A Greater Evil Page 7

  He’d lived in the studio’s one room, he’d told her, until five years ago, when he’d married Cecilia and moved into her house in Islington. He and Trish had been so close geographically for so long they must often have passed in the street, unaware of the links between them.

  Steve was waiting for her in chambers. He didn’t bother with any polite frivolities, such as a greeting.

  ‘Now that Ms Mayford is dead,’ he said abruptly, ‘the loss adjusters need to regroup.’

  ‘Have they appointed a successor already?’ It was a question she hadn’t wanted to make within Sam’s hearing. ‘Talk about dead men’s shoes!’

  ‘I doubt if they’ve made a formal appointment, but someone has to handle her caseload. Because of the size and complexity of this one, they’ve allocated it to her boss, Dennis Flack. His secretary says you’ve met him.’

  ‘Once, right at the beginning. I didn’t take to him. And he had all the short-man’s Napoleonic arrogance, so I’m surprised he’s prepared to have the meeting here.’

  ‘I insisted on it,’ Steve said, ‘knowing you had this other private business to sort out. You’ve got just under an hour to review the papers. I hope that’ll be enough. The tigers are getting hungry, you know.’

  Faced with his habit of quoting Churchill’s speeches whenever he thought she was slacking, Trish wanted to get back to the comfortable solitude of her own room as fast as possible. Steve had no need to worry: the London Arrow and its perplexing movement was in the back of her mind all the time. Now Cecilia was dead, it seemed even more important to win the case for her.

  In Trish’s room, her desk was piled high with papers. The sight made her think more kindly of her pupil’s return. It was often a nuisance to have a scared or arrogant baby barrister with you all the time, wanting to know what you were doing, needing to be taught and given tasks to occupy her day after day until she knew enough to be let loose on a small but real case. The brighter, tougher sort could be useful, but there had been times when the current one, Bettina Mole, had made Trish think of the toddlers she’d seen clinging to their mothers’ clothes so tightly the poor women couldn’t even go to the lavatory alone.

  Still, Bettina wasn’t bad at filing and she was clever enough. No one had ever been offered pupillage in 2 Plough Court without exceptional brains. Once she’d gathered a little confidence she’d probably be useful in more ways than tidying papers. The trick would be to give her the confidence without muffling her necessary self-doubt or the urge to watch and learn. Trish had so far had her for two weeks, which meant there were twenty-two to go before she could hand her on to the next pupil master. Maybe she could ask for a break then. Presumed to be a soft touch, she was nearly always given the wobbly pupils.

  She switched on her laptop and carefully reacquainted herself with all the arguments the other parties had used to explain their refusal to agree a settlement. There had been representatives of QPXQ (the Arrow’s new owners), the main contractors who had actually built it, and the three separate professional-negligence insurers covering the construction company, the consulting engineers and the architects, as well as someone from each of their partnerships, and of course the crowd of lawyers.

  She had all the unhelpful facts marshalled in her brain by the time Steve phoned to say that Dennis Flack was already in the library with an assistant and Giles Somers, the solicitor.

  Trish arrived just as Dennis unilaterally declined the offer of tea for all four of them. She shook hands with him, holding on to his a little longer than usual as she said how sorry she was about Cecilia’s death.

  Dennis nodded abruptly, pulling his hand away and stepping back, as though he didn’t like being reminded he was shorter than Trish. His square jowly face seemed full of rage until she looked more carefully and saw signs of misery. The pouches around his dark eyes were swollen, and his broad shoulders were slumped so that they seemed to have shrunk. ‘I have to try not to think about her; otherwise I lose it completely. Can we keep this strictly business?’

  ‘Sure,’ Trish said, surprised by his unexpected sensitivity. She turned to Giles, a pleasant-looking grey-haired man in his early fifties, who’d been helpful and efficient throughout the progress of the case. ‘I’m so glad Leviathan aren’t worried about the conflict of interest.’

  ‘This is the first I’ve heard of any conflict,’ Dennis said in a voice like a barking guard dog. Trish made hers as soothing as possible and explained.

  ‘How exceptionally inconvenient. You ought to have warned us of this as soon as the takeover was mooted.’

  ‘Come on, Dennis,’ said Giles, clearly puzzled by his reaction. ‘It’s a pretty tenuous connection. I’ve already advised Leviathan that there’s nothing to worry about. And there’s no way Ms Maguire’s relationship could affect your interest in the case.’

  ‘Great,’ she said, smiling at the assistant Dennis had brought with him but not bothered to introduce. ‘Hi, I’m Trish Maguire.’

  ‘Hello,’ said the assistant, without offering her own name or even a smile. She did manage to shake hands with Trish, who instantly wished she hadn’t. The other woman’s palm was clammy and she barely moved her muscles as Trish gripped her hand. It felt like a raw squid.

  ‘Oh, this is Jenny Clay,’ Dennis said, not looking at her. Trish put extra warmth into her smile to make up for his rudeness, resisted the temptation to wipe her hand on her trousers and set about taking control of the meeting.

  By the time she had relayed all the information they could possibly need, Trish’s tongue was sticking to the roof of her mouth between each word and her throat felt like the Sahara, but the atmosphere of the meeting had improved a little. She reached forwards to fill a tumbler with water from the jug. It tasted flabby and much too warm.

  ‘That’s all very clear,’ Dennis said, slapping his papers into a neat rectangle. ‘We’ll have to run through Cecilia’s calculations again, but otherwise we’ll simply take up where she left off.’

  Jenny sighed, then blushed as Dennis glared at her with such patronizing reproof that Trish flashed another comforting grin in her direction. A hint of gratitude showed in her eyes, before she lowered her lids again and presented an even more scared and miserable front. Trish watched and took mental notes. She hadn’t expected to dislike Dennis quite so much.

  ‘After all, Trish,’ he said, with an edge that suggested he was about to punish her for her wordless interference, ‘the answer to why the building is moving must be there in the files, and it’s a ludicrous waste of your expensive time to be ploughing through data you don’t understand and are ill equipped to interpret. We’ll get back to you when we’ve completed our checks. I think that’s it for today. When we know where we are, we can move forward.’

  ‘Good,’ Trish said, careful to hide her sense of insult.

  However difficult she might have found the engineering principles and calculations, she was entirely capable of getting to grips with them. She’d learned and then forgotten far more complex stuff than this. Every barrister had to. If you didn’t understand everything about the subject at the heart of an action, you weren’t doing your job. And you’d never be able to cross-examine witnesses effectively.

  ‘Before you go, Dennis, may I ask you one thing about poor Cecilia?’ she asked with an entirely false smile.

  ‘If you must.’ He waved the others ahead of him. When Giles and Jenny had left the room, he added, ‘I suppose you want to know whether I think her mad husband did it.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I was going to say, but it sounds as though you think he did.’

  ‘I’m sure of it. I’ve known and worked with Cecilia Mayford for nine years.’ He puffed out his chest and began to declaim, as though he were giving the address at her funeral. ‘She was one of the calmest, kindest, brightest women I have ever known. And the most generous.’

  Trish’s smile became more natural. Maybe his posturing and aggression were no more than a front to cover grief.

&n
bsp; ‘Watching her since she fell for Foundling,’ he added, his neck and jaw tensing so his voice was constricted too, ‘I’ve seen her good nature stretched beyond bearing. He really put her through it.’

  ‘Yet she always talked about him as though she loved him,’ Trish said truthfully, ‘and he seems distraught by what’s happened.’

  Dennis shrugged and took a step towards the door. ‘I don’t suppose that would be too hard to fake.’

  ‘Maybe. In any case, I wasn’t going to ask you about him. I wanted to know about the man who’s been harassing her at work.’

  ‘Harassing Cecilia? Nonsense! We have powerful anti-sexist, anti-bullying policies in place, like everyone else these days. It wouldn’t have been allowed. Where did you get such a weird idea, Trish?’

  ‘I heard it came from one of your colleagues, but I don’t know who.’

  ‘Sounds like silly secretarial chatter to me. And wholly unlikely. I must go. Jenny will get back to you when we’ve been through all Cecilia’s files.’

  When he’d followed the others out of the library, Trish took her papers back to her room, thinking his idea of bullying might be different from hers. She quickly typed up notes of the meeting so she could return to Sam. There was plenty of work here to give her an excuse to stay in chambers, but the thought of him scrubbing away at his wife’s blood told her she had to go back to help.

  Before she left chambers, she picked up the phone to call Caro Lyalt, not sure whether she wanted an apology for the way Caro had treated them both this morning, or an opportunity to offer her own excuses for interfering. She and Caro had been friends for so long that it felt uncomfortable to be at odds with her like this. But Caro could look after herself in this situation and Trish didn’t think Sam could.

  To her surprise, she was put straight through once she’d found the phone number of the incident room.

  ‘Well?’ Caro said, tension rattling in her voice. ‘Have you phoned to offer cooperation or a complaint?’

  ‘Neither. Come on. This is me.’

  There was a long pause, which Trish didn’t even try to break. She had enough faith in Caro to believe all would be well in the end.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ It wasn’t a generous apology, but it was there. ‘I shouldn’t have been so angry this morning. It was just seeing you on your knees slaving for my chief suspect, getting between me and the truth on a case I absolutely have to solve.’

  ‘I’m not getting between you and the truth, Caro. All I’m doing is giving a bit of support to a very lonely man at a time of maximum horror for him. You can’t grudge him that.’

  ‘Will you tell me why he came to see you in chambers the day his wife was beaten to death?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? He’s not your client any longer, Trish, even if he was as a child. There’s no privilege involved now.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ she said, realizing that Gina must already have told Caro everything she knew about Sam’s background, ‘but he talked to me in confidence. Neither he nor I have any legal obligation to tell you. If he wants it kept confidential, I can’t gainsay him.’

  ‘Gainsay? It’s not like you to be so pompous unless you’re trying to hide something. What is it?’

  ‘Nothing. Caro, think what you’re doing to him. Here’s a man so isolated it makes my whole skin shrivel to think of it, who’s found his wife dying and knows their baby may die too. He’s well aware you suspect him. Are you surprised he doesn’t want to tell you anything he doesn’t have to?’

  ‘If he’s innocent, he has nothing to fear from us,’ Caro said, pompous in her turn.

  Trish laughed, with a bitterness that shocked her and silenced Caro. Into the crevasse that had opened between them, Trish dropped a reminder of some of the famous cases in which innocent suspects had had their lives ruined by the police’s misguided attempts to get them convicted.

  ‘None of those have anything to do with me or the officers working with me,’ Caro said, more hurt than angry now. ‘We have no interest in anything except getting to the truth. By encouraging Foundling to keep silent, you’re stopping us.’

  ‘You know perfectly well that’s nonsense,’ Trish said. ‘In a state like his, it would be easy to say something that could be taken out of context later and used to make him look guilty, even if he’s not.’

  ‘Then it will be the job of his defence counsel to make that clear.’

  ‘He’s not on trial yet.’ Suddenly what had been nasty sparring between friends became much more urgent. ‘Caro, listen to me. I’m only trying to give him the kind of support you or I would automatically get from our families and he has never had. He’s had more to put up with than either of us could possibly imagine and he’s turned himself into someone of such creativity, he—’

  ‘I can’t bear all this, “I’m an artist so I’m too important for you to touch” stuff,’ Caro said, almost spitting down the phone. ‘I’ve had all that from his agent, from the dealer who sells his work, and from someone at the Arts Council. For a lonely man he’s remarkably well supported. He has half the arts establishment of London fighting his corner. He doesn’t need my best friend too.’

  ‘Oh, Caro,’ Trish said, half her resistance melting. ‘Try not to hate him. If you do, you’ll never see the truth even if it hits you in the face.’

  ‘Has he told you about the life insurance?’ Caro’s voice had softened too. ‘That poor woman, who married him in spite of all the warnings she was given about how dangerous he could be, took out a colossal policy when she got pregnant.’

  Trish began to feel cold. ‘In his favour?’

  ‘No. In favour of her unborn child. Makes you think, doesn’t it? She wrote a codicil too, to be sure the payout would go to the baby, not her husband. The will she signed on marriage leaves everything else to him, including her professional death-in-service benefit and her house in Islington. She knew her death would make Sam Foundling a rich man. This shows she wanted to be certain their child would have enough of her own money to be independent of him.’

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ Trish said, trying not to see what Caro was telling her.

  ‘Back to your scrubbing for my suspect?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘I’d warn you to beware of getting too close to him if I didn’t think you’d sneer. Can I trust you to tell me if you hear or see anything?’

  ‘Don’t ask me to spy for you.’

  ‘You’d shield a murderer, Trish? You, of all people? Maybe you should see the photographs of Cecilia Mayford’s body before you get too hung up on this mission to support the man who killed her. Shall I send you a set?’

  Trish gripped the phone hard, as though that could help her hold on to her belief in Sam’s innocence. ‘When I see evidence that he was the one who battered her, I’ll help you. Not till then.’

  ‘Why are you behaving as though you owe him something? It should be the other way round.’

  ‘I must go,’ Trish said, thinking: I do owe him. He trusted me and believed I cared about him, while I never gave him another thought once the case was done.

  When she’d cut the connection she thought of all the things she’d like to have said to Caro, explanations of why it was so important for Sam to have people on his side for as long as possible. Cecilia was now beyond help. Giving him the benefit of doubt wasn’t going to hurt her any more. Even if, in the end, he were proved to have killed her, the only way he could ever be rehabilitated would be to remember that there had once been people prepared to support him.

  Sam greeted Trish with a wary expression that held only the smallest hint of a smile. ‘I didn’t think you’d come back.’

  ‘I hate leaving jobs undone,’ she said, then winced as she remembered Cecilia’s saying exactly the same to her.

  ‘There’s not much more to do,’ he said, gesturing to the floor. ‘You made such a good start I carried on after you’d left. And all the filthy fingerprint dust has gone. There’s only ordinary cleaning l
eft.’

  ‘Will you be able to work here again?’

  Sam shot a look at her, full of suspicion, then calmed down as though he could see the question was genuine.

  ‘I don’t know. Work’s always been a refuge before; I don’t know whether this will … I want to do another head before I forget. She … I’ve got another piece of the same marble. Carrara. I won’t be able to make it the same, but there’s a chance if I start now I’ll catch something of how she was before … before it happened. Does that seem callous?’

  ‘God, no! Brave. It sounds as though you don’t need me now. I’ll get off home. Look, Sam …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know whether you have plans for Christmas, but George and I are doing it this year in my flat, which is only just round the corner from here. It’ll be a bit of a scrum because we’re having his mother and mine, and my young half-brother’s aunt, uncle and their two boys from Australia. If you’d like to come, we’d love to have you.’

  He stared, as though he couldn’t understand her. She hadn’t meant to say anything like it and wondered whether she was mad, and whether George would go mad when he heard what she’d done. She tried to blank both thoughts with the knowledge that it was lucky Caro and Jess were going to Jess’s brother. There was no way Caro could have shared a celebration with this man.

  ‘I was … I don’t know,’ he said. ‘We were going to Gina’s, but now … I don’t know. And the baby may be out of hospital by then. I don’t know.’

  ‘There’s no need to decide now. But I’ll give you the address so that if you’d like to come on the day, you’ll know we want you. And the baby if she’s well enough.’

  He put a hand over his mouth. The colour in his cheeks deepened and deepened. Trish thought he looked furiously angry again and tried to think of a way of mending whatever she’d done this time. Then she saw tears in his fierce eyes for an instant before he turned away. He’d been rejected over and over again. No wonder he didn’t know how to respond to the opposite.