Break Point: BookShots Page 5

  Keller felt the words Maria will do that forming on her lips, but of course Maria wouldn’t.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Foster said. ‘I’ll sort it.’

  Once Keller was asleep, and after he had rescheduled her practice time, he called Ruth Cullen.

  ‘It was a pretty grim scene,’ Cullen said. ‘We found Maria strung up in front of highlights of Kirsten Keller on a loop. I didn’t want to tell you in front of Kirsten.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Foster told her about the memory stick and the fact that Keller’s stalker must have been at the scene of Rosario’s death.

  ‘So what’s on it?’ Cullen asked him.

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ Foster said. ‘I’m about to watch it.’

  Cullen told Foster she’d send an officer to collect the memory stick, and then hung up. Foster pulled open his laptop and inserted the stick. The video was of Keller losing the final in Paris; the soundtrack was of a guy laughing bitterly as she ran off the court in tears. Foster listened carefully. The guy was indoors, somewhere quiet. He didn’t sound especially old, but he didn’t sound young, either. It wasn’t much to go on. The content told Foster what he already knew: the guy was fixated on Keller.

  Foster let Kirsten sleep until lunch, before driving her to the courts, where she smashed the ball harder than ever. She spent two hours lost in her game, perfecting every stroke in the glare of the sun and the gaze of the press.

  An hour into her workout, Foster headed over to the watching paparazzi. One of them turned as he approached. He was too tall and too thin. He had eager eyes with heavy bags and the smile of a man who had nothing to smile about.

  ‘I saw you at Maria Rosario’s house,’ the man said as Foster approached, his voice thin and tinny. ‘Should I know you?’

  ‘I saw you, too,’ Foster said. ‘It’s my job to keep you away from Kirsten.’

  ‘Not doing it very well,’ the guy observed with a wry smile.

  ‘I need every photo you took this morning.’

  The eager eyes narrowed.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Here’s the deal,’ Foster told him. ‘I need the pictures. There are three ways I can get them. You can give me a copy, and we both walk off smiling. Or I could talk to my friends at the Met, who will get a warrant and make your life difficult. Or I can ram that camera down your throat and then kick you around the court, until the memory card comes out of your arse. What do you reckon?’

  Once Keller had finished her practice session, Foster drove her back to the Shard and ordered room service. Keller called her family to reassure them that everything was alright, even though she was fairly certain it wasn’t.

  ‘Don’t fly over,’ she told them. ‘Every time I see you in the crowd, I’ll remember that something’s wrong.’

  Foster went through the reporter’s photographs, scanning the crowd for familiar faces, but none of them proved interesting. The sun sank gradually and Keller asked him if he wanted to stay the night.

  ‘I can’t,’ Foster told her.

  She stood in the bedroom doorway and waited for a reason, but he didn’t elaborate.

  ‘You’ll be safe enough,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not about being safe.’

  Foster looked at her.

  ‘What is it about?’

  ‘Last night,’ Kirsten said. ‘I had a good time. Didn’t you?’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  She padded towards him, just as she had done the night before.

  ‘Do I have to spell it out, Chris? Seriously?’

  She came close to him and put a hand on his chest.

  ‘We had a great time last night. And you’re a perfect gentleman. And every time something goes wrong, you’re there. I could get used to having you around – you know what I mean?’

  He cupped her head in his hand, his fingers combing through the back of her blonde hair. He pulled her into his chest and kissed the top of her head gently, mostly so that he wouldn’t have to look into her eyes while he let her down.

  ‘The day I got these scars,’ he said, ‘I lost my wife.’

  Keller looked up at him, eyes wide and swimming with a hundred different emotions.

  ‘I saved my client,’ Foster said. ‘But I should have saved her.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Keller said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Not your fault. But I’m not ready to, you know, move on.’

  Keller pulled his hand from her hair and brought it to her mouth. She kissed the top of his fingers delicately.

  ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘I’ve lost people, too. I don’t want to sound cold, Chris. But at some point you have to let go and make the best of what you’ve still got. You have to enjoy the life that’s left.’

  Foster looked at her. She was so young.

  ‘You sound like a therapist,’ he said eventually.

  She put the hand she had been kissing gently back by his side and stepped into him, wrapping her arms around his middle and resting her head on his chest, so that she could hear his heart thumping away inside him.

  ‘I’ve met a few of those,’ she smiled, as a summer shower began to beat on the glass outside.

  CHAPTER 13

  KIRSTEN KELLER PLAYED first on No. 1 Court the next day and won easily, somehow parking her grief and powering through in straight sets. Foster sat in the players’ box, watching the people who had access to the locker room and wondering if any of them had drawn the message on the mirror. None of them looked out of place, so he spent the second set in the cheap seats, high up in the stand.

  He was a perfect grey man, blending in until he was almost invisible. He waited and he watched, letting his eyes settle and trusting that his instinct would kick in if anything unusual happened. But it didn’t. Keller won, and the crowd began to shuffle towards the strawberry kiosks, and Foster headed down to the side of the court where Keller was making for the locker rooms.

  He reminded himself what a bad idea it had been to sleep with a client, but in all honesty, as he watched her, he couldn’t say he regretted it. She was glowing from the exertion of the match, pumped up and beautiful. She kept her game-face on until she was out of sight of the crowds and the cameras, but not much further.

  ‘Was he there?’ she asked Foster as they met in the corridors in the belly of No. 1 Court.

  ‘Who?’

  Keller stopped and looked Foster in the eye.

  ‘You know who. It’s your job to protect me from the freaks, not from the truth.’

  ‘Fair enough. But no, I didn’t see anyone in the crowd.’

  ‘He’s out there, though, isn’t he?’ she said. ‘He killed Maria and he’s somewhere out there.’

  ‘We don’t know that anyone killed Maria.’

  Keller paused and stared at him. ‘There’s no way she killed herself. No way.’

  By the time they reached the locker room, she was starting to unravel into the scared young woman Foster had first seen in Paris. She hovered by the door. Foster smiled reassuringly and said, ‘I’m not coming in with you.’

  She smiled back weakly.

  ‘Yeah, I guess that’s how rumours start.’

  She pushed backwards into the locker room, rolling her shoulder around the door and only breaking eye contact at the very last second.

  ‘Shout if you need me,’ Foster called after her. As he turned away from the door, his phone buzzed. It was Ruth Cullen.

  ‘We’ve just got the pathology reports back,’ she said. ‘Apparently they found rope burns.’

  ‘You’re going to find rope burns, Ruth. She hanged herself.’

  There was a long pause at the other end of the line. At the far end of the corridor a man and a young girl were walking hand-in-hand towards Foster.

  ‘Thing is, Chris,’ Ruth Cullen said, ‘the burns were on her wrists.’

  CHAPTER 14

  THE PLAYERS’ CORRIDOR would not have looked out of place in the city hospital, with white walls and halog
en spotlights picking out occasional pictures designed to splash a little colour. The guy with the young girl had almost reached Foster, so he listened without speaking and pushed the phone a little harder against his ear, so that none of the ugliness Cullen was describing could escape into the air around him. There was a stairwell opposite and Foster pushed into it. Once he was sure the girl was out of earshot, he said, ‘So you’re telling me somebody killed Rosario and set it up to look like a suicide?’

  ‘It looks that way. They went to a fair bit of trouble, too. You ever tried lifting a dead weight?’

  Foster chose not to answer.

  ‘I would have shoved a handful of paracetamol down her throat,’ Cullen continued. ‘Saved my back, you know?’

  ‘So there’s no question that she was targeted?’ Foster reasoned.

  ‘No question in my book,’ Cullen said. ‘The department wants to investigate the panicking burglar scenario, just to tick it off, but I don’t buy that at all.’

  ‘Burglars who panic stab you,’ Foster said. ‘Or they strangle the life out of you. No burglar ties someone’s wrists and goes looking for a beam to hoist them up on, out of panic.’

  ‘What’s your theory, Sherlock?’ Cullen asked. ‘And what’s the deal with Keller?’

  ‘She’s been getting a lot of threats,’ Foster said. ‘Nothing precise. No accusations, no demands. Feels like it’s escalating, though.’

  ‘Killing her coach would be a hell of an escalation.’

  ‘True, but I’m not sure,’ Foster said. ‘Maria Rosario was pretty easy to dislike. She was all about tennis – nothing else mattered. No manners, no small talk. She was focused, demanding, aggressive. You get the picture? She could easily have enemies of her own.

  ‘Until now, all the threats have been focused on Keller. Nothing about Rosario.’

  There was silence on the line for a minute while Cullen and Foster were thinking.

  ‘I’ve been imagining a betting syndicate trying to scare Kirsten into the result they want,’ Foster said. ‘Or maybe a tennis rival or another coach playing with her mind, and the whole thing getting seriously out of hand.’

  ‘Which one’s your money on?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ruth. But none of them really sound like they’d have a good reason to kill Rosario. Not to me, anyway.’

  ‘Well, me neither,’ Cullen said, then sighed. ‘You know we’ll have to talk to Kirsten at some point? As a witness, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  Foster hung up and headed back to the locker room to break the news to Keller.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE POLISHED WOODEN door of the locker room opened at the exact moment Foster arrived. Another player was on her way out, fresh from the shower and weighed down by an oversized racket bag.

  ‘Are you the guy with Kirsten Keller?’ She had a heavy Eastern European accent that Foster guessed was Polish or Slovakian. ‘You’d better go in. She’s a real mess.’

  Foster’s skin prickled and he headed past the player, calling Keller’s name. She didn’t reply, so he moved further into the lockers, and further into the steam, which was billowing from the showers the same as the last time. He raised his voice, quickened his step, his mind full of images of Kirsten slashed or stabbed, blood flowing across the shower-room floor. But she hadn’t made it as far as the shower. She hadn’t even made it out of her clothes.

  She was crumpled on the floor, but there was no blood. Instead she was surrounded by an explosion of black rose petals, tinged red at their edges and scattered around her collapsed frame. One fist clutched a thick bunch of smashed rose stalks, and her other hand was holding her head. Her hair was covering her face and she was breathing hard.

  He sat down next to her in the steam, and for a long while neither of them said anything. Rosario had her faults, but she had been fiercely loyal to Keller and they had travelled the world together for three tough years. They were family. Foster was surprised Kirsten had held it together for so long. So he let her sob, and in the end it was Keller who spoke first, her breathing slowing as she lifted her head to look at Foster.

  ‘Marta Basilia was here.’

  Keller ran her fingers through her hair, pulling it from her face and revealing bloodshot eyes.

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘She brought flowers and said she was sorry about Maria. Maybe she was trying to get into my head. I don’t know. The flowers just made me realise that Maria is gone and she’s never coming back. This locker room feels so fucking empty without her.’

  Foster took a breath.

  ‘I just spoke to Ruth Cullen. They think it was murder.’

  Keller stared into the shower steam for a long minute, before eventually turning back to Foster and fixing him with a resolute stare.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Maria Rosario was a fighter. Now nobody will be able to call her a coward. She would have hated that.’

  Foster nodded, and they sat in silence for a minute, listening to the sound of the water falling onto the tiles.

  ‘I’ll wait for you while you shower,’ he said eventually. ‘If you want me to?’

  Keller said that was exactly what she wanted, and she stood up and took a deep breath.

  ‘Maria used to coach Basilia before she joined my team. Could she be behind all this?’

  Foster looked unsure.

  ‘Switching teams is hardly a motive for murder,’ he said.

  Keller blushed, because she realised that she should have told him something a long time ago.

  ‘You don’t know, do you?’

  Foster’s face told her that he didn’t.

  ‘Maria was much more than Basilia’s coach. They were lovers.’

  CHAPTER 16

  KELLER ASKED FOSTER to grab a couple of coffees, telling him she needed something to pick up her mood. The truth was that she wanted five minutes alone to process everything in her head, and she stood naked in the shower, hoping the hot water would wash away the dread that had clung to her since the 4 a.m. phone call. But the water did nothing to numb the pain. She turned it from hot to cold, hoping the icy water would blast all thoughts of Maria Rosario from her mind, but it didn’t.

  Under the pin-sharp jet of cold water, Keller remembered the day she and Maria had decided to work together. Rosario said that working with Marta Basilia was killing their personal relationship and they’d mutually agreed to the working split, but Keller got the feeling Basilia had resented the deal right from the start. Either way, before long the two of them separated in a horribly public break-up. The reporters had loved every minute of that, and Rosario had never been quite the same afterwards. The inevitable destination for all of these thoughts was the image of Basilia standing over Maria Rosario, and Rosario dead at her feet. Keller chastised herself. It was a dreadful accusation and she had no proof. But something rang true enough to make her feel nauseous.

  She stumbled from the shower and pulled on a T-shirt and jeans, struggling to breathe. She felt as if she were suffocating, the thoughts and images knocking her off-balance and intuition twisting in the pit of her stomach. She needed air and headed for a battleship-grey fire exit, which she shoved through.

  She found herself in a thoroughfare between No. 1 Court and the outer courts and started walking towards the practice courts. Almost immediately the open space did the job. She walked fast, so as not to be recognised. The further out she got, the quieter it became until the walkways were almost deserted and the wide-open sky was all hers. Her breathing became less ragged, and eventually she slowed up until she found a court wall covered in thick ivy. She turned and leaned back, sinking into the leaves like a duvet. After a few seconds she took a breath and looked down. She saw her bare feet, which made her smile.

  She was still smiling when she saw the second pair of feet walk up right next to her and stop. Men’s feet. A big guy. She realised instantly what a dumb idea it had been to leave without telling Foster. On impulse, she smashed the palm of her righ
t hand against the watch on her left wrist and fired her panic alarm.

  CHAPTER 17

  FOSTER HAD TAKEN his time heading towards the coffee concession, testing a gut feeling that someone was following him. There was no logic to it, just a sensation – born of years of training and service – that somebody was umbilically attached to him, weaving the same path as him through the crowds.

  It was the guy with the baseball cap. The one who had filmed him on the practice courts. Foster caught a first glimpse of the man’s distorted reflection in the mirrored doors to Centre Court. He slowed his pace, reeling him in like a fish. He steered away from the cafés, where crowds were still milling, and into the shallower waters, past Court 4, then Court 8. He stole glances in windows and doors and watched the guy closing in until he was breathing down his neck. They walked past Court 12, out into the quiet of the outer courts.

  Foster turned into the public toilets near the exit onto Somerset Road. He took two paces inside and then turned on his heel and barrelled back out at full speed, straight at the stalker. He struck the guy as he reached the door, taking him completely by surprise. This turned out to be a big problem, because the guy was not carrying nearly as much weight as Foster had expected. Foster hit him too well. Too hard. Too cleanly. The guy’s legs ripped out from under him and he cartwheeled through the air like a table footballer spinning on his bar. Foster had expected to use the guy as a cushion as they hit the concrete floor. In the event, he went straight through him, landing hard on the walkway and smashing all of his weight onto his scarred, damaged left arm.

  Barbed-wire ribbons of pain ripped across his bicep and seared so painfully through his pectorals that he felt as if they were ripping his heart out of his chest. He screamed and rolled, clutching his left arm with his right. He heard the ring of metal on concrete as the knife fell from the stalker’s hand. The guy was dazed, but already struggling to his feet. Foster wanted to throw up. Or pass out. Or both. But he forced himself upwards and towards the attacker, smashing a fist into his throat. The guy twisted away and ran.