A Clear Conscience Read online

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘You what?’ She was furious. ‘You knew, and didn’t tell me?’ She handed him a glass of beer with an expression which made it clear she would rather have thrown it.

  ‘Whoah, now, climb off that high horse. I only knew recently and because of something else entirely. Background material. Remember me talking about that murder a week or so ago? The brawl? The victim was Cath’s brother.’

  ‘Well sod you, Bailey. Aren’t you good with a secret? I suppose you would have told me if I’d given my keys to a homicidal maniac?’

  ‘Look, don’t be stupid. If you or I handle confidential information because of what we do for a living, that’s what it’s supposed to remain: confidential. Of course I would have told you if I’d known before you hired her, but she hasn’t done anything wrong, has she? She didn’t confide her family history to you or Emily Eliot, why should I? What difference does it make?’

  ‘The whole bloody difference between knowing something and not knowing. And the fact that you seem to assume I’d broadcast the information on a loudspeaker, along with details of where I’d heard it.’

  ‘I never said that. I didn’t even think it, either.’

  ‘Christ, Bailey, I sometimes wonder if you’re hiding a clandestine wife and a tribe of kids. Anything else you’d like to tell me, such as you’re leaving for Timbuctoo in the morning and it slipped your mind?’

  ‘OK, OK. I’m sorry.’

  He was not sorry: he was angry; and the fact that it was an anger without rhyme or reason only made it worse.

  ‘What should I do to help her?’ Helen demanded.

  ‘Nothing. There’s nothing you can do. Besides, your friend and Ryan’s friend, PC Mary Secura, might call on her. I just want someone to get inside that house. Don’t ask me why either, because I don’t really know. Do you think we could drop this conversation?’

  He had finished a glass of the amber liquid, still in the jacket he had worn against the rain. In the shambles of the flat, he had no desire to take it off. The cleanliness and order of his own home was suddenly appealing.

  ‘Do you want some help?’ he asked diffidently.

  ‘No, thanks,’ she replied with equal diffidence.

  ‘What shall I do, then?’

  ‘Sit and read the paper, but since you’re itching to go home, perhaps that’s an option you’d like to consider. I was going to get cleaned up and take you out for supper.’

  ‘But you’re not quite ready yet, and you’d really rather clean your house?’

  They stood glaring at one another for a minute. Then he nodded and turned to leave, the dignity of his exit marred by the chest of drawers and the need to breathe in to get by. That small idiocy made her smile for a minute, but only until his footsteps died.

  Oh, shit. The understated disagreement was worse than any row. She wandered into the red-walled living room, still fuelled by anger, and stood there listening for his car, while a small voice told her, You know him by now, you might also know he keeps things from you, and in all fairness you do the same to him. But she had looked forward to seeing him, she always did, and there had been a particular desire to talk to him this evening: he was a fair, kind and honourable man and he would have made suggestions to soothe her sense of inadequacy even if the advice in the last resort was simply to live with it. And if she was honest, the bit about not being a wee wifey had gone home like a well-aimed arrow. What was she supposed to do for the pleasure of his company? Comb her hair, paint her face, recline in négligé with Vivaldi in the background and a kitchen smelling of coffee?

  The steam had gone out of the cleaning. She looked at the emptiness of the living room, the marks on the walls where the pictures had been, the gouging of the nails making it resemble a gangsters’ hideaway where the walls were peppered with shot. When Bailey finally went, which surely he would in the absence of either the commitment or the support which were the vital plant food to any kind of relationship, would he leave his mark? Would there be rectangles of faded patches in her life, imprints all over her body, like a rash, to indicate where he had been? Would she just carry on? Should she fight the inevitable, become an Emily? For the moment, she could only follow instinct. Clean the walls. Offer practical help to Cath. In that order.

  Blue and yellow curtains, this time next week. Ceilings, tomorrow.

  Joe was not the only one good at hiding things. He had been quiet last night, home late, hunched over the TV, refusing the sandwich she had made, so silent she hadn’t dared speak. It was often thus after conflict, a complete withdrawal by them both until finally one reached toward the other in shy desperation. A cold reaching out; a brush on the arm, a cup of tea accepted with mumbled thanks, a comment ventured on the weather. And then a few halcyon days of sweet normality until the whole cycle began again. It was only the drink, plus the terrible fact that he seemed to require a level of fury to complete the act of love with her. She supposed it was the scar, it put him off; he liked to touch it but then he was repelled. On that one time the policewoman in the plain skirt came round, the one whose voice she occasionally ordered by phone when she played with the answer machine, well that girl had not made a lot of sense, but on the other hand, Cath could still remember everything she said. Don’t say he only hits you because of drink, she had announced. It’s him and the drink, don’t you see? Other people drink and simply go to sleep, or buy their wives perfume, or cuddle the cat. Against her better judgement Cath had laughed, explaining irrelevantly that the man could not stand cats and as for perfume, he was allergic to that and, really, he was a good man most of the time. Your choice, the woman had said. Yes, it is, Cath had replied. My choice. Everyone has a cut-off point, the woman had said, let us know when you get to yours.

  Cath would never have cut off from Joe. Unless Damien had asked. Until now.

  They both hid things from each other: the small objects which would cause trouble. It began with his army memorabilia, preserved against the call to arms he would always crave, since, despite the disappointments, he had loved military life and dreamed of it still. Like everything he did, the memorabilia collection was half-hearted: uniforms, caps, badges, in the main, bayonets, all cheap to buy, cheap to sharpen into usefulness, until, of course, Joe’s horror of the second-hand and the discovery of how many thousands of others did it, made him desist and hide the small collection with a suggestion of shame, since she had always loathed it. Most of it had long since gone over to the Spoon. There had been days when he did as she asked. She did not know whence that syndrome had fled, only that it was long gone. Gone even before Damien died.

  Cath never said ‘killed’. She only said ‘died’.

  She breathed deeply. In the attics sound was muted: reduced to a steady thump from downstairs and the steadier drip from the residue of the rain through a point in the ceiling. Boxes had been moved from the floor beneath. Nothing could be allowed to happen to Joe’s hammock until they had two trees, or the grass strimmer until they had a hedge, and Oh, the waste of it all. She had placed the shrine by the window, on a dry space on the floor surrounded by Joe’s goods, in the hope it would lie undisturbed. Now the flowers, admittedly dying when last she had tended them, bore the imprint of a foot; there were stains on the wooden floor indicating the colour of the pansies taken from Helen West’s garden. The photos had gone. The candle she had lit in the hope of bringing Damien back, like a moth to a bright flame, lay on the window ledge. Cath touched a fresh set of livid bruises on her thigh. They were not important. It was the desecration of memory which was the cut-off point.

  From far down below came the cracked sound of the doorbell. Cath did not panic. She moved downstairs out of the attics, slowly and demurely. It no longer mattered who it was.

  I’m mad, said Mary Secura to herself. And I wish that meant I was bad and dangerous to know. She had the good leather handbag slung across her chest, and was oddly grateful for the raucous beat emanating from the ground floor. The door sprang ope
n; a voice shouted from upstairs. Mary followed the sound, away from the life below, fishing in her bag for a card, a leaflet and the radio which would signal help into a well-deserved silence.

  The door at the top was open. ‘Hello?’ she called with a false gaiety, looking into a hall and the room beyond, both impeccably clean. The woman appeared, long curly hair round her shoulders, surprisingly smiling. She was dressed in a dull skirt and long-sleeved white blouse; no sign of neglect, perfectly normal, but stooping.

  ‘Don’t mind me if you’re busy,’ Mary said, extending her warrant card. ‘Only I’m from the Domestic Violence Unit. For a chat, if that’s all right. Any chance of a cup of coffee?’

  This neat little person showed no symptom of alarm. Cath thought she had guessed the reason for this call. It was all down to that Miss West, and while yesterday she would have resented this breach of promise not to tell, this manifest interference in her life, today she did not mind such an act of fate. Her smile grew. Mary was confused, taken aback by such docility.

  ‘I don’t have any coffee,’ Cath said, ‘only tea. What time is it?’

  ‘Nine thirty.’

  ‘Well, I suppose we’ve got time. Only he comes back around midnight, and I’ve still got to pack.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Mary, ‘I mean fine. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Put the kettle on, I suppose, since you wanted a drink. Then give me a lift to my brother’s place. I’ve always kept the key, you see.’

  ‘You’re leaving?’ said Mary. ‘Now?’

  ‘What do you think I said?’

  ‘Where will you go?’ Mary was nonplussed, awkward, wondering just what situation she seemed to have precipitated and whether the woman was sick in the head.

  Cath was impatient, she seemed to imagine Mary had come armed with an agenda in perfect accord with her own.

  ‘I’ve got a place to go, I told you. My brother’s.’

  ‘Look,’ said Mary.

  ‘Oh, all right then,’ said Cath, turning away. ‘I’ll walk or get the bus. It’s only one stop, but I’ve got a few things to take.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Mary desperately. ‘Do you want to make a complaint against your husband?’

  ‘What would I want to do that for?’

  ‘Then why are you leaving?’

  ‘That’s none of your business. Are you going to help or not?’

  Mary thought of Shirley Rix. Shirley had been slow with explanations and the help had still come too late.

  ‘I’ll help,’ she said. ‘Forget the tea.’

  The Eliots’ small garden had become scrubland, resembling a poor football pitch after a long season without rain. Now it was swampy, the way Jane Eliot liked it best. She had added to the demise of the remaining flower-beds by jumping out of her bedroom window, conveniently on the ground floor at her own insistence. The route out of her window and round to the back door which led, via a corridor, back into the house, was one she could repeat again and again, flinging herself out from the edge of her bed, running back, doing it again, for no purpose other than a slight thrill. This evening, dressed in nightie, she paused in the twilight to rescue a remaining flower, without apology for having crushed the rest in weeks of indifference.

  People dug in the ground and hid things. Her friend Susan had a dog which hid bones in their garden. Jane was in possession of stolen goods herself and, while the theft had been easy (from the bottom drawer of Daddy’s desk, where he kept small surprises for them all, especially for Mummy), conscience had this way of creeping up. Jane loved perfume, always had to beg for it, as well as other grown-up indulgences, and she did not see why. So she had taken the biggest boxes she could find. The earth seemed a good enough place to preserve the contraband, ready for transfer to school at the end of these long holidays. While Mark and the others shouted over a game in the kitchen, Jane scrabbled with her hands at the soil below her window. Just as it was occurring to her that she would find it impossible to disguise all this dirt on her front and would have to invent something to explain it, she struck gold.

  Not gold exactly, but a golden justification of very base metal. An old something or other; she could say she had been mining. Perhaps it was worth a fortune, and ugghh! Worms! She pulled the thing out of the hole she had made, dropped it and stood back, squinting in the dying light. It was a dagger, something like that, it had a handle like a sword and a metal sheath, rusty, unpleasant to the touch. Jane looked round, then moved three yards away and quickly dug another hole, a shallower grave for the Givenchy.

  Then she carried the bayonet indoors and found she was wrong. Neither parent thought it was anything special and in no way did the discovery excuse the dirt. So she went to bed in mild disgrace and clean clothes. The bayonet remained in the kitchen. They were not alarmed: it could have been there for ever, although Emily remarked that the blade had been sharpened once.

  Alistair suggested they could use it to poke the fire in winter. His parents had done the same. They did not listen to Jane when she said maybe it came from the man who had crept into the garden. The one who was scared of perfume.

  It was a good tale to tell, raising the spectre of the bogeyman who no longer gained her the attention he had, but it was like all good tales. No-one believed you.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Pre-trial conferences. Ryan hated them. Going over old ground with a new barrister who pretends he understands it. Bailey, looking both aggressive and uncertain, and a timid young man from the CPS taking notes.

  ‘This is the way I see it,’ Bailey announced. ‘No, more like the way I smell it. Feel it, if you like,’ he added, noticing the expression on Ryan’s face at the mere mention of intuition. ‘Like I feel egg coming down all over my face.’

  ‘Well I understand why you find it so unsatisfactory,’ Alistair Eliot remarked. ‘But it’s too late, isn’t it? I mean the way it’s been delivered to me, your investigation is complete. Trial date set, only a month away. Trail gone cold and hardly time for further enquiries now. Of course it isn’t entirely fair. There were three men involved in the fight, on either side. The three who came back to collect the money they’d lost had weapons: pool cues, a knife or two. The other three, including the dead man, Damien Flood, weren’t armed, unfairly disadvantaged, you might say.’

  Ryan considered the relative sizes of the men and the boys, and shook his head. Fights between drunks were never equal.

  ‘Damien Flood doesn’t seem to mind the disadvantage, according to one of his friends. He wades in, gets into a close scuffle with our defendant, who manages to hit him on the side of the head, and he reels back. His friends are so big that they’ve frightened one youth and disarmed another. They leave Damien, take up the chase. They catch the one who grappled with the deceased. With remarkable restraint, they merely slap him, find out where he lives and let him go. Then they go back and look for Mr Flood, who seems to have gone home. He is not where they have left him, slightly hurt, as they thought. They go to Damien’s bedsit. No sign. They back-track through the leisure centre. Find him there. Call the police.’

  Alistair shook his head. He was in formal role, sitting in chambers: a small room, shared with three others, crammed with books. Ryan considered a barrister ludicrous without wig and gown, found himself shocked at the sight of an obvious scorch mark on a shirt, noticed how the man’s hair lay flat against his skull as though waiting for the headpiece. Then Alistair caught Ryan’s scrutiny and smiled with such unfeigned sweetness that the other man blushed.

  ‘Anyway, ‘ Alistair continued, ‘because Damien’s friends knew where the youth they had pursued actually lived, he was arrested. He has always refused to say who the other two of his gang were and is adamant none of them, bar himself, carried a knife. He’s also adamant he only used it to inflict a scratch, but the evidence,’ he glanced at a lurid photograph on the desk, blenched slightly, ‘is clearly to the contrary.’

  ‘A little flick knife,’ Bailey murmured.

  �
�Not enough to do damage like this, you mean?’ Alistair asked gently.

  ‘The pathologist says possibly, but only with considerable force. Since we don’t have the actual knife, only one identical to the one the boy describes, who can say?’

  We should have found that knife, Bailey thought. The boy said he chucked it away, can’t remember where, but showed us an identical one he kept at home.

  ‘In any event,’ Alistair continued, ‘it makes little enough difference. We aren’t putting the case on the basis that this boy was totally responsible. We’re putting it on the basis that our defendant went away and armed himself, on his own admission. He came back to the scene intending to do serious bodily harm. In the ensuing fight, a man was killed. We do not need to prove anything else, but the intention to do serious injury. If death results, even by recklessness, it is murder. That’s the law. Murder does not necessarily involve an intention to kill. Even if his compadres were equally guilty, it does not make this one innocent of murder. What egg on face do you mean, Mr Bailey? It seems to me you have done the best you can.’

  Surnames here. No first-name terms in this set of chambers, not like at home, laughing over the Eliots’ kitchen table.

  Alistair spread his hands. ‘But,’ he said, ‘having told you I don’t see this case as anything other than straightforward, albeit stuffed with dissatisfaction, leaving the defendant free to blame his absent friends, I must now tell you that I am walking away from it. The CPS agrees someone else should take over. We juniors are easily interchangeable, you know,’ he added, noting Ryan’s look of disgust. Fickle bunch of bastards, Ryan thought. They take on a brief and all that money, then they dump you in the shit almost at the door of the court.

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ Bailey was saying, giving Ryan a stern glance before relenting and explaining. ‘Didn’t I tell you, Ryan? Damien Flood’s sister works for Mr Eliot’s wife. It all gets a bit personal, see?’