A Greater Evil Page 15

  Chapter Twelve

  For form’s sake Trish asked the switchboard to put her through to Dennis Flack’s office. She was pretty sure a man of his seniority wouldn’t be working between Christmas and the New Year, but she didn’t want to look as though she was going behind his back if he was there.

  ‘He’s on holiday at the moment. Can anyone else help?’

  ‘I think so. Is Jenny Clay in?’

  Trish waited for only a few seconds before a tentative, slightly squelchy voice said: ‘Is that Trish Maguire?’

  ‘Yes. Jenny?’

  ‘Yes. How did you …? I mean, I’m glad you phoned. I … I need to ask you something.’

  ‘Sure,’ Trish said, putting confidence-boosting warmth into her voice. ‘D’you want to go first or shall I?’

  ‘I … Could I come and see you? There are things I need to show you. It would be easier face to face.’

  ‘OK. Come to chambers. Most of the clerks are away so the door may be locked, but if you bang on it, I’ll come down and let you in.’

  ‘I’ll be about twenty minutes. Bye.’

  Surprised by the haste, Trish fired up her laptop so she could check through her latest notes on the Leviathan case, hoping to fire up her brain too. If she had only twenty minutes she’d better get a move on.

  In fact Jenny didn’t arrive for nearer half an hour, by which time Trish was reasonably confident of being able to understand whatever information was coming her way. She ran downstairs as soon as she heard a knock on the door and pulled it open. Jenny stood there, dark hair sticking up all round her head, as though she’d been gunning her hands through it. She was dressed in jeans almost as saggy as David’s and a very old CalTech sweatshirt, and she carried a slim dark-green folder.

  Hi. Sorry I’m not dressed for work. I’m supposed to be on holiday. It’s just that I was working at home when I realized I’ve … Oh, God! Somehow I seem to have cocked up the calculations. And I don’t know what … I’ve been over and over them and I can’t work out what’s wrong. I daren’t tell Dennis until I can find out how it could have happened. And I—’

  ‘Hey, Jenny. Calm down.’ Trish gestured to her own loose grey trousers and ancient raspberry-coloured sweater. ‘No one in the Temple is dressed up at the moment. Come on in and tell me what’s happened.’

  Jenny rubbed her right eye. It was red and sore-looking. Her lips were bitten too.

  ‘Whatever’s happened, there’ll probably be a way round it,’ Trish said gently, as they went upstairs to her room. ‘And if there isn’t, it’s much better to know now than to have it chucked at me unexpectedly when we’re in court.’

  ‘Okay. Well, look here.’ Jenny dumped the folder on Trish’s desk.

  Trish whisked her papers out of the way and put them on one of the shelves behind her desk, before bending to look over Jenny’s shoulder.

  ‘Here’s the series of wind-stress tests on all the components,’ she said, pointing to a sheet Trish recognized as part of a printout listing the preliminary work done before the final specifications had been produced. As Jenny turned the pages, Trish saw she bit her nails and had chewed one so far down that the nailbed was bleeding. She used the finger to point to a line on the printout.

  ‘This is the one that won’t work, the stress test on the outer cables.’ Jenny looked up at Trish, frowning. ‘You know the ones I mean?’

  ‘The ones that act as guy ropes at the four corners of the Arrow.’

  ‘That’s right.’ She pulled another sheet of paper from her folder. It was a hard copy of one of the test results, and it had little sums in red ink scribbled all over the page. The numbers at the top were neat and tidy; lower down they sprawled and some were crossed out with wild hatching.

  ‘Here.’ Jenny pointed again. The nailbed was oozing fresh blood, exactly the same colour as the red ink. ‘I’ve been checking the figures again and again, rerunning the test, and the answer always comes out wrong. I don’t understand how it can because everyone involved would have checked it before they accepted the results. And both Cecilia and I went through all the tests when Leviathan first handed us the claim to investigate. So it must be me doing something wrong. And I just can’t see where.’ Tears spilled from Jenny’s eyes. She looked half demented and wholly terrified.

  ‘Sit down a minute,’ Trish said, gesturing to the visitor’s chair. There were more important aspects to this than an inability to get the right answer to a series of sums. ‘How long have you been working for Dennis?’

  ‘Since I left university, three and a half years ago.’ She sniffed and rubbed the back of her hand under her nose.

  ‘And has he always frightened you?’

  More tears spilled over, dripping down her pink cheeks. Trish offered her a box of tissues. Jenny took one, shaking her head.

  ‘It’s not Dennis. It’s me. He’s been under tremendous pressure, and I can’t help making mistakes and losing things, which makes it all so much worse for him. I don’t know why. I’ve never been like this before. I used to be quite efficient, but now I put things in the wrong order and even when they’re not, I can’t find them. My calculations keep going wonky like this. I can’t seem to get the same answer twice, whatever calculator I’m using. Which is why I started to do them by hand, too. But that doesn’t work either.’

  Trish remembered how much she’d disliked Dennis Flack’s bullying air when he came to chambers. Even then she hadn’t realized how destructive it was. She pulled her own calculator out of the top drawer and whizzed through some of the red-inked sums on the photocopy.

  ‘I get the same answers as you,’ she said, looking up with a smile. ‘The original mistake will be buried somewhere in the files. It’ll take time to find it, so there’s not much point looking while you’re here. I’ll have a crack at it later. Did things go wrong like this when you were working with Cecilia?’

  ‘Sometimes. Not so often. But then she was more patient than Dennis.’ Jenny looked away from Trish, biting her lip. ‘I know I must sound like a pathetic five-year-old, but I really miss her.’

  ‘So do I.’ Trish watched Jenny’s head come round until they were face to face again. ‘You shouldn’t give yourself such a hard time. It sounds to me as though Dennis is taking his own grief out on you. He was particularly close to Cecilia, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Not as close as he wanted,’ Jenny said, perking up a little. ‘He was always trying to pretend they were a kind of unit and she’d pull back every time. It was quite subtle, but anyone watching them would have seen it.’

  ‘Was she scared of him too?’

  ‘Cecilia?’ Jenny looked astonished. ‘She wasn’t afraid of anything. She’d have known exactly how this happened and what to do about it now, unlike me, I just can’t …’

  ‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ Trish said, thinking of the shadows she’d seen in Cecilia’s expression. ‘Everyone’s frightened of something. And fear makes all of us less competent than we really are. Being a bit more detached from all this than you I may be able to see what’s gone wrong. In any case, I’ll get back to you. Will you be in the office tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve got to work out what’s going wrong before Dennis gets back on Monday. I can’t …’ She was back to staring out of the window, chewing her lip again. ‘I found the problem on Boxing Day and I haven’t been able to sleep since, except with pills. Even then I wake at dawn, wondering if I should resign now, or …’

  ‘You should be wondering why no one else has noticed that the figures don’t work,’ Trish said, letting herself sound tougher. ‘You’ve had the guts to bring the problem to light, so there’s a big mark in your favour. I’ll let you know what I track down.’

  ‘Okay.’ Jenny pushed both hands through her hair and licked her lips as she faced Trish again. ‘Sorry to have banged on so. You wanted to ask me something too.’

  ‘I just wondered whether you saw Cecilia on the morning she died.’

  Jenny nodded. ‘She looked tired,
but I wasn’t surprised: she’d been working really late the night before.’

  ‘On a Sunday night? How d’you know? Were you there too?’

  ‘The last email she sent me was timed at just before 11 p.m., so she was still at her desk then. She was trying to get everything finished before she went on maternity leave.’

  ‘So why did she leave the office on Monday morning? It can’t have been normal for her just to waltz out like that, particularly when she was so busy.’

  ‘She was always having to go out to site meetings and client meetings.’ Jenny’s surprise at Trish’s obtuseness was making her sound more confident. ‘And doctors, of course, being pregnant. She was too senior to have to ask anyone’s permission. Like Dennis.’

  ‘Did he go out that morning too?’

  Jenny nodded and sniffed. ‘Luckily. He’d had a real go at me because of some papers I couldn’t find and then he got even crosser because I couldn’t stop crying.’ She brushed her eyes again. ‘When I’d got hold of myself and washed my face and come out of the loos, he’d gone. Which meant I could get stuck in to doing the stuff Cecilia had emailed about.’

  ‘Had there been any phone calls for her just before she left?’

  ‘Of course. Her phone hardly stops; that’s why sometimes she used to work at home. They all do when there’s a lot of documents and stuff to get their heads round. Then they come in at weekends or evenings to work while the office is quiet.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Trish smiled, even though she hadn’t got what she wanted. ‘Now, if I were you, I’d knock off for the rest of the day and go to the gym or swim or something. Forget all this, let your brain relax. It’ll function much better if you do.’

  A quivering smile made Jenny look a bit less defeated. ‘That’s not a bad idea. I’ll give it a try. You will tell me if you find anything, won’t you?’ She fished a card out of her wallet and handed it to Trish. ‘This has my mobile number. You will ring me, won’t you?’

  ‘I will.’ Trish escorted her safely off the premises and sighed in relief to be rid of her fears and misery.

  Before Trish went back inside, she looked round the empty courtyard as always enjoying the sight of the fountain in the centre with its neat octagonal grey-stone balustrade and elegantly planted flowerbed. Now, in mid-winter, it was filled with glossy evergreens. Turning her back on it, she hoped Jenny’s news would provide the spur she’d needed to make herself concentrate on the Arrow’s problems.

  A rolling clatter made her look over her shoulder to see the postman pushing a red trolley so stuffed with letters and packages they stuck out at all angles. Trish waited until he’d reached her steps, before putting out a hand.

  ‘I can take anything for 2 Plough Court,’ she said.

  She needed both hands to hold the four thick bundles. Some must be Christmas cards, sent too late or delayed in some overburdened sorting office. She took the load to the clerks’ room and handed them to dark-haired Sally, the long-suffering trainee clerk, who was the only one not allowed an extended Christmas break. She too was wearing weekend clothes, in her case a flippy pink corduroy skirt barely covering her knickers and a low-cut purple sweater that showed off not only her incredible cleavage but also a diamond S suspended on a gold chain.

  Considering Sally’s usual all-concealing dark-grey or black suit, Trish had to admit this rebellious mufti was a more cheering sight. She had to hide a smile at the thought of Steve’s likely horror. As she waited for her post, she saw a copy of the Daily Mercury in the wastepaper basket.

  ‘May I borrow that?’ she said, pointing to it.

  Sally blushed until her cheeks almost matched the skirt, which told Trish more than she wanted to know. She took the offered paper and tucked it under her arm while she waited to be given her letters.

  There were only two: both stiffened brown envelopes, one with a typed address; the other handwritten by Caro. Trish checked the postmarks. Caro’s had been sent only two days ago, but the typed one had been franked on 23 December and sent by second-class post.

  ‘Thanks, Sally,’ Trish said and ripped open Caro’s as she walked back to her room. She didn’t want to look at the paper until she was alone. There was a pile of glossy photographs in Caro’s envelope, with a Post-it stuck to the top one.

  You ought to see these, Trish, as a corrective to your idea that it’s better for nine guilty men to go free for ever than one innocent to be put through a bit of anxiety while we get at the truth.

  Trish caught her foot in a rip in the carpet on the threshold of her room and tripped, dropping the paper and spilling the photographs as she fought to stay upright. Looking down at the prints, she saw a body laid out for autopsy. The scar of her Caesarian, a wide smiling shape at the base of her belly, was raw, with the few clumsy stitches very obvious. Presumably the surgeon had known she was dying and hadn’t spent any longer than absolutely necessary as he worked on her suffering body. But it was the wounds to Cecilia’s head and face that made Trish gag.

  The features were just about recognizable, even through the red-and-black bruises and the cut under one swollen eye. Cecilia’s dark-blonde hair was matted with dried blood and the right half of her skull looked quite flat under it. The weight of the blows must have been tremendous.

  Hating Caro for making her look at these, hating the knowledge that Cecilia had lived nearly a day with these injuries, Trish gathered the photographs together, shoved them back into their stiffened envelope and put them in her desk. She hadn’t needed to see them. The horror, the sympathy she had always felt for Cecilia, did nothing to loosen her determination to protect Sam for as long as she could.

  She shook out the Mercury and turned the pages, looking for her own name or that of Mrs Justice Mayford. Neither appeared until page eight and only then in a small paragraph at the bottom of a list of trivial news items.

  Contrary to the report in yesterday’s edition, Mrs Justice Mayford and barrister Trish Maguire are not in conflict. Ms Maguire’s support for the husband of Mrs Mayford’s late daughter is a source of reassurance for Mrs Mayford, who is extremely grateful for it. We are happy to make this clear.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine the negotiations that must have gone into that bland paragraph. Hardly anyone except the individuals concerned would even notice it, but it was there, and for that Trish was grateful.

  She stuffed the Mercury into her own wastepaper basket, where it belonged, and opened the second envelope. Its typed and official-looking address gave her the instant sense of relief she always found in word-heavy documents. They were safe, however scary the information they might contain. Subject to rational analysis, they could not destabilize her as pictures like the ones of Cecilia’s body might.

  The envelope contained a batch of letters, handwritten by the same person, with a covering note typed on the loss adjusters’ thick, headed paper.

  Dear Trish,

  You asked about a stalker who could have been scaring Cecilia. We found the originals of these in her desk. Maybe they explain the rumour.

  We’ve obviously given the originals to the police, but your questions make me think you might like a set of copies.

  Yours ever,

  Dennis

  The photocopies were clear enough to see that the originals had been written on lined paper ripped from a shorthand notebook. Trish could see the imprint of the scalloped edge at the top of each page. The writing was the sloping-back kind often produced by lovers of the green ink that usually signalled someone with iffy mental controls and an overflow of spite. The first letter addressed Cecilia formally and went on to say:

  How can you be in any doubt about the forces making the London Arrow move? You must know as well as I that when the resting places of the dead are disturbed, their ghosts will walk.

  Go to the Arrow tonight and listen. If you have any sensitivity at all, you will hear echoes of the crunch of bones as the pile drivers did their evil work. I had to listen to them for real as I stood on the edge of the
pit they dug to raise their impious monstrosity.

  If you care enough you will also hear the cries of the plague victims themselves and smell the stench of the suppurating buboes on their rotting flesh.

  How can you pretend the building is not cursed and everyone involved in its wicked construction consigned to hell for ever?

  ‘Wow,’ Trish said aloud, as she swapped the first letter for the one beneath. She rather liked ‘impious monstrosity’. All eight letters were written in the same hand and the same high-flown language. None was signed.

  There was nothing in any of them to make Cecilia afraid, even if she hadn’t been the sensible, intelligent woman Trish had known. As a loss adjuster, she’d had nothing to do with the choice of the Arrow’s site or its construction. She’d probably never given the building a thought until it had become part of her caseload. And as an admirer of common sense, she’d have had no truck with ghost stories. Like Trish, she’d probably believed the only ghosts were either minute, localized climatic effects or memories, generated within the minds of the living by their own emotional needs.

  There was nothing in any of the letters to suggest someone capable of wreaking the kind of damage Caro’s photographs had shown. In Trish’s experience effusions like these provided the perfect creative outlet for their authors’ bizarre impulses. They rarely needed any other satisfaction.

  It crossed her mind that Dennis Flack might have sent them himself, as a way of diverting attention from whatever pressure he’d been putting on Cecilia. Could he have the imagination necessary to write of the stench of buboes?

  Sam got Maria-Teresa’s letter agreeing to his visit on New Year’s Eve. He’d been so sure the post would take even longer than usual at this time of year that he was shocked. There should have been more time to get used to the idea of confronting her. He thought of phoning Trish and asking her to take over and make the visit for him, but that would have been cowardly, and whatever else he was, he wasn’t a coward. Never had been. The whimpering boy might be, but Sam had him safely back behind strong mental bars where he belonged.