Private Lives

‘Helen. The injunction was lifted,’ said Anna finally.

‘What?’ The cold steeliness in her voice made Anna want to run and hide.

‘Another few minutes and it would have been finalised, but Stanhope’s QC got hold of the story as it was breaking. The judge overturned.’

There was no sound from the other end of the line. The roar of the traffic on the Strand seemed to engulf her. She felt as if she was walking on quicksand that was giving way under her feet, sucking her into a loud, claustrophobic hole she’d never be able to climb out of.

‘Does Sam know?’ said Helen, her tone cold.

‘I’ve just told him. He was angry. He said I was fired.’

‘Oh Anna,’ said Helen. ‘You stupid, stupid girl.’

But I did nothing wrong! Anna wanted to cry. How can I help it if someone decides to break the rules? Instead she just stood there, feeling as if she was being given the worst dressing-down by her headmistress.

Helen paused. ‘I told you, Anna: no mistakes.’

‘It wasn’t a mistake,’ she replied, fighting to keep her voice even. ‘Stanhope and Katie must have talked despite the gagging order.’

‘You should have served everyone with the injunction and shut the media down.’

‘We had a strategy. We all agreed on it.’

She knew that her suggestion that even Helen Pierce was fallible was pointless. Although Helen

, as Anna’s supervising partner, had signed off the decision to gag only Blake and Katie, she knew that fact would be conveniently forgotten and that the failure would be hers alone. So much for partner by Christmas, she grimaced.

‘Donovan Pierce is a boutique firm, Anna,’ added Helen. ‘We don’t have a big rota of lawyers, but the ones we have are the best. We don’t make mistakes. Our reputation is everything. Without that reputation, we are nothing.’

‘I’ll try talking to Sam again,’ said Anna. ‘I guess the Standard will run with the story this afternoon, but if we can get him to do a sympathetic interview with the Sun tomorrow, it will soften the impact.’

‘I think you’ve done enough already,’ said Helen. ‘I will talk to Sam and do the firefighting myself. I’ll see you when you get back to the office.’

Anna felt sick as she handed the phone back to Nigel. He looked sympathetically at her. ‘Worse things happen at sea,’ he said.

‘Do they?’ she said. She felt numb, as if she’d had all the air knocked out of her. ‘Sorry, Nigel, I’ve got to go.’ She saw a black cab approaching and stuck out her arm.

‘Don’t take it so hard. There will be other cases,’ said Nigel kindly as he opened the door for her.

Don’t be so sure, thought Anna as she sat back in the seat, dreading the inevitable face-to-face with Helen.

The cabby looked at her in the mirror.

‘Where you going, love?’

‘To face the music,’ she said grimly.

11

Sam gripped the arms of his seat and tried to swallow. The pilot was banking the private jet to the right in preparation for landing, and Sam could now see Cape Cod peeking between thin, low clouds, a finger of land criss-crossed by roads and houses, surrounded by the flat grey Atlantic Ocean, completely oblivious to the tiny gnat flying overhead. If only he could just stay up here, permanently circling the earth, hermetically sealed from the rest of the world, he’d be happy with that.

Sam had always loved air travel; he’d been brought up in a bland working-class part of London, not far from Heathrow, where the planes roared so low over his house he could make out the name of the airlines: Air China, Thai Air, Air New Zealand, reminding him how easy it was to be transported, for the price of a ticket, away from your humdrum existence. And since he had become really famous, aeroplanes had become his sanctuary. A reclining seat thirty-five thousand feet above sea level was one of the few places he could truly relax, switch off and not be bothered by the millions of people who wanted a piece of him.

But tonight, despite the champagne and the tasty finger food the pretty stewardess had kept bringing over, he could not relax. Today he wished for storms and delays and the outbreak of bird flu, anything to keep them from landing, anything to keep him from the inevitable confrontation with Jessica.

He’d called her, of course. There was no getting around that. After Anna had given him the bad news – no, the disastrous news – about the injunction, he had been forced to wake Jessica up from the comfort of her luxury Boston hotel suite, where she was staying while filming the thriller movie Slayer in the city.

Their conversation had been excruciating. At first she had been tired and groggy, irritated that he was disturbing her. No, she hadn’t heard the early-morning news. No, she hadn’t been called by her agent.