A Clear Conscience (29 page)

It was the plaintive voice of a little girl, driven to the thumb-sucking habits of adult dementia. Cath swayed slightly, sighed and went on speaking, with difficulty.

‘Only I'm a little bit drunk, see? I got it on the way. I thought if it worked for him it might work for me, even if I hate the taste. And then if he hits me, p'raps I won't feel it.'

She was grinning inanely, puzzled, entirely naked, with her hands crossed across her chest, her hair lank, her
lumpy stomach folding over a puckered scar. She was shaking her head.

‘It doesn't work, you know. I don't know why he ever thinks it does, does nothing for me.'

‘I'm a police officer, Mrs Boyce. And Joe's dead.'

She began to wail, like an animal in pain.

He had no personal radio with him. The burglars had taken the fancy phone. There were enough reasons for him to ignore the formulae he should have followed, such as calling for help, getting in a female officer, all that. Instead, he turned his back on her, put the kettle beneath the tap and bellowed over the sound of running water and her desperate wailing.

‘I'm making tea, love. Get some clothes on, there's a good girl.'

The pity had grown to a lump of gristle in his throat, choking. He was thinking of the lump of humanity, abused by his own kind, a pretty woman making herself revolting by being so pitiable. He was also thinking of Joe Boyce, rolling round on the top deck of an empty bus. Lying there and dying in his own vomit, perishing through asphyxia and blood loss, not from his clumsy wounds. Thinking too, how this woman had been a constant presence not in one home, but two. Would Helen's kitchen, or Emily's, ever sport tea cloths with daisies? As his mind raced, like his delinquent clock, he wondered how he would phrase his report to the Crown Prosecution Service, to lawyers like Helen, so removed but working in the interests of justice as far as they knew it, which was not as well as he. Thinking of the bottom line, insufficient evidence, or a plea bargain, plus all that destructive nonsense in between.

H
elen had found the shoes and the car keys. This kind of car would be safe wherever she took it and since she felt as attractive as a leper, she was safe too. East. Away from gentrified houses and towards the urban edges of the metropolis. The number 59 droned past the end of the road; she followed it.

There was no sensation of following a star, like the three kings trailing through another kind of desert in pursuit of divine message, hope instead of despair; it was simply an alternative
to doing nothing.

Light was fading at nine o'clock, diminishing with the slow reluctance which heralded the inexorable sunset of summer. Long shadows, heat stored in the brickwork, ragged flowers and brown grass between buildings, the trees of north London still green, the hedges of gardens still gallant. Helen did not feel self-conscious about following a bus. Late evening traffic was brisk and purposeful; no-one noticed. The bus itself skipped stops, skittish, like an antisocial cat. On paper, Helen knew these streets, some of them boasting real or faded glory, others history, others an ethnic dominance which was busy and brave in the dying light. Looking for landmarks, pausing, with the bus, parallel to playing-fields, watching a game of football on brown turf, moving forward again. She thought she would have been safer on the bus, without the shell afforded by a car, until she remembered Joe Boyce.

Major junction, red lights, where the youths came forward in a gang, threw water at the windscreen and began to wipe it off. Helen had no money, sat there revving the engine and on the change of lights jolted forward without payment. One shook his fist and yelled; the others melted back: wrong car. Hackney emerged through glass streaked with dirt and soap: the exhaust of the bus spouted blue smoke; and into the equation, as she saw where she was, came motorway signs, local signs, a distinctive pub and railway-station sign, and then the block Cath had pointed out emerged on the left. There was no-one behind to protest at her abrupt and ill-mannered manoeuvre towards it.

Top floor, Bevan House: that was where she was, strange Cath, and this was where a stranger parked a car. In between two other cars, one wrecked, the other in the first stages of renovation, Helen's car simply looked like a vehicle awaiting therapeutic attention. And this was where she walked on a sultry evening. Sauntered downhill, into a building, found a lift, pressed a button, waited in vain until someone ran past and rewarded her optimism with a two-fingered salute and a grin. She looked at the darkening flight of stairs to which he pointed. She knew these places on paper: she had a map of the city in which she lived, on paper.
She could climb stairs, too.

She felt the scar on her forehead, she could never quite suppress the memories of fear and pain. She felt Bailey's contempt, and remembered at last what it was Cath had said. Going out as she was coming in, Helen somehow disturbed to find her back – yesterday had been the final day: Helen needed no more help than regular cleaning, Cath no more help than regular jobs. She had felt a sense of being taken over, something which had made her brusque, until Cath had said, humbly, she just had to see what it was like with everything finished. The sight of Cath, with a great big bin-liner, taking away left-over paint, without asking first, made Helen feel mean as well as angry. You didn't need it, Cath had said, all wounded and defensive; I thought you wouldn't mind. I'm going to do up our place, now I've seen what can be done with yours. No-one's going to interfere, this time. There had been no invitation and even less inclination to ask about Cath's grand night out with the old man. Emily Eliot did not know about that; Helen did not think anyone else did either, apart from Mary Secura, Bailey least of all. Big night out, special treat, the man drunk. Him coming home on the bus. Cath hated the bus. Cath knew when she took the paint that wherever he had gone, Joe Boyce was not coming home.

No-one had managed to find her, Bailey said. Because she had been hiding in HeIen's flat until Helen came home, planning, getting the time wrong. And if Cath said no-one was going to interfere in her domestic plans this time, she could only have been referring to him. Him, the until-death-us-do-part man.

It was somewhere on the way back that Helen came to the conclusion that she would say nothing unless anyone asked. Even if Cath were guilty of collusion in a death, so be it. Even if it went completely against her principles and her belief in justice by the rules. Shades of Mary's bitterness. Mind your own business. Watch out for policy. The fact that in all her cases there had been one, potentially murderous, husband convicted out of the last dozen, with her watching Cath work up to new life without
really offering help, standing in the sidelines, working in the interests of justice. About which they said, if it ain't broke don't fix it. Helen drove back to home, sweet home.

‘I
suppose she sent you, as well,' Cath said. ‘She keeps on sending people.' The whine was still in the voice, the childish note gone with the tea.

‘Who's she, Cath?' he asked gently.

‘Helen. Lady I worked for. Decorating. Shan't go back there. She won't want me anyway. Very mean, that lady. Real slaver. Makes me work hard. Forgets to pay, have to fight for it.'

Bailey could not begin to equate this description of Helen with the truth, although he could see that Mary Catherine Boyce was in the kind of state where accuracy was unlikely and truth, if it emerged at all, would be accidental. It was the kind of accident he prayed for; truth, coming out of a side road before the driver noticed a wrong turning. He had underestimated her. Cath was accustomed to underestimation. It was a feature of her life, amounting to contempt.

‘I don't like this tea much,' she grumbled. ‘Did you put sugar in it?'

‘Plenty. Cath, what was that bayonet doing in the kitchen drawer?'

‘I couldn't throw it away, could I? I never throw anything away.' She looked at him as if the suggestion was vulgar.

‘Oh I don't know. It's a good idea, sometimes, isn't it, throwing away things which aren't any use? Keeps the place tidy.'

She nodded earnestly, as if he had endorsed a long-held philosophy.

‘But it's Joe's, you see. I was never allowed to throw away anything which was Joe's. I knew he had it, of course, even though he put it upstairs with all his other stuff. Burglars might have found it, left it out. He brought it with him last night. Showed it to me when we were in a pub. Told me I would get some of it if I didn't behave. We were supposed to go somewhere nice, but we didn't. He just got drunk.' She began to cry, a snuffling sound which produced
moist eyes rather than tears. Bailey remained completely still.

‘I ran away from him,' Cath said. ‘I ran out of the last place the back way and went for the bus, only a bus didn't come. They never come when you want them. But he found me. He was cross. He got that thing out on the bus. I thought he was going to do for me. I was fighting him for it. I didn't scream, what would be the point and anyway, I didn't want anyone to see him, drunk like that. It slipped, went into his tummy. He was laughing. I didn't think he was so much hurt. I just thought I've got to get away and never come back, this time. Can I have some more of that tea, please?'

‘You must have known you'd have given him a nice little scar, Cath. Like he gave Damien.'

‘Yes,' she agreed, nodding vigorously, then clamped her hand over her mouth.

‘And like Damien gave you, all that time ago?'

She was suddenly more composed. ‘Oh, I don't know. That policewoman, Mary, she told me I could get that fixed, but I didn't believe her, not really.'

Bailey was silent, his mind running on again to the report. They would move him soon, he knew they would, to a life well above street level, full of endless reports. Reports which could not even begin to place reliance on what a suspect said under the unfamiliar influence of alcohol, without being given the formal words of caution. You do not have to say anything, but what you do say can be used against you. The woman talked in code.

‘I think I sort of knew about Joe and Damien,' Cath continued chattily. ‘You know, things Joe would let slip when he hit me. You and your brother, bad as one another, that kind of thing. He had to go, he would say: he can't do that to you, and not go. Thought he meant Damien not being around when I was pregnant. He never knew it was Damien's baby. I didn't know for certain how he'd killed Damien until I saw him with that knife last night. I kept thinking, why didn't he use a proper knife? But I don't suppose he could. I would have noticed if he took things from the kitchen. I knew when I saw that old dagger thing. He would never
have used anything new. He couldn't. It would have spoiled it.'

Bailey poured more strong tea into her cup. Both were orange in colour. He ladled into it three teaspoons of sugar.

‘Damien got you a fine scar on your belly, didn't he? Then Damien is cut apart, the same way you were. No anaesthetic though. Joe did that. Did you kill Joe for revenge, Cath? For Damien, or for all the beatings he gave you?'

‘Kill him?' Cath was wide-eyed, shaking. ‘Kill him? I would never have wanted to kill Joe. Didn't cross my mind. I loved him. I loved him. You don't seem to understand anything. Someone else killed him. I loved him.'

‘We'll have to go, Cath. May take a while. Do you want to bring anything with you?'

She looked around in a state of total confusion.

‘I can't, can I? It's all gone! and I … anyway, I haven't got a bag.'

Bailey led her out of the house with the deference of a ballroom dancing partner, his mind still running ahead, going into overdrive. Get this place watched and turned over in the morning. Nothing doing, been burgled by an expert. Formal interview under caution, get a woman to do it. Even halfway sober, Cath could clam up in response to sympathy, couldn't blame her, really. Yeah, she'd done for her old man just like he did for her brother, but what if she said nothing, said she'd gone home alone? What he knew already showed she'd left some pub or other long before Joe. It would be, at best, a formal prosecution, with a bit of public attention because it had all happened on a bus. They wouldn't even get near a conviction for manslaughter, not with a battered wife, not with this kind of history. Formal result. A fable of the times, discussed in newspaper editorials for a day. At least that little boy on a murder charge might not go down for long enough to really learn how. He supposed that was something of an achievement, the best he was going to get.

‘One more thing,' he said once they were inside his car, while she patted and stroked the seat, like a pet. ‘Did you keep on going with your brother Damien, making love to him, I mean, after
you married Joe?' It was a casual question, ending with a click of seat belt. Nothing said in cars would do as evidence these days; there would be nothing he could do with the knowledge. Cath's eyes beneath the street light shone like pools of rain on a white pavement.

‘Oh yes, whenever he wanted. He was my brother. He would have told Joe about how I used to sleep with him before if I didn't. Joe loved Damien, you see, and anyway, I loved Damien, too. Most of my life, see, he was all I ever had.'

She settled back, a child on an outing. ‘So I never wanted it to stop, not really,' she continued. ‘Not even when he came to meet me in the park. Sometimes he frightened me, doing that. He liked to play games. Hide-and-seek in the park, in the dark.' She giggled, softly. ‘He liked that.'

C
lose on midnight, Alistair Eliot phoned Helen West. He was as far out of Emily's earshot as Helen was herself; still both of them spoke in low voices, as if afraid of being overheard.

‘Sorry to bother you.' Alistair so often prefaced statements or requests with an apology.

‘Alistair, don't do that. I'm having an argument with Emily, not with you.'