A Greater Evil Read online

  The sight of him so angry and defeated sent her back to some of their difficult early days together. Their combined insecurities and weird expectations of what the relationship would be like had made them hurt each other over and over again. They’d both moved hundreds of emotional miles since. She couldn’t bear to go back. She’d do anything to give him the contentment they’d shared over the last year. Then she heard Antony Shelley’s mocking voice in her mind: ‘Whose career is more important, Trish? Yours or George’s?’

  ‘I know,’ he said, making her wonder what on earth he was talking about. ‘At least James managed to hold the rest of them to nothing more than a sabbatical – and paid at that. My profit share won’t be affected, nor my standing when I go back in July. Or that’s the theory.’

  She waited. This was just the kind of moment when you could say too much too soon and cause yet more hurt.

  ‘But, you know, I just sat there and thought how I half killed myself to qualify and do well enough to become Maltravers’s partner, then to build up the practice into what it is today. I’ve given more than a quarter of a century to the firm that provides those ungrateful shits with their living. I’ve put my own life on hold over and over again because of work. Why? What did I do it all for?’

  ‘Money,’ she said drily, reminding herself of his preference for spiky women over sweetly passive ones. ‘Money and status and interest – and an occupation. Come on, George. It’s unutterably bloody, grossly unfair, and completely unnecessary, but it wasn’t only altruism that’s kept you working so hard. And besides—’ She broke off, watching his face harden to shut her out. Had she taken the wrong tone with him this time?

  ‘Worse things happen at sea,’ he said, heaving himself off the sofa as though he still carried the excess stones he’d shed last year. ‘I know. I just feel as though they’ve kicked me in the gut. Is there any food in this place?’

  ‘Plenty of raw materials in the fridge,’ she said, knowing how he used cooking to get rid of unbearable emotion. ‘Shout if you need an assistant.’

  He nodded, the recently revealed bones of his cheek and jaw looking sharp beneath the skin. Maybe she had made it worse. The only thing to do now was wait, without trying to comfort him, until he found his own way out of the humiliation his partners had visited on him.

  Caro couldn’t understand how Sam managed to look and sound so calm. They’d been at it in this session for four hours now, as she’d felt around for gaps in his mental armour. Each time she thought she’d found one it closed up on her before she could use it. He’d shown anger sometimes and plenty of misery but he’d never betrayed himself. All she had to show for the effort was a crunching headache and the kind of circumstantial evidence any good barrister could argue away.

  And the witness, she reminded herself. At least I’ve got my witness to the fact that he returned to his studio long before he claims and just before the witness heard the banging and screams.

  ‘Chief Inspector,’ said Frankie Amis, her voice stiff with lack of use and tiredness. ‘This is going nowhere. You’re talking round and round the same issues. My client has answered all your questions and given you satisfactory back-up to every piece of information you have demanded. It is nearly eleven o’clock. Everyone needs to sleep. Please bring this to a conclusion.’

  Caro exchanged glances with her inspector and thought of the chief super upstairs, waiting to hear that she’d done what he wanted. She thought of the highly paid shrink and her belief in what Sam Foundling’s body language and choice of words had betrayed. She thought of the CPS gatekeeper, who’d already sanctioned a charge of murder. And she thought of all the hairs, fibres, fingerprints and blood splashes the lab had proved belonged to Sam. His lawyers might claim they’d been deposited in the most innocent way possible as he tried to save his battered wife’s life, but for Caro they added to all the rest to tip the balance. Just.

  Bracing herself against all her own doubts, she said: ‘Samuel Foundling, I am charging you with the murder of your wife …’

  Sam let himself go at last and slumped forwards, letting his face hit the table with enough force to hurt. Caro winced as she continued to recite the formal wording of the charge.

  ‘And so, Trish, the hearing will be at Southwark Mags tomorrow,’ Gina Mayford said, referring to the magistrates’ court. ‘The case will automatically be sent to the Crown Court under the provisions of S51 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, and—’

  ‘I know,’ Trish said, holding the phone hard against her ear to make sure the noise didn’t disturb George, who was fast asleep at her side.

  ‘Of course you do. Sorry. I’m all over the place,’ Gina said. ‘I imagine he’ll be in police custody until then, but it’s just possible he’ll get bail. If so, I expect he’ll want to collect Felicity from you tomorrow afternoon. In the circumstances, Social Services will have to be involved, unless he’s prepared to hand her over to me. I hope he’ll see that’s the better way. So it makes sense really for me to collect her direct from you. Shall I come now?’

  Trish, reeling from the news, noticed Gina’s studied fairness and was grateful for it.

  ‘It’s kind of you,’ she said, trying to sound polite as well as keeping her voice quiet enough to prevent George waking. ‘But I can manage till he gets here. Or till we know he won’t. Why have they charged him? There wasn’t any evidence.’

  ‘The lab has come up with enough hairs, fibres and prints to convince the CPS to go for it.’

  Trish felt her breath stop, as though a plug had been put in her throat. Police officers and juries loved scientific evidence, even though it was often ambiguous.

  ‘And there’s the witness I told you about,’ Gina reminded her, ‘who saw him return to the studio moments before the sounds of battery and screaming.’

  ‘I’d forgotten. Is the witness reliable?’

  ‘It’ll be up to defence counsel to test that in court.’

  ‘D’you know who that’ll be?’

  ‘I thought probably Jake Kensal.’

  ‘He’d be ideal if you could get him,’ Trish said, thinking: You really are an extraordinary woman. There can’t be many people in your position who would use your professional knowledge and contacts to provide the chief suspect in your daughter’s murder with the best possible legal team. Maybe that’ll help Sam hold on until his trial. And maybe it’ll help him agree you should have the care of Felicity till it’s over. But if he doesn’t, I can’t give her to you.

  Gina put down the phone, wishing she’d asked what Trish had found in Cecilia’s house. Her own attempt to track Trish’s footsteps had turned up nothing but dust. It hurt to see that Sam hadn’t unpacked the baby kit and food she’d so carefully bought to ease Felicity’s first few days with him. He hadn’t even touched the parcel with the Shetland lace shawl, although it looked as though he’d moved the note she’d left. It didn’t quite fit the dust marks.

  Or had that been Trish?

  Gina wished she’d thought more carefully before asking for support and a bridge to Sam. She should have known she was laying herself open to this kind of invasion. Trish had one of the best forensic minds of her generation and Gina had let it loose on Cecilia’s life. Was she scuffling around now to find information to discredit Cecilia so Sam’s counsel could run a defence of provocation?

  Her ears hurt as her teeth ground together, shutting out her own feelings. The image she’d had of her daughter – over-scrupulous, intelligent, kind and generous – was being overtaken by someone else.

  An anger she could neither understand nor bear kept trying to make her hate Cecilia. It was as though a malign force from deep in the most primitive part of her brain was throwing up pictures of a secretive woman who’d lived two quite separate lives: the superficial life in which she would never give her mother a moment’s worry; the other, wilder, bigger, more free, and belonging to people and places she should never have known.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Sam fel
l fully clothed onto the sofa in his studio. He didn’t have the energy to pull it out to make a bed of it, or to light the stove. All he wanted now was oblivion, even if it was freezing here.

  Sleep wouldn’t come. In spite of feeling as though his skull was full of wood shavings instead of grey matter and his legs so weak they couldn’t bear his weight, he couldn’t lose consciousness. Eventually he got up, put a match to the kindling sticks already laid over the briquettes in the stove, turned on all the lights and examined the marble head he’d worked so hard to repair.

  The joins were like scars and just as obvious. They always would be, even when time had faded them, but it was recognizably Cecilia, as she’d been in the beginning when his need to be with her had been so strong it had hidden everything else.

  He stroked the white marble head as it stood on its pillar, then stepped back to see it more clearly. In her own way, she was beautiful, his wife, his love, his life. His rescuer. Beautiful in spite of the breadth of her face that had worried her so. He took another step away, liking the way the light fell slantwise across her cheekbones, making the head look almost alive, moving again. Another step brought him up against the modelling plinth, which rocked at the impact. He swung round to catch the swaddled clay head just before it fell.

  Leaving the cloths on the floor, he stared at his own hated face and drove his thumbs into the eye sockets, pulling the clay away from the chicken-wire core. There was no way he could make this head work.

  Echoes of Cecilia’s pleas during the worst of their times together sounded all around his mind: ‘Don’t be so afraid of showing your real self, Sam. You’re safe now. I love you. Why can’t you let me in?’

  He’d nearly hit her then, as her deep, kind voice bored into the shell he’d grown to cover all the things he couldn’t bear to remember. The impulse had so shocked him he’d crashed out of her tight, pretty house, and spent the next five hours walking along the canal. First he’d gone east to Canary Wharf, then when he’d run out of canal, he’d crossed over and come back on the opposite tow-path, striding on right through Islington and reaching the Paddington basin before he’d walked off his rage.

  Cecilia hadn’t been there when he’d let himself back into the house. Later he’d learned she’d gone to her mother’s. But when she came home, she didn’t mention the quarrel or his departure or whatever she’d done to try to heal herself. She’d just been ordinary, carrying on as though they were a normal couple with nothing to hide or fear. He’d loved her for it.

  Now he had most of the clay torn off the core, which he squashed under his heel and threw into the gaping black bag of waste. The clumps of clay were probably still workable, but he’d handled them too much and they must be impregnated with his sweat as well as the hatred that had filled the studio on the day she died.

  Hot water pouring over his hands stung in dozens of small cuts. He didn’t know how he’d got them, but the small hurt helped. When he was sure he was clean again, he levered a fresh chunk of orange clay off the huge plastic-wrapped block and began again.

  He was so tired the usual defences were down. He didn’t even think about where he was going or what this head would look like and he never once glanced in the mirror. His hands could do the thinking for him, and the talking too.

  Three hours later, he knew he mustn’t do any more. His legs were as useless as a pair of stuffed stockings and he could hardly drag himself to the sink to wet a new set of cloths, but he forced himself to do it. With the head protected, he let himself go and blessed sleep rolled over him, shutting out every memory and all the biting fear.

  *

  The phone woke him on Wednesday morning. Lying with his head bent at an extraordinary angle, he heard someone banging on the door too. The phone seemed less urgent. After all, there was an answering machine. Wincing as he stretched his cramped muscles, he made it to the door and dragged it open. His solicitor stood there.

  ‘I’ve just come from the Mags. You were supposed to be there at ten o’clock. You promised when I was arguing with Chief Inspector Lyalt last night and she wanted to keep you in the cells. What are you thinking of? I’d never have fought so hard if I’d realized you could be this irresponsible. What—’

  ‘Shit! I forgot,’ he said, dragging yesterday’s smelly shirt over his head. He hoped she wasn’t going to mind the sight of his hairy chest. An itch halfway down made him scratch, hard. She looked away.

  ‘There’s a taxi waiting downstairs. Put on a suit and tie. We can do the rest in the cab.’

  Four minutes later, he was following her out of the door and tying his tie at the same time. He hoped no one would get too close to him today. He needed a long, hot shower and a lot of soap. In the cab, she handed him three pieces of extra-strong chewing gum and a battery-driven razor from her handbag.

  ‘As fast as you can,’ she said to the cabbie. ‘We’re late and it matters.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can. But look at this traffic.’

  They were in a narrow road, lined on both sides with the red-and-white barriers utility companies erected to protect their workmen as they dug up the roads. Cars were hooting. A large lorry was reversing at the cross-roads.

  ‘Wouldn’t we be quicker to run?’ Sam said, at last facing the truth of what he’d risked by forgetting to set the alarm clock.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Once we’re past this crossing, it’ll go quicker. At least I hope it will.’

  Trish had risked bringing Felicity to chambers and so far it was working fine. The baby slept and evoked only sentimentally admiring attention in the few people who came into the room. Bettina was back, looking pale enough to justify her long absence with the flu, and she seemed more than familiar with babies’ routines, which was an unexpected bonus.

  ‘Shall I change her again?’ she asked, as Felicity produced another wail.

  ‘Would you? It’s hardly suitable work for a pupil barrister, but you’re much better at it than me, and she should be picked up soon. One way or the other.’

  Bettina smiled and looked transformed into someone intelligent and attractive and confident. ‘I’ve got a much younger half-sister. I’m used to it.’

  She slid one hand under the baby’s head and lifted her smoothly. Felicity’s cries stopped at once.

  Trish turned back to a comparison of the hard copy and computer files of detailed specifications for the cables that held the Arrow upright. The few paper versions Giles Somers had managed to find had at last arrived. They all described cables of the precise type and diameter listed in the specifications, on the suppliers’ invoices, and on the results of the tests Cecilia had had done once the cracking had become visible.

  ‘Shit!’ Trish said, then heard the email beep and clicked to see it on screen. It was from Giles.

  Did you get everything? Did it help?

  She typed back a yes/no response and watched it leave her computer. A half-formed idea teased the back of her mind.

  Pushing her chair away from the desk with such vigour that the wheels spun, she shot to the shelves under the window where her bag lay and in it her phone. She grabbed it and punched in the code for David’s mobile. As expected, she was answered by the automatic voicemail.

  ‘Hi. It’s Trish here. I don’t want to disturb you, but I need some help. Techie help. When you’ve got a minute.’

  She put the phone back and picked up a pencil and a torn-off piece of scrap paper, sketching something that could have been a maypole or the Arrow’s central core with the cables hanging off it. Her phone rang.

  ‘Trish?’ David’s voice was excited. ‘What can I tell you?’

  ‘Am I interrupting anything?’

  ‘No. We’re in the car.’

  ‘Okay. Is it possible for someone to monitor someone else’s laptop and see exactly what she’s typing into an email?’

  ‘Of course.’ His voice was puzzled. ‘It’s easy. You’d either put in a key logger, so that every keystroke she used popped up on your computer, or y
ou’d open a back door.’

  ‘A what? How?’

  ‘You’d send her an email with the name of someone she often had in her inbox, and an attachment.’ David was speaking patiently and very clearly, as though to a confused inhabitant of a geriatric ward. ‘When she tried to open the attachment, there wouldn’t be anything there, but by clicking on it, she’d have opened a back door into her computer, so that whenever she was online you could get in, do anything you wanted.’

  ‘How easy would it be? I mean, could you do it?’

  ‘Are you asking if I’m a hacker?’ he said, suddenly wary.

  ‘Heaven forfend!’

  ‘Fuckin’ hell, Trish. What does forfend mean?’ he said, his voice now bright with laughter.

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’ She thought this wasn’t the time to explain the taboos she hoped he’d accept before too long. It was weird, she’d decided a while ago, that words you used yourself without even thinking about them could sound seriously offensive coming from the mouth of a child. ‘How easy would it be to open a back door?’

  ‘Easy for anyone with the right stuff. I haven’t got it, but it’s not hard to get and some of it’s even legit … for companies and things to use. Of course she could stop it if she had good spyware and kept it up to date and used it properly. But lots of people don’t. And if she was using wireless technology, you wouldn’t even need to open a back door, you could just get everything that went in or out on your own laptop.’

  Of course, Trish thought. Why didn’t I think of that?

  ‘We’ve got here,’ David said. ‘D’you need any more? Or can I go with the others?’

  ‘I don’t need anything else. All okay with you?’

  ‘I’m fine. We’re having a great time. Bye.’

  Could it be as simple as this? she wondered. Did someone who’d opened a back door into Cecilia’s computer panic when he read her email to Giles Somers, asking specifically for any hard copies of documents relating to the external cables?

  And if he had done that, what else might he have done? Trish looked for another piece of scrap paper, always finding it easier to think or to demonstrate her thinking with written words and diagrams. Computers were wonderful – her work would be infinitely harder without them – but pencil and paper still felt right for some aspects of it.