Gagged & Bound by Natasha Cooper Page B

meeting in the Café Rigoletto.
    ‘Wouldn’t you rather come to the flat?’ Trish said. ‘We’ll have free run of it till at least seven, so we’ll be able to talk more easily there than in the café. I’ll open a bottle.’
    ‘OK. Fine. I’ll be there at five.’ Caro put down the phone. Trish blinked at the peremptory tone.
     
    When Caro reached Southwark, she was still wearing the tidy, practical dark trousers and jacket she favoured for work, with well-polished flat loafers on her feet. Her hair was as tidy as ever, but her expression belonged to someone on the brink of losing control. There were new lines running right across her
forehead, her eyes were darkened by the dilated pupils, and her lips kept moving as though she was trying to pick the right word out of a mass that wouldn’t do.
    Trish was glad she’d chosen a particularly good bottle of wine. She reached for the corkscrew, but Caro shook her head, saying abruptly, ‘I don’t want a drink. Have you heard about what happened to Stephanie Taft this morning?’
    ‘Yes.’ Trish put down the bottle unopened. ‘Did you know her?’
    ‘It was she who warned me about me about my rival taking bribes.’
    ‘Oh, shit!’ It wasn’t the most elegant or sympathetic of expressions, but it was all Trish could produce in time. Ideas poured through her brain like rafts in white water, churning and banging against obstructions as they went.
    ‘One comfort must be that she was for real,’ she said, hoping she wasn’t trampling too hard on Caro’s sensibilities. ‘I mean, she can’t have been part of a set-up designed to manipulate you after all. It would be too much of a coincidence for her to be shot by accident only just after she asked you for help in blowing the whistle on a corrupt cop working with a violent crime family.’
    ‘It isn’t a comfort.’
    Trish looked at her friend’s face and saw in it an expression she knew far too well from her own mirror.
    ‘You’re not telling yourself you’re responsible for her death, are you, Caro?’
    ‘How can I not?’ Her voice was high and thin with strain. ‘If I hadn’t been so keen to protect my own interests … If I’d been quicker about deciding how to handle her information, I might have been able to get her out of the front line in time to save her.’
    ‘I doubt it. Not in less than twenty-four hours. In any case, that doesn’t make you responsible for what happened,’ Trish
said steadily. ‘You didn’t ask her for information; you didn’t betray her to anyone; you didn’t set up the raid this morning, or put her in the front of it. Nor did you organise the shooting. None of it’s your fault.’
    ‘I know that,’ Caro said with a snap like a bulldog clip. ‘Sorry. I didn’t come to shout at you. I just wish I could believe it as well as know it.’
    ‘What are you going to do now?’ Trish forgave the snap; she knew all about the way fear and misery could emerge in the guise of fury. ‘You’ll have to tell someone on the investigating team, won’t you?’
    ‘Listen.’ Caro dragged a chair away from the table and plumped down into it. ‘Listen, Trish.’
    ‘I am listening.’ She sat on the opposite side of the table. ‘Carry on.’
    ‘I told you how Stephanie had tried to use the whistle-blower’s phoneline all those times, as well as telling a whole lot of senior officers what she thought about John, didn’t I?’
    ‘You did,’ Trish said, registering the suspect officer’s first name.
    ‘And they’ve done nothing. Which has to mean he’s been investigated and found to be clean. So if I go repeating Stephanie’s allegations …’ Caro’s voice died as though the prospect of the disaster that might cause was too much to contemplate.
    ‘I’m not sure you’re right,’ Trish said, recognising a new possibility that made sense of a whole lot of things that had been puzzling her. ‘Caro, has it occurred to you that it’s odd you were allowed to see John