Fault Lines (16 page)

‘Trish, my only love,’ called a rich voice from the door.

She turned to see Jeremy Platen, a criminal silk who had once been one of her pupil masters. There was the usual mocking smile on his otherwise cherubic face. She had enjoyed her six months with him and been sorry when he left chambers to join a different set.

‘Where have you been hiding yourself?’

‘Jerry,’ she said, getting to her feet. He enfolded her in a huge and affectionate but in no way passionate embrace. ‘Lovely to see you. How are you?’

‘Flourishing. But what about you? What
have
you been doing to yourself?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘You’re all pale and miserable-looking. Trish, quite frankly you look as though you’ve crawled out from a dripping, rat-ridden cellar somewhere. Has someone been horrible to you? Not that fat solicitor of yours? I always said you should never sleep with the enemy. Why did you spurn me? Didn’t I tell you you were missing out on a good thing?’

‘Oh, shut up, Jerry. Of course he hasn’t done anything to me. And he’s not fat, anyway. He’s a big man, in every sense of the word.’

‘Fat!’

‘No, he isn’t. And he hasn’t done anything to me. I’ve been a bit busy, that’s all. And one of my witnesses was murdered the other day.’

‘Ah, yes, I can see how that might take the edge off your pleasure.’ For a moment Jeremy’s bright black eyes softened with concern, but then he grinned again, buffeted her shoulder and asked why she hadn’t offered him a drink yet. She made sure that he knew all the other people around her table then turned away to order yet another bottle.

‘By the way, Jerry,’ she said, when he had commented on the generosity of her choice and said how sensible she had been to spend some of her time on chancery cases instead of slogging away with the criminals as he had been doing, ‘have you ever heard of a man called Martin Drakeshill, who operates somewhere in south-west London?’

‘Drakeshill? No, can’t say I have. But have you heard the story about the drake who went to a grand hotel with his best beloved duck and asked room service for a condom?’

‘No,’ said Trish, dragging out the vowel into an auntly sound of disapproval and resignation. She could vividly remember Jeremy’s laughing himself into choking fits over the most childish jokes, most of them involving smut or lavatories, and sometimes both. For a man as sophisticated and clever as he, it was an odd quirk.

He understood her tone and stuck out his tongue. ‘Well, all right then, Smarty-pants. I won’t tell you.’

‘Oh, go on. How could I resist?’

Like most barristers, he was an excellent raconteur, playing the part of each character in his mildly grubby story and giving them all the appropriate voices and gestures. In the end it was quite funny. Trish gave in and laughed with the rest. ‘Did that come from your junior clerk?’ she asked.

‘No. My son. He’s eight now, and the funniest thing ever.’ Jeremy looked preposterously proud, and Trish had a moment’s knife-like envy. ‘He collects jokes for me from the school playground. I thought that was nearly as good as Napoleon and his armies.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’ve all heard that one,’ said Rosie Boxwell, a hard-faced woman from the commercial bar, whom Trish had never much liked.

‘But what about the man who was dying of thirst in the desert and met a genie?’ called somebody’s pupil, a young man Trish had never met before and whose name she had not heard properly.

Jeremy said, with tremendous dignity, that he’d heard that story long ago and that it was quite as old as his Napoleon joke, and not nearly as funny, besides being racist. The challenge proved too much for everyone and soon they were all at it, offering strings of madder and madder stories, as though they, too, were showing off in a school playground.

It was all very silly and great fun. Trish eventually reeled home across the bridge, as usual stopping halfway to look down the river, which was particularly romantic in the moonlight. Leaning on the edge of the bridge, unaware of the cold, she gazed at the piled buildings on either side of the river. White and silver with the black water rushing down to the sea between them, they made her wish she could paint – or even take good photographs.

Her elbow slipped off the metal and fading common sense told her she had better get herself home while she was still on her feet and drink at least a pint of water before she went to bed.

The water seemed to have had no effect when she woke at three-thirty in the morning with a dry mouth, boiling eyeballs and a thudding in her head as though devils in football boots were prancing about inside her skull. Getting up felt like a serious mistake as the floor swayed under her, but she needed some Nurofen.

She thought of Rosie Boxwell and the moment at which she had become just too irritating to bear. Trish had drunk enough by then to let her feelings show and she had roused a gale of laughter from everyone except Rosie with her neatly aimed insult.

Oh, shit! What a mistake! A woman like that wouldn’t forget.

Trish closed her eyes and laid her hand across her aching forehead, wishing she could forget her idiocy. Later on, she had even started talking about SWAB. It was clear enough that hard-faced Rosie hadn’t been invited to join yet either, but it had been mad to make it seem as though she herself had. Rosie must know some of the members quite well and she was enough of a cow to check whether Trish was a member. Oh, hell! That was probably the end of her chances there.

God, she was thirsty! Two pills and more water might help. But she didn’t deserve to feel better. What a fool! And she wouldn’t sleep for hours. Not now that the drink had tickled up her liver and made her brain think it was daybreak. Shit.

It was at that particularly awful moment that she remembered George telling her that in his experience just about every barrister in London was incapable of keeping his or her mouth shut. Trish had furiously denied it at the time. Now she put her hands over her hot face and groaned. What a fool she’d been! Rosie would tell everyone what she’d said and they’d all laugh at her. Oh, shit.

When she came back from the bathroom, she dug around in the pile of half-read books on the floor by her bed for the one that usually solaced her insomniac hours. It looked boring. She tried another and then another and eventually got out of bed to find
Presumed Innocent
, which could always hold her attention. That was better. She drank some Badoit from the bottle and tried to believe she was a human being.

Turning the pages, she realised that some good had come out of the evening. Her physical sensations were disgusting and all those bottles she had shared had been quite unnecessary, but she felt younger, years younger, than she had for ages. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that George was past forty, and life with him had been getting a bit middle-aged recently. Perhaps a gap was no bad thing. And she still had a lot more friends than she’d realised. Good friends. They’d got tight too, most of them. It hadn’t been only her. Lots of them had made fools of themselves, as well. She wasn’t unique. And they’d mostly forget everything she’d said. Another swig of water and another chapter of Scott Turow and she’d be right as rain.

And somebody had said something useful about Drakeshill. Trish frowned, picking through her memories. Yes. Someone she hadn’t met before who’d done a fair bit of criminal work in the furthest reaches of south west London had heard a rumour from a boy he’d been defending that Drakeshill was thought to be a dangerous man to cross. Trish had tried to pin the barrister down, but he either didn’t know any more or was protecting his source. He’d just said that the word was that if Martin Drakeshill asked you to do something you either did it or got right off his patch before he could do you a serious mischief.

That made him sound a bit more of a player than the small-time informer Trish had imagined, but it was still some way short of Collons’s major conspirator. As sleep continued to seem impossible, she began to wonder whether she ought, after all, to go to Kingsford herself and try to find out more about Drakeshill and whether he had had links of any kind with Kara.

When she woke again, soon after nine, Trish felt a lot better than she deserved, and after a long, hot shower almost well. There was no need to hurry because even Dave could not have drummed up some unwinnable case hundreds of miles from London in such a short time, and Kingsford and Martin Drakeshill could wait for an hour or two.

She could potter about in the kitchen, making herself some real coffee, instead of her usual mug of instant. While the kettle was boiling, she dug in the freezer for some bread and came upon a bag of brioches she and George had made as an experiment one weekend. Her pleasure in her renewed freedom faltered.

They had spent most of the morning in her kitchen, surrounded by the warm sexy scents of yeast and flour, discovering that they could share even the narrow space of her galley kitchen without falling over each other, except when they meant to. The whole enterprise had developed into an act of love almost as devastating as the real thing.

Trish could remember the way her fingers had slid into the barely resilient dough that had felt so soft and smelt so evocatively of welcome and plenty. George had been standing behind her with his arms around her waist as she worked the dough. Every so often, he would lower his head so that his lips could lie on her bare neck.

Her eyelashes were wet as she opened the bag and levered two of the icy rolls away from the rest. They resisted her efforts and she picked up the breadknife to push between the rock-hard surfaces that seemed superglued together. Eventually one leaped away from the knife blade and ended up skittering across the hard studded rubber of her kitchen floor. She brushed the first brioche on the seat of her jeans and put it on a dark-blue pottery plate with the second, which had let go with less violence.

When she opened the freezer again to put the rest away in their plastic bag, a chunk of granular ice fell on to the bagged evidence of innumerable meals she’d shared with George. Neither of them liked waste so they tended to freeze the leftovers, meaning to use them up later. But they never had. She ought to throw them out, but not just now. She’d been getting rid of too much recently.

Having slammed the freezer door, she reached to the shelf above for her favourite French porcelain breakfast cup and a matching plate. She had bought them in Provence on a holiday before she had ever met George and he had never liked them. The thickness of the sticky dust lining the cup showed how long it had been since she had drunk out of it.

When she had washed and dried it, she took butter from the fridge and found a jar of particularly special macadamia nut honey, which he also disliked, and carried the whole lot to the dining table. She rarely breakfasted in such style, it was either a cup of instant on the run or a frolic in bed at the weekend with George. This kind of stately, private celebration was something new.

The first mouthful of black coffee tasted powdery, with hints of chocolate and a rich bitterness. Trish kept it in her mouth until she had decoded each separate flavour, amused to find herself behaving like the kind of wine critic who talked of delectable wet-nettle noses and tobacco-scented cedarwood notes with tarry overtones. She and George had often read out the wilder descriptions from the weekend papers, laughing at the thought of the earnest oenophiles licking wet nettles and cigar boxes to test their comparisons.

George. Why couldn’t she get him out of her mind?

She was angry with him, and with reason, so it couldn’t hurt this much to be without him. It couldn’t.

‘I won’t apologise till he does,’ she said aloud. ‘I won’t.’

A crash in the middle of her front door provided a useful distraction. The metallic clang of the letter-box being forced up was followed by the savage ripping of thick paper. She got up to fetch her mangled newspaper as it dropped on to the front-door mat.

There wasn’t much in the paper about Kara, only a small paragraph on page four of the main news section, announcing that the police were pursuing various leads in their search for the Kingsford Rapist. Trish wished she had some kind of line into the investigation to find out whether they had ever considered Collons among their suspects, or even knew of his existence.

A second crash of the letter-box in the front door presaged the arrival of the post. There was the usual collection of exasperating mail-order catalogues, several bills, a postcard from a friend who was skiing in Italy, a thank-you letter from her favourite godchild, whose birthday Trish had managed to remember for once, and two other handwritten letters.

One was addressed in her father’s writing. She put that on her desk unopened. The other proved to be from Kara’s mother.

My dear Miss Maguire, How very kind of you to write about my daughter’s death. I do not know how you knew her, for she never spoke to me about you, but I am glad that you valued her so highly. I was so proud of her as she grew up and I loved her very much. Her death has been the most terrible shock to me, and I sometimes feel as though I shall not be able to sleep again until the police have found her murderer and allowed me to put her to rest. They are doing their best, I know, but it is very hard not to be able to give her a funeral. Forgive me for writing at such length, but I’m alone now except for some cousins in Australia whom I never see. There are very few people who can understand what I mean when I talk about Kara. Your kind letter made me think that you might be one of them. I do hope that when I am allowed to have a funeral for her you will come.

Yours sincerely,

Katherine Huggate

The tone of the letter was so surprising after what Kara had said about her mother’s dislike that Trish had to reread it twice to make sure she hadn’t misunderstood the first paragraph.

She pushed her hands through her hair, trying to understand, well aware that she was a relative innocent when it came to mother-daughter conflicts. Her own good relationship with her mother had always been part of the underpinning of her life, but she knew she was unusually lucky. Nearly all her friends had horror stories of argument and insensitivity to swap whenever they started talking about their mothers. Kara had complained much less than most, but the little she had said had been enough to tell Trish that Mrs Huggate had made her daughter feel not just unloved but unlovable.