Trial by Fire (19 page)

But he cared if someone else knew. If darling child wanted to be secretive about her own bits of rubbish, and if he wanted to tear up his wife's clothes, they would do so. Family was family. They had come here to preserve family, whatever kind of shambles this one had been for years. With the careful calculation of two whiskies down, he waited until ten o'clock, dialled the number left by Amanda Scott. He knew enough about the inside of people's houses to hazard a guess at her life-style, saw her with cold cream, cocoa, and nightie, rather liked the thought. Two birds to be shot with a single stone: avoid prying eyes on the one hand and cast a lure for a new woman on the other. Not a bad prospect, Amanda. Might at least know the value of money and be grateful. Yvonne, the bitch, only liked the best.

In the Bailey-West household, peace of a kind reigned. A single phone call from Amanda Scott, bursting with the desire to report something or other, but guarded and satisfied when Bailey had said he would hear it in full tomorrow. No information given or received.

One of their neighbours was sitting on the sofa, complaining to Helen about her children. He was amazed at the picture they made, these two disparate women, even more amused when he contrasted Helen's obdurate unclubbishness with her complete inability to close the door on a visitor. No, she would not attend a meeting, be seen dead on a committee, sign a petition, but she would listen, pour a drink, and extend a welcome, unable to resist. At home in far-off London, her phone had never stopped ringing. Bailey had been irritated by it then, but found he missed it here. Listening to the neighbour, the well-meaning but harassed mother of two, despairing over the decisions made by local school authorities, he wondered at the implications of these empire-building residents of Branston, questioned whether fresh air and keeping up with the Joneses was really an improvement over life in London.

`He does so much worse than anyone else in his class,' the neighbour was saying. She was not tearful yet, simply indignant.

Stop pushing him, then, Bailey added silently to the conversation, wishing she would go. The boy is healthy. No one else is sick. What's the problem? Push, push, push, an endless spiral of improvement. Better houses, better cars and schools, all lined with the same amount of discontent. People nagging away: it's so good now; it can't possibly be good enough. We've come quite a long way, Helen; it might be time to turn back.

Bailey regarded the visiting woman with mild eyes she found slightly unnerving. He reflected that this brave-new-worlder was trapped economically in marriage, like a state-aided couple in a slum, neither with another place to go and no money to split up. The only difference was that one couple was more affluent and lived in a different cage where the padding didn't really help.

There were plenty of murders in these situations, plenty of scope for them in cosy Branston. The upwardly mobile, striving for heaven, by some accident curtailing their choices rather than expanding them, leaving themselves no time to think. No time to see how the children thought, either. Would they prefer the posh schools or the concrete playground?

Electronic toys or cardboard boxes? He didn't know. There was no time to judge your partner. Maybe Helen had time: she did not need him in the same way he needed her.

Since his contribution to this living-room chat was not required beyond an occasional murmur, Bailey was free to think of his own day. It had been pleasant in its way, a release from supervision, reports, delegation, and listening. Superintendent Bailey trying his hand at being junior detective and legworker — that took him back a year or ten.

Getting on and off buses, amazed at how arbitrary they were, how patient their passengers all around the parish, buses that stopped at two burned-out shelters and took him to Waltham and Woodford armed with a copy of William Featherstone's photo, taken on his second arrest. 'Seen this boy, have you?' he had asked, showing the unflattering image in black and white. Odd how these new Polaroids were no improvement on the old in giving every subject the appearance of a villain. 'Yes, I seen him, guy. Often, as it happens, but he usually smiles, poor kid. Been seeing him for years, but he's grown a bit.'

Bailey had been surprised to find in William's travelling acquaintances something approaching genuine affection, at worst a mild tolerance. Perhaps in calling him 'poor boy'

Helen had seen something he had missed.

He turned in response to a nudge from her. 'Pardon?'

`Mrs Levinson was asking if we like it here,' said Helen.

Òh, we like it fine,' said Bailey. 'Lovely place.' Noting with surprise how Helen had passed that awkward question to him. Perhaps the space was not so important to her after all.

He noted that, recorded it with amusement and something like hope. Perhaps — an impossible thought in the face of the evidence — she loathed the place as much as he did.

And akin to this, a sadder conclusion: yet another day had gone by without real conversation; the weekends of life were lost so entirely by midweek.

Helen thought, I should tell him about the committal proceedings. Then she listened to his polite praise of Branston and held her tongue

Shops. Oxford Street filth drifting on pavements that needed rain. Judging from the sky, they were shortly to be blessed with it. Of course, no one went to Oxford Street to look at the sky. All of them looked ahead or sideways, never upward, occasionally down to see what was entangling their feet, keeping handbag in front and pockets clear.

Helen was streetwise, used to standing for hours in Marlborough or Bow Street court prosecuting queues of pickpockets, dippers in every colour with quicker fingers than Fagin's children, smiling benignly as they passed on the escalator with a wallet already gone to the one behind, netting thousands a day. She was careful in the shops, too, once versed in the Can-I-help-you? conman: urbane and immaculate on the floor of a department store otherwise devoid of helpers, assiduous in assisting with choice of scarf, jacket, tie, before offering to take those traveller's cheques, dollars, yen, Visa card, whatever you were needing change of.

Take a seat, ma'am, I'll be back shortly, and you will sit here for ever if you're waiting for me. Famous characters when not in prison. Policemen patrolling this fairground of shops for the parvenues of the cheap to the merely priceless called it simply 'the Street'. The Street was dirty, shabby, crowded, and jostling, downmarket, upmarket, middle market. No one spoke English or walked in a straight line. Rudeness was customary.

Pretend stolen goods as well as real were sold on pavements along with tacky souvenirs, overpriced fruit and dangerous toys. Shop assistants either crowded around customers like flies or studiously ignored them. Litter bins overflowed, and the three underground stations were frankly sinister. Bargains and impolite robbery were equally available. There was nothing essential to life or decent to eat within a mile, and there were bomb scares.

Helen loved it.

Nothing better for a shopping addict. She loved shops, full stop. Here her essentially serious nature took off into harmony with the frivolous world. Helen could not shop with any precision, a facet of her that irritated Bailey to the extent he could never accompany her on any expedition unless she set out to buy one item in an emporium that sold nothing else —

paint in a paint shop, for instance, nails in a shop that sold only nails. This suited Helen, who preferred to shop alone or accompanied by another female of kindred spirit who understood that when shopping you looked at everything: duvets and food in Marks and Spencer even when you went there to buy a skirt; washing machines, carpets and coats in John Lewis, even if you had gone for a plug. And if you had embarked on a vague search for clothes, there would never be an end to it, not even a beginning.

Bailey could not understand how she could return from such a foray armed with nothing but exhilaration, replete with things seen, people met, and everything else, but without a parcel in sight — although that was rare. Something always got hold of the purse, but it mattered not if the product of four hours' wandering was no more than two pairs of tights and a pineapple, one lipstick and a newfangled potato peeler, two light bulbs and a free sample of perfume.

Today she intended to do better: this was a prearranged frolic with itching credit card.

Helen was looking for the boost of a new autumn coat, replacements for down-at-heel shoes, and a new pair of trousers to make her look at home in ultracasual Branston. Having decided on that, she would not be disappointed to return with a tube of toothpaste. The looking was the thing: that was the way it was with shopping, the way she liked it.

Helen sat on the train, thought of the day ahead, armed with the inevitable book, forgetting to read in an almost empty carriage, so empty she felt the sense of secret holiday.

Really, she and Bailey were equally bad. What harm would there have been in mentioning that she had seen part of his case and had met Evelyn Blundell in the process? But she had said nothing, and had allowed last evening's garrulous neighbour to exhaust them.

They had gone to bed when she left, Bailey for an early start, she for a piece of truancy like this. What the hell. She was dreaming, gazing out of the window into a lowering sky, nothing ahead but dirty London and crowded shops. She wriggled a little with the sheer pleasure of it, ate an apple for late breakfast, watched the world. Thirty-five minutes by train on a good day from Branston into Oxford Circus, more usually exceeding an hour: never travel without a book for distraction or enough thoughts to fill the time.

The Central Line rolling stock, running on Central Line rails, operated as a bone-shaker fit to disgrace any subcontinent, requiring restraints between stations, gathering speed with a threat to throw any unbraced passenger from her seat into the arms of the one opposite.

Rush hours with strap hangers lurching around like drunkards only became more comfortable when passengers were packed like sardines, each avoiding the eye of the other as they stood in intimate stability, swaying in unison within the purgatory of the train, bottoms and stomachs joined like serried Siamese twins. Emptier carriages made others unwary: neglected parcels on a dozy afternoon would leap from their bonds between Debden and Theyden as the tube rattled and shook with the effort of speed, braked in fury for a deserted stop.

Out of office hours the train was depopulated by the further reaches of outer London, as if places like Branston had ceased to exist. Once people moved away as far as this, unless commuting with the herd, they were supposed to remain where they lived. Otherwise, the floor-shaking, arm-bracing Central Line, as stable and sweet as a wagon train, became their punishment.

But in those languid hours, there was the mixture of views that drew Helen into the vortex of beloved London every time she caught the surroundings blurred by the consistently dirty windows of the carriage. Surprising fields around Branston, signs of harvest; then, seen near the rails, looking like an outpost, prefabricated 1950s buildings resembling Nissen huts, postwar construction still standing in lurid pastel colours. Debden melting into the background. Theyden Bois next, known locally as Theyden Boys, somewhat more settled than Debden, but scarcely visible.

A tunnel of green approaching Snaresbrook, the presence of trees a sign of prosperity, homes with lawns, mock Tudor, mock Spanish, and older Edwardian houses with outbuilt conservatories, hidden to all but Central Line passengers. She had once sat in a train stopped by signal failure between stations, a frequent hazard of the Central Line, at this very spot, and watched mesmerized as a naked man washed while singing in front of a window, reaching to a shelf out of sight in all his glory, unconscious of the silent audience.

Helen had nudged the woman next to her in case she missed it. 'Look at that,' she'd said, unable to resist sharing it, both of them sniggering like children. She thought of it every time she passed the place.

Greater prosperity still as the train chuffed away from Snaresbrook, downhill from the territory of lesser showbiz, and East End crooks seeking new life in security-alarmed houses, into the duller safety of South Woodford's narrower avenues. Earnest small blocks of flats to augment neat tree-lined streets, the territory of hopeful artisans, bank clerks, teachers, and the more modestly prosperous of the age. A tasteless place, safe and dull but green enough to pass. Then a quicker descent to reality: street after street of stocky row houses coming into Leyton, mean back yards bearing signs of loving devotion, covered in washing, a place of crowded roads.

On the right, a vast graveyard that looked as if it might have held every corpse found in London over a hundred years. Plunging away from Leyton, another graveyard, this one for cars, bodies of metal in clumps piled up like weeds, rusty and shiny lorries, mangled cars, shells awaiting redemption, looking jaunty perched one on top of the other, cheerful scrap heap, metal stripped of all the aspirations and images once invested in the living machine.

Mine belongs here, thought Helen; I might like it better without wheels.

Then Stratford and a quickening of heart among even meaner houses, the train plunging underground as the city began. The rest of the journey a crowded blur, onset of the true metropolis, train rattling slower, stopping to open its doors for engorging crowds at Mile End, taking in the city-bound people laden with bags and haversacks, holdalls and cases, bound on business, for shops, trains, aeroplanes. Liverpool Street, a pause for breath with more of the same in skin of every perspiring colour. Tick, tick, tick, doors closing, opening again as if indecisive, ever unwilling to take travellers from the east, unwilling to go on, sighing and moving with a jolt.

Crashing into the gloom of St Paul's to collect a gaggle of brochured tourists speaking in tongues, panting into Holborn via Chancery Lane for lawyers' clerks, Tottenham Court Road for all the world plus wife, and then Oxford Circus, ever late for waiting crowds with shopping bags, four deep on the platform, doubting the train would ever arrive. The uninitiated pushed in and out, forever terrified of being carried on or left behind with doors closing on the skulls of half their families: