Collons’s flat proved to be one of fourteen in a block of raw red brick barely softened by miniature evergreen creepers. She rang his bell and waited. After a long silence she tried again, putting her ear close to the intercom speaker, in case she’d missed his answer. Still nothing. She pressed the bell nearest his and within a couple of seconds a crackly male voice said, ‘Hello.’
‘Blair?’ asked Trish brightly. ‘Is that you?’
‘No. This is John Barker. Who d’you want?’
‘Blair Collons. Flat five. Have I rung the wrong bell?’
‘This is flat five, but he’s flat four. He’s out.’
‘Oh? D’you know when he’ll be back?’
‘I’m not his sodding secretary. I heard him go about half an hour ago. OK?’
‘OK. Thanks. Sorry again.’
Trish went back to her car, sure now that Collons must be deliberately avoiding her. The first message she’d left had told him she’d drop in before her six-thirty meeting. It seemed a bit rich for him to have gone out deliberately after the way he’d forced her to see him and listen to his hysterical theories. Could he have guessed that she’d heard about the prowler? Or had he just assumed that her meeting in Kingsford must be with the police?
With no answers and no possibility of getting any until she’d managed to talk to him, Trish was stuck. The frustration was so distracting that she got lost three times and had to make tricky and illegal U-turns into fast oncoming traffic.
She could not find a way of letting herself off the hook of Kara’s concern for Blair Collons, and it was driving her mad. Only if she betrayed everything Kara had stood for and everything she herself had so much admired in Kara could she tell Chief Inspector Femur what she suspected. But if she didn’t say anything, her silence might allow Kara’s killer to escape. And perhaps not just Kara’s killer.
The Kingsford Rapist had been operating at about the time Collons had first moved to the area. He had raped six women and killed one within the space of a year and then, just as Collons had begun to find some renewed self-respect in the job he’d managed to get with the council, the Rapist had stopped. Only when Collons had been sacked and most deeply humiliated, had another rape and killing taken place.
She found the police station at last and was greeted with enough suspicion at the main desk to reinforce her feeling that an innocent man with Collons’s difficulties might not survive a police investigation intact. Once she had shown the sergeant her driving licence and told him three times that Chief Inspector Femur had phoned her at home that morning to make the appointment, he deigned to ring through to the incident room to check. Whatever he heard made his scowl thicken, but he grudgingly told his constable to take her to the incident room.
The constable, who looked as though he had hardly started to shave, took Trish to a big, smelly, untidy room furnished with rows of desks and battered chairs. There were only three people, each hunched over the keyboard of an ancient computer.
‘He’ll be through there,’ said her guide, pointing to a scarred brown door. He knocked and announced her to a grey-haired man, who had an expression of reined-in irritation on his pleasant, weary face.
He was wearing a nondescript, crumpled dark-grey suit over a plain white shirt, and his blue and grey striped tie had worked its way round so that most of the loose knot was hidden under the shirt collar. He looked as if he’d slept in his clothes and hadn’t had a very good night. His eyes were the only remarkable feature: almost diamond-shaped and of a clear hard grey. He got to his feet, holding out one large, dry hand.
‘Chief Inspector William Femur,’ he said, as Trish took his hand. ‘Right, what have you brought to show me?’
‘These,’ said Trish, pulling the envelopes of cuttings out of her capacious shoulder bag.
‘So?’ he said coldly when he’d had a chance to look at them.
She reminded herself of the stress he must feel, but she could have done with a little human warmth, even a scrap of sympathy. When she had told him briskly how the cuttings had come into her possession and why they frightened her, she described the night’s phone call. His expression softened marginally, but even so she kept most of her terror to herself.
‘Right,’ he said again, but this time the word carried overtones of ‘oh, I see, I’m sorry I snapped’, instead of ‘you’re a boring time-waster and the last thing in the world I need right now’.
‘I can see why you’re bothered,’ he added, ‘but what makes you think the caller was referring to Kara Huggate’s murder?’
‘Because he said he’d sent the cuttings to show me what happens to women who interfere.’
‘And my case is the only thing you’ve been poking your nose into, is it?’ Femur might as well have added, ‘I don’t believe it,’ because that was written all over him.
‘Yes.’
‘Right.’ He sighed and pushed back his thick grey hair with both hands.
Now that she looked more closely, she could see deep lines around his mouth, dragging its comers towards his chin. The skin around his lips was roughened too, as though he hadn’t been getting enough vitamins. Or perhaps it was just chapped by the cold.
‘Let’s take it from the top.’ Femur pulled a pad of paper towards him and wrote her name on it with the date and time.
Was it designed to intimidate? Trish wondered. Or was he merely being efficient? Be fair, she told herself, you always make notes of important interviews.
‘Now, who could want to scare you into silence about your friend Kara?’
‘That’s just it. I don’t know,’ Trish said. It was almost impossible not to mention Blair Collons’s name, but she had to do it. ‘But, as I explained to the officers who came to see me in chambers, Kara was due to appear in a case for damages against a man who could well have wanted to stop first her and now me. He’s called John Bract and he might have thought he could intimidate me into –’
‘We know all about him, and we’ve eliminated him from our inquiries.’
‘Why?’
‘You don’t need to know that, Ms Maguire, but you can take it from me that we’re satisfied he had no involvement of any kind.’ When Femur saw that she wasn’t satisfied, he sighed. ‘Did your caller sound like him at all?’
‘No,’ Trish said, certain that Bract himself couldn’t have produced the voice she’d heard. But, then, she’d never thought that he would have attacked Kara himself, only paid someone else to do it. So he could’ve paid the same person to intimidate her.
‘Right. So, who else could it have been? DC Lyalt told me you’ve been down here asking questions.’ The tone of his quiet voice was quite enough to tell Trish that he was absolutely furious with her intervention. She was glad that she was not one of his suspects. ‘Who did you talk to?’
‘One of Kara’s neighbours, a Mrs Davidson. I was standing in the road looking up at Kara’s house when I saw her watching me, and I thought it too good an opportunity to miss.’
‘Because you thought we might’ve forgotten to talk to a murder victim’s neighbours?’ Femur said, pretending to sound puzzled but actually showing every bit of his fury.
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I needed to talk about Kara and find out what had been happening to her just before she died for some emotional reason I don’t quite understand. Look, Chief Inspector, Kara was an extraordinary woman, and I liked her so much that I had to do something.’
As she saw his face soften a little, Trish cleared her throat and sat up straighter to tell him everything she had heard and thought about the prowler, except for the name she thought he bore. She saw that none of it was news to Femur. ‘And so I suppose what scared me when I got the cuttings and picked up the phone last night is that somehow, whoever he is, he found out my identity and has been trying to scare me off.’ She saw that Femur wasn’t convinced.
‘I don’t see how he could have heard anything about you, do you? He’s hardly going to go banging on the doors of the Church Lane hous
es asking whether the owners have told anyone that they saw him loitering with intent. Who else did you talk to?’
‘I went on to have a look at a man called Martin Drakeshill, a second-hand-car dealer in Station Drive here in Kingsford.’
There was a very slight stiffening in Femur’s shoulders.
Ah, then, maybe there is something sinister about Drakeshill, Trish thought, working to keep her face clean of both surprise and satisfaction. Could Collons possibly have been right? If so, then I was right to keep his name out of it. There was a little comfort in that.
‘Now, why would you do a thing like that, Ms Maguire? Did Kara tell you something about Drakeshill?’
Trish was tempted to lie because it would have provided such a convenient excuse for her questions, but she couldn’t do it, not to a man struggling to find Kara’s killer. She might withhold her suspicions of Collons in order to protect him for Kara until she had some real evidence against him, but she would not tell any actual lies unless they were forced on her. Instead she told him about the legal gossip she’d heard about Drakeshill.
She was relieved to see that Femur was looking more interested than angry.
‘All right, I can understand that, but why did you go to see him?’
‘I thought I might learn something. But I didn’t. His appearance suggested that he could be capable of all sorts of things, and one of the mechanics on the forecourt looked easily tough enough to take on anyone with a baseball bat, but that isn’t proof of anything. I have to admit that I didn’t see anything to suggest any wrongdoing beyond, perhaps, fencing stolen cars.’
‘I see.’ Femur had written down Drakeshill’s name, but that was all. ‘And who else have you approached?’
She told him about Roger and the KGB, and the council’s deal with Goodbuy’s, and he wrote that down, too. It all seemed pitifully inadequate. ‘You’re not telling me everything, are you?’ Femur said. He still sounded impatient but now there was something hard and dangerous in his voice. ‘What d’you know about Kara’s private life?’
‘Not a lot,’ Trish said, ‘although, as I told DC Lyalt, Kara did tell me that she was in love again. But I’m not sure that’s the most relevant thing.’
‘Oh?’
‘No.’ She told Femur her theory that Kara’s need to see good in everyone and bring it out by kindness could have led to her death, if the person she had been trying to help had been psychotic or psychopathic.
For the first time there was a hint of approval in his professional smile as he listened. It wasn’t much, just a flicker in the tight muscles around his mouth, but it seemed to signal a definite weakening of hostility.
‘You’re talking about the Kingsford Rapist, I take it?’
‘Yes. He’s never been found, has he? And from the papers it sounds as though what happened to Kara was very like what happened to the other victims. He could have been a client of hers, couldn’t he? Or simply an acquaintance.’
‘Anyone particular in mind?’
‘No,’ she said, in a casually firm voice, glad that her ten years at the bar had taught her to speak to a hostile audience without betraying her own emotions.
‘Right,’ he said, after a long examination of her face. ‘Now, what else can you tell me about this new lover of hers?’
‘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 ha
d 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.
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