A Certain Justice (32 page)

Piers hadn’t spoken for some minutes. Now he said: “Harry Naughton’s the prime suspect for me, sir. He knew about the blood, he knew where to find the wig, he admits that no one saw him leave Chambers or arrive at his home station. And then there’s his extraordinary behaviour this morning. He’s done that journey from Buckhurst Hill for — how long? — nearly forty years and he’s always walked straight down Chancery Lane and into Chambers. So why does he suddenly find it necessary to go walkabout?”

“He said he had personal matters to think about?”

“Come off it, Kate. He’d had the whole journey from Buckhurst Hill to do his thinking. Isn’t it possible that he just couldn’t face going into Chambers? He knew damned well what was waiting for him. His behaviour this morning was totally irrational.”

Kate said: “But people don’t always behave rationally. And why pick on him? Are you saying that you can’t believe a senior barrister would be guilty of murder?”

“Of course I’m not, Kate. That’s bloody silly.”

Dalgliesh said: “I think we’ll call it a day. I shan’t be in London for the first part of tomorrow. I’m going down to Dorset to see Venetia Aldridge’s ex-husband and his wife. Aldridge seems to have called on Drysdale Laud for help about her daughter’s engagement without success. Perhaps she tried Luke Cummins. In any case, they have to be seen.”

Piers said: “An agreeable part of the country and it looks as if you’re going to have a pleasant day for it, sir. I believe there’s an interesting little chapel of ease at Wareham which you could probably find time to visit. And, of course, sir, you could take in Salisbury Cathedral.” He glanced smilingly at Kate, his good humour apparently restored.

Dalgliesh said: “You could take in Westminster Cathedral on the way to Miss Elkington’s Agency. What a pity you’ll be too busy to find time for a quick prayer.”

“What should I be praying for, sir?”

“Humility, Piers, humility. Well, shall we call it a day?”

I
t was just after midnight, time for Kate’s invariable last ritual of the day. She tugged on the warmer of her two dressing-gowns, poured herself a modest whisky and unlocked the door to the balcony overlooking the Thames. Below her the river was empty of traffic, a heaving black waste of water quicksilvered with light. She had two views from her flat, one from the balcony which overlooked the huge shining pencil of Canary Wharf and the glittering glass-and-concrete city of Docklands, and this, her favourite, the river view. This was a moment she normally savoured, standing glass in hand, her head resting against the gritty brickwork, smelling the sea-freshness brought up with the tide, star-gazing on clear nights, feeling at one with the throb of the never-sleeping city and yet lifted up and apart from it, a privileged spectator, secure in her own inviolate world.

But tonight was different. Tonight there was no sense of contentment. Something, she knew, was wrong and she had to set it right, since it threatened both her private world and her job. It wasn’t the job itself; that still held its fascination, still compelled her loyalty and her dedication. She had experienced the worst and the best of policing in London and was still able to feel something of her initial idealism, could still be convinced the job was worth doing. So why this unrest? The striving hadn’t ceased. She was still ambitious for promotion when the opportunity came. So much had been achieved: senior rank; a prestigious job with a boss she liked and admired; this flat, her car, more money than she had ever before earned. It was as if she had reached some staging-post in which she could relax and look at the journey travelled, taking pleasure in the difficulties surmounted and finding strength for the challenges to come. Instead there was this nagging unrest, this sense of something which in the hard years she had been able to put out of mind, but which now must be faced and come to terms with.

She was missing Daniel, of course. He hadn’t been in touch since he had left the Met, and she had no idea where he was, what he was doing. Piers Tarrant had taken his place, burdened with her resentment, a resentment which wasn’t any easier to cope with because she knew it was unjust.

She had asked: “Why theology? Were you training to be a priest?”

“Good God no! Me a priest?”

“If you’re not intending to go into the Church, what’s the point of it? D’you find it useful?”

“Well, I didn’t read it to find it useful. Actually, it’s a very good training for a police officer. You cease to be surprised by the unbelievable. Theology isn’t so very different from criminal law. Both rest on a complicated system of philosophical thought which hasn’t much to do with reality. I read it because it was an easier way of getting into Oxford than choosing history or PPE, which were my other options.”

She didn’t ask what he meant by PPE but she resented it that he obviously thought she knew. She wondered whether she was jealous of Piers, not sexually jealous, which would be demeaning and ridiculous, but jealous of that unstressed camaraderie which he had with Dalgliesh and from which she felt that she, as a woman, was subtly excluded. Both men were perfectly correct towards her and towards each other. There wasn’t anything definite to which she could point the finger, but the whole sense of being a team had gone. And she suspected that, for Piers, nothing was of overwhelming importance, nothing could be taken seriously because, for him, life was a private joke, one presumably shared between him and his God. She suspected that he found something risible, even slightly ridiculous, in the traditions, the conventions, the hierarchy of policing. She sensed, too, that this was a view which AD with part of his mind understood, even if he didn’t share it. But she couldn’t live her life like that, couldn’t be lighthearted about her career. She had worked too hard at it, sacrificed too much for it, used it to climb out of that old life as an illegitimate motherless child in an inner-city high-rise flat. Was that at the heart of her present discontent — was she beginning for the first time to feel disadvantaged, educationally and socially? But she put that resolutely out of her mind. She had never given way to that insidious and destructive contagion of envy and resentment. She still lived by that old quotation, remembered but never identified:

What matters it what went before or after?
Now with myself I mil begin and end.

But three days earlier, before the Aldridge case broke, she had gone back to the estate, to Ellison Fairweather Buildings, and, rejecting the lift, had climbed the concrete flights of stairs to the seventh floor, as she so often had in childhood when the vandalized lift had been out of use, doggedly mounting behind her complaining grandmother, listening to the old woman’s laboured wheezings, laden with their shopping. The door of Number 78 was pale blue now, not the green she had remembered. She didn’t knock. She had no wish to see inside even if the present owners were willing to admit her. Instead, after a moment’s thought, she rang the bell at Number 79. The Cleghorns would be at home; with George’s emphysema, they rarely risked finding the lift wouldn’t work.

It was Enid who had opened the door, her broad face showing neither welcome nor surprise. She said: “So you’ve come back. George, it’s Kate, Kate Miskin.” And then, ungrudgingly, since hospitality must be offered, “I’ll put on the kettle.”

The flat was smaller than she remembered, but, then, it would be. She was used to her double sitting-room above the Thames. And it was more cluttered. The television set was the largest she had seen. The shelf to the left of the fireplace was heavy with videos. There was a modern sound system. The sofa and two chairs were obviously new. George and Enid were managing nicely on their two pensions and her carer’s allowance. It wasn’t lack of money which made their lives hell.

Over the tea Enid said: “You know who controls this estate, don’t you?”

“Yes, the children.”

“The kids, the bloody kids. Complain to the police or the council and you get a brick through your window. Tell ’em off and like as not you get an earful of foul language and burning rags through the letter-box next day. What are your lot doing about it?”

“It’s difficult, Enid. You can’t bring people to law without evidence.”

“Law? Don’t talk to me about law. What has the law ever done for us? Thirty million or so spent trying to nail that Kevin Maxwell, and the lawyers getting fat on it. And that last murder case you got mixed up in must have cost plenty.”

Kate said: “It would be exactly the same if someone was murdered on the estate. Murder gets priority.”

“So you’re waiting for someone to get murdered? You won’t have to wait long the way things are going.”

“Haven’t you a community policeman on the estate? There used to be one.”

“Poor sod! He does his best but the kids laugh at him. What you want here is some dads on the estate who’ll do a bit of clipping round the ears and bring out the strap now and again to keep the boys in order. But there aren’t any dads. Poke the girl, breed the kid and be off, that’s young men today. Not that the girls want them around, and who’s to blame them? Better be on the welfare than get a bloody nose every Saturday when the old man’s team doesn’t win.”

“Have you put in for a transfer?”

“Don’t be daft. Every decent family on this estate has put in for a transfer, and there are decent families.”

“I know. I lived here with Gran, remember? We were one of them.”

“But you got away, didn’t you? And stayed away. Monday’s dustbin day, so they’re out early kicking over the bins and strewing the muck up the stairway. Half of them don’t know what a lavatory’s for, or don’t care. Have you smelled the lift?”

“It always smelt.”

“Yes, but it was pee, not the other thing. And if they catch the little bastards and take them to youth court, what happens? Bloody nothing. They come home laughing. They’re in gangs now by the time they’re eight.”

Of course they are, thought Kate. How else can they survive?

Enid said: “But they leave us alone now. I found a way. I whisper to them that I’m a witch. Upset me or George and you’re as good as dead.”

“Does that frighten them?” Kate found it difficult to believe that it could.

“It bloody well does, them and their mums. It started with Bobby O’Brian, a kid in this block with leukaemia. When they took him off in the ambulance, I knew he wouldn’t be back. You don’t get to my age without knowing death when you’re looking it in the face. He was the worst of the kids till he got ill. So I chalked a white cross on his door and told the kids I’d put a curse on him and he’d die. He was gone quicker than I thought, within three days. I’ve had no trouble since. I tell ’em: Any bother from you and you get a cross on your door, too. I keep my eyes open. There’s always a bit of trouble I can see coming and I’m ready with the chalk.”

Kate sat for a moment in impotent silence, afraid that the disgust she felt at the exploitation of a child’s pain, a child’s death, must show in her face. Perhaps it did. Enid looked at her closely but said nothing. What was there to say? Like everyone else on the estate, Enid and George did what they needed to do to survive.

The visit hadn’t done any good. Why had she ever thought that it would? You couldn’t exorcise the past either by returning to it or by running away. You couldn’t resolve to put it out of your mind and memory, because it was part of mind and memory. You couldn’t reject it, because it had made you what you were. It had to be remembered, thought about, accepted, perhaps even given thanks for, since it had taught her how to survive.

Kate closed the door on the river and the night, and suddenly there came into her mind a picture of Venetia Aldridge, of the hands falling with graceful abandon over the arms of her chair, of that one dead open eye, and she wondered what luggage Venetia Aldridge had brought from her privileged past to that successful life, to that lonely death.

T
he office of Miss Elkington’s Domestic Agency, in a short street of neat early-nineteenth-century town houses off Vincent Square, was so unexpected in its location and appearance that, if it hadn’t been for the neat brass name-plate above the two bell-pushes, Kate would have wondered whether they had been given the right address. She and Piers had walked the half-mile from New Scotland Yard, cutting through the noisy busyness of the Strutton Ground street market. The rails of gaudy-coloured cotton shirts and dresses and the clear bright gleam of the piled fruit and vegetables, the smell of food and coffee and the raucous camaraderie of one of London’s villages going about its daily business seemed further to raise Piers’s spirits. He was singing softly under his breath, a complicated and half-recognized tune.

She said: “What’s that, last Saturday at Covent Garden?”

“No, this morning on Classic FM.” He sang on, then said: “I’m rather looking forward to this interview. I have high hopes of Miss Elkington. It’s surprising that she actually exists, for one thing. You’d expect to find that the original Miss Elkington died in 1890 and Elkington’s is now just the usual boring domestic agency which has kept on the name. You know the sort of thing: glass-fronted premises, insalubrious street, depressed receptionist battered into submission by dissatisfied householders, the occasional sinister housekeeper looking for a rich widower with no relations.”

“Your imagination’s wasted on the police. You should be a novelist.”

The top bell said “House,” the lower “Office.” Piers pressed it and the door was opened almost immediately. A cheerful-faced young woman, crop-haired and wearing a multi-striped jersey and a short black skirt, danced a small jig of welcome at the door and almost threw herself into Piers’s arms as she ushered them in.

“Don’t bother to show your warrant cards. Policemen always do, don’t they? It must get very boring. We know who you are. Miss Elkington’s expecting you. She’ll have heard the bell, she always does, and she’ll be down as soon as she feels like it. Have a seat. Do you want coffee? Tea? We’ve got Darjeeling, Earl Grey and herbal. Nothing? Oh well, I’ll just get on with these letters. No good grilling me, by the way. I’m only the temp, been here just two weeks. Funny place, but Miss Elkington’s all right if you make allowances. Oh sorry, I forgot. My name’s Eager, Alice Eager. Eager by name, eager by nature.”