The Power of One

by Jane A. Adams

  Fitch, originally an employee of Joy’s father, was, as a result of what had happened that Spring, now more a member of the family and Rina knew the Duggans felt they owed herself and Tim a great debt. She was profoundly glad to be able to call on that now.

  ‘We shouldn’t tell Lydia and Edward,’ Rina said. ‘That we’ve been shot at, I mean.’

  ‘Lucky he missed then,’ Tim said. ‘But Rina, as soon as our guests are safe, we have to tell Mac what happened at the house. Someone else might get in their way and not be so lucky. As it is, I think you’ll be the one waving the white flag this time. And I think you should have those flowers and chocolates ready in reserve.’

  An hour later and with basic equipment quickly gathered, the de Freitas’s were ready to leave. Rina had revised her earlier plans and they would now be taken to the old farm she had thought of, just until Fitch could get to them. He would collect them from there and take them North, the Duggans having far more resources of the security kind at their disposal than Rina could possible muster. And, Rina figured, given the late Jimmy Duggan’s various criminal contacts and connections – many of which, Rina admitted, she’d still rather not know about – it was likely that they might be able to get a handle on what was going on.

  ‘Can’t we just stay here?’ Lydia had asked, nervous of moving from a place of safety.

  Rina exchanged a glance with Tim. ‘We think someone was watching when we left the house,’ she said, resorting to a half-truth. ‘Just in case they trace the car, I’d like to get you away from here.’

  Lydia stared at her, then nodded. ‘I’m scared, Rina. I thought I could handle just about anything. I’ve always been the strong one, the organised one. Kept things anchored while Edward did his thing, you know? But I can’t handle this.’

  ‘You can,’ Rina told her. ‘You are. Our friend will come and get you and take you somewhere safe and we’ll sort things out at this end.’

  ‘But what if they come after you? Rina, I just can’t believe I’ve been so thoughtless as to involve you and the rest of them. What if …’

  Rina patted her arm. ‘We’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Let’s just get you away, shall we?’

  They took the de Freitas’s out the back way, into a narrow street where Tim regularly parked the car. It was a dead end, used mainly by local residents, so strange cars stood out as did anyone hanging about. Matthew did a quick reconnaissance, walking round the block and coming back in the front door, while Steven watched from the upstairs window. Their bags already in the vehicle, it remained only for Lydia and Edward to join them. A last check and Tim hustled them inside. They ducked down in the back, plaid blankets Tim kept in the car pulled over their heads.

  ‘I’ll have to go straight on to work,’ Tim told Rina. ‘I’ll give you a call about eight thirty, after my first set. Meantime, you get on to Mac, OK?’

  Rina nodded. ‘Now go, and Tim, take care.’

  TWENTY

  Rina waited half an hour before she called Mac. Half an hour of pacing and fretting and looking anxiously out of the window for cars that might suddenly have moved or strangers that showed too much interest in Peverill Lodge.

  Mac wasn’t there, and Sergeant Baker, curious as to what the redoubtable Mrs Martin wanted, didn’t know when he’d be back.

  ‘No, thank you,’ Rina told him. ‘I don’t think you can help. Will you just ask him to give me a ring?’

  She stood in the hall, undecided. Then tried Mac’s mobile only to be diverted on to his voicemail.

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake.’ She gave up and instead marched into the kitchen and, for want of anything else to do, filled the kettle and set it on the range.

  ‘You won’t help anything by storming around like some unhappy rhino, Rina dear,’ Bethany told her from the doorway. ‘Not that you are anything like a rhino, of course, you’re far too slim and elegant for that.’

  ‘But they do talk about a crash of rhino, don’t they?’ Eliza attempted to come to her sister’s rescue. ‘And you are crashing rather.’

  Rina turned, exasperated, harsh words rising to her lips. She swallowed them down; the sight of the Peters sisters, pretty, still artfully blonde, still, Rina thought, children despite their now advancing years, doused her anger.

  ‘I’ve always thought of Rina more as a secretary bird,’ Matthew said, wandering in. ‘All elegance and jaunty feathers and long neck but with a sharp beak at the ready to impale her prey.’

  Rina, who in turn had always thought of Matthew as a man-sized saluki, couldn’t help but laugh. ‘I’m not sure I like your version of me any better,’ she said. ‘But you’re right, this really won’t help anyone. Better to be doing.’

  She patted Matthew affectionately on the arm and sailed out of the kitchen, thinking about the photocopy Mac had given her. That was a puzzle to solve and, hopefully, something to take her mind off the worry. She knew Tim had been as shaken as she had by the gunshot and was as concerned as Rina that the gunman would have found out who and where they were. He’d be alert and careful.

  Perhaps she should have confided in Sergeant Baker.

  Shaking her head and forcibly pushing her anxiety aside, Rina went into her little room and closed the door.

  ‘What is this place?’ Lydia asked as they got out of the car in front of the old farmhouse. The drive was even more overgrown than Tim remembered it, nettles and brambles reaching out across the gap, hawthorn scraping the sides of the car. The privet hedge that surrounded the farmyard itself was a good foot higher, twined through with bindweed and belladonna. Birds sang, but beyond that there was utter silence.

  Two of the farmhouse windows had been boarded up since Tim had last been there and the front door had gained a padlock; Tim supposed the police had affixed that when the house was still considered a crime scene.

  ‘Who owns this place?’

  ‘I actually have no idea,’ Tim said. ‘But no one’s lived here in years. You won’t be here for long and you saw how long the drive was. We can’t be seen from the road.’

  ‘It still looks … I don’t know. Creepy. How did you know about this place?’

  Tim was rummaging in the boot of the car, sorting through his tool kit, trying to find something to break the padlock off the door. He wondered what to tell Lydia in response to her question. He’d been puzzling about this since they left Peverill Lodge and now decided something close to the truth would have to do. A large screwdriver found to attack the door, he emerged from behind the car. ‘Just before you came to live in Frantham, there was a kidnapping, just a few miles away. Two little girls. They were held here for a while. Our friend Fitch helped to find them.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Lydia said. ‘I read about that in the newspaper. Wasn’t there a siege or something?’

  Tim nodded. He slid the blade of the screwdriver behind the door and pulled, wrenching the screws out of the door frame with a splintering crack.

  He held the door open. ‘Shall we? Don’t worry, it’s only for a few hours. Fitch has somewhere far more comfortable in mind.’

  Reluctantly, they followed Tim in. ‘Kitchen on the left, living room on the right. There’s a toilet through the back there and I can soon get the water back on.’ He stood, uncertain, at the foot of the stairs, ‘Look. I know it’s kind of, well, primitive …’

  ‘Do we have to stay here?’

  Edward took his wife’s hand. ‘Think of it as camping out,’ he said. ‘We’ve not done that since before we got married.’

  Looking at him, Tim was surprised to find that Edward actually looked better than he had since he’d arrived at Peverill Lodge. Some of the colour had returned to his cheeks and he had a look of purposefulness in his eyes.

  ‘Camping out?’ Lydia stared at him in disbelief, then to Tim’s relief she laughed out loud. ‘Oh, lord; you are such an idiot sometimes.’ She kissed him gently on the cheek and Tim retreated to fetch their gear from the car. Something about that little kiss was so tender and so intimate
he could not have felt more like a voyeur if he’d surprised them making love. He took his time taking the suitcases and the supplies from the car. As Edward came out to help, Tim’s phone rang. It was Fitch, with an ETA. Tim handed the phone to Edward so that he could speak with their incipient rescuer and by the time he gave the mobile back to Tim, he was looking happier and more confident.

  ‘I’m going to have to be off soon,’ Tim said as they carried bags and supplies back into the house. ‘I’ve got to get to work and I want to take the long way round.’

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ Lydia told him. ‘Don’t worry. And we really are grateful, you know.’ She smiled, wryly. ‘It’s all a bit surreal, isn’t it? Paul would have used this as a scenario for a game.’

  She glanced anxiously at her husband, suddenly aware that she might have said the wrong thing. Edward slipped an arm around her shoulder.

  ‘Well,’ he said softly. ‘I think we shall have to do it for him, won’t we?’

  Rina was trying to work out where the clipping might have come from. Not having the actual article was a nuisance; The Frantham Gazette, a little pamphlet of a thing imparting parish news had quite a distinctive pinkish look and the Echo, the local free paper, purveyor of coastal news and advertising for local business had a buff hue, like most of the bigger locals, for whom that was a little offshoot.

  She dragged out various examples from the recycling bin, collecting a mug of tea on the way through the kitchen and then began the task of comparing typefaces. Her worry was this advert came from one of the national papers and therefore might be much more difficult to place but a quick flick through of the personal ads, and more precisely the funeral announcements, convinced her that she was looking at a torn up bit of the Echo. Same typeface, same typical layout, so far as she could tell, the real giveaway being the double black line that surrounded all funerary announcements.

  Returning to the kitchen with her discards and helping herself to more tea, Rina rummaged in the recycling for any other copies of the Echo; came up with three.

  ‘Births, marriages and deaths,’ she said as she passed a mystified Steven in the hall.

  She was familiar with the layout of these columns in the Echo, but she had only ever scanned them before, not analysed the layout in any depth. Death announcements, as was usual, were in the later columns, with funeral information always on the right hand page and in the column closest to the edge. They all had this double black line, though they varied in size and some had other emblems of death and mourning. Ivy leaves and funeral urns seemed popular, she noted. She wondered, in a spirit of mischief, if she could arrange to have dancing skeletons on hers and then abandoned the idea on the grounds that she wouldn’t be there to share the joke.

  The announcement for Payne 23 seemed to have come from the top of the column, the margins still running along the right-hand edge and the top corner still intact. She compared it to the way others were laid out.

  ‘So your last name was Payne. Obvious enough and the line below must have been your year of birth and death.’ Stopped in her tracks by the obvious nonsense of that, Rina looked again at the columns. ‘But no, that definitely can’t be right, can it. If you’d been born in 1923 then that would be the date left on the page when this piece was torn off. The left-hand date, not the right hand … and as we haven’t got to 2023 yet, well … now that really doesn’t make sense.

  ‘And if it had been a funeral date, say, September the twenty-third, well, no. That doesn’t work either, does it?’

  She scanned the pages for clues, but found nothing at first. A second newspaper made her wonder if this was part of a phone number. Beneath the name of one Betsy Marriot, for example, was the invitation for her friends and relatives to phone should they need further information and the number was given. But, surely, you wouldn’t just put a number without an advisory message and it was clear from the placement of the number 23, immediately beneath the PA of Payne, that no additional message had been present.

  What was going on?

  Rina scanned the other copies of the Frantham Echo for any further clue and found it, tucked at the bottom of a column from three weeks before.

  ‘Arthur Payne,’ she read, ‘b. June 1923. To give all friends and family the chance to attend, the funeral of Uncle Arthur has been delayed. Please call Paul for further details.’

  The hall phone rang and Rina heard Bethany answer it. ‘Hello, Peverill Lodge. Oh Rina, dear, it’s for you.’

  Mac, Rina thought. She took the receiver from Bethany and retreated once more to her room. ‘Yes, Mac, something is very wrong and I need to speak with you properly. Now. And I’ve solved the puzzle, or rather I’ve found another piece of it. Payne 23. I’ve found another death announcement for the poor man.’

  Fitch had called them to say he was five minutes away. To be ready to leave. Lydia and Edward stood in the hallway, conscious of the dark stairs behind them, of the dramatic events that had taken place here and which now seemed to poison the atmosphere of the place, despite its peaceful, tranquil surroundings.

  They would be glad to leave.

  The car headlights coming up the drive caused a feeling of panic which Lydia fought to control. What if this wasn’t the man Rina had sent for them? What if it was … them?

  Lights were doused. The bulky man who eased himself from the driver’s seat matched the description they had been given. The surprise was the smaller, slighter figure that slipped from the passenger side.

  ‘Hello,’ the girl said, fair hair gleaming in the headlights. ‘I’m Joy Duggan. Mum thought we ought to balance things up a bit, you know, all this macho stuff going on? This is Fitch. Fitch, say hello to the nice people.’

  Fitch came forward, hand extended. ‘Don’t mind her,’ he said. ‘She has one little adventure and thinks she’s Lara Croft or something.’ He shook Edward’s hand and then Lydia’s. ‘I suggest we get a move on,’ he said. ‘Rina doesn’t think we should hang around down south longer than we have to.’

  He put their suitcases in the car, assured them that it was fine to leave everything else behind. Tim would take care of that later. Got Lydia and Edward settled in the back of the Range Rover. It wasn’t easy to turn the large vehicle in the small space in front of the house, but Fitch made it look casually simple. Within minutes of their arrival, they were heading back down the long drive, brambles and hawthorn scraping at the windows and the paintwork and then back out on to the little road and heading for the motorway.

  ‘We thought the four-by-four would be best,’ Fitch told them. ‘The rear windows are smoked glass, gives you a bit more privacy. Bridie, Mrs Duggan, she’s getting one of the guest rooms ready and you’ll be welcome for as long as you need.’

  ‘This is really kind,’ Lydia said.

  ‘Oh, Mum will love having you. She’s been wanting to do something to say thanks to Rina for ages. Rina isn’t the easiest person to pay back favours to, you know.’

  ‘You’ve known her for long?’

  ‘Only since spring. My brother was murdered. Rina helped out.’ She hesitated for a moment and then asked, ‘Is Tim all right. Did he, um, say anything?’

  ‘What she wants to know,’ Fitch said, ‘is did Tim give you any message for her. I mean any additional messages to the ones he texts to her three or four times a day or what they manage to fit in on those hour-long phone calls. Not to mention the emails and …’

  Joy giggled, embarrassed but pleased.

  ‘He didn’t know you were coming, remember,’ Fitch said. ‘So he’s not likely to have left you a love note is he? Mind if I put some music on? And if it’s all right with everyone, we’ll stop for coffee once were safely on the M5, I thought the services just the other side of Bristol. Then we’ll do the rest in one if that’s all right. Sooner we get home, the better I will feel.’

  ‘We should let Rina know we’re all right,’ Lydia said.

  ‘Yes, do that,’ Fitch agreed.

  ‘Use your phone,’ Edward t
old her. ‘My battery’s about flat.’

  Lydia rummaged in her bag, found her mobile, and switched it on for the first time since Rina had fetched her bag from the house. She dialled Rina’s number to tell her they were safe with Fitch and on their way, not realising that the satnav transmitter in her phone, activated the moment she switched it on, now made them anything but.

  Mac, unable to reply to Rina’s summons immediately, had arrived some twenty minutes after Lydia called. He took one look at her face and demanded to know what she’d been up to.

  ‘You are not going to be pleased with me,’ she said. ‘But, please, Mac, take a deep breath and keep your mouth shut until I tell you everything.’

  Mac seethed as she filled him in. Telling him about the de Freitas’s suddenly turning up on her doorstep, that she and Tim had gone to collect their things and the events at the house.

  ‘Someone shot at you? Rina, why the hell didn’t you call me? Dial nine, nine, nine? For God’s sake, woman, if there are people wandering around the countryside with guns …’

  ‘There are,’ Rina told him coldly. ‘Regularly people wandering around the countryside carrying weapons. We usually call them farmers. But no, I suppose you’re right and I’m sorry, but if Lydia and Edward thought we were involving the authorities, they’d have run further than Peverill Lodge and who knows what would have happened to them.’

  ‘Instead of which they are?’

  ‘With Fitch, on their way to Manchester to stay with the Duggans.’

  She watched as Mac absorbed this, understanding that he may not be quite as impressed as Rina had hoped. The Duggan family were, of course, not quite on his side of the law and order divide. ‘Bridie Duggan will look after them. I can’t see many people trying to get into their place; she’s got it done up like Fort Knox.’