A Clear Conscience (15 page)

‘Nothing.'

‘Good.'

Pardon me for being alive. Insolence would be her downfall. All this was about poor Shirley Rix, with those great big eyes, staring out of a photo, a nameless, numberless person she had seen depicted but never met, to be remembered as another notch on the bedpost of guilt, one more tick in the record of personal failures. Mourned by Redwood like any other source of embarrassment. Helen sat at the back of the room, mulish. Even from that distance, he could feel her bitter impatience.

‘We've had a bit of a débâcle,' Redwood went on. ‘In a case which should have been dropped at a far earlier stage. Ladies and gentlemen, please, if it is clear that a witness is not going to give evidence, make the clean decision sooner rather than later. Don't seek adjournments simply for the sake of saving face. And then don't just put it back on the pile for someone else.'

Helen cringed. She watched the others, nodding, puzzled, sensing that someone in their midst was in disgrace for disgracing Redwood's service, wondering which of them it was.

She drew on the pad a rough sketch of rearranged furniture in her living room, slapped her own hand as if receiving a reprimand, and tried to suppress tears. Regret less for her own humiliation than for Shirley Rix and the failure to survive. Also for her own reserve, which would prevent her from tapping on the window of her office and waving at someone in the building across the street. It was that same reserve which had made her hesitate this morning before phoning Mary Secura for advice, suddenly suffused with shame both for doing nothing and for not knowing Cath's surname. What a fool was conscience, so effective in restraint, so weak in the spur to positive action.

She was grateful for the protection of home.

T
o call this place a mess, Bailey thought later as he squeezed himself in, is the understatement of the year. He recognised Helen's present mood although he had rarely seen it in such an extreme. There was nowhere to sit. Furniture from the living room was in the hall and in the kitchen; he was forced to insert himself round the door with indrawn breath and clamber over a chest of drawers until the dying wheeze of the Hoover stopped him in his tracks. From the small room she used as study and dining room, he could hear a theatrical sigh, before she appeared, dishevelled.

‘Who
was it you were trying to keep out?' he asked, pointing to the chest. ‘Or is there someone you were trying to keep in?'

‘I'm cleaning cupboards,' she said, with dignity. ‘And yes, I know that may seem strange, but I've got a man, painting ceilings only, tomorrow. Decorator had a cancellation. Isn't that lucky?' Bailey did not look as if this counted as luck. In fact, he looked acutely disturbed. It had been a long, wet day. He had brought no provisions with him and it did not look as if the kitchen was fit for use in any event. The floor had become a dumping ground for plants and ornaments; the surfaces were littered with books. She followed the direction of his eyes, and looked a little crestfallen.

‘How about a drink?' she suggested brightly. He smiled at her.

‘Don't worry, I'll get it. Don't look so guilty. You're not a wee wifey who has to warm my slippers, you know.'

She could sense the irritation behind the light words, and countered it with a rising irritation of her own. No, she was no wee wifey, or even a
grande dame
with a gin and tonic waiting for her hero and provider to come home. She was a working woman, gritty with the residue of the day's guilt.

‘I thought the wonderful Cath would do all this kind of thing,' he said.

‘You've seen what she does. She cleans everything which moves. She doesn't wash walls and make the place fit for painting. I do that.'

Helen followed him into the kitchen and adjusted herself into a leaning position next to the fridge, where a dusty bowl held a selection of meaningless keys, none of which she could identify but she preserved them all the same.

‘Listen,
Bailey, I want to ask you something about Cath …'

Bailey shifted in immediate discomfort and kept his back to her. He had deliberated whether to reveal Cath's connection to the dead Damien Flood, and, after a day or so, found the decision to remain silent easier than the alternative. This was always Bailey's way when in doubt, although when Helen copied his secrecy he could quite see how infuriating it was. There was no reason why his professional knowledge should impinge on Helen's life, or the Eliots' for that matter. What would it achieve apart from unease, if either of them knew that the woman wielding their dusters had a brother who had died by the knife and a barman husband with a dubious boss? He shrugged. Silence was not always golden.

‘What about Cath?'

‘Only that she's being beaten up by her husband.'

‘Yes, I know.'

‘You what?' She was furious. ‘You knew, and didn't tell me?' She handed him a glass of beer with an expression which made it clear she would rather have thrown it.

‘Whoah, now, climb off that high horse. I only knew recently and because of something else entirely. Background material. Remember me talking about that murder a week or so ago? The brawl? The victim was Cath's brother.'

‘Well sod you, Bailey. Aren't you good with a secret? I suppose you would have told me if I'd given my keys to a homicidal maniac?'

‘Look, don't be stupid. If you or I handle confidential information because of what we do for a living, that's what it's supposed to remain: confidential. Of course I would have told you if I'd known before you hired her, but she hasn't done anything wrong, has she? She didn't confide her family history to you or Emily Eliot, why should I? What difference does it make?'

‘The whole bloody difference between knowing something and not knowing. And the fact that you seem to assume I'd broadcast the information on a loudspeaker, along with details of where I'd heard it.'

‘I
never said that. I didn't even think it, either.'

‘Christ, Bailey, I sometimes wonder if you're hiding a clandestine wife and a tribe of kids. Anything else you'd like to tell me, such as you're leaving for Timbuctoo in the morning and it slipped your mind?'

‘OK, OK. I'm sorry.'

He was not sorry: he was angry; and the fact that it was an anger without rhyme or reason only made it worse.

‘What should I do to help her?' Helen demanded.

‘Nothing. There's nothing you can do. Besides, your friend and Ryan's friend, PC Mary Secura, might call on her. I just want someone to get inside that house. Don't ask me why either, because I don't really know. Do you think we could drop this conversation?'

He had finished a glass of the amber liquid, still in the jacket he had worn against the rain. In the shambles of the flat, he had no desire to take it off. The cleanliness and order of his own home was suddenly appealing.

‘Do you want some help?' he asked diffidently.

‘No, thanks,' she replied with equal diffidence.

‘What shall I do, then?'

‘Sit and read the paper, but since you're itching to go home, perhaps that's an option you'd like to consider. I was going to get cleaned up and take you out for supper.'

‘But you're not quite ready yet, and you'd really rather clean your house?'

They stood glaring at one another for a minute. Then he nodded and turned to leave, the dignity of his exit marred by the chest of drawers and the need to breathe in to get by. That small idiocy made her smile for a minute, but only until his footsteps died.

Oh, shit. The understated disagreement was worse than any row. She wandered into the red-walled living room, still fuelled by anger, and stood there listening for his car, while a small voice told her, You know him by now, you might also know he keeps things from you, and in all fairness you do the same to him. But she had looked forward to seeing him, she always did, and there had been a particular desire to talk to him this evening: he was a fair, kind and honourable man and he would have made suggestions to soothe her sense of inadequacy even if the advice in the last resort was simply to live with it. And if she was honest, the bit about not being a wee wifey had gone home like a well-aimed arrow. What was she supposed to do for the pleasure of his company? Comb her hair, paint her face, recline in négligé with Vivaldi in the background and a kitchen smelling of coffee?

The
steam had gone out of the cleaning. She looked at the emptiness of the living room, the marks on the walls where the pictures had been, the gouging of the nails making it resemble a gangsters' hideaway where the walls were peppered with shot. When Bailey finally went, which surely he would in the absence of either the commitment or the support which were the vital plant food to any kind of relationship, would he leave his mark? Would there be rectangles of faded patches in her life, imprints all over her body, like a rash, to indicate where he had been? Would she just carry on? Should she fight the inevitable, become an Emily? For the moment, she could only follow instinct. Clean the walls. Offer practical help to Cath. In that order.

Blue and yellow curtains, this time next week. Ceilings, tomorrow.

J
oe was not the only one good at hiding things. He had been quiet last night, home late, hunched over the TV, refusing the sandwich she had made, so silent she hadn't dared speak. It was often thus after conflict, a complete withdrawal by them both until finally one reached toward the other in shy desperation. A cold reaching out; a brush on the arm, a cup of tea accepted with mumbled thanks, a comment ventured on the weather. And then a few halcyon days of sweet normality until the whole cycle began again. It was only the drink, plus the terrible fact that he seemed to require a level of fury to complete the act of love with her. She supposed it was the scar, it put him off; he liked to touch it but then he was repelled. On that one time the policewoman in the plain skirt came round, the one whose voice she occasionally ordered by phone when she played with the answer machine, well that girl had not made a lot of sense, but on the other hand, Cath could still remember everything she said. Don't say he only hits you because of drink, she had announced. It's him
and
the drink, don't you see? Other people drink and simply go to sleep, or buy their wives perfume, or cuddle the cat. Against her better judgement Cath had laughed, explaining irrelevantly that the man could not stand cats and as for perfume, he was allergic to that and, really, he was a good man most of the time. Your choice, the woman had said. Yes, it is, Cath had replied. My choice. Everyone has a cut-off point, the woman had said, let us know when you get to yours.

Cath
would never have cut off from Joe. Unless Damien had asked. Until now.

They both hid things from each other: the small objects which would cause trouble. It began with his army memorabilia, preserved against the call to arms he would always crave, since, despite the disappointments, he had loved military life and dreamed of it still. Like everything he did, the memorabilia collection was half-hearted: uniforms, caps, badges, in the main, bayonets, all cheap to buy, cheap to sharpen into usefulness, until, of course, Joe's horror of the second-hand and the discovery of how many thousands of others did it, made him desist and hide the small collection with a suggestion of shame, since she had always loathed it. Most of it had long since gone over to the Spoon. There had been days when he did as she asked. She did not know whence that syndrome had fled, only that it was long gone. Gone even before Damien died.

Cath never said ‘killed'. She only said ‘died'.

She breathed deeply. In the attics sound was muted: reduced to a steady thump from downstairs and the steadier drip from the residue of the rain through a point in the ceiling. Boxes had been moved from the floor beneath. Nothing could be allowed to happen to Joe's hammock until they had two trees, or the grass strimmer until they had a hedge, and Oh, the waste of it all. She had placed the shrine by the window, on a dry space on the floor surrounded by Joe's goods, in the hope it would lie undisturbed. Now the flowers, admittedly dying when last she had tended them, bore the imprint of a foot; there were stains on the wooden floor indicating the colour of the pansies taken from Helen West's garden. The photos had gone. The candle she had lit in the hope of bringing Damien back, like a moth to a bright flame, lay on the window ledge. Cath touched a fresh set of livid bruises on her thigh. They were not important. It was the desecration of memory which was the cut-off point.

From
far down below came the cracked sound of the doorbell. Cath did not panic. She moved downstairs out of the attics, slowly and demurely. It no longer mattered who it was.

I
'm mad, said Mary Secura to herself. And I wish that meant I was bad and dangerous to know. She had the good leather handbag slung across her chest, and was oddly grateful for the raucous beat emanating from the ground floor. The door sprang open; a voice shouted from upstairs. Mary followed the sound, away from the life below, fishing in her bag for a card, a leaflet and the radio which would signal help into a well-deserved silence.

The door at the top was open. ‘Hello?' she called with a false gaiety, looking into a hall and the room beyond, both impeccably clean. The woman appeared, long curly hair round her shoulders, surprisingly smiling. She was dressed in a dull skirt and long-sleeved white blouse; no sign of neglect, perfectly normal, but stooping.

‘Don't mind me if you're busy,' Mary said, extending her warrant card. ‘Only I'm from the Domestic Violence Unit. For a chat, if that's all right. Any chance of a cup of coffee?'

This neat little person showed no symptom of alarm. Cath thought she had guessed the reason for this call. It was all down to that Miss West, and while yesterday she would have resented this breach of promise not to tell, this manifest interference in her life, today she did not mind such an act of fate. Her smile grew. Mary was confused, taken aback by such docility.