Read Online A Clear Conscience by Frances Fyfield - Free Book Online Page B

he knew how to move a chair for a customer who was only on the brink of deciding they needed to sit.
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Whichday 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.’
    â€˜Are you being bitchy?’
    â€˜No. It doesn’t count as bitchiness when you’re talking about someone you like.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Andwho’ll care?’ Bailey had said over supper. ‘The three who were armed were all yobs. They couldn’t have won against three men.