oil if you don't.'
I promise.' He was looking at her, his eyes filled with rapture, suffused with complete adoration as he sat beside her, fingered the earrings, laughed in loud relief at the softening of her features. Evie could look so terrifying, especially in this light, her tiny figure as threatening as a whip, eyes blazing with scorn, reducing him to one of those crawling beetles they sometimes saw on the floor, blinkered things, looking desperately for light as William sought relief.
Not today. Today he could tell she was relieved to see him, had made him a cup of weak sugary tea, which he loved, even without the milk he was supposed to have provided if the kitchen had not been so wary. 'Couldn't bring any,' he explained, gesturing to the cup she handed him, never taking his eyes off her face.
`S'all right,' she said, her favourite phrase. 'Doesn't matter.'
Silence fell. He drained the lukewarm tea in one gulp, set the mug on a box, shuffled closer to her, smiling his beatific, hopeful smile, tentatively reaching a hand toward her, questioning with his pale and vacant eyes.
`S'all right,' she repeated. 'You can. Only today, mind.'
Then she lay back on the mattress, small nipples pointing toward the dusty ceiling, her eyes closed. William lay beside her awkwardly, stroking her slender torso with one disproportionately large hand that could have spanned her waist. She was so small, so neat, her skin seemingly stretched over bone and the taut and miniature muscles that held the flesh to this graceful skeleton. He placed his mouth around one of the nipples and sucked like a child at breast.
Ow. That hurts.' But William was panting by now, one hand below the waistband of her jeans, button undone as she had left it undone. She always hoped he might change his mind, but gradually learned that there was as much chance of that as of her baby nephew refusing a feed; she considered both pastimes – that witnessed, this undergone – equally inexplicable and unnecessary, but she was prepared for foolishness all the same. The zipper of her jeans fell away at his touch. He felt lucky today: he had been so good, so very good; he did not know precisely why she should be so pleased with him, but she was. 'Can I?' he whispered. 'Can I really, please?'
Oh, all right,' she was murmuring, eyes still firmly shut, 'but only if you take it out, you know, before. Only if you take it out.' Then she sat up abruptly, pulled the jeans off her legs while he pulled down his loose canvas trousers. 'Oh, God,' she said in the tone of a bored sophisticate, looking at him with a distaste he did not recognize. 'Hurry up, will you, before it grows any more, but touch me, so it won't hurt.'
He touched, a rough and peremptory stroking, with his breath arriving in clumsy gasps while she lay supine, legs splayed, faint traces of Vaseline on her inner thighs, her arms loose by her sides in an attitude of resigned waiting. 'A little bit more,' she commanded, and he obeyed in an agony of impatience, then stopped, rolled on top of her, and thrust himself inside, pumping against her unresisting thinness, remembering her order in his final abandon, whimpering as he released his sticky souvenirs on to her stomach and the blanket. Then he rolled to one side, clutching her hand, and was almost instantly asleep, the smile transfixed on his flushed face.
The butane lamp guttered. Evelyn sighed in the silence broken only by his breathing, drew her arm from beneath him, slid down the wall side of the bed. She picked up his T-shirt, scrubbed at her abdomen with something like a housewife's disgust, and then, as an afterthought, placed it over the small remnants on the blanket. After that, she rolled the unresisting form of William on to his chest. She put on her clothes and turned off the lamp, leaving him in the dim glow of daylight filtering through the cellar entrance, and made for the steps.
He would waken in minutes; she was only just becoming familiar with the pattern after these occasions. It was time for her to leave, avoiding all the tiresome affection that followed. He might wake on his own and cry for her and that was all for the best, when she came to think of it; it might make him more grateful for these rare privileges, these conversationless and far from invariable Sunday treats that seemed to matter so much to him for reasons she could not really fathom, given the vague distaste they inspired in her. They had learned thus far together from the pile of pornographic magazines in the corner, from pictures that had frightened poor William to death, but they had not quelled her curiosity nor eased his desperate longing.
`S'all right,' she said to herself, as if reciting a litany while emerging into the blinding light outside the summerhouse.
`S'all right, really. Time to go home now.' She remembered the fat constable in the kitchen, the snores of her father, wondered if she might have cut too fine her own timetable, broke into a run.
Looking back from halfway down the length of the field, she was almost sorry to have left him. Then she thought of the ridiculous pictures in those magazines, giggled, paused and stretched in the middle of the windswept barley-field, sprinted home.
CHAPTER FIVE
A pile of pornographic magazines and videos, bagged in black plastic, sat accusingly in the corner of the office Helen shared with two other solicitors whose desks were currently empty.
The day before, with a speed and deftness that annoyed her senior colleagues, she had gone through the pornography, drafted summonses, requisitioned statements, and demanded the material that was missing – two hours' work to Helen, a full day to anyone else. Now she immersed herself in another exhibit list, professional antennae twitching, gripped by the emergence of the narrative of the Branston murder, working on three levels, absorbing the story, but still ticking off the irrelevancies, isolating hearsay, sorting the appropriate order of witnesses, giving the thing its courtroom shape, conscious all the time of a mistake.
Even while she listed the further inquiries and inevitable missing links, she was remembering that Redwood, the branch crown prosecutor who ruled her life, had been out of the office the day before and that was the single reason why she had been allocated the case at all. Redwood's deputy had sent her the papers only because he was free of the insecurities and strange chauvinistic jealousies that afflicted his boss, and he wanted a competent hand at the tiller.
Sooner or later Redwood would intervene; the speed of the intervention would only depend on how soon he could find an excuse. Helen was prepared for something of the kind, had schooled herself not to resent it, and was determined to do her professional best for the case before interruption. In the meantime, what she had read disturbed her.
The resolution of the case was so neat, so complete, so quick. A faultless report from Bailey, the contents of which he had refused to discuss with her at home, like a writer being secretive about a new opus. She could see why. Dismissing from her own mind any knowledge of the protagonists, she was dismayed by the comprehensive evidence, the tidy jigsaw puzzle of it, ready to be assembled in front of a jury with no missing pieces.
It was hardly the mandate of a prosecutor to query such a satisfying picture. Not for the crown to show that Sumner didn't kill the woman, only that he did. The defence must raise the doubt if doubt was to be raised, but in Helen's perfectionist mind, that was never enough when life imprisonment hung in the balance. She believed the Crown must show it has explored every avenue, drawn a blank at the feet of any other possible culprit, examined the motives of many, looked closely at husband, woman rival, even children. God forbid.
Here the target had stepped into the net without a murmur and never a sideways glance from the investigators for anyone else. Helen's instinct told her to insist that the police begin all over again: 'Where would you have looked if you had not found him? Look there now. We cannot rely on the defence to do it for us. It is the Crown that must see justice done, facts fully explored. Go on; turn a few more stones.'
Fidget, light a cigarette, debate the next move. Phone Bailey in professional guise, lace the conference with a colleague to make sure it is fully impersonal, get on with it before Redwood uses his undoubted knowledge of the West-Bailey relationship to justify massive interference. Still inured with belief in justice and a passion for the truth, Helen wanted to ask questions. Phone Bailey. It was always a pleasure, that amiable conflict between two highly tuned minds meeting on a similar level of legal experience. She relished it.
As she dialled the number she could have dialled blindfolded, footsteps sounded on the worn carpet outside her door, the familiar, clipped steps of the branch crown prosecutor.
Helen replaced the receiver quickly, hating conversations with Bailey to be overheard as much as her chief hated the idea of one of his independent prosecutors cohabiting with a senior police officer. Nor did she wish for
