‘It must have some relevance! Or at least the police must think it has. If it truly isn’t important, we need to explain to them why.’
‘Leave it to Bill, Toby. Leave it to Bill.’
They walked all the way to the waves, dodging grey strips of shallow seawater lurking in the sand. It took less time than Toby had expected: the waves turned out to be no more than six inches high, tickling the beach.
Lars realized what was happening first.
‘That tide’s coming in fast!’
They reversed direction and headed back towards the dunes, the water lapping on their heels. Toby scanned the beach ahead of them: the tide was swooping around them in a flanking movement. They ended up running to a point where the beach inclined slightly upwards, slowing the incoming sea.
Lars turned to watch the water close over the patch of sand on which they had been walking only a few minutes before. ‘Now that doesn’t happen on Lake Michigan.’
TWENTY-THREE
Alice didn’t really like Lisa Beckwith. Worse, she didn’t trust her.
As a corporate lawyer, she was ignorant of her criminal brethren. Corporate law, at least as Alice’s firm practised it, involved big deals, big brains and big fees. In particular it involved large piles of paper, virtual paper leafed through in electronic form on tablets or computers. She assumed most of the time criminal law involved lesser cases, lesser brains, lesser fees. Many corporate lawyers assumed that a criminal lawyer’s job was to guide guilty felons through a chaotic and overstretched legal process. Difficult, frustrating, but small time.
But Alice also knew that murder trials were big deals in themselves, that not everyone accused of a crime was guilty of it, and in certain cases considerable ingenuity and knowledge of the law was required to get an innocent accused off the hook. Or a guilty one for that matter.
Lisa Beckwith was small and dark and had the worn face of a woman who had seen it all before. But her eyes were intelligent and alive and Alice could tell at once she was engaged. She wanted this case, and she wanted to get Alice off.
Which was all to the good.
Despite the lack of trust, which Alice was pretty sure was reflected by Lisa, the two lawyers had quickly developed something of a rapport, or at least a modus operandi. Overnight Alice had worried about how she could withhold information from her solicitor without actually lying to her, or undermining her innocence. But Lisa made it easy. She knew exactly what questions to ask and, more importantly what questions not to ask. Her goal was not to prove Alice’s innocence, but to thwart the police’s attempts to prove her guilt. And she was optimistic.
It wasn’t surprising that the police had arrested Alice. She was the last person to see Sam alive and she had hidden the fact she had gone to meet him at the pub from her family.
But Lisa believed the police would need more than that to charge her. Forensics were not helping them. Alice’s fingerprints were present in Sam’s bedroom. But the police hadn’t found a murder weapon. And, most significantly, they hadn’t found any of Sam’s blood on the clothes Alice was wearing that night. There was quite a lot of blood on Sam and on the floor of his bedroom. Lisa would argue that there should be quite a lot of blood on Sam’s murderer. Who therefore could not be Alice.
The police were also struggling with motive. They had no real idea why Alice might have killed Sam. They had guesses but, according to Lisa, the less they knew, the less they could guess. One such theory was that Alice and Sam knew each other already, which was ridiculous. Another was that there was something suspicious about Craig Naylor’s death on the submarine. If the police were on the wrong track, Lisa urged Alice to leave them there, wasting time.
The implication was that if they were on the right track, Alice should leave them there too.
Lisa insisted that Alice tell the police the bare minimum, a strategy that Alice was happy to follow. It made the interviews with the police easier, once she had got over the awkwardness of refusing to answer their perfectly reasonable questions. It meant she didn’t have to worry about keeping her story straight, about avoiding lies.
She could do this.
But after hours of questioning both by the police and by her own solicitor, she was tired and it was a relief to be allowed back into her police cell. And to have time alone to think.
She thought of Toby. He would be worried about her, she knew that. He would be figuring out ways to help her.
But would he believe in her innocence?
Of course, he would deny that he suspected her. He would claim that he didn’t believe a word of the police’s suspicions, that he was certain it was all some terrible mistake.
But would he doubt her? And if he did doubt her, would he abandon her?
If Toby abandoned her, it would all be over. She would crumble inside. And outside.
She couldn’t believe Toby would abandon her. She couldn’t allow herself to believe that.
She thought about her mother and her father and how she always seemed to be looking after them both. Even though her mother was dead seven years. Even though her father seemed competent and solidly reliable. More than that: businessmen paid Bill Guth good money to fix things, and he fixed them.
Alice remembered the night about a month after her mother’s death and a week before she was due to return to the States to take her bar exam. Her father had been devastated, but he seemed to be handling it well; with help from Alice.
Bill had spent the day in Paris on business. Maya was seventeen, still at school and living at home at the Kensington flat. She had asked Alice to join her at a party, as long as Alice promised to leave early. Which she had done: having a procession of young English eighteen-year-olds hitting on her was just embarrassing. She was old enough to be their elder sister, for God’s sakes!
Maya was having fun, though, when Alice left.
Alice had arrived home at about ten to find her father in the living room working his way through a bottle of Templeton rye whiskey, and listening to the Eurythmics. Alice knew the bottle had been nearly full that morning; now it was two-thirds empty.
‘How are you, Alice?’ Bill asked from his slumped position on the sofa. He was careful not to slur his words. Very careful.
Alice told him briefly about the party that Maya had invited her to, and he nodded in slightly the wrong places.
Alice had seen her dad slightly drunk once or twice. But never like this.
But if his seventeen-year-old daughter was allowed to get drunk, why shouldn’t he?
She was about to withdraw and put herself to bed, when she hesitated. This was wrong.
‘What happened in Paris, Dad?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ Bill said. ‘My meeting only took an hour, so I had most of the afternoon to kill. I wandered around. Sat in a cafe with a glass of wine. Caught the flight home.’
‘What happened, Dad?’ said Alice, sitting next to him.
Bill put down his glass of whiskey and closed his eyes. Then he opened them and looked straight at Alice. ‘I thought I saw her,’ he said. ‘In the Jardin du Luxembourg. There was this woman with long honey-coloured hair talking to an older lady. I couldn’t see her face, but from the back she looked just like Donna. Not Donna now, but Donna when we were young. When we listened to this,’ he waved vaguely towards the speaker.
‘I called out to her – “Donna!”. I knew when I was doing it it was stupid, but I couldn’t help it. Just in case. It wasn’t her, of course. But it stabbed me. Right here.’ He jabbed his chest. ‘I hadn’t thought of her all day; it must have been the first day since she died I haven’t thought of her. And then I did. And I couldn’t stop thinking about her, how I would never see her again.’ A tear ran down his cheek, then another. For a few seconds he fought it, and then he began to sob.