Last Rites (6 page)

“Mrs. Jacobs?”

Lorraine glanced at the warrant card in Vincent’s hand.

“Detective Constable Vincent, CID.”

“How can I help you?” A few drops of water shook themselves free from a stray strand of hair and fell on to Lorraine’s sleeve.

After the last guest had gone and it had become clear that Derek was intent upon giving her the hurt and silent treatment, Lorraine had found a largely untouched bottle of unoaked Chardonnay and busied herself with clearing away the remains of the strange, strange afternoon. Now Derek and the children were off somewhere in his car, most probably carting empty bottles to the dump.

“Just a few questions.”

“About what?” With one hand she pulled at an end of the towel and as it came free, shook her head so that her hair, still damp, rose, then fell slowly back across her neck and shoulders.

“Your brother.”

“What about him?”

“He was at your mother’s funeral earlier today, I believe?”

“Yes, but …”

“And afterward?”

“We all came back here, family and friends. Michael stayed until he … until he had to go back.” She looked at Vincent defiantly. “Back to prison.”

“And that would be the last time you saw him?”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Jacobs, you’re sure?”

Lorraine pulled her robe tighter. “Look, what’s all this about?” A flush had risen from the base of her throat. “Has something happened? If something’s happened to Michael, I want to know.”

“Your brother absconded, Mrs. Jacobs. He attacked the officers guarding him and escaped.”

Vincent couldn’t tell if it were joy or fear bringing the shine to Lorraine’s eyes.

When Derek arrived back with the children ten minutes later, instead of his wife, he found Carl Vincent in the living room. Vincent looking none too idly at the family photographs lining the shelf above the fireplace.

“Who are you?” Derek wanted to know.

As Vincent was introducing himself, Lorraine came into the room, dressed in blue jeans and a loose gray sweatshirt, hair pinned up. “Michael’s got away,” she said.

“What?”

“Run off, escaped, done a bunk. Ask him, he knows.”

“You two,” Derek said to the children, who had entered on their mother’s heels, “off you go upstairs for a bit and leave us to talk.”

“Dad,” complained Sandra. “You never let us in on anything.”

“Uncle Michael,” Sean said, addressing Vincent, “did he beat up the guards? Did he? Them two as was here? Did he kill someone?”

“Out! Both of you, out now. Sandra, get him out of here.”

Without bothering to ask anyone else if they wanted to join her, Lorraine was standing by the drinks cabinet, fixing herself a stiff gin.

“Did he hurt anyone?” Derek asked.

“Cut one of the officers pretty badly, I believe,” Vincent said. “He’s being treated now in Queen’s.”

“Cut?” Derek repeated. “He had a knife?”

“A razor blade, apparently.”

Derek flashed a glance toward Lorraine, which Carl Vincent couldn’t miss. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, either of you?” Vincent asked. “How he might have got hold of a blade?”

“No, why would we?” Lorraine said. She carried her drink over to the settee and sat down, the two men watching her all the way.

“I imagine he went to the bathroom, for instance,” Vincent said, “while he was here?”

“I imagine he did.”

“I doubt if there are any blades there,” Derek said. “I use an electric, have done for years.”

“So do I,” said Lorraine with what was close to a giggle. How much has she been putting away, Vincent wondered? A regular habit or simply the strain of the funeral? “What does it matter,” Lorraine asked, “where Michael got it from? Unless you think one of us slipped it into his hand.”

“And did you?” Vincent asked lightly.

“Oh, yes. Of course.” Lorraine drank some more of her gin and tonic. “In fact, Derek and I planned the whole thing.”

“You’ll know where he is now, then.” Vincent smiled, playing along. “Michael.”

Lorraine smiled back at him over the top of her glass. “Upstairs. Under the bed.”

“Lorraine, for God’s sake … My wife isn’t being serious,” Derek said. “It’s been a trying day. I hope you realize …”

“Oh, yes,” Vincent said. “Yes, of course. I do have to ask you, though, both of you, if there was anything Michael said today that might have given you the idea he was considering absconding?”

Derek’s head started to turn toward Lorraine, but he checked himself and looked at the floor instead; Lorraine continued to stare at Carl Vincent over her glass. “What sort of thing?” she asked.

“Anything to make you think he was planning to do something like this.”

“Nothing,” Lorraine said, perhaps a touch too quickly. “Certainly not to me. Derek, he didn’t say anything to you, did he?”

“I doubt if we exchanged more than a dozen words the whole time.”

“Yourself and Mr. Preston, then,” Vincent queried, looking at Derek, “you weren’t on what you’d call friendly terms?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Wouldn’t you, Derek?” Lorraine swiveled on the sofa, reaching out with her free hand to steady herself. “Really? Well, of course, that’s just because you’re too polite—Derek being polite, you see, gentlemanly. Quite big on the old-fashioned virtues, Derek, standing back and opening doors, always walking on the outside of the pavement so that … Why is that exactly, Derek, I forget? To protect me from anyone wanting to snatch my bag from a passing car or bike, or is it something to do with not getting splashed?”

Derek’s face drawn now, thin lips pursed tight; his hands, Vincent noticed, were closed into fists upon his thighs, their knuckles white. He was a small-boned man, wiry; if someone had said he had been an athlete when he was younger, middle distance most likely, Vincent would not have been surprised. Probably still played tennis in the summer, went swimming with the kids.

“He doesn’t like to give offense, you see,” Lorraine was saying, “Derek. Not to anybody. And not to me especially, this being such a delicate time. The funeral and then seeing Michael again after all that while …” Shifting position, Lorraine slid forward on the cushions of the settee, the tall glass wobbling in her hand till Vincent ducked forward quickly and took hold of it, easing it from her fingers and setting it on the floor.

Pushing a hand up through her hair, Lorraine gave Vincent a long look. “The truth of it—you want to hear the truth—is that Derek doesn’t like Michael one bit, he never did. Not ever.”

“That’s not true,” Derek exclaimed, looking at Lorraine for a moment, then away. “That’s just not true.”

“Of course it’s true. What’s the matter with you? Can’t you own up to a single bloody emotion, even if it means admitting you hate somebody’s guts?” Lorraine was leaning toward him, eager and alive; the brightness Vincent had noticed in her eyes before had returned.

“I don’t hate anyone.”

“Oh, Derek.” Lorraine reached down and recovered her glass. “You might keep it locked away inside, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there, festering away. All that ill will, gurgling around down there in your gut, growing …”

Before she could finish, Derek was on his feet and heading for the door. A smile on her face, Lorraine lifted her glass high, toasting him on his way. Footsteps faded, then stopped. Vincent was conscious of the clock ticking on the wall, of the glass tilting dangerously in Lorraine’s hand. Somewhere in the house, a door slammed.

Ten

Until he had fallen from grace into the arms of Helen Siddons some two years previously, Resnick’s immediate superior, Jack Skelton, had been an evangelist in the cause of cleanliness and Godliness, healthy bodies making healthy minds. “That man,” as Resnick’s colleague Reg Cossall had been heard to say, “doesn’t just think he’s holier than Jesus Christ; he thinks, given a standing start, he could take him over fifteen hundred meters.”

But the affair with Siddons pulled Skelton’s life apart. His daughter already off the rails in the way of teenage kids half the world over, his wife, Alice, had started doing her drinking and hollering in public, instead of in the privacy of their four-bedroom detached. For her part, Siddons tried easing herself out of the relationship and, when Skelton wouldn’t let go easily, she dumped him flat. Fitness regime abandoned, private life the stuff of canteen gossip, Skelton began turning in for work later and later and, on occasion, not at all. Only a sixth sense of survival, allied to some unofficial counseling from his colleagues, pulled him back from the brink.

At his age, not so far short of his statutory thirty years service, Skelton was never going to get back the taut trimness he once had; but the surplus fat that for a while had hung around his gut and pouched out his face had disappeared, his shirts were crisp and white once more, suits clean and pressed, every paper clip and piece of paper on his desk knew its exact place.

When Resnick knocked and walked into the superintendent’s office that evening, it was almost as if nothing had ever happened to throw Skelton’s life off course; except they both knew that it had.

“Jesus, Charlie, why didn’t they tell us?”

“Sir?”

“Prison Service, letting someone with Preston’s record home for the day, you’d have thought somebody would have had the nous to let us know. Pick up the telephone, fax, send a bloody e-mail—this is the communications age, or so we’re told—but no, nothing, not a sodding word. Didn’t even occur to them to request assistance, I suppose.”

Resnick shrugged. “Likely knew what headquarters’d say, low priority, staff shortages, look after your own.”

“They still could have asked.”

“Maybe.”

“Damn it, Charlie, think of all the hours it’s going to cost us now. As if we didn’t have enough on our plate with a bloody range war building up out there. What’s the latest on all that, anyway? This shooting and what went on at the club—linked, is that what we’re thinking?”

“Looks that way.”

“I’ll need a report, Charlie. The Chief’s been hollering down the phone.”

Resnick nodded. There was nothing like a bit of media activity for stirring interest from way on high.

Skelton eased his chair back from his desk and reached into a side drawer. “This other business—I pulled Preston’s file.”

“It was your case.”

“Preston and three mates,” Skelton continued, “they took off a wages van in Kimberley. New supermarket. One of the security guards fancied earning his money for a change. Soft bastard. Got himself whacked half to death with an iron bar.”

“That wasn’t Preston?”

Skelton shook his head. “Frost. Frank Frost. That sort of mindless violence was much more his mark. But Preston had been the fixer; he’d put the team together, laid it out. Organize, he could do that. And what he had besides, his old man’s betting shop—a better place for laundering cash’d be hard to find.”

Plucking at the seam of his gray suit trousers, Skelton recrossed his legs. “Had him in for it. Twice. Three times. Him and his running mates. Nearest we came, talked Gerry O’Connell into saying he’d supplied Preston with the guns direct, which was more or less the truth. Couple of days later, O’Connell’s cut himself shaving, thirty or so stitches till the surgeon stopped counting. Severe case of amnesia, O’Connell, after that.”

“And Preston walked away.”

“Cocky bastard. Came up to Reg Cossall and myself in the side bar of the Borlace Warren, says how he’s heard poor Gerry O’Connell’s had a nasty little accident and would we like to chip something in toward a collection he’s getting up, send O’Connell some flowers maybe. Buy him a week in Skeggy. Convalescence.”

Resnick smiled. “I can see Reg loving that.”

“Came close to head-butting Preston there and then. Told him he was so full of shite, it wasn’t any wonder every time he opened his mouth that was what came pouring out. Preston laughed in his face and slapped a tenner down on the bar, told Reg the next round was on him. Still laughing when he went through the door.” Skelton slipped a pack of Silk Cut from his pocket, took out a cigarette, and rolled it between his fingers before pushing it back again, sliding the packet toward the corner of the desk and farther from temptation. “Next time I saw him, Preston, he was sitting back of the counter of the betting shop, place all closed up, sitting there with a bottle of scotch between his legs, two-thirds empty; his old man was in the garage out back with his head stove in.”

“You must have asked yourself why he didn’t make a run for it, try and get away?”

Skelton squinted up his eyes, remembering. “When we got there, seemed as if Preston had been waiting for us. “Some of your handiwork?” I asked him, and he turned to me and said, “The best day’s work I ever fucking done. Only I should’ve done it a bastard time ago.” And that was that, pretty much. I tapped him on the shoulder and told him he was under arrest and all he did was take another long belt at the scotch, then get to his feet with both hands outstretched. It was about as much as he ever said about it again, at the trial or before. Well, you know, you were around.”

Resnick nodded. “For some of it, yes.”

“Best we could figure out,” Skelton said, “his father had been cheating on him, money he was laundering; holding back, siphoning off the top. Michael fronted him out with it and that was the result. Truth or not, likely we’ll never know. Not that it matters, not to us. He went down for it and that’s enough.”

“Till now,” Resnick said.

“Anything by way of a sighting?” Skelton asked.

“One, unconfirmed. Leicester station, round the beginning of the rush hour. Quarter to five. There’s a London train, leaves Leicester just past the hour.”

“We’ve informed the Met?”

“Photo and description, faxed down.”

Skelton folded his hands, one across the other. “All we can do.”

Resnick nodded. “I’m putting a watch on the sister’s place. Just for tonight. If Preston’s looking for somewhere to hide out, it might be there. Carl Vincent was round there earlier, some sort of aggravation between Preston’s sister and her husband …”

“Lorraine,” Skelton said, remembering. “That her name?”

“Yes. Sounds as if she and her brother were pretty close.”