A Greater Evil (8 page)
‘There’s only one thing. The police have said I can have my studio back. They’ve recommended a specialist cleaning firm, but I don’t want any more strangers in there, messing about with my work. So I’m going to do it myself. I could use some help. But it won’t be … easy.’
‘No.’ Her voice dragged. He waited for the excuse. ‘It won’t. But I’ll do what I can. When were you thinking of starting?’
‘Tomorrow. I’m at the hospital now. But there aren’t any beds left for parents, so I’ll sleep at the studio and get going as soon as I wake. You don’t have to come that early. I know you’re busy.’
‘I’ve some phone calls to make first thing, but I could get to you by about nine, if you give me the address.’
Sam waited while she wrote it down, then clicked off the phone, wondering whether she would turn up. Scrubbing Cecilia’s blood away from the site of her murder was going to be hard in every way.
Trish wondered if Sam’s request were a test, designed to probe her loyalty, or whether the true weirdness of it hadn’t even occurred to him. She didn’t see why anyone would want to take on a task like that: gruesome and most desperately inappropriate. And yet maybe if you were an artist the idea of snooping strangers in your private space was unbearable. Perhaps if she helped him with this horrible task, she’d have done enough to show she wasn’t rejecting him as everyone else had done for so long.
Back in her warm bedroom, now decorated with George’s sleeping figure, she wished she hadn’t yielded to the impulse to phone. But as she slid under the duvet, he opened one eye, then the other, and smiled as he reached for her.
The water in Trish’s bucket was red and she’d barely started to scrub. The stain Sam had directed her to clean was a broadly oval patch on the wooden floor in front of the sofa. He hadn’t said anything about what he’d found when he got back from the meeting in her chambers, so it was left to Trish’s imagination to work it out.
There were other, smaller splashes about two feet away, with a sharp line along the edge, as though something like a rug had once lain there. Whoever killed Cecilia must have dragged her from the sofa to this place. Had she fought back? Or been so desperate to protect her child that she’d rolled herself around her great belly, offering him only her own back to hit?
Sam himself was on his knees below a long workbench, patiently dealing with a pile of white marble pieces, cleaning the blood off each one, rinsing and then drying it, before arranging it in a pattern that must make some sense to him. He raised his head, as though alerted by the lack of scrubbing sounds.
‘Is there a problem?’ His voice was harsher than usual.
‘No. I was pausing to get my back straight again. And I saw what you were doing. Will it mend?’
‘Not really. But it was the first of her heads I ever did and the one she liked best, so I need to …’ He looked away.
No point saying sorry, Trish told herself. Get back to work and shut up unless he wants to talk.
Trying to ignore the fact that it was Cecilia’s blood she was touching, she rinsed the old-fashioned scrubbing brush in her bucket, shook the water off and leaned forward. There were plenty of women in the capital who paid a fortune to go to keep-fit classes and perform movements very like these, she told herself, swapping the brush for a wet cloth to wipe up the loosened, rehydrated blood. With the stove pumping out heat, she was soon so hot she had to pause again to take off her sweater.
Then she found a rhythm: push, pull, dip, swipe; push, pull, dip, swipe. The sound of rough bristles against the wood was like the scratching of a pack of dogs. Her back ached. Friction between her wet hands and the wooden top of the brush soon made her skin burn. When one-third of the stain was nearly gone, she broke the rhythm to examine the right palm and saw blisters, white and squishy with fluid, in a row along the side of her hand.
It took a lot to make her start again, but she did it, forcing herself to lean harder on the brush and manoeuvre it even more vigorously. Her hand slipped over the edge of the brush and one nail dragged along the floor. A splinter pierced the skin under the nail, making her gasp.
The pain was vicious; small, of course, but bad enough to make her eyes water. She examined her hand again and saw a good quarter of an inch of barbed wood sticking out from under her nail. Closing her eyes, she gripped the end of the splinter and pulled, clamping her lips together to make sure she didn’t make any more noise. A few drops of her blood fell onto the newly scrubbed planks. Biting her lip, Trish shook her hand to get rid of the pain, told herself it was only a splinter and so far from everything Cecilia must have suffered that she should be ashamed to feel it, and picked up the scrubbing brush again.
Nothing else disturbed the work, except for her periodic trips to empty the horrible bucket and refill it with clean water at the sink in the corner, until there was a loud knock on the door. Trish glanced up to see Sam put down the piece of marble he was polishing. He bounced to his feet with an agility she envied.
She didn’t want to pry, so she bent forward again, to push the harsh bristles into the stain.
‘Trish! What are you doing here?’
The sound of a familiar voice did make her look up. There was Caro Lyalt, standing beside a much younger man dressed in jeans and a leather jacket.
‘Giving Sam a hand with a hellish job,’ Trish said. She brushed some hair off her forehead with the back of a sore, damp hand. ‘What about you, Caro?’
‘I’m the SIO on the case. I came because I need to ask Mr Foundling some questions.’
‘I thought Mrs Justice Mayford had provided him with a solicitor. Why haven’t you—’
‘I didn’t know you two knew each other,’ Sam said in a voice so accusing Trish felt like rushing into apology and explanation. His face was harder than ever and his eyes showed a worrying blankness. ‘I’d never have let you in here, if I’d—’
‘Were friends,’ Trish said, trying to sound casual, ‘but I didn’t know Caro was involved in this. The only person I’ve spoken to is a constable, who phoned to ask if it was true you’d come to see me in chambers the day before yesterday.’
He stared down at her. She’d rarely felt at such a disadvantage, scrubbing brush in hand, kneeling at his feet. They were very close to her face. And very large in thick-soled black boots. She thought of the blood tainting the water in her bucket, staining her fingernails, mixing there with that tiny speck of her own.
He looked away, releasing her. ‘Well, Chief Inspector, that’s your answer, isn’t it? I’m not answering any more questions without my solicitor. If you want to know anything, we’ll come to the police station. Otherwise, keep out of my face and my space. You can come to the house if you must, but I don’t want any of you in here now you’ve finished collecting the evidence.’
Trish had to watch Caro to see how she took his refusal. There was nothing in her expression except cool interest, which seemed to be directed towards Trish rather than Sam. It was the younger officer who showed them a face of angry suspicion. After a moment, Caro took a step forward.
‘Very well, Mr Foundling, but it seems an unnecessary waste of your money to drag your solicitor to an interview when all I want to know is whether your wife said anything to you about a man who had been harassing her at work.’
Sam produced a cruel crack of laughter. ‘That’s pathetic. If you really wanted to know, you’d have asked me yesterday when you had me in that interview room for four hours. Why are you here? To see if I’ve been trying to hide something?’
‘We’re on our way to a meeting and passed your door. It seemed a good opportunity to ask you about the harassment suggestion we’ve had from one of your wife’s colleagues,’ Caro said, before leaving with her junior at her heels.
Sam didn’t say anything. As soon as the door had shut behind them, he made sure the latch had caught.
‘It often sticks,’ he said, when he saw Trish looking at him. ‘D’you think that question was genuine?’
‘I didn’t to start with; now I’m not sure. I can’t imagine someone like Caro lying about information from one of Cecilia’s colleagues. It would be so easy for you to check.’
‘Caro! I wish you wouldn’t call her that. I hate the thought of her being a friend of yours.’
‘She’s a good woman, Sam,’ Trish said, bending to her scrubbing again. ‘And intelligent.’
‘She thinks I killed Ceel. And, whatever excuse she’s dreamed up, she was round here to see whether I was buggering about with evidence they’d missed. So she’s a liar too.’
He was staring at Trish as though wondering whether she too suspected him. Again she found she couldn’t break the link between them while he wanted to keep it. She tried to keep her expression open and friendly. Then her phone rang, freeing her.
The call was from Steve, her clerk, telling her Leviathan Insurance had decided they didn’t care about the conflict of interest that had so worried George’s partners. Trish thanked him with unusual fervour.
‘It’s what I’m here for. The loss adjusters want to talk to you today. Can you be in chambers in two hours’ time? There’ll be Cecilia Mayford’s replacement and some assistants. And Giles Somers, of course,’ Steve said, referring to the solicitor who had originally briefed Trish on the case.
She had to work hard to avoid sounding too grateful. When she’d got Steve off the phone, she went back to scrubbing with renewed energy to make up for her relief at the prospect of escape. By the time she had to leave, she’d reduced more than three-quarters of the four-foot oval to a pale patch that showed nothing but the grain of the wood. Sam would have to colour it to match the rest if he weren’t to have a constant reminder of what had happened here. But would he need reminding? How could you ever forget?
Back outside, in the crackling cold, Trish was glad she was close enough to her flat to shower and change before the meeting. But there was an uneasy sensation in her mind too.
Her own enjoyment of coincidence now seemed childish. It was uncomfortable enough to know she’d played such a big part in Sam’s mind for seventeen years, during which she hadn’t thought of him once. Worse was his belief that they’d been communicating in some extra-sensory way all along. She wished she could get rid of the fear that she’d been responsible for planting a kind of parasite within a profoundly damaged man, distorting all his normal relationships.
He’d lived in the studio’s one room, he’d told her, until five years ago, when he’d married Cecilia and moved into her house in Islington. He and Trish had been so close geographically for so long they must often have passed in the street, unaware of the links between them.
Steve was waiting for her in chambers. He didn’t bother with any polite frivolities, such as a greeting.
‘Now that Ms Mayford is dead,’ he said abruptly, ‘the loss adjusters need to regroup.’
‘Have they appointed a successor already?’ It was a question she hadn’t wanted to make within Sam’s hearing. ‘Talk about dead men’s shoes!’
‘I doubt if they’ve made a formal appointment, but someone has to handle her caseload. Because of the size and complexity of this one, they’ve allocated it to her boss, Dennis Flack. His secretary says you’ve met him.’
‘Once, right at the beginning. I didn’t take to him. And he had all the short-man’s Napoleonic arrogance, so I’m surprised he’s prepared to have the meeting here.’
‘I insisted on it,’ Steve said, ‘knowing you had this other private business to sort out. You’ve got just under an hour to review the papers. I hope that’ll be enough. The tigers are getting hungry, you know.’
Faced with his habit of quoting Churchill’s speeches whenever he thought she was slacking, Trish wanted to get back to the comfortable solitude of her own room as fast as possible. Steve had no need to worry: the London Arrow and its perplexing movement was in the back of her mind all the time. Now Cecilia was dead, it seemed even more important to win the case for her.
In Trish’s room, her desk was piled high with papers. The sight made her think more kindly of her pupil’s return. It was often a nuisance to have a scared or arrogant baby barrister with you all the time, wanting to know what you were doing, needing to be taught and given tasks to occupy her day after day until she knew enough to be let loose on a small but real case. The brighter, tougher sort could be useful, but there had been times when the current one, Bettina Mole, had made Trish think of the toddlers she’d seen clinging to their mothers’ clothes so tightly the poor women couldn’t even go to the lavatory alone.
Still, Bettina wasn’t bad at filing and she was clever enough. No one had ever been offered pupillage in 2 Plough Court without exceptional brains. Once she’d gathered a little confidence she’d probably be useful in more ways than tidying papers. The trick would be to give her the confidence without muffling her necessary self-doubt or the urge to watch and learn. Trish had so far had her for two weeks, which meant there were twenty-two to go before she could hand her on to the next pupil master. Maybe she could ask for a break then. Presumed to be a soft touch, she was nearly always given the wobbly pupils.
She switched on her laptop and carefully reacquainted herself with all the arguments the other parties had used to explain their refusal to agree a settlement. There had been representatives of QPXQ (the Arrow’s new owners), the main contractors who had actually built it, and the three separate professional-negligence insurers covering the construction company, the consulting engineers and the architects, as well as someone from each of their partnerships, and of course the crowd of lawyers.
She had all the unhelpful facts marshalled in her brain by the time Steve phoned to say that Dennis Flack was already in the library with an assistant and Giles Somers, the solicitor.
Trish arrived just as Dennis unilaterally declined the offer of tea for all four of them. She shook hands with him, holding on to his a little longer than usual as she said how sorry she was about Cecilia’s death.
Dennis nodded abruptly, pulling his hand away and stepping back, as though he didn’t like being reminded he was shorter than Trish. His square jowly face seemed full of rage until she looked more carefully and saw signs of misery. The pouches around his dark eyes were swollen, and his broad shoulders were slumped so that they seemed to have shrunk. ‘I have to try not to think about her; otherwise I lose it completely. Can we keep this strictly business?’
