Resolutions Read online

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  RESOLUTIONS

  RESOLUTIONS

  A Rina Martin Novel

  Jane A. Adams

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published 2010

  in Great Britain and in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  Copyright © 2010 by Jane A. Adams.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Adams, Jane, 1960-

  Resolutions. – (A Rina Martin mystery)

  1. Martin, Rina (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. McGregor, Sebastian (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  3. Retired women–Fiction. 4. Police–Great Britain–

  Fiction. 5. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  823.9'14-dc22

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-106-4 (ePub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6896-1 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-242-0 (trade paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  She’d just come in from shopping when the phone rang, struggling through the front door with three overloaded bags and trying to fend off the tail-wagging adulation of Frankie as he greeted her in the hall.

  It had been raining and she was dripping wet.

  Emily dropped her bags and grabbed the phone.

  ‘We’ve found your father,’ Mac’s voice said.

  The world slid sideways at that moment and Emily just managed to sit down on the bottom step before it swung a complete three-sixty degrees.

  ‘You’ve what? Mac?’

  ‘Look, Emily, I’m sorry to give you the news like this, but I’ve been trying to reach you since first thing and it’ll be on the evening news. I wanted to get to you first; sorry it’s over the phone.’

  The receiver fell from nerveless fingers and dropped on to the tiled floor of her hall. She could hear his voice. ‘Em, are you there? Em, are you OK?’ She couldn’t seem to respond.

  Frankie yapped excitedly and then again, this time with an edge of concern. He snuffled at the fallen receiver and barked enquiringly. Emily leaned forward, wrapping her arms around her knees and crushing her breasts close against her thighs. She began to cry, the sobs dragged out reluctantly as though they’d been lodged in her throat so long they were now reluctant to leave. Are you sure? she wanted to ask him. How can you possibly be sure? But of course he must be sure: why else would he have called? He . . . they . . . must be sure. They had found her dad, after all this time. Not once did it occur to her that he might not be dead.

  ONE

  More than two hundred miles from home and Alec was feeling the effects not just of the early start but of the tension that had accompanied it. He had insisted on coming down to talk to Mac rather than just sending the news by official channels. The last time Alec had seen his friend and one-time close colleague had been at Alec’s wedding earlier in the year. Mac had been a mess back then, just getting back to work after a six-month enforced spell of sick leave.

  Sick leave and a hell of a lot of therapy.

  Mac was back at work now, here in this little south-coast backwater, and, at first sight, looked as though the peace and quiet was suiting him.

  ‘How did she take it?’ Alec asked, fingering his still steaming cup of coffee, impatient for it to cool enough for him to drink. An enticing scent of vanilla accompanied the aroma of fresh ground beans.

  ‘I’ll call in to talk to her properly on my way up to Pinsent,’ Mac said. It had taken several minutes for him to persuade Emily Peel to pick up the phone and respond to him again. Frankie, the dog, had filled the absence with snuffling and puzzled barks, but the canine conversation had not been loud enough to drown out the sound of Emily sobbing in the background.

  ‘She thought he was dead,’ he added. ‘That letter she received a few weeks after . . . after Cara died.’ It was still so hard to say. ‘After Cara was murdered, Emily was convinced that her father must have committed suicide.’

  ‘But you never were.’ Alec was curious. He sipped cautiously at the coffee, found it tasted as good as the aroma had been.

  ‘No. A man like that doesn’t kill himself. Suicide would have implied remorse, something like humanity. A man who did what he did to that child, I can’t believe he would be capable of anything like human feeling. Not for anyone.’

  ‘He appears to have cared for his daughter.’ Alec found himself playing devil’s advocate.

  ‘Appeared,’ Mac repeated flatly. ‘Just appeared. Remember, I worked that case from the very beginning; I was there when . . .’ There when Peel killed Cara Evans. ‘Which is why I’m accepting the secondment.’

  Alec was silent for a moment, then he said, ‘You know the offer’s being made purely out of professional courtesy. No one expects you to take it up.’

  ‘Poor old DI McGregor. Got to be seen to play nice by him.’ Mac grimaced. ‘I can’t blame them, Alec, but they’re wrong. I’ve always known he’d resurface, and now he has, I’m ready.’

  Alec said nothing and the two men sipped in silence, Alec listening to the quiet sounds from the front office as the two other officers who made up this tiny rural team sorted through their day. ‘You like it here?’

  ‘A lot, yes.’

  ‘It seems to be suiting you.’ Alec was still cautious, unsure of how to ask.

  ‘You want to know if I’m still in la-la land. I’ve had regular psych assessments, Alec.’

  ‘True, but we all know what answers the shrinks want to hear. I want to hear it from you, Mac. I want to know h
ow you are. How you really are.’

  Mac considered the question. It was less than a year since he had seen Alec, but life had changed beyond all recognition. He had changed. He had come to Frantham, this funny little town with its Victorian B & Bs and short promenade, as a broken, fragmented near-suicide – though he’d been taking the slow, alcoholic route to that end. It had been winter then, February winds driving in from across the bay, freezing exposed skin. Now, it was winter again – November. The town once more cold, grey, empty of tourists, but Mac had mended. True, the repairs to his psyche were still not complete – the ‘glue’ still tacky and yet to fully harden – but mended none the less.

  ‘I’m in a relationship,’ he said, aware as the words came out just how oddly formal they sounded.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You don’t need to sound so surprised.’ Mac managed a laugh. ‘You’re not the only one that can attract a beautiful woman.’

  ‘Beautiful, eh?’ Alec’s eyes shone and Mac knew he was thinking of his own wife, Naomi. Love of his life and a woman Mac too had once held a torch for.

  He dug his wallet out of his pocket and showed Alec the picture of Miriam Hastings he carried there. ‘We’re . . . we’re thinking of moving in together, probably after Christmas, when the contract on her flat comes up for renewal.’

  Alec nodded approvingly at the picture of Miriam, admiring the long, dark hair and bright, startlingly blue eyes. He looked from the picture to Mac, as though appraising his suitability. Mac laughed, put the picture away, knowing what he was seeing. Unlike Alec, with his square jaw, wavy hair, 1950s Hollywood looks, Mac classified himself as ordinary. His own eyes were grey, usually the rather washed-out, cloudy grey of a day that can’t quite be bothered to rain. His chin was a little too pointed, face a bit too thin and nose a little too broad and just a tad crooked – he had played rugby in his teens and the nose had suffered for it. He knew he wasn’t handsome, but Miriam said that she loved his smile and the way his eyes changed their tone almost in sympathy with the weather, and he found, much to his own surprise, that he had almost come to believe her.

  ‘I’m OK, Alec,’ Mac said quietly. ‘No, not one hundred per cent. I’m not sure I’ll ever be that, but I’m ready. Alec, I couldn’t bear not to be a part of this. You understand that?’

  Alec nodded. ‘I suppose I’d feel the same,’ he admitted. ‘But, Mac, be warned. They’ll be watching, looking for the cracks to appear.’

  Alec left soon after, and Mac called the two other members of his team into the office, brought them up to speed. There had been sightings of Cara Evans’s killer; the net was closing. Mac wanted to be there.

  Sergeant Frank Baker nodded his greying head. ‘We’ll hold the fort,’ he said. ‘Andy and me can cope, and we can call on our colleagues in Exeter if anything exciting happens.’

  ‘Nothing exciting happens in the winter,’ Andy Nevins complained. His bright red hair seemed to have brought its own illumination into Mac’s rather dark office and his pale, freckled face emerged almost ghostlike from the gloom. Mac thought about turning on the lights, but found he didn’t really want the additional luminance. It seemed oddly inappropriate.

  ‘I arrived in winter,’ he reminded Andy.

  ‘True,’ Frank Baker chuckled. ‘And you’ve got to admit, Andy, we’ve had a fair bit of excitement since. Something of a crime wave this year, by local standards. More murders than Exeter.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Andy agreed. ‘But he won’t be here, will he? With Mac gone, everything’ll settle down again. Back to boring.’

  ‘To be honest, boy, I could do with a bit of boring,’ Frank said with feeling. Mac was inclined to agree.

  The sound of the outer door opening and releasing gale force wind into the front office brought Frank Baker to his feet just before the desk bell rang. Andy rose too.

  ‘Hang on a minute, will you, Andy.’

  The young man sat back down and looked nervously at his boss. ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘Not so far as I know. Andy, you’re coming up to the end of your probationary year. I’d half expected you to have applied for a transfer by now?’

  The young man shuffled in his seat.

  ‘I just wanted you to know that I’ll back up whatever you want to do.’

  Andy looked awkwardly at his boss. ‘Even if I want to stay here?’

  Mac was momentarily caught off balance by the unexpected reply.

  ‘I like it here,’ Andy went on. ‘Oh, I know I’ll have to move on some time, get urban experience and all that, but I’ve had more hands-on this year on some really big cases than I’d be likely to have got in five years up the coast. I’d have been bottom of the pile there. Here, you’ve treated me like I’m an important part of the team. You know?’ He finished lamely. ‘I’d like to stop here, if it’s all right with you.’

  Mac found that he was smiling; grinning so much his cheeks hurt. ‘It’s fine by me,’ he said. ‘More than fine.’

  The young man rose to go, and Mac started to think what needed doing before he left for Pinsent. Andy had paused in the doorway.

  ‘Mind if I ask something, boss?’

  ‘Ask away.’

  ‘The guy that killed that little girl. That Cara Evans. I know his name was Thomas Peel ’cos I looked it up in the file, but you never call him by his name. I just wondered: why is that?’

  Mac stared at him, totally floored by the question. He wanted to deny it, to say that of course he used the man’s name. Not to would have been . . . Then he realized that, of course, Andy was right. He avoided voicing Thomas Peel’s name. Avoided even thinking it.

  ‘I just started thinking,’ Andy went on, carefully avoiding his boss’s eye, ‘about something Mrs Martin once said. She was talking to me mam about someone they knew what had cancer, I think. Anyway, this woman didn’t want to talk about it. Wouldn’t say that word.’

  Mac was uncomfortable with the direction this was taking and taken aback by the fact that Andy Nevins should be quoting Rina Martin. ‘Andy, where are we going with this?’

  Andy shrugged. ‘Only that Mrs Martin reckoned that you’d not faced up to something if you couldn’t call it by its name. She said if you give a thing a name, you start to cut it down to size. That’s all.’ Cheeks flaming almost as red as his hair, he retreated into the front office, leaving Mac slightly stunned.

  Mac closed his eyes. So now Andy Nevins too had fallen under the Rina Martin spell. But he was right and so was she, Mac acknowledged. Name a thing, have power over it. Wasn’t that a kind of ancient magic?

  ‘Thomas Peel,’ he said softly. ‘His name was Thomas Peel and he killed Cara Evans while I watched and could do nothing, and then I let him go.’

  He closed his eyes. Not that he needed to. The image of that night on the beach was so strong, so vivid, he had no need to conjure it up.

  Bright stars in a heavy, black sky, pressing down so hard the world seemed compressed. The sea, oily and calm, lapping at the killer’s feet as he held the child in front of him, a knife at her throat. Mac could no longer recall the words he’d used as he tried to talk the man into dropping the knife, his ears straining for the sounds of the promised backup arriving. He had just said anything: keep talking, keep him looking at you, keep the child alive.

  And then the stray siren, despite Mac’s demand that the approach be silent, and the shriek of sound broke the spell that Mac had been weaving. Seconds, less than seconds later, the child lay on the sand and her killer had fled and Mac – Mac went to the child and not after the man, despite the fact that reason and his own horrified gaze told him that Thomas Peel had cut her throat so deeply he had severed blood vessels, severed her trachea: there was nothing he could do.

  And that was how his colleagues had found him. Kneeling in the shallow water, the body of Cara Evans cradled in his arms, his hand on her throat, trying to stem the flow of blood that had already spilled out on to the sand.

  ‘Thomas Peel.’ Mac said it with mor
e conviction this time, knowing that he’d be hearing that name repeated numberless times in the coming days and that Andy – and Rina – were right: you had to name your fears if you were to have any hope of controlling them. ‘His name was Thomas Peel.’

  TWO

  Emily Peel could not settle anywhere. She had managed to unpack the shopping, even to make herself a cup of tea – though not to remember to drink it. It sat, reproachful and cold, with that sort of cloudy scum on top that forms when too much milk has been added to the mug, like when Calum made it. She’d made Calum tea. She never made Calum tea.

  Emily took a deep breath, trying to get a grip on the stupid, random thoughts that were racing through her brain as she tried to block those memories that her mind didn’t want to deal with. She ought to take Frankie for a walk, she thought. She ought to get the washing done. She should at least tidy the kitchen.

  In the end, she did none of those things – and had done none of those things by the time Calum came home and she realized the day was ended and she had not even been aware of its passing.

  ‘Em?’ The front door slammed shut and from the hall came the dull thud that signalled the dropping of Calum’s work bag on to the tiled floor. ‘You home, love? Why is it so dark in here? Hello, Frankie, boy; where is she, then?’

  Calum bustled into the living room, Frankie in tow. ‘Emily? What is it, baby?’

  He knelt down beside her, taking her hands. ‘Emily?’

  She stared at him, uncomprehending. ‘He’s not dead,’ she whispered. ‘He’s not dead. Calum, it isn’t over and now I don’t know what to do.’

  He didn’t need to ask who she meant. Instead, he pulled her off the chair and down beside him on the floor, gathering her as close to his body as he could, Frankie joining the group embrace and whimpering softly.

  ‘He doesn’t know where you are, Em; you don’t need to be scared. He’s not part of our lives, not part of you any more. Emmy, he’s not here.’

  She was trembling, shaking so violently that he too was truly scared, as though her fear was somehow contagious. ‘We’ll go away for a while. I’ll phone work and tell them I need time off. It isn’t a busy time of year; Jim will understand.’