Fault Lines (12 page)

Anna looked at her with the kind of speculation a judge might show towards a defendant who had just changed a not-guilty plea at the last possible moment and at great cost to the public purse.

‘What?’ Trish asked warily.

‘I’m just thinking that George Henton must have some amazing secret. I can see I shall have to pay much closer attention when we next meet.’

‘George? What
do
you mean, Anna?’

‘Well, when you and I last had lunch on our own – what is it? Nearly two years ago? – you spent most of the time telling me how ill it made you to be dealing all the time in human misery and watching children being punished for their parents’inadequacies and angers. George is the only thing that’s different in your life now, as far as I can see, so it must be him.’

‘I suppose you’re right in a way,’ Trish said. ‘Being happy these days, it is easier to keep a space between me and what happens to my clients.’ She was struck all over again by how much she owed George and made a mental note to tell him so. ‘And Seb, Anna? How’re things with him? You haven’t said a word about him.’

‘There’s nothing very interesting to say.’ Trish frowned in quick concern. Anna noticed and smiled as she shook her head. Then she shrugged. ‘Honestly. We’re OK.’

‘I’m glad.’ Being five inches taller, Trish had to stoop to kiss Anna goodbye. ‘Really glad. Good luck with the big series.’

‘And you with the next case. It’s been great, Trish. Thank you for lunch.’

‘See you soon.’

Back at her desk, feeling better and more decisive for the distraction, Trish rang the clerks’room to ask for Blair Collons’s solicitor’s phone number. She got through without trouble.

‘Mr Bletchley? It’s Trish Maguire here. Look, I’ve been thinking about our client, and I realise I need to know a bit more about his background.’

‘I see. What exactly is it that you wish to know?’

There was something extra-careful in his voice that made Trish’s antennae twitch. ‘Whatever there is.’

‘I don’t think I quite understand.’

‘Oh, I think you do,’ Trish said, hoping she sounded lightly amused instead of intensely curious. ‘I’ve heard that tone from solicitors before, and I know what it means. Look, you badgered my clerk to get me to represent your client in a case that, on the face of it, does not require the attentions of counsel. I want to know why. And I think the least you can do is give me everything you know about him. What is it you’ve been hiding?’

‘Hiding? Ms Maguire, what can you be thinking of?’

‘Oh, come on. What’s the snag? Has he got a record?’

There was a pause and then a dry cough.

Now we’re getting somewhere, she thought. Perhaps that explains Collons’s peculiarities – and his terrors.

‘In a way. But please do not think, Ms Maguire, that I have been concealing anything. It is simply irrelevant and I didn’t want to bother you with it. His past difficulties have no bearing on this case. There was no question of fraud or dishonesty, you see. Naturally I’d have told you if there had been.’

‘So what was there, then?’ Trish was feeling for a pen so that she could take proper notes.

‘A few years ago he had a rather unfortunate experience with a young woman,’ Bletchley said, his voice taking on a distant tone Trish had not heard from him before. It made him sound self-conscious, almost guilty, which couldn’t have been his intention. ‘Not so young, in fact, now I come to think of it.’

‘What kind of experience?’ In the long silence, she remembered Collons’s exaggerated reaction to her question about satisfying Kara. ‘Something sexual? Assault of some kind?’

‘It wasn’t exactly assault.’

‘So something like flashing then? Or was there physical contact?’

‘Some. Not much. And it was all a mistake.’

‘Oh, come on, Mr Bletchley, for heaven’s sake. This is like drawing teeth. And it only makes him sound worse. Why not just spit it out?’

‘He once formed an affection for a woman he hardly knew. She lived in the same block of flats as he in Balham. It was a genuine misunderstanding. He believed that she cared for him, although they had never been introduced and had hardly ever spoken to each other. You see, they travelled on the same tube to work every single morning and after the first year or so, she tended to smile at him and occasionally greeted him or commented on the weather. No more than that.’

‘The kind of thing most commuters do,’ Trish agreed, remembering with a shudder the daily trauma of being squashed between other people’s bodies in a dirty train that sat in airless tunnels for minutes at a time. Living within walking distance of chambers was worth an incalculable amount. How George could stick with his Fulham house, she couldn’t imagine.

‘Yes. Unfortunately, our client, who – as you will have realised – is a little short on social skills, built up the relationship in his mind into rather more than it actually was. He, er, took the woman’s friendly courtesy as a sign that she had fallen in love with him.’

‘I see. And what did he do?’

‘To begin with he just followed her through the block of flats to her front door whenever they returned from work at the same time, and once or twice he loitered outside her windows to catch a glimpse of her. She had a ground-floor flat. I have talked to him at some length about all this, you see, and realised how innocent he was.’

‘There’s innocence and innocence, of course,’ Trish commented drily.

‘Indeed. Every time the young woman left a gap in her curtains, he was sure it meant that she knew he was there and wanted him to see her … well, undressing. And so he occasionally, er, took down his trousers to show that he “understood” her messages. Either she did not see him or she did not realise who he was. Having interpreted her actions or lack of them as encouragement, he began to touch her surreptitiously in the underground, during the rush-hour, and when she did not protest, he took it as another signal that she knew what he was doing and enjoyed it.’

‘Poor woman. She was presumably either too embarrassed or thought it was just the crowd pressing in on her.’

‘I fear so. But our client deserves sympathy, too. One day on the underground, she smiled particularly kindly at him over her shoulder and all his inhibitions were overcome. He put both hands on her hips and dragged her back against him, grinding himself into her and whispering something lewd into her ear.’

Described in the solicitor’s precise, chilly voice, the scene seemed almost funny, but Trish could well imagine how the unknown woman must have felt at the time. ‘So presumably she went to the police,’ she said, as a tadpole of suspicion wiggled into her mind.

‘She did. At first they did not believe her because she was not exactly a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.’ The solicitor sounded regretful rather than contemptuous. ‘But there was very little doubt that she was still unravished.’

What is it about solicitors, Trish wondered, that makes them bring poetry into their everyday conversation? George did it, too. She quite liked it from him in their private lives, but in Bletchley, talking about a case, it irritated her.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said stiffly, as though she had never read ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.

‘She was in her late thirties, unmarried, rather plump and very dowdy. This was some time ago, don’t forget, and they assumed in their misogynist way that it was she who was fantasising. That is, until they interviewed our client.’

‘He confessed, did he?’

‘Immediately. As soon as they asked him about the incident, he poured out the whole story. He was so puzzled by her reaction that he wanted them to understand and told them everything he had done and why. There had been more, you see, silent telephone calls and so on.’

‘Pretty much a classic stalker, in fact.’

‘That is what it sounds like, isn’t it? But in those days no one knew about the forces that drive such men. He was merely cautioned for the indecency.’

‘You mean he wasn’t prosecuted?’ The tadpole in Trish’s mind was growing legs.

‘That’s correct. If he had been, I should have told you. Naturally. But the whole episode rocked what little confidence he had. He had genuinely believed the woman thought of him in the terms in which he had been dreaming of her. He became very depressed, started drinking, lost his job, stopped paying his mortgage, and ended up on the streets.’

‘I see.’ Trish was beginning to see quite how unfair Collons had been to his solicitor. James Bletchley sounded remarkably tolerant and very much on his client’s side.

‘I hope you do. He’s been quite a hero in his way. You see, he pulled himself together, found his way to a Salvation Army hostel, kicked the drink and eventually he began to look for a job again. And then a flat.’

‘Which is why he’s been working as a lowly bookkeeper despite having been a chartered accountant.’

‘Precisely, Ms Maguire. I do not suppose he would ever have set the world on fire, even the world of accountancy, but if he had been able to talk to that unfortunate young woman in the ordinary way and invite her to eat with him, go to the cinema perhaps, enjoy some normal social intercourse with her, he might well have behaved acceptably and none of it would have happened.’

‘Maybe.’ But if he had been able to approach her like that, thought Trish, he wouldn’t have been the man he was, so the point was academic.

‘As it is, he has shown considerable courage and has never offended again. Indeed, he positively keeps his distance from women. This unfair dismissal is giving him exactly the kind of stress that could throw him right back. It was truly unfair, Ms Maguire, and I am determined to have it rescinded. You do see, do you not, why he needs your help?’

‘Yes, I do.’ Trish thought of Kara’s letter. She, too, had seen Collons’s disadvantages principally in terms of the help he needed. Clearly both Kara and James Bletchley were better people than she was herself. ‘As a matter of interest, why didn’t you tell me all this before I met him?’

‘I felt it would not be fair. I thought it better that you should have the opportunity to form your own judgement of him.’

‘I see. Well, I’d have preferred to know it all first. We’ll have to work out a way round it, if it comes up.’

When Trish had put down her phone, she realised that the tadpole of suspicion had turned into a full-grown frog. She knew all about the way some sex offenders progress from voyeurism and minor crimes, such as the theft of knickers from a washing line, to harassment, assault, rape, and ultimately murder.

If Collons were one of them, and if he had once believed that a woman who had merely smiled at him on the tube had wanted a relationship with him, how much more might he have misinterpreted Kara’s kindness?

Had he gone to her cottage the night she died in the belief that she wanted to make love with him? If so, she would have rejected him. Trish had no doubts whatever on that score, just as she was certain that Kara would have done it gently. But could anyone have done it gently enough? If Collons had moved up the ladder of serious offences, any rejection could have triggered real violence. Well aware that most rapists were motivated by power rather than desire, Trish also knew of cases in which an inability to relate normally to women did impel men to try to take what they couldn’t ask for.

Something was nagging at her memory, something the two young police officers had said when they came to her chambers the morning after Kara’s death. Then she remembered: they had told her that Kara had been assaulted ‘with an implement of some kind’.

Trish’s mental pictures became increasingly vivid as she thought of Collons in the grubby pub near Waterloo, his face glowing like a peony after her unintended suggestion that he might have failed to satisfy Kara.

What if he had tried to have sex with her against her will, been unable to sustain an erection, grabbed something he could use to punish her for his failure and then in an excess of humiliation and fury killed her?

But why, if he were the killer, would he have risked arousing suspicion by forcing himself on Trish and banging on and on about how she must investigate Kara’s death?

A knock on the door made her blink. Debby’s anxious face appeared round the jamb. Trish forced herself to concentrate on the present. ‘Yes, Debby? What is it?’

‘It’s this opinion I’m typing for Mr Hogwell. I can’t work out what he’s getting at and I can’t read his writing.’

‘Debby, why come to me?’ Trish, who had done all her own typing for years, found some of the other barristers’refusal to learn to use a laptop quite infuriating. She saw Debby flinch at her impatience and made herself smile as she explained, ‘It‘s not my writing you can’t read, is it? Or my opinion you’re typing. Why should I be able to answer your questions?’

‘No, I know it isn’t,’ Debby said, twisting her long curly hair around her index finger and looking about ten years younger than she could possibly have been. ‘But Mr Hogwell gets so angry when I ask questions, and looks at me as though I’m stupid. I thought you’d know, you see, what he was getting at here, so I wouldn’t have to ask him. Sometimes he tells Dave to make me concentrate better if I’ve asked too many questions, and you know what Dave can be like when he’s angry. I’m really sorry if I’m disturbing you.’

‘That’s OK.’ Trish could not remember ever being as young and frightened as Debby. ‘Bring it here.’

The problem was easily solved and Debby went off more happily. Trish’s difficulties were less tractable. Her own advice to Collons was ringing in her ears. If he had information – or even simply suspicions – about Kara’s death then he should go to the police.

But it wasn’t so easy for her. This time it wasn’t the code of conduct that held her back. Collons hadn’t told her that he’d had anything to do with Kara’s death so there was no question of contravening the rules about client privilege. But there were other considerations.

Trish knew from her own experience how it felt to be the target of unjust police suspicions and she would not wish that on anyone, particularly not on someone with a personality as fragile as Collons’s, and a past like his. The stress of being taken in for questioning again, having his flat searched, even just living under suspicion, might be more than he could take.