A Greater Evil (2 page)

She nodded but didn’t speak and avoided the offered handshake by rubbing her temples as though they ached. Her face, pallid with exhaustion and anxiety, had taken on a withdrawn expression that was new to Trish. But then her only pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage at a much earlier stage, so she didn’t know precisely what Cecilia would be feeling now.

When Guy had gone after the rest and the door had banged behind him, Cecilia let her head flop forwards and blew out a gusty sigh.

‘At last! I couldn’t have taken much more, Trish. Thanks for what you tried to do.’

‘I’m sorry it didn’t work. And I’m sorry it took so long. You must be worn out.’

Cecilia rubbed her eyes, then put both hands behind her immaculate black jacket and pushed at her aching spine. Trish watched the bump in fascination as it swelled forwards. How could you lug something that big around and sit through acrimonious meetings like the one they’d just endured and still show such courtesy and patience?

Trish had always admired her, but today’s performance had added a kind of awed respect she rarely felt for anyone. They hadn’t yet become friends – and probably couldn’t until the case was over – but she hoped one day they’d be able to meet and talk about smaller, more important, things than this claim with its multi-million-pound implications.

‘How much longer?’ she asked.

‘Technically four more weeks,’ Cecilia said, pinching the bridge of her nose. She was squinting too. The headache must be getting worse. ‘But I’m so vast I can’t believe it’ll be that long. I’m sorry, you know.’

‘For what?’

‘I’d planned it all so carefully.’ She took her fingers away from her face and looked at Trish. ‘I thought we’d manage to get a settlement today, giving me time to clear my desk and hand over my other cases to colleagues well before Christmas, have the baby, then be back from maternity leave in time to deal with any fallout from the Arrow in the summer. Now here I am abandoning you with everything still unresolved.’

‘Going for a settlement was probably a bit optimistic. There’s so much at stake.’

‘Even so, I hate failing like this.’

‘You haven’t failed. You’ve done wonders already,’ Trish said, wanting to make her look less miserable. ‘Your colleagues are good too. We’ll manage to keep going while you’re off having the baby. And you should be back from maternity leave long before we get to court. Now, you look to me as though you should be at home in bed. Shall I ask them to call you a cab?’

‘I’d better walk.’ A spasm, perhaps driven by pain, twisted Cecilia’s broad face. ‘They say it helps, so I try. On days when I really can’t face the flog up to Islington, I cheat and hop across the bridge to Sam’s studio so he can drive me back when he’s done for the day.’

‘You know I couldn’t believe it,’ Trish said, distracted, ‘when you told me that you’re not only married to my favourite sculptor but also the daughter of the judge I most admire. I was up before her only last month.’

‘I know. She told me. She approves of you too,’ Cecilia said, but her eyes changed, as though someone had come between her and the light.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing.’ She shivered. ‘Except I hate coincidences like this.’

‘Do you? Why? I like the whole six degrees of separation thing, finding links wherever I look.’ Trish couldn’t prevent a laugh bubbling up.

‘What?’ Cecilia said, with an unlikely note of panic in her voice. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘Only the words we were all using today,’ Trish said, surprised into an explanation she knew would sound heavy-handed. ‘Practically all of them had at least two meanings: we wanted a settlement for a building that’s subject to settlement; we discussed a listed building that’s listing badly; someone wanted to get cracking with the discussion about the cracks. Links everywhere, you see. I love it.’

Cecilia’s frightened expression eased a little, but she didn’t smile. ‘I don’t mind that sort. It’s the personal ones I hate, where everyone you meet turns out to be friends with friends of yours, or even with old acquaintances you thought you’d never see again. They tell you stories they’ve heard about you and you realize everything you’ve ever done or said is stuck somewhere in someone’s memory. Like computer data you can never get rid of, however often you hit “delete”.’

She had managed to get herself upright and balanced at last. The movement must have freed something in her, for her voice had more of its usual bounce when she added: ‘Talking of coincidence: have you always practised commercial law? Something I heard made me wonder.’

‘No,’ Trish said, picking up Cecilia’s briefcase as well as her own and following her out of the room. ‘I used to do family cases but I gave up when the relentless misery got to me. But we shouldn’t hang about chatting. You need to be at home. I’ll phone you on Monday.’

Making her way across Blackfriars Bridge towards her flat twenty minutes later, Trish wondered whether she’d been irresponsible in letting Cecilia trudge off alone. For such a heavily pregnant woman to fight her way through the dark and cold of a December evening couldn’t be sensible. But she must know her limitations, and she was an intelligent adult. No one had any right to tell her what to do.

Still uncomfortable, Trish paused halfway over the bridge, to be transfixed by her favourite view made even better by the frosty darkness. The yellow lights along the river seemed to hang in the middle of blurred halos, yet their reflections in the black water of the Thames were as sharp as ever, disturbed only by the wake of a boat chugging its way upstream. The stars were hidden by the glare of artificial lights, but the glittering city was so spectacular in both directions she couldn’t regret them. To the east, Norman Foster’s Gherkin stood like a brilliant sentinel, balanced by the Arrow to the north, looking as delicate as it was dazzling.

How could it be moving? What fault had there been in the design or manufacture of steel, glass and concrete that no one had yet identified?

Eventually the cold made Trish’s ears ache and got her moving again. She thought of Cecilia, struggling northwards to Islington, and envied her the baby she was about to have. Not that Trish regretted anything about the way her own infertile life had taken her. With her young half-brother, she and her partner, George, had become a family. Their set-up might be eccentric but it worked, and it made her happy.

Years ago they’d devised the arrangement by which George kept his antique-filled, pastel-coloured house in Fulham and she lived in her echoing, brick-walled loft in the much edgier borough of Southwark. Each had keys to the other’s place, and they wandered in and out at will.

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 child’s drawing of a Christmas tree than an arrow.