Fault Lines (22 page)

There were twenty cuttings in all, some clearly from broadsheets, others from the more hysterical tabloids. They followed the case from the discovery of the body, through various arrests, and on to a long, expensive and ultimately fruitless search for a local man whose DNA matched samples recovered from the victim’s body. There was also a retrospective article from one of the most serious weeklies, arguing the case for a national DNA register that would have enabled the police to narrow down their suspects to perhaps five men in the whole country, who could then have been thoroughly investigated.

Trish stared at the cuttings, trying to work out who could have sent them to her and why. She had never met anyone called Peasdown-Jones; she had never even been near the Kennet and Avon Canal, as far as she knew. There was no connection of any kind between her and the case, and yet someone had bothered to collect accounts of it and deliver them anonymously to her door.

There were only two likely reasons: one, that someone who knew – or guessed – that she was trying to find out more about Kara’s killer believed there was a connection between him and the man who had murdered Janet Peasdown-Jones and wanted Trish to have the information; the other, that someone was trying to frighten her.

There were few people who knew of her interest in Kara’s death: George, who would never have sent the cuttings in a million years, however angry she might have made him; Kara’s mother, who could have had no more reason to do it than George; Kara’s elderly neighbour, Mrs Davidson, who was just as unlikely; and Blair Collons.

Trish thought of his warning that the people who had killed Kara would soon come after her, afraid that Kara might have passed on to her dangerous secrets about the Kingsford conspiracy. Could he have sent the cuttings to try to make her believe that she, too, was a target for the conspirators?

It was, of course, possible that the cuttings had no connection with Kingsford or Kara. Whoever had sent them must have known that they would worry Trish, coming like that out of the blue, anonymously, and with no explanation. Perhaps someone she had annoyed had wanted to give her a bad evening.

But who?

There must be plenty of candidates, she told herself drily. My father, for one. Although I don’t suppose even he could have sunk that low.

An idea slid into her mind, an idea and a memory. She was not sure quite what they were at first. There were no distinct details, only a powerful feeling of security and a fuzzy mental picture.

Her work had made her familiar with most of the techniques used for counselling disturbed adults and children and she knew that one of the questions often asked to release their memories was: ‘You’re in a room: who else is there?’

In her particular room the light was dim and she was warm and tightly held. More details become clear as she concentrated. The tightness around her came from cream-coloured cellular blankets, tucked firmly between her mattress and bedstead. There was a tear in one of them, making the neat square holes big and round. She was wearing soft, almost downy pyjamas. Suddenly she saw them with pinpoint accuracy, and felt them too. They had been made of Viyella: pale blue with pink roses, piping and buttons.

Trish would never have considered herself a child with a taste for pink or rosebuds, but she had been proud of those pyjamas. She couldn’t have been more than four, five at the most.

She was in her bedroom, in her bed. Her father was there, reading her a story, and she was playing with his cufflinks.

They had been lovely and round with smooth edges, like Smarties made of gold. There were two for each cuff, joined together with a fascinating chain. Her father used to let her take them out of his cuffs and play with them while he read to her.

It had been hard to get them out of his shirt, pushing and tugging them through tightly stitched buttonholes. But it was always worth it. The metal felt warm against her skin and caught the light as she poured the two pairs of chained golden blobs from hand to hand. She would listen to her favourite books, and play with her father’s cufflinks.

Her memory-blurred vision sharpened as she focused on the pile of cuttings in front of her again. She knew that the man who had sat on her bed and read her those stories could never have sent them. She also realised that he couldn’t have been quite the louse that she’d thought for so long, but that was too much to take on board just then.

She slid the cuttings into the red plastic folder and then into the envelope, hating the feel of them under her fingers because of the other hands that must have touched them. She stowed the envelope in the bottom drawer of her desk and locked it, as though that might contain the fear that was growing in her. Then she went to have a shower.

As the hot water needled her skin then flowed softly down over her face and body, other memories surfaced from the emotional sludge in her brain.

One afternoon in a baking summer her father had bought a sprinkler for the garden. He had set it up and switched it on. Trish, even younger than the child with the cufflinks and the bedtime story, had sat on the lawn laughing up at the drops that splattered down over her.

She thought she had been plump then, and she had definitely been sitting in a pair of voluminous red and yellow bathing pants and nothing else. She had been laughing, and so had he as he bent to pick her up and swing her round and round through the spray.

It had fallen on her hot body with a thrilling kind of sizzle and they had both shouted with laughter and squealed at the cold. Her father had been fully dressed, and Meg had appeared in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on her apron to tell them both to come in out of the wet and stop being so silly. The two of them together.

Trish turned off the shower and shook the water out of her eyes. George had once told her that she was like a vengeance-obsessed harpy in her stubbornness against her father. Was that true? Was it self-indulgence to have wanted to protect herself against the kind of damage he had once done to her?

She started to rub her legs with a clean towel. When she looked down minutes later, wondering why her legs hurt, she saw that the skin was bright red with the friction.

The safety her father had once given her had been a lie. The child who had played so trustfully with his cufflinks had been thrown away without a second’s thought. Wasn’t she justified in taking this small revenge for what he had done to her and her mother?

‘So, George was right,’ her inner voice said, with irritating satisfaction. ‘It is vengeance you’re practising here, not self-protection.’

‘Oh, shut up!’ she said aloud, and tried to turn her mind to more useful thoughts.

She suddenly thought of someone who might well have been angry and cruel enough to send her the cuttings: Darlie’s tormentor.

He was not a stupid man, and he must have known – or been told by his solicitor – that Trish would be making the most of all the written evidence Kara had left to present to the judge. He might well have wanted to frighten her into dropping the case. Having read newspaper accounts of Kara’s death, he might have thought descriptions of another woman’s murder might do the trick.

‘Really?’ The derisive inner voice in Trish’s mind sounded very like George at his most provoking, but she knew it was right.

She also knew that she had only one real suspect for the sender of the package and that was Blair Collons. But whether he was trying to threaten her or warn her that Kara’s assailant had killed before, she could not be certain.

Sliding her bare feet into a pair of butter-soft leather shoes, she pulled a heavy sweater over her head. As she emerged from the steamy bathroom, she decided she’d been a fool to think that the difference in the way Janet Peasdown-Jones and Kara had been assaulted meant that their attackers must have been different, too. If Janet had been his first victim and he had read the press reports, he would have learned of the importance of keeping all traces of semen away from the bodies of any future victims.

Could it have been Collons?

Although Trish could imagine him killing Kara in the dark, driven by a frenzy of shame, self-hate and fury, she had great difficulty picturing him standing up to an angry black Labrador in full daylight and putting up with its bites long enough to kill it.

Sandra had no idea that she and Michael were blocking the way to the main chair-lift. All she knew was that she had to get him to admit he’d been having an affair with Kara Huggate. It was the lies he’d been telling that hurt most. There she’d been, worrying about him for months, trying to think of ways to help him and still put up with his snapping, and the only thing that had been wrong with him was a guilty conscience!

‘So what was it about that middle-aged cow’s rear end that made her so much more attractive than me?’ she said, trying to goad him into dropping his stupid pretences.

This time she succeeded. He spat out two simple, cruel, words: ‘Her intelligence.’

Sandra flinched and her skis slid away from her. Hauling herself upright on her sticks hurt her arms. She could feel the ligaments in her wrist stretching, and in the backs of her legs.

‘Unlike you,’ Michael said, with deadly coldness, ‘she didn’t spend her days having oil rubbed into her pampered body and using the organ that passes for a brain in some women to work out petty revenges for imagined slights.’

The skin around his eyes, where his goggles stopped the sun getting to him, was white and hard, like a toilet pan, Sandra thought, as she tried not to cry.

‘She used everything she had – her brains, her emotions, her strength, her warmth – in the service of the most miserable, least attractive members of the human race. She thought other people’s needs were always more important than any of her own. She was brave and kind and clever, and worth ten of you. And now she’s dead.’

I’m glad she’s dead, Sandra thought. Glad. Her teeth were clamped together, making her jaw hurt, but she didn’t dare open them to let out any of the words that were gushing up. Then she saw that Michael was crying.

He just stood there like a six-year-old, with tears pouring down his handsome face,
in public
, making them both look ridiculous.

‘You’re pathetic,’ she said, and turned away. Her skis got tangled with each other and she fell heavily on her right hip. Trying to get up, she fell again, this time with her face in the snow. She hadn’t realised how sharp it could be, like a cheese-grater rasping the skin off her face.

Later, when she was back in their room at the hotel, looking at the big bed where she’d thought they might make love again, she knew she never wanted to have anything to do with him ever again.

There was another fat brown envelope waiting for Trish on Friday evening. Only the possibility that it might contain some explanation – or a hint of who had sent it – forced her fingers under the flap. The paper seemed thicker than before and she had to wrench through it, bruising her knuckles as she tore it.

WOMAN CHAINED TO PIPE IN ABANDONED HOUSE The naked body of a woman was found by police today after reports of a disturbance last night. She was so thin she must have been starved for several weeks, and she had been beaten. The wound that killed her was a slit wrist. She bled to death over many hours. On her chest…

Trish was not prepared to read any more. She glanced at the rest of the cuttings for just long enough to see that they were all about the same case.

She felt hated. Whoever he was, he wasn’t sending the cuttings to give her useful information that might lead to Kara’s killer: he wanted her terrified. That was clear enough. But it was the only thing that was. She knew she needed help.

George would have given it to her without question if she had asked him, but she couldn’t do that. She’d bollocked him for giving her orders and telling her how to run her life. She couldn’t go whimpering to him now, wanting protection, just because she’d been scared. She had to tough this one out without him.

Her hands felt so clumsy and swollen that she was surprised to see them still as thin as usual when she reached above her desk for the phone book. They worked well enough and she soon had the number for the main Kingsford police station. The phone rang and rang. Things began to move more quickly once she’d got through and said she had some information on the Huggate murder.

‘Incident room, DC Lyalt,’ said a pleasant female voice, a moment later. ‘How may I help you?’

‘My name’s Trish Maguire. I’m a barrister. I don’t want to bother you with something that may be irrelevant, but I…’

‘If you have any information that may relate to Kara Huggate’s death, please give it to me. It doesn’t matter if it turns out not to be important.’

‘Look, it’s just that Kara was a friend of mine and she was due to give evidence in one of my cases. Two of your colleagues came to talk to me the morning after she died.’

‘Oh, yes? Have you remembered something you wanted to tell them? Would you like to speak to one of them now?’

‘No,’ Trish said urgently. ‘No. You’ll do fine. I told them everything about that when they came to chambers. This is something different. I just wanted to explain the background.’

‘I see. Carry on.’

‘I’ve been down in Kingsford, asking a few questions – because I needed to know more about what’s going on than I can read in the papers – and …’

‘Oh, yes?’ This time the pleasant voice was much harder. ‘And what did you discover?’

‘Very little. I’ll tell you in a minute. That’s not why I’m ringing. Please listen.’

‘I
am
listening.’

Trish blinked and tried to sound as professional and sensible as she was. ‘Since my trip to Kingsford I’ve had two envelopes stuck through my door, full of press cuttings about murders of women. Not Kara, but other women. I’ve tried to believe that there’s no connection, but I can’t.’

‘Ah. I see. Yes. You’d better tell me exactly what it is you’ve been sent.’

Trish described the contents of the two envelopes in minute detail.