A Perfect Death (34 page)

‘You’re looking well, Pam,’ Ian Rowe said with a smug smile that made Pam want to slap his face.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she said, taking a step back.

‘You really shouldn’t leave your back door unlocked, you know. I’m surprised Wesley didn’t tell you that. Or maybe you thought
that being married to a policeman puts you in some sort of protective bubble. Sorry to have startled you and all that but
you’ll really have to learn to be more careful.’

‘What are you doing here?’ she repeated. ‘And how did you find out where we lived?’

‘You’re not ex-directory. Very careless. Not like Wesley at all.’

‘What do you want?’ Her heart was thumping as she looked Rowe in the eye, her fists clenched in both fear and pent-up fury.
She wanted him out of her kitchen and out of her life. He was trouble.

She took a deep breath. ‘Wesley’s due back any minute.’

‘Good. I need to see him.’

She was tempted to tell him to get lost but she sensed that he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He wasn’t going to leave until
he got what he wanted. Whatever that was.

‘The police thought you were dead,’ she said, watching him suspiciously.

‘I nearly was,’ he answered quickly. ‘And if a certain person finds out I’m still alive I don’t reckon I’ll last long.’

Pam’s curiosity got the better of her. ‘What are you talking about?’

Rowe hesitated. ‘I’ll wait for Wesley. I need to tell him the whole story.’

He slumped on to a stool and ran his fingers through
his hair, leaving furrows in the greasy locks. He looked as though he needed a good bath and a meal. Pam’s charitable side
fought with her anger and eventually scored a little victory.

‘Do you want something to eat?’

Rowe looked up and gave her a smile that verged on the dazzling. Through the dirt and hunger, he still clung on to a vestige
of his charm. ‘I don’t want to put you to any trouble.’

She didn’t answer. Considering that a man who intruded into her home uninvited didn’t deserve much effort, she put some bread
in the toaster and opened a can of beans. Beans on toast. Student food to keep body and soul together. And keep Ian Rowe occupied
until Wesley turned up. Then she sat down on the stool opposite her unwelcome visitor, sending up a silent prayer that Amelia
wouldn’t call down as she sometimes did, wanting an extra bedtime story or a drink. She didn’t want to leave Rowe on his own.
She felt she couldn’t trust him not to rifle through their private belongings in search of money or credit cards.

‘What time does Wesley usually get in?’ Rowe asked.

‘That depends,’ she answered quickly. ‘Where have you been living since … since the fire?’

‘At a hostel for the homeless in Morbay, keeping my head down. They tried to bloody kill me so I’m taking no chances.’

‘Who did?’

He hesitated and shook his head.

‘Does anybody know you’re here?’

‘Only Demancour, Nadia’s boss. I paid him a visit
earlier. Don’t worry. I left him in one piece.’ He smiled. ‘I got it all wrong about him. I was led to believe he’d got his
hands on some valuable treasure, something he’d pinched from some museum or archaeological site. I thought he’d hand over
some of his ill-gotten gains in return for my silence. How wrong can you be?’

He began to laugh and the laughter gradually grew louder, almost uncontrollable. Pam watched him and felt a thrill of fear.
Could he be mad? Had he set fire to the cottage himself because of some sort of paranoid fear that ‘they’ were after him?
Could a lot of this be in his head?

The sound of a key in the front door made her jump. She hadn’t realised she was so tense. She felt a rush of relief that Wesley
was home and she called out to him loudly. ‘Wes. We’ve got a visitor. Ian Rowe’s here.’

She watched Rowe stand up and turn to face the door, drawing himself up to his full height.

Wesley appeared in the doorway. There was a look of shocked disbelief on his face, there for a moment then swiftly suppressed.
As he walked into the kitchen Pam caught his eye and gave him a slight nod, as if to say, ‘I’m OK,’ before starting to butter
Rowe’s toast. If Rowe was planning anything, he could hardly act while he was eating.

Wesley stared at Rowe for a few moments before speaking. ‘Where have you been?’ he said. ‘We’ve been looking for you. We thought
you were dead, until we got hold of your dental records.’

‘Ah, yes. I can explain that.’

‘Go on then.’

Wesley sat down on the stool beside Rowe and leaned towards him expectantly.

‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a bath, is there?’ Rowe asked. ‘The world of the homeless is fine if you want to disappear
for a while but it’s almost impossible to keep up the usual standards, if you see what I mean.’

‘Maybe later,’ Wesley said in a voice that told Pam he wasn’t falling for Rowe’s smooth talk a second time. ‘What made you
come here?’

‘I need to know what’s going on. And a bit of police protection wouldn’t come amiss.’

‘We’ll see,’ Wesley said firmly. He wasn’t going to make Rowe any promises. ‘Look, Ian, I want to know everything. The lot.
And don’t leave anything out.’

Pam spooned the beans on to the toast and pushed the plate under Rowe’s nose. He began to shovel the food into his mouth like
a man who hadn’t eaten for a while. When the plate was clean he sat back, satisfied, and gave Wesley a smile.

‘I’ve made a bit of an ass of myself, Wesley. And now I think I’m in the proverbial shit.’

‘Go on.’ Wesley spoke softly, inviting confidences.

‘I’ve just been round to Yves Demancour’s place. And if he tells you I threatened or assaulted him, he’s lying. I just wanted
to find out what happened to Nadia.’

‘You told me you asked Demancour for money.’ Pam couldn’t let him get away with that one.

‘OK. Nadia told me he’d found some treasure, something
fantastic, so I thought he’d be OK for a few quid. Anyway …’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Anyway this fantastic treasure
turned out to be some mouldy old book.’

‘You asked him about Nadia?’

‘He claims he knows no more than I do.’

‘Believe him?’

‘No. He’s lying. I think he could have killed her. He’s weird enough to set light to her like that. You’ve met him, I presume?’

Wesley didn’t answer the question. ‘Tell me what happened.’

Pam watched Rowe’s face. She guessed that this was what suspects looked like when they were about to tell all. She sat quite
still, not wanting to distract Rowe from his revelations.

‘I came back to Devon to see Martin Crace.’

‘We know about that. We found the letter in your holdall. You made the appointment through Eva Liversedge.’

‘Of course. She deals with all his appointments. He’s always saying he’s got no secrets from her. Not altogether true but—’

‘And did Eva know where you were staying?’

‘Yes. I told her I was at Jack’s cottage. I feel a bit bad about taking off like that after the fire. Jack’s been good to
me, letting me stay there, but I reckoned that, if someone was trying to kill me, it might not be wise to hang around. Mind
you, I suppose he’s insured. Jack likes to do things properly.’ He focused the charming smile on Pam again. ‘Not like me.
Wing and a prayer, me.’

‘Why did you want to see Crace?’ Wesley asked.

‘That’s my business.’

‘Ian, people have been killed,’ Pam heard herself say, rather to her surprise. ‘You’ve got to tell Wes everything you know.’

‘Truth is, I don’t reckon I know very much. I thought I did but—’

‘You haven’t answered my question,’ said Wesley. ‘Why did you want to see Sir Martin? You can either talk here or we can go
back to the police station and you’ll be interviewed properly under caution with the tapes running.’

Rowe raised his hands in mock surrender. ‘OK, OK. Don’t go all Mr Plod on me.’ He paused for a few moments, gathering his
thoughts. ‘I wanted to confront him.’

‘Confront him?’

‘I wanted him to take a DNA test. Martin Crace is my father.’

Pam glanced at Wesley and saw that he looked as surprised as she was.

‘He edged me out of my job there … said I’d been drinking when I hadn’t. At first I wondered whether he thought I’d stumbled
on something he didn’t want known, like some scam or … I asked Nadia to keep an eye out for anything unusual but she drew a
blank.’

‘So what makes you think he’s your father?’ Pam asked.

‘I needed a blood transfusion once when I had an accident. I found out then that the man I’d thought was my father wasn’t.
My mother would never say who
my real father was, only that I’d be proud of him. She used to say how she’d known Crace when he was young. She’d worked for
his dad or something. I could tell he meant a lot to her but I didn’t know why till after she died six months ago and I read
through some old diaries she’d left locked away in an old suitcase in the loft. It was all there.’

‘What was?’

‘Like I said, they were old diaries and it was all teenage stuff about how she was in love with him and how they used to meet.
When I was working for him I told him who my mum was and he said he remembered her but he was sort of cagey – made out she
was just a Saturday girl in his dad’s shop and he hardly knew her.’

‘Teenage girls have been known to have fantasies … and write them down in their diaries,’ said Pam as though she knew what
she was talking about.

But Rowe ignored her. ‘Everything was OK for a while then I got the feeling I was being edged out, as if he didn’t want me
around, and I started to ask myself why he wanted rid of me. Then six months ago, when I found the diaries, I knew.’

‘Where are the diaries now?’

Rowe put his head in his hands. ‘I left them on the coffee table in the living room of that bloody cottage, didn’t I? I was
going to look through them before the meeting … prepare my case. But everything in that room went up in smoke. Nothing left.’

Pam was tempted to say, ‘How convenient,’ but she decided to keep silent.

‘Who else knew about this?’ Wesley asked.

‘Nadia … and Jack. I mentioned it to Jack but he told me to leave it. He reckoned Crace’d never admit it.’ He thought for a
moment. ‘Crace is a clever man, Wes.’

‘I can’t understand why you didn’t just ask your mother straight out about her relationship with Crace when she was alive,’
Pam said.

Rowe looked away. ‘Like I said, she died six months ago. But she’d spent the last couple of years of her life away with the
fairies in a haze of vodka.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. We never really got on.’

‘You didn’t think of asking Sir Martin straight out if he’d had an affair with your mother?’ she continued.

‘Pam’s right, Ian. I don’t really understand.’

‘Image, dear boy. If it’s one thing Sir Martin Crace doesn’t want, it’s a scandal.’

Pam snorted. ‘In this day and age. So he got a girl pregnant when he was young. Big deal. He could even have turned it to
his advantage. Tearful father and son reunion.’

She saw Wesley give her an admiring glance. He knew she was right.

‘Ah … that’s the awkward bit. When my mum died I discovered that she was only just fifteen when she had me. Getting a fourteen-year-old
girl pregnant when he must have been around twenty wouldn’t have looked good on Crace’s CV, would it?’

‘That’s more like it,’ Wesley whispered.

‘Since I read those stupid teenage diaries I’ve been
wondering what to do about it. The dates were right, you see. Then I plucked up the courage to ask for an appointment and
when the letter came from Eva I admit I was surprised. I’d expected to be fobbed off. In fact I rang Eva when I arrived in
Devon and dropped a few hints.’ He smiled. ‘Something like “Some papers left by my late mother contain some interesting facts.”
I thought she’d tell Crace and it might get him worried. Soften him up. Then I spelled out a few home truths and I said that
once it was proved who my father was, she’d treat me with a bit more respect. She’d treated me like shit in the past so I
couldn’t resist it.’

Pam looked at Wesley. The thing about Sir Martin Crace being Rowe’s father could well be a figment of his vivid imagination,
she thought. That was the trouble with people like Rowe: it was hard to know what to believe.

‘I presume Nadia knew about all this?’ said Wesley.

‘We saw the e-mail she sent warning you to be careful.’

‘Oh, yes. She knew everything and she agreed that I had a right to know the truth – just like she wanted to know the truth
about her own mum.’

‘Perhaps she confronted Crace herself ?’ Pam suggested.

Rowe hesitated. ‘I don’t … No. She’d have told me. After all, it’s almost like heresy to say anything against Martin Crace,
isn’t it? She wouldn’t have acted on her own. Surely.’ Somehow he didn’t sound too sure of himself.

Pam was starting to feel confused and one look at Wesley told her that he was too. Either Sir Martin was
the bad guy or he wasn’t. But if Rowe’s story was true, his reputation might never recover.

‘What about the cottage? One of Sir Martin Crace’s security men was found dead inside.’

Rowe gave a low whistle. ‘Was that who it was?’

‘His name was Denis Wade. He was knocked unconscious then the cottage was set on fire. You were there at the time. Did you
kill him?’

Rowe looked outraged. ‘Absolutely not. I had nothing to do with it. I might not be a saint but I draw the line at murder.’

‘So tell me what happened.’

‘OK. I’m upstairs and I hear someone smash the window. I creep to the top of the stairs and see this guy going into the living
room so I make my way downstairs and I stand by the door. I can hear him opening drawers and searching the place, so while
he’s busy I manage to get outside, intending to get in Nadia’s car and drive off. But I’ve left the bloody car keys upstairs,
haven’t I? Stupid. Anyway, I’m just wondering what to do when this car drives up so I hide behind some trees but it’s pitch
dark and I can’t see much so don’t ask me to tell you the make or number or anything like that. Someone gets out and I hear
them going up to the front door and … there’s no sound of glass breaking or anything so maybe I’d not closed it properly. Anyway,
I wait there for a while until whoever it is has driven away then I see flames at the windows and I think, bloody hell, they’ve
set the place on fire. They must have really wanted rid of me. I thought they were together, you see. I thought the second
one had joined
the first. Then I make for the main road and I manage to hitch a lift to Morbay and that’s where I’ve been, lying low.’