Break Point: BookShots (6 page)

‘My pocket,’ she whispered, horror jarring at the edges of her voice. ‘I just found …’

In her hand was a memory stick, identical to the one she’d shown him in the British Embassy in Paris.

‘Shit!’ Foster said, and he closed the door and headed round to the driver’s side, scanning the crowd as he went. Nobody running. Nobody wearing a baseball cap.

‘Kirsten, who gave it to you?’

It was no use. She couldn’t focus on the palm of her hand, let alone the crowd outside. Foster slammed the Range Rover into first, taking her away from the scene.

‘Can you remember what happened?’ he asked after a while. She couldn’t, so he leaned over and took the memory stick from her. He turned it over in his fingers. Someone had used something sharp to scratch two angry words into the soft plastic casing:
You’re next.

IT TOOK AN
hour to get back across London, the rush-hour traffic bunching up at every junction. Foster stopped once along the way, at a petrol station on the A3 to pick up Haribo and Evian, which he gave to Keller. At the hotel, he settled her on the sofa and made her hot, sweet tea. Keller sat listening to the hum of the kettle rippling through the otherwise silent air and said nothing. He sat next to her and asked her nothing until she was halfway down the cup and a reasonable amount of colour had come back to her cheeks.

‘You okay?’

‘Better for the tea,’ she shrugged. ‘Thank you.’

She nestled into the nook of his arm, which he didn’t think was a good idea, but he could hardly push her away right at that moment.

‘I fell onto the car, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I remember the fresh air hitting me as we walked outside, and I remember the crowd closing in. And somebody caught me as I fell.’

‘Me.’

She smiled and all of a sudden she was back in the room.

‘Thank you.’

Foster said nothing, but he saw warmth returning to Keller’s eyes.

‘Well, we know something,’ Foster said. ‘The guy who’s been stalking you was at Maria’s place at some point.’

Some of the new-found colour drained from her cheeks.

‘Oh my God! He must have been right there in front of me.’

Foster shook his head.

‘Maybe. Best not to dwell on it.’

‘He was there,’ Keller said firmly. ‘And Maria’s dead. That’s a pretty big coincidence, don’t you think? I told you Maria wouldn’t kill herself.’

‘We have to let the police do their job on that,’ he said. ‘Ruth Cullen’s a good police officer. I worked with her for a few years. She never got a case wrong that I knew. So if there’s anything to find, she’ll find it.’

‘Shall we see what’s on the memory stick?’ Keller asked suddenly.

‘You need to sleep,’ Foster replied.

‘I need to practise. I’ve got a match tomorrow.’

‘All the more reason to sleep. I’ll drive you to the courts this afternoon. Do you have to reschedule your court booking?’

Keller felt the words
Maria will do that
forming on her lips, but of course Maria wouldn’t.

‘Don’t worry,’ Foster said. ‘I’ll sort it.’

Once Keller was asleep, and after he had rescheduled her practice time, he called Ruth Cullen.

‘It was a pretty grim scene,’ Cullen said. ‘We found Maria strung up in front of highlights of Kirsten Keller on a loop. I didn’t want to tell you in front of Kirsten.’

‘Thank you.’

Foster told her about the memory stick and the fact that Keller’s stalker must have been at the scene of Rosario’s death.

‘So what’s on it?’ Cullen asked him.

‘I don’t know yet,’ Foster said. ‘I’m about to watch it.’

Cullen told Foster she’d send an officer to collect the memory stick, and then hung up. Foster pulled open his laptop and inserted the stick. The video was of Keller losing the final in Paris; the soundtrack was of a guy laughing bitterly as she ran off the court in tears. Foster listened carefully. The guy was indoors, somewhere quiet. He didn’t sound especially old, but he didn’t sound young, either. It wasn’t much to go on. The content told Foster what he already knew: the guy was fixated on Keller.

Foster let Kirsten sleep until lunch, before driving her to the courts, where she smashed the ball harder than ever. She spent two hours lost in her game, perfecting every stroke in the glare of the sun and the gaze of the press.

An hour into her workout, Foster headed over to the watching paparazzi. One of them turned as he approached. He was too tall and too thin. He had eager eyes with heavy bags and the smile of a man who had nothing to smile about.

‘I saw you at Maria Rosario’s house,’ the man said as Foster approached, his voice thin and tinny. ‘Should I know you?’

‘I saw you, too,’ Foster said. ‘It’s my job to keep you away from Kirsten.’

‘Not doing it very well,’ the guy observed with a wry smile.

‘I need every photo you took this morning.’

The eager eyes narrowed.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Here’s the deal,’ Foster told him. ‘I need the pictures. There are three ways I can get them. You can give me a copy, and we both walk off smiling. Or I could talk to my friends at the Met, who will get a warrant and make your life difficult. Or I can ram that camera down your throat and then kick you around the court, until the memory card comes out of your arse. What do you reckon?’

Once Keller had finished her practice session, Foster drove her back to the Shard and ordered room service. Keller called her family to reassure them that everything was alright, even though she was fairly certain it wasn’t.

‘Don’t fly over,’ she told them. ‘Every time I see you in the crowd, I’ll remember that something’s wrong.’

Foster went through the reporter’s photographs, scanning the crowd for familiar faces, but none of them proved interesting. The sun sank gradually and Keller asked him if he wanted to stay the night.

‘I can’t,’ Foster told her.

She stood in the bedroom doorway and waited for a reason, but he didn’t elaborate.

‘You’ll be safe enough,’ he said.

‘It’s not about being safe.’

Foster looked at her.

‘What is it about?’

‘Last night,’ Kirsten said. ‘I had a good time. Didn’t you?’

‘Of course I did.’

She padded towards him, just as she had done the night before.

‘Do I have to spell it out, Chris? Seriously?’

She came close to him and put a hand on his chest.

‘We had a great time last night. And you’re a perfect gentleman. And every time something goes wrong, you’re there. I could get used to having you around – you know what I mean?’

He cupped her head in his hand, his fingers combing through the back of her blonde hair. He pulled her into his chest and kissed the top of her head gently, mostly so that he wouldn’t have to look into her eyes while he let her down.

‘The day I got these scars,’ he said, ‘I lost my wife.’

Keller looked up at him, eyes wide and swimming with a hundred different emotions.

‘I saved my client,’ Foster said. ‘But I should have saved her.’

‘Oh God,’ Keller said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Not your fault. But I’m not ready to, you know, move on.’

Keller pulled his hand from her hair and brought it to her mouth. She kissed the top of his fingers delicately.

‘I understand,’ she said. ‘I’ve lost people, too. I don’t want to sound cold, Chris. But at some point you have to let go and make the best of what you’ve still got. You have to enjoy the life that’s left.’

Foster looked at her. She was so young.

‘You sound like a therapist,’ he said eventually.

She put the hand she had been kissing gently back by his side and stepped into him, wrapping her arms around his middle and resting her head on his chest, so that she could hear his heart thumping away inside him.

‘I’ve met a few of those,’ she smiled, as a summer shower began to beat on the glass outside.

KIRSTEN KELLER PLAYED
first on No. 1 Court the next day and won easily, somehow parking her grief and powering through in straight sets. Foster sat in the players’ box, watching the people who had access to the locker room and wondering if any of them had drawn the message on the mirror. None of them looked out of place, so he spent the second set in the cheap seats, high up in the stand.

He was a perfect grey man, blending in until he was almost invisible. He waited and he watched, letting his eyes settle and trusting that his instinct would kick in if anything unusual happened. But it didn’t. Keller won, and the crowd began to shuffle towards the strawberry kiosks, and Foster headed down to the side of the court where Keller was making for the locker rooms.

He reminded himself what a bad idea it had been to sleep with a client, but in all honesty, as he watched her, he couldn’t say he regretted it. She was glowing from the exertion of the match, pumped up and beautiful. She kept her game-face on until she was out of sight of the crowds and the cameras, but not much further.

‘Was he there?’ she asked Foster as they met in the corridors in the belly of No. 1 Court.

‘Who?’

Keller stopped and looked Foster in the eye.

‘You know who. It’s your job to protect me from the freaks, not from the truth.’

‘Fair enough. But no, I didn’t see anyone in the crowd.’

‘He’s out there, though, isn’t he?’ she said. ‘He killed Maria and he’s somewhere out there.’

‘We don’t know that anyone killed Maria.’

Keller paused and stared at him. ‘There’s no way she killed herself. No way.’

By the time they reached the locker room, she was starting to unravel into the scared young woman Foster had first seen in Paris. She hovered by the door. Foster smiled reassuringly and said, ‘I’m not coming in with you.’

She smiled back weakly.

‘Yeah, I guess that’s how rumours start.’

She pushed backwards into the locker room, rolling her shoulder around the door and only breaking eye contact at the very last second.

‘Shout if you need me,’ Foster called after her. As he turned away from the door, his phone buzzed. It was Ruth Cullen.

‘We’ve just got the pathology reports back,’ she said. ‘Apparently they found rope burns.’

‘You’re going to find rope burns, Ruth. She hanged herself.’

There was a long pause at the other end of the line. At the far end of the corridor a man and a young girl were walking hand-in-hand towards Foster.

‘Thing is, Chris,’ Ruth Cullen said, ‘the burns were on her wrists.’

THE PLAYERS’ CORRIDOR
would not have looked out of place in the city hospital, with white walls and halogen spotlights picking out occasional pictures designed to splash a little colour. The guy with the young girl had almost reached Foster, so he listened without speaking and pushed the phone a little harder against his ear, so that none of the ugliness Cullen was describing could escape into the air around him. There was a stairwell opposite and Foster pushed into it. Once he was sure the girl was out of earshot, he said, ‘So you’re telling me somebody killed Rosario and set it up to look like a suicide?’

‘It looks that way. They went to a fair bit of trouble, too. You ever tried lifting a dead weight?’

Foster chose not to answer.

‘I would have shoved a handful of paracetamol down her throat,’ Cullen continued. ‘Saved my back, you know?’

‘So there’s no question that she was targeted?’ Foster reasoned.

‘No question in my book,’ Cullen said. ‘The department wants to investigate the
panicking burglar
scenario, just to tick it off, but I don’t buy that at all.’

‘Burglars who panic stab you,’ Foster said. ‘Or they strangle the life out of you. No burglar ties someone’s wrists and goes looking for a beam to hoist them up on, out of panic.’

‘What’s your theory, Sherlock?’ Cullen asked. ‘And what’s the deal with Keller?’

‘She’s been getting a lot of threats,’ Foster said. ‘Nothing precise. No accusations, no demands. Feels like it’s escalating, though.’

‘Killing her coach would be a hell of an escalation.’

‘True, but I’m not sure,’ Foster said. ‘Maria Rosario was pretty easy to dislike. She was all about tennis – nothing else mattered. No manners, no small talk. She was focused, demanding, aggressive. You get the picture? She could easily have enemies of her own.

‘Until now, all the threats have been focused on Keller. Nothing about Rosario.’

There was silence on the line for a minute while Cullen and Foster were thinking.

‘I’ve been imagining a betting syndicate trying to scare Kirsten into the result they want,’ Foster said. ‘Or maybe a tennis rival or another coach playing with her mind, and the whole thing getting seriously out of hand.’

‘Which one’s your money on?’

‘I don’t know, Ruth. But none of them really sound like they’d have a good reason to kill Rosario. Not to me, anyway.’

‘Well, me neither,’ Cullen said, then sighed. ‘You know we’ll have to talk to Kirsten at some point? As a witness, obviously.’

‘Obviously.’

Foster hung up and headed back to the locker room to break the news to Keller.

THE POLISHED WOODEN
door of the locker room opened at the exact moment Foster arrived. Another player was on her way out, fresh from the shower and weighed down by an oversized racket bag.

‘Are you the guy with Kirsten Keller?’ She had a heavy Eastern European accent that Foster guessed was Polish or Slovakian. ‘You’d better go in. She’s a real mess.’

Foster’s skin prickled and he headed past the player, calling Keller’s name. She didn’t reply, so he moved further into the lockers, and further into the steam, which was billowing from the showers the same as the last time. He raised his voice, quickened his step, his mind full of images of Kirsten slashed or stabbed, blood flowing across the shower-room floor. But she hadn’t made it as far as the shower. She hadn’t even made it out of her clothes.

She was crumpled on the floor, but there was no blood. Instead she was surrounded by an explosion of black rose petals, tinged red at their edges and scattered around her collapsed frame. One fist clutched a thick bunch of smashed rose stalks, and her other hand was holding her head. Her hair was covering her face and she was breathing hard.