Part 1
April
Chapter One
Mel
Success is an aphrodisiac. Mel pulled out her phone and called Paul’s work number. ‘Another triumph.’
‘I’ll read that as another criminal on the streets. So much for legal ethics. Where are you?’
‘Isleworth. On my way to the tube. I don’t need to go into chambers.’
‘The thing is, Mel, I can’t really get away.’ It was as if he had slammed a door in her face. ‘What about tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘I could grab a couple of hours.’
‘Jacob’s back. Plus, I’m in Northampton all day.’
‘Sounds like we’ll… listen, I need to shoot. Three o’clock seminar. Mel? You there?’
‘Traffic noise. It’s difficult to hear.’
‘I’ll call you later.’
She slipped the phone into the side pocket of her bag and headed northwards past school playing fields and dull suburban houses towards the Great West Road. The day was grey, dry, and windless, neither warm nor cold, the sun no more than a faint glimmer through clouds. Disappointment would subside. How could she expect Paul to adapt his schedule without warning on a Tuesday afternoon in term time? Ringing him had been a spur of the moment thing, a longing to share the thrill of victory. She wasn’t one of those women who fell to pieces at their lover’s absence.
As she fell into the comforting rhythm of the walk, her whirling mind slowed. The phone call had been a mistake. She usually waited for him to contact her.
The houses between the Crown Court and the tube were mostly bow-fronted semis with clipped hedges and low walls. She could imagine Paul in such a house, though his would be bigger, glassier, with kitchen and loft extensions. Of course, she would never see the family home which he and Caro had bought soon after the dinner party seventeen years ago where Mel and Paul had met for the first time.
Mel was still with Claude then and they were planning their own family home, though that dream was to crumble a few years later. There were two other couples at the party, but their names or faces had become lost in time. Even Caro had become a blur, though Mel still recalled her gentle, pale blue eyes and flustered manner as she struggled with the burnt Osso Buco in between sprints up and down the stairs trying to get the children to sleep.
In the large kitchen the rest of them had speared the charred meat, drank a lot of red wine and argued. Mel couldn’t remember what they’d argued about, only that she had felt outnumbered, and unsupported by Claude. She had sensed Paul watching her and had never forgotten the expression on his face, the power of his deep blue eyes as he turned to her in agreement and said, ‘You are not alone.’
Three years ago, Claude long gone, she had run into Paul in the Temple. He told her he often used the short cut from Waterloo to his office at the University of North London where he worked. Walking through a well-tended garden was much pleasanter than struggling with crowds on the Strand. They went for a coffee. She talked. The pressures of work. Her need to hold her life together for her son. He listened. Afterwards, she wondered if she had talked too much. But, two days later he rang to say how much he had enjoyed seeing her again, inviting her for a drink. He didn’t mention Caro.
‘That sounds great,’ she said.
When she put the phone down her heart was beating hard. But she felt no guilt. Paul was what she needed at this point in her life. No one would know. No one would get hurt. Sometimes, when Jacob was staying with Claude, she and Paul would meet in Mel’s flat, though there was a niggling discomfort at his presence after they had made love, awkwardness over their cups of tea or glasses of wine. She wanted him, but not in this place. They were better off somewhere neutral. There was a sweet-sour detachment in their hotel encounters which enhanced their intensity. Paul would never move into her life to find fault with her slovenly habits and her moody teenage son.
The sun emerged from its sheet of cloud. When she started at the Bar, she little realised how much of her time would be spent tramping around London’s fringes, seeking out-of-the-way courts. The courts were fewer and larger now, the directions easier, thanks to mobile phones and Google maps. But she had enjoyed those backstreet expeditions, her battered Court Guide tucked into her rucksack, working out obscure bus routes or parking spots. Nowadays she used a wheelie bag, but that end-of-the-day feeling was unchanged, the mid-afternoon lull that preceded the next set of instructions.
At least the trains were frequent, and today she would be travelling against the rush hour with the luxury of nothing immediate to prepare, no one to report to, and a good thriller on her Kindle. Never mind Paul. She would do the right thing, hurry back to chambers, listen to other people’s war stories, talk rugby with Andy, her clerk. It was time she showed her face.
Coming out at Holborn tube an hour later, she cut through Lincoln’s Inn Fields, then across the Inn to the Temple. More than twenty years after she had first seen the place, it could still work its magic, particularly on a bright spring day after a successful afternoon in the Crown Court. Walking past the weathered brick, the arching fountain surrounded by neatly trimmed lawns, the pale tight buds of the lime trees, she breathed the scent of newly cut grass, the sense of renewal deep within the city’s turbulence. Whatever went wrong in her personal life, she had this.
Bridge Court Chambers was bustling with tenants coming in from court, picking up papers for the next day, solicitors accompanying clients for conferences. Mel swept through the clerks’ room, past the pigeonholes, which even in this day of electronic communication remained a focal point, shouted ‘Hi,’ to the clerks and bounded up the stone stairs to her room. It was cramped but light, with three desks. Two were piled high with other people’s papers, the third and best placed faced out across the Temple Gardens.
In these days of hot desking she could no longer regard it as her own, and it was currently occupied by a beautiful Asian woman. Her glossy hair was drawn back into a large clip, and so fine and symmetrical were her features, so perfect the hairline, that she had no need of the loose strands which most women, Mel included, used to soften the outlines of their faces. Alisha was staring intently into a laptop, flipping the pages in the thick Lever Arch file beside her. Mel viewed her with detached admiration. It would be easier to like Alisha if she had been prepared to let down her guard in private. Chambers gossip hinted at a difficult husband, a gambler. Alisha’s Hindu parents reportedly disapproved. Mel had learnt all this from her friend Georgie and felt a little piqued that she herself had not been chosen as a confidante.
‘Hello, stranger.’
‘Hi, Alisha.’
‘How d’you get on?’
‘Fine.’
What else could she say? In the last five days she had slain the prosecution witnesses, guided her client through his shaky evidence, rescued him from a powerful cross-examination and finally soared in her closing speech. She’d been at her best. Standing up in court she had been oblivious to the outside world, focusing only on the evidence she needed to handle, her own well-prepared tactics, the thrill of battle. The judge’s summing up had felt weighted towards the prosecution and the wait for the verdict was as ever, nerve-jangling. But against all odds, they had won. That her client was clearly guilty, and would no doubt go out and mug another innocent passer-by was something she preferred not to think about.