Fault Lines (31 page)

‘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.

Blair Collons was swallowing hard. His putty-coloured face had taken on a greenish tinge and he was sweating like a pig.

Femur grabbed the bin and thrust it across the desk. He was only just in time. Collons threw up. Femur had to turn away. He shouldn’t have been so squeamish, but the noise and the smell, quite apart from the sight, of anyone being sick had always revolted him. Hot liquid burst into his own mouth and for a moment he was afraid he was going to join Collons in paroxysms of vomiting. Femur told the tape what had happened and that the interview was terminated.

Then he stopped the machine, and opened the door to call for a uniform. When the constable came, a fresh-faced girl who looked like a school-leaver, Femur asked her to send for the doctor and get hold of some water and some tissues and someone to clear up vomit.

Then he waited with Collons until the doctor came, glaring at Femur as though he were Herod. He left them to it, told the custody sergeant to phone through as soon as Collons was certified fit to leave or be questioned again, and went painfully back to the incident room.

‘I did you an injustice, Tony,’ he said, stopping by his desk.

‘What, Guv?’

‘I was angry that you’d bullied Collons, stopped him giving us everything he had, and then I went and did exactly the same. Only worse.’

Blacker stopped picking at his ear. ‘It’s the thought of him with a woman like Kara. D’you reckon he did it?’

Femur shrugged. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. He cared more than he could say, but he still hadn’t any proof. ‘Try and get me Trish Maguire on the phone again, will you?’

Femur watched him dial and then wait, his mouth half open, before he spoke, obviously leaving a message on her machine. Femur shook his head in disgust and went into his own office. He couldn’t think what Maguire was playing at.

There was a batch of phone messages on his desk, taken by the overnight desk sergeant. Femur leafed through them, then sat staring at the one at the bottom. It had come in from a nick in Southwark, informing him that Trish Maguire had been attacked in her flat by a man with a sharpened screwdriver.

Femur phoned through at once, only to be told that the officers who’d sent the message had gone off shift and no one on duty at the moment knew anything. After pulling rank and nearly losing his temper, he persuaded someone to look at the paperwork left by the preceding relief.

It took nearly five minutes, but then Femur was able to listen to an account of everything that had happened to Maguire. Half-way through, impatience got the better of him and he asked whether Maguire had given any description of the assailant. She had, the voice at the other end of the phone told him before laboriously reading it out. It wasn’t much, but she’d said enough to prove to Femur that the attacker couldn’t have been Blair Collons.

Having checked that the screwdriver and balaclava mentioned in the report had been properly preserved in the right sort of evidence bags, Femur arranged to have them sent directly to the lab and put down the phone, wondering whether he would ever get himself sorted.

His teeth were clamped together with a bit of the inside of his cheek between them. It was painful, but not half as painful as his conscience. He’d known Maguire was frightened of the man who’d phoned her in the night, but he’d told her patronisingly to go home and stop interfering in his case – well, words to that effect anyway. And now she’d had to face a murderous attack. Lucky she’d had her boyfriend with her. Otherwise … Well, otherwise didn’t bear thinking about. But why the hell wouldn’t she answer her phone?

His own rang then. Expecting to hear about Collons from the custody sergeant, he simply said, ‘Yes?’

‘Chief Inspector Femur? It’s Trish Maguire here.’

‘Ah. I hear you’ve been in the wars, Ms Maguire,’ he said, not as helpfully as he’d intended. ‘I mean …’

‘It’s all right. I know what you mean. I was ringing to make sure you’d got the report. The officers promised to phone it through to you.’

‘I have. I understand that you saw your attacker’s face.’

‘That’s right.’

‘What did he look like?’

When she’d given him much the same description he’d already had from the Southwark police, he said, with fake lightness, ‘So, it wasn’t Blair Collons, then?’ There was a pause. He could almost feel her nervousness down the line. ‘You
do
know about him, I take it, Ms Maguire?’

‘I do. But …’

‘Why didn’t you say anything about him when you came in yesterday?’

‘He’s my client, Chief Inspector. I’m to represent him at his employment tribunal. I couldn’t talk about him.’

‘Even though he could have killed your friend?’

‘I didn’t think he had.’ Her voice sounded strained, but that could’ve been the effect of what she’d been through. ‘And last night’s performance pretty well proved it. Have you talked to Blair?’

‘We’re in the process of it now, but I needed to take a break. Get some air.’

‘Ah. Yes, I can see that. Has he told you about the conspiracy yet?’

‘Conspiracy? What conspiracy?’

‘I think you’d better get it from him. I promised him I wouldn’t pass on anything he said to the police. That’s why I couldn’t tell you about him. And I can’t let him down, specially not now.’

‘Right.’ It was going to take Femur a long time to forgive her. ‘Before you go, had you ever seen your attacker before?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Would you know him again?’

She was obviously thinking before she spoke. He approved of that.

‘Yes. I’m pretty sure I would.’

‘Right. Now, I gather you’re not at home. Where can I find you if I need to?’

She gave him her boyfriend’s phone number then rang off. Femur sat at his desk, taking deep breaths and blowing them conscientiously out again, until he felt more in control. Soon he’d be able to go back to Collons and find out what Trish Maguire had been talking about.

It took nearly half an hour for Collons to tell Femur what he thought had been happening at the council. When he’d finished writing up his notes, Femur frowned. ‘You really believe all this? That Martin Drakeshill, a secondhand-car dealer in Kingsford is also a drug importer, that he’s got a sergeant in the drugs squad on his payroll, that he’s infiltrated Kingsford Council for some nefarious purpose of his own and, afraid that you were about to blow his cover, engineered your dismissal?’

‘Yes.’

‘And not content with that, he sent someone to murder Kara Huggate, to silence her, too, after she’d started asking questions about the financing of some building work by the council?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you expect me to believe it too?’

‘Yes.’

Femur blinked. ‘I suppose I can just about see how there could be a connection between a drugs squad officer and a drugs importer, even that there are people within the council who are in the pay of the same drugs-importer, but I can’t see how they could be connected with the building work.’