A Reason to Kill (21 page)

Mice and foxes and stuff
, George told himself.
That's all. Nothing scary
. He thrust his chilly hands deep into inadequate pockets, wriggled his backpack into a more comfortable position and plodded on.

Paul trailed behind him, lost in thought. Or, at least, George assumed he was. Paul seemed to be in shock. He had cheered up considerably once he'd eaten, though he'd still been morose even then. Now, with the fish and chips a long time ago and George's stomach telling him it could happily eat the same all over again, Paul seemed to have lapsed even deeper into that state of emptiness which, frankly, worried George to death.

It annoyed him too. He wanted company just now, someone to talk to, to pass the time with. A human voice to block out the skittering, creeping, twig-snapping noises that accompan-ied his every step.

An owl hooted and George nearly jumped out of his skin, despite recognizing it for what it was. A vixen called and a dog fox answered. George stared in the direction of the sound. Any other time and this contact with nature might have seemed exciting. Tonight, it just added to his sense of unease.

There had been little traffic and, thankfully, as most drivers were on full beam this late at night, they'd had plenty of warning and time to get off the road. That they might be seen by someone scared George even more than all the night-time stuff going on in the undergrowth. Who'd be out at this time of night? Somehow, George couldn't think of any good reason, any valid reason, and therefore anyone who was out driving this time of night was likely to be someone who George wouldn't want to meet.

It was two o'clock according to George's watch when they saw the sign that told them they were entering Frantham. George sighed in deep relief. ‘Look,' he said to Paul. ‘We just have to get round this bend, then we can cut off the road and hide out in the tin huts.

Paul shrugged.

‘Look, snap out of it, will ya? I'm tired too, and I'm scared too, and I don't know what to do either, but we got to get inside and get some sleep or something.'

Paul's look was withering. George could make that out even in the dark. Then he sighed. ‘I'm sorry,' Paul offered. ‘I'm sorry. I'm just …'

‘I know,' George told him. ‘But we'll figure it out. Just not tonight.' All he wanted to do tonight was sleep and he was pretty sure he would be able to sleep anywhere that was out of the biting wind and away from the increasingly cloud-laden sky.

Walking side by side now, they rounded the bend and then stopped dead. Recovering himself, George pulled his friend into the shadow of the high hedge. ‘What the hell's going on? That's Mark Dowling's place, ain't it?'

Beside him he felt Paul nod. Then he heard him swear, softly but emphatically.

The brilliant neon blue of police lights illuminated the road. Car headlights were on. Figures passed by, silhouetted against their brightness.

Stealthily, George crept forward. There was, if he remembered right, a gate close by, with a stile that gave access to the public footpath across the old airfield. They were on the opposite side to their destination of the tin huts, but George was reluctant to cross the road when so many lights were pointed directly their way.

‘Come on,' he whispered. ‘Over here. Keep your head down.' Staying low against the fence, they got over the stile, back tracked a little in the shadow of the hedge, then George made a run for the old buildings he remembered seeing from the road on the odd times he'd travelled on the top deck of the bus.

Paul followed, his breathing hard and ragged. George wanted to tell him to calm down, that they'd hear him right across the road making that much noise, but then he realized that his own breath wheezed in his lungs, caught whistling in a throat that seemed closed tight against the flow of air.

The flat land, unbroken by hedge or tree, allowed for better visibility and a broken window gave them access into the building. This, George thought, must have been the conning tower – no, a conning tower was on a submarine. This would be the place where the flight controllers sat. It smelled damp and stale, as though the air inside had remained static and unmoved despite the years and the winter gales.

He tried to get his bearings, eager to find somewhere from where they might be able to see the road.

‘Up here, mind the steps, they might not be good. Keep your feet near the wall.'

Gingerly, they climbed upward. George wondered how long it was since this place had been used. Vaguely, he remembered it had been built in the war and then used by a flying club until the money had run out. Reaching the top of the stairs, he tested the wooden floor. To his relief it creaked but felt sound and he was right, there were windows up here that looked towards the road.

George heard Paul stumble and then sit down hard. Glancing back, he could make out his friend's shape, slumped against the wall. He found a broken pane and, wrapping the end of his coat sleeve round his hand, managed to remove a few slivers of the cracked glass, enough to peer through into the outside world.

‘I can see,' he said.

‘What's happening?'

‘Looks like three – no four – police cars and one of them vans, you know, they've got something scientific written on the sides.'

Paul grunted.

‘You know what this means,' George said. ‘Karen was right. They've come to arrest him. We can go home.'

He crept over to his friend and shook him hard. ‘We can go home, Paul.'

In the dark he felt rather than saw his friend shake his head. ‘Not till I know for sure,' Paul said. ‘Not till someone can tell me they locked him up and threw away the key.'

George's heart sank but he knew there would be no point arguing with Paul tonight. He sighed and went back to his place by the window, grateful that at least it was not quite so cold in here, and they were out of the rain that had just begun and which he could feel as drops splashed through the broken window. Patiently, George settled down to wait for the night to pass and morning to bring some kind of solution. Minutes later he heard Paul snoring softly from across the room.

Mac followed the path laid out by the first officer on scene. The parents had rushed in, he told Mac, seen their son and tried to revive him. Getting the position of the body established had not been the only challenge; they had turned him over, tried to make him wake up and then spread trace and bloody footprints all over the scene.

Mac could see the tracks of a woman's shoe, high heeled and slipping in the blood as she hurried across to the hall phone.

‘God, what a mess,' Eden said. ‘And I don't just mean the state of the body.'

Mac nodded. The parents had done what parents do. They may not have liked their son, but he still was their son. They had reacted to the shock and the pain by doing what anyone would have done when they saw a loved one covered in blood and motionless on the floor: they had tried to help.

They had also messed up the crime scene, big style.

The Crime Scene Co-ordinator motioned them across to the foot of the stairs. ‘You get the best view from here,' he said. ‘So far as we can make out he was lying close to the door when they arrived. Face down on the floor with his head closest and legs stretched out towards the phone table.

‘Time of death?'

‘Based on liver temp, probably between seven and eight this evening, but as you can feel, the place is like a hot house, and that could throw our figures off.

Mac nodded. ‘They moved the body?'

‘Turned him over, flipping him to the right. The father tried to give him CPR, but, well … It was a bit late by then. The mother says she shook him, tried to get him to wake up. When she phoned the ambulance she said her son had collapsed and was bleeding. It wasn't until the crew got here that anyone realized how long he'd been gone.'

‘Cause of death?' Eden asked. The jowls seemed particularly pronounced tonight, Mac thought, and the bags under his eyes had expanded to the size of steamer trunks.

‘Your old-fashioned blunt-force trauma, so far as we can tell. Which blow killed him is a moot point, of course, but there's one odd detail.'

‘Oh? And what's that?'

‘His nose was broken. And you know how much noses bleed, even worse than head wounds at times. Well, there's a blood trail leading to the kitchen and that blue towel there – you see it? It's half beneath the body now, but … anyway, it's a match to the towels in the kitchen and Mrs Dowling confirms that's where it came from.'

‘So,' Mac began, trying to figure it out, ‘either he had a nose bleed and went into the kitchen for a towel then came back and opened the door to his killer, or his killer allowed him to clean himself up before hitting him again?' He looked expectantly from Eden to the Co-ordinator, expecting a response. A contradiction.

‘That's about what we've come up with. If there's a third way, as it were, I'm buggered if I can think what it might be.'

Karen, though tired beyond words, could not manage to sleep. She watched the television, sound turned right down, moving pictures refusing to make an iota of sense as she thought about her father and George and her mother and what they would have to do now.

She was reluctant to move on again. She had her jobs and her course and a boyfriend who, while not entirely serious as relationships went, made her feel good about herself. Made her feel womanly, feminine, desired. And that was something she would be sorry to give up.

Just briefly her mind rested upon the earlier incident with Mark Dowling. And to Karen, that was all it had been: an incident born of necessity. Earlier, talking to Mac, she had quoted Machiavelli, and now another of his dictums came to mind. Irritated, she wished she had thought of it earlier and then there would have been no stupid hesitation in her dealing with Mark Dowling.

‘If an injury has to be done to your enemy,' the Prince had said, ‘then let it be done with such severity that you should have no fear of his revenge.'

Karen nodded, satisfied. She had thought she had dealt with their father that same way all those years ago, but she had been just a fifteen-year-old child then, fallible and afraid.

‘I won't make that mistake again,' Karen said softly. ‘Oh no, never again.'

T
he morning briefing on the Tuesday was a more formal and more crowded affair than Mac had been accustomed to in Frantham. Extra bodies packed into the reception area – a larger space than either Eden's lair or the general office. A mobile incident room was on its way from Exeter and expected by mid-morning. Until then, the usual display of crime scene photos, approximate timelines and notes on the victim would have to wait.

‘Mark Dowling,' Eden intoned. ‘Let's say he's well known to us, shall we? Usual mix of joyriding and petty theft, but it looks as though he might have excelled himself this time.'

He produced a set of photographs from a manila folder on the front desk. ‘Mrs Marjorie Freer,' he said. ‘As she was a year ago. The picture was taken by her carer at the time.' He lifted a second picture. ‘Mrs Freer after her killer had finished with her.'

Mac watched the reaction of those gathered in the cramped space.

‘What's the connection?' someone asked.

‘DI McGregor will fill in the details, but from information received, we believe that Dowling may have been responsible for the old woman's death.'

‘Reliable information?'

Eden deferred to Mac, who stepped forward. ‘We believe so,' he said, and proceeded to give them the facts, keeping it brief and concise, watching as notes were taken, attention focussed. Pictures of the two boys were handed round. Questions asked.

‘No, never been in trouble,' Mac said. ‘Not until the break-in, and we're assuming peer pressure. Maybe even coercion, but obviously we need to find these two.'

A few more questions and the meeting began to break up. Mac found himself thinking that the local cafés would be making a fair bit of extra profit that morning.

The phone rang. Andy took the call and after a brief conversation handed over to Eden. Mac heard him mutter the name of one of the larger local papers. Eden rolled his eyes and took the phone.

It's beginning
, Mac thought. Two killings in sleepy little Frantham-on-Sea, within a couple of weeks. Media interest this time would not be restricted to a few locals standing on the street corner, and the pressure would be on for everything to be tidied up and out of the way before the tourist season began.

Eden put down the phone. It began to ring again. ‘Andy, tell anyone interested that there'll be a press call at noon.'

‘OK. Where?'

Eden shrugged. ‘That's for the officer in charge to decide, isn't it?'

‘You're not in charge?' Mac asked.

‘Thankfully, no. Let's go and get us a coffee, shall we? No, not one of mine; that little caff you like so much should be open by now.'

Mac raised an eyebrow.

‘Oh, lad, not much gets past me.'

Lad?
Mac thought. It was a very long time since that description fitted. ‘So, who
is
in charge?' he asked.

Eden shook his head. ‘Don't know yet. They'll assign someone from along the coast. Probably arrive with the incident room. I've been told I'm too close to retirement and you're too new to be bothered with a double murder.'

‘New? I'm hardly new.'

‘Well, you are round here.' Eden let the doors swing closed behind them. ‘Folk can get a bit territorial, you know. It takes time …'

Mac was shaking his head. ‘They think I'll fall apart,' he said flatly. ‘Like I did last time.'

Eden paused, clasped his arm. ‘Let it go,' he said quietly. ‘Time will prove you right and them wrong. Meantime there'll be plenty of work to go around.'