A Clear Conscience (4 page)

Mary knocked again, this time louder, the feeling of dread beginning to take hold. She checked the time: nine twenty, forty minutes before they were expected at court. Miss West would be early, she always was; there were still minutes to spare. The third knock was louder still; she had the absurd desire to use the radio in her bag to shatter the wired glass which took up a quarter of the door. Through the glass an electric light glowed in the hall. Mary had been cheered by the sight of that, now she knew it was ominous.

When the door to flat sixteen opened Mary supposed she was halfway to acceptance, as close as cool Helen West always seemed to be with her bloody good manners. On the doorstep was a woman of indeterminate years, somewhere between thirty and fifty, short on speech and square against the kind of ill wind which blew no good.

‘If you want Shirl, she's gone. Kid and all. 'Bout an hour ago. Not coming back.'

The
door slammed. There was the sound of two bolts sliding into place.

Mary Secura looked at her watch again, then knocked on Shirley's door one more time, knowing it was useless. Inside, the light winked at her while the place reeked of emptiness. When she got back to the car, she found herself trembling with rage. Six weeks' work, hours of building trust; such was the nature of friendship.

T
he foyer outside court number five, North London Magistrates' Court, was almost deserted. There was none of the stink, smoke and grumblings of the waiting area outside courts one to four, which Helen could see as she leant over the balcony watching the human traffic ebb and flow. Court number one was remands; she was glad she was not down there with a hundred cases to shoot from the hip: the overnight arrests, the bind overs to keep the peace, the guilty pleas, the postponements for preparation or nonappearance; the whole thing an exercise in concentration. Better to be up here, with a single case listed for the whole morning, if it lasted that long. The prisoner was in the cells, the two police witnesses had booked in, everything was set to go. She looked downstairs again, in time to see Constable Secura coming through the main entrance and barging, rudely, through the crowds. Alone. Even as Mary made for the steps towards the comparative calm of court five, Helen could feel her own bile rising, the vomit of frustration.

Mary Secura reached her side, slightly out of breath, said nothing, simply shrugged her shoulders. The defection of a crucial witness was not a phenomenon requiring an announcement. Even one still recovering from her split lip, missing teeth, fractured skull and broken arm, all suffered in the name of obedience to the man in the cell downstairs. Helen felt a brief white rage against the victim who remained a victim.

‘The stupid, stupid bitch,' Helen said. ‘The silly cow. What does she think she's doing? Are you sure she knew the date?'

Something snapped in Mary Secura's brain. She leaned forward with her hands on her hips and her face inches from Miss West.

‘Of
course she knew the bloody date! We've been through it enough times. She knew the date, the place and the fact I was coming to pick her up. And don't you dare call her a bitch. You've seen the photographs, you know what she's like. I can call her what I fucking like, it's me who's got her this far, but you can't, you stupid ignorant cow. You've got no bloody idea …' And then to her own consternation, she was in tears, turning to one side to fumble in the good leather handbag for the sheaf of paper handkerchiefs she always carried, dropping the radio with a clatter on the stone-tiled floor.

‘I think those things cost hundreds, don't they?' said Helen. She bent to retrieve it while Mary, blowing her nose, made the same movement. Their heads almost clashed. Helen held the radio to her ear, shook it, pulled a face.

‘Receiving Radio One, I think. It'll do.'

Both started to talk at once, breaking off with a touch of awkward laughter. Helen breathed deeply, pulled another face and sat down. Mary Secura did the same.

‘OK, so what do we do? This committal has been on the cards for four weeks, he's been in custody for six and we've given every reassurance it will go ahead. We've got outside evidence of a row, shrieks and screams, injuries found after the police were called. His admissions vary from saying she fell over a pushchair to saying she went ape shit and hit him first and he had to calm her down. We can put him there, but not tie him down. Whichever way you look at it, there just isn't enough evidence without her.'

‘Nope.'

‘So I don't have much choice about going in there and discontinuing the whole thing, do I?'

‘Please,' said Mary Secura. ‘Please. Just try for one more adjournment. Give me one more chance to find her. She'll have to come home sooner rather than later.'

‘Why should she?'

‘Because she hasn't got anywhere else to go.'

‘And
then she'll only skip again, next time. After another few hundred pounds of public money?'

‘Please,' said Constable Secura. ‘Please, Miss West. Next time he might kill her.'

The usher stood by the door, smug with sympathy and the prospect of a short morning.

T
he tea was cold, the service indifferent.

‘Look, I apologise for calling you a stupid ignorant cow,' Mary Secura said with a touch of stiff formality an hour later as they sat in the canteen. They had bypassed the rows of cheese rolls, weary even this early in the day, ignored the bacon smell from the steamers, the rack of sad toast which no-one would eat now, the baskets with packets of biscuits and the plates holding forlorn scones. Court canteens always purveyed food to the lowest common denominator of taste, bland in the extreme. Helen imagined the custard for the lunchtime apple pie was made once a month and carved into slabs.

‘Don't wrap it up, say what you really think,' she said cheerfully. ‘I wouldn't be here if the occasional insult made me curl up and die, but I don't like them much from someone I respect. Which is why I should apologise too. Of course I knew you'd have done everything you possibly could to get that woman to court. I implied you hadn't, because I was irritated.'

‘Irritated?' said Mary. ‘I was furious. I like Shirley. And the child's just beautiful.'

They were silent for a moment.

‘Anyway, you're halfway right,' said Helen. ‘I am ignorant. I mean, after all this time and all these cases, I don't understand the pressures. Not really. I still don't quite know how a woman stays with a man who hits her.'

Constable Secura stirred her filthy coffee.

‘Oh, I think I do, a bit. Which is why I'd like a change. Something simple. Like catching criminals and getting convictions.'

‘You been reading fairy stories again?' Helen asked. ‘Or do you want to join the robbery squad?'

Secura
shrugged and smiled. ‘You know what I mean. From where I sit, a stint on robbery or murder looks like a holiday. You don't get too many results with battered wives.'

‘If I were you,' Helen said cautiously, aware of her own frustration rather too freely expressed earlier, ‘I'd sometimes want to hit them myself.'

‘Well I don't, because you get to the point where you can't get angry, any more than you would with a child. I only get angry with the man. It's like treading on eggshells. The neighbours call us out more often than the victim, and off we go. Usually the drunken bastard gets arrested on a late-night domestic and we come in to collect the evidence next morning. By which time the victim with her limited knowledge – and I can't tell you how limited it often is – looks at us like a dog turd. And screams. So you get her to climb down and maybe make a statement. Then she sits at home with a couple of screaming kids, works out that the devil she knows isn't half as bad as the one she doesn't, especially if the feckless sod helps keep the roof up. Oh yes, and then there's this little complicating factor of love.'

‘For someone who breaks your ribs?'

‘Yes, ma'am,' said Mary, saluting Helen mockingly. ‘C'mon. You've got Bailey, I've got mine, we know all about Love.'

‘Not that way, we don't.'

Helen sensed that Mary did not want to go on in such a serious vein. She cared too much, Mary did, took all professional failures personally. They had got their temporary reprieve, Helen implying that Shirl's absence could well be the result of illness or kidnap rather than reluctance. She could lay on the guilt with a trowel, Mary thought: she could make the buggers think they had no choice in the matter at all; and I do wish she'd talk about something else.

‘Tell me something,' said Helen, leaning forward in so confidential a manner, Mary recoiled as if this normally calm prosecutor were about to confess to a bizarre sexual deviancy, ‘do you and your bloke agree about colour schemes? I know Bailey and I don't actually live together, but he does spend a lot of time at my place, and I suddenly want everything yellow, and he seems to think yellow is nothing more or less than the colour of, well, pee.'

Mary
bridled. ‘What the hell does his opinion matter? Yellow? Paint or wallpaper?' she went on, eyes alight with a fervour. It was an illumination Helen recognised, the single-minded devotion of a fellow shopping-addict. ‘I've got a yellow bathroom. Big roses. Love it.' She was fumbling in that big bag with the radio and the mass of tissues. For the sixteenth time that day she looked at her watch. Helen had a fleeting image of Bailey who never looked at a watch, even in the middle of the night, he always knew the time. Strange that he should also be a man who was passionate about clocks, when he was the last person to need them.

‘Well, I have to phone in again,' said Mary. ‘In case anyone's seen Shirl. Otherwise, I've got an hour. There's an amazing do-it-yourself paint and wallpaper shop down the road. Why else do you think I like this court?'

Eyes met in mutual recognition. Despite the photograph of Shirley Rix, shown to the magistrates, despite the memory of serious common purpose, there was also that peculiar elation which followed the demise of adrenalin, the slow ebbing of tension which brought about a certain euphoria. Then they were out there, heels clacking on stone steps, moving with the guilty speed of children playing truant.

S
uperintendent Bailey could feel Detective Constable Ryan's reluctance to get out of the car.

‘I dunno, sir. Can't we just look from here? This thing might be short a set of wheels by the time we get back.'

‘It's got an alarm, hasn't it?'

‘Sure, but I don't quite know who it would frighten. Nobody under fourteen anyway. School holidays, guv, nothing's safe.'

‘I can see cars with wheels. Let's go. Your tyres wouldn't pass an MOT, anyhow. Just don't want to look, do you? You've lost the honourable art of walking, that's your problem.'

They set off across the road towards Bevan House, which towered above them. It was fronted by a scrubby green, once landscaped by non-surviving trees, now littered with cars, which dipped down into a concrete approach that led in turn to a central portico, also concrete, before deviating left and right to side entrances and stairwells. Three stairwells, three lifts, most defunct at any given time. There were open walkways along the first twelve floors; after that the remaining twelve rose like a monument, too high for the windows to be smashed by anything but a passing rocket.

‘Would
you believe', Ryan volunteered, interested despite his truculence and his resentment at being there at all, ‘that they put families with children on the lower floors, well, as far as possible they do, the council, I mean. Unmarried mums and dads go further up, singles at the top, but no bugger wants to live at the top. Least, that's the plan; it all gets muddled, except for nobody wanting to live at the top. I mean, is that where you'd want to live on a pension? Half empty, the top. Little flats, cubbyholes, really. Council can't get rid.'

Bailey looked with indifference at the frontage. He felt a distant rage that anyone could ever design a building so alien to human beings, then repressed that familiar old-hat opinion and wondered instead how much it would cost to persuade the children who played around them, dusty as the concrete on which they moved, to get organised and burn the thing down. Heartless architecture did not cause a riot all by itself, but it certainly helped.

‘Show me,' he commanded.

Ryan shrugged. ‘Damien Flood lived on the top. Would you believe he could run up all those stairs, even when he was pissed, which was often? He had another place, too, always running away from women, but this was his main gaff.' Ryan turned abruptly, almost full circle, so that instead of pointing upwards towards the height which made him giddy, he pointed away.

‘Over there, see it? Just poking out, that's the leisure centre, right? Kept that nice, they have, video cameras and bouncers all over the place. Got a park round the side. The park was there first, if you see what I mean. Got proper trees and stuff. Damien used to go to the centre to work out: a lot of boxers did, though really they've got their own places. He wasn't so regular since he went to seed a bit, but he was still a fit bloke.' Ryan turned back, looked upwards again and shielded his eyes.

‘I
mean, anyone who could run up all them stairs, he must have been fit.'

Bailey squatted down. He was wearing a jacket over slacks, had had the sense to take off his tie. His thin knees stuck out: Ryan hoped his trousers would bag and knew they wouldn't. Nor would his voice stop.

‘It was your job, Ryan. I gave it to you and said get on with it.'

‘I did, too. We got a result, didn't we? Committed for trial. And if you've been too fucking busy to worry until we have to go and see some fucking barrister about it, why the hell are you on my back now?'

A child came up to them, dirty faced and full of cunning, trailing a skateboard. He stood with his powerful ten-year-old body full of challenge.