A Greater Evil

by Natasha Cooper

  Trish felt her eyebrows pull together, frowning as she recreated the scene.

  ‘Yes,’ she said slowly, staring at the space in front of her where he had stood, telling her who he was. ‘They looked dirty, but the marks were bruises. Grey bruises all along the sides of both hands. They didn’t look exactly fresh. Why?’

  ‘Sod it!’ Caro must be pretty stressed, Trish thought; she rarely swore, even with such mild expressions as this. ‘That’s what he claimed, that he’d damaged his own hands days earlier.’

  ‘Are you beginning to accept that he could be innocent?’ Trish carefully kept all expression out of her voice. She didn’t want to be accused of sneering again.

  ‘Don’t get your hopes up. There’s stacks of evidence against him.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Trish, I’m in the middle of a murder investigation. I can’t go giving away information like that to any chance caller, particularly not one with a conflict of interest like yours.’

  ‘You’re the caller here, Caro. Blocking like this just makes me suspicious. What is your evidence?’

  There was an angry laugh down the phone. Then Caro said in a deliberate voice that sounded very cold: ‘I’m not going to tell you. But reflect on this, Trish: the pattern of bloodstains shows Cecilia was still lying on the sofa when the attack started. There were no signs of forced entry into the studio. Add up those two things and ask yourself who—’

  ‘Stop there. There must be other people who have keys to Sam’s studio.’

  ‘None, except Cecilia.’

  ‘What about the cleaner?’

  ‘There isn’t one. Which is presumably why he needed an expensive barrister to scrub his floor.’

  ‘Lay off me, Caro. This kind of evidence is pathetically inadequate, as you very well know. Circumstantial at best, fantasy at worst. The CPS would throw it out at once. Haven’t you got anything else?’

  ‘You can’t seriously expect me to tell you what we’ve got. But you must face it: he is almost certainly guilty.’

  ‘I’ve never heard you sound so hard.’

  ‘You’ve never obstructed me before.’

  ‘I’m only trying to protect—’

  ‘You don’t have to protect anyone from me, Trish.’ Caro’s anger was like a nut stuck in her throat. She could hardly get the words round it. Coughing hard, she added: ‘All I want is the truth. You could help, but if you’re not prepared to, I must go.’

  Trish was left to stare at the phone. Until this case Caro had been the most stalwart of her friends, open-minded, stoical, and very warm. Now she was acting like everyone’s bad dream of a pigheaded police officer, blind to everything that didn’t square with her own picture of what had happened.

  She had to be stopped if she wasn’t to break Sam all over again.

  Chapter Eight

  George and David went swimming on Sunday morning. Trish didn’t like submerging herself in cold chlorinated water, so she took her exercise alone and on foot. Wanting a change from her usual journey to work, she crossed the river at Southwark Bridge. Bright winter sun sparkled on the water, but the river looked odd from here, and the view was nothing like as good as you got from Blackfriars.

  Up Queen Street and on past Mansion House, she soon found herself between cliff-like buildings that cut off most of the light. On weekdays these streets were full of scurrying figures rushing from meeting to meeting, with one or two loitering in doorways, hunched over cigarettes. Today there was almost no one to get in the way as she picked her route through narrow streets with the romantic names of their medieval predecessors: Bread Street, Whitehorse Yard, Love Lane. First burned in the Great Fire of 1666, rebuilt, then bombed, they’d been rebuilt and improved again and again over the last sixty years.

  Streets with names like these should have beautiful buildings, she thought, seeing another monstrosity in the distance; not slabs of dirty pink polished granite like the nastiest kind of gravestone.

  She turned a corner and came upon a church, one of Wren’s. The stone facade was ravishing in its pale-grey simplicity, and it had a pretty red-brick vicarage still attached. There were few signs of life, even though it was Sunday, until she passed the west door of the church and a sonorous throaty rush of organ music poured out. She didn’t recognize the piece but liked it and walked with a lighter step as she matched the rhythm.

  On she went, aimless and at ease in her own city, until she realized she was only two streets from the Arrow. Tipping back her head, she could see it soaring above the muddled roofline. The sunlight, which didn’t reach the pavements here, glistened on its pristine glass and white concrete, making it look even more ethereal than usual.

  A black cab bustled past, nudging her to the back of the narrow pavement. When it had gone, she crossed the empty road and made her way to the base of the Arrow.

  It stood in the centre of a square lawn, mown to the smoothness of a snooker table and edged with flat white stone panels that made it look rather like the First World War graves in France and Belgium. She thought of the hidden bodies of the hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of anonymous plague victims that lay beneath. These plain stones were more appropriate than she’d realized when she was reading the specifications.

  At each of the four corners of the Arrow, narrow slightly convex ribs outlined its shape and drew the eye towards the apex, fifty storeys up. As graceful as any Gothic vaulting, the ribs looked as though they had no function but decoration, although in fact they housed the cables Trish always thought of as guy ropes, anchoring the building to piles driven as deep into the ground as the central core.

  She laid her hand on one rib. The concrete looked smooth but felt rough against her palm, and very cold. There was no sign of the cracking from here, and the whole brilliant, surging structure looked as straight and strong as any other, and a lot more beautiful. What could be wrong with it?

  A uniformed security guard peered out of his glass pod near the entrance, curious to see someone apparently stroking his building. Trish pulled back her hand and made a circuit of the whole site. Still there was nothing to suggest a problem or its solution. It seemed unfair that the architects’ imaginative vision should be rewarded with disaster and years of argument when the dreary rectangles of brick and granite that made the other streets round here so dull and ugly should cause no one any trouble.

  A peal of church bells clattered its way through a cascade of changes, heralding twelve heavy chimes, which told Trish her swimmers would be home and hungry in less than half an hour. Turning her back on the Arrow, she hurried home.

  The answer would come, as she’d told Cecilia, but would it come in time to save Leviathan millions?

  Maria-Teresa Jackson’s letter agreeing to see Trish came through surprisingly fast and she was on her way to Holloway five days before Christmas.

  She hadn’t been to the prison for years, but in the old family-law days it had been a familiar journey. There was no point taking the car, only to spend hours in traffic jams around King’s Cross and then have the usual struggle to find somewhere to park, so she walked up to Holborn from chambers and caught the Piccadilly Line to Caledonian Road, almost sleepwalking the well-known route.

  Today it was even more depressing than she remembered. The sky looked like mouldy white bread and as she turned left out of the Tube station it began to spit hailstones. They felt sharp as they struck her skin but bounced so high when they hit the pavement they could have been made of rubber. She narrowed her eyes against them and the cold and wished she had a hat. Bending her head, she walked as fast as she could without slipping, and turned into Hillmarton Road. The big houses gave a bit more shelter here, and she rubbed the stinging rain out of her eyes. Soon she saw the blank red-brick walls of Holloway dead ahead.

  The relief of getting out of the cold was enough to ease the otherwise daunting business of queuing to get in, presenting her identification, being searched and eventually shown into the visiting room, with its huddles of
weary, irritable people. The officer on duty pointed out Maria-Teresa Jackson, and Trish walked forward to introduce herself.

  She had seen women like this so often her heart sank. Maria-Teresa’s thin skin had the grey tinge that comes from too many fags, too much booze and too little hope. Her sharp-featured face was half hidden by lank shoulder-length dark hair, which clung to her prominent cheekbones. Her eyes were dull, as though she’d lost all sense of there being anything in the world she wanted to see. The smell of old cigarette smoke hung about her hair and clothes. Each time she moved, a new waft reached Trish, who tried not to wrinkle her nose.

  It had been a client like this, she remembered, who’d gazed at her bullet-headed pre-teenage son and asked why neighbours made such a fuss about a bit of thieving and vandalism. ‘He’s only a boy, isn’t he?’ she’d said, ignoring the suffering of his terrorized victims. ‘All boys cause trouble. It’s not his fault.’

  Trish had sometimes wondered whether the boy had been expressing the rage his mother had been too defeated to admit in herself. Now she pulled an unopened packet of cigarettes out of her bag and pushed it across the table towards Maria-Teresa. Loathe the habit though she might, Trish knew it was the only pleasure she could offer today.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ Maria-Teresa said. There was still a faint Italian accent in her hoarse voice. ‘How’s Sam?’

  ‘He’s okay,’ Trish said, not yet ready to hand over any more information than necessary. She smiled, hoping to evoke some reaction from Maria-Teresa. There was nothing.

  Trish tried to see past the marks of hopelessness to the seventeen-year-old she’d once been. Could she really have dumped her burned and beaten baby on the steps of the London Hospital in 1975? Could her union with a man brutal enough to have tortured his three-month-old son have produced an artist like Sam? A man so loved by Cecilia, with all her sophisticated intelligence and generosity, that she had married him and put up with his emotional violence and longed to bear his child?

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ Trish said at last, trying to see the real person behind the mask of defeat.

  ‘When?’

  ‘When you took the baby to the hospital twenty-nine years ago.’ Maria-Teresa scratched her left ear, which reminded Trish of the way Gina Mayford had assaulted her own forearms as she fought the urge to cry.

  ‘I knew he’d die if I di’n’ do something.’ Maria-Teresa’s eyes looked even bigger in her wasted face. She pushed back some of the lank hair, hooking it behind her ear, which was raw from the scratching. ‘So I waited till Mick was drunk, then I put Sam’s blanket on him, yeah? Then I let myself out of the house, quiet like, and took him to the hospital. We lived in Ainsley Street, near Bethnal Green. In the basement.’

  ‘Can you remember the way you went?’

  ‘Course. How could I of forgot? I went out of Corfield Street into Three Colts Lane, and down Brady Street to Whitechapel Road and the hospital. There was a shop, fruit ’n’ veg, and there was piles of boxes on the road. I thought Sam’d be safer in one of them ones, so I took it and put him in.’

  She swallowed. Trish saw her eyes were damp. It seemed wrong to take notes, but she wanted to check the story’s details later.

  ‘He was heavy, yeah? I never realized he’d be so much more heavier if I’d of carried him like that, in a box, like, ’stead of laying up against me. My arms was sore. But we got there, see. I thought of clearing the snow off of the step before I put the box down, but people was still coming and going, even though it was like four o’clock in the morning. I left the box on the step by the door, where the snow couldn’t of got to him. Then I went home, yeah? I didn’t have no money. Where else would I of gone?’

  ‘You wrote in one of your letters that you put your wedding ring in the box with him. Was that true?’

  ‘Course.’ The woman’s surprised expression was more convincing than any angry protestation of truth. ‘He didn’t have no birthmarks, so there had to be something to tell who he was.’

  ‘Where exactly did you put it?’

  ‘In his nappy. I didn’t want it to fall out of the box, see, so I tucked it in his nappy.’ She brushed the back of her hand against her eyes. Trish saw more wetness sparkling on her skin.

  So maybe the hospital staff didn’t steal the ring, Trish thought. Maybe it was simply chucked away with the filthy nappy.

  ‘It don’t matter, though, not now they have that DNA. The test can say who he is. Why won’t he have it?’ Maria-Teresa Jackson asked, her voice whiny with pain or resentment. ‘It’s easy. Only like a scraping in your mouth. It don’t hurt.’

  Memories came back to Trish of a study carried out in New Zealand, which explored the violence prefigured in a damaged or low-active MAOA gene on the X chromosome. As far as she could remember, boys with the faulty gene were unusually passive – unless they’d been physically, sexually or emotionally abused, in which case they were likely to be violent. Abused boys who didn’t have the damaged gene were no more likely to be violent than the rest of the population. Girls with the damaged gene were less at risk because of their second X chromosome. If Sam did have the DNA test this woman wanted, maybe the lab could also check his MAOA gene. An undamaged one wouldn’t prove anything, but its existence would be reassuring.

  ‘It’d be the best Christmas present in the world,’ said Maria-Teresa, twisting her left hand in her straggly hair. ‘Every time I go to mass, I ask for it. At the Protestant service too. You know what it says in that carol they have? “Unto us a child is born. Unto us a son is given.” It’s what I want. Just to know Sam’ll take the test, like, and see he’s mine.’

  ‘Why is it so important now?’ Trish said and watched a fanatical light flash in the woman’s eyes. But she didn’t answer. Her greyish lids dropped over her eyes, hiding whatever they might have revealed. ‘Because of the trial that’s coming? Do you want the court to know how you saved the life of one baby boy all those years ago so they’ll find it easier to believe you might be innocent this time?’

  ‘I di’n’ kill Danny,’ Maria-Teresa said with quiet dignity. ‘I tried to protect him, like I tried to protect Sam, all them years ago. It’s not why I want him to know he’s mine. I don’t want him in court, giving evidence, like. Only to say he knows why I done it and left him at that hospital. That’s all.’

  ‘Fine,’ Trish said, more curious than ever. There was more to this woman than her pathetic looks suggested. Unfortunately neither her increasingly obvious intelligence nor the hints of spirit that were sparking like an engine about to ignite meant she was honest. ‘But just tell me …’

  Maria-Teresa Jackson stood up, stiffening her spine so that she looked much taller.

  ‘I don’t want to talk no more.’ She turned and stalked away.

  Feeling thoroughly rebuked, Trish gathered her belongings and made her way towards the exit. As she left the visiting room, she heard a long agonized scream and shuddered. In the old days that had been the sound of Holloway for her, more even than the endless shouts and banging doors. Designed to give the impression of a hospital rather than a prison, it had confounded all its creators’ intentions and become a place of horror for many of the inmates.

  Mentally ill, addicted to drugs, incapable of seeing the outside world or its inhabitants as anything but hostile, they were confined in cells and dormitories that made recovery unlikely. Weeping, screaming, cutting themselves, they infected each other with their own particular breed of distress. Like the wildly multiplying bacteria of MRSA, misery ended up devouring all the healthy emotions it touched. Trish shivered again, then checked her watch.

  It was a gesture David had recently shouted that he hated, so she tried to do it as little as possible. The trouble was that time ruled her life. There was never enough. At least today he was having tea with one of his friends and wouldn’t get back until nearly six. Even so there was no incentive to linger, either in the prison or on the depressing walk back to the Tube.

  Minutes after
her train had left King’s Cross, it screeched to a halt, making much more noise than usual. Mildly surprised, Trish raised her eyes, expecting to see Russell Square station. All that met her gaze were the dingy brick walls of the tunnel. Careful not to contravene Tube etiquette by catching the eyes of any other passengers, she went back to her paper. Five minutes crawled by. Everyone in the carriage was becoming restless. Trish recrossed her legs and turned to the foreign news.

  There was still trouble in the Middle East. She couldn’t remember a time when there hadn’t been and wasn’t sure she could imagine how it would be if all the killing and kidnapping stopped. A croaking noise from the loudspeaker distracted her and she tilted her head to hear better.

  ‘Erm, well, folks, sorry about this delay,’ said a disembodied male voice. ‘I’ve been informed that there’s a signalling problem. Should be sorted out soon and we’ll be on the move again. Sorry about that.’

  Grimacing, Trish found herself catching the eye of the woman opposite. Now there was a problem, it seemed reasonable for them to communicate.

  ‘It’s a right pain, isn’t it?’ the woman said. ‘I’ve got a meeting in ten minutes.’

  Trish offered a sympathetic smile, then went back to her paper. The tension in the carriage increased as the long minutes dragged on, and there were sounds of much fiddling with packages and luggage. No more information came over the loudspeaker. She didn’t look up again until a different woman’s urgent shout disturbed her.

  ‘Kayleigh, come here! You come back here. Now.’

  A wail told Trish Kayleigh couldn’t be more than a toddler. She tried to hide her loathing of mothers who yelled at their children with that kind of cruel edge, but she couldn’t stop herself looking up to see who they were.

  A small dark-haired child in a pink parka was being hugged so tight it made no sense of the woman’s harshness. Puzzled, Trish followed their frightened gaze and looked further along the carriage until she saw a sallow young man with a dark beard, sweating heavily into his long beige robe and paler overshirt. He had a crocheted cap on his head. A canvas bag rested on his knees, tightly gripped between his hands. As she watched, he started to shake, looking first one way then the other, as though for sympathy, or perhaps a means of escape.