Someone Out There

CHAPTER TEN

The police guard made it impossible to get near Harry Pelham without explaining who he was and the reason for his visit. Ben Morgan had no intention of doing either. He’d had dealings with the police before and he didn’t want to renew the experience. He had been lucky to miss them at Harry’s house the day before and he had been lucky again to find out about the guard before it was too late. He arrived at the ward to find Harry nowhere in sight, so he asked a nurse for directions. She pointed to a side room and told him he’d have to ask the police officers if he could see Harry. There were two of them and one was standing outside the door to the room.

‘Why are they here?’ he asked.

‘No idea. All I know is any visitor has to get their permission if they want to talk to him.’

‘Do you think they’ll be staying long?’

She shrugged, then said, ‘He’s lucky he’s not handcuffed to one of them.’

Ben laughed nervously at that and the nurse said she wasn’t joking. She had heard them talking about it but, in the end, they’d decided not to.

‘Are you family?’ She peered at him curiously, as if he might be related to a serial killer. He was late thirties maybe, tall and skinny with a patchy beard and pale, restless eyes.

‘No.’ He hesitated, and when she obviously wanted more, said, ‘Just a friend.’

‘Looks like he needs one.’

‘Would you be able to give him a note for me?’

Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. She didn’t reply and started walking towards the policemen.

Ben Morgan turned the other way and fled, making himself walk at a normal pace. Then he heard the nurse call to him and he ran down the stairs and out of the building, hurrying away from the hospital as fast as he could.

He jogged for fifteen minutes along the sea front until he came to a bar beside Brighton beach. He went inside and asked for an orange juice. He didn’t dare risk alcohol. He ordered a sandwich but was too wound up to eat it. He sat by the window staring out to sea. It was wild today, whipped up by a strong onshore wind which had blown away the earlier rain. He could feel his high mood turning sour. He was edgy and irritable, frustrated that he hadn’t been able to talk to Harry.

‘I do not have to get angry over this,’ he muttered. ‘I am choosing not to get angry. Just chill out.’

Ben Morgan had been in Brighton for almost a month now. He had forced himself to be cautious and to check out the situation thoroughly before making his move. For once, everything he had done had been carefully planned. He was pleased with himself about that. He hadn’t jumped straight in with both feet and no thought as to the consequences. He had a habit of doing that when he was feeling good, he knew, and it needed to be controlled.

The medication did control it pretty well but he wasn’t always so good about taking it; it had been a bit random lately. He noticed that his right leg was bouncing up and down on the floor and with an effort he stilled it and took a few deep breaths to try to calm himself down. He recognized the signs. The anger, the desire for action, the ideas racing through his head, the total confidence in himself. He had learned to be wary of these things. Learned the hard way.

He had been watching Laura Maxwell, following her, studying her routines and gathering details about her life. When he first arrived he had stood across the road from Morrison Kemp waiting for her to come out. What a shock it had been to see her again, what nightmare feelings the sight of her had aroused, feelings he had tried to bury deep but which kept bubbling back to the surface. The experience had literally made him ill. He had scuttled away and been sick in an alleyway.

Ben Morgan felt sick now thinking about what had happened to him. And Harry’s case was so similar to his own – his torture, at the hands of Laura Maxwell, so exactly what Ben had endured. When he had discovered that, he had wanted to die. It brought back, in technicolour, all the trauma of six years ago.

Well, this time the result would be different, he would make sure of that. He had been there and would not stand by and let it happen again. Hatred and bitterness filled him. He was going to put a stop to it, once and for all.

Ben Morgan shook his head and tried, unsuccessfully, to get the ugly memories to go away. The Maxwell woman had made him seem like a complete danger to his young daughter, a father with a serious personality disorder. His medical notes had been taken to pieces by her, selective quotes taken from his psychology sessions, from his psychiatric assessments, from his previous medical history – he had been destroyed as a person and as a father. She had consigned him to hell.

He had sat in court listening to her make judgements about him, biased judgements designed to make him suffer, along with social workers and other so-called experts who discussed his bipolar disorder, discussed his behaviour and thoughts and emotions as if he were invisible, as if they were able to understand what was going on in his head. The whole inside of his mind had been invaded by her – someone who knew nothing about him or his illness. He had been violated and degraded and he felt it again now just as keenly as he had done at the time. The taste of acid filled his mouth.

He remembered how tormented he had been over what to do about it, what action he should take. Sometimes it had been so bad it was like a physical pain. It had only got better when he had stopped thinking about possible consequences and started following his instincts. But that, of course, had not worked out well. He had stabbed a police officer, been sectioned for hospital treatment, and lost all contact rights to his daughter.

The bar was starting to fill up with the lunchtime rush. He hated crowds and noise. They stressed him out and could trigger off his illness. He wanted to run. It was one of the few strategies he had for coping with stressful situations – to run through the streets, faster and faster, until all he could think about was the burning in his lungs and his legs. He liked to think it was a positive thing, a definite plan to help himself, but in his darker moods he felt that all it amounted to was running away.

The afternoon was cold and the rain was spitting again. Ben Morgan stood for a moment gazing up uncertainly at the heavens with a tense and troubled face. Then he set off at high speed for his appointment, his tall, thin figure racing towards the café near the crumbling West Pier.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Tunisian lawyer, Karim Chehoudi, did remember Laura and he was happy to help. She was grateful and agreed to meet him for dinner next time he visited London. He knew much more about child abduction cases than she did and she noticed he was careful not to raise her hopes of success too much. Given that he wanted the dinner date, he was probably trying to sound as optimistic as possible, and secretly rated her chances as zero.

She gave him the details for Ahmed and his father, sent him their photographs, and he promised to pass them on to the Tunisian immigration authorities with a request to be informed if the pair left the country. If they went anywhere which had signed the Hague Convention it might be possible to intercept them there and get the boy returned to England.

Karim Chehoudi said he had good contacts among the immigration officers and assured her he knew how to get them to take his request seriously. Laura wondered if he meant money and whether she should offer to pay for any necessary expenses. But she worried he might take offence so she said nothing except how much she appreciated his help. He sounded pleased and she hoped she had done the right thing. Now she could only wait and keep her fingers crossed that the chance came up. It was all she could do for Mary Hakimi. She thought that it wasn’t very much.

There was an email from Anna in her inbox asking if she could find out from the police how long Harry was going to be in hospital and how long he would be held for questioning. Anna desperately wanted reassurance that action would be taken to protect her and Martha before, as she put it, ‘that vile man is on the loose again’. Laura had called her earlier to tell her the news from Barnes, and Anna had been very shocked and disgusted to hear what her husband was suspected of.

‘I can’t have him seeing Martha any more, Laura, I just can’t,’ she sobbed down the phone. ‘Really, I couldn’t cope with that. It makes me wonder if … ’

Anna hadn’t been able to finish the sentence but Laura knew what she was wondering. Had Harry ever abused his daughter? He had never been violent towards Martha, Anna had said, but what else might he have been doing?

Laura pulled a bundle of papers from the Pelham file, details of Harry’s financial affairs. There were property developments, options for building projects, company directorships and various bank accounts, a number of them overseas. Some of these had slipped his mind when he’d listed his financial resources for the court. Anna had filled in the gaps and Laura was preparing to raise the discrepancies at the next hearing. Anna knew that Harry was concealing large amounts of money and had done her best to gather evidence to prove it.

‘He’s been cheating and hiding things for years,’ Anna had said in one emotional outburst. ‘He thinks I don’t know but I do and I want the judge to know exactly how mean and deceitful he is.’

Laura warned against personal abuse or appearing too vindictive because it didn’t go down well. Of course, Harry must be honest about his financial resources and if there was evidence that he was not, the court would take that very seriously. But the judge wouldn’t be interested in dishing out blame or hearing vitriolic attacks by one partner on the other. The court’s sole aim, after ensuring Martha’s welfare, would be to achieve a fair settlement between husband and wife. It wanted compromise not retribution.

It was Laura’s duty to advise Anna of these things, it was up to Anna if she took any notice. She didn’t. Laura may as well have been talking a foreign language that she didn’t speak a word of. Anna was haunted by the terror that if she showed the slightest weakness, the slightest sign of wavering, he would take advantage and somehow return to controlling and manipulating her.

‘If I ever told him “no” he wouldn’t accept it. He just insisted on what he wanted until my “no” became a feeble “yes”. I didn’t know how to stand up to him, but never again,’ she said.

It was the reason Anna at first refused point-blank to take part in mediation.

‘I’m scared stiff of meeting him again, Laura, he’ll just try to get power over me.’

Laura did eventually manage to persuade her to give mediation a try but it had gone badly. Laura had not been there but heard about it from Anna. Harry was loud and domineering, wanting everything done his own way. Seeing his behaviour again at close quarters had triggered her intense fear of him.

She had screwed up her courage and told the mediator how she’d been forced to leave home because of his increasing violence. She hadn’t known what he might do next or if Martha was safe. Harry went mental over that, Anna said, shouting that he’d never hit anyone and would never harm his daughter.

The mediator had tried to get the session back on track and to talk about important things that needed resolving, such as Martha’s future, and her financial arrangements, but Harry had started accusing Anna of having an affair, calling her a slut and demanding to know how many other men she’d slept with during their marriage. Anna had surprised herself then; for a moment she’d forgotten to be frightened. She fought back, defiantly giving details of her husband’s extreme, mindless jealousy.

He was obsessed with the idea that she had a lover. He’d bugged the entire house. The telephone, the toilets, every room had been wired for sound. She hadn’t even been able to visit the bathroom without being recorded. There’d been a couple of cameras, one hidden in a clock, the other in a smoke alarm. He’d read her emails, monitored her mobile phone calls. He’d even tested her clothes for semen stains with something called a semen detection kit.

The mediation had come to a swift, unhappy end. Afterwards, Anna became even more determined to stand her ground.

Laura once asked Anna why she had married Harry.

Anna hesitated, then said, ‘There was a boy I loved, when I was young, but it didn’t work out,’ she paused again, ‘then Harry came along. He was strong and he said he loved me and no one had ever said that before. It made me feel happy and safe and I liked it. Of course I didn’t understand then why I liked it and that I wasn’t safe at all.’

She realized now that she had liked it because of her own neediness and low self-esteem. She’d never had any confidence, had been badly bullied at school; it was as if she attracted abusers. She thought Harry Pelham had sniffed her out as a victim and homed in on her as someone he could dominate and control.

The phone rang. It was Morrison, abruptly summoning Laura to his office. She had been waiting for it, she’d been lucky to get away without seeing him the previous afternoon. He would have been expecting an update on Mary Hakimi. He would be annoyed that he’d had to ask.

As she arrived, Sarah was coming out. Laura said ‘Hi’ but Sarah brushed past with her face averted.

Morrison gestured towards a chair. He provided two sorts of chair for his visitors; which one they were offered depended on their status. Important clients, and people he was on friendly terms with, were ushered into a large, comfortable leather armchair which mirrored the one on his side of the desk. Laura had first sat in it when she came for a ‘chat’ – there had been nothing so crude as a job interview – about moving to Morrison Kemp from her prestigious London firm. She had occupied it on every occasion since. But today she was faced with the other one, a small, hard, functional chair that was lower than Morrison’s so that anyone offered it, unless they were a giant, would find themselves having to look up into the cold grey eyes opposite.

Laura was not very tall and she realized at once how effective the chair was in making its occupant feel inferior. The familiar, uncomfortable impression was upon her that he thought she wasn’t quite up to the mark, that he had expected great things from her, which she had not delivered. She shifted in the chair, trying to find a position in which she could relax, in which she didn’t feel like an underperforming pupil in front of the headmaster. She was wearing her glasses but they weren’t helping much.

He leaned towards her, putting his elbows on the desk and his hands underneath his chin. ‘So,’ he said softly, ‘the Hakimi fiasco. What have you got to tell me?’

The shrewd little eyes fixed on her as if she was a specimen in a jar. She considered asking him what Sarah had told him, but decided not to – he was unlikely to tell her and would interpret the question as a sign of weakness.

‘I’ve talked the problem through with Mary Hakimi and assured her we’ll do all we can to get her son back. Obviously she’s very distressed but she agreed that was the best way forward for now.’

‘And how exactly do you plan to get the boy back?’ He made no effort to hide the scepticism in his voice.

Laura told him. As she spoke his eyebrows rose and his lips set in a thin line.

‘Snowball’s chance,’ he said dismissively.

‘Well, yes, I know it’s a long shot but there might … ’ Laura stopped. It was stupid to start justifying herself; it would only further undermine her. She changed what she had been going to say. ‘I felt it was really important to demonstrate that we cared and we wanted to help.’

‘We always care about our clients, Laura. You’ll be aware that that is one of the guiding principles at Morrison Kemp.’

‘I was quite honest with her,’ Laura continued, ‘I told her I couldn’t promise anything.’

‘Of course you were honest with her. I hope you’ve been honest with her at all times, Laura.’ He paused, took off his glasses and put them down on the desk. He sat up straight in his chair and leaned further towards her. ‘I trust she understands that this firm is not to blame in any way for what’s happened?’

He was waiting for her to dig herself into a hole. She guessed Sarah had told him she had given the forged letter to Mary Hakimi because, so far as Sarah knew, that was what she’d done. She also guessed that he would deny ever telling Sarah to write the letter and was busy distancing himself from the whole thing. She wondered if he had come to some arrangement with Sarah and if that arrangement meant dumping the blame for the deception squarely on Laura. If he believed she had handed over the letter, he would realize at once that it made her vulnerable. He would be licking his lips at the sight of a scapegoat.

‘Absolutely. I hope I was able to convince her of that. By the way,’ Laura added, smiling sweetly at him, ‘do you still want Sarah Cole fired? I met her coming out of your office just now and I was hoping you might’ve had second thoughts.’

He retreated across the desk, replacing his glasses on his hawkish nose. He sat back in his big chair, steepled his fingers together and frowned.

‘I’m afraid she told me a very worrying thing which I don’t think can be right.’

Laura waited, not asking. He wanted her to, but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. He’d have to tell her anyway if he was going to put the blame on her. It didn’t take long.

‘She says Mrs Hakimi was never sent a letter telling her to remind us about the passport order. She tells me that a copy of a letter to that effect, which you gave to Mrs Hakimi yesterday, was in fact a fake and you were well aware of that when you gave it to her.’

It was what she had expected but she still felt shocked that he could be so shameless. How did he sit there and brazenly ignore the truth of what had happened? He showed no sign of embarrassment or regret. Instinctively, she knew what his reaction would be if she reminded him of his involvement. He would give her that thin-lipped, patronizing smile and she would hear him whisper, ‘I think you must be mistaken, Laura, and I think I’ve been mistaken about you.’ Then he would throw her to the wolves.

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