A Clear Conscience (7 page)

Emily
had brief but intense flirtations with places outside home, and for this one in particular, they had cause to be grateful. It was the barman here who had listened to them talking a year ago about what Em described as the rising tide of scum in their house. He introduced them to Cath. Excuse me, he had said with a careful swipe of the table, I couldn't help listening. I happen to know of someone who's rated highly. You hear things in here, you see? Shall I tell her to call? Cath had been a godsend, but it did not follow that the Eliots both went back to the Spoon. Emily alone had surmised Mr Fixit the barman was married to Cath, but, apart from that, they did not know quite from whence she came, and cared even less. She was Cath, the Treasure, with no surname and a telephone number only for emergencies.

Alistair sat, early in the evening, fiddling with his half pint and his good fortune. Raising his right fist level with his mouth in order to sip the drink, he noticed his cuff smelt of perfume, a lingering smell, which had been with him all day, competing with the window-box flowers, irritating and refreshing by turns. It had been pleasant to smell the blossom among the disinfectant fumes of the cells where he had been first thing this morning, but not so pleasant now. The scent of it seemed to have grown stronger as the day wore on. Alistair smiled. He need have no conscience about his wife. He carried her with him, wherever he went. Or it might have been Jane, with her arms round his neck this morning, her nightie soaked with
eau de parfum
.

Quite aside from the need to have an interval, however short, between the circus of court and the more stimulating circus of home, Alistair stopped at the Spoon and Fiddle to nod to the barman. There were refinements to Alistair's conscience which Emily did not share. She did not see that once you were bored with a place, you did anything other than simply stop going there, even if the service had been excellent and the memories delightful, and in this wide, pragmatic sweep of temporary patronage she included hairdressers, butchers, bakers and restaurants in the constant search for something new if not necessarily better. Alistair, on the other hand, would have gone to the same small rat-run of entertainments and services, year in year out if left to his own devices. To do otherwise made him feel slightly guilty. Objectively, he was well aware that he owed nothing to the Spoon, with its strange decor of flowers outside and an odd assortment of military memorabilia above the bar inside, either for good times had or for the respite it had given during the difficulties of last summer, nor was there any real debt to a barman because he was so pleasant and married to the cleaning lady. He simply felt a kind of duty to call in from time to time, just in case Joe felt unfairly abandoned. There was another feature, too, in this strange refinement of manners. For all that he was born of patrician stock with a lineage in Debrett, Alistair was secretly more at home with the little people of his world than he was with the great, the rich and the good.

In
any event, the motives did not matter, since Joe the barman (known as nothing but) seemed to appreciate the effort. When Alistair had walked into the miniature saloon during the slack hour between the end of post-working-hour sippers and the start of serious evening drinkers, the smile on the barman's face lit the dim interior. Joe knew everyone by name and with minimal supervision from the owner, he ruled this little roost with all the efficiency of a quartermaster. The cocktails, along with the military memorabilia, were only an optional extra to attract those seeking either novelty or the quickest road to oblivion. Alistair wished they would take down all those regimental badges on the wall, as well as the ceremonial sword and the crossed bayonets which did not go with the immaculate chintz. He drank like someone who has never really learned the habit, ordered the usual half.

‘Ah,
Mr Eliot! What a pleasure. No need to come into the dark. Sit outside, I'll bring you the usual. I feel like one myself. Get into the sun, will you. Tomorrow it'll rain …'

The man never showed sign of drink. He looked like the ex-soldier he was (ex-barman, officers' mess, sir, he had told Alistair once), so the latter supposed he had long since overcome the alcoholic hazards of his profession. Alistair did not mind the chattiness, he liked it, in fact. It was a change from the taciturnity of many of his clients, and once he got home he was in for a long evening of holding several conversations at once.

‘Family well, Mr Eliot?'

Alistair was a literally minded and humble man. If anyone asked him a question, he answered it fully. Joe Boyce thus knew quite a lot about his family.

‘Well, Jane and her brother have been fighting like cat and dog. Funny that, they used to play like puppies and in between bouts of scrapping and when they aren't leaving marks all over one another, they still do. Strange, isn't it? I don't understand these relationships, really, do you? I was a one and only. I would have loved a brother.'

‘Well, you say that, Mr Eliot, but they can be a mixed blessing, you know.' It was one of Joe's virtues, Alistair decided, that he not only spoke softly, but also expansively. Alistair loved to listen. Part of him did not want to be a barrister at all: he was sick of talking.

‘Me, I'm like yourself, the only one. They got rid of me into the army as soon as they could, don't blame them. But my wife, now, she had a brother and he was a real trial to her. Needed looking after every day of his life. Always on the scrounge for money, always in trouble with the law, drunk as a skunk. I tell you, Mr Eliot, he nearly had us divorced. Because you can't turn away your brother, can you? You have to let him into your house, come what may, even if he is a disgrace.'

‘Yes, I suppose you do,' Alistair agreed, genuinely curious. ‘And then how do you get rid of him?' He had a sudden vision of how Emily might deal with a recalcitrant relative of his own. The thought was not comforting.

‘Well,
this one, Mr Eliot, he got rid of himself. After I'd tried to befriend him and everything. Got him a job, even, but no, he wasn't having anything, that one. You can't stop a man if he wants to kill himself, can you?'

‘Is that what he did?'

‘Yes, you could put it like that, in a manner of speaking. Got himself killed in a fight.'

‘Sad,' Alistair murmered, the lager suddenly sour on his tongue, even though Joe spoke airily, as if the incident were many moons ago and a hundred miles from here. Pub brawls, affray, the spontaneous formation of little gangs to exact petty revenges were all part of his stock in trade. He had dabbled in more cases of manslaughter than he could count, and suddenly did not want to talk about it. As usual, Joe Boyce sensed the need to move the conversation aside, in the same way he knew how to move a chair for a customer who was only on the brink of deciding they needed to sit.

‘Now, Mr Eliot, here's a joke for your daughter. We're down at the bottom of the sea, sharks swimming about all over the place. One shark is a moneylender shark, and another one in debt, so the second one he goes off and catches a poorly old octopus, brings it back to the other one, for breakfast. So what does the moneylending shark say?'

‘I don't know.'

‘He says, Hallo there. Have you got that sick squid you owe me?' Alistair, who loved such childish and ghoulish wit even more than his youngest daughter, laughed immoderately.

There were times when even Joe Boyce forgot the distinctions between them and us.

‘S
o how was your day really?' Bailey asked, rolling the clichéd question on his tongue, turning it into a drawl.

He did not think of himself as a detective, nor had he ever invested his own job with a scintilla of romance. He was simply a functionary who had to mop up trouble and sometimes go searching for it, but there were times when he could resemble a machiavellian private eye with the looks of a seedy lounge lizard. He even had a silk dressing-gown, provided by Helen, which had seen not only better days, but better years.

‘Which
day are we talking about?' she asked, looking at the clock with the speeding hands. ‘Oh, today. Well, I told you about Cath, the cleaning lady who is going to revolutionise my life. She might even oversee the revolutionising of my flat. The nicest thing about today is the comforting discovery that Emily Eliot is not quite the domestic paragon I thought she was.'

‘Are you being bitchy?'

‘No. It doesn't count as bitchiness when you're talking about someone you like.'

‘First I heard. I'll never understand women.'

He was teasing. Helen thought of the vacant eyes in the photograph of Shirley Rix, and the tragedies of wilfully wasted lives. Of Mary Secura's passion for her job and of Cath with her apparent passion for cleaning.

‘You don't understand women? I'm not sure anyone does, even other women.'

She had not mentioned Shirley Rix to Bailey. It made her too sombre, and her lingering guilt would have to fade before she could speak of it. Instead, they had talked long and late about Bailey's case, never thinking it was wrong to talk shop, since neither of them did so with anyone else. It re-established sanity in his mind to tell her why he was worried, although he was often economical with the harsher facts, wanting to protect her; she did not exhort him to get on with it and forget moral self-indulgence in the interests of results. So Helen knew all about the pub murder, nicely far away from her patch, so that she would never have a professional hand in it, to Bailey's relief. She knew about a group of men going out drinking, an argument with others in a pub. Three of the visiting team went away, see, coming back armed to the teeth, ready for the fight which ensued, leaving one of the home team injured, the other two in pursuit of the assailants, who had run soon after the first exchange of blows. The home team thought their injured friend was merely winded or scratched; when they came back to find him, he was dead. Brutal, foolish, wasteful and bloody. It was the drink which did it, said the one assailant who had been caught soon after, knife in back pocket. He had gone to the scene deliberately armed, ready to do serious injury. He would not name his companions. Death had been the result of his part in this loose conspiracy and since he had contributed, he was charged with murder. Although he had not intended to kill, struck once, he said, and ran as soon as blood was let.

‘And
who'll care?' Bailey had said over supper. ‘The three who were armed were all yobs. They couldn't have won against three men. Only the one we've got is less of a yob and stupidly loyal.' They had wandered from that theme to others, to weekend plans, to the speeding clock which told them a month of their lives had passed in one evening, until Helen's thoughts returned to Bailey's laconic narrative of pavement death.

‘What was his name, the dead man?'

‘Damien Flood. Ex-boxer. Pool player. Handsome man.'

‘I don't understand men,' she said. ‘Why do they always want to fight?'

‘Hormones, I'm told. I wouldn't know. I don't want to fight any more.'

‘No, you don't.'

Not for me or against me, she added to herself. Not for anything. You sidestep, like a dancer. You would fight for your own version of justice, but you will not fight to keep me.

S
he
could hear the thump, imagine the silence which would follow; then the chorus of voices. Then the screaming. Mary Secura played it like a video in her mind, first fast, then slower, until the frames were frozen. A slow wash of blood came down over the scene, like the crimson curtain in a theatre. End of Act Three. Time to go home. Act One: Shirley Rix, pretty child, bruised by her dad. Act Two: pretty woman, battered by her husband; devoted mother. Act Three: on the run, for reasons she wouldn't begin to define for herself. She tries to cross the road on the way to her sister's at nine thirty in the morning. She has an old suitcase in one hand, the child is being dragged along by the other. Shirley has to adjust the suitcase: it is heavy. She loses hold of the child who wants to go home. He runs into the road; she runs too, screaming at him, unable to see where he has gone before someone grabs him as the bus grunts to a halt. And as all the passengers lurch forward in their seats, Shirley gets a sidelong blow from the lumbering beast, enough to send her spinning into the path of the car which is late for work, impatiently overtaking the number 59. Shirley Rix, crashing against the windscreen, teeth bared, arms and legs waving like the obedient puppet she was, sliding out of sight, her fingers clawing the bonnet, leaving marks. The driver, numb, the whole scenario falling into silence apart from the boom of sound from his stereo, until, with the actions of an automaton, he turns it off. Other sounds, then. The wailing of a car horn, a woman's scream which turns into a chorus, the drumming of heels on the road as the body with the broken neck jerks without control. Someone at the side is hugging a child to an ample stomach, pushing his head into her skirt while he protests at the embrace of a stranger, but the stranger will not let him go.

They
all watch, paralysed. Someone else moves forward, treading carefully.

M
ary Secura waited in the Unit in case someone rang. However pointless and aimless it seemed, she needed to remain where she was, to play with paperwork, and compensate her own nagging sense of failure. She had often suggested, to blank stares of amazement, that if they wanted to be more effective than they were, there should be someone on duty at night. It was the drink, so most of the victims said, which meant someone should be sitting in this office beyond the witching hour when public houses closed and men went home to beat their wives. Poor Shirley Rix had denied her husband the chance to kill her. Mary had no business being here. No-one was paid overtime to wait for a call when the answerphone worked and victims of any kind had universal recourse to dialling 999. The sergeant at the front desk had asked, didn't she have a home to go to? Mary resolved to use the back way out.