Anna will be in London, but Lucy is certainly not going to let her mother know she is nervous and afraid of failing. Anna would tell her she has spent too long in Cornwall, and this is what happens when you drop out, even for a short time.
She can hear her mother’s voice and she grins suddenly, thinking of Tristan, who would say the same thing but in a different way.
‘You’re just in a panic because you got a bloody good job when you didn’t expect to, Lu. Come on, you didn’t do languages to wait on tables, did you?’
Lucy sighs and jumps off the rocks onto the sand. She is not accustomed to being melancholy and she turns slowly for home. Now she is up and wide awake she might as well sort out her things. She has accumulated so much crap. She will have to go up into the attic and see if there is any room to store all the childhood stuff she cannot bear to throw away.
Lucy climbs the ladder up to the attic and pushes open the hatch. She feels vaguely guilty, as if she is about to trespass. She should really have asked Barnaby before she came up here.
Using her torch Lucy finds the light switch on her left, and the dim bulb swings slightly, catching the dust. There is plenty of room up here. Most of the floor has been professionally boarded and Lucy wonders why her grandfather has always had a thing about people coming up here and falling through the ceiling.
The room smells of mice and dust and a world that no longer exists. There is an old gilt mirror, mottled, the frame rotting. Heavy, old-fashioned golf clubs. A box of little pewter mugs, relics of school cricket matches. A box of books. A huge grim picture of a fast-running grey sea. A faded, frayed hat with paper flowers. Leather suitcases neatly stacked one on top of another. Rolled carpets, a broken wicker chair, and a disintegrating box of crockery and vases.
Lucy swings the torch round in an arc and sees a hardboard partition to the left of the hatch opening. Big enough to house a water tank, it has been eaten by mice and is beginning to disintegrate. There is a crude door into it with a small latch.
She heaves herself over the ledge of the open hatch and crawls over to the door. She pulls it cautiously and it falls away, completely rotten round the hinges. Kneeling upright she drags it carefully away from the partition and pushes it aside. Shining her torch inside the darkness she sees an old school trunk. Nothing else. No water tank, no hidden electric wires or pipes.
Moving inside the hidden room, Lucy sees that over the years the trunk lid, with her grandfather’s initials on the top, has warped, and documents have slid to the floor below. A rusty padlock lies broken in the lock. Lucy pulls it out and opens the lid. Mice have been in and made nests; there are droppings and small mounds of eaten paper. On the top lie cardboard files of deeds and medical journals; letters in bundles, some stored in plastic files.
Lucy shines the torch downwards into the trunk and pokes about with her free hand. Why has Grandpa made a room to hide this trunk? Under her fingers Lucy suddenly sees a faded pink box nestling under letters and old documents, pushed carefully to the bottom of the trunk, underneath diaries and ancient ledgers.
She leans over and moves the bundles of letters carefully so that she can pull the box out and she places it on the floor beside her. The box is tied with colourless ribbon and the writing on the lid is faded and in Polish. Lucy’s fingers hover over it.
Gran’s box? Her heart is thumping. In that small second of hesitation Lucy’s intuition tells her she should stop and put the box back in its hiding place, yet she is already sliding off the ribbon and lifting the lid.
Letters. Browning letters in a foreign hand. A large envelope with typewritten German: Social Welfare Department of the Municipal Administration of Warsaw. It is not sealed. Lucy opens a creased and faded piece of paper within a small cardboard folder like an identity card.
The document is torn and flimsy, almost in pieces. This writing too is in German. It seems to be some sort of crude birth certificate: ‘Anna Esther … Born 8 February 1941, Warsaw, Poland.’ The surname is indecipherable, as if it has been rubbed out.
‘Mother. Marta Esther …’ ‘Oweska’ has been added later, obliterating the name underneath. ‘Father …’ The paper is watermarked and conveniently torn.
All that is left on the card in which the paper is folded is some sort of German official stamp and the date, 1943. The rest is illegible. What does it mean? Her mother was born in London in 1945. Gran and Grandpa have told her so. This piece of paper would make Anna four years older than she is. It does not make sense, and why have the surnames been rubbed out?
Lucy shivers. With shaking fingers, she pushes the documents away from her, back into the box. She does not want to know. She replaces the lid and puts them all back into the top of the trunk. Clumsily she moves away backwards, anxious to be out of the attic. There is nothing she can do about the rotten door.
She closes the hatch with a bang, pushes the ladder back to the ceiling and, blanking from her mind all possible implications, she runs across the garden to go and dress Martha before she starts her breakfast shift at the hotel.
Coming out of court Anna congratulates herself. She was unsure she could win this case, but she was assisted by an overconfident Junior Counsel for the Prosecution who had not done his homework.
She stands for a moment, a tall figure in navy suit, blinking in the early evening sun. Her fair hair blows away from a face with high cheekbones and startling blue eyes. People glance at her as they pass, turn for another look, as if she might be someone they should know.
She looks at her watch: it is rush hour, too late to walk back to chambers and get involved with post mortems. She hails a taxi, without any difficulty, much to the annoyance of two business men, and climbs in. She will make her way to the Old Vic. If she is early she can have a drink while she waits for Rudi.
As she sits in the early evening traffic, Anna’s mind returns to the man she has just defended. His solicitor rang her at her chambers. He was not from the usual firm who instructed Anna, but he told her he had a client who had insisted he contacted Anna, as he had been told she was the best QC he could have to defend him.
The solicitor had apologised, knowing Anna’s list would be full, but he had promised his client that he would approach her. Anna was immediately interested when he mentioned the name of the firm involved in the fraud case. The solicitor also came from a prestigious law firm it would be useful for Anna to have instruct her in the future. She arranged for a conference with Counsel for the one hour she had left that week.
The client had come to her chambers on his own as his solicitor was in court. He had thanked her for seeing him and was visibly distressed.
‘I have nothing to lose by asking you to help me.’ He held out an envelope to Anna with shaking hands. ‘Would this be enough to retain you?’
Anna was amused, but she also admired his courage and determination in wanting her to defend him. She was aware she had a rather alarming reputation. She went over the case with him, then asked her long-suffering clerk to juggle her list so she could take on the case. Something in the man’s blind faith in her had made her sad. She rang the man’s solicitor and asked him to look into legal aid.
The Prosecution Counsel tried to prove that the defendant’s ignorance of the deception going on within his own firm was pure fabrication, a callous and calculated fraud. Anna’s defence rested on the fact that he was totally ingenuous and had had a steadfast but misplaced trust in the honesty of his business partner.
That fraud, operated on the vast scale it had been, would have been beyond him. She was forced to make him seem stupid in court, but it was part of her job. He’d paid dearly for blind trust. She worked for a fraction of her normal fee and,