Resolutions (6 page)

Mac nodded, understanding what Alec meant. Rains could never be part of the general prison population. He'd have been dead within the month. Less, probably. Someone would have known who he was and what he'd done and taken it upon themselves to do something about it. Mac had a sneaking suspicion that Alec thought that was exactly as it should be, though unlike some of their colleagues – Wildman included – he'd never voiced the opinion out loud.

He turned back to the file, noting that Rains was due for a parole hearing in six months and would have every reason to be behaving himself. ‘Have his family stayed in contact?'

Alec shook his head. ‘There was never a suggestion he'd touched his own kids, but the wife took the children and left the country. She's Canadian, I think. Not British, anyway, and I understand she's gone back to her parents. Rains always reckoned Peel threatened his family. Maybe he did. Either way, I think she did the right thing. Finally.'

Mac glanced sharply in his direction. ‘You think the wife knew what Rains was into?'

‘How can a woman not know? I mean . . .' Alec shrugged and trailed off.

‘People keep secrets, even within families,' Mac argued. He thought of Ginny, the woman he had bumped into so unexpectedly in the café and wondered again if her husband really didn't know how she came by the extra money. Surely, by now, he'd realize she didn't actually have a cleaning job? ‘People see what they expect and want to see,' he said. ‘Some things feel so unbelievable or so unacceptable that they
really
don't see them. The human brain is nothing if not flexible.'

Alec snorted. ‘Look, I can fully understand not
wanting
to see, not
wanting
to know, but there must be something at the back of your mind tells you this isn't right or that doesn't add up. The way I see it is that she put her own kids at risk too.'

‘I thought Rains didn't touch his own children.'

‘Well, no, he didn't, but you're not telling me he wasn't tempted and you're not telling me there wouldn't have come a time when his friends didn't get access to them.'

‘Maybe,' Mac said. ‘Most people do have their line in the sand, even if it's a pretty wavy one.' He found himself thinking about George and Karen and what they'd gone through with their violent father, and their mother too battered and beaten by years with him to be capable of fighting back. Karen had drawn her own line and it had been a pretty decisive one. She'd realized she could do nothing to change or save her mother, do very little, when her dad was around and she was so young, to protect herself, but when Parker had come back from a spell in prison and started hurting George, he'd crossed Karen's line and she'd made him pay for it.

Mac found himself excusing her attack on Edward Parker, her father. The world would not be a worse place for his loss, but it seemed that once she had crossed her line, set herself up as protector of her little brother, there was nothing she was incapable of in pursuit of that. He had once told Rina that he thought such love would become a terrible burden for George to bear, and he had seen nothing that disabused him of that view. Worse, his attempts to protect George from knowledge of what his sister had done and why had come to nothing. George was
not
someone who refused to see. Loyalty and love might prevent him from speaking of it, even with Rina or Mac, but he had said enough for Mac to understand the depth of George's comprehension. George, young as he was, looked life in the face and dealt with it.

Karen was capable of everything, up to and including murder – up to and including such obsessive love that Mac feared for anyone who might stand in the way of it, and that, bizarrely, included George himself.

‘Penny for them,' Alec said.

‘Oh, I was thinking about home. Frantham.'

Alec smiled. ‘About Miriam?'

‘Actually, no. Not at that particular moment, but now you've brought her to mind . . .'

Alec laughed at that. ‘I'm happy for you, I really am. We all thought . . .'

‘That poor old McGregor was a lost cause. Hey, don't bother to argue, I thought it too. But I've been lucky.'

Lucky that new friends had chosen him, taken it upon themselves to make him whole again. And what a bizarre selection of people they were, Mac thought.

Further thought was interrupted by their arrival at the prison gatehouse, and Mac turned the focus of his thoughts back to the man they had come to see. ‘I never interviewed Rains,' he said. ‘What should I expect?'

Alec reached through the window to present their ID and permission to visit. ‘Banality,' he said, and Mac got the distinct impression that in Alec's eyes that made it worse.

It was another fifteen minutes before they'd dealt with the formalities and Rains was brought out to them. They had been put in the visitors' room, a space occupied by a dozen small, melamine-topped tables surrounded by blue plastic chairs and with a coffee machine wedged into a corner close beside the door. Off this main area was a viewing room, glass-panelled and equipped with telephones, alarms and a large wooden table stacked with paperwork and currently occupied by two prison officers who seemed to be trying to work out some kind of shift rota. They had glanced up as Alec and Mac passed by the open door, assured them that Rains would be no trouble and gone back to their work.

Rains was brought in through another door at the far end of the visiting area. Dressed in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, Rains approached them cautiously, pulling out a chair and settling himself uneasily at their table. He was a tall man, matching Mac for height but not quite reaching Alec's. Pale, with tired eyes and hands that shook slightly as he accepted the coffee they had bought for him from the machine. He'd once been a powerful, well-built individual, Mac guessed; there was a squareness to the shoulders and a tightness to the shirt sleeves that spoke of someone who once played around with weights, though now a layer of flab covered once-flat abs and his face sagged at jawline and chin.

‘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—'