Fault Lines (10 page)

Trish sighed. There was no way she was letting him come to the flat. No barrister would willingly allow any client, let alone one as weird as Blair Collons, to know where she lived. She tried again. ‘As I said, the people you should be talking to if you’re worried about anything to do with Kara’s death are the police. I’m sure they won’t be swayed by anything anyone on the council has said about you, but if you like I could have a word with them myself. I’ve already been interviewed, but if you’d rather not approach them in person, I could always phone them for you now and let them know that you were a friend of Kara’s and might be able to help. How would that be?’

‘It would be a disaster.’ His voice was tragic. ‘You must promise not to talk to them until you’ve understood everything. And then you must promise you won’t ever say that it was me who told you. Not now; not ever. Please. Say it. Say you promise.’

‘All right. All right. If you don’t want me to talk to them for you, I won’t. It’s all right, Mr Collons. You don’t need to be so het up.’

‘You don’t understand. If you’d only let me tell you all about it, you would. And you need to understand in case they come after you, too. They probably will, you see. They’ll know you were a friend of Kara’s, just like I did. And they’ll be afraid she might’ve talked to you, too.’

‘Now, calm down,’ said Trish, sounding nearly as tetchy as she felt. ‘Mr Collons, you really mustn’t get hysterical.’

‘But
why
won’t you listen to me? Oh, Christ! I feel like Cassandra.’

‘I will listen. I
am
listening,’ Trish said, surprised by the reference. ‘We can’t meet, but I will listen to anything you want to tell me now, while we’re on the phone.’

‘It’s not safe, even on a mobile. People have scanners to eavesdrop with.’

Trish sighed again and thought of asking whether extra-terrestrials ever sent him messages through his television screen, but the man sounded desperate. It might be wildly unethical – no, it
was
wildly unethical, but she was beginning to think she would have to meet him, if only to shut him up. Without Kara’s letter, she would never have done it but, as things stood, she did not see that she had any option.

After some to-ing and fro-ing, they arranged to meet the following evening in an obscure pub near Waterloo station. It sounded anonymous enough and quite unlike the sort of place where anyone she knew might drink, particularly on a Friday evening.

Having got rid of him at last, Trish had a look in the fridge to see what she could cook for George. There was a chicken, which she had forgotten about but which, amazingly, had three days to run before it was no longer fit to be eaten. She set about dealing with it.

The following evening when Trish reached the pub, she peered through the smoky gloom, hoping that Blair Collons had had second thoughts. He hadn’t. He was sitting without a drink at a table about fifteen feet away from the door. As he saw her, he got to his feet and waved furtively before tucking his hand deep into his trouser pocket and looking over his shoulder to see who was behind him.

He was no longer wearing the dreadful suit. Instead he had on a pair of relatively clean cords and a crumpled shirt that was fraying at the collar and cuffs.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘What …?’

‘I was afraid you weren’t coming after all. Thank you. It’s really good of you. I’m
so
glad to see you. You can’t imagine –’

‘That’s all right. Now, we’d better have a drink. What would you like?’

‘Anything soft. I don’t mind. A Coke? Thank you.’

Trish fetched his drink and a half of lager for herself. ‘Now, what exactly is all this about?’ She put the glasses down on the smeared table, wishing she had a cloth to wipe up the spilled drink and ash.

‘Kara wasn’t killed by any rapist, whatever the papers say.’

Trish blinked.

‘They’re only repeating what the police have told them, and
they
want everyone to believe it was the rapist. It’s in their interest that the truth should never come out. But there was no rapist involved. Kara died because of what we were doing together. I’ve been worried sick.’

Trish put on what she hoped was a sympathetic face and relatively credulous expression. ‘I see. And what exactly was it that you and she were doing?’

‘I … She …’ He fell silent, biting his lip and then the edge of his left thumbnail. His eyes kept flicking left and right and once he even turned to check whether anyone was listening to them.

‘How did the two of you meet in the first place?’ Trish asked, more gently.

Collons’s terrors might have been no more than products of his own imagination, but they were obviously real to him. He drank some Coke then coughed, neatly covering his mouth with his hand like a well-behaved child. Then he took another clean handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his lips.

‘When she came to the finance department. She wanted information on the costs of the social housing Kingsford Council is going to build on some waste-ground near the high street.’

For the first time since Trish had met him, Collons sounded normal. At that moment she could – just – believe he had once worked as a chartered accountant.

‘She told me a little about the scheme,’ Trish said. ‘It’s to deal with difficult families who need a lot of supervision, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right. It’s going to be so different from any other public housing scheme that, as soon as she heard about it, she was determined to be part of it. That’s why she wanted the job in Kingsford so much.’ He smiled and sat more proudly on his stool. ‘She told me so when we had a drink once in her house. She invited me there. To her home.’

As she saw how even remembered approval transformed him, Trish began to understand why Kara had come to feel so protective of him. ‘And what exactly did she think was so special about the scheme?’

‘Well, to cut a long story short, the council was – is – going to build small blocks of flats, some two-storey houses and some bungalows for the elderly and infirm, all together in a kind of complex. There are going to be safely enclosed gardens and a health centre on site and plenty of wardens and care workers. It’s to have a very high carer-to-client ratio. Oh, yes, and there’s going to be some kind of children’s home, too, and maybe facilities for children with special educational needs, but they’re not sure if they can afford that in the first phase. It’s going to be a long-term project.’

‘I see. It all sounds admirable. Expensive, too.’

‘Well, that’s just it, you see. That’s how it started. Part of the total cost has to come out of the social services budget, and that’s been seriously stretched for months.’ Collons paused, looking speculatively at Trish. ‘I don’t know how much you knew about the detail of Kara’s job?’

‘Not a great deal.’

‘I thought not. Bear with me, will you? I’ll have to tell you or you won’t understand. One aspect of her brief was to make quite big savings in the budget. If she couldn’t get what she needed from greater efficiency and less waste, then she was going to have to cut jobs and services. And she didn’t want to do that, you see.’

‘No, I can imagine that would go against the grain. So, she came to you to see whether her department’s share of the building costs could be reduced. Is that it?’ Trish was frowning again, unable to believe that Collons had been in control of anything as important as the financing of a major construction project. But if she didn’t pin him down, she’d never find out what was really bothering him.

‘Oh, no. She just wanted information. She’d already tried to get it from the chief finance officer, but he didn’t have any time for her. He sent her to me, and told me to talk her through the estimates. Even he would admit that
that
was within my capabilities.’

‘And could you satisfy her?’

Collons’s plump cheeks turned a rich cochineal. He looked so embarrassed that Trish realised what he must have thought she’d meant. Watching him, it struck her that his fantasies might have gone beyond paranoia to include some kind of erotic fixation on Kara, which would have explained a lot.

‘We worked out,’ he said, with a resumption of his official manner, settling his shoulders with a series of tiny shudders, ‘that the estimates were so much higher than they should have been because the land on which the housing is to be built is heavily contaminated with chemical residues from the factories that were once operating there. Cleaning it up is going to be costly. Very costly indeed.’

‘Then why on earth,’ asked Trish, ‘did Kingsford Council ever pick such an unsuitable site?’

‘That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,’ Collons said, beginning to look happier. ‘Kara and I both asked each other the very same one over and over again.’

‘That wouldn’t have done much good,’ Trish said, forgetting that she had meant to be supportive, ‘since neither of you had any answers. Didn’t you ask it of anyone else?’

‘Well, of course we did.’ He sounded pettish again. ‘Both of us, separately. And when they saw that we weren’t going to be fobbed off, they had to get rid of us. One way or another.’

‘Oh, come on.’

‘It’s true. First they made sure that anything I ever said would be taken as spiteful revenge for being sacked. And then, once I was out of the way and no more risk to them, they stopped her too.
Now
can you see why I’m so worried?’

Trish took a moment to think how best to deal with him. He was obviously serious and believed every mad word he’d said. Somehow she was going to have to persuade him that local council officials just do not go around raping and murdering people who ask inconvenient questions about building overspends. But she was worried about how he might react to the demolition of his grandiose fantasies. Facing up to the reality of his own pathetic situation might cause all sorts of problems, and he clearly had enough of those already.

‘Mr Collons, you can’t really expect me to believe that Kara was killed because she was trying to reduce the social services’ contribution to the costs of a housing project,’ she said at last. ‘Are you sure that your quite understandable distress at the loss of a friend isn’t making you see enemies where there aren’t any?’ At the sight of his face, she added, still more gently, ‘I expect that her death has left a big hole in your life. And I can understand exactly why you want her killer caught. I do, too. But we have to leave it to the police. It’s their job and they have all the resources.’

‘We can’t leave it to them. It’s far too dangerous. They have their own agenda.’

Trish tried not to roll her eyes to heaven. She sipped her lager and gathered her patience. She wished that she had the deep wells of kindness that Kara had apparently been able to draw on at will.

‘Is it this Martin Drakeshill you mentioned who’s frightening –’

The colour drained out of Collons’s face. His hands clutched the edge of the table. He was mouthing words soundlessly. Trish felt seriously worried that he might faint, or worse. She did not want to be responsible for an unconscious man whom she ought not to have been with in the first place.

‘You mustn’t –’ he gasped. He put one hand to his chest. ‘You mustn’t tell anyone I ever said anything about him.’

‘Of course I won’t, if you don’t want me to. But it would help me to understand, Mr Collons, if you could tell me a little more about what’s frightening you so much.’

‘I’ve told you all I can. Kara was killed because of the questions she and I were asking about the social housing so we both had to be silenced. That’s all I can tell you. And you have to believe it.’

Trish detested being told by anyone that she
had
to do anything. She would have liked to explain to Blair Collons that she was under no obligation whatsoever to believe anything he told her or to take any kind of action. But she didn’t. Instead, hanging on to her temper with difficulty, she said, ‘but I don’t understand what you expect me to do about it, given that you don’t want me to talk to the police.’

He looked at her as though she had been deliberately obtuse, and cruel with it. ‘Not the ones on the ground because they’re in it, too. I’m sure they are. I want you to find out why our questions frightened them so much that they had to kill Kara.’

‘Mr Collons …’

‘And then I want you to use that information to persuade someone really senior in the police, who’s well above all the local corruption, that her death has to be properly investigated. And then I’ll get my job back.’

It was absurd. He must see that.

‘I’m your barrister, Mr Collons, not some kind of private eye. I’ll do everything within my remit to get you your job back, I promise, but I can’t investigate Kara’s death. The police are doing that at this moment. I have neither the facilities nor the skill to compete with them. Nor the time.’

‘Someone has to do it,’ he said, sighing deeply, as though all his blood were being drained out of him, ‘and I can’t. You’re the only person who’s in a position to do what has to be done.’

‘It’s a job for the police,’ Trish said again, feeling sorry for them. Still, they must be used to dealing with people like Collons.

‘Even though the victim was Kara, your great friend? Isn’t this the least you can do for her after everything she’s suffered?’

He stood up. His hands were trembling and his eyes were nearly as full of hurt as Darlie’s. Trish thought he needed a doctor not a lawyer.

‘I’ll think about it,’ she said, as a way of helping him leave the pub peacefully.

‘Don’t take too long. It’s desperately urgent. We have to stop them before they do any more damage.’ He bent down so that his face was so close to hers that she flinched. She couldn’t help it. Lowering his voice, he added, ‘And you must promise not to tell anyone – at any time – that it’s me who alerted you to what’s been going on.’

‘I won’t.’ Trish wiped his spit from her cheeks, hoping his peculiar appearance and hoarse, desperate whispers weren’t making too many people look at them.

He turned away at once and scuttled out through the crowd of drinkers, some of whom moved aside as though he might infect them. Trish gave him plenty of time to get away then left the pub herself, ignoring everyone who looked in her direction.