Fault Lines (3 page)

‘Yes.’

‘Are there any similarities in the MO?’

‘I haven’t been told,’ Watkins said, looking as though he’d licked an unripe lemon. Trish almost smiled as she understood the reasons for his hostility. How he must have resented chasing up red herrings in London when the real action was in Kingsford!

She got rid of them at last and tried to settle down to work. Before she’d got very far, the phone rang. She picked it up and gave her name.

‘You wouldn’t listen this morning,’ said Dave, at his most peevish, ‘but I have to give an answer to this solicitor from Kingsford in south-west London who wants you to represent his client, Mr Blair Collons, at an employment tribunal. Unfair dismissal. I heard what you said this morning and I know you don’t do employment law, but for some unfathomable reason of their own…’

Trish felt faint amusement as she recognised one of the favourite phrases of the most senior silk in chambers, for whom Dave had always had a quite sickeningly exaggerated respect.

‘… they want to brief you and no one else. Will you do it?’

‘No,’ she said, noticing the coincidence and dismissing it. After all, a lot of people lived in Kingsford. There needn’t be any connection between Blair Whatsisname and Kara. ‘It’s not my field. I wouldn’t be able to do a good enough job for the client.’

‘I know, and in the normal way I’d never ask you to take the case, but they’re adamant they want you. It’s a simple enough business. You could do it standing on your head.’

‘Then why can’t the solicitor do it himself? Hasn’t he got any bottle?’

‘I’ve no idea. Neither he nor any of his partners has come to us before, but they’re well thought of. I asked around. That’s why I’d like to give them what they want. No bad thing to take a brief from them, you know. Could lead to a lot more interesting work in the future.’

‘Look, Dave, there’s no point mugging up the subject for one piffling little tribunal. Can’t you get someone else to do it? Eric would be perfect. Let him cut his teeth on it.’

‘They want
you
.’

‘Sorry, Dave. Nothing doing. I’ve got far too much on already.’ Trish put down the phone, glad that she had achieved a big enough reputation to be sure of getting plenty of work in the future, whatever Dave thought of her rebellion.

She found she couldn’t concentrate so she started to excavate the paper ramparts of her desk, a nice, mindless task that had to be done some time. Filing, chucking, and putting as few things as possible in her pending tray, she came across the morning’s post. It included an envelope marked ‘personal’, addressed to her in Kara’s writing.

Trish sat looking at it, wiping her fingers on her black skirt. A strong scent of garlic and tomato wafted out when she eventually ripped open the envelope. Kara must have written the letter in her kitchen while something was cooking beside her. That brought her back into Trish’s mind more vividly than anything else could have done. She’d never been to Kara’s house, but once, after they’d been working late on Darlie’s case, they’d gone back to Trish’s flat with the solicitor for a working supper and Kara had volunteered to cook.

Unlike Trish, she’d been a brilliant, instinctive cook, and she’d moved around the strange kitchen, peeling and chopping, melting, stirring, caramelising, and amalgamating scent, taste and texture into one perfect dish. So at ease had she been that she hadn’t needed to concentrate on what she was doing and had talked as passionately as Trish about the need for children to be protected against the awful damage that could be done to them by vicious or simply hopeless adults.

Trish bit her lip and tried not to think of the horror of what had happened to Kara herself. The letter might help.

Dear Trish, I hope you’re not going to be too cross with me, but I’ve given your name and phone number (chambers
not
home, of course) to a slightly pathetic chap – well, more than pathetic, actually – who’s been sacked from the council here and is taking them to a tribunal. I’d have kept the news until we meet tomorrow except that I’m not sure we’ll be able to talk privately for long enough and I don’t want you faced with him without an explanation – as you’ll understand when you do meet him. He’s called Blair Collons and he’s an altogether sad case, and a bit difficult to like, but I think he’s been very shabbily treated, even though I can’t manage to believe in all the wild conspiracies he sees around him. Although I suppose he could well be a case of ‘just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you’. Anyway, he needs a lot of help in general and just now a barrister to represent him at his employment tribunal. I know it’s not your sort of work, but he needs someone kind as well as clever, if only to prove to him that not everyone in the world
is
out to get him. Somehow I feel sure that if you chose you’d be able to help him, even if you can’t get him his job back. And he needs help, Trish. He seems to have no one in the world and must be very lonely. I suspect that’s half the problem in fact. If you could manage to squeeze the time, I’d be terribly grateful. And you’d earn yourself a lot of plenary indulgences for that great court up in the sky. If you see what I mean. Well, anyway, you will when you’ve met him, I’m afraid. By the way, I’m sorry to have moaned so much about my love life that day. In fact it’s been looking up recently. I’ve met someone. I’m not naïve enough to believe that this is happy-ever-after time, but it is wonderful at the moment. I haven’t told you before because I wasn’t sure it was real, but now I think it could be. There are complications, practical difficulties, if you see what I mean, but he’s worth putting up with them. Well worth it. I’d love you to meet him in due course. I have a feeling that you’d like him and vice versa.

Love, Kara

P.S. Good luck tomorrow. I’ll do my best for poor Darlie, and I won’t forget any of your advice about behaviour in the witness box!

‘Oh, shit,’ said Trish.

The incident room at Kingsford was cold but nose-stuffingly airless. It smelt of stale smoke, coffee and bacon sandwiches. Four of the twenty phones were ringing and both dedicated fax machines were slowly cranking out sheets of paper as officers came and went, jeering, throwing mock blows, laughing at each other’s jokes and scoring whatever points they could. None of them looked at the photographs of Kara Huggate’s mutilated body that were pinned to the large cork board, or at the one of her in life, smiling gravely straight at the camera.

Chief Inspector William Femur, drafted in from the local Area Major Investigation Pool with a sergeant and two constables of his own, was waiting for them to settle down. The first half-hour in any local nick was always crucial. You had to establish your authority by the end of that time or you were done for. He was still surprised by the childish resentment his arrival could arouse in local officers, but he’d learned to deal with most of the stalling tactics they dreamed up.

Femur was in his early fifties. He’d done thirty years and could have retired on a full pension, but he wasn’t going until they pushed him out. It wasn’t so much that he loved the job itself – although he did get a kick from building an unshakeable case against the sort of toe rag who beat up old ladies or raped and murdered social workers. No, he wanted to stay because he was good at what he did and someone had to do it. Besides, what else would he have done with so much time now that the kids had grown up and gone?

His hair was more grey than dark-brown, these days, but he was still fit: running and weight-training saw to that. To be fair, so did the gardening his wife nagged him to do at weekends. He certainly didn’t look forward to spending more time on that, disliking her obsession with straight edges and her determination to poison everything that crawled Or flew or grew where she thought it shouldn’t.

As in so many things, Femur’s taste in gardens was quite different from his wife’s. He’d have preferred something more like a meadow, with a few real trees, full sized, here and there, instead of neat little pointed conifers in pristine beds cut into the edges of a lawn as flat and unrelieved as a snooker table. His grass would be longer and paler, with straw-like bits mixed in with it and seed heads, too. There would be flowers dotted about wherever they happened to grow, big daisy-like things and bluebells and something pink – or poppies, maybe. They’d be scented but not as overpoweringly as the paper-white narcissi Sue grew in bowls in the lounge, which made the room smell of sick all winter long. There’d be butterflies in his meadow and perhaps a river at the bottom, where he might dangle a line to catch a passing trout.

It was a pleasant fantasy, and thinking about it always made him breathe easier. He’d never have it. Still, it had done its work again and he was ready to get heavy with his new mob.

They looked a particularly unprepossessing bunch, these Kingsford officers, and Femur found himself thinking that it wasn’t surprising they hadn’t managed to catch their rapist. Then he suppressed the thought. It would do no good whatsoever if they picked up a blast of hostility from him. Firmness was crucial – humour, too – but no hostility. It would come across as weakness and, if they sensed that, they’d be on him like a pack of hunting dogs and he’d never get a result. That would be a win for them, a win they’d probably like even better than catching the killer.

‘Right,’ he said loudly, but not too loudly. Only one or two stopped talking.

Femur just stood there, his buttocks resting on the edge of the white melamine-topped table behind him, waiting, expecting them to settle down. After a while it worked and they began to pay attention. It probably took only a few seconds; it felt like minutes.

‘Right,’ he said again, when all but two were quiet and at least half were looking directly at him. There was one at the back who seemed a bit more co-operative than the rest, a young dark bloke with a lively eye and a hint of intelligence in his twisted smile. Good teeth, too, not that they had any bearing on his brains. Femur made a mental note to give him something interesting to do.

‘We all know why we’re here,’ he went on. ‘Forty-one-year-old social worker Kara Huggate, living alone at number three Laburnam Cottages, Church Lane, Kingsford, has been sexually assaulted and murdered. The killer’s MO has some similarities with that of the Kingsford Rapist – he’s been careful to leave no semen, for one thing, which means he’s well aware of the risks of DNA testing – so we’ll have to look back at the old investigation to see where that leads us.’

‘Nowhere fast, if you ask me.’

Femur couldn’t see who’d interrupted. ‘On the assumption,’ he went on crisply, ‘that we can do better this time.’

That didn’t go down well but it was fair comment, and it wiped the grins off several smug faces.

‘Right. Like I say, there are similarities, but there are differences too this time. We’ll have a clearer idea of how many and how serious they are when we’ve got all the SOCO and lab evidence in, but there’s one obvious difference already and that’s the look of the victim.’

Femur pointed over his shoulder at the row of glossy ten-by-eight colour prints. He’d seen plenty worse in his time, but that didn’t make these any easier to look at, or any less important. Even the thought of them made him sick and angry; so angry that he’d do whatever it took to nail the bastard who’d rammed a chisel up Kara Huggate for his own pleasure and then throttled her.

However hopeless or obstructive the Kingsford officers might be, Femur would use whatever skills they had between them to get a result.

‘As you can see from the photographs of the earlier victims – that is, the five who lived and the one who died – they were all small women; in their late teens or early twenties, with pointy little faces and feathery dark hair.’

Femur saw one of the Kingsford officers sniggering with a mate as they mouthed the word ‘feathery’and waggled limp wrists at each other. He ignored them. If that was the worst they could find to do to irritate him, he’d be on velvet for the whole investigation.

‘Kara Huggate was bigger, older, blonde and notably square-chinned. Where the earlier victims were physically fragile, she was powerful. She could hardly have been more different. Why?’

‘Could’ve been a different man wot dun it, sir,’ suggested one of the local officers, with a yokel’s earnestness.

It was so convincing a picture of stupidity that, if Femur hadn’t been well aware that it took a certain amount of intelligence to get into CID, he might have taken the comment at face value and set about reminding them that he’d just raised the possibility himself. A few of the other locals sniggered.

‘Or something could’ve happened to the Kingsford Rapist during the intervening period to make him select a new type of victim,’ Femur went on. ‘He’s been inactive now for three years …

‘As far as we know,’ said the thin, dark chap from the back row. Femur suddenly remembered his name: Stephen Owler.

‘He could’ve moved away from the area and been knocking off older women up in the north or somewhere and grown out of feathery girls, sir.’

‘Good point, Owler. Get on to the central reporting desk at the Yard and find out what they’ve got on unidentified rapists operating anywhere in the country.’

‘Or he could’ve been done for something else and spent the time banged up somewhere,’ suggested Brian Jones, the younger of the two AMIP constables Femur had brought with him.

‘Quite possible, Bri. And, if so, there might’ve been a probation officer who bugged him or a woman from the Board of Visitors, prison governor or what-have-you, who’s given him a new blueprint for the ideal victim. See what you can dig up about any local men who’ve recently been released, will you?’

‘Sure, Guv.’

‘Right. Another possibility is that something happened to the Kingsford Rapist after his last known outing, when, as you will remember, he first killed.’ Femur glanced behind him at the photographs and saw the head-and-shoulders shot of the nineteen-year-old who had died. He pointed to her to make them concentrate. ‘Maybe the knowledge that he’d murdered someone shocked him into stopping for a while. Or maybe something in his life changed and gave him some kind of legitimate satisfaction that meant he didn’t need to terrorise young women to make himself feel powerful.’