A Clear Conscience Page 18

  The silences were uncomfortable. Cath could feel Helen’s disappointment and her helpless desire to make amends: it washed over her like a balm both prickly to the skin and comforting, until, within the strict confines of her ability, she relented. She spat out, in her own code, the conclusions reached on the number 59 from Knightsbridge to here. Conclusions formed while sitting on doorsteps which remained cold despite the sun, contemplating the death of still-unformed hopes.

  ‘You see? It ain’t no good at all, trying to do without a man, is it?’ she burst out. ‘No good at all. At least, as long as I had Joe, other people couldn’t push me round. Still, I suppose I’ll get used to it. I gotta get used to it, haven’t I?’

  Helen thought of Redwood, the tyrannies of work from which Emily Eliot was so immune, and frowned.

  ‘Having a man never stopped anyone pushing me around,’ she remarked.

  Cath was not listening. ‘I need something new to wear,’ she announced. That sounded positive.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ Helen agreed, no longer surprised by the illogical sequence of Cath’s announcements.

  ‘Make me feel better. You always feel better if you try. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Sure you do.’

  ‘We’re going out next Monday,’ Cath stated flatly. ‘Joe and me. For a chat.’

  ‘Is this the first time you’ve left him?’ Helen asked, sadly. Cath managed to shake her head and nod at the same time.

  ‘Once before. That wasn’t any good either. This time I gotta manage. Get myself looking nice, at least.’

  Helen thought of leaving Bailey and all the times it had been on the cards, never more so than now, because their needs seemed to have become so incompatible. That was all any of them were, men and women both, nothing but a series of needs to be met by a series of ever-more-disgraceful compromises and, in the light of that, she realised how powerless she was to help Cath in any but the most small and practical of ways. People do what they will: you cannot make them trust or do what is best for themselves.

  ‘Monday?’ she queried. ‘I suppose that’s as good a day as any. Somewhere nice? Come on, Cath,’ she was trying to be cheerful, finding it a strain, trying to break an unbreakable code. ‘Tell me, what’s your idea of a nice time? A treat?’

  Cath looked down at her bread and butter, replaced the last morsel on the plate, held it captive there in case it should escape. She felt nothing but despair. She could not think of the last time she had been happy, apart from when she had lost herself in work, or, dawdling at the Eliots’ kitchen table, had watched Jane in the garden; and that thought, more than anything, made her want to cry.

  ‘I think,’ she said, swallowing quickly, trying to emulate Helen’s smile, ‘I think my idea of a real treat is never again going on the number 59.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem much to ask,’ Helen said.

  She thought, in desperation, Is there anything I can offer to do which will help? Anything?

  ‘Does your new place have hot water, Cath?’

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice. I manage.’

  Helen imagined the vacuum of the weekend ahead. Wondered what a woman did at the top of a block on a sweltering Sunday.

  ‘If you could help me part of Saturday, Sunday too if you like, Monday if you can make it, Cath, that would be great. We’d finish everything, gloss paint the lot. Hang the curtains, put everything back. I can’t do it on my own. Then I’m sure I can get you loads more work, and anyway, there’ll still be plenty to do here. The garden for a start. OK?’

  It was the right kind of offer. Practical. Cath nodded with vigour. Helen wished she could like her. Find more in her own heart than a guilty kind of admiration. It was true what Bailey and Mary Secura both said in their separate ways. She did not understand.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘Do you know what they print at the bottom of Crown Prosecution Service letters? They’ve got this printed line. It says, “Working for Justice”. They must be out of their minds, printing that. What a nerve.’ Mary Secura stared at her own hands holding the drink, noticed her bitten fingernails and hid them under the table.

  ‘Helen West told me how she got a letter back from a bloke. Said he couldn’t see how that line at the bottom of the letter had anything to do with the rest of it. Why don’t we have something like that at the end of a letter from the police? You know, a little something to tuck inside the summons, like they give you with the big electricity bill, telling you it’s all for your own good, really.’

  Ryan smiled at Mary Secura’s mockery. ‘We used to have a recruiting slogan,’ he said, ‘years ago. “Dull it isn’t.” They put it on the bottom of posters in the Tube. Wasn’t true, either. Another?’

  Amazing how quickly his hangovers seemed to flee these days. Maybe that meant he was a real alcoholic instead of pretending, or it could have been that the two days spent in the bosom of his family since the last binge had effected a cure. More likely, it was the simpler pleasure of Mary’s company, what with both of them grousing and putting the world to rights. Ryan would have preferred Mary with hair ruffled and no clothes on at all, but a man cannot be picky. Since that sight was not on the menu so far, he was perfectly prepared to make do with the company of a woman who felt as hard done by as he did himself. There were many routes to bliss: this was only one of them. No-one ever told you what a positive pleasure it was to sit down and moan.

  ‘Think you’ll do all right with Bailey,’ he hinted. He was going to go on and add how he had put in a good word, but then avoided the chance to tell a downright lie that Mary was likely to detect. The two of them were having a pleasant evening and Ryan did not want to spoil it. PC Mary Secura was reeling from the discovery that her career was in the lap of the gods, who rated the weight of brain power and dedication rather less than perfume and a short skirt. She was remembering her admonishment, uneasily tempered by the overlong handshake, followed by the reaction of her policeman partner at home, who had acted as if she had laid a dozen men by lunchtime on a Monday: boiling with angry shock, wondering about the impact of her disgrace on his own career, all that shit. In the tide of these resentments, the face of Shirley Rix swam up like a picture of a drowned woman with her hair floating away, and with that image there swelled all the furious love Mary still felt for her chosen career and her chosen victims. Apart from the Rix incident, she had always played it by the book; now there seemed less point and she looked at Ryan with a greater appreciation of alternative methods for getting any damn thing done.

  ‘It isn’t just a job, Mike, is it? Not just nine to five, do what you can, surely not? Yes, it is, I can see it written in your face. Working for justice, hey? What a laugh. Last time I saw justice was a punch-up at a party where the right person got a fat lip.’

  Ryan sipped his drink. Not a bad pub, not as nice as the Spoon and Fiddle, source of his last hangover. He thought he might take Mary there another time provided it changed hands as well as management, since a pub owned by huge Mickey Gat and managed by a bloke he might have fingered for murder was not a place he would take a respectable girl who was spoken for. He tried to recall what Bailey had said to him the other night, about the enormous pleasure of having a conversation free of double meaning, innuendo and at least three motives. A luxury too complicated for Ryan. Speaking for himself, he never had conversations like that, especially with women.

  ‘How are you getting on with Mary Catherine Boyce?’

  He waited for her to say she thought this was a social conversation, but she didn’t. Mary mixed business with pleasure, without noticing the difference. She took work home and also out for the evening like other people would a baby. She would be hell to sleep with, Ryan thought; she would talk about work in her dreams.

  ‘Went to see her today, as a matter of fact. We had her husband in the Unit yesterday, claiming we’d kidnapped her. He’d been tearing the flat apart, he said, not a bad flat either, if you don’t mind leaks, and he’d found one of our leaflets So we cal
med him down, sent him to Everyman – clinic for violent men. But, of course, he’ll never go. Cath’s been out most of the week working, she says, and I know where, good for her, not many of our ladies work or even know how, even less their mothers, wish they did. So, we talked about getting her tenancy legal and we talked about getting benefits and I might as well have been talking to a brick wall, and then we talk about getting a solicitor so she can get a formal separation, and then, stone me, calm as a cucumber, she says she’s going out with her old man on Monday, and what should she wear? I swear to God, I could’ve killed her. What do you do? I mean, what do you do?’

  ‘Give up,’ Ryan volunteered.

  ‘Sounds about right. Not easy, but sure as hell, right.’

  Ryan had never had an abstract passion for justice. It was some moving standard way out there on the horizon while he enjoyed his job for the freedom, the powers and the occasional moment of influence. He could feel such a moment coming on, right now. He could also feel the guidance of Bailey’s philosophy, which had a rough translation along the lines of, if you obey most of the rules, most of the time and then have the patience to wait, you get them in the end. Ryan could see the advice in purely picturesque terms; an old family motto, carved wood around some old grizzled buzzard, which lent the whole idea a kind of respectability, although he himself had never quite got round to believing it. There was always a quicker way to work for justice.

  ‘Listen to what I found out about that poor cow’s husband,’ he began. Ryan forgot, in the telling, that truth was a virtue, while conjecture was not; he revelled instead in this wide-eyed, female audience far younger and sexier than many who had made him cast discretion to the wind. All right, so Bailey and he, the other morning, had dreamt up a scenario which was more acceptable as an explanation for Damien Flood’s murder than the one on record so far. The tale Ryan now told Mary included details of how he had checked with the Boyce neighbours, only to discover that Joe Boyce had indeed come home on the night of the murder much later than the times underlined in his statement and that of his weeping wife. Despite the row they made themselves, the downstairs neighbours knew that the Boyce partnership never took a bath at night, except this once, when one of them did and the bath leaked through the neighbours’ ceiling. It was the first time that had ever happened, not a leak, the sort of flood you get with an overflow: someone had left the thing running, but would they come to court and say so? Never. They had only remembered because it was the day before Giro cheques and because of Joe’s uncharacteristic humility the next moming when they mentioned it. Since then, he had reverted to type.

  Ryan did not add that he had only got thus far by threatening a full-scale drugs raid, not in his power to activate, nor did he stress that these late and unreliable enquiries were ones he might have thought to make in the first place, soon after the death. Bailey would have done so, but Bailey, at the time, had three or four major enquiries. You could get to hate Bailey’s example if you worked for him long enough, which in Ryan’s case was not yet.

  Mary Secura lit her fourth cigarette, smoking as if she only did it to make herself feel worse, a woman with a guilt problem, scratching it raw through amazement and outrage. In her company, Ryan came to share her frustration, it passed between them like a buzz. His story rendered her shell-shocked.

  ‘He kills her brother and she’s worried about what to wear on their grand reunion,’ Mary murmured. ‘If that don’t beat all.’

  There was a vision dancing before her eyes of going to the Boyce household, ringing the bell, standing back, waiting for the blood to come over the doorstep. Or going, as she had done once, to a house full of hungry blue bottles, swarming round a corpse. Cath would be one of those; the type of battered wife who goes on claiming love, ignoring the cut-off point, leaves, returns, leaves and returns until she is finally carried away in a coffin. And then the man pleads he was provoked.

  ‘Don’t suppose she has any idea of what Joe might have done,’ Ryan suggested.

  ‘Don’t suppose you have much hard fact either,’ Mary replied, but he could tell she was hooked. She could see Joe Boyce as a murderer all right. She could see all husbands as potential murderers; the job had got to her brain.

  ‘You going back to see her again? Like, over the next twenty-four hours?’ he asked.

  ‘Could do, I suppose,’ she said, stretching and yawning like a glorious, aerobic-exercised cat. Think of that in a leotard, Ryan told himself; better than no clothes at all, leotards.

  ‘Fancy a curry?’

  She seemed to recover herself, shuffle slightly like someone who had heard these unseductive lines before.

  ‘What’s your wife doing this evening, Mike?’

  ‘Spanish class.’

  ‘I thought,’ she said as she swept up her good handbag from the table, planted a kiss on his forehead and stroked his cheek in a way which made him feel dizzy, ‘she might have been home, ironing your shirts. You’re a star, Mike. Thanks for the drink.’

  Alistair Eliot went to the pub on his way home. He knew that he did not stop at the Spoon as a panacea, or even because two days without a professional cleaner had turned his house into a minefield of things on which the average man could break his neck. He stopped because he no longer wanted to get home, on account of a row with Emily which had passed all boundaries known before, and because if home was no longer a source of comfort, his conscience was worse. How could she have sacked that poor woman for stealing perfume? Perfume was simply not important enough to warrant such action against someone so loyal. In a proper job Cath would have been given warning. His anger had been one of bewilderment, a disappointment in his wife, even before he remembered that Emily had not known exactly how unfortunate Cath was. It did not matter, he had said, who possessed the perfume hidden in his desk drawer; sacking Cath still stank. Poor Cath, he had kept on repeating to Emily’s evident displeasure; poor Cath. She is not poor Cath. She smells, she’s irritating, she has bad table-manners and she’s a thief!, Emily had yelled, aggressive and defensive. A thief!

  And you are scarcely better, he said gravely, to treat her in such a fashion without a second chance or any attempt to find out the truth, listen, evaluate or learn why someone who so clearly loves and reveres you should behave in such a way, for so little.

  I gave her a hundred pounds and she took it, Emily flashed back. Isn’t that what you lawyers call an admission? Only an admission of need, he replied: supposing you were innocent as charged, wouldn’t you have taken the money? What finished it was when he told her of Cath’s situation, bereaved of a close brother, beaten by an otherwise loving husband. To Alistair’s amazement, Emily had said that made no difference at all. She was not duty bound to take on other people’s problems; she did not want them in her house any more than she wanted carpet beetles. Which all explained why Alistair went to the Spoon, with some vague and woolly idea of doing good by explanation. Or parting with another hundred pounds, something along the lines of atonement by word or deed, in full recognition that whatever he did would be clumsy. It was a cloudy, muggy evening; the flowers in the window-boxes drooped, reminders of how everything comes to an end, even summer, slipping slowly past the sell-by date. Alistair sat by their suffocating smell.

  Joe Boyce had watched his hesitant steps down the street as he stood by the mullioned windows polishing glasses. In contrast to the days before, his mood had become benign. He thought of Mickey Gat, in here yesterday, purringly kind, saying now, now, Joe, I got news for you. Joe had somehow forgotten to take offence at the fact that Mickey Gat knew the whereabouts of his wife while he himself did not: it seemed perfectly acceptable in the order of things, this female solidarity, a reminder that Mickey was one of them, after all. Condescending, yes, but also acceptable as long as Mickey Gat did not lord it, only said, humbly, that she was acting as go-between and wouldn’t it be a good idea if the two of them started all over again? Joe and Cath, starting with a clean slate and a special night out, Monday? Sh
e misses you something dreadful, Mickey Gat said; she does, really, Joe, she keeps saying so, but you gotta behave these days if you want to keep a wife, and you gotta start as you mean to go on, so next Monday, evening off, show her the town. Joe nodded, sweating with relief, trying not to laugh when the paw produced perfume again. If only Mickey would not do that, forgetting the last time and the time before.

  Over twenty-four hours, though, the facts got blurred and Joe’s old arrogance began to surface. The prospect of next Monday evening had undergone a subtle change. It was no longer a gentle, tentative experiment in which he would treat his little wife like gold dust and let her know how much he cherished her; it was becoming instead a fait accompli in which Cath returned to him and said she was sorry, ready to come home and resume normal married life there and then. Joe decided he might accept her apologies, but then again, he might not. It was not himself who required forgiveness: it was her.

  So Mr Eliot came at a good time. Joe Boyce was getting back into the driving-seat, feeling magnanimous and perfectly prepared to overlook the fact that a favourite customer had not been in for a while.

  ‘Hello there, Mr Eliot! How are you? No, stay where you are, sir, I’ll bring the usual.’ Alistair was nonplussed by the bonhomie. Joe sat with him, the same old scenario, only this time with one of them deeply uncomfortable.

  ‘I gather my wife wasn’t working for your wife last week, Mr Eliot. She was staying with relatives, you see, I hope it wasn’t inconvenient. Only one day, can’t remember which, I forgot and called with a message for her, something I wanted her to get on the way home. I talked to your daughter, silly me. Cath will be back in harness, any time now.’

  ‘Oh.’ The expression made Alistair wince.

  We are all at cross purposes, he thought, every one of us a little mad, each of us with a piece of puzzle in our hands, while the truth floats up there like that big, black raincloud. Alistair knew part of the story, Bailey knew something, Helen West another thing and this man on the opposite side of the table was in possession of his own version entirely. Alistair drank his token half pint and made small talk, thinking how you could not apologise to someone who was entirely unaware of anything deserving it, even less to a man who hit his wife. He rose to leave, giddy with confusion.