Martin didn’t stay long. I went back to my office in the eaves of Burgess Court but found it so hard to concentrate I headed out for an early lunch. It was a cold, grey day, the weather failing to launch into anything resembling fresh spring weather, but I wanted to eat outdoors. I put on my coat, grabbed a sandwich from Pret a Manger on Fleet Street and sat on one of the benches by the fountain outside Middle Temple Hall.
My phone chirped and I looked at the incoming text. I winced when I saw it was from Clare.
Can you talk? Just reading about Donna Joy.
No, I didn’t want to talk, I thought, realizing she had finally connected all the dots. I certainly didn’t want a lecture, and I suspected that would be how the conversation would go if I rang her back.
I stuffed my phone deep into my pocket, and closed my eyes, listening to the tipple-tapple of the water, enjoyed for a few fleeting moments the sensation of the cold flecks of spray that tickled my face. In the distance, I could hear the sound of a piano recital, and for a second, under the shade of the ancient mulberry trees overhead, I felt a sense of calm and comfort that I had not experienced in days.
Heels tapped against the cool flagstone of the court. One set was heavier than the others and as I heard them stop in front of me, I snapped open my eyes.
‘Are you all right?’ said Tom Briscoe as I looked up to see him standing there. He was dressed in a thick black coat, one hand was pulling his pilot case, the other holding a brown paper bag from our local sandwich shop.
‘Just tired,’ I replied, embarrassed to be caught by him like this.
‘You look like shit,’ he said, sitting next to me on the bench.
‘Cheers,’ I replied, giving the nearest thing to a chuckle I’d managed all week.
He took out a can of Coke and offered it to me.
‘Do you want this? You probably need it more than I do.’
I nodded, realizing that I hadn’t bought a drink from Pret and a shot of caffeine might be some sort of antidote to a sum total of five hours of weekend sleep. Thanking Tom, I took the can, which felt cold and inviting in my hand, tugged back the ring pull and let the fizzy liquid slide down my throat.
‘I owe you one,’ I said with a slow, satisfied sigh.
‘You’re welcome,’ he said rummaging through his sandwich bag and pulling out a baguette.
I was glad of the company, and as I watched Tom take a bite out of his lunch, I wondered why we didn’t do this more often.
‘Was that Martin Joy I saw coming out of chambers?’ he asked, casually motioning towards Burgess Court.
I nodded crisply, feeling hurt. I should have known better than to think Tom wanted my company for its own sake. He was here for the gossip. I shifted in my seat and put myself on guard. Tom was nothing if not ambitious. He’d said it himself: we were in a competition, first one to make silk. And I had no idea how far he would go to win.
‘He’s on his way to the police station,’ I said.
‘I heard he’s instructed Matthew Clarkson. He’ll sort him out,’ he said with a relaxed confidence.
Despite Tom’s motives for our impromptu lunch break, despite his obvious curiosity about Martin Joy, I felt reassured by his words. His didn’t need to promise that everything would be all right.
‘Are you in court today?’
I shook my head.
‘Then you should go home.’
‘I can’t go home,’ I said, thinking about the pile of case files on my desk.
Tom shrugged. ‘There aren’t many benefits to being self- employed. You might as well take advantage of one of them.’
The sceptic in me thought about all the additional work that was being put Tom’s way: the file that Paul had been holding that morning, and no doubt countless other applications, injunctions and contact orders that our senior clerk thought I was unable to handle. No wonder he was encouraging me to play truant.
‘Just go,’ Tom repeated, and as I thought about my empty diary – for the first time in weeks, I hadn’t had a scheduled day in court – I threw caution to the wind and decided to have the afternoon in bed.
I honestly intended to go home. I walked down Kingsway to my usual bus stop to take the number 19 north, but when I saw the one that took the southern route I found myself crossing the road to take it.
Nerves jangled throughout my body with the sense that I was setting off on an adventure. Sitting down on the scratchy fabric of the seat, I wanted to be invisible, but on the half-empty bus I felt exposed, as if the whole world was watching me.
The bus went south, almost to its final destination, past the soft sparkle of the Ritz, the patrician grandeur of Knightsbridge, down Sloane Street towards Chelsea. I guessed which stop was nearest to Donna’s house and with a tentative finger presssed the bell as we approached the lower reaches of the King’s Road.
It was another dark and miserable afternoon, grey clouds and drizzle reminding me of the night that I was last here. I pulled my coat around my waist, so tightly it felt I was corseted, and turned the corner on to Donna’s street. Immediately I noticed activity at the house. I crept forward, uncertain steps taking me towards the pub where I had observed her house a week earlier.
I felt too exposed to watch what was going on from the street, so I stepped inside. The warm hop-scented air was like a blanket, swaddling me from the cold damp afternoon. It was almost empty, although that came as no surprise. It was Monday afternoon. I didn’t suppose there were too many alcoholics in the Chelsea area and although they served lunch in the pub, that crowd had gone, just some empty glasses and a half-eaten burger on a plate, the only evidence of earlier activity.
I needed a drink. A pretty brunette, washing down the beer-spattered counter with a sponge, stopped what she was doing and asked what I wanted as I approached the bar.
It was a friendly question, the sort she would have asked dozens of times that day, but to me, it felt like an accusation. What do you want? What are you doing here? I didn’t even know the answer to that one myself.
I asked for a vodka tonic, my hand shaking as I handed over a ten-pound note. There was a bank of tables underneath the window and I crossed the room to take a seat at the one with the clearest view of Donna’s house. It was the same table, the same stakeout point as the previous week and as I sat down, I could clearly remember doing the same thing the previous Monday.
I remembered the back of Donna’s pink coat going into the house, the dark blot of Martin’s arm in the small of her back as he ushered her in.
I could picture a shadow at the window, Donna’s slender silhouette closing the shutters, flat lines of golden light illuminating the slim spaces between the slats.
The house had seemed so imposing and still that night, but today as I watched, it looked busy and violated. I could see the scene-of-crime officers in their stark white forensics suits, the cheap-suited detectives, and a gaggle of photographers and reporters. I could see the television vans, the police dog vehicles and the rubberneckers, all being told to keep their distance by an officer barely out of Hendon. I couldn’t see any blue-and-white crime scene tape, but it struck me that it was like watching a cop drama with the sound turned off. I’d seen enough of those shows to speculate what was going on inside, SOCO officers on their hands and knees, scouring the floors and carpets for blood, saliva and fibres. There’d be tweezers and evidence bags, areas combed for fingerprints and skin cells as they started to piece together what had happened to Donna Joy. And the scene in front of me told me they didn’t think she was missing. They thought she was dead.
I took my phone out of my bag and looked at it. Clicking on the Messages icon, I scrolled through the ones from Martin. Texts about dinner and arrangements to meet. Morning-after texts, intimate texts. Texts that said things we sometimes couldn’t say to one another in person.
I want to taste your cunt.
Martin had told me to get rid of them all. But I couldn’t. I didn’t want to wipe away our history. I didn’t want to pretend we hadn’t existed.
I closed my eyes to compose myself, to think methodically, logically, like I did when I pored over my case files. If I got back to my flat at around two in the morning, I was probably in the pub until closing time. I imagined a timeline for what went on inside the house that evening. Did Martin and Donna have sex immediately? Did they close the door and start fucking against the wall, happy, heady and oblivious to anything, everything, especially the fact that I was watching them? More fragments of the evening started coming back to me. There was a delay between their entrance into the house and Donna closing the shutters. That suggested no scenes of passion in the hall – not like the night I had first gone back to Martin’s loft, I thought, with a short-lived stab of victory.
No, this would have been a slower, more subtle seduction. I imagined Donna opening a bottle of wine, sitting on the sofa and kicking off her shoes as they talked and laughed about old times and people they had in common.
Perhaps she had got up to refill their glasses and he had followed her. I imagined them in the kitchen, a show-home space with a rack for the claret and a cabinet for her cut-glass stemware. I pictured her choosing the wine, her long artistic fingers stroking the bottles suggestively, at which point Martin would have acted on the impulse they had both been feeling all evening. Perhaps he kissed her on the back of the neck, and pushed up her dress.
The wine would have been forgotten by now. Let’s go to bed, she’d have whispered and he’d have picked her up, light as a feather, and carried her to the master bedroom, their room, a place where they’d have made love hundreds of times before. Then and now.
Martin said he left her house at 1 a.m., but I didn’t remember any of that. I was probably on my way back to Islington by then. I didn’t remember anything beyond the shutters closing and the soft lights taunting me.
I glanced across at the barmaid, wondering whether to ask her if she’d been on duty that night. Did the staff have to kick out a lovelorn dribbling drunk and find her a taxi? Had I been an angry, vocal drunk, or did I sit and seethe silently by the window?
I wanted to know if anyone at the pub remembered me, but suddenly I was too afraid to find out.
My breath was quickening again and I felt helpless to stop it. Anxiety began to suffocate me, emotions were white-water rafting around my body, a thrill ride I was unable to get off.
‘Want another one?
The barmaid was standing next to me, clearing my empty glass from the table.
For a moment I couldn’t speak and she put a gentle hand on my shoulder.
‘Are you all right, love?’ she asked and her voice seemed to guide me back to reality.
‘Yes. Just feeling a bit dizzy,’ I nodded.
‘I’ll bring some water over,’ she replied. ‘The kitchen’s stopped serving, but we’ve got crisps behind the bar if you think that’ll help. It’s probably your sugar levels.’
I watched her fill a jug from a tap behind the bar and she brought it to the table.
‘You watching the action out there?’ she asked, handing me a clean glass.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked as innocently as I could.
‘It’s that lady that went missing. We’ve had the reporters in and out of here all day.’
‘The banker’s wife? I read about that. She lives on this street?’
The barmaid nodded. ‘I used to see her around. Beautiful woman, like a model. I hope she’s all right.’
I was grateful for the water but not her observation about the way Donna looked, which made me feel small and unremarkable.
I gulped back the water and when I’d drained the glass, I knew that I’d seen enough, knew that no greater clarity on the events of last Monday night would come to me, and that I should go home.
But as I watched a cadaver dog come out of Donna’s house, I also knew that I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing. I’d never been a wallflower, always hated playing the victim. Pure grit had taken me from our terraced house in Accrington to Charles Napier and Vivienne McKenzie’s upper-middle class, white-collar world, and I couldn’t sit back and let those people across the road – the police, the forensics team, the media – turn the screws on Martin. I had to be there for him, I had to help him. Because one glance at Donna’s house was enough to tell me that all those people trying to find her were pointing the finger and blaming Martin. I had to help him and I had to start that moment.
I picked up my phone, hoping to see a message from him. Some reassurance that he’d only been asked a few perfunctory questions before being allowed to go home.
But there was nothing, no missed calls or unread texts. So instead of putting my phone away, I sent a message to Phil Robertson, asking him to come and meet me as quickly as possible.
Phil only lived in Battersea, so within twenty minutes I saw him pull up on his bike outside the pub.
‘That was quick,’ I said, giving him a wave.
‘They don’t call my neck of the woods Little Chelsea for nothing,’ he grinned as he pulled up a chair. We both knew that Phil’s flat was a world away from this pocket of SW3. I’d never been to his house, but I could imagine it. A rented two-bedder, he’d complained on many occasions that he wasn’t even the tenant, he was the lodger, the consequence of a messy divorce that had seen his unfaithful wife stay in the family home with their six-year-old daughter, while he was forced to pay £700 a month to a chef called Sean to sublet a double room behind Queenstown Road station.
‘I thought we were meeting for coffee, but I’m guessing this is a stakeout,’ he said, raising an eyebrow.
‘I thought I’d come over to see what’s going on,’ I told him, feeling suddenly relieved that I had a partner in crime.
Phil got a beer, I asked for pint of lemonade and I told him that I had seen Martin earlier that day and that he was at the police station for further questioning.
Phil just sat and listened and took slow sips of his Stella.
‘We need to help him, Phil,’ I said feeling fortified by his presence, expecting Phil the divorcee, not just Phil the investigator to jump on board with my idea. But he sat back in his chair unmoved by my appeal.
‘I know you’re a brilliant lawyer, Fran, but you’re Martin Joy’s divorce lawyer and this has got to be his criminal team’s job now.’
His words were like a personal affront. I couldn’t believe he’d be so pedestrian.
‘But we have a head start on them,’ I said, hearing the panic in my voice. ‘I don’t know his solicitor Matthew Clarkson at all, but for all we know they might not be even thinking in terms of doing their own investigation. And even if they are, we started a week ago.’
I had a notebook in my bag – Martin’s bag – and I put it on the table, opening my ink pen with a satisfying pop.
I liked to write things down. It helped me work things out and clarify my thoughts.
‘When we met the other day, you said that you thought Donna Joy was seeing someone. That there’d been mini-breaks, and several nights when she didn’t come home. You said you thought she was seeing her husband, but what if it was someone else?’
‘Someone other than Martin Joy?’
‘It’s possible,’ I said, forcing myself to remain emotionally unattached. ‘She was separated. In her eyes, she was young, free and single. She was an attractive woman …’ I stopped short of saying beautiful. ‘She would have had admirers. Lots of them.’
‘It makes sense,’ said Phil, nodding.
‘You should look into it.’
Phil peered at me over the rim of his glass and frowned. ‘Has the client authorized it? Dave Gilbert didn’t want me to chase down the mini-breaks …’
‘That was Martin’s divorce. It was just intel-gathering for negotiations on the financial settlement. This is different,’ I said, letting my words hang heavily between us.
‘So Martin wants us to look into it,’ he replied slowly.
‘I’ll speak to him later, but he wants us to help in any way we can.’
Phil looked as if he was about to shake his head, but finally he shrugged.
‘Just make sure you let his criminal solicitor know what we’re up to. I don’t want to go treading on anyone’s toes, all right?’
‘Of course,’ I replied, standing up to go to the loo.
In the cool, dark bathroom, I felt better already. It was good coming here, I decided. It had been a good idea to meet Phil. Although I couldn’t remember any more details about what I saw the night that Donna and Martin met for dinner, I felt as if I had taken a step away from the edge of the chasm. I felt more empowered and finally able to see a way through the darkness.
I placed my hands on either side of the cold enamel sink, then turned on the tap to splash some water on my face. As I looked up into the mirror I could see thin trails of mascara drip from the corners of my eyes, dark and soulful like Pierrot’s tears. I wiped it again with the corner of a tissue, reapplied my red lipstick and felt ready to step outside again. I felt back in control, my body surging with emotion and excitement, ideas coming thick and fast about what we could do.
My stomach rumbled and I realized I was hungry. I didn’t want to stay in the pub any longer, and wondered if Phil would come for dinner with me somewhere on the King’s Road.
I ascended from the basement bathroom, and as I approached our table I noticed that Phil was reading a newspaper, a copy of today’s Evening Standard.
‘Have you seen this?’ said Phil, glancing up. His expression was serious and I was immediately on guard.
I sat down and he turned the paper so that I could see it.
‘Police have released an e-fit of someone they’d like to talk to,’ he said, pointing at the newsprint.
It took a second to register the significance of the picture, but when I did, I felt a wave of panic so strong it almost knocked me off my seat.
‘I suppose it’s good for Martin,’ said Phil, finishing off his beer. ‘At least it means they’re open-minded, considering that the husband might not be the doer – you know, if anything has happened to Donna Joy.’
I was only half listening, my eyes speed-reading the story that Phil had given me. The news-story that revealed that police would urgently like to speak to a thirty-something woman who was asking about Donna Joy’s whereabouts on the evening of her disappearance. A woman with brown hair, wearing a black coat and a green scarf, who had been at Donna’s studio around seven o’clock. My eyes flickered to the e-fit – the narrow, distrustful eyes, the almost comically rounded nose, and I was almost offended that it was not a very accurate or flattering likeness of me.