Mac parked up behind the police station, squeezing his car between a Range Rover and a scientific support unit van. Usually there was his car, the patrol car and Eden’s motorbike installed in the tiny yard and it felt full even then. He opened his door as far as he could and tried to make himself as thin as possible. How, he wondered, was everyone going to manage to get out? There wasn’t room to swing a moggie, let alone turn a car.
Sergeant Baker handed him a cup of Eden’s coffee as he came in through the rear door. ‘Saw you drive into the yard,’ he said. ‘The boss said you’d need this.’
‘Thanks, I do.’ When had he last slept?
‘Upstairs,’ Frank said. ‘Everyone’s waiting on you.’
The interview rooms had not been much used since Mac had been at Frantham. In fact, the smaller of the two was used for storage and was packed with box files. The two boys, along with their guardians, Eden and an officer Mac did not know, were waiting in the one remaining, sitting silent around a Formica-topped table that looked like a relic from a 1950s café.
Karen spared him a small, tight smile. The unknown officer was disclosed as DI Newman, the new officer in charge.
Mac sat down in the only vacant chair. ‘Hi, George. Paul, we met when I came to your house. Do you remember?’
Paul nodded sullenly.
‘I’ve discussed things with DI Newman,’ Eden said quietly, his tone somewhat chilly, Mac thought. ‘He’s agreed with me there’s no need to interview the boys separately at this stage. They’re not about to try and pull the wool, are you, boys?’
George shook his head. Paul swallowed hard and just stared at Mac. The tape was started and those present listed. It sounded like a three ring circus, Mac thought. ‘Now,’ he said gently. ‘Suppose we begin with Sharon Bates’s cider.’
It took time to coax their story from them and Mac wished more than once that Paul’s parents weren’t there. Paul would have found it easier without their shocked silences and horrified exclamations. Karen held George’s hand tight, as though scared he’d try to run away again, but she stayed calm and quiet. But then, Mac thought, she already knew all this, had already absorbed much of the shock.
George helped Paul through the early part of their story but by the time he had reached his account of the beating he had received from Mark Dowling, he was effectively on his own. Mrs Robinson began to cry. She didn’t stop. Her weeping became an audible backdrop to her son’s words but he was speaking more fluently, more determinedly now, and Mac did not want to break the flow by asking her to leave. All he could hear was the sobbing, Paul’s words. There was no other sound.
‘I thought he’d break me arm,’ Paul said. ‘He’d grabbed me and twisted it up behind me back and then he started thumping me in the ribs and I couldn’t breathe and he hit me in the mouth and across the face and me lip was bleeding and me eyes were swelling up. I tried to tell him I’d been lying about the gun. That I never saw no gun. That I’d just lost me nerve, but he just said that liars deserved a beating anyway. He weren’t going to stop, no matter what I said.
‘Then he made me go with him to that old lady’s house. He said if I didn’t go he’d beat up George and me mam, only worse, so they wouldn’t be able to tell on him. So I went with him.’
‘You believed him?’ DI Newman asked; Mac wanted to tell him to shut up and listen.
‘Yeah, I did.’ Paul’s face was white, his breathing shallow. He was back there, on that night, scared half to death. ‘He took a hammer from the tin huts where his dad works. I told you, that was where we were. And he smashed the panel in her door. We got in and she was just standing there, in the front room, leaning on her frame and with this statue thing in her hand and Mark said … Mark said, “Where’s the gun?” and she said she ain’t got no gun. The police took it away. But he didn’t want to know. He grabbed that statue thing from her and he hit her with it and she fell down and then he started on wrecking the place and I tried to go to her, but he had a knife in his hand and he told me to stay where I was and then he told me to go upstairs and look and I tried to get out the front door but he came and grabbed me and hit me again.’
That explains the blood on the stairs, Mac thought. ‘And what happened then, Paul?’
Paul sighed. ‘He dragged me up the stairs and he started wrecking the stuff in the little room and then he pushed me into her bedroom and told me to look there. I didn’t know what for. I didn’t ask. I started to look through drawers and stuff and then I heard him go back down and I just stopped there, in that room, then when I heard him in the hall again I thought I’d better go back down.’
‘And when you went downstairs?’
Paul flushed bright red and then the colour drained again. Now, Mac noted, his skin was grey, his lips pale. ‘He made me look. He grabbed my arm and he dragged me into the room and he made me look. She was lying there, on the floor near the bed and her head was all bashed in. She was … He said that’s what he’d do to me mam if I said anything – and to George and George’s mam too.’
Finally, the tears began to flow. He tried to wipe them away but now they’d been released he just could not stem the flow. Eden signalled the end of the interview and then stopped the tape. Mrs Robinson’s sobs seemed louder still in the silence. Her son wept silently, sitting quite still, and when Karen reached out and placed his hand as well as George’s between her own, he did not pull away.
Instinct to protect, Mac thought. Some might say what better reason to kill?
Thirty-Two
Mac had finally slept. Rina’s tiny spare room was cramped but the bed was comfortable and breakfast something to celebrate, just himself and Tim and Rina at the kitchen table with a full English and a large pot of tea.
Rina had told him how they’d found the boys but had made little comment upon Mac’s quietness and reluctance to talk. Tim didn’t seem quite awake enough for conversation. Mac was grateful of that. His mind was buzzing and not with pleasant thoughts. Yesterday, at the end of the interrogation, he had suddenly and irrationally known that Karen had taken Mark Dowling out of the picture.
He asked himself if the thought would even have crossed his mind if he’d not spoken to Edward Parker that afternoon and heard his accusations. Was she capable of it? Kendal had asked, and now more than ever Mac wondered if the answer was yes.
The day’s work brought the post-mortem report on Mark Dowling. It had been rushed through late the previous night. Mac studied it but it told him little he did not already know. Someone had hit Dowling a total of seven times. The killing blow had been to the head or possibly to the back of the neck, just where it met the skull. Either would have done it, so which came first was a moot point. Mac thought about it, reading between the lines of the report. His killer could have hit twice in quick succession. One blow while he was standing and the second as he fell. That would make sense. Not, Mac concluded, that it really mattered. The outcome was the same.
The weapon was a pipe or a bat or something similar. It was ridged, at least on some part. Small, parallel indentations showed in two of the wounds.
Mac put the report aside and checked to see what else had come in overnight. He was surprised to find details of Edward Parker’s stay in hospital, which had been faxed through to him by Kendal.
A police report had been filed. The assumption had been that Parker was the victim of a violent mugging and he’d not disabused anyone of the notion. He’d been stabbed in an alley at the side of his favourite pub. No one had connected him with the Edward Parker wanted for domestic abuse simply because for five days no one even knew his name and also because no one was looking very hard for Edward Parker, abuser. He was assumed to have long gone.
By the time the connection had been made, Parker had disappeared from there as well, together with a hospital wheelchair, implying that he must have had some help.
‘These friends of his, I suppose,’ Mac muttered to himself.
Two knife wounds, both potentially life threaten
ing. One was a slash to the face and neck. He’d lost a lot of blood, but his attacker had failed to connect with the major vessels, the knife deflecting off the jaw. The second was a deep stab wound to the side and from that he should have died. Luck saved him. Another drinker taking a short cut back to his Sunday lunch. He’d run back inside, raised the alarm and the barman had administered first aid, keeping pressure on the wound until the ambulance arrived.
Mac leaned back in his chair and stared hard at both reports as though staring could bring him answers. She’d have been fifteen then, abused for a good portion of her life, witness to abuse that Mac could not even begin to imagine.
That gave her a reason, but, Mac asked himself, did it give her the right?
Paul had gone with his parents to stay with relatives for a few days and George missed him. He was bored. His mum had woken up for a while and had some tea and toast but then flopped on the sofa in a half doze, staring at the daytime television.
Karen had gone back to the house to get some more of their stuff and George hoped she’d remember his PlayStation. George hoped she’d be OK. He told her she should ask Mac to go with her but she’d just smiled and told him she’d be fine. She’d keep her eyes open.
George sat on the windowsill, staring out on to the promenade and watching people go about their daily tasks. It was too early in the season for there to be tourists and the locals were all bundled up against the steady drizzle that had started at dawn and gave no sign of letting up.
George glanced across at his mother, wondering if he should make her a cup of tea. At least it would be something to do. He went across to the sink and filled the kettle, flipped open the cupboard doors, curious to see what policemen ate. This one, it seemed, not a lot.
Sighing, George slammed tea bags into the pot and then wandered back to the window, waiting for the water to boil. George froze. Out there on the promenade, leaning against the sea wall, stood Edward Parker – and he was staring up at George. Then, absurdly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, he smiled and waved.
George backed away. He was seeing things. He should tell his mother, call the police. Phone Karen on her mobile.
He moved back to the window, half convinced that the man would have gone, or transmuted into some harmless stranger who just happened to bear a passing resemblance to his dad. But no, Parker senior was still there and now he was crossing the promenade and heading towards the front door.
George, eyes wide with fear, looked again at his mother. She was oblivious to it all, mouthing the answer to the questions on the quiz she was watching. George could not let his father come inside. He couldn’t even let him bang on the door. She’d hear. She’d know. She’d freak out.
Squaring his shoulders, he sneaked behind the sofa, paused to grab his coat from the peg near the door, and slipped out. He met his father on the stairs.
‘Georgie boy!’
‘Shhsh, please, Dad.’
Parker’s grin broadened. ‘Your mother there, is she? Your bitch of a sister?’
Shocked, George shook his head. ‘She went out,’ he stammered.
‘Yeah, I suppose she must have. I don’t hear any sirens, see any little hell cat with a knife.’
‘Knife?’ George was confused now.
‘Oh, you don’t know?’ Edward Parker turned and headed back down the stairs and out on to the promenade. Hesitant, George followed him.
‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’
‘Maybe we should go and find her?’ Parker threw back over his shoulder. He started to walk down the promenade.
‘No!’ George shouted after him. ‘I told you, she went out.’ Worried about his dad getting to Karen, it didn’t occur to George that his father was headed in quite the wrong way anyway. The opposite direction from their house.
Not sure what to do, afraid that if he retreated to the flat his dad would follow, George trailed after him, trying to keep a decent distance behind. They reached the end of the promenade. Turn one way now and you were on the stone-built jetty that jutted into the bay. The other way took a big loop round towards the Railway pub or up to the hotel at Marlborough Head. George wondered desperately what his father was planning to do.
Edward paused, waited for George to catch up, then beckoned him on. ‘What’s up, Georgie boy? I ain’t going to hurt you.’
‘You said that before,’ George told him. His dad’s eyes hardened but he forced a laugh.
‘Well I’m sorry I scared you, old son,’ he said. ‘But sometimes your mam would provoke me so far I just didn’t know what I was doing. I’d lose it with her and I know that probably frightened you, but it’s past history now. You and me, we’re going to start again. Be a team like. Father and son. Like it’s supposed to be.’
George stood stock still. He couldn’t be serious. Could he? He shook his head. ‘I ain’t going nowhere with you.’ He turned on his heel and started to run. He only managed three paces before strong arms swept him off his feet. George yelled but then a hand was clamped tight and moments later George was bundled into a car, squashed on the back seat between his dad and the man who’d grabbed him.
George whimpered in fright. He couldn’t help himself.
‘Nothing to be scared of, Georgie boy,’ his father said. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘Where’s George?’ Karen demanded as she came back into the flat. Her mother looked up momentarily from the television then turned back to her chat show.
Karen switched the television off. ‘Mum, where’s George?’ She marched through to the bedroom. Knocked on the bathroom door. It swung open to her touch. There were only so many places in the flat that a boy could hide. Where the hell was he? She checked the coat hooks, but his coat was gone. ‘Mum, didn’t you even see him go?’
Momentary bewilderment on Carol’s face was followed by blankness. She shook her head. ‘Isn’t he here?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Mum!’
She grabbed the phone; delved in her bag for the number Mac had given her. ‘George is gone,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t know where. I don’t know how long. I went to the house to get some things and left him with Mum. I got back and he’d gone and she’d not even noticed. OK, I’ll wait here. Please hurry.’
She lowered the phone and tried not to give into the dread gnawing at her belly. It was their dad, she just knew it. She just knew.
George found himself in a tiny room papered with large cabbage roses. More roses, red this time, climbed a trellis print on a pair of ageing curtains. A window gave a view out on to the sea. The window was locked. He angled his neck, trying to see what was below, but he couldn’t even glimpse the ground and, considering the several flights of stairs it had taken to get up here, he figured he must be three floors above the ground.
George had a vague idea where he was. They’d taken the road past the hotel, winding up on to the headland, and then joined the coast road. He’d managed to look at his watch. It had been ten fifteen when they’d passed the hotel and only fifteen minutes after that they’d turned into a long cart track of a drive. The car had been put in a garage before they got out and they entered the house by a side door. George had then been taken upstairs and locked in. He’d rarely had reason to be out this way but he remembered that from Marlborough Head you could see a cluster of buildings, whitewashed and imposing, on a craggy outcrop of land jutting out into the sea as Marlborough did. The house was tall, unusually so for one as exposed to the elements, and George felt certain that was where he was now imprisoned.
All he had to do now was let someone know. Easy.
He surveyed his tiny kingdom. A single bed, made up with clean sheets. He could smell the fabric conditioner. A chest of drawers, empty. A bedside table with a single drawer and a cupboard, also empty. George had used the cupboard to climb up on to the high sill of the locked window. He rested his feet on it now and perched uncomfortably on the sill.
He couldn’t see much of anything, and even less of anyth
ing helpful.
His dad had taken his coat from him before leaving the room and made him empty his pockets. Where, George wondered, was the carefully concealed Swiss Army knife when you most needed it?
He sighed. A right mess he’d made of things, yet again. He couldn’t quite figure out what his father wanted. He didn’t for one minute think that his father really, actually wanted him. He’d always despised George and had never bothered to hide the fact. ‘You’re just a waste of skin,’ he’d say and mean every word of it. ‘Your mam must have put it around while I was inside. No way I fathered a ginger idiot.’
And what was all this stuff about Karen? This stuff about a knife?
George thought back to the day they’d run away from their father. The ambulance had come, taken their mum away and instead of following her on the bus or cadging a lift in the police car like they usually did, Karen had said they’d wait and go later on.
The police woman had been a bit quizzical, but he’d heard her fellow officer say that the kids must be used to it by now. Probably sick of it all. Good that Karen wanted to put her dad away. They’d arrange for a responsible adult to come to the station to sit with her while she made a statement.
‘Don’t change your mind,’ he told her sternly.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Karen had said. ‘You’ll be seeing us.’
Then she’d told George to go to the shops and given him a list of stuff to get. He tried to recall how long he’d been gone and guessed it must have been about an hour. He’d not been scared. Not been worried about meeting their dad. They knew his habits, knew he’d be getting pissed in one of two local pubs and George could easily avoid both.
A Reason to Kill Page 19