Fault Lines (30 page)

George caught up with her and said, gasping between the words, ‘He ran about two minutes ago. Dressed in army fatigues, about five ten or eleven, tough, early twenties, black stubble, snub nose, curly hair. Did you notice anything else, Trish?’

‘Only that he must have a big bruise on his face. George had him by the hair and slammed his face down on the floor. There must be a mark.’

‘OK, Constable,’ said an efficient-sounding woman officer to the man with the radio. ‘Got all that? Call it in
now
, take the car and go after him with Thompson.’ She looked back at Trish ‘Will you be able to identify him when we pick him up?’

‘Yes.’

‘Great. Well, I can see you need a bit of help here,’ she said, smiling from Trish to George and back again. ‘Wayne? Call out a blood-wagon will you. Sorry, ambulance. I call them blood-wagons.’

‘Fine by me,’ Trish said, relieved to be in the hands of someone so breezily confident.

‘Now, I’m Sergeant McDonald.’ She put a hand on Trish’s shoulder. ‘Come on in, and tell me your names.’

She urged Trish towards the sofa. Now that the danger had gone, and even George was looking better and not as though he might pass out or throw up at any moment, Trish felt almost hysterical with relief. A bubble of laughter emerged from between her lips and then another.

‘It’s OK,’ said Sergeant McDonald, who had obviously seen such sights before. ‘You’re both OK now. Come and sit down.’

‘I don’t want my sofa covers getting bloody,’ said Trish. For some reason her legs gave way just then and she subsided, not very elegantly, on to the floor, still laughing. But there were tears on her face, too, along with the feathers that seemed super glued to her cheeks with her own blood.

‘I must look like a half-killed chicken,’ she said.

‘Turkey,’ said George, who was wiping his hands over his face and giving his name to another officer, busily taking down the details. The young constable Sergeant McDonald had addressed as Wayne was still yelling urgently into his radio and three others stood, just gazing at the carnage. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ said Trish, working hard to get herself back in control.

‘Cups of tea, Wayne, when you’re ready. OK?’ said Sergeant McDonald, whose hand was still on Trish’s shoulder. Trish couldn’t quite work out how it had got there or what she was doing on the floor. Her mind wasn’t firing properly.

The sergeant was squatting beside her, talking to her, asking her questions. Heat flooded Trish’s head and then her whole body, only to be followed by what felt like a cold shower. The floor beneath her tilted and flung her about. She didn’t know she was going to lose consciousness until she was too far out to do anything about it. She tried to say George’s name again, but her tongue wouldn’t move.

When she opened her eyes again, a man in a livid lime green all-in-one uniform was bending over her. She looked up into his face.

‘Ah, there you are. D’you know what your name is?’

‘Of course I do. This is my flat you’re in,’ she said crisply. Then she realised why he was asking and smiled. ‘Trish Maguire. Is George here?’

‘Yes. He’s recovering in the chair over there.’ The paramedic moved aside so that Trish could sit up.

She wasn’t in her flat any longer. The walls around her were a dirty cream and the chair George was sitting in was one of a row full of people in their outdoor clothes. He smiled at her and stood up.

Trish frowned. She looked down at her own body to see that it was covered with a red blanket and that she was lying on a wheeled trolley. Hospital.

George, looking almost his normal colour, came towards her. She had never seen so much love – or so much relief – in anyone’s face.

‘God! Trish, you frightened me, passing out like that. How’re you feeling?’

‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘Well, sore. You?’

‘Ditto. They’ve got a doctor coming pretty soon, they say, to check you out and see if you need stitches.’

‘Great.’ She turned back to the paramedic. ‘Look, I don’t suppose I needed an ambulance really, did I? They were only grazes.’

‘The cuts aren’t deep, but I thought you ought to get checked out. The doctor’ll tell you everything you need. He’ll want to know if you’ve had a recent tetanus shot.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that. That screwdriver could’ve been filthy. And presumably hepatitis as well. And Aids.’

George’s hand was stroking her hair. ‘We can think about all that in time, Trish. The crucial thing now is to get you stitched up and on your feet again.’

‘Did the intruder cut himself?’ asked the paramedic.

‘No. No, I don’t think so.’

‘You should be all right, then. The Aids virus can’t live long without a host. It’s unlikely to have been active on the screwdriver. But you can always have a test to make sure. I’ve got to get back to the ambulance. Will you be all right now?’

‘We’ll be fine,’ said Trish. ‘Look, you’ve been very kind. Thank you so much.’

‘It’s what we’re here for. So long.’

Trish smiled at his Kermit-like retreating back and then at George. ‘I’m sorry, you know,’ she said. He looked surprised and his stroking hand paused. ‘About what I said. About, you know, interference and all that.’

‘No. It’s me who should be sorry. It was a ham-fisted thing to do, my love.’ His hand moved on her head again. ‘Whatever I think, the way you deal with your father
is
your affair. I shouldn’t ever have –’

‘What have we here?’ said a young woman doctor, with a face like a hurt child. ‘Knife wound?’ She looked suspiciously at George, then behind him to where, Trish saw, two uniformed police officers were standing.

‘No, no,’ said Trish quickly, reading the expression in the doctor’s face. ‘It wasn’t him. He saved me. It was an intruder.’

‘OK. Good.’ The doctor waved to a porter who came over to wheel Trish’s bed into a cubicle.

It turned out that the paramedic had cleaned Trish’s cuts in her flat while she was still unconscious, and had also made sure that there was no arterial damage, before strapping her wounds with temporary dressings. Those had to be removed, painfully pulling the stubble from her leg.

‘Teach me to let my legs get hairy in winter,’ she said, seeing that George was worried by the faces she’d made.

‘Nothing serious there,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ll get a nurse to sort you out and take some blood samples. We’ll test for all the possible infections. And then you can go home. Have you got transport?’

‘I think we’ll get a lift in a police car,’ said George, gesturing to the cubicle curtains, behind which the two young officers were still patiently waiting.

‘Oh, sure,’ said the doctor, whisking the curtains aside as she left, adding to the officers, ‘Won’t be long now.’

Only half an hour later, with the tight, comforting strapping around her leg, Trish was back in the flat, sipping tea and answering questions. At first it had been hard to persuade either George or the police that the attack hadn’t sent wild persecution fantasies flooding through her brain. As she relayed everything she knew about Kara’s murder, it seemed weird that George had no idea what she had been doing and hadn’t even heard of Blair Collons.

Collons, she thought suddenly, pausing in her explanation of her first visit to Kingsford. Since he hadn’t been her attacker, he was almost certainly innocent of Kara’s murder too.

‘Ms Maguire?’ said the constable, who was taking notes.

‘Sorry,’ said Trish, flooded with relief at the knowledge that she had not been protecting a killer from the police. ‘I keep thinking of other things. Look, I think you’d better get in touch with Chief Inspector William Femur in the incident room at Kingsford as soon as you can. He’s dealing with the Kara Huggate case and he knows everything I know – and much more. I was with him only this evening. Oh, shit!’

‘What, Trish?’ George, who had been looking horrified as she related what she’d been doing, sounded as though he was in the twelfth round of a fight with a world heavyweight champion. ‘What now?’

‘The screwdriver. I wasn’t even thinking.’

‘It’s OK, Trish. The police have already got it.’

‘No. It’s not that. Just that I’ve probably buggered the fingerprints by picking it up.’

‘You may have. But didn’t you say the man was wearing gloves?’

‘Yes. So maybe that’s not … Look, I think that’s really all I can tell you.’ She gazed around her flat. ‘It still looks like a chicken killing shed in here. Will I be able to clean it up or will you need any of it for evidence?’

‘We’d like to send a SOCO first thing in the morning so you won’t be able to do any cleaning till then. Is that OK?’

‘Fine. I just want to get to bed now.’

‘We’ll leave you to it. If you think of anything else, you will tell us, won’t you? Either of you?’

They both agreed and Trish sat nursing her mug of tea while George showed the two officers out.

Later, when they were lying in each other’s arms in her bed, she asked him why he had come back just then. He kissed her bare shoulder. ‘I wish I could say I knew you needed help, or that I felt you calling out to me, but I didn’t. I got your message and I’d come back to have it out with you. I couldn’t sleep – again – and I thought we had to clear the air, tell each other how angry we felt and draw a line and start again.’

‘Ironic!’

‘Yes. And then when I had a foot on the bottom stair outside I heard you scream. I came up those stairs like a torpedo. I’m not quite sure what happened next. I saw your face, and his screwdriver, and I lost it.’

‘You did brilliantly.’ She kissed him. ‘A true hero.’

The phone rang.

‘It’s him,’ she said, as her eyes dilated.

‘What? What d’you mean? How d’you know, Trish?’

She turned on the light and looked at the clock. ‘It’s the time he rang before.’

‘Don’t,’ said George as she touched the phone.

‘I must. We need to know who he is. Hang on, George.’ She lifted the receiver, holding it a little way from her ear so that he could hear too. ‘Hello?’

‘You may have got away wiv it vis time, slag, but don’t fink we’ll let it happen again.’

That was it. The phone was banged down and they heard no more.

‘That settles it,’ George said, pushing off the duvet. ‘We’re not staying here. I’m taking you to Fulham. We’ll spend the rest of the week there.’

‘Chief Inspector William Femur returning to the interview room at ten thirty-three, Sunday the sixteenth of February,’ Tony Blacker said into the tape, as Femur stood in the doorway holding two plastic cups of tea. He watched Blair Collons twisting his fingers in and out of each other and chewing his lips, still looking as though he might throw up at any minute. The thin plastic wasn’t much protection from the heat of the tea and Femur shook his hands to cool them as soon as he’d dumped the cups on the table.

Collons didn’t look up, he just sat nibbling his lips and staring at the tea stains on the melamine. His Adam’s apple was working up and down in his neck as though he was being forced to swallow too much.

Watching him, Femur thought of the hour that he and Blacker had spent hanging around Collons’s flat last night, hoping to catch him returning from whatever assignation he’d had with Trish Maguire. They had given up after an hour, but they’d gone back first thing this morning and had better luck. But he wasn’t giving anything away.

All he’d told them in a couple of hours’questioning was that he’d met Kara Huggate on council business before he was dismissed for gross misconduct. Close examination of the events surrounding his dismissal had produced the fact that Kara had played no part in it, having no responsibility for his department, but that she had been wonderfully supportive after he’d been forced out.

When it became clear that they weren’t going to be able to persuade or force him into telling them anything else, Femur had left the room to phone Trish Maguire in the hope of getting something he could use as a lever. But she wasn’t answering her phone. Femur had left a message on her answering-machine and then, deciding to find out whether sympathy might trigger a confession, fetched the tea.

‘Here.’ He smiled. ‘I got you one with milk and sugar, Mr Collons. I hope that’s OK,’ he said, pushing one cup across the table towards him.’

The little man looked surprised at the kindness. ‘Thank you. How much longer am I going to be here?’

‘Only as long as you want. As I’ve repeatedly said, you’re not under arrest. But you knew Kara Huggate better than any of us. And you have information that may help us to get her killer.’

Collons shrugged and shimmied in his seat. ‘Sergeant Blacker’s been treating me as though I was your chief suspect.’

That was the last thing Femur wanted or would have expected of such an experienced officer. He turned to look at him in amazement. Tony Blacker was tugging at his left ear. He looked embarrassed and so he bloody well should have.

‘While you were out of the room, sir, Mr Collons admitted that he sometimes spent some time after dark in Kara Huggate’s garden, sir,’ he said. ‘Without her knowledge. That fitted in with everything we’d been told by the neighbours, but it seemed strange behaviour to me and I was trying to persuade him to explain it.’

And to deal with your own guilt at not having believed the neighbour, thought Femur, in irritation. He wished he hadn’t given Caroline the weekend off, she’d have tackled the whole interview differently, worked to give Blair Collons enough confidence to open up.

‘Right. I see.’ Femur turned back to his suspect.

Collons was looking defiant but even more embarrassed than Blacker. Femur smiled again, hoping he looked a lot more kind than he felt, and tried to think himself into Caroline’s skin.

‘Were you perhaps watching over Kara in case anything happened to her, Mr Collons?’

Collons’s red eyes began to swim. He opened his mouth but no words emerged. He shook his head and found a handkerchief to blow his nose. He coughed and then whispered, ‘Might I speak to you alone, Chief Inspector? Without the tape?’

‘We have to tape record all interviews nowadays, Mr Collons. It’s for your own safety and protection. But we can certainly lose my officer.’ He nodded to Blacker, who looked a bit sheepish and made no protest as he got up to go. Femur told the tape recorder what was happening. ‘Now, Mr Collons?’