delighted.
'No problem. How can I help?'
'Look, obviously we don't want to interfere, but Alun told me that you've allowed the BRISIC lawyer rights of audience.'
'It's a matter in my discretion. I took the view his client has a legitimate interest.'
'Of course. But it's only right you should know that their agenda is far from benign. This is a political Islamist organization that peddles malicious conspiracy theories. Take a look at the message boards on their website - they accuse the British state of everything from black propaganda to murdering its own citizens. I'm afraid I'd have to disagree that their interest is legitimate.'
Refusing to be cowed, Jenny said, 'I'm sure I can keep them under control.'
'I understand you've adjourned already. One of our people was due to give evidence tomorrow . . .'
'It's nothing sinister.'
'Not according to our friends' news interviews. You're already orchestrating a cover-up as far as they're concerned.'
'And how are you suggesting I should be influenced by this information?'
'I'm not suggesting anything,' Gillian Golder said. 'I'm merely forewarning you. Dangerous nonsense can sound very credible, even to a perfectly sound and rational mind.' She drew out this final phrase, giving Jenny a message that needed no further articulation:
Chapter 11
The wind came up in the late evening, a cold northerly that found new cracks and crevices in the fabric of the cottage to penetrate. When it gusted, the back door rattled on its hinges, making Jenny start and long for a drink to soak up the childish fears that the creaking building stirred up in her. Ross was staying over at a friend's in Bristol, and she was too embarrassed to phone Steve to say she was scared of being alone in her own home. She spent the evening locked in her study becoming steadily more jittery. Late in the afternoon the police photographer had emailed more images from inside the wrecked van and they refused to leave her: two men in their early twenties with exploded foreheads, one twisted across the bench seat, the other lying face up in the footwell, his broken features grossly swollen. A partially eaten burger lay on top of the dash. They were tree surgeons, men who earned a living clambering on rotten branches with chainsaws, but it seemed that something as tiny as a faulty tyre valve had sent them into oblivion. Her work was a constant reminder that every day, and without notice, life was snatched away from even the fittest and healthiest. And where did they go, these poor souls catapulted into the afterlife with a mouthful of flame-grilled and onions? To think it could be as simple as switching out the lights would be comforting, but she couldn't believe that for a moment.
Two pills weren't enough to put her under. In what was becoming a routine, she lay in the darkness, the duvet pulled up around her ears, flinching at every sound. Mrs Jamal, the missing boys and the corpses in the van paraded behind her eyes and entered her fitful dreams: she and Mrs Jamal chased through a labyrinth of anonymous streets after a fleeing black van which limped along with a flat tyre. Desperate, breathless and exhausted they eventually rounded a corner and found it crumpled against a tree. Blood dripped out from under the sills onto the pavement. While Mrs Jamal wailed and rent her clothes, Jenny steeled herself with righteous anger and wrenched open the cab door. Inside was a young girl who looked up with blood-soaked hands she had wiped across her face. The child split the air with a cry and Jenny recoiled and fled with legs that turned to stone. As she fought to drag one foot in front of the other, a cold shadow stole over her; she heard the disembodied voice of her son: 'You don't know me. You can never know me.' She tried to call his name, to bring him out from his hiding place, but the landscape changed around her and became the street where she had lived as a child. For a brief second she was elated to be safe, then realized that the buildings were empty shells. There were no curtains at the windows, no people or furniture inside. Utterly and completely alone and bereft, she wept.
Jenny woke to a sensation of wetness on her pillow and with a sense of dread that was almost exquisite in its clarity. She sat upright and reached for the light, trying to shake off the image of the girl with the bloodied face. It was four-thirty a.m. She reminded herself it was only a dream, the product of a churning, restless mind that would soon calm down, but it didn't. The girl's face, somehow familiar, lodged like a bone in her throat. She was impressing herself on her, haunting her, pleading to be seen.
She pulled on her robe and made her way downstairs, switching on all the lights as she went. She dug her journal out from the drawer of her desk and started to write, then frantically to sketch the face of the child . . .
She took the slip road off the M48 and drew into the car park of the Severn View service station for her early-morning rendezvous with McAvoy. He was leaning against his elderly black Ford smoking a cigarette. She pulled up in the space alongside and climbed out, the cold breeze biting into her cheeks.
He smiled through tired, red eyes that looked as if they'd seen little sleep.
'Will you look at you, fresh and beautiful at this godforsaken hour.'
'That'd be the three hours in make-up.'
'Modest, too.' He tossed down his cigarette butt and rubbed it out with his toe. 'You truly are one of nature's innocents.' He pushed back his hair with both hands and rolled his stiff shoulders. She could feel his hangover.
'Late night?'
'It's the people I have to do business with. They don't tend to keep conventional hours.' He shivered. 'The air con's busted in this heap - any chance I can come with you?'
'Didn't you say Madog was going to meet us here?'
'That's what I suggested. He seemed a little reticent. But I know he was on the early shift this morning. He should be about due his break.'
McAvoy's smell was an aromatic mix of cigarettes, whisky and a hint of perfume. With the heater on full it filled her little car and conjured images of cheap casinos and topless hostesses.
'Swing round onto the northbound carriageway and we'll end up at the canteen block this side of the plaza,' McAvoy said and opened his window a touch. 'Do you mind?'
'I've got some painkillers if you need them.'
'Thank you, but I'm superstitious about treating self- inflicted pain. I worry the devil'd only give it back to me twice over.'
She smiled and drove on in silence for a short while. 'You're serious?'
'Read your gospel of Matthew - nine separate mentions of hell. They can't all have been metaphorical.'
'You sound like my officer. She goes to an evangelical church—'
'Bad luck. No poetry or humility those people,' McAvoy said, interrupting her. 'Try going to confession once a fortnight and spilling your sins out to a celibate priest. There's something to put you in your place.'
'Is that what you do?'
'I try.'
Curious, Jenny said, 'How do you find that squares with your work? I know criminals need defending — '
'When I was in the jail, you know who visited me, gave money to the wife? My clients. From my upstanding colleagues, not a single damn word. We could have both been rotting for all they cared.'
'Maybe they didn't know what to say.'
'The thing about villains, they live with the consequences. Forget your sociology bullshit, no one understands right and wrong like they do. Your lawyers and politicians and businessmen, it's all arm's length with them. They're sipping Chablis while the wee girl's getting her legs blown off in Africa. It's not the robbers and thieves, it's those suited bastards who are the rulers of darkness of this world.'
She glanced across and saw the tension in his face.
'Sorry,' she said.
'Take no notice. I always rant like a madman when I've a sore head.'
'Only then?'
He gave her a pained smile. 'Shut up and drive.'
As they approached the English end of the bridge, McAvoy told her to pull over next to a single-storey
