A Greater Evil (3 page)

Her phone rang and she lifted the receiver to hear Steve, the head clerk, saying Sam Foundling was in the waiting room and wanted a private word with her.

‘Send him in,’ she said at once, wondering what could have happened to Cecilia.

She was on her feet by the time he came in, a short stocky man with a brooding, powerful face marked by heavy black brows and restless eyes of an extraordinarily pale blue. He was carrying a big brown envelope under one arm.

‘Is she okay?’

‘Who?’ he said, frowning.

‘Cecilia. I’ve been worrying about her ever since—’

‘She’s fine. Full of beans.’

‘Great.’ Trish breathed more easily as she pulled the visitor’s chair nearer her desk. ‘Then have a seat and tell me what I can do for you.’

She couldn’t understand why he was staring at her with a mixture of expectation and something that looked like truculent misery.

‘Don’t you recognize me?’

‘Of course.’ She smiled. ‘Even if I hadn’t come to the private view at Guildhall last year, I’d know you from all those photographs beside the reviews of your exhibitions. But I’m amazed you clocked me. There must have been hundreds of your admirers there.’

‘I didn’t know you were there,’ he said, even more puzzled. ‘I thought you’d know … Maybe I should have said: I changed my name as soon as I could, but I’m Sam, Samuel Johnson.’

Trish’s mental retrieval system, powering through her brain at speed, turned up only one Samuel Johnson, creator of the dictionary, hero of Boswell’s masterpiece.

‘You saved my life,’ he said, his voice heavy with disbelief. ‘You were the first adult I’d ever trusted, and you saved my life. Seventeen years ago. Have you forgotten?’

As Trish stared at him, memories of the child at the centre of the first case she’d handled on her own oozed back. Twelve years old but the size of someone much younger, with a sullenness she’d recognized as defensive even then, he’d had burns and bruises all over him.

‘It never occurred to me it was you,’ she said, treading carefully because she knew she trod on fragile stuff. ‘One of the artists I most admire, whose career I’ve followed ever since I first saw the
Head of a Horse
at your degree show. I had no idea.’

He lowered his head, hiding his expression, giving her time to get her rushing thoughts under control.

‘I don’t know why I was sure you’d remember,’ he muttered. ‘But I’ve always felt there was this connection between us. When things got really bad, I sort of conjured you up in my mind and talked to you. Sometimes it felt as if you were answering. That’s what kept me going.’

Trish couldn’t have interrupted even if she’d wanted to. But soon she’d have to make him understand how a case that fills your whole life while it’s happening has to be unloaded at the end to free up the mental space you need for the next.

‘You never touched me, or even came too close like everyone else did,’ he said, obviously well back in the past. ‘You kept your distance, and you told me: “You can trust me, Samuel. I am not like them. I will fight for you. And I will never fight you. I
will
make you safe.” And you did. It’s all come from that moment. Everything I’ve got.’

Did I say anything like that? she asked herself. If I did, I was wrong. There was no way I could have guaranteed your safety. Even with the scars and bruises, your testimony and your social worker’s reports, the case could easily have gone the other way. You were known as an appalling troublemaker; violent too.

Even when the judge’s words had set him free from the foster parents he’d claimed had tormented him for years, Trish hadn’t been able to feel triumph; only an indescribable weakness that had made her want to lie on the floor of the court until it passed.

‘What happened?’ she asked now, thinking of the huge obstacles the boy must have cleared to make himself what he was. ‘How did you become a sculptor?’

Memories began to speed up even more, chasing each other through her mind, and she was almost back in the Royal Courts of Justice, feeling the sickness in the pit of her stomach. Even then she’d known only part of it came from horror at what had been done to him. Most was triggered by her own fear. Was she up to the job? Had she chosen the wrong career? What would happen to this boy if she failed him? What would happen to her? She’d stood up in front of a judge who’d glared at her throughout her stammering, over-worked, over-practised arguments, while she fumbled with her papers, dropped her pen, and never dared look at the child in case the sight of him removed the last rags of her competence.

‘It was the art teacher at the next school I went to,’ he said, pulling her back into the present. There was a distant look in his eye, as though his mind was taken up with working out how she could have failed him so.

The depth of his disillusion was a measure of the trust he’d once had in her, and that was worrying. To have had so much effect on someone else’s life was a huge responsibility.

‘I was angry and I hated everyone – except you – and I messed around in every class, winding the teachers up, bullying, breaking things, bunking off, stealing. One day, Mr Dixon made me wait after the others had gone. I thought it was for another punishment and I was all ready to take it, then get my own back in other ways. Like I always did. But he just gave me a lump of clay and said he had work to do in the staffroom and he’d come back in half an hour. Then he left me.’

Sam was looking less shocked, and his colour was better. Maybe he’d be able to forgive her for the lapse that had clearly rocked him to his shaky foundations.

‘I don’t really remember anything except the moment when the clay began to do what I wanted. And the way he came back when he said he would, and stood away from me like you’d done, and said: “I thought so. You could be very good.” ’

‘That must have been an amazing moment,’ Trish said, watching his face lose its truculence as the story developed.

‘He showed me I was worth listening to. I trusted him. He was the second person. If it hadn’t been for you I wouldn’t have dared. You …’

Trish waited again. Almost the first thing she’d learned from her child clients in the old days had been that if she rushed into speech, to comfort them or ask questions, she’d risk closing them down for good. But he didn’t add anything. She hesitated to turn this emotionally charged encounter into an ordinary business meeting, but someone had to move things on.

‘How can I help you now?’ she said when the silence had lasted too long.

He licked his lips and shrugged. His shoulders were enormous, and his hands very strong. They were dirty, she thought, until she realized the marks were bruises.

After a moment he reached for the envelope he’d brought and took out a stained, creased sheet of lined paper, which he unfolded and laid flat on the desk in front of Trish.

The handwriting was clumsy, ill-educated. She looked at the address: HM Prison, Holloway.

Sam drew in a breath so deep she could actually see his chest expand, even through the thick, dark-blue wool of his Guernsey sweater.

‘She says she’s my mother. The real one, the one who left me on the steps of the London Hospital in a box twenty-nine years ago.’

Chapter Three

Trish was glad her pupil was on holiday so that she could have her room to herself as she ran through everything she and Sam had said during their half-hour together. Even now he’d gone, the air still felt dank with his unhappiness. She could understand exactly why he hated the prospect of having anything to do with the woman in prison. The possibility that she might be his genetic mother was almost worse than the idea that she was an imposter, after him for the money she assumed he had.

She’d set out to find him, she had written in the first letter, after she’d read about him in a magazine one of her cell-mates had. It had been an old one, from nearly two years earlier, just after he won the Rodin Prize and became known to connoisseurs around the world. The interviewer had asked him then about the derivation of his unusual surname.

Trish pushed the letter to one side to reread the cutting he’d brought her:

I’ve never known when I was born or who I am. My real life started when I was found on the steps of the Royal London Hospital on 13 February 1976. So that’s always been my birthday, even though the staff thought I was about three months old. I’d been left in a cardboard box with only a thin, ragged blanket between me and the snow. And there were bruises and cigarette burns all over my body. Who does that to a child?

There was nothing to identify me, so the staff picked a name. One of them was a literary type and she called me after Dr Johnson. So it was as Samuel Johnson that I was given for fostering. I don’t want to talk about that. I was rescued twelve years later. The day I left that couple’s so-called care, I decided to have a name of my own. I’ve been Sam Foundling ever since.

Trish had once known all about the baby’s discovery on the hospital steps, but the case’s details were hard to retrieve. She hated the thought that her clearest impressions were still of her own feelings. Did it matter? Maybe not, given that she
had
saved Sam from his tormentors. But she couldn’t forget the look on his face earlier this morning as he’d understood she had no idea who he was, even when he’d told her his old name. The shame that was never far away made her cheeks burn.

It was bad enough that she’d given up working with damaged, terrified, battered children for the infinitely better paid, infinitely less traumatic, cases of the commercial court. But that she could make one of the few truly successful survivors of such an experience look as though she herself had hit him was awful.

She picked up the first of the letters he’d brought her and read again the pitifully ill-spelled declaration.

Deere Sam,

I dint leeve you without nothing. I put my weding ring in that boxe to. He hit me agen when he see my bear finger. 3 ribs and my gaw got broke. If you have’nt gote it, the nurses must of stowl it, or your foster parence. I cride till I was sick when I red what they done. First yore farther an then them. It broke my hart to putt you their, but I done it becos I din’ kno what else too do. Of corse your’ angry. I don expec you to fourgive me. But I wanto mete you. I no you won’t beleeve Im’ youre muther and not mad, so Ill’ take a DNA test to show you. I don neede it to no. You look jus like my farther. Yor reel names’ Giovanni Daniele. It was his to.

Yore muther, Maria-Teresa Jackson

It was easy to imagine how Sam must have felt as he read the letter for the first time, and just as easy to understand why he didn’t want to have anything to do with the woman who had written it.

‘Do I have to?’ he’d asked Trish.

She had seen his hands ball into fists so tight the knuckles looked as if they might burst through the skin, which had made the bruises look darker than ever. He’d turned his head away, as though he couldn’t bear her to see his face.

‘I spent so much of my childhood longing for a mother that it sounds mad not to want to find out now; but I’ve made myself into something that works. I survived. I’m married to Ceel. My work’s doing well. Do I have to risk it all for this … this person?’

‘No,’ Trish had said at once and she still believed it. No parent who abandoned a child had any right to demand anything from that child in adulthood. ‘Not even if she is your genetic parent. Why is she in prison?’

‘God knows! I haven’t done anything about the letters, so all I know is there on your desk.’

Now Trish examined her uncomfortably lively conscience, aware her views on the subject of deserting parents had been coloured by her own father’s disappearance from her life when she was seven. But she’d had a warm, intelligent, supportive mother, so her loss was as nothing in comparison to Sam Foundling’s.

Trish’s father was a charming, feckless, undomesticated Irishman, who had also tried to re-establish contact after seeing in a newspaper article that his only child had gone on to public success. For years she’d resisted his approaches. She’d got over that, though, and learned to enjoy his company, even acknowledging the parts of her character she’d had from him. Her growing affection had been stunted only by the discovery that Paddy Maguire had also fathered David and abandoned him and his mother to poverty and fear in one of the worst inner-city housing estates.

Had she given Sam the wrong advice? No, she decided, still staring at the letters. However pathetic this woman was, however cleverly she’d phrased her illiterate pleas for his understanding, she had given up her rights on that February morning twenty-nine years ago. And if she were not the woman who’d put him there in the cardboard box, with or without a wedding ring, then she was no more than a manipulative chancer in search of a free ride on Sam’s earnings.

And yet, Trish could also understand why he hadn’t torn up the letters or sent them back unopened. Facing fatherhood himself for the first time, he must have wanted to know more about his own parents and so about himself. But it had been hard to see what she could do for him.

‘I’ll pack these up again for you,’ she’d said and watched his mouth tighten and his eyelids droop. Diagnosing hurt and yet more disillusion, she’d felt a powerful urge to offer amends, to do something that might justify his scary trust in her. ‘Would you like me to see if I can find out a bit more about her? That might make it easier to decide what to do.’

‘Yeah. Maybe. And will you keep the letters for me? I haven’t told Ceel anything about them. She’s got enough on her plate with the baby, so I don’t want her finding them when she’s tidying my stuff.’

‘Does she do that?’ Trish had grimaced at the thought of George or David rifling her papers. ‘Even in your studio?’

‘Sure. She has the run of it, whether I’m there or not.’ Sam had looked oddly at Trish then and said with a quietness that was all the more convincing for its intensity, ‘I trust her too. With everything. But I don’t want her to see these. Not till I’ve decided what to do about this woman and her shitty DNA test.’

Thinking of the way he’d looked then, Trish shivered. The anger in his expression didn’t surprise her, nor the bunched fists, but even the memory of them made her wish she hadn’t volunteered to ask questions on his behalf. Already there were layers of potentially lethal emotional problems in store for him and Cecilia. More information about his parentage might make life even harder for them both. But she’d made the offer so she had to do something about it.