Private Lives Page 12

  Matt glanced towards the window, which looked on to the street. It was six o’clock, yet there was still a pack of photographers on the square.

  ‘We had a high-profile case last week. The leading players are in hiding and the paparazzi seem to think we’ve got our client stashed away in here somewhere.’

  ‘You weren’t acting for Sam Charles, were you?’

  Matt smiled thinly. He’d only worked in media law a fortnight, but even he could tell the failure of Sam’s injunction was not good news for the firm. There had been some high-handed opinion pieces in the broadsheets about how the overturned injunction represented victory for freedom of the press. Secretly he thought they were right.

  ‘So you’re a friend of Erica’s?’ he said, as much as a way of distracting the client as opening conversation.

  ‘Yes, but she’s not the reason I’m here,’ said Rob with a sardonic laugh. ‘She’s a friend. Not a special friend.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Matt said quickly.

  ‘She speaks highly of you.’

  ‘She does?’ Matt couldn’t help but be curious. He knew Rob had approached the firm on Erica’s recommendation and had been contemplating calling her to thank her.

  ‘When I told Erica about my marriage, she said you were the man for the job.’

  ‘I’m flattered.’

  Rob nodded and looked down at his hands.

  ‘This is difficult, isn’t it?’

  ‘Divorce is never easy. I’ve been there.’

  Twice actually, he thought. Despite insisting to Carla that he could not represent her in her divorce from David, his ex-wife had never been off the phone with lists of questions and requests for advice. It was proving impossible not to get dragged in.

  ‘So do you want to tell me why the relationship has broken down?’

  Rob sat back in his chair and began to tell his lawyer about his marriage to Kim. How they had met when he had directed one of her videos eight years earlier. About their son, Oliver, who was around the same age as Jonas. And the reasons why they had drifted apart.

  ‘She wants to get a fashion label off the ground,’ he said. ‘She’s seen Posh Spice do it and thinks she can too, so she’s been travelling a lot. Next year she wants to tour, get her music going again. Kim is one of those sorts of people who always has to be doing something. I’ve always supported her in that, but sometimes it doesn’t make for the most straightforward of marriages.’

  He pushed an envelope towards Matthew.

  ‘This is the petition she sent me last week.’

  Matt speed-read the document inside.

  ‘Unreasonable behaviour?’ he asked.

  Rob shrugged.

  ‘I’m away a lot. Filming takes months, you see. And she’d get jealous of the actresses, but I told her, what am I supposed to do, just make films set in prison? And . . . well, there was a lot of conflict over money. I think Kim thought she was marrying the new Spielberg, but it’s not quite worked out like that. I do my best, but I guess it’s just not good enough.’

  Matt glanced up and recognised Rob’s sad, frustrated expression. He’d felt all those emotions himself.

  ‘Do you want to get divorced?’ he asked gently.

  Rob paused.

  ‘Not really, but it’s a marriage that can’t work. We want different things. That’s what she says, anyway,’ he added, trying for a smile.

  ‘You could contest it.’

  ‘Sure, but why be in a marriage someone else doesn’t want to be in?’ He shook his head sadly. ‘No, I don’t want to contest this. I just want to keep things as simple as possible. For my son’s sake. For everyone’s sake.’

  They wrapped up the meeting and Diane showed Rob out.

  Coffee, Matt said to himself, getting up and heading down to the space-age kitchen area at the end of his corridor. It was full of shiny machines and utensils, but he had no idea where the actual coffee was kept. As he searched around, opening cupboards, one thing Rob Beaumont had said kept going around in his head. ‘I always did my best,’ that was what he had said. Matt thought of that terrible day he’d found out about Carla’s unfaithfulness. He should have gone straight to his lawyers and petitioned for divorce on the grounds of adultery there and then. He could see now that he’d been a fool, but love didn’t work that way. If you got hurt, you still wanted to try and make it better. But Carla didn’t want to make things better. At least not with him.

  ‘Where is the bloody coffee?’ he said irritably.

  ‘Here,’ said a voice. He turned to find Anna Kennedy holding up a tin that looked like a time capsule. ‘In the coffee container.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘Bad morning.’

  ‘I know how you feel,’ said Anna, gently moving Matthew out of the way to get at the Gaggia.

  ‘So how’s things?’ he asked, although he could predict her answer. Her pretty face looked tired and sombre. The feistiness that had scared him a little at Scott’s restaurant was subdued, and with good reason, he supposed. The whole firm was still whispering about Sam Charles. He could only imagine the roasting Helen must have given her when she had come back from court, and she had barely left her office since.

  ‘Bearing up. Although I could do without being followed home by any more paparazzi.’

  ‘They’re following you?’

  She nodded. ‘I’m convinced they think Sam’s hiding out in my shed.’ She handed him a mug. ‘Speaking of which, I hope Rob Beaumont left through the back door.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well the street is full of paparazzi and he just had an appointment with a family lawyer. They’re not the brightest bunch, but even they can put two and two together.’

  Matt felt a jolt of panic as he remembered Helen’s quip: rich people are different. Should he have made arrangements to meet his client elsewhere instead of the office? Suddenly he felt very green and out of his depth.

  ‘And have you been in touch with Piers Douglas?’ She leaned on the cabinets as she sipped her coffee.

  ‘Who’s he?’ asked Matt, feeling himself get defensive. This woman seemed to do this to him. He tried not to dwell on their Scott’s lunch on their first day at the firm – after all, his father’s heart attack had overshadowed everything – but he still hadn’t forgotten her combative, cocky stance on privacy. He wondered whether she’d changed her mind about it recently.

  ‘He’s a media consultant we have on retainer. PR expert.’

  ‘Why would I need him?’

  She looked surprised.

  ‘Because if Rob and Kim are having problems, that’s front-page news. A media law firm has to offer a fully rounded service. Image management, that sort of thing. Plus you need to control the media when trouble’s brewing, not just when the shit has hit the fan.’

  This conversation was increasingly feeling like a telling-off.

  ‘I thought we were a law firm. Not the offices of Max Clifford.’

  ‘Well you’d better catch up,’ she whispered playfully. ‘Discretion is everything.’

  He struggled not to frown. He was her boss and yet she was succeeding in making him feel stupid and embarrassed.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure you should be the one dishing out expert advice on discretion, Anna.’ It was a cheap shot, but she was annoying him. How was he supposed to know all this stuff about PR and image management? At his old firm, he’d just had to make sure they had a full box of Kleenex on the desk every morning.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she said, glaring at him.

  ‘Nothing,’ he muttered.

  ‘I’d rather you came out with it.’

  ‘Look,’ he sighed. ‘You don’t need me to tell you that the Sam Charles thing was handled badly.’

  ‘Handled badly? We all agreed on the strategy. How can I help it if someone decides to leak the story?’

  ‘But they did.’

  ‘Yes, and we should be doing everything in our power to find out who talked.’

&n
bsp; Matthew raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I’m no media expert – clearly – but I’d say that was next to impossible. All it would take would be an anonymous email, or maybe they texted that picture from a mobile. You can get a disposable SIM card for a quid these days.’

  ‘Thanks for that insight,’ she mumbled, walking to the door. ‘I’ll email you Piers’ details; maybe you can brief him on how to go about leaking a story.’

  Matt watched her go. He thought about following her to apologise but he was too tired and bad-tempered. Women, he grunted to himself. He was better off on his own.

  13

  Anna walked back into her office and closed the door with a slam.

  How dare he? The patronising bastard! He’d worked in the media what, all of five minutes, yet he still had the nerve to lecture her.

  She sat down at her desk, closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. She could have done without a confrontation with the new managing partner, who seemed almost as uptight and miserable as Helen Pierce, but then again, he was her boss even if he had been handed the firm by Daddy.

  She looked at the piles of newspapers and magazines stacked up on her desk. The News of the World, the Mail on Sunday, the Globe, The Chronicle, each one of them running their own slightly different version of the Sam Charles story. And that was before you got to the gossip magazines and papers from the States and Europe. For the tabloids, of course, it was a perfect story: a sensational tale of celebrity debauchery supported by titillating pictures of a pretty girl in her bra, along with the bonus of being able to put the boot into media lawyers in the guise of stopping the madness of a legal system that protected rich, unfaithful rogues like Sam Charles. They certainly weren’t going to drop this story until they had wrung every last drop of value from it.

  She picked up Sunday’s copy of the News of the World, which featured a large picture of Katie Grey in skimpy black lingerie next to the headline ‘My Night With Sam: Exclusive Interview’. With everything else that was going on the world – soldiers being killed in Afghanistan, the situation in Sudan, Iran, North Korea, the global recession – it was difficult to comprehend why even the broadsheets found the fact that Sam Charles had slept with an escort girl of such international significance. But they did. And what the British tabloids said had been repeated by every media outlet from twenty-four-hour satellite news programmes to worthy Internet discussion sites. There were even a batch of Sam Charles jokes going around. Q: ‘How many prostitutes does it take to screw in a light bulb?’ A: ‘None. They’re all too busy screwing Sam Charles.’

  She threw the paper down angrily.

  The last few days had been hellish. In her entire working career she had never felt more isolated and ashamed. Ashamed of her professional failure in getting the gagging order. Ashamed that she had promised Sam that everything was under control. Ashamed that her parents were watching the story – the bitter irony being that her sister Sophie’s Dorset Kitchen show had aired immediately before her own appearance on News at Ten; although why anyone would consider footage of her leaving the office on Friday night news was still a mystery to her.

  Anna leaned over and picked up the phone, dialling 1 for Sid, the trainee solicitor assigned to her.

  ‘Sid, can you come through for a moment?’ she asked.

  She didn’t really want to see anyone, but she had to do something. She had found it very difficult coming into work that morning; part of her had been tempted to phone in sick and go and live on a kibbutz. It would certainly have been the easiest thing to do. Helen Pierce hadn’t said so in as many words – in fact, it seemed as though Helen was pretty much ignoring her – but Anna knew that this whole episode had been a PR disaster for the firm. After all, Donovan Pierce had been named in every newspaper from Brussels to Bangalore as the firm who failed to get the injunction. Whoever had said ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’ had never worked in the law.

  ‘Ah, come in, Sid,’ she said at the timid knock on the door.

  The redheaded trainee came into the room and Anna indicated the piles of papers.

  ‘I’d be grateful if you could get rid of these. You’d better file them, although if it were up to me, you could go and make a bonfire out of them in Broadwick Street.’

  ‘After I’m done with them, do you mind if I go?’ Sid replied.

  Anna glanced at her watch. It was barely six thirty. Most of the other trainees worked until seven, eight o’clock, eager to please and prove. Then again, Sid had recently found out that she was not one of the five trainees who would be kept on for a full-time assistant solicitor’s job when they qualified in September. When Anna had joined the firm and found out that she had been assigned Sid as her trainee she had questioned the move, as Sid was only due to stay at the firm another few weeks. But right now, Anna realised that her own job at Donovan Pierce was not much more secure than Sid’s was.

  Anna nodded. ‘Yes, you can go.’

  Sid smiled gratefully and carried the papers out, taking care to close the door behind her.

  With the papers gone, Anna realised how sparse her office looked. There was just a pen pot and a couple of files on her desk. She had barely made her mark on Donovan Pierce and there was a distinct possibility that she might not ever get the chance. When she had accepted the job, Helen had assured her that she would be considered for partnership at the end of her three-month probationary period. Now she wasn’t sure she would even make it to the end of the three months. She could feel tears welling up. Since Friday she had held it all together, but there was only so much she could cope with.

  ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid,’ she whispered to herself, screwing her fist into a ball. ‘I’ll be buggered if I take this lying down.’

  She grabbed her notepad and flipped it to a new page.

  ‘Right . . .’ she said out loud, writing the word ‘Strategy’ at the top and underlining it twice. It was her favourite word. Positive, active, a word that said you knew where you were going. But which way? It was obvious to Anna that she had to fight back, but her pen paused above the paper, unsure of what to write next. She looked down at the space where the newspapers had been sitting and clicked her fingers. If they wanted a story, she would give them one.

  ‘Blake Stanhope,’ she scribbled. ‘Sued for Contempt. Sam Charles Escort Girl Imprisoned for Leak.’

  She smiled to herself. Matthew bloody Donovan was wrong; dead wrong. There were always ways to find out who had leaked the story. Of course Blake himself would deny it – as he said himself, he could go to jail for such a stunt. But someone, somewhere knew who had spilled the beans. In theory, the editor of the Daily News or the owner of the gossip website was unlikely to tell her the source of the story, but then again, Blake Stanhope had never been their favourite person. He was a parasite feeding on other people’s mistakes and indiscretions, and Anna was pretty damn sure there were plenty of people who’d like to see him get a taste of his own medicine. Besides, she had bartered with editors on many occasions: one piece of information for another. The problem now, however, was that she had no leverage, no stories to swap, nothing to offer.

  The phone began ringing and Anna glanced at it with irritation. For a moment she thought about leaving it. After-hours calls were never good news and she needed some randy footballer begging for an injunction like she needed a hole in the head. Sighing, she picked up the receiver.

  ‘Anna Kennedy.’

  There was silence at the other end.

  ‘Hello? Anyone there?’

  Finally she heard someone take a deep breath and a small voice said, ‘Is that Sam Charles’s lawyer?’

  Oh God, not a crank call, she thought. Or even worse, a fan who wanted to ask what Sam was really like.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m Mr Charles’s representative. Or rather I was.’

  ‘I’m sorry for calling so late,’ said the voice. ‘I wasn’t sure whether to ring.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  The voice was
young. Maybe teenage. They certainly didn’t sound like anyone able to afford Anna’s £250 an hour Donovan Pierce associate rate anyway. And too timid to be a journalist or another solicitor.

  ‘You don’t know me,’ said the voice. ‘But I really need your help.’

  ‘Are you in legal trouble?’

  There was another pause.

  ‘I think my sister was murdered.’

  Anna frowned.

  ‘In which case I think you should be talking to the police,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I’ve done all that – she died seven months ago, you see – but they don’t seem to be interested any more.’

  ‘In that case I don’t see—’

  ‘It was the inquest into her death last week,’ said the girl quickly. ‘The coroner didn’t say it, of course, but I know she was murdered and I want – I need – to prove it.’

  Anna took a sip of coffee. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand why you are calling me.’

  ‘You deal with celebrities, don’t you? My sister’s death made the newspapers when it happened so I thought someone might look into it a bit more, especially after the inquest. But now there’s this big story about Sam Charles having an affair everywhere and it’s as if my sister never even existed.’

  Despite herself, Anna was intrigued.

  ‘Who was your sister?’

  ‘Amy Hart.’

  Anna wrote it down, but it didn’t ring any immediate bells.

  ‘I still don’t understand why you think I can help you,’ she said.

  ‘I called you because you know about the law and you know about celebrities. Someone famous killed my sister and they’re trying to cover it up. Even the newspapers are in their pocket.’

  Anna felt her heart beating faster.

  ‘Look, I can prove that my sister was killed. Can’t you meet me? Please.’

  Anna knew she shouldn’t touch this with a bargepole, but the pleading in the girl’s voice did make her feel sorry for her. She sounded lonely, desperate, alone. It was no fun facing anything traumatic on your own; the last three days had taught her that. The girl’s words rang around her head: Even the newspapers are in their pocket. Was it possible? Anything was possible if you had connections and money.