‘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.’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
‘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 misco
nduct. 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?’
‘You’re right, you see I did sometimes go to the cottage to make sure Kara was all right.’ He was blushing painfully. ‘And I was there that night, the night she died. But not in the way Sergeant Blacker was trying to make out.’
A large translucent drop was hanging from the end of his nose. Femur wished Blair would use his hand-kerchief, but he said nothing.
‘Right. Now that will help us. It’s a pity you didn’t come forward before this. We could’ve got a lot further.’ Femur tried to look friendly and appreciative, and that was nearly as tough as anything he’d had to do in the investigation. ‘But you’re here now. So, what exactly did you see?’
‘A man,’ Collons whispered. ‘He drove up in a big car. A BMW, I think it was. It came swishing up the road and parked as though the driver owned the place.’
‘Did you get a good sight of him?’
‘Fairly. He was tall and fit looking. Tanned, too, I think, as though he’d been skiing.’
‘Where were you?’
‘Erm.’ Collons coughed again, neatly covering his mouth. He looked as though he wanted to die before he had to say anything else.
Femur smiled again, willing himself to feel kind. ‘Mr Collons, we need your help here. No one else has any idea what happened to Kara that night. You may be able to give us the key that will get us to her killer.’
‘I was behind the hedge, but I could see well, because there was a decent moon, and because … because …’
‘Yes?’
‘Kara opened the front door and the light was streaming out from behind her. She looked wonderful, prettier than I’d ever seen her. She was wearing a loose, long black dress. It sort of clung to her legs when she came out of the door. She stood there, with the wind blowing the stuff against her legs, and she had her arms out. It was very low cut.’
The torrent of words stopped. Femur thought he had the picture. Kara’s Sojourner returning. Kara, having dressed herself up to receive him, waiting full of love and welcome in the moonlight.
‘I … It was difficult for me. I was upset and I left as soon as they’d gone inside.’ Collons blew his nose again. ‘That’s what I can’t forget. If I’d stayed, I’d have been there when she needed me. If I’d been there when she began to understand what kind of man she’d let … I could have saved her. I …’
I wonder if you did leave, thought Femur, watching him. Collons wouldn’t meet Femur’s eyes, and he kept wiping his hands on his trousers as though they were perpetually sweating, and yet it wasn’t at all hot in the interview room. Femur put a hand on the radiator and felt no heat in it at all.
It couldn’t be heat making the man sweat. But was it guilt or fear? Femur started to probe ‘Are you sure you didn’t stay there to watch? You sound very jealous of this man she’d dressed up for and welcomed so lovingly.’
Collons’s puffy cheeks flushed a dense, dull red and his lower lip pushed out further than the top one. His eyes were half shut and betrayed nothing. Femur decided to push a little further, try out a few possible stories and see what sort of reaction he got.
‘Perhaps you waited there behind your hedge, watching until her visitor had gone. Was that it?’
Collons’s eyelids lifted. He looked at Femur like a rabbit in a car’s headlights, terrified but unable to protect himself.
‘You didn’t go home at all, did you? You stayed in the garden, waiting until the man had left and Kara was alone again. And then you went in, didn’t you?’
Collons didn’t move or speak. He just sat there, looking as though he was being tortured.
‘Was it because you thought that if she’d been giving it away to the man who’d just left, you deserved a share too? Was that what it was?’
‘No.’ The word was forced from between his lips in a kind of howl.
‘You knew your way around her cottage, didn’t you? You’ve already told me you’d been there to drinks. Or was that just a story to explain why we’ll find your fingerprints among all the ones we took from her cottage?’
‘No, she had invited me for drinks. She’d asked me there twice and the second time we had supper.’
‘But she didn’t ask you in that night. That night she had someone she liked better than you, didn’t she? That must have made you angry.’
Collons put his hands over his eyes. Femur battled on relentlessly, hating the thought of Kara having to deal with a man like this, having him in her house, watching him slavering over her. Femur wanted to wipe his hands on something too.
‘And you were left out in the rain watching them. I should think that made you very angry. Did it, Blair?’
‘No.’ Collons let his hands drop away from his eyes. But he didn’t look at Femur, he just sat, with his shoulders sagging and his little round belly sticking out, staring at nothing.
‘I think it did. I think you watched and saw what they were doing together and hated her because it wasn’t you she was making love with.’
‘Don’t be disgusting. Of course I didn’t.’ The little man’s Adam’s apple was working again, moving up and down, up and down, and he kept coughing his short, dry coughs. He really did look as though he might throw up.
‘I never hated Kara. I couldn‘t.’
Femur glanced quickly around the room for a receptacle to use if he had to. There was a metal wastepaper bin. That would do at a pinch. He put out one leg and hooked the bin towards him with his foot so that it would be ready when he went in for the kill.
‘Shall I tell you what the pathologist has told me about what was done to Kara that night?’ Femur asked in a casual kind of way, unthreatening.
Collons looked up, his watery eyes even more scared. He shook his head.
‘It was one of the worst cases he’d ever seen.’ Femur leaned forward in his chair so that their eyes were on a level. As he began to describe the screwdriver and how it had been used on Kara, Collons’s cheeks turned the colour of old putty. His jaw dropped and a blob of spittle appeared in the corner.
He’s excited, thought Femur in disgust.
Then Collons raised his eyes. They looked as if he was in agony.
‘You took your time about it, didn’t you? The pathologist’s told me it was a good hour before you finally killed her. Was it hard controlling her for so long? Strangling her like that, just enough to keep her quiet while you had your fun, but not enough to put her out?’
Still Collons said nothing. Femur tried again.
‘You were straddling her, weren’t you, sitting on her belly with your legs trapping her sides to keep her quiet? And every time she tried to throw you off, you squeezed her neck again; not enough to kill her but enough to make her lose consciousness. And then you let her come back again and again to all that fear and pain. You know, every time I think of what she must have felt …’
At the sight of Collons’s face, Femur suddenly grabbed hold of his disappearing self-control, asking himself what the hell he was doing. The man in front of him might have killed Kara in just such an obscenely cruel way, but then again he might not. And even if he had there was no future in this kind of interviewing. No court in England was going to accept any confession bullied out of a man like this. Besides, he’d just handed a whole lot of confidential information over to a suspect.
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