Fault Lines (37 page)

An usher came towards them, his shoes squeaking against the stone flags. As he handed each of them a thick white order of service, he whispered that there were spaces near the front. They followed him up a side aisle to the third row.

Trish, constrained by the thought that they must be invading the family’s space, smiled hesitantly at the nearest occupant of the pew, a tall, slim man in a dark suit and very white, very smooth shirt. He moved nearer to the woman beside him and nodded encouragingly at Trish.

‘Is this really all right?’ she whispered. ‘You’re not expecting more family?’

‘No. I’m not family either,’ he whispered back, his accent distinctly Bostonian.

Trish smiled and slid into the pew ahead of George, just as the organ burst into life with a triumphant crashing sound that didn’t seem altogether appropriate. There was a rustle all around the church. She looked back to see the choir processing up towards the chancel, followed by the vicar, dressed in a simple white surplice over his cassock.

The organist stopped playing as the priest reached the chancel steps, where he turned. Holding his prayer book against his heart, he said, in a voice of surprising power, ‘Friends, we are here today not to mourn but to remember, rejoicing, the life of a remarkable woman. Mourning there has been for all of us, and anxiety and anger, but today we must put all that aside. Kara lit up our lives, each one in a different way. She had a gift of friendship that will live as long as the last one of us. She gave freely of herself to all of us and many others. Remember her.’

The man beside Trish shivered. She snatched a glance at him and saw such pain in his face that she had to look away.

‘And now, will you join with me in singing, ‘Love Divine, all love’s excelling’?

As the huge congregation stood, Trish caught sight of Femur and Constable Lyalt in plain clothes in one of the pews on the far side of the aisle. She thought of the last time they’d met, in a grim little crematorium on the outskirts of Kingsford, where they were the only mourners at Blair Collons’s dismal funeral.

There had been no hymns and no address, simply a hurried recitation of the burial service and some tinkly taped music as his plain coffin rolled away through the curtained doorway to the furnace. Trish had watched it go, sick at heart and full of shame.

‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ Femur had said, when they walked out into the raw cold outside, averting their eyes from the miserable ragged wreaths of earlier services. ‘If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine.’

‘We both failed him,’ she’d answered. ‘And both for much the same reason, I suspect.’

‘He didn’t come across as a good witness,’ Femur said. ‘He didn’t help himself.’

‘I know, but it doesn’t excuse us,’ Trish answered. ‘We were both sure at one stage that he’d killed her and we must have shown it. Given how guilty he already felt for not having saved her, that can’t have helped him find a reason to go on living.’

Femur had nodded, but as they reached the edge of the car-park, he sent Caroline Lyalt on ahead. Standing in the rain beside Trish, his face unhappier than she’d ever seen it he said, ‘Did it ever occur to you that he could have been the original Kingsford Rapist?’

She nodded. The rain trickled through her hair, right over the back of her head and down her neck. ‘But I didn’t think there was any evidence.’

‘There wasn’t. But someone assaulted those women and killed the last of them. And he –’

‘Don’t,’ she said urgently. ‘Don’t decide it was Blair just because he was creepy and made you feel ill. If you think it was him, then find a photograph of him and show it to the surviving victims, then …’

‘Their rapist was masked,’ he reminded her. ‘We’ll never know, since there was never anything to use for a DNA match. But I think that outpouring of apology to Kara meant that he knew it was his fault she’d died like that. He’d got over whatever had driven him to attack the other women – perhaps it was relative success at work, perhaps it was the stress of having been driven to kill the last of them, we’ll never know. But he must have come to understand that, if he’d never done any of it, Kara’s killer wouldn’t have had the blueprint for what he did. You and I both realised he felt guilty about what happened to her. I think this is why.’

‘But you’ve no proof,’ Trish reminded him.

‘No. We’ll never know.’

First published in 1999 by St Martin’s Press

This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

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Copyright © Natasha Cooper, 1999

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