Read Online Keep Me Alive by Natasha Cooper - Free Book Online

to think any more about the possibility that Caro might die.
    When the phone rang, she grabbed it, more than ready to talk to George, who had promised to ring from Australia tonight. Then she saw that it was still too early for him, so she gave her name much more cautiously.
    ‘Trish, it’s Andrew. I’m sorry to phone you at home. I just thought it would be easier to ask this if I could be sure we wouldn’t be overheard.’
    ‘To ask what?’ she said, puzzled.
    ‘For your help interviewing Kim Bowlby, the child in Caro’s case.’
    ‘I couldn’t,’ Trish said at once, without even thinking about it. ‘I’m up to my neck in my own work. Besides, I’d have no standing. I don’t do family law any more.’
    ‘I could swing it, having you as an expert, I mean, given your experience. Please, Trish. You helped Dean to speak and probably saved his life. If anyone could work the same kind of miracle with Kim it would be you.’
    ‘I can’t, Andrew. I’m sorry, desperately sorry, for the child, but I can’t help. It’s just not possible.’
    ‘Even to save Caro’s reputation?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘The buzz is that she’s not half as ill as she seems, that she’s faking this near-death condition,’ Andrew said.
    ‘Who could possibly believe anything so idiotic?’ The snap in Trish’s voice echoed back at her down the line.
    ‘Her colleagues in the Child Protection Unit,’ Andrew said with all the mildness of a man trained to avoid reacting to aggression. ‘The suggestion is that she’s come to realize that she’s overreacted to the Kim Bowlby case for some unknown reason of her own. Projection probably. And now she’s staked
so much of her reputation on the outcome, she can’t back down. Being ill will let her off. They think she’ll carry on like this until the interim care order has expired and then make a miraculous recovery, when it’s too late to do anything for Kim.’
    ‘That’s ludicrous. And unbelievably offensive. Caro is far too self-aware and experienced to do anything like that. She’d never be so irresponsible,’ Trish said, adding silently to herself: or make the people who care about her go through this kind of terror.
    ‘Misreading what goes on in families and relationships does happen. To all of us. You know that. But this is another reason why I’d do anything to get Kim to talk. She’s important – any child in that kind of state would be – but Caro matters more. She’s in a position to save a hundred Kims, so long as she doesn’t lose her confidence and standing over this. You have to help.’
    Blackmail, Trish thought. Sodding blackmail. ‘How do you know that’s what her colleagues are saying?’
    ‘There’s a young PC there, Pete Hartland, who’s devoted to Caro and passionately determined that Kim should be saved from her stepfather. Hartland has been keeping me up to speed. It was he who told me Caro was better, which is why I rushed straight round to Dowting’s this evening. I told you: we’ve got less than fourteen days to deal with this. You know what I found. She’s not in a position to help anyone now.’
    ‘Look,’ Trish said, feeling her resolution crack, ‘whatever happens, however urgent it is, I couldn’t do anything until the weekend. I have to be in chambers for pre-court preparation by seven every morning; we’re in court all day; then there’s the post-mortem conference and plenty more after that.’
    ‘The weekend may be the best we could do. But if I got permission, would you talk to Kim then? Please, Trish. The child needs you. We all need you.’
    She thought of her empty flat and the sense of freedom that
rushed towards her each time she opened the door now, knowing there would be no one else there. Usually at the end of the day, she’d find George in her kitchen, cooking an elaborate and terribly filling dinner as a way of dealing with the frustrations of his day, while David would want help with his homework and then a chance