Dead Feint

by Grant Atherton

  He sank down onto the windowsill as if suddenly weary. “I talked with his sister again a few days ago. Just so she could keep me up to date.”

  “She doesn’t still blame you, does she?”

  Shaking his head, he said, “I don’t think so. She understands now how it was between us. She doesn’t bear me any ill will. We met up for a meal. It helped clear the air between us. That’s why I went back to London.”

  That was one mystery solved at least. And a timely reminder of what an idiot I can be when I get it wrong.

  I said, “You’ve been so down recently. I knew something was troubling you. I wish you’d been able to talk to me about it.” I searched his face, puzzled. “Why didn’t you tell me? I hate to think you had to go through all that alone.”

  The smile faded. “I was ashamed. I should have thought more about his needs and not just my own. It was selfish.”

  How ironic. He could as easily have been talking about me, about the way I had treated him. “This is me you’re talking to. Who knows better than me what that’s like. I would have understood.”

  He stared at me long and hard as if seeing me for the first time. “I wasted years blaming you for what happened between us. I should have tried to understand. This has made me realise how easily we can hurt someone without meaning to.”

  “Then I’m sure you must also realise how bitterly I regret it.”

  He nodded.

  I said, “A few months ago, we made a commitment to each other. Remember what you said? If we’re going to make this work, we have to be honest with each other, discuss our problems.”

  “I remember,” he said. “I should learn to heed my own words.”

  “Yes, you should. We’ll do that in future then, shall we?” I tempered the admonishment with a smile.

  He returned the smile and said, “Deal.”

  Relief washed over me.

  These last few days, he had seemed distant, distracted, even hostile. And I had presumed that the fault was mine that somehow I had let him down. But maybe that was my guilty conscience. I guessed it would be a while before I had enough confidence in our relationship to feel secure. Even so, perhaps it was a good time to take stock.

  “All this time, I thought it was about Rusty. I know you said you accepted there was nothing—”

  He cut me short. “Mikey, stop.” He pushed back against the arm of the couch and stared at me from under furrowed brows. “I don’t like the guy is all. Never did. But I never doubted you. I was angry with you for not telling him about us.”

  “I wouldn’t have blamed you if you had thought the worst.”

  “Listen to me,” he said, “and listen good.” His tone was firm. “I know you’re having a hard time adjusting to a new lifestyle. You’ve made that obvious. But I also know you wouldn’t be putting yourself through that if you were going to screw up by having a relationship with Rusty. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “We’re not going to get very far if we build our relationship on blame and regret, are we?”

  “No argument there,” I said.

  “Good. Then don’t let me hear any more of this crap, okay?”

  I responded with a mock salute. “Yes, Sir.”

  We grinned at each other and then his smile faded. “I’m glad we talked,” he said.

  “Let’s keep on talking, shall we? And you’ll let me know if there are any developments with Brendon?”

  “Sure I will.”

  “Why don’t you take a break? I’m sure we could both use one.”

  He glanced over at the pile of files on his desk and pulled a face. “If only.” He squeezed my thigh. “Why don’t I call you later? Dinner maybe?”

  “Sounds like a plan.” I rose to my feet. “Will you be okay?”

  He nodded up at me and tried a smile.

  “I’ll leave you to it then.” I nodded towards his desk. “You look like you have enough to keep you going for a while.” I headed for the door.

  “Mikey?”

  With one hand on the door handle, I turned to face him.

  “I know we’ve had our problems,” he said. “And there have been some rough patches along the way. But I’ll never regret us.”

  I held his gaze and said, “I’ll remind you of that next time we’re in the middle of a blazing row.”

  “Don’t make it too soon.”

  He was still smiling as I closed the door on him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  I left the Elan in the station car park and made my way home on foot. My head was still buzzing, full of disparate conflicted feelings, and I needed time to sort them out.

  Lost in thought, I was only dimly aware of the hustle and bustle of others around me, as I passed through the town. The sun was high in a clear azure blue sky, and a cooling breeze blew in from the coast, bringing with it the rhythmic sound of waves swashing against the sea wall. But I was in no mood to enjoy it. My mind was elsewhere.

  Part of me was relieved, glad not to have been the basic cause of Nathan’s recent sour despondent moods. But I was bemused too. Why couldn’t he have told me about it? Had he not felt he could rely on my support?

  And then there was Brendon. Poor broken Brendon. And loathe though I was to admit it, I had to accept that I had sought my own future happiness at his expense. When Nathan ended their relationship in favour of ours, I hadn’t given a second’s thought to how much it may have hurt him.

  Instead of carrying on to the end of the High Street towards home, I turned off to my left and headed towards the Fairview. I needed company, and if Karen wasn’t too busy, perhaps I could persuade her to join me for lunch. If anyone could help raise my spirits, she could.

  The place was heaving. I wound my way around the busy tables on the terrace and narrowly avoided being tripped by a couple of boys chasing each other around the edge of the terrace with a yapping terrier at their heels.

  An enquiry at the reception desk led me to a harassed-looking Karen helping to serve meals in the restaurant.

  I caught her on her way to the kitchen balancing a tray of dirty dishes. She made it clear that lunch was out of the question.

  “It’s just something I dream about in my more lucid moments,” she said.

  “It was just a thought. I’ll leave you to it. Catch you later.” Seems I was going to be stuck with my own company after all.

  As I turned to go, I caught sight of Marcus and Carol Farrow at one of the tables by the window. Judging by the sneering expression on his face and her tight-lipped response, they appeared to be in the middle of a heated discussion.

  I tilted my head in their direction. “I see the Farrows are squaring up to another fight. Does that man never stop arguing?”

  Karen wrinkled her nose. “They’ve been hard at it since they arrived.”

  The reasons for this current sparring match weren’t hard to guess at. No doubt she’d now learned of his affair.

  Seeing them here had given me an idea. “Have they been here long?”

  “About fifteen minutes. They’ve not been served yet.”

  “Good.”

  With the two of them out of the way, I would have an opportunity to talk to John Farrow. Presuming, of course, he was at home alone. Part of the missing puzzle in the investigation into Candy’s murder were details of her more immediate history. Where she has lived before arriving in Elders Edge and who she had associated with could all provide pointers to other lines of enquiry. And in the course of her relationship with John Farrow, despite adopting a false identity, she may well have let slip information which could prove useful.

  He had steadfastly refused to believe Candy’s motives in forming a relationship with him had been anything less than honourable. As a consequence, he had been defensive when questioned about it by the police and may have been less than forthcoming about her past. Perhaps if I spoke with him, he may open up. It was worth a try, anyway.

  “Where do the Farrows live?”

  �
�Up at The Heights on the Charwell Road.”

  The Heights was an area considered to be at the top end of the residential market so I wasn’t surprised that someone like John Farrow would live there.

  “What number?” I asked.

  Karen narrowed her eyes. “Why do you want to know that?”

  “Just thought I’d take a look at the house,” I said, trying to sound casual.

  She folded her arms. “You’re not interfering are you, Mikey? You know how Nathan goes off on one if you get too involved.”

  “Of course I’m not.”

  She didn’t sound too convinced, but she gave me the details, anyway. I pressed my lips to her forehead, thanked her, and said my goodbyes. She was still glaring at me as I left.

  It was too much of a hassle to walk back to the Elan so I walked up to the Heights. It was only fifteen minutes away, and it gave me time to work out what I wanted to say.

  The house was a grand affair. Set far back from the road, it was a large Gothic-type-mansion of a place built of weathered black stone and reached along a winding gravel drive via an imposing arched wrought-iron metal gate.

  John Farrow answered the door.

  The man I remembered from the interview at the station was tall, sprightly for his age, and with an erect military bearing. This was no longer the same man. He seemed withered, grey featured, and with a slow slouching gait. The drastic change was a shock.

  I introduced myself, explained my role in the investigation, and asked if would answer some more questions.

  He agreed. But with a lack of enthusiasm that suggested he couldn’t care less one way or the other.

  He showed the way through a large oak-panelled lobby to a well-stocked library off the main hall. A large window overlooked a tree-lined side garden and the other three walls were fitted head to foot with bookcases, each one stacked full with books of all sizes and colours. The man was obviously well-read.

  He showed me to a brown leather armchair at the side of an empty fire grate and sank into its twin on the other side of the hearth.

  I explained that I was tasked with building up a profile of his fiancée as a means of assessing any possible actions and motives that could have led to her murder.

  “I’m sure you’ll want us to do all we can to find her murderer,” I explained.

  “It’s not going to bring her back is it?” his voice was flat, monotonous, with no trace of emotion.

  This was a man in the depths of despair.

  “No, of course not. But we need to catch whoever did this.”

  I prompted him, as gently as possible, for any relevant information about Candy’s past. With some coaxing, he told me how they had first met, a few months after his wife’s death from a stroke. She had knocked at his door after her car had broken down nearby and asked to use the phone to call a friend to come and pick her up. Later, she had returned with a bottle of wine As a thank-you present.

  “Such a charming thoughtful woman,” he said. “We soon became good friends.”

  Something about that particular scenario rang alarm bells. But I mentally filed the information away for future consideration.

  I steered him around to details of her background. “What can you tell me about her past? Did she speak about it much?”

  “She told me everything. Why wouldn’t she?” The look of defiance on his face slowly morphed into one of pain. “Though of course, after what we’ve all learned over these past few days, I can’t be certain how much of it is true. I can only suppose the poor woman must have been running from something terrible. If only she could have confided in me. I might have been able to help.”

  Piecing together the fragments of information John Farrow had gradually gleaned from his late fiancée during their relationship, I was able to build up a picture of a woman who bore no resemblance to the one portrayed by Rusty.

  The image conjured up for the benefit of Farrow had been of an upper-middle-class woman, the daughter of a barrister father and doctor mother, from Mayfair, one of London’s more fashionably select areas.

  The more he told me, the more I realised that none of what he had learned from Laura Carrington, aka Candy Bayliss, was even remotely near the truth. Eventually, realising I would learn nothing about her true background, I brought the discussion to a close, thanked him profusely for his help, and took my leave.

  On the way home, I thought over what he had told me. Two things struck me as significant. The first was the manner of their meeting. About three years earlier, I had been involved in a case where a woman had conned a wealthy widower out of his life savings. I had learned there was a pattern to this kind of crime, known as the sweetheart scam, where lonely wealthy men were targeted by confidence tricksters, usually through obituaries in the local press which identified them as being recently bereaved. Such men were often vulnerable and open to such scams. The circumstances of John Farrow’s meeting with Candy, turning up on his doorstep as she did, seemed to follow that pattern.

  The other significant aspect of John Farrow’s story had been the details of Candy’s fictitious past. It was the sort of background that would have appealed to someone like him. Almost as if it had been invented for that very purpose.

  Much as I disliked the man, I was beginning to think that there was something to Marcus Farrow’s claim after all. That Candy had set out from the start to fleece his father. And if that were the case, if she were nothing more than a con artist who knows how many enemies she may have made along the way.

  I was still musing over this when my mobile rang. It was Nathan. He’d made some headway with his workload and was taking a break. He was still feeling bad about our row and apologised again. We agreed to meet later that evening for a meal and I arranged for him to pick me up at the cottage.

  By the time we’d finished our call, I was back on the High Street. Instead of turning left towards the police station to pick up the Elan, I decided to pick it up later, and turned right towards home instead.

  Almost within sight of the cottage, I became aware of a vehicle behind me, the sound of its engine getting louder as it approached. It was moving fast.

  Too fast.

  I turned to face it.

  A battered old red transit van rattled towards me, hugging the wall.

  It bore down at high speed, throwing up a cloud of dust from beneath its wheels.

  With no pavement on this side of the road, I stepped back and pressed myself up against the embankment wall to let it pass.

  It gathered speed.

  Only at the last moment did I realise it was heading straight for me.

  A clattering rampaging heap of solid bone-shattering metal.

  Moments from impact.

  Only one way to go.

  A burst of adrenaline tore through me, my body reacting on automatic.

  Turning, as a dizzying blur of red filled my vision, I grasped the top of the wall and, in one fluid movement, hoisted myself up and over, hitting the ground on the other side, arms flailing, grasping at thin air.

  The steep slope gave way beneath me.

  I tumbled down the embankment, bringing along a shower of scree in my wake.

  I grabbed out at anything within reach in a desperate attempt to slow my progress; handfuls of weeds, loose stones, clumps of grassy earth, and all the time vaguely aware that the van had stopped somewhere above me.

  Brambles tore my hands and sharp embedded rocks, dug into my flesh as I rolled over them. But nothing was enough to stop my rapid fall. I hit the ground at the bottom of the slope, bruised and bleeding, with a force that knocked the wind out of me.

  Gasping for air, I tried to clamber to my feet but slipped again on the loose gravel and scrambled on all fours to the safety of an old sandbox by the disused railway line. From behind it, I peered up at the wall above.

  A dark-clothed figure in black balaclava and sunglasses stared back at me.

  And then he was gone.

  The door of the van slammed shut
, and it screeched off into the distance.

  I tried to stand but the pain in my leg was too much to bear and I sank back to the ground.

  Fishing in my jeans pocket with a trembling hand, I dug out my mobile and called Nathan. “I’m not sure I’ll make it for dinner tonight,” I said. “Someone just tried to kill me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “Nothing too serious,” said Dr Marks. “Just some bruising and soft tissue damage. But try to keep off that leg for a while.”

  Nathan said, “Don’t worry, doc. He won’t be going anywhere.” His tone of voice didn’t invite argument.

  I was laid up at home, lying full length on the couch, exposed leg up on the arm, with Nathan and Dr Marks from the local surgery hovering over me.

  Examination over, Dr Marks snapped shut his bag, gazed down at me over the top of his spectacles and, in the sort of tone usually reserved for people of limited intelligence, said, “And the next time you think about taking a shortcut across the town, may I suggest you use the road instead? It would save us all a lot of time and trouble.”

  To avoid possible public alarm, Nathan had decided some discretion was called for about the reason for my fall. Apparently, presenting me as some sort of idiot who launched himself over the embankment wall as a means of shortening his journey across town was considered more appropriate. Any objections I had to this approach were shouted down amid claims that I was an idiot anyway, so it didn’t really matter how it looked.

  Nathan saw Dr Marks to the door and as he closed it behind him and turned to face me, I braced myself for the inevitable verbal battering.

  He had already made his thoughts clear on what he called my indiscriminate and reckless disregard for my own safety. I suspected I was about to feel the full force of his displeasure.

  “Are you completely stupid?” His tone suggested he’d already decided the answer to that one.

  He’d been quick to respond to my phone call, arriving with Lowe in tow at the scene of my fall within a few minutes. But once he’d helped me back into the cottage, sent Lowe off to check on the red van, arranged a flying visit from the doctor, and satisfied his concerns about my health and well-being, he must have decided it was now time to challenge my ability to make intelligent decisions.