A Place of Safety by Natasha Cooper

first email she read was from George, saying simply: ‘You haven’t forgotten dinner at the Carfields tonight, have you? Do you want me to collect you or shall we meet there? They live on the river, just by Tate Modern.’
    Sighing, Trish clicked on ‘Reply’ and told him she’d meet him there, if he’d send her the address. That way, neither of them need hold the other up if work got in the way.
    She had never met their hosts and didn’t like going to formal dinners in the middle of the week, but Jeremy Carfield was the founder of a huge software company and one of George’s biggest clients, so he had to be kept sweet. And it wasn’t as if she had to get up early to work on any case papers now.
    Knowing that George would forget to buy them anything, she made a mental note to get something herself. Wine would be insulting and silly for a man as rich as Carfield, she thought, and chocolates were a bit ordinary. Flowers might be all right, except that they always got in the way when hosts were busy greeting their guests and pouring drinks. The whole business of giving presents to people who didn’t need them and would probably recycle them or take them to a charity shop irritated her, but everyone else did it, so she had to join in.
    Her phone rang. It was Steve, wanting to know whether she could accept a brief for a dispute between a catering company and some manufacturers of kitchen equipment. It sounded small and deadly dull, and it was going to be heard in Guildford of all places, but at least it was something.
    ‘All right.’
    ‘Good,’ he said, adding as a reward for obedience: ‘There’s more in the pipeline. I’ll put the papers in your pigeonhole. You’ve already got a bunch of personal stuff in it. You ought to come and empty it. It’s messy when it overflows and you know I don’t like mess in the clerks’ room.’
    There was the faintest hint of a smile on Trish’s lips as she put down the phone. Now that no one would think she was hanging around in the hope of picking up some crumbs from the silks’ table, she didn’t mind going in to collect her post.
    Her pigeonhole wasn’t quite overflowing, but it was full. There was the traditional pink-tied brief for the catering dispute, as well as a bunch of ordinary-looking post and an expensive, stiff cream-coloured document envelope with her name and address in equally expensive handwriting. This must be Buxford’s information about the Gregory Bequest.
    A quick look at the catering company dispute told her she need not start on that yet. She almost wrenched her forefinger from its socket as she ripped open the envelope, so thick was the
paper. As she slid out the neat pile inside, she saw a handwritten note on the top.

    Dear Trish,
    Thank you for agreeing to take this on. As you will see from the board meeting minutes and the other documents, the whole business of the trust is very simple. But if there is anything you need to ask, please don’t hesitate.
    Yours ever,
    Henry

    Nice and clear, she thought, but then it would be. Anyone with his responsibilities would have learned long ago to waste neither time nor words. She turned quickly through the top sheets, adding each one to the neat pile when she’d finished with it.
    In the past she had had to discipline herself to keep her papers tidy; now it was second nature. She could work much more quickly with neat, clearly identified bundles than with the mess she’d allowed herself in her early days.
    The first interesting item was the probate valuation of Helen Gregory’s estate after her death in 1969. Trish saw that she had had very little money, and her only assets had been her house and its contents. As Henry had said, the valuers hadn’t thought much of the paintings, but the phrasing they had used struck Trish as unnecessarily contemptuous:
    ‘Sundry cardboard tubes containing oil paintings of doubtful provenance and value. Those examined proved to contain nineteenth-century copies in