Fault Lines (21 page)

‘Well, yeah, maybe. But no one else has got them either, and at least Spinel gets the mules and the runners. Everyone thinks he’s great. Except the DI that is, and that’s only because Spinel shows him up.’

‘Right.’ This wasn’t the moment to lecture Owler on the proper respect due to a senior officer. ‘But Spinel didn’t do much good when he was working on the Kingsford Rapist, did he?’

‘No one did,’ said Owler quickly, adding after a moment, ‘S for Spinel? No, Guv. Honestly. I told you before. You’re barking up the wrong tree there. It couldn’t be him. I know he’s in Huggate’s diary, but he’d never have been the kind of man to make her draw hearts and flowers. And, anyway, why would he want to knock her off?’

Femur laughed. He’d never been much of a one for amateur dramatics, but he thought he’d done it quite well. Owler’s tight jaw muscles relaxed visibly, so it must have been fairly convincing.

‘I can’t imagine,’ he said, keeping a jolly smile on his face and thinking he deserved an Oscar nomination for that, too. ‘No, I’ve just been wondering how far to trust his judgement. He seems to have known Kara better than anyone else here, even though he didn’t like her. You were right about that. And he’s come up with some interesting ideas about her and who her attacker could’ve been.’

‘Oh, I see. Well, I don’t know, Guv. I wouldn’t have put him down as the sensitive type who sits down and listens to women much, or cares what they’re thinking.’ He frowned, thinking hard. Then he shrugged. ‘On the other hand, he has got a rich wife, and so …

‘Rich wife?’ The best possible disguise for a bent copper with more money than he should have from payoffs and kick-backs. ‘Has he? Have you met her?’

‘No. She’s not the type to mix with the Job. She’s a headhunter in the City. Bit of a success story, they say. Earns a fortune. I can’t see why she’d stay with him if he didn’t have something other than, well …’

Femur, whose mind was beginning to work faster as he thought of the implications of the rich-wife story, looked up as the boy paused and was amused to see him looking self-conscious. Caroline must have been regaling the incident room with Femur’s unparalleled dislike of smut. There was very little that bonded a disparate team as well as sharing surprise – and contempt – at the guv’nor’s shibboleths.

‘A good big lunch-box,’ he supplied, smiling. Owler smiled back in relief. ‘OK, Steve. Take that as read. A rich wife could do a lot to stop you worrying about making enemies on the Police Committee. Has anyone ever suggested that his mind’s not totally on the Job?’

‘Spinel? Fuck, no. Sorry, Guv. If anything, the opposite. He’s got more people banged up than anyone else. He gives it everything he’s got, whatever you’ve heard. He may bend the odd rule about dealing with suspects – I dare say he’s even laid a finger on one or two in the past. But it’s all been in a good cause.’

‘Great. Thanks, Steve. Just what I wanted to know. Now, how’re you doing?’

‘Not so bad. Although Bob Smith isn’t any good to us either. Hasn’t seen Huggate in three and a half months and, anyway, he’s got an unbreakable alibi.’

Femur raised his eyebrows. ‘How unbreakable?’

‘Totally. He was in hospital, Guv. Having an operation on his knee. Cartilage. According to the nurse, he couldn’t stand.’

‘That’s him out, then. How many more on your list?’

‘Another six.’ Owler sounded bored.

‘Still, it’s got to be done. Stick to it.’

‘Cool, Guv.’

Femur watched him go, thinking, If Spinel is involved in Kara’s death, then the connection must be drugs. Nothing I’ve heard about her suggests she’d have liked him unless he was pretending to be someone else – decent, even gentle. He’d only have bothered with that if it was worth his while. And the only thing Femur could think of that would make it worth Spinel’s while was drugs. After all, they only met in the first place because an underage client of hers was having trouble with a drug-dealer.

The idea seemed to be slipping out of his grasp, like a wet tumbler in the sink, but he held on, trying to work through the few facts he had, checking the logic of his suspicions as he went.

‘Caroline!’ he yelled through the open door a few minutes later.

‘Guv?’ She had her hand over the telephone receiver, and was obviously busy.

‘How about a change from interviewing rape victims?’

‘I wouldn’t say no.’

‘Right. When you’ve finished your call, then.’

There was a faint smile on her face as she came into his office and closed the door. She sat in the chair opposite his desk and sighed as she took the weight off her feet.

‘We’ll get there in the end, Cally,’ he said.

‘We nearly always do. But it’s a tough case.’

‘Sure it isn’t more than that?’ It was worth taking a moment out to make sure she wasn’t unhappy. Her well-being was essential to the team – and to him. ‘Trouble at home, maybe?’

‘Jess is having a tough time right now,’ she admitted, rubbing the space between her eyes. ‘And she needs more than I’ve got to offer at the moment. Her agent’s giving her the runaround and her confidence is a bit iffy. I do what I can. But this is
my
job and she needs to under– Sorry, Guv. You don’t need to hear this. We’ve been here before. We’ll sort it. Now, what d’you want me to do?’

‘A while ago Kara was after a schoolboy crack dealer,’ Femur said, respecting Caroline’s decision to keep her life private. ‘A Sergeant Spinel from the drugs squad told me that they were well aware of the dealer’s activities over there and have been watching him, presumably to get enough evidence for a successful trial. I want you to find out – discreetly, mind, and not from Spinel himself – whether they know where the boy got his supplies.’

‘Sure.’

She never asked stupid questions or tried to show how clever she was, she just did as she was told; and if she thought what you wanted was right off the wall, she’d say so without making herself unpleasant – or sulky – about it. And then if you told her to stuff her objections and get on with it, she would. As he watched her leave his office, he decided she was worth her weight in bacon sandwiches.

God! He was hungry. Steve Owler’s appetite must have infected him, after all. He drank the cooling tea the boy had brought and thought about getting away from the incident room for a proper meal that evening. Tony Blacker might be back and they could go out together and see what Kingsford could offer them. Meanwhile, Spinel.

Femur was well aware of the temptations of drugs squad officers everywhere. It was so easy to siphon off a half-kilo of this or that when you’d made a big bust and go into business on your own account. And then there were a lot of big dealers willing to spend ‘twenty or thirty large’on making evidence of their crimes disappear before the CPS lawyers could see it.

If Spinel were in the pay of a big dealer, say, who’d been employing the schoolboy who’d sold the crack to Kara’s client, he could well have been told to block her questions before they did any damage to the dealing network. And it was just possible, if she’d been persistent enough and got close enough to the identity of the original supplier, that he’d decided she’d be better out of the way.

Would Spinel have agreed to that?

Femur thought about the man he’d met, flexing his thigh muscles, thrusting his physical strength in your face, telling you with every gesture he made just how tough he was and how little he cared about your opinion. He was probably fairly free with his fists under the right provocation, but murder was a different matter.

Of course, he needn’t necessarily have known anything about the murder plans. He could have reported Kara’s intransigence to his Mr Big, handed over her address and whatever he knew about the layout of her cottage, and her likely movements, and the job could’ve been done by someone quite different.

Femur smiled sadly as he recognised the temptation. He’d always hated finding that any copper was bent, even one as dislikable as Barry Spinel, so he’d invented a scenario that would let Spinel off the worst of the hooks. But it wouldn’t do. If anything in the scenario was true, Spinel would have had to know about it all. Otherwise, his Mr Big wouldn’t ever have known enough about the Kingsford Rapist’s MO. Sod it! Either Spinel had nothing to do with Kara’s death at all, or he was right there in the frame.

If so, this would be the first time in Femur’s direct experience that anyone had paid a copper to set the scene for murder – or to carry it out. Still, it could have happened. There’d been whispers for years of contract killings fixed by police officers and at least one death within the force itself that some people believed to be the work of coppers with too much to hide.

The more Femur thought about it, the more it made sense. Spinel could so easily have set Kara up by having an affair with her. He was well pleased with himself and would probably be quite happy to seduce anyone, just to prove he could do it, even a woman ten years his senior. Whoever Kara’s killer had been, he had known exactly what he was doing and how to get into her house without making enough noise to wake the neighbours – or give her time to push her panic alarm. True, there had been signs of forcible entry through the back door, but they could have been made after she was dead, as a distraction.

And Spinel would’ve known just how to distract the SOCOs from anything he didn’t want them to see.

If he had done it, or told someone else how to do, it was a pity, from his point of view, that his knowledge had been so precise. If the killer hadn’t moved the body into the exact same position as the first dead victim, Femur would’ve been much more likely to believe in the scene.

‘Keep an open mind next time, lad.’

Femur could remember his first CID sergeant telling him that after he’d buggered a case completely by charging towards a suspect he was sure was guilty and trampling over some crucial evidence on the way.

‘That way you won’t make a flaming arse of yourself again and I won’t be tempted to kill you myself.’

As though that remembered voice had sharpened his wits, Femur remembered that Spinel had had no firsthand knowledge of the case in which the Kingsford Rapist’s victim died. He had dealt only with the first, in which the victim had been damaged – and traumatised – but had lived to tell Caroline Lyalt all about it.

Still, he must have had enough contacts left in CID and the labs to pick up whatever information he needed. He couldn’t be ruled out yet. Femur decided he’d better get Tony Blacker on to all the possible sources of the relevant crime-scene photographs and find out whether any had been borrowed or gone missing, and whether any of the people who worked there was particularly friendly with Sergeant Spinel – or had an expensive drug habit they shouldn’t have been able to afford.

Trish got home from an exasperating day in Gloucester, paying her debt to Dave with a tiny unwinnable legal aid case that should have been handled by the youngest tenant in chambers, to find a heap of envelopes on her doormat. She made herself some tea and took them to her favourite sofa.

Her cleaner was not due for another two days so the red and purple cushions were still hollowed into the shape of her long body, ready for her. She sank into them and let her head fall back against the softest of them all. She realised that she had a headache, had had it in fact for most of the day, but she didn’t have the energy to go in search of painkillers. The tea would probably help.

As she drank, the warmth spread down through her chest like an internal poultice. After a while she started to rip open the envelopes. Bills went into one heap on the floor, circulars and empty envelopes into another, and letters that needed answering into a third. There didn’t seem to be anything very interesting. Even the bills were what she had expected.

The last envelope was large and brown with a printed label addressed to her as Miss Patricia Maguire and it carried no stamp or postmark. Assuming that it must contain more rubbish she didn’t want, and surprised that anyone had bothered to deliver it by hand, she was tempted to throw it away.

Something stopped her and she ripped it open, then shook the contents on to her chest. A red plastic folder filled with newsprint fell out, releasing a shower of cuttings that fluttered round her like feathers after a pillow fight.

Swearing, she got up and picked one small piece of paper out of her tea, shaking the drops off it and laying it to dry on the edge of the fireplace. The headline caught her eye:

WOMAN’S BODY FOUND IN CANAL

Trish read the short paragraph to discover that the naked body of a woman had been found in the Kennet and Avon Canal and was so far unidentified. Puzzled, she looked for a date on the cutting, but there wasn’t one. The paper was thin between her fingers and brownish-yellow. Quite old, then. She smoothed it out and put it back on the edge of the fireplace before searching among the rest of the cuttings for a note to explain them.

She shook each of the coloured cushions in case it had floated behind one, then pulled the heavy square black ones off the seat so that she could feel down all the sides of the frame. There was a collection of pens, paperclips, crumbs and coins, and even – shamingly – some eggshell fragments, but there was no letter.

Puzzled and wary, she bent down to collect the rest of the cuttings and carried them to the dining room table, where she spread them out. The heavy black type of the violent headlines made a sinister patchwork on the smooth tabletop. She pulled out a chair and started to read.

CANAL BODY IDENTIFIED Police say the body found in the Kennet and Avon Canal yesterday is that of Janet Peasdown-Jones, 29. She had been raped before being strangled. An unemployed man is helping with enquiries.

DOG DIES TO SAVE OWNER IN CANAL KILLING Police are appealing for information on anyone seen with severe dog bites on his face and arms. Forensic evidence shows that black Labrador Bluejohn fought bravely to save his mistress, Janet Peasdown-Jones when she was attacked.

Before the dog was strangled and thrown into the canal, he must have marked his killer’s arms and face. Anyone with anything to report should call the incident room on the following number …