Keep Me Alive Read Online Free

what she wanted, eating or not eating as she chose, without ever worrying about anyone else’s feelings. She’d hate to be on her own like this for long, but the novelty was adding an unexpected sparkle to her life.
    There was a bounce in her step as she and Antony emerged through the shade of Temple Lane into the dazzle of Fleet Street. The twisting road was narrow here at its junction with the Strand, and choked with traffic. Puzzled tourists clogged the pavements, cars hooted and everyone in sight seemed to be shouting. The pounding clangour of a pneumatic drill ripped through the rest.
    Sodding roadworks, she thought, as she stepped round a row of orange and white traffic cones and tried not to breathe in the dust thrown up by the drill. Even without it, the air would have been worse out here. The heat haze that shimmered on the cars and around the muscular dragon on top of Temple Bar was already acrid with exhaust fumes.
    Her pupil had gone on ahead with all the bundles of paperwork the team would need in court today, which was a relief. Tugging a trolley full of files and cases through this lot would have been a nightmare.
    Breathing as shallowly as possible, she and Antony made their way to the stony coolness of the Royal Courts of Justice. For once there were no television cameras to record the arrival of celebrities. Theirs was the only case being heard.
    Trish shoved her bag on the X-ray machine’s rollers for the usual security checks and walked unchallenged through the metal detector.
    ‘There’s Applewood,’ Antony said as their eyes adjusted to the gloom indoors. ‘Get on over to him and sort him out before you go to the robing room. He looks far too twitchy. I’ll keep out of your way so you can make him feel truly loved.’
    Trish felt his hand flat on her back, pushing her forwards through the small rabble of lawyers, claimants, defendants and ushers. She didn’t need the encouragement, but she enjoyed the moment of physical contact. Looking back over her shoulder, she could see that he knew. She flashed him a wicked smile and faced forwards again.
    Will had seen her and was beckoning. He’d shaved carefully this morning, in preparation for his long-awaited stint in the witness box, and his springy hair was as smooth as the dark City suit he’d put on. When she’d first met him, he’d been wearing tweed, apparently chosen to look as much like a muddy field as possible, and well-polished brown brogues. Today his cheekbones were a lot sharper than they’d been then, and there were big grey smudges under his eyes.
    ‘You didn’t have a good night, did you?’ Trish said, putting all her pent-up sympathy into her smile.
    ‘Not exactly.’ He laughed, and the cheerless sound made her scalp tighten. ‘When I wasn’t rehearsing my answers to
Antony’s questions, I was telling myself we can still win, even after the way they savaged us last week.’
    ‘It’s good to have confidence in the outcome of the case,’ Trish said, picking her words with care, ‘but all you need to think about now is giving your evidence as clearly and accurately as you can. So long as you do that, you’ll be fine.’
    Will grinned. His teeth were clenched, and the muscles around his mouth quivered. Trish laid her left hand gently on his forearm. She could feel his tendons, hard as steel hawsers.
    The case would never have come to court if it hadn’t been for him. When Furbishers’ machinations had driven his business into liquidation, he’d collected twenty-nine other victims and taken their case to solicitor after solicitor until he’d found one prepared to take them on without any guaranteed payment.
    Trish had always liked Will’s passion for the employees who’d lost their jobs as much as she admired the strength of his conviction that justice would be available to them all if he could only find the right words to explain exactly what Furbishers had done. Unfortunately the right ones rarely came to him.