Fault Lines (25 page)

If he were recalcitrant, she would face him with the report of the prowler in Kara’s garden, a prowler who looked just like him. With luck that would shock him into telling her the truth.

‘Of course, if he did kill Kara,’ said the derisive voice in her mind, ‘you might also shock him into attacking you. Have you thought of that?’

She told the voice to shut up. She’d already worked out that she couldn’t expose Collons to the police without evidence. And she still didn’t have any. It was a risk she was going to have to take.

Carrying a mug of the strong black coffee in one hand, she rummaged among the papers on her desk with the other until she found the piece of paper on which he’d written his phone number. She pushed the relevant buttons on the phone, her fingers rebounding off the plastic in a good punchy way. She was definitely feeling better. Taking action usually helped, whatever mood she was in.

Collons had his machine switched on and she listened to his outgoing message with more than usual care, measuring it against her memory of the other voice. The taped message was not quite long enough for her to be certain, but she did not think the voice she heard could have been disguised into sounding like the night caller’s.

After the beep, mindful of the professional risk of giving her name on to a tape, she said, ‘Blair, this is me, Kara’s friend. I have to be in Kingsford around six this evening, and I was thinking of dropping in to see you first. I’m not quite sure what time I’ll get to you, but if you’re not going to be in anyway, don’t worry. I’ll catch up with you some other time.’

She took her coffee up the spiral stairs and had another stinging shower, which completed her return to full consciousness. Later, warm, dry, and pulling on a new pair of jeans, she tried to feel that it was a relief not to have to warn George that she’d be out that evening or worry about what they might eat. She did not convince herself.

Her belt was still flapping unbuckled around her waist when she succumbed to temptation. With the receiver tucked under her chin, she did up the belt and waited for him to answer his phone. He, too, was out, but at least his answering-machine was on again.

‘George, it’s me. Trish. Can we stop this? I hate it. You’re probably as cross as I’ve been. But don’t let’s throw away the good bits. I’m sorry for what I did, for what I made you feel, I mean. I’ve got a late meeting and I’m not sure what time I’ll be back, but could we speak? I miss you so much.’

Trish rang Collons for the fourth time when she was half-way to Kingsford, but she got his machine again. She couldn’t think why he was playing so hard to get. There was no particular reason why he shouldn’t have gone out – or even be away for the weekend – but he hadn’t given her the impression of a man with much of a social life.

When she eventually reached Kingsford, after an exasperating journey of traffic jams, potholes and kamikaze pedestrians, she drove straight to the address she had taken from the papers James Bletchley had left with her.

Collons’s flat proved to be one of fourteen in a block of raw red brick barely softened by miniature evergreen creepers. She rang his bell and waited. After a long silence she tried again, putting her ear close to the intercom speaker, in case she’d missed his answer. Still nothing. She pressed the bell nearest his and within a couple of seconds a crackly male voice said, ‘Hello.’

‘Blair?’ asked Trish brightly. ‘Is that you?’

‘No. This is John Barker. Who d’you want?’

‘Blair Collons. Flat five. Have I rung the wrong bell?’

‘This is flat five, but he’s flat four. He’s out.’

‘Oh? D’you know when he’ll be back?’

‘I’m not his sodding secretary. I heard him go about half an hour ago. OK?’

‘OK. Thanks. Sorry again.’

Trish went back to her car, sure now that Collons must be deliberately avoiding her. The first message she’d left had told him she’d drop in before her six-thirty meeting. It seemed a bit rich for him to have gone out deliberately after the way he’d forced her to see him and listen to his hysterical theories. Could he have guessed that she’d heard about the prowler? Or had he just assumed that her meeting in Kingsford must be with the police?

With no answers and no possibility of getting any until she’d managed to talk to him, Trish was stuck. The frustration was so distracting that she got lost three times and had to make tricky and illegal U-turns into fast oncoming traffic.

She could not find a way of letting herself off the hook of Kara’s concern for Blair Collons, and it was driving her mad. Only if she betrayed everything Kara had stood for and everything she herself had so much admired in Kara could she tell Chief Inspector Femur what she suspected. But if she didn’t say anything, her silence might allow Kara’s killer to escape. And perhaps not just Kara’s killer.

The Kingsford Rapist had been operating at about the time Collons had first moved to the area. He had raped six women and killed one within the space of a year and then, just as Collons had begun to find some renewed self-respect in the job he’d managed to get with the council, the Rapist had stopped. Only when Collons had been sacked and most deeply humiliated, had another rape and killing taken place.

She found the police station at last and was greeted with enough suspicion at the main desk to reinforce her feeling that an innocent man with Collons’s difficulties might not survive a police investigation intact. Once she had shown the sergeant her driving licence and told him three times that Chief Inspector Femur had phoned her at home that morning to make the appointment, he deigned to ring through to the incident room to check. Whatever he heard made his scowl thicken, but he grudgingly told his constable to take her to the incident room.

The constable, who looked as though he had hardly started to shave, took Trish to a big, smelly, untidy room furnished with rows of desks and battered chairs. There were only three people, each hunched over the keyboard of an ancient computer.

‘He’ll be through there,’ said her guide, pointing to a scarred brown door. He knocked and announced her to a grey-haired man, who had an expression of reined-in irritation on his pleasant, weary face.

He was wearing a nondescript, crumpled dark-grey suit over a plain white shirt, and his blue and grey striped tie had worked its way round so that most of the loose knot was hidden under the shirt collar. He looked as if he’d slept in his clothes and hadn’t had a very good night. His eyes were the only remarkable feature: almost diamond-shaped and of a clear hard grey. He got to his feet, holding out one large, dry hand.

‘Chief Inspector William Femur,’ he said, as Trish took his hand. ‘Right, what have you brought to show me?’

‘These,’ said Trish, pulling the envelopes of cuttings out of her capacious shoulder bag.

‘So?’ he said coldly when he’d had a chance to look at them.

She reminded herself of the stress he must feel, but she could have done with a little human warmth, even a scrap of sympathy. When she had told him briskly how the cuttings had come into her possession and why they frightened her, she described the night’s phone call. His expression softened marginally, but even so she kept most of her terror to herself.

‘Right,’ he said again, but this time the word carried overtones of ‘oh, I see, I’m sorry I snapped’, instead of ‘you’re a boring time-waster and the last thing in the world I need right now’.

‘I can see why you’re bothered,’ he added, ‘but what makes you think the caller was referring to Kara Huggate’s murder?’

‘Because he said he’d sent the cuttings to show me what happens to women who interfere.’

‘And my case is the only thing you’ve been poking your nose into, is it?’ Femur might as well have added, ‘I don’t believe it,’ because that was written all over him.

‘Yes.’

‘Right.’ He sighed and pushed back his thick grey hair with both hands.

Now that she looked more closely, she could see deep lines around his mouth, dragging its comers towards his chin. The skin around his lips was roughened too, as though he hadn’t been getting enough vitamins. Or perhaps it was just chapped by the cold.

‘Let’s take it from the top.’ Femur pulled a pad of paper towards him and wrote her name on it with the date and time.

Was it designed to intimidate? Trish wondered. Or was he merely being efficient? Be fair, she told herself, you always make notes of important interviews.

‘Now, who could want to scare you into silence about your friend Kara?’

‘That’s just it. I don’t know,’ Trish said. It was almost impossible not to mention Blair Collons’s name, but she had to do it. ‘But, as I explained to the officers who came to see me in chambers, Kara was due to appear in a case for damages against a man who could well have wanted to stop first her and now me. He’s called John Bract and he might have thought he could intimidate me into –’

‘We know all about him, and we’ve eliminated him from our inquiries.’

‘Why?’

‘You don’t need to know that, Ms Maguire, but you can take it from me that we’re satisfied he had no involvement of any kind.’ When Femur saw that
she
wasn’t satisfied, he sighed. ‘Did your caller sound like him at all?’

‘No,’ Trish said, certain that Bract himself couldn’t have produced the voice she’d heard. But, then, she’d never thought that he would have attacked Kara himself, only paid someone else to do it. So he could’ve paid the same person to intimidate her.

‘Right. So, who else could it have been? DC Lyalt told me you’ve been down here asking questions.’ The tone of his quiet voice was quite enough to tell Trish that he was absolutely furious with her intervention. She was glad that she was not one of his suspects. ‘Who did you talk to?’

‘One of Kara’s neighbours, a Mrs Davidson. I was standing in the road looking up at Kara’s house when I saw her watching me, and I thought it too good an opportunity to miss.’

‘Because you thought we might’ve forgotten to talk to a murder victim’s neighbours?’ Femur said, pretending to sound puzzled but actually showing every bit of his fury.

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I needed to talk about Kara and find out what had been happening to her just before she died for some emotional reason I don’t quite understand. Look, Chief Inspector, Kara was an extraordinary woman, and I liked her so much that I had to do something.’

As she saw his face soften a little, Trish cleared her throat and sat up straighter to tell him everything she had heard and thought about the prowler, except for the name she thought he bore. She saw that none of it was news to Femur. ‘And so I suppose what scared me when I got the cuttings and picked up the phone last night is that somehow, whoever he is, he found out my identity and has been trying to scare me off.’ She saw that Femur wasn’t convinced.

‘I don’t see how he could have heard anything about you, do you? He’s hardly going to go banging on the doors of the Church Lane houses asking whether the owners have told anyone that they saw him loitering with intent. Who else did you talk to?’

‘I went on to have a look at a man called Martin Drakeshill, a second-hand-car dealer in Station Drive here in Kingsford.’

There was a very slight stiffening in Femur’s shoulders.

Ah, then, maybe there is something sinister about Drakeshill, Trish thought, working to keep her face clean of both surprise and satisfaction. Could Collons possibly have been right? If so, then I
was
right to keep his name out of it. There was a little comfort in that.

‘Now, why would you do a thing like that, Ms Maguire? Did Kara tell you something about Drakeshill?’

Trish was tempted to lie because it would have provided such a convenient excuse for her questions, but she couldn’t do it, not to a man struggling to find Kara’s killer. She might withhold her suspicions of Collons in order to protect him for Kara until she had some real evidence against him, but she would not tell any actual lies unless they were forced on her. Instead she told him about the legal gossip she’d heard about Drakeshill.

She was relieved to see that Femur was looking more interested than angry.

‘All right, I can understand
that
, but why did you go to see him?’

‘I thought I might learn something. But I didn’t. His appearance suggested that he could be capable of all sorts of things, and one of the mechanics on the forecourt looked easily tough enough to take on anyone with a baseball bat, but that isn’t proof of anything. I have to admit that I didn’t see anything to suggest any wrongdoing beyond, perhaps, fencing stolen cars.’

‘I see.’ Femur had written down Drakeshill’s name, but that was all. ‘And who else have you approached?’

She told him about Roger and the KGB, and the council’s deal with Goodbuy’s, and he wrote that down, too. It all seemed pitifully inadequate. ‘You’re not telling me everything, are you?’ Femur said. He still sounded impatient but now there was something hard and dangerous in his voice. ‘What d’you know about Kara’s private life?’

‘Not a lot,’ Trish said, ‘although, as I told DC Lyalt, Kara did tell me that she was in love again. But I’m not sure that’s the most relevant thing.’

‘Oh?’

‘No.’ She told Femur her theory that Kara’s need to see good in everyone and bring it out by kindness could have led to her death, if the person she had been trying to help had been psychotic or psychopathic.

For the first time there was a hint of approval in his professional smile as he listened. It wasn’t much, just a flicker in the tight muscles around his mouth, but it seemed to signal a definite weakening of hostility.

‘You’re talking about the Kingsford Rapist, I take it?’

‘Yes. He’s never been found, has he? And from the papers it sounds as though what happened to Kara was very like what happened to the other victims. He could have been a client of hers, couldn’t he? Or simply an acquaintance.’

‘Anyone particular in mind?’

‘No,’ she said, in a casually firm voice, glad that her ten years at the bar had taught her to speak to a hostile audience without betraying her own emotions.

‘Right,’ he said, after a long examination of her face. ‘Now, what else can you tell me about this new lover of hers?’