Silks (23 page)

Eleanor reached forward across the table and took my hand.

‘We were so blissfully happy together for five years. She wanted to have a baby as soon as we were married but I talked her into waiting until she had qualified, but then we discovered that having a child was not as straight forward as we thought. We tried for ages without success, but a scan then showed that her tubes were blocked so we had to try for
in vitro
, you know, test-tube baby and all that. And that worked absolutely straight away. It was brilliant. And we were both so pleased that she was carrying a boy.’

I stopped. Tears welled in my eyes for Angela and our unborn son.

‘She was eight months pregnant when she died.’ I had to stop again and take a few deep breaths. Eleanor went on holding my hand and saying nothing.

‘It was a pulmonary embolism,’ I said. ‘I found her lying on the floor. The doctors said it would have been very sudden.’ I sighed loudly. ‘That was more than seven years ago now. Sometimes it seems like yesterday.’ I let go of Eleanor’s hand and held the cotton table napkin up to my face. It was as much as I could do not to sob.

We sat there together in silence for what felt like ages until a waiter came over and asked us if we wanted some more coffee.

‘Thanks,’ I said, back in control. He poured the hot black liquid into our cups and then left us alone again.

‘So,’ said Eleanor with a sigh. ‘Not much chance for me then.’

We laughed, a short embarrassed laugh.

‘Give me some more time,’ I said. But I’d had seven years. How much longer did I need?

‘How much more time?’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said in exasperation.

‘But I need to,’ she said in all seriousness. She stared at my face. ‘I like you, Mister Barrister. I like you a lot. But I do need some response if I’m going to invest my time and my emotions. I’m thirty-three years old and, as they say, my body clock is ticking. I want…’ She tailed off and dropped her eyes.

‘What?’ I said.

‘You… I think,’ she said, suddenly looking back up at my face. ‘And a house and kids and … family life.’ She paused and I waited patiently. ‘When I started out as a vet, with all the
years of training, I only cared about my job and my career. I loved it, and I still do. But now I find I need more than just that. I realize that I want what my parents had,’ she said. ‘Love, home and family.’ She paused again for a moment and took my hand again in hers. ‘And I think I want it with you.’

Eleanor went back to her hotel near Tower Bridge for the night and I took a taxi home to Barnes. It wasn’t that we took a conscious decision to go in diametrically opposite directions, it was just sensible logistically. The equine symposium would start again for her at nine in the morning while, at the same time, I was due to be collected from my home by a car from a private hire company and taken to Bullingdon Prison to see my client. However, I now spent the whole journey home from the restaurant, along the Cromwell Road, past the V&Aand Natural History museums, under the dark sloping walls of the London Ark and across Hammersmith Bridge, wondering whether I should ask the taxi driver to turn round and take me back to Eleanor at the Tower.

Then, quite suddenly and before I had made up my mind, we were outside my home at Ranelagh Avenue in Barnes. I clambered unsteadily out of the cab and paid off the driver, who gunned his engine and noisily departed, no doubt back to the West End to find another late-night passenger in need of a ride home.

I stood for a moment on my crutches and looked at the old
Edwardian property with its two side-by-side front doors and I speculated about what it was that had kept me here these past seven years. Perhaps I really had been foolish enough to think that life would have somehow returned to the blissful time with Angela. Maybe I had been living too long with my head in the sand and now was the time to make a fresh start with someone different. But how could I dispel the feeling that doing so would somehow be disloyal to Angela’s memory?

A car turned slowly into the far end of the avenue and all of a sudden I felt very vulnerable, standing alone on the poorly lit pavement at nearly midnight with no one else about, no one this time to come running to my rescue if I shouted. Even my downstairs neighbour’s lights were out. And Julian Trent, or whoever had been into my house to take that photograph, knew exactly where I lived.

I hurried as best I could up the half a dozen outside steps to the front doors and fumbled with my keys and the crutches. The car’s headlights moved little by little down the road towards me and then swept on past, round the bend and out of sight.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief, found the right key, and let myself in. I leaned up against the closed front door and found that I was trembling. I slid the bolt across behind me and carefully negotiated the stairs.

Why did I exist like this? I had asked myself that question umpteen times over the past weeks as I had struggled with the six steps up from the street to my front door and then the thirteen steps up from there to my sitting room. I had often not bothered with the twelve more to my bedroom, sleeping, instead, stretched out on the sofa. I had no garden, no terrace, no deck, not even a balcony. Just a view of Barnes
Common, and even that was obscured in the summer months from all but the topmost bedroom windows by the leaves on the trees.

I had stayed here for the memories but maybe it was time now to make more memories elsewhere. Time to shake off this half-life existence. Time to live my life again to the full.

Steve Mitchell was a shell of his former self. As a jockey, he was well used to existing on meagre rations, and prison food was not exactly appealing to the discerning palate. But it was not the lack of food that had made the greatest difference to Steve, it was the lack of his daily diet of riding up to six races with the muscle toning and stamina which comes from regular exercise as a professional sportsman. He looked pale, thin and unfit, because he was, but he seemed to be coping fairly well mentally, considering the circumstances. Steeplechase jockeys had to be strong in mind as well as in body, to cope with the inevitable injuries that came with the job.

‘What news?’ he said, sitting down opposite me at the grey table in the grey interview room.

‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ I said.

He looked at the crutches lying on the floor beside me. This was the first visit I had been able to make to see him since my fall at Cheltenham.

‘Sandeman?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Read about it in the paper,’ he said. ‘Knees are a bugger.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed.

‘Also read about that bastard Clemens winning the Gold Cup on my bloody horse,’ he said. The ‘bastard’ tag, I noticed, had
now been moved from Scot Barlow to Reno Clemens. ‘It’s bloody unfair.’

Yes, it was, but, as my mother had told me as a child, life is unfair.

‘But you did meet with Sir James Horley?’ I said it as a question. ‘When I couldn’t make it last time.’

‘Bit of a cold fish, if you ask me,’ said Steve. ‘Didn’t like him much. He kept talking to me as if I’d done it. Even asked me to examine my conscience. I told him to bloody sod off, I can tell you.’

I knew. I had heard about it at length from Sir James on his return from Bullingdon to Gray’s Inn. As a rule Sir James didn’t much care for visiting his clients on remand, and this time had been no exception. He preferred that to be a job for his junior, but I had been rather incapacitated and he’d had no alternative but to go himself. The interview had clearly not gone well. Mitchell may not have liked his lead counsel very much but that was nothing compared to the utter disdain in which Sir James now held his client. Not for the first time I thought that Sir James would be rather pleased to lose this case.

‘Can’t you act without that silly old buffer?’ he said.

‘He is a very experienced Queen’s Counsel,’ I replied.

‘I don’t care if he’s the Queen herself in drag,’ he said, ‘I would much rather have you defending me in court.’

‘Steve,’ I said seriously. ‘I’m not altogether sure it would make much difference who defended you in court at the moment.’ I paused while my underlying meaning sank in.

‘I didn’t do it,’ he said finally. ‘I tell you. I didn’t bloody do it. Why will no one believe me?’

‘I believe you,’ I said. ‘But we need something to make the jury believe you, and there’s nothing. The evidence is quite
compelling. There’s the blood in your car and on your boots, and the fact that the pitchfork was also yours doesn’t help. And everyone knows you hated Barlow. Those betting receipts and your lack of any sort of alibi are going to hold considerable sway with the jury.’

‘There must be something you can do,’ he said rather forlornly.

‘I haven’t given up hope yet,’ I said, trying to sound more optimistic than I felt. ‘The evidence is either circumstantial or can be explained away. When the prosecution finish presenting their case, I will make a submission to the judge that you have no case to answer. But I think it’s unlikely that he or she will agree and, with nothing new turning up, I fear that things may not go well.’

‘So what’s the down side?’ he said.

‘In what way?’ I said.

‘How long if I get convicted?’

‘How long a sentence?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said, irritated. ‘How long until I get an appeal? Until something comes up to show I didn’t do it.’

‘There’s no guarantee you would get an appeal,’ I said. ‘It would have to be either because there is a question of law, say a ruling or the summing up by the trial judge was considered questionable or biased, or if new evidence has appeared in the case. Either way it would be quite some time. Appeals against short sentences are heard more quickly than those for longer ones. It’s not much good waiting two years for an appeal against a three-year sentence, you’d already be out. But life…’

‘Life?’ Steve said loudly, interrupting me.

‘Murder carries a life sentence,’ I said. ‘Mandatory. But life doesn’t actually mean life in most cases.’

‘Oh God,’ he said resting his forehead on his hand. ‘I’ll go bloody mad if I have to stay in here much longer.’

The private hire silver Mercedes was waiting for me outside the prison and it pulled up to the main gate when I appeared. Bob, the driver, stepped out to hold the door for me as I clambered awkwardly into the back seat. Then he carefully placed the crutches in the boot. I could get quite used to this, I thought.

‘Back to London, sir?’ Bob asked.

‘Not yet,’ I said, and I gave him directions to our next stop.

Sandeman was eating from his manger when I went in to see him. He looked casually in my direction, blew hard down his nostrils and then went back to concentrating on his oats. I hobbled over to him and slapped him down his neck with the palm of my hand while feeding him an apple from my pocket.

‘Hello, old boy,’ I said to him as I fondled his ears and rubbed his neck. He put his head down against me and pushed me playfully.

‘Whoa,’ I said amused. ‘Careful, my old boy, I’m not yet able to play.’ I slapped him again a couple of times and left him in peace.

‘He’s doing well,’ said Paul Newington at the door, from where he’d watched the exchange. ‘We’ve started walking him around the village every morning, and he has even trotted a bit round the paddock on a lunge. Still too early to put any weight on that back, of course, but he doesn’t seem to be in any pain.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘He looks well.’

‘Plenty of time for Kit to brush his coat.’ Kit was the stable lad that ‘did’ for Sandeman.

‘Will he ever be able to race again?’ I asked Paul. I had asked him that several times before on the telephone and he’d always been rather noncommittal in his answer.

‘I suspect he could,’ he said. ‘But he’s thirteen now and he would quite likely not be fit enough to run before he becomes fourteen.’ All horses in the northern hemisphere became a year older on 1 January, irrespective of the actual day on which they were born. In the south the date was, for some reason I had never worked out, not 1 July as one would expect, but a month later on 1 August.

‘Are you saying he’d be too old?’ I asked.

‘Racehorses can race at that age,’ he said. ‘I looked it up on the internet. The oldest ever winner was eighteen, but that was over two hundred years ago.’

We stood there leaning on the lower half of the stable door, looking at my dear old horse.

‘I’m not saying he couldn’t get back to fitness,’ Paul went on. ‘I’m just not sure it would be cost effective, or even if it’s fair on the old boy.’

‘You think it’s time to retire him?’ I was miserable. Retiring Sandeman from the racecourse would be tantamount to retiring myself from race riding. I knew that I was too old to start again with a new horse.

‘I do,’ he said bluntly. ‘And I do realize that it would quite likely mean that you wouldn’t have a horse with me again.’

‘But what would we do with him?’ I asked forlornly.

‘Now don’t take this the wrong way,’ he said, ‘but I am in need of a new hack. And that’s not, I promise, the reason I think you should retire Sandeman.’

‘I know that,’ I said. ‘But what about old Debenture?’

Debenture had been Paul’s hack for almost as long as I could
remember and Paul rode him up to the gallops every morning to watch his horses work.

‘He’s too old now,’ said Paul. ‘It’s time to put him out to grass. Every time I’ve got on him recently I’ve feared he’s about to collapse under me.’

‘So you’d replace him with Sandeman?’ I asked.

‘I would like to, if Sandeman recovers sufficiently,’ he said. ‘And I think he probably will, if his progress so far is anything to go by.’

‘Well, I suppose that would be fine by me,’ I said. ‘But can he go on living in this stable?’

‘Geoffrey, you are far too sentimental,’ he said, laughing. ‘No way. He’ll have to live in the dog kennel.’ He laughed loudly, mostly at my expense. ‘Of course he can stay here and Kit will continue to look after him.’

‘Can I still ride him?’ I asked.

‘Geoffrey,’ he said laying a hand on my shoulder. ‘You don’t want to ride him as a hack. I would simply walk him through the village at the head of the string and then I’d sit on him as I watched the other horses, before he walked back here. If you really want to ride out, you can ride one of the others.’