with anything as yet. The police are waiting until they get an analysis of the blood spatters. And there were plenty of those. The signs are that the other man will live, but he is still not in a state to be interviewed.’

‘I can’t just leave it like that,’ Trish muttered, staring at the tiny phone that nestled in her hand like a scarab.

There wasn’t much she could do until after Antony had given the closing speech. Then they were bound to have at least a day

– probably more – while the judge considered his verdict, so she could start to make proper enquiries then. In the meantime, she could at least phone Susannah for confirmation of the date of her father’s death.

‘It was almost exactly six years ago. The twentieth of next month. Why d’you need to know?’

‘Just confirmation,’ she said, without offering any explanation. ‘And I didn’t want to bother Will with questions while he’s so vulnerable. How does he seem to you?’

‘Morose. He won’t tell me anything about what happened or whether he’s facing more trouble from the police. Do you know?’

‘No.’ It wasn’t quite a lie, but Trish still hated saying it. Remembering Will’s reaction to her indiscretion last night, she knew she couldn’t tell Susannah any more now. ‘Still, we shouldn’t have too long to wait for the Furbishers verdict. The judge must be pining to get shot of the case. Everything will look different once we’ve got the verdict.’

‘Only if it’s in Will’s favour. And he doesn’t think it will be. If it isn’t … if he doesn’t get any damages—’ Susannah gasped. ‘Oh, God! I don’t know what we’ll do then. I must go.’

Trish switched on her laptop and ran Jamie’s film again, wishing there were more landmarks to be seen around the airstrip. If she could find that, she could almost certainly find the pilot, who, Will believed, was the man who’d protected him from discovery in France. So far, Trish had no proof that anything in Will’s story had been true. If she could check that out, she might feel better.

Had
she backed the wrong horse? Susannah’s anxiety was as nothing to Trish’s dread.

‘And so, my lord, I submit that Furbishers Foods has consistently operated a policy of deliberate breach of contract,’ Antony said, without any emotion at all. He almost sounded as though he didn’t care. ‘They have put my clients in a position of maximum financial vulnerability in order to squeeze out the last drop of profit for themselves. Taking immense pains to ensure that there was nothing whatsoever in writing about what they now claim to have been only the first of two contracts in each case, Furbishers proceeded to allow my clients to believe that they had a contract that would last for several years. At the same time, as you have heard, Furbishers’ head-office staff were deliberately spinning out the negotiation of the paper contracts my clients had been told, orally, were a mere formality to confirm what had already been agreed.’

Trish watched Mr Justice Husking as carefully as any hen overseeing its chicks, but she still couldn’t discern any change in his expression. Antony paused for him to catch up with his notes. The judge eventually looked up and nodded for him to begin again.

Antony ran through the actions Will and the others had taken to deal with Furbishers’ initial interest and then to fulfil the orders. Trish didn’t see how anyone who heard Antony could find for Furbishers, but then she was wildly prejudiced in his favour. She glanced at Ferdy and his junior, who were carefully
looking unworried. No one from Furbishers was in court today.

At last it was done. Mr Justice Husking thanked counsel and announced that his verdicts would be delivered in two days’ time, which was about as quick as any judge could possibly be.

‘Celebration lunch, Trish? Colin?’ Antony said as soon as the judge had left.

‘Yes, please,’ Trish said.

She was itching to find out more about the pilot and the airstrip, but she couldn’t turn Antony down, and she knew Colin would never lunch with him unless she were there too. Colin looked as though he’d barely slept, which must mean he was worrying over the papers for his immigration case. Somehow, Trish had to show him that even though stringent preparation was essential, so was clinging on to real life. And squash.

Antony took them to the Garrick, which might not have been quite as empty as El Vino had been but was much more sparsely populated than usual.

As soon as they’d ordered, Antony asked Colin whether he’d come to any conclusions about the area of law he wanted to go for. He blushed.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘commercial. I’d always thought it would be a dry business, all about money.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘Not the way you and Trish practise it.’

Antony laughed, and toasted her in the club’s claret. ‘That’s Trish. I don’t go in for her kind of sympathy. There aren’t many of us who do. How is Will Applewood, Trish, now that he’s at risk of a murder charge?’

Colin looked from one to the other, as if still trying to decode their subterranean messages. It occurred to Trish that he knew nothing about Will’s disaster.

‘Verbally aggressive,’ Trish said.

‘So long as it’s only verbal, I don’t mind,’ Antony said. ‘If it
looks like getting physical, I want you right away from him. At once. Understood?’

‘All right. But there’s not much he can do to anyone now, with one arm and one ankle in plaster.’

‘I wondered why he wasn’t in court.’ Antony turned to the gaping Colin, smiled and added: ‘You’d better fill him in, Trish. It’s not fair to keep him hanging like this.’

A waiter brought their food as Trish gave Colin a version of what had been happening. He was too tactful to ask questions or make any connection with the research he’d done for her. At the end of her explanation, he moved the conversation on to his own immigration case.

‘Your client sounds quite desirable,’ Antony said, refilling Colin’s glass. ‘So I hope you manage to win for him. But some of the people trying to sneak in are an infection of the body politic. Rather like your food-poisoning bug, Trish, but considerably more dangerous.’

Could that sort of infection be relevant to her own enquiries? she wondered, suddenly aware of a whole range of new possibilities. Could the smuggling out of mucky meat be only a sideline to the real business of bringing in live bodies of people rich enough to pay for their journey and with an unusually strong need to evade every possible kind of immigration control? That would make infinitely more sense – and infinitely greater profits.

Was ‘the rest’ that Jamie Maxden had promised to email a film showing illegal immigrants descending from the plane? It sounded more than possible, and it made Trish want to find the pilot fast.

 

That afternoon, while the judge started to ponder his verdict, Trish trawled through all the notes she’d made of Will’s telephoned story, coming upon the reference to a farmer near Smarden, who was thought to own his own plane. She phoned
the Civil Aviation Authority to ask for the names of all farms with airstrips within a radius of thirty miles of the town.

‘We don’t have that information available,’ came the polite reply.

‘What? You must.’

‘No. Private planes can be flown off any piece of grass: your own front lawn, if it’s big enough. We don’t regulate them.’

‘What about the planes? They must be registered.’

‘Yes. They all have to carry a five-character identification. The first is the prefix that identifies the country. Ours is G. Then there’s a hyphen and four other letters.’

That must have been the illegible marking she’d seen on the plane’s fuselage in Jamie’s video.

‘I haven’t got the identification, I’m afraid,’ Trish said. ‘So if you could just look through your lists for any planes registered to addresses …’

‘That’s private information. All I can tell you is whether any particular named individual has a private pilot’s licence. Nothing else. If you haven’t got a name, I’m afraid I can’t help you.’

All Trish had was a first name – Tim. She contemplated the smears on the glass in front of her. It was more than time the window cleaner had another go at them.

‘Then, do you have any specific rules about amateurs flying? That might help me.’

‘No. There are no rules for private aircraft flying in uncontrolled airspace, that is below five hundred feet in congested areas and one thousand five hundred in uncongested ones, except that the pilot must have the relevant qualification.’

‘So what happens if someone’s flying into the country at night? I mean, don’t air traffic controllers monitor who they are and where they’re going?’

‘Not if they’re flying in uncontrolled airspace. Private aircraft there, in daylight or after dark, operate on a “see and be seen”
basis. That is, it’s up to them to keep out of other aircraft’s way.’

‘Thank you,’ Trish said, although she wanted to curse. She couldn’t believe it was so easy to hop in and out of any country in the world. No wonder the asylum problem was so bad.

She put down the phone to re-read the notes. There was nothing in them to show what legitimate use the pilot had for his plane and so there was no obvious way of tracking him down. It was beginning to look as though she would have to drive down to Smarden and cast about for local information.

Through the smears on the window she could see the sun still shining as brightly as it had for the last six weeks. It seemed eccentric to long for rain, but the relentlessness of the dazzle was getting to her, and the dust in the streets choked everyone. She looked out her sunglasses and a bottle of water, collected her laptop, and set off.

 

It wasn’t hard to find and identify the pub nearest Smarden Meats, which Will had mentioned in his notes. That was where he’d heard a group of one-time farmers talking about their bed-and-breakfast businesses and the friend who owned a small plane. A notice told her that the pub closed after lunch and wouldn’t be open again until the evening. Trish cast around the village and its outskirts until she found a sign for one of the bed-and-breakfast operations.

She didn’t much like driving her Audi down the potholed drive, but there were no sinister sounds of the axle cracking on any obstruction and no obvious damage. At the bottom of the lane was a perfect Kentish farm, with an oast house, lots of white paint, and a small apple orchard to one side. Chickens were clucking somewhere and bees buzzing. It looked like an illustration from a children’s book.

The woman who opened the front door had dressed herself to match with a voluminous blue and white gingham apron over
her sprigged cotton dress. She looked hot, but welcoming.

‘Hello,’ Trish said, ‘I was passing and I saw your sign. I’m thinking of bringing the family to Kent for a week at the end of August. I wondered whether you take bookings and how much you’d charge.’

‘Come in and have a cup of tea and a look round. I’m making apple jelly with the windfalls at the moment and I don’t want it to burn. D’you mind?’

‘Not at all. How kind.’

The kitchen was all the exterior had promised and Trish was soon sitting at the big scrubbed table with a mug of strong tea and a slice of thick dark fruit cake while the farmer’s wife tested the temperature of her jelly. The scents of apple and sugar mingled with preserved meats and cheese to bring a Fortnum & Mason style smell of incredible luxury into this childhood paradise. Trish wondered whether the kitchen had looked like this in the days when it had been the centre of a working farm.

‘How many of you would there be?’ asked the farmer’s wife.

‘Three, if we come. My only worry is about my half-brother. He’s ten and he’s never lived in the country. I’m worried he might be bored. Are there any stables round here, where he could have riding lessons?’

‘Plenty. And there’s canoeing on the river. Most boys like that, I’ve found. We’ve got bikes, too, and he’d be welcome to borrow one.’

‘That would be great.’ Looking around the kitchen, Trish was beginning to think she really might bring David here for a while. It would do him good to experience a way of life that was so different from anything he’d ever known. She reminded herself to get on to the real questions before she lost herself in the other woman’s fantasy world.

‘What about more exotic things: hot-air ballooning or flying or something? He’s always talking about a friend of his whose father has a plane. I wouldn’t know where to begin to find that.’

The other woman was pegging a curious cone-shaped flannel bag to the legs of an upturned stool. Then she put a large earthenware bowl below it and proceeded to pour her boiling, apricot-coloured liquid through the bag. How odd that apples should turn that colour!

‘There, that’ll clear nicely and I can concentrate.’ She put the jelly pan in the sink and ran cold water into it, before pouring herself a mug of tea from the big brown pot she’d put out for Trish. ‘Ballooning? I’ve never heard of anyone round here with a balloon. But they give flying lessons at Lydd Airport, down towards Dungeness, and run charter flights. That’d be the place to go.’

Shit, thought Trish, keeping the smile on her face. A legitimate airport was the last place she wanted.

‘That would be great,’ she said, smiling as she lied. ‘I’ll look them up. Is there much recreational flying here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You see I’ve been reading about how there are lots of little airstrips in Kent. I wondered who could be using them. It can’t be crop spraying. There aren’t those sorts of fields here.’ This could take for ever, Trish thought, and the woman was beginning to look suspicious.

Trish moved the conversation on to the date of the house and how full it was at the moment. Soon, she was being shown around some beautifully kept bedrooms, with high, plump beds positively smothered in huge soft pillows cased in pristine linen. She almost promised to take two of the rooms for the last week in August, but got away without making any definite commitment.

None of the next three farms she tried were half as alluring, and none produced any information about local aeroplanes or night flights. Her cheeks were aching with the smile she’d had to keep on her face, and little hammers were banging behind her eyes. The petrol gauge in the Audi was showing empty and the warning light glared at her from the dashboard.

Stuck in the middle of a tangle of tiny country roads, she had no idea which direction would take her to the nearest garage. She didn’t want to drive even deeper into nothingness and run out altogether. Feeling a fool, she stumped back up the garden path to knock on the door of the last farm.

‘I’m sorry to bother you again. I just wanted to know where’s the nearest place I could get some petrol.’ She waved at the car, which looked horribly urban and out of place, even with the Kentish dust fanning along the sides.

The owner of the bed and breakfast directed her to a town five miles to the west, where she’d find a twenty-four hour petrol station.

‘Thank you.’

‘That’s all right. I was thinking after you’d gone that if you wanted more information about how to get your brother up in an aeroplane, you could ask Mr Hayleigh.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘He has a cherry farm on the edge of the Marsh, only about two miles from here.’

It was in the opposite direction from the garage, but Trish’s blood was up now and she wasn’t going to abandon the hunt.

‘He takes aerial photos too. He might be able to help. I don’t know if he takes passengers up ever, but you could always ask.’

 

Thirty minutes later, with her car’s tank filled to the brim with petrol, Trish was leaning against a sagging post and rail fence, with her laptop balanced on the post. She was running Jamie Maxden’s film and trying to decide whether the buildings that formed big black lumps in the distance on the far side of the field could be the same as the orangey-red ones she saw in front of her, looking warm and comfortable in the late sun.

She was never going to be able to swear to it, but they looked pretty much alike to her.