A Painted Doom (21 page)

Neil put his trowel down and brushed the soil off his hands in a futile attempt to look more presentable. ‘They’re moving
it back to the church for this history evening they’re organising in aid of the village hall fund – there are posters all
around the place. Do you fancy coming?’

Anne blushed. ‘When is it?’

Neil took a deep breath and wished the earth would swallow him up. It had never occurred to him to find out the date. He shrugged
his shoulders. ‘Don’t know. Soon,’ he added hopefully.

‘Well, if you find out when it is, I might consider coming along.’ She turned to go.

Neil watched her walk away and experienced an uneasy feeling that he hadn’t made a very good impression.

Jill Hoxworthy opened the front door of the farmhouse. Wesley could see that her hands were shaking. She stood aside to let
them in.

‘It was in the back of the wardrobe in an old metal box,’ she said as she started to climb the stairs ahead of them. ‘I’ve
put it back where I found it.’

She was trying to sound normal, practical. Trying to hide her gnawing anxiety. But it was too close to the surface to fool
Wesley. One wrong look, one word out of place, and the façade would drop.

Wesley and Heffernan remained silent as they followed
her upstairs and into Lewis’s bedroom, which, Wesley noted with approval, had been transformed. The carpet, which had been
concealed beneath mounds of debris, was bright blue and newly vacuumed. The furniture was white melamine, wiped clean of finger
marks. The bedding was decorated with fresh yellow checks. Wesley allowed himself the optimistic thought that, when Lewis
returned, he’d be pleased with the transformation. Then he mentally substituted the word ‘if’ for ‘when’. It was best to be
prepared for the worst.

Jill Hoxworthy walked slowly over to the wardrobe in the corner of the room and opened the door. ‘I didn’t touch the gun.
I didn’t take it out of the box,’ she said quietly. ‘I thought you’d want to see …’

‘Thanks,’ said Wesley. ‘You did the right thing.’

Wesley could see the metal box on the shelf. After putting on a pair of plastic gloves, he pulled it out gently and took the
lid off. There was a thin veil of tissue paper inside, which Wesley peeled away carefully to reveal a small handgun. It looked
almost harmless lying there, like the toy guns he had used as a child to fight a thousand fantasy battles before his mother
had read somewhere that such games fostered violence in growing boys. But this was the real thing: an instrument of death.

‘Where the hell did the lad get it?’ asked Gerry Heffernan rhetorically.

Wesley stood there asking himself the same question. He turned to Jill, who was hovering behind them, chewing her fingernails
nervously. ‘You’d no idea about this? He’d never spoken about it or hinted …?’

The question, he knew, was naive. The last people Lewis Hoxworthy would have let in on his secret were his parents. Jill shook
her head.

Wesley turned to Gerry Heffernan, who was staring down at the gun with his mouth slightly open. ‘I really think we should
have a go at reading all Lewis’s e-mails. I’ll ask Tom from Forensics to come over here first thing tomorrow.’

‘Do you think this has something to do with his disappearance?’ Jill asked quietly.

‘I don’t know.’ Wesley was about to say that he hoped so in the light of what they had discovered about Alec Treadly, but
he didn’t want to add to the Hoxworthys’ worries. The fact that a boy had gone missing and there was a convicted paedophile
living virtually next door had caused the police to put two and two together, and Wesley was almost grateful for this glimmer
of hope that their worst assumptions were wrong.

He glanced at his watch. Eleven-forty-five. He was meeting his mother and Pam in Morbay at one. ‘We’ll have to take the gun
back for examination,’ he said.

‘Take it,’ Jill Hoxworthy said, looking him in the eye. ‘I just want it out of here.’ She was near to tears.

Gerry Heffernan put a comforting hand on her shoulder. ‘We’ll do our best to find him, love, we really will.’

Heffernan took charge of the box containing the gun. As they left the house, they met Terry Hoxworthy coming in the front
door.

‘You’ve got it, then? She’s told you?’ The man looked exhausted. He couldn’t have been more than fifty but he had the drained
pallor of an old man. The dark shadows beneath his eyes told Wesley that he probably hadn’t slept since his son left. He felt
like assuring him that Lewis would turn up, that everything would be all right. But lies only postponed the pain.

They drove away from the farm, and when they reached the old barn they turned into the lane and drove past the Old Vicarage’s
tiny lodge. There was a police car parked outside. Alec Treadly was being brought in for questioning.

Wesley just hoped that when he returned from his lunch appointment he wouldn’t be expected to take part.

Morbay’s Royalty Hotel had an impressive façade. A great white wedding cake of a building, visible for miles around, it was
a fine example of art deco architecture dating from
the late 1920s, when Morbay had been the epitome of style, the place to be seen.

The wealthy had built their villas there, and the beautiful people of the time had taken their leisure in the shade of the
resort’s palm trees: a little piece of the Riviera on the south-west coast of England. Back in the 1930s famous crime writers
had conjured murder mysteries, far more glamorous – and painless – than any Wesley Peterson had ever investigated, in the
town’s most sophisticated haunts. The pre-war age of titled ladies and vintage motor-cars had been Morbay’s time in the sun.

Morbay’s glory may have faded since those heady days but, like an ageing actress undergoing face-lift after face-lift, the
old trooper kept on doing her best against the rising tide of foreign holidays, unemployment, outlying problem housing estates
and rising drug addiction. And the Royalty Hotel remained a gracious landmark on the promenade – although the retired colonels
and the titled ladies were long gone and it catered mostly for the conference trade.

Wesley stood outside the great revolving door with its framework of gleaming brass, and straightened his tie. He pushed at
the door, which spun round and deposited him in the hotel foyer, a well-preserved art deco vision in marble and polished walnut.

He looked around. Seventy years ago someone of his racial origins would have felt out of place in such an establishment. But
now there were many Asians, black and Chinese faces in the milling crowd of conference attendees. Wesley looked quite at home
among the assembled doctors of Great Britain, and a few even nodded to him, thinking him one of their own, as he set off in
search of his wife and mother.

They were to meet in the conservatory, which, being well signposted, was easy to find. It was an elegant room with windows
on three sides giving a panoramic view of the hotel’s extensive gardens. With the plants only in bud as yet, the grounds were
a mere shadow of their future selves – the view in summer would be spectacular.

The furniture, in keeping with the conservatory theme, was well-upholstered wicker, with comfortable chairs arranged in clusters
around low bamboo tables. It was Pam who spotted him first and waved. He hurried over and his mother stood up, arms outstretched
to greet him.

Dr Cecilia Peterson had been a beauty when young and was still an attractive woman now she was in her mid-fifties. She was
a little taller than her daughter-in-law, who sat beside her with her baby grandson on her knee. Not as slim as she once was,
but dressed with elegant simplicity, she could have passed for twenty years younger. She smiled, a dazzling smile, took her
son in her arms and kissed him firmly on both cheeks.

‘Wesley, it’s so good to see you.’ She held him at arm’s length. ‘Let me have a look at you, son. You’re looking well. And
what about Michael? Look at the size of him. I can’t believe how he’s grown.’ She leaned down and touched the baby’s cheek
and was rewarded with one of Michael’s wide grins. ‘Your father sends his love,’ she continued. Her accent was soft Trinidadian,
musical, redolent of sunnier climes. ‘And did you know Maritia brought her boyfriend to meet us last weekend? He’s curate
at a church in Oxford. Such a nice, gentle young man. I told her she could do worse.’

‘She told me. She e-mailed us last week,’ said Wesley, not mentioning that his sister had said that, before taking her new
love to meet their parents, she had felt a little apprehensive. They had pointed out the possible pitfalls of a mixed-race
marriage when Wesley and Pam’s relationship had become serious. Now Maritia too had chosen a white partner but, from Cecilia’s
reaction, it seemed that the curate had made a favourable impression – but then the Petersons were devout, churchgoing folk.

‘She e-mailed you? Don’t talk to me about computers, son. The ones in my surgery are always crashing or whatever it is they
call it. Terrible things. More trouble than they’re worth.’

‘My boss says exactly the same,’ said Wesley, laughing.

‘How is he, this Gerry Heffernan? Still getting on all right with him, are you?’

‘Oh, Gerry’s like a big teddy bear,’ said Pam. ‘He growls a bit but he’s soft underneath.’

Wesley smiled. He doubted whether Steve Carstairs would have agreed with Pam’s description of the boss.

‘Is he still seeing that American lady from Stokeworthy, Wes?’ Pam asked.

‘I think she’s away at the moment.’

‘That’s a shame,’ said Pam with genuine sympathy. ‘I’m sure he gets lonely in that house all by himself.’

‘He’s a widower, isn’t he? What happened to his wife?’ Cecilia asked. She had always been interested in people: that was what
made her a good GP. ‘How did she die?’

Wesley hesitated. ‘I think it was some sort of car accident but it’s not something you like to ask about, is it? It might
bring back painful memories.’

Cecilia nodded, happy with the answer; happy that she’d brought her boy up to consider other people’s feelings. ‘So what case
are you working on at the moment, Wesley? Pamela tells me there’s been a shooting.’

Wesley hadn’t wanted to talk shop but his mother, head inclined slightly, was clearly awaiting an answer. ‘Yes. A former rock
star called Jonny Shellmer was shot in a small village near Tradmouth.’

‘Oh, yes, I read about it in the paper. I remember Jonny Shellmer from years ago. He was in Rock Boat, wasn’t he?’ To Wesley’s
astonishment, she began to sing a snatch of a song, very softly, almost inaudibly. Then she started to laugh. ‘Your father
and I used to like that one when we were first married. It was on the radio all the time. “Angel”, that was it.’

Wesley was lost for words at discovering a side of his parents’ life he had never encountered before. He suddenly saw in his
mind’s eye a young couple, newly qualified as doctors, in love and far from their native land, setting up
home together, decorating their first flat and singing along with the songs on the radio – singing along with Jonny Shellmer.

‘There are some terrible things happening in this world,’ Cecilia muttered, shaking her head.

‘I expect you see some awful things in your job too,’ said Wesley lightly, trying to change the subject.

Cecilia frowned. ‘I had three cases of suspected child abuse last week, as well as the usual quota of women who’d “walked
into a door” – or into their boyfriends’ fists,’ she added with disgust. ‘And then there was a woman the week before who was
raped by her own brother. Honestly, I see some things that make my blood run cold.’ She saw that her son and daughter-in-law
were listening intently.

‘I suppose it’s always gone on but now people are more willing to talk about it and get help,’ said Pam thoughtfully.

‘You’re probably right, Pamela. But let’s change the subject, eh? We’re here for a nice lunch, so let’s forget about the world’s
problems for a while.’ She picked up a menu that was lying on the table. ‘What do you fancy, then?’

Wesley and Cecilia studied the menu as Pam went off to obtain a highchair for Michael. Wesley made his choice, handed the
large, shiny menu over to his mother and surreptitiously glanced at his watch. If he ate slowly he might avoid questioning
Alec Treadly altogether.

‘Where’s the chief inspector?’ Wesley asked as he made for his desk. The lunch had been good and he felt pleasantly full.
It was a pity he had to return to the station instead of enjoying a leisurely Sunday in the bosom of his family.

It was Rachel who answered. ‘He’s down in the interview room questioning Alec Treadly, and he’s left us to phone everyone
in Jonny Shellmer’s address book. Did you enjoy your lunch?’

‘Yes, thank you. It was lovely.’

‘How’s your mum enjoying Morbay?’

‘She’s spent most of her time at the conference, so she hasn’t had much time for sightseeing.’

‘She’s not missing much,’ Rachel answered with a smile. ‘The boss took Steve down with him to interview Treadly,’ she went
on, suddenly solemn. ‘Do you fancy relieving one of them? Fresh face, fresh approach?’

Wesley shook his head. If possible he wanted to avoid spending any time cooped up with a paedophile. ‘I’m sure Steve and the
boss are managing okay,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll give you a hand with the phone calls. Have you come across anything interesting
yet?’

‘Angela Simms’s number’s in the book.’ She looked at him expectantly but Wesley made no comment. He was thinking.

‘I know. Anything else?’

‘Most of the numbers are in London. Everyone seemed quite shocked and eager to help and there was nothing that rung any warning
bells. The Met are going to have a word with the people who claimed to know him well.’

‘What about the ex-member of Rock Boat who lives in Gloucestershire?’

‘No reply. I’ve a feeling that one might be worth following up.’ She opened Shellmer’s address book. ‘Then there’s a number
written in the front of the book with no name by it. I rang it and guess who answered. Jack Cromer – the TV presenter. It’s
his number.’

Wesley raised his eyebrows. Jack Cromer was a household name. He had started his TV career by presenting popular consumer
watchdog programmes, but now he was famed for his aggressive interviewing technique. His rise in the BBC had been fairly meteoric.
He habitually made mincemeat of the victims on his programme – it was rumoured that he had reduced some unfortunate spokes-woman
for a holiday company to tears with interrogation techniques more brutal than anything permitted by the Police and Criminal
Evidence Act. And now, along with several of his fellow celebrities, he had a second home in Derenham.