Babyface. Elizabeth Woodcraft
Danny or her unhappy husband. Or maybe she had bought them herself, I could hear Lena sternly asserting, from her wages from the shop. Remembering her relaxed approach to opening hours and the absence of any customers during the two hours that I was there, I doubted that the shop could fund that level of sumptuousness.
Yolande stood up, swayed towards me and I leaned to kiss her on the cheek.
I had found some dusty, non-matching plates at the back of the cupboard in the small kitchen area at the far end of the clerks’ room and, optimistically, had taken two matching glasses from the chambers box of champagne glasses. Now the plates were spread across my desk, piled with sandwiches made of interesting bread. ‘I like picnics,’ she said. ‘And this is almost a picnic.’ She gestured at the food with her left hand, the diamonds glinting heavily. ‘There’s a BLT, something with houmous and peppers, and a chicken thing. Oh and water.’ She pulled a blue bottle out of her plastic bag, twisted the lid and poured out two glasses of fizzing mineral water.
‘Sometimes you don’t need alcohol to get a buzz,’ I would have said, but couldn’t summon enough enthusiasm.
As I ate seriously through every flavour, she nibbled at a triangle of chicken salad. She made conversation about Somerset House and the Courtauld Gallery, which she had just visited, she talked about fountains and cobble stones and ice rinks. I talked about Somerset House when it was part of the Family Division, and the hours I had spent sitting in narrow corridors, proposing compromises to angry people who thought they were preserving their dignity when their sadness was blinding them to an easier way forward.
‘Coffee?’ I asked, screwing up my serviette and putting it on the empty plate in front of me.
‘How nice,’ she smiled. ‘I’ll amuse myself looking out of your window.’
I flew along the corridor to the kitchen.
As I returned with two unchipped mugs of coffee, I could hear voices in my room. My heart shrank. Simon must have limped bravely back from the hospital and Jenna must have told him Yolande (or someone like that) was here. He would be furious that I was entertaining a defence witness in chambers. I wondered if I could leave the coffee outside the door, just give a tap to let her know it was there – Simon could have mine, I thought generously – and then I could leave the country and start a new life with a new identity.
‘Courage,’ I said to myself, and then I said it again, with a French accent. A new life in France was an option. I would think about it later. I could say she had come to see how Simon’s foot was, to wish him luck for the trial. She was just sitting in my room to wait.
But it wasn’t Simon, it was Marcus. I would much rather it had been Simon. Marcus was another member of chambers and he and I didn’t get on. And it wasn’t just because, unaccountably, he earned a lot of money and had a very nice new car. It was deeper than that. He was a slimeball. You only had to look at his hair.
And there was the smell of cigarette smoke in the room. Bastard. I hate smoking, I won’t have it in my room. Yolande stood by the window, her arm half hanging out. She was the smoker. Oh. OK. But, I noticed, Marcus was chewing. He was eating our picnic.
‘Hello Frankie,’ he said, as if we were the greatest friends in the world. ‘I just came in for a word, but I see you’re … in conference?’ His eyes flicked mockingly over the half-empty plates.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘absolutely.’
‘Catch you later then,’ he said with an easy smile. ‘Great sandwiches.’ He picked up half a BLT which I had been looking forward to taking home. He bit deeply into it. Even Marcus wouldn’t eat the sandwiches if he thought he was interrupting a conference. ‘Very nice meeting you … ?’
I wasn’t going to tell him Yolande’s name and nor was she, so Marcus backed out of the room, grinning and chewing.
Yolande flicked her cigarette out of the window. I worried briefly about the dry greensward outside while she moved plates to make room for the coffee. ‘Friend of yours?’ she asked.
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘He seemed very interested in Danny’s case.’ She indicated the thin brief now lying on top of a pile of back copies of Family Law. I thought I’d thrown it onto the shelf with my notebooks when I had brought the plates in.
‘Did he?’ I said cautiously. Marcus must be annoyed that Simon had got the case. Corpseless murders were considered rather exotic in the world of the criminal barrister.
‘He seemed a bit disappointed when he saw it was so thin.’
Silently, I moved the brief to a higher shelf and sat down.
I still wasn’t sure why she was here. It didn’t feel as if she was here for me, there was something else. Silence stretched between us. I yearned for a small personal activity to fill in the space. Smoking for example: I could lean across the table, take a cigarette from her packet, look round the room tapping the cigarette on the box, strike a match, inhale, look at the cigarette, look attractive. But I don’t smoke and she did.
‘You weren’t smoking at the shop, were you?’ I said.
‘We’re not supposed to smoke in the shop. It burns holes in the stock.’ She took another cigarette out of the packet. ‘Do you mind?’
‘No.’
She sat smoking, relaxed, at ease, her arm draped along the window sill. As if she was just there for a pleasant lunch, a ‘picnic couvert’. While I jittered, fiddling with a piece of cellophane.
I shook my head. Sod it, why not? ‘Did you know Terry Fleming?’ I wasn’t sure if this was helping her or me.
‘Vaguely.’
‘Do you think he’s dead?’
‘Are you interested or are you just making conversation?’
‘I thought you were interested.’
‘I’m not particularly interested in Terry Fleming.’
‘I thought he was the cause of all your problems.’
‘My problem is to stop Danny pleading guilty to this charge.’
‘Well if Simon knew more about Terry Fleming, he wouldn’t have to.’
‘Tell Danny that.’
‘I just wondered if Terry Fleming had taken off.’
‘Good point,’ she said, and I had that ridiculous glow of pleasure again. ‘He has disappeared before.’
‘When?’
‘When things got hot. When he fell out with people or had trouble with business deals, that kind of stuff. They all do. They all have their little places. Danny does.’
‘Like prison you mean?’
She raised her eyebrows at me. ‘They go and wait for things to calm down, for a new deal to be done.’
‘I didn’t get the sense that Terry Fleming was a businessman.’
‘He had his car business,’ she said. She looked round. I had no ashtrays. I had a small dish containing paper clips, which I now emptied into a drawer, and gave to her. ‘But I meant more generally, Effo’s business.’
‘Who’s Effo?’ The question was out before I could stop it.
She looked at me with her eyebrows very slightly raised. This was obviously information that was in the papers I hadn’t had. But I didn’t try to explain that. And apparently she wanted to tell me.
Edward Farnigan was known as Effo to his friends, of whom there were, apparently, many and in high places. He was a well-known local businessman, a property developer, an entrepreneur, with a hand in a lot of pies. He had a number of people who worked for him, including Terry Fleming and Ronald Catcher. He owned the Lambada Casino and Hombre, the menswear shop, where Terry Fleming