A Greater Evil (35 page)

‘Yes.’ Trish smiled encouragement.

‘I happened to be speaking to her solicitor the other day and she said Jackson’s trial is on at the Bailey now. It’s going pretty fast, apparently. I thought you might like to know.’

‘Thanks, Sally.’

‘It’s an awful case,’ she added with a shiver. ‘Have you heard what she and her bloke did to that baby?’

Trish shook her head.

‘I was told the body was hardly recognizable as human by the time they’d finished with it.’

‘I think that’s all I need to know,’ Trish said quickly. Her days of having to learn every detail of the unspeakable things parents did to their children were long over. However difficult it might be to absorb the facts and theoretical principles necessary for any big commercial case, it was easy in comparison.

Sally looked disappointed, so Trish thanked her again for the information about the trial and sent her off a little happier.

Do I tell Sam? she wondered, then put the question aside until later. She had more urgent decisions to make. All night she’d kept waking beside the peacefully sleeping George with new ideas for trying to get evidence to show Sam was innocent. Even in the drowsy half-light of dawn they’d seemed like phantasmagoria. Now, in control of her imagination and back in her proper sphere, she put adjectives to them in tones of the most contemptuous defence counsel: Machiavellian; Baroque; Jacobean.

Other helpful words, she decided, were stupid, illegal, and counter-productive. Fantasize though she might about using kindness and sympathy to inveigle Guy Bait into confessing, she knew perfectly well any such attempt would screw up the faintest hope she had of seeing him convicted for bribing someone at the ASP to change the data on the Arrow extranet, which she was sure he’d done, or being charged with Cecilia’s murder, which was still very much in doubt.

She couldn’t even approach him without risking a charge of interfering with a witness in one case or the other. And she still had no evidence.

Jake Kensal would probably manage to get Sam acquitted – after all, the evidence against him still wasn’t very strong – but that wouldn’t be enough unless someone else took his place in the dock. With no other suspect, Sam would always be considered guilty by enough people to matter. And as the years went on, someone would tell Felicity her father had killed her mother. What kind of life could she have with him then?

The only person who could go after Guy Bait was Caro, and she had cut herself off behind the wall of fury and obstinate certainty of Sam’s guilt. Faced with it, Trish could understand some of the emotion that must have driven the Assistant Commissioner’s pre-Christmas outburst against the rituals and flummery of trial by jury in the criminal courts.

‘Are you all right?’ Bettina sounded frightened.

Trish remembered her pupil was due to conduct her first solo case today and needed all the confidence-building available, so she smiled and nodded. ‘How’s the preparation going?’

‘Okay, I think,’ Bettina said. ‘I was practising in front of the mirror this morning. I think I’ve got it all straight. I’m due at the Mags by two.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ Trish said and watched her pupil’s face relax a little. ‘And the euphoria you’ll feel afterwards is worth all this angst, I promise.’

Trish waited until Bettina had gone, leaving at least twice as much time as necessary to get to the magistrates’ court, before embarking on her own search for more personal information about Guy Bait. If there were something – anything – in his past that might correspond with Sam’s traumas, it could help to persuade Caro to disregard the psychologists’ predictions about the abused turning abuser. All the resources of the internet were available at the touch of a few keys.

She already knew Guy had been at Brunel University and she had the details of his public school in no time. It was going to be harder to find something in his past or character to counterbalance Sam’s violent and violated childhood.

Guy had never married, she reminded herself. Maybe there was something there that might help. He’d once been engaged to Cecilia, but the relationship hadn’t outlasted her abortion. Was there something fundamental in his character that made all his relationships fail?

The internet soon provided the names of his parents and grandparents, as well as the address of a house in Devon, where his parents had lived when he was born. They hadn’t sold it until four years ago. A few more strokes of the keyboard brought up a map with a red circle around the house.

Set in a small village, it couldn’t be hard to find. And if they’d lived there so long, they must have left other inhabitants with useful memories of them and their only son. Trish phoned home to hear George tell her he and David had plans to go swimming first thing after school, then to the cinema, unless she needed them at home.

‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some work to do, so I probably won’t be back till late tonight anyway. Okay?’

‘Sure. I can stick around and sleep in Southwark, so take your time. Hope the work goes well. Bye.’

Trish printed off the map and directions, turned off the computer, told Steve she wouldn’t be back till tomorrow, and legged it out of chambers. Fetching the car would take about twenty minutes, she thought, and the drive perhaps three and a half or even four hours. It could be a wasted trip, but it had to be worth making. And she was bound to find out more than she’d get with any cold-calling on the phone.

Traffic in central London wasn’t too bad and she was soon free and batting down the M4 towards Bristol, with a Bob Dylan CD playing. She’d switch to the M5 at Bristol, then turn off just after the county boundary between Somerset and Devon.

By the time she reached her target, the daylight had gone and the dusk after it. She’d forgotten how dark the country could be. Only the beam of her headlights and a few friendly gleams through the curtains of the row of white cob cottages gave her any help. There was a tiny church in the village, with a small graveyard beside it, an old-fashioned red phone box, and that was it. No post office, no shop, no pub.

Feeling a fool for her suburban assumption that every village had something of the infrastructure she’d known in the small Buckinghamshire town of her childhood, she wondered how anyone could bear to live in a place so isolated. She also wondered how the inhabitants would take to a stranger knocking on their doors after dark. She’d planned to take her seat in the local pub and fall into conversation. As it was, she’d have done better to stick with the internet and save herself the 300-mile round trip.

A knock on the nearside window made her jump. She flicked on the inside light and saw an elderly woman peering in at her. Pressing the button that lowered the window, Trish leaned across the empty passenger seat to smile and heard the sound of more than one dog, worrying at something in the grass verge.

‘Are you all right?’ asked the woman in commanding tones more familiar from the bench than anywhere else. Trish smiled.

‘I’m absolutely fine, thank you. Just lost. I’ve been going round and round looking for a village called Oakleigh.’

‘You’ve reached it. Who d’you want?’

‘No one in particular. I’m doing some research into a family who were here for generations, and I assumed there’d be a way of looking up the parish records. But the church is locked, and there doesn’t seem to be a vicarage or anything.’

‘We’ve been part of a group parish for ages and the vicar’s based elsewhere. Which family are you after? The Chards? They’re the only truly long-standing lot hereabouts.’

‘Actually no. It’s a family called Bait. The latest ones living here were Alan and Miriam.’

The woman stiffened and her voice was much sharper as she said: ‘I don’t know who sent you here, but, whoever they are, they’ve given you rotten information.’

Trish’s back and arms felt as though she was being racked, stretched as she was across the car and looking up into the woman’s face. So she switched off the light and got out. One of the black Labradors sniffed interestedly at her shoes, while the other barked.

‘Shut up, Dougal,’ said the woman, who had a strong-featured face under a puff of white hair as soft and round as a dandelion seedhead. Trish wasn’t surprised to see the animal shrink apologetically against the brown cord trousers his mistress was wearing under her torn green Barbour.

‘My information is that they were here for at least thirty years.’

‘No time at all in this part of the country.’

‘Were you yourself here then? I mean, did you know them?’

‘I did. But I doubt if I could be much help, even if I wanted to be. I’ve never had much time for snoopers.’

‘I suppose it must seem as though I’m snooping,’ Trish said with a careful smile, ‘but my motives are pure. May I tell you why I’m here?’

She got no direct encouragement, but launched into a more-or-less true account of her determination to help the police avoid a miscarriage of justice.

‘Perhaps you could tell me which the Baits’ house was,’ she added when she saw a slight softening in the other woman’s expression.

‘There. The cottage at the end; the one with the ugly conservatory wrapped round it. They’d never get planning permission these days. Hideous, isn’t it?’

Trish wondered whether the woman’s increasingly full responses suggested she might have some problems with the village’s isolation and be in need of a friendly chat herself.

‘I’d planned to find someone who could help me and then offer them a drink,’ she said with a less tentative smile, ‘but there doesn’t seem to be anywhere round here that could provide such a thing. Might I drive you – and the dogs, of course – somewhere that could?’

‘Better come to my cottage,’ said the woman. ‘It’s right up here. Leave the car. It’ll be quite safe. No one drives this way after dark – which is why I was sure you were distressed and came down with the boys to see what we could do.’

‘The boys?’

She gently kicked her Labrador with a muddy brogue. ‘The boys. Come along. I’ll give you a whisky. One won’t do you any harm.’

Reluctant to leave the car unlit at the edge of such a small road, Trish took a surreptitious swipe at the rear reflectors as she passed, to clear off any mud that might stop them gleaming at an oncoming vehicle.

‘By the way,’ said her hostess over her shoulder, ‘I’m Margaret Woods.’

‘And I’m Trish Maguire. This is very kind of you.’

‘Still a few of us who stick to the old country ways. Here we are. Give your feet a good scraping or you’ll tramp mud into the house.’

There was a kind of grating beside the door. Trish obediently rubbed her shoes first one way, then the other, and stepped across the threshold. She’d expected to see dusty antiques, Persian rugs and faded chintz, and gaped as she took in the sleek glass-and-steel shelves and the ice-white leather blocks of sofa and chairs.

A rich laugh rumbled all round her. ‘I know. Astonishing, isn’t it? When my husband died, I decided I’d spent long enough stroking family furniture, polishing silver, and darning his mother’s rugs. The one and only good thing to come out of being left on your own is being able to have everything as
you
want it at last. Here.’

She handed Trish a plain heavy tumbler with half an inch of whisky in it.

‘Do sit down. The leather’s more robust than it looks.’

‘Thanks.’ Trish laughed too. ‘You’re a most surprising woman to find at the end of a trip I was beginning to think had been a stupid mistake.’

‘What is it you want to know? Here, boys. Come along.’ The dogs rubbed themselves against her brown trousers and put up their faces to be caressed.

‘Did you like the Baits?’ Trish asked.

‘He was all right, Alan. She was mad, poor thing.’

‘Mad, how?’

‘Towards the end they started calling it Bipolar Affective Something-or-other.’

‘Ah. Yes. Tricky for the neighbours in a place as small as this.’

‘Worse for the family. Whenever there was any nonsense talked about the boy, I reminded the tittle-tattlers that plenty of us had wanted to brain her over the years. I’m glad it’s me who found you. You might have got some pre-tty nas-ty non-sense out of some of the others,’ she said, giving the words unusual emphasis by dividing them in the middle.

‘It doesn’t sound as though my journey was wasted,’ Trish said, sitting up like a pointer. ‘What happened?’

‘He attacked her one day, the boy. He was eleven or twelve, I suppose, and she was on the way down. Always at her worst then. When she was in the depths of despair, poor thing, she was really rather likeable. But halfway down, she was a devil. She said things then that could make a grown man cry. What they did to her son, I hate to think.’

‘What happened?’

There was a long pause. Margaret Woods busied herself with an excessively thorough examination of her dogs’ ears. Trish knew better than to try to break through her loyalty until she was ready.

‘No one ever knew for certain. Poor old Alan came back from work, parked his car, and found the boy white as a sheet and vomiting, and Miriam lying on the kitchen floor with a great dent in her head and blood and sugar everywhere. Brown sugar, of the kind that goes hard in the cupboard. Luckily the wound wasn’t serious. They got the doctor out and he put in a couple of stitches. They gave him some story about her tidying the cupboards and pulling the sugar down on her own head. Of course it looked to everyone who knew them as though the boy—’

‘Guy?’

‘That’s it. Guy. It looked as though he’d lost his temper and started to belabour her head with the nearest thing to hand. Unfortunately for everyone, it happened to be a pound of sugar gone as hard as a rock.’

‘Were the police involved?’

‘No. Alan took the view – he explained it all to me later – that she’d done enough damage to the boy already. He admitted it, you see. There was no question of any kind of lunacy on his part; he’d been driven to it. They sent him to a very good boarding school for troubled children. Up in the north somewhere; Yorkshire, I think. Must have cost them all they had, but it worked. And after a few years – three or four – he moved on to a normal school, and there was no more trouble.’