A Greater Evil (14 page)

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Not your fault. I just meant it doesn’t get me any further, except in the wrong direction.’ He stopped. Trish waited. ‘I suppose I wanted you to hate her so I could write her off. Thanks. See you on Christmas Day.’

Gina Mayford finished wrapping the presents she would take with her to Dorset and tried not to look at the glowing semi-abstract seascape she’d bought for Cecilia or the batch of sweaters for Sam. They were a bit pedestrian, but she didn’t understand enough about his taste to buy him any kind of picture or object, and he always wore sweaters rather than jackets. She hoped he wouldn’t feel short-changed or insulted.

She longed to phone Chief Inspector Lyalt and beg for news of the investigation, but she knew she couldn’t. The family liaison officer had told her everything she was allowed to know.

Sam’s innocence had still not been disproved. Trying to believe in it, trying to forget all the times Cecilia had arrived at her house in tears or looking white and strained to breaking point because of something he’d done, Gina stared at the parcel she was making for him.

Once he’d spent nearly a whole weekend without speaking, giving Cecilia nothing but furious glares and increasingly impatient grunts whenever she asked a direct question. She hadn’t been able to tell whether he was angry or unhappy, and the only response she’d had to any of her attempts to comfort him had been snapping and criticism of everything she said or did or cooked or ate or wore. It had sounded like hell.

Now Gina remembered listening to Cecilia’s tears and trying to help. The trouble was she’d had so little experience of close relationships herself. She’d considered sharing some of the stories she’d heard in court, then thought better of it. In the end she’d fallen back on the old method of cooking something special to take the place of words. Unlike Sam, Cecilia had known exactly what the beautifully presented soufflé meant and had absorbed the intended comfort with the foamy cheese confection.

‘And she loved him,’ Gina said aloud. She reached for another sheet of thick, grey-and-silver paper and folded it around the box containing the first of Sam’s cashmere sweaters. ‘She
did
love him, however bad it got.’

She was a little comforted until she thought of the poor judgement Cecilia had shown in picking earlier boyfriends.

There had been a parade of them, from her last years at school all through university and her first ten years on her own in London. All of the men Gina had been allowed to meet had shown signs of being wounded in one way or another and all of them had soon overstepped some undisclosed mark, making Cecilia dismiss them before they got too close. Only Sam had lasted more than a year or so.

Was that because his wounds were obvious? The trickiest of his predecessors had been the ones who presented themselves as perfectly normal, functioning human beings, only to end up playing bizarre emotional games neither they nor Cecilia had understood. Sam’s verbal aggression and sulks might have been uncomfortable to live with, but at least they weren’t devious.

What did I do to her to make her need damaged men? Gina wondered. Was it only bringing her up without a father? Did I lay her open to this kind of horror from the beginning simply because I was too wet to lay claim to Andrew Suvarov?

The questions in her mind became more personal, more selfish, as she wondered whether it would have been easier to face being in the same house as Andrew over Christmas if he’d known he was Cecilia’s father. And with that question came another: what if she did, at last, tell him and find he hated her for depriving him of the pathetically inadequate thirty-four years of their daughter’s life? And what
had
he been doing in London on the day she died?

Gina speeded up her rate of wrapping and bent her mind to the task of finishing the parcels with ribbon and miniature berried wreaths. There had never been any easy answers in her life and she should have known better than to expect them now.

Thirty-four years ago, she’d been sure the refusal to name her baby’s father had been principled. She’d needed to protect him from knowledge of what had happened, to leave him free to find his utopia in the New World. In spite of all her own need and longing, she’d been determined not to cling or hold him back and make him settle for less than he wanted from life. But he’d never married and from what his sisters had told her he hadn’t found utopia either, or even ordinary contentment.

Was she mad to be putting herself in his way again after so long? Wouldn’t it be better to hole up in the flat for Christmas, not letting anyone know where she was or that she was alone, to watch television, listen to music, and eat stupidly luxurious delicacies packaged for the rich and lonely? Or even join Trish Maguire’s eccentric-sounding household and risk falling into the black pit of suspicion and misery at the sight of her probably murderous son-in-law?

On Christmas Eve Caro was sitting in her glass-walled cubbyhole at the far end of the incident room, feeling as though all the contradictory pressures were closing in on her. It was like being permanently stuck in a rush-hour Tube train with the hot bodies of angry strangers pressed right up against you. When her phone rang and she saw Trish’s name on the screen, she was tempted to leave it unanswered. But she’d never be able to forgive herself if it turned out later that Trish had finally decided to cooperate.

‘Yes?’ she said into the phone, trying to forget how angry she was. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I just wanted to let you know I’m having Sam Foundling to Christmas lunch.’ Trish’s voice was unusually breathy, as though she knew she was behaving badly but couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge it. ‘I didn’t want you finding out from someone else and being angry again. The poor man’s on his own and grieving. I had to do something.’

‘You must do whatever you want,’ Caro said, a whole new outrage latching on to the old. She thought about pointing out the risks Trish was taking, then saw her chief superintendent appearing at the far end of the incident room. ‘I’ve got to go.’

She vaguely heard Trish wishing her a happy Christmas and murmured a reluctant echo before she put down the phone. The chief super was stopping to speak to each officer. He looked like an old-fashioned industrialist tipping his workers at Christmas. Was this common practice in the Major Incident Teams? Surely not. Even such a senior officer couldn’t imagine they’d close down an enquiry as important as this just because the rest of the working world was about to stop for ten days.

Some of the team were taking Christmas off, but there’d been more than enough volunteers prepared to carry on collecting information, collating and then analysing it to see if there could be anything they’d missed. The surveillance boys would continue to watch Sam Foundling too, even though their overtime was going to screw the budget.

The chief superintendent was only two desks away from Caro’s door when he looked up to catch her attention. A big man, he had a jowly face and usually looked as though he needed at least one extra shave a day. Now she saw his expression was much too serious for this visit to be part of any Christmas courtesy. She was relieved.

‘Morning, sir,’ she said, standing up as he closed the door behind him.

‘Caro. Sit down.’ He pulled out the visitor’s chair. She saw coarse dark hairs poking out from under his neat cuffs; others grew right down on to the backs of his hands. ‘How’s it going?’

The tone of voice told her this was no casual friendliness. He couldn’t have come for a report either; she was producing those at regular intervals. This had to be the preamble to a reprimand.

‘I’m sorry we haven’t got a result yet,’ she said.

‘It is a pity. We need one quick. This isn’t a case we can leave with everyone knowing who did it but no evidence to bring the suspect to court. What are your principal lines of enquiry?’

‘The husband’s movements and motives,’ she said, ticking them off on her fingers. ‘The still-unidentified harasser. And the visiting professor from the US, Andrew Suvarov, who’s been confidentially named as the victim’s father.’

‘What about her work? Anything there?’

‘No. For one thing: who’d try to kill a loss adjuster, even if they didn’t get the insurance payout they’d expected? For another: how would disappointed insurance claimants have known she’d be in her husband’s studio? And why would they have done it there? I did check that out with the shrink when I was talking to her, and she said it was psychologically highly unlikely.’

‘So the best prospect is still the husband?’

‘Definitely. Although the father has been identified as the owner of the newly bought mobile phone from which the last text was made to the victim’s BlackBerry, about half an hour before she left the office for the last time.’

‘What’s the significance of the text?’

‘The victim’s mother—’

‘The judge.’

‘Precisely. Mrs Mayford has insisted that Professor Suvarov did not know he was the victim’s father and had never met her, which makes him trying to contact her suspicious.’

‘What are you doing about it?’

‘He’s in the country with his sisters for Christmas, but he will be staying at the Heathrow Hilton on the night of the twenty-sixth, before catching an early flight back to Boston the following morning. I have an appointment to talk to him there at 7 p.m. on the twenty-sixth.’

‘Why you, Caro? You’re in charge; your responsibilities are managerial. It’s members of your team who should be rushing about interviewing people.’

Caro blinked at his tone, then collected her thoughts at speed. ‘In view of the sensitivity of the case, and the unlikeliness of Suvarov having anything to do with it, I thought I’d …’

‘Ah, I see. Kid gloves. Not a bad idea.’

‘That’s right, sir. Mrs Justice Mayford has asked me to be particularly discreet and there’s no reason – no evidence – to override that yet. It’s possible some of the hairs and fibres we’ve found in the studio belong to Suvarov, but we’re still waiting for results from the lab. They’re taking even longer than usual because they’re short of staff in the run-up to sodding Christmas. We can’t get much further till we’ve got the results. And we certainly can’t keep Suvarov from flying home.’

‘Could he be the owner of the gloved smudges on the hammer?’

‘He could. But there’s no way the scientists will ever be able to prove that unless we can get hold of the gloves and match the oil traces we think were left by the leather. And we won’t. Those gloves will have been destroyed long ago.’

‘Pity,’ he said again. She still didn’t know why he was here. There was nothing he’d asked that hadn’t already been included in all her reports. ‘Where are you with the husband?’

‘He’s stopped cooperating, but the original statements he gave us contradict the evidence we’ve got from the CCTV outside the studio building. Those show he left at 11.20 a.m., returned at 11.23 and did not emerge through that door again until he left with the ambulance at 1.10, giving more than enough time to quarrel with the deceased, who was logged on the CCTV as arriving at 11.45.’

‘Any other exits from the building?’

‘There’s a basement back door without CCTV coverage. We have no evidence to show he used it, but he must have if it’s true he went to see the barrister, Trish Maguire, in the Temple. We just don’t know when.’

‘What does Maguire say?’

‘She has confirmed he was there that morning; so has the head clerk at her chambers. But she won’t say what Foundling wanted. And neither of them can give precise times for his arrival or departure, which is why the whole thing looks like an attempt to muddle the evidence and so establish an alibi.’

‘Who else have you identified from the CCTV?’

‘Not everyone. There’s a lot of coming and going. We’ve put names to several of the other tenants of the building, but not all. It’s not a particularly high-grade system, and there are quite a few people whose faces are simply not clear enough on the film, even with the enhancement technology. Some were looking away from the camera; others moving too fast; others had hoods or scarves that make it hard to see their features clearly. It was a cold day.’ Caro tried a smile, but it didn’t arouse an answering one.

The chief superintendent looked like any employer of a new manager, hoping for signs of success but wary of failure.

‘We recognized Sam Foundling,’ Caro went on in a more formal tone of voice, ‘because he wasn’t wearing any kind of hat or scarf and he has a distinctive build and gait. His wife’s pregnancy makes her easy to spot too.’

He took a small leather-backed notepad out of his pocket and reached for one of the pens on her desk to make a note, adding without looking up: ‘Is there anything you need from me?’

‘What happens if I go over budget, sir? I’ve still got Foundling under surveillance, and it’s costing …’

‘That’s less important than you may have been led to believe at the start of this enquiry.’

Caro’s surprise sent her head jerking up. She’d never heard anything like this.

‘Why?’

‘Word has come down from on high that it’s essential to get a result on this one.’ The chief superintendent looked over Caro’s head. His chin was tilted so far up that the usually slack skin of his neck was stretched tight. His continuing refusal to meet her gaze suggested either shame or suppressed fury. Knowing what she did of his record, she thought she’d go for fury any time.

‘She’s a popular woman, the judge,’ he went on, still looking at something way up the wall. ‘It’s been decided that a satisfactory outcome to the enquiry into her daughter’s murder could go some way to mending our rift with the judiciary.’

The formal phraseology and sluggish delivery were enough to tell Caro her analysis of his temper was correct.

‘After the Assistant Commissioner’s unfortunate public reaction to the Lord Chief Justice’s attack on our ability to solve crime, we are thought to need some of the judges back on our side.’ He lowered his chin so for a moment their eyes were on a level again. At last he looked more human. ‘Don’t let me down. It’s not just your career that depends on this one now.’