Fault Lines (11 page)

That night Collons lay in bed with his prick in his hand, talking to Kara. Her photograph was stuck on the wall at just the right height so that he could see her as he lay on his side. It wasn’t the same as talking to her when she was still alive, not as thrillingly wonderful, but not nearly as difficult either.

She always understood him now and he wasn’t clumsy with her any more. She knew him very well, and loved him, and she gave him all the right answers. There weren’t any more of the equivocations that she used to go in for. Now she was all reassurance as she smiled at him and loved him.

‘I hope you’re right about Trish Maguire, Kara,’ he said to her. ‘She seems bright enough, and I know you think I can trust her. But she didn’t believe me and I didn’t see any of the warmth you talk about. She didn’t seem warm to me at all. Just hard.’

Kara smiled at him with her wise, gentle smile, the one he loved most of all, and told him he was right to be careful. She advised him to wait a bit more and test Trish, watching her carefully, before he told her the rest.

And then Kara kissed him as she had every night since her death. And a few minutes later he came. And slept.

By Sunday, Sandra’s knee was better so she and Michael spent all morning together while Katie was at ski school. He was more affectionate than he’d been for ages, and Sandra knew everything was about to come right again. In a sudden surge of happiness, she realised that in spite of everything she was going to be able to forgive him for making her life hell.

He chose a very expensive restaurant for lunch and ordered a bottle of white wine instead of the usual beer. The food was lovely, and so was the way he listened to her instead of snapping and sniping. Her face began to ache she was smiling so much. When he’d paid the bill, he even put his arm around her, kissed her cheek, and said that he felt so knackered he thought he’d go back the hotel for a snooze. Sandra smiled secretly and pressed herself against him.

In the early days of their marriage, when Simon was tiny and woke them at all hours, they’d usually been too tired to make love at night. But at weekends, after lunch, they would put him down in his room and shut the curtains in their own, pretending they were young lovers having an affair in Paris or somewhere.

‘Why don’t I come with you?’ she said luxuriously. ‘I’m quite tired, too.’

She looked up at him, smiling, to make sure he knew what she meant. His handsome face closed up as though he was a woodlouse rolling up at the touch of a broom.

‘Better not,’ he said, pulling away from her and walking towards the massed skis in the rack outside the restaurant. ‘You’ve missed three days already and you need to work on your turns. You’ll be fine so long as you stick to the runs I’ve shown you. I’ll see you out here later if I wake in time, or else at tea.’

Sandra couldn’t believe it. She stood open-mouthed, watching him collect his skis from the rack and leave her without another look. Her goggles were all misted up, not because she was crying – she wasn’t really – but because her eyes were hot and the plastic lenses were so cold. She took them off to polish them, squinting in the sudden dazzle.

She couldn’t see properly and didn’t know what was happening when a child smashed into her at what felt like a hundred miles an hour. She picked herself up, expecting an apology, but all she got from the horrible child, who looked like an insect in his huge goggles, helmet and bright red salopettes, were furious shrieks in some foreign language. Seeing that she did not understand, he gave up in the end and flew off down the mountain, shaking his fist as he went.

Sandra couldn’t bear it. Whether Michael wanted her or not, she was going back to the hotel after him.

The compacted snow in front of the hotel had brown stains all over it, like a baby’s nappies that hadn’t been properly washed in hot-enough water. Sandra shuddered. Tiredness hung on her legs like lead anklets and made the climb up the outside steps to the balcony almost more of an effort than she could manage.

The first thing she saw on the balcony was Michael, sitting beside the fat man and reading his newspaper. She couldn’t believe it.

‘Michael, what
are
you doing?’

The fat man looked round at the sound of her sharp voice, his face almost comically frightened.

‘Sandra!’ Michael said, with a snap that meant: how can you embarrass me like this, you awful woman?

‘You said you were too tired to ski,’ she said, more quietly. ‘I thought you’d be in bed.’

‘I’m on my way. Mr Watford here has kindly lent me his paper and I’ve been catching up on the news before I go up. What
is
the matter with you?’

She couldn’t tell him, not with the fat man there, anyway. So she shrugged and then, to save face, asked whether there was anything interesting in the paper.

‘Not a lot,’ he said, folding it up and putting it on the floor under his chair.

Somehow that made Sandra even angrier. He looked shifty and embarrassed enough to suggest he was hiding something. She bent down to pick up the newspaper. It was easy to see he’d been reading about the Kingsford Rapist because the pages were all wrinkled from his sweaty fingers.

‘Don’t read it,’ he said quickly. ‘The police haven’t got him yet so it’ll only worry you.’

‘Then why were you reading it?’ She looked up from yet another big photograph of the victim, trying to understand. ‘Why are you so interested?’

‘Kara Huggate was a colleague,’ he said, turning away. ‘I need to know what’s happening in the case.’

‘A colleague?’ Sandra was amazed. ‘She couldn’t have been, Michael. She was a social worker, nothing to do with the planning department.’

‘We’re both employed by the council. That makes her a colleague. And we’re working with social services at the moment.’

Sandra looked at the photograph again and then up at Michael. ‘D’you mean you
knew
her?’

He nodded, still not looking up.

‘Did you know her well?’

‘Not really.’

‘Then why are you in such a state?’

He didn’t answer.

Sandra looked at the picture of Kara Huggate in the paper, wondering if the incredible suspicion that had just occurred to her could possibly be true. There was nothing glamorous about Kara Huggate, in fact she looked quite old; but perhaps some people might find her attractive, if they weren’t bothered about her awful thighs.

‘
How
long have you known her?’

Michael shrugged, staring down at his boots. ‘Two months? Three? It must be about that.’

In other words, Sandra thought, just about the length of time you’ve been extra specially sulky and difficult. You must have met at the same time as you stopped wanting to touch me. She’d never been particularly good at maths, but the sums in front of her weren’t exactly difficult to add up. ‘You must have thought me very stupid,’ she said slowly. He did look up then, surprised. ‘What were you planning to do, the two of you? Just have an affair till you got bored? Or were you thinking of something more permanent? When were you going to tell me – and the kids?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Sandra.’

The fat man, who was looking ill with embarrassment, at last managed to get out of his chair so that he could leave them alone.

‘I’ve been wondering for weeks why you’ve been so difficult,’ she went on, feeling as though her mouth was full of cotton-wool, ‘but I never thought it could be something like this. I believed every lying word you said, all those evenings about how you’d been working late or having a drink with Barry Spinel and the lads. And all the time you were with her. How could you?’

‘Sandra, don’t be ridiculous. Kara Huggate was a colleague, an acquaintance, no more than that, but she’s been killed in horrible circumstances. Anyone who’d met her even for an instant would be upset.’

‘Not like this,’ she said, staring at his lying face. ‘I’ve been married to you for nineteen years, Michael, I know you. This is more than just being sorry a colleague’s dead. You’re feeling really guilty. And so you bloody well should.’

‘What’s the matter?’ said Katie, from behind her parents. Her voice was shaking.

Sandra wondered how much she’d heard. ‘Hello, Katie,’ she said brightly, trying to ignore the frozen expression on her daughter’s face. ‘Good ski school? Where did you have lunch?’

‘It was OK, but what’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. Don’t you worry. Your dad and I were just having a disagreement.’

‘No, we weren’t,’ said Michael, coming back to life. ‘Your mother’s gone mad. Temporarily, I hope. What are you doing with all that makeup on your face, Katie? You look revolting. Go and wash it off at once and put some sunscreen on.’

Katie burst into tears. ‘I hate you, Dad.’

Sandra did not try to stop her rushing off. Instead she rounded on Michael. ‘So, not content with ruining our marriage, you have to go and upset Katie, too. Why do you always have to spoil everything?’

Like the good mother she’d always tried to be, Sandra didn’t wait for an answer but followed her daughter, knowing that she would have to spend the next half-hour calming Katie and reassuring her that everything between her parents was fine. Sandra’s own pain, the real searing hurt at what Michael had done, would have to wait.

Trish was not in court on Monday and had long ago booked a rare lunch with a friend, Anna Grayling, who had recently set up her own small television production company. Living on opposite sides of London and moving in very different circles, they did not often meet, but they kept up with each other’s news on the phone and lunched on the few occasions when they were both free in London on the same day. Anna always gave Trish the feeling that she swam in a sea much wider – and sometimes even rougher – than the legal one Trish knew so well.

As they sat down at a small table in the Chancery Lane wine bar Trish favoured, she was tempted to ask Anna’s advice about Blair Collons, not about her legal and ethical obligations to him as a client, but about his likely mental state and what she could – or ought – to do about that.

If Kara were still alive and had seen him as he was in the Waterloo pub on Friday, Trish was sure she would have done something to help him. Even though he must have invented the story of a police and council conspiracy as a way of dealing with the shame of being sacked for gross misconduct, it had run away with him now. He was definitely frightened. Trish had the uncomfortable feeling that Kara would have taken him home with her and allowed him to believe that she understood him, perhaps even shared his fears, so that she could have guided him towards the right kind of psychiatric specialist. But Kara was dead and Trish couldn’t pretend to be her, or even to be like her.

Collons’s idea that she should start poking around in Kingsford looking for evidence to back up his claims was absurd. Even if she had believed his story, she was far too busy and, in any case, it wasn’t her job. On the other hand, she found she couldn’t forget his bitter little question at the end. Was it really the least she could do for Kara?

If Kara hadn’t begged Trish to do her best for Collons, she’d have sent him packing without the slightest hesitation. As it was, she thought she might have to go a bit further than the usual duties of counsel to a client, even if it was only as far as making sure that his suspicions of his solicitor were as unfounded as they seemed.

Eventually, half listening to Anna and making all the right noises to keep her talking, Trish decided that if she spoke to James Bletchley and got some idea of what he thought about Collons, then pumped a few reasonably accessible sources for background information on Bletchley himself and some of the other targets of Collons’s suspicion, she would have done enough. She might even pick up something that would prove to Collons that his fears were groundless, which would help them both.

‘So, Trish, how are things with you? You seem a bit preoccupied,’ Anna said, as she looked up from the menu.

‘Oh, work, you know. A tricky case I can’t quite see my way through.’

‘Oh, God, don’t I know what that feels like?’ The waitress appeared with her pad at the ready. ‘I’ll have the goat’s cheese salad. Trish?’

‘What? No, I think it’s too cold for that. I’ll have
penne al arrabbiata.
Thank you. And we’ll have a bottle of the Chianti. So, Anna, what is it you can’t see your way through?’

‘The financing of my bloody company. But I’ll get there.’

Trish smiled. Anna’s vivid face, which only the most charitable would have described as anything but pudgy, took on an expression of almost pantomime horror as she started to tell Trish about the struggles she had had to raise the money she needed to keep afloat. As she talked it became clear that she was so full of her own affairs that she wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on anything much else, even if Trish had decided to raise it.

Trish, who admired her guts in going it alone, asked all the right questions. But even as she listened, throughout the hour and a half they spent together, part of Trish’s mind kept reverting to Kara and Collons.

‘So I think we’d better get the bill,’ Anna said, breaking into Trish’s thoughts. ‘Alas.’

‘It’s on me,’ Trish said, hoping that Anna had not realised quite how distracted she was. ‘No, no, honestly. I haven’t got any huge debts to all those smoothly sexist venture capitalists.’

‘Well, I have, so I’ll accept with pleasure – if you’re sure. It’s sweet of you, Trish.’

‘Not at all. Look, it’s been great seeing you, Anna. It always is. An inhabitant of another world. I love hearing about it, and I can’t tell you how impressed I am with what you’ve achieved.’

‘Then that makes two of us.’ Anna’s round freckled face was alight with the kind of affection no one could doubt or question. ‘I don’t know how you keep going, having to spend all your days with child abusers and murderers.’

Trish handed her credit card to the waitress, laughing and fully back in the present. ‘It’s not quite as bad as that, you know. What I actually do is spend my days with like-minded friends, most of whom I’ve known ever since I was called to the bar. Sure, we’re often dealing with some pretty unsavoury – or desperate – clients, and occasionally it all gets too much, but for a lot of the time it’s really stimulating, fun, too.’