Fault Lines

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘You must go to the police.’ Trish said quietly, pushing down her own fears, hoping he couldn’t sense them.

  He looked as though he had just had confirmation that the whole world was against him. His cheeks were trembling and his slightly protruding lower lip was wet. And then he moved his head and the light caught his neat little round brown eyes. Trish thought she could see anger behind the creepy, pleading misery they always showed, anger and hate.

  ‘Blair, you must,’ she said, as steadily as she could.

  ‘It’s just that Kara…’ His voice broke on her name. His eyelids covered the anger and whatever else his eyes might have betrayed. Coughing, he pushed his clasped hands between his tightly closed thighs and leaned forward over them. ‘Try to understand, Ms Maguire. Kara told me only a few days before she was killed that she’d seen Martin Drakeshill having a surreptitious meeting with Michael Napton.’

  He looked round at Trish, as though he expected her to know what he was talking about. ‘Now do you see?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Napton? Who’s he? Blair, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘He’s the chief planning officer of Kingsford Council. I’ve told you about him before.’

  ‘So you have, but not by name.’

  ‘They had a much younger man with them.’ Blair went on, his voice now straining with the effort of persuading Trish to take him seriously. It only made him sound constipated, and his contorted expression didn’t help. ‘She recognised him too, you see, and she told me she thought he’d seen her and must have told the others who she was. It’s at that point they realised she was on to them and would have to be killed.’

  ‘On to them about what? I don’t understand.’

  ‘About the drugs,’ he shouted. Trish recoiled, frowning. She felt as if she had hold of an eel that kept squirming out of her grasp.

  ‘Kara said the young man with Drakeshill and Napton was Sergeant Spinel, an officer in the drugs squad she’d had dealings with. When she saw them together it all fell into place.’

  ‘What did?’ As soon as she’d said it, Trish remembered Femur’s questions about the name of Kara’s lover and whether she’d ever mentioned anyone with the initial S in his name.

  Collons turned on her a look of such icy fury that he didn’t seem remotely pathetic.

  ‘I’m not trying to be difficult,’ Trish said quickly. ‘Just trying to understand what you think they were doing together.’

  Her calm voice seemed to have some effect. Collons’s thighs relaxed and he removed his fists, laying his hands almost flat in his lap. He leaned back against the seat, sighing.

  ‘I’m also trying to understand,’ Trish went on, still carefully, ‘why on earth you didn’t tell me all this when we were first talking if it’s so important.’

  His face blurred in front of her as a torrent of questions about him and Kara, and about Kara and the drugs-squad sergeant spurted into Trish’s mind.

  ‘I didn’t know then that I could trust you,’ he said. ‘In spite…’

  Trish made her eyes focus on his face again. His expression was curious so she smiled slightly, and saw an answering movement of his wet lips. He leaned closer. She flinched before she could stop herself and felt the back of her head touch the car window. Collons leaned even further out of his own seat.

  ‘In spite of everything Kara always says about you.’

  Trish felt a sickening lurch in her gut as she noticed his use of the present tense. Was he conducting seances or merely imagining Kara giving him instructions? Either would fit with his history. Or could he be like one murderer Trish had heard about, who had cut off his girlfriend’s head and kept it to chat to for months. Oh, God! What should she do?

  Stop it, Trish, she ordered herself. He hasn’t got Kara’s head in his fridge or anywhere else. No one has ever suggested that her body was dismembered. Calm down, grow up and concentrate.

  She controlled her face, keeping a fairly easy smile on her lips. As she corrected her posture so that she no longer leaned backwards, Collons moved jerkily back into his own seat and plucked at the knees of his soiled trousers. A peculiar smile made his lips move. Trish thought that he was about to say something until she realised that the words being shaped were never going to be said aloud, and that she was not the intended recipient.

  He clearly had a vivid fantasy life and, equally clearly, Kara played a huge part in it. Trish began to see what might have happened. If Collons had been in Kara’s garden to collect material for his fantasies of their life together and seen her with S, his dreams would have been smashed. Had he decided then that if he couldn’t have her, no one would? Had he waited until S had gone and then broken in to kill her? And if S were this Spinel, had Blair turned the story round to make S the villain?

  Blaming S for Kara’s death would have been a way of getting her back in his fantasies. But he must have known, at some level, that it was he who’d killed her. Perhaps inventing the conspiracy between S and a well-known local criminal had been an elaborate attempt to avoid that unbearable truth. If so, his desperate attempts to persuade Trish, not only a friend of Kara’s but also a barrister, to believe it could have been a way of helping him to believe it was real.

  ‘You see, it must be something to do with drugs, Ms Maguire,’ Blair said, jerking her out of her preoccupation. His staring eyes were watering. Everything about him seemed damp.

  ‘Kara hated drugs. Everyone in the council knew that. She thought they were at the root of most of the problems she had to deal with. She was always talking about finding ways to penalise people who were known to be dealers, and she’d run up against Spinel several times as she tried to force him to do his job. She thought he was slapdash at best.’

  ‘Did she?’ Trish couldn’t think of any more useful comment, and Collons was looking at her as though he expected something.

  ‘Yes, and “dangerous” at worst. Dangerous. That was the word she used. He and Drakeshill and Napton were somehow linked with the supermarket land deal so when we started to ask about the costs they got frightened, and then when they realised Kara had seen the three of them together, they had to make sure she couldn’t tell anyone.’

  ‘Blair, there’s no evidence for any of this. They could have been three friends chatting together. Come on, you must admit that.’

  He said nothing. He just looked at her as though he hated her.

  ‘Now, I’ve got a question of my own,’ Trish said, in a voice that sounded astonishingly confident. ‘I want to know what you were doing in Kara’s garden after dark several times in the week before the murder.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he said, beginning to whimper. ‘I knew you wouldn’t, but Kara keeps insisting that I talk to you. Tell you the truth. I knew it wouldn’t do any good.’

  Trish lost patience. ‘Blair, she’s dead. She can’t be insisting about anything.’

  He shuddered, his whole squashy little body juddering in the seat beside her.

  ‘Blair…?’

  ‘I’d never have guessed you could be such a bitch,’ he said. ‘For the first time I’m glad she’s dead. It would have hurt her so much to know what you’re really like.’

  Trish felt behind her for the door handle. She needed to know she could get out of the car fast if she had to. And she laid her free hand casually on the horn in case she needed it. Then she said, ‘I think you’d better go now.’

  Collons swivelled on his seat so that he was facing her. His lips began to work. A bubble of spit appeared in one corner.

  The effort involved in keeping her expression calm and friendly was making Trish’s scalp itch and her throat ache.

  ‘I can’t. Not yet. You’ve got to help me stop Kara’s killer. She told me you’re like a terrier when you’re fighting for what’s right. And this is. He’s got to be found and stopped. The police aren’t trying to find him. They know who he is and they want him shielded. You’ve got to do it. No one else will. He’s dangerous.
You’ve got to stop him before he does it again.’

  He was edging ever closer to her, almost crying. Trish kept her right hand on the door handle behind her.

  ‘You’ve got to help me. I can’t do it alone.’

  She could feel the pressure of his breath on her skin, smell the baked beans and cheese he had eaten for his last meal – and the decay of his teeth. She tried not to recoil.

  ‘He’s got to be stopped. And only you can do it now. Kara can’t. She tried, but she didn’t know enough about him to understand the threat.’

  ‘And you do,’ said Trish, almost certain that he was talking about himself. ‘It’s not up to me to stop him, Blair. If he can’t stop himself, the only people who can are the police. You must talk to them and tell them everything you know. The investigation’s being run by Chief Inspector William Femur, who isn’t a local man. He’s been drafted in from another area. You’d be in good hands with him. I’ve just been talking to him myself and –’

  ‘You promised you wouldn’t,’ Collons cried, fumbling with the door handle.

  Trish could see that the sweat on his fingers was making it impossible for him to grip the metal. He pushed the door open at last and ran.

  She didn’t know what to do as she got out of the car.

  Leaning against the cold wet metal, she breathed in great lungfuls of the delectably petrol-scented air and tried to think.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Bill Femur was sitting quietly in the one armchair in Kara Huggate’s small living room, trying to get a handle on the person she had been: not the social worker, or the victim, but the woman. Trish Maguire had obviously had a lot of time for her, and he’d been impressed by Maguire, impressed and bloody angry too.

  For one thing she should never have interfered in his case; for another, he was sure she’d been holding something back. He still couldn’t decide whether it was Kara’s lover she was protecting or someone else. He’d let her go – he hadn’t had any choice given that he had no grounds for an arrest – but he’d have another crack at her soon. The one thing he had believed was that she’d cared for Kara.

  Everyone who’d known her had been the same, except for Spinel. They’d nearly all talked about her warmth and the way she treated people as though they mattered. However disadvantaged, dispossessed, demented or damaged they’d been, she’d listened to them with the same respect she showed the great and the good. One of her colleagues had said, in a tone that was more puzzled than anything else, as though it was something he’d never come across before, that Kara had somehow seen through all the mess that life dumped on you to the person you really were inside – and the one you wanted to be. Which was much the same as Maguire had said.

  Were she and Steve Owler right? Could Kara have met the man who’d been the Kingsford Rapist, penetrated his mask of normality, and scared him into killing her?

  Femur shook his head in exasperation. They had to be wrong. If the Kingsford Rapist had killed Kara, the thumbmarks on her body would have matched the ones on his first dead victim, and they didn’t. And even if the lab had made a mistake about the thumb size, the original rapist would never have arranged Kara’s body to mirror the position of her predecessor. That first victim hadn’t been laid out, Femur was sure; she’d been flung down when the bastard had finished with her. It was only Kara who had been moved after she died, dragged and placed in that apparently casual heap with one arm under her head and the other half twisted behind her back.

  Femur just couldn’t buy it. He hadn’t in the beginning and he still didn’t. This was a copycat killing of the nastiest sort and somehow he was going to prove it.

  He looked around Kara’s room as though her possessions could give him the clues he wanted. Everything had been meticulously searched by the SOCOs already. There was no evidence here. He knew that. But still he hoped that some essence of Kara would be there to tell him what had happened in the last agonised hours of her life.

  With its whitewashed walls and two quiet sunny semi-abstract landscape paintings, the room was like an indoor version of his imagined meadow. The pale beech bookshelves were untidily crammed with novels and psychology textbooks. Only one basic kilim, in a mixture of buffs and russet colours, softened the hardness of the polished floorboards, and there were none of the china bits and bobs that Sue stuck all over their lounge and cursed him for breaking.

  He started thinking, half embarrassed, about a film he’d once watched with Sue one Saturday evening. He didn’t reckon much to watching old black and white films, but there hadn’t been any sport on that night so he’d watched this Laura with her.

  It had been a fairly silly film, but Sue had enjoyed it and, although bits of it had made him laugh, he’d got caught up in the story in the end. There’d been an American cop sitting in the apartment of a murder victim, falling in love with her portrait.

  Well, he wasn’t in love with Kara Huggate, but by all accounts she had been a woman he’d have liked a lot, and she shouldn’t have died.

  He told himself it was only a matter of time before he got her killer. All he had to do was take it step by step, go on asking the right questions, and never let himself get sidetracked.

  There was a CD player on the low bookshelf by the chair he was sitting in and he gave in to temptation and pressed the buttons to listen to the last piece of music Kara had ever heard. The icy sound of a pure soprano was let loose into the room. According to the label she was singing a sixteenth-century lament.

  Femur wondered why Kara had been listening to anything so sad, and then decided that it must have been peace she’d wanted in her music, the detachment of this singer’s passionless, perfect voice. To him it sounded as though it was all about acceptance of sorrow and he was angry all over again: a woman like Kara shouldn’t have had to accept anything.

  Looking towards the foot of the stairs, he thought of the photographs of her body and wished he hadn’t had to know exactly what had been done to her there. The thought that she could have been put through all that extra horror just to disguise her killer’s identity and real intentions made him burn up. It was one thing for a mad psychopath to terrorise and murder a woman because of his own incomprehensible urges, but quite another for a cynical bastard to do it to cover his own tracks.

  When the phone rang Femur almost shouted. He’d been so deep into his reconstruction of Kara that if he’d been one to believe in ghosts, he might have thought her spirit had been with him in the room, only to be frightened away by the noise. Feeling fooled by his own sentimentality, he waited for the answering-machine to cut in.

  The caller was probably only a double-glazing salesman. Femur’s officers had been checking the tape every day, just as they had collected Kara’s mail to read, but so far there hadn’t been anything useful in any of it. The machine clicked and there was silence, presumably as her message was played to the caller, and then a strong, masculine, American voice: ‘Kara? It’s me. Great news! I am coming over to the UK again next week. I should hit Heathrow Tuesday at ten after six. I’ll call you from the airport and come straight on over unless I hear. I got your letter, honey, I just haven’t had a moment to answer. There’s so much I have to say. I wish you were there. Goddam, I’m missing you. Sorry I couldn’t call before, or even write. It’s been hell here with Mandy and the kids. I can only call from the office now, and even there it’s hard. She has spies everywhere. She can’t wait to get me out of the house, but her attorneys are nailing me to the floor, and my people don’t want me to give them any ammunition – like you. I can’t wait till it’s over and we can be together. If there’s a problem about Tuesday, will you call the hotel and leave a message? I …’

  Moving slowly and with an effort, as though the air was resistant, almost viscous, Bill Femur reached out his right hand to pick up the phone.

  ‘Good evening. This is Chief Inspector William Femur of the Metropolitan Police.’

  ‘What? Who?’ The pleasantly deep voice had sharpened, but
with suspicion not fear. ‘Why’re you picking up Kara’s calls?’

  ‘There’s been a serious crime in the area. Who am I speaking to?’

  ‘My name’s Dale Waters. How serious? Is Kara OK? What’s happened?’

  ‘I regret to have to inform you, Mr Waters, that Ms Huggate is dead.’

  ‘What?’ he said, in an explosion that sounded as though he’d been punched in the gut. ‘What happened?’

  ‘When did you last see her, sir?’ Femur asked, letting some sympathy leak into his voice, but not very much because he was so angry with his team for failing to find this Dale Waters, and with the man himself for being so secretive.

  ‘Tuesday of the week before last. How’d she die? Goddammit, man, tell me what happened! She was my –’

  ‘She was murdered, sir. What time did you leave her?’

  ‘Murdered?’

  Femur sighed. He felt sorry for the man – if he was innocent – but they had to move the conversation on.

  ‘Yes, sir, murdered. Now, will you please tell me what time you saw her that Tuesday?’

  ‘We spent the evening together in her cottage, then I drove to the airport, Heathrow, slept at the Balkan Hotel there –’

  ‘What time did you get to the hotel?’

  ‘About midnight, I guess, having left her around eleven fifteen, maybe eleven thirty.’

  ‘Is there any way of confirming that?’

  ‘You mean she died that night, after I left?’

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to establish. She was found on the Wednesday morning by her cleaner. We have to establish the latest time she was seen alive.’

  ‘I can see that. But I guess I don’t have any witnesses to offer. There was a receptionist on duty at the hotel, but she wouldn’t remember me. I didn’t talk to her. They have keycards so I didn’t ask for a key from the desk. And I didn’t call anyone from my room. I took a shower and went to bed, then caught the first plane out – back to Boston – Wednesday. How’d he kill her?’