Fragile Lives Read online

  ‘Morning, Inspector.’ A quick smile from one of the white-suited figures lifted Mac’s spirits as he recognized her. It would be very good, he thought, to meet the blue-eyed Miriam Hastings in a venue other than over dead bodies.

  ‘Mac, come on down, as they say.’

  Mac turned, surprised by the second familiar voice. ‘Didn’t think this was your patch?’

  DI Kendal smiled. ‘Not sure that it is. It’s often a bit of a moot point when you get out into the boondocks but since we’ve both got an interest in Edward Parker I guess we can sort out the niceties of jurisdiction later.’ He led the way. A narrow path had been cut or worn into the crumbling face of the cliff and there was evidence that there had once been a handrail. Now, Mac thought, it was a route only fit for the average mountain goat. ‘How are they going to get the body out?’

  ‘We’ve got the coastguard giving us a hand. Helicopter. It was either that or strap him to a gurney and haul him up and no one really fancied that. We’ve only got about another hour before the tide comes in so the ’copter’s due any time.’

  ‘Should be interesting to see,’ Mac commented. He was shocked at how calm he felt. The last deaths he had attended he had felt very differently. He recalled with vivid embarrassment that he had nearly thrown up when viewing Mrs Freer’s body. The old lady had been battered to death and the blooded fragility of her corpse had shattered any control he might previously have had. He’d handled it though, but again, when Mark Dowling had been found he had been challenged and found wanting. Less wanting, for sure, but …

  Maybe there was a diminishing return: reaction weighed against perception of guilt. Mark Dowling had been a murderer, taking the old woman’s life so casually and so easily that perhaps some part of Mac’s psyche decided he was only worth so much shock; some tiny percentage of a reaction. Maybe that was why he felt so calm now. Parker senior had been a violent and brutish man and Mac could not think of a single reason to grieve his passing.

  ‘Who found him?’

  ‘Retired Brigadier and his wife out walking their dogs. The wife was a bit shaken up so I had them taken home. They’re expecting us later. SOCO have done almost all they can here but we wanted to wait for you before we bagged and moved.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Mac said. It helped, seeing an intact scene. However good the crime-scene pictures or the documentary information, it never quite matched that first impression.

  The body had been wedged between rocks at the foot of the cliff. Battered by tide and stones and eaten by whatever opportunistic creatures fancied an easy meal, it was still identifiably human but beyond that it was hard to say. Shredded remnants of what looked like blue jeans and a striped shirt still clung to the body. Mac tried to recall what Edward Parker had been wearing. Where were the shoes and coat? Had they been dragged off as the body scraped over the rocks?

  ‘Reckon it’s him?’ Kendal asked. ‘Looks to be the right height and build. Have to be dental records for identification, I reckon. Doesn’t look to be much left of the fingers.’ He shrugged. ‘The sea isn’t gentle with the dead.’

  Mac nodded. They both glanced up at the sound of a helicopter. ‘This is his ride. How will they land?’

  ‘Oh, they won’t, just send a winch man down. Best get out of the way so he can be bagged up.’

  Mac nodded and the two of them retreated to the other end of the narrow cove and watched as the body was eased out of its wedged position and a body bag was laid out ready to receive it. The photographer stepped forward to take the pictures of the back of the body as it was turned and to record anything lying beneath. There was a sudden pause in activity. And a shout from the photographer.

  ‘Better come and take a look.’

  Curious, Mac and Kendal hurried over.

  ‘Back of the head,’ the CSI indicated.

  ‘Bloody hell. Looks like an entry wound. That isn’t right.’

  ‘Shot? If he was shot, then it isn’t Parker. What about an exit wound?’

  They laid him back down and Miriam gently probed what was left of his forehead. ‘Hard to tell,’ she said. ‘There’s so much damage, it isn’t possible to identify what might be an exit wound and what might have been caused by time and tide.’

  ‘OK.’ Mac stood. ‘Well, no use standing here and speculating.’ They backed off again, leaving the crime-scene team to do their work and the helicopter crew to do theirs. ‘So,’ Mac wondered out loud. ‘If it isn’t our friend Parker, who the devil is it?’

  Kendal shook his head. ‘This was such a quiet place before you got here,’ he said.

  Three

  ‘It isn’t Parker,’ Mac announced. ‘Not unless someone shot him in the back of the head after the fact.’

  DCI Eden raised an eyebrow and directed Mac to sit down. A shout brought the rest of their little team through from the front office.

  ‘We’ve got ourselves a different body,’ Eden announced. ‘The sea has yet to deliver our friend Parker for inspection. Andy, some coffee while we discuss matters, I think. The kettle should already be full.’

  Eden’s kettle, Mac reflected, always was. Andy set it to re-boil.

  Mac described the cove where the body had been found. ‘It wasn’t until we moved him that we realized there was a bullet wound. The face is a mess, forehead caved in and the soft tissue all but gone, but the entry wound looked just too regular to be anything else. We’ll know more after the post-mortem.’

  ‘Do you know when that will be?’

  Mac shook his head and accepted his coffee, grateful that Andy had made it and not his boss. Eden’s brew was always super strength; enough to keep you flying for hours. ‘Miriam said she’d give me a call this afternoon once he was added to the list.’

  ‘Miriam?’

  ‘Um, Miriam Hastings. One of the CSI, she was acting scene manager this morning.’

  Eden gazed up at the ceiling as though trying to recollect something. ‘Long dark hair,’ he said. ‘Big blue violet eyes. I don’t remember ever getting to call her anything but Miss Hastings.’

  Mac could feel himself getting warm. ‘We just got talking,’ he said. ‘She seems like … well, like a very nice person.’

  Sergeant Baker guffawed. ‘Oh, I think she’s that,’ he said. ‘Very nice.’

  ‘Anyway.’ Mac tried to regain his composure and some measure of control. ‘Seeing as this isn’t Parker …’

  ‘Not much more we can do until Forensics have had their shot,’ DS Baker observed. ‘If he’s been knocking around in the currents for a while, it’ll be down to a dental record for identification. The doc might be able to give an approximate age and height and so on and we can look through our missing person reports, see if we get any possibles, but until we’ve got something more to work on …’

  Eden nodded. ‘So. On hold with that one. How’s young George settling in?’

  ‘I’ll give him a call later.’ Mac said. ‘He was going back to school today.’

  ‘Good, get back to normal, whatever that is. Still no news on the sister but she’s not daft, she’ll have put plenty of distance between herself and us. Dowling’s parents are still calling twice a day to see if we’ve made progress. Seems like in death all sins are forgiven and their precious son is no longer the murdering bastard he was.’

  ‘He’s still dead,’ Mac observed. ‘He was still killed.’

  ‘By a scrap of a girl trying to protect her own,’ Frank Baker intoned. ‘Oh, I know the girl is still a murderer but you can’t help but hope she keeps on running, can you?’

  The counter bell rang in the outer office and Baker eased himself reluctantly from his seat, called Andy, the probationer, to heel and returned to his domain.

  ‘Do you hope that too?’ Mac asked his boss, more curious than judgemental.

  ‘Me, I hope I’m safely retired before I have to deal with it. If I get my wish you won’t catch up with her until I’m well and gone and that day is getting closer all the time.’

  ‘Eight
, no, nine weeks,’ Mac said. ‘She still killed him in cold blood though, you know that. It wasn’t just an act of defence or revenge. It was chillingly thorough and the photograph …’ He shook his head recalling the mobile phone images Karen had shot of Mark Dowling, dead or dying. She had sent her phone to Mac once she was safely away. Proof, she had said, to make sure no one else was accused.

  ‘Well, she had some sense of honour.’ Eden seemed almost to be following his thoughts. So far, few people knew about the images. Eden thought it best that they be withheld. Karen was smart, cool, used to running having acquired years of experience trying to escape Parker senior. The search for her must, of necessity, be as smart and as cool and as subtle as she was, and anyway right now she was officially just a possible witness to a murder, not the prime, indeed the only suspect that Mac and Eden knew her to be.

  ‘What are the chances of her still being in the country?’ Eden wondered aloud.

  ‘Good, I think. I don’t imagine she’d want to put that much distance between herself and George. She’s spent half her life looking out for him, I don’t think she’s about to give up on that altogether.’

  George’s morning had been filled with questions; both the openly expressed and the silently implied.

  It had been his best friend, Paul’s, first day back too after witnessing the horror of Mrs Freer’s murder. Paul had been quiet, subdued, and George had found himself fielding questions and comments for the both of them.

  ‘You OK, George? Paul? Good to have you back.’ That had been Miss Crick, their form teacher and been echoed by the subject teachers.

  George had learned quickly that an emphatic nod and a mumbled ‘yes thanks’ sorted that particular level of inquiry. They didn’t expect a proper answer, just a response to their good manners in asking.

  Karen had been really hot on manners. ‘They cost nothing,’ she always said. ‘And they oil the wheels of the world.’ Sometimes, she could come out with some odd, almost old-fashioned stuff, but George had learnt to trust the content of her advice even though her actions were sometimes far beyond his reckoning.

  The curiosity of their classmates had been harder to dispel with just a gesture and few mumbled words, but that hadn’t stopped him from trying.

  The rumour mill had been working overtime. According to various versions, they had been charged with breaking and entering – almost true. They had killed some old lady – definitely not true. George’s mam had topped herself – unfortunately, all too true. George and Paul had done Mark Dowling in because he’d killed the old woman – not true at all but uncomfortably close to what George knew to have happened.

  The one good thing was that Dwayne Regis, George’s old nemesis, seemed content to leave them both alone now that Mark Dowling, Dwayne’s protector, had gone. Dwayne seemed almost as subdued as Paul and no longer, from what Paul had told him, a source of torment to be endured on the school bus.

  ‘He didn’t say nothing,’ Paul was awed to report. ‘Everyone says he’s not said nothing since … you know?’

  Paul, George realized, was still having enormous trouble even labelling recent events. He certainly wasn’t ready to talk about them, and George wondered what took place in his weekly sessions with the counsellor. He imagined long avenues of silence while a clock on the wall counted the seconds. Shrinks always had a ticking clock on the wall in George’s experience.

  Break time had been the worst ten minutes of the morning. Left alone with their classmates and without adult supervision, the questions and the catcalls had come thick and fast.

  ‘Did you really see the body?’

  ‘Was there blood all up the walls?’

  ‘Are you going to be sent to jail?’

  ‘Sorry to hear about your mum.’

  ‘How come you’re living in that kids’ home. Thought that was just for …’

  George didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. He headed out into the crowded corridor, dragging Paul with him and got them both cans from the machine, then settled in the tiny alcove next to the radiator to drink them.

  ‘Thanks,’ Paul said. He opened the can and drank half of it without stopping.

  ‘They’ll forget all about us in a few days,’ George said with more confidence than he felt. ‘We’ll just be like chip paper.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like … Oh, never mind. They’ll just forget about us.’ It had seemed to make more sense when Rina had said it even though Tim still had to explain that chips used to be wrapped in newspaper so yesterday’s headlines were just tomorrow’s waste paper. George had got what she meant; he didn’t think Paul was in any mood to even try.

  Lunchtime, he figured, would be the worst, but there wasn’t a lot they could do to avoid that. Too young to be allowed off campus and too high profile at the moment for the staff to take their eyes off them for too long, there was no chance even of sneaking into an empty classroom. George suddenly felt very vulnerable and terribly alone.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, chucking his part-empty can in the bin. ‘We better get back.’

  Obedient, Paul followed. George sighed. He knew that Karen had sometimes found it hard, being the responsible, reliable sorting-everything-out one. He figured he was getting to understand what she’d meant.

  Rina had known Andrew and Simeon Barnes since she had first come to live in Frantham. Andrew was a journalist, though generally of the magazine article persuasion rather than newspapers, writing articles on finance that were then franchised to many of the major weekly and monthly journals. It was a living, though not necessarily what Andrew wanted, but it fitted in with life with Simeon and, after all, his brother, Simeon, was a very different story.

  ‘How is he?’ Rina asked, unsurprised to have run into Andrew in Frantham’s tiny general store; the owner insisted it was a supermarket but Rina had long ago decided that was far too vulgar a term for so old-fashioned and classy an establishment.

  ‘Oh, Simeon is all right. I’m just checking things out ready for our shopping trip. Evan rang to say he’d rearranged some of the lines and you know how Simeon is.’

  Rina nodded.

  ‘It’s good of Evan to be so understanding.’

  ‘Good customer relations,’ Rina said wisely, ‘and anyway, he is a very pleasant man.’ Privately she thought it likely that Evan was not only keeping a good customer happy but also, having experienced it once, avoiding the embarrassment of a hysterical Simeon scaring away potential new ones. Simeon loved his fortnightly shopping trips but could not deal with unexpected change. Provided Andrew explained it all to him in advance, he could cope. Just.

  ‘I’m glad I saw you, though,’ Andrew continued. ‘I’ve got Simeon’s list. I was going to just drop it through your door.’ He fished in the pocket and brought out several sheets of neatly folded, lined paper covered in Simeon’s tiny, obsessively neat writing.

  Rina took them. ‘More than usual,’ she commented.

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry about that. Look, if you don’t have the time, I quite understand.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I’ll do my usual and send him some comments. In fact, maybe you can ask him to look out for something in particular for me? If you think he’s up to it.’

  ‘Oh, I know he’ll be glad to. Anything for you, you know that. What do you have in mind?’

  ‘Lights,’ Rina said, remembering what Mac had told her a few weeks before. ‘About ten o’clock at night, maybe a bit later, just below Marlborough Head and close in to shore.’

  ‘Oh?’ Andrew was intrigued. ‘Not a good place to be at that time of night. The currents are vicious round that headland.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Rina said. ‘Of course, there may be nothing to see from your side, in fact there may be nothing to see at all now, but there’s a bit of a beach down below the hotel and a tiny hole of a cave and the lights may be related to something going on there.’

  Andrew nodded. He’d lived his whole life here in Frantham. ‘I know the place. We missed
the tide once and got ourselves stuck. Our dad was mad as hell. Had half the town out looking for us. That was before, you know … when Simeon was still …’

  Rina nodded. Simeon had been only twelve years old when it had happened. The accident. No one had even thought he’d walk and talk again but he had. Time had cured many of Simeon’s ills but, though Andrew was always hopeful, Rina doubted any amount of time would cure the rest. ‘I’ll post his list back to him as usual,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks, he looks forward to your letters. So, you’re not going to tell me any more about these lights?’

  ‘Journalistic nose twitching, is it?’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘Not a lot more to tell,’ Rina said innocently.

  ‘No? I’ll ferret it out before long.’ Andrew laughed at himself. The idea that even he could ‘ferret’ information out of Rina was an absurd one. ‘Something to do with Edward Parker, is it? Didn’t he take his final leap from there?’

  Rina patted the young man’s arm. ‘He did indeed,’ she said. ‘You’re a good boy, Andrew, now don’t forget to pass my message on to Simeon will you?’

  ‘I won’t.’ He watched as she rewound the two scarves and prepared to go back out into the cold. ‘I take it the Peters sisters have been knitting again.’

  Rina sighed, thinking about her productive lodgers. ‘Oh yes. And I don’t like to be seen to show favour. I tried wearing a different one each day but they were each convinced they were being short-changed so …’ She shrugged. ‘At least I’m warm and at least it’s only scarves. The day their skills extend to jumpers I am really in trouble.’

  Andrew fell into step beside her as they walked back along the promenade. ‘Has Tim found any more work yet?’

  ‘Odd things. Mostly children’s parties and between you and I he’s not really cut out for that kind of thing.’

  Andrew clearly found the thought hilarious. ‘Tim in a clown’s suit. No. Really, no! I ask though, because that new hotel, The Palisades, it’s been advertising for entertainers. Or at least, it will be, the ad’s going in the paper this week. I saw it when I dropped my article off.’