A Clear Conscience (28 page)

She had her left arm firmly round his shoulder for balance as she plunged the blade into his belly. There was an inconsequential thought of how much more easily this could be done with a kitchen knife if such items were not, somehow, sacrosanct. As she plunged, with the same energy she applied to housework, she leaned closer, putting her hand over his mouth, the way she had done before when the conductor was looking, and dragged the blade towards herself, twisted, pulled it away, despite the resistance, then began again, left to right, systematically, the way she Hoovered stairs. The large sheet of thin polythene, pinched from Emily's dry-cleaned clothes and now used as a kind of apron, rustled as she twisted the blade for the second time. Cath had a passion for cleanliness and did not want to get dirty: the skirt was important. Joe's eyes opened wide; his mouth bubbled with spittle; he struggled in weak spasms. She held him tighter; she had muscles like an ox. From behind they looked like a couple adjusting themselves for amorous comfort. The little barks he made could have been those of a man fondled intimately.

Before the blood cascaded, Cath covered him with the jacket which had been half off his shoulders when he wailed his way to the bus stop. She wiped her hands on it first. She looked around again before tugging out the bayonet, amazed at the effort it took, mumbling under her breath about the inefficiency of the thing and at the same time examining the dark floral skirt and the black blouse for damage. There was little sign. The bus sailed past St Paul's Road and into Hackney. Cath waited for a moment, withdrawing from him fastidiously and carefully. She was a mile or so from home.

Fate had given her the weapon. She was governed
by fate. A child had given her the knife. It was preordained.

W
hen she alighted, five stops from the main terminal, surrounded and hidden by three teenagers in search of a club they had heard about up here which stayed open all hours, she looked like an ordinary little waitress coming home from a job rather than someone returning from a night out. She remembered not to open her mouth, set off for Bevan House. With the bayonet in the PVC bag, Cath walked smartly along the main streets, her little heels whacking the pavement in challenging sound. No-one stirred. No short cuts, no shrinking in the shadows. Walk proud: someone had told her that was the way for a woman to stay safe.

Halfway up the rising heat of the flats, wiping away the last of the mascara, blurred by tears into black channels round her mouth, she reminded herself how dangerous it was out there. Wept anew, because she had loved him.

H
elen West was day-dreaming, playing several scenes
over in her mind. Scene One: the door would open. Bailey would cross the threshold, gasp with admiration and fall at her feet. Scene Two: the pair of them hosting a party, without argument. Scene Three: herself, in this room, preaching hypocritically to Emily Eliot and Redwood about the joys of single life. Scene Four was the door opening again, but this time to admit a total stranger, a dependable-looking male with a chunky physique diametrically opposed to Bailey's own, carrying a bouquet of flowers as he murmured, What a lovely home you have, Helen; what exquisite taste; marry me tomorrow and never work again. Scene Five: even bigger bouquets. The next, possibly most realistic scenario, was the door opening yet again, Bailey waiting behind it, refusing to come in, while she ran across to welcome him and tripped on the new carpet. The last sequence was Bailey and herself sitting in the golden living room by the fire, like Darby and Joan. Then the film snapped.

Unable to make much sense of her own quixotic day-dreams, Helen was severely ashamed of them. Halfway through Tuesday evening, she had completed the final touches, added two new plants and some flowers in the kitchen. She was so impressed with the splendour of the flat, she had been tempted to phone Bailey and warn him that if he did not faint at the sight there would be dire recriminations, but that would spoil the surprise.

Day-dreams made her angry, they were yet another weakness. It was useless pretending she was not influenced by what she saw and read; she was not immune to the contagion of the romantic or the desire for security purveyed by mothers and magazines, even though experience had taught her to expect so little. Wedding bells were the music of the young. Helen did not want a solid Emily Eliot style ménage, but she did not quite know how
not to not want it either, or how to close her ears to the blandishments of marriage propaganda. So here she was, a grown-up woman, more emancipated than most, mistress of all she surveyed in an elegant apartment with real food in the kitchen, waiting for her man with all the subtlety of a street-corner prostitute.

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.

D
amien 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.

T
he 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 either 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.'