A Greater Evil Read Online Free

lowered his head, hiding his expression, giving her time to get her rushing thoughts under control.
    ‘I don’t know why I was sure you’d remember,’ he muttered. ‘But I’ve always felt there was this connection between us. When things got really bad, I sort of conjured you up in my mind and talked to you. Sometimes it felt as if you were answering. That’s what kept me going.’
    Trish couldn’t have interrupted even if she’d wanted to. But soon she’d have to make him understand how a case that fills your whole life while it’s happening has to be unloaded at the end to free up the mental space you need for the next.
    ‘You never touched me, or even came too close like everyone else did,’ he said, obviously well back in the past. ‘You kept your distance, and you told me: “You can trust me, Samuel. I am not like them. I will fight for you. And I will never fight you. I will make you safe.” And you did. It’s all come from that moment. Everything I’ve got.’
    Did I say anything like that? she asked herself. If I did, I was wrong. There was no way I could have guaranteed your safety. Even with the scars and bruises, your testimony and your social worker’s reports, the case could easily have gone the other way. You were known as an appalling troublemaker; violent too.
    Even when the judge’s words had set him free from the foster parents he’d claimed had tormented him for years, Trish hadn’t been able to feel triumph; only an indescribable weakness that had made her want to lie on the floor of the court until it passed.
    ‘What happened?’ she asked now, thinking of the huge obstacles the boy must have cleared to make himself what he was. ‘How did you become a sculptor?’
    Memories began to speed up even more, chasing each other through her mind, and she was almost back in the Royal Courts of Justice, feeling the sickness in the pit of her stomach. Even then she’d known only part of it came from horror at what had been done to him. Most was triggered by her own fear. Was she up to the job? Had she chosen the wrong career? What would happen to this boy if she failed him? What would happen to her? She’d stood up in front of a judge who’d glared at her throughout her stammering, over-worked, over-practised arguments, while she fumbled with her papers, dropped her pen, and never dared look at the child in case the sight of him removed the last rags of her competence.
    ‘It was the art teacher at the next school I went to,’ he said, pulling her back into the present. There was a distant look in his eye, as though his mind was taken up with working out how she could have failed him so.
    The depth of his disillusion was a measure of the trust he’d once had in her, and that was worrying. To have had so much effect on someone else’s life was a huge responsibility.
    ‘I was angry and I hated everyone – except you – and I messed around in every class, winding the teachers up, bullying, breaking things, bunking off, stealing. One day, Mr Dixon made me wait after the others had gone. I thought it was for another punishment and I was all ready to take it, then get my own back in other ways. Like I always did. But he just gave me a lump of clay and said he had work to do in the staffroom and he’d come back in half an hour. Then he left me.’
    Sam was looking less shocked, and his colour was better. Maybe he’d be able to forgive her for the lapse that had clearly rocked him to his shaky foundations.
    ‘I don’t really remember anything except the moment when the clay began to do what I wanted. And the way he came back when he said he would, and stood away from me like you’d done, and said: “I thought so. You could be very good.” ’
    ‘That must have been an amazing moment,’ Trish said, watching his face lose its truculence as the story developed.
    ‘He showed me I was worth listening to. I trusted him. He was the second person. If it hadn’t been for you I wouldn’t