A Greater Evil (31 page)
‘The day his wife died?’
‘Exactly. He was completely obsessed with the question that brought him here. Cecilia wasn’t anywhere in his mind. Has he told you why he needed to talk to me?’
‘Yes. And I can understand why he didn’t want anyone else to know. It’s good of you to have kept it quiet.’
‘There’s nothing else really,’ Trish said, ‘except my feelings about him – not
for
him, but about him. I do not believe he is violent. Not now. Whatever he was like as an adolescent, I believe he’s got past it.’
‘Your feelings are not susceptible to proof,’ Frankie said with all the casual disdain so many solicitors used without even thinking of the effect it might have.
Trish had taken years to break George of the habit and even now stress could bring it back. She hated it.
‘Jake Kensal may want to call an expert psychiatric witness to testify to his ability to overcome his old violence,’ Frankie went on, ‘although that can be dangerous with juries these days. They’re more and more reluctant to trust experts after those cot-death cases. But apart from that, we haven’t got a lot.’
‘There are some bits of evidence that might throw doubt on the prosecution’s allegations,’ Trish said, working far harder than Frankie to avoid trampling on other people’s sensibilities. ‘I think the police have been studying CCTV tapes of the Somerset House ice rink on the morning Cecilia died. Could you get hold of them?’
‘Of course. But it may take ages.’
‘I’d like to see them. If they show what I think they may, that would be something you could use.’
Frankie shrugged, not looking remotely convinced, then nodded. Trish wasn’t sure what either gesture meant.
The post had been delivered while Sam was in court. As he swung the carrycot across the studio threshold, he saw the letter on top of the sprawling pile. It was from Maria-Teresa Jackson.
He did everything Felicity could possibly want before settling her in the crook of his arm to give her a bottle, then put her down for her afternoon sleep. At last he could have the shower he so badly needed. Clean again, and warmer, he wrapped himself in a bathtowel the size of a Roman toga to heat some tinned meatballs and baked beans on the old Baby Belling’s double rings.
Spooning the food into his mouth as though he’d been starved for a week, he stared at the untouched pile of envelopes by the door. He decided to get dressed first. Only when he’d run out of excuses did he rip hers open.
Dere Sam,
Im’ sory you sore that beeting. I’d never of wanted you too. Im beter now. Just bruized stil and my eye looks badd. Wourse than it feles.
I heard what you sed when you come here and Im’ not going to try and change yore mind. I unnerstand. Its only write after what I done for you too be free of mee now.
But think of mee now my trile’s come up. Its’ at the Old Baylie. I’m scard. I do’nt mind what they do too mee, not now I have’nt got you nor Danny no mor, but Im’ scard of standing thare in that dock heering what they say about me.
He’s in the dock two, neere enough to tuch, and I never wont to see him agen after what he dun to Danny.
Think of me, Son. I’m so scard. Maria-Teresa Jackson
Sam lit a match, but he couldn’t make himself set fire to the letter. When the flame reached his fingers, he cursed and blew it out.
Felicity woke, crying with an urgency that was new. He stuffed the letter under a pot of orange sticks on his desk and ran to pick her up. It took nearly half an hour to get her calm enough to lie down. She started crying each time he put her in the carrycot.
Kissing the top of her downy head when he’d picked her up yet again, he noticed the way the brain pulsed between the bony plates of her skull under the thin skin. Or was it just her blood pumping? He could fit her whole skull into one hand. The most vulnerable part of her body had no protection at all. His own survival from birth to the moment he was discovered on the hospital steps was taking on a miraculous aspect. Maybe he hadn’t been uniquely unfortunate.
He strapped the sling around his body and levered Felicity in. She felt warm against his chest. The weight of her made him aware of his heart as it beat with a steady thud. Could he work like this? Encumbered but warmer than he could remember feeling in his life, he flexed his arms. They still moved freely.
He’d never know unless he tried. Still afraid of her presence, needing to protect her, feeling weird with her small body between him and his work, he put his hands on the clay, and let ideas about fragility flood his mind.
The next day, Trish was sitting in Frankie Amis’s office, with the Somerset House CCTV tape running. She was amazed at how quickly the police had disgorged it. Was it a sign Caro was feeling so guilty about what she was doing to Sam that she wanted to bend over backwards to help his defence? Or was it evidence of her absolute confidence that he was guilty?
Cecilia was easy enough to spot with her great pregnant belly taking up the space of two ordinary-sized people. Beside her walked a man of medium height. At first his face was fuzzy, like Cecilia’s, but as they neared the camera their features were more visible. He looked rather like Chekhov without the beard. She looked troubled. Trish searched the crowd behind them, peering forward as though she could make the tape reveal what she needed. But she couldn’t see anyone else she recognized.
‘What did you expect?’ Frankie said, seeing her droop.
‘One of the two other men who I think could have killed her,’ Trish said.
‘I can’t believe you made me get it for that. It’s not our job to show who did it, only to maintain that the police haven’t proved it was Sam Foundling.’
‘I thought …’ Trish hesitated. She’d seen Guy Bait only once and couldn’t conjure up a very precise idea of his appearance, except that he had not been as tall as she was and he had a pleasant roundish face and short hair. And a very quiet voice, which wasn’t relevant to his appearance. But, allowing for the difference in age, he did look rather like Dennis. They were the same physical type at least. And so was Sam.
Trish thought of all the people she knew, both men and women, who’d divorced their first spouses, only to choose replacements so like the first they could have been clones. Even their affairs had been with men or women of the same physical and emotional type as the ones who’d proved so unsatisfactory.
‘I thought we might get a full-length picture of him, which could explain why the witness in Sam’s studio believed she saw Sam coming back at least half an hour before he did,’ she said.
‘That’s more like it. Who is he? Or they, if there really are two of them.’
Trish sketched in what she knew about Dennis and Guy and why both of them could have been in pursuit of Cecilia on the day she was murdered.
‘It’s all supposition,’ Trish said at the end. ‘But supposition based on fact and reasonable logic.’
‘I’ll see what Jake Kensal thinks he can do with it,’ Frankie said. She looked more friendly now. ‘And whether he thinks it worth getting an investigator to dig for evidence of misidentification. Thank you.’
‘Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.’ Trish was aware that she stood on delicate ground. Anything she did or said to help Sam now could be taken as trespassing on Jake Kensal’s territory.
‘I will. Thanks again.’
Walking back from Lincoln’s Inn to chambers, passing plenty of people she knew and stopping to talk to a few, Trish knew her only permissible role was to support Sam emotionally as he spent the best part of the next year worrying about what would happen at his trial.
She should have been feeling triumphant now her own work was going well and she and Jenny Clay had uncovered a possible reason for the Arrow’s cracks. But all she could think of was Sam.
Plenty of adults had felt unwanted in childhood, yet managed to deal with most crises in later life. Sam was different. For him, there could be no question of distant feelings or vague memories. He knew the facts. He’d been thrown away as a baby, then spent twelve years with foster parents who had systematically tortured him.
Trish had no difficulty calling up the feelings he must have fought all his life: the anger, the guilt, and the inability to believe he would ever be acceptable to anyone. It would undo any of the healing he’d achieved for such a man to stand in the dock at the Old Bailey and hear witnesses testifying to his violence and lack of control, his inevitable moments of mistreating his wife, his identification as the man who had smashed her head in with a hammer and killed her. And if he were convicted …
She shuddered. It mustn’t happen. If he hadn’t done it, the injustice would be terrible.
Meg’s gentle warning echoed in her head. ‘Don’t let him break your heart.’
I have to know, Trish thought. Either way, I have to know.
Trish shoved a pound coin into the slot to release her trolley. It seemed no time at all since she’d last been here, at the biggest supermarket in the area, and stocked up with enough food for the inhabitants of a small country. She had George’s list for the welcome-home supper he’d planned for David in her pocket. Her own list was in her head.
‘Trish!’ A familiar, beautifully modulated voice made her whirl round to see Caro’s partner with a trolley half full of food.
Jess was a slight woman, several inches shorter than Trish and about five years younger, with a charming face fringed with feathery blonde hair. She looked and often sounded fragile, but Trish had come to realize she had her own strength and an obstinacy of astonishing power. You probably couldn’t bear the uncertainty of life as an actor without it, she thought. Today Jess was wearing blue jeans so tight they looked painted on and a short soft cardigan of a slightly darker blue, which showed the lacy top of her white bra at the point of the V-neck.
‘Jess,’ Trish said, leaning over the trolleys to kiss her cheek. ‘How are you? Is Caro here?’
‘No. Which is lucky. She’d probably throw a wobbly at the sight of you. I’ve never heard her so angry with anyone.’
‘Why?’ Trish gripped the plastic pushbar of her trolley. ‘What have I done
now?
’
‘Betrayed her,’ Jess said, wide-eyed with surprise at Trish’s stupidity but matter of fact in her speech.
Trish reminded herself that Jess’s profession sometimes spilled out over into her private life.
‘How, precisely?’
‘By coaching a suspect in the best way to resist her questions.’
‘That’s rubbish, Jess. As Caro must know.’
‘I don’t think she does. She’s never talked about what goes on at work before. But this time she was so hurt she couldn’t hold it in. I heard the whole story last night: all about how she’d told you everything about our life together and how we nearly broke up last year, and how you’ve passed it all on to this wife-killing psychopath she has in the cells.’
‘I didn’t,’ Trish said, but Jess wasn’t listening.
‘After hearing you bang on about loyalty and law for years, I could hardly believe it. How can you live with yourself?’
‘You can’t believe I’d do anything like that.’ Trish was grateful she had the trolley to lean on. ‘And if Caro does, she must have gone mad. Jess, you’ve got to make her see I’m not capable of it. Will you tell her?’
‘She can’t bear the sound of your name right now.’ Jess looked like someone delivering the diagnosis of a terminal illness.
Trish opened her mouth to protest, but Jess wouldn’t wait.
‘All that’s happened,’ George said later that evening, with a gritty edge to his voice, ‘is that I’ve been given a present of six well-paid months of freedom. They’ll mean that I can take over responsibility for David and let you give your all to the Arrow case. It has to be a good thing.’
Trish pushed all her feelings about the three-way row with Jess and Caro to the back of her mind. She laid her face against George’s shoulder, feeling the smoothness of his sweater against her cold cheek, as he cooked David’s welcome-home supper. He wasn’t here yet, but it couldn’t be much longer. She had to use this time to shore up George’s sense of himself, without behaving like a soppy adorer who’d say anything to please. He’d loathe that as much as she would.
They knew several couples whose relationships had foundered on the mismatch of power that came with a career blip for one or other. It shouldn’t be more difficult for men to play the less powerful role, but it nearly always was.
One good thing was that she and George weren’t going to have any financial worries. Some women’s much greater earnings sent a message to their husbands that said: ‘My time is worth more than yours; therefore I am worth more than you; therefore you should not have the cheek to contradict me or demand of me anything I don’t already give. How am I supposed to defer to you when I’m responsible for paying the bills?’ However much those women would hate the message if it had been spelled out to them, it was the one they often transmitted.
Trish tried to think of something to say that might help. She was fairly sure the only guaranteed way of bolstering George’s mood would be to persuade him to tackle something he found seriously difficult.
‘You’ve always talked about learning to sing,’ she said, remembering the rumbling bass monotone that occasionally issued from the bathroom. ‘Why not use this bonus time for that?’
She felt his tension all through her own body and hurried to take away any sense of criticism. ‘Or something else. Anything. Kayaking, playing poker, macramé. Whatever. But don’t turn yourself into David’s nanny. He doesn’t need one these days, and you’d end up hating him and me and probably yourself, as well as Malcolm Jensen and the rest of the stinking crew at Henton, Maltravers, who deserve to be hated.’
‘Anger management would probably be the most useful lesson. And I could pass some on to you.’ George managed to laugh, which helped, even though there wasn’t a lot of humour in the sound. ‘You’ll have to move. I need to start beating this sauce.’
Trish stepped back. ‘I’ll go and make sure my mother didn’t leave any of her stuff in David’s room when she was here looking after Felicity.’