When she came back from the bathroom, she dug around in the pile of half-read books on the floor by her bed for the one that usually solaced her insomniac hours. It looked boring. She tried another and then another and eventually got out of bed to find Presumed Innocent, which could always hold her attention. That was better. She drank some Badoit from the bottle and tried to believe she was a human being.
Turning the pages, she realised that some good had come out of the evening. Her physical sensations were disgusting and all those bottles she had shared had been quite unnecessary, but she felt younger, years younger, than she had for ages. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that George was past forty, and life with him had been getting a bit middle-aged recently. Perhaps a gap was no bad thing. And she still had a lot more friends than she’d realised. Good friends. They’d got tight too, most of them. It hadn’t been only her. Lots of them had made fools of themselves, as well. She wasn’t unique. And they’d mostly forget everything she’d said. Another swig of water and another chapter of Scott Turow and she’d be right as rain.
And somebody had said something useful about Drakeshill. Trish frowned, picking through her memories. Yes. Someone she hadn’t met before who’d done a fair bit of criminal work in the furthest reaches of south west London had heard a rumour from a boy he’d been defending that Drakeshill was thought to be a dangerous man to cross. Trish had tried to pin the barrister down, but he either didn’t know any more or was protecting his source. He’d just said that the word was that if Martin Drakeshill asked you to do something you either did it or got right off his patch before he could do you a serious mischief.
That made him sound a bit more of a player than the small-time informer Trish had imagined, but it was still some way short of Collons’s major conspirator. As sleep continued to seem impossible, she began to wonder whether she ought, after all, to go to Kingsford herself and try to find out more about Drakeshill and whether he had had links of any kind with Kara.
Chapter Fifteen
When she woke again, soon after nine, Trish felt a lot better than she deserved, and after a long, hot shower almost well. There was no need to hurry because even Dave could not have drummed up some unwinnable case hundreds of miles from London in such a short time, and Kingsford and Martin Drakeshill could wait for an hour or two.
She could potter about in the kitchen, making herself some real coffee, instead of her usual mug of instant. While the kettle was boiling, she dug in the freezer for some bread and came upon a bag of brioches she and George had made as an experiment one weekend. Her pleasure in her renewed freedom faltered.
They had spent most of the morning in her kitchen, surrounded by the warm sexy scents of yeast and flour, discovering that they could share even the narrow space of her galley kitchen without falling over each other, except when they meant to. The whole enterprise had developed into an act of love almost as devastating as the real thing.
Trish could remember the way her fingers had slid into the barely resilient dough that had felt so soft and smelt so evocatively of welcome and plenty. George had been standing behind her with his arms around her waist as she worked the dough. Every so often, he would lower his head so that his lips could lie on her bare neck.
Her eyelashes were wet as she opened the bag and levered two of the icy rolls away from the rest. They resisted her efforts and she picked up the breadknife to push between the rock-hard surfaces that seemed superglued together. Eventually one leaped away from the knife blade and ended up skittering across the hard studded rubber of her kitchen floor. She brushed the first brioche on the seat of her jeans and put it on a dark-blue pottery plate with the second, which had let go with less violence.
When she opened the freezer again to put the rest away in their plastic bag, a chunk of granular ice fell on to the bagged evidence of innumerable meals she’d shared with George. Neither of them liked waste so they tended to freeze the leftovers, meaning to use them up later. But they never had. She ought to throw them out, but not just now. She’d been getting rid of too much recently.
Having slammed the freezer door, she reached to the shelf above for her favourite French porcelain breakfast cup and a matching plate. She had bought them in Provence on a holiday before she had ever met George and he had never liked them. The thickness of the sticky dust lining the cup showed how long it had been since she had drunk out of it.
When she had washed and dried it, she took butter from the fridge and found a jar of particularly special macadamia nut honey, which he also disliked, and carried the whole lot to the dining table. She rarely breakfasted in such style, it was either a cup of instant on the run or a frolic in bed at the weekend with George. This kind of stately, private celebration was something new.
The first mouthful of black coffee tasted powdery, with hints of chocolate and a rich bitterness. Trish kept it in her mouth until she had decoded each separate flavour, amused to find herself behaving like the kind of wine critic who talked of delectable wet-nettle noses and tobacco-scented cedarwood notes with tarry overtones. She and George had often read out the wilder descriptions from the weekend papers, laughing at the thought of the earnest oenophiles licking wet nettles and cigar boxes to test their comparisons.
George. Why couldn’t she get him out of her mind?
She was angry with him, and with reason, so it couldn’t hurt this much to be without him. It couldn’t.
‘I won’t apologise till he does,’ she said aloud. ‘I won’t.’
A crash in the middle of her front door provided a useful distraction. The metallic clang of the letter-box being forced up was followed by the savage ripping of thick paper. She got up to fetch her mangled newspaper as it dropped on to the front-door mat.
There wasn’t much in the paper about Kara, only a small paragraph on page four of the main news section, announcing that the police were pursuing various leads in their search for the Kingsford Rapist. Trish wished she had some kind of line into the investigation to find out whether they had ever considered Collons among their suspects, or even knew of his existence.
A second crash of the letter-box in the front door presaged the arrival of the post. There was the usual collection of exasperating mail-order catalogues, several bills, a postcard from a friend who was skiing in Italy, a thank-you letter from her favourite godchild, whose birthday Trish had managed to remember for once, and two other handwritten letters.
One was addressed in her father’s writing. She put that on her desk unopened. The other proved to be from Kara’s mother.
My dear Miss Maguire, How very kind of you to write about my daughter’s death. I do not know how you knew her, for she never spoke to me about you, but I am glad that you valued her so highly. I was so proud of her as she grew up and I loved her very much. Her death has been the most terrible shock to me, and I sometimes feel as though I shall not be able to sleep again until the police have found her murderer and allowed me to put her to rest. They are doing their best, I know, but it is very hard not to be able to give her a funeral. Forgive me for writing at such length, but I’m alone now except for some cousins in Australia whom I never see. There are very few people who can understand what I mean when I talk about Kara. Your kind letter made me think that you might be one of them. I do hope that when I am allowed to have a funeral for her you will come.
Yours sincerely,
Katherine Huggate
The tone of the letter was so surprising after what Kara had said about her mother’s dislike that Trish had to reread it twice to make sure she hadn’t misunderstood the first paragraph.
She pushed her hands through her hair, trying to understand, well aware that she was a relative innocent when it came to mother-daughter conflicts. Her own good relationship with her mother had always been part of the underpinning of her life, but she knew she was unusually lucky. Nearly all her friends had horror stories of argument and insensitivity to swap whenever they started talking about their mothers. Kara h
ad complained much less than most, but the little she had said had been enough to tell Trish that Mrs Huggate had made her daughter feel not just unloved but unlovable.
Trish was increasingly sure that it must have been Kara’s childhood experiences that had left her with such a profound need to make other people happy – or, at least, happier than they had been before she met them. Whenever she failed, her instinct was to withdraw, as though she couldn’t believe herself worth liking unless she was doing something useful.
It was ironic that her mother was not only the one person she had never been able to help but also the one she could never have abandoned. Perhaps that explained the contradiction. The criticism that had so distressed Kara might not have originated with her mother in the first place. If Kara had been sending out signals of failure or dislike from some kind of emotional sonar, they could have locked on to her mother’s unhappiness and come pinging straight back to Kara.
On the other hand, Trish reminded herself, the letter need not have been genuine. Mrs Huggate could have drafted that first paragraph out of guilt or simply as a way of rewriting history to make herself feel better about what she had done to her daughter.
‘God! You’re such a cynic, Trish,’ Kara had said to her once, and it was true. But at least cynicism was safer than naïveté. As a cynic you could take a certain miserable satisfaction when you discovered that people were quite as treacherous or cruel as you’d feared. If you’d believed in them – trusted them – and they let you down, you were stuck.
Kara had been like that, believing that everyone she met was fundamentally good until she was forced to admit the opposite. She’d once told Trish that she was sure there was something likeable in everyone in the world and that if you were careful enough – kind enough – you could bring it out. She’d also believed that no one could consistently meet kindness with cruelty, so that if she could only hang on long enough she would get the response she wanted in the end.
Was that why she’d died? Had she been pouring out warmth and affection on to someone who was beyond help? Collons? Or someone even more damaged?
Trish put Mrs Huggate’s letter in the basket where she kept things she didn’t want to throw away but did not have any particular use for, and looked at her father’s unopened letter. There could be no comparison. Kara might have been wrong about her mother, although that still wasn’t certain, but it didn’t mean that Trish had misjudged her father.
Whatever Mrs Huggate turned out to be like, Paddy Maguire was a treacherous louse, and his daughter had every right to avoid him.
Unable to destroy his letter without reading it, Trish put it in one of the drawers of her desk, along with all the others he had written whenever he read about her cases in the press. Having to think about him made the prospect of going to Kingsford to gather evidence to support or banish Blair Collons’s suspicions into an alluring distraction instead of a dreary chore.
The road was dreadful, full of bottlenecks and inadequate signs, inconsiderately parked delivery vans, and buses sitting panting while long queues of slow-moving passengers embarked and paid for their tickets.
Oh, for the days when all a driver had to do was drive, thought Trish, and buses could move off as soon as the waiting passengers had boarded.
She got to Kingsford eventually and was pleasantly surprised to find parts of it thoroughly attractive. Once a town in its own right, it had long ago been overtaken by the inexorable spreading of the suburbs, and its original seventeenth-century brick houses with their deep white cornices and sloping slate roofs were surrounded by streets of Edwardian half-timbered semis and overlooked by the ugly concrete towers of sixties housing estates.
The High Street was still alive and lined with branches of most of the usual chain stores and building societies. Trish drove into the car-park of Sainsbury’s, not wanting to risk infringing unfamiliar parking regulations and find the car clamped or towed away.
Even though she had come to Kingsford to suss out Martin Drakeshill, she found that she wanted to see the place where Kara had died. It wasn’t prurience, just a need to make some kind of contact with her friend.
Church Lane proved to be a pleasant quiet street on the edge of the recreation ground, well away from the bustle of the high street. All the cottages in the row were built to the same model and they had quite big gardens. They’d probably once been home to agricultural workers, but must have been gentrified several generations ago.
Each of the sloping front gardens was divided by a flagged path that led up to a plain painted door in the middle of a two-storey plastered building. There were two windows on the ground floor, three above, and the roofs were steeply pitched with working chimney-pots at either end. All the gardens were well kept and the walls and window frames recently painted. Most of the cottages were white or cream, but a few were the unsubtle pinks and greens of the Neapolitan ice cream that had been one of Trish’s childhood treats.
Caring neighbours, she thought, and wondered why none of them had heard what was happening to Kara and come to help her or at least called 999.
It was easy to identify Kara’s cottage by the white tapes tied around the boundary and the police notice stuck to the front door. As Trish stood at the bottom of the garden, looking up at the house and thinking of what had happened inside it, she was overwhelmed by a tide of anger that pushed aside every other feeling.
Whoever had killed Kara had to be found before he did any more damage. Then, whatever his private torments or inadequacies, he had to be punished as harshly as the law allowed.
At that moment Trish couldn’t have cared less about understanding or rehabilitation; still less about forgiveness. She wanted to know that Kara’s killer was suffering.
A movement caught her eye and she looked up. In the cottage to the left of Kara’s a curtain was twitching. A moment later Trish was ringing the bell.
An elderly woman, very short and with a distinct dowager’s hump, opened the door and tried to appear surprised as she twisted her head up to look at Trish.
‘I saw that you were in,’ Trish said, with a smile, ‘and I wondered if I could talk to you about Kara Huggate. She was a friend of mine, you see, and I …’
‘Oh, you poor thing,’ said the woman, backing away, her head still painfully twisted to allow her to see more than her own feet. ‘Come in and sit down. You look very tired. I’ll put the kettle on.’
‘My name’s Trish Maguire,’ she said, worried that anyone was prepared to let a complete stranger into her house, particularly a woman as frail and unprotected as this one. ‘I’m a barrister, and Kara and I met over a case for which she was to be a witness. I’m sure I’ve got some identification with me. Hold on.’
‘Don’t worry about that.’ The woman patted Trish’s hand. ‘I can tell you were a real friend of hers. You’ve got an honest face. You saw me looking at you, didn’t you?’
Trish nodded.
‘Well, I could see you, too, and I could tell how sad you are. Come into the kitchen while I make tea. I didn’t know her well. She only moved in last autumn and we don’t mix much in Church Lane. We keep ourselves to ourselves.’
‘Although I see that you do have a Neighbourhood Watch,’ Trish said, following her down a dark passage towards the kitchen, which looked out over a neatly dug vegetable garden. Her hostess must have help – or perhaps a younger, stronger person living in the house.
‘Well, yes, we do, but we don’t like to pry, you see.’
‘No. I can imagine that. Do you …? I can’t go on calling you “you”. May I know your name?’
‘Of course.’ She put the lid on the kettle and wiped her hands on a red and white checked tea towel. ‘I’m Mrs Davidson.’
They shook hands. Trish gestured to the garden. ‘D’you do all this work yourself, Mrs Davidson?’
‘Oh, no. I’ve a man who comes in once a week. He’s just done the winter digging. It’s something to do with the frosts. I’ve never understood, but I let him
get on with it. Kara was planning to do all her own gardening, but I don’t think she had enough time, really. I mean, look at the weeds. I tried to persuade her to use my Jake, but she wouldn’t, said she couldn’t afford him.’
Trish stepped closer to the kitchen window and saw that there was an excellent view into Kara’s back garden, which didn’t seem to her unaccustomed eyes to be particularly untidy.
‘You are quite close, aren’t you? Did you hear anything on the night she … on the night it happened.’
‘Well, no, I didn’t.’ The kettle was boiling and it was not until Mrs Davidson had made the tea that she added, ‘but I don’t sleep well these days without a pill, and then once I’ve taken one, a train could come through my room and I wouldn’t wake. I’d had one that night, you see, and I didn’t hear a thing. If I’d known she was in danger, I’d never have taken it.’
‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ said Trish. ‘I understand that.’
‘And I haven’t dared take any since. Not with him still out there.’
Mrs Davidson put a knitted cosy over the tea-pot and stood with her hands clasped around it, and her head on one side again so that she could stare out of the window. Trish would have liked to reassure her, but she couldn’t. On the face of it, it seemed unlikely that anyone would risk returning to the place where he had committed murder, but you never knew. If the killer suspected – or had been told – that there had been a witness, he might well decide he had to silence her.
‘So I lie awake thinking about what happened to her. It’s awful knowing she suffered like that while I was asleep, that there was no one to help her when … Her other neighbours were away skiing, you see.’
Mrs Davidson turned and Trish saw that there was nothing ghoulish in her face, just fear and a bottomless sadness. ‘She was a very kind woman.’
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