Revelling in a security that would once have seemed wildly beyond her grasp, Trish let herself into the flat and tripped over a large, dirty trainer. As she regained her balance and stared at the offending shoe, she considered the few aspects of life with her half-brother she could have done without. Then she thought of the slight, vulnerable, silky-haired child who had found his way to the flat after his mother’s death, only five years ago.
For his sake she couldn’t regret his transformation into a noisy, confident thirteen-year-old, who seemed to have an inexhaustible appetite and a band of friends even bigger and louder than he was himself. Still, she was not prepared to have smelly trainers strewn around her flat.
‘Daaaaavid!’ she called, loud enough to reach through the beat of music that thudded through his bedroom walls. There was no response. She called again, even more loudly, without moving. The music was slightly muted, as though he’d turned the CD player down a pip or two. His tousled head peered round the edge of the doorway. Even the texture of his hair had changed into something rough and unbiddable.
‘I thought you’d be later,’ he grunted. ‘I’ll put the headphones on.’
‘Great. But there’s this too.’ She pointed down at the trainer as if it was a dead animal brought in by someone’s cat.
A wonderful smile transformed David’s whole face for a second. He looked amused and tolerant and guilty and affectionate all at once. Letting his expression fade into the now familiar vacancy, he ambled out of his room. His jeans were so loose around his narrow hips they were in danger of falling down completely. The sagging T-shirt he’d put on after school had once been white but was now a muddy pink, having been washed with a variety of sports socks at much too high a temperature. His astonishingly big feet were bare and none too clean, the toes widely spaced and looking very flat against the polished wooden floor. Trish wondered where today’s socks were, and indeed the other trainer.
He bent to scoop up his shoe and she caught a whiff of acrid sweat from his T-shirt. Was it time to comment or not? She’d discussed the problem with the mothers of his two best friends and learned it was a cherished mark of growing-up to have sweat that smelled. All the mothers were treading as carefully as Trish around the burgeoning masculinity of these boys, who’d been adorable, confiding children so recently and were now turning into galumphing aliens with caverns of scary vulnerability well hidden behind the mess and bluster.
‘What?’ said David, allowing the final consonant to dribble away somewhere unnoticeable. At least he hadn’t yet had his ear pierced as some of his friends had done. ‘What’re you looking at?’
‘Just feeling amazed at how you seem to grow every day. Are you hungry?’
‘I’m always hungry, but I’m not starving,’ he said, stuffing his free hand down the front of his jeans. ‘ ’Cos I had a couple of toasted sandwiches when I got back.’
‘David, not here! You can do whatever you like in the privacy of your bedroom, but …’
He looked surprised, but obediently removed his hand and used it to give the back of his head a good scratch. Trish reminded herself how much she loved him, how soon he would grow out of this particularly trying stage of development, blew him a kiss that made him pretend to gag, and went up to her own room at the top of the spiral staircase.
There she indulged herself with scents of lavender and beeswax furniture polish, as well as her own expensive soap and shower gel. The poor law student she’d once been, who’d scraped together the rent for a bedsitter in Deptford, found her clothes in charity shops and subsisted on the cheapest of bargain food, seemed like someone from another world.
The luxurious sheets were crisp and white and there were fresh Christmas roses in a glass bowl on the chest of drawers beside Sam Foundling’s Head of a Horse. She’d always loved it for its tenderness and the way the bent head curled around the neck, as though the horse was stroking its own cheek. She hoped it was a true expression of the man himself. From what she’d seen, Cecilia needed tenderness.
Trish dropped her clothes on the bed and gave herself a long shower, filling the bathroom with fragrant steam and forgetting everything except the temporary bliss of hot water. She vaguely heard the phone ring, but did nothing about it.
When she descended to the rougher world on the floor below, David bellowed from his room that Caro had phoned and wanted Trish to ring back to talk about Christmas. She smiled at the thought of her best friend, now promoted to Chief Inspector and embarking on a tough new job with the Major Incident Teams of the Metropolitan Police. Grabbing the phone, she punched in Caro’s number.
‘Hi. Thanks for getting back to me so soon,’ Caro said. ‘How are you? David thought all was well. In fact he said you were in world-beating form.’
‘Your godson brings out the virago in me these days; I suspect that’s what he meant. I’m fine. What about you two?’
‘Not bad at all. But I’m feeling more than a bit swizzed because we’ve decided duty has to take us to Jess’s brother for Christmas. So we’re off to Scotland for three stressed days, instead of loafing round to Southwark to be with all of you. I’m sorry, Trish. We really liked it last year.’
‘So did we. What a pity. But the glow of duty done might see you through the New Year glooms so it’s not all bad. Have you got time for a lunch between now and then, or are you frantic?’
‘Not yet. They’re letting me into the new job lightly, and it’s driving me mad. I never thought I’d start pining for a murder.’ Trish had to laugh at Caro’s mock-tragic tones.
‘I know I won’t get anything except the most boring domestics for the first year or so, but even that would be better than ploughing through reports by the Murder Review Group and learning the Murder Investigation Manual by heart.’
‘Poor you. But you shouldn’t have too long to wait. Christmas is always crunch time for unhappy couples; there’s bound to be a juicy killing in south London soon.’
‘You’re right, unfortunately.’ Caro’s voice was deeper now, and slower. ‘I don’t really want anyone murdered, and—’
‘You don’t have to tell me that,’ Trish said. There were few police officers of either sex who could match Caro’s instinctive compassion for the victims of any kind of violence. ‘I’d better go and cook something to feed the monster. Love to Jess.’
‘Sure. And ours to George. I’ll phone you at work next week when we’ve got our diaries and fix a time for lunch.’
‘Great. Bye now.’
*
On Monday morning, after a restorative weekend with George and David, Trish was at her desk in chambers. When she’d first decided she wanted to be a barrister, she’d found the private language as foreign as Sanskrit. Now it was second nature and she didn’t even think of the oddity of naming both the building where she worked and the association of other self-employed individuals who shared it as ‘chambers’.
Today she was struggling to understand some of the more complex engineering principles involved in the construction of the Arrow. There were times when she felt as though the preparation of each new case was like working for a degree in a wholly unfamiliar discipline. And when other members of chambers were in aggressive or riotous moods, concentration could be particularly difficult. Luckily the atmosphere was calm today, with all the others in court or hard at it on their own case papers.
Trish focused on her computer screen, which showed one of the working drawings for what she always thought of as the Arrow’s skeleton. Because the site covered part of one of the old plague pits, where victims of the Great Pestilence of 1665 were buried, the architects hadn’t been able to use ordinary foundations. The ground was too fragile and the archaeology of the place too important. Instead, they’d designed a great central core to be driven through a specially chosen part of the mass grave, down to the solid ground beneath. On to this core were hung the components of the rest of the building, suspended on steel cables. Trish sometimes thought its elevations looked more like a chi
ld’s drawing of a Christmas tree than an arrow.
Her phone rang and she lifted the receiver to hear Steve, the head clerk, saying Sam Foundling was in the waiting room and wanted a private word with her.
‘Send him in,’ she said at once, wondering what could have happened to Cecilia.
She was on her feet by the time he came in, a short stocky man with a brooding, powerful face marked by heavy black brows and restless eyes of an extraordinarily pale blue. He was carrying a big brown envelope under one arm.
‘Is she okay?’
‘Who?’ he said, frowning.
‘Cecilia. I’ve been worrying about her ever since—’
‘She’s fine. Full of beans.’
‘Great.’ Trish breathed more easily as she pulled the visitor’s chair nearer her desk. ‘Then have a seat and tell me what I can do for you.’
She couldn’t understand why he was staring at her with a mixture of expectation and something that looked like truculent misery.
‘Don’t you recognize me?’
‘Of course.’ She smiled. ‘Even if I hadn’t come to the private view at Guildhall last year, I’d know you from all those photographs beside the reviews of your exhibitions. But I’m amazed you clocked me. There must have been hundreds of your admirers there.’
‘I didn’t know you were there,’ he said, even more puzzled. ‘I thought you’d know … Maybe I should have said: I changed my name as soon as I could, but I’m Sam, Samuel Johnson.’
Trish’s mental retrieval system, powering through her brain at speed, turned up only one Samuel Johnson, creator of the dictionary, hero of Boswell’s masterpiece.
‘You saved my life,’ he said, his voice heavy with disbelief. ‘You were the first adult I’d ever trusted, and you saved my life. Seventeen years ago. Have you forgotten?’
As Trish stared at him, memories of the child at the centre of the first case she’d handled on her own oozed back. Twelve years old but the size of someone much younger, with a sullenness she’d recognized as defensive even then, he’d had burns and bruises all over him.
‘It never occurred to me it was you,’ she said, treading carefully because she knew she trod on fragile stuff. ‘One of the artists I most admire, whose career I’ve followed ever since I first saw the Head of a Horse at your degree show. I had no idea.’
He lowered his head, hiding his expression, giving her time to get her rushing thoughts under control.
‘I don’t know why I was sure you’d remember,’ he muttered. ‘But I’ve always felt there was this connection between us. When things got really bad, I sort of conjured you up in my mind and talked to you. Sometimes it felt as if you were answering. That’s what kept me going.’
Trish couldn’t have interrupted even if she’d wanted to. But soon she’d have to make him understand how a case that fills your whole life while it’s happening has to be unloaded at the end to free up the mental space you need for the next.
‘You never touched me, or even came too close like everyone else did,’ he said, obviously well back in the past. ‘You kept your distance, and you told me: “You can trust me, Samuel. I am not like them. I will fight for you. And I will never fight you. I will make you safe.” And you did. It’s all come from that moment. Everything I’ve got.’
Did I say anything like that? she asked herself. If I did, I was wrong. There was no way I could have guaranteed your safety. Even with the scars and bruises, your testimony and your social worker’s reports, the case could easily have gone the other way. You were known as an appalling troublemaker; violent too.
Even when the judge’s words had set him free from the foster parents he’d claimed had tormented him for years, Trish hadn’t been able to feel triumph; only an indescribable weakness that had made her want to lie on the floor of the court until it passed.
‘What happened?’ she asked now, thinking of the huge obstacles the boy must have cleared to make himself what he was. ‘How did you become a sculptor?’
Memories began to speed up even more, chasing each other through her mind, and she was almost back in the Royal Courts of Justice, feeling the sickness in the pit of her stomach. Even then she’d known only part of it came from horror at what had been done to him. Most was triggered by her own fear. Was she up to the job? Had she chosen the wrong career? What would happen to this boy if she failed him? What would happen to her? She’d stood up in front of a judge who’d glared at her throughout her stammering, over-worked, over-practised arguments, while she fumbled with her papers, dropped her pen, and never dared look at the child in case the sight of him removed the last rags of her competence.
‘It was the art teacher at the next school I went to,’ he said, pulling her back into the present. There was a distant look in his eye, as though his mind was taken up with working out how she could have failed him so.
The depth of his disillusion was a measure of the trust he’d once had in her, and that was worrying. To have had so much effect on someone else’s life was a huge responsibility.
‘I was angry and I hated everyone – except you – and I messed around in every class, winding the teachers up, bullying, breaking things, bunking off, stealing. One day, Mr Dixon made me wait after the others had gone. I thought it was for another punishment and I was all ready to take it, then get my own back in other ways. Like I always did. But he just gave me a lump of clay and said he had work to do in the staffroom and he’d come back in half an hour. Then he left me.’
Sam was looking less shocked, and his colour was better. Maybe he’d be able to forgive her for the lapse that had clearly rocked him to his shaky foundations.
‘I don’t really remember anything except the moment when the clay began to do what I wanted. And the way he came back when he said he would, and stood away from me like you’d done, and said: “I thought so. You could be very good.” ’
‘That must have been an amazing moment,’ Trish said, watching his face lose its truculence as the story developed.
‘He showed me I was worth listening to. I trusted him. He was the second person. If it hadn’t been for you I wouldn’t have dared. You …’
Trish waited again. Almost the first thing she’d learned from her child clients in the old days had been that if she rushed into speech, to comfort them or ask questions, she’d risk closing them down for good. But he didn’t add anything. She hesitated to turn this emotionally charged encounter into an ordinary business meeting, but someone had to move things on.
‘How can I help you now?’ she said when the silence had lasted too long.
He licked his lips and shrugged. His shoulders were enormous, and his hands very strong. They were dirty, she thought, until she realized the marks were bruises.
After a moment he reached for the envelope he’d brought and took out a stained, creased sheet of lined paper, which he unfolded and laid flat on the desk in front of Trish.
The handwriting was clumsy, ill-educated. She looked at the address: HM Prison, Holloway.
Sam drew in a breath so deep she could actually see his chest expand, even through the thick, dark-blue wool of his Guernsey sweater.
‘She says she’s my mother. The real one, the one who left me on the steps of the London Hospital in a box twenty-nine years ago.’
Chapter Three
Trish was glad her pupil was on holiday so that she could have her room to herself as she ran through everything she and Sam had said during their half-hour together. Even now he’d gone, the air still felt dank with his unhappiness. She could understand exactly why he hated the prospect of having anything to do with the woman in prison. The possibility that she might be his genetic mother was almost worse than the idea that she was an imposter, after him for the money she assumed he had.
She’d set out to find him, she had written in the first letter, after she’d read about him in a magazine one of her cell-mates had. It had been an old one, from nearly two years earlier, just after he won the Rodin Prize and bec
ame known to connoisseurs around the world. The interviewer had asked him then about the derivation of his unusual surname.
Trish pushed the letter to one side to reread the cutting he’d brought her:
I’ve never known when I was born or who I am. My real life started when I was found on the steps of the Royal London Hospital on 13 February 1976. So that’s always been my birthday, even though the staff thought I was about three months old. I’d been left in a cardboard box with only a thin, ragged blanket between me and the snow. And there were bruises and cigarette burns all over my body. Who does that to a child?
There was nothing to identify me, so the staff picked a name. One of them was a literary type and she called me after Dr Johnson. So it was as Samuel Johnson that I was given for fostering. I don’t want to talk about that. I was rescued twelve years later. The day I left that couple’s so-called care, I decided to have a name of my own. I’ve been Sam Foundling ever since.
Trish had once known all about the baby’s discovery on the hospital steps, but the case’s details were hard to retrieve. She hated the thought that her clearest impressions were still of her own feelings. Did it matter? Maybe not, given that she had saved Sam from his tormentors. But she couldn’t forget the look on his face earlier this morning as he’d understood she had no idea who he was, even when he’d told her his old name. The shame that was never far away made her cheeks burn.
It was bad enough that she’d given up working with damaged, terrified, battered children for the infinitely better paid, infinitely less traumatic, cases of the commercial court. But that she could make one of the few truly successful survivors of such an experience look as though she herself had hit him was awful.
She picked up the first of the letters he’d brought her and read again the pitifully ill-spelled declaration.
A Greater Evil Page 2