COPYRIGHT

Harper

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First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Collins Crime

Copyright © Elizabeth Woodcraft 2000

Elizabeth Woodcraft asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006514794

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780007476961

Version: 2016-02-29

DEDICATION

To Caroline

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

ONE: Wednesday Afternoon – Chambers

TWO: Thursday Morning – Highbury Corner

THREE: Thursday Afternoon – Chambers

FOUR: Friday – Edmonton

FIVE: Saturday Morning – Church Street

SIX: Saturday Evening – The Queen of Sheba

SEVEN: Sunday – Columbia Road

EIGHT: Monday Morning – Paperwork

NINE: Tuesday Morning – Stoke Newington Police Station

TEN: Tuesday Afternoon

ELEVEN: Tuesday Evening

TWELVE: Wednesday – Royal Courts of Justice

THIRTEEN: Wednesday Evening – Chambers

FOURTEEN: Thursday Afternoon

FIFTEEN: Late Thursday Evening – Finsbury Park

SIXTEEN: Thursday Night/Friday Morning

SEVENTEEN: Early Friday Morning

EIGHTEEN: Friday Lunchtime

NINETEEN: Friday Night

TWENTY: Saturday Morning

TWENTY-ONE: Sunday

TWENTY-TWO: Sunday Midday

TWENTY-THREE: Sunday Lunch

TWENTY-FOUR: Sunday Evening

TWENTY-FIVE: Sunday Night – The Caravan

TWENTY-SIX: Sunday Night

TWENTY-SEVEN: Monday

TWENTY-EIGHT: Monday Afternoon

TWENTY-NINE: Monday Evening

THIRTY: Later Monday Evening

THIRTY-ONE: Monday Night/Tuesday Morning

THIRTY-TWO: Tuesday Morning

THIRTY-THREE: Wednesday Lunchtime

THIRTY-FOUR: Wednesday Afternoon – Kay’s Office

THIRTY-FIVE: Wednesday Evening

THIRTY-SIX: Thursday Morning

THIRTY-SEVEN: Thursday Evening

THIRTY-EIGHT: Thursday Night

THIRTY-NINE: Late Thursday

FORTY: Friday Evening – The Club

KEEP READING

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

ONE
Wednesday Afternoon – Chambers

The phone on my desk rang. I licked my fingers, moved my cream cheese and tomato sandwich and picked up the receiver.

‘Frankie, I know you said you wanted to do paperwork tomorrow, but Davidson’s have just rung. Kay’s got a quick in-and-out job for tomorrow morning that she wants you to do. She’s faxing the papers through. It’s at Highbury Corner Mags.’

I groaned. A quick in-and-out at Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court was a contradiction in terms and Gavin, my clerk, knew that very well. Then again, if Kay Davidson wanted me in particular there might be something interesting in it.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Drunk and disorderly.’

‘Drunk and – Gavin! I’m meant to be doing those appeal papers in Morris. We’re nearly out of time.’

‘She said it was important.’

‘Oh, what, important that someone regularly in the Court of Appeal should return to the magistrates’ court?’

‘Someone regularly where?’

‘All right, someone who would like to be regularly in the Court of Appeal. Someone of nearly ten years call –’

‘Who is charming and eager to help out a clerk in distress …’ Gavin was playing the game in his gruff, cockney accent.

‘Someone who has been at the Bar for nine years, and who may well be charming and eager to help out a clerk in distress but who has, it should be remembered, forgotten most of the crime she ever knew – you are saying it is important that she should do this case?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Isn’t there anyone else?’ I wheedled. In the pause that followed I knew Gavin was pretending to look at the computer screen to see what everyone else in chambers was doing the next day. He liked Kay. If she had asked for me, he would make sure she got me.

‘No,’ he said. There’s no one else.’

‘All right, Gavin, I will do it. But if I’m not out of court by half past eleven you will seriously regret it.’

‘You say the sweetest things,’ he said. I replaced the receiver and picked up my cup of tea.

My phone rang again. I spilt tea on my sandwich as I answered it.

Gavin said cheerfully, ‘I’ve got Kay on the line, to have a word about tomorrow.’

‘OK.’ I pushed the briefs on my desk out of the way of some insistent drips of tea and looked for something to make notes on. I found a piece of paper that looked suspiciously as if it had been on my desk for some time. I read ‘FR ring Dr Henry’ and a number with a Brighton code, and promised myself I would do it as soon as I had spoken to Kay. Gavin put her through.

‘Frankie, I’m sorry about this case.’

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I thought, as I dabbed at the tea by the desk calendar.

‘It’s just that it’s an old client of yours.’ She paused. ‘It’s Saskia.’

‘Saskia! My God, Saskia.’

I hadn’t seen Saskia for at least five years. Tall, blonde, lovely Saskia. She had large grey eyes and a wide friendly smile with perfect teeth. I’d represented her on several occasions when she’d been arrested after demonstrations. We’d had some good results, mainly due to that charming smile. She made you think of full cream milk and welfare orange juice, as my mum would say. She was in fact more a child of the seventies and eighties, rebelling against the Conservative government.

‘What is Saskia doing being charged with drunk and disorderly? I would have thought a little marijuana was more her thing.’

‘I don’t know. She rang me from the police station. She sounded in quite a state.’

‘What time was she arrested?’ I began making notes.

‘Half past two this afternoon.’

‘Half past two! Where?’

‘Balls Pond Road. Outside the sofa factory.’

‘I can’t believe this. What was she doing in Islington? I thought she lived in Manchester now.’

‘I don’t know any more about that than you do. It was a very short phone call,’ Kay said. ‘The last I saw of her was at one of those women’s sixties evenings at Camden Town Hall. That was years ago.’

‘Do you mean THE women’s sixties evening, where you and I … ?’

‘Yes.’

I snorted. That must have been seven years ago, almost to the month. Kay and I had had our final, noisy, passionate argument at the back of the hall when she refused to dance to ‘Get Ready’ by the Temptations. She said you couldn’t dance to that beat, whereas anyone with half an ear for music … but don’t get me started. Kay and I hadn’t spoken to each other for nearly a year after that night, and since she was a criminal solicitor and I had stopped doing crime shortly after, we had rarely spoken since.

‘What’s in the brief then?’ I said professionally.

‘That’s about it, actually.’

‘And I assume this is a freebie.’ I tried not to sound calculating.

‘We’d never get Legal Aid for it.’ Did she breathe deeply before saying, ‘How about I take you out to supper to make up for it?’

‘When?’ I asked.

‘When you like.’ She was expansive. ‘How about tonight?’

Mentally I surveyed the contents of my fridge. Olives and semi-skimmed milk would test the powers of the best TV chef. I put majesty into my voice: ‘All right, where?’

‘What do you want to eat?’

‘Italian?’ I ventured.

‘There’s a good Korean restaurant near here.’

‘I said Italian.’

‘I know you did.’

I wondered who had stood her up. I could hear the olives calling me, pathetically, tragically. The milk, I knew, was sour.

‘Chinese?’ I was willing to compromise. I always had been. There was silence. ‘I don’t want to eat Korean,’ I complained. ‘The only thing I like are those flowers carved out of carrots and turnips, and you can’t eat those.’

She sniffed.

‘Think Italian,’ I continued. ‘Think of red wine and garlic and crusty bread and a cheerful companion. We can go to that place on Upper Street and you can drive me home after.’

‘I’ll see you there at seven.’ I didn’t like her resigned tone of voice. ‘I’ll bring your brief,’ she added.

‘And your happy face,’ I pleaded. I put the phone down and said, ‘Damn.’ I’d been so close to getting through a phone call with Kay without whingeing. I began dabbing Tipp-Ex over the tea stains on the instructions to prepare Mrs Morris’s notice of appeal.

I always forget where Gino’s is and I got off the bus at the wrong stop just as it began to rain. When I arrived at the restaurant I was very wet. And late. I was not cheerful.

As I opened the door, warmth, candlelight and the smell of garlic embraced me.

‘Buona sera, signora,’ Gino bustled up, his hair a new alarming shade of aubergine. ‘Comment allez-vous? Very very wet, I see. Table for … ?’

I looked round the room. Kay was late too.

‘Two.’

‘And some vino tinto, signora? Asseyez-vous.’ He put me next to the huge open fireplace.

‘Yes.’ I was puzzled. Kay was never late. I sat down, absently giving Gino my dripping coat. My long black jacket, bought expensively from Ede & Ravenscroft, suppliers of wigs and robes to the legal profession, was wet too. I took it off and hung it on the back of the chair. My trousers would have to stay where they were. It was my favourite court outfit, and I was pleased I was wearing it when Kay suggested going out. I always liked how I looked in it, slick but professional. Except that at the moment I looked slick like a wet rodent looks slick. And so much for my fabulous new haircut – my lowlights had slid into my highlights and they all looked just wet. In the back of the spoon I could see spikes of my long fringe sticking damply to my forehead.

Perhaps her car had broken down in the rain, although that was unlikely. She always had a new car; being a successful solicitor, it was a business car. I was still driving my L-reg Renault. Not that I’m bitter, but she wouldn’t have got where she is today without me. I was the one who sat up with her at nights testing her on criminal procedure and client/solicitor relations. Huh!

Perhaps she hadn’t come because she’d had a better offer. She had done that to me before, but not for seven years, and she was meant to be bringing me my brief. Kay would never be unprofessional in that way, she’d never leave me without a brief. Although, as she had said, there was nothing in the brief. It would be merely a piece of white paper with a pink ribbon round it. My instructions would be: ‘Counsel will do her best.’

The red wine came. I ordered some garlic bread. To hell with what it did to my stomach.

She didn’t come.

It was eight o’clock. I didn’t have my mobile with me – I wondered whether I’d left it plugged into the charger – so Gino let me use the phone on the bar and I rang her office. The answerphone wasn’t on. I thought about ringing my flat to pick up my messages but I couldn’t remember my secret code number. I rang Kay’s home, she still lived in the small Victorian house in Stamford Hill which we had shared during our relationship, and left a concerned and only slightly irritated message. I ordered spaghetti à l’amatriciana and my clothes and my hair began to dry. The house red which Gino had poured solicitously into a large glass was soft and full and tasted almost as if I was in Italy. And as I sat, steaming gently by the fire, waiting for my pasta, I thought nostalgically back to me and Kay on our last holiday in a tent in Tuscany.

I had just passed my final exams – yes, OK, she had done her bit and had tested me on revenue and trusts – and she had just been taken on by a law centre in North London. We were both very pleased with ourselves and bursting with success and ambition. The weather in Tuscany was glorious and we visited wonderful cities and ate fabulous food. Then, on our last night, as we walked back to the tent after a silent meal in a small restaurant, she told me our relationship was over. As I stumbled along the grass verge trying to take in what she was saying, she told me she wanted her freedom. We both needed different things, she said, at this new time in our lives. We had had five good years and now we should move on. I assumed that she’d met someone she fancied at her interview.

Of course, the trouble with being on holiday in a tent is that you can’t put physical distance between you. We crept into our individual sleeping bags, but by the first light of day we were in each other’s arms for warmth. By the time we got to the airport we had reconciled, and we bought joint olive oil and sun-dried tomatoes in the duty-free shop. The relationship had limped along for another eighteen months until the night of the women’s sixties do when she had gone home with a woman who probably thought ‘Green Onions’ was something you threw out of your kitchen cupboard.

Gino brought me my pasta. ‘Everything OK, signora?’ he asked, concern filling his soft, round face.

I probably would have burst into tears but I took a mouthful of my food and nearly choked on the chilli.

‘Everything’s fine, great,’ I said, breathing in.

I drank almost the whole bottle of wine. Kay had still not appeared and I was worried.

I asked Gino if he could bring the bill and check again whether anyone had rung me. He went to confer with the chef and brought over my damp coat and the bill with a sad shake of his head.

It was still raining and cars hissed by me as I walked back to the tube. I felt peculiar and it wasn’t the effects of the alcohol or the mix of red wine, garlic bread and green salad. Upper Street was almost deserted and as I approached Highbury Corner, with the little alleyways leading off and the dark looming pub on the corner, the strangeness increased so that if anyone had asked me I would have said that I thought I was being followed. Just by the bus stops someone behind me coughed, but when I turned round there was no one there.

A taxi was passing on the other side of the street. I shouted at it, gesticulating, and narrowly avoided being crushed by a number 19 bus as I ran across the road.

The driver had to go some way in the wrong direction before he could turn off for Stoke Newington and I was pleased. When we got to the house I asked him to wait until I’d got inside the front door before he drove off.

I walked into my ground-floor flat and locked the door behind me. The timer had already switched on the lamp in the living room, filling the room with a pale light. Everything looked normal. The flashing red light of my answering machine on the floor, the Guardian draped over the couch where I had left it last night and a pile of papers marked ‘Return to solicitors NOW’ waiting patiently on the old comfy armchair. A used wine glass, mine, and a half-drunk cup of tea, also mine, sat together on the dark wood coffee table, next to the remote control for the TV. Everything was normal.

I played my messages. My mum, laughing, leaving me her name and number like the machine had asked her to, just saying hello. Dr Henry’s secretary primly asking me to ring the doctor at my earliest convenience. And then Kay. Her voice was strained.

‘Frankie, it’s me. It’s, em, a quarter to seven. I … I just went out of the office to get some cigarettes and when I got back the place had been burgled. I’ve rung the police. I can’t remember the name of the restaurant to ring you there. I’m sorry I shan’t make it. Hope you get this in time. I’ll … I’ll speak to you.’

There was a beep and then it was Kay again, sounding more relaxed. ‘You’re still not home. Don’t you ever take your mobile with you?’

I silently answered an outraged ‘sometimes’ as I noticed my phone in its smart black jacket sticking up sadly between the two cushions of the sofa.

‘I hope you’re having something nice to eat,’ the message went on, ‘and you haven’t given yourself indigestion. It’s nine o’clock. The police took ages. I had to buy some more cigarettes. Ring me when you get in.’

And finally Lena. Lena was my Best Friend.

‘Hi, Fran. Just to remind you about tomorrow evening. The film starts at six forty. The reviews say it’s absolutely fab. Ring me soon. Night.’

I really wanted to ring Lena, but I knew I ought to ring Kay because she had my brief.

She answered the phone immediately.

‘They made such a mess of it,’ she said. ‘All my files everywhere. But no one else’s. And they didn’t even take any money. They scratched the cash box but didn’t open it, or even take it, which they could have done.’

‘Perhaps they were baby burglars and didn’t know what to do. Or perhaps it was an unhappy client who got community service when he’d really wanted forty days in clink.’

‘That’s what the police said, that it might have been a client who’d got a bad result, but there’s no one I can think of.’

‘What about my brief?’ I interrupted her train of thought.

‘Oh, I’m sorry … Can you make yourself a back sheet?’

‘I suppose so. What name is Saskia using now? And what is she pleading?’

‘Susan Baker. I think it’s a straight guilty plea, unless she tells you something that makes you think you should fight it.’

‘Are you all right? Do you want me to come over?’

‘I’m fine, fine.’

‘OK, I’ll ring you tomorrow when I’ve finished.’

I rang Lena.

‘Hiya,’ she said, brightly. ‘How are you?’

I told her about my evening. Despite being in a traumatic relationship, which was more than I was, Lena’s always good for a bit of advice, the telephone equivalent of a cup of Horlicks. Not that I drink Horlicks. But then, she regularly gives me advice that I ignore.

‘Do you think she really was burgled?’ Lena asked. ‘You don’t think she was … required elsewhere?’

‘No, no. She was burgled, you could tell from her voice. Anyway, how are you? Is the gorgeous Sophie accompanying us to the Screen on the Green tomorrow?’

‘She might.’ Lena sounded doubtful. ‘We’re not seeing quite so much of each other at the moment.’

‘Oh dear,’ I clucked.

Our conversation continued along the old comforting lines. I forgot about Dr Henry and went to bed, clicking on a Motown cassette and drifting away as the Four Tops implored their woman to get out of their life and let them sleep at night.

TWO
Thursday Morning – Highbury Corner

Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court was full of cigarette smoke and depressed young men. Susan Baker was listed as appearing in Court 5 and I made myself known to the usher, smiling so that we would be called on early. Saskia herself was in custody and I made my way down the concrete stairs to the cells to see the jailer.

‘Have you got Miss Baker here?’

‘Indeed we do, madam,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Just along there, past matron’s room on your right.’

I made my way along the dark corridor, past solid, locked cell doors, breathing in the smell of disinfectant on concrete. A woman asked me for a light. I could see her lips through the open wicket. I didn’t have any matches. Each door had a small blackboard beside it. I stopped by the board with the word BAKER chalked in clumsy capitals. I peered through the hatch.

‘Saskia?’ I asked into the gloom of the tiny cell.

‘Frankie!’ Saskia crept up to the door. Her face was a mess. Not so much peaches and cream as pork and beans.

‘What has happened to you?’ I looked at her in alarm.

‘I’ll tell you later,’ she said. ‘I’m going to get out, aren’t I? Have you got your car here? Oh, Frankie, get me out.’ She was crying.

‘OK. First of all, how did you come to be charged with drunk and disorderly? Were you?’

‘No. But I’ll have to say yes, won’t I? Yes, say I was, say I was. Because I don’t want to plead not guilty, I just want to get out. I will get out, won’t I?’

‘Yes, you will, whether you plead guilty or not guilty. If you plead guilty today you’ll get out, with a fine probably. But you could fight it. They’d have to give you bail unless there’s any serious reason why they shouldn’t. Are you living in London now?’

‘Yes … well, I was. Yes, yes, I am.’

‘Saskia, are you OK? Have you seen a doctor?’

‘What? In here? You’re joking. Look, Frankie, I’m just going to plead guilty to this. OK, I was on Balls Pond Road and I was singing, rather loudly. Things have been a bit heavy recently. Then the cops came and we had a bit of a discussion about one thing and another. The only thing of any relevance was that they said I was singing flat. I knew I wasn’t and the lamp-post agreed with me. And I asked lots of people in the street what they thought. I don’t think they like music in Balls Pond Road.’ This is just what she used to be like in those demonstration cases. Talking to lamp-posts! I could imagine how they would feel about that in Balls Pond Road. It was a busy road with huge lorries pounding along day and night, but it couldn’t make up its mind whether it was a select residential area, with its large houses converted into expensive apartments, or a lively friendly place with high-rise local authority flats. Either way they would think she was drunk.

‘Well,’ I said, trying to find the right tone, ‘was it right-on music? Did it have Important words?’

I remembered her singing in court one day, years before, about the purpose behind one of the direct actions she and her mates had done outside a porn cinema. The song had about fourteen verses, but the magistrates were so shocked they listened to every line. Perhaps singing did mean she got her message across. I sighed. I felt old and cynical.

Now she looked at me disapprovingly, as if she knew I still ate meat and that I did not take my bottles to the bottle bank.

‘None of us can claim our music is important. Only history will tell whether it was.’

‘All right, what was it about?’

‘That, Frankie, can only be told over a cup of coffee. You used to make lovely coffee. Are you still in the flat with the Danish pastry shop across the road? Mmm, warm cherry.’ Saskia was obviously beginning to perk up, which I knew had nothing to do with my presence or any sense of confidence she had in my courtroom skills. It was because we were having something like a political argument.

‘Saskia, were you drunk?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. It was sunny and I was drunk on the crisp autumn air.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Saskia, shut up for a minute,’ I snapped, momentarily losing my professional veneer.

She smiled at me, a shadow of her normal smile, tinned pineapple and Dream Topping, but devastating just the same.

‘Do you consider that your behaviour was disorderly?’

‘I don’t know. What do you think?’

‘I think the magistrates might.’

‘I’m pleading guilty, Frankie. I want to get out.’ She was desperate again. I was surprised. This woman had gone in and out of prison very regularly at the height of the demonstrations. She never agreed to be bound over to keep the peace, she was always sent to jail.

‘OK.’ She knew the score. I would follow her instructions.

It was five to ten. I went back upstairs and spoke to the man representing the Crown Prosecution Service, who looked about fourteen. He had a large pile of buff-coloured files in front of him and was trying to talk to six barristers at once. I pushed myself to the front, hissing, ‘I’m a quickie, I’m a quickie,’ and got him to tell me what evidence the police were intending to give. Extraordinarily, their story was almost identical to my client’s, except that they said she asked a Belisha Beacon whether she was singing flat. ‘Lamp-post? Street furniture?’ I suggested hopefully. We settled on ‘inanimate object’ and I told him we would be pleading guilty. He seemed relieved.

The usher was bustling importantly at the back of the court, her black gown occasionally revealing flashes of a shocking pink dress. I pointed to the name of Baker on the list attached to her clipboard and told her that we were a five-minute job and we could be in and out before she had time to turn round. I thought I was being irresistible.

However it wasn’t until twenty-five past eleven that I leapt to my feet as Saskia was escorted into the dock. ‘I represent Miss Baker this morning, madam.’

They weren’t used to drunks looking like Saskia or being represented. The charge was put to Saskia, she pleaded guilty and I had hardly finished repeating my name for the third time for the benefit of the very old magistrate on the left when the chairwoman said, ‘Miss Richmond, we were thinking of a twenty pound fine and ten pounds costs or one day. Do you wish to say anything?’

‘No, madam.’

‘You may stand down, Miss Butcher.’

‘Baker,’ I corrected.

‘Yes.’

By being in custody overnight Saskia had served her one day in prison so she wouldn’t have to pay the fine. She knew that and grinned at me as she walked out.

I bowed to the bench, picked up my Guardian and slid along the seat. A shifty-looking man in his mid thirties, wearing a shapeless brown jacket with the collar up, and holding a spiral notebook, approached me at the back of the courtroom.

‘Miss Eh … ?’

‘Yes?’ I said pleasantly. I noticed that he bit his nails.

‘Your client there, isn’t she also known as Saskia Baron?’

‘You’d better ask her.’

‘And how do you spell your name, Miss Eh … ?’

‘Correctly,’ I said primly, and walked to the door of the court as he slid over to speak to the officer in the case. It was eleven thirty exactly.

Saskia appeared from the lavatory and we walked out to my car, which was parked in a side turning off Holloway Road. There was five minutes left on the meter.

‘Did that journalist speak to you?’ I asked her as she got into the car.

‘What journalist?’ she asked, clicking her seat belt into place.

‘In the courtroom,’ I said as I slowly turned the car in the narrow street where I had parked. ‘He had pock-marked skin and was wearing brown shoes. There he is –’ I watched him cross the road. ‘Why’s he leaving at this time? He can’t have finished work, it’s too early. And I doubt your case is the scoop of the day, it’s hardly frontpage news.’

As I waited for a large lorry to squeeze past me, I saw the man get into the passenger seat of a dark saloon car.

‘Where?’ Saskia twisted in her seat, as the car moved away in the opposite direction. ‘Where?’ Her voice was loud and anxious.

‘He’s gone,’ I said, irritated that she hadn’t seen him, concerned by her reaction. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked her. I didn’t tell her he’d had a driver.

Saskia sat with her head back and her eyes closed, as if savouring her freedom. As we turned into Holloway Road I asked, ‘Do you want to nip in and see Kay? Her office is just down here. You could have a wash and brush up, then we could go somewhere nice for coffee. There are some good places on Church Street.’

Saskia pulled down the sun visor and looked at her face in the mirror. ‘Oh my God, look at me,’ she said mournfully, touching her face with her fingertips. ‘My cheek, my eye – Frankie, I can’t go out in public looking like this. Can we just go to your place? Would that be OK? I can’t face seeing anyone. Perhaps I could I have a bath or something …’

I looked at my watch. I could hear the appeal papers in Morris calling me. Rapidly I reorganised my timetable. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘OK.’ We drove past Kay’s office and I touched her arm gently. ‘You don’t look that bad.’

She smiled at me gratefully. ‘You know, you haven’t changed a bit,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘You’re still … well, smart and crisp, all professional in your black clothes,’ she said. ‘I like your hair, is it different?’

‘No.’ I looked at myself quickly in the rear-view mirror. ‘It’s always been like this.’ It was short at the back and long at the front. ‘I’ve just had some blonde streaks put in, to highlight the brown or something.’ I flicked my fringe back.

‘Well, it’s lovely to see you,’ she said. ‘It’s like coming home.’

At my flat I ran a bath in my small white bathroom and found some green herbal essence which filled the room with something vaguely related to the smell of fields and trees as I poured it under the running tap. I put out two giant blue towels and an old clean shirt of mine and left her to it. In the kitchen I made coffee and took some apple strudel out of the freezer to put into the microwave on Saskia’s reappearance.

I rang chambers and told Gavin I’d be in later.

‘You’ve got a couple of messages,’ he said. ‘Can you please ring Dr Henry. And someone called Hayman or Wayman rang – I can’t read this, Jenna wrote it, she’s a lovely girl, but her handwriting’s shocking – anyway, I think it says it’s not urgent and they’ll ring back.’

‘Who is Dr Henry?’ I asked.

‘I thought you knew,’ he said. ‘She said he’d ring you at home, he has your number.’

‘Who did?’

‘The secretary. I thought it was personal.’ He gave me Dr Henry’s number again, reminded me of my appeal papers and rang off.

I dialled the number. ‘Dr Henry’s surgery,’ an efficient female voice said.

‘Is Dr Henry there?’ I could hear Saskia singing something folky in the bath.

‘I am afraid Dr Henry is in consultation at this moment. Could I ask you to call back later?’

‘Well, no,’ I said. ‘Dr Henry appears to be trying to contact me.’

‘What is this concerning?’ The thin voice was guarded.

‘I have no idea. My name is Frances Richmond.’

‘Oh, Miss Richmond,’ her tone was concerned, caring, ‘I’m afraid Dr Henry is so busy right now, but I’ll say that you called. I know that the doctor is very anxious to speak with you.’

I thanked her and put the phone down as Saskia came in, smelling sweet and looking much better than I ever did in my grey denim shirt. Her blonde hair stood up in wet spikes.

‘Frankie, that was a life-saver. Mmm, something smells wonderful.’ She sat down at the kitchen table as I poured coffee into two cups. The autumn sun cut through the French doors. Outside two late pink roses swayed in the wind. Saskia looked like a battered angel as her hair dried into soft pale layers.

The microwave pinged and I took out the strudel. I cut slices and put them on my blue and yellow Italian plates. ‘Now,’ I said, pulling out a chair, ‘we are going to do some serious talking.’

She nibbled her strudel.

‘First of all,’ I began, ‘where do those bruises come from?’

She picked up her cup and ran her fingers across the blue-painted rim. She took a mouthful of coffee. ‘Heaven.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well …’

The phone rang in the living room.

‘Frankie! You’re in! I was going to leave a message on your machine.’

‘Lena, I’m a bit busy at the moment. Can I call you back?’

‘Well, actually, sweetie, you can’t – that’s what I’m ringing about. I’m just off for three days to Paris.’

‘Paris!’ I turned to raise my eyebrows at Saskia, to see her disappearing into the hall.

‘Saskia!’ I called and heard the front door click.

‘Frankie? Frankie?’

‘Look, Lena, I’ve got to go.’

‘I’m ringing just to say I’m going to Paris with Sophie.’

‘With Sophie? My God. I thought you two weren’t talking to each other.’ I stretched the cord of the phone as far as I could and looked out of the large bay window. I banged on the glass as I saw Saskia heading towards Stoke Newington High Street.

‘She rang last night after I spoke to you and said she was exhausted and –’

‘Lena, I’ve got to go.’

‘You’re not upset, are you?’

‘No, no, have a lovely time, send me a postcard. Bye bye.’

‘It means I shan’t be able to make the film.’

‘No problem. Bye.’

‘OK. Bye. I’m sorry. Bye.’

I slammed down the phone and ran out of the house. At the corner of the road there was no sign of Saskia but a 149 bus was sailing majestically towards Dalston. ‘Shit,’ I said and turned back to the flat. ‘Shit,’ I said again as I realised I was locked out.

THREE
Thursday Afternoon – Chambers

‘You look a bit cold, Frankie,’ Gavin said, as I walked into chambers an hour later. ‘You should have come out in a coat.’

‘I should have come out with my handbag, keys and wallet and then I wouldn’t have had to walk most of the way and been frozen half to death,’ I said stiffly. I had found a pound in my jacket pocket but I’d had to get off the bus at Liverpool Street. I had come into chambers because I kept a spare set of house keys in the drawer of my desk. I know most people have a good friend or neighbour who looks after a spare set of keys for moments such as this, but Lena lived in Finsbury Park, which was too far away, and I didn’t know my neighbours very well.

There had been attempts, by my neighbours, when I first moved in to the flat. The woman who lived in the top flat invited me to a make-up party. It was shortly after my split with Kay, and I thought I could buy my way back to attractiveness and social success through cosmetic products. As it turned out, I spent the evening feeling bleak and out of place and signed a cheque for £27.50 for two small bottles of something green for my complexion. I hadn’t spoken to them since.

I felt I could do with something green for my complexion now, particularly my nose, which I knew was red and glowing.

I thought that was the reason for Gavin’s stunned look. ‘I didn’t know you were coming in, so Marcus is having a con in your office.’ He was apologetic. ‘He’s, eh, he’s only just gone in.’

I groaned. Marcus was famous for his two-hour conferences with clients.

‘Think of it this way,’ Gavin said, ‘he’s a sad bloke and it’s the only social life he’s got.’ Marcus was a self-made upper class man. He had changed his voice, his education and his background to become more aristocratic than any of them.

‘Think of it this way: I’m a sad woman,’ I said, thinking of the now cold cup of coffee and the congealing slice of apple strudel waiting to be eaten in my kitchen. ‘I am not Marcus’s social secretary. This means I can’t even get on with my appeal papers.’

I slumped on to a chair.

‘Jenna’s just popped out to pick up some books from the High Court,’ Gavin said. Jenna was the newest recruit in the clerks’ room, our fourth junior clerk. ‘So you can sit there for a moment.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. There was a constant battle in the clerks’ room between the clerks trying to retain their territory and barristers wanting to flop down in the secure and busy atmosphere of the centre of chambers.

‘I think Simon wanted to speak to you, actually.’ Gavin picked up the phone. ‘Simon, Frankie’s in. Didn’t you say you wanted a word? She looks as if she needs lunch … He’s coming right down,’ he said to me.

‘Gavin!’

My life was an open book to the clerks, but Gavin still persisted in trying to get me off with men.

‘I know you’re, you know, That Way,’ Gavin had said to me in the pub one evening, ‘but I also see you as a very open-minded person.’ He had been drunk. ‘Now Simon, he’s just the type of man you could do with.’

‘Does he dust? Does he clean? Would he have my dinner on the table when I got in?’

Gavin blinked at me.

‘Well then, what’s the point?’ I said.

‘No no, he’s, he’s, well, you’re a bit of a thinker, aren’t you? And Simon isn’t. What, for you, could be more perfect? A lot of ladies do find him good looking, you know.’ Gavin had been looking at too many computer screens. ‘Plus, he’s loaded.’

Thinking of the pots of money I knew Simon had inherited only recently after the death of a doting grandmother, his regular private income and his part share in a farm, when he walked into the clerks’ room, I said, ‘All right, Simon, you can take me out for lunch.’ I looked at his wide smile and his good teeth. He really was quite good looking in an old-fashioned way. If he paid more attention to his choice of tie, I thought, he’d be quite a catch for someone.

We went to the Café Rouge in Fetter Lane. As soon as we sat down Simon ordered a bottle of Bourgueuil.

‘Is that just for you, or are we sharing it?’ I asked as the waitress walked away.

‘It’s for both of us,’ Simon said. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry, I should have asked you. You know about wine, don’t you?’

‘I’m not sure that’s the right answer, Simon. If I had been a man I assume, perhaps stupidly, that you would have asked me at least to agree to your choice.’

‘If you’d been a man like Marcus, who knows nothing about wine, I probably wouldn’t,’ he said irritatingly. ‘But I concede your point. I forgot about your knowledge of wine, because you are a woman.’

‘Well, thank you for that,’ I said.

‘Do you hate all men?’ Simon asked.

‘For God’s sake, Simon, what a stupid thing to say. I work with you, don’t I?’

The waiter came to ask if we were ready to order and we both asked for steak and chips, rare.

‘But it’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? Lesbians …’ I didn’t like to think where this conversation might be going. ‘Have you ever thought of starting your own set?’ Simon poured wine into my glass. ‘You could be head of the first women-only set.’

‘Are you trying to get rid of me?’ I asked.

‘Not at all. I like you being in chambers. It’s an idea, though, isn’t it?’

‘I’m not sure what the point would be. It couldn’t be all lesbians, there aren’t enough of us at the bar.’ I had thought before about the possibility of striking out into the strange territory of an all women’s set of chambers, with women clerks.

‘And so,’ Simon said carefully, ‘some of the barristers would have boyfriends or husbands, and they might have boy children.’

‘Exactly, you couldn’t keep men out.’ I tore a piece of bread in half, showering the table with flakes of crust. ‘You’d have male clients. Then there’d be the motorbike couriers, the postman, the window cleaner.’

The waiter placed our orders in front of us.

‘And I know you’d be the last to say this, Simon, but women barristers are not necessarily any better, whatever that means, than men. They’re not intrinsically more politically right on. Margaret Thatcher was a barrister. They’re not kinder or gentler – but you don’t want that in a barrister anyway.’ I stuffed chips into my mouth.

‘They usually smell nicer.’

‘Simon,’ I said. ‘Barristers are barristers. Rich, posh, privileged.’

‘Are you?’ he asked.

‘I’m trying to make a political point. I’m not, as it happens, as you can tell perfectly well from my vowel sounds. And I’m not rich … well, not particularly. Certainly not at the moment, anyway.’

‘This lunch is on me,’ Simon said with concern.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

We raised our glasses to each other. Simon said, ‘You don’t really think I’m trying to get rid of you, do you?’

‘No, Simon, I don’t.’

‘Because that would be absurd. Because, you know, I really like you.’ His cheeks began to glow. ‘And if there ever came a time when you thought you wanted to, you know, try … try again, try with a man … you could always turn to me.’

‘Thank you, but no.’

‘No strings attached, just to see, you know.’

‘Simon, give me a break.’

‘Just a bit of practice?’

‘Simon,’ I said, slowly swilling the contents of my glass, ‘if this were not expensive wine, I would pour it on your head now.’ I looked at his broad face and his eager blue eyes. ‘Just order two Armagnacs and we’ll forget you said that.’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Sorry. This is rather good wine, isn’t it? I assume neither of us is in court this afternoon.’

‘I’m not,’ I said, still trying to assert a sense of annoyance.

‘But if the system is so awful,’ Simon said, as we sat with large glasses of rich amber Armagnac, ‘isn’t it going to corrupt you?’ He gazed at me.

‘It might, but not the way you want it to, Simon. Don’t start that again.’

‘Well, let me cheer you up and tell you about my morning in front of His Honour Judge Swiffham till you regain your sense of justice and love for all humankind.’

‘A slight feeling of pity may be as good as you’re going to get,’ I said. ‘We’d better have some coffee.’

I ordered two espressos and Simon began his story. We were a few minutes in when I realised he was talking about the dreadful pornography case that he had been involved in for weeks, led by our head of chambers. Their client had been found guilty and had been sentenced this morning.

‘And just as the judge was about to pass sentence, our client leapt up and shouted, “Police corruption! Police corruption! I paid good money to keep out of court, and look at me now. How much are you supposed to pay?”’

‘How much are you supposed to pay?’

‘I don’t know.’ Simon grinned. ‘But our client had obviously not paid enough. I didn’t know anything about it, it hadn’t been part of our case. But from something my client mumbled later in the cells, he paid something in the area of five thousand pounds. Not that he had anything to pay for, of course. His was an entirely above-board art bookshop. It was all a horrible misunderstanding. But I have to say, some of the officers in the case arrived at court in very nice cars.’

‘I suppose that’s one of the perks of working in Soho.’

‘Yes. Although not all our shops – all right, so we had a string of them – were in Soho. One of them was in Camden.’

‘Why do you do cases like this?’

‘It’s the cab-rank rule, Frankie. If it comes in with my name on, in my area of work, I have to do it.’

‘Oh yes?’ I said, thinking of barristers who return cases because there’s not enough money on the brief.

‘I don’t have your politics,’ he said. ‘But, anyway, I thought you did this kind of work when you did crime.’

‘I represented prostitutes, not the jerks who live off them. Although I did once represent a woman charged with running a brothel. When she got off, she gave me that china high-heel shoe on my table in chambers. But all of that’s a million miles away from your case.’

Somehow the story ended up involving hiccups, snoring and bad language. It wasn’t very funny but by the time we had finished the coffee, and against my better judgment, we were giggling like contestants in a quiz show. I felt sure enough time had passed for Marcus to have finished his conference so we got the bill.

‘He’s still in your room,’ Gavin said mournfully as we walked into the clerks’ room.

‘Can I make a phone call from here?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, Jenna’s desk’s free, use her phone.’ As junior clerk, Jenna had to take her lunch very late or very early. She was still at lunch. I rang Kay and told her as coherently as I could about Saskia’s court appearance, bruises and all.

‘Oh no,’ Kay sighed. ‘Where is she now?’

‘I don’t know, she just skipped off while I was on the phone.’

‘What, at court?’

‘No, in my flat.’

‘In your flat? God, Frankie, you never give up, do you?’ Did she sound irritated? I was.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘that’s none of your business and, anyway, she just came to have a bath.’

Kay shouted with laughter.

Normally, this is where I put the phone down, but I was seriously worried about Saskia.

‘There was a guy at court with brown shoes,’ I said.

‘Oh yes?’ Kay said. ‘So it’s true, brown is the new black.’

I squeezed my eyes tight shut with frustration, then went on calmly: ‘He seemed very interested in Saskia.’

‘I’m assuming he wasn’t a reporter, am I?’

‘I thought he was at first, he looked the type: seedy, greedy, all those -eedy words.’ I reflected for a moment. ‘Not tweedy, I suppose.’ I remembered I was talking to my instructing solicitor. ‘But then he left court at the same time as us, about half past eleven, and was driven off in a smooth black car. Saskia didn’t see him but she seemed quite shaken when I told her. What’s going on?’

Kay was silent.

‘Why was she so bruised, why was she so desperate to get out of the cells, and what was she doing in Balls Pond Road, of all places?’

‘I don’t know,’ Kay said.

‘She’s not involved in anything … iffy, is she? Nothing that could be connected to your break-in?’

Kay was silent, then said curtly, ‘Meet me tonight at the same place as last night.’

‘We didn’t actually meet last night, if you remember.’

‘Seven o’clock all right?’ Kay asked in a clipped voice.

‘Yes,’ I said humbly.

As I put the phone down it occurred to me that I was quite tired and I needed to do something that would wake me up and keep me awake if I was going to make it through to the evening.

‘I’m going to the pictures,’ I announced.

‘You going with, erm, you know?’ Gavin leered.

‘If you mean Simon, no, I’m not.’

‘Not what?’ asked Simon, coming through the clerks’ room to make himself some coffee. His blue and orange tie had something related to steak and chips on it.

‘Not going to the pictures with you.’

‘But why not? I love the cinema. Apollo 13, James Bond, Toy Story. Whatever. Toy Story 2.’ Simon was eager, like a bouncy puppy. ‘We could share a tub of popcorn, although you probably like salted, don’t you? We could have one each. Ice cream, coffee. What are we going to see?’

I looked at him. In court he was feared for his sharp wit and ruthless cross-examination. Around women he was as daft as a brush.

‘Something French and obscure.’

‘Oh, I’ll take a rain check then,’ he said.

‘Bye,’ said Gavin, shaking his head with disappointment.

I remembered my financial state, ‘Lend us twenty quid, Simon.’

‘Is that enough?’

‘It’ll do,’ I said, snatching the old spare mac hanging behind the door in the clerk’s room. I was on the landing outside chambers when I remembered my keys.

I went back into chambers. ‘Because the con’s been going on so long,’ Gavin said, ‘I’ll go in and get them.’ It was a strict rule that conferences must not be disturbed. When he came out he handed me the small bunch of keys. ‘The things you’ve got in your top drawer,’ he remarked. ‘It could have been very embarrassing for Marcus.’

‘He could have said they were for his feminine side. Perhaps it might stop him having cons in my room. He shouldn’t look in the drawers of my desk anyway,’ I said, and swept out of chambers.

The film was French but light and had that comedy the French laugh at – people hiding in dustbins and being loaded on to dustcarts by mistake, like Benny Hill with an accent – which I always forget about when I say I like French films. But I enjoyed myself being critical and feeling superior about the subtitles, which were too short, too vague, too late. The story of my life.

It was a quarter to six when I came out of the cinema and the air was less cold than it had been earlier. I was humming the film’s catchy theme tune which hadn’t yet become irritating and I decided to walk to the restaurant to meet Kay.

All I will say is, Brunswick Square to Kings Cross was easy enough, through the streets of high mansion blocks and large houses, past the turrets of St Pancras station to the concrete flatness of Kings Cross, but the hill up to the Angel reminded me that I had done a lot of walking already that day and also notified me of all the spots where my shoes rubbed. At least it wasn’t raining.

I felt irritable and ragged when I limped into Gino’s.

‘Signora,’ Gino bustled towards me, his face all concern, ‘you look a little fatigué. Come, sit down, asseyez-vous, and I bring you a bottle of vino tinto red, yes?’

The restaurant was empty and Gino guided me to a small, discreet table tucked behind a large Swiss cheese plant.

‘I am expecting someone,’ I said defiantly, as he put down the bottle of wine and began removing the plate and cutlery opposite me.

‘Of course, yes, signora,’ he said, pretending to tidy them. ‘How long you will be waiting?’

It was ten to seven.

‘Fifteen minutes,’ I said. I had £15 left from the £20 Simon had lent me. That meant, if absolutely necessary, if she didn’t come, I could have the wine, a starter and just about enough for a cab home. I was worrying about the tip when Kay appeared.

I always do a double take when I haven’t seen Kay for a while. She’s tall, about five foot nine, and carries her weight well. She has dark hair and dark eyes, but it’s her mouth that I’m drawn to. It is full and perfectly shaped and she does something which always makes her lips shine. She licks them. It works.

She leaned on the back of the empty chair opposite me.

‘May I?’

I smiled and she sat down. She was wearing a grey trouser suit, with a long draping jacket, it said Armani, it said Donna Karan, it said, successful solicitor. I realised my outfit today said Top Shop, and the jacket was too tight across the shoulders. I poured her some wine and Gino hurried forward with a menu. I ordered a mushroom risotto and Kay ordered chicken.

I had warmed up, I was relaxed and it was good to see her.

‘Saskia rang me,’ she announced. I sat forward in my chair. ‘She said she was OK and thank you very much and sorry she left without saying goodbye. Oh, and she said something about a grey shirt?’ It was a question.

‘She went off in my shirt. But did she say where she was? Did you ask her about the bruises?’

‘Well, I couldn’t really ask about the bruises because I didn’t see them. And she didn’t say where she was.’ She looked at my face. ‘And, no, I didn’t ask her either. To be honest, I didn’t have the time for a chat.’ Unlike you, I read in her eyes. I make time because I care, I flashed back, silently. Oh, please! Her eyebrow twitched.

She shook out her napkin. ‘She did say something odd. She said, “It’s the singer not the song.” I wondered if she’d been flicking through your record collection.’

‘Did you ask her what she meant?’

She didn’t bother to answer. ‘Sometimes I think Saskia says things just to be mysterious. It doesn’t mean anything. What could it mean?’

I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders.

‘There’s nothing more you can do,’ she said sensibly. ‘Saskia’s an adult. And she’s pretty much told us to lay off.’ She poured more wine in my glass and I tried to put my anxiety aside.

We had a pleasant evening. I talked about chambers, she talked about her office. Once we looked at each other as we were laughing about the lifts at Wood Green Court, and the possibility of going home together hovered in the air, but the moment passed.

In Kay’s car at the end of the evening I concentrated on what Saskia could mean by that comment, ‘the singer not the song’. It was true, she often said things for effect, she said it brought interest to people’s lives. But there was something wrong, something not Saskia in all this.

As she dropped me off, Kay said, ‘Look, Saskia was a client, you represented her, the case is over. All you can do now is return the brief and forget about it. There’s no Legal Aid for all this worrying, and your professional insurance probably doesn’t cover you for it either. Knowing Saskia, she’ll turn up in about two years’ time, after another demo, and you’ll be representing her on an assault police charge.’

I looked at her.

‘For God’s sake,’ she said, ‘go to bed.’

I went into the flat and headed straight for the bathroom to run a bath to relax me so that I could sleep. I noticed that Saskia had carefully cleaned the bath, which is not my practice. I believe in self-cleaning baths like other people believe in fairies. My theory is self-cleaning ovens exist, so why not self-cleaning baths?

I undressed as the bath filled. I opened the clothes basket to dispose of my underwear and noticed a blue shirt sheltering like a cuckoo in the nest of my dirty clothes.

I looked at it, uncomprehending, for three seconds then realised it was Saskia’s.

I lifted it out of the basket between thumb and forefinger as if it was a piece of china which might have fingerprints on it. It was a long-sleeve polo shirt with a pocket over the left breast.

I couldn’t work out whether I felt like a detective or a thief as I considered slipping my fingers into the pocket to see what was in there. I knew that Saskia liked and trusted me so I decided I could assume the rights and even duties of a good friend. Also, if there was a tissue in there and I washed it, it would wreak havoc with my court things. I hooked the pocket open with my index finger and looked in. There was nothing but a screwed up turquoise and white wrapper, Orbit sugar-free gum. I was humming the advertising slogan as I pulled it out of the pocket and tossed it in the bin. I tried to picture Saskia chewing gum. It didn’t fit, I had never seen Saskia chewing gum, so I scrabbled among the tissues and old toilet roll to retrieve the wrapper.

What was I expecting? Something dramatic, something helpful, a note that said, ‘I have moved and can now be reached at 0837-24391,’ perhaps. Perhaps an address. Perhaps something more sinister, a name, written in blood.

It didn’t say anything like that. But it did say something: ‘7.30 Gino’s F.’

What? At first I thought I must have written it. I had just come from Gino’s. How had that fact got into Saskia’s pocket? I’d been with Kay. Had Kay written it? It wasn’t Kay’s writing. I tried to remember Saskia’s handwriting.

‘7.30 Gino’s F.’

What did it mean?

Automatically I got into the bath, washed and got out, no more relaxed than I had been five minutes earlier. I wandered into the living room in my dressing gown.

The answer machine light was flashing.

‘Frankie, it’s Gavin. It’s eight thirty. Look, I’m sorry about this, but a new solicitor has just rung and needs someone to do a quick non-mol at Edmonton. You know I wouldn’t normally ask you to do an injunction, but you live so close and she needs a bit of soft soap which I know you’re good at.’

‘You taught me everything I know, Gavin,’ I said to the machine, and missed the last part of the message.

I played the tape again. ‘Client’s name is Fiona Stevens, brief at court. Don’t forget, Edmonton’s a ten o’clock start. See you tomorrow.’

I groaned, then groaned again. A non-molestation application at Edmonton County Court could take all day. The application itself would last ten minutes, the rest of the time would be spent waiting till the judge or the usher decided which of the twenty or so cases in the list could go in.

This was so depressing. I shouldn’t be doing cases like this, picking up my brief at Edmonton County Court on the morning of the hearing. I should be in the High Court, staggering under the weight of briefs which I’d received months before, for hearings which would last two or three weeks. What was the matter with my practice? Was it my solicitors? My clerks? Me?

I put on Sam and Dave singing, ‘Hold On, I’m Coming’ and thought, ‘Well, hurry up then,’ and went to bed.

FOUR
Friday – Edmonton

Edmonton was everything I had dreaded and more. I left the house in good time, puzzling over the meaning of the sugar-free gum note and was still abstractedly worrying about it at half past nine as I climbed the narrow stairs to the tiny Ladies Robing Room in the eaves of the brick courthouse. As I shrugged off my heavy dark grey overcoat I realised I had forgotten to put on my jacket. I considered my options. I was wearing a black T-shirt, which fortunately had long sleeves, but was rather short and a little faded. I had no options. I tied my black devoré scarf round my neck and hoped it looked deliberate.

‘I’m in the case of Fiona Stevens,’ I told the new usher downstairs in the waiting area.

‘Are you being represented this morning, Miss Stevens?’ he asked me.

‘I’m the barrister,’ I hissed.

We were there all day. Fiona Stevens needed an emergency injunction, without her ex-husband knowing, to protect her and the children. He had punched her the day before as she was leaving home to collect the children from school and had threatened to come back to her house and tear it apart one night while she was out with her new partner, a woman.

Before we could appear in front of the judge we had to issue our application in the court office. But I had no papers, I couldn’t issue anything. ‘Everything is in the file,’ the solicitor told me when I rang her, ‘the outdoor clerk picked it up last night.’ I had no outdoor clerk. ‘We tell our clerks to be there half an hour before the hearing,’ the solicitor said accusingly, ‘she’ll be there somewhere,’ as if I was being stupid by failing to see her.

‘Are you ready?’ the usher asked me twice, and I said winningly, ‘Well, we haven’t issued, but yes.’

‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I can’t send you in before the judge without issuing. He’d have my guts for garters,’ and he laughed. I laughed too, in case I needed him later. My client went downstairs for a cigarette.

The solicitor’s clerk arrived at quarter past eleven. She was late because she had washed her hair so it looked lovely and clean, but as she searched for the papers it became clear that she had been given the wrong file. She had to go back to the solicitor’s office to collect the right one.

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ Fiona Stevens said as we sat outside the ladies’ toilet, sipping bad coffee from beige plastic cups, waiting for the clerk to come back, ‘but he never wanted to go out with me, day or night. He used to like going out with his mates or with his girlfriend, he’d get all dressed up, but he’d say, “Who in their right mind would go out with you?” So I found someone who would, and he doesn’t like it.’

We left court at quarter past four with the injunction which would be served on Gary Stevens later that evening. When I got to my car, I was sorry I had snapped at the solicitor’s clerk as the car wouldn’t start and I had to ask her for a push. Humiliatingly, the client helped and then there was an uncomfortably quiet journey as I gave them a lift to Seven Sisters tube station.

My mental memo, which this morning had read, ‘Find Saskia,’ now read, ‘Find Saskia. Buy new car battery. Possibly buy new car.’

I drove back to my flat and rang my solicitor to tell her what had happened in court.

Gratifyingly she said, ‘The client was really pleased.’ But then she added, ‘She’s got a large ancillary relief case coming up and she’d like you to do it.’

Through gritted teeth I said, ‘Of course, I’d love to.’ I hate ancillary relief. Divorce work is bad enough with people being horrible to each other, but money matters seem to bring out the very worst in everybody. Compromise is usually the only answer because there’s not much money and the legal costs are so high, but the parties feel that compromise is giving in, like losing, so they argue over who gets the sun lounger and it goes to trial and the only winners are the lawyers. Then I thought of the car battery I needed. ‘Send me the papers,’ I said.

I rang chambers. Gavin was obviously distracted as he didn’t even apologise for sending me to Edmonton. He said, ‘I’ve got you a five-day case in the High Court, starting Monday fortnight. You’re for the First Respondent, the mother. The solicitor wants a con next Thursday. Brief’s coming down to chambers early next week.’

‘Gavin, I love you,’ I said, thinking, Perhaps I could get a new car, a green one.

‘I’m glad someone likes me,’ he said.

‘Bad day?’ I asked, thinking, I could have four doors and a sun roof.

‘Your room-mate Marcus sometimes has a very forthright way of expressing himself,’ he said, meaning Marcus had sworn at him for something which was doubtless Marcus’s own fault. ‘Do you want your messages? Hang on …’ Gavin put me on hold while he collected the messages from the message board. ‘“Lesley Page”,’ he read, ‘“please ring back.” Do you want the number?’

I made a note, asking, ‘Is that a solicitor? Did they say what it was about?’

‘I don’t think it’s a solicitor. That’s a mobile phone number isn’t it?’ Gavin said, ‘I’ve no idea what it’s about, I didn’t take the message.’

‘OK, fine. I don’t suppose there’s a message from Saskia?’

‘Nothing here.’

‘Anything from Kay?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Frankie, you’re not starting all that nonsense again, are you?’ Gavin asked. He liked Kay, but there had been two occasions when he had found me in tears in my room at the tail end of our relationship, and he had put my coat over my shoulders and taken me to the George and bought me drinks till I cheered up.

I rang the number he had given me for Lesley Page. A snooty voice told me it had not been possible to connect my call. Someone else who never switched on their mobile. I put it out of my mind. People know where to find me.

I had a shower – the luxury of my bathroom is that I have a separate shower – and put on some black jeans and a loose black jumper. I put on my black suede boots. The reason I became a barrister is because I like black clothes.

I was going back to Gino’s. F could be Frankie, but it could be Friday. It could of course be foolish, but I had no social life anyway. The weather was still cold and I wrapped my heavy overcoat round me as I walked out to my car, which started perfectly.

I got there at seven fifteen. The restaurant was empty except for Gino and a man in a white coat and a blue and white apron who I knew was the chef. They were sitting side by side at a table near the kitchen with a crossword between them.

‘Signora, so lovely to see you. How many you are? A bottle of vino tinto red?’

‘Gino,’ I said carefully, drawing him over to the bar area, ‘I don’t know if I’m staying and I don’t know if I’m meeting anyone.’

‘Si, signora, yes, of course,’ he said with concern. ‘So you would like just a glass of red for the meanwhile and you sit at the bar, yes?’

I smiled at him gratefully and eased myself on to a stool. Gino bustled round behind the bar. I could see his grey roots as he bent his head to pour the glass of wine.

‘Gino,’ I began slowly, ‘have you seen a woman with spiky blonde hair, taller than me, wearing … I don’t know, possibly a rather nice grey denim shirt, in the last day or two?’

‘I have seen you in the last day or two, signora. You didn’t see her yourself?’

‘No, I didn’t. But then it might not be her I’m expecting,’ I murmured, partly to myself.

Gino placed the glass of wine in front of me with a flourish. ‘What are imitation germs?’ he asked. ‘Five letters. P something S something something.’

‘Pests?’ I suggested.

‘It’s paste,’ the chef growled. ‘It was imitation gems, not germs.’

‘Oh, you English,’ Gino twinkled and went to welcome some new arrivals.

I sat at the bar with my back to the restaurant watching in the reflection of the peach-tinted mirror as the restaurant began to fill up. I had almost finished my glass of wine when he walked in. It was the man with the brown shoes from the magistrates’ court.

I watched Gino hurry over to him and greet him like an old friend, like he greeted everyone. He showed the man to a table and came back to the bar. The man looked at the clock on the wall which stood permanently at half past nine and then at his watch.

I checked my watch. It was seven twenty-five. Gino was popping the lid from a bottle of mineral water.

‘Gino, has that man been in here before?’ I asked casually, out of the corner of my mouth.

Gino threw me a look.

‘Si, signora, he was here last night, about this time, and, maybe, the night before, I think.’ He creased his face in concentration. ‘He did not stay long. He too is waiting for someone. Is he waiting for you? Is it a Blind Date?’ he asked eagerly.

‘No, no,’ I said, shocked. ‘Not with those shoes.’

Gino placed the mineral water in front of the man and hurried away to greet some newcomers. The man followed Gino with his eyes, then looked at his watch again.

In the subdued lighting of the restaurant, it was hard to get a clear picture of him in reverse. I noticed that the rosy sheen of the mirror made me look very well and I couldn’t be sure whether the man was young and attractive, as it appeared in the reflection, or mean and nasty. I didn’t want to turn round in case he recognised me. He took off his beige raincoat. He was wearing a grey sweater with a short zip at the neck. With tan shoes! Extraordinary.

Gino came back to the bar and opened two bottles of wine. He looked quizzically from me to the man but said nothing.

The man reached into the pocket of his mac and drew out a folded copy of the Daily Telegraph. I’m always surprised when people, especially people under forty, read the Daily Telegraph. All the news of a tabloid with the disadvantage of the size of a broadsheet.

What would Saskia be doing, knowing someone like that, I wondered.

He was reading the sports pages. Each time the door opened he half-closed the paper and looked up expectantly. It was ten to eight.

Gino had just poured me another glass of wine. ‘I’ll charge you for the bottle,’ he said, pushing a packet of bread sticks under my nose, when the man began elaborately to fold the newspaper and gestured towards the bar for his bill.

‘Gino, see if you can find out his name,’ I hissed, cramming three inches of bread stick into my mouth. I realised I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Edmonton didn’t have much to offer if you didn’t want to eat at McDonald’s, and, as a gesture of solidarity with Saskia, I hadn’t.

I watched Gino’s dark head bobbing in conversation. A look of confusion passed over the man’s face and then he drew out a credit card. Gino bounced back to the bar and spoke to me from the corner of his mouth as he fiddled with the clumsy machine.

‘His name is P. J. Kramer,’ he murmured excitedly.

‘He doesn’t look old enough,’ I muttered back.

Gino’s eyebrows rose. ‘P. J. Kramer,’ he enunciated slowly.

‘I thought you said Billy J. Kramer,’ I said and snorted with laughter. Oh God, I was not sober. I shoved another bread stick into my mouth.

The man was putting on gloves.

Casually I shrugged into my coat and put a £10 note on the counter.

He was leaving the restaurant.

I slid off the stool and then froze as he stopped at the door, adjusting the newspaper in his pocket. He went out into the street, leaving the door of the restaurant open to the cold night air, and turned sharply left. I followed him and closed the door.

He was about five foot nine and skinny but looked strong. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Physically, I knew I was no match for him. What was I doing even thinking about the possibility of physical confrontation? I am five foot five but slight. I once did a six-week self-defence course and I could probably still do the moves and the shouting, but any real possibility of a physical exchange was bound to end in tears. Mine. At best.

He was getting into a car; not the dark saloon but an old Ford. It was parked two cars away from mine, facing in the opposite direction. I shrugged down into my coat to hurry past him and jumped into my car. As his headlights came on, I fumbled with the key, turning it in the ignition. The engine whined in a tired unhappy way, like an exhausted wasp, then was silent. ‘Come on!’ I pleaded, breathing deeply but casually, trying not to let my car know I was questioning its continued existence in the world. ‘Oh God,’ I muttered as the man started doing a three-point turn. In Upper Street. He had to be mad. Or desperate. ‘I don’t really want a new car,’ I whispered faithlessly to the dashboard as the Ford lurched unhappily backwards and forwards in the middle of two opposing lines of traffic. I turned the key again. The engine coughed and purred into life. Now what was I going to do?

I followed him. He drove to Highbury Corner, turned into Holloway Road towards Archway and then up Highgate Hill. Then a Pizza Hut moped rider overtook me and I lost sight of the Ford. I was looking around for the car when I turned and found myself staring him in the face. I hadn’t noticed that he had pulled in to the side of the road, and now I was driving past him. He had parked outside the little house in Waterlow Park where on summer nights people have parties. But now it was dark and cold, cheerless and threatening and he seemed to be speaking angrily on a mobile phone.

I drove on, casually slowing down, throwing anxious glances in my rear-view mirror. Headlights were coming up behind me and I couldn’t make out if it was his car. As the lights drew closer I was dazzled and quickly looked away. Suddenly there was a bang and I shot forward. My seat belt clicked firmly and thrust me back. I could hear the revving of an engine very close behind me. Something large had made damaging, buckling contact with the back of my car. Automatically, I switched off my engine. I had no fear, just an enormous sense of fury and protectiveness for my small, unassuming car which had never hurt anyone. Certainly not since I’d had it, anyway. I unbuckled my seat belt, ready to jump out to look at my bumper and confront the bastard who had done this, when suddenly the door was wrenched open.

I was conscious of a narrow, pointed face with pock-marks and thin pale lips leaning towards me. I could smell garlic and something meaty, like pâté. A hand came round my neck and I was being dragged out of the car.

I was outraged, choking and gagging, repeating, ‘What? What?’ and clawing at the hand. There was a swish of material and something came towards me very fast. It was a fist, which punched me hard in the right eye. As my head jerked back a thin, harsh voice hissed, ‘Just keep your fucking nose out of things,’ and something that sounded like, ‘Fucking lesbos – you’re all the same,’ but perhaps I was just feeling sensitive. Then he threw me on to the ground and my face landed in gravel. I lay still for a couple of seconds, hoping he would go away, but he was standing there moving back and forth on shoes that in the half-light looked suspiciously as if they might be brown. I stretched out my left arm and groped along the ground, trying to get my bearings, trying to find something to hold on to, when a foot landed in my stomach. The impact flung me against the edge of the open car door. I snaked my hand round until I felt the door compartment with the reassuring cassette tapes, then eased my forearm up to the arm rest and began to pull myself up, using the door as protection.

Somebody was breathing heavily, which could have been me, but when he coughed a laugh I knew it wasn’t. ‘Got a bit of a headache, have we?’

As I stood up I smelt pâté breath from the other side of the door. I swayed slightly, my face and in particular my right eye were stinging.

As he advanced towards me I pulled the door quickly towards myself, then thrust it back hard against him. From his groan I guessed the edge of the door had hit the target. He bent forward and I came round the door. Raising my right knee and flipping my foot sharply, I kicked him very quickly between the legs. ‘That’s for all the lesbos,’ I said. He staggered backwards clutching his groin, and I contemplated doing it again, but decided to leave while I was ahead. As I slid behind the steering wheel I watched him in the rear-view mirror, limping over the gravel. I locked myself in with my elbow as a car door slammed behind me. There was a sound of violent revving and squealing into reverse, and I heard a car roar past me, but by then I had my head in my hands, leaning on the steering wheel, so I saw nothing.

Had that really happened? I’d been following a man and then he’d beaten me up? I hate that kind of clichéd situation. And keep my fucking nose out of what? Saskia? Kay? One of my other cases? Could Kramer have something to do with a family case of mine? Had he been hired by the husband of one of my clients? Most of the men in the cases I did would probably want to say that to me. The man in the case today might well have felt like that when he was served with the papers. Then I heard a car labouring up the hill. Was he coming back? Had he even gone? I lifted my head, conscious of a pounding pain behind my right eye. I turned the key in the ignition, prayed, and the car sparked into life. I jerked into first gear, pulled away from the kerb and across the road in one movement and sped into Hornsey Lane. I wanted to get away from the place, away from the man, away from the pain as soon as possible. I put on a cassette of Motown Greatest Hits. The low cello introducing Brenda Holloway singing ‘Every Little Bit Hurts’ seemed appropriate, the slow, deep notes solicitously filling the car, taking my mind off the throbbing in my head.

My mind was still scrambling over the events of the last few minutes. I was trying to remember all the details. Should I tell the police? Something niggling in the back of my mind said I shouldn’t. What would I tell them? I saw him in court. ‘And then you were following him, madam? A man you say you’ve never met … I see. And then he assaulted you? Well, sounds like we’ve got a bit of a domestic here, madam.’ If I missed out the part about seeing him in court – and I was beginning to wonder if I had seen him, perhaps I’d just imagined that part – they’d probably say it was a road-rage incident. ‘Don’t you worry, madam, we get a lot of this: attractive young lady in a small car, meandering slowly up the hill, gentleman behind gets a little bit impatient, a bit aggressive. Unfortunately that’s the modern world of today. Perhaps you should try keeping up with the speed limit, madam.’ But it wasn’t just road rage, he knew me, and that meant he might try it again. Surely I should at least get the assault on the record.

Then it came to me, the reason why I couldn’t go to the police. I was drunk, that was why.

Brenda Holloway was wondering why her lover treated her so, when I had to stop the car and be sick in the gutter. It didn’t last long, but it was a very intense experience. When I stood up I leaned on the railings of the viaduct and looked down at the traffic rushing along the Archway Road below and wondered if he was down there looking up at me. I shuddered and turned back to the car. As I opened the door, I glanced up at the sky which was clear and filled with stars and a crisp crescent moon. My eye hurt and my stomach ached.

I drove home carefully, wincing at every bump in the road. I was driving so slowly I worried I might be stopped, but it was still only nine thirty and the police obviously hadn’t started looking out for Friday-night drunk drivers.

I went into the flat, shut the door and considered who I could ring. I couldn’t ring Lena because she was in France, and I definitely couldn’t ring Kay because she had very clearly warned me to leave well alone and I couldn’t bear to hear the unspoken ‘I told you so’ in her voice when she sighed, ‘Oh, Frankie.’ I did a mental run through my address book and realised there was no one I could ring at ten o’clock at night and say, ‘I’ve just been punched in the face, it hurts like hell, will you be nice to me?’ Feeling alone and extremely sorry for myself, I fetched a glass of water from the kitchen and took two aspirin.

I trailed into the living room and put on the Four Tops, who said I could reach out and they’d be there.

And I wondered, as I so often had, if the idea was to reach out now while I was listening to the song, which would be fairly unproductive since I was quite obviously on my own, or if I should wait till I was at a really good party and then reach out and it would all fall into place. Except at parties you can never be sure how good the music will be. That’s why I like sixties nights – they do both, play the song and it’s usually a good party, so you can reach out without anxiety. Except, of course, the last one I’d been to, I’d reached out to Kay and she wouldn’t dance. The Four Tops said I just had to look over my shoulder. You do that, of course, and you’re doing the Hitch Hiker – not my favourite dance. It was time to go to bed.

FIVE
Saturday Morning – Church Street

I had forgotten to switch off my alarm. At seven thirty the voice of Sue MacGregor, joking with a sports reporter on Radio 4 brought me into consciousness – seven thirty on a Saturday. The sports reporter was giving the racing selections for the day: Loyal Boy in the three fifteen at Chepstow. It was seven thirty on a Saturday. I was disgusted. I needed a drink of water. I put the light on and looked blearily round my bedroom. My bedroom was fairly disgusting in its own right. Clothes everywhere, blobs of dust on my chest of drawers where I keep my hairbrush and my collection of small earrings for court and I could see a spider’s web up in the corner above the bed. It was still dark. It was seven thirty.

Was this a sign? A message that if I got up now and cleaned the flat then I could spend the rest of the day slobbing around?

I made a bargain with myself. If I did the vacuuming in half an hour I could have a blueberry muffin from the freezer for breakfast, back in bed.

‘It’s a deal,’ I said aloud and twisted out of bed. My whole body ached and my eye throbbed. For a moment I couldn’t think why I felt so terrible but the memory came flooding back and filled me with despair and alarm and a nagging worry. Hoover therapy seemed as good an idea as any.

As I dragged the machine from its place at the back of the cupboard I greeted it like an old but distant friend. I clicked the Motown Dance Party cassette into my Walkman, slipped the Walkman into the pocket of my dressing gown, switched on and started. I vacuumed, I dusted and I put bleach in the toilet. I was just wiping round the window frames, singing along with the Velvelettes, ‘He Was Really Sayin’ Somethin”, when I noticed the red light flashing on the answer machine. There had been no messages when I came in after my adventure the night before. Someone had rung me while I was cleaning. Yet another reason why housework is a bad idea. You clean, you miss phone calls. I rest my case.

I pressed the playback button. There was a long silence.

‘Bugger,’ I shouted. ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger.’

I rang 1471 and was told that the caller, who had rung twenty minutes earlier, had withheld their number.

Miserably I made my coffee, heated the blueberry muffin and went back to bed, but the muffin stuck to the roof of my mouth and the coffee grains floated to the top of the cup and niggled against my teeth. I hate missing phone calls. To take my mind off the frustration I began to worry at the quick crossword of the day before. Slowly I relaxed and had even got as far as referring to my Thesaurus when the phone rang.

I snatched it up and breathlessly said, ‘Hello?’

‘Oh, Frankie, that was quick. I didn’t even hear it ring.’

It was my mum.

‘Did you ring me about half an hour ago?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t ring you that early on a Saturday.’ She explained that she had one or two Christmas presents she had to buy (it was October after all, she reminded me) and she wondered if she could come and stay.

I walked with the phone into the bathroom to clean my teeth. That’s the effect she has on me.

I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror. I had a black eye. How would I explain that to my mother?

‘I’m going out,’ I said desperately.

‘That’s all right, I’ve got a key.’

‘No, I mean tonight.’ It wasn’t true, but something might come up. ‘I might be in really late.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll make up the bed and switch on the TV and it’ll be just like home.’

I sighed. I don’t know why I even bother to try. If my mum wants to come and stay, my mum will come and stay. I thought it best to wait and tell her about the black eye face to face. She’d only worry.

‘I’ve got a black eye,’ I heard myself blurt out.

‘A black eye? Why, whatever have you been doing?’

I looked at myself again and my mind went blank. ‘I walked into the door,’ I said. ‘The bedroom door,’ I explained, adding detail to make it sound true. ‘I switched off the hall light before I switched on the bedroom light and I forgot.’ I wasn’t taken in, was she?

She sighed. ‘Well, as long as you don’t have a friend who has one just like it.’

‘No, I don’t,’ I said, thinking of the owner of the pock-marked face with its sly grin, unsullied by bruise or cut, but with hopefully fatal internal injuries. ‘I don’t fight, Mum,’ I said, thinking, Not very well anyway.

‘I’d hate to think it was in the genes,’ she said, obviously thinking of my father’s uncle, who had a reputation for assaulting his women friends.

The consolation was she didn’t think I was the victim. But then, which was worse? To be the victim or the aggressor?

‘I don’t think it’s a genetic thing, Mum, I just have a black eye. It happens.’

‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you later.’

At least the house was tidy.

The phone rang again. It was Lena.

‘Did you ring me about half an hour ago?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t ring you that early on a Saturday.’

‘Where are you ringing from?’ I asked. ‘I thought you were in Paris.’

‘I’m back. I came home early,’ she said, too brightly.

‘Where’s Sophie?’

‘Oh, she’s still there.’

‘Are we having coffee then?’ I asked. ‘The Blue Legume in twenty minutes?’

‘That would be great.’

‘I’ll bring the brandy,’ I said and rang off before she burst into tears. She and Sophie, what a pair.

Slowly I put on some jeans and a faded black sweatshirt. My muscles were creaking. I wondered if I had overdone it. Physical assault followed by housework, not a good combination. As I bent to lace up my Doc Martens my eye twinged, reminding me I should wear dark glasses. I went to the sunglasses shelf on my bookcase. In front of three volumes of Stone’s Justices’ Manual of 1992 and two volumes of Rayden on Divorce lay twelve pairs of sunglasses, most purchased on holiday because of my habit of forgetting to pack the pair I bought last year.

After five minutes fussing in front of the mirror I had chosen a groovy round wire-rimmed pair that looked as if they came from the thirties and convinced myself that the black eye was scarcely visible. I nearly broke my neck going down the steps of my house because the lenses were so dark, but it was a bright sunny day and I got used to them.

I walked down to Church Street and found Lena already at a table in the gloom of the small café. I stopped in surprise. There was something about her that made me feel I was looking at a reflection of myself. She was wearing dark glasses, but then I realised she was also wearing an old jacket of mine which I had put out for a charity shop. It looked so good on her that I suddenly and intensely wanted it back, till I remembered it had never looked that good on me. With the great jacket and her thick black hair, caught back in a ponytail, you’d never have thought she was ten years older than I was.

‘Frankie, darling, what has happened to your eye?’ she exclaimed as she leaned over to kiss me. ‘Tell me in a minute,’ she said, picking up her large wallet from the table and heading to the counter to order the coffee. She had obviously weighed up who was more deserving of sympathy and had decided that, superficially at any rate, I was.

Lena and I had known each other for almost eight years. We’d been really friendly for seven, ever since the infamous sixties night, when I’d gone into the toilets to be tragic over Kay and, instead, found Lena grimacing into the mirror, swigging determinedly from a hip flask. Her on/off girlfriend, Sophie, had just danced past her, very obviously on with someone else.

‘I wouldn’t have minded,’ she had said through gritted teeth, her dark fringe flopping into her eyes, ‘but that other woman is wearing a shirt exactly like the one I put in a bag of stuff for Sophie to take to the Oxfam shop. Bloody cheek.’ So we left the toilets together and danced all night long. We even danced the Twist, which is not something I normally do.

The day after that I rang her to see if she was OK.

‘Do you want to go to the pictures?’ I asked. ‘Then we could go out for dinner and trash our girlfriends.’

‘Oh, Frankie, what a pal you are.’ She grinned down the phone. ‘That sounds great. What shall we go and see?’

We wanted a film with wit and women, which we felt were missing from our lives. There was a Cary Grant retrospective at a small cinema in Soho and we went to see His Girl Friday, to pick up a few tips on being suave and elegant, and then we went to Chez Gerard in Charlotte Street, for the set menu. As we sat spreading anchovy butter on French bread we had shared our life histories.

They were remarkably similar. We had both grown up on council estates with parents who had wanted us to do better than they had.

My dad was an old Teddy Boy and my mum had had a beehive and wore American tan stockings, even on their wedding day. She and my dad went to the local dance hall together and jived to Bill Haley and Eddie Cochran. But when Tamla Motown came in in the sixties my mum swapped her allegiances and became a mod, while my dad naturally became a rocker. After that my mum went to dances with her girlfriends, and on the odd occasion she took me. I have no real memory of it but apparently once she took me to see Wilson Pickett at the town hall. She loved the big trumpet sound of ‘Midnight Hour’ but Wilson Pickett was late and she only dared listen to two songs before running all the way home with me asleep in her arms. Perhaps that was the night the music seeped into my blood stream.

By 1969 they were separated and Dad moved to a flat round the corner. My mum trained to be a primary teacher while my dad carried on working in his car-repair workshop. I saw him regularly and there wasn’t too much wrangling, not that there was much to wrangle about, but they both had solicitors and had to go to court a few times. I think it was the mystery of all the legal correspondence and the dressing up for the days in court that made me decide to study law.

I looked over at Lena as she smiled and chatted with the young man behind the counter. Lena had danced her way out of her estate, and eventually became a teacher of modern dance. You could tell by the way she moved. She was an inch shorter than me and her hair had one or two dashing streaks of grey. But the main difference between us was that she always made people feel that they were the most interesting person in the world. That’s how she always knew what was going on. People told her everything.

‘My darling, I thought I was feeling bad, but you look terrible,’ she said, putting two large creamy coffees down on the table. ‘I was going to suggest we go to that new bar this evening, the one that’s just opened off the City Road. To cheer me up. But you might not want to go out, looking like that.’

‘I would love to go out,’ I said, ignoring the implications of her comments. ‘My mum’s coming up.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Why? Ashamed to be seen out with me?’

She hesitated. ‘Of course not. It should be good. There’s a band too.’

‘Oh God, you didn’t say there was a band. They’ll play modern music really loudly.’ My brain was clicking. ‘Oh, I don’t know, I can’t bear to stay in with my mum, not on a Saturday. What would it say about my life?’ I took a small bottle of brandy from my inside pocket and held it up.

‘Great,’ she said, and I poured a slug into her coffee. Then I lifted the bottle to my lips but thought better of it.

‘Yes, do come,’ she went on. ‘But I will just say one thing. Those sunglasses are a little odd and they don’t actually cover up the blue and purple bits. Are you going to tell me what happened, or am I going to have to drag it out of you?’

‘It was a client.’ I didn’t want to tell Lena, I felt there was a need for secrecy, confidentiality, discretion. Perhaps I’d been doing the job too long. She looked at me amazed.

‘A client hit you? Why, because you lost? I didn’t realise clients got that unhappy with their barristers.’

‘Actually, it was the client’s husband,’ I said wildly. ‘There was a bit of a to do outside court. I don’t really want to talk about it.’

‘What did the police say?’

‘Well, I haven’t actually told them because it was partly my fault.’

‘Frankie,’ she said sadly, ‘violence is never the victim’s fault. Which court was this?’

‘I shouldn’t say any more.’ I sneaked back behind professionalism. ‘The case is ongoing.’

Lena nodded sagely and I turned the conversation to safer matters. ‘What happened in Paris?’

Lena told me how they had arrived at the Gare du Nord and argued because Sophie had wanted to sit in cafés all day while Lena had wanted to visit as many museums as she could. Then things had got more personal and Lena had had to leave. ‘She called me a tourist!’ Lena gasped.

I knew I could not afford to say, ‘Well, you were.’

‘What am I going to do with my mum?’ I asked.

‘She could come with us tonight.’

‘Lena!’

‘Just a thought. What about Columbia Road tomorrow morning? She could buy some plants to take home.’

We finished our coffee and wandered down Church Street, window shopping in the secondhand shops. It was hot and sunny and we were half looking for a new table for Lena’s kitchen (she had just reorganised her flat) but half looking for outfits for the evening. In a small shop selling pine furniture and altar cloths was a large cardboard box full of shoes. Most of them were the same style, dull black and gold slingbacks, but one pair had three-inch heels, sharply pointed toes and neat stud buttons up to the ankle.

‘Perfect club wear!’ Lena exclaimed.

‘They’re 37s,’ I said sadly, feeling like an ugly sister who knows that even if she sliced off the tips of her toes they would never fit. Not that I would ever have worn them, but they were such a bargain at £3. The pair! Lena on the other hand was bouncing with excitement since 37 was exactly her size.

‘Come on, Lena, you can’t wear those. They’re far too femme for you,’ I said.

Lena sighed, as if I was spoiling her fun. ‘As you and I have discussed on many occasions, Frankie, the headings Butch and Femme are merely a shorthand and superficial description of the myriad ways women express their sexuality. And clothes are the least helpful indicator of how a woman feels about herself. I have a leather jacket, you have a leather jacket, and we are sometimes described as butch, but then Kay has a leather jacket and Sophie has a leather jacket, and they are undoubtedly femme. What conclusions can we draw from that?’

‘That we’re all very boring people. But those are really femmy boots.’

She tried them on and she couldn’t walk in them so they went back in the box.

By the time we’d slipped into Fox’s Wine Bar for a small glass of white wine and some haddock pâté and then gone into the book shop on the High Street for something uplifting and topical to read and discuss, it was gone four o’clock. It was time to prepare myself mentally for my mother’s visit. I sauntered back home, thinking positive thoughts, planning a little more washing up and general tidying, and bought a small bunch of white and orange freesias to perfume a small part of my living room, in her honour.

As I turned into Amhurst Road I could see a taxi outside the house and a short bulky figure getting out. It was my mother in a large fake fur coat.

‘What do you think?’ she said, twirling in the street.

‘It’s astonishing,’ I said, paying the driver and picking up her two cases. ‘You’re early.’

‘Freda next door was going into town and offered me a lift to the station. Anyway I thought it would be nice to have a bit of time with you – and your black eye – before your big night out.’

Fortunately, for both our sakes, she didn’t mention the eye again. Instead we spent two hours drinking tea while my mother brought me up to date on all my relatives who lived near her in Colchester: two aunts and their husbands, and one unmarried uncle. Then I heard about the neighbours and the parents of old friends of mine who still lived nearby. By now we were on gin and tonic. When we got to the antics of the couple who were the holiday replacements for the people in the newsagents, I left my mum to watch Blind Date while I went into the bathroom to prepare for the Queen of Sheba, as the club was known.

‘Now don’t you worry about me,’ she said, looking up from the Guardian TV page, as I slid my wallet into my inside jacket and decided against wearing a coat. ‘There’s not a lot on television tonight, but I’m sure I’ll find something. Can you get Channel 5 here?’

‘Not very well,’ I said, and pointed to the pile of Rock Hudson and Doris Day videos I had dug out from my collection specially for her.

‘Oh, you know me,’ she said, ‘I can never work a video. I’ll be all right, dear. Off you go and enjoy yourself.’ She patted my hand bravely and I stomped out of the house, rage and guilt steaming off my skin into the cold night air.

SIX
Saturday Evening – The Queen of Sheba

Lena had rung to say she’d just remembered her car needed a new MOT so we agreed we’d take my car and I’d pick her up from Finsbury Park. I hooted as I drove past her house then double-parked a couple of doors down.

Through the rear-view mirror and in the light from the lamp-posts I saw her come out of her house and walk towards the car. She was wearing her long straight maroon coat, her hair was loose and shiny and she looked exotic and mysterious. My own efforts at glamour had been to change my round dark glasses to small rectangular ones, and to put on my charcoal grey Jigsaw suit with the bootleg trousers.

As Lena settled herself into the passenger seat she asked, ‘Where’s your number plate?’

‘What?’

‘Where’s the back number plate? You have no back number plate.’

‘Oh my God, it hasn’t dropped off again. I thought that was just in summer, when it got hot. I stuck it on with some …’ I tried to remember the name.

‘Sticky-back plastic?’ Lena asked brightly. ‘Well, it doesn’t seem to have worked.’

‘It’s dropped off,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ Lena put on her best understanding voice. ‘Where do you think it dropped off?’

‘I don’t know. It could have happened anywhere.’ An idea was forming in my mind but I didn’t want to deal with it. ‘It could have happened weeks ago, months ago, I never look at the back of my car.’

‘You would have been stopped by the police by now if it had been that long. Where have you been in the last day or two?’

‘Here, there, you know.’

‘Did you hear anything?’

I looked at her.

‘You know, when it dropped off?’

We were at Stoke Newington Green. I signalled and pulled into the side of the road, got out of the car and walked round to the back. Lena followed. There was no number plate.

I looked under the car, in case the number plate was hibernating underneath where the spare wheel should be.

‘We could retrace your steps over the last twenty-four hours.’ Lena seemed to relish the prospect of a game of hunt the number plate. I ran my hand along the bumper. ‘We should organise this methodically. We could do it tomorrow morning. Frankie? Frankie, what is it?’

‘Look at that,’ I said, ‘not a mark on the rest of the car. You wouldn’t even think it had been bashed.’

‘Bashed?’ Lena said uncertainly.

I took a deep breath and decided to come clean. ‘Last night someone banged into the back of the car and then came round and punched me in the face.’

‘What? Your client’s husband?’

‘Yes … no. Let’s get back in the car.’ We settled back into our seats and I switched off the lights. ‘It wasn’t my client’s husband.’

‘Who was it then?’

‘I don’t know, someone called P. J. Kramer.’

‘Billy J. Kramer?’

‘No, P. J. Kramer. I don’t know who he is, he’s been following me. And I – well, I’ve been following him.’ I was fiddling with the ignition key.

Lena scrunched round in her seat to face me. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Nor do I.’

Her face was creased with such anxiety it was contagious and with a jerk I started the car. ‘Don’t do that,’ Lena said.

I switched off the engine.

‘Now explain.’

‘I don’t know what to say,’ I began. ‘Did I tell you I represented Saskia the other day?’

‘You never tell me the names of the people you represent,’ she said, regretfully. ‘But Saskia … How is she? Why does she need a family lawyer? She hasn’t had children, has she?’

‘Let’s just say I represented her, but there was a man at court who seemed interested in her. Then she disappeared. I thought she might be at Gino’s last night. She wasn’t but he was, so I followed him and he ended up banging into the back of the car and punching me in the eye.’

‘Did you tell the police?’

‘I was drunk, I couldn’t tell them. And anyway, it didn’t seem right to get the police in. It’s all just hunches on my part.’

‘A punch is not a hunch.’

‘No, but in a way it was my own fault.’

‘Because – why? Don’t tell me, you were driving really provocatively. Frankie, I told you there is never an excuse for violence.’

‘Don’t lecture me, Lena,’ I said. ‘I just have to think now what I’m going to do.’

‘You could go and see if the number plate is there, where it happened.’

‘But that means going back …’

‘Well, you’ve got to, because if the number plate is there and you don’t find it, he will and then he’ll be able to find you.’

‘Oh God.’

But in the end it wasn’t him who found me – it was the police. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When I told Lena where it had happened we agreed that there was no point going all that way back up to Highgate, especially since we were both looking so glamorous for our evening out. As we drove down towards Old Street, we assured each other that there were two possibilities. If we went to Waterlow Park and the number plate was gone, there would be nothing we could do, but it would ruin our evening. And if it was still up there, lying in the road, it was unlikely to be stolen while we, along with most of the population of London, were out having a good time.

At Old Street roundabout I was still trying to convince myself that all this had a logic and was true. When we found a parking space right outside the club I knew we had made the right decision.

The club was still quite empty. ‘This is one of the good things about being older,’ Lena said. ‘We arrive early and so we get a seat. Youth doesn’t arrive, on principle, till it’s standing room only.’ I wasn’t sure I liked being included in her comments about age. I felt I should do something childish and petulant to highlight our age difference, but I couldn’t think of anything, so I sulked.

The room was dark and small, about the size of a living room that’s a good size for a party. Tables formed a semi-circle round a raised dais, each table boasting a flickering night-light. We chose a small table near the front and I went to the bar to order a bottle of Californian Chardonnay. Already the room was beginning to fill up with women who looked the same age as me and Lena, who took all the tables. As I sat down again I was feeling old on my own account, but it meant I could stop sulking. Lena poured the wine. It was chilled and fruity and I began to relax.

Lena knew someone involved in the management of the club so she explained, ‘When there’s no act the stage is where the dancing happens.’ But a small neat woman in a tux stepped into the spotlight on the stage and announced that tonight there was an act, a singer. I was disappointed, I had got used to the idea of a loud band and dancing so I could forget all the things that wouldn’t leave my mind: Saskia and my black eye and my unreliable car and my lack of work.

When the act stepped on to the stage half an hour later the club was almost full. She looked tired, in her late thirties or early forties, and had thick coarse blonde hair. She wore a black beaded sheath which accentuated her full figure, and her black patent high-heel shoes highlighted her good legs. She tapped the microphone and I could see her hand trembling as she adjusted the height of the stand. The piano, her only accompaniment, began to play softly. She coughed and missed her entrance.

My heart sank. Had I left my warm friendly flat with a good night’s TV for this? I remembered I had also left my mother and sat forward, willing the singer to do well.

She sang ‘Cry Me a River’. Her voice was soft and smoky. The longing and loss in her voice touched me and I guessed most of the people in the room. Everyone was silent, no glasses tinkled, no money rattled in the till at the bar. Everyone was transfixed by the beauty she brought to the song. As she sighed the last notes and hung her head in conclusion the place erupted with applause. She looked genuinely surprised and pleased, smiling and bowing, holding her hands pressed together between her knees.

She sang ‘Funny Valentine’, ‘Georgia’, ‘Me and Mrs Jones’ and all those sleepy, sexy songs that make you miss everything you thought you had but didn’t, or thought you wanted but couldn’t.

At the end of the set women were whistling and whooping and the MC, leaping back on to the stage from her position on a stool at the side, had trouble quietening them down. ‘Margo will be back in half an hour,’ she said, and there was a scattering of applause before people drifted to the bar. A jazz trumpet began sobbing softly through the PA system.

I went to the bar to order another bottle of wine. When I got back to the table it was empty. I knew where Lena would be: standing at the side of the stage talking to the singer. I wasn’t surprised. Lena was an old performer, she’d been a dancer and was very good at telling other artists how much she liked their work. Sometimes, as I did then, I sat and watched the recipients melt with pleasure beneath the warmth of her sweet praise. Margo smiled, looking down, frowning slightly with a deprecatory expression. Then Lena gestured towards our table and Margo smiled over at me and I nodded in reply. Lena was explaining something and Margo looked at her watch. Lena wrinkled her nose and patted Margo’s arm. Margo turned and went backstage and Lena returned to the table. ‘She’s going to join us for a drink,’ she said, pulling over an empty chair from the next table. ‘At first she said she wouldn’t but I convinced her that there would only be serious intellectual conversation and dry white wine at our table so she relented. I think she might even have a small interest in you. She said she’d heard of you when I mentioned your name.’ She raised her eyebrows at me and I raised mine back.

Feeling pleased with myself, I sauntered to the bar and called to the bar woman who was waiting as a glass filled with lager. ‘Wine glass,’ I mouthed. ‘For the singer.’ Across the heads of the crowd, she passed me a glass and gave me a wink. The stud in her nose flashed.

I had just sat down when Margo came to the table, moving worriedly through the crowd, smiling occasionally at people who said hello. She was wearing another dress, red, short and tight, with high red sparkling shoes. I felt confident that the Jigsaw suit was good. She sat down and Lena introduced us.

‘You’re a barrister,’ Margo said. I nodded. Sometimes it turns people on that you’re a barrister and I was happy with that.

‘And you’re a wonderful singer,’ I said, pouring wine into her glass. ‘How long have you been singing?’

‘Not long,’ she said. ‘A year or so. Are you a wonderful barrister?’

‘Oh, the easy ones first. I don’t know if I’m wonderful, but I think I’m quite good and I fight hard. Why? Do you need a barrister?’ I hoped she didn’t, since a professional relationship might interfere with the relationship I had in mind.

‘Maybe. Don’t we all sometimes?’

‘I suppose so, possibly, mmm.’

Lena said, ‘I’m just going to talk to …’ and slipped away.

I was looking at Margo’s almond-shaped eyes. There were lines at the corners and her mascara was slightly smudged, but they were the deepest blue I had ever seen.

‘Why are you wearing dark glasses?’ she asked me.

‘I have a black eye,’ I said. ‘It’s a long story.’

‘Take them off.’

Reluctantly I removed the glasses. She raised her hand and gently smoothed her fingertips over the bruise. Her hand was cool. ‘You can hardly see it,’ she murmured, kindly. ‘Don’t put them back on. You have lovely eyes. I like brown eyes.’

‘How did you come to be singing here tonight?’ I asked. I watched her mouth as she spoke about knowing the bar woman who was a friend of the manager and the band they’d booked having let them down and the manager having rung her friend who had rung her. She spoke softly and slowly and her full red-stained lips formed the words hypnotically. I had to stop myself licking my own lips.

She looked at me watching her and smiled. For a moment neither of us spoke. She looked at her watch.

‘I’ve got five minutes. I need to get some fresh air before I go back on stage,’ she said. ‘Do you want to come outside while I have a smoke?’

We walked to the side of the stage and she led me out through a fire door into the chill dark air. We were in an alley, with high brick walls on either side. The narrow rectangle of the sky was clear and there were some stars. ‘Can we see the Plough from here, do you think?’ I asked her.

She leaned against one wall and took a pack of Camel cigarettes from the small bag on her wrist.

I don’t like smoking – I don’t like the smell of smoke, I dislike the sight of a saucer filled with squashed cigarette butts, I hate it when people smoke in the non-smoking compartments of trains, but now I was standing in a dark alley next to a woman with a cigarette in her hand. And at that moment all I wanted in the world was to slip my hand in my pocket, pull out a silver lighter and flick it open to light her cigarette. But I didn’t have a silver lighter, or any lighter at all, and she lit her own cigarette with a match which she waved out with a snap of her wrist.

She rubbed one arm with the other.

‘Are you cold?’ I asked, ‘Do you want my jacket?’ I went to take it off.

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘You’ll get cold too.’

I leaned against the wall opposite and watched her as she smoked, inhaling deeply, creasing her eyes against the smoke. ‘It always feels so good, up there on stage,’ she began, looking down the alley. ‘It’s such a buzz.’ She shook her head and inhaled again. ‘It’s so different from the rest of my life. I feel like a different person, a stranger. And tonight there’s you. I don’t know what’s happening. I’ve never spoken to a barrister before.’ She looked me straight in the eye. ‘I didn’t know barristers could be lesbians.’

‘Barristers can be anything,’ I said. ‘It’s not who we are, it’s what we say that counts. I suppose it matters sometimes …’ I could feel myself getting boring, but I couldn’t stop. ‘Sometimes you don’t get the briefs. But that’s usually because you’re a woman, not because of who you sleep with.’

‘How long have you been a barrister?’

‘Ten years.’

‘Ten years is a long time. What would my life be like if I’d started doing this ten years ago?’

‘I don’t know, what was your life like ten years ago?’

‘Well, ten years ago it wasn’t bad, it just got worse as time went by.’ She shook her head again, then looked up. ‘What did you say about the Plough?’

We both gazed up at the sky. I took a step forward and could feel her close to me. I ran my hand down her arm and felt her shudder. We looked at each other and I took another step towards her and put an arm across her shoulders, watching her face to check her reaction.

She was an inch or two shorter than I was and she looked up at me with her head on one side. I pushed her gently back against the wall and put my hands on either side of her head. She slid her arms around my waist and closed her eyes.

She felt soft and ripe in my arms. I bent my face into her hair and smelt perfume and cigarette smoke. She raised her eyelids and looked at me while I put my hand against her cheek. It felt like peach down. I tilted her face to mine and kissed her. Her lips were as soft and full as they had looked in the club, and now they parted slightly. I slid my tongue between her teeth and in the warm dark wetness of her mouth her tongue touched mine.

I pulled her closer and felt the curves beneath her dress all the way down my body. She moved her arms up round my neck, sliding her hands into my hair, pulling my mouth closer into hers.

As we drew apart she smiled at me. She licked her lips. ‘I feel like a stranger in paradise,’ she said. ‘You’re a good kisser.’

‘It takes two to tango,’ I said.

‘I’ve always been fond of dancing,’ she murmured, and pulled my head down.

After five minutes or perhaps ten she looked at her watch. ‘Oh God, I’ve got to go back on.’

‘What time do you finish?’ I asked and then remembered my mother. ‘I’d like to see you after, go for a drink, invite you home with me, but my mother is staying. She came up to do Christmas shopping.’

‘Don’t talk to me about Christmas,’ she said. ‘It’s OK, I’d like to invite you home with me, but I can’t.’

‘Another time,’ we said together.

I took out my wallet and gave her my card, writing my home number on the back. I wrote her number on the reverse of another and slid it back into my wallet.

She walked slowly on to the stage for her last set. She sang ‘One Fine Day’ in her soft, husky voice of honeyed gold. And I thought that I certainly wanted her for my girl.

As the room erupted with whooping and cheering, Margo was gazing at the back of the room. I turned and saw Saskia.

And she did look remarkable. She was wearing my grey shirt, which looked stained and crumpled, and, I noticed with some concern, torn along one of the sleeves. Her hair was flat, which made her look subdued, crushed. The bruising on her face wasn’t so visible. But her expression as she stood staring into the room was bleak and desperate.

I stood up abruptly and pushed my chair back. I was torn between staying to applaud and smile at Margo and going to speak to Saskia. I patted my wallet which contained Margo’s phone number and turned towards the back of the club.

The crowd seemed to have swollen. Everyone was on their feet now, clapping and whistling, stamping their approval, pressing towards the stage. I pushed my way to the back, stepping on toes, knocking elbows, shouting, ‘Sorry, excuse me, sorry, sorry, excuse me.’ When I got to the back of the room, Saskia was gone.

I went through to the small lobby and out into the street. It was narrow and dark, lined with cars. There was no sign of her. I walked round to the side of the building and looked down the alley, which was lit by a solitary light, beaming over the fire doors that Margo and I had come out of an hour before. She wasn’t there. I walked back to the front of the club and stood looking round for two minutes.

Had she seen me? Had she come to see me? How would she know I would be there?

The door to the club banged open and people began to spill out on to the street. Lena came over to me. ‘What are you doing out here, sweetie? But more importantly, tell me about Margo. Shall I make my own way home, or can we journey together?’

‘I have no plans,’ I said. ‘Let’s find the car.’

SEVEN
Sunday – Columbia Road

At half past seven there was a tap on my bedroom door. ‘Cup of tea?’ my mum said brightly and came into the room.

I had been dreaming. I rarely dream of the people I want to but in this one I’d been dancing with Margo, moving slowly round to a sensual rhythm, holding her in my arms, feeling the softness of her body, smelling the sweet rose perfume and cigarette smoke in her hair.

I sat up crossly. ‘Mum, I didn’t get in till three o’clock.’

‘You said we had to get to Columbia Road early to miss the crowds.’

‘Yes, but I didn’t say the middle of the night.’

‘Ah, now, talking of the middle of the night, before I forget, about midnight a friend of yours rang. I can’t remember if she said her name. Ssss –’

‘Saskia?’

‘Mmmm, perhaps. I’m sure she told me, and I was going to write it down, but she said there was no message. I told her where you were anyway.’

‘And did you know where I was?’

‘I heard you talking on the phone to Lena. If you said “the Queen of Sheba” once, you must have said it ten times during the conversation. Did she find you?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘in a manner of speaking.’ I yawned. My throat was raw and my head was not happy. I didn’t know if that was the alcohol or the black eye. I tried to remember how much I had had to drink the night before. I’d had too much to drive and there had been the very scary experience of Lena driving us home, meandering slowly through the streets of the City. ‘I’m better when I’ve got my glasses on,’ she had said.

‘Drink your tea, it’s getting cold,’ my mother reminded me.

I sat up obediently.

‘Now there is something I wanted to talk to you about,’ she said, settling herself on the edge of my bed. I moved over to make room for her.

I waited.

‘Have you heard of Dr Henry?’

‘That name rings a bell,’ I said.

‘He said he’d ring you.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘he has rung me. I tried to ring him back. Is he a friend of yours?’

‘Well …’ My mother smiled coyly. ‘In a funny sort of way, I suppose he is. I met him at a drinks do at Audrey’s a month or so ago.’ Audrey was my mother’s oldest friend, from her schooldays. ‘I know in this day and age a woman ought to be able to simply ring a man and ask him to the theatre, but I’ve never felt happy doing that. So I found a sort of excuse.’

‘What do you mean? What kind of a doctor is he?’

‘He’s a surgeon, a plastic surgeon.’

‘So, what, you’ve been ringing him up asking about thigh reduction? I thought you were proud of your firm thighs. I thought it was the one thing I had to thank you for.’

‘Don’t be unnecessary, Frankie. No, it was a nose job, actually.’

‘You don’t need a nose job. You’ve got a really nice nose.’

‘Well, it wasn’t for me,’ she said slowly, looking at my face.

I started to laugh. My mother wanted me to have a nose job because she fancied the doctor.

‘It doesn’t have to be a nose job, I just thought you might like that,’ she said. ‘It could be collagen in your lips, that would be nice. Or possibly,’ she hesitated, ‘breast enhancement.’

‘For God’s sake, Mother.’

‘I’d pay.’

‘Mum, are you desperate or what? I can’t tell you how shocked I am. You are going to ring this man and tell him very clearly that I love my nose and all those body parts you mentioned, and I want none of them changed.’

‘I wonder if he does things with black eyes,’ she murmured.

‘Mother! I am very happy with my body and I don’t even want a sniff of a plastic surgeon in my life. If you want to go out with him, ask him, just ask him. Or at least have the decency to go under the surgeon’s knife yourself.’

‘He is very attractive,’ she said.

We drove silently to Columbia Road and I made her buy me bagels and coffee for breakfast. As we wandered through the market I began to relent. I knew she was lonely and had been for a long time. She was a very nice woman and it made me angry that she still felt the need to engage in subterfuge to catch a man. We bought two bunches of deep red and white chrysanthemums, and two small pots of early Christmas bulbs for Freda next door, and Mum said she was weighed down and would have to do the rest of her Christmas shopping in Colchester. By the time I tipped her and her case and bags of flowers into the train at Liverpool Street I was sorry to see her go.

‘I tell you what,’ I said, ‘why don’t I ask him out for you?’

‘Oh, Frankie, you can’t,’ she said. ‘Have you got his number?’

‘Yes, I have, and I shall ring him tomorrow and tell him there’s a perfectly formed woman in Colchester who would like to go and see The Return of Martin Guerre with him, to discuss whether he did it by plastic surgery.’

She giggled with pleasure. ‘I have no pride,’ she said. ‘Do it if you must.’

As I walked away from the platform and went into W. H. Smith’s to buy the Observer I realised that my headache wasn’t just a hangover, I was getting a cold.

I rang Lena and we went to Hampstead to see a revamped copy of Bringing Up Baby. I had to go out halfway through the film to buy a packet of tissues and by the end my nose was streaming.

‘You should go home and have a hot toddy,’ Lena said.

‘Would hot whisky have the same effect?’ I sniffed. ‘I don’t think I’ve got the other ingredients.’

Lena ordered me to stop the car at the corner of her street while she went into the Italian shop and came back with three lemons and a jar of honey.

‘Go to bed,’ she said, thrusting them on to the seat, ‘I’ll walk from here.’

It was only seven o’clock when I turned into Amhurst Road. My head was aching and I was sneezing every thirty seconds. A car drove away from outside my house just as I was slowing down to a crawl, looking for a parking space. It’s like a small but precious gift when you can park outside your own home in London. I switched off the engine and the voice of Paul McCartney singing ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ disappeared abruptly. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed something that I knew was significant, but I was so busy concentrating on turning the car key the right way up to lock the door, smooth side up for driver’s door, smooth side down for passenger door, that I didn’t think.

As I walked up the steps to the front door I looked over at my bay window, the half-drawn white blinds gleaming in the darkness. In the darkness – that was it, the window was dark. It shouldn’t have been dark, the lamp on the timer in the living room didn’t go off till one o’clock.

‘Bloody long-life bloody light bulbs,’ I muttered, juggling the bag of lemons and honey, scrabbling in my pocket for the key.

The door swung open and I stepped into the hall. I lifted my hand to press the communal timer switch and sneezed at the same time. The bag fell from my hand and lemons and honey escaped across the floor. As I picked them up in the silence I could hear the timer switch wheezing its way slowly out again. I was shoving the jar of honey back into the bag when the timer gave a final sigh and the light went out and I realised my front door was open.

Tentatively I pushed the door and slid my hand round the door frame to switch on the light in my hall. As light flooded into the living room, it was clear the room was empty. It was also completely untidy. Papers strewn on the floor, newspaper tossed on the sofa, cups knocked over on the carpet. Or was that just how I’d left it before I went out?

I went over to my table. The desk drawers were open and the papers in them looked messy. That could mean anything.

Then I saw it, in the middle of the desk, on top of my laptop: a card. It said, ‘Make love, not sausages.’

‘Saskia!’ I said. ‘Saskia?’ I walked through into the kitchen and switched on the light. ‘Saskia?’ The kitchen was empty. ‘Saskia?’ I walked back through to the bedroom and opened the door. The bed was empty.

I looked down at the card in my hand. I turned it over. On the back were the words, ‘It was too easy to get into your flat, you should do something about security,’ written in a small, tight hand as if she was anxious about what she was writing. And so she should be, breaking into people’s homes.

I walked back into the living room, wondering whether I should ring Kay, or even the police about Saskia’s visit. I immediately rejected the option of the police. Burglary of domestic premises was a serious offence. Not that it was burglary. It was Saskia. But the police might look at it differently. And I was more than happy that Saskia should come into my home at any hour of the night or day, to have a bath, help herself to a bowl of ice cream from the freezer, or even something more substantial. I just wish she’d stayed. I needed to talk to her.

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