A Greater Evil

by Natasha Cooper

  Bingo, Trish thought, before turning the page. If the story she had dreamed up to explain everything she’d heard from Sam, Jane Frant and Cecilia herself was accurate, there should be a balancing payment somewhere.

  She found it on the next statement: a payment for precisely twice Guy’s amount had been made to the Primrose Clinic, with a neat tick beside it to show that Cecilia had checked the figures as usual.

  No wonder she made such a good, clear-minded loss adjuster, Trish thought. If she kept her own papers in this kind of order it must have been second nature to ensure she never lost track of anything in her case files.

  Directory Enquiries provided the phone number of a Primrose Clinic near Brunel University and a call there confirmed it had been in existence fourteen years ago and that it existed to provide abortions.

  Which of them wanted the termination? Trish wondered as she clicked off the phone. Did the engagement break down because Guy wanted children and she wasn’t prepared to take on such a responsibility before her own adult life had begun? Or did he decide she’d agreed to marry him only because she was pregnant and demanded she have an abortion to prove she loved him? Or did they fall out over something else and she refused to bring a child into the world, knowing how it felt to be fatherless?

  Trish was never likely to find out. Even if she ever found a legal way to question Guy Bait, she wouldn’t be able to trust his memory or his reasons for saying whatever he chose to tell her.

  She tried to bring back into her mind an accurate picture of the only moment when she’d seen the two of them together, at the failed settlement meeting. Cecilia had looked ill and withdrawn, and she had avoided the risk of touching him by covering her face with her hands. But that was all. And it wasn’t enough.

  At what point in her work on the Arrow case had she become aware that one of the crucial members of the engineering team was her old fiancé, the father of her aborted child?

  And what had the sight of her, pregnant by someone else, done to him?

  The phone rang, a sharp urgent sound in the silence. Trish looked round and saw a combined phone and answering machine on a flouncy table near the window. She waited until she heard Gina’s voice:

  ‘Trish, are you still there? If you are, please pick up. This is Gina Mayford.’

  She pushed the files to one side and stood awkwardly, almost falling as the pins and needles in her right leg made it give way beneath her. Hobbling, hopping, she reached the phone and said her name.

  ‘I’m glad you’re still there. Have you found what you wanted?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I’ve been worried all morning: where’s the baby? Have you got her with you?’

  ‘I left her in my mother’s charge.’

  ‘Trish!’ For the first time in her life, she heard Gina sound angry. ‘How could you! She’s my granddaughter. I told you to telephone me if you needed help. Why didn’t you?’

  ‘You were sitting today,’ Trish said with care. ‘I know you want … I’m sorry. Sam left her in my charge, so when I knew I had to come here, I called on my mother, who’s the most reliable, kindest woman you can imagine. She’s retired, so she has more time than either you or I. Please don’t worry. She’ll take the best possible care of Felicity.’

  ‘What? How d’you know that’s her name? Sam told you, I suppose? That man …’

  ‘Gina …’ Trish gazed up at the ceiling in despair. Who else was she going to piss off in her determination to stick by Sam for as long as she could? ‘Whatever happens in the investigation, even if they charge him, he ought to get bail. I’m not laying any kind of claim to Felicity. God forbid. I’m just babysitting her while her father is …’

  ‘Unavoidably detained,’ Gina said, pulling back with audible effort. ‘You’re right of course, and it’s not fair to be angry with you. May I come and see her at the end of the day?’

  Trish hesitated.

  ‘You invited me to your flat for Christmas.’

  Trish didn’t need the reminder. She was aware of everything they’d tried to do for each other, including the generosity of Gina’s support over the Daily Mercury's malice and the threat to her own reputation. Why was it never an easy choice between good and bad? Why did fighting for Sam entail hurting this woman?

  ‘What time would you like to come? You could meet my mother too. You’ll like her.’

  ‘I’ll be there at five. You’d better give me the address again.’

  I only hope Sam doesn’t arrive while you’re there, Trish thought, as she gave directions to her flat. Or he’ll think I’ve sold out.

  She put down the receiver and took her own mobile from her jacket pocket, pressing in the code for Caro’s number. She’d be questioning Sam now, so Trish didn’t expect to be answered by anything but the voicemail service.

  ‘Trish.’ Caro’s real voice, clipped and cold, almost made her drop the phone. ‘Don’t send me on any more wild-goose chases. I trusted you enough to spend an hour with Guy Bait yesterday morning, and I can assure you, he—’

  ‘Don’t go any further, Caro. I know you’re busy, but there’s something you have to hear. I’m in Cecilia’s house at the moment, with her mother’s permission. Let me tell you what I’ve found.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  Trish’s well-trained mind organized the facts and the inferences she’d drawn without conscious effort. She laid it all out for Caro, who kept quiet until the end.

  ‘That makes her fear of coincidence wholly credible,’ she said at last. ‘But no more than that. This discovery of yours is interesting, but it’s even less of a motive for your man than the possibility that he made a mistake in his work on the London Arrow and killed her because of it. You keep telling me my evidence against Sam Foundling is circumstantial. It’s nothing to this fantasy of yours. I’m busy. I’ve got to go.’

  Caro flipped her phone shut and fought her own anger. At last she felt her heart return to the steady slow beat she needed. Some of the heat left her skin. Maybe Trish’s intervention wasn’t all bad. The abortion story could help her crack Sam Foundling open.

  So far he’d done no more than repeat the information given in his first few interviews. Neither she nor any of her officers had managed to get more from him, and they had limited time left to question him before they’d have to decide whether to charge him or let him go. The story was more fluent now he’d had time to practise it, or been coached, but so far there had been no gaps Caro could use to insert any kind of emotional chisel to lever out the rest.

  His solicitor had had nothing to do as Sam explained over and over again, sounding more tired than angry with each retelling, that on the day his wife died he hadn’t seen her. He’d been working so late the night before that he’d slept at the studio, as he often did. He’d then left to visit Trish Maguire in her chambers some time after eleven o’clock in the morning, only to remember a moment later that the dustbins were due to be emptied during the morning. Not wanting to miss the rubbish collection, he had turned back, collected two black bags for disposal and carried them out of the back of the studio building, unbolting the basement door from the inside in order to do so. He had then taken a taxi to Trish Maguire’s chambers and spent some time with her, perhaps twenty minutes or half an hour, returned to the studio building on foot and entered through the basement door so he could rebolt it from the inside. He had climbed the back stairs, where there were no CCTV cameras, because that was easier than walking through to the front of the building to take the lift.

  He had found his own studio door closed but not double-locked and guessed his wife had come to see him, she being the only other person to have keys. He was worried because this kind of visit was odd in the middle of a working morning and she was within weeks of her due date. He unlocked the door as quickly as he could and heard her moaning from the doorway. He sprinted across to where she was lying, bleeding in front of the sofa, and called an ambulance, using the mobile from his pocket.

 
When Caro had told him they had a witness to his return to the studio at least fifteen minutes earlier than he claimed and only just before sounds of banging, shouting and screams could be heard, he had merely said: ‘They’re lying. If this witness heard screams why the fuck didn’t they intervene and save her?’

  Not even a betraying pronoun to suggest he knows who the witness is, Caro had thought, while she’d said aloud: ‘Because it wasn’t the first time the witness had heard sounds of argument and things being thrown in your studio. On previous occasions it had been you. The witness assumed it was you on this occasion too, having only just seen you letting yourself into the studio.’

  Sam had tightened his right hand as it gripped the left. Beads of sweat had burst out of the skin on his forehead. But his voice had been as tightly controlled as ever.

  ‘Any artist worth anything loses patience with his work and so shouts and throws things. That’s all your precious witness can ever have heard from me.’

  On the brink of losing patience, Caro had decreed they all needed a bathroom break. She had parted from the rest and taken five minutes in her own little office, imagining some barrister with even less conscience than Trish making Sam’s points for him and persuading a witless jury he had no case to answer.

  ‘God, how I hate lawyers!’ she’d said aloud. Then the phone had rung and she’d seen Trish’s name on the little screen.

  There was a water cooler just outside her cubbyhole. She filled a plastic cup with cold water and sipped, listening to the glopping bubbles as the water level readjusted and trying to think herself back into the kind of calm determination that was the only state in which she’d get what she needed from Sam.

  ‘Right, Sam,’ she said as she walked back into the interview room, while Glen Makins told the tape who had entered the room and the time at which the questioning was resumed.

  ‘Tell me about your wife’s abortion.’

  The solicitor’s head snapped up. Clearly this was news to her. Unfortunately it was just as clearly no news to Sam.

  ‘Why? It happened over a decade ago. Long before I knew her.’

  ‘But she told you about it?’

  ‘Of course.’ He looked puzzled and more reachable than at any time so far. Maybe this would do it. ‘She told me everything.’

  ‘Everything?’ A sarcastic edge in Caro’s voice made Frankie Amis, the solicitor, twitch. It didn’t seem to worry Sam. ‘I doubt that.’

  He didn’t respond.

  ‘Did she talk to you about her father, for example?’

  ‘Andrew Suvarov? Of course.’

  ‘You mean to tell me she talked to you about him, even though she never said a word to her mother, even about knowing who he was? Why?’

  ‘Because she didn’t need to protect me.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘That’s because you won’t listen, Chief Inspector.’ His voice throbbed and he looked like a man in the middle of a marital row. Caro smiled and waited. This was looking more hopeful.

  ‘My wife and I … Oh, what’s the use?’ He sighed. ‘Listen: she grew up with the knowledge that her very existence was a threat to her mother’s well-being, so she had to learn to be quiet and tidy and good and hard-working and never to say anything that might add to her mother’s burdens.’

  Caro glanced at Frankie, who had been provided by Mrs Mayford, and wondered whether professional etiquette would stop her passing any of this back. She was impressed to see no change of expression on the solicitor’s face.

  ‘I thought you told me you liked your mother-in-law, Sam.’

  ‘Even though she shares all your suspicion of me, I both like and respect her. That doesn’t mean I want her interfering in my life, but—’

  ‘How can you like her if she put this kind of pressure on the woman you loved?’ Now Caro was genuinely puzzled.

  He laughed at the question, with a cackling sound that made her wince. ‘That’s nothing to what some parents do to their children. Gina’s a good woman and absolutely straight. I’ve never caught her out in a lie. And she never plays emotional games.’

  At least he’s talking, Caro thought, even if it doesn’t make sense. ‘Did you trust your wife?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In spite of her abortion?’

  ‘What the hell’s that got to do with me?’

  Come on, Caro, she told herself: get down to it. She fixed an even smugger little smile on her lips and said casually: ‘Only that she’d been in contact with that baby’s father, who paid half the cost of the termination. That must have made you pretty angry. Jealous too. After all, you didn’t like hearing her talk about your predecessors, did you?’

  Sam tightened in front of her. She could see his bulky chest shrink as though he was pulling all his muscles in, a kind of shutting down that also had the effect of shutting out everyone else in the room.

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said after a long pause. He was no longer looking at her, but picking at a rough patch on the edge of the table. ‘I had no idea she’d been approached by the man and so I was neither angry nor jealous. How could I have been?’

  ‘Guy Bait, wasn’t that his name?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. She didn’t volunteer his name and I never asked.’

  ‘He’s another engineer.’ Maybe Trish’s interfering digging really would be useful. ‘They were at the same university and it seems that work has recently brought them together again. They’d been seeing each other.’

  ‘Is he the one you talked about before? The man who’s been harassing her?’

  Sod it, Caro thought, feeling punished for her smugness. Why did I ever tell him that?

  ‘We don’t know. It seems unlikely.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘A lot less likely, in fact, than that the sounds of banging and shouting your studio neighbours heard so often had nothing to do with your work and everything to do with your anger and jealousy of your wife. When did she tell you she’d been seeing Guy again?’

  He was silent, back to laboriously picking a long splinter of veneer off the edge of the table.

  ‘You had a fight, didn’t you? And it got out of hand.’

  ‘We never had fights.’

  ‘Come on, Sam.’ Caro laughed. ‘Are you really trying to make me believe you never rowed?’

  He looked up. ‘Of course not. All couples argue. We yelled at each other often enough and made each other unhappy – just like you and your partner do – but no more than that.’

  Damn Trish Maguire, Caro thought as her next set of prepared questions flew out of her mind in a surge of fury. Damn her to hell. How could she tell him about Jess and me? How am I supposed to get anywhere with her coaching him in the best way of blocking me?

  Felicity was beginning to feel more at home in the flat, or perhaps it was just that Trish was better at keeping the baby comfortable and at exuding the necessary confidence. She’d given Felicity her last bottle of the day and watched her fall asleep upstairs in the bedroom about half an hour before George’s heavy tread sounded on the iron staircase outside the flat and then his key crunched in the lock.

  ‘Hi,’ Trish called from the sofa, not getting up because he didn’t like her making a fuss of his arrivals and departures when he was stressed.

  There was no answer, so she shifted her bum along the sofa, then craned her neck to look round the great double-sided fireplace to see what he was doing. He was standing beside the front door, head bowed, slowly unwinding the scarf from his neck. Unusually for him, he let it lie where it fell and plodded towards her, unbuttoning his overcoat as he came.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, leaning down briefly to kiss her. His cheek felt cold and rough with the day’s stubble.

  ‘You okay?’ she asked, frowning because it was obvious that he was far from happy. He was pale too, and his normally smiling mouth looked pinched. His thick, dark-brown hair was wilder than ever. This was no time to introduce him to
the sleeping baby. ‘What’s happened?’

  He blew out an angry-sounding breath. ‘Those bastards at work have sent me on a six-month sabbatical.’

  ‘But it’s your firm, George. Henton, Maltravers. And Maltravers went years ago. How can they?’

  ‘Because we’re a partnership.’ He plumped down at the end of her sofa and absent-mindedly rubbed one of her stockinged feet. So vigorous was he, and so repetitive the movement of his hands that it soon began to hurt. She pulled her foot away, smiling to mitigate the rejection. ‘I suppose I could have fought, but it might have broken the firm completely. And they were so revoltingly reasonable.’

  ‘Who were?’

  ‘James Rusham mainly.’ George looked at her and she flinched from the mixture of sympathy and resentment in his face. ‘The man I worked so hard to make the others take seriously enough to accept as senior partner when I stepped down. At least he kept making jokes at the meeting and didn’t join in when the rest had a go at me because of you.’

  ‘What did they say about me?’ she asked, mostly to give him permission to tell her if he wanted to.

  ‘You don’t want to know. It was insulting and inaccurate.’ His lips jammed against each other so hard the blood was driven out and a white line ringed his mouth.

  ‘George …’

  ‘Don’t try, Trish. I’ll only lose it. James did his best to shut the bastards up, then he pointed out that with QPXQ Holdings still threatening to withdraw all their business, it was only politic for me to absent myself from the office until the Leviathan case is over.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Trish said at once, even though it wasn’t her fault QPXQ had bought the company that owned the Arrow. Or that someone – presumably Malcolm Jensen – had stirred them up to make this protest. Should she tell George what her internet searches had suggested about the link between him and Guy Bait, even though she still had no proof? Or wait till she had some and George was calmer?