A Greater Evil (36 page)
Trish had been hating Guy Bait for days. Now, with this possibly crucial part of his history laid out for her, she couldn’t help seeing another side. It no longer surprised her that a professional engineer might have been frightened of admitting he’d overlooked a serious mistake. Any child growing up with a parent whose illness led her to endless switching between being a needy dependant and a tyrant shouting at him for real and imagined failings could find it almost impossible to face up to what he’d done.
But would it have made him a killer too? Trish asked herself.
It didn’t seem likely. Thousands of children grew up with manic-depressive mothers and hardly any turned violent. But she did wonder whether Guy might be found to have a damaged MAOA gene on the X chromosome.
‘You look bothered,’ said Margaret Woods, ‘and you haven’t drunk your whisky. What were you expecting to hear when you came?’
Trish shook her head, took a small sip of burning spirit. ‘I was going to ask whether you’d met any of Guy’s girlfriends, but it’s not relevant now. There is one thing; can you remember what Guy did in his spare time? What were his hobbies?’
‘He wasn’t an out-of-doors type. Read a lot. And once he got his computer he was more or less glued to that. Became pretty well expert. They used to say in the village that he could write a program for anything he wanted the bally machine to do.’
Trish tried to hide her satisfaction. None of this was evidence, but it did provide helpful background to how he’d known enough to bribe the geek at the ASP. If he had.
‘What’s happened to his parents?’
‘Miriam died nearly five years ago now, and Alan struggled on in the cottage on his own, getting frailer and frailer, until one day we began to notice that we hadn’t seen him for a few days. And Chard, he’s the local farmer, broke in and we found the poor old chap had had a massive stroke.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Mercy, really. He can’t have known anything about it. We should all be so lucky.’
‘Maybe. You’ve been very kind and I ought to get going now.’
‘Far to go?’
‘London,’ she said before she thought.
‘Long way to come to hear a story about misery and a bag of bloody sugar.’
‘Worth it, though.’
Had
he followed Cecilia, Trish wondered, after she refused to listen to him, pushed his way into the studio and tried again to persuade her to help him with his cover-up? Tired, worried and angry, she’d have refused, perhaps adding something cutting in an unconscious echo of his mother’s ferocious criticisms. Could that have made him grab the nearest weapon, only to find it wasn’t a bag of sugar but a hammer?
Or had he followed her and been trying to reason with her, perhaps grabbing her by the arms, or breaking down and weeping in her lap as she lay on the sofa, and been disturbed by Sam?
Already angry with the woman in prison, how would Sam have reacted then? Was it impossible to believe that he’d forced Guy to leave and then set about Cecilia’s head with the hammer himself? But if so, why wouldn’t Guy have said anything when Caro interviewed him?
Halfway back down the motorway, her eyes burning with the strain of concentrating on the lights ahead and in her mirror, Trish found the answer to her own question. If Guy had been disturbed by Sam while he was wrapped around Cecilia, pleading with her, he’d never tell Caro or anyone else because he’d have to explain why he’d been there. Which would uncover the mistake he’d been so desperate to conceal.
If he could somehow be confronted with evidence to prove his involvement in altering codes in the extranet, would he then give a statement about what had really happened that day in Sam’s studio?
The incident room would have closed now and Caro’s role would be restricted to answering questions from the Crown Prosecution Service when they got round to their case preparation. She could already be involved in at least one other murder enquiry.
Trish had to make her call first thing this morning, before she was once more professionally involved in the Arrow case – and before the CPS became so entrenched in their determination to prosecute Sam that no amount of new evidence from Caro or anyone else would move them.
Not sure where Caro would be physically, Trish used her mobile number again.
‘I’m busy,’ Caro said, without waiting for any greeting. ‘Please don’t bang on about your certainty that Sam Foundling is innocent. I don’t need to hear it again.’
‘I know.’ Trish made her voice gentle to avoid strengthening Caro’s resistance. ‘I need to show you something. Can we meet?’
‘I’m very busy.’
‘Of course you are. And I know you’re angry with me, but unless we’re going to chuck all these years of friendship down the drain, we’re going to have to meet some time. Let it be now. Please? I won’t take up much time.’
There was a sigh. ‘Oh, all right. D’you want to come to me, to the flat? Or shall I come to you?’
‘George and David will be in Southwark. Let me come to you. What time?’
‘Six. I
could
be home by six today.’
‘Great. I’ll see you then.’
As soon as Caro had rung off, Trish phoned Frankie again.
‘Thanks for your message,’ Frankie said, sounding friendlier. ‘Don’t worry about Jake Kensal. I haven’t told him anything about your ideas.’
‘That’s probably wise. Look, I’m sorry to bother you again, but I wanted to ask whether you’ve still got the CCTV tapes from Somerset House.’
‘I have.’
‘Could I borrow them?’
‘Of course not. They’re evidence.’
‘You said they were a duplicate set, copies.’
‘That’s true. Even so, I can’t hand them out to you.’
‘Then may I come and have another look in your office? Last time I was searching the wrong bit of tape, the wrong time.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Great. Now? I haven’t much time.’
Trish was soon back in the graceful building in Lincoln’s Inn, sitting in a windowless room in the basement, watching the tapes on a dusty television with an integral video player.
She found the part where Cecilia was walking towards the camera with her father, then rewound, stopping every few seconds until she saw a short stocky man. She hit the pause button. Peering through the horizontal lines on the screen, trying to match his features with those in her photographs of Guy Bait, she knew she’d got the wrong man. She pressed the rewind button again.
Nearly thirty minutes later, she had two almost certain sightings of Guy and noted the time, which was shown in white figures at the bottom right of the screen. The first was nearly twenty minutes before Cecilia arrived at Somerset House; the second only two minutes after she left.
Trish thought of skipping out of the building with the tape in her bag, but decided it wasn’t worth the risk of pissing off Frankie as well as Caro, so she took the tape back to the solicitor’s office and hurried back to chambers to organize her material as carefully as though she was about to go into court.
*
Caro opened the door of the flat she shared with Jess, looking anything but welcoming. She was still dressed in one of the dark suits she habitually wore to work, and her thick fair hair was tightly suppressed with matt wax so that it added to the severity she’d once have shed before they met.
‘Hi,’ Trish said as breezily as she could. ‘Thanks for this.’
‘Do you want a drink?’
There had never been a less enthusiastic invitation, Trish thought as she said, ‘I’d rather show you what I’ve brought first.’
‘Suit yourself.’ Caro produced a constricted smile, as though trying to make up for her brusqueness. ‘I’m not sure I want to see it, whatever it is. But you’re so damn stubborn I know you’ll make me look, one way or another.’
Sensing a small thaw, Trish laughed. ‘Come on, old thing. I’m on your side, you know.’ She led the way to the grey sofa, opening her bag as she went.
There was a pile of Jess’s magazines on the coffee table, as well as a row of cuboid glass vases stuffed with red and purple tulips cut off just under the flowers. They looked glorious, but they were in the way. Trish carefully slid them backwards, then laid out her photographs in their place.
‘Look, Caro,’ she said. ‘Here’s Sam Foundling …’
‘I told you I didn’t want to hear this.’
‘I know. But you have to look. If you can’t see what I mean, I’ll take myself and my ideas away, and I won’t bother you again. But you have to look. You’re too fair-minded to refuse that much.’
‘Flattery …’
‘
Please
, Caro. Don’t play games. You sent me photographs of Cecilia’s wounds to remind me why you feel as you do. I looked at your pix; you ought to look at mine. Here’s Sam Foundling in the position in which your witness must have seen him. Okay?’
‘Yes.’
‘And here’s a photograph I took of Guy Bait’s back view earlier in the day yesterday.’
There was a long pause. At last Caro looked up. Suspicion fought doubt in her suddenly expressive face.
‘Aren’t you taking a risk here, Trish? This is what Sam’s defence will produce at his trial. Handing it to me on a plate like this is …’
‘Going to make you tell the CPS to withdraw the charge, I hope,’ she said, determined to put everything else on the plate too. ‘This isn’t the only thing. If you take another look at the CCTV tapes from Somerset House, you’ll see that a man who looks extraordinarily like Guy arrived there fifteen minutes before Cecilia and left only two minutes after her.’
‘If his back view looks so like Foundling’s,’ Caro said with all the old chill, ‘what makes you think the man on the film couldn’t be Foundling?’
‘Because the front views aren’t so alike and because Sam was with me. I know I haven’t got specific times for his arrival at chambers or his departure, but he couldn’t have been at Somerset House at 11.30 and then killed Cecilia,
and
been with me in the Temple for as long as he was that day. Not physically possible.’
She laid another print of the photograph of Guy Bait and Malcolm Jensen on the table, pushing the rest back.
‘I know you found Guy Bait convincing, but this encounter is evidence that he’s not straight.’
Before Caro could dismiss her, Trish explained the whole saga she’d already used to convince James Rusham. Caro didn’t give in so easily, but eventually she ran out of reasons to protest.
Trish then described her trip to Devon and what she’d learned of Guy’s childhood and tendency to violence.
‘I wish I could use it all, along with my knowledge of Cecilia, to persuade Guy to talk,’ Trish said, ‘maybe even to confess he begged her to hide the evidence of his mistake over the Arrow’s outer cables when they met in Somerset House, using their old closeness to put emotional pressure on her, but I can’t. I’m too deeply involved in the insurance case. So
you’ve
got to do it.’
Caro didn’t speak.
‘Look, Caro, it all fits together. You’d heard rumours of a stalker, of whom there’s been no evidence. I no longer think it was Dennis; Guy’s a much more likely candidate. I suspect Cecilia thought he was trying to resuscitate their old relationship, when all he wanted was to make sure she hadn’t discovered his mistake or planned to expose it. When she did discover it—’
‘How would he know she had?’ Caro said with a snap like a trap.
‘Because of the back door I think he opened in her computer,’ Trish said gently. ‘We know the attack came from a computer at his firm, although we haven’t got any evidence to prove it was he who operated it. He’s just much the likeliest person to have done it. And it seems he has the expertise.’
‘You’d better carry on then.’ All the expressiveness had left Caro’s face, along with every scrap of the warmth and affection Trish had once known.
‘I think he also picked up the texts she and Professor Suvarov exchanged via her BlackBerry when they arranged to meet in Somerset House that last day. Witnesses have said that Guy hung about waiting until Suvarov had gone, then talked to Cecilia. I think he told her he knew she knew what he’d done, and pleaded with her to help him hide it and save his professional life.’
‘This is all getting very complicated. And it’s all speculation in any case.’
‘Bear with it a little longer. Cecilia would have refused at once. I know she would. But it’s possible the encounter so troubled her that she rushed – probably by taxi – to her husband’s studio, phoning him on the way and leaving the message you found.’ Trish paused, then added: ‘You’ve never told me what she said.’
‘I don’t suppose he has either, which is hardly surprising given how bad it makes him look. It went something like this: “Sam, Sam! Why didn’t you come home last night? I need to talk to you. Please pick up the phone if you’re there. Please. I need to see you. I’m on my way. Please don’t be angry with me.” ’ Caro’s voice was detached, emotionless. ‘She sounded frightened, Trish.’
‘So she might, having just had the encounter with Guy Bait. I don’t know whether he threatened her, or whether she was just scared of his fury …’
‘If she was as frightened as you’re suggesting, why would she have let Guy Bait into the studio, supposing he really did follow her?’ Caro was still not looking friendly, but at least she was taking the propositions seriously enough to argue now.
‘This is only guesswork,’ Trish said, ‘but it could have been because there’s no spyhole in the door, or chain, so she wouldn’t have known it was him until she opened the door. Or—’
‘I told you she was attacked while she was lying on the sofa,’ Caro reminded her. ‘She wouldn’t have gone back to lie on it if she’d found a furious enemy on the doorstep.’
‘Or,’ Trish went on as she’d planned all along, ‘because the latch hadn’t clicked properly. I saw that happen myself the day you found me scrubbing the floor.’
‘What then? What’s the next scene in this mental movie of yours?’
‘He tries again,’ Trish said, wondering why Caro looked so blank, almost as though half her mind was somewhere else, ‘hoping to persuade her. When she refuses to help, he grabs one of the sculpting hammers and attacks her. Or maybe he doesn’t even try to persuade her. Maybe he pushes his way in, through the unlatched door. She’s lying on the sofa, assuming the incomer is Sam. By the time she’s realized it isn’t and has managed to push herself up – I saw how long that took even with a table to lean on – he’s there, holding one of Sam’s hammers in his gloved hand.’