Plots and Errors

by Jill McGown

  Paul’s eyes widened as Josh’s idea was finally spelled out to him. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Yes. Look – she should get there first. Have you got your key? Can you let her have it?’

  ‘It’s the least I can do,’ said Josh, then hesitated a little uncharacteristically before he spoke again. ‘What about your hotel room?’ he asked. ‘Have you got the key to it?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘There’s no sense in letting it go to waste, is there?’ said Josh, and glanced over to where Billy stood by his motorbike.

  Paul looked across at Billy, and back at Josh. ‘Oh, I don’t know, Josh,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, come on! Who’s going to know?’

  Against his better judgment, Paul dug in his pocket, gave Josh the key, then walked quickly to his car, watching in his mirror as Josh handed the last bag to its youthful owner, and a few words were exchanged. The boy nodded as he mounted the bike and fired the engine. Josh was speaking to Sandie as Paul reversed with difficulty out of the little space.

  He glanced out over the bay as he drove, and the fisherman still sat there, patiently waiting for a catch. Josh was right; he probably was being paranoid. That was just a fisherman. But this way, if Elizabeth did have someone following him or Sandie, whoever it was would have to back off; there was nowhere to go after his mother’s cottage but into the sea, and they would know if someone trailed them there. That meant that once he was there, he could relax.

  He had a key to the cottage, as did every member of the family, though it was an unspoken rule that they were only to be used with permission from the owner. He was about to break that rule for a purpose of which his mother would deeply disapprove, and if it occurred to him briefly that he was once again allowing Josh to lead him into temptation, and that he had always got into severe trouble for that in the past, Paul chased the thought away.

  SCENE VI – DEVON.

  Saturday, August 23rd, 6.30 p.m.

  A hotel room in Plymouth.

  ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ Joe said, and could feel her body stiffen as he spoke the words; they were, after all, never the preamble to anything anyone wanted to hear.

  They were lying in a double bed in a curtained room of the Excalibur Hotel. They had had a nice lunch, followed by a nice afternoon, and now he was going to spoil it all, but he did have to tell her.

  ‘I didn’t win that money. I got a loan for all that equipment.’

  ‘Why?’ Kathy sounded startled, as well she might. ‘Why did you pretend you had spare money if you hadn’t?’

  ‘I wanted to help you out.’ He sighed. ‘And I told the bank manager I would be going into partnership with another ex-police officer who already had an established business. But I won’t be, not now.’

  ‘But when we set up together, we can pay it off from the business takings. The bank might be prepared to give us a longer term or something.’

  ‘That’s just it. We can’t set up together.’

  There was a long silence; Joe waited for the questions, but they didn’t come, so he ploughed on.

  ‘I was going to pay the loan off when I got my severance pay. But I’m not getting early retirement after all. The job at HQ’s going to be full-time. So the bottom line is that I can’t work in any sort of detective agency. And you can’t afford the loan repayments either, so the stuff will all have to go back. I’ll stand any loss – I don’t want you to be out of pocket because I was a bloody fool.’

  She turned towards him. ‘We might not have to send it back,’ she said. ‘I can get a job. With two incomes coming in, we can still pay off the loan, and then when you do retire, we’ll have all the equipment we need to set up.’

  Joe took a metaphorical deep breath. ‘Maybe we should think about it a bit more before we rush into anything,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, her voice sharp.

  Joe shrugged. ‘It’s just that . . . well, stealing you back from Andy might have been all right once, but now . . . well. I don’t know.’

  ‘What’s different about now?’

  ‘He’s in a wheelchair, Kathy!’ Joe got out of bed, pulled on the complimentary bathrobe, and walked to the window, drawing back the heavy curtain to look out at the well-kept grounds of the hotel. That was below the belt, he told himself, and he hadn’t really meant it to be. The wheelchair had damn-all to do with it, but it had seemed like a better reason than the truth. That setting up home with Kathy was the last thing he wanted to do. That he wanted Debbie back, not Kathy, and the whole thing had been a dreadful and costly mistake.

  The light went on, and he let the curtain fall back, turned to look at Kathy, who was sitting up in bed, her face angry.

  ‘He was in a wheelchair when we met up again,’ she said. ‘He was in a wheelchair when we discussed our options. Leaving him and moving in with you was one of them, if you remember.’

  ‘I know. I just don’t think I can do it to him,’ he said. ‘Andy was my best friend, even if he hasn’t spoken to me for twenty years. It doesn’t seem right taking advantage of him like this.’

  ‘It’s you that should have the grudge against him,’ said Kathy. ‘Not the other way round.’

  Joe knew that. Andy had stolen his fiancée, and to start with, he had indeed thought that he had a grudge against him. That was why he’d made a nuisance of himself like he had just after Kathy had married him, trying to spoil what they had. But Debbie had come along, and he had realized then that he didn’t begrudge Andy whatever happiness he had found with Kathy. All that his phone-calls and letters had done was to turn Andy against him.

  It was when they had checked in as Mr and Mrs Cope that he’d begun to realize how wrong he’d been. And then he’d seen Ian Foster, of all people, and had felt a stab of real jealousy. Not because there would be anything going on between him and Debbie, but because Ian saw her every day, and Joe didn’t.

  ‘It’s me you’ve got the grudge against,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it? Is this your way of getting back at me?’

  ‘No!’ He turned to look at her, and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said again.

  ‘Why did you let me make a fool of myself, then?’

  He sat down on the bed. ‘I didn’t. You haven’t.’

  She looked at him for a long time, then shook her head. ‘I said that we couldn’t sleep together unless we were serious about it,’ she said. ‘And I am serious about it, Joe. That’s why I’m here. Why are you here?’

  Because he’d fancied a weekend in Devon, and because he’d thought that Kathy could fill the gap in his life. But whatever he had once felt for Kathy, whatever he had imagined had been rekindled by their meeting again, had gone for good; the doubts that had crept in with the signing of the register and bumping into Foster had been confirmed the minute the hotel room door had closed behind them, and Kathy had turned the key in the old-fashioned lock. A more honest man than him would have told her that before he spent the afternoon in bed with her. A slightly more honest man than him would tell her that now. He just didn’t answer.

  ‘You don’t want to take advantage of Andy? That’s a laugh. He was right about you. That’s exactly what you want to do!’

  ‘Maybe,’ Joe said. ‘But I don’t think you really want to leave him. You want him back the way he was, that’s what you really want.’ Andy seemed to have changed since his accident, but Kathy had thought that he could be rescued from the self-pity, and Joe had truly wanted to help bring that about. It wasn’t going to happen if she left him. ‘You don’t want me,’ he said. ‘You want Andy.’ But it would have been more truthful to say that he wanted Andy.

  He and Andy had grown up together; they had played in puddles together, climbed trees together, suffered adolescence together. They had shared a flat, gone to football matches, got drunk, helped one another out with money, given one another quiet, uncomplicated moral support when it was needed. It was Andy’s friendship that he had truly missed all these years; it was Andy’s friendship that he had h
oped to buy back with his misguided loan. He had missed Andy, not Kathy, and she would never understand that, not in a million years. He had only really understood himself this afternoon. He wanted Andy’s friendship and Debbie’s love, and he didn’t really want Kathy at all.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m moving too fast, I know I am. But it isn’t going to happen overnight. I won’t just walk out on him without making sure he’s all right.’ She threw back the sheet. ‘I’m going to have a bath.’

  ‘Do you want me to go?’

  ‘No. I want you to show me how to use the briefcase thing. If you don’t have to have it back before tomorrow morning, that is,’ she added, with a smile. ‘What do you want me to do with the other stuff? And all the office equipment?’

  He smiled back. ‘You can keep it until you’ve worked out what you’re going to do. Maybe you’ll think of some way of keeping going.’

  He had to sell it, try to get as much for it as he could, maybe even get the money back on some of it – most of it hadn’t been used. But he didn’t want to make things any worse between him and Kathy than they already were; he truly hadn’t meant to deceive her, and demanding the return of all that stuff seemed a bit mean. Besides, if she didn’t want him to go, his generosity might not go unrewarded, and Joe had always held to the notion that if you couldn’t be with the one you loved . . .

  She went into the bathroom, and he opened the briefcase, taking out the tiny camera, embedded in a lapel pin. ‘It’s just like the ones you’re already using at home,’ he told her, raising his voice above the sound of running water. ‘Except it’s portable, and the business end is in the briefcase.’

  ‘Will you be able to get frames off it for me to send to Mrs Esterbrook?’ she asked. ‘She won’t be able to play the video.’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ said Joe. There was a frame-grabber in the computer suite at work. But there was something funny about all this. ‘Did you say that this poor bloke’s got the room below this one?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. She booked us into this room, so that it would look like a genuine mistake if he checks up.’

  ‘But won’t you have to pretend you’re room-service, or something?’ he asked. ‘How can you just walk into his room? He’ll have locked the door, won’t he?’

  ‘She says not.’

  Joe frowned. ‘She knows the door’s going to be unlocked?’ He went to the bathroom door. ‘It sounds like a set-up, Kathy. Blackmail, maybe.’

  She looked a little worried, then got into the bath. ‘Well, what if it is?’ she said, with a touch of defiance. ‘I’m not doing anything wrong. What she does with the information is her business.’

  And blackmail was Joe’s business. But not, he thought, for much longer. Not once he’d gone to be a glorified secretary in Barton. A glorified secretary with a wife and two kids who had to be maintained, a loan for office equipment and gadgetry that he couldn’t use, and an insatiable desire to keep bookies in the manner to which they had become accustomed.

  Oh, what the hell, he thought. Kathy was right. What her client did with the information was her business. But . . . he could make it his, he supposed. He’d be getting his hands on that video before Kathy did, so he’d be very well placed to do just that.

  SCENE VII – CORNWALL.

  The following day, Sunday, August 24th, 9.15 a.m.

  Angela’s Cottage.

  Paul, almost as interested in his stomach as he was in other pleasures of the flesh, had bought bacon and eggs, having found a twenty-four-hour garage that sold such things at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning. His mother’s provisions at the cottage ran to dry goods only, and he had had no intention of missing Sunday breakfast. Now even more wary of being followed, he had kept his eye on the cars behind him, but none of them had followed him out to the cottage.

  He was suspecting every stranger, everyone who seemed to be where he was for no good reason, but whenever he had been able to check up on them, they turned out to be just what they said they were. Like the fisherman, who had been hiring the boat for weeks, and had first hired it on a Tuesday, when Paul wasn’t even in Penhallin.

  Paul had decided that he had to try to curb the paranoia, to relax and make up for the morning’s unpromising start, and thus it was that he was lying in a delicious state of semi-consciousness, having had Sunday breakfast with Sandie, after which they had retired to the bedroom. She had fallen asleep afterwards; he hadn’t, and was just thinking of waking her again when his mood was rudely interrupted by the phone ringing downstairs in the hallway. He waited for it to stop, but it didn’t, and he got out of bed and padded downstairs. Whoever was ringing knew that there was someone here, and only one person knew that, so he thought he’d better answer it.

  ‘Paul, it’s Josh. Sorry, but your weekend’s being cut short. Angela’s just rung me.’

  Paul frowned. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Little Elmley.’

  ‘Little Elmley?’ Paul repeated, then realized what that meant. ‘She must know the diving’s been cancelled – she’ll tell Elizabeth! What the hell am I going to do?’

  ‘Relax,’ said Josh. ‘She rang me on my mobile. She thought I was still in Penhallin, and I didn’t tell her any different. But there’s been a change of plan – she’s coming back this morning, and she needs a letter she left at the cottage, so she wants you to pick it up and bring it to her. She apologized for making you miss your long weekend.’

  Paul worked on that. ‘But if she’s going back to Little Elmley this morning, she’ll know you’re not in Penhallin,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll make myself scarce, don’t worry.’

  How could he not worry? This sounded very odd to him. ‘What is this letter, anyway?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s from a firm of solicitors – someone’s coming specially to pick it up from her, and she wants it by four o’clock this afternoon. Hang on, I’ll find the details.’

  While he was hanging on, Paul began to realize what his interfering mother was doing. No one was coming to pick up any letter. It was a holiday weekend, for God’s sake. ‘Why can’t I just fax it to her?’ he demanded as soon as Josh came back on.

  ‘She has to sign the original. It’s some sort of release clause for a publisher or something.’

  Oh, sure. This was pure harassment. But he’d have to do what she asked, all the same; his mother was a better ally than an enemy, and as long as he kept in with her, she would do nothing to give him away to Elizabeth. Crossed, there was no telling what she would do.

  Josh gave him the details about the letter. ‘She says it might be in her desk, but to check the drawer in her bedside cabinet first, because she was going over it in bed.’

  He had to leave a message on his mother’s answering machine to let her know he’d found the letter, and that he was on his way. She would be back at about ten o’clock, and she would expect to have heard from him by then. Her and her bloody answering machine.

  ‘What time is it now?’ Paul asked.

  ‘Half past nine.’

  He groaned. ‘Yes, OK,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’ He’d have to get a move on. He hated rushing. He went back upstairs and nudged Sandie. ‘We’ve got to go,’ he said, getting a grunt in reply. ‘Get up. Now.’ Sandie didn’t move; he walked to the window and drew back the curtains, letting light flood in through the open sash window, and was transported back thirty years.

  ‘What?’ Sandie said, sitting up. ‘What is it?’

  He had almost forgotten the treehouse; his mother had had it made for him when he was four years old, and he had spent hours up there, doing what, he couldn’t really remember. Playing. Imagining. Being a pirate, being an Indian scout, being one of Robin Hood’s merry men. He wasn’t sure now what that had entailed, but he knew it had been fun. He remembered making a bow and arrow, which had never quite worked. He had had sole occupancy of the treehouse until they had moved to Little Elmley, and he had acquired a brother.

  Then Penhallin had become their holiday
cottage, with his mother and father in one small bedroom and him and Josh in the other. Since then his mother had knocked the two rooms together, but this part had been his room, and he had been able to look out at his tree-house. After he’d had to share it with Josh it had never been quite the same; when Josh played, he was Captain Hook, he was Hawkeye, he was Robin Hood, not one of his merry men. The significance of that distinction between them had escaped him until now.

  He left the window, and sat on the bed, sliding open the drawer. ‘I’ve got to find a letter for my mother,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to take it to her.’ After a few minutes’ careful searching through various bits and pieces untidily pushed into the drawer, he discovered it. He stood up. ‘I’m just going to ring her,’ he said. ‘Be up and dressed when I get back.’

  ‘Use this.’ She handed him her mobile.

  ‘I told you not to bring that,’ he said.

  ‘Are you going to refuse to use it on principle?’

  He took it from her, and sat down on the bed, punching the numbers angrily. His bloody mother thought this was clever, he supposed.

  SCENE VIII – CORNWALL.

  Sunday, August 24th, 9.40 a.m.

  The Treehouse in the Garden of Angela’s Cottage.

  Paydirt, Sam.

  Ian Foster had gradually realized the day before that the boat wasn’t coming out for its afternoon session, and had taken his hired motorboat back, got into his car, and driven to The Point in the hope that Townsend would be there, and he could, so to speak, pick up the trail again. She, however, had cancelled her reservation; according to the receptionist, something had happened to the boat. Foster had given up, thinking that they would all have gone heading back eastwards, but he had stayed at the hotel as planned, rather than drive all the way back to Barton.

  He had made an early start that morning, pulled into a garage to fill up, and had been about to drive off when Esterbrook’s car had drawn up, and Esterbrook had got out and gone into the shop. This was it, Foster had thought. The change of routine that Mrs Esterbrook had said would be needed if he was to catch her husband at it.