Free A Greater Evil by Natasha Cooper

tried a simple ‘thank you.’
    ‘And I wondered if there was anything I could do. Anything practical, I mean, sorting anything out or providing company if you wanted to talk. Anything.’
    Anything? Sam repeated to himself. I wonder.
    Then he remembered what she’d done for him in the past and how she hadn’t flinched from any of the things he’d told her.
    ‘There’s only one thing. The police have said I can have my studio back. They’ve recommended a specialist cleaning firm, but I don’t want any more strangers in there, messing about with my work. So I’m going to do it myself. I could use some help. But it won’t be … easy.’
    ‘No.’ Her voice dragged. He waited for the excuse. ‘It won’t. But I’ll do what I can. When were you thinking of starting?’
    ‘Tomorrow. I’m at the hospital now. But there aren’t any beds left for parents, so I’ll sleep at the studio and get going as soon as I wake. You don’t have to come that early. I know you’re busy.’
    ‘I’ve some phone calls to make first thing, but I could get to you by about nine, if you give me the address.’
    Sam waited while she wrote it down, then clicked off the phone, wondering whether she would turn up. Scrubbing Cecilia’s blood away from the site of her murder was going to be hard in every way.
    Trish wondered if Sam’s request were a test, designed to probe her loyalty, or whether the true weirdness of it hadn’t even occurred to him. She didn’t see why anyone would want to take on a task like that: gruesome and most desperately inappropriate. And yet maybe if you were an artist the idea of snooping strangers in your private space was unbearable. Perhaps if she helped him with this horrible task, she’d have done enough to show she wasn’t rejecting him as everyone else had done for so long.
    Back in her warm bedroom, now decorated with George’s sleeping figure, she wished she hadn’t yielded to the impulse to phone. But as she slid under the duvet, he opened one eye, then the other, and smiled as he reached for her.

Chapter Six
    The water in Trish’s bucket was red and she’d barely started to scrub. The stain Sam had directed her to clean was a broadly oval patch on the wooden floor in front of the sofa. He hadn’t said anything about what he’d found when he got back from the meeting in her chambers, so it was left to Trish’s imagination to work it out.
    There were other, smaller splashes about two feet away, with a sharp line along the edge, as though something like a rug had once lain there. Whoever killed Cecilia must have dragged her from the sofa to this place. Had she fought back? Or been so desperate to protect her child that she’d rolled herself around her great belly, offering him only her own back to hit?
    Sam himself was on his knees below a long workbench, patiently dealing with a pile of white marble pieces, cleaning the blood off each one, rinsing and then drying it, before arranging it in a pattern that must make some sense to him. He raised his head, as though alerted by the lack of scrubbing sounds.
    ‘Is there a problem?’ His voice was harsher than usual.
    ‘No. I was pausing to get my back straight again. And I saw what you were doing. Will it mend?’
    ‘Not really. But it was the first of her heads I ever did and the one she liked best, so I need to …’ He looked away.
    No point saying sorry, Trish told herself. Get back to work and shut up unless he wants to talk.
    Trying to ignore the fact that it was Cecilia’s blood she was touching, she rinsed the old-fashioned scrubbing brush in her bucket, shook the water off and leaned forward. There were plenty of women in the capital who paid a fortune to go to keep-fit classes and perform movements very like these, she told herself, swapping the brush for a wet cloth to wipe up the loosened, rehydrated blood. With the stove pumping out heat, she was soon so hot she had to pause again to take off her sweater.
    Then she found a