‘Then I started reading bits of paper from that awful trial you’ve got to tell me more about, and got to thinking nastiness might run in the Shearer family. Marianne was quite a clever brute in court, wasn’t she? I’ve got to read the whole thing, I suppose. There’s nowhere else to look for clues. It’s absolutely all I have got of hers. That’s why I feel so bloody inadequate. She left me to deal with her estate, but nothing else. No will, no explanations, all her personal possessions disappeared or stolen. Do you know the most despicable fact about sudden death is the opportunities it creates for theft? Especially a well-publicised death. Someone’s got her stuff and can’t see why they should give it back. Someone’s nicked it.’
‘You don’t know that,’ Peter objected, always wanting proof of an allegation before it was made. ‘It’s probably shipped off to a friend, held up in a queue somewhere, a mix-up…’
‘Yes, but where? She’s not given us a hint, no records, no receipts, damn her eyes. I was relying on the stuff they sent me over from chambers, but all they had in her office was that.’ Again he pointed, this time to volumes of paper spilling out of a box, ‘Nothing else, she hadn’t been in there over Christmas. Bugger, bugger, bugger. I hate being given a job without the tools.’
The best description for Thomas at the moment was of a man not quite himself. His sangfroid was sinking in alcohol; he was smoking cigarettes as if his life depended on it in a littered room overlooking dark Lincoln’s Inn Fields with the window open and a bottle of whisky on the table, his nerves shot. His language was all over the place, words scattered like spat-out crumbs, a frightened man. They were talking in non sequiturs.
‘So what is it exactly that Rick Boyd did?’ Thomas said crossly. ‘Only he’s got these bloody great big hands and I can feel them round my neck.’
‘Rick Boyd is a fantasist and a serial abductor of young women,’ Peter said crisply. ‘He got them to fall for him, spun them a yarn about being a poor orphan or poor man on the run, extracted as much money as he could, took them out of their own environment, and then, once the money ran out and he was tired of them, kept them, or persuaded them to keep themselves, like spiders keep dead flies in a web. He had a woman in Peterborough, one in Milton Keynes and the last one, Angel Joyce, in Birmingham. Three in a year, provided a generous income.’
Thomas snorted.
‘I don’t believe it. In this day and age? What rubbish. What the hell kind of female would allow that? Women rule the world and they know it.’
‘Not his kind of woman.’
‘Where the hell has Marianne deposited her bloody goods?’ Thomas yelled.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know her, haven’t got a clue,’ Peter said. ‘I keep telling you I didn’t really know her. I worked with her, and latterly against her. I don’t rightly know why I’m here, except for the fact that in some funny way, she may have quite liked me.’
Thomas pushed the window open wider. Even with the fire, it was freezing in the room.
‘You’re here because you’re a clueless failure and she knew you might be available for whatever fucking game she wants to play, and you’re going to find out where the stuff is. I don’t know. If I were to think of a single reason why you’re here, it’s because there’s obviously a connection between that last big case and her suicide. That brute coming in here today, gotta connect, hasn’t it? Anyway, that aside, I wanted you here at this precise moment because they sent along her clothes from the mortuary and I don’t like being alone with them. What’s she wearing now, sunny boy, what the hell is she wearing now, poor soul? High heels in hell?’
Thomas took a slug of whisky and shuddered. He flexed his fingers as if trying to restore his own circulation.
‘You’re here, dear boy, because while you’re otherwise useless, I want someone present. They bagged up her clothes and sent them on. I know it’s not usual. They probably wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t been a lawyer and I hadn’t demanded it. I must have been out of my mind, and they may have to go back, but I had the crazy notion she might have hidden something about her person and I wanted someone there when I opened them.’
It was hardly the time to feel offended by Thomas’s version of why Marianne Shearer had elected him to assist her friend and executor in the sorting out of the aftermath of her death, although he did pause to find the reasons unflattering. She had named him not because he was honest and doggedly curious, or because she had flirted with him a long time ago, like a glamorous aunt to an innocent nephew when she had been his pupil master. Pupil mistress, darling, she had said, please. I’m not here to teach you anything; you’re here to carry my bags. He had been elected only because she knew he would be available, but that could have applied to any number of younger men with whom she had had contact over the years and he still did not quite understand. Why me? It was humiliating to think she had chosen him simply because he was idle and penniless enough to say yes, and to know that when she was alive, that was the way Ms Shearer had described him. He could hear her strident voice, discussing him over a drink with Thomas Noble. He’s so wet, my dear; he actually believes in Justice and Truth; he wastes so much time and energy being sorry for people. Ah yes, she had seen him coming, but still, she was way too canny for there not to be something else on her mind, such as him knowing all about R v Boyd and what she had done with it. Alternatively, she might have thought she owed him something for getting him drunk a dozen years ago.
‘Is that what she said about me?’ he asked Thomas humbly. ‘That I was so useless I’d be up for any humdrum task? That I might otherwise be sweeping the streets and glad of any old job?’
‘Not in so many words, no,’ Thomas said, irritated and ready to move on. ‘That’s simply what I surmise. Yes, all right you’ve worked with her before that last big case and she talked about you, like she did about everyone. We loved mutual gossip about people we didn’t know. She said you were way too soft and you were never going to make it.’
‘There are other ways of making it than her ways,’ Peter said.
‘Not as far as she was concerned. The only way to win she said, was wanting to win at all costs, and people like you don’t want it enough, have never been hungry enough, so you lose every time. Oh, for God’s sake, I can’t even remember what she said. Except she also said that if she’d ever had a son, she’d have liked him to be something like you. Now, can we get on?’
Peter had an uncomfortable memory of being twenty-one and assigned to Ms Shearer as pupil mistress, to follow her round from court to conference, doing her research, until at the end of six months, that drunken evening to celebrate his fitness to take a case all by himself. He could remember waking up at three in the morning in a back alley behind the pub, covered in filth, with the sound of her laughter in his ears, and the note pinned to his chest in her cool hand. CLAPHAM COURT, 9pm TOMORROW. That was Shearer’s kind of training, otherwise known as learning how to function with a hangover, no money, and with the contempt of the court and the client oozing out of every pore. He shook his head. She had been kinder then: perhaps she meant to be kind now. She had taught him his own incompetence by reverse example and in R v Boyd she had been at her utterly competent, dreadful best.
‘Pooh,’ Thomas said, settling into the wheeled office chair he used to propel himself around his small office space. ‘Pooh, pooh, pooh, everything smells of that awful man. Perhaps Mr Handsome Boyd and dear Frank Shearer will go off into some glorious sunset together now I’ve introduced them, but meantime the business in hand is looking at these blasted clothes. Will they smell, too? Here goes… No, I can’t, I absolutely can’t. You do it.’