A Greater Evil by Natasha Cooper Page A

exceptionally inconvenient. You ought to have warned us of this as soon as the takeover was mooted.’
    ‘Come on, Dennis,’ said Giles, clearly puzzled by his reaction. ‘It’s a pretty tenuous connection. I’ve already advised Leviathan that there’s nothing to worry about. And there’s no way Ms Maguire’s relationship could affect your interest in the case.’
    ‘Great,’ she said, smiling at the assistant Dennis had brought with him but not bothered to introduce. ‘Hi, I’m Trish Maguire.’
    ‘Hello,’ said the assistant, without offering her own name or even a smile. She did manage to shake hands with Trish, who instantly wished she hadn’t. The other woman’s palm was clammy and she barely moved her muscles as Trish gripped her hand. It felt like a raw squid.
    ‘Oh, this is Jenny Clay,’ Dennis said, not looking at her. Trish put extra warmth into her smile to make up for his rudeness, resisted the temptation to wipe her hand on her trousers and set about taking control of the meeting.
    By the time she had relayed all the information they could possibly need, Trish’s tongue was sticking to the roof of her mouth between each word and her throat felt like the Sahara, but the atmosphere of the meeting had improved a little. She reached forwards to fill a tumbler with water from the jug. It tasted flabby and much too warm.
    ‘That’s all very clear,’ Dennis said, slapping his papers into a neat rectangle. ‘We’ll have to run through Cecilia’s calculations again, but otherwise we’ll simply take up where she left off.’
    Jenny sighed, then blushed as Dennis glared at her with such patronizing reproof that Trish flashed another comforting grin in her direction. A hint of gratitude showed in her eyes, before she lowered her lids again and presented an even more scared and miserable front. Trish watched and took mental notes. She hadn’t expected to dislike Dennis quite so much.
    ‘After all, Trish,’ he said, with an edge that suggested he was about to punish her for her wordless interference, ‘the answer to why the building is moving must be there in the files, and it’s a ludicrous waste of your expensive time to be ploughing through data you don’t understand and are ill equipped to interpret. We’ll get back to you when we’ve completed our checks. I think that’s it for today. When we know where we are, we can move forward.’
    ‘Good,’ Trish said, careful to hide her sense of insult.
    However difficult she might have found the engineering principles and calculations, she was entirely capable of getting to grips with them. She’d learned and then forgotten far more complex stuff than this. Every barrister had to. If you didn’t understand everything about the subject at the heart of an action, you weren’t doing your job. And you’d never be able to cross-examine witnesses effectively.
    ‘Before you go, Dennis, may I ask you one thing about poor Cecilia?’ she asked with an entirely false smile.
    ‘If you must.’ He waved the others ahead of him. When Giles and Jenny had left the room, he added, ‘I suppose you want to know whether I think her mad husband did it.’
    ‘That wasn’t what I was going to say, but it sounds as though you think he did.’
    ‘I’m sure of it. I’ve known and worked with Cecilia Mayford for nine years.’ He puffed out his chest and began to declaim, as though he were giving the address at her funeral. ‘She was one of the calmest, kindest, brightest women I have ever known. And the most generous.’
    Trish’s smile became more natural. Maybe his posturing and aggression were no more than a front to cover grief.
    ‘Watching her since she fell for Foundling,’ he added, his neck and jaw tensing so his voice was constricted too, ‘I’ve seen her good nature stretched beyond bearing. He really put her through it.’
    ‘Yet she always talked about him as though she loved him,’ Trish said truthfully, ‘and he seems distraught by