He stared back at her from under half-closed lids. Something in his eyes, the peculiar intensity, perhaps, suggested that he was trying to tell her something he couldn’t actually say.
‘Carry on, Mr Collons,’ she said cheerfully, as though she had not noticed. ‘How long had you been working for Kingsford Council before they sacked you?’
‘Nearly four years. In the finance department.’
‘As a bookkeeper?’
‘That’s right. I am … I used to be … I am an accountant, chartered, but bookkeeping’s been my job at Kingsford from the beginning. Needs must when the devil drives, you know.’
Trish only just stopped herself from blinking. He didn’t look like any chartered accountant she had ever seen. ‘I see,’ she said feebly, waiting for more. ‘And what exactly is it that the council thought you’d done?’
‘Falsified expenses, creaming off a slice for myself before paying out to the people who’d presented claims.’ His voice was indignant. There was no attempt at justification, just outrage. ‘When they showed me some of the dockets, it was easy to see that they’d been altered. It had been very clumsily done, but it hadn’t been done by me.’
‘Fine. Any idea who had done it?’
‘None. And since these particular expenses were all for petty cash, there’d been no cheques paid in anywhere, which would have provided some evidence.’
‘I see. And how much is involved?’ Trish had read all the papers already, but she wanted to make sure that the story the client would tell at his tribunal tallied in every respect with the documentary evidence.
‘The charge is that I’d been doing it ever since I arrived and had made something in the region of ten thousand pounds out of it.’
‘That’s a lot of money to be made out of claims for bus fares, even over four years.’
‘There was a bit more to it than bus fares, Ms Maguire,’ Blair Collons said pettishly, once more making peculiar faces at her.
Any minute now, she thought, he’s going to start winking at me. She was beginning to understand why his solicitor might not have wanted to represent him at the tribunal. Quite apart from his unsavoury appearance, the facial tic – or whatever it was – wouldn’t exactly enhance his credibility.
‘And yet they haven’t involved the police,’ she said. ‘Is that right?’
‘Quite right,’ said Bletchley, crossing his elegantly suited legs. ‘Which makes it clear that they can’t ever have had any hard evidence, which makes their sacking my client on what amounts to little more than suspicion quite outrageous.’
The phone on Trish’s desk rang, which surprised her. Dave and the junior clerks were usually scrupulous in refusing to put calls through during a con. Assuming it was something urgent, she picked up the receiver.
‘Ms Maguire?’ said Debby, the much criticised and put-upon secretary who worked in the clerks’room. She sounded anxious. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but there’s someone on the line who says he positively must speak to Mr James Bletchley and I know he’s in with you. Dave’s not here at the moment, or I’d have –’
‘Don’t worry, Debby,’ said Trish, anxious to hold back the flood of explanation. ‘I’ll tell Mr Bletchley,’ She put a hand over the receiver, forgetting that modern telephones are too efficient to be so easily muffled, and asked whether he was prepared to take the call.
‘Ah, thank you, Ms Maguire. Yes, I know what it is and it’s important. I wonder if I might take the call somewhere else? The clerks’room, perhaps.’
‘Fine.’ Trish was not sure that she wanted to spend any time alone with the peculiar Mr Collons but she could hardly say so.
As soon as his solicitor was out of the room, he said, ‘That’s lucky. Now, we haven’t much time, and I must speak to you alone. Kara told me all about you, and said she was sure you’d understand everything.’
So that’s what the grimaces were all about, thought Trish. Help. ‘I’m afraid,’ she said, doing her best to avoid sounding patronising, ‘that you’ll have to wait until Mr Bletchley comes back. The bar’s code of conduct means that you and I cannot discuss the case – or anything that might have a bearing on it – without your solicitor present.’ Trish thought of her meetings with Kara and decided they had been quite different, and just about acceptable. ‘But, as a friend of Kara’s, you might be able to help me. D’you know if there’s going to be a funeral? I wouldn’t want to miss it, but I haven’t heard anything about when it might be. D’you know?’
‘No. But, then, they wouldn’t tell me. It was only Kara who ever …’ He produced a surprisingly clean handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘But listen, Ms Maguire, it’s not the case that we need to talk about. Not really. I don’t mind Bletchley hearing about that, even though he thinks I’m guilty. You don’t, do you?‘
‘No,’ said Trish, surprising herself. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘Kara said you wouldn’t. She said she’d trust your judgement anywhere.’ He smiled, revealing chipped, discoloured teeth, but also a saner, slightly more attractive personality. ‘That’s why I said I had to have you in spite of all Mr Bletchley’s protests that you weren’t the right kind of barrister for me. Kara had recommended you, you see, and that was enough for me.’
‘That was nice of her,’ said Trish, still trying to keep him off the subject of his case. ‘Had you known her long?’
‘Not long enough. Not nearly,’ he said, as his eyes started to water. Trish quite liked him for that. ‘Only since she came to Kingsford. But she was wonderful to me. Really, really kind. I’ve never known anyone like her before.’
Trish nodded, wondering how much longer she could spin out the innocuous discussion.
‘She thought you were wonderful, too,’ Blair went on, his smile beginning to look a bit sickening. ‘She was always talking about you.’
‘Oh,’ said Trish inadequately, wishing Kara had never mentioned her to this peculiar little man. ‘I wonder when Mr Bletchley’s going to be back. I shall want to get everything clear then so that I don’t have to trouble you again before the tribunal. I shall be asking you to tell me why exactly you think someone on the Kingsford Council staff was trying to frame you.’
‘But that’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you now. While he can’t hear. It’s not safe to involve him. I don’t … You must listen, Ms Maguire. You must. Kara wanted you to. Really she did. There have been things going on at Kingsford Council that only she and I know about. That’s why they tried to get me sacked and I’m sure it’s why they killed her.’
Trish blinked.
‘So you do see, don’t you, why I can’t trust anyone but you?’ Blair Collons’s breathy, excited voice did not help his ludicrous statements. ‘And why I need you to help me now. I wouldn’t be telling you any of it if I hadn’t had Kara’s word that you were pure gold.’
The door opened and Trish signalled her relief at the sight of the solicitor in a wider, warmer smile than she usually let any stranger see.
James Bletchley looked a little surprised but, having glanced at his client, who was sitting back in a resentful heap in his chair, nodded as though he understood.
‘Now, Ms Maguire,’ he said briskly, coming back to his chair and sitting down, ‘how much more do you need to know from us?’
Trish scanned her notes and listed several points on which she wanted clarification. Collons fumbled his facts and couldn’t get the right words out. In the end James Bletchley stopped prompting him and simply gave Trish the information. Even then, he stopped politely at the end of almost every sentence to check with his client that he had got everything right.
When everything had been said and all three of them were on their feet, Collons came towards Trish with his right hand outstretched. She had hoped to get away with only verbal farewells, but it was clear she was going to have to shake hands with him. She knew exactly how his palm would feel: limp and clammy as a raw squid.
It did, but she could feel something else as well, something in
animate. As he pulled his hand away from hers, she realised he had left a folded scrap of paper in her palm, rather as the oldest and grandest of her great-aunts had occasionally left a five-pound note with her when she was a schoolchild.
As soon as she was alone, Trish unfolded the piece of paper and saw written on it a telephone number and the words: ‘Please ring me. Please. I MUST talk to you about Kara alone.’
He’d had no chance to write it during the conference so he must have brought it with him. Trish shuddered. She couldn’t think what Kara had seen in him. And she couldn’t think what she herself was going to do about him and his bizarre fantasies.
Chapter Six
Hundreds of miles away, on a balcony looking over the French Alps at Meribel, a fat man sat immersed in his newspaper. He seemed oblivious to the sharp icy peaks of the mountains that looked so dazzling against the blue sky, and to the only other occupant of the balcony, who watched him resentfully.
It wasn’t that he was doing anything wrong, but Sandra thought it would have been nice if he’d paid her a bit of attention. She was bored out of her skull and longing to chat to anyone, even a man in his fifties who looked like he weighed twenty stone. She’d wrenched her knee when she fell off the drag lift on the first day of the holiday so she couldn’t ski at all. The others wouldn’t be back at the hotel till tea and she might just as well have been stuck at home in Kingsford waiting for Katie to come home from school and hoping that Michael wouldn’t be in too bad a mood when he got in from work. She’d already written to Simon, who was staying with a schoolfriend because he didn’t like skiing, and now there was nothing except her book, which was boring.
The fat man must have felt her gaze on him because he looked up quite suddenly, his face shocked. She smiled reassuringly. ‘Isn’t it a lovely day?’ she said, hoping that might lead to something.
‘What?’ He sounded nearly as sharp as Michael on the worst of his bad days. ‘Oh, yes. It is. But the news is horrible’
‘Is it? I haven’t seen a paper since we left London. What’s happened?’
‘Another rapist who’s killed his victims.’
‘Oh, no.’ There was nothing forced about Sandra’s reaction. ‘We had one in Kingsford a few years back. For anyone like us with a young daughter, it was –’
‘You’d better read this, then,’ he said, in a weird voice, and started to heave himself out of his chair.
Sandra had to look away. It would’ve been too cruel to watch such a difficult, humiliating process. But he managed it in the end, after several painful grunts. She took the paper, which he’d folded open at the centre spread. It was the least she could do after he’d made such an effort. When he’d padded off for his usual afternoon swim, she opened the paper out flat to see a huge headline:
LONELY SOCIAL WORKER RAPED AND MURDERED IN DREAM COTTAGE
Underneath it was a colour photograph of one of the houses in Church Lane in Kingsford. Sandra knew it at once, even before she’d read the caption, because she recognised the way the garden sloped down to the pretty white picket fence and the spire of St Michael and All Angels towering above the deep roof. She’d often hankered to live in Church Lane and always drove that way when she could. It was nearly as familiar as her own road, and less than half a mile away.
Below the picture of the house there were three photographs of a woman. The largest showed her business-like in a straight-skirted suit of some dark material with her hair tied back and a large pair of spectacles disguising half her face. She looked smart and in control, the kind of woman who always made Sandra feel a bit inadequate.
Flanking that picture was one that must have been taken on holiday: the woman was sitting squinting up at the sun, with her long hair blowing loose around her bare shoulders. Her bikini wasn’t at all flattering. Sandra thought she should’ve known better – a woman of her age – and worn a black one-piece that wasn’t cut nearly so high in the leg.
The last photograph must have been taken ages ago. It was clearly the same woman, with that great cloud of thick hair and the square chin, but she looked years younger and much thinner, and she seemed to be shouting into a microphone. In front of her was a huge crowd and behind her a banner with the words ‘A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle’ painted in straggly letters. Sandra started to read:
Who would have thought in the heady days of seventies’ Women’s Lib, for which Kara Huggate fought so hard, that there would come a time when she must have longed for male protection?
Two nights ago she became the seventh known victim of the Kingsford Rapist. He broke into her dream cottage some time around midnight, raped and murdered her. She was found only when her cleaner turned up for work the next morning.
Dr Jed Thomplon, her partner of five years, has told the Daily Mercury of his anguish when she left him just over nine months ago. He never wanted to break up with her. Even so he blames himself for not fighting harder to keep her. But, as he says. ‘When you’ve been hurt by someone who values her career over everything you had together, it’s all too easy to turn your back. If I’d been more tolerant then, she might be alive today. I’ll never forgive myself for that.’
Sandra usually enjoyed reading the Mercury. Its mixture of gossip and features interested her and she agreed with what most of the columnists had to say about family values and the importance of making sure that children have, a proper start in life and the right sort of upbringing. But she didn’t like the introduction to this piece one little bit. It sounded gloating and as though the poor woman had deserved what happened to her. And Sandra wasn’t sure she liked the idea of Dr Jed Thomplon either. Why shouldn’t his girlfriend have wanted a career just like he had?
Sandra hadn’t had a paid job since her marriage, and she hadn’t minded when the children were little and Michael still talked to her. But recently, once he’d started alternately ignoring and yelling at her, she’d been thinking that if only she had something of her own, some job where she was with other people, then it would’ve been easier to put up with him. He was hardly ever at home these days, but when he was he was snappy and impatient, always finding fault with her or picking on the children. She’d tried to tell him that was just the kind of behaviour to make Simon go back to his druggy friends again, but Michael wouldn’t listen.
She’d come to expect so little from him that when he and Katie came back for tea she was amazed that he kissed her. He even told her he’d missed her, which made her think that perhaps the holiday would work the miracle, after all.
‘Were you very bored, sitting here all day?’ he went on, just as the waitress came out with the loaded tea-tray she’d ordered. ‘Oh, aren’t you clever to have guessed when we’d be back? That looks good. No, no, don’t move, Sandra. We’ll bring it to you.’
She sat in her basket chair with the sun on her face, waiting while Michael brought her the tall glass of lemon tea in its silver holder and Katie put a selection of cakes on a plate for her. She’d never eat so many, as Katie must have known very well, but it was a nice thought. Perhaps they were all going to be all right. She smiled at them both.
‘So, what did you do with yourself?’ Michael asked, stirring sugar into his glass of tea.
She told him a bit about the massage she’d had, trying to forget how awful it had been thinking about the Kingsford Rapist while the masseur was digging his hard fingers into her spine. Only when Katie had eaten two huge pieces of chocolate cake and gone off to have her bath, did Sandra tell Michael about what she’d read in the paper.
‘What? Sandra, what are you talking about?’
‘I read it in the paper,’ she said, angry with him for treating her like a stupid child all over again. ‘A man who was here lent me his Mercury and it was in that. A social worker has been raped and murdered in Kingsford – in Church Lane. It’s making me really scared for Katie again.’
She wondered whether Michael had heard what she said. There was something funny about his face. It was looking w
hite and pinched again, but it wasn’t just that. He was staring past her as though she didn’t even exist.
‘It’s all right, love,’ she said, leaning forward uncomfortably to pat his knee. ‘If I can’t fetch her from school myself, I’ll make sure one of the other mothers does. We’ll fix up some kind of rota so that all the girls have an adult with them all the time they’re not in school.’
She rather wanted him to say that he was worried about her, too, but he didn’t.
‘Social worker?’ he said, as though the words had only just filtered through to his brain. ‘What social worker?’
‘I can’t remember her name. Higgins or something like that. No, Huggate, I think.’
‘Where’s the paper?’
‘I threw it away.’
Michael sighed, closing his eyes, as though she was completely useless.
‘How was I to know you’d want it? The fat man had finished with it and so had I, so I threw it away.’
‘Where?’
‘In the bin in the bar. It’s probably still there if you want it that much. They don’t usually empty the bins till just before drinks’ time.’
Sandra was talking to the air. Michael had already gone.
Chapter Seven
The pub was quiet and not very interesting, which was just what Barry Spinel liked. Neither he nor Martin Drakeshill had ever been there before, and judging by the thin beer and limp crisps they’d never go again. No one showed any interest in them. With luck no one would ever remember seeing either of them.
The only problem was that the scrawny barmaid was as uninterested as the rest of the drinkers and kept refusing to catch Drakeshill’s eye when he lifted his tankard to signal his need for a refill. Spinel could not imagine why he should want any more, but he understood how the difficulty of getting it made it matter.
Martin Drakeshill hated being beaten, especially by a woman. And she knew what she was doing, this barmaid. In the normal way, she would have looked in their direction at least once. As it was, she kept her back to them whenever she could and stared over their heads when she could not, or picked at her nails.
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