Gagged & Bound (19 page)

It was amazingly lucky, she thought yet again, that her mother was so happy to help with David, who was no blood relation of hers, and so good with him. He’d once said casually that he felt really safe with Meg, the highest compliment he ever paid anyone.

The last message came in a light, amused male voice.

‘Trish Maguire? My name’s Charles Poitiers. I gather you want to pick my brains about Jeremy Marton and Christ Church in the early seventies. Delighted to tell you anything I can, but I’m off to New York this evening. I’ll phone again when I get back later in the week.’

Steve put his head out of the door of the clerks’ room as Trish walked past.

‘You know you wanted the names of any pupils involved in Jeremy Marton’s defence team in 1972?’ he called after her.

She whirled round. It had been easy to find out who had been the silk in charge of Jeremy Marton’s defence, but he’d retired in 1982 and died six months later. The junior barrister was now a judge and therefore not likely to be an amenable source of information about an old client. Tracking down the name of the pupils involved had been a lot tougher. Even if any of them had been in court, they wouldn’t have been named in the trial transcript, and Trish hadn’t wanted to advertise her interest by asking too many indiscreet questions. Steve, with the whole clerks’ network at his disposal, was much better placed to find out without causing too much curiosity around the Temple.

‘You mean you’ve found one?’ she said, coming back to stand beside him.

‘Adrian Hartle,’ he said, naming a man who now, thirty years later, had become one of the leading human rights silks.

‘That’s great, Steve. Thanks. I owe you.’

Trish knew Hartle by sight and reputation, but they had never met and so she sent him an email, set out as formally as an old-fashioned letter.

The answer came back during what must have been the lunch adjournment of his current case.

Trish sent David a text message to say she’d be home by about half past five. Then she completed her plans for the dull contract case she’d been working on, checked with Steve that it was still due to start on Thursday, ran through the evidence with Nessa, explaining the parts that still puzzled her, and was ready to cross the Temple to Adrian Hartle’s chambers by four o’clock.

There was still plenty of light as she set off, prepared to enjoy the six-minute walk. It would be even better when the trees were in full leaf, but it was still the best place in the world to work. She passed plenty of friends and acquaintances as she strolled through the courtyards and gardens to King’s Bench Walk, stopping to chat to a few, waving to others.

Adrian Hartle’s chambers were the top three floors of number 11A. Like the others in the row, it was an elegantly proportioned brick building that looked out over the trees and lawns of the Temple’s garden. Traffic inching along the
Embankment could be heard throbbing like a single vast engine, but Trish couldn’t see any of it from in here. She gave her name to the young clerk who greeted her at the door and he ushered her straight into Adrian Hartle’s room.

Like Antony’s, it was large and well-lit by two long windows. It was also lined with the same legal texts. There the similarities ended. Where Antony’s desk was clear and showed off its well-polished surface, here higgledy-piggledy heaps of briefs and statements hid whatever lay beneath. Pens without their tops lay between the heaps. Perched on the apex of one heap was a half-eaten packet of fig rolls.

Of all the biscuits consumed in such a place, Trish thought, fig rolls must be the most unlikely. It was years since she’d had one. Hartle saw the direction of her gaze and offered her the packet.

‘They’re soft anyway, so sitting about in the open air doesn’t hurt them, and I like the figgy glue. Have a seat.’

‘Thanks,’ Trish said, pushing some papers to one side of the enormous leather chair in front of the desk. ‘It’s good of you to see me at such short notice.’

She took her copy of
Terrorist or Victim?
out of her bag and laid it on her knee.

‘It’s OK,’ he said, a smile creasing his thin face. ‘I’ve got my own. The publishers sent it to me when it first came out.’

‘Why? Did they know you’d been involved in the case?’

‘I doubt it. They will have sent copies to most of the human rights silks, I imagine. We all get this kind of non-fiction from publishers who hope we’ll talk up their titles.’

So, Trish thought with interest, Motcomb and Winter did more to publicise the book than Bee’s given them credit for. She smiled back at Adrian Hartle.

He wasn’t tall, and he had very little colour. His hair was white, not the grey shared by most men of his age but the white of cotton wool. It stuck out at all angles, as though it had been
starched and dried without being combed. It looked very odd above the equally starched white shirt, from which he must have ripped the bands as he left court. His black gown was flung over the top of a low bookshelf under one of the windows, and his wig sagged over a mug. Trish hoped it was empty.

His skin, which was perfectly clear, was pale too, and his lips were so chewed that flakes of dry white skin were dotted over most of the red. Only his eyes, a deep hot brown, saved him from looking like an etiolated maggot.

‘I’d have seen you in any event,’ he said, ‘but it was your working for Beatrice Bowman that won you the speedy entree. I’ve had a lot of time for her since reading her book. What can I do for you now?’

‘I wanted to ask about the case. Presumably with Jeremy’s having confessed to the police, all you could do was go for mitigation.’

‘Of course. There wasn’t anything else: no technicalities we could have used to get him off. We were trying for manslaughter and a suspended sentence. As you know, we failed.’

‘D’you think Baiborn – whoever he was – knew the bus would be coming?’ Trish asked, as a way in to what she really wanted to know.

Hartle shrugged. ‘Given that at the time we weren’t allowed to know anything about Baiborn ourselves, I can have no opinion on that question.’

‘You mean Jeremy never mentioned his name?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Bee Bowman’s told me she was convinced by the diary descriptions that Baiborn was the codename for a French student anarchist, who’d been involved in all the 1968 stuff in Paris. D’you think that’s possible?’

The shrug took Hartle’s shoulders right up under the dry mop of hair to his earlobes.

‘Anything’s possible. But I never heard of one called that.’

‘Forgive me if I’m being thick, but is it likely you’d have heard the codenames of European revolutionaries?’

He laughed. ‘That shows how young you are. I was in Paris in sixty-eight myself. And Grosvenor Square, both times. I ran rent strikes in university towns and sat-in all over the place. I knew most of the street fighters in Europe.’

‘Was that why you were asked to help out with the Marton case?’

‘Yup. My pupil master hoped I’d be able to get pally with Jeremy and persuade him to break his silence. If you don’t want a fig roll, what about a drink? I’ve got some whisky somewhere.’

‘I’m fine, thanks. I’ve been reading up about the late sixties and early seventies since I met Bee, and it’s been an eye-opener. I had no idea the student movement was taken so seriously by the authorities.’

Hartle sat back in his big black chair. Trish saw that the leather was splitting, but it clearly didn’t bother him. He fitted into it like baby in its sling, his head resting naturally in a kind of divot, where it obviously always lay.

‘We terrified them,’ he said, his eyes seeing nothing in the present. A smile played about his lips, which were surprisingly full under the broken, flaking skin. ‘I can still hear my father trumpeting about irresponsibility and long-haired layabouts trying to destroy everything his generation had fought for. They couldn’t understand why we were so pissed off by their hypocrisies and prejudice, but they could see we were determined to change their world for ever.’

‘Even Jeremy?’ Trish said, thinking of the anguish in his diary and the need to protect that steamed up from almost every sentence. Adrian Hartle would probably fight a just cause for a lifetime, but not go to prison for more than twenty years to protect someone else. ‘He sounds so gentle. Until the bomb anyway.’

‘He was never one of us.’

‘Tell me about him.’

‘You’ve read the Bowman book. It’s all there: Jeremy’s kindness, his insight, the determination that could drive him to do things that terrified him so long as he was convinced they were right.’

‘And the obsessiveness? That must have been hard for other people to live with.’

‘That too.’ Hartle’s dry lips parted in a small smile. ‘But it always took you by surprise, you know, because he didn’t reveal it at first meeting. Sure you don’t want a biscuit?’

‘Quite sure. Who were his friends?’ Trish asked.

‘He didn’t have any by then. He’d bored the pants off everyone with his campaign against X8 Pharmaceuticals. No one was interested. There were so many much more glamorous fights going on. If you’re trying to find Baiborn among his friends, don’t bother. We all tried to do that – the unknown person who provided the bomb – and we all failed.’

‘I know the police stripped every building where Jeremy had lived or worked in their search for evidence.’

‘The police and the other mob. MI whatsit. They were in the investigation up to their wretched necks. Everyone wanted to know where the bomb had come from and who the Evil One was.’

‘Even the ones who hated Jeremy?’

‘Even them.’

‘I did wonder,’ Trish said carefully, ‘whether Baiborn might never have been real. D’you know what I mean? Solitary children often invent friends to ease their loneliness. Maybe Jeremy did that, too, partly because he was so alienated from everyone else, and partly to have someone to blame in those awful early-morning hours when one’s sins always seem even worse than they are.’

‘He wasn’t that kind. Definitely a realist. And the bomb came
from somewhere. He didn’t have the wherewithal to make it himself.’

‘OK. Then let’s go back to the other anarchists who might have been in a position to provide it. Which of those could have been Baiborn?’

‘None. Come on, Trish, we weren’t stupid.’ The way he talked to her, as though they’d known each other for years, made her warm to him even more. ‘We looked at all the likely groups and individuals. That was my particular job, and I’m not exactly proud of it. I called in a lot of favours and got absolutely nowhere.’

‘Pity.’

He was looking at his watch, an old steel one on a strap that seemed to be held together with Elastoplast. ‘I can only give you another five minutes today, so if there’s anything urgent we ought to get straight to it.’

Time to take a risk, Trish, she told herself, smiled and said, ‘Do you think it would be worth my while approaching Simon Tick for help?’

‘The Lord of All Homelessness?’ he said, surprising her. She’d expected either genuine puzzlement or an attempt to head her off, not a joke. The mock title sounded ludicrously familiar and yet ludicrously wrong.

‘I’ve never heard him called that,’ she said. ‘In fact, I’ve never heard him called by anything except his real title. Does he have any other nicknames?’

‘Only Slimy Simon,’ he said, laughing. ‘His old mother may have called him something more flattering, but I never heard what. Why would you think of consulting him? Have you been suckered by all his stories about how he wrenched up the paving stones to build barricades around the Sorbonne and was beaten senseless with police batons for his pains? I didn’t realise he was still telling them. What fun!’

‘Suckered?’ Trish repeated, feeling her way with as much care
as if she’d been walking around a quicksand. She wasn’t going to admit that this was the first she’d heard of Simon Tick in the Paris riots. ‘You mean they’re not true?’

Hartle tipped back his untidy white head and laughed so much she thought he was going to choke.

‘Hell no! It is just possible that he was in Paris at the time, skulking in some hotel on the right bank, well out of sight and sound. But
we
never saw anything of him. It used to be one of the great amusements in the more radical pubs in the old days: you’d happen on one where Slimy Simon was holding forth to a gaggle of wide-eyed girls and hang back, listening and waiting for the moment when he saw you. The embarrassment was palpable whenever he was within earshot of anyone who had actually been there. And he knew us all. He was a limpet-like hanger-on, until there was any kind of trouble in the offing, when he’d quietly drop away.’

‘Like T.S. Eliot’s Macavity,’ Trish said, half to herself, thinking of the local-authority housing scandal.

‘Exactly like Macavity. Looking at him now makes me bloody glad I went in for law not politics. At least I can still do something useful. Now, I must throw you out. You can always email me any more questions, and I’ll do my best to answer.’

‘Thank you. You’ve been very helpful. At least I won’t waste time trying to get Lord Tick to reveal the secrets of his anarchic past to me.’

‘No, don’t. It’s all imaginary. His posturing could send you in quite the wrong direction.’

 

Trish paused for a moment on the top step outside her own front door, analysing the mixture of scents from David’s grilled sandwich. There was definitely cheese in it today, she thought, but not pesto. Mustard and maybe onion, too. She pushed open the door.

‘How’s it going, David?’

He looked up from his books, pushing the dark hair out of his eyes with both hands, and grinned at her. He looked himself again and without a doubt in the world. If there had been any trouble at school, it must have stopped. She felt her shoulder muscles relax.