Fault Lines (17 page)

Trish was increasingly sure that it must have been Kara’s childhood experiences that had left her with such a profound need to make other people happy – or, at least, happier than they had been before she met them. Whenever she failed, her instinct was to withdraw, as though she couldn’t believe herself worth liking unless she was doing something useful.

It was ironic that her mother was not only the one person she had never been able to help but also the one she could never have abandoned. Perhaps that explained the contradiction. The criticism that had so distressed Kara might not have originated with her mother in the first place. If Kara had been sending out signals of failure or dislike from some kind of emotional sonar, they could have locked on to her mother’s unhappiness and come pinging straight back to Kara.

On the other hand, Trish reminded herself, the letter need not have been genuine. Mrs Huggate could have drafted that first paragraph out of guilt or simply as a way of rewriting history to make herself feel better about what she had done to her daughter.

‘God! You’re such a cynic, Trish,’ Kara had said to her once, and it was true. But at least cynicism was safer than naïveté. As a cynic you could take a certain miserable satisfaction when you discovered that people were quite as treacherous or cruel as you’d feared. If you’d believed in them – trusted them – and they let you down, you were stuck.

Kara had been like that, believing that everyone she met was fundamentally good until she was forced to admit the opposite. She’d once told Trish that she was sure there was something likeable in everyone in the world and that if you were careful enough – kind enough – you could bring it out. She’d also believed that no one could consistently meet kindness with cruelty, so that if she could only hang on long enough she would get the response she wanted in the end.

Was that why she’d died? Had she been pouring out warmth and affection on to someone who was beyond help? Collons? Or someone even more damaged?

Trish put Mrs Huggate’s letter in the basket where she kept things she didn’t want to throw away but did not have any particular use for, and looked at her father’s unopened letter. There could be no comparison. Kara might have been wrong about her mother, although that still wasn’t certain, but it didn’t mean that Trish had misjudged her father.

Whatever Mrs Huggate turned out to be like, Paddy Maguire was a treacherous louse, and his daughter had every right to avoid him.

Unable to destroy his letter without reading it, Trish put it in one of the drawers of her desk, along with all the others he had written whenever he read about her cases in the press. Having to think about him made the prospect of going to Kingsford to gather evidence to support or banish Blair Collons’s suspicions into an alluring distraction instead of a dreary chore.

The road was dreadful, full of bottlenecks and inadequate signs, inconsiderately parked delivery vans, and buses sitting panting while long queues of slow-moving passengers embarked and paid for their tickets.

Oh, for the days when all a driver had to do was drive, thought Trish, and buses could move off as soon as the waiting passengers had boarded.

She got to Kingsford eventually and was pleasantly surprised to find parts of it thoroughly attractive. Once a town in its own right, it had long ago been overtaken by the inexorable spreading of the suburbs, and its original seventeenth-century brick houses with their deep white cornices and sloping slate roofs were surrounded by streets of Edwardian half-timbered semis and overlooked by the ugly concrete towers of sixties housing estates.

The High Street was still alive and lined with branches of most of the usual chain stores and building societies. Trish drove into the car-park of Sainsbury’s, not wanting to risk infringing unfamiliar parking regulations and find the car clamped or towed away.

Even though she had come to Kingsford to suss out Martin Drakeshill, she found that she wanted to see the place where Kara had died. It wasn’t prurience, just a need to make some kind of contact with her friend.

Church Lane proved to be a pleasant quiet street on the edge of the recreation ground, well away from the bustle of the high street. All the cottages in the row were built to the same model and they had quite big gardens. They’d probably once been home to agricultural workers, but must have been gentrified several generations ago.

Each of the sloping front gardens was divided by a flagged path that led up to a plain painted door in the middle of a two-storey plastered building. There were two windows on the ground floor, three above, and the roofs were steeply pitched with working chimney-pots at either end. All the gardens were well kept and the walls and window frames recently painted. Most of the cottages were white or cream, but a few were the unsubtle pinks and greens of the Neapolitan ice cream that had been one of Trish’s childhood treats.

Caring neighbours, she thought, and wondered why none of them had heard what was happening to Kara and come to help her or at least called 999.

It was easy to identify Kara’s cottage by the white tapes tied around the boundary and the police notice stuck to the front door. As Trish stood at the bottom of the garden, looking up at the house and thinking of what had happened inside it, she was overwhelmed by a tide of anger that pushed aside every other feeling.

Whoever had killed Kara had to be found before he did any more damage. Then, whatever his private torments or inadequacies, he had to be punished as harshly as the law allowed.

At that moment Trish couldn’t have cared less about understanding or rehabilitation; still less about forgiveness. She wanted to know that Kara’s killer was suffering.

A movement caught her eye and she looked up. In the cottage to the left of Kara’s a curtain was twitching. A moment later Trish was ringing the bell.

An elderly woman, very short and with a distinct dowager’s hump, opened the door and tried to appear surprised as she twisted her head up to look at Trish.

‘I saw that you were in,’ Trish said, with a smile, ‘and I wondered if I could talk to you about Kara Huggate. She was a friend of mine, you see, and I …’

‘Oh, you poor thing,’ said the woman, backing away, her head still painfully twisted to allow her to see more than her own feet. ‘Come in and sit down. You look very tired. I’ll put the kettle on.’

‘My name’s Trish Maguire,’ she said, worried that anyone was prepared to let a complete stranger into her house, particularly a woman as frail and unprotected as this one. ‘I’m a barrister, and Kara and I met over a case for which she was to be a witness. I’m sure I’ve got some identification with me. Hold on.’

‘Don’t worry about that.’ The woman patted Trish’s hand. ‘I can tell you were a real friend of hers. You’ve got an honest face. You saw me looking at you, didn’t you?’

Trish nodded.

‘Well, I could see you, too, and I could tell how sad you are. Come into the kitchen while I make tea. I didn’t know her well. She only moved in last autumn and we don’t mix much in Church Lane. We keep ourselves to ourselves.’

‘Although I see that you do have a Neighbourhood Watch,’ Trish said, following her down a dark passage towards the kitchen, which looked out over a neatly dug vegetable garden. Her hostess must have help – or perhaps a younger, stronger person living in the house.

‘Well, yes, we do, but we don’t like to pry, you see.’

‘No. I can imagine that. Do you …? I can’t go on calling you “you”. May I know your name?’

‘Of course.’ She put the lid on the kettle and wiped her hands on a red and white checked tea towel. ‘I’m Mrs Davidson.’

They shook hands. Trish gestured to the garden. ‘D’you do all this work yourself, Mrs Davidson?’

‘Oh, no. I’ve a man who comes in once a week. He’s just done the winter digging. It’s something to do with the frosts. I’ve never understood, but I let him get on with it. Kara was planning to do all her own gardening, but I don’t think she had enough time, really. I mean, look at the weeds. I tried to persuade her to use my Jake, but she wouldn’t, said she couldn’t afford him.’

Trish stepped closer to the kitchen window and saw that there was an excellent view into Kara’s back garden, which didn’t seem to her unaccustomed eyes to be particularly untidy.

‘You are quite close, aren’t you? Did you hear anything on the night she … on the night it happened.’

‘Well, no, I didn’t.’ The kettle was boiling and it was not until Mrs Davidson had made the tea that she added, ‘but I don’t sleep well these days without a pill, and then once I’ve taken one, a train could come through my room and I wouldn’t wake. I’d had one that night, you see, and I didn’t hear a thing. If I’d known she was in danger, I’d never have taken it.’

‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ said Trish. ‘I understand that.’

‘And I haven’t dared take any since. Not with him still out there.’

Mrs Davidson put a knitted cosy over the tea-pot and stood with her hands clasped around it, and her head on one side again so that she could stare out of the window. Trish would have liked to reassure her, but she couldn’t. On the face of it, it seemed unlikely that anyone would risk returning to the place where he had committed murder, but you never knew. If the killer suspected – or had been told – that there had been a witness, he might well decide he had to silence her.

‘So I lie awake thinking about what happened to her. It’s awful knowing she suffered like that while I was asleep, that there was no one to help her when … Her other neighbours were away skiing, you see.’

Mrs Davidson turned and Trish saw that there was nothing ghoulish in her face, just fear and a bottomless sadness. ‘She was a very kind woman.’

Trish nodded. ‘Did she have many friends visiting her here?’

‘A few. But she was considerate. If she was expecting anyone who might stay late or be noisy, she’d always warn me. Or if she was going to have workmen in or anything. So that I’d always know what any odd noises might be.’

‘A good neighbour, in fact.’

‘Very good, although sometimes we didn’t speak for weeks. I hadn’t seen her for several days before she died. I’d heard her sometimes, coming home in the evening when I was in bed, and I saw her to wave at one morning when she was going to work and I was putting out the milk bottles. But we didn’t meet so I never had a chance to tell her.’

‘Tell her what?’

‘About the man who was hanging around her garden in the night.’ Mrs Davidson poured the tea and pushed forward milk, sugar and biscuits. ‘If I’d known I wasn’t going to see her, I’d have written her a note, but I kept thinking that one day soon we’d meet, and it would be easier to explain it face to face.’

Trish felt her eyes widening.

‘He’d done it before, you see. I suppose it might not have been him who killed her, but I can’t help being afraid it was. If only I …’ Mrs Davidson sat with her hands on the tea-cosy, unable to go on.

Eventually Trish supplied a gentle prompt ‘You said “before”. Does that mean you saw him that night as well? The night she died?’

‘Yes.’ Her eyes were full of horror.

‘And how often had you seen him before?’

‘Twice. At least, I think it was twice.’

Trish smiled and willed her voice into even more gentleness. ‘Have you told the police about the man?’

‘Oh, yes. And I rang them each time I saw him. Straight away. But he went off before they came the first time and when I rang them again they didn’t come at all. You see, I don’t think they believed me.’

‘That must have made you angry.’

Mrs Davidson nodded painfully. ‘I told the constable who came round asking questions the morning after they’d found her, and then I said it all over again to the plain-clothes man who came later.’ Her smile wavered. ‘But I don’t see so very well, these days, and when he started to ask for all those details and I got flustered, he was angry. And then I couldn’t remember anything.’

‘What do you remember about the prowler now?’ Trish asked, wishing she could have given the interviewing officer a few lessons in making witnesses feel comfortable enough to do their best for you.

‘Well, not really anything more than I told the police. He was middling height and I think he had brown hair, but it was dark and raining, so I can’t be sure of anything. And I never saw his face. But he looked furtive, if you know what I mean?’

‘Yes, I do. What did he do exactly?’

‘Well, I don’t know that he did anything. Except watch. I used to see him if I was putting out the rubbish or calling Suet – he’s my cat and he’s rather fat, a tabby. He – the man – would just be standing in the shadows inside her hedge and looking up towards her windows. She didn’t always draw her sitting-room curtains, you see, so anyone could watch her moving about, reading, listening to music. She did that a lot when she was on her own.’

Trish drank some tea. ‘You say he was of middling height. Did he seem to you to be thin or fat?’

‘I’m not really sure. The police asked that, too. My impression is of a bit of stoutness, not real fatness, but something rounded about him. And furtive.’ That seemed to be all she could remember for certain and so she was clinging to it. ‘He was scuttly.’

Collons, thought Trish. It has to be Collons. There couldn’t have been two scuttly, furtive, middle-aged men in Kara’s life.

‘What else did the police ask you?’ she said aloud.

‘Oh, whether poor Kara had any enemies, that sort of thing.’

‘And had she?’

‘Some of her clients were rather unpleasant.’ Mrs Davidson dabbed her lips with a wisp of a lace hand-kerchief and tucked it back up her sleeve. ‘One of them even put something disgusting through her letter box after she had had to take his children into care.’

‘Did he? What was it?’

Mrs Davidson shuddered and had recourse to the handkerchief again, before whispering, ‘Dog mess.’

‘And you told the police that, too, did you?’ asked Trish, thinking, Poor Kara.

‘Oh, yes. I told them everything I knew. And they wrote some of it down.’

‘Well, that’s all right, then. They’ll know how to take it further.’ Trish hoped she was right. ‘And you’ve been very kind, giving me tea like this, but I shouldn’t really take up any more of your time.’ As she got to her feet she watched Mrs Davidson push herself out of her chair, leaning painfully against the edge of the table. She didn’t let go until she was sure of her balance.