A Greater Evil Read Online Free Page A

have dared. You …’
    Trish waited again. Almost the first thing she’d learned from her child clients in the old days had been that if she rushed into speech, to comfort them or ask questions, she’d risk closing them down for good. But he didn’t add anything. She hesitated to turn this emotionally charged encounter into an ordinary business meeting, but someone had to move things on.
    ‘How can I help you now?’ she said when the silence had lasted too long.
    He licked his lips and shrugged. His shoulders were enormous, and his hands very strong. They were dirty, she thought, until she realized the marks were bruises.
    After a moment he reached for the envelope he’d brought and took out a stained, creased sheet of lined paper, which he unfolded and laid flat on the desk in front of Trish.
    The handwriting was clumsy, ill-educated. She looked at the address: HM Prison, Holloway.
    Sam drew in a breath so deep she could actually see his chest expand, even through the thick, dark-blue wool of his Guernsey sweater.
    ‘She says she’s my mother. The real one, the one who left me on the steps of the London Hospital in a box twenty-nine years ago.’

Chapter Three
    Trish was glad her pupil was on holiday so that she could have her room to herself as she ran through everything she and Sam had said during their half-hour together. Even now he’d gone, the air still felt dank with his unhappiness. She could understand exactly why he hated the prospect of having anything to do with the woman in prison. The possibility that she might be his genetic mother was almost worse than the idea that she was an imposter, after him for the money she assumed he had.
    She’d set out to find him, she had written in the first letter, after she’d read about him in a magazine one of her cell-mates had. It had been an old one, from nearly two years earlier, just after he won the Rodin Prize and became known to connoisseurs around the world. The interviewer had asked him then about the derivation of his unusual surname.
    Trish pushed the letter to one side to reread the cutting he’d brought her:
    I’ve never known when I was born or who I am. My real life started when I was found on the steps of the Royal London Hospital on 13 February 1976. So that’s always been my birthday, even though the staff thought I was about three months old. I’d been left in a cardboard box with only a thin, ragged blanket between me and the snow. And there were bruises and cigarette burns all over my body. Who does that to a child?
    There was nothing to identify me, so the staff picked a name. One of them was a literary type and she called me after Dr Johnson. So it was as Samuel Johnson that I was given for fostering. I don’t want to talk about that. I was rescued twelve years later. The day I left that couple’s so-called care, I decided to have a name of my own. I’ve been Sam Foundling ever since.
    Trish had once known all about the baby’s discovery on the hospital steps, but the case’s details were hard to retrieve. She hated the thought that her clearest impressions were still of her own feelings. Did it matter? Maybe not, given that she had saved Sam from his tormentors. But she couldn’t forget the look on his face earlier this morning as he’d understood she had no idea who he was, even when he’d told her his old name. The shame that was never far away made her cheeks burn.
    It was bad enough that she’d given up working with damaged, terrified, battered children for the infinitely better paid, infinitely less traumatic, cases of the commercial court. But that she could make one of the few truly successful survivors of such an experience look as though she herself had hit him was awful.
    She picked up the first of the letters he’d brought her and read again the pitifully ill-spelled declaration.
    Deere Sam,
    I dint leeve you without nothing. I put my weding ring in that boxe to. He hit me agen when he see my bear finger. 3 ribs and