sweet baby,’ someone murmured over my left shoulder.
I jumped. It was the receptionist, Janice, who’d appeared out of the Ladies at the top of the stairs, pink lipstick reapplied.
‘Oh. Thank you.’
‘It’s Mrs Shilling, isn’t it?’
‘Er, well …’ I eyed the stairs longingly.
‘Nine o’clock with Sam? He’s in there, waiting for you.’ She beamed at Archie. ‘Would you like to leave him with me?’
‘No, no, I’ll take him in.’
‘He’ll be no trouble?’
‘He might. He’s a bit of a monster.’
‘He looks jolly placid to me.’
‘Please take your hands off my buggy.’
She blanched, surprised. Then: ‘I quite understand,’ she said quickly. ‘You’ve lost your husband and one does become terribly protective.’
Casting me a sympathetic look, she ushered us through into the reception area; and then there was nothing else for it because she was bustling to open another door, into Sam’s inner sanctum.
The room had remained as neat and tidy as on my last visit, which didn’t bode well somehow. The man himself was installed behind his desk, suit jacket and tie in place, no casual shirt sleeves rolled up, and on the telephone, communicating by way of an elegantly raised finger that he wouldn’t be a moment. His face was stern, stony even. It was with a sinking heart that I sat down opposite him, drawing Archie’s buggy very close beside me. No, in front of me.
‘I see,’ Sam was saying gravely. ‘Yes, I suspected as much.’ He massaged his brow with his fingertips, elbows on the desk, face to his blotter. ‘Thank you for confirming it.’
His dark hair was just slightly flecked with grey at the temples, I noticed. Distinguished. Handsome. An officer’s face, my father would say; he’d been one himself, many years ago, in the cavalry. How could I ever have thought him a foot soldier like me? Suddenly I felt angry. This whole set-up, the whole up-the-wiggly-backstairs-to-a-provincial-solicitor’s-practice, had been a front, a smokescreen, an attempt to appear a man of the people. But I’d seen him outside his manor on a horse, in a pink coat. Oh, yes. I knew better.
‘Overwhelming evidence,’ he was saying. ‘I agree. Circumstantial as well as actual. And such obvious guilt at the time. Fleeing the scene of the crime for one thing.’ He looked up at me. Hard. I flushed. Shit. He was talking about me. ‘She doesn’t have a leg to stand on,’ he went on. My thighs felt gripped in the frozen lock of my tights, which seemed to shrink like a vice. I waited, paralysed.
After a moment he said goodbye. His face was grave as he put down the phone. But then an odd thing happened. He got to his feet, beamed, came around his huge leather-topped desk, and bent to kiss me on both cheeks.
‘Poppy. How lovely to see you. You survived, I see! I must say I thought you were tremendously brave sailing over those hedges and ditches when I gather you hadn’t ever hunted before. Everyone was terribly impressed, and old Gerald Harper even went so far as to tell me in a very loud voice that he thought you had spunk!’ He threw back his head and laughed.
I blinked, confused. I thought I had hours to live; a condemned woman. But apparently I had spunk? Could he have been talking about someone else on the phone? Another client?
‘And let me tell you, that wasn’t an easy meet. Sometimes we toddle around the woods for hours on end and bugger-all happens; but we had a five-pointer yesterday, and there you were, galloping away at the front with the best of them!’
‘Yes, just … a little too much at the front sometimes,’ I managed to stammer, wondering what was coming next.
‘Oh well, that happens to everyone. When I first went out I overtook the master, the hounds and even the bloody fox! Ended up sinking a lonely pint in a pub miles away with my heaving horse tied up outside, too bloody frit to get back on again!’
‘Excellent, excellent,’ I croaked, baffled. His eyes seemed to be glowing at me in a rather admiring way and he was still standing quite close; he was leaning back on his desk, his crotch at eye level.
‘Is this Archie?’ He crouched down to the pushchair and gazed equally admiringly at my son. ‘Isn’t he sweet?’
Now he was admiring babies? Like a politician, I thought suddenly. Is that what this was? A softener, before the killer blow? Was ‘bigot’ privately on the tip of his tongue? Or ‘dog killer’, with a