Trial by Fire
Page 23
Ànd her father?'
Àh. Counsel also says no to a charge of harbouring an offender. Besides, we don't know if he actually did so. He simply knew darling child had the gold, and he chose to ignore the implications. He saw the jewellery in her pocket the day after the murder, he told Bailey, knew she had it. It strikes me that both of them, father and daughter, preferred Mama to be dead. He would have seen the murder as a massive economy drive, but she committed it.'
And then you and I and all of us fell down while the obvious flowed over us. We were outwitted by a child who delivered the unkindest cut of all. Redwood had dissociated blame and himself from Amanda Scott, but like her, he ignored the second tragedy in deference to the prospects of criticism, recrimination, blame, extrication, and getting a conviction. William had robbed him of that chance. I am going mad, Helen thought. Is it only Bailey and I who feel William to be the only loss, the only innocent, killed by the wilful blindess of us all.
You could not blame such a clumsy hand as his own. You don't cure by convicting his assassin. Without our intervention he might have lived, under the shade of what dominance and how poor the quality of life does not matter; it is still life lost.
But if her own capacity for guilt was endless, Redwood's was nonexistent. Like the law. She should have known better by now, but because of the guilt, could not criticize either.
She had no right.
`We'll try to avoid using you as a witness.'
`Thank you. I don't see how you can avoid it, but no doubt you'll try. You know I'm transferring back to London?'
`Yes.' He had the grace not to pretend regrets, looked at her with respect, even a tinge of affection. 'I'm sorry. When do you go?'
`Tomorrow if I could. More likely a week or two.'
Ì should stick to road traffic cases if I were you, when you go back,' he said with heavy sympathy. 'Less traumatic.'
`No, ' said Helen, surprised into indignation. 'I've learned plenty.' In the saying of it, she recognized her first positive thought in more than three weeks.
Oh, Bailey mine, what do I do with you now? The cloudburst that had blackened the sky and drenched the ground lifted before brilliant sunlight shimmering on the Tarmacadam of the carpark. The force of the rain had cleansed her car of weeks of sticky dust. Clean enough for a funeral. Go home, Featherstones. Go back to the city where you might at least find like kind. They were bound to attend the last rites, surely they must, although Bernadette had lately taken to the same liquid remedies as her husband and John Blundell, all of them in search of oblivion. Why live? Why open your eyes at all? Because then you can see, and like the force of this sudden sunlight on her own tired eyes, it hurt.
As she started the car, she thought that of all the omnipresent nightmares which had disturbed her sleep in the days and weeks preceding this, there were none as compelling and selfish as the one featuring Bailey running towards her in pursuit of a criminal, pushing her aside in the process, sublimely indifferent to her presence, so seized was he with the urgency of the moment, acting as if she had never existed.
Do not lose me now, Bailey. We have eyes, both of us, a duty to live and do better, cannot afford our superior overview of the world: look at how blind we are. We should not have come here; this place does not suit us. Living under one roof may not suit us; we are both too secretive.
I was so angry with you, so full of blame, keeping my mouth shut until I realized that was unfair. And then I look around and see that, whatever your failings, you are so much finer than the rest. And if I do not completely understand your methods, the workings of your soul, if I am sometimes alienated by your tunnel vision, the hard realism of your policeman's psyche, which sometimes investigates what it needs and nothing more, unable to afford curiosity, I still understand you more completely than anyone else, however incomplete the knowledge, and there is a sort of privilege in that.
As you in your way almost accept me, even admire me. Careless of me sometimes, refusing to share, ignorant of me often enough to wound and enrage me, but still knowing me better than any other living soul. I am less of a stranger with you than with anyone else. I do not want to live without that. You are waiting for me to speak. I have marshalled my packing cases, prepared my own home for my return, but I shall not leave you now.
What was wrong with the indecisions before? Why did we come here? Why were we subject to the universal belief that life is always capable of that kind of improvement? You have injected too many poisons into my conscience, Superintendent Bailey. You make me feel the business of the law is futile, while I know it is not. But it has to be done by someone well equipped, not someone who is tempted to give up.
Do you know something? I do not feel as if I love you at the moment, but I know I do.
There are times when I have to say it to feel it.
She pushed open the door to number fifteen Invaders Court, looked at the automated kitchen, imagined with relief her life packed into boxes. On the draining board, glittering like a warning, lay one of William's bracelets. There was a lump of cheese and half a loaf, Bailey's contribution to an evening meal, hopeful rather than skilled.
Helen put down her files and her shopping, heard his footsteps upstairs.
She would save the next William. Bailey would be more careful, grow eyes in the back of his head. Listen sometimes. One of these days she would grow into an interfering old bitch.
`Come on, Bailey,' she said out loud. 'We can do better than this.'
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE