Take My Breath Away (8 page)

Lea sighed and shook her head. ‘Sorry, can’t help. He took it home.’

Nic swore inwardly. He was aching from the weariness of nights with no sleep and wasn’t in the mood to
be denied. ‘Maybe I can take a look at his place. You have a key?’

‘I do, as a matter of fact. But you’re wasting your time.’

‘Look, I realise the laptop will be full of confidential stuff. But all I’m interested in is this stuff about the solicitors who died. Promise.’

‘God, I trust you not to download all our trade secrets. To say nothing about the dirt we gather on our candidates’ private lives. That isn’t the problem. Something else happened the day Dylan died. Caron took her revenge on him. He’d given her a key to the house and she went over there that evening.’

Nic stared at her. ‘She trashed the place?’

‘No, she’s not a vandal. She simply wanted to get her own back. When she heard that he’d been killed, she rang me up and confessed. She was distraught, full of guilt. I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone, okay? She wasn’t to know what would happen to him that very night, was she?’

‘So what did she do?’

Lea exhaled. ‘Just cut the arms off Dylan’s favourite leather jacket and chucked his laptop into the river.’

As she walked down the Strand, Roxanne felt guilt smothering her, like a blanket pressed against her face. She blamed herself for Haycraft’s accident. If it was an accident. Maybe he’d meant to walk under the wheels of the wagon. She could not be sure. More likely, he had ceased to care whether he lived or died. He’d realised that he was ruined. If he had not been run over in Chancery Lane, there would have been a tragedy somewhere else on some other day. Even so, she felt guilty. Haycraft was obviously at his wits’ end. Joel Anthony had said the man was in deep, deep trouble and she had taken a dislike to him, so she had allowed him to stare disaster in the face.

Five minutes after she arrived back in Avalon Buildings, Joel paused on passing her room to ask if she was okay.

‘Of course.’ She didn’t want anyone to know that she had seen what had happened. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘It’s just that – you looked a bit flustered, that’s all.’ In the background, Roxanne could hear the ubiquitous piped music. Another lush ballad, ‘Make It Easy On Yourself’. ‘Haycraft didn’t try anything with you, I hope?’

‘He was too far gone for that.’ The stud in Joel’s ear gleamed under the fluorescent light. ‘You did a very good job on him.’

As the door closed behind him, she swore to herself. Joel was sensitive to mood and atmosphere, more interested in what people were thinking than the other
lawyers she had met. She was still afraid that he might start reading her mind.

Ben marched in a couple of minutes later. ‘Well, then, young Roxanne, how’s it going?’

‘One thing’s for sure. I never expected to spend my first week at Creed trying to defend Ali Khan’s empire from being punished for the sexism of some middle-aged manager.’

‘I’ll let you into a little secret, Roxanne,’ Ben said, lowering his voice. ‘Just between you and me, all right?’

She could not imagine what was coming, but when he paused, she muttered, ‘All right.’

‘You’ve seen how much Haycraft is paid. His package costs Thrust a small fortune, yet he’s a dinosaur. Snag is, it would take an age to sack him for poor performance without running the risk of a pricey unfair dismissal claim. So the main board had already given an executive search consultancy a tip-off about him.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘It’s how companies offload their over-paid under-achievers. An old trick. Management tips off a headhunter that one of their top executives may be on the look-out for a fresh challenge. The headhunter contacts him and, ego massaged, he’s kick-started into considering a move. A prospective employer is then supplied with a reference trumpeting his achievements and – hey presto! – the problem is solved.’ Ben laughed. ‘Some third-rate managers spend their careers shifting jobs at regular intervals, accompanied each time by a testimonial which makes them sound like a cross between Bill Gates and Richard Branson.’

‘And?’

‘Unfortunately, Haycraft interviews so badly that
two of Thrust’s main competitors have already turned him down. Then along comes Gina Mandel. A lucky break, her claim could save our clients a small fortune. As a bonus, their equal opportunities enforcement record gets a boost. It’s not every day a senior executive is sacrificed at the altar of anti-sexism crusade.’

Roxanne said, ‘So they can sack him, throw money at the girl to settle the claim and then go back to making profits for shareholders. For Haycraft, end of story.’

‘Don’t sound so shocked,’ Ben said. His tone was suddenly cold. ‘The law isn’t a game, you know. This is the real world we’re working in. Litigation is like warfare. You can’t hope to avoid collateral damage.’ The screensaver on her computer blinked at her. The legend read
Roxanne Wake.
It helped if she constantly reminded herself of who she had become. A couple of right-on caseworkers at Hengist Street had made it clear that by joining Creed she’d sold her soul. The salary was amazing and she wasn’t embarrassed to take it. As soon as her first month’s pay was transferred into her account, she would buy the leather coat she’d coveted in Selfridges. But the money mattered much less to her than it did to most. As for selling her soul – if only those other girls knew.

Her father had worked as a printer before competing technology bankrupted the company which had employed him for twenty-five years. He’d never worked again and she’d watched him age before her eyes, spending money that the family could not afford in the Buxton pubs, rotting his life as well as his liver. Her mother was a nurse who supplemented her work at the local hospital with shifts at a private care home which brought in a few extra pounds each week. The home owner took a fancy to her and when she
rebuffed his advances, she soon found herself made redundant in the interest of economy. Her husband urged her to take up a claim in the tribunal, but she’d refused through a combination of pride, ignorance and fear of the unknown. Cassandra said nothing, but resolved that one day she would help people like her parents to regain the pride that a worthwhile job could bring.

Of course, things didn’t turn out as expected. Her parents’ marriage broke down and Cassandra’s father finished up in a council flat in Whaley Bridge. On her fourteenth birthday, he fell down a flight of steps in a drunken stupor and broke his neck. Cassandra’s mother struggled to bring up a teenage daughter on her own and tempers were often frayed. As Cassandra’s interest in boys developed, her childish enthusiasm for wielding the sword of justice waned. And then she met Grant Dennis.

Later, Roxanne had time enough to reflect upon Cassandra’s mistakes. Doors had closed during her lost years. She needed to make a complete break and strive to become someone else, so far as the rest of the world was concerned. Even if deep down she would always be Cassandra Lee.

One evening while flicking through the
Evening
Standard
she’d seen a box advertisement in the Situations Vacant. An advice centre in Hengist Street had an urgent need for paralegals. She’d fixed up an interview under the name of Roxanne Wake and walked straight into the job. Ibrahim was so desperate for staff that he’d probably have taken her on even if her CV had contained the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He’d never shown the slightest interest in getting to know her better; nor had any of
the other colleagues she worked with. In Creed, it was proving harder to guard her privacy.

Just how difficult became plain that afternoon. Will Janus rang and asked if she’d like to come up to his room in ten minutes. She prayed he wouldn’t mention Buxton again.

His room was on the top floor, next to the boardroom where the partners met. He insisted on taking her in to see the vast round table and the Kandinskys on the wall.

‘Very fine, don’t you think?’ Will said, as she remembered to express her admiration. ‘Kandinsky saw himself as having a mission. Messianic, almost.’

Roxanne smiled cautiously. Before coming upstairs she’d prepared herself by checking Kandinsky out on the web. All that she’d had time to discover was that he loved mumbo-jumbo. Typecast as a lawyer to the end of his days and beyond, that was poor Wassily.

He ushered her back to his own room, humming to the background music. ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’.

Roxanne said, ‘You wanted me?’

‘A bit of devilling, if you don’t mind. I’m preparing a paper for the Council of Ministers and I’d like you to let me have a precis of the latest judgments. My topic is surveillance at work. You’re familiar with the current law?’

‘In my last job I acted for someone who wanted to take a case to the Court of Human Rights. She discovered her boss had been taping all her phone calls in the office. She also had a claim under Clause Four of the European Convention.’

‘Clause Four, yes.’ He gave a satisfied nod and she remembered that a celebrated lecture of his had
influenced a radical overhaul of the legislation. ‘Did you win the case?’

‘We couldn’t get the funding. Our client was refused Legal Aid.’

‘Perhaps it’s as well,’ Will said. ‘Your client would have lost if the employer had warned her he was monitoring her calls. As we do, for instance.’

She stared at him. ‘I didn’t know that.’

Will Janus said pleasantly, ‘Haven’t you read your office manual? It’s all there on the intranet. Don’t look so alarmed. We introduced monitoring as a routine precaution. For everyone’s comfort. And security.’

Back in her room, Roxanne took a deep breath.
What if they listen to the call Hilary made to me? She called me Cassandra. I’m finished.

Heart thudding, she checked the intranet. Sure enough, the monitoring policy was there, in print rather smaller than the office dress code. But the message was clear.
Big Brother is listening to you.

So what? Thousands of reputable employers monitored calls and the partners were simply covering themselves. Of course, it was good practice to put something in black and white. No organisation she knew of systematically checked all calls made and received. The cost would be prohibitive. The tapes were kept for a few days and then recorded over. Why would they want to snoop on a newly recruited paralegal? All she needed to do was to keep her nerve and the threat would disappear.

On Friday morning, Ben called her in to his room. It boasted an ego wall covered from floor to ceiling with framed cuttings recording his famous victories. Most included a photograph of Ben outside a tribunal building or the steps of a courtroom, punching the air in
triumph or pumping the hand of a celebrity client. A recurring motif was the sheer awfulness of his taste in ties; an offence against human rights if ever there was one. One picture showed him looking on as a jubilant Ali Khan sprayed a bottle of champagne over a group of reporters outside the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand.

‘I have news for you,’ he said. ‘Howard Haycraft has been seriously injured in a road accident, he’s still in intensive care. A broken pelvis is the least of his problems, he still hasn’t regained consciousness. I gather it’s touch and go whether he will survive. Even if he does, there’s a likelihood of brain damage.’

She didn’t know what to say.

‘It must have happened shortly after you left him,’ Ben murmured. ‘He was run over in Chancery Lane.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Her past might be chequered, but it gave her one advantage: experience in telling lies. Only now did she see how well this had equipped her for a career in the law. ‘Terrible news.’

Ben leaned back in his chair, arms folded, eyes glinting with amusement. He might have been a small ugly boy who had discovered how easy it is to tear the wings off flies. ‘You must have put the fear of God in him. According to eye witnesses, he walked right under the wheels of the truck, as if he was in a daze. What on earth did you say to him?’

‘Nothing! I can’t imagine what…’

‘Steady on!’ He laughed. ‘I was pulling your leg. It’s not your fault that he didn’t watch where he was going. Stupid fool. He’d been losing it for some time. This episode with the Mandel girl was just the latest in a long line of difficulties. One would not want to be callous, of course. But frankly, this is the ideal solution.’

Five minutes later Joel looked in. His skin was
glowing; he looked good enough to eat. Chloe had told her that all the partners had the option of a weekly manicure from Creed’s in-house executive refreshment specialist. Power pampering while they worked, complete with a shave, exfoliation and a camomile-soaked hot towel. Ben didn’t take advantage of the service; no wonder, Chloe said bitchily, that his nasal hair was a disgrace.

A rub of the smooth chin. ‘I hear Howard Haycraft has been run over.’

‘Ben says the accident happened a few minutes after I interviewed Haycraft,’ Roxanne said carefully.

‘What sort of mood was he in when you talked to him?’

Roxanne was conscious of Joel’s keen scrutiny. She shifted in her chair. ‘He wasn’t exactly full of the joys of spring. He realised his career was over.’

‘So you got the message across that Haycraft was in the shit?’

‘What else could I say?’ She hated herself for sounding rattled. ‘It was the truth.’

‘Of course,’ Joel said. ‘It sounds to me as though you handled the meeting perfectly.’

Roxanne said, in a voice so low that Joel had to bend close to hear, ‘But Haycraft has finished up in intensive care.’

‘Not your fault.’

She caught the faint smell of camomile on his flesh. ‘What if he meant to do it? What if talking to me hurt him so much that he’d stopped wanting to live?’

‘You did the right thing. Believe me.’

‘I didn’t intend to destroy his life.’

Joel said sharply, ‘That’s enough, Roxanne. You’ve nothing to reproach yourself for. Everything is under control. You did – what you had to do.’

Nic understood Amy Vinton’s suffering, knew what it was to be obsessed by past crimes. People coped with family tragedies in different ways. For Amy, time hadn’t been a healer. Five years had passed before she’d made herself into an image of Ella, dressed in her sister’s old clothes and destroyed first Dylan Rees, then herself.

Needing the kick of caffeine, he went for a walk. Half an hour later he was ordering an espresso in the coffee bar where, according to Lea, Amy had worked. The place was crowded but he managed to strike up a conversation with a plump Brazilian girl on the till. She was, he judged, Amy’s age and the name on her badge was Lani. Nic hinted that he was the brother of one of Amy’s schoolfriends. He soon learned that Lani had been fond of the dead girl.

‘She was so quiet,’ Lani said in careful English. ‘Nice, but she never said much. Kept herself to herself, you know? She told me she’d been a student. When she first came here, she said she might go back to college. But she didn’t like to talk about – personal things.’

‘She didn’t mention Dylan Rees?’

‘Uh-uh. I couldn’t believe it when I heard this morning what she’d done. This man I’d never heard of…’ She spread fleshy arms, her face a picture of bewilderment.

‘Was she seeing anyone?’

Lani gave him a sly look. ‘Jealous, eh? She was a pretty girl. You fancied her?’

‘I was simply wondering…’

She turned to serve a customer. When she’d rung up the till, she murmured, ‘I guessed she had met someone. In the last few weeks. But I never knew his name.’

‘A man she met here, perhaps? A customer?’

‘I don’t know, honey.’

An off-the-wall idea struck him. ‘It couldn’t have been Dylan Rees, could it? The man she killed?’

‘What kind of sense would that make? All I can say is that she changed.’

He leaned close to her. ‘How did she change?’

She smiled at him and he realised that she thought he fancied her. ‘She stopped talking about going back to college. This man she’d met, whoever he was, I guess she must have seen a lot of him. She and I had gone to the pictures a couple of times when we were on the same shifts. We both fancy Jude Law. But lately she’d been making excuses. Always too busy.’

He inhaled the aroma of roast coffee beans. ‘Did she ever talk about her sister?’

Lani shook her head. ‘Not to me. She lost interest in the job. Started coming in late, not caring what happened. Only a week ago the supervisor gave her a final warning. Amy didn’t seem to mind. I thought it was because of this man she’d met. He was generous, she didn’t say much, but she told me once she’d been sent a bunch of flowers. Red roses, very romantic. If he had money, maybe she wasn’t worried if she lost a crummy job like this.’

‘And now what do you think?’

A shrug. ‘Who knows, honey? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe all the time she was just dreaming of how she would kill him. The man who betrayed her sister.’

Phil was packing a suitcase when Nic arrived back at the flat, cramming clothes in without caring whether it crumpled them. She was breathing hard and there was a light in her eyes that he hadn’t seen for a long time. A big new job, he guessed. The one thing guaranteed to turn her on more than fun and games with strawberries and cream.

‘A double decker ploughed into a parish hall up in Northumberland,’ she said. ‘I’ve been retained by the bus company. It’s a catastrophe. One simple driver error and the police, the health and safety apparatchiks and half the cabinet are on the warpath. My clients floated less than a month ago and already the share price is down through the floor.’

‘Anybody hurt?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘loads. That’s the big problem. They were all old people taking part in a whist drive. The journalists will hang my clients out to dry if we don’t make the right noises.’

After a few moments, he asked, ‘When will you be back?’

‘No idea. Could be several days. The chief executive’s worried about how the union will react and the operations director is threatening to go off sick with stress. Tell me about it. Still, the fees are going to be fantastic. Every cloud.’ She paused in the act of trying to stuff a new pair of Levis into an over-full bag to add, ‘You’ll have some time to yourself. You can make a start on the book.’

‘I don’t think so.’

She put the case down and planted her hands on her hips. ‘For God’s sake, Nic. Don’t you think it’s time you started to get your act together? What sort of a writer do you call yourself? One who doesn’t like writing, as far as I can tell.’

‘I’m not sure I do call myself a writer. Any more than I call myself a lawyer.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ll write another book when I find something I’m desperate to tell the world. I’m not going to repeat
Crippen
, that’s for sure. It’s time to move on.’

‘And where exactly are you moving on to?’ She was angry now and her voice was rising. ‘On to your arse, basically. It’s not enough, Nic. You’ll have to shape up.’

He folded his arms. ‘Or else – what?’

Pink spots appeared on her cheeks. ‘Or else – you can move on from here. I’m sick of all this. If you can’t show me work-in-progress by the time I get back, I’m washing my hands of you.’

He spoke gently. The anger had gone; he’d made up his mind. ‘This isn’t working, is it?’

‘Too bloody right, it’s not working. And neither are you.’

‘So that’s your final word, is it? I start a second book, or I’ll be the one packing my bags?’

‘If you like. An ultimatum. I’m so utterly pissed off with killing myself while you just hang around.’

‘Fine, I’ll be gone before you get back.’

For a moment she hesitated, as if about to tell him not to be so stupid. Something in his expression made hers harden. ‘When you go, push the key back under the door.’

Once she’d gone, the flat was cool and still. A graveyard, the place where their affair lay dead and buried. He started throwing a few things into a case, dropping her cards and letters into the wastepaper basket. Mustn’t drown in sentiment’s quicksand. He was better out of it. Phil, the flat, everything.

He walked over to Chancery Lane. At the top of Law Society’s Hall was Carmichael Webb’s lair. If
anyone could tell him who the dead lawyers might be, it was Carmichael.

‘What can I do for you?’

Carmichael reminded Nic of an ageing bloodhound. He sat behind his VDU, scrolling through the archive records. For fifteen years he had been the Law Society’s Curator of Records and although the information technology at his disposal was supposed to be the best money could buy, no one doubted that the database he carried in his head was far more extensive than anything held on the computer network and much less likely to crash. Ask him who had been struck off for fiddling trust accounts in 1979 and he could recite the names without a second thought.

‘I’m researching background. Perhaps for a book one day.’

‘So you are still set on writing for a living?’

Carmichael didn’t understand why anyone should want to give up being a solicitor. All his life, he’d been fascinated by small print. The legal profession was tailor-made for him, but money had been tight and he hadn’t been able to afford the premium that firms used to charge for the privilege of two years of dogsbodying as an articled clerk. So he had worked in libraries and museums instead until the opportunity of a job in Chancery Lane had come his way. To take it meant accepting cuts in pay and pension, but Carmichael hadn’t hesitated. At last he was part of the legal world. Whenever they talked, it wasn’t long before Nic felt a qualm of guilt. He’d thrown away a career for which Carmichael would have given his right arm.

‘We all have to eat,’ Nic said. ‘I wanted to check on something Dylan Rees mentioned to me.’

Bushy eyebrows rose. ‘A dreadful business. I heard that you tried to save him.’

‘Fine job I made of it, didn’t I?’

‘You did your best.’ Carmichael shook his head. ‘I hadn’t seen Dylan Rees for a couple of years until he called in last month. Hard to credit that he’s gone.’

‘What was he after?’

Carmichael frowned over his half-moon glasses. Together with his three-piece pinstripe suit, they made him look like a pre-war family solicitor. He even kept a watch on a chain. When he put on a severe face, Nic imagined him advising an aged client against an unwise testamentary disposition.

‘He gave the impression that Valentines were updating their records of the people they dealt with. He wanted to access our archives. Candidly, his manner struck me as evasive.’

‘That’s not like Dylan.’

‘No, in my experience, he was always one to chat. We’d met several times when he was trying to ferret out the truth behind the gaps in the curriculum vitae of a candidate who had signed up with his agency. People who said they’d left jobs for career development reasons when in fact they had been sacked for failing their probation, that sort of nonsense. Straightforward detective work, and he enjoyed having a chinwag about it. He used to say the law is a people business. I always regarded that as rubbish. To my mind, it’s a document business, slowly transforming into a technology business.’

Nic refused to be diverted. ‘What did he do when he was here that last time?’

‘He spent an afternoon tapping notes into his laptop, but he made it clear he wasn’t interested in discussing
what he was up to.’ Carmichael grimaced. For all his lugubrious demeanour, he was a sociable man and he expected others to respond accordingly. ‘As you might imagine, that piqued my curiosity, but I didn’t make any headway when I asked him the odd question.’

‘So did you know who he was checking on?’

‘After he’d gone, I did happen to notice the record on our system of the sites he’d visited on our database.’

‘And?’

‘He was researching Creed.’ Carmichael raised his eyes to the Heavens. ‘You’ll have seen their advertisements and television commercials. There’s no escaping them.
Lawyers who are different
. As if that’s something to boast about! I presumed Dylan was targeting them for business. Though why he was checking details of their deceased partners, I can scarcely imagine.’

‘Deceased partners?’

Lesson one in cross-examination. Let the witness talk.

‘He looked up the late Matthew Creed himself. And Bradley Hurst, who died in a car crash.’

Nic racked his memory. ‘Creed died of a stroke or a heart attack or something, didn’t he?’

‘Natural causes, yes, but I don’t believe the details were ever made public. Deference to the family, I presume. It was certainly very sudden.’ Carmichael wagged a finger. ‘Mind you, lawyering is a dangerous business, people don’t realise.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘You may mock, young man, but this is rather a hobby horse of mine. Did you see the last annual report of the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva?’

Nic grinned. ‘Sorry, it must have passed me by.’

‘Do you realise they have identified five hundred cases where lawyers have been murdered, intimidated or simply disappeared?
Five hundred!
You wouldn’t want to be a legal representative in Turkey, Burma or Brazil, I can assure you. As for Northern Ireland…’

‘There was nothing unusual about the deaths of Creed or Hurst, was there?’

‘True,’ Carmichael conceded. ‘But may I ask why you are so interested?’

‘Something Dylan said made me curious, that’s all.’ Nic tensed as an idea struck him. ‘By the way – Matthew Creed was worth a packet, wasn’t he?’

Carmichael pondered. ‘Certainly. He founded the firm and even as it grew he kept a large slice of the equity. Didn’t
Loophole
’s gossip column nickname him Croesus Creed? Rather unkind, if you ask me. Was it his fault if the Legal Aid fund and his trade union clients paid him hand over fist?’

‘And Bradley Hurst?’

‘A larger than life character,’ Carmichael said judiciously. ‘No restraint, of course. Think of that day at the High Court when he broke the nose of that barrister from a right-wing tabloid. Any other solicitor would have been struck off, but Will Janus made a joke of it and Bradley survived. What he lacked in IQ, he made up for with girth. He wasn’t someone you’d willingly antagonise.’

Nic leaned forward, not daring to reveal his excitement. ‘Bradley was a giant of a man?’

Carmichael nodded. ‘Six feet five and broad-shouldered, but overweight. I fancy he became too fond of good living in the latter years. If you wanted to be
unkind, you might call him a fat thug, but I suppose you could properly describe him as a giant.’

In the library, he checked out the newspaper archives and then took a look at Creedlaw.com. Naturally, the firm’s website was state of the art, interactive to a fault. Visitors could download Plain English model contracts and personnel policies, subscribe to daily employment law updates, strike up a conversation in the chat room with other business-minded human resources professionals. No wonder entries in the guest book sang the praises of Will Janus and his mission to modernise the delivery of legal services for the new millennium.

A mini-biography of every partner was no more than a double click away, a history of the firm recorded its contribution to advancing the cause of fairness at work. Matthew Creed’s career as a pioneering crusader of the industrial tribunals was noted and there was page after page about Will Janus’s achievements, including extracts from his books and major public speeches, as well as a chance to put questions to him direct about his views on ethical employment and human rights. An index search for Bradley Hurst came up with nothing. Nic wasn’t surprised. Stuff on the net was like history. Written by the survivors.

Back in Clerkenwell, Nic found himself piecing fragments of a story together.

Matthew Creed had been the leading civil liberties lawyer of the late twentieth century as well as the wealthiest. For several years his wife had suffered from motor neurone disease. Following the diagnosis, he’d led campaigns for increased health funding to combat the effects of the condition with the same energy he’d long displayed in acting for workers exploited by ruthless management. Yet he had predeceased her
and all the reports were vague as to the precise cause. There were references to his being struck down suddenly and it was easy enough to infer a coronary or cerebral haemorrhage. Not the slightest hint of anything odd about his death. Yet in his head Nic could hear Dylan lilting the paradox.