A Greater Evil (27 page)

She’d had clean nappies; she’d had a bottle; she’d had clean bedding; she’d even been taken into Trish’s bed.

Thank God, she thought, George hadn’t planned to be here tonight.

The only thing that kept Felicity quiet for more than a few seconds at a time was being walked up and down the living room, with Trish’s tuneless voice singing snatches of half-remembered folk songs or chunks of Gilbert and Sullivan to her. She only hoped the downstairs tenants couldn’t hear any of it.

‘Take a pair of sparkling eyes,’ Trish croaked, remembering the Losey film of
The Go Between
rather than any performance of
The Gondoliers
. ‘Take a pair of ruby lips.’

Felicity turned her face towards Trish’s chest and sighed a little as she relapsed into sleep. Trish stopped singing with relief, but she didn’t dare stop walking for another ten minutes. By then the baby’s breathing was regular enough to give her a little more confidence. With great care, Trish ascended the spiral staircase and laid the child back in her carrycot. Hardly daring to breathe, Trish waited, staring down at the tiny face, terrified the eyes would open and the cheeks clench all over again. Nothing happened. Walking backwards, she moved away until her legs touched the end of her own bed. She crawled into it and let her head touch the pillow. Breathing became possible again. She let her own eyelids close.

An urgent, unhappy, angry sound forced its way into her brain. With her mind screaming protests and obscenities, she dragged her eyes open and saw a pale-grey streak outlining the blinds that covered her dormer windows. She lay, watching it for a few seconds, unable to believe it could possibly be daylight, while the cries became even angrier.

Running her tongue around a mouth that felt and tasted disgusting, Trish flung back the duvet and padded over to the carrycot. There she saw the expected crumpled face. With all her mother’s advice in her mind, she made herself smile and put a firm but gentle hand on the baby’s chest. Like a miracle the sound stopped. Felicity’s eyes opened and she started to suck at her bottom lip.

‘Good heavens,’ Trish said aloud, leaning down to scoop her up. ‘It works in the daytime.’

She found the sling Sam had left, then had to lay Felicity on her bed in order to strap it on. The cries started up again at once. Resisting a momentary temptation to swear, Trish finished tying on the sling, picked Felicity up again and awkwardly deposited her in it. Once there, her cries began to dwindle. Trish hurried down to the kitchen to heat water and make up a bottle, while also brewing a pot of seriously strong coffee.

Meg’s arrival was nearly always an event to be cherished, but this morning, when she rang the bell at ten, Trish practically fell into her arms. Meg laughed.

‘I thought it might be harder than you expected. You look like hell, Trish. Go and have a shower and get dressed. Whatever work you’re planning to do this morning won’t succeed if you embark looking like that.’

Chapter Sixteen

Gina Mayford’s clerk looked pretty frosty when she came out into the huge stone hall of the Royal Courts of Justice to find Trish, but she handed over the keys, adding: ‘The burglar alarm code is 9158. You have to punch it in when you hear the running beeps. When you’ve finished in the house, Mrs Mayford would like you to reset the alarm. You have to punch in the number again, then press button A, then press the white button on the lintel outside the front door when you’ve shut it. Then you must double-lock it. Do you understand?’

‘Perhaps you’d better write it down for me,’ Trish said, not wanting to antagonize this woman.

‘I can’t do that. You might drop the note somewhere it could be picked up and used to burgle the house.’

Trish summoned her reserves of patience and asked for the instructions to be repeated. She thought she could probably remember them between the Strand and Islington. As she stood on the steps a moment later, she saw a passing taxi with its light on, hailed it and was in the pretty early nineteenth-century street in less than fifteen minutes.

No one approaching the neat white-painted house would see anything amiss, she thought. Its stripped-pine shutters, probably original, were all closed, but so were many in the other houses along the street. Inside, she managed to silence the alarm’s beeping without trouble and put the keys down on the radiator shelf so she couldn’t lose them.

The house felt empty in a different way from the big spaces of her flat, which had an invigorating kind of energy. In this house the atmosphere was heavy and bleak, almost as though someone had been very unhappy here.

Old-looking parquet covered the hall floor, and the walls were painted a sunny yellow, presumably in an attempt to add light. There was a thin veil of dust over everything. Looking back towards the door, she saw her own footprints. No one else had been inside for days.

With no map or information to guide her, a systematic search seemed like a good idea. She started in the basement, where she found a traditional dining room, papered in a Regency stripe and furnished with antique mahogany and a lot of silver, which was already tarnished. Surprised by so much formality, Trish opened the sideboard doors and found nothing but bottles and flowered china. There were no other places where files and documents could be stored.

The kitchen had all the unlikely high-status contents that had become desirable in areas like this: an Aga, still belting out heat even though there was no one around to use it, as well as innumerable machines for making bread and ice cream, rolling pasta, and reducing vegetables to uniform slices or juice. Even if Sam and Cecilia had been the kind of obsessive cookery enthusiasts George could be, they wouldn’t have needed all this. Trish thought of the double gas ring in Sam’s studio, the cracked pottery sink, and the few battered pans.

Again the cupboards held nothing unusual and certainly no papers. The only oddity was a collection of full supermarket plastic bags in the centre of the kitchen table. Already powdered with dust, they proved to contain both dry and tinned food and more or less the same baby kit Sam had brought round last night. Beside one was a package wrapped in crisp white tissue paper and pink ribbon. A folded note with his name on it lay on top.

Trish looked at it. There was no envelope, and no staples or Sellotape sealed it. Giving in to temptation, she flipped it open with one finger, as though physical gentleness made her curiosity less offensive:

Dear Sam,

This was Cecilia’s when she was a baby, knitted by my dearest friend. C always looked especially serene when wrapped in it. I would love it if it had the same effect on your daughter. Please let me know as soon as you need anything. I want to help, Sam.

With love to you both, Gina

Ashamed of prying, Trish replaced the letter, using the dustmarks as guides and retreated upstairs.

Two ground-floor rooms had been knocked through to make one reasonably light drawing room, decorated in a style of slightly countrified elegance that added to the stultifying effect of the dining room and made Trish understand Sam’s less than enthusiastic attitude to the house. It reminded her of George’s place and the way she’d felt imprisoned in its chintzy softness in the early days of their relationship. She knew Cecilia had owned this house for several years before she’d met Sam. Perhaps he too had felt he could only breathe safely in his own studio in Southwark. Even so it still seemed odd that he was happy to live in a place where she’d been beaten to death.

A pretty walnut bureau standing where the back fireplace would have been yielded nothing more than old Christmas cards and the records of any busy woman’s life. Trish pulled open each of the four drawers below the flap and found nothing useful. There were bookshelves in each of the alcoves beside the chimney breasts, with solid cupboards beneath them. The pair nearest the window held outdated hi-fi equipment, CDs and vinyl records. The next had a television on a complicated swinging arm that would bring it up to eye level for anyone seated on the sofa. And tucked onto a lower shelf was an old-fashioned computer with the kind of stout rounded screen not seen in any office for years. Clearly Cecilia couldn’t bear to throw away anything. The third cupboard looked more useful. There were neat rows of box files on both the shelves.

Trish sat cross-legged on the floor and began to look. She found it much sooner than she’d expected: two box files full of cheque stubs, just like her own. To her delight, she saw Cecilia had kept her account with Coutts, who provided more information on their statements than any other bank. The statements must be somewhere close by. It would be easier to search those than the cheque stubs.

Here they were, filed in the bank’s own dark-red leather folders. It wasn’t hard to work out which years Cecilia had spent at Brunel, or to chart the pattern of her spending: university bills, credit cards, the odd restaurant, and plenty of entries for small amounts of cash. She’d owned a tiny share portfolio, Trish discovered, which generated dividends of a few pounds every quarter, and there was a regular sum from Gina, which must represent her allowance, as well as the termly grant cheque.

She had obviously been a careful student, rarely straying into overdraft and ticking off each entry as though she balanced her chequebook at regular intervals. The amounts hardly fluctuated. In some summers there were extra payments, presumably the proceeds of temporary jobs. Then, just after her last term at Brunel had come a large sum paid to her by Guy Bait.

Bingo, Trish thought, before turning the page. If the story she had dreamed up to explain everything she’d heard from Sam, Jane Frant and Cecilia herself was accurate, there should be a balancing payment somewhere.

She found it on the next statement: a payment for precisely twice Guy’s amount had been made to the Primrose Clinic, with a neat tick beside it to show that Cecilia had checked the figures as usual.

No wonder she made such a good, clear-minded loss adjuster, Trish thought. If she kept her own papers in this kind of order it must have been second nature to ensure she never lost track of anything in her case files.

Directory Enquiries provided the phone number of a Primrose Clinic near Brunel University and a call there confirmed it had been in existence fourteen years ago and that it existed to provide abortions.

Which of them wanted the termination? Trish wondered as she clicked off the phone. Did the engagement break down because Guy wanted children and she wasn’t prepared to take on such a responsibility before her own adult life had begun? Or did he decide she’d agreed to marry him only because she was pregnant and demanded she have an abortion to prove she loved him? Or did they fall out over something else and she refused to bring a child into the world, knowing how it felt to be fatherless?

Trish was never likely to find out. Even if she ever found a legal way to question Guy Bait, she wouldn’t be able to trust his memory or his reasons for saying whatever he chose to tell her.

She tried to bring back into her mind an accurate picture of the only moment when she’d seen the two of them together, at the failed settlement meeting. Cecilia had looked ill and withdrawn, and she had avoided the risk of touching him by covering her face with her hands. But that was all. And it wasn’t enough.

At what point in her work on the Arrow case had she become aware that one of the crucial members of the engineering team was her old fiancé, the father of her aborted child?

And what had the sight of her, pregnant by someone else, done to him?

The phone rang, a sharp urgent sound in the silence. Trish looked round and saw a combined phone and answering machine on a flouncy table near the window. She waited until she heard Gina’s voice:

‘Trish, are you still there? If you are, please pick up. This is Gina Mayford.’

She pushed the files to one side and stood awkwardly, almost falling as the pins and needles in her right leg made it give way beneath her. Hobbling, hopping, she reached the phone and said her name.

‘I’m glad you’re still there. Have you found what you wanted?’

‘I think so.’

‘I’ve been worried all morning: where’s the baby? Have you got her with you?’

‘I left her in my mother’s charge.’

‘Trish!’ For the first time in her life, she heard Gina sound angry. ‘How could you! She’s
my
granddaughter. I told you to telephone me if you needed help. Why didn’t you?’

‘You were sitting today,’ Trish said with care. ‘I know you want … I’m sorry. Sam left her in my charge, so when I knew I had to come here, I called on my mother, who’s the most reliable, kindest woman you can imagine. She’s retired, so she has more time than either you or I. Please don’t worry. She’ll take the best possible care of Felicity.’

‘What? How d’you know that’s her name? Sam told you, I suppose? That man …’

‘Gina …’ Trish gazed up at the ceiling in despair. Who else was she going to piss off in her determination to stick by Sam for as long as she could? ‘Whatever happens in the investigation, even if they charge him, he ought to get bail. I’m not laying any kind of claim to Felicity. God forbid. I’m just babysitting her while her father is …’

‘Unavoidably detained,’ Gina said, pulling back with audible effort. ‘You’re right of course, and it’s not fair to be angry with you. May I come and see her at the end of the day?’

Trish hesitated.

‘You invited me to your flat for Christmas.’

Trish didn’t need the reminder. She was aware of everything they’d tried to do for each other, including the generosity of Gina’s support over the
Daily Mercury
's malice and the threat to her own reputation. Why was it never an easy choice between good and bad? Why did fighting for Sam entail hurting this woman?

‘What time would you like to come? You could meet my mother too. You’ll like her.’

‘I’ll be there at five. You’d better give me the address again.’

I only hope Sam doesn’t arrive while you’re there, Trish thought, as she gave directions to her flat. Or he’ll think I’ve sold out.

She put down the receiver and took her own mobile from her jacket pocket, pressing in the code for Caro’s number. She’d be questioning Sam now, so Trish didn’t expect to be answered by anything but the voicemail service.