‘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.’
‘You’re still doing the odd bit for the local paper then?’
‘Oh, this was a thing on private pension schemes versus property development. Speaking of which, have you heard? Someone’s finally bought the old airfield.’
‘No? Really? I’d heard a few rumours but never gave them a second thought.’
‘Some local businessman, come back to his roots.’ Andrew frowned. ‘Mitchum. That’s it. David Mitchum. He and his wife own some kind of software company, but they’ve recently expanded their hardware Research and Development and were looking for a base. They’re planning on building some kind of small industrial unit at the back of the tin huts and reopening the airfield as a going concern.’
‘Must have more money than sense.’ Rina was not impressed. ‘Though I suppose if they’ve bought the land behind the tin huts it’ll stop the flipping supermarket moving in. Ruination to our local shops that would have been and I can’t see a supermarket wanting to keep the tin huts there either,’ she added, referring to the ramshackle mix of tiny workshops set up on what had once been part of the wartime air force base just beyond the town limits. ‘Another company might be a bit more tolerant of the little local business. After all, they’re not likely to be competition, are they?’
‘Right,’ Andrew said. ‘I’d better be off. Tell Tim to give that hotel a ring. They’ll be in a bit of rush to get set up ready before the season starts. They’ve not left themselves much time.’
‘I will,’ Rina said. ‘Thank you, Andrew.’ She watched him stride away. Good looking chap, she thought with his height and his blond good looks. Should have been snapped up by now, married to a pretty wife and with a couple of kids in tow, but she knew Simeon would never cope with that. Or, if he could, that it would be an exceptional woman willing to take on both brothers, one as husband and one as eternal child.
She shook her head. Whoever it had been, driving the car that knocked Simeon down, had ruined not just one life but a whole family of lives. They deserved …
She clamped down on the thought reminding herself that it was that kind of impulse for revenge that had led young Karen Parker to kill Mark Dowling. Deserved, it might be, but that didn’t make it right. Did it?
Rina tightened her twin scarves and tugged her soft red hat further down over her ears, then, with a little tug at the wicker shopping trolley, she headed for home.
The sense of dread that had been building since break had reached dam-bursting proportions by lunchtime. Paul and George joined the lunch queue, doing their joint and level best to appear nonchalant and unconcerned, but painfully aware of the curious glances and whispered conversations. And it wasn’t just their classmates this time; the entire school seemed to know who they were and that they were somehow tied up with two murders and, in George’s case, a suicide.
‘You want chips or mash with that?’
The dinner lady shoved chips on his plate without waiting for a definitive reply. At least the catering staff seemed oblivious, George thought, relieved. Rushed off their feet and focused purely on getting as many kids through in the shortest time, they didn’t have time to listen to the rumour mill or, at least, didn’t have leisure to discuss it in the lunchtime rush. He spotted empty seats at the table closest to the door. Always the last table to be filled because the constant opening and closing of the double doors meant it was a chilled and drafty spot, it suddenly looked ideal to George and he steered a silent Paul in that direction.
‘Hey, George, come and sit over here.’
Ursula’s voice rose over the general hubbub of voices in the dining hall. George felt himself go red as the noise level dropped for an instant and George felt that every eye was upon them.
He glanced around, searching for where the voice had come from. Ursula sat at a much better table, close to the window and facing the doors. She held solitary court at a table set for four, and it was clear to George that she had been waiting for them. How, he wondered, could such a tiny, insignificant-looking person have kept everyone at bay for –the evidence of her half-finished lunch told him – five minutes at least?
Grateful anyway he sat down and, when Paul seemed at a loss as to what to do, told him to do the same.
‘Sit down. Eat something. This is Ursula, she lives at that place too. This is Paul.’
‘Hello.’ Ursula said.
Paul didn’t speak. He stared for a second or two and then, as though it represented the lesser of two evils – conversation being the greater one – he set to work on his lunch.
‘He normally talks,’ George said. ‘It’s his first day back too.’ He looked from his new friend to his old and wondered if the two of them would get along or if this was just going to pose yet one more problem in the life of George Parker.
‘OK,’ Ursula said at last. She examined Paul curiously but added nothing more and for several minutes they ate in silence while all around them several hundred pairs of eyes watched and dozens of conversations speculated.
‘You’ll get talked about,’ Paul said unexpectedly before cramming another chip into his mouth.
Ursula shrugged. ‘So,’ she said.
And George relaxed. Somehow, he thought, it was going to be all right though there was a frisson of fear in his next thought. Ursula was a lot like his sister Karen.