Resolutions

by Jane A. Adams

  ‘Thomas Peel,’ Alec said.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Been in touch, has he?’

  Rains sighed. ‘And why should he have been? We’ve got nothing to say to one another. Not now.’

  ‘But at one time? No, don’t bother answering that: we know you had a lot to say to one another. Regular correspondents, weren’t you? Email and little postcards and the telephone conversations. Oh, and the blackmail, of course.’

  Rains looked away. ‘I told you: that was then. He’s the reason I’m here, nothing more to say.’

  ‘Oh,’ Alec said. ‘Peel is the reason you’re here, is he? I thought it was the children you abused, the ones you photographed.’

  Rains’s attention snapped back in Alec’s direction. ‘Photographed, yes. I never touched them though.’

  ‘But you watched while others did more.’ It was the first time Mac had spoken, and Rains turned his head slowly to regard him with a surprisingly steady gaze.

  ‘I know about you,’ Rains said. ‘You were the cop that got that girl killed. Peel told me so. He said he’d never have cut her throat if you hadn’t been there. He said your face was an absolute picture.’

  Mac drew a deep breath and then held it, releasing it slowly before he spoke. He was relieved beyond measure that his voice was almost steady. ‘I don’t doubt it was,’ he said. ‘I would count myself a much lesser man if I hadn’t reacted to the death of a child. Would you have taken a picture of that too, Mr Rains?’

  Rains took a swallow of his coffee but did not speak.

  Mac was aware of Alec’s anxious glance, knew he had to maintain his control. Test number one had been accepting the offer of return to the case; here was test number two. ‘So,’ Mac asked, ‘has your erstwhile colleague been back in touch?’

  ‘Erstwhile,’ Rains savoured the word. ‘Use big words like that in here and you’d get a shiv in your back just for being a ponce. No, my erstwhile friend has not been in touch. Not since he came to watch me being sentenced.’

  Alec and Mac exchanged a glance, and Mac saw Rains smile. He knew the man felt he had scored a point. Rains had been sentenced months after Cara Evans had been killed, and the hunt for Peel had still been intense.

  ‘Came to gloat, did he?’ Alec asked innocently, and Mac was encouraged to see the transient look of disappointment that fled across Rains’s face.

  ‘I’m surprised you said nothing,’ Mac added. ‘After all, you seem to blame Thomas Peel for, shall we say, drawing attention to you in the first place. Without his help, we might never have caught up with you. But, I suppose, you already know that?’

  Rains flinched, the satisfaction now completely wiped from his face. Mac drove the point home. ‘A simple word would have done, I’d have thought. A little note to your barrister, telling him that one of the most wanted men in the country was sitting in the courtroom. Where was he, Rains – sitting in the public gallery? Did he smile and wave when the sentence was handed down? Or did he cheer like all the rest? Did he spit at you when they led you out, Rains? After all, he’d have to blend in, wouldn’t he?’

  Rains was on his feet, the plastic coffee cup falling to the floor as he knocked the table in his haste to get up. Out of the corner of his eye, Mac could see the two men in the observation room start to move towards the door and he saw Alec gesture that it was all right.

  ‘You must be very frightened of him,’ Mac said softly. ‘Very loyal or very much afraid and, well, given that Peel showed you so little loyalty, I’d have to draw the second conclusion.’

  ‘I’ve nothing more to say,’ Rains said, and Mac could see that he was badly shaken, though he was unsure of what exactly he had said to have disturbed the man’s composure.

  ‘What would happen if he thought you had?’ Mac asked. ‘Had more to say, I mean.’

  ‘And why tell us now that Peel was in the courtroom?’ Alec mused. ‘Did he tell you to?’ He sighed. ‘That’s the one big weakness he has, in my book. This tendency to showboat. The need for the world to know how clever he is, getting one over on a court full of judges and reporters and police like that. It must have really frustrated him that no one noticed, but, I suppose, like everything else, he knew that it was a bit of information that might come in useful one day. He must have felt that time was now.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Rains said.

  Mac could almost see Rains’s mind working as Alec pressed the point home, Rains trying to figure out who was the fool here. ‘So, he knew we’d be bound to come and talk to you some time soon, seeing as how the Cara Evans case has been upgraded to active again, and how you and he were once so close and all. So, the way I see it is this: he’s been in touch, time to time, maybe telling you he’s sorry to have dropped you in it, maybe even telling you to hang tight, say what you know the parole board will want to hear, wait it all out, and then the two of you, when you get out, well, it’ll be just like old times. Is that what he’s been telling you, Rains?’

  A sharp look told Mac they’d hit home somewhere. ‘And then he tells you, Rains, old friend, play that ace. Tell them I was there in the courtroom. Tell the pigs when they come to talk to you that I was there, within reach, and that I was still too clever for the bastards. Is that what he told you to say?’ Alec waited for a response, but Rains, fists clenched at his side, gaze fixed firmly on the floor, said nothing.

  Mac stood and Alec followed his lead, signalling to the officers that they had done with the prisoner.

  ‘Pity we weren’t impressed,’ Alec said. ‘Like my friend here said, Peel is an exhibitionist, can’t resist the urge to show off.’ He shook his head sadly at Rains. ‘You can’t hope to compete, not even vicariously.’

  He dug in his pocket for change and crossed to the coffee machine, deliberately ignoring Rains. ‘You want anything?’ he asked Mac.

  Mac shook his head. ‘I’m not a big fan of machine coffee,’ he said.

  ‘Prefer the coffee shop on the promenade, don’t you? That Italian stuff with the syrup,’ Rains said.

  Mac stiffened. He turned to look at Rains, schooling his expression to maintain some semblance of neutrality. ‘Peel tell you that, did he?’

  Rains was exultant now. ‘He knows all about you, McGregor. He knows just how much he hurt you, just how much of a problem you had with the booze – and you know what? He’s going to finish what he started, grind you into the dust.’

  ‘That what he did to you, is it?’ Alec asked casually. He took a swallow of his coffee and grimaced. ‘Think I’m with you,’ he said to Mac. ‘This is truly bad.’

  The prison officers were ready now to escort Rains back to his cell, and Mac followed Alec through to the observation room. His heart thumped and his chest tightened so rigidly he thought he might run out of breath. Already he could hear the blood pounding in his ears and a red mist blurred his vision.

  Alec pulled out two chairs. ‘Sit,’ he said quietly. ‘Take a minute, Mac.’

  Dimly, Mac heard him leave the room and go and speak with someone outside. Then he was back. ‘I’ve requested the visitor book and the phone records for the past three months,’ he said. ‘We’ll go back further if we have to, but Peel only floated to the surface again this past month or two; I’d make a bet on him being in those records. Oh, and they’re bringing in some tea.’

  Mac took a deep breath and nodded. ‘If Peel’s been watching me . . .’

  ‘Then you need to let your people know. Exeter too. See if they can put any extra support in while you’re gone.’

  ‘I’ll get on to DI Kendal,’ Mac said. ‘I’ve worked several cases with him since I’ve been down there. Frank and Andy need to be given the heads up and so do—’

  ‘Anyone who knows you down there, Mac. Look, if Peel is taking that much of an interest, maybe you should get yourself back down there. You’ll be splitting yourself in two, worrying about your friends and trying to keep on top of what’s happening this end.’

  ‘You don’
t think I’m up to it?’ Mac asked harshly.

  Alec shrugged. ‘Damn sure I wouldn’t be,’ he said frankly. He groaned, suddenly thinking of something.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. I’m just visualizing the moment we have to brief DCI Wildman, that’s all.’

  Mac managed to laugh. ‘He will, no doubt, be delighted,’ he said. ‘Probably leave me tethered out in a field somewhere as bait.’

  ‘Not funny, Mac,’ Alec said, and Mac nodded as the realization hit them both that this was exactly what Mac was, and for that reason, if no other, he had to stay.

  For the next hour or so they went through the records of visits and phone calls. On the visitors front there was little enough to look at. None of Rains’s family came to see him and his friends seemed to have melted away. He’d had a local vicar, one Reverend Tom Longdon, come to see him twice, and a woman called Sara Curtis who was on the list of official prison visitors. During the past month he had made only two phone calls, both to his legal representative, and received only three. Two of those had been regarding his parole hearing and the third was from the same Reverend Longdon. Other than that, Rains seemed to have had little or no contact with the outside world for at least the past three months.

  ‘You fancy the Reverend Longdon for being Peel in disguise?’ Alec joked as they drove away, heading – late – to their second appointment of the day.

  ‘Or maybe this Sara Curtis,’ Mac suggested. ‘Thomas Peel in drag.’

  He closed his eyes, leaning his head back against the rest and striving for composure, or at least the surface veneer of it. He had, he reckoned, spoken Thomas Peel’s name more times in the past twenty-four hours than he had in the past year and, he was almost relieved to discover, Rina and Andy Nevins were right: the name did not fill him with so much dread. He had taken possession of it, used it, exposed it for what it was: just two words, just sounds, just letters, strung together in a particular configuration.

  ‘Why would he want to stalk me?’ Mac ventured. ‘I mean, that’s what it amounts to, isn’t it?’

  ‘Unless, of course, that was just one random fact Peel managed to acquire and happened to mention to Rains, knowing he’d pass it on to us.’

  ‘Which sounds really likely, I don’t think,’ Mac said. ‘But why now?’

  ‘We don’t know that it is just now,’ Alec pointed out. ‘You may well have been the object of his attention ever since he killed Cara Evans.’

  Mac shook his head, closing his eyes again. He could feel Alec’s scrutiny. ‘No, it has to be more recent. Before DI Eden retired, I hardly used the place. Eden made the most foul coffee imaginable, strong enough to stand a spoon up in – that’s if it didn’t eat its way through the metal first. Eden went in July and I started to buy my coffee regularly at the coffee shop on the promenade just after that.’ He opened his eyes, stared out through the front windscreen. ‘I can’t believe I didn’t see him.’

  ‘He may not have been there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, it would have been simple enough for Peel to hire someone to keep an eye on you. I’m guessing Frantham is like Pinsent in the tourist season. Incomers everywhere. It’s only this time of year that strangers get themselves noticed.’

  Mac nodded, accepting that, feeling a little better at the thought that Thomas Peel may have been doing his spying at second hand. The thought that Peel might have been so close, and Mac not known or acted, was an unbearable one. ‘Right, so what’s next on our “to do” list?’

  ‘Ricky Marlow – the man Thomas Peel went to visit when he surfaced three weeks ago. And then to have another chat with John Bennet, Peel’s work colleague.’

  ‘The one who alerted us to the fact that Peel was back,’ Mac nodded. ‘Emily, Peel’s daughter, she said she remembered Bennet. She’s of the opinion that her father wanted to be seen, that he showed himself to Bennet.’

  ‘We came to the same conclusion. He stood around on the street corner until Bennet left work at lunch time. The cob shop Bennet used was just across the road. Bennet admits to being something of a creature of habit. Peel would have known that; the two of them worked in the same office for five years. Peel went back to the B & B to collect a scarf he’d left behind.’

  ‘Strange to think about Peel working for a living.’

  ‘But he did and apparently was very good at what he did. Bennet is another draughtsman; they both work, or rather worked, for the same architects’ office. Bennet has three kids, and Peel visited his house on a number of occasions. He must have wondered . . .’

  ‘Any evidence he did?’

  ‘Thankfully, no. Peel was never alone with the Bennet children.’ Alec indicated, turned off the main road and down an increasingly narrow lane. ‘Peel went to see his old friend Ricky Marlow at work. We’re visiting the great man at home.’

  ‘Great man?’ Mac queried.

  ‘Ricky – Richard Marlow – owns the Ramolt Hotel in town, part-owns three pubs and two car dealerships, and has an extensive buy-to-let “portfolio” or whatever it’s called. Supports a dozen local charities and yada yada.’

  ‘Oh, that Richard Marlow.’ Mac frowned. ‘And the connection with Peel?’

  ‘Well, on the surface, it’s that the architects that Peel used to work for did the extension on Marlow’s house and other bits and pieces on his pubs or something. Anyway, Peel did the drawings, generated the computer models or whatever they do now, liaised with Marlow on the changes. According to Marlow, that was the extent of their involvement, but . . .’

  They were turning now into a set of double gates at the end of a long drive. The house up ahead was modern but obviously not off the peg. Painted white and with an odd, green pantiled roof that Mac was not sure he actually liked, it spread expansively either side of a massive front door. Single-storey wings extended the frontage even further, and glancing through the tall windows as they parked up, Mac realized that one wing housed a large indoor pool.

  ‘All right for some,’ he said. ‘Second pool on the other side?’

  Alec laughed. ‘Apparently, he collects orchids or something,’ he said. ‘I believe that’s where he keeps them.’

  ‘Orchids. Right.’

  ‘You don’t like orchids?’

  ‘Actually, no. They’re sticks with fancy bits stuck on the ends. You can’t tell me that’s attractive. And we have nothing on Marlow except that Peel contacted him?’

  ‘So far, no. Usual rumours about dodgy dealings and backhanders, but nothing more concrete or more unusual. He’s cooperated with the investigation, claims he was as shocked as anyone could be when Peel turned up, but he failed to report their meeting and it was only after John Bennet reported seeing Peel that Marlow admitted to having his own encounter.’

  ‘He came forward, then?’

  ‘No, we managed to track Peel’s movements on CCTV, saw him coming out of one of Marlow’s pubs. We confronted Marlow and he admitted Peel had been to see him.’

  ‘And? What did Peel want?’

  ‘That’s what we don’t know. Marlow insists Peel just bought himself a drink and sat at the bar nursing it. Marlow says he saw him, recognized him and realized he was maybe the last person he wanted around, told him to leave. Marlow says Peel left without comment, but I find that hard to believe.’

  ‘Witness statements?’

  ‘Indicate a brief conversation between the two of them. Marlow just insists that Peel took a bit of convincing, that Marlow threatened to call the police, a threat which he did not carry out either at the time or retrospectively. He claims just to have been glad to see Peel go, to have been worried about what Peel might do if Marlow crossed him.’

  ‘Which may be true.’

  ‘Which may be true, but . . .’ Alec opened his car door and had to grab the handle as a gust of wind caught it and wrenched it back. Mac was more cautious, holding on to the door as he got out of the car, and looked around, noting the depth of gravel on the drive and
the measured manicure of the lawns.

  Money, he thought. And lots of it.

  The front door opened as they crossed the drive, and Mac realized that Marlow must have been watching them, waiting for them to get out of the car. He stood on the top of the short flight of steps, holding the door half-closed behind him as the wind pushed hard against it, as though intent on fighting its way inside.

  ‘Bitter day,’ Marlow said, stepping back and gesturing for them to go in. ‘A truly bitter day.’

  Mac could not help but wonder if he meant the wind or purely that the police had come to call.

  Marlow’s study was book-lined and so thickly carpeted that small children could be lost in the pile. The hall floor, Marlow told them, was reclaimed parquet from an old manor house that had been demolished when his was being built. He said it was two hundred odd years old. The carpet in the study, Mac thought, certainly did not have that age or pedigree, but probably, he considered, a similar cost.

  An orchid sat on the heavy oak desk, long stems strapped tightly to green canes, and did nothing to rectify Mac’s opinion of the plant, though he had to admit that the flowers were interesting. Deep orange with freckled faces and very different from the ones he was used to seeing in the local supermarkets trapped in their plastic bags.

  Marlow gestured them to twinned captain’s chairs, preparing to seat himself in a somewhat more opulent example behind the desk.

  ‘Would you like something to drink?’

  Both declined. The tea at the prison had been no better than the machine coffee, but both Mac and Alec had downed two mugs of the stuff while working their way through the visitation records. Mac felt he was already swimming.