Chapter 3

The rest of that week passed normally. I had a slightly uncomfortable interview with the head of Chambers. He'd found about my uninvited visitor and wanted to register his concern but was unsure quite what it was that should concern him. I was taciturn rather than truculent - we never have seen eye to eye. So it came to Friday and I was having a quiet glass of wine in El Vino's on Fleet Street. The old wine bar was once the haunt of the 'fourth estate' but since the newspapers had all relocated to Docklands; the legal profession now claimed it as their own.

I was chatting to couple of 'silks' - Queen's Counsels - when Joachim called me from behind the bar. "Telephone for Mr Booth!" He pronounced it 'Boot' but I'd heard his mangling of my name often enough to know he meant me.

"Hello, Martin Booth speaking."

"Mr Booth, thank Gawd I've caught you."

"Bernie! What's the panic?"

"There's a young lady to see you Mr Booth, here in Chambers!"

"Do we have a name, Bernie or have you been unusually coy?"

"She won't give no name, Mr Booth, just says it's very urgent."

"Let me see, Five foot Eight and Blonde?"

"No, Mr Booth, about Five Six and dark with very blue eyes."

"I'll be right there."

I dashed back to the Temple. It had to be Angela Sable. I didn't know whether to be relieved or worried. In the end I managed to be both at the same time. She was sitting in the cubbyhole that passes for a waiting room in our Chambers. She rose as I came in and stared at me intently, as if it were me that was out of place.

"Angela, this a turn-up. What are you doing here and what happened last Sunday?"

"Hello, Mr Booth."

"It's Martin, remember?"

"Ah yes. Martin. I have no one else to turn to. I need help, Martin. I'm sorry but you are the only person I could think of."

"OK. Let's get out of here and go somewhere we can talk in private."

She looked hurriedly about her and I indicated Bernie with a flick of my eyes. She gave the briefest nod of understanding and followed me out. I cudgelled my brain to think of somewhere we go where we could talk without being overheard. It was early Friday evening and the pubs and bars in that part of London were full of people celebrating the weekend. In the end I gave up and hailed a Black Cab. We went to my place.

I have a small Mews house just off Queensgate. I bought it for a song years ago, unconverted and run down. It had been a bit of a money pit in the beginning and my Bank Manager had not looked favourably on a Pupil Barrister taking on such a pile of debt. Fat lot he knew! Modernised and tarted up, it's now worth around a million. It's no palace, three rooms, kitchen and bath, as the Estate Agents would say, but Freehold houses in SW7 are as rare as hen's back teeth, especially ones with integral garages. Apart from anything else, it's quiet. No traffic, no pubs, no shops. It suits me very well. I looked at it as being a good part of my pension. When I call it a day, London won't see my arse for dust. I'll settle in the country somewhere, the Cotswolds, maybe.

I showed Angela into the sitting room and asked what she wanted to drink. She shrugged. Well, if she couldn't be bothered, I'd decide. I opened a bottle of Chateau Lestage, a very respectable little Haut Medoc. Once she got the drink in her hand, she couldn't stop talking. It was like a dam bursting. The whole story of the last week came flooding out of her.

After I had left on the Saturday, two men arrived at her studio. She had been expecting them. They had contacted her earlier in the week, claiming to have to have been colleagues of her father. She had been suspicious, but not overly so. She had left Estonia years before and was not really aware of what her father had been doing latterly. She knew he had been in the Soviet Army, of course, but he had never spoken much about it and had been away a lot, when she was growing up. They hadn't been particularly close and rarely wrote to each other. She didn't know if these colleagues were from his Red Army days or more recent times. She only thought to ask after they had hung up.

The two men arrived, introduced themselves as representatives of the Russian Federation Ministry of Culture and started talking vaguely about offering her an exhibition. She grew nervous when it became obvious that neither had the slightest idea about her work. One of them mentioned 'your paintings.' Then they started to talk about her father. What a Grand Fellow he had been; how he must have been proud of his artist daughter. They were about as subtle as a charging Rhino. They kept asking her if her father had given her anything for safekeeping, just until his 'comrades' could reclaim it. She said she had nothing - had never had anything - of her father's.

They clumped about some more and left with vague promises of being in touch. Once they had gone, she called the Russian Embassy. They confirmed her suspicions that there were no Ministry of Culture representatives currently in the UK and that the Cultural Attaché was presently in Edinburgh with the Ballet. Angela said that she had lived long enough under Russian occupation to know that all of this meant trouble. She was scared, she said. She thought of coming to see me but didn't feel she could involve someone she'd only just met. She worried late into the evening and decided it was high time to get out of there, to go to ground, so to speak.

She packed up her few valuable belongings into her old Ford Escort and left at around midnight. She knew some Estonian friends in Leicester and had arrived there in the early morning. She slept in the car until it was light and then went to call on her friends. They had seen the story on the TV News. They claimed to be worried for her. What had happened? She told them her story, foolishly, she now said, as they became very interested in what it might be the men were after. They pumped her about her father. She became paranoid, jumping at shadows, perhaps, but she had to leave.

On Tuesday she had made her farewells, unable to escape the feeling that they were desperate for her to stay but didn't know how to compel her to do so, without giving some kind of game away. She had fled, aimlessly. She stayed that night and the next in a Bed-and Breakfast in Shropshire. Then, she reasoned, if people were truly after her, they would have her car registration and description. She sold the car for £500 to a dealer in Oswestry and caught a train to Birmingham. She stayed in Birmingham one night and resolved to find me. She had gone to the City Library and found me in a Legal Directory. She was afraid to telephone so she decided to come to Chambers. She'd waited in Temple Court until the area quietened down and had slipped into our Chambers just as Bernie was about to lock up.

She had a little money but not enough to live for long in London. Throughout her story she was calm, rational and held me with those ice eyes. Magic sat at her feet with his head on her lap, fixing her with his adoring gaze that he gives anyone who sits still long enough. Trotsky, being Trotsky, ignored us both. There was silence when she finished. My brain was whirling. There was something rotten about all this but I couldn't think what it was for the life of me. I'm a boring bloody Tax Barrister, for Christ's sake! I'm no James Bond. I liked Angela, admired her immensely as a sculptor, but that didn't seem enough to have me cast as the 'Knight in Shining Armour.' I suppose I must have just sat there with a stupid expression on my face for a full five minutes. She didn't say another word, just fixed me with her Nordic gaze. Eventually, I had to say something.

"You can stay here tonight, at least. I need time to think."