A Greater Evil (21 page)
‘Caro, we’re back with the same point. Until Sam himself gives me permission to tell you why I went there, I can’t. It’s true I went on his behalf, but Sam’s interest in Maria-Teresa Jackson is irrelevant to his wife’s death. You must accept that.’ She paused, then added with unusual bitterness, ‘Just as I had to accept those gruesome photographs you chose to send me. I told you I didn’t need to see them.’
‘They were to make you take this seriously.’
‘Oh, I take it seriously, Caro. Believe me.’
‘Has he spoken to you since he got back this afternoon?’
‘No.’
‘So you don’t know that Maria-Teresa Jackson was attacked while he was there?’
Trish felt her heart jolt, as though someone had thumped her chest. She kept quiet, knowing Caro would get to the point soon enough.
‘She was attacked by another inmate, as she’s been before, because she’s thought to have killed her two-year-old child last year. She was kicked in the head and trunk. One rib is cracked and she has a black eye. Why is Sam Foundling interested in her?’
‘Caro, you’ll have to ask him. There’s nothing discreditable about it. But it’s private.’
‘This case has already shown me one example of how cruel well-intentioned secrecy can be,’ Caro said slowly. ‘Talk to me, Trish. I need your help.’
Trish had never found it easy to resist that particular plea, but Sam’s needs were more urgent than Caro’s.
‘Ask Sam. There’s no reason for him not to tell you now. But it has to come from him. I’ve got to go, Caro. I do want to talk, not to the SIO but to my friend. Will you be at home over the weekend?’
‘I doubt it.’ The angry edge was back in Caro’s voice. ‘There’s too much to do. Goodbye.’
As soon as the phone was back in its cradle, Trish swore with the kind of violence that would have shocked her in anyone else.
A picture slid into her mind of Cecilia, still working after eleven at night just before she was killed: Cecilia, whose files were always in perfect order, checked and rechecked. What if she
had
seen that the figures didn’t work and wanted to know more?
Reopening her laptop, Trish typed a message for Giles Somers, the solicitor who had briefed her on the case and was in charge of garnering all the files and any other evidence she might need.
Did Cecilia email you the night before she died, asking for copies of any original documents or computer files relating to the Arrow’s construction or components?
Another possibility struck her as she watched the email disappear from her screen, and she reopened the file containing the final specifications for the Arrow. The cables listed there conformed precisely to the ones tested. Frustrated, she searched for the letters that had been sent out to all the contractors who had been invited to tender for different parts of the building and double-checked the documents attached to each of them. All specified the same cables.
She heard echoes of Cecilia’s voice in her mind, saying: ‘I know there’s a reason; I just wish it had been me to find it.’
Maybe you did, she thought as she caught sight of the reference at the top of the tender documents: VF59687/F&FGB/JMcS.
VF stood for Verity Farnell, the architects’ practice, and the number was the file reference for the whole project. F&F were Forbes & Franks International, the consulting engineers. And GB had to be Guy Bait, the partner who had attended the abortive settlement meeting on his firm’s behalf.
Trish should already have been on her way to Fulham, but with curiosity pricking her on, she had to dig deeper. In the library were all the relevant professional directories, as well as
Who’s Who
, and
Debrett’s People of Today
.
It was the work of only a few minutes to establish that Guy Bait had been at Brunel University at precisely the same time as Cecilia Mayford. Was
this
the coincidence that had worried her so? Had she too been wrestling with a professional conflict of interest?
A clock somewhere in the Temple boomed out seven thudding strokes. Trish crammed the books back into their shelves and ran back to her room to close down her computer, lock her desk and beg the fates to send a free taxi to the Embankment.
Without David to look after, Trish moved into George’s house in Fulham for the whole of the New Year weekend. The friends who’d given them dinner shared their dislike of making a fuss over something as arbitrary as a change of date, so they’d been encouraged to leave well before midnight, even though Trish had arrived three-quarters of an hour late.
Now she’d had a shower and was tucked up in George’s antique bateau bed while he bathed. The central heating had gone off an hour earlier and the air in the room was freezing. It smelled faintly of the rosemary he’d learned to keep in the linen cupboard. ‘More masculine than lavender,’ he’d once explained, ‘and just as good at keeping mustiness at bay.’
She sniffed appreciatively and pulled the duvet closer. Filled with Siberian goose down, it was like a warm cloud billowing around her. She wriggled down the bed until it covered everything up to her nose, and thought about a city in which some people were free to care about precisely which species of bird provided the feathers in their duvets, while others had so little they slept on newspaper and cardboard in the street.
George emerged from the bathroom, untying the cord around his frayed dark-blue wool dressing gown, which he’d had for thirty years.
We’re not extravagant in everything, she thought and felt a bit better.
‘You look very serious,’ he said, as he dropped the dressing gown on the end of the bed and inserted himself in beside her. ‘Ouf, it’s cold. Come here.’
Her body had warmed up enough to feel the shock of his cold legs and feet. It took some time before they were both comfortably the same temperature. Big Ben’s gong-like chimes echoed from a neighbour’s radio and there were cheers from out in the street, then breaking glass and a lot of raucous laughter.
‘Hmmm,’ Trish said against George’s shoulder. ‘Who’d have thought that Slummy Southwark would be so much quieter and better behaved than Fancy Fulham?’
‘You don’t know what they’re doing in Southwark tonight, so stop throwing aspersions on my streets. And concentrate.’ He trailed his now-warm fingers down the length of her spine.
That first evening set the pattern. They idled about in dressing gowns until lunchtime, filling the days with food and drink, and sex and Scrabble. It was a quite different game between two adults, without David to be placated or educated. The spats they had about whether a word was acceptable or not added just enough spice to stop them breaking their resolve to avoid talking about their professional conflict and what George’s partners might decide at the forthcoming meeting. Trish couldn’t keep it right out of her mind and she was pretty sure it still took up quite a lot of George’s, but they never mentioned it.
Even so, by Sunday evening Trish felt as though someone had combed out most of the tangles in her spirit, and George had lost the tightness in his jaw that had begun to worry her. He smiled more often and could hardly keep his hands off her. She couldn’t remember this ease of touching between them, even in the early days of quite irresistible lust.
On Monday they decided they needed a little bracing before the re-entry to work next day and set off in Trish’s car for Richmond Park. There was so little traffic they were there in less than quarter of an hour, and it was easy to find space in the first car park they tried. Pulling on gum boots and Barbours, winding scarves around their necks, they were behaving, said George, like any traditional couple from the country. All it needed to complete the picture was a dog.
They set off towards the ponds and Trish listened in admiration to George’s ease in naming all the species of waterfowl skittering along the surface of the water or zooming across the low white-and-grey sky. That was probably the kind of knowledge you picked up without even noticing when you were brought up deep in the country, part of a family who’d lived in the same place for generations.
A noisy group with a clutch of children trying out new bicycles and roller blades soon sent them away, to tramp around the Isabella plantation. It was duller now in its winter barrenness than it would be when the red, pink and orange azaleas were in flower and looking like thickened sunlight pouring along the banks of the curling stream. Even so, it was pretty and empty of every other human being, which was what Trish and George wanted. They stopped in the shadow of a big beech to watch a thrush systematically smashing a snail on a flat stone until she could get at the meat within the shell.
George turned and backed Trish against the smooth trunk of the tree and kissed her cold bright face.
‘If anyone had told me when I was young that the love of my life would be a skinny, black-haired barrister with a mind like a razor and an independence so impenetrable she’d never let me look after her in even the littlest ways, I’d have …’ He paused.
‘What would you have done?’ Trish was trying not to laugh at the least romantic, but most heartfelt, compliment she’d ever had.
‘I’d have sent him to a shrink.’
She did laugh then and asked what kind of woman he’d expected to love.
‘Oh, blonde, you know. And little, and a bit round. Slim but a bit round. And blue eyes. Grander than me, coming into money one day from a grandfather or a godfather or something. And no ambition beyond beating her mother at her own game.’
‘So what went wrong?’ she asked, not sure if he was serious. ‘With the life you led, you must have met dozens of women like that.’
George leaned back, keeping his arms locked around her waist. ‘I suppose I did. Luckily – for them as well as me – my subconscious must have known that sweet passivity wasn’t my thing.’
‘Sweet passivity sounds like a plant,’ she said, laughing again as she looked over his shoulder at the woodland undergrowth all around them. ‘Low-growing, evergreen ground cover with tiny little scented white flowers in June.’
‘Positively inviting trampling. Give me soaring spikes any day. What about you? What were your girlish dreams made of?’
‘I’m not a romantic like you,’ she said. ‘All I wanted was to prove to my bossy stepfather that I could make it at the Bar in spite of everything he thought about my intellectual and social shortcomings.’
‘No dreams of love
at all?
’
‘A few, I suppose.’ She had to smile at the memories he was stirring up. ‘But they were all wound up with the rest. My fantasy bloke was definitely a star of the Bar: much, much cleverer than me, but dazzled by my amazing insights and staggeringly brilliant advocacy. I’m not sure I ever really got past the approval bit into any actual love.’
George tightened his arms, kissed her again, then let her go. ‘I’m well and truly dazzled, so I qualify there, if nowhere else.’
‘You qualify,’ she said. ‘In every way that matters.’
They walked on, with Trish thinking about the generosity of a man bruised and worried about his career who could still reveal himself so clearly. She let her shoulder touch his as they strode across the scrubby remnants of bracken towards the car park and hoped she would be able to contain her rage at what his young partner was trying to do to him at work when she came face to face with him at the Twelfth Night party.
Chambers was much fuller after the bank holiday, but the atmosphere hadn’t yet tightened into the mixture of aggression and cynical humour that would set in once the courts started sitting again. All Trish had had in answer to her email to Giles Somers had been an automatic response to say that he would be out of the office until 10 January. Hoping one of his juniors might have read his emails and decided to help in advance of his return, Trish checked her email for the tenth time at the end of Thursday afternoon, just before leaving to dress for her two important parties. Still nothing.
Back in the flat, she set about her preparations with as much care as she took when robing for court. Dressing well was part of the job. And she had the perfect clothes to do it in, including an apparently plain dark-red Jean Muir jacket, which moved in ways she’d never known clothes do. She put it over black silk trousers and camisole, knowing it would show off the triple-row choker of baroque pearls George had given her for Christmas. She was reasonably satisfied as she stood in front of the long mirror in her bedroom.
Never beautiful, she thought she looked better now than she’d done in her twenties. Part of it was that she could afford more expensive clothes, and the dark-red collarless jacket warmed her pale skin and dark hair; and part was simply that she was more confident and met the rest of the world as an equal, instead of an angry outsider. Tonight she looked as different as possible from the mad harridan of the
Daily Mercury
's photographs, or the violence-obsessed neurotic of the editorial.
A quick spritz of a new fruity Jo Malone scent round her neck and on her wrists and she was ready. She collected her heavy overcoat, made sure she had enough money and left the flat to find a taxi.
‘You look fabulous, Trish.’ James Rusham, the new senior partner of George’s firm, was standing with his back to a lusciously decorated Christmas tree in the biggest meeting room at Henton, Maltravers. He bent to kiss her cheek and his boyishly shaggy fair hair tickled her skin. ‘I’ve never understood why George should have had the luck to find a woman like you.’
‘Perhaps you don’t appreciate him as you should,’ Trish said with what she hoped was a flirtatious smile. She’d love to have told him precisely what she thought of his weakness in the face of Malcolm Jensen’s plotting, but that would have been counter-productive. She glanced around the crowded noisy room, recognizing some of the clients and most of the older solicitors. ‘How are you liking being senior partner and in charge of this lot, James?’
He reached towards a passing waiter to grab a glass of champagne for her.
‘To tell you the truth, Trish, I’m no longer surprised George decided to jack it in. I don’t mind the strategic responsibility or the ambassadorial stuff, or even the extra financial headaches. What I can’t bear is the
moaning
.’