A Greater Evil Read online

  ‘There was Guy, but Cecilia’s mother must know about him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They were engaged.’

  ‘What’s his full name? Mrs Mayford hasn’t mentioned any engagement to me.’

  ‘I’ll get the surname in a minute; it’s on the tip of my tongue.’

  ‘Great,’ Trish said. ‘D’you know what went wrong with the relationship?’

  ‘I didn’t know anything had. They got engaged in the last summer term, just before finals. I assumed they’d gone ahead with the wedding.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you have known? I mean, you were her best friend; you must have expected an invitation.’

  There was a brief sigh down the phone. ‘I didn’t like him much, and when I said so we quarrelled. I went to see her just before finals to wish her luck. She looked awful, ill, but she said she’d been working all night. I tried to tell her she was wasting herself on Guy and she told me to bugger off because she was committed now. I always meant to get in touch after the exams, to make up, but something always got in the way.’

  ‘Like what?’

  The laugh came again, a defence presumably against anything too personal. ‘I thought she ought to apologize.’

  ‘What didn’t you like about him?’

  There was a long pause. ‘It wasn’t just that he always came right into your face to talk – you know, pushing you back into a corner as you tried to keep your distance. He had a scary voice. He always talked very quietly, sounding kind and breathy. I hate it when people do that. It makes me wonder what they’re hiding.’

  ‘You’ve been very helpful,’ Trish said, thinking of the moment when Guy Bait had finally spoken after the unproductive settlement meeting, and she’d appreciated the gentleness of his voice after the manufactured aggression of the others.

  ‘Except that I can’t remember his surname.’

  ‘If it comes back to you, would you email me?’ Trish was determined not to make any suggestion that could lead her witness to a false memory. The phone emitted the beeps that told her she had another call waiting. ‘I’d better go. Thank you for taking the trouble to get back to me.’

  ‘When you know about the funeral, will you tell me? I’d like to make peace, even now it won’t do her any good.’

  ‘Of course I will.’ Trish scribbled a note, then switched to take the new call. It was David, still sounding happy. She tilted her chair back, swung her legs up onto the desk and prepared to listen to his adventures.

  Sam couldn’t work. It wasn’t Felicity getting in his way. She was lying in her carrycot on the floor near the stove, breathing easily with a kind of wuffling sound he liked. It was his own clumsy hands again. And his brain. Again.

  Stare into the mirror though he might, he couldn’t see anything in his own face he wanted to reproduce in the clay. Even if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to do it. Each piece he tried to add looked more like a huge bubo than any ordinary piece of flesh.

  The only things keeping him going were the baby and the knowledge that she was happy here – so far anyway – and the sight of the Carrara marble head he’d mended and replaced on its rudimentary MDF pillar by the sofa. Even with the cracks, the face looked like Ceel’s again. It helped him remember there had been times when she’d been happy here too. Not always, but often enough to make it possible to ignore the worst of his unbearable thoughts.

  He tried to reconstruct what she’d said once when he’d been unable to work like this. Something about it being him she loved, not his skill or the brilliant reviews he’d been getting in the French art press. Nor the price he’d just been paid for his Head of a Man. At the time he’d thought it patronizing. Now he’d have given anything to be able to replay the words she’d spoken in that deep, kind, confident, steady voice he would never hear again.

  It was exactly five weeks since he’d sat on the floor here with her battered head in his lap, waiting for her to die.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Caro looked at the grey-suited man on the other side of the desk and wished the winter sun wasn’t quite so bright behind him. All she could see was a shadowed face and the outline of impressively square shoulders and very short hair.

  ‘I don’t understand why you want to talk to me,’ he said, sounding entirely unworried. ‘But I’m more than happy to tell you anything I can.’

  On his desk was a tangle of thin stainless-steel rods and curves standing about ten centimetres high and mounted on a black plaque. He put one stubby finger on a protruding corner and set the whole thing rocking. Caro instinctively put out a hand to stop it collapsing. He laughed as he saw her register its paradoxical stability, each piece pulling against the stress of the next so that, rock though they did, they held together and remained upright.

  ‘My version of all those 1960s executive toys like Newton’s cradle,’ he said. ‘More original and all my own work. But I distracted you. Sorry. You were going to tell me what I can do to help your enquiry into poor Cecilia’s murder.’

  ‘We’re trying to talk to everyone who had any contact with her in the weeks running up to her death.’

  ‘But why? Didn’t her husband do it?’

  ‘It’s a question of evidence,’ Caro said, hoping this meeting would produce enough incontrovertible facts to establish his noninvolvement and so justify hating Trish for her endless interference. ‘Did she ever talk to you about him?’

  ‘I can’t help you there.’ Something in his gentle voice suggested he was smiling, but the dazzle behind him made it impossible to see. Caro felt like a prisoner interrogated in front of a spotlight. ‘We had no opportunity for any kind of personal stuff because we’re on opposite sides of a big insurance case. I don’t suppose I saw her more than three times, and then always at big meetings.’

  ‘But you had a personal relationship with her once, didn’t you?’

  ‘You are having to dig a long way back, Chief Inspector.’ He sounded a little less friendly, but still untroubled. ‘I don’t envy you trawling through the past fifteen years for evidence of her husband’s brutality. Yes, when we were at university, Cecilia and I were close. But I never knew Sam Foundling. Was he there at the same time?’

  ‘No; he’s younger than you. He was at the City & Guilds art college in Kennington and then worked with a sculptor in France. How close were you and Cecilia?’

  ‘Very close indeed – for a while,’ he said, wistful now. The stainless-steel tangle had come to rest and he set it going again. This time Caro repressed her urge to hold it together. ‘But it didn’t last. To tell you the truth, I’m amazed she ever did get married. Was she happy with her sculptor?’

  ‘I hoped you’d be able to tell me.’

  ‘We’d had no contact since university until the day she turned up as the loss adjuster for Leviathan Insurance on the Arrow case.’ He got up to show Caro a large matt black-and-white photograph of the building set against an angry sky. It looked even more magnificent than in reality, and sinister.

  ‘It’s about this building, Chief Inspector, which has been showing signs of cracking none of us can understand. It’s giving us all a lot of grief. The one good thing in the whole sorry mess was finding myself on the opposite side of the table from Cecilia. And now she’s dead.’ He turned his head away, swallowing with difficulty.

  Now they were away from the dazzling sun-filled window, her eyes worked better. When he looked back at her, everything she saw in his expression squared with her idea of a man whose old friend had died in a brutal attack.

  She stood up, her mind full of everything she wanted to say to Trish. She must be really frightened for Sam Foundling to have set up a red herring like this. Guy Bait was an even less likely suspect than the victim’s colleague Dennis Flack.

  ‘Are you sure there isn’t anything else I can tell you?’ Guy said, taking a step towards her.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ The phone in Caro’s pocket vibrated against her thigh. She couldn’t break off the interview to answ
er it. ‘Unless you know of anyone else who could have been involved in her life and who we might have missed.’

  He shrugged, his shoulders almost filling the small gap between them. Caro stepped back.

  ‘I’ve read about her husband’s work, and I believe her mother’s a judge. That’s all I know.’

  ‘Not even the name of the man who was harassing her at work?’

  His easy smile disappeared behind a mask of surprise. ‘Harassing Cecilia Mayford? Chief Inspector, I don’t want to sound rude, but do you know anything at all about the woman? She was astonishingly tough. Think Boadicea and double it. No one would have dared harass her.’

  Caro smiled and shook his hand. ‘I keep wishing I’d met her. I think I’d have liked her.’

  ‘I think you would too. In Yorkshire, where I grew up, they’d have called her grand; a grand lass.’ He laughed, then added in a thick northern accent: ‘And gradely with it. Good to meet you. Don’t hesitate to phone if you think of anything else you need from me.’

  Caro heard echoes of Trish’s voice in her mind, taunting her with having no idea what this man had been up to at the time Cecilia was beaten to death.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Maybe as I’m here you could tell me what you were doing on the morning of December the sixth.’

  ‘Hang on while I have a look at the diary,’ he said, apparently quite happy with the question.

  Like everything else in his office the diary was simple in design and beautifully made. He flicked through the pages.

  ‘We had an internal partners’ meeting,’ he said, with one finger resting on the relevant page. ‘It started at eight o’clock. I haven’t got a note here, but they’re usually over in about half an hour. My next appointment wasn’t till lunch. So … I remember. I went out to look at a site in the City. We’re working to make the architect’s weird ideas practical at the moment. I can get you the details if you want. Then what happened? I know: I have a feeling I bought my Christmas cards. Hold on.’

  He opened his door and went out to talk to one of the secretaries who worked at a four-person station in the corridor. Caro watched his back view, impatient at the waste of time and at her own weakness in coming here at all. Friendship had made her cross her own boundaries before, but never as stupidly as this.

  ‘Lucy agrees,’ Guy said on his return. ‘It was that morning I came back with the cards. She printed off the address labels while I was at lunch and had the cards ready for me to sign when I got back from the afternoon meetings.’

  ‘You don’t have official cards?’ Caro said, while at least half her mind was still on her own weakness.

  ‘As a firm we give a donation to charity instead, but there are still some clients and colleagues I feel should have cards, so I send my own. After buying them, I had my lunch engagement. Then …’ He looked down at the diary again and swung it round so she could look. ‘Then – as you see – solid client meetings all afternoon. I hope that helps.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. It’s very clear.’

  I can’t risk phoning Trish, Caro thought as she waited for the lift, or I’ll shout at her. She entered her PIN into the phone to listen to her messages.

  ‘Guv! I’ve been trying to get you all morning,’ said the voice of Glen Makins. ‘We’ve got a witness.’

  She stuffed the phone in her pocket and drove back to the incident room, reining in her impatience all the way and muttering each time a mad pedestrian stepped out into the road without looking or a van carved her up. She was sweating when she drove back into the car park, but it didn’t stop her flinging herself up the stairs at speed. She found her team steaming with excitement.

  ‘Tell me, Glen.’

  ‘The witness saw Sam Foundling let himself into the studio, guv. Only minutes before Cecilia Mayford started shouting and there were sounds of crashing.’

  ‘Why didn’t she intervene?’

  A smile spread over Glen’s face like melted butter. ‘Because it wasn’t the only time there’d been rows and broken china and hammers chucked across the room. The first time this woman – Marisa Heering – heard it, she did try to intervene and had her ear chewed off by Cecilia herself. So she kept quiet on December the sixth. Now she can’t forgive herself.’

  ‘So why haven’t we heard this before?’

  ‘Because she went on holiday the next day and missed our house-to-house enquiries. She’s been back for weeks, though, so I don’t know why she waited to come forward till now.’

  ‘Bring her in and give me the notes of your interview.’

  Caro retreated to her own office, sat in her high-backed chair and let her head rest against it. She was breathing more deeply than she had for a long time, and her fingers relaxed out of the claw shape they’d been in for days. Now she’d get somewhere.

  ‘Trish?’ Sam Foundling’s voice was rough and demanding over the phone. Trish levered herself up from the sofa, where she’d been lying half asleep with a mug of tea on the floor beside her.

  ‘Sam, what’s happened?’

  ‘Can you help me with the baby?’

  ‘What d’you need?’

  ‘Someone to look after her. Can I bring her round?’

  Trish looked wildly about the echoing spaces of her flat. ‘What about your mother-in-law?’

  ‘I can’t go to her. It’s not safe. Please, Trish.’

  ‘How long will you be away?’

  ‘I don’t know. The sodding police are here. I’m being arrested.’

  Trish felt as though the floor had tilted suddenly, throwing her off balance. She grabbed the back of the sofa and hung on, trying to find something to say that might comfort him without sounding idiotic.

  ‘So I need someone to look after the baby,’ he said into the silence. ‘Will you help?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Great,’ he said, sounding like any impatient angry man. ‘We’ll drop her off on the way to the fucking incident room.’

  Trish heard the rumble of male voices and knew the arresting officers must be standing very close to him.

  ‘Don’t forget to bring nappies and bottles,’ she said quickly. ‘And formula if you’ve got some. I haven’t anything here to feed a baby.’

  ‘It’s all ready. Be with you in ten, Trish.’

  Why had Caro done this? Hadn’t she listened to a single thing? Or was this punishment at one remove for the way Trish had told her to look at Dennis and Guy? How was Sam going to cope with the assault on his fragile personality of a pair of aggressive – or manipulative – detectives trying to make him confess?

  Only minutes later, Trish heard at least two pairs of feet on the iron staircase and pulled open the front door. Sam stepped across the threshold, holding the straps of a pale-blue carrycot in one strong hand. From the other dangled a scarlet nappy bag of the kind that unrolls into a changing mat. A uniformed police officer behind him was holding a rucksack. He offered it to Trish and she nearly dropped it, not having expected such a weight.

  ‘I don’t know how long they’ll keep me,’ Sam said, gently lowering the carrycot onto the nearest black sofa. ‘So I’ve brought all her bottles and the sterilizer and the biggest tin of formula I could find. You’ve got nappies for three days and if you need more, I’ll obviously reimburse you. There’s a big pot of nappy-rash cream. I can’t think of anything else. She sleeps most of the time and is …’ He gritted his teeth, then produced something that sounded like a cough but could have been meant to be laughter. ‘She’s the easiest baby I’ve ever had to deal with.’

  Trish laid her hand on his arm, knowing this was the only baby he’d ever dealt with. How much longer would he be allowed to keep her? He stared at Trish with an intensity she found unbearable. Looking down at the baby was the only way of escaping his gaze.

  ‘Don’t go handing her over to Gina now, will you?’ he said, the effort to sound casual making his voice even scratchier. ‘I don’t want to risk a messy legal fight to get her back. If this nonsense goes on for
more than a day or two I’ll have to think again, but if I come out of it I have to know I’ll be able to pick her up straight away. Can I rely on you to keep her with you until we’ve talked? Whatever happens?’

  ‘Yes.’ Trish forced herself to look back at him, hating her own impotence. ‘You can trust me, Sam.’

  There was a long pause. The police officer said they had to go. Sam looked straight at her. ‘I know. She’s called Felicity.’

  Trish nodded. Memories of what had been done to him when he was barely older than this baby, and of what had happened once he’d been handed over to the care of foster parents, made it easy to see why he couldn’t bear to let her out of his reach. Even to someone as honourable as his mother-in-law.

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ he said.

  Trish wanted to repeat the words he’d just used, but she couldn’t. She didn’t know whether he had killed his wife or not. She could only hope, so she nodded and smiled. Felicity cried, with a sound like a mewing kitten. Sam’s face clenched. The copper took his elbow and tugged.

  ‘We’ve got to go,’ he said urgently. Sam didn’t move.

  ‘I’ll look after her,’ Trish said, trying to make it easier for him. ‘Do you need me to phone your solicitor?’

  ‘I’ll be allowed to do that at the station, I assume,’ he said, glancing at the policeman.

  ‘Of course, but we have to go now.’ The officer nodded to Trish and it struck her that he’d shown real humanity allowing this visit. There were plenty of men who’d have taken the baby with Sam and handed her over to the duty social worker, in which case she would have ended up with Gina. Trish hoped he wouldn’t get into trouble for it. Or had he got permission from Caro? It would be good to think this morning’s intervention had had that much effect at least, but it didn’t seem likely.

  Trish saw them out, then came back to sort through the equipment Sam had brought. Felicity seemed minute and terrifyingly breakable; the responsibility of looking after her, mountainous. As was the trust Sam had put in Trish.