Control by Hugh Montgomery

Author:Hugh Montgomery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction

27

They drove in silence, the regular squeak of the windscreen wipers filling the silence where conversation should have been. The crowd had dribbled rather than poured out of the courthouse, Anna Chaloner disappearing into the rain-slick streets. Kash had stared after her, wanting to say something, anything – wondering all the while why she had seemed so undisturbed at Ange’s declarations, why she was not lashing out like a wounded animal – but, by the time he had formulated a sentence, she was gone, off into a waiting taxi and away. Instead, he had followed Ange.

At the lights, Angela opened the glove compartment with her left hand to rummage for her cigarettes. The lighter clunked out, and she drew against its hot orange rings. Through the smoke, Kash watched the traffic ahead.

‘Pull in, Ange.’

She glanced at him briefly, anxious not to take her eyes from the rear red lights of the car ahead. ‘What?’

‘Come on, Ange. We need to talk.’

‘We’re running late. We’ve got to . . .’

He cut in, his voice calm and measured. ‘Ange. Just pull the car over, please.’

This time she did as she was told. Beneath the railway arches there was a supermarket car park and she swung into it, through the deepening rain.

‘I had to do it, Kash. He was wrong. And he’d been getting away with it for years.’

‘You know, everyone keeps saying it about Michael Trenchard: that he’d been getting away with it for years. But if that’s the case, if he’d been marching around the Victory turning everything he touched into ash, well, why didn’t anybody say anything? Why the garlands and awards? Why does everyone crawl out of the woodwork now to say what a bastard he was?’

Ange fumbled for another cigarette. For this, there was no answer.

‘You should have told me, before we went in there. You should have told me it was you who’d pushed for this. And all to . . . to do what? Expose Michael Trenchard – after the fact, when he can’t stand up for himself, when he isn’t there to put up a fight? That’s . . . cowardice, Ange. If you really thought that about the man, you had years to . . .’

Ange studied her cigarette, watching as a finger of grey ash slowly developed. Her voice was low.

‘I had to go to patient affairs the next day. You know, to do the certificate. I planned to just sign it. The mother wasn’t going to cause a fuss. Sometimes they don’t – they just don’t want more pain. So I could have done it. Just signed it. You know how hospitals work, Kash. In there, you’re a prisoner to reputation. Doing anything else wasn’t going to do me any good – certainly not to my career prospects . . .’ She paused. Then, through tight lips, ‘I could have done it, but my hand, my heart wouldn’t let me. It wasn’t right, Kash. Trenchard murdered the boy. He used my hands, but he did it. And if I’d said nothing before about his behaviour, it was because I had put my own career first.

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