Fault Lines (27 page)

Collons swivelled on his seat so that he was facing her. His lips began to work. A bubble of spit appeared in one corner.

The effort involved in keeping her expression calm and friendly was making Trish’s scalp itch and her throat ache.

‘I can’t. Not yet. You’ve got to help me stop Kara’s killer. She told me you’re like a terrier when you’re fighting for what’s right. And this is. He’s got to be found and stopped. The police aren’t trying to find him. They know who he is and they want him shielded. You’ve got to do it. No one else will. He’s dangerous. You’ve got to stop him before he does it again.’

He was edging ever closer to her, almost crying. Trish kept her right hand on the door handle behind her.

‘You’ve got to help me. I can’t do it alone.’

She could feel the pressure of his breath on her skin, smell the baked beans and cheese he had eaten for his last meal – and the decay of his teeth. She tried not to recoil.

‘He’s got to be stopped. And only you can do it now. Kara can’t. She tried, but she didn’t know enough about him to understand the threat.’

‘And you do,’ said Trish, almost certain that he was talking about himself. ‘It’s not up to me to stop him, Blair. If he can’t stop himself, the only people who can are the police. You must talk to them and tell them everything you know. The investigation’s being run by Chief Inspector William Femur, who isn’t a local man. He’s been drafted in from another area. You’d be in good hands with him. I’ve just been talking to him myself and –’

‘You promised you wouldn’t,’ Collons cried, fumbling with the door handle.

Trish could see that the sweat on his fingers was making it impossible for him to grip the metal. He pushed the door open at last and ran.

She didn’t know what to do as she got out of the car.

Leaning against the cold wet metal, she breathed in great lungfuls of the delectably petrol-scented air and tried to think.

Bill Femur was sitting quietly in the one armchair in Kara Huggate’s small living room, trying to get a handle on the person she had been: not the social worker, or the victim, but the woman. Trish Maguire had obviously had a lot of time for her, and he’d been impressed by Maguire, impressed and bloody angry too.

For one thing she should never have interfered in his case; for another, he was sure she’d been holding something back. He still couldn’t decide whether it was Kara’s lover she was protecting or someone else. He’d let her go – he hadn’t had any choice given that he had no grounds for an arrest – but he’d have another crack at her soon. The one thing he had believed was that she’d cared for Kara.

Everyone who’d known her had been the same, except for Spinel. They’d nearly all talked about her warmth and the way she treated people as though they mattered. However disadvantaged, dispossessed, demented or damaged they’d been, she’d listened to them with the same respect she showed the great and the good. One of her colleagues had said, in a tone that was more puzzled than anything else, as though it was something he’d never come across before, that Kara had somehow seen through all the mess that life dumped on you to the person you really were inside – and the one you wanted to be. Which was much the same as Maguire had said.

Were she and Steve Owler right? Could Kara have met the man who’d been the Kingsford Rapist, penetrated his mask of normality, and scared him into killing her?

Femur shook his head in exasperation. They had to be wrong. If the Kingsford Rapist had killed Kara, the thumbmarks on her body would have matched the ones on his first dead victim, and they didn’t. And even if the lab had made a mistake about the thumb size, the original rapist would never have arranged Kara’s body to mirror the position of her predecessor. That first victim hadn’t been laid out, Femur was sure; she’d been flung down when the bastard had finished with her. It was only Kara who had been moved after she died, dragged and
placed
in that apparently casual heap with one arm under her head and the other half twisted behind her back.

Femur just couldn’t buy it. He hadn’t in the beginning and he still didn’t. This was a copycat killing of the nastiest sort and somehow he was going to prove it.

He looked around Kara’s room as though her possessions could give him the clues he wanted. Everything had been meticulously searched by the SOCOs already. There was no evidence here. He knew that. But still he hoped that some essence of Kara would be there to tell him what had happened in the last agonised hours of her life.

With its whitewashed walls and two quiet sunny semi-abstract landscape paintings, the room was like an indoor version of his imagined meadow. The pale beech bookshelves were untidily crammed with novels and psychology textbooks. Only one basic kilim, in a mixture of buffs and russet colours, softened the hardness of the polished floorboards, and there were none of the china bits and bobs that Sue stuck all over their lounge and cursed him for breaking.

He started thinking, half embarrassed, about a film he’d once watched with Sue one Saturday evening. He didn’t reckon much to watching old black and white films, but there hadn’t been any sport on that night so he’d watched this
Laura
with her.

It had been a fairly silly film, but Sue had enjoyed it and, although bits of it had made him laugh, he’d got caught up in the story in the end. There’d been an American cop sitting in the apartment of a murder victim, falling in love with her portrait.

Well, he wasn’t in love with Kara Huggate, but by all accounts she had been a woman he’d have liked a lot, and she shouldn’t have died.

He told himself it was only a matter of time before he got her killer. All he had to do was take it step by step, go on asking the right questions, and never let himself get sidetracked.

There was a CD player on the low bookshelf by the chair he was sitting in and he gave in to temptation and pressed the buttons to listen to the last piece of music Kara had ever heard. The icy sound of a pure soprano was let loose into the room. According to the label she was singing a sixteenth-century lament.

Femur wondered why Kara had been listening to anything so sad, and then decided that it must have been peace she’d wanted in her music, the detachment of this singer’s passionless, perfect voice. To him it sounded as though it was all about acceptance of sorrow and he was angry all over again: a woman like Kara shouldn’t have had to accept anything.

Looking towards the foot of the stairs, he thought of the photographs of her body and wished he hadn’t had to know exactly what had been done to her there. The thought that she could have been put through all that extra horror just to disguise her killer’s identity and real intentions made him burn up. It was one thing for a mad psychopath to terrorise and murder a woman because of his own incomprehensible urges, but quite another for a cynical bastard to do it to cover his own tracks.

When the phone rang Femur almost shouted. He’d been so deep into his reconstruction of Kara that if he’d been one to believe in ghosts, he might have thought her spirit had been with him in the room, only to be frightened away by the noise. Feeling fooled by his own sentimentality, he waited for the answering-machine to cut in.

The caller was probably only a double-glazing salesman. Femur’s officers had been checking the tape every day, just as they had collected Kara’s mail to read, but so far there hadn’t been anything useful in any of it. The machine clicked and there was silence, presumably as her message was played to the caller, and then a strong, masculine, American voice: ‘Kara? It’s me. Great news! I
am
coming over to the UK again next week. I should hit Heathrow Tuesday at ten after six. I’ll call you from the airport and come straight on over unless I hear. I got your letter, honey, I just haven’t had a moment to answer. There’s so much I have to say. I wish you were there. Goddam, I’m missing you. Sorry I couldn’t call before, or even write. It’s been hell here with Mandy and the kids. I can only call from the office now, and even there it’s hard. She has spies everywhere. She can’t wait to get me out of the house, but her attorneys are nailing me to the floor, and my people don’t want me to give them any ammunition – like you. I can’t wait till it’s over and we can be together. If there’s a problem about Tuesday, will you call the hotel and leave a message? I …’

Moving slowly and with an effort, as though the air was resistant, almost viscous, Bill Femur reached out his right hand to pick up the phone.

‘Good evening. This is Chief Inspector William Femur of the Metropolitan Police.’

‘What? Who?’ The pleasantly deep voice had sharpened, but with suspicion not fear. ‘Why’re you picking up Kara’s calls?’

‘There’s been a serious crime in the area. Who am I speaking to?’

‘My name’s Dale Waters. How serious? Is Kara OK? What’s happened?’

‘I regret to have to inform you, Mr Waters, that Ms Huggate is dead.’

‘What?’ he said, in an explosion that sounded as though he’d been punched in the gut. ‘What happened?’

‘When did you last see her, sir?’ Femur asked, letting some sympathy leak into his voice, but not very much because he was so angry with his team for failing to find this Dale Waters, and with the man himself for being so secretive.

‘Tuesday of the week before last. How’d she die? Goddammit, man, tell me what happened! She was my –’

‘She was murdered, sir. What time did you leave her?’

‘Murdered?’

Femur sighed. He felt sorry for the man – if he was innocent – but they had to move the conversation on.

‘Yes, sir, murdered. Now, will you please tell me what time you saw her that Tuesday?’

‘We spent the evening together in her cottage, then I drove to the airport, Heathrow, slept at the Balkan Hotel there –’

‘What time did you get to the hotel?’

‘About midnight, I guess, having left her around eleven fifteen, maybe eleven thirty.’

‘Is there any way of confirming that?’

‘You mean she died
that
night, after I left?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to establish. She was found on the Wednesday morning by her cleaner. We have to establish the latest time she was seen alive.’

‘I can see that. But I guess I don’t have any witnesses to offer. There was a receptionist on duty at the hotel, but she wouldn’t remember me. I didn’t talk to her. They have keycards so I didn’t ask for a key from the desk. And I didn’t call anyone from my room. I took a shower and went to bed, then caught the first plane out – back to Boston – Wednesday. How’d he kill her?’

‘He?’

‘Isn’t it a he? Did she …? Was it …?’

‘Did she have a nickname for you, Mr Waters?’

‘Nickname? What
is
this?’

‘Would you just answer the question, sir?’

‘If it’s that important I’m not often in the UK, so she called me her Sojourner. Oh, God!’ There was the sound of a deep intake of breath down the phone and then a spate of coughing. When the voice came again it sounded croaky: ‘My apologies, Chief Inspector. There was some poem or other Kara knew that said something about the sojourner returns. Kind of thing. Was it … was it bad for her?’

‘It wasn’t quick and it wasn’t pretty.’

‘Oh, God!’ The pain in Waters’s voice should have been enough to confirm his innocence, but Femur was taking no chances. ‘Can you give me your full name and address and details of your hotel and your flight?’

Dale Waters dictated all his details, including his planned time of arrival the following week and promised to answer any questions the police might have then. ‘I’m an attorney, sir,’ he added, surprising Femur. ‘I’ll do all I can to help. But I need to know what happened to Kara. I can’t … Oh, God! Why didn’t I stay with her that night?’

‘I don’t know, sir. Why didn’t you?’ asked Femur, interested.

‘Because I didn’t want to drive to the airport in rush-hour traffic,’ the American said drearily. ‘It’s much quicker at night. What’d he do to her when I’d gone?’

‘I’d rather give you the details when you’re here.’

‘Come on, Chief Inspector. I have to know.’

‘She was attacked in her cottage and died. But don’t think too much about it, sir. However bad it was for her, it’s over now. She’s at peace.’

‘Sure.’ His voice was raw enough to make Femur wish he could let him go, but there were things that still had to be asked.

‘While you’re on the line, will you tell me whether she ever talked to you about drugs, or drug dealers?’

‘No. I don’t think so. She wasn’t a user, Chief Inspector, and neither am I, if that’s what you’re asking. She liked a drink now and then. No more than that.’

Femur heard him gulp, cough, try to say something else and fail.

‘We know she herself wasn’t an addict,’ he said, giving the man time to get control of himself. ‘The post-mortem made that clear enough. D’you know if she had any enemies?’

‘There were people at work who were difficult.’ His voice was working reasonably well again, but it was thickened and ragged at the edges. As well as the pain, Femur thought there was anger, perhaps even stronger than his own. ‘She put some noses out of joint trying to clean the place up and cut budgets, but nothing to explain murder. Though there was a guy called Jed Thomplon, who –’

‘We know all about him. He’s in the clear. Anyone else?’

‘Yeah, there was a man I wished she’d cut loose from. She was sure he wasn’t dangerous any more. But he sounded … Oh God, if it’s him, I’ll never forgive myself. I should’ve made her see how –’ His voice cracked and then there was silence.

‘I understand, sir, believe me,’ said Femur, keeping his compassion in check with difficulty. ‘Who is he, this man she didn’t think was dangerous?’

‘He was a colleague, kind of.’ There was a pause and then the sound of a nose being vigorously blown. ‘His name was Blade or Blain. No, Blair. That was his first name. I don’t know his surname. She talked about him often, trying to kid herself she liked him. She didn’t, I could tell. He was a creep, and he made her skin crawl.
And
he’d been in trouble with the police years ago. But she tried to see the best in him, and she used to let him come to her house and talk to her about his fantasies by the hour.’