A Greater Evil (20 page)

There was nothing in any of them to make Cecilia afraid, even if she hadn’t been the sensible, intelligent woman Trish had known. As a loss adjuster, she’d had nothing to do with the choice of the Arrow’s site or its construction. She’d probably never given the building a thought until it had become part of her caseload. And as an admirer of common sense, she’d have had no truck with ghost stories. Like Trish, she’d probably believed the only ghosts were either minute, localized climatic effects or memories, generated within the minds of the living by their own emotional needs.

There was nothing in any of the letters to suggest someone capable of wreaking the kind of damage Caro’s photographs had shown. In Trish’s experience effusions like these provided the perfect creative outlet for their authors’ bizarre impulses. They rarely needed any other satisfaction.

It crossed her mind that Dennis Flack might have sent them himself, as a way of diverting attention from whatever pressure he’d been putting on Cecilia. Could he have the imagination necessary to write of the stench of buboes?

Sam got Maria-Teresa’s letter agreeing to his visit on New Year’s Eve. He’d been so sure the post would take even longer than usual at this time of year that he was shocked. There should have been more time to get used to the idea of confronting her. He thought of phoning Trish and asking her to take over and make the visit for him, but that would have been cowardly, and whatever else he was, he wasn’t a coward. Never had been. The whimpering boy might be, but Sam had him safely back behind strong mental bars where he belonged.

When the phone rang, he picked it up automatically and said his name.

‘This is Dowting’s Hospital. My name’s Anita Matthews. I’m calling to let you know the doctor has said your baby’s now well enough to go home. Have you got everything ready for her?’

Sam pulled his mind back from the woman in prison and considered everything he’d been told to buy. Most of it was already in the house, efficiently laid in by Cecilia over the past few months.

‘I’ve got it all. But I can’t come straight away. There’s something I have to do first.’

‘When will you be here? We need to make arrangements for the health visitor to come by and make sure you’ve got everything you both need and that you can manage her.’

‘I’ll pick her up this afternoon. Say about four?’

‘We’ll expect you.’

It’s just as well to see the woman in prison before the baby comes home, Sam told himself. That way we can both go forward and forget the rest.

He doused the stove, switched off the lights and let himself out of the studio, taking one last look before closing the door on his past. He still wasn’t sure how he would incorporate his daughter’s needs into his own routine, but he’d find a way. Gina kept trying to make him hire a nanny, offering to pay the wages herself, but he wanted to see what he could do first. A nanny, particularly one hired and funded by his mother-in-law, would be a spy.

It wasn’t until he was sitting in his van at the traffic lights controlling the junction at Camden Town that he realized he ought to give Gina the news. He waited until he saw a parking space, then pulled over and took out his mobile. He wasn’t going to take any risks with even the smallest of laws that might give Chief Inspector Lyalt an excuse to haul him into her interview room again.

‘That’s wonderful, Sam,’ Gina said. Her voice sounded odd, strained. ‘I know you’ve been sleeping in the studio, so would you like me to look in at the house, turn the heating on and things like that? I could buy some food for you too.’

‘It’s okay,’ he said, failing to sound grateful. He didn’t want to have to explain his plans. ‘I can manage.’

‘It would be easy, Sam. I’ve got to go to Sainsbury’s anyway this morning. Why don’t I just get in some basics for you both? I’d like to.’

‘Fine, then. Whatever you want.’ Forcing himself to sound kinder, he added: ‘I’ll talk to you when she’s settled so we can sort things out. I’ve got to go now.’

He clicked off the phone without waiting for more, aware that he was as uncomfortable with their new relationship as she was. He wished he’d remembered she had keys to the house. She’d always had them and it had never occurred to him to ask Cecilia to take them back after the wedding. In a way it had been reassuring to know she could get in if something happened to the house while they were away. Now, with their relationship so strained, it was different.

If she was going to drop in later this morning, he’d better go to the house now to collect the carrycot, nappies and all the rest. Otherwise Gina would try to bring it to the studio herself and start interfering there too. He was only about eight minutes’ drive away.

In and out of the house in little more than half an hour, he stowed everything the baby could possibly need in the back of the van and retraced his earlier route. Following signs to Holloway and The North, he expected the journey to last for ages, but in fact he was there, facing the low red-brick building, long before he was ready for it.

Once through the prison gates, he had to go through a whole series of searches and demands for identity. His feelings were all over the place. One minute he was spooked, the next relieved. At first he couldn’t understand why the searches made him feel a bit safer. Maybe it was because they showed he was an outsider here.

Waiting at the plastic-topped table, he lost the weird sense of comfort. If the police had their way, he’d soon be in a place like this for real. He looked round, trying to get used to the idea, but all he could feel was a shrieking ‘no’ in his mind.

A woman appeared in the further doorway. Thin and scraggy, like the stray cats he and Cecilia had seen in the Greek Islands last year, she hesitated, but she looked straight at him, undistracted by the other groups of remand prisoners and their visitors.

It’s because you’re the only one on your own, Sam told himself.

‘Sam?’ she said, standing behind the orange chair on her side of the table. ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’

Photographs, was his next thought as he nodded to her. She’s seen magazine photographs. Even if she is my mother, there’s nothing in how I look now that she could have seen when she dumped me on the hospital steps.

‘Thank you for coming,’ she said in a husky foreign voice. ‘I know how hard it is. And I’m sorry about your wife. How’s the baby doing?’

‘She’s fine now. I—’ He only just stopped himself giving her the news that was none of her business. ‘I didn’t come to talk about her. Or myself. I came because it didn’t seem fair to say what I have to say in a letter.’

‘You’re not going to have the test,’ she said, slumping in defeat. ‘You don’t even want to know if I’m your mother.’

Fight back, he wanted to shout at her. Don’t just take it. You’ll be a victim for ever if you don’t hit back.

‘What you wrote to me may well be true,’ he went on, answering the protests she should have made, ‘but I can’t deal with it, okay?’

She shook her head, gazing down at the scars on the table.

‘I’ve got enough to do to keep going and make a life for the baby now. I can’t go back. Whatever the truth is, it’s in the past, and I don’t want to go there. There’s too much … I can’t go back.’

She didn’t raise her head or answer.

‘D’you understand?’

A faint shake of her head was the only response, but still she didn’t protest.

‘Maybe I should have done this on paper,’ he said, putting both hands on the edge of the table so that he could push his chair back and stand up. ‘I’d better go. I hope things go okay for you at your trial.’

She did look up at that. Her deep-set eyes were very dark. There were no tears in them. And no hope.

‘Nothing won’t go well now,’ she said.

Get away now, Sam told himself. The longer you stay the worse it’ll be. You can’t do anything for her, and she can only drag you down. Leave. Save yourself and leave. He walked away, towards his route out into the free world, but he had to look back.

She too had got to her feet. Moving as though every step was painful, she stuffed her hands into the central pockets of her fleece and bent her shoulders round and down. Her head hung down, as though her neck was too spindly to support it. If she was his mother, she’d been only sixteen when her first brutal bloke made her pregnant. Sam tried to remember how he’d felt at sixteen, thirteen years ago. He wasn’t ready to be a parent now. Then he’d barely been able to look after himself. How had it been for her?

Four steps took her across the path of another woman, stronger-looking and much younger, who took a swing at her, catching her chin with a vicious upper cut.

He heard himself shout as she went down. Officers started to move towards her. In his mind it took minutes, but it can have been only seconds. Even so it gave the thug enough time to kick her hard in the head, then in the belly. She lay there, the woman who might have given birth to him, taking it. She didn’t move or try to protect herself, as though she felt she deserved the punishment. Some of the children around them screamed and the adults shouted protests.

At last two officers grabbed the other woman, while one knelt beside Maria-Teresa, and a fourth talked urgently into her radio.

Fighting an impulse to rush forward, to agree to anything she wanted, Sam waited until he saw the officers help her to her feet. Once she was standing again, she turned to look over her shoulder and stared at him through a slick of blood, which dripped untouched down the front of her pale-grey fleece.

It was as if she was saying, ‘See. See what’s been done to me all my life. Can’t you understand? Can’t you forgive what
I
did? Can’t you believe me? Can’t you save me?’

He looked back at her, not sure which of his feelings he could trust now. Her bloody head dropped even further towards her chest and she turned away from him. All Sam could do was stand and watch until she was removed from his sight. Then he let himself stumble out into the cold.

A man sitting in the front seat of an old dark-blue Fiesta illegally parked in the street just outside the gates glanced away as Sam went past looking as though evidence of everything he’d ever done wrong was plastered over his face. For a while Sam couldn’t remember how to open the van door and just leaned against it, breathing huge gulps of air, trying to subdue the acid surges in his gut and deaden all his thoughts.

The man in the Fiesta kept his head averted until Sam had walked out of sight. Then he activated the phone pinned to the dashboard and heard the dialling tone. He pushed in a one-button code and was through to Chief Inspector Lyalt’s direct line.

‘It’s me again, guv. Foundling was inside for nearly half an hour. On his way now. D’you want me to follow the van or go in and find out what he was up to? He looked shaken.’

‘We’d better know who he was visiting, what she’s in for. Get all that and anything else interesting and report back.’

‘Okay, guv.’

He switched the phone off and pulled himself out of the car. It was too small for a man of his size. Even so he’d have preferred to stick in it than penetrate Holloway. Most officers loathed the place for the misery you could smell the minute you were through the door. Still, it had to be done and the quicker the better. This trip of Foundling’s was the first surprising thing any of the watchers had seen him do.

Trish decided to call it a day. She’d used her personal password to log on to the extranet that had been set up in the earliest stages of the Arrow’s design to allow architects, engineers, quantity surveyors and all the other groups involved to exchange and keep track of all the drawings and information they needed. Everyone involved had a different password, and there were innumerable different levels of access. Hers allowed her only as far as the final drawings and specifications, but that was all she’d needed. She’d wanted to see whether Jenny’s printout of the stress test had been corrupted in some way. But it was precisely like the one on the extranet. She still couldn’t understand why no one had spotted the discrepancy before, and she’d been staring at the unworkable results for hours.

She’d recalculated all the figures, first on the computer; then by hand. Neither method produced the right answer. Jenny’s inability to balance them was justified and not part of some subconscious fight-back against Dennis’s bullying. Trish wasn’t yet sure what effect – if any – the discrepancy had on the building’s cracks. But it was the first oddity, so she’d have to pursue it until she was satisfied there were no more questions to ask.

She couldn’t leave Jenny hanging on for reassurance any longer, so she made a quick phone call to explain the little she’d found and what she still needed to establish. Jenny sounded breathlessly grateful and rang off.

Putting down the phone and looking back at the figures on her computer screen, Trish felt as though her eyes were blurry with strain and her brain fogged with too much irrelevant information. The advice she’d given Jenny applied just as much to herself. Knock off now and come back with clearer eyes and a fresher mind. Which was lucky because she was supposed to be dressed up and in Fulham in less than an hour’s time.

Neither she nor George had ever liked elaborate New Year’s Eve parties, but this year they’d agreed to go out to dinner with his oldest friends, who lived within walking distance of his house. It wasn’t going to be formal, but Trish would have to change into something tidier than her sagging grey trousers and comfortable old sweater.

The phone rang. Presumably George wanting to know where she was.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I know it’s late, but—’

‘This is Caro, Trish.’

‘Ah. Great. I’d love to talk, but now isn’t a good time. I’m late.’

‘I won’t keep you long.’ Caro’s voice had never been so formal. ‘Provided you tell me now why you went to Holloway to visit Maria-Teresa Jackson on the twentieth of December.’

‘I thought remand prisoners were allowed unlimited and unsupervised visits,’ Trish said, while her mind churned through the only information her private and professional ethics would allow her to give away.

‘Don’t play games. Sam Foundling was there today, so I’m assuming you went on his business, which suggests it could be why he came to see you on the day his wife died. That being so, I need more from you.’