The Night Lawyer: A Novel of Suspense Hardback - 2006

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Eleanor Porter doesn’t look one little bit like a woman with murder on her conscience. She’s not beautiful, but she has two outstanding assets that make her more conspicuous than she’d like. There’s her reddish gold hair; it’s long and full and curly, and, on damp days—of which there have been precious few this spring—it frizzes out and forms a halo round her face. There’s also, on occasion, her cleavage. Though Ellie’s scarcely aware of it, heads turn and grown men weaken when she shrugs off a shawl to reveal a well-cut black dress and a décolletage to die for.

Ellie’s mother insists that it’s crucial that girls should look good, and generally Ellie disagrees. Ellie would like to be judged not on her appearance, but on who she is and what she does. This morning, however, is different. It’s Ellie’s first day in her new job as night lawyer. She is a bag of nerves; because of that, she has spared nothing in her effort to look the part. No décolletage today. No little black dress. Instead, she has eased herself into a tailored suit with a narrow skirt, and tamed her hair into a prosaic plait. She made up her delicate features as artfully as she could. Before she left the house, she stood for minutes before the mirror, practicing a Gioconda smile. Ellie may be quaking in her court shoes, but she won’t let it show on her face.

“You can do this,” she whispers fiercely to herself, as she clicks shut her document case and steps out the door of her house. “They wouldn’t have appointed you as night lawyer if they weren’t confident you’ve got what it takes.”

Night lawyer. She rolls the title around on her tongue as she covers the short distance to the Docklands Light Railway. Night lawyers are people possessed of nerve and impeccable judgment; that’s what Harriet said. Pompous or what? Ellie thinks, as she smoothes her skirt and takes her seat on the train.

But Harriet hasn’t been the only one to put an alarming slant on this night lawyer business. Ellie uses the short journey north to Canary Wharf to run through the things that the head of the legal department stressed during the interview. Clive was a short man, with a brisk, cheerful manner, and a tendency to pepper his conversation with random words in French. Just before he’d offered her the job, he had cleared his throat. “The night lawyer is responsible on his or her own,” Clive had said—nodding pointedly at Eleanor, as if she might need to be reminded of her gender—“for the version of the paper that is finally sent to press. He or she is expected to approve the front page, or not, as the case may be. To ensure that, after the day lawyers have gone home, nothing creeps onto the page that could land the paper in court. If you’re lax,” said Clive, looking very serious indeed, “and if you wave everything through, there’ll be damages to pay.”

“And if I err on the side of caution?” Ellie asked.

“Even worse,” Clive shot back. “Cut the good stories, and there’ll be no news to sell. Editor will down on you like a ton of bricks.”

Eleanor alights from the train and hurries across the open space toward a sleek building with a stainless steel surface that reflects back the darkening sky. One Canada Square is where the Chronicle has its offices and it’s a good address. It’s the centerpiece of the Canary Wharf development and, some would say, the first skyscraper in Britain. It’s a symbol of British confidence and prosperity. Wharfers call it simply “the tower.”

Her smile resolutely in place, Ellie passes into the tower’s vast luxurious lobby. She scrambles for her new identity card and flourishes it at the barrier. She locates the lift to the twenty-third floor.

Her shift begins at 5:45. Ellie arrives early, and wishes she hadn’t. The day team aren’t ready for her yet. She stands awkwardly in the narrow corridor waiting for Clive. As soon as he is free, he introduces her to the other members of the legal team. They are slip- ping into mackintoshes, snapping shut their briefcases, preparing to depart. Hands slide forward and clasp hers quickly. There are a few questions—Still no sign of rain? Did you used to work for Rogers & Quilter?—and one or two mildly curious glances. It’s a courteous encounter, and a brief one. The day lawyers are there, all dark suits and gold wedding bands and practiced smiles, and then they are gone.

Clive beams as they depart. The day staff are a tightly knit team, he tells her. They swap stories, share ideas, and help one another out. They operate very much ensemble. But on the night shift, Eleanor’s shift, it’s different. Eleanor will work alone.

“Toute seule,” Clive says, with an impish grin. “You’re not a Night Lawyer, Miss Porter. You’re the Night Lawyer. Singular, that’s you.”

CHAPTER 2

“ A tour?” Clive asks, flourishing his hand in the direction of the newsroom.

“Oh, yes. Yes, please.” Ellie is eager to take stock of her new domain.

Clive insists on starting with the library, where anything from magazine cuttings to a Serbo-Croat dictionary can be supplied. “A dictionary of Serbo-Croat, if you please,” Clive says to the librarian, as if this is a particular point on which Ellie must be convinced, and they wait while someone goes to fetch one.

Clive parades her up and down thinly carpeted corridors. Past the mainframe computer, sealed in glass. Through the pre-press area, where pictures and advertisements are electronically manipulated before they’re inserted into the finished page.

“Electronically manipulated?” Ellie says. “Sounds rather sinister, don’t you think?”

“Just don’t get caught in there yourself,” Clive says, with a twinkle. He shuffles her past the goods lift, squeezing his way around tall metal trolleys. Ellie notices that they’re stuffed with a bizarre assortment of objects: a birdhouse, a trio of rag dolls, a lamp. On a newspaper? “Home and Leisure section,” Clive explains.

And everywhere she looks, there are clocks. Round-faced and metal-rimmed, they appear on every wall and in every alcove. Ellie spins on her heel and counts five.

“So you’ve noticed!” Clive says. “My dear, when you work for a newspaper, time is everything.”

Clive is perhaps forty to Ellie’s thirty, and the “my dear” sounds to Ellie’s ears like an affectation designed to lend him an air of au- thority. But she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings, so she smiles and lets it pass.

It is clear from the spring in his step that Clive enjoys showing Ellie around. He takes her elbow as if they were on promenade and steers her past the glass-paneled offices belonging to the design editor, the chief of layout, the managing editor, that line the outer walls. It’s going-home time. Empty desk chairs point in the direction of office doors, as if the occupants had raced off in a hurry.

At last Clive escorts her into the muted light of the newsroom. Ellie can’t help but catch her breath. This enormous room with its quiet gray carpet is not at all what she’d expected. Large oval tables are set out across the carpet like a string of islands in a vast ocean, their surfaces picked out by pools of cool light. People are positioned at intervals along their curved perimeters. They work steadily and unsensationally, their heads tilted toward computer screens like flowers to the sun.

Apart from the air conditioner’s hum, the vast room is unexpectedly quiet; voices are subdued and words indistinct. There’s an atmosphere of purposeful calm. Ellie can feel her own pulse starting to slow.

“Something wrong?” Clive asks.

“It’s only—” Ellie stops abruptly. What she’d expected was Watergate, Deep Throat, Enron: the excitement of big stories breaking, the thrill of corruption exposed. A frenetic pace. An atmosphere vibrant with righteous reportage. “No, no. It’s nothing.” The hustle-bustle newsrooms of her mind echo to shouts of “Hold the front page!”, a consequence, almost certainly, of too many Saturday afternoons spent snuggled down with Will watching films from the thirties and forties. Yet another way in which Will had led her astray.

“Come,” Clive says. He is gentle now, sensing Ellie’s shyness. “Come and meet the rest of your colleagues.”

Clive trots her around the room, pointing out editors, sub-editors, and journalists, pausing here and there to make introductions. Arts: a friendly man with a delicate frame and a Glaswegian accent. Current Affairs: a woman whose spectacles, and even her jacket, resemble those of Elton John. A chap underneath a checked starter’s flag in the motoring section who calls Ellie “love” in a calculating tone. The sheer quantity of information is overwhelming Ellie’s Gioconda smile is fading fast and she longs to be alone.

The assistant sports editor comes as a relief. She’s the kind of girl with looks that seem made for television. A luminous complexion. Lustrous hair in subtle shades of blond. Long, lazy legs. But she has a name that Ellie will remember—Ariana Raine—and such compelling charm that when the journalist is called away, Ellie feels as if she’s stepped into a draft.

“I’m so pleased to see another girl,” Ariana says. “There are altogether too many men here. I’ve been hopelessly outnumbered.” And, as they part, she adds, with a wink at Clive, “It’s a very friendly place to work.” Ellie hopes so.

At last the time has come to do some work. Clive briefs Ellie on the stories that have occupied the legals during the day. “If I were you,” he says, “I’d watch that Tory Filbert case.”

Ellie struggles to recall the story. She has been too concerned about preparing for the job to read the paper, and when it comes to dredging things up from earlier in the week, her memory—overloaded with Ella from Advertising and Lennie from Arts—doesn’t cooperate.

“That fifteen-year-old, you know,” Clive says with a trace of impatience. “The one who was stabbed by his classmates in Hackney?” He finds the reference on the screen. “Here. Watch it, my dear. The judge is out to hammer the media on this one. Other than that,” he says, “it’s pure routine.”

“Routine?” Ellie echoes. Not for me. None of it is routine for me.

“Shouldn’t give you any trouble,” Clive says. He is watching her face.

Ellie can’t resist the question. “What kind of trouble?”

Clive smiles broadly as if she’s made a joke. He doesn’t reply, but his eyes twinkle like those of a clean-shaven Father Christmas.

Ellie watches intently over Clive’s shoulder as he opens the story on-screen and shows her how to mark it up. “You suggest an alternative phrasing like so,” he says. He glances at Ellie. “Of course, you know all this?”

For a fraction of a second—a fraction that seems like hours—Ellie’s mind empties of everything she learned at her retraining seminars. A knot of fear lodges in her stomach. Then she puts her chin in the air and looks straight at Clive, making him blink from the power of her pale gray gaze.

“Know it? Of course I know it. I’m the night lawyer. Aren’t I?”

“Toute seule, Miss Porter,” Clive says with a chuckle.

Media reviews

PRAISE FOR MICHELLE SPRING

The Night Lawyer

“Nail-biting suspense combines with genuinely thought-provoking characterization to make this one of the freshest thrillers in a long time.”
–Val McDermid, author of The Torment of Others

In the Midnight Hour

“Spring continues to combine psychological suspense with raw emotions for a gripping story that holds its secrets until the end.”
–Florida Sun-Sentinel

Nights in White Satin

“Spring uses the setting with a sharp sense of irony about the power of beautiful things to distract from their ugly interiors.”
–The New York Times Book Review

Standing in the Shadows

“A suspenseful thriller . . . truly startling.”
–Los Angeles Times

Every Breath You Take

“An auspicious debut for what promises to be an excellent series . . . This is a well-constructed and highly readable suspense tale with feminist overtones and terrific characters.”
–Toronto Globe and Mail