A Question of Guilt Read online

  Spindly, unprepossessing, thirty-three going on seventy and ignorant of youthful indiscretion, Lawrence had done as Lawrence misguidedly did in court, stood thinly in a fat man’s stance, legs astride, watch chain resplendent across concave stomach, thumbs hooked into the lapels of his waistcoat, jacket hanging off his shoulders, while he intoned on the law for twenty numbing minutes, revealing throughout at armpit level a large and well chewed lump of Farley’s rusk, perfectly preserved in the saliva of his youngest child. A devoted and liberal father who was proud of the fact that he bore so many of the domestic burdens of his two children, nevertheless the hideous spectacle of himself decorated with their souvenirs whilst in all the uniform of his dignity quite destroyed his confidence to the unsung relief of many. Lawrence abdicated with elegant excuses, persuaded himself he was too refined for open conflict, but still spoke and thought, not in jotting phrases, but always in fully grown sentences as if he were making a speech.

  ‘What in these circumstances, is my duty to my client? To do as she directs, of course, but advising caution … A matter entirely for her, of course. Her barrister, senior though he is, will not be informed,’ and there Lawrence paused to dwell on his dislike for Mr Quinn, whose condescension was a thorn in the side, ‘unless I am instructed to do so. I am sure Mrs Cartwright will understand. She and I have a perfectly good understanding, a meeting of minds.’ In the aftermath of a disagreement with Daintrey, and at the merest thought of Quinn’s contempt, Lawrence warmed to the thought of his client as though they were the allies they might have been, if not the way he had come to understand it, and his letter was genial.

  Eileen knew she had already achieved her object. Lying on her bunk, she tore the pages into shreds, the only way to preserve it from eyes both prying and bored, and wrote her reply.

  ‘Dear Mr Lawrence, Thank you for your letter. Please do exactly as I said in the first place. Yours, Eileen Cartwright.’

  She knew all about it, knew what a solicitor should be and shouldn’t, when they were naïve, and when not. Entering Michael’s office by chance to sort out the meagre bits and pieces of her husband’s estate, it had been quite simple. He had been pleased to see her, admired the brooch on her lapel, expressed curiosity, flattered her. Noticed her white spirit smell, contrasted it with the sweeter perfumes of Mrs Bernard, and still admired. In the wide world of her charmless life, he had gone to her head like a pint of brandy, an intoxication which survived all sickness.

  Poor Sylvia Bernard: so very far from the wicked creature Eileen had come to imagine. The lady was a trifle silly, was all: restless and bored. Michael had wanted a good little, pretty little wife, and that was what he had got. Sylvia died in the end after Eileen changed colour, forgot the original jealous impulse, and simply found it intolerable that she should stay alive. Hate conquered love without anyone realising, Eileen least of all, but she found it quite possible to be objective, whatever the object.

  Helen West knew all about objectivity, and knew that its only virtue was as a discipline to make her consistent in action, since it was quite impossible to be consistent in opinion. She had long since abandoned the notion of equality with which Lawrence was infected: knew, as he did, that the power of the client she did not like was greater than the power of the client she did, simply because of a small factor known as guilt. All that cant about legal objectivity was so much rubbish: it simply meant she would work harder for untouchables because lack of affection towards them must never show. Helen was thinking wildly and idly, the irritating mish-mash of thoughts just before sleep when molehills become mountainous, clutching at stray thoughts to keep the rest at bay. Looking at self after midnight was always a bad idea. Especially when you hated what you saw, the virtues in particular, since virtues were unloveable assets. Helen was wishing she had the strength of wickedness with none of the instinct to be good.

  Duties – life was fuller than ever of duties. Functions, office parties where absence would be an insult, gatherings where absence would be a denial of friendship, days out endured in the desire not to offend because no one deserved it. Time-consuming guilt, wanting to be liked, high-stepping funny chatting through hours of painful boredom, nicely nicotine-stained, without the faintest idea why she had bothered in the first place, knowing she was superfluous.

  Going to dinner with ex-husband and fiancée had been such a duty. Zoie, she had been called, sweet, glamorous model, good for Hugo’s image, bubbling with the relief of one who was finding a difficult evening far better than she had hoped and was content to share the honours, but not all of them. Trying to be mature, visibly relieved at the sight of Helen’s older face, handsome still, but nothing like her own juvenile perfection: she needn’t have worried after all. A well-handled initiation which had taxed Helen’s charm and left her boiling. And now another invitation, far worse, and despite the anger at her own weakness, she felt utterly obliged to attend. Standing on the sidelines at the wedding of a former husband to a younger bride had all the conventional ingredients for a crisis of confidence, but it was no simple recipe which so turned her insides upon themselves. Hugo insisted on the invitation for several reasons: first among these was the desire to show the world he was an admirable man without enemies, whose friends included an ex-wife who forgave and supported him, and it was this which infuriated her most since she did not entirely forgive him. Why not admit at least to himself that it was his wife who had prevented him from stealing from his clients, instead of pretending none of it had ever happened, not even the infidelities and the lies? She would have liked him better and kept all his secrets as she always had, but this was galling: she would not, could not do it. And knew she would, not out of love, but out of the daft desire to be stronger, and kinder, than she felt.

  She closed her eyes and concentrated on what to wear. Planning an outfit was much less depressing than examining life, so that when she heard the faint and puzzling rustlings in the garden which were now so familiar after dark, her mind was geared to other things, which skirt with what, and since the sounds were acceptable by now, she was content to ignore them.

  Sitting in his own Ford, converted to the occasional use of his employers and the glee of his children who liked to play with the radio, Ryan gave up the slow addition of his mileage expenses beneath a street lamp, wondering how it was he had drawn this particular short straw, this game of monkeys, and how soon he could stop. ‘One or two nights a week for the next five,’ Bailey had said. ‘I’d like to see if there are any comings and goings. Bernard’s house, and the place where Edward Jaskowski lives.’

  ‘But why?’ Ryan had asked, truculent at first, bitter against his normal willingness, taking Bailey’s hesitation as a sign of weakness, knowing him well enough to suspect it was not.

  ‘Why? A very slight suspicion. I can’t even call it a guess; some suggestion that life has not entirely returned to normal in either of those places? I don’t really know why.’

  ‘How are you going to justify my overtime, sir, on a hunch?’

  ‘With difficulty. Which is why some of it will have to be night duty. Only some.’

  Ryan tried again, with the control of one who knows it is already hopeless. ‘I still don’t get it, sir. Either there’s something to see, and we observe all the time, or nothing which watching some of the time wouldn’t miss.’

  ‘No, it isn’t quite like that. I’m looking for the consistent things, not the odd incidents. Movements in or around either place, who shuffles round in the vicinity, when they turn their lights off, which of them comes home late or not at all, does Bernard put out his milk bottles, and does Edward Jaskowski come home after midnight. I only want to know what someone watching either of those households would see on normal nights: I’m not expecting anything dramatic.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Yes, that’s all. I’m not hoping to find closet murderers. More a question of loose ends.’

  Man must have lost his marbles. There they were both of them, that mons
ter Cartwright and the idiot Jaskowski in the slammer, done, finished unless the jury stayed drunk, and Bailey was carping on about loose ends, like an old woman with her knitting. Mutiny had been apparent in his face.

  ‘Just do it, Ryan, will you? I’m sorry to ask, but I think it’s necessary. Someone may be getting at Bernard, for what little that may achieve.’ He smiled, and Ryan saw the order in the smile.

  ‘… And while you’re at it, could you check on Mrs Cartwright’s address? It’s been empty for three months, but if she has friends looking after it, or it’s for sale, or whatever, I’d like to know.’

  ‘The local police station would tell you that.’

  ‘Probably,’ said Bailey mildly. ‘You’d better ask them. And let them know you’re there.’

  Ryan had done both, with a surliness which provoked less help than he deserved. Detective constables on peripheral murder enquiries were privileged animals. Let them find out for themselves: no one tells us anything, and then get off our patch.

  Lighting a cigarette in the darkness, he knew he would not have objected to any of this in most circumstances, accustomed to fulfilling orders beyond his comprehension, including those which were silly by any standard, far worse than these only mildly uncomfortable directions which at least allowed him to remain warm and dry. He was no professional moaner, normally cheerful with observations in the freezing rain, all-night stands by the canal which flanked the rear of that warren of empty warehouses, waiting for the expected outside a house. He could doze with his eyes wide open, watch with them half closed, hear through the clothing layered around his head. He knew that habit of slight, silent, persistent, movement which could keep alert the muscles which screamed for rest, was half used to functioning in fatigue, the way of life of it, where sleep assumed new proportions of sheer delight.

  No, that was not the point: nor was it the point of his objection that this current kind of desultory watching had none of the advantages of his former employments when all the misery of it was shared, pooled and dissipated in the early hours grumbling and blowing on hands, and the after-hours joking even in defeat, with all the others equally raw, cold and hungry; nor did this, unlike all the similar tasks, have the dim prospect of an event, a conclusion, an arrest, or even a single moment of drama. He was watching streets, and all streets were basically the same; so were all houses when there was no purpose to it but the satisfaction of a senior officer’s whim, a work-creating scruple which was wasting precious time, and what was more, ruining his love life. That placed any other objection into a milder perspective. He could stand all risks to boredom or sanity, but she could not.

  The love life of an active, thirty-year-old detective constable, generally working hard under the anonymous cloak of central London, can be complex, and in Ryan’s case well beyond his own understanding. First, there was the wife, married when he was twenty-one, and she twenty, amidst great celebration, the obligatory disco, and a carefully chosen dress, a marvellous do, they had all said, nothing spared. He could still smile at the memory of it, never wondering why they all took weddings as seriously as they did, there being so many. Even Clarke, smallest man on the division, was married twice before he was twenty-four, big party each time, and the second wife leaving after six months. For that he had received the proceeds of two collections, and plenty of sympathy for his optimism and all the expense. Nothing at the end of the day more romantic than a copper. Wives were inevitable; you had to have one, and it was in the nature of the beast that it never understood what you did with your time, not even a WPC; never came close to knowing what it was like, never knew that the excitement of a new bathroom, a new car, or even a new baby, could not compare with running in fury, stalking in cold blood, questioning with cunning, pursuing if not glory at least satisfaction. Nor could she ever know that the trust you placed in her was minimal compared to the trust you placed in Bill, Tom, Dick or Harry to arrive when he did, to know when you needed him and he needed you. How could she know she existed at the fringe of a life so much more pressing than hers, not even a competitor with the other kinds of loyalty? She might once have heard the truism that good policemen make, of necessity, bad husbands, but not when she was nineteen, and if she had heard, would not have believed it. She wanted more: they always wanted more, and wanting an indefinable, impossible, first place in his life, was forced to ask for payment in kind instead, first sign of discontent in a second class citizen which had given them entry to the age-old, Blackmail–Overtime Tunnel.

  ‘I never see you: you don’t even know your own kids. Don’t say you’re not going to be back this weekend, it’s his birthday …’

  ‘I know, love, but it’s overtime … there’s that new carpet …’

  Without answers to that, Ryan’s once pretty and adoring wife stayed fighting, simply for his time, for some prominence, some relief from one-parent child-rearing, but not the same kind of war she had once fought. She had accepted substitutes, carpets, an extension to the house, a reasonable wardrobe, a garden, holidays, occasional meals out, and given him in the process a defeated alibi for all his non-official absences.

  He was wrong in assuming that she never guessed when the overtime excuses were working overtime themselves, since the method of his lying did no credit to a detective. He was right in assuming that she no longer cared, having educated herself and the two children into a state of semi-contented self-sufficiency. He was right, too, in the knowledge that apart from his pay packet, he was redundant in his own family life. Not introspective, far from analytical, as opportunistic as the next with a thousand-and-one examples to follow, it was then Ryan had started to keep his eyes peeled for all the other more demanding, less demanding women. They were not difficult to find. Making the choices was harder.

  Pubs. That was where you found them, hunting in pairs, you with your mate, she with hers, bored husbands finding bored wives, but not always, and pubs with music were best, mating corners, not just for the lonely. He had met the first in a pub, all drowned in sound and crowd, happy with beer, eager for jokes, loving each other, more than content to meet again another night, same place, same time, same row, same masks. Night three, by prearrangement with your minder, unless he was having less luck, you paired away, and found somewhere, there was always somewhere, women out for a good time could always find you somewhere. The soullessness of it never occurred to him, nor did the fact that the designs might not have been common, to say nothing of the desires, but he was too good-humoured to encounter much resentment, too ready with laughter, too lacking in embarrassing insistence, and if there was a hint of pique, there were always other pubs. The moving tribes of London moved, stopped for a week or two, then moved on, not without accidents of unreciprocated lust which he learned to avoid. ‘Never tell them your real name, or where you work, and never tell them you’re married,’ was the sterling advice he invariably followed. With scant enough information to equip pursuit, and all the inhibition of wounded pride or possessive husbands, Ryan’s ladies had left him fairly free; those, that was, who had ever wanted more than he offered. Perhaps in a year or two the circle would become too small, but already he was finding the lack in it. Practice was not making perfect, conquest was not its own reward: it was Romance with a capital ‘R’ he craved rather than exercise, and all of Ryan’s uncharacteristic sulkiness was because of the awful fact that he had found it.

  Possibly the pubs themselves had made the more complex version of love so unlikely. Legs might have revealed themselves in pubs, but hearts did not above the pulse of sound and cliched words, and all the smells of the wilfully, temporarily homeless. Maybe Ryan had needed a quiet meeting, one to one, in order to find Romance. As in pleasant house-to-house enquiries in the days after Mrs Bernard’s death, leading him inexorably towards the nanny two doors away, who had greeted him in company with two baleful infants, quickly informing him they were not hers. That was Annie, whose face was not worth the launching of ships, nothing splendidly slim or awesomely statues
que about the body either, more like the one worn by his wife, but younger. Twenty, to be exact. She was no legendary Swedish au pair, no pouting French help, but Annie from Bristol, soft West Country accent, first job away from home, missing her mother, kind lady employer, but lonely all the same. ‘It’s big, London, isn’t it?’ was the first remark which enchanted him, the second her statement that she only knew boys below the age of three, but of course her most interesting contribution, if only initially, had been the description of the man carrying the gift-wrapped parcel. ‘Very funny, that,’ she had told him, ‘very sloppy, you know? If he’d wrapped it himself, he needed lessons. Could have done a lot better myself. It was a funny shape, and he looked worried, big fellow. You don’t suppose it was a gun, do you?’ Ryan had reported back, returned to take a statement: ‘Come up to my room, will you?’ And to her room, private from the rest of a liberal household, Ryan had been returning again and again, armed with gifts and flowers, light on his feet as he bounded up the stairs, blessed by the lady of the house who considered that a happy nanny would stay longer. The odd part about it, and the facet of it which he considered least, was the fact that she recounted all the tales Ryan’s own wife might have loved to have told once, given the chance. The only difference was that Annie and he lay naked on a bed too narrow while Annie regaled him with stories of precocious two-year-olds, and he listened to the domestic triumphs and disasters of her day, spellbound by traumas he would never have credited. ‘It’s a very responsible job, you know,’ he told her, ‘looking after kids; I mean, I never realised …’ Ryan’s wife would have wept. Ryan’s murder enquiries lasted all night. The lady of the house smiled indulgently: Annie bloomed out of her state of almost complete ignorance of the opposite sex, and wrote her mother that she had fallen in love. Ryan told no one, and his condition was agonisingly similar.