Wrong Place Wrong Time(68)

‘I …’ she starts to say. She can’t bear to do it to him.

‘It’s – I mean, it’s the day?’ he says. And it isn’t that she might get sacked, in the future somewhere, if she misses today. It isn’t that she knows the outcome – Andrew loses. It is that she knows him to be heartbroken, and that he sounds so flat and sad, like all her clients, like her. And so Jen, as she has a thousand times before with a thousand other clients, tells him she will be there in ten minutes.

Liverpool county court is municipal-looking but nevertheless imposing. Jen hardly ever comes here – like most solicitors, she tries to settle early, and settle often, before acrimony and court fees set in. But Andrew and his wife wouldn’t. Their primary argument was about a substantial pension fund, due to reach maturity next year. Jen remembers being surprised Andrew wouldn’t give it up, but most people who have betrayed or have been betrayed are irrational. It’s the single most important lesson she’s learned in her career.

‘Look,’ she says to Andrew, after she’s greeted the barrister – thank God, somebody who can remember the case is conducting the hearing. ‘We’re going to lose this.’

She would never usually say something like this. So bold, so pessimistic. But they are: of course, she knows they are. ‘If I were the judge, I would find in favour of your wife,’ she tells him.

‘Oh, well, great, nice to know now that you’re on my side,’ Andrew says acidly. He’s approaching sixty-five but still young with it, plays squash three times a week, tennis on the other nights. He’s most certainly lonely, hasn’t seen the other woman since it happened, after which he issued a full confession to his wife. Jen sometimes wonders, if she were Dorothy, whether she would have forgiven Andrew. Probably, but it’s easy for Jen to say, having been so privy to her client’s heartbreak, his dysfunction, the way he’s left all the photographs of Dorothy up all around his house.

She guides Andrew into one of the meeting rooms that flanks the corridor into the court. It’s dusty and cold, feels like it hasn’t been opened for at least a few weeks. The lights hum as she flicks them on. ‘I think you should offer something up,’ she says to Andrew.

He takes some convincing but, finally, after Jen’s insistent, dispassionate arguments that he is going to spend more on barrister’s fees than he’s trying to save, he offers up seventy-five per cent of the pension fund. Jen takes the offer to the meeting room, where his wife is sitting. She thinks it’ll be enough.

Dorothy is with her lawyers. She’s a diminutive-looking woman, good posture and even better make-up, her physique hinting at a kind of wiry strength, the kind of sixty-five-year-old who walks ten miles on a bank holiday.

‘Seventy-five per cent of the Aviva,’ Jen says to the solicitor, a man called Jacob who Jen went to law school with. Back then, he ate the same lunch every single day – chicken nuggets and chips – and got forty-nine per cent in the family law exam. Jen wouldn’t want him representing her, and it strikes her that most professions are probably full of these people.

Jacob raises his eyebrows at Dorothy. Evidently, a threshold of acceptability has already been agreed, because Dorothy nods, her hands clasped together. She signs the consent order Jen drafts carefully, feeling pretty pleased with how much easier she has made this day for everybody. When she brings it back into their meeting room, at not even ten in the morning, she sees that, next to her signature, Dorothy has written a small note. Andrew looks at it, the paper conducting the trembling of his hands as he holds it. Jen tries not to look like she’s reading it, too, but she does. It says only: Thank you x.

Jen wonders as she walks back to her office if this will help, somehow, in the future, both her and them. This small, small change that she’s made. It probably won’t – how could it, when she will wake up next before she’s made it?

Just as she arrives at her desk, her phone pings with a text from Kelly. How’s the trial? x. She reads it but doesn’t reply. A photo comes in next. Coffee for one, it says, a Starbucks takeaway cup held in his hand, his wrist tattoo on show. But blurred into the background – she recognizes it. It’s a tiny corner of the house, the abandoned house he visited at Whitsun. It’s the same shingle on the drive and the brickwork. He’s there again, now. So brazen: he thinks she won’t notice; he thinks she’s never been there.

So here she is. In the office while receiving this text, rather than in court. It must be for a reason.

Eventually, she wanders down to Rakesh’s room without her shoes on, feet in tights, the way she has a hundred times before. He looks younger, still smells of cigarette smoke.

She recites the address to him. ‘This house, Sandalwood, went bona vacantia,’ she says. Property passing to the Crown. ‘Is there any way we can find who owned it before that?’

‘Ooh, bona vacantia, now you’re testing me,’ he says with a flash of a smile. His teeth are whiter.

‘I think you can look at the epitome of title with bona vacantia – hang on,’ Rakesh says, clicking quickly at his mouse. Jen is glad to be here, with him, in his office in the past. He’s always been so much better than her at legal theory. She should have asked him ages ago.

‘Looks like they’re trying to check who to pass it to because the beneficiary is dead,’ Rakesh says. ‘Hiles. H-I-L-E-S.’