Fault Lines

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘Sure.’

  She never asked stupid questions or tried to show how clever she was, she just did as she was told; and if she thought what you wanted was right off the wall, she’d say so without making herself unpleasant – or sulky – about it. And then if you told her to stuff her objections and get on with it, she would. As he watched her leave his office, he decided she was worth her weight in bacon sandwiches.

  God! He was hungry. Steve Owler’s appetite must have infected him, after all. He drank the cooling tea the boy had brought and thought about getting away from the incident room for a proper meal that evening. Tony Blacker might be back and they could go out together and see what Kingsford could offer them. Meanwhile, Spinel.

  Femur was well aware of the temptations of drugs squad officers everywhere. It was so easy to siphon off a half-kilo of this or that when you’d made a big bust and go into business on your own account. And then there were a lot of big dealers willing to spend ‘twenty or thirty large’on making evidence of their crimes disappear before the CPS lawyers could see it.

  If Spinel were in the pay of a big dealer, say, who’d been employing the schoolboy who’d sold the crack to Kara’s client, he could well have been told to block her questions before they did any damage to the dealing network. And it was just possible, if she’d been persistent enough and got close enough to the identity of the original supplier, that he’d decided she’d be better out of the way.

  Would Spinel have agreed to that?

  Femur thought about the man he’d met, flexing his thigh muscles, thrusting his physical strength in your face, telling you with every gesture he made just how tough he was and how little he cared about your opinion. He was probably fairly free with his fists under the right provocation, but murder was a different matter.

  Of course, he needn’t necessarily have known anything about the murder plans. He could have reported Kara’s intransigence to his Mr Big, handed over her address and whatever he knew about the layout of her cottage, and her likely movements, and the job could’ve been done by someone quite different.

  Femur smiled sadly as he recognised the temptation. He’d always hated finding that any copper was bent, even one as dislikable as Barry Spinel, so he’d invented a scenario that would let Spinel off the worst of the hooks. But it wouldn’t do. If anything in the scenario was true, Spinel would have had to know about it all. Otherwise, his Mr Big wouldn’t ever have known enough about the Kingsford Rapist’s MO. Sod it! Either Spinel had nothing to do with Kara’s death at all, or he was right there in the frame.

  If so, this would be the first time in Femur’s direct experience that anyone had paid a copper to set the scene for murder – or to carry it out. Still, it could have happened. There’d been whispers for years of contract killings fixed by police officers and at least one death within the force itself that some people believed to be the work of coppers with too much to hide.

  The more Femur thought about it, the more it made sense. Spinel could so easily have set Kara up by having an affair with her. He was well pleased with himself and would probably be quite happy to seduce anyone, just to prove he could do it, even a woman ten years his senior. Whoever Kara’s killer had been, he had known exactly what he was doing and how to get into her house without making enough noise to wake the neighbours – or give her time to push her panic alarm. True, there had been signs of forcible entry through the back door, but they could have been made after she was dead, as a distraction.

  And Spinel would’ve known just how to distract the SOCOs from anything he didn’t want them to see.

  If he had done it, or told someone else how to do, it was a pity, from his point of view, that his knowledge had been so precise. If the killer hadn’t moved the body into the exact same position as the first dead victim, Femur would’ve been much more likely to believe in the scene.

  ‘Keep an open mind next time, lad.’

  Femur could remember his first CID sergeant telling him that after he’d buggered a case completely by charging towards a suspect he was sure was guilty and trampling over some crucial evidence on the way.

  ‘That way you won’t make a flaming arse of yourself again and I won’t be tempted to kill you myself.’

  As though that remembered voice had sharpened his wits, Femur remembered that Spinel had had no firsthand knowledge of the case in which the Kingsford Rapist’s victim died. He had dealt only with the first, in which the victim had been damaged – and traumatised – but had lived to tell Caroline Lyalt all about it.

  Still, he must have had enough contacts left in CID and the labs to pick up whatever information he needed. He couldn’t be ruled out yet. Femur decided he’d better get Tony Blacker on to all the possible sources of the relevant crime-scene photographs and find out whether any had been borrowed or gone missing, and whether any of the people who worked there was particularly friendly with Sergeant Spinel – or had an expensive drug habit they shouldn’t have been able to afford.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Trish got home from an exasperating day in Gloucester, paying her debt to Dave with a tiny unwinnable legal aid case that should have been handled by the youngest tenant in chambers, to find a heap of envelopes on her doormat. She made herself some tea and took them to her favourite sofa.

  Her cleaner was not due for another two days so the red and purple cushions were still hollowed into the shape of her long body, ready for her. She sank into them and let her head fall back against the softest of them all. She realised that she had a headache, had had it in fact for most of the day, but she didn’t have the energy to go in search of painkillers. The tea would probably help.

  As she drank, the warmth spread down through her chest like an internal poultice. After a while she started to rip open the envelopes. Bills went into one heap on the floor, circulars and empty envelopes into another, and letters that needed answering into a third. There didn’t seem to be anything very interesting. Even the bills were what she had expected.

  The last envelope was large and brown with a printed label addressed to her as Miss Patricia Maguire and it carried no stamp or postmark. Assuming that it must contain more rubbish she didn’t want, and surprised that anyone had bothered to deliver it by hand, she was tempted to throw it away.

  Something stopped her and she ripped it open, then shook the contents on to her chest. A red plastic folder filled with newsprint fell out, releasing a shower of cuttings that fluttered round her like feathers after a pillow fight.

  Swearing, she got up and picked one small piece of paper out of her tea, shaking the drops off it and laying it to dry on the edge of the fireplace. The headline caught her eye:

  WOMAN’S BODY FOUND IN CANAL

  Trish read the short paragraph to discover that the naked body of a woman had been found in the Kennet and Avon Canal and was so far unidentified. Puzzled, she looked for a date on the cutting, but there wasn’t one. The paper was thin between her fingers and brownish-yellow. Quite old, then. She smoothed it out and put it back on the edge of the fireplace before searching among the rest of the cuttings for a note to explain them.

  She shook each of the coloured cushions in case it had floated behind one, then pulled the heavy square black ones off the seat so that she could feel down all the sides of the frame. There was a collection of pens, paperclips, crumbs and coins, and even – shamingly – some eggshell fragments, but there was no letter.

  Puzzled and wary, she bent down to collect the rest of the cuttings and carried them to the dining room table, where she spread them out. The heavy black type of the violent headlines made a sinister patchwork on the smooth tabletop. She pulled out a chair and started to read.

  CANAL BODY IDENTIFIED Police say the body found in the Kennet and Avon Canal yesterday is that of Janet Peasdown-Jones, 29. She had been raped before being strangled. An unemployed man is helping with enquiries.

  DOG DIES TO SAVE OWNER IN CANAL KILLING Police are appealing for information on anyone seen
with severe dog bites on his face and arms. Forensic evidence shows that black Labrador Bluejohn fought bravely to save his mistress, Janet Peasdown-Jones when she was attacked.

  Before the dog was strangled and thrown into the canal, he must have marked his killer’s arms and face. Anyone with anything to report should call the incident room on the following number …

  There were twenty cuttings in all, some clearly from broadsheets, others from the more hysterical tabloids. They followed the case from the discovery of the body, through various arrests, and on to a long, expensive and ultimately fruitless search for a local man whose DNA matched samples recovered from the victim’s body. There was also a retrospective article from one of the most serious weeklies, arguing the case for a national DNA register that would have enabled the police to narrow down their suspects to perhaps five men in the whole country, who could then have been thoroughly investigated.

  Trish stared at the cuttings, trying to work out who could have sent them to her and why. She had never met anyone called Peasdown-Jones; she had never even been near the Kennet and Avon Canal, as far as she knew. There was no connection of any kind between her and the case, and yet someone had bothered to collect accounts of it and deliver them anonymously to her door.

  There were only two likely reasons: one, that someone who knew – or guessed – that she was trying to find out more about Kara’s killer believed there was a connection between him and the man who had murdered Janet Peasdown-Jones and wanted Trish to have the information; the other, that someone was trying to frighten her.

  There were few people who knew of her interest in Kara’s death: George, who would never have sent the cuttings in a million years, however angry she might have made him; Kara’s mother, who could have had no more reason to do it than George; Kara’s elderly neighbour, Mrs Davidson, who was just as unlikely; and Blair Collons.

  Trish thought of his warning that the people who had killed Kara would soon come after her, afraid that Kara might have passed on to her dangerous secrets about the Kingsford conspiracy. Could he have sent the cuttings to try to make her believe that she, too, was a target for the conspirators?

  It was, of course, possible that the cuttings had no connection with Kingsford or Kara. Whoever had sent them must have known that they would worry Trish, coming like that out of the blue, anonymously, and with no explanation. Perhaps someone she had annoyed had wanted to give her a bad evening.

  But who?

  There must be plenty of candidates, she told herself drily. My father, for one. Although I don’t suppose even he could have sunk that low.

  An idea slid into her mind, an idea and a memory. She was not sure quite what they were at first. There were no distinct details, only a powerful feeling of security and a fuzzy mental picture.

  Her work had made her familiar with most of the techniques used for counselling disturbed adults and children and she knew that one of the questions often asked to release their memories was: ‘You’re in a room: who else is there?’

  In her particular room the light was dim and she was warm and tightly held. More details become clear as she concentrated. The tightness around her came from cream-coloured cellular blankets, tucked firmly between her mattress and bedstead. There was a tear in one of them, making the neat square holes big and round. She was wearing soft, almost downy pyjamas. Suddenly she saw them with pinpoint accuracy, and felt them too. They had been made of Viyella: pale blue with pink roses, piping and buttons.

  Trish would never have considered herself a child with a taste for pink or rosebuds, but she had been proud of those pyjamas. She couldn’t have been more than four, five at the most.

  She was in her bedroom, in her bed. Her father was there, reading her a story, and she was playing with his cufflinks.

  They had been lovely and round with smooth edges, like Smarties made of gold. There were two for each cuff, joined together with a fascinating chain. Her father used to let her take them out of his cuffs and play with them while he read to her.

  It had been hard to get them out of his shirt, pushing and tugging them through tightly stitched buttonholes. But it was always worth it. The metal felt warm against her skin and caught the light as she poured the two pairs of chained golden blobs from hand to hand. She would listen to her favourite books, and play with her father’s cufflinks.

  Her memory-blurred vision sharpened as she focused on the pile of cuttings in front of her again. She knew that the man who had sat on her bed and read her those stories could never have sent them. She also realised that he couldn’t have been quite the louse that she’d thought for so long, but that was too much to take on board just then.

  She slid the cuttings into the red plastic folder and then into the envelope, hating the feel of them under her fingers because of the other hands that must have touched them. She stowed the envelope in the bottom drawer of her desk and locked it, as though that might contain the fear that was growing in her. Then she went to have a shower.

  As the hot water needled her skin then flowed softly down over her face and body, other memories surfaced from the emotional sludge in her brain.

  One afternoon in a baking summer her father had bought a sprinkler for the garden. He had set it up and switched it on. Trish, even younger than the child with the cufflinks and the bedtime story, had sat on the lawn laughing up at the drops that splattered down over her.

  She thought she had been plump then, and she had definitely been sitting in a pair of voluminous red and yellow bathing pants and nothing else. She had been laughing, and so had he as he bent to pick her up and swing her round and round through the spray.

  It had fallen on her hot body with a thrilling kind of sizzle and they had both shouted with laughter and squealed at the cold. Her father had been fully dressed, and Meg had appeared in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on her apron to tell them both to come in out of the wet and stop being so silly. The two of them together.

  Trish turned off the shower and shook the water out of her eyes. George had once told her that she was like a vengeance-obsessed harpy in her stubbornness against her father. Was that true? Was it self-indulgence to have wanted to protect herself against the kind of damage he had once done to her?

  She started to rub her legs with a clean towel. When she looked down minutes later, wondering why her legs hurt, she saw that the skin was bright red with the friction.

  The safety her father had once given her had been a lie. The child who had played so trustfully with his cufflinks had been thrown away without a second’s thought. Wasn’t she justified in taking this small revenge for what he had done to her and her mother?

  ‘So, George was right,’ her inner voice said, with irritating satisfaction. ‘It is vengeance you’re practising here, not self-protection.’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ she said aloud, and tried to turn her mind to more useful thoughts.

  She suddenly thought of someone who might well have been angry and cruel enough to send her the cuttings: Darlie’s tormentor.

  He was not a stupid man, and he must have known – or been told by his solicitor – that Trish would be making the most of all the written evidence Kara had left to present to the judge. He might well have wanted to frighten her into dropping the case. Having read newspaper accounts of Kara’s death, he might have thought descriptions of another woman’s murder might do the trick.

  ‘Really?’ The derisive inner voice in Trish’s mind sounded very like George at his most provoking, but she knew it was right.

  She also knew that she had only one real suspect for the sender of the package and that was Blair Collons. But whether he was trying to threaten her or warn her that Kara’s assailant had killed before, she could not be certain.

  Sliding her bare feet into a pair of butter-soft leather shoes, she pulled a heavy sweater over her head. As she emerged from the steamy bathroom, she decided she’d been a fool to think that the difference in the way Janet Peasdown-Jones and Kara had been assa
ulted meant that their attackers must have been different, too. If Janet had been his first victim and he had read the press reports, he would have learned of the importance of keeping all traces of semen away from the bodies of any future victims.

  Could it have been Collons?

  Although Trish could imagine him killing Kara in the dark, driven by a frenzy of shame, self-hate and fury, she had great difficulty picturing him standing up to an angry black Labrador in full daylight and putting up with its bites long enough to kill it.

  Chapter Twenty

  Sandra had no idea that she and Michael were blocking the way to the main chair-lift. All she knew was that she had to get him to admit he’d been having an affair with Kara Huggate. It was the lies he’d been telling that hurt most. There she’d been, worrying about him for months, trying to think of ways to help him and still put up with his snapping, and the only thing that had been wrong with him was a guilty conscience!

  ‘So what was it about that middle-aged cow’s rear end that made her so much more attractive than me?’ she said, trying to goad him into dropping his stupid pretences.

  This time she succeeded. He spat out two simple, cruel, words: ‘Her intelligence.’

  Sandra flinched and her skis slid away from her. Hauling herself upright on her sticks hurt her arms. She could feel the ligaments in her wrist stretching, and in the backs of her legs.

  ‘Unlike you,’ Michael said, with deadly coldness, ‘she didn’t spend her days having oil rubbed into her pampered body and using the organ that passes for a brain in some women to work out petty revenges for imagined slights.’

  The skin around his eyes, where his goggles stopped the sun getting to him, was white and hard, like a toilet pan, Sandra thought, as she tried not to cry.

  ‘She used everything she had – her brains, her emotions, her strength, her warmth – in the service of the most miserable, least attractive members of the human race. She thought other people’s needs were always more important than any of her own. She was brave and kind and clever, and worth ten of you. And now she’s dead.’