Read Online Prey to All by Natasha Cooper - Free Book Online

Sadness made his voice throb, but Trish wasn’t convinced. It wouldn’t have been difficult for him to pick up the phone. ‘You know how it is, Trish. Or was. She left to get married – most girls of Debbie’s type still did in those days – and I went in for politics. Our ways parted and we moved in different worlds. But I’ll always be glad she remembered how close we’d been and still trusted me enough to call on me when she found herself in this hellish mess. I went straight down to see her.’
    He brushed one finger over his left eyebrow. In anyone else the gesture would have meant that he was removing some sweat, but Chaze wasn’t sweating. Too much perfect confidence and self-control. Trish wished she had the trick of it: the air felt like oily flannel against her skin and she could feel the sweat trickling down her spine.
    ‘I wish there was something I could do for her,’ Chaze said wistfully.
    ‘Isn’t there?’ Trish was surprised by her continuing,
instinctive, mistrust of him. It was years since she had had this kind of reaction to a man who was a trifle more pleased with himself than seemed quite justified. No woman at the Bar could survive if she minded a little thing like that. It was almost a qualification in the Temple.
    ‘Only appearing on this film of Anna Grayling’s as a kind of character witness for Debbie,’ Chaze was saying, with an apparently rueful smile that he must have practised. It was very good. Even Hugh Grant would have been hard pushed to better it.
    Stop it, Trish, she ordered herself. You’re turning into a bad-tempered old bag. Smoothness and good looks aren’t a sign of dishonesty. And self-deprecation can sometimes be real, even in a man like this.
    ‘And writing the article about her case,’ Chaze added, keeping the smile going. ‘It’s all ready, so as soon as Anna gives me the word Debbie will be splashed all over the Sunday Review. For my part, I’d have got it in as soon as I’d written it, but Anna wants it out in the same week as the programme. I’m going along with that.’
    ‘It makes sense.’
    ‘And I am, of course, keeping an eye on Debbie’s treatment.’ He gazed out across the river towards St Thomas’s Hospital.
    ‘Really? How?’
    ‘One of the few benefits of being an MP is that people worry about your good opinion.’ He grinned again, but this time he looked less smooth and a lot more real in his satisfaction. ‘I’ve made sure the prison governor knows I take an interest. How did she seem when you saw her?’
    ‘Not too bad,’ Trish said. ‘She had prison skin and a prison figure, and she was worried about her cell-mate, who’d just OD’d on heroin.’
    ‘What?’ Chaze’s face was in shadow so she couldn’t see
much, but bursts of tension came off him like radio waves pulsating out from a broadcasting mast.
    ‘It does happen, you know, even in prison,’ Trish said, wondering why he was quite so angry. Drugs in prison were a fact of life.
    ‘It’s a fucking disgrace.’ The perfectly ordinary expletive she heard fifty times a day, and often used herself, sounded shocking from someone whose language had seemed so artificial until then. He looked at his watch. ‘Damn. Too late to catch the Chief Inspector of Prisons tonight, but I’ll put him on to it on Monday. It’s outrageous if that quantity of drugs is still getting through to inmates. I’ll get it stopped if it’s the last thing I do.’
    Trish was fascinated by his passion, so much hotter than anything he’d shown for Deb.
    ‘Sorry,’ he said after a while, once more smiling at Trish with all the deliberate charm of a thirties film star. Any minute now he was going to tell her he didn’t give a damn. ‘I detest the thought of her being exposed to that kind of filthy danger. In her own cell, too!’
    Trish wished she could see his eyes more clearly, but the low sun was right behind him. That might have been chance, but she decided it was unlikely. With no