Read A Clear Conscience for Free Online

guilt with a trowel, Mary thought: she could make the buggers think they had no choice in the matter at all; and I do wish she’d talk about something else.
    â€˜Tell me something,’ said Helen, leaning forward in so confidential a manner, Mary recoiled as if this normally calm prosecutor were about to confess to a bizarre sexual deviancy, ‘do you and your bloke agree about colour schemes? I know Bailey and I don’t actually live together, but he does spend a lot of time at my place, and I suddenly want everything yellow, and he seems to think yellow is nothing more or less than the colour of, well, pee.’
    Marybridled. ‘What the hell does his opinion matter? Yellow? Paint or wallpaper?’ she went on, eyes alight with a fervour. It was an illumination Helen recognised, the single-minded devotion of a fellow shopping-addict. ‘I’ve got a yellow bathroom. Big roses. Love it.’ She was fumbling in that big bag with the radio and the mass of tissues. For the sixteenth time that day she looked at her watch. Helen had a fleeting image of Bailey who never looked at a watch, even in the middle of the night, he always knew the time. Strange that he should also be a man who was passionate about clocks, when he was the last person to need them.
    â€˜Well, I have to phone in again,’ said Mary. ‘In case anyone’s seen Shirl. Otherwise, I’ve got an hour. There’s an amazing do-it-yourself paint and wallpaper shop down the road. Why else do you think I like this court?’
    Eyes met in mutual recognition. Despite the photograph of Shirley Rix, shown to the magistrates, despite the memory of serious common purpose, there was also that peculiar elation which followed the demise of adrenalin, the slow ebbing of tension which brought about a certain euphoria. Then they were out there, heels clacking on stone steps, moving with the guilty speed of children playing truant.
    S uperintendent Bailey could feel Detective Constable Ryan’s reluctance to get out of the car.
    â€˜I dunno, sir. Can’t we just look from here? This thing might be short a set of wheels by the time we get back.’
    â€˜It’s got an alarm, hasn’t it?’
    â€˜Sure, but I don’t quite know who it would frighten. Nobody under fourteen anyway. School holidays, guv, nothing’s safe.’
    â€˜I can see cars with wheels. Let’s go. Your tyres wouldn’t pass an MOT, anyhow. Just don’t want to look, do you? You’ve lost the honourable art of walking, that’s your problem.’
    They set off across the road towards Bevan House, which towered above them. It was fronted by a scrubby green, once landscaped by non-surviving trees, now littered with cars, which dipped down into a concrete approach that led in turn to a central portico, also concrete, before deviating left and right to side entrances and stairwells. Three stairwells, three lifts, most defunct at any given time. There were open walkways along the first twelve floors; after that the remaining twelve rose like a monument, too high for the windows to be smashed by anything but a passing rocket.
    â€˜Wouldyou believe’, Ryan volunteered, interested despite his truculence and his resentment at being there at all, ‘that they put families with children on the lower floors, well, as far as possible they do, the council, I mean. Unmarried mums and dads go further up, singles at the top, but no bugger wants to live at the top. Least, that’s the plan; it all gets muddled, except for nobody wanting to live at the top. I mean, is that where you’d want to live on a pension? Half empty, the top. Little flats, cubbyholes, really. Council can’t get rid.’
    Bailey looked with indifference at the frontage. He felt a distant rage that anyone could ever design a building so alien to human beings, then repressed that familiar old-hat opinion and wondered instead how much it would cost