A Reason to Kill Read online

  Mac was stunned. He’d suspected most of this, but to hear it out loud and delivered so starkly came as a shock. ‘Paul was there? Jesus wept.’

  ‘Poor little bugger was scared out of his wits. He told George but made him promise to keep it secret. Course, I got it out of George. He’s not used to keeping stuff from me. I thought, stupidly I suppose, that if I put Dowling in the frame, Paul’s problems would be over. I mean, I knew it would have to come out that he was there and, as you’ve probably guessed, that it was him and George who broke in the night before.’

  ‘Why did they do that?’

  Karen shrugged, resigned. ‘Got pissed on Sharon Bates’s dad’s booze, and couldn’t resist the dare. Or face being made to look like a pair of wimps if they chickened out. Oh, they both knew it was wrong; George has been going through hell over it. I’d have made him tell, but it seemed more important to get someone to take notice of Mark Dowling.’

  ‘Karen, you should have just come to us, told what you knew. When did you know?’

  ‘Sunday night. I got it out of him. You’re right though, I should have brought him in but he was horrified at the idea of dropping Paul in it. Paul’s convinced he’s an accessory to murder.’

  ‘Well, in a way he is. But any decent lawyer would plead mitigation.’

  She nodded. ‘I know. It’s just I’m used to protecting my own the best way I know how. I guess I don’t always get it right. George must have let on to Paul that he’d told me and he must have been terrified. People – if you can count Dowling as a person, though I can’t call him an animal; that would be downright insulting – the Dowlings of this world thrive on knowing they have everyone running scared. Even if that’s just a thirteen-year-old kid. The Dowlings of this world need their entourage and that entourage has to be too shit-scared to step out of line. It’s like Machiavelli said: “Men shrink less from offending those who inspire love than those who inspire fear.”’

  ‘Machiavelli?’ Mac laughed. ‘OK, Machiavelli. Though to be frank, I suspect that comparing him with Dowling probably insults the Prince more than it insulted the animals. Look, Karen, I’ll need you to make a formal statement. I’ll arrange it for tomorrow. If need be we’ll sort out someone to come and sit with your mum while you do it. Meantime, try and get some sleep.’

  She nodded. ‘Yeah. I’m knackered. Look, thanks again. I really don’t know what to say about this …’ She gestured, taking in the scruffy little flat.

  ‘Get some sleep,’ Mac repeated and quietly let himself out, pausing on the stairs to listen as she locked the door and slid the bolt.

  Then he went out into the night, his bag oddly heavy though there was very little inside it. He paused on the promenade and called Eden at home, waking him from sleep and then waking him more fully as he revealed that they had a witness to Mrs Freer’s murder.

  For a few minutes they discussed the possibility of bringing the raid forward, but it was already midnight and by the time everything was rearranged maybe only an hour or so would be saved in time.

  ‘I’ll arrange for a patrol to keep obs,’ Eden said.

  As Mac closed his phone and slipped it back into his coat, he glanced over at the headland where he had seen the lights. Nothing tonight. The sky was black and small clouds were scudding, not yet heavy with rain but busily gathering their moisture for later in the new day.

  He turned and walked down on to Newell Street and paused outside Peverill Lodge, recalling that he had done the same just a few nights before. A light burned in Rina’s inner sanctum. This time Mac knocked quietly on the door.

  Rina sat him down at the kitchen table and Tim made tea. The rest of the house, it seemed, was asleep, but the two had been watching a late film together.

  Mac filled in sparse details about his day, about the Parkers, Paul, Mark Dowling. He knew Rina could be trusted to say nothing and he needed to unload. She seemed unsurprised by any of it.

  ‘There’s a small spare room,’ Rina said. ‘We use it for storage so it’s a bit cramped, but you can get to the bed. I’ll find some fresh sheets.’

  It sounded like heaven to Mac. Tim set his tea down in front of him and he sipped the scalding liquid gratefully.

  ‘So,’ Rina said, ‘how much of a threat is this Parker fellow?’

  ‘Hard to say, I suppose, but I’ve seen pictures of what he did to Carol Parker and I saw her reaction to his picture. She was terrified.’

  ‘Why wasn’t he put inside? It’s common assault.’

  ‘Because,’ Tim said, ‘she wouldn’t press charges. Am I right, Mac?’

  Mac nodded. ‘Now, of course, the police can decide to press charges whether the victim is willing or not. But that wasn’t true a few years ago. Karen was willing, apparently, but Edward Parker took off into the wide blue yonder before anyone could bring him in.’

  Mac’s phone began to ring, the tone uncomfortably shrill in the calm of Rina’s kitchen. Wearily, Mac answered it. What now?

  ‘You’re kidding me? You’re not kidding me. Right, OK, I’m on my way. No, be as quick for me to walk down. Fifteen minutes. Right.’

  He closed the phone and stared at it, disbelieving.

  ‘What is it?’ Rina asked.

  ‘It’s Mark Dowling,’ Mac said softly. ‘His parents arrived back from seeing friends and found him dead on the hall floor. Someone killed him.’

  ‘Should I applaud?’

  ‘Rina,’ Tim said. ‘It’s still murder.’

  ‘And your point is?’

  Tim shrugged. ‘You want a lift down? The car’s parked out the back.’

  Mac had forgotten that Tim owned a car. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  Mark Dowling dead? Mac just hadn’t seen that one coming.

  Twenty-Seven

  George, used to the journey by bus only taking three quarters of an hour to get to or from the school, had not realized just how far it was by foot. Or how lonely.

  They had carried out their plan and gone first to the bus station, but had been disappointed that no one seemed to be taking any notice of them. George thought that was inevitable, given that there was hardly anyone there. A sole driver sitting in his cab, reading the paper. A couple of people in the draughty-looking waiting room. They duly wandered round a bit and then George decided they should begin their trek back to Frantham.

  Once away from the comfort of the streetlights, the night closed in around them. Barely any moon, little starlight despite the clearing skies. It was better once their eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, but it was still seriously spooky, their footsteps unnaturally loud on the tarmac and the night rustlings in the grass frighteningly alien.

  Mice and foxes and stuff, George told himself. That’s all. Nothing scary. He thrust his chilly hands deep into inadequate pockets, wriggled his backpack into a more comfortable position and plodded on.

  Paul trailed behind him, lost in thought. Or, at least, George assumed he was. Paul seemed to be in shock. He had cheered up considerably once he’d eaten, though he’d still been morose even then. Now, with the fish and chips a long time ago and George’s stomach telling him it could happily eat the same all over again, Paul seemed to have lapsed even deeper into that state of emptiness which, frankly, worried George to death.

  It annoyed him too. He wanted company just now, someone to talk to, to pass the time with. A human voice to block out the skittering, creeping, twig-snapping noises that accompan-ied his every step.

  An owl hooted and George nearly jumped out of his skin, despite recognizing it for what it was. A vixen called and a dog fox answered. George stared in the direction of the sound. Any other time and this contact with nature might have seemed exciting. Tonight, it just added to his sense of unease.

  There had been little traffic and, thankfully, as most drivers were on full beam this late at night, they’d had plenty of warning and time to get off the road. That they might be seen by someone scared George even more than all the night-time stuff going on in the undergrowt
h. Who’d be out at this time of night? Somehow, George couldn’t think of any good reason, any valid reason, and therefore anyone who was out driving this time of night was likely to be someone who George wouldn’t want to meet.

  It was two o’clock according to George’s watch when they saw the sign that told them they were entering Frantham. George sighed in deep relief. ‘Look,’ he said to Paul. ‘We just have to get round this bend, then we can cut off the road and hide out in the tin huts.

  Paul shrugged.

  ‘Look, snap out of it, will ya? I’m tired too, and I’m scared too, and I don’t know what to do either, but we got to get inside and get some sleep or something.’

  Paul’s look was withering. George could make that out even in the dark. Then he sighed. ‘I’m sorry,’ Paul offered. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just …’

  ‘I know,’ George told him. ‘But we’ll figure it out. Just not tonight.’ All he wanted to do tonight was sleep and he was pretty sure he would be able to sleep anywhere that was out of the biting wind and away from the increasingly cloud-laden sky.

  Walking side by side now, they rounded the bend and then stopped dead. Recovering himself, George pulled his friend into the shadow of the high hedge. ‘What the hell’s going on? That’s Mark Dowling’s place, ain’t it?’

  Beside him he felt Paul nod. Then he heard him swear, softly but emphatically.

  The brilliant neon blue of police lights illuminated the road. Car headlights were on. Figures passed by, silhouetted against their brightness.

  Stealthily, George crept forward. There was, if he remembered right, a gate close by, with a stile that gave access to the public footpath across the old airfield. They were on the opposite side to their destination of the tin huts, but George was reluctant to cross the road when so many lights were pointed directly their way.

  ‘Come on,’ he whispered. ‘Over here. Keep your head down.’ Staying low against the fence, they got over the stile, back tracked a little in the shadow of the hedge, then George made a run for the old buildings he remembered seeing from the road on the odd times he’d travelled on the top deck of the bus.

  Paul followed, his breathing hard and ragged. George wanted to tell him to calm down, that they’d hear him right across the road making that much noise, but then he realized that his own breath wheezed in his lungs, caught whistling in a throat that seemed closed tight against the flow of air.

  The flat land, unbroken by hedge or tree, allowed for better visibility and a broken window gave them access into the building. This, George thought, must have been the conning tower – no, a conning tower was on a submarine. This would be the place where the flight controllers sat. It smelled damp and stale, as though the air inside had remained static and unmoved despite the years and the winter gales.

  He tried to get his bearings, eager to find somewhere from where they might be able to see the road.

  ‘Up here, mind the steps, they might not be good. Keep your feet near the wall.’

  Gingerly, they climbed upward. George wondered how long it was since this place had been used. Vaguely, he remembered it had been built in the war and then used by a flying club until the money had run out. Reaching the top of the stairs, he tested the wooden floor. To his relief it creaked but felt sound and he was right, there were windows up here that looked towards the road.

  George heard Paul stumble and then sit down hard. Glancing back, he could make out his friend’s shape, slumped against the wall. He found a broken pane and, wrapping the end of his coat sleeve round his hand, managed to remove a few slivers of the cracked glass, enough to peer through into the outside world.

  ‘I can see,’ he said.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Looks like three – no four – police cars and one of them vans, you know, they’ve got something scientific written on the sides.’

  Paul grunted.

  ‘You know what this means,’ George said. ‘Karen was right. They’ve come to arrest him. We can go home.’

  He crept over to his friend and shook him hard. ‘We can go home, Paul.’

  In the dark he felt rather than saw his friend shake his head. ‘Not till I know for sure,’ Paul said. ‘Not till someone can tell me they locked him up and threw away the key.’

  George’s heart sank but he knew there would be no point arguing with Paul tonight. He sighed and went back to his place by the window, grateful that at least it was not quite so cold in here, and they were out of the rain that had just begun and which he could feel as drops splashed through the broken window. Patiently, George settled down to wait for the night to pass and morning to bring some kind of solution. Minutes later he heard Paul snoring softly from across the room.

  Mac followed the path laid out by the first officer on scene. The parents had rushed in, he told Mac, seen their son and tried to revive him. Getting the position of the body established had not been the only challenge; they had turned him over, tried to make him wake up and then spread trace and bloody footprints all over the scene.

  Mac could see the tracks of a woman’s shoe, high heeled and slipping in the blood as she hurried across to the hall phone.

  ‘God, what a mess,’ Eden said. ‘And I don’t just mean the state of the body.’

  Mac nodded. The parents had done what parents do. They may not have liked their son, but he still was their son. They had reacted to the shock and the pain by doing what anyone would have done when they saw a loved one covered in blood and motionless on the floor: they had tried to help.

  They had also messed up the crime scene, big style.

  The Crime Scene Co-ordinator motioned them across to the foot of the stairs. ‘You get the best view from here,’ he said. ‘So far as we can make out he was lying close to the door when they arrived. Face down on the floor with his head closest and legs stretched out towards the phone table.

  ‘Time of death?’

  ‘Based on liver temp, probably between seven and eight this evening, but as you can feel, the place is like a hot house, and that could throw our figures off.

  Mac nodded. ‘They moved the body?’

  ‘Turned him over, flipping him to the right. The father tried to give him CPR, but, well … It was a bit late by then. The mother says she shook him, tried to get him to wake up. When she phoned the ambulance she said her son had collapsed and was bleeding. It wasn’t until the crew got here that anyone realized how long he’d been gone.’

  ‘Cause of death?’ Eden asked. The jowls seemed particularly pronounced tonight, Mac thought, and the bags under his eyes had expanded to the size of steamer trunks.

  ‘Your old-fashioned blunt-force trauma, so far as we can tell. Which blow killed him is a moot point, of course, but there’s one odd detail.’

  ‘Oh? And what’s that?’

  ‘His nose was broken. And you know how much noses bleed, even worse than head wounds at times. Well, there’s a blood trail leading to the kitchen and that blue towel there – you see it? It’s half beneath the body now, but … anyway, it’s a match to the towels in the kitchen and Mrs Dowling confirms that’s where it came from.’

  ‘So,’ Mac began, trying to figure it out, ‘either he had a nose bleed and went into the kitchen for a towel then came back and opened the door to his killer, or his killer allowed him to clean himself up before hitting him again?’ He looked expectantly from Eden to the Co-ordinator, expecting a response. A contradiction.

  ‘That’s about what we’ve come up with. If there’s a third way, as it were, I’m buggered if I can think what it might be.’

  Karen, though tired beyond words, could not manage to sleep. She watched the television, sound turned right down, moving pictures refusing to make an iota of sense as she thought about her father and George and her mother and what they would have to do now.

  She was reluctant to move on again. She had her jobs and her course and a boyfriend who, while not entirely serious as relationships went, made her feel good about herself. Made
her feel womanly, feminine, desired. And that was something she would be sorry to give up.

  Just briefly her mind rested upon the earlier incident with Mark Dowling. And to Karen, that was all it had been: an incident born of necessity. Earlier, talking to Mac, she had quoted Machiavelli, and now another of his dictums came to mind. Irritated, she wished she had thought of it earlier and then there would have been no stupid hesitation in her dealing with Mark Dowling.

  ‘If an injury has to be done to your enemy,’ the Prince had said, ‘then let it be done with such severity that you should have no fear of his revenge.’

  Karen nodded, satisfied. She had thought she had dealt with their father that same way all those years ago, but she had been just a fifteen-year-old child then, fallible and afraid.

  ‘I won’t make that mistake again,’ Karen said softly. ‘Oh no, never again.’

  Twenty-Eight

  The morning briefing on the Tuesday was a more formal and more crowded affair than Mac had been accustomed to in Frantham. Extra bodies packed into the reception area – a larger space than either Eden’s lair or the general office. A mobile incident room was on its way from Exeter and expected by mid-morning. Until then, the usual display of crime scene photos, approximate timelines and notes on the victim would have to wait.

  ‘Mark Dowling,’ Eden intoned. ‘Let’s say he’s well known to us, shall we? Usual mix of joyriding and petty theft, but it looks as though he might have excelled himself this time.’

  He produced a set of photographs from a manila folder on the front desk. ‘Mrs Marjorie Freer,’ he said. ‘As she was a year ago. The picture was taken by her carer at the time.’ He lifted a second picture. ‘Mrs Freer after her killer had finished with her.’

  Mac watched the reaction of those gathered in the cramped space.

  ‘What’s the connection?’ someone asked.

  ‘DI McGregor will fill in the details, but from information received, we believe that Dowling may have been responsible for the old woman’s death.’