A Greater Evil

by Natasha Cooper

  All of which meant there was no good reason why he should not be allowed back into the room where his wife had been beaten to death, weird though his longing for it was.

  Caro needed to understand it. All she could think was that he’d hidden something there. Could the SOCOs have missed anything?

  George was soaking in the bath with an old John Buchan novel for comfort, and Trish was moving about her bedroom. She switched on the bedside lamps to provide a kinder light than the harsh, blemish-revealing glare she needed when she was dressing. Twitching the heavy coverlet off the bed, she folded it and flung it in the bottom of the wardrobe, revealing the fine sheets that were as different as possible from the nasty mauve nylon ones she’d had in her first rented flat. The memory of how they’d felt against her skin made her shudder.

  Unlike that damp-smelling hovel, this room was gorgeous, she thought, glowing and gentle in its muted colours. And the height and width of the great bed had just the right kind of generosity.

  She heard a low buzzing sound from the direction of the bathroom, which took a moment to decode: George was attempting to sing ‘The Volga Boatmen’s Song’ in Russian. She was glad he trusted her enough, even today, to reveal his complete tunelessness. Her hand rested on his pillow, sliding over the smooth linen, wondering how much longer he was likely to be.

  Her pleasure in her own good luck splintered suddenly as she thought of Sam, presumably alone in his house, waiting for news of the baby. Gina’s voice echoed in her mind, banishing George’s attempt at a rolling bass, telling her Sam was terrified of being abandoned all over again.

  His wife was dead, he had no parents he knew, and Gina herself couldn’t bear to see him. Trish had tasted enough loneliness in the old days to have some idea of how he must be feeling now. He’d come to her only yesterday because he’d trusted her for so long. She couldn’t ignore him now.

  ‘I’ve just remembered, George,’ she called as she passed the open door of the bathroom, ‘there’s a phone call I’ve got to make.’

  He broke off his warbling to say he’d be out of the bath by the time she’d finished. He sounded more or less himself again. Maybe they’d get through their crisis.

  Gina Mayford had ricked her back climbing up into the loft to retrieve the box of baby clothes she hadn’t looked at since she’d stowed them away when Cecilia grew too big for them. All carefully washed and wrapped in tissue paper, they might be in good enough condition for the baby. If she survived long enough to need clothes.

  It was a practical thing to do, Gina told herself as she tried not to cry, and not a self-indulgent wallow in grief. If she could remember the time Cecilia had had, and celebrate the way she’d used it, there might be something good to be wrested from the horror of her death. And checking over the baby clothes might help her decide what to do about Andrew Suvarov.

  Dust flew up Gina’s nose as she hauled the box towards the lip of the trapdoor and she sneezed, almost falling off the ladder. Eventually she got the box out of the roof-space and bumped it down as she retreated backwards, rung by rung.

  At last her feet were flat on the floor again and she could let the box drop with a thud, expelling another cloud of dust. A thorough rub with a cloth got it clean enough to risk opening the cardboard lid. She washed her hands.

  Inside it was better: a few sprigs of ancient lavender had crumbled into nothing, but a faint scent still hung about the tissue paper. As gently as if she were touching the baby in her incubator, she parted the first leaves of tissue. They had none of the crackle of modern paper, but felt soft and slithery, like old suede gloves.

  The first thing she saw was the cobwebby Shetland lace shawl Andrew’s mother had knitted for Cecilia. One fat tear dripped onto the delicate woollen lace. Without Felicity Suvarov, Gina couldn’t have managed. Felicity had kept the secret of Cecilia’s paternity, and her support had made it all possible.

  Did babies still have shawls? Gina wondered. Probably not. You wouldn’t need a shawl like this if you’d already put your infant into a stretchy all-in-one body suit. Even so, she shook it out, amazed as she’d been in the beginning by the lightness of the four-foot square. She laid it aside on her bed and bent her aching back to pick out the next package.

  A voice in her mind taunted her with the threat that Cecilia’s baby wouldn’t live to wear any of these things. Premature, born by Caesarian while her mother was dying, and subjected to grotesque brutality in the last hour before the mad dash to hospital, what chance did she have?

  ‘Every chance,’ Gina said aloud, determined to silence her own doubts. ‘The doctors promised.’

  Each minute garment she retrieved from its tissue wrappings brought back pictures of Cecilia, and the unmatchable, delectable smells of milk-fed contented baby. It was probably more Johnsons Baby Powder than the child herself, Gina thought, as a guard against sentimentality.

  What would happen to this child if she did survive? If Sam were convicted, there’d be no question: Gina could step in and take over. But if he were declared innocent or never tried for the crime? Would he ever be able to forgive her for suspecting him? Would he be able to let her try to do for him and his daughter what Andrew’s mother had done?

  And would Gina ever be able to forget her fears for the baby? Even if a jury decided Sam hadn’t killed Cecilia, his background made him the least suitable man to have sole charge of a vulnerable child.

  Sam knew the staff in the SCBU wanted him out of their way. They were scared of him, too. But he had the right to be here, sitting at the side of his daughter’s cot, looking at her red, twisted little face under the white knitted cap. It wasn’t as wizened as he’d expected. They’d told him that at only three weeks premature she was more or less the size of many full-term babies.

  She still looked tiny. How could he have been so afraid of this? There was nothing in him that could have damaged a creature so fragile and unthreatening. All that fret and fear for nothing! How could he have been so stupid?

  Restless as before, she rolled her head away from him, waving her fists in the air, tugging at the tubes that led from them to the machines that were monitoring her heart and helping her breathe.

  He’d asked the doctor how big she’d be by the age of three months, and they’d gone together to look at a three-month-old in the next ward. This baby looked stronger, more together, but not much bigger.

  How could anyone have burned a child that size with cigarettes, or hit it? Or packed it in a cardboard box with a thin raggedy blanket, and dumped it out of doors on a February night?

  The new letter from the woman in prison was in his back pocket. Maybe Trish Maguire was right. So what if the woman was his genetic mother? She’d given up her rights when she put him in that box.

  Even if she did it only to protect you? said a voice in his mind.

  The phone hooked to his belt vibrated. He’d forgotten to switch it off. Running to get it out of the way of the machines that were keeping his daughter alive, he found a space by the window outside in the corridor and took the call.

  ‘Sam? This is Trish Maguire. I wanted to say how very sorry I am about Cecilia’s death. That sounds pathetically inadequate, but there aren’t any better words.’

  She paused, so Sam thought he’d better say something and tried a simple ‘thank you.’

  ‘And I wondered if there was anything I could do. Anything practical, I mean, sorting anything out or providing company if you wanted to talk. Anything.’

  Anything? Sam repeated to himself. I wonder.

  Then he remembered what she’d done for him in the past and how she hadn’t flinched from any of the things he’d told her.

  ‘There’s only one thing. The police have said I can have my studio back. They’ve recommended a specialist cleaning firm, but I don’t want any more strangers in there, messing about with my work. So I’m going to do it myself. I could use some help. But it won’t be … easy.’

  ‘No.’ Her voice dragged. He waited for the
excuse. ‘It won’t. But I’ll do what I can. When were you thinking of starting?’

  ‘Tomorrow. I’m at the hospital now. But there aren’t any beds left for parents, so I’ll sleep at the studio and get going as soon as I wake. You don’t have to come that early. I know you’re busy.’

  ‘I’ve some phone calls to make first thing, but I could get to you by about nine, if you give me the address.’

  Sam waited while she wrote it down, then clicked off the phone, wondering whether she would turn up. Scrubbing Cecilia’s blood away from the site of her murder was going to be hard in every way.

  Trish wondered if Sam’s request were a test, designed to probe her loyalty, or whether the true weirdness of it hadn’t even occurred to him. She didn’t see why anyone would want to take on a task like that: gruesome and most desperately inappropriate. And yet maybe if you were an artist the idea of snooping strangers in your private space was unbearable. Perhaps if she helped him with this horrible task, she’d have done enough to show she wasn’t rejecting him as everyone else had done for so long.

  Back in her warm bedroom, now decorated with George’s sleeping figure, she wished she hadn’t yielded to the impulse to phone. But as she slid under the duvet, he opened one eye, then the other, and smiled as he reached for her.

  Chapter Six

  The water in Trish’s bucket was red and she’d barely started to scrub. The stain Sam had directed her to clean was a broadly oval patch on the wooden floor in front of the sofa. He hadn’t said anything about what he’d found when he got back from the meeting in her chambers, so it was left to Trish’s imagination to work it out.

  There were other, smaller splashes about two feet away, with a sharp line along the edge, as though something like a rug had once lain there. Whoever killed Cecilia must have dragged her from the sofa to this place. Had she fought back? Or been so desperate to protect her child that she’d rolled herself around her great belly, offering him only her own back to hit?

  Sam himself was on his knees below a long workbench, patiently dealing with a pile of white marble pieces, cleaning the blood off each one, rinsing and then drying it, before arranging it in a pattern that must make some sense to him. He raised his head, as though alerted by the lack of scrubbing sounds.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ His voice was harsher than usual.

  ‘No. I was pausing to get my back straight again. And I saw what you were doing. Will it mend?’

  ‘Not really. But it was the first of her heads I ever did and the one she liked best, so I need to …’ He looked away.

  No point saying sorry, Trish told herself. Get back to work and shut up unless he wants to talk.

  Trying to ignore the fact that it was Cecilia’s blood she was touching, she rinsed the old-fashioned scrubbing brush in her bucket, shook the water off and leaned forward. There were plenty of women in the capital who paid a fortune to go to keep-fit classes and perform movements very like these, she told herself, swapping the brush for a wet cloth to wipe up the loosened, rehydrated blood. With the stove pumping out heat, she was soon so hot she had to pause again to take off her sweater.

  Then she found a rhythm: push, pull, dip, swipe; push, pull, dip, swipe. The sound of rough bristles against the wood was like the scratching of a pack of dogs. Her back ached. Friction between her wet hands and the wooden top of the brush soon made her skin burn. When one-third of the stain was nearly gone, she broke the rhythm to examine the right palm and saw blisters, white and squishy with fluid, in a row along the side of her hand.

  It took a lot to make her start again, but she did it, forcing herself to lean harder on the brush and manoeuvre it even more vigorously. Her hand slipped over the edge of the brush and one nail dragged along the floor. A splinter pierced the skin under the nail, making her gasp.

  The pain was vicious; small, of course, but bad enough to make her eyes water. She examined her hand again and saw a good quarter of an inch of barbed wood sticking out from under her nail. Closing her eyes, she gripped the end of the splinter and pulled, clamping her lips together to make sure she didn’t make any more noise. A few drops of her blood fell onto the newly scrubbed planks. Biting her lip, Trish shook her hand to get rid of the pain, told herself it was only a splinter and so far from everything Cecilia must have suffered that she should be ashamed to feel it, and picked up the scrubbing brush again.

  Nothing else disturbed the work, except for her periodic trips to empty the horrible bucket and refill it with clean water at the sink in the corner, until there was a loud knock on the door. Trish glanced up to see Sam put down the piece of marble he was polishing. He bounced to his feet with an agility she envied.

  She didn’t want to pry, so she bent forward again, to push the harsh bristles into the stain.

  ‘Trish! What are you doing here?’

  The sound of a familiar voice did make her look up. There was Caro Lyalt, standing beside a much younger man dressed in jeans and a leather jacket.

  ‘Giving Sam a hand with a hellish job,’ Trish said. She brushed some hair off her forehead with the back of a sore, damp hand. ‘What about you, Caro?’

  ‘I’m the SIO on the case. I came because I need to ask Mr Foundling some questions.’

  ‘I thought Mrs Justice Mayford had provided him with a solicitor. Why haven’t you—’

  ‘I didn’t know you two knew each other,’ Sam said in a voice so accusing Trish felt like rushing into apology and explanation. His face was harder than ever and his eyes showed a worrying blankness. ‘I’d never have let you in here, if I’d—’

  ‘Were friends,’ Trish said, trying to sound casual, ‘but I didn’t know Caro was involved in this. The only person I’ve spoken to is a constable, who phoned to ask if it was true you’d come to see me in chambers the day before yesterday.’

  He stared down at her. She’d rarely felt at such a disadvantage, scrubbing brush in hand, kneeling at his feet. They were very close to her face. And very large in thick-soled black boots. She thought of the blood tainting the water in her bucket, staining her fingernails, mixing there with that tiny speck of her own.

  He looked away, releasing her. ‘Well, Chief Inspector, that’s your answer, isn’t it? I’m not answering any more questions without my solicitor. If you want to know anything, we’ll come to the police station. Otherwise, keep out of my face and my space. You can come to the house if you must, but I don’t want any of you in here now you’ve finished collecting the evidence.’

  Trish had to watch Caro to see how she took his refusal. There was nothing in her expression except cool interest, which seemed to be directed towards Trish rather than Sam. It was the younger officer who showed them a face of angry suspicion. After a moment, Caro took a step forward.

  ‘Very well, Mr Foundling, but it seems an unnecessary waste of your money to drag your solicitor to an interview when all I want to know is whether your wife said anything to you about a man who had been harassing her at work.’

  Sam produced a cruel crack of laughter. ‘That’s pathetic. If you really wanted to know, you’d have asked me yesterday when you had me in that interview room for four hours. Why are you here? To see if I’ve been trying to hide something?’

  ‘We’re on our way to a meeting and passed your door. It seemed a good opportunity to ask you about the harassment suggestion we’ve had from one of your wife’s colleagues,’ Caro said, before leaving with her junior at her heels.

  Sam didn’t say anything. As soon as the door had shut behind them, he made sure the latch had caught.

  ‘It often sticks,’ he said, when he saw Trish looking at him. ‘D’you think that question was genuine?’

  ‘I didn’t to start with; now I’m not sure. I can’t imagine someone like Caro lying about information from one of Cecilia’s colleagues. It would be so easy for you to check.’

  ‘Caro! I wish you wouldn’t call her that. I hate the thought of her being a friend of yours.’

  ‘She’s a good
woman, Sam,’ Trish said, bending to her scrubbing again. ‘And intelligent.’

  ‘She thinks I killed Ceel. And, whatever excuse she’s dreamed up, she was round here to see whether I was buggering about with evidence they’d missed. So she’s a liar too.’

  He was staring at Trish as though wondering whether she too suspected him. Again she found she couldn’t break the link between them while he wanted to keep it. She tried to keep her expression open and friendly. Then her phone rang, freeing her.

  The call was from Steve, her clerk, telling her Leviathan Insurance had decided they didn’t care about the conflict of interest that had so worried George’s partners. Trish thanked him with unusual fervour.

  ‘It’s what I’m here for. The loss adjusters want to talk to you today. Can you be in chambers in two hours’ time? There’ll be Cecilia Mayford’s replacement and some assistants. And Giles Somers, of course,’ Steve said, referring to the solicitor who had originally briefed Trish on the case.

  She had to work hard to avoid sounding too grateful. When she’d got Steve off the phone, she went back to scrubbing with renewed energy to make up for her relief at the prospect of escape. By the time she had to leave, she’d reduced more than three-quarters of the four-foot oval to a pale patch that showed nothing but the grain of the wood. Sam would have to colour it to match the rest if he weren’t to have a constant reminder of what had happened here. But would he need reminding? How could you ever forget?

  Back outside, in the crackling cold, Trish was glad she was close enough to her flat to shower and change before the meeting. But there was an uneasy sensation in her mind too.

  Her own enjoyment of coincidence now seemed childish. It was uncomfortable enough to know she’d played such a big part in Sam’s mind for seventeen years, during which she hadn’t thought of him once. Worse was his belief that they’d been communicating in some extra-sensory way all along. She wished she could get rid of the fear that she’d been responsible for planting a kind of parasite within a profoundly damaged man, distorting all his normal relationships.