She was getting impatient to reach the top of the legal tree. For any other twenty-nine-year-old woman at the bar, Camilla Balcon’s career trajectory would have been termed stratospheric. Balliol College, Oxford, top five in her year at Bar school and a tenancy in one of London’s most elite chambers. In the last twelve months alone she had been junior counsel for the chambers’ top silks in three major fraud cases. She had a growing reputation as an astute and brutal cross-examiner in her own right, and consequently was topping six figures in yearly fees. Not bad for someone regularly dismissed as posh totty.
But still, it was not quite good enough for Camilla, whose entire life had been spent plotting her next conquest, her next brilliant achievement. It was her legacy as the third child in a high-achieving family. You either gave up before you’d even started, or you worked your damnedest to outshine them all. And Camilla wanted to shine.
She turned to look at her colleagues and reflected that they might just be the reason her career was going more slowly than she would like. While her commercial chambers had a fantastic reputation, with so much ego and talent in one building it was hard enough to get noticed, let alone scramble up the ladder. So while Charles McDonald might throw her the odd compliment during a Friday night’s drinks, she felt sure it was simply to pacify the chambers’ only female tenant.
A tall, gangly, but good-looking man bounded over with a bottle of Moët. ‘I see somebody’s glass needs a refill,’ said Matt Hornby, one of chambers’ senior clerks with a blush. ‘Charles has splashed out on the good stuff so we might as well quaff it.’
‘Just because it’s free, doesn’t mean we have to drink it all,’ said Camilla, holding out her glass with a coquettish smile. Aware that Matt, a twenty-five-year-old East Ender, had been hopelessly in love with her since she started at Cornwall Chambers, she didn’t want to encourage him, but he had a kind, handsome face, peppered with freckles, and she found it rather cute that he considered champagne such a treat.
‘Saw you in those Evening Standard party pages last night,’ continued Matt, drinking the Moët in nervous gulps. ‘So what are you up to this weekend that could possibly be more glamorous than tonight’s soirée?’
She laughed and sipped her champagne. ‘Lots of invitations to things – not looking forward to any of them. In fact, in about two hours I should be at a Charles and Nigella’s dinner party. The food will be fantastic, but nothing sounds better right now than being tucked up in bed with a video and a Chinese.’
‘Why don’t you take me along and let me be the judge of what’s the best night out?’
She smiled, unable to stop herself. ‘Where to?’ she purred, ‘Charles and Nigella’s or back to mine?’
‘Oy, you little minx. Are you flirting with me?’
She slapped him on the arm and put her glass on the table. ‘Absolutely not. And anyway, I think Nat might freak if I turned up with you as Friday night entertainment.’
Matt tried to smile at the mention of Nathaniel Montague, whom he’d only met twice but regularly saw gurning in the Daily Mail diary pages.
‘You have a point,’ laughed Matt, filling his flute to the rim and stuffing his mouth with a handful of Japanese rice crackers. ‘He scares the bejesus out of me.’
As Matt disappeared to ‘find some more snacks’, Camilla felt a tall presence at her shoulder. ‘Are you staying around for a little while or are you dashing off?’ asked Charles McDonald, in a manner that wasn’t so much a question as a request.
‘I haven’t got to be anywhere until about eight p.m. Why?’
He gently put his hand on her shoulder, steering her towards the door conspiratorially. ‘Shall we go somewhere quieter?’ he said, ‘I need to talk to you about something you might find interesting.’
Camilla felt her stomach flutter as they went down the staircase to her office on the second floor. This had to be the talk about improving her workload, she thought. Charles stopped Camilla at the door and picked up her Armani coat from the hat stand.
‘I think we should get out of here,’ he said, holding up her coat. ‘This is fairly confidential. Walls have ears, and all that.’
The Pen and Wig, tucked away in a side street behind Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was the perfect barrister’s watering hole. Dark and Dickensian, its stools were upholstered in faded red velvet, while caricatures of corpulent judges sat holding court around the bar. It was busy, full of lawyers killing time before they returned to wives and children in Victorian villas in Wandsworth Common. Not exactly the ideal place for a private chat, thought Camilla, as Charles fetched her a gin and tonic from the bar. Still, if he was about to increase her caseload, or move her to the more prestigious upper-floor offices, it was probably best if he did so out of the earshot of the other tenants.
‘Thank you so much for your acknowledgement of my work earlier,’ she said, impatient as always to cut to the chase. ‘Hopefully you’ll see that I’m ready to move up to lead counsel soon.’
Charles paused, putting his orange juice down carefully. ‘Actually, it wasn’t chambers I wanted to talk to you about,’ he began, fixing Camilla with his gaze and leaving a dramatic pause. It was a technique Camilla had seen him use to devastating effect in court when he was about to annihilate someone under cross-examination.
‘Camilla, you’re almost certainly the most ambitious law student I have ever interviewed for pupillage,’ said Charles. ‘And, believe me, we’ve had a lot of gung-ho lawyers through the doors of Cornwall Chambers.’
‘Isn’t everyone super-ambitious when they’re twenty-two and trying to get into good chambers?’ she smiled, relieved that she hadn’t been brought here for a dressing-down.
‘I suppose. But I always found it strange with you, with your background. We’ve had a lot of public school- and Oxbridge-educated barristers in this chambers, but I’ve always been suspicious of taking on the truly privileged ones.’ Charles whispered the word ‘privileged’. ‘Lazy bastards, a lot of them.’ He stopped.
‘Which is why I was hesitant to take you on, Camilla.’
Beginning to wonder where this conversation was going, Camilla began swirling the ice cubes at the bottom of her glass around and around.
‘Do you remember when I took you out for lunch in your first week?’ asked Charles.
Camilla remembered it well. It was to Wilton’s in Belgravia. She was the only woman in the restaurant and she ate pheasant when she knew she should have ordered the fish. It was the first time she had felt small, scared and a little out of her depth. Rather like now, in fact.
‘Do you remember that Michael Heseltine was sitting in the next booth and you became terribly excited?’ said Charles.
Camilla smiled. ‘I think I even said hello.’
‘I think you might have been a little drunk, actually. Don’t worry,’ he chuckled, lifting his orange juice. ‘Lunchtime drinking never agreed with me, either. But I remember thinking at the time, why is this girl so excited about meeting Heseltine when she must have met dozens of high-ranking political sorts through her family? I think your father was a Lords’ frontbencher at the time, wasn’t he? You had a fierce look in your eye and you told me that Heseltine had once said the president of the Oxford Union was the first step to becoming prime minister. And that’s the reason why you went for it,
