A Clear Conscience (8 page)

She had what her employers described as a stable existence, particulars of which had been added discreetly to her annual reports for the last two years. Officer resides with PC Dave Inglewood (nice lad: should go far), attached to traffic, ‘A' division; joint mortgage on maisonette. There was no mention of her hunger for achievement which he did not share, or the relief she felt when the patterns of his duty rosters meant they scarcely saw each other for weeks on end. Her parents, regretting the absence so far of a wedding ring, looked with pride at the photos, dusted daily, of their daughter in a starched white shirt and blue uniform. Hadn't the girl done well?

The office nested in the nether regions of the police station: second floor, through two fire-proof doors, turn left, right and straight ahead. No-one rang while Mary fixed a photo of Shirley Rix to the wall. It showed Shirley's bruised profile hidden behind the smiling face of her fair-haired baby. The picture had been taken merely to make her relax, c'mon Shirl, let's have one of Jason, oh, isn't he gorgeous. Pride made Shirley turn to the camera. This mother-and-child picture was not part of the case which, like all good prosecutions for domestic warfare, lumbered off the ground with all the speed and efficiency of a crippled jumbo jet. They had given Shirley a copy of the picture: Mary supposed Mr Rix would find it amongst her things on his release, flourish it in indignation while he sued for false imprisonment.

Finishing
the careful pinning of the photo to the notice board, Mary realised she was being stupid. Each additional minute here achieved nothing more than compounding a reputation for eccentricity, hardly a virtue in police circles, especially for a woman.

She had reached the first set of heavy fire doors when she heard the phone behind her. She turned back in a hurry, but there was always the wrong decision to make with these double doors, whether to pull or push, which one to shove first, what to drop in order to use both hands, and by the time she was back inside the tidy office, with the files ranged against the wall and the empty computer screen staring at her, the ghostly, cheerful message on the answerphone was halfway through its reassuring recitation, ending abruptly with a click and purr as she grabbed the receiver and listened to nothing else.

That was the point when Mary Secura sat down and wept for Shirley Rix, who had died while her one protector had gone hunting wallpaper with a solicitor. She would never be able to forgive Helen West for distracting her. She hit the double doors with her fist on the way back out, stopped, winced, then used her palm to push the door in the right direction. Outside in the car park, someone whistled, slow but loud.

Mary was thinking, there must be another way. She was still thinking it when she slammed through her own front door to a clean house with a yellow bathroom.

Is this all? she was asking herself. Is this really all?

H
ome, sweet home. Cath put down the phone and giggled. Joe had an answerphone; they had everything. They had the top two floors and the attics of this creaking house for next to nothing. Home, sweet home. There was a landing at the top of the stairs, living room and kitchenette on one small floor, bedroom and bathroom on the next, then three attic rooms above, each with a brown stained ceiling, and in one a hole in the plaster through which she could see the stars. Someone owned the place, Cath supposed. Some poor old fart who had forgotten about the rent and the legal action long after Joe had ceased to pay and said it was now their own, since no-one had bothered them for a year, and let's face it, Cath, it was cheap at the price even before then. Yes, even though she felt they lived here through some kind of theft. Spacious, yes, but it leaked, was cold, and probably condemned.

‘Oh,
Joe.' She had been hot with pleasure. Now she blushed at the memory of her first sight of those bare dark walls, the stains, the lino floors, the dripping kitchen tap, everything else taken except for the stains and the stairs.

‘I said I'd look after you, didn't I?'

He could not have a wife of his in a council house, even if they could have got one, and he hadn't tried. Got to be black or lesbian, he had said, and oddly, she had believed him. Council houses were for poor people, he had added, and we're gonna be rich. Cath had risen to the challenge like air bubbling out of water. She was already an expert at what could be lifted from skips and second-hand shops, the dirtier the better; a keen bargainer at the kind of auction where no-one looking for valuables would bother, fought over pennies for things worth their weight in gold. Cath knew to walk down a street the night before a weekly rubbish collection, finding treasures; she could knock on doors where someone had left a square of carpet, a three-legged chair, a kitchen cupboard. She could make shelves using good wood and breeze blocks, and find the posters with the daisies on and the tea towels to match. She was built for work: she had no embarrassment in her quest for a home.

Needs must as the devil drives, she had said cheerfully, although Joe was not the devil then. Cath had been homeless once, and that was the memory which drove her. But Joe's pride was a different animal, one which could not feed on leftovers.

The more she did, the quieter he grew. When the walls were painted, and the floors more or less covered with something or other to hide the scratched and broken boards, and the kitchenette had recycled taps which did not drip and a cooker which was free along with a fridge, he was so pleased he beat her black and blue. All round the body, leaving buttocks and thighs a patchwork of bruises. Had she possessed the ability to speak to anyone at all, she might have confessed that the beating took the edge off her decor, since she never quite lost her sense of irony, but the voice had gone the way of two broken ribs, and she did not have any friends. In his insidious fashion, he had seen to that.

No
friends between them, either, except her brother, Damien.

T
he light on the answerphone maintained a steady glare, which Cath liked when she came home to a dark room; it had the same effect as a night-light, although to all other intents and purposes, it was redundant. The light indicating a message never meant more than a wrong number, an occasional call from Joe's employer, big Mickey Gat, or someone selling double glazing. The latter struck in the early evening (Hallo, my name's Lucy, have you got a minute?), and Cath always found she had enough minutes to make them run through the gamut of their wares before putting down the receiver. There, she would say to the wall, that's stopped YOU bothering anyone else, although she had liked being bothered. When Damien was alive, there had been more phone calls, of course, and even if his voice had been so slurred that he sounded as if he was on the other side of the world, he was always an improvement on a salesman. These days, without the occasional illumination of his voice, Cath used the phone to gain access to other answer machines, listening to the messages, sometimes leaving one of her own, slamming back the receiver as if it was hot should anyone real happen to speak. There were all kinds of company to be had this way; all kinds of dreams. For instance, the girl on the Domestic Violence Unit message had a nice voice. Friendly. It could have belonged to the girl the neighbours sent round one morning after a worse than usual row. The one who had not believed Cath when she had said, no, nothing's wrong, will you please go away? The old couple downstairs who had done the reporting did not live here any more. Instead, there were new people: kids, who made enough row themselves to cover Joe at his worst.

It
was nine in the evening. The day was beginning to die, and through the sparsely covered floorboards of Cath's living room, the steady thump of the bass rhythm entered her feet without a tune, and echoed in her ears.

She took a plate of bread and butter and a cup of tea one floor up and ate it, perched on the side of the bed, careful of the crumbs. Sometimes, if it was not too cold, she took her snacks in the attics, unbearable though they were. She loathed these rooms not for the temperature, or the dampness which dried out over each successive summer, but for the objects the rooms contained. Boxes from mail-order firms. Joe's dreams of a better life, drawn from the imagination of his which was as fat and one dimensional as the catalogues he regarded with such reverence. Joe's storage dump, the warehouse of his dreams, lovingly acquired against the day when they would move into their palace. She had said to him once, in the days when she still teased him, that if he ever went near a court of law and they offered him a bible to take the oath, he would ask for a mail-order catalogue rather than scripture, on the basis that there was not a word or promise in there which he could bring himself to disbelieve. Better than all that military stuff he'd had once, though, even though Damien had liked it. At least she'd made Joe get rid of that, once he realised that it too was second hand.

Cath ate the bread and butter, still hungry. He would not want her going out for chips. Once she was indoors, she remained there. It was an aspect of him she had loved, the big man guarding the small woman. Lovable Joe. Even if she shrank from the man in his living room; even if she despaired and ran away again; even if their mutual entertainments outside these walls consisted of no more than yet another visit to yet another pub, she was proud when it happened. At least she had her man, and her home was spotless, which was more than that poor Helen West. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The
attics seemed to sway with the sound of traffic. She hated the height, thought lovingly of living below stairs, hurried down again to the same pulsating noise from below. The phone rang when her mouth was still full. Cath looked at it in amazement, her jaw drooping before she clamped it shut with her fist and winced. He never rang, not Joe. Cath remained paralysed and then started to chew furiously as the phone spewed out Joe's cheerful message – ‘Hallo! We aren't here at the minute …' – a message which made it sound as if he and his spouse were constantly out at parties. If he was not behind a bar working, he would be in front of one drinking, and still Cath found herself looking over her shoulder, chewing even faster in case he was in the doorway, commenting on her manners for not acknowledging his presence and eating like an animal. As she stood, head turned, limbs immobile, all she could hear was the warm and hesitant voice of Helen West, beginning as if she too was thrown by the sound of Joe's pretty speech. The voice grew more confident and assured as it went on. Without putting her conclusions into words (a pastime Cath found dangerous and deeply suspicious), Cath sensed someone who was not entirely at home with a machine and not nearly as confident as she looked.

‘Oh, er, hallo, message for Cath. Christ, I've just realised it's a bit late to be phoning, but did I actually give you the keys? Anyway, tell Mrs Eliot if I didn't, I'm so stupid. Look forward to seeing you next time. Take care, Helen.'

The voice hurried towards the end, as if the very sound of it made the speaker nervous. I'm so stupid, it said. Cath rocked on her heels, surprised into a sudden snort of laughter and a sudden, delirious sense of pity. Fancy, this other woman was really a bit pathetic, looking the way she did and being the age she was, ten years or so older than Cath, and not having a man who looked after her.

Cath washed up her plate and knife, used them again to make sandwiches for Joe, then went round the kitchen with a damp cloth and a weary touch. She thought of Helen West, weaving a romance to explain the inexplicable phenomenon of a pretty woman without a man. And there was something else. Helen West verged on the beautiful, but she had a great big scar in the middle of her forehead which showed when she swiped away the long, almost black hair which was held back in a slide that could not quite contain the mass of it. Cath knew about scars. The scar alone was sufficient reason to tolerate the woman.

Cath
found herself standing over the machine, looking for a way to play back the message so she could hear it again. She had liked the sound of insecurity and her own luxurious feeling of pity, and she had not thought of Damien for at least an hour.

J
oe Boyce walked towards the number 59. He had a satchel in which he carried some of the tools of his trade. He did not want them stolen, such as they were. A small knife with a comfortable handle, a shiny Thermos flask for mixing and shaking, a chamois leather, soft as silk, for polishing glasses to a high shine. Last month, someone had broken and entered the Spoon and removed all the spirits from behind the bar. Joe had only shrugged. He had told Mickey Gat more times than he could count that the back of the place was insecure and, besides, the loss of the spirits was not the end of the world. Cocktails were out of fashion; the buggers only wanted beer and wine in summer, apart from the strange old school from the jungles of Chelsea, living on pensions and borrowed time, who bundled themselves into a corner to drink one whisky sour after another. It was the younger varieties, throwing money around while they yawed in those dreadful voices, who got so far up Joe's nose and down his throat he wanted to hit them, but they were the kind big Mickey wanted in the pub. Big Mickey knew nothing about fine wines, but was not a fool. Don't encourage these slow, steady drinkers, Joe was told; nor the ones who come in for half a pint and stay for ever. Joe was respectful to the boss. Mickey Gat was an outstanding and unusual member of the British working class and Joe had plenty of time for those, even those coasting round the edges. Mickey may have been a wolf in sheep's clothing, but still a wolf. If Mickey, born Michaela, had been a mere male, instead of a creature of male mannerisms and attitudes, that male would have been intimidating. As it was, Mickey the woman, with all the strengths of a man plus all the subtleties of her own sex, presented a combination fit to terrify.

‘'Ere's
a little something for your lady wife,' patting Joe on the shoulder with a power which made him wince, one broad-built person to another. ‘She'll like this. You could put yourself in luck, old son.'