Fault Lines (26 page)

‘Nothing more than I told DC Lyalt. Kara never told me anything else. No, it’s true. I’m not stalling, and I’m sorry I can’t help you. I would if I could. The only hint I got was in a letter she wrote to me just before she died, and she didn’t tell me his name or anything about him. By the time I got the letter she was already dead, so I couldn’t have asked her anything even if I’d wanted to.’

‘May I see the letter?’

This time she was going to have to lie if she was to keep Collons out of it, so she told Femur she had destroyed it.

‘Now why would you do that? The last letter of a woman who you say was such a friend that you had to go gawping at the cottage where she was murdered and talking to her neighbours.’

‘I’m not sure.’ Trish looked him full in the face. It was no worse than trying to persuade a suspicious jury of the truth of her client’s case. ‘Ever since I got rid of it, I’ve regretted my impulse, but it’s too late now.’ I’m not under caution, she thought.

They went on round and round the letter, Jed Thomplon, the rest of Kara’s private life, what she had said to Trish about it, what else she might not have said, and whether Trish had ever heard her talk about anyone of either sex with the initial S. Gradually Femur began to seem convinced that she didn’t know who the person could be.

As he thawed, Trish relaxed too, but there wasn’t much more either of them could do for the other. Femur told her that if she had any more threatening phone calls she should ring her local station to report the caller and get them to pass the information on to him. Or she could ring the incident room direct if she preferred. He gave her the number. She picked up her bag, leaving the envelopes of cuttings on his desk.

This time she did get an answer when she rang the bell of Collons’s flat, but he refused to let her in when she said who she was. Left standing on the step, she was wondering what on earth to do next when she saw him running down the corridor towards the glazed front door. His short figure was rippled and distorted by the ridges in the glass but unmistakable.

When Trish opened her mouth to greet him, he thrust a piece of paper at her, pushing her backwards off the shallow brick step. Gagging on the almost feral smell that rose from his clothes, she opened the note and read the backwards-sloping writing: ‘I must talk to you. I’ve got something important to tell you about Kara. But not here. It’s not safe. Can we go somewhere in your car? That can’t be bugged. It’s important.’ The last two words were underlined four times in thick black ink.

‘I haven’t long,’ Trish said, exasperated by his dramatics. She was also deeply reluctant to let herself be trapped in her car with him. ‘I have to get back to London.’

‘I know,’ he said, as he turned away from her to double-lock the front door. It seemed a redundant gesture since any intruder could have broken the glass.

Those two words helped confirm her suspicion that he couldn’t have made his voice sound like the one that had threatened her over the phone, but she still had to be convinced.

‘Will you tell me, Blair, why –’

‘Not now,’ he said frantically, urging her down the slope to the small car-park.

She led the way reluctantly to her Audi. He stood there, waiting for her to unlock the door, his impatience so obvious that he might have had flags proclaiming it sprouting from his ears. Trish looked at him in the pallid light shed by the opaque white globes that stood on poles, like severed heads, at intervals around the forecourt.

For the first time she noticed that there were very few lines on Collons’ face. In a man of his age that seemed sinister, but she could not work out why.

He was wearing the corduroy trousers she had first seen in the pub and a saggy old tweed jacket with fraying cuffs and ink stains in the corners of the right-hand pocket. There was debris of some kind sticking to his lapels. He looked weak and pathetic, but she had far too much experience to believe that the weak couldn’t be dangerous. She thought of the little she had read in the papers about Kara’s injuries and wondered whether he had a knife hidden somewhere in his clothes.

He had his hand on the passenger-door handle and was nodding urgently towards the bleeper in her hand. Not wanting an undignified scene, Trish released the locks and allowed him to get in.

‘Now drive,’ he ordered, with the surprising force he occasionally showed.

Trish gritted her teeth and briefly turned to see what he was doing. He looked a lot less powerful than he had sounded. His hands were in his lap, trembling and glistening with sweat. Catching her eye, he clutched them together so that they stopped shaking.

‘Please drive, Ms Maguire. We need to get away from here.’ His voice was shriller than it had been, but it still did not sound anything like the one on the phone.

‘Please. Oh, please, Ms Maguire.’

Trish turned on the ignition and backed carefully out on to the road. It was not a particularly busy one and she wanted to be somewhere where other people would be able to see her.

A large garage appeared on the left, positively guttering with bright yellow light. It was the sort of place that had not only banks of petrol pumps and automatic washing and vacuuming devices, but also a small supermarket at the back. Eight cars were being filled with petrol and several more queued behind them. It would do. Trish parked in the gutter, right under the oil company’s enormous sign. Light spread over her windscreen and filled the car. Even one of the notoriously passive British passers-by would probably intervene if Collons started to assault her in such a public place. And she could always slam her fist on the horn if she needed help fast.

‘There are too many people,’ Collons whispered, as though the drivers filling their tanks would be able to hear him. He pressed himself back against the seat, trying to get out of the light. ‘Far too many. We must go somewhere quieter, darker.’

‘No,’ said Trish firmly. The last thing she wanted to do was go anywhere dark and private with him. ‘Look, Blair, there are no microphones here and no one who could recognise my car or know who either of us is. If you don’t want to talk to me here, you’ll have to go to the police or let me take you. There isn’t any third option.’

‘I can’t go to the police.’ There was hysteria in his voice. ‘I told you. I wish you’d listen to what I’m saying.’

Whatever he had or hadn’t done to Kara – or anyone else – Trish found it hard to believe he could be the kind of rapist driven by rage and a longing to make women cower in front of him. But it was impossible not to see him forcing himself on Kara because he believed she’d wanted him. If she’d fought him, perhaps screaming, showing how much she hated what he was doing to her, could the shock of it have made him angry enough to kill her? Or perhaps he’d just needed to keep her quiet.

‘You
must
go to the police.’ Trish said quietly, pushing down her own fears, hoping he couldn’t sense them.

He looked as though he had just had confirmation that the whole world was against him. His cheeks were trembling and his slightly protruding lower lip was wet. And then he moved his head and the light caught his neat little round brown eyes. Trish thought she could see anger behind the creepy, pleading misery they always showed, anger and hate.

‘Blair, you must,’ she said, as steadily as she could.

‘It’s just that Kara…’ His voice broke on her name. His eyelids covered the anger and whatever else his eyes might have betrayed. Coughing, he pushed his clasped hands between his tightly closed thighs and leaned forward over them. ‘Try to understand, Ms Maguire. Kara told me only a few days before she was killed that she’d seen Martin Drakeshill having a surreptitious meeting with Michael Napton.’

He looked round at Trish, as though he expected her to know what he was talking about.
‘Now
do you see?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Napton? Who’s he? Blair, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘He’s the chief planning officer of Kingsford Council. I’ve told you about him before.’

‘So you have, but not by name.’

‘They had a much younger man with them.’ Blair went on, his voice now straining with the effort of persuading Trish to take him seriously. It only made him sound constipated, and his contorted expression didn’t help. ‘She recognised him too, you see, and she told me she thought he’d seen her and must have told the others who she was. It’s at that point they realised she was on to them and would have to be killed.’

‘On to them about what? I don’t understand.’

‘About the drugs,’ he shouted. Trish recoiled, frowning. She felt as if she had hold of an eel that kept squirming out of her grasp.

‘Kara said the young man with Drakeshill and Napton was Sergeant Spinel, an officer in the drugs squad she’d had dealings with. When she saw them together it all fell into place.’

‘What did?’ As soon as she’d said it, Trish remembered Femur’s questions about the name of Kara’s lover and whether she’d ever mentioned anyone with the initial S in his name.

Collons turned on her a look of such icy fury that he didn’t seem remotely pathetic.

‘I’m not trying to be difficult,’ Trish said quickly. ‘Just trying to understand what you think they were doing together.’

Her calm voice seemed to have some effect. Collons’s thighs relaxed and he removed his fists, laying his hands almost flat in his lap. He leaned back against the seat, sighing.

‘I’m also trying to understand,’ Trish went on, still carefully, ‘why on earth you didn’t tell me all this when we were first talking if it’s so important.’

His face blurred in front of her as a torrent of questions about him and Kara, and about Kara and the drugs-squad sergeant spurted into Trish’s mind.

‘I didn’t know then that I could trust you,’ he said. ‘In spite…’

Trish made her eyes focus on his face again. His expression was curious so she smiled slightly, and saw an answering movement of his wet lips. He leaned closer. She flinched before she could stop herself and felt the back of her head touch the car window. Collons leaned even further out of his own seat.

‘In spite of everything Kara always says about you.’

Trish felt a sickening lurch in her gut as she noticed his use of the present tense. Was he conducting seances or merely imagining Kara giving him instructions? Either would fit with his history. Or could he be like one murderer Trish had heard about, who had cut off his girlfriend’s head and kept it to chat to for months. Oh, God! What should she do?

Stop it, Trish, she ordered herself. He hasn’t got Kara’s head in his fridge or anywhere else. No one has ever suggested that her body was dismembered. Calm down, grow up and concentrate.

She controlled her face, keeping a fairly easy smile on her lips. As she corrected her posture so that she no longer leaned backwards, Collons moved jerkily back into his own seat and plucked at the knees of his soiled trousers. A peculiar smile made his lips move. Trish thought that he was about to say something until she realised that the words being shaped were never going to be said aloud, and that she was not the intended recipient.

He clearly had a vivid fantasy life and, equally clearly, Kara played a huge part in it. Trish began to see what might have happened. If Collons had been in Kara’s garden to collect material for his fantasies of their life together and seen her with S, his dreams would have been smashed. Had he decided then that if he couldn’t have her, no one would? Had he waited until S had gone and then broken in to kill her? And if S were this Spinel, had Blair turned the story round to make S the villain?

Blaming S for Kara’s death would have been a way of getting her back in his fantasies. But he must have known, at some level, that it was he who’d killed her. Perhaps inventing the conspiracy between S and a well-known local criminal had been an elaborate attempt to avoid that unbearable truth. If so, his desperate attempts to persuade Trish, not only a friend of Kara’s but also a barrister, to believe it could have been a way of helping him to believe it was real.

‘You see, it must be something to do with drugs, Ms Maguire,’ Blair said, jerking her out of her preoccupation. His staring eyes were watering. Everything about him seemed damp.

‘Kara hated drugs. Everyone in the council knew that. She thought they were at the root of most of the problems she had to deal with. She was always talking about finding ways to penalise people who were known to be dealers, and she’d run up against Spinel several times as she tried to force him to do his job. She thought he was slapdash at best.’

‘Did she?’ Trish couldn’t think of any more useful comment, and Collons was looking at her as though he expected something.

‘Yes, and “dangerous” at worst. Dangerous. That was the word she used. He and Drakeshill and Napton were somehow linked with the supermarket land deal so when we started to ask about the costs they got frightened, and then when they realised Kara had seen the three of them together, they had to make sure she couldn’t tell anyone.’

‘Blair, there’s no evidence for
any
of this. They could have been three friends chatting together. Come on, you must admit that.’

He said nothing. He just looked at her as though he hated her.

‘Now, I’ve got a question of my own,’ Trish said, in a voice that sounded astonishingly confident. ‘I want to know what you were doing in Kara’s garden after dark several times in the week before the murder.’

‘You don’t understand,’ he said, beginning to whimper. ‘I knew you wouldn’t, but Kara keeps insisting that I talk to you. Tell you the truth. I knew it wouldn’t do any good.’

Trish lost patience. ‘Blair, she’s dead. She can’t be insisting about anything.’

He shuddered, his whole squashy little body juddering in the seat beside her.

‘Blair…?’

‘I’d never have guessed you could be such a bitch,’ he said. ‘For the first time I’m glad she’s dead. It would have hurt her so much to know what you’re really like.’

Trish felt behind her for the door handle. She needed to know she could get out of the car fast if she had to. And she laid her free hand casually on the horn in case she needed it. Then she said, ‘I think you’d better go now.’