This one walked like a princess, full of natural charm. The right kind of diffidence and a perfectly crazy coat. Like something made out of a man’s wool pinstripe, pieced together with big, bone buttons. He craved it in a different size. Also the red boots.
‘Thank you for seeing me, Mr Noble. Where would you like me to sit?’
‘Anywhere you like. I don’t expect you’ll be staying long, we close soon.’
‘Yes, I know that. It’s very kind of you to see me at all.’
She perched on the edge of the armchair, with no sign of permanent occupation, still wearing her coat, ignoring the fire and everything else that might have impressed her. So far, so good.
‘How can I help?’
His standard response, while wondering whatever it was for. A woman appearing out of the pages of a transcript, beautiful but businesslike, smaller than he could ever have imagined, with a nice, electric voice he seemed to have heard before. The sister of a nutcase who has scissored off her own finger. Only the last joint of it; he must remember that.
‘I don’t know if you can actually help, Mr Noble, but I wondered if you could. I gather Mr Richard Boyd, who thinks Ms Marianne Shearer, deceased, may have kept something of his, visited you recently. I don’t know if that’s true, but if he comes back, could you give him this?’
She gestured towards the bag at her side.
‘He may thinks it’s his,’ she said. ‘He may think Ms Shearer had it. Not the bag, the contents.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Just about.’
He cleared his throat to hide deepening confusion and a faint feeling of going mad.
‘Is there anything of hers in there? Anything that could explain her death? Anything I should see?’
She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think so. It might be better if you didn’t look.’
‘I don’t understand. You want me to act as messenger to this Rick Boyd, whom I do not know, just like that? I’m a lawyer, Miss Joyce, not a delivery service. A lawyer acting as ex officio executor in the estate of Ms Marianne Shearer, a lady you’ve encountered, I believe, in a professional context?’
To his surprise, she smiled. It was a delightful smile, showing small teeth and a wide mouth and crinkles round her eyes. A face of premature wisdom, he decided, falling into one of his sudden, unaccountable likings for highly individual women. In Marianne Shearer’s case, it had proved more dangerous than falling in love and he was glad to find he still had the capacity. The smile on her face grew broader and more rueful, until it turned into a small, natural laugh, directed at herself.
‘Two questions in one,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I just love the idea of a professional encounter. Puts it into context. I never quite thought of it that way. Witness and interrogator, that’s all it was. Professional. Personally, I could never bring myself to refer to her as a “lady”. Could we start again?’
He was smiling in response to her smiling, beginning to enjoy himself, forgetting scissors, fingers in pies and Peter Friel’s gross impertinence in not telling him where, exactly, he had taken that skirt and with whom, precisely, he had left it. Or not telling him the context of how she was otherwise involved. He was entertaining small thoughts of jealousy at the same time. Peter got to her first, and Peter was in demand with the Lover. Beggars cannot be choosers. A gay man who preferred the company of women had to take what he could. Live by the hour. He sat back. So, to his relief, did she. Intriguing.
‘I love this square,’ she said. ‘Although it isn’t really a square. It was a field. Then a building site, I suppose. Some of the oldest buildings in London. What a great place to work. I knew where you were, because it’s so close to the Sir John Soane’s Museum. I can’t imagine how you manage to do any work here at all. Me, I’d spend all my time looking out of the windows.’
‘I do,’ he said.
There was a brief, relaxed pause. He noticed the big fat scissors still sitting on the desk. He worked it out, briefly. Her testimony had preceded her sister’s. She would not know, might not know what was suggested next, but clearly, huge scissors sitting around, ready to chop, held no fear for her.
‘Can I be clear?’ he said. Rules of cross-examination, ask one question at a time. Never ask a question when you don’t already know the answer, something learned at law school, never much used in his practice. Up until now, he waited for people to tell, rather than recite to them what he needed to know. For her, he would make an exception.
‘You’re Henrietta Joyce. Your sister killed herself, accidentally or not (oh God, more lawyer speak, always hedging bets), rather than continue to be cross-examined by Marianne Shearer. You were yourself professionally mauled by Ms Shearer, who is my deceased client, in her very last, important case. You’re some kind of expert in old clothes. My colleague, Peter Friel, consulted you in the matter of a dead woman’s apparel.’
Why couldn’t he stop speaking like this? Apparel? Deceased, rather than ‘dead’?
She was shaking her head. Rain fell out of her hair. Marianne always had good hair, even when flattened by a wig. Good hair, ugly face.
‘None of which explains why you’re here. I’m inadequately informed, Miss Joyce. Enlighten me.’
He was doing it again. Old-fashioned speak, his best defence against being charmed. Wasted on the Lover, though not on her.
She was smiling again. Thank God for an interval between smiles, otherwise a smile became a rictus, no wonder you never got smiling portraits, the longest pose to hold. Thomas never could rid his mind of irrelevancies. He wanted to look out of the window into the new dark, and did it anyway. Taking off her coat she followed and stood beside him.
At first glance, Lincoln’s Inn Fields was obscured by blinding rain, bashing against the windows with a thudding sound. Almost a squall. Then the shape of trees and shrubs took shape, swaying in the wind beyond the railings guarding the fields and, although dark and feeling like the middle of the night, the pathways in the fields were full of life. People crisscrossing, going-home time, offices, everything, emptying out with scurrying human beings aiming themselves elsewhere and out of the place where they would linger on the grass in summer. If you looked long enough, you could imagine it. As it was, he could see the beautiful shapes of winter, bare branches, grey shrubs, elegant street lamps casting pools of wet light, could have watched for ever.
‘I’m so lucky,’ Thomas said, gazing. Such an instinctive remark, he didn’t realise he had spoken it out loud. ‘So lucky to have this.’
He had forgotten where he was, turned to her and remembered.
‘How can I help?’ he asked, thinking, one question at a time. This time, he meant it.
‘Oh, look,’ she said. ‘Just look.’
He looked and saw a jogger tripping round the paths of the Fields with a basset hound at his heels, going faster than him on small, wobbly legs, caught in the light of the intricate lamps as a comic freeze frame, jogger defeated, dog triumphant, plodding along arrogantly. They both admired the dog first.
‘So handsome,’ Hen said.
They stayed where they were, looking for similar delights, watching as the hound went out of vision and the other people continued. Easier to talk near a window, like talking in a car.
‘I brought you some incrimating photographs, Mr Noble, and I shouldn’t have done it, really. They’re the original photos of my sister in the extremes of her own sort of torture. I think Rick Boyd is desperate to find any of the evidence left over from his trial. Anything which might still incriminate him and anything not revealed which shows what he is. Marianne Shearer would have plenty of material like that, wouldn’t she? Things she could reveal. He’s still afraid. He was acquitted, but he was never proved innocent. Anyway, I wanted to give them to you because Peter told me that he’s been here already. He went to the initial inquest, too. Rick Boyd wants what he thinks Marianne Shearer kept, even her memories. He’ll want what he knows I have. He wants the physical evidence of anyone else’s knowledge. Fear neutralised everyone else, except Ms Shearer and me. I don’t know exactly what he wants. Only that he’ll come back, now she’s dead, either here to this office, or to me, to get what he thinks is his, so I thought you might be able to give him this, and say leave us alone. Get him off everyone’s back. It might be enough. Then he might disappear again. Otherwise, he might hurt anyone else who gets in the way.’