Resolutions (15 page)

‘He tells me he's managing,' Rina said.

‘I hope he'll be all right.'

Rina watched them as they opened the back doors of the car and scrambled inside. Vince, the usual driver from the local firm, waved at Rina and she waved back, standing on the doorstep until he drove away.

‘I hope we all will, George,' Rina said.

FOURTEEN

I
t had been a frustrating afternoon, Mac thought. They had applied for the CCTV footage from the court on the day of Rains's sentencing, but been told that it no longer existed. Recordings were kept for a month and then overwritten, which meant there was no way of actually verifying Rains's story about Peel being in the public gallery that day. Mac was starting to think it had just been a wind-up, by Rains himself or suggested by Peel.

Nothing useful either on Ricky Marlow. A request had been made for a warrant for his financial records and had so far met with resistance from the local judiciary. Marlow had powerful friends and a reputation for tough but honest dealing; additionally, officers had gone back and talked to the bar staff who'd been on that day, and had also met with a customer they identified as being a regular on Wednesday lunchtimes. He thought he remembered Peel from the photograph they showed him, definitely recalled ‘a bit of an altercation' and that Marlow had asked a rather drunk customer to leave. Recalled that the man said he hadn't finished his drink and that Marlow had offered a refund.

‘I remembered,' he said, ‘because I was ready to tell Mr Marlow that the staff hadn't served him above one drink, so he must have come in like that and the staff not noticed or whatever.' Mr Marlow was, apparently, very hot on his staff not serving the overly inebriated and the customer had not wanted Sally, a new employee of Marlow's and one the customer evidently admired, to find herself in trouble.

‘Interestingly,' Alec told Mac, ‘both staff on duty that lunchtime insisted that Peel had seemed stone cold sober when he'd come in and he'd only had the one drink.'

‘Give the man an Oscar,' Mac muttered. ‘So what's left?'

‘John Bennet,' Alec said. ‘We still need a word. He made a statement the day he reported seeing Peel. Time to see if he's remembered anything more.'

‘Fat chance.' Mac was inclined to be pessimistic. It was that sort of day.

Alec laughed. ‘Almost certainly right,' he agreed, ‘but best go through the motions, eh?'

John Bennet lived on the outskirts of Pinsent on one of those bland 1970s estates that had sprung up just before the 1980s brought the building industry to its knees and shrank the size of new builds for ever. The houses on the Freelands estate were large and oblong and large-windowed, with grassy frontages and off-road parking, arranged in a curling mass of little cul-de-sacs that all seemed to be part of the same road.

John Bennet's house was in the third cul-de-sac they tried, found after they'd finally figured out that the numbers ran consecutively and not odd on one side and even on the other.

It was dark and cold, and Mac was ready to pack up for the day, out of patience with himself, with Wildman, with the minutiae of an investigation he somehow had little faith in. He could not explain his mood or his depression; only that it wrapped his mind too much in memory, in a time that had already been fixed and a quest that had failed, miserably. He could not seem to convince himself that this time would be different. Maybe, he thought, he had just forgotten how tedious some police work could be. True, he had been assigned a posting in the back of beyond, but, even when major events had finally been persuaded to pass Frantham-on-Sea by and go and play elsewhere, he had not been bored. He had, unwittingly, become something of a neighbourhood policeman, part of the community, at home with a job that called upon him to take half an hour to walk the few hundred yards along the promenade, just because everyone stopped to talk to him, and where, should he pause to look out to sea, he might become involved in a deep discussion regarding the next day's weather. He liked it; he was happy. Back in Pinsent, he was homesick and heartsick. ‘Do you ever think about giving it up?' he asked Alec.

‘Sorry?'

‘Police work.' Mac stared vindictively at the semi-detached house they had now identified as John Bennet's. ‘Seventies architecture,' he said. ‘The decade of bland.'

‘We discussing ambition or architecture?' Alec asked.

‘Neither. Both. I don't know.'

Alec waited, but Mac was done with talk. He got out of the car and walked up the rough concrete path to the red front door set between two large windows. A rubber plant took up most of the entrance hall.

‘Who the hell has rubber plants these days?'

‘People who consider the aspidistra old-fashioned?' Alec suggested. He rang the bell, glanced anxiously at Mac. ‘I can handle this. Want to wait in the car?'

‘No, I'm fine. Just tired and . . .'

‘Jaundiced,' Alec said.

The inner door opened and John Bennet came out into the hall. He recognized Alec, stood back. ‘Go on through,' he said. ‘Tea? Coffee? Millie, it's Inspector Friedman and – sorry, I don't think we've met.'

‘Inspector McGregor,' Alec said, as though not trusting Mac to answer for himself. ‘Sorry to disturb your Saturday evening.'

‘Oh, not at all.'

The inside of the house was pretty much as Mac had expected. A long lounge-diner with patio doors at the end leading out into the garden. Millie was closing the heavy curtains as they came in. She turned, smiling. Two little girls sat at the dining table. ‘The kids are just having their tea,' she said. ‘Can I get you anything?'

Mac declined; Alec said he would like a coffee if it wasn't too much trouble. The room smelt of spaghetti hoops and tomato sauce, buttered toast. It was such an odd thing to do, Mac thought absently. Drown pasta in bright red sauce and plonk it on toast. George loved the stuff; Ursula, if she had to eat anything tinned and tomatoed, preferred beans. Funny, he thought, the random facts you picked up about people.

He took a seat on the plump blue sofa, aware of the wide-eyed children staring at them from the other end of the room.

‘So,' John Bennet said, ‘what can I do for you?'

‘We're reviewing evidence,' Mac said, finding his voice. ‘I know you've spoken previously to Alec here and other colleagues; I just wondered if you'd mind going over things again.'

Bennet looked slightly taken aback, then recovered himself. ‘No, not at all, but I don't think there is anything I can add. I went out at lunchtime on Wednesday last. Well, actually it was the Wednesday before last now, wasn't it?' he laughed, suddenly slightly nervous, as though he felt he might be taking a test. ‘I take sandwiches two or three times a week, but Wednesday I usually go to the little shop on the corner. It's become a bit of a habit, I suppose. Friday too, most Fridays anyway.'

‘Why Wednesday?' Mac wanted to know.

‘Why? Oh I see, well, Millie has a little job – she works Wednesday mornings, Thursday afternoons and sometimes Fridays. The local chemist shop. Occasionally she'll cover other days too, but her hours are nine till two on Wednesday, two till six on Thursday and, as I say, sometimes on a Friday. Oh and evenings when it's their turn on the rota.'

‘Rota?'

‘For late opening. All the local chemists are on a rota. Emergencies, you know: people trying to buy paracetamol at eleven o'clock at night, I suppose.' He laughed nervously. Millie arrived with Alec's coffee. ‘Ah, I was telling them about your job. About why I don't take a pack-up on Wednesdays.'

‘Oh, I don't get time on Wednesdays, not getting the girls to school and me to work and all the breakfast things tidied away before I go. I can't bear the thought of coming back to it all at lunchtime.'

‘Right,' Alec said. ‘Well, I suppose that's . . . Right then.'

Mac tried not to smile. ‘And this has been the arrangement for . . . how long?'

‘Oh, just this past year,' Millie said. ‘Just since I had this job.'

‘And this Wednesday when you saw Peel?' Mac could see Alec begin to frown, knew he'd picked up the same detail as Mac.

‘Oh,' John Bennet said, ‘well, as I told you all before, I was coming out of the cob shop and I saw him hurrying down the road. I knew it was Thomas – in fact, I almost called out to him and then I remembered, you know, that he wasn't the Thomas I used to work with any more, not after . . . well, you know.'

‘Not after he killed Cara Evans,' Mac said.

Millie glanced anxiously at her girls and then glared at him. ‘Please, Inspector. The children.'

‘So you followed him instead.'

‘Yes, yes, I did.'

‘You didn't think to phone the police straight away?'

‘I . . . I didn't have my phone. I'd left my mobile in the office.'

Mac nodded. ‘And you saw him go into the B & B where we now know he'd been staying.'

‘Yes, as I told you before. That's what I did.' He frowned. ‘Look, I'm not sure what all this is about and I'm not sure I like the way this conversation is going. You sound almost, well, accusing.'

‘No, Mr Bennet, I'm not accusing. Just tell me one thing, though. When you worked with Thomas Peel, did you buy your lunch at the same shop on a Wednesday then?'

‘Well, no, I told you, or rather Millie did. Just this past year, since she got her job.'

Alec drank his coffee and set the cup down on the tiled-top coffee table. Mac wondered if it had come with the house; it was certainly of the same vintage.

‘Unlucky for him, then,' he said quietly. ‘To come back to Pinsent and to happen to be in the street just as you happened to come by.'

Bennet frowned. ‘I don't like your tone,' he said. ‘I did the right thing. I saw him, I reported it.'

‘You did,' Alec agreed. ‘Thank you, Mr Bennet, Mrs Bennet. Have a pleasant evening.'

Sitting in the car, Mac said, ‘So, either Peel was watching John Bennet and knew his movements or . . .'

‘Or someone had the forethought to tell him.'

‘If Peel wanted to be seen. I know that's the assumption but—'

‘It's the right assumption,' Alec said. ‘Peel shows himself. The investigation is reopened. I came up here.' He was thinking aloud now, not sure where the thought led.

‘So, who told Peel where Bennet would be on a Wednesday lunchtime?'

Alec shrugged. ‘Bennet?' he suggested.

‘Why would he? Do we know how close they were before Peel went over to the dark side?'

‘Peel did that long before we knew about him.'

‘True. Did Bennet know? Did Bennet collude, or are we looking at an innocent man, and I'm just, as you say, jaundiced?'

Alec shrugged. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘But I think we need to keep him in mind.'

FIFTEEN

P
hilip Rains was dead. The news came just as Alec had dropped Mac at the flat and was heading for home. He spun the car around and returned to find Mac already standing in the doorway waiting for him.

Alec drove while Mac tried to get extra details before they arrived at the prison.

‘Stabbed to death,' Mac said. ‘A shiv made from a hacksaw blade.'

‘A hacksaw blade? How did that get past the searches? And what's wrong with the great tradition of the sharpened toothbrush handle?'

‘Apparently his attacker took metalwork classes – they think he got the broken blade from the scrap bin. Whatever, it did the job.' Mac thought of Alec's comments about Rains the day before. About him being unable to join the main prison population because of his proclivities. It looked as though he hadn't been safe anywhere.

‘What do we know about his killer?'

‘His name . . .' Mac consulted the hastily scribbled note he'd made and tried to read his own writing. ‘His name is Billy Tigh, convicted sex offender, though unlike Rains he prefers young women. Three counts of aggravated rape, just transferred this week, took exception to Rains from the moment he arrived.'

‘No honour among perverts,' Alec said. He pulled up at the gatehouse. Three marked cars had already parked in the yard beyond, and the scientific support van pulled up just behind as Alec showed their ID. ‘You should have had a cup of Bennet's coffee,' Alec said. ‘It's going to be a long night.'

Fifty miles down the coast, a knock came at Emily Peel's door. Calum opened it, still on the chain.

‘I'm here to see my daughter,' Thomas Peel said.

‘You're what!' Momentarily too startled to react, Calum soon recovered and pushed the door closed, but the hesitation had been enough and Thomas Peel thrust something long and metallic into the space between door and frame. Shocked, Calum realized that the man was armed, that the metal thing was a shotgun, that he, Calum, was facing both barrels. Hastily, he backed away, pressed against the wall, staring at the weapon, appalled at how solid it looked.

‘Open the door,' Peel said.

‘I–I can't. It's on the chain.'

Peel took a step back. ‘Contrary to what you might have seen in the films,' he said, ‘wood won't save you from a shotgun blast, so I suggest you remember that. Shove the door to, take off the chain, open it properly and let me in.'

Calum stared. Behind him, Emily came from the kitchen and into the hall, Frankie at her heels.

‘Oh my God.'

Thomas Peel heard the exclamation. ‘I've come to see my girl,' he told Calum again. ‘I'm not planning on hurting anyone. I just want to talk.'