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.
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