Хилари Боннер - A Kind Of Wild Justice

He bought the drink for her and sat down opposite. Neither of them spoke for what seemed a long time but was probably just a few seconds.

‘You look tired,’ she said eventually.

‘Thanks a bunch,’ he responded. ‘I’ve seen you look better too.’

‘I’ve just come from the Phillipses,’ she said.

‘Oh, fuck.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And now you’re off home. Something else to look forward to.’

‘Yup.’

‘I keep trying to figure out what went wrong.’

‘Yup,’ she said again.

‘I was sure the bastard would go down. Instead it’s all the rest of us who are down, right down the pan in my case.’

He looked so miserable. A completely different man from the one she had first encountered all those years ago. Like a small boy, really, but a very old small boy. She felt a sudden urge to give him a cuddle. But those days were long gone and this was certainly not the moment to rekindle anything. ‘We did the right thing,’ she said, as much to reassure herself as him.

‘Did we? And since when did the likes of you and me even try to do the right thing?’

She sighed. ‘We do sometimes.’

‘And sometimes not.’ He looked down at his hands, holding his pint glass on the table in front of him. ‘I was remembering when we met after O’Donnell walked the last time...’

He didn’t need to explain further. She had known that would be as much in his mind as it was in hers. It had to be. ‘So was I,’ she said softy.

He looked up at her. Suddenly there was just a spark of the old Mike Fielding. ‘God, we were good,’ he said. And his eyes twinkled.

‘We damn well were, weren’t we?’ she responded, and for what seemed the first time in for ever she managed a big broad grin.

But that was the only reference they made to their old relationship. One thing was obvious — and that was how much they both remembered it, how easy it was for them to relive their time together. Nonetheless, although they continued to talk about the old days they spoke more about other people than themselves.

‘You used to drive that old bastard Frank Manners crazy, you know,’ he said.

‘Didn’t I, though,’ she replied with some satisfaction. And they had almost managed a bit of a giggle at that. It was as if by silent consent they did not want to talk about anything that might be contentious in any way. They stayed in the pub together for more than an hour and also, perhaps surprisingly, talked very little about that day’s courtroom disaster. There was, after all, little point. Neither of them could see any way of taking the matter forward. Or their relationship, come to that. This stolen hour had been a great comfort to her somehow and also, she suspected, to him. But it could not be more than that.

‘I’ve really got to get back to that report,’ he said eventually. ‘If I want to keep the small chance I have of hanging on to my pension.’

She found it sad to hear him talk in that fashion. The Mike Fielding she had known before had been convinced that he was going straight to the top. That Mike Fielding would not have believed that twenty years down the line he would have progressed just one rung up the promotional ladder and be grimly hanging on to the remains of his career, desperate not to lose his bloody pension.

Was that really all his lifetime’s work amounted to? She was lucky in that respect, she reflected. She already had total financial security, albeit thanks largely to her marriage to Paul.

Paul. Seeing him that night promised to be a perfect end to a perfect day. ‘I have to go too,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.’

‘Good luck,’ he murmured. He still seemed to know what she was thinking. Did he also know that thanks to him, and for reasons she could not quite explain to herself, she now felt more able to deal with what lay ahead? Certainly both stronger and calmer than she had done when she arrived at the pub.

Outside the pub they kissed goodbye on the cheek, like the old friends she told herself they could only ever be again, particularly after this latest débâcle. How come they always seemed to cause each other trouble? How come she had not been able to stop herself feeling some of the old longing for him? And how come she was so convinced that he still felt it too?

He looked different. He was different. He was weary and disappointed, a failure, more or less, hanging on in there. And yet as she watched him walk away from her to his own car she did not see that at all. No. She saw the same bold, high-flying young maverick, with his to-die-for grin and winning ways, that she had fallen in love with twenty years earlier.

Whatever succour she had gained from her meeting with Fielding rapidly disappeared on the way back to London when she finally made herself call Nigel Nuffield on his mobile phone.

The barrister answered at once. She wanted, irrationally or not, to scream abuse at him, but there was no point. ‘I just need to know if you think there is anything else we can do, Nigel?’ she asked. ‘Is there any kind of appeal procedure at this stage? And if so, is there still any reasonable chance of success?’

‘My dear Joanna, I only wish there were,’ he told her, sounding as languid as ever. ‘We could appeal to the Queen’s Bench on a point of law over the Human Rights Convention issue, and we would be in with a chance on that. Somebody will have to get a ruling on it sooner or later. But I’m afraid we’ve been bowled a googly on the DNA admissibility issue and that is our only new evidence, as that infuriating woman magistrate pointed out.’

Bloody cricket again. She wished he wouldn’t do that. Her irritation got the better of her. ‘Nigel, you quite obviously didn’t know about the ruling on the Weir case...’

The barrister interrupted her. ‘Jo, you know as well as I do the confusion over interpretation of the law regarding DNA,’ he asserted. ‘If we’d had a different umpire we might have won the day regardless, worried about the next step then. As it is I played all the shots but the decision went against us. Badly, I’m afraid.’

A different umpire? Played all the shots? The man was infuriating. She really wasn’t going to let him get away with it. ‘Nigel, I’m sorry, I think our case was ill-prepared and I’m going to tell Paul so, and if I have my way the Comet will damn well sue you.’ She very nearly shouted the last few words into the phone.

Nuffield replied in a slow, slightly amused drawl, his public-school vowels even more extended than usual, ‘Joanna, Joanna, calm down. This is litigation, not life.’

She completely lost it then. ‘That may be how it is for you, prancing about in your damned silly wig, but for real people it is their lives, you overpaid, over-hyped patronising fucking bastard,’ she yelled at him. Then she switched her phone off.

Unprofessional. Unhelpful. Yes. But oh, it was also the only fleetingly satisfying moment in a truly nightmare day. A day which had yet to end.

Paul was sitting on the big black leather sofa in their spacious living room surrounded by the next day’s papers when she finally arrived home just after midnight. The walls and the floor were cream. The only colour came from Paul’s collection of vibrant abstract paintings. The scattered newspapers were the only clutter in the room. Probably in the house. Paul was like that. So too was their daughter, hopefully sound asleep upstairs by now. Emily took after her father in personality. She was self-contained, capable, organised, meticulously tidy. Unnaturally so, Joanna sometimes thought. All Emily’s contemporaries seemed to be congenitally lazy and specialised in leaving a trail of debris behind them. They were, well, sort of normal really. Jo shrugged away her vague disloyalty and forced herself to concentrate on the unwelcome confrontation she knew was about to begin.