Fault Lines

by Natasha Cooper

  Having shaken some more ink down into the felt tip of her pen, which kept drying out and scratching through the paper, she settled for a short, formal note that couldn’t offend anyone:

  Dear Mrs Huggate, Although we have never met, I wanted to write to say how sorry I am about Kara’s death. She was one of the most generous and impressive people I have known. I shall miss her very much.

  Yours sincerely,

  Trish Maguire

  PS Please don’t even think of answering this letter.

  Trish reread the letter and shivered, at last becoming aware of just how cold her legs and feet were. She stuffed them under one of the sofa cushions, rubbing one leg against the other. There was a mug of tea on the floor beside her, half drunk, but that, too, was cool. In a minute she would summon the energy to get hold of Mrs Huggate’s address and then have a hot shower, but for the moment she just sat, thinking about Kara and what it must be like to face someone who’d come to kill you.

  The sound of a key in the front door made Trish smile. Her shoulders relaxed and she rubbed both hands across her face and through her short hair.

  ‘Trish?’ George’s deep voice was full of all his usual vigour and affection, and it satisfactorily filled the empty spaces of the flat.

  ‘I’m in here.’

  He appeared round the side of the great open fireplace she hardly ever used, and the sight of him – tall, powerfully built and, as always, alive to everyone and everything that happened around him – sent new energy streaking through her like an electric current. She got to her feet.

  ‘George.’

  Hi, Trish.’ The pleasure in his face changed as he looked at her, and his deep voice quickened: ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘One of my witnesses was found murdered this morning,’ she said, with an attempt at casualness that didn’t work. Knowing that her voice had wobbled, she made herself explain: ‘More than a witness, a friend.’

  ‘The social worker you like so much? Kara Something?’

  ‘Yes.’ Trish had often thought Kara and George would get on, but there had never been an opportunity to introduce them. On the only two evenings when Kara had been able to stay up in London, George had been busy with inescapable commitments. Now they never would meet.

  ‘Oh, Trish.’ He said nothing more, just dumped his briefcase on the floor and put his arms around her.

  Trish felt one large hand pulling her head against his firm shoulder. The first tears oozed out from between her lids, wetting the smooth bird’s eye worsted of his expensive suit. He stroked her head. Self-control didn’t seem to matter any more, and she let herself howl.

  It was soon over. Trish loathed crying, and in any case, did not see why George should have his suit ruined, or why he should be bothered with her feelings before he had had a chance to recover from the stresses of his own day.

  ‘Tea?’ she said, in apology, as she pulled away from him.

  He smiled and wiped her cheeks with his thumbs. She could feel a tiny callus on the edge of one scraping her skin. It made him seem all the more real. She leaned against his hands.

  ‘Yes, but I’ll make it. You ought to shower.’

  Trish raised her eyebrows, about to ask whether she was particularly smelly, when he added, ‘You feel freezing. You’ll never get warm without hot water. I’ll go and put the kettle on. D’you want a refill?’

  ‘Great. Thanks. And then I’ll think about what we might eat. I’m not sure what there is in the fridge.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, never one to make a fuss.

  Since they had started to spend most of their free evenings together, Trish had tried to remember to shop more efficiently than in the old single days, but there were still times when there was nothing edible in the flat and they had to send out for a takeaway.

  George hadn’t needed to learn any new skills. As Trish had discovered, when he first took her back to his house in Fulham, he seemed able to keep his fridge full of fresh food. Surprised, and even a little awed by the sight of meat, vegetables, three sorts of cheese and unmouldy bread, she had peered into his tall freezer and seen that it was stocked not only with luxurious ready-cooked dishes but also with all kinds of raw ingredients that could be defrosted and made into something delicious. He had turned out to be a much better cook than she was, too, nearly as good – if not quite as relaxed and imaginative – as Kara.

  Trish went slowly up the spiral staircase to the shower, hearing him padding about her narrow kitchen brewing tea, and she counted her blessings. They had been together for nearly eighteen months, which was longer than any of her previous relationships had lasted, and they had left the first astonished, terrifying excesses far behind. The next stage of any affair, which had been one of perplexed, unhappy disillusion for her in the past, had been successfully negotiated and they were beyond that, too, into something that felt very like a safe harbour.

  She stood under the shower, feeling the cold being drummed out of her, and admitted that once again he had known just what she needed. She didn’t even mind that any longer, which was saying something for a woman as determinedly independent as she.

  George looked up from his Evening Standard when she came down the stairs, dressed in loose black jeans and a soft scarlet sweater, and wondered what was making her look so cheerful after her unprecedented flood of tears. She saw him watching, and smiled at him with so much love that he almost dropped the paper. When she was lying again on her usual sofa, he knelt beside her, put his hands on either side of her thin, magnificent, still tear-marked face, and kissed her.

  In the early days, her response would have led to a frantic rush back up the spiral staircase to her bed, with both of them wrenching off their clothes at every step. Occasionally George missed the passion of those days, but as he felt her lips moving softly against his he knew that their infinitely less frenzied, more communicative – altogether easier – life suited them both much better.

  He loved Trish in a way that had surprised him from the start. He couldn’t have defined what he meant by ‘love’, but if he had had to sum up what she had given him, he would probably have said that he had never once been bored in her company; she made him laugh; and when she showed that she trusted him, which was happening more and more often, she could move him almost unbearably.

  She could also make him angrier than anyone else in the world.

  ‘So, tell me about Kara Huggate,’ he said, much later, when they had opened a bottle of Australian Cabernet Shiraz and shared the cooking of a mushroom risotto. Well, he had done the actual cooking, but Trish had chopped the onions and the garlic, soaked the porcini and offered plenty of helpful suggestions.

  ‘What d’you want to know?’ she asked, handing him the plate of Parmesan she had grated.

  ‘What happened to her, why, what the police are doing about it, and what you feel – if you want to tell me. And anything else that’s relevant.’

  He poured more wine into her glass and watched her as she told him everything she had already told the police, adding a bit more about Kara and why she had come to matter so much and so quickly. Trish’s occasionally harsh face grew soft as she talked, and George was surprised to feel a prick of retrospective jealousy. He’d always known from the way Trish had talked that she had liked the woman, but he hadn’t realised quite how much. Not that it mattered now. It might as well have been a hundred years ago since the wench was dead, poor thing. And in unspeakable circumstances. Jealousy was idiotic. It always was, but especially now. He tried to stop feeling and start thinking again. That was the only way he was going to be able to help Trish. And that was what he was there for. Partly.

  ‘OK,’ he said at the end. ‘I think I’ve got most of that – except this Jed character. I can’t fathom him at all.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘You say he knew she longed to leave her old job, yet he tried to stop her taking the Kingsford one. Why? Just because he didn’t want to move?’

  ‘That was a bit o
f it. He said he didn’t want to commute, which was fair enough, or leave his existing practice, which was less fair since he’d spent their whole time together complaining about how much he detested his whingeing patients. But there was more. Worse.’ Trish felt the usual tug between her eyebrows that meant she was frowning.

  ‘What was worse?’ George asked, his own frown pulling down the corners of his mouth.

  ‘It’s pretty nasty.’ Trish put both elbows on the table and propped her chin on her clasped hands. ‘And you’ll need a bit of background to understand why.’

  ‘OK. I’m listening.’

  ‘I know. You always do. It’s … Anyway, Kara was never very confident with anyone except her clients, in spite of all her obvious talents, so she needed a fair bit of reassurance from wherever she could pick it up. Being offered the Kingsford job like that, out of a huge field of other candidates, gave her a lot.’

  Trish paused, gathering her thoughts. Had Kara’s lifelong sensation of being disliked by her mother contributed to that lack of confidence? Had her care for the disadvantaged and hopeless had something to do with her own need to be valued?

  ‘So?’ George said, as his frown gave way to an expression of absolute benevolence laced with amusement. He was thinking that it didn’t seem to have occurred to Trish that everyone needed shovelfuls of their own particular form of reassurance.

  ‘And Jed didn’t like that,’ Trish said. ‘She once told me that he found it much easier to be nice to her when she was feeling what she called “a bit pathetic”.’

  Trish’s voice had taken on an edge as she thought of one of George’s predecessors in her life, who, now she came to think of it, had shared Jed’s taste for being surrounded by subordinates.

  ‘What is it, Trish?’

  ‘What? Oh, nothing, George. I was just thinking. In some ways Kara was a bit like you.’

  He frowned again, but it was a different frown, not the worried sort, merely the prelude to the kind of question designed to amuse her. She waited.

  ‘Would you really have said I was lacking confidence, Trish?’

  She gave him his laugh then, shaking her head. ‘Never. But there are lots of other ways you’re like her. You care about people, as she did. And you stick with them, even when they annoy you.’

  ‘Some people.’ He was serious. ‘Mostly you.’

  Trish considered asking what it was she did that annoyed him, but then thought better of it.

  ‘So, anyway, while Kara was feeling so boosted by the job offer, Jed just had to take her down. He told her she’d never hack it, and that if she believed anyone would offer her a job so much bigger than her current one unless they positively wanted her to fail, she must be even stupider than he’d thought.’

  ‘Charming!’ George poured more wine into both their glasses.

  ‘Wasn’t it? And there was plenty more on the lines of: “Given that you’ll be out on your ear within twelve months, I’m buggered if I’m going to up sticks and move to an armpit like Kingsford, only to have to move again.”‘

  ‘No wonder she left him.’

  ‘Exactly. She said that she told him she hadn’t realised he despised her so much, and she wasn’t sure she could bear to live with someone who felt like that about her. He said she could do as she damn well pleased, that he’d fallen out of love with her years before and only stuck with her out of charity. Oh, yes, and he also told her that she bored him rigid in bed and out of it, that her bum was droopy and her tits were getting as wrinkled as pricked balloons.’

  ‘Sounds as though she had pretty awful taste in men,’ George said, too casually, as he helped himself to more risotto, scraping the rich brown burnt bits from the edge of the pan. Then he looked up. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘You’re making it her fault. That’s not fair.’ Trish could see that George had heard the stiffness in her voice and was irritated by it, but he couldn’t have known that something that felt like an unpeeled lychee was stuck in her throat.

  ‘You said yourself that she’d lived with this Jed character for five years, Trish,’ he said, sounding infuriatingly reasonable, ‘and he sounds unspeakable. She didn’t have to stay so long. Ergo, she must have had poor taste in men – or a masochistic streak five miles wide, and none of your descriptions of her have ever suggested that.’

  Trish drank some wine, concentrating on her glass. The lychee wouldn’t move and she wasn’t going to say anything else until she could be sure she’d sound normal.

  ‘Oh, Trish, come off it.’ George wasn’t quite laughing at her, but he wasn’t taking her seriously. ‘I know she was a friend of yours and I know she’s dead – and that’s miserable for you and worse for her – but that doesn’t mean you have to ignore the laws of logic and start claiming that she couldn’t have contributed to anything that ever went wrong in her life. Now does it? It’s not like you to be irrational and –

  ‘I just can’t stand it when people blame the victim,’ she snapped. ‘Like those judges who say that a skimpily dressed woman out on her own at night has invited rape.’

  ‘After eighteen months you ought to know me better than that.’ George’s quiet voice sounded odd after Trish’s unusual harshness. His eyes had gone blank. He looked hurt.

  At once she reached across the table for his hand. After a moment he let her have it, although sometimes he still chose to reject such casually affectionate gestures, particularly when she’d made him angry. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘But I suppose I can’t always stop my subconscious making me afraid you’ll turn out to be different… Don’t you ever have doubts about me?’

  ‘I don’t go in for your sort of angst,’ he said.

  She was relieved to see that his lips were horizontal again and his eyes looking more lively.

  ‘I trust you and I trust my own judgement. I wouldn’t love you if you weren’t who you are.’ There was still something cold about him, withdrawn. Then he shrugged. ‘Since I do love you, I know you’re the sort of person I can love.’

  ‘I wish I’d done a degree in logic or philosophy or something instead of law,’ Trish said, relieved that his face was almost normal again. ‘I don’t think a circular argument like that works.’

  ‘Pedant.’

  ‘Aren’t all barristers at bottom?’

  George pretended to think about it. He was smiling. ‘Well, on balance, I’d say that although you’re about the worst pedant I’ve ever come across, even at the bar, your bottom’s terrific.’

  Trish threatened him with the sticky risotto spoon and all was well.

  Chapter Four

  ‘The ones on the left are the ones with first names that begin with S. There aren’t many, so I’ve put down all the ones with S surnames on the right,’ said Brian Jones, handing his boss a neatly typed sheet of paper, ‘with everything I’ve been able to find out about them.’

  ‘Right.’ Femur took it, not sure whether S and the rapist were the same person, but determined to find him. He looked down the list, noticing how many of the names had either ‘colleague’ or ‘client’attached to them. ‘As you say, not many Simons and Stevens.’ He thought of Caroline Lyalt and had another quick look. ‘Or even Sallys. Who’s Sergeant Spinel?

  ‘Barry Spinel. Sergeant with the drugs squad here, apparently.’

  ‘Where’s young Owler? Get him in here, will you, Bri?’

  The dark-haired young constable was obviously pleased to be summoned back and seemed unaffected by Femur’s earlier brush-off, but he looked disappointed merely to be asked for nick gossip.

  ‘Barry Spinel and Kara Huggate? No way. I mean, I shouldn’t have thought that was a runner, Guv. He couldn’t have been a friend of hers.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He’s about a decade younger for one thing, and for another she was a social worker.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, do-gooders aren’t really Spinel’s bag.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  Owler laughed. ‘If he had a m
otto, it would be “Bang the scrotes up and bugger the evidence. They’re sure to have done something you can use to scare them into talking or blackmail them into grassing up their mates.” Social workers don’t approve of that sort of thing.’

  Femur raised his eyebrows, hoping he didn’t have to point out that police officers shouldn’t either.

  Owler grinned at him, looking very young. ‘You know what I’m talking about, Guv. People like Huggate see their clients as children who have to be saved from the rough boys in the playground. And they don’t come much rougher than Spinel. He’s even been heard to say he thinks social workers are to blame for most crime.’

  ‘Right. It does sound unlikely they were friends, then.’ Femur shuffled through the paper on his desk and picked up Kara’s diary. ‘Thanks.’

  Working back from the day of her death through both diaries, he didn’t find any entry for Sergeant Spinel until fourteen weeks earlier. Then there were three meetings marked on successive Mondays. It was soon after the last that the first clutch of evening appointments with S began to appear. Too much of a coincidence, or not?

  Whatever young Owler had said, Spinel would have to be interviewed about his dealings with Kara Huggate. If they had had a thing going, it wouldn’t be the first meeting of opposites Femur had ever come across. Spinel might have been giving Kara some kind of rough-trade frisson, and, if he did play as hard as Owler had suggested, he could have been softening her up for some nefarious purpose of his own.

  She could have been lonely in Kingsford, perhaps regretting the break-up of her five-year relationship, in which case she’d have been easy prey for a sting of some kind. To Femur it seemed likely enough. After all, the initials fitted and the hearts and flowers started coming remarkably soon after Kara’s three professional meetings with Spinel.

  It was, of course, possible that the two had met and discovered in each other something that cut right through their prejudices. Cynic though he was, Femur had to admit that kind of thing did happen. It could have happened to these two. He’d have to see.