A Greater Evil

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘Are you all right?’ Bettina sounded frightened.

  Trish remembered her pupil was due to conduct her first solo case today and needed all the confidence-building available, so she smiled and nodded. ‘How’s the preparation going?’

  ‘Okay, I think,’ Bettina said. ‘I was practising in front of the mirror this morning. I think I’ve got it all straight. I’m due at the Mags by two.’

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ Trish said and watched her pupil’s face relax a little. ‘And the euphoria you’ll feel afterwards is worth all this angst, I promise.’

  Trish waited until Bettina had gone, leaving at least twice as much time as necessary to get to the magistrates’ court, before embarking on her own search for more personal information about Guy Bait. If there were something – anything – in his past that might correspond with Sam’s traumas, it could help to persuade Caro to disregard the psychologists’ predictions about the abused turning abuser. All the resources of the internet were available at the touch of a few keys.

  She already knew Guy had been at Brunel University and she had the details of his public school in no time. It was going to be harder to find something in his past or character to counterbalance Sam’s violent and violated childhood.

  Guy had never married, she reminded herself. Maybe there was something there that might help. He’d once been engaged to Cecilia, but the relationship hadn’t outlasted her abortion. Was there something fundamental in his character that made all his relationships fail?

  The internet soon provided the names of his parents and grandparents, as well as the address of a house in Devon, where his parents had lived when he was born. They hadn’t sold it until four years ago. A few more strokes of the keyboard brought up a map with a red circle around the house.

  Set in a small village, it couldn’t be hard to find. And if they’d lived there so long, they must have left other inhabitants with useful memories of them and their only son. Trish phoned home to hear George tell her he and David had plans to go swimming first thing after school, then to the cinema, unless she needed them at home.

  ‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some work to do, so I probably won’t be back till late tonight anyway. Okay?’

  ‘Sure. I can stick around and sleep in Southwark, so take your time. Hope the work goes well. Bye.’

  Trish printed off the map and directions, turned off the computer, told Steve she wouldn’t be back till tomorrow, and legged it out of chambers. Fetching the car would take about twenty minutes, she thought, and the drive perhaps three and a half or even four hours. It could be a wasted trip, but it had to be worth making. And she was bound to find out more than she’d get with any cold-calling on the phone.

  Traffic in central London wasn’t too bad and she was soon free and batting down the M4 towards Bristol, with a Bob Dylan CD playing. She’d switch to the M5 at Bristol, then turn off just after the county boundary between Somerset and Devon.

  By the time she reached her target, the daylight had gone and the dusk after it. She’d forgotten how dark the country could be. Only the beam of her headlights and a few friendly gleams through the curtains of the row of white cob cottages gave her any help. There was a tiny church in the village, with a small graveyard beside it, an old-fashioned red phone box, and that was it. No post office, no shop, no pub.

  Feeling a fool for her suburban assumption that every village had something of the infrastructure she’d known in the small Buckinghamshire town of her childhood, she wondered how anyone could bear to live in a place so isolated. She also wondered how the inhabitants would take to a stranger knocking on their doors after dark. She’d planned to take her seat in the local pub and fall into conversation. As it was, she’d have done better to stick with the internet and save herself the 300-mile round trip.

  A knock on the nearside window made her jump. She flicked on the inside light and saw an elderly woman peering in at her. Pressing the button that lowered the window, Trish leaned across the empty passenger seat to smile and heard the sound of more than one dog, worrying at something in the grass verge.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked the woman in commanding tones more familiar from the bench than anywhere else. Trish smiled.

  ‘I’m absolutely fine, thank you. Just lost. I’ve been going round and round looking for a village called Oakleigh.’

  ‘You’ve reached it. Who d’you want?’

  ‘No one in particular. I’m doing some research into a family who were here for generations, and I assumed there’d be a way of looking up the parish records. But the church is locked, and there doesn’t seem to be a vicarage or anything.’

  ‘We’ve been part of a group parish for ages and the vicar’s based elsewhere. Which family are you after? The Chards? They’re the only truly long-standing lot hereabouts.’

  ‘Actually no. It’s a family called Bait. The latest ones living here were Alan and Miriam.’

  The woman stiffened and her voice was much sharper as she said: ‘I don’t know who sent you here, but, whoever they are, they’ve given you rotten information.’

  Trish’s back and arms felt as though she was being racked, stretched as she was across the car and looking up into the woman’s face. So she switched off the light and got out. One of the black Labradors sniffed interestedly at her shoes, while the other barked.

  ‘Shut up, Dougal,’ said the woman, who had a strong-featured face under a puff of white hair as soft and round as a dandelion seedhead. Trish wasn’t surprised to see the animal shrink apologetically against the brown cord trousers his mistress was wearing under her torn green Barbour.

  ‘My information is that they were here for at least thirty years.’

  ‘No time at all in this part of the country.’

  ‘Were you yourself here then? I mean, did you know them?’

  ‘I did. But I doubt if I could be much help, even if I wanted to be. I’ve never had much time for snoopers.’

  ‘I suppose it must seem as though I’m snooping,’ Trish said with a careful smile, ‘but my motives are pure. May I tell you why I’m here?’

  She got no direct encouragement, but launched into a more-or-less true account of her determination to help the police avoid a miscarriage of justice.

  ‘Perhaps you could tell me which the Baits’ house was,’ she added when she saw a slight softening in the other woman’s expression.

  ‘There. The cottage at the end; the one with the ugly conservatory wrapped round it. They’d never get planning permission these days. Hideous, isn’t it?’

  Trish wondered whether the woman’s increasingly full responses suggested she might have some problems with the village’s isolation and be in need of a friendly chat herself.

  ‘I’d planned to find someone who could help me and then offer them a drink,’ she said with a less tentative smile, ‘but there doesn’t seem to be anywhere round here that could provide such a thing. Might I drive you – and the dogs, of course – somewhere that could?’

  ‘Better come to my cottage,’ said the woman. ‘It’s right up here. Leave the car. It’ll be quite safe. No one drives this way after dark – which is why I was sure you were distressed and came down with the boys to see what we could do.’

  ‘The boys?’

  She gently kicked her Labrador with a muddy brogue. ‘The boys. Come along. I’ll give you a whisky. One won’t do you any harm.’

  Reluctant to leave the car unlit at the edge of such a small road, Trish took a surreptitious swipe at the rear reflectors as she passed, to clear off any mud that might stop them gleaming at an oncoming vehicle.

  ‘By the way,’ said her hostess over her shoulder, ‘I’m Margaret Woods.’

  ‘And I’m Trish Maguire. This is very kind of you.’

  ‘Still a few of us who stick to the old country ways. Here we are. Give your feet a good scraping or you’ll tramp mud into the house.’

  There was a kind of grating beside the door. Trish obediently rubbed
her shoes first one way, then the other, and stepped across the threshold. She’d expected to see dusty antiques, Persian rugs and faded chintz, and gaped as she took in the sleek glass-and-steel shelves and the ice-white leather blocks of sofa and chairs.

  A rich laugh rumbled all round her. ‘I know. Astonishing, isn’t it? When my husband died, I decided I’d spent long enough stroking family furniture, polishing silver, and darning his mother’s rugs. The one and only good thing to come out of being left on your own is being able to have everything as you want it at last. Here.’

  She handed Trish a plain heavy tumbler with half an inch of whisky in it.

  ‘Do sit down. The leather’s more robust than it looks.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Trish laughed too. ‘You’re a most surprising woman to find at the end of a trip I was beginning to think had been a stupid mistake.’

  ‘What is it you want to know? Here, boys. Come along.’ The dogs rubbed themselves against her brown trousers and put up their faces to be caressed.

  ‘Did you like the Baits?’ Trish asked.

  ‘He was all right, Alan. She was mad, poor thing.’

  ‘Mad, how?’

  ‘Towards the end they started calling it Bipolar Affective Something-or-other.’

  ‘Ah. Yes. Tricky for the neighbours in a place as small as this.’

  ‘Worse for the family. Whenever there was any nonsense talked about the boy, I reminded the tittle-tattlers that plenty of us had wanted to brain her over the years. I’m glad it’s me who found you. You might have got some pre-tty nas-ty non-sense out of some of the others,’ she said, giving the words unusual emphasis by dividing them in the middle.

  ‘It doesn’t sound as though my journey was wasted,’ Trish said, sitting up like a pointer. ‘What happened?’

  ‘He attacked her one day, the boy. He was eleven or twelve, I suppose, and she was on the way down. Always at her worst then. When she was in the depths of despair, poor thing, she was really rather likeable. But halfway down, she was a devil. She said things then that could make a grown man cry. What they did to her son, I hate to think.’

  ‘What happened?’

  There was a long pause. Margaret Woods busied herself with an excessively thorough examination of her dogs’ ears. Trish knew better than to try to break through her loyalty until she was ready.

  ‘No one ever knew for certain. Poor old Alan came back from work, parked his car, and found the boy white as a sheet and vomiting, and Miriam lying on the kitchen floor with a great dent in her head and blood and sugar everywhere. Brown sugar, of the kind that goes hard in the cupboard. Luckily the wound wasn’t serious. They got the doctor out and he put in a couple of stitches. They gave him some story about her tidying the cupboards and pulling the sugar down on her own head. Of course it looked to everyone who knew them as though the boy—’

  ‘Guy?’

  ‘That’s it. Guy. It looked as though he’d lost his temper and started to belabour her head with the nearest thing to hand. Unfortunately for everyone, it happened to be a pound of sugar gone as hard as a rock.’

  ‘Were the police involved?’

  ‘No. Alan took the view – he explained it all to me later – that she’d done enough damage to the boy already. He admitted it, you see. There was no question of any kind of lunacy on his part; he’d been driven to it. They sent him to a very good boarding school for troubled children. Up in the north somewhere; Yorkshire, I think. Must have cost them all they had, but it worked. And after a few years – three or four – he moved on to a normal school, and there was no more trouble.’

  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?

  Chapter Twenty One

  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 cer
tainty 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.