Fault Lines (6 page)

At once she reached across the table for his hand. After a moment he let her have it, although sometimes he still chose to reject such casually affectionate gestures, particularly when she’d made him angry. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘But I suppose I can’t always stop my subconscious making me afraid you’ll turn out to be different… Don’t
you
ever have doubts about me?’

‘I don’t go in for your sort of angst,’ he said.

She was relieved to see that his lips were horizontal again and his eyes looking more lively.

‘I trust you and I trust my own judgement. I wouldn’t love you if you weren’t who you are.’ There was still something cold about him, withdrawn. Then he shrugged. ‘Since I do love you, I know you’re the sort of person I can love.’

‘I wish I’d done a degree in logic or philosophy or something instead of law,’ Trish said, relieved that his face was almost normal again. ‘I don’t think a circular argument like that works.’

‘Pedant.’

‘Aren’t all barristers at bottom?’

George pretended to think about it. He was smiling. ‘Well, on balance, I’d say that although you’re about the worst pedant I’ve ever come across, even at the bar, your bottom’s terrific.’

Trish threatened him with the sticky risotto spoon and all was well.

‘The ones on the left are the ones with first names that begin with S. There aren’t many, so I’ve put down all the ones with S surnames on the right,’ said Brian Jones, handing his boss a neatly typed sheet of paper, ‘with everything I’ve been able to find out about them.’

‘Right.’ Femur took it, not sure whether S and the rapist were the same person, but determined to find him. He looked down the list, noticing how many of the names had either ‘colleague’ or ‘client’attached to them. ‘As you say, not many Simons and Stevens.’ He thought of Caroline Lyalt and had another quick look. ‘Or even Sallys. Who’s Sergeant Spinel?

‘Barry Spinel. Sergeant with the drugs squad here, apparently.’

‘Where’s young Owler? Get him in here, will you, Bri?’

The dark-haired young constable was obviously pleased to be summoned back and seemed unaffected by Femur’s earlier brush-off, but he looked disappointed merely to be asked for nick gossip.

‘Barry Spinel and Kara Huggate? No way. I mean, I shouldn’t have thought that was a runner, Guv. He couldn’t have been a friend of hers.’

‘Why not?’

‘He’s about a decade younger for one thing, and for another she was a social worker.’

‘So?’

‘Well, do-gooders aren’t really Spinel’s bag.’

‘Why’s that?’

Owler laughed. ‘If he had a motto, it would be “Bang the scrotes up and bugger the evidence. They’re sure to have done something you can use to scare them into talking or blackmail them into grassing up their mates.” Social workers don’t approve of that sort of thing.’

Femur raised his eyebrows, hoping he didn’t have to point out that police officers shouldn’t either.

Owler grinned at him, looking very young. ‘You know what I’m talking about, Guv. People like Huggate see their clients as children who have to be saved from the rough boys in the playground. And they don’t come much rougher than Spinel. He’s even been heard to say he thinks social workers are to blame for most crime.’

‘Right. It does sound unlikely they were friends, then.’ Femur shuffled through the paper on his desk and picked up Kara’s diary. ‘Thanks.’

Working back from the day of her death through both diaries, he didn’t find any entry for Sergeant Spinel until fourteen weeks earlier. Then there were three meetings marked on successive Mondays. It was soon after the last that the first clutch of evening appointments with S began to appear. Too much of a coincidence, or not?

Whatever young Owler had said, Spinel would have to be interviewed about his dealings with Kara Huggate. If they had had a thing going, it wouldn’t be the first meeting of opposites Femur had ever come across. Spinel might have been giving Kara some kind of rough-trade frisson, and, if he did play as hard as Owler had suggested, he could have been softening her up for some nefarious purpose of his own.

She could have been lonely in Kingsford, perhaps regretting the break-up of her five-year relationship, in which case she’d have been easy prey for a sting of some kind. To Femur it seemed likely enough. After all, the initials fitted and the hearts and flowers started coming remarkably soon after Kara’s three professional meetings with Spinel.

It was, of course, possible that the two had met and discovered in each other something that cut right through their prejudices. Cynic though he was, Femur had to admit that kind of thing did happen. It could have happened to these two. He’d have to see.

‘Get a hold of Spinel for me, will you, Owler?’ he said. ‘I’ll need to have a word with him.’

The young Kingsford officer turned away obediently to the nearest phone.

‘Thanks, Bri. That was useful. Will you process the rest of the names on the list? Find out how well they all knew Kara and when they last saw her. OK? And talk to her colleagues. One of them may have been a confidant.’

‘Sure, Guv.’

‘Spinel’s with his guv’nor,’ Owler said, turning back from the phone. ‘I’ve left a message for him to give you a bell as soon as he’s free.’

‘Right. Good. Anything from the CRD while you’re here?’

‘They’re faxing a list of unidentified rapists through to us, but there’s nothing that sounds exactly like our boy – in either phase.’

‘Let me see the fax as soon as it comes in.’ Femur smiled, Owler deserved it. He’d done OK. Not well enough to be called by his Christian name yet, but that’d probably come. He was a bright lad. ‘Meantime, you’d better get back to the old files. It may be a waste of time, but we’ve got to be sure.’

Barry Spinel was almost spitting with fury. He’d always thought the DI pathetic, but he’d never been this hopeless before. It was more than time he learned the facts of life. Flexing his powerful thighs in their tight, faded jeans and hunching his big shoulders, Spinel said, ‘What’s the point, sir? Supposing they do get Drakeshill on receiving or theft, or whatever it is their Neanderthal brains have come up with, what good’s it going to do anyone? He’d probably get no more than a slapped wrist, at the most a year or two inside. And we’d lose our best snout. He’s been funnelling gold-dust information through to us for over two years now. We’ve intercepted three major deliveries of smack, we’ve picked up God knows how many small dealers, and one reasonably big one. To put him out of action for a few nicked cars – cars that there’s no real evidence he had anything to do with himself – is just barking. Can’t you keep them off his back?’

‘I’m doing my best, Barry,’ said Detective Inspector Robert Lydane, with an irritating whining note in his voice, ‘but surely you can make him keep his nose clean and control those young men of his so that we can avoid upsetting our colleagues.’

‘How many more times do I have to say it, sir? Can’t you get it across to those brain-dead bozos that snouts are never model citizens? They wouldn’t have access to any useful information if they were.’

‘There’s no need to take that tone with me, Spinel.’

It was a relief to know the man had balls of a sort, even if they were the size of sugar lumps.

‘Sorry, sir,’ Spinel said, loading the apology with contempt.

‘Thank you.’ It didn’t sound as though the DI had noticed anything but the words. ‘Now, Barry, think about it from their point of view. In some ways it would be easier if Drakeshill was into drugs fair and square. Then it would be only our own cases we’d have to pull to protect him, not theirs. It would be our trade-off. As it is, the crime squad see us messing up their operations after a lot of work and some expensive stake-outs and they get royally pissed off. You can understand it, can’t you?’

Spinel shook his long curls, and rubbed his stubbly chin. ‘Can’t you just tell’em it’s hands off Drakeshill for everyone for ever? That way the crime squad won’t waste time trying to make cases against him and we won’t risk our best source of information.’

‘I can try,’ said the DI, sighing, ‘but they’re never going to be happy giving
carte blanche
to a known criminal.’

Carte blanche
, Spinel thought. Must he sound so prissy? It would do him good to get back out on the street and face some real aggro. Wrapped in cotton-wool, sitting behind his desk all day, he’d forgotten what it was like out there – how violent.

‘Have a word with him, Barry, and get him to cool it on the cars for a while. And do it soon. I mean that.’

Spinel said nothing and watched the DI flush as he understood what the silence meant. So perhaps he wasn’t so thick, even if he was too pathetic to stand up for his own men.

‘It’s important, Barry.’

Spinel shrugged. ‘OK, sir. But he won’t like it. The information may well dry up and we’ll be back to square one. Class A drugs coming into Kingsford is a lot more serious than a few old bangers nicked for an evening’s joyriding by his mechanics, even if it was them that did it.’

‘The thefts sound considerably more serious than that. But it’s important Barry. I should like you to do it, and to do it now.’ There was a surprising hint of steel in the DI’s face at that moment, and Spinel, who had been intending to have a jar with Drakeshill in any case, decided he’d be too busy to do it until the next day at least.

He turned away and sauntered back towards his own desk without another word, every muscle in his hard-toned body expressing his feelings. That was probably a waste of time, too.

‘Sarge, someone from AMIP wants to talk to you about the Huggate case over at the incident room,’ said one of the woman constables, whose first name Spinel could never remember. She was Becky or Betsy Deal, plain as her surname and just as uninteresting: hardly even worth winding up since she took everything he threw at her and never reacted, just like a lump of uncooked pastry. He always thought of her as Doughface.

‘Get him for me, will you, darling?’ he said casually, still hoping for a rise one day but not prepared to put in much effort. She didn’t answer back, she didn’t even wince at the sarcastic endearment, or smile. She and the DI would make a good pair, Spinel thought, impervious to insult. Fucking boring.

When Doughface had put the call through to his phone, she picked up a file and appeared to block out of her mind not only him and his call but everything else that was going on around them. He wondered what it would take to crack her, but stopped thinking about her as soon as he heard the voice of the AMIP officer introducing himself and asking about his dealings with Kara Huggate.

Spinel took a moment or two. ‘Yeah. I do remember her,’ he said. ‘She had a client whose nine-year-old son was sold a microscopic rock of crack by the school dealer. The mother wanted the dealer hanged – or at least castrated – and Huggate came to me with the name. It’s one we knew well – we’d been watching the little toe rag for weeks, hoping to get on to
his
supplier – but we’ve had trouble getting enough evidence to go after either of them. Huggate and I had a couple of meetings a few months back when she tried to persuade me to make an arrest on the unsupported word of a frightened nine-year-old, who wouldn’t have stuck by his story in court for more than five minutes. We had a bit of a fight – you could tell she’d not had many dealings with the CPS. Still wet behind the ears, like most of these do-gooders.’

‘Right. I’d like all the details, as soon as possible,’ said the chief inspector, with stupid politeness. It made him sound as though he was as much of a big girl’s blouse as the DI, but that didn’t square with the powerful voice that came so confidently through the phone. Spinel began to feel vaguely curious about the man. ‘Names, dates, and so on. And your personal impressions of Huggate, too. Could you fax it all over? Or you could give the details to one of my officers over the phone, if that would be simpler.’

‘Sure,’ said Spinel, through his teeth. Why should he waste time helping their investigation? Of course, there would be compensations. He grinned to himself. It would piss off the DI if he spent so long producing information for this Femur bloke that he had to put off the drink with Drakeshill. A murder inquiry definitely took precedence over warning off an iffy snout. But Spinel was damned if he’d look too co-operative with the AMIP team, that would ruin his reputation with the local boys if they got to hear of it. And they probably would. Everyone seemed to know just about everything in this nick that wasn’t protected with serious threats.

‘If you think it’s worth doing, sir,’ he said, as though he was commenting on someone’s urge to use doilies.

‘Let me be the judge of that,’ said Femur, sounding much more on the ball than the DI. He’d have to watch that. ‘It sounds as though you didn’t like Ms Huggate much, Sergeant.’

‘She was all right, I suppose, as social workers go. But she had stupid ideas about what can be done to protect children who go out looking for drugs.’

‘Right. Idealistic, was she?’

‘You could say so. Or you could call it naive. She once told me I’d never make a difference until I got over my cynicism. Cynicism!’ Spinel was still outraged. Kara Huggate had been one of the few people he hadn’t even tried to wind up, so she’d had no reason to give him aggro. Uppity cow. ‘I told her if she’d seen the half of what I have to deal with on a daily basis she’d be cynical too.’ Spinel laughed then, and after a moment Femur joined in, which made it sound as though they’d be able to work together.

‘You want me to dig out my file and bring it over, sir? I’ve got plenty of time. Then you could ask whatever you want without waiting for your officers to get to it.’

‘Would you, Sergeant? That’s very good of you.’

Trish’s day had gone well. In court for the sentencing of a man she had helped to prosecute for living off the immoral earnings of under-age girls, she had got pretty much what she wanted. The trial itself had finished a couple of weeks earlier. The CPS had done their stuff and provided all the necessary witnesses; there had been no nasty surprises, and none of them had been broken in cross-examination. The silk who’d been leading her had performed brilliantly, and Trish had thoroughly enjoyed herself as she and her leader had wiped the floor with the defence evidence as well as counsel’s arguments.