A Greater Evil Read online

  ‘Now.’

  Sam looked up again and slapped the flat of his right hand against his forehead, before turning back the way he’d come.

  ‘I haven’t seen anyone acting out that kind of “how silly of me” moment since I watched the film of The Day of the Jackal,’ said the psychologist. ‘Have you?’

  ‘I don’t know. But you’re right: it does look theatrical. What else?’

  ‘Moving on to the video of your interviews with him, there are several moments when he displays marked aggression and hostility. Both would be characteristic of your killer.’

  She switched the tapes and showed Caro what she meant over and over again, until Caro’s restiveness got the better of her discretion.

  ‘As you say, none of this is definitive.’

  ‘I was invited to express my opinion about your suspect,’ the psychologist said with an unexpectedly patient smile, which ratcheted up Caro’s own impatience by several notches. ‘My opinion is that you have a man here whose violent impulses are not well controlled, who is probably frightened by his own anger and what he knows it might make – or may already have made – him do. You also have him giving an exaggerated show of his departure from the building and re-entry, which goes to support your idea that he could have been setting up confusion in order to distract you from the imprecision of his alibi. That’s all I’ve got. If you haven’t anything else for me, Chief Inspector, I ought to go. I’m on a tight schedule today.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Caro said, recovering her temper. ‘You’re right. You’ve done precisely what I asked. I just hoped you’d be able to provide me with the certainty I need.’

  ‘You know where to find me. If the CPS want me as an expert witness at his trial, I’ll be happy to appear.’

  ‘So you do think he did it?’

  A wide smile revealed perfect teeth and an even more attractive personality.

  ‘Listening to that interview and watching the films of him all morning? Added to what we know of his childhood? Of course I do.’

  The burning sensation in Caro’s eyes eased. At last!

  ‘But that’s not evidence either,’ said the psychologist.

  Strong black coffee, Trish’s favourite stimulant, was keeping her mind buzzing. She reread the message that had at last come through from Giles Somers on his return from the extended Christmas holiday:

  You’re absolutely right. Cecilia did email me at about midnight the day before she died. She wanted any hard copies I could get of the original documents relating to the external cables. She was very specific about that. It wasn’t the internal ones on which the components are suspended; it was the four you always call guy ropes. I’m afraid I quite forgot in the horror of her death. I’ll get on to it now and forward anything I can get as soon as it reaches me.

  D’you want to tell me why you want them? Giles

  Trish had decided to wait for the evidence before passing on to Giles any of the speculations that had been teasing her brain. Now she had to get them organized. It was lucky, she thought, that her pupil had developed ’flu over the Christmas break and was still in bed. She didn’t want any witnesses to her forthcoming meeting.

  ‘Chief Inspector Lyalt is here,’ said Sally Elliott over the phone fifteen minutes later.

  ‘Thanks, Sally. I’ll come and fetch her.’

  They didn’t kiss each other as they would normally have done. Caro, dressed in her usual dark-grey suit and flat shoes, looked more tired and strained than Trish had ever seen her. She also had deep vertical lines between her flattened eyebrows, and her hostile eyes were almost covered by the overhanging lids.

  It’s only a frown, Trish told herself, understanding now why George so hated it when she glared at him.

  Caro waited until they were safely inside Trish’s room with the door securely closed before she said: ‘If you’re wasting my time, I don’t think I’ll be able to forgive you.’

  ‘Sit down and listen,’ Trish said, making her own face as friendly as she could. ‘And really listen because it matters.’

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘The day we met in the studio, you told me someone had been harassing Cecilia at work.’

  ‘So?’ Caros tone was obstinately unforgiving.

  ‘It’s pretty clear to me it had to be her immediate boss, Dennis Flack.’ At the sight of another impatient scowl distorting Caro’s good-looking face, Trish hurried on to describe the way Dennis had treated his assistant, Jenny Clay.

  ‘It would be unlikely for there to be two men bullying younger women within one office, so I suspect the rumours you’ve heard came from the way Dennis tried to exercise the same kind of power over Cecilia.’

  Caro neither softened nor said anything.

  ‘He also sent me photocopies of anonymous letters Cecilia had about the ghosts of the plague victims buried under the Arrow,’ Trish went on, feeling as though she were ploughing the stoniest ground. ‘He said you had the originals.’

  ‘Again, so what?’

  ‘Don’t you think he might have written them himself? As a way of distracting you from your suspicions of him?’

  ‘No. We know where they come from and we’ve eliminated the writer from our enquiries.’

  ‘Did you know Dennis Flack went out of the office around the same time as Cecilia on the morning she was killed?’ Trish asked, suppressing her curiosity about the letter-writer. ‘And that he’d been her favoured walker until she met Sam? And that he kept trying to make people believe she was his property, while she did everything she could to show she wasn’t? And that he’s talked to all kinds of people, including me, about how much he loathed Sam?’

  ‘None of this makes him a killer, Trish.’

  ‘If he was angry enough to want her dead, he’d have had a real incentive to throw suspicion on Sam, wouldn’t he?’ Trish went on, refusing to be deflected. ‘Maybe he somehow discovered Sam wouldn’t be in the studio that morning and faked a message from him, asking Cecilia to go there, followed her and beat her up just before Sam got back from his meeting with me.’

  Caro was silent, but she looked a little shaken. This time it was Trish who said, ‘Doesn’t it at least make you think?’

  ‘You said you had two possible suspects. Who’s the other?’

  ‘An engineer called Guy Bait, who worked on the designs for the Arrow, is involved in the insurance battle, and must have known Cecilia at university.’ Trish pushed forward the photocopied pages of the reference book in which she’d found entries for both of them. ‘See: they were both at Brunel at the same time.’

  ‘Trish, no one is going to murder a loss adjuster because of an insurance fight. Anyone with half a brain would know the company would simply put someone else in her place. And partners in consulting engineering firms have a lot more than half a brain. I can’t believe you got me out of my office for this. I don’t have any more time to waste.’ Caro’s voice sounded tired now.

  She blinked and the horizontal line of her eyebrows broke. She rubbed her eyes, then massaged her forehead.

  ‘If I don’t get a result by the end of the week, they may take the investigation away from me,’ she added, looking up.

  Trish felt the tendons in her neck soften. This was more like the old Caro: human, honest and a lot less angry.

  ‘Better to take time to get the right result than make a case that goes tits up,’ Trish said, but Caro didn’t smile. ‘Even if you won’t consider Dennis Flack, you must look at Guy. The insurance case is going to turn on the precise causes for the failure of the Arrow’s structure. For reasons I can explain if you want, this is likely to be down to the engineers and the work they did to make the architects’ designs practical. Guy Bait is probably implicated in whatever went wrong. The fact Cecilia knew him at university could be the coincidence that was haunting her.’ Trish waited for a response, thought of all the half-formed ideas in her mind and added: ‘Part of it anyway.’

  ‘Likely; probably; maybe; and you think,’ Caro
said as the ugly frown snapped back into place. ‘You’ve no evidence against either of these men, have you?’

  ‘No, but …’

  ‘But nothing.’ Caro reached for the squashy shoulder bag she’d allowed to flop on the floor. ‘As you’re always reminding me: without evidence, the most convincing speculation is worthless.’

  ‘Don’t go yet. Please.’

  ‘I must.’ Caro was on her feet and halfway to the door when she looked back over her shoulder. She tried to smile and failed. ‘Next time, Trish, wait until you’ve got something that will stand up before you pull me away from my team during an enquiry as urgent as this.’

  ‘Why is it okay for you to be convinced of Sam’s guilt on no real evidence but monstrous of me to suggest Dennis Flack and Guy Bait could be worth a look?’

  Caro produced a sound between a sigh and a growl, before muttering something about a psychologist. Before Trish could ask any questions, she’d slammed the door behind her.

  Trish felt her back itching as she thought of all the other ways she could have handled the meeting. Would any of them have been more effective? Probably not. She shoved her hand painfully up between her shirt and her back to scratch and thought of Gina Mayford with those red weals up the inside of her forearm. Why did worry make you feel as though you had microscopic insects hopping about on your skin?

  Filing Dennis for later because she had an almost direct line to him through Jenny Clay, Trish tried to see a way of approaching Guy Bait so that she could get something that would make Caro look harder – and might save Sam from more fruitless but destabilizing interviews.

  If Trish hadn’t been involved in the Arrow case she could have arranged to meet Guy herself and used her supposedly miraculous skill to make him talk. Had Cecilia faced the same dilemma and come to a different conclusion? Had she risked her own professional ethics by sharing her doubts about the cables with him? Or even by asking him about the wind-speed tests with the inexplicably wrong calculations?

  Or had he been trying to influence her findings? As Caro had suggested, no one would set out to kill a loss adjuster in order to avoid the embarrassing outcome of an insurance claim, but was it so impossible to believe Guy Bait could have been trying to persuade Cecilia to soften her report, only to lose his temper when she refused, and then lash out at her?

  Trish could just about picture it, but she couldn’t see why it would have happened in Sam’s studio. She definitely preferred Dennis and the idea of his faking a message from Sam to get Cecilia to a place where he could take whatever revenge he wanted on them both.

  Even so, neither he nor Guy was as likely a suspect as Sam himself. Trish could see that as well as anyone, however hard she fought it, but she wasn’t going to allow herself to believe it until she was faced with evidence. Hearing a mental echo of her mother’s warning not to let Sam break her heart, she picked up the phone to call the Royal Courts of Justice and asked for Mrs Mayford’s clerk.

  This time it seemed the judge had no inclination for another session beside the ice rink in Somerset House. Instead, the clerk said she would come to Trish’s chambers on her way home at the end of the day.

  Gina Mayford’s hair still had the good colour Trish had noticed at the party, but the cut was already looking ragged. Her skin was dry and flaking, and she had the thinned-out appearance of someone who’d been forgetting to eat or sleep.

  ‘Dennis Flack and Guy Bait?’ she said in answer to Trish’s first question, as they sat on opposite sides of the desk with cups of tea in their hands. ‘I’m afraid I don’t remember ever hearing either name.’

  ‘Pity. Did Cecilia socialize much with people from work?’

  ‘I don’t know. She never introduced any of them to me. But then we never lived in each other’s pockets.’

  ‘What about the other engineering undergraduates when she was at Brunel? Did she do things with them?’

  ‘A fair amount, I suppose, although her best friend was a mathematician. Jane something. Jane Frant, I think. Another lost soul: she had that intense inwardness of so many mathematicians, which looks a bit like Asperger’s to the outside world.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘No idea, I’m afraid. I’m sorry I can’t help you.’ Gina had her hand over her mouth again, so Trish couldn’t hear what she was saying. But her misery was clear enough without words.

  ‘How is the baby?’ Trish asked, trying to help.

  Gina’s eyes darkened as though the pupils had widened in shock, but she took her hand away and spoke easily enough.

  ‘She’s out of hospital and Sam has her living in the studio with him. He says he’s coping and wants her there to keep her from feeling she’s got to fill her mother’s place.’

  ‘At less than a month old?’

  ‘I know, Trish. The health visitor’s going in as often as she can manage, much more often than new mothers get, because everyone can see Sam needs support. I’ve volunteered to babysit whenever he wants to go out, but he hasn’t let me do it yet.’

  A shadow fell across her face as she raised her hand again, this time to pick at the loose skin between her eyebrows.

  ‘What am I going to do, Trish? It isn’t safe. Even if he didn’t kill Cecilia, he’s not the man to have uninterrupted charge of a small baby. When he’s working he gets so absorbed that all idea of time disappears and with it any hint of an obligation to anyone else. But I can’t …’ Her voice faded.

  ‘You can’t use the law to try to get her away from him,’ Trish said, unable to hide her loathing of the idea. ‘Of course you can’t.’

  Gina winced and went on scratching, staring at the flakes of skin that fell into her lap. She picked one up and absent-mindedly rolled it between her fingers. ‘Last night, I even found myself wishing someone would come up with enough evidence to convince a jury he killed Cecilia, even if he didn’t, because at least that way I’d be able to save the baby. There’s not much further down to go.’

  ‘I wish I could help.’

  Gina’s mouth quivered, then firmed up again. ‘You’re a bridge to Sam. That does help. And I’m grateful.’

  She stood up abruptly and left without another word. Remembering the smoothness of her social skills, Trish knew she was at the very edge of what she could bear. The only thing that could help now would be proof of who had killed her daughter.

  Trying not to think what would happen to Gina if the case were never solved, Trish opened her emails in case Giles Somers had sent her the documents she needed. There was nothing.

  Silently swearing in the filthiest words she could think of because she couldn’t get any further until she had the information, Trish clicked her way out of her email and on to a search engine, typing in the name of Cecilia’s university friend. There were pages of references to people called Jane Frant, but only one looked promising, the author of papers on fractals and chaos theory. An email address was given so Trish clicked on that and quickly typed in:

  Dear Dr Frant,

  You probably know that Cecilia Mayford died just before Christmas. I am trying to contact people who knew her, and believe you and she were friends at Brunel. I’d very much like to talk to you.

  Yours, Trish Maguire

  It could take a while before she got an answer. Most people, deluged with spam and schoolboy hacking attempts at this time of year, put off answering unsolicited emails from anyone they didn’t know.

  The ease of finding the list of Jane Frants tempted her to search for both Dennis and Guy, and she flicked through a selection of the hundreds of links listed, frustrated and disheartened, until she found her way to reports of two big construction cases on which Guy had acted as an expert witness. In itself that wouldn’t have meant anything, but the instructing solicitor in each case was named as Malcolm Jensen, working at the firm he’d left two years ago to join George’s.

  Another coincidence? Or something more significant?

  Trish scrambled her way from website to website u
ntil she learned that Jensen was married to the news editor of the Daily Mercury. With links like these in front of her, she was pulled away from her ideas about Cecilia’s death and deep into a much more personal quest. At last she saw one possible reason why the ratpack had been sent to her flat on Christmas Day. And why the finance Director of QPXQ Holdings had shown no hostility to her and George at the firm’s party. She’d been wondering why, if his company was genuinely afraid she represented a dangerous conflict of interest, he’d been so friendly.

  A beep announced the arrival of an email. With all her instincts pushing her to see Malcolm Jensen as publicly humiliated as she had been in the post-Christmas newspapers, Trish clicked back to her email inbox to see that Jane Frant had answered.

  Hi. I didn’t know Cecilia had died. How awful. I haven’t seen her for years.

  When’s the funeral? What do you need to know?

  Trish tried to ignore everything she wanted to do to Malcolm and tapped away:

  Sorry to be the one to give you the news. No funeral can be organized because she was murdered and the police still haven’t charged anyone. I need to know the names of people she was close to at Brunel. Any advice wd be v. welcome.

  She thought for a moment, then added her phone number. It would be much easier to drop Guy Baits’ name into an oral discussion than anything written down. Ten minutes later, she was talking to a woman with the soft adenoidal accent of the Midlands.

  ‘But who are you?’ she said.

  Trish explained her interest in the case as unexcitedly as possible, mentioning her growing friendship with Cecilia’s mother and her long-standing connection with Sam Foundling.

  ‘Right,’ Jane Frant said. ‘And what exactly is it you want to know about her friends at uni?’

  ‘Her mother has talked about the way Cecilia tended to fall in love with men who had problems of one kind or another. She doesn’t think she ever knew all their names. We wondered if you could help.’

  Is that ‘we’ fair? Trish wondered as she waited for an answer, then decided she didn’t much care. Sam’s safety was too important for little niceties.