‘You’re busy,’ Joanne said carefully.
‘Oh, God, I’m run off my bloody feet,’ Mona said, and then she laughed, and looked back at her shoes. ‘I really shouldn’t have bought these. But I couldn’t resist.’
Joanne nodded. ‘What are you working on?’
‘Oh, everything,’ Mona said. ‘I have to get a full day’s work done in half a day today. I have a lunch meeting with Rupert.’
‘So you’re taking a half-day?’
Mona looked to her screen. ‘Eoin sanctioned it. He said it’s important that we give Rupert the time he needs. Even if it’s in an informal setting. There’s still a lot of background we have to make sense of.’
‘Don’t we have all the background we need in the case notes by now?’ Joanne said, but Mona kept her eyes on her screen.
‘Don’t ask me, ask Eoin,’ she said. ‘I’m just doing what I was told.’
Joanne sighed. What this meant was that Mona’s workload for the day would end up being hers. She had too much to do as it was. But she would have to agree. Mona had been there longer than Joanne. She claimed seniority — as long as it was understood that seniority, in this instance, was not a matter of age.
‘You’re not going to walk all the way to the restaurant in those heels, surely,’ Joanne said. ‘It’s a fair trot to Fitzwilliam Square.’
Mona looked at her as though she were mad. ‘I’m not meeting Rupert at his restaurant,’ she said, in an incredulous tone. ‘Rupert can’t be seen at his restaurants at the moment. The paparazzi are staking them out. Didn’t you know?’
‘I have to say, I didn’t.’
‘Well, yes, they are,’ Mona said, turning fully around in her chair now. ‘That creep over at the Herald has a total vendetta against Rupert.’
Joanne felt the beginnings of a smirk. She turned it into a cough. One photograph of Rupert Lefroy had, indeed, been taken outside his sushi restaurant and carried alongside coverage of the case in an evening newspaper, but the coincidence of a high-profile American actress having eaten there on the same evening could hardly be ignored. Neither did Joanne imagine that a scattering of bored newspaper photographers, fitting the job between an ad shoot and a football match, could be described as paparazzi.
‘I’m sure Rupert is well able for them,’ she said, and Mona nodded.
‘Well, yes, he’s used to this sort of thing,’ she said. ‘But, still, I hope they’re not waiting for us at the Shelbourne.’
‘The Shelbourne’s hardly out of the way.’
Mona ignored this. ‘So I’ll need you to step in on some stuff for me,’ she said, pulling her chair back up to her desk. ‘There’s a big section of the transcript that I haven’t even looked at yet, and Eoin wants notes on it by this evening. It’s that old bat again, Rupert’s mother. I’m sorry to land you with more of her ramblings.’
‘Fine,’ Joanne said, and clicked into her email window. She had no new mail. She clicked out again and into one of the websites she kept open, but hidden, on her screen for much of the day; she knew Mona did the same. On a good day, Joanne only ever dipped into the virtuous sites — the newspapers, the things it was not so bad to be caught on by Eoin or Imelda, since you could be looking up court reports or precedent cases — but today was not turning out to be a good day, and she let herself fall into a rabbit hole to numb the brain: news items on celebrities, photographs of them walking in the street with their boyfriends or girlfriends or babies, links that led to more photographs, more snatches of gossip, to reader comments that were, more often than not, defamatory. Maybe, if Eoin or Imelda walked past, she could say she was researching Internet litigation. Eoin might buy it, but Imelda would know a gossip website when she saw one.
But Eoin was in court, and Imelda was staying safely in her office, and Mona was absorbed in the work she had to get finished before lunch. And so Joanne clicked on, and found out what was happening in the world. A teenage film star was pregnant. A model had been filmed taking cocaine. Mel Gibson had gone apeshit and said something anti-Semitic to a police officer. Paris Hilton had been spotted with her dog. It was junk. It was mindless. And when next she glanced at the clock it was almost lunchtime.
It never ceased to amaze her how easily and rapidly time seeped away when she went online. She opened the Lefroy transcript and looked at the last notation she had made. She stared at it, struggling to place herself back inside its world. Check? her own handwriting read, in block capitals. No arrow, no word circled, nothing to make clear what needed to be checked, and how, and why. She read the paragraph again. Paddy Glackin, the barrister for the plaintiff, was setting out the grievances of his client. Mrs Lefroy had sent her son to the very best schools. Mrs Lefroy had supported him through his years in college. Mrs Lefroy had paid for his master’s, the master’s he had never finished, and when he had gone into journalism, she had supported him then, too, making sure there was money in his bank account, making sure her son had the means to live the lifestyle he wanted to be seen to live. She had paid for the mews house to be painted and decorated, so that he and his friends would be comfortable there. She had bought him his first car. She had never been anything but supportive of her son, Glackin went on, even when he had broken her heart by moving to London. And when she had signed over the lease of the mews on his return to Dublin, she had done so in good faith, in the belief that he needed a home, that he had tax difficulties, that he was under pressure. And because Mrs Lefroy wanted her son to have a place of his own, because she did not want to see him suffer, she had signed the deeds transferring the property to him, and very soon afterwards, said Glackin, she had discovered what kind of a son she truly had. She had had her eyes opened, said Glackin, to the true nature of their bond.
Joanne rolled her eyes. Glackin was fond of his melodrama. She skimmed the passage again and again, and still she could not see anything she needed to check; still she could not spot the detail about which, on a previous read, she had written a note to herself. She looked back to the previous page. It was more of the same; Glackin setting out in agonized detail the depth of the son’s betrayal. How lonely the old woman was. How badly she had been let down. How she had lost her husband so many years ago, and was no longer in touch with her daughter. ‘And now this, Judge,’ Paddy Glackin had said. ‘And now this.’
She stopped. She read the paragraph again. She opened the folder of case notes and searched through the very first details they had gathered from Rupert. He was one of two children, he’d told Eoin; his sister, Antonia, had moved to New York many years ago. He had said nothing else about her; had Eoin asked him nothing else about her? Apparently not. And all through the court transcripts Joanne had read nothing, until now, of a daughter; there had been no mention of another child at all.