A Clear Conscience

by Frances Fyfield

  Dear Bailey, save me from an evening of contemplating nothing but my bank balance. Even if the effort was not entirely mine, will you please, for once, compliment me? Even if you don’t love me, admire what I’ve achieved.

  He had a key. She had taken off the dirty track-suit suitable for dusting books and hanging pictures, wore a casual shirt in loud stripes, clean jeans cut off at the knee and bare feet, the better to enjoy the carpet. Even in her present mood she could not manage frills, and added only enough perfume to mask the smell of cigarettes and paint.

  Bailey administered a peck on the cheek and walked straight into the kitchen, the one place in her whole abode which had altered the least radically. He opened the fridge, ignored the ample contents, pulled out a lager and leant against the wall with a sigh.

  ‘What do you think?’ she demanded.

  ‘About what?’ He was staring into the garden. ‘Listen, has your cleaning lady been here today?’

  It was not a request for information, more an aggressive demand, and he was refusing to turn round and face her. Or look beyond, into the marvels of the hall. The hectoring tone prompted rising anger, chill anxiety and a spontaneous lie.

  ‘No. Why?’

  Cath had been here, to Helen’s surprise, when she herself came home. They had coincided for half an hour; not long, so not therefore, quite such a large lie. The encounter had not been pleasant; she wanted to forget it until later.

  ‘Husband was killed. On the bus, late last night. They forgot to check everyone was off, parked it. Found him this moming. No wallet. I didn’t get called in to identify him until this afternoon. We couldn’t find her anywhere.’

  He made it sound like an accusation. Helen leant against the kitchen table, appalled.

  ‘How was he killed?’

  ‘Stabbed. Thoroughly. He might have survived, all the same, if he hadn’t lain there and bled to death. By the smell of his clothes and the vomit, he was as drunk as a skunk.’ He slumped against the sink. ‘I don’t know why I thought she might be here. People tend to come to you, that’s all. I should have gone to her place and waited. Someone’s got to tell her. I don’t particularly want it to be Ryan.’

  ‘You know I thought for a minute you were going to say she had something to do with it. Killing him, I mean.’

  He looked at her vacantly, his way of telling a lie. ‘Why would you think that?’

  ‘I didn’t …’

  ‘Good. I’ve got to go.’

  ‘I’ll just get my shoes. Wait a minute.’

  Bailey swallowed the last of the beer and turned on her. ‘You don’t need shoes. What do you need shoes for? What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Going with you. Look, I don’t love her, but for all I know, I’m the best she’s got. Better than some great big copper standing over her saying, Madam, did you know your husband’s dead? Wait for me.’ She was hurrying out of the room, like one of the scenes from the day-dreams, tripped on the new height of the carpet, before he was holding her by the arm, roughly.

  ‘No! I’m not taking you anywhere. I’m not. I don’t want you with me, understand? This is work. I don’t want you going to places I have to go to, right?’

  ‘But I want to go. For Christ’s sake, it isn’t me who’ll come to harm. What are you doing which can’t take a witness? If you don’t take me, I’ll go by myself.’

  ‘You don’t know where she lives.’

  ‘Block of flats on the 59 route. Top floor, I’ve seen the place.’

  ‘Which block, which number flat? Don’t be silly.’

  She put her arm across the door, stopping him, suddenly calm. ‘Listen to me for a minute. You’re going to tell some poor persecuted woman that her husband’s dead. He might have been a bastard and she might not be what I’d call a friend but she’s valued by me and she knows me, so why can’t I come with you, even if I only sit in your car? The only reason is you can’t ever really let me share the important bits of your life. You seem to want a dizzy little bimbo you can park on a bar stool without the meter running. If you can’t give a better excuse, you and I don’t go anywhere, ever again. Have you got that? I’ll get my shoes.’

  He shuddered, as if afflicted by cold. Helen felt the breeze and heard the slam of the front door before she was halfway back from the bedroom. She sat in the golden living room, ashamed of her own state of ultimately guilty rage. Judgement day. She was nothing but a little woman who ignored the world to paint her house.

  Damien Flood’s place had been turned over good and proper. There was a hole in the door to indicate where the lock had been chiselled out in clumsy fashion, noisily and slowly. No attempt had been made to resecure it: the damage was fresh. Inside, there had been precious little to steal: no video-recorders, cameras, computers, nothing to make the time spent worthwhile. There was a token amount of wanton destruction, even that limited, as if the childish burglars had grown tired: sugar and powdered milk dumped on the floor, slices of bread scattered, a set of makeshift bookshelves, put together out of planks and painted breeze-blocks, dismantled, two mugs smashed. No faeces or graffiti; no statement of envy pertinent in a flat as bare as this; instead, Bailey supposed children had used it as a temporary playground.

  He noticed a print on the wall showing a bowl of daisies, a theme echoed in two tea towels hanging over a chair, as if someone had once tried to give a touch of personality to the anonymity of the place. Bailey felt his angry frustration die, felt only sympathy for the occupant. Wherever she was, life was pushing Mary Catherine Boyce to the limit.

  The pity had grown to outrageous proportions by the time he encountered the inside of the real home of Cath and Joe Boyce. A young neighbour from downstairs tried to close the door on him, as if he was a Jehovah’s Witness come to save her soul. Yes, she had been out all day; she’d said so before, hadn’t she? And the place had been burgled on Saturday night: is that what he had come about? They had all heard the man who lived there walking round and screaming when he came home. He had paced round, crying and shouting most of Sunday, none of their business.

  Bailey went upstairs, put his shoulder to the door. It showed signs of fortification, recently destroyed by experts, gave to the slightest pressure. There was nothing inside to indicate burglary, merely a sense of emptiness which was all the more pathetic because the living room, kitchen and bathroom on this floor bore such signs of strenuous, penny-pinching effort. Daisy print on the wall here too; shelves constructed in the same way as Damien’s. There was the detritus he might have expected from a primitive married man left on his own for a week, a few unwashed dishes, grime accumulating on the draining board, all at odds with a significant smell of bleach. Bailey picked up a tea towel, patterned with daisies, he noticed, and used it to cover his hands as he looked through an old kitchen unit, battered, lovingly painted with gloss at some point in a venerable life. Lying among the knives in the cutlery drawer was an old bayonet. Bailey lifted it out with the tea towel, and moved into the living area to find better light. The pattern on the towel, those clumsy shelves, the print on the wall, somehow shocked him more than the weapon in the drawer. Damien Flood’s hideaway, Joe Boyce’s home: both somehow dominated by the same, feminine touch.

  Bailey tried to imagine the time it would take to sharpen such an obdurate piece of metal blade designed for the forceful thrust rather than the delicacies of surgery. Someone at some time had ground this blade on a lathe to obtain such a cutting edge, refined by resharpening again for effective use. There were marks on the side of the breeze-block shelving, Bailey remembered his mother outside the back door, sharpening a carving knife against the wall.

  No-one had ever searched this house: Joe Boyce had never been a suspect. Bailey could not see why this savage bayonet had been left, even by Joe Boyce. Joe could have kept it sheathed among the military memorabilia above the bar of the Spoon, or taken to carrying it again after he had been attacked on the way home; murderers were always fools, and yet nothing quite explained eit
her why it should be the cleanest and most incriminating thing in an otherwise greasy drawer, or the pervasive scent of bleach which hung around the sink.

  Then there was a footfall from above him, a plaintive voice, calling down querulously.

  ‘Is that you, Joe? I’m sick, Joe, make us some tea. I hurt, Joe, I hurt all over …’

  The voice echoed, and the air was suddenly cold. The voice spluttering, repeated the refrain. I hurt, Joe, make us some tea. It was a refrain like a chant; finally, it unnerved him.

  ‘Come on down,’ he shouted.

  Poor bitch; perhaps she was so attuned to obedience, she would have obeyed the summons of a thief, provided he was male. The step on the stairs was weary; the figure emerging into the stuffy room, slow and shambling.

  ‘Hello,’ Mary Catherine Boyce murmured without rancour or surprise. ‘If you’ve come to take any more stuff, don’t bother. Someone else has had it all. Joe’s going to be ever so cross. I should have been here, you see, only I wasn’t. I was somewhere else. It’s so hot today. Someone took all the boxes.’

  It was the plaintive voice of a little girl, driven to the thumb-sucking habits of adult dementia. Cath swayed slightly, sighed and went on speaking, with difficulty.

  ‘Only I’m a little bit drunk, see? I got it on the way. I thought if it worked for him it might work for me, even if I hate the taste. And then if he hits me, p’raps I won’t feel it.’

  She was grinning inanely, puzzled, entirely naked, with her hands crossed across her chest, her hair lank, her lumpy stomach folding over a puckered scar. She was shaking her head.

  ‘It doesn’t work, you know. I don’t know why he ever thinks it does, does nothing for me.’

  ‘I’m a police officer, Mrs Boyce. And Joe’s dead.’

  She began to wail, like an animal in pain.

  He had no personal radio with him. The burglars had taken the fancy phone. There were enough reasons for him to ignore the formulae he should have followed, such as calling for help, getting in a female officer, all that. Instead, he turned his back on her, put the kettle beneath the tap and bellowed over the sound of running water and her desperate wailing.

  ‘I’m making tea, love. Get some clothes on, there’s a good girl.’

  The pity had grown to a lump of gristle in his throat, choking. He was thinking of the lump of humanity, abused by his own kind, a pretty woman making herself revolting by being so pitiable. He was also thinking of Joe Boyce, rolling round on the top deck of an empty bus. Lying there and dying in his own vomit, perishing through asphyxia and blood loss, not from his clumsy wounds. Thinking too, how this woman had been a constant presence not in one home, but two. Would Helen’s kitchen, or Emily’s, ever sport tea cloths with daisies? As his mind raced, like his delinquent clock, he wondered how he would phrase his report to the Crown Prosecution Service, to lawyers like Helen, so removed but working in the interests of justice as far as they knew it, which was not as well as he. Thinking of the bottom line, insufficient evidence, or a plea bargain, plus all that destructive nonsense in between.

  Helen had found the shoes and the car keys. This kind of car would be safe wherever she took it and since she felt as attractive as a leper, she was safe too. East. Away from gentrified houses and towards the urban edges of the metropolis. The number 59 droned past the end of the road; she followed it.

  There was no sensation of following a star, like the three kings trailing through another kind of desert in pursuit of divine message, hope instead of despair; it was simply an alternative to doing nothing.

  Light was fading at nine o’clock, diminishing with the slow reluctance which heralded the inexorable sunset of summer. Long shadows, heat stored in the brickwork, ragged flowers and brown grass between buildings, the trees of north London still green, the hedges of gardens still gallant. Helen did not feel self-conscious about following a bus. Late evening traffic was brisk and purposeful; no-one noticed. The bus itself skipped stops, skittish, like an antisocial cat. On paper, Helen knew these streets, some of them boasting real or faded glory, others history, others an ethnic dominance which was busy and brave in the dying light. Looking for landmarks, pausing, with the bus, parallel to playing-fields, watching a game of football on brown turf, moving forward again. She thought she would have been safer on the bus, without the shell afforded by a car, until she remembered Joe Boyce.

  Major junction, red lights, where the youths came forward in a gang, threw water at the windscreen and began to wipe it off. Helen had no money, sat there revving the engine and on the change of lights jolted forward without payment. One shook his fist and yelled; the others melted back: wrong car. Hackney emerged through glass streaked with dirt and soap: the exhaust of the bus spouted blue smoke; and into the equation, as she saw where she was, came motorway signs, local signs, a distinctive pub and railway-station sign, and then the block Cath had pointed out emerged on the left. There was no-one behind to protest at her abrupt and ill-mannered manoeuvre towards it.

  Top floor, Bevan House: that was where she was, strange Cath, and this was where a stranger parked a car. In between two other cars, one wrecked, the other in the first stages of renovation, Helen’s car simply looked like a vehicle awaiting therapeutic attention. And this was where she walked on a sultry evening. Sauntered downhill, into a building, found a lift, pressed a button, waited in vain until someone ran past and rewarded her optimism with a two-fingered salute and a grin. She looked at the darkening flight of stairs to which he pointed. She knew these places on paper: she had a map of the city in which she lived, on paper. She could climb stairs, too.

  She felt the scar on her forehead, she could never quite suppress the memories of fear and pain. She felt Bailey’s contempt, and remembered at last what it was Cath had said. Going out as she was coming in, Helen somehow disturbed to find her back – yesterday had been the final day: Helen needed no more help than regular cleaning, Cath no more help than regular jobs. She had felt a sense of being taken over, something which had made her brusque, until Cath had said, humbly, she just had to see what it was like with everything finished. The sight of Cath, with a great big bin-liner, taking away left-over paint, without asking first, made Helen feel mean as well as angry. You didn’t need it, Cath had said, all wounded and defensive; I thought you wouldn’t mind. I’m going to do up our place, now I’ve seen what can be done with yours. No-one’s going to interfere, this time. There had been no invitation and even less inclination to ask about Cath’s grand night out with the old man. Emily Eliot did not know about that; Helen did not think anyone else did either, apart from Mary Secura, Bailey least of all. Big night out, special treat, the man drunk. Him coming home on the bus. Cath hated the bus. Cath knew when she took the paint that wherever he had gone, Joe Boyce was not coming home.

  No-one had managed to find her, Bailey said. Because she had been hiding in HeIen’s flat until Helen came home, planning, getting the time wrong. And if Cath said no-one was going to interfere in her domestic plans this time, she could only have been referring to him. Him, the until-death-us-do-part man.

  It was somewhere on the way back that Helen came to the conclusion that she would say nothing unless anyone asked. Even if Cath were guilty of collusion in a death, so be it. Even if it went completely against her principles and her belief in justice by the rules. Shades of Mary’s bitterness. Mind your own business. Watch out for policy. The fact that in all her cases there had been one, potentially murderous, husband convicted out of the last dozen, with her watching Cath work up to new life without really offering help, standing in the sidelines, working in the interests of justice. About which they said, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Helen drove back to home, sweet home.

  ‘I suppose she sent you, as well,’ Cath said. ‘She keeps on sending people.’ The whine was still in the voice, the childish note gone with the tea.

  ‘Who’s she, Cath?’ he asked gently.

  ‘Helen. Lady I worked for. Decorating. Shan’t go b
ack there. She won’t want me anyway. Very mean, that lady. Real slaver. Makes me work hard. Forgets to pay, have to fight for it.’

  Bailey could not begin to equate this description of Helen with the truth, although he could see that Mary Catherine Boyce was in the kind of state where accuracy was unlikely and truth, if it emerged at all, would be accidental. It was the kind of accident he prayed for; truth, coming out of a side road before the driver noticed a wrong turning. He had underestimated her. Cath was accustomed to underestimation. It was a feature of her life, amounting to contempt.

  ‘I don’t like this tea much,’ she grumbled. ‘Did you put sugar in it?’

  ‘Plenty. Cath, what was that bayonet doing in the kitchen drawer?’

  ‘I couldn’t throw it away, could I? I never throw anything away.’ She looked at him as if the suggestion was vulgar.

  ‘Oh I don’t know. It’s a good idea, sometimes, isn’t it, throwing away things which aren’t any use? Keeps the place tidy.’

  She nodded earnestly, as if he had endorsed a long-held philosophy.

  ‘But it’s Joe’s, you see. I was never allowed to throw away anything which was Joe’s. I knew he had it, of course, even though he put it upstairs with all his other stuff. Burglars might have found it, left it out. He brought it with him last night. Showed it to me when we were in a pub. Told me I would get some of it if I didn’t behave. We were supposed to go somewhere nice, but we didn’t. He just got drunk.’ She began to cry, a snuffling sound which produced moist eyes rather than tears. Bailey remained completely still.

  ‘I ran away from him,’ Cath said. ‘I ran out of the last place the back way and went for the bus, only a bus didn’t come. They never come when you want them. But he found me. He was cross. He got that thing out on the bus. I thought he was going to do for me. I was fighting him for it. I didn’t scream, what would be the point and anyway, I didn’t want anyone to see him, drunk like that. It slipped, went into his tummy. He was laughing. I didn’t think he was so much hurt. I just thought I’ve got to get away and never come back, this time. Can I have some more of that tea, please?’