Resolutions Page 9

  Lunchtime talk was casual, catch-up time, the little news of life and learning and knitted scarves and magic and the plans for the Pallisades’ Christmas extravaganza – the hotel was already booked solidly for the entire Christmas and New Year period. Serious discussion was never permitted to spoil a meal at Peverill Lodge.

  Rina half listened, impatient for the meal to be over and to be able to tell Fitch just why he was here.

  Abe Jackson arrived just as lunch was ending, but was brought with due ceremony to the table and supplied with cake in lieu. Joy went to the kitchen with Rina to help bring in the coffee trays.

  ‘Mum sends her love,’ she said. ‘She wondered if maybe you and Tim might come and stay for a while after New Year. I know neither of you can get away before.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can get away then,’ Rina said. ‘I don’t like to leave them for long, you know.’

  Joy laughed. ‘Rina, they’re not kids, not really. Mac and Miriam can look in on them all, and at least you know no one will starve. You deserve a break, and Mum would love someone to do the January sales with.’

  ‘That sounds wonderfully normal,’ Rina said wistfully. ‘Yes, Joy, tell Bridie I’d love to. I can’t recall the last time I had a proper break. It was probably back in my acting days, though I called it “resting” then and didn’t like it one bit.’ Not, she thought gratefully, that there had been many such gaps in her life; although fame, with Lydia Marchant Investigates, had come relatively late in her career, she had rarely been out of work.

  ‘I can’t recall the last time you saw Mum when there wasn’t some emergency happening,’ Joy added.

  ‘That too. Joy, I love having you here, you know that, but things are getting more complicated by the day here and . . .’

  ‘And I’ve probably been with you through worse,’ Joy said. ‘Hey, Rina, I had to come, you know that. Mum knows that. She says if you need reinforcements, you only have to say the word, but she knows I’d not miss the opportunity to see you all.’

  ‘Especially Tim,’ Rina said mischievously.

  ‘Especially Tim. Mum knows we Duggan women won’t be put off once we’ve got something into our heads and she reckons I could do a lot worse.’

  ‘Have you informed Tim that his fate is sealed?’

  Joy giggled and suddenly looked like the twenty-year-old she was, maturity slipping away. ‘Oh, I think he knows,’ she said. ‘But I’m being sensible, getting on with my studies and all that. I promised Patrick I would and I’m not about to let him down.’

  Patrick, Joy’s dead brother. The maverick son not prepared to go into the family business with his father and older sibling. Patrick who wanted to make his own, legal, way in the world and who hoped his sister would do the same. Joy had grown up so much this past year, Rina thought; it was just a pity that so much grief should be the cause of that.

  Back in the dining room, Rina poured coffee, noting a subtle change in mood seemed to have taken place in her brief absence. She intercepted what could only be described as a meaningful glance between Matthew Montmorency and Eliza Peters. She groaned inwardly.

  Steven Montmorency took his cup from her and set it down purposefully. He steepled his plump fingers and leaned back in his chair. Bethany wriggled in her seat and exchanged an excited glance with her sister.

  ‘Now,’ Steven said. ‘We’ve all eaten and we’re all happy to be back together, but none of us imagines this is a social visit, do we, Matthew?’

  Matthew Montmorency shook his head. Unlike his supposed twin, who was almost bald, Matthew had a mane of thick, grey hair that hung past his collar. He pushed a heavy lock back off his face. ‘No, indeed, we don’t,’ he said. ‘Do we, girls?’

  The ‘girls’, neither of whom would see sixty again, chorused an answer. ‘No, Matthew, we most certainly don’t.’

  Rina looked at Fitch, who shrugged. ‘Well, you’ve got to admit, Rina, the last time we all got together was a tad dramatic, so it’s a natural assumption. Who goes first?’

  Rina took a deep breath. She looked at Tim, but he was busy playing with Joy’s hand and seemed not to be giving the conversation a hundred per cent attention. Abe Jackson merely shrugged when she glanced his way.

  ‘So,’ Fitch prompted, ‘what the devil are we dealing with this time, eh?’

  Rina scanned the expectant faces around the table. ‘A girl called Karen Parker,’ she said quietly, ‘who may or may not be about to cause us some problems.’

  ‘Young George’s sister,’ Matthew nodded, satisfied. ‘I told you that was her, Steven. I said, that’s young George’s sister and she’s dyed her hair, didn’t I?’

  ‘Quite,’ Steven said, ‘but that’s not the end of it, is it, Rina?’

  ‘No,’ Rina said quietly. ‘When I asked Fitch to come and give me a hand, I thought what I had in mind was maybe some intelligence-gathering and someone to keep an eye on George should Karen try to coerce him, but I spoke to Mac this morning and it seems that his former life has well and truly come back to haunt him. To haunt us all, in fact. As you may know, Mac left to go back and work with his former colleagues. Now, I know you’re all aware that when he came here he was recovering from a major . . . well, let’s call it a collapse. He’s so much better now, but I’m still concerned about the effects this whole thing will have on him.’

  ‘Oh, poor Mac,’ Bethany said. ‘He is such a lovely man, and lovely people tend to be, well, fragile, I suppose.’

  She looked to her sister for confirmation and Eliza nodded wisely.

  ‘I would not suggest that Sebastian is fragile,’ Matthew said. He and Steven were the only people, as far as Rina knew, who ever used Mac’s given name. He tolerated it with a good grace. ‘But any of us can suffer ill health as a result of stress – that’s just the way of things, isn’t it?’

  ‘So,’ Fitch said, ‘suppose you start at the beginning and bring us all up to speed, Rina. You’re suggesting we’ve got ourselves two problems – one big and one fairly small – so let’s start with Mac and work our way out from there.’

  Rina nodded. ‘It began with the kidnap and murder of a little girl,’ she said. ‘Her name was Cara Evans, and Mac witnessed her death. He still can’t get over the fact that there was nothing he could have done.’

  For the next hour Rina told them all she knew about Mac and his previous life in Pinsent and the reopened investigation, and about the possibility that Thomas Peel had been watching Mac as he began his new life here in Frantham. She told them about Miriam’s scare the night before and Mac’s warning that Peel was intent on creating trouble for him, even as Mac attempted to track him down. She watched their faces carefully, anxious not to upset them all too much. Bethany and Eliza, though they may look like elderly, fragile flowers, were as tough as old boots. Steven was, oddly, much more vulnerable. This last year had been difficult, and Rina worried that this was one upset too far. Matthew’s comment about anyone being vulnerable was, she knew, all about his beloved Steven, now arthritic of knee but well of mind for these past few secure, Peverill Lodge years.

  ‘And so,’ Rina said by way of conclusion, ‘I’m worried about Karen because of what kind of life I suspect she has been leading since she left.’ She had decided to leave out the implication of George’s sister in the death of Mark Dowling; that seemed a shock too far for the general company. ‘George has settled here now. I don’t want him pressured. The second problem is, I suppose, just as speculative. Thomas Peel may or may not be of concern.’

  Now she had voiced all of this, Rina was aware of how flimsy it sounded and worried that she had overreacted. After all, Karen was the same age as Joy; she was just a girl. Why should Rina have been so upset, just because she turned up in decent clothes and possessed of an extra dose of confidence?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Fitch, Abe, I feel now that I’ve called on you for no reason.’ She sighed deeply. ‘I’m probably just being an old woman with too much imagination.’

  A chorus of
denial at the table. ‘You’re not old,’ Joy declared.

  ‘And I’ve rarely met anyone with more acute instincts,’ Abe Jackson said quietly. The table fell silent. Abe had barely spoken since taking his place and being instructed to devour cake.

  ‘You know something?’ Fitch was suddenly more alert and Rina more painfully aware that he had originally come to her rescue, even though he doubted there had been anything to rescue her from.

  Abe slipped some papers from his inside jacket pocket and handed them to Fitch. ‘Rina, I used my contacts and did some checking. Your Karen has cut quite a swathe since she left here – little thefts and frauds all up and down the country. Nothing anyone’s been able to pin on her, but . . .’

  Fitch glanced up sharply from what he was reading and then caught on and followed Abe’s lead. ‘She’s enterprising,’ he said. ‘I suppose when you’ve gone without for as long as she and George must have done, then other people’s weakness and inattention must lead you into temptation.’

  Rina studied them both, wondering what had not been said. Fitch, never a good liar, was avoiding her eye.

  ‘Anyway,’ Joy said, ‘we’re all here now and that’s something to celebrate, don’t you think? Matthew, Rina says George and Ursula are coming to tea. Is there anything I can do?’

  Rina blessed her. The Montmorency twins at once began to clear the table, helped by the Peters sisters, and soon Joy was deep in discussion with them regarding the very important provision of ‘High Tea’. Tim managed a quick kiss before being ushered off, and Rina led the way into her little sitting room at the front of the house – her private space in which she could escape the beloved madness of her household.

  Fitch and Abe followed, Tim in their wake, looking back regretfully.

  ‘Go,’ Rina heard Joy whisper. ‘We’ll take a walk later, just the two of us, and I thought I might come and see you perform tonight.’

  Rina chuckled to herself. Tim was well and truly out of his depth, she thought, and she approved completely.

  The tiny front parlour seemed even smaller with Fitch and Abe and Tim all crammed in beside her, but they managed to seat themselves, Tim having brought an extra chair from the hall.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘which of you is going to tell me what’s going on?’

  Fitch handed her the printed sheets that Abe had given to him, and Tim leaned in so he could read it with her.

  Rina read and then read again. ‘Are you sure about this? Of course you are.’ She took a moment or two, wondering what else to say.

  ‘Mac’s absence is no coincidence, Rina; neither is Thomas Peel coming out from whatever hole he’s been hiding in. And there’s Karen, right at the heart of it.’

  TWELVE

  Mac was in need of a break. The briefing room had been filled to capacity with officers all morning and they had spilled out into one of the interview rooms. Mac had found refuge in Alec’s office, only to find that Wildman had already staked a claim to the last available space and squeezed a desk into the corner by the door. The door crashed into the side of the desk every time it was opened, and getting to the chair required an effort of bodily convolution that a contortionist would have been proud of. That Wildman would be able to get in at all was a general source of amazement; bets had been taken on his ability to free himself from behind the desk once he was there. So far, Mac had seen no evidence of him even trying to do either. Wildman was a percher; desks, radiators, backs of chairs, all welcomed his rotund buttocks, but no chair ever seemed destined to be favoured with their pressure. Mac had begun to wonder if Wildman was even capable of bending at the knees.

  Mac had spent the morning working his way through witness statements, reliving in memory the interviews and events he had supervised or attended or noted down. Faces, names, incidents, all seemed at once so long ago and so immediate, as though he recalled seeing them on a cinema screen. He found it very hard to feel he had a place in all of this, an odd sense of detachment, curtain-like and muffling, having fallen between him and what he did. He recognized it for what it was: his attempt to protect himself, to avoid the hurt of last time. Mac told himself that detachment was good, that he’d see more clearly and more precisely, maybe catch some small mention, some tiny revelation that had not been recognized before.

  In practice, what was really going through his mind was that he didn’t want to be there, in Pinsent, in close proximity to Wildman, the percher, who was poised, Mac felt, to catch him out, to take note of any weakness and seize upon it. He felt Wildman’s eyes upon him again and looked up, met the man’s gaze. Was the first to look away.

  The file on the desk in front of him seemed to have been written in a foreign language. Words writhed and faded and came back into focus for a mere instant before fading out again. He had read that paragraph, what, three, four times? He just knew that Wildman had noted the hesitation, the lack of concentration, and as if to confirm that, he heard Wildman’s sharp voice ask, ‘Find something interesting there, Mac?’

  Mac closed the file and stood up, brushed past his boss and went to find himself a coffee.

  Down in the main briefing room, men and women examined financial records, phone calls, tracked movements of suspects who had seemed relevant eighteen months ago and who would now have had time to fade back into whatever murky world they inhabited. They had lost time, lost momentum. Now, all of that would have to be kick-started, urged into life, momentum regained – and how long would that take? Mac took a look at the hessian pinboards that lined the longest wall. On day one they had shown only the images of Cara Evans and Thomas Peel; now other images joined them, captioned and connected by arrows drawn on to scraps of paper, red cord that some enterprising soul had found and used to recreate more complex contacts, scribbled notes speculating about payments made or phone calls received. Two collators, both women – one a uniformed sergeant and the other a young, newly promoted DI – sat close to the board, one at a computer, one making handwritten notes on to the loose pages of a ring-binder. As new leads came in, new possibilities emerged, it was their job to cross-reference and to annotate. Others would join them, but it was important to keep this part of the team small, agile, constantly interacting. Computer databases were wonderful, but it was often the human being who recalled the little things, the tiny, broken fragments of information that had to be properly phrased before the computer could even begin to search.

  He studied the faces pinned on to the board, thinking of all the glossy US television series he and Miriam liked to watch – and criticize – with their glass partitions on which the growing evidence could be displayed and their instant transfers of complex information, ready and available at the touch of a computer key, and he wondered, briefly, if it was really like that, anywhere. If the reality was always closer to what it was here: groups of people reading and comparing and talking, and making entries on to sheets of paper just as often as they did into vast computer systems, and where links were drawn out with pins and lengths of red string.

  He needed air. He took his coffee and went out into the yard at the back of the police station. No view and not much in the way of fresh air as this space was now refuge for the few remaining committed smokers. They were clustered together, huddled with coffee mugs in one hand and cigarettes in the other, close to the perimeter fence. Officially, no one was permitted to smoke anywhere on the premises and they were still, technically, within the purview of the building regulations, but everyone turned a blind eye. It occurred to Mac, suddenly, that he knew very few people who smoked any more. Neither Andy nor Sergeant Baker did, though Baker had done in his younger days. None of Rina’s household. He had become unused to seeing these huddled groups of dispossessed.

  ‘Time for a break, is it?’

  Mac groaned, looked up. A ramp led down into the yard from the rear door and Wildman now leaned on the railing, peering down. Mac figured the railing was too high to perch upon; he’d noticed that leaning was a secondary Wildman trait.


  The DCI slouched down the ramp and commandeered a place beside Mac. ‘So,’ he said, ‘how are you holding up?’

  It was almost a relief that Wildman had actually asked the question. ‘I’m doing all right, so far,’ Mac lied.

  ‘Can’t be easy, though, coming back here, to where it happened, having everyone looking at you like you’re the guilty one.’

  ‘I can’t say I’d noticed that they had,’ Mac said steadily. Was that what everyone was thinking? He became aware, suddenly and intently, of a dozen imagined slights, of eyes that avoided his, of . . . ‘I don’t believe that’s what everyone is concerned with,’ he said more firmly. ‘Our focus should be Thomas Peel: where’s he’s been, where he is now, why he’s suddenly come out of hiding.’

  ‘I’m sure Cara’s parents agree with you,’ Wildman said.

  Mac turned to fully face the man. ‘Actually, they do,’ he said. ‘Nothing can bring her back; the best they can hope for is some kind of justice, is . . .’

  ‘Closure?’ Wildman’s voice was heavy with sarcasm.

  ‘No,’ Mac said. ‘They and I both know there can be no closure. Some wounds scab over, even grow new skin, but they will always be there, raw and hollow beneath the surface, ready to bleed.’

  He held Wildman’s gaze, aware that this was not the response the DCI had been expecting. ‘I suppose the truth is, both Cara’s parents and I, we don’t want closure, as you call it. I sometimes wonder if justice really has any meaning when someone has done something like that. Can you really settle for justice with a man like Thomas Peel?’

  ‘So, what, then?’ Wildman smiled, and Mac was horrified to realize that the DCI saw a certain kinship between them. ‘You out for revenge, Mac? You’ll get Peel in a dark corner somewhere, beat seven shades out of him, leave him dying with his throat laid wide open?’ He laughed as Mac turned away. ‘No, I don’t suppose you would. I don’t suppose you’d have the stomach for it.’

  ‘You don’t know me,’ Mac said softly. ‘You’ll never know me, so don’t pretend to try.’