A Clear Conscience

by Frances Fyfield

  ‘I did, too. We got a result, didn’t we? Committed for trial. And if you’ve been too fucking busy to worry until we have to go and see some fucking barrister about it, why the hell are you on my back now?’

  A child came up to them, dirty faced and full of cunning, trailing a skateboard. He stood with his powerful ten-year-old body full of challenge.

  ‘See that car?’ Bailey said, pressing two pound coins into a grubby palm. The child nodded. ‘Go and look after it, will you? Got a man here worried about his wheels.’ As the boy rushed away, Ryan felt the old, familiar humiliation spreading through him like his mother’s hot flushes.

  ‘I done what I could. We got a body, like I said. All right, they were all of them in that pub over there.’ He gestured again. ‘Near the leisure centre. Well-run pub. Damien Flood was in there with his mates. He won too much money at pool. The losing team came back for a fight. Damien got separated from his mates and then got stabbed. All right, I didn’t get the three lads on that team, but I did get one. And you know I didn’t force him to talk; I done every rule in the book to stop him talking, but he sang like a budgie. Lot of budgies, in these flats. They aren’t supposed to keep pets.’

  Bailey sat back on the grass. His silence was never a relief, even when he lay, squinting at the sun with his face red from the heat.

  ‘What you got was a skinny little boy. You didn’t look any further. You made no enquiries in the pub itself.’

  ‘So what?’ said Ryan, trying to hide his own irritation and all the guilt Bailey’s nonchalance induced. It was all compounded by the man’s ability to rise to his feet without a helping hand, like a dog bounding up to play. There was a sound of breaking glass. Ryan supposed it came from the prominent rubbish bins which flanked the main entrance, and marked the only attempt at architectural grandeur. Bailey heard it only as a normal sound.

  ‘I hope that little sod isn’t doing in the windows of your car.’

  ‘Not yet. Why can’t you get stuffed, sir?’

  ‘Because I like to needle you, that’s why. And you didn’t try with this one, did you?’ Ryan could have sworn that one of them spat, but Bailey, when next he looked, was as impervious as ever, kicking the dry ground with the toe of his shoe.

  ‘Only I’ve seen the photos,’ Bailey was saying as they walked back to Ryan’s car. ‘Seen better, seen worse, but Damien Flood wasn’t killed by any nineteen-year-old kid who lost at pool. Or his friends. Come on, Ryan, come on.’

  ‘All I could find,’ Ryan said.

  Bailey did not sigh any more than he ever looked at his watch or opened his mouth without purpose.

  ‘Shame,’ was all he said as they pulled away from the cliff face of Bevan House. ‘Bloody shame.’ Ryan knew at least the half of what he meant.

  His footsteps padded down the corridor, tripped on the curled edges of carpet tile and moved on with less assurance. He opened the door, sidled his way inside, closed it behind him and breathed deeply. Now he had her. Half-past lunch and not back at work. Bull’s-eye. Brian Redwood, Branch Crown Prosecutor, Helen West’s boss, among other problems, a man of ferocious timidity, lowered his large behind into her chair, puffed out his chest, shook his head, drummed his fingers on the table and still looked like a man who bore the imprint of the last person who had sat on him. Then he began to prowl.

  Mess was what he found. No evidence whatever of the clear-desk policy he advocated, less evidence still of respect for rules. A towering in-tray, nothing in the out, two dead plants and a packet of sticky mints in the top desk drawer. Redwood huffed, ate one absent-mindedly while continuing his researches. Old birthday cards, a shopping list, a pair of shoes requiring mending, nothing more personal than that. Perhaps she hid things, these days. His eyes fell on the paper sack in the corner of the room. Confidential waste, the place to put litter with no destination other than the shredder, cleared once a fortnight. Hmm. The brown paper crackled at his touch accusingly, and the contents were revealing. Policy manuals, vital memos from himself, delivered daily, part of his own attempt to rule by written words. It was faintly shocking to find that in Helen’s case, his efforts represented nothing but the shortest route between the in-tray and the bin.

  Redwood gazed out of the window and found, to his horror, someone gazing back. The office was separated by the mere width of a narrow street from other offices over the road, where a comely woman stared, and then waved. Redwood, a guilty thing surprised, felt as if he had just lost his trousers, and ducked out of sight still clutching a bunch of paper. He was on his hands and knees with his bottom pointing towards the door when Helen opened it. Just as she always did, he reflected later, she turned the tables on him.

  ‘Something you wanted, sir?’

  She dropped the file she carried under one arm. The paper spilled out and the photo of Shirley Rix’s injured features lay uppermost on the floor. While Redwood looked at it without interest, Helen neatly hid her shopping bag behind the desk.

  ‘You’re late,’ he barked, scrambling to his feet. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘You should know. North London Court. Battered wives society. You’ve had me doing nothing but battered women for six months. Another no-show this morning.’

  She was thinking of the contents of her bag. Of how she had substituted the vexed question of whether it had been right to ask for a witness summons for the woman in the photo with the search for yellow paint. Thinking of the various hues of silk emulsion paint, so delicious looking in little sample pots, she could have grasped them out of the hidden bag, peeled off the plastic lid and eaten one like a fruit yoghurt.

  ‘We need a policy,’ Redwood barked, ‘about what to do when these women don’t turn up. When to give up and when to carry on. Write it.’

  ‘Write what? What’s wrong with deciding what to do in each case as it comes? Each one’s different. Sometimes you should give up, sometimes not.’

  ‘You might get it wrong.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said patiently. ‘I might, you might, we might. And so might an inflexible set of rules. We don’t have a policy written in stone for other kinds of reluctant witnesses; why have one for victimised women? We just have to listen to the police.’

  ‘Helen, we’re supposed to be independent of police opinion.’ Redwood regarded her warily, waiting to see if she would take such remarks personally. He had a deep suspicion of all policemen and supposed her own view was jaundiced as a result of her misguided, miraculously long-running affair with one of them. Redwood was waiting for Miss West to recover from her strange infatuation with Superintendent Bailey with the same weary patience he had experienced when his daughter was recovering from measles. Partnerships like that were not against the rules, but they were not comfortably within them either.

  ‘We can’t be independent of their judgement when they’ve met the victim and we haven’t,’ she was saying calmly. ‘Besides, there’s hardly much scope for bribery and corruption in a Domestic Violence Unit.’

  He was silent, then shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I really don’t know how it happens. I thought this was the age of equality. If I hit my wife, it would be the very last thing I’d do.’

  Visualising the bulk of Mrs Redwood, Helen privately agreed.

  ‘Think about the policy,’ Redwood urged as he found himself, without knowing quite how, being shown out like a visiting window-cleaner.

  ‘Sir,’ she said sweetly, ‘I think of nothing else.’

  The sun had flattened itself behind their own building. New offices, nasty furnishings which would not outlive the lease. Men like Redwood promulgated bureaucratic nonsense in the hope of saving their seats from the encroachment of younger, even greyer men. Helen felt a quiet despair, suppressed by the dancing visions of yellow paint now hidden in the bottom drawer along with a supply of make-up, biscuits past their sell-by date, books loaned or borrowed and the ashtray Redwood had failed to discover. Sunshine reflected off the glass frontage of the offices across the way, obscuri
ng her daily surreptitious examination of their lives. She buried her head in work.

  The light faded, gracefully. The out-tray grew. Shouts of laughter echoed in the corridor outside. Someone ran past her door, yelling, ‘Wait for me!’ in a long and eerie wail. Someone else tripped on the carpet, and then there was only the disturbing descent of silence, penetrating slowly until, with a stab of disappointment, she looked up through the window to find that all the workers in the opposite block had gone. Alas, no chance this evening to see who had lingered and finally left with whom; no chance of an update on the fate of the opposite office Lothario.

  The phone bleeped. A new phone, anchored to the revolving desk.

  ‘Go home, Helen West. Go home now. Stop whatever you are doing and go.’

  Her heart stopped for a moment: the silence of the building was suddenly oppressive, until the distant sound of traffic restored sanity.

  ‘Emily, you scared me. What time is it?’

  ‘Half six, you ninny. Don’t you have a watch, for Gawd’s sake?’

  Somehow those strident patrician tones never struck a discord: hers was a voice inspiring pleasure and confidence; artlessly kind Emily, enviably efficient and, in truth, a bit of a bully.

  ‘Two things. First, I left the number of the cleaning lady on your answerphone, but I doubted you’d ever get around to organising a meeting, so I did. You’re halfway down the fifty-nine bus route between where she lives and here, and she says it’s no bother. OK? Be with you in an hour, so get your skates on.’ Skates, bikes, Emily drew metaphors from all the impedimenta of her children. ‘And the other thing is, she’s here so late, helping me, because I’ve got people coming to supper. They don’t include you and Bailey by any chance, do they?’

  ‘Nope. Soon, I hope.’

  ‘Christ. I wish I could remember who’s coming. Isn’t that awful? They could be a posse of vegetarian judges. Oh, by the way, she smells of carbolic soap or disinfectant, or something. And she does tend to eat with her mouth open, but that’s nothing. Really. Helen? Don’t forget to go home, will you?’

  Home. With the dusty windows and the wild garden and the floors in need of a clean and the bees at the window. The thought made her shiver with pleasure. Halfway down the corridor, she remembered the little snack pots of paint in her desk drawer. She would not have trudged back for anything less, but these had the innate value of contraband. She was the only person she knew who had left a chicken defrosting on the office floor for a weekend. She boasted about that one, but not about the fish left under the top deck seat of the number 59.

  She avoided the bus in the interests of speed. Below the hot streets, the Underground was tolerable with the mad work exodus an hour old. The street where Helen lived seemed fresh, dignified, safe, adorned by large Victorian houses with white stucco frontages, elegant in whatever state of repair, built for affluent families, currently subdivided, the basement flats like hers, euphemistically known as garden apartments, were sunny at the back, darker at the front. Helen walked down her own road with familiar pleasure, noting the age of the trees, the clematis on the black railings, the emergence of blood-red geraniums and startling blue lobelia in window-boxes. Then she did as she did with shameful frequency: stopped, looked in windows to see what people did with their rooms.

  On the doorstep was a woman, waiting with preternatural patience, as if she never needed to move, would wait for ever, like a piece of garden sculpture.

  ‘Yes?’ Helen queried abruptly. ‘Are you selling something?’

  The sculpture stood up from the step and smiled. ‘I’m Cath,’ she said. ‘I’ve come to clean. If you want me.’

  ‘Cath?’ Helen echoed. ‘Cath? Oh, yes!’

  She unlocked the door, turned back, smiling apologies for her own gross delay, muttering how she was usually early; forgive me, she was murmuring. She wanted to apologise for her own house, suddenly spotlit as they went into the kitchen, which caught the full blaze of the sinking sun from the south-facing garden; and it was then, catching in the absent smile of the other woman a signal of nothing, that the cat came in and Cath lifted her off the floor in a crow of delight. For one split second, hers were the same hurt, brown eyes which had stared from the photographs of Shirley Rix, defying the world to say that her own fate was her own fault. Helen shook herself.

  No-one had identical eyes, any more than the same voices or fingerprints.

  Aside from that, Cath had the face of a madonna.

  CHAPTER THREE

  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Which raised in his mind the strict definition of ‘broke’. For ‘broke’ read broken, not penniless. Bailey could hear some pedantic judge translating the phrase for the benefit of a jury. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this means, if an object is not broken, it should on no account be repaired.’

  Somehow that did not sound quite the same. Lacked a certain je ne sais quoi. Bailey looked at the clock in his hands which had sent him off on this tangent. Not broken as such, M’lud, but working overtime, with the hour hand racing round at the same speed as the one counting seconds. He set the clock down on the work surface. ‘Just let me know which hour of the day I’m in,’ he murmured, ‘and I’ll phone up the speaking clock to check the week.’

  The repair of this old timepiece could wait until Helen had seen it. ‘Look,’ he would say. ‘That’s what happens when you see your life passing in front of your eyes. At the last glance, you are now fifty-six.’ Maybe it wasn’t so funny after all.

  Bailey, long and thin, with his slightly cadaverous features, did not look like a man who smiled easily, although he could and did, frequently, if sometimes shyly, like a man amazed by his own amusement. Helen made him smile: he could catch himself watching her from a distance and grinning. He supposed he was lucky. Not many men could have these ups and downs, these swings of mood, these black days and this unfair ambivalence in the face of commitment to a rather beautiful woman, and still find themselves loved and tolerated, albeit with a degree of exasperation. As an old-fashioned man, raised to regard marriage as the desirable norm, Bailey was ashamed of his lack of formal commitment; sometimes, he realised that Helen had reached the point in their relationship when that was what she wanted. If you don’t want to make a lifetime of it, he told himself sternly, you should let go and make space for some other bugger to do better, but he did not want that either. Nor did he want anyone else, not even the freedom to search for a relationship less complex, although he had flirted with the idea, as had she, both retreating from the brink. And he had proposed marriage, repeatedly, in the early days, to be met by her uncertainty, hurtful at the time, like someone refusing a gift he had taken the trouble to wrap. The tables had turned in the last few months: he supposed he was getting some small revenge.

  According to the clock, one hour had passed in one minute. Helen was late. They were currently in one of their tranquil phases, a celebration of the hazy days of summer, but despite his silent insistence that their relationship remain as it was, the uncommitted, nevertheless exclusive kind, he had to admit that all this talk about tearing down walls in her flat disturbed him a little. He wanted her independent, of course, but not so independent that she built a life without reference to him at all. You’re getting your cake and eating it, said Ryan, ever jealous of the bachelor state. Bailey supposed he was. He hadn’t said to Ryan that even eating cake took effort.

  Nor did he confide in Ryan that Helen and he had hardly made a good job of living together the one time they had tried, although the choice of place, which both of them loathed, had been less than fortunate. And their tastes did not coincide. She was all for deep colours, dozens of pictures, warm fires, dark old curtains, so that her red-walled living room resembled a gentleman’s club. Bailey’s huge single floor, with not one curtain, contained less colour than her bathroom. There was wood and more wood. Shelves rather than cupboards, the pastel work surfaces of the integral kitchen where he placed the clock all cleaned with a spray and wipe. The only dirty th
ing around here was the cat which came and went and remained missing for days at a time. Cats are like women, Bailey told himself with the cynicism of a policeman; they stay if they want to.

  Eight thirty, supper simmering and no-one to share it. If all else failed, he would read a book. He had been thinking of going further than his LLB, acquired at night school; he might even read a law book. Pity, though: it was one of those evenings when he really needed to talk. There were not many couples, he reflected, who could discuss murder while eating lamb chops. Nor those who study post-mortem photographs for dessert. He wanted to share his current moral dilemma: a trial in which he knew they had not arrested the right man. If not exactly the wrong man, not the right one either.

  The flat was clean: he was clean. Only his conscience was like a dirty windscreen.

  Helen did not know what to do with a cleaning lady. The confrontation made her awkward. It struck her as a rather lonely and boring job; and, for that reason, she hated to ask anyone to do it, even though as a Crown Prosecutor, not rich like her City and commercial cousins, there was enough for a good standard of living. Including someone to clean the house, if only she could suppress the guilt which came with asking.

  ‘And this is the living room. And this is the bathroom,’ she heard herself saying, sounding to her own ears like a condescending estate agent to an idiot client. Cath nodded. Of course she would see what they were, she wasn’t blind, Helen told herself furiously, her own embarrassment made worse by Cath’s passivity. She was a strong-looking young woman, but she walked with a slight stoop, as if she carried something heavy round her waist, and instead of speaking, she inclined her head. But she showed no sign of recoiling from the scattered clothes in the bedroom, or the gritty feel to the kitchen floor.

  ‘I’m sorry about the mess,’ Helen was saying, ‘only I don’t have much time …’

  ‘I wouldn’t call this mess,’ Cath said neutrally. ‘It isn’t even really dirty. You’ve got a nice place.’