Alternative outcome

by Peter Rowlands

  “Well, up to a point. I found out they lived in the Manchester area, and he was in property. But they seem to have vanished overnight – probably the same year I met them. It’s a bit of a mystery, actually.”

  “Well well. Intriguing.” He scratched his head. “I suppose you’ll keep on looking for them, will you?”

  “Probably.”

  “Good, good. You never know what you might turn up, do you?”

  “I suppose not.”

  He nodded and started to wander away, but I said, “Do you mind me asking who these other people are?”

  He looked again. “No idea. Friends of the Markhams, probably.” He dropped the picture back on the pile.

  Coffee proved a slightly stilted affair. Gordon had disappeared to the greenhouse, but Mary continued to make fishing remarks about why I was there, and Ashley continued to fend them off. I picked up a strong sense of mother-daughter friction, probably stretching back many years.

  Finally Ashley stood up. “Well, we’ve got places to go and sights to see.”

  * * *

  As we closed the car doors she turned to me. “I wish I really could give you a sightseeing tour.”

  “Rain check?”

  She nodded. “So what time is your train?”

  I shrugged. “No particular time. Whenever it leaves.”

  She glanced at her watch. “OK, great.”

  She drove back to the main road, then headed off at a brisk pace into a grey sky. The signs said we were going in the direction of Redruth.

  We continued for a while without saying much. I had a feeling she had an agenda, and felt the safest approach was to let it run its course. Eventually she pulled in at a road house – a sort of combined diner and pub.

  “Bit early for lunch,” she commented as we walked over from the car, “and this isn’t exactly Cornwall’s finest, but what the heck?”

  We found a table for two by the window, and she looked thoughtfully at me for a moment.

  “OK, let me tell you about Kieron.”

  Chapter 43

  She sat facing me over her coffee and smiled. “There’s nothing much to tell, actually, but I suppose in a way I have Kieron to thank for everything that’s happened to me since then.”

  I waited while she collected her thoughts.

  “He turned up one day to check over some of Latimer’s trucks. He was from a firm in Leeds who were putting a tracking system in our fleet. This is years ago. Latimer’s had a place outside Truro then, and I worked there in admin. Next thing I know, he’s left that firm and joined Patrick’s firm here in Truro, and before I know it I’m living with him in his cottage.” She raised her eyes heavenward. “Silly me.”

  I nodded without comment.

  “I left my job at Latimer’s and went to work on the counter at a craft centre – more or less for nothing. It was my Bohemian phase.” She put verbal quote marks round the phrase.

  “Then one day Patrick tells me he’s found out Kieron is screwing some girl in Penryn. Plus, he’s still seeing his girlfriend in Leeds when he goes up there. So that, in nutshell, was that.” She sat back. “It was all horribly predictable, and I suppose it was pretty trivial in the scheme of things. But we all have our story, don’t we?” She smiled ironically.

  “Then what happened?”

  “Well, you know, life. I moved on, Latimer’s took me back, my parents got over themselves –” another fleeting heavenward glance – “and then there was Jack. He was a school friend of Patrick’s, and suddenly we clicked.”

  Cautiously I said, “But do you actually want to marry him?”

  She examined her coffee cup for a long moment without answering, prodding the sugar sachet that had come with it. “Ah, now there’s a question.” She raised her head and gave me a long, quizzical look.

  We ordered more coffees, and then she leaned forward over the table. “So what’s your story Mike?”

  Ha. What was my story? I started to reflect, then suddenly it seemed incredibly simple.

  “You could say it all started here, really. At Falmouth, I mean. I used to see that girl, Trina, and I wanted to get to know her, but I didn’t know how to. I felt as if there was an invisible barrier blocking my way. And once I recognised it, it seemed immovable. Same thing happened every time I met someone I liked. I couldn’t break it down. Years passed, and all my friends got themselves paired up, but I never did. Pathetic or what?”

  She waited, so I added, “When I finally met Sandy, my wife, I just felt grateful that she was willing to give me the time of day. I smiled ironically. “Talk about marry in haste. Or live together in haste, anyway.”

  She scrutinised me for a moment. “Well, obviously you’re nothing to write home about in the looks department, and as for your personality, well … should we just call it a personality deficit?” She paused theatrically. “I think I see the problem, Mr Stanhope.”

  We sat staring at each other for a moment, then we simultaneously broke into suppressed laughter. I said, “Maybe I should fetch out the violins.”

  From coffees we graduated to a hamburger lunch, chatting in a more relaxed way about our life histories. I asked her if she had ambitions beyond Latimer’s.

  “Probably not. I’m very settled there, and they’re a great crew. Bob Latimer took me under his wing when I transferred over there from Truro, and they’ve promoted me repeatedly. It might not be that long before I’m running the marketing department.”

  “Do you like the logistics world?”

  “Do I like it? It’s more or less in the blood now. It’s hard to imagine working in any other business.”

  “Well, it’s a big part of our lives that we have in common.”

  She looked a little uneasy at this – reminding me that the one thing absent from the conversation was any sense of where we now stood with each other. We were behaving like a long-established couple, yet we were barely a couple at all.

  Finally, as more coffees arrived, I sat back and looked at her. “I wasn’t sure if you would want me to come on this trip. I didn’t know what to think.”

  “Probably that I was being a pain.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I probably was. Anyway, I’m glad you did come.”

  I searched for the right words. “I’ve never been in this position before – that’s all. I don’t know the rules.”

  She stared at her coffee again, toying with the teaspoon. “Nor do I.”

  Finally we paid and left the restaurant. The sky had turned leaden, and heavy drops of rain were already falling on us by the time we reached the car. We sat without speaking for a moment, staring through the windscreen as the flat landscape collapsed into a distorted blur.

  I reached out and took her hand, and that electrical connection instantly sparked between us. We stayed like that for a long moment.

  * * *

  We said little as she drove me back to Truro. As we approached the station I said, “The way things are shaping up with Latimer’s, I’ll probably be down here again in a few weeks’ time.”

  “Good.” She said it with emphasis.

  “I don’t know …” I tailed off. I wasn’t sure what I didn’t know.

  She said, “I’ve got some thinking to do. I need to work things out.”

  “OK.”

  I probably sounded disconsolate, because she immediately said, “I will, I will.” And as I prepared to get out of the car she leaned over and kissed me briefly on the lips. “See you soon, yes?”

  2012

  It became almost a hobby, tracking Sasha down. The more I looked, the less I found, and the whole thing turned into a challenge: if the woman I’d seen wasn’t her, what in fact had happened to her?

  The people at Polperro would tell me nothing. If they still had records, they weren’t sharing them with me. The internet was worse than useless. It gave no clue that she had ever existed. It was months before I even discovered her surname: Hawkins. I soon learned this was a common name.
Too many Hawkins, and none of them was mine.

  Still, I launched a Facebook page and subscribed to various missing persons web sites. It brought no success, but I soon had several live threads in progress on forums and in chat rooms. I might not be getting any closer finding Sasha, but the search was almost becoming an end in itself.

  It was only later that year that I started thinking laterally. I rummaged through news reports for the summer we’d first encountered each other, searching on “Hawkins” and looking for notable events – events that might prompt someone to disappear.

  That was when I found it: the Newbury security van heist. It happened the very week we were at Polperro. Coincidence, I thought at first. I checked the names of the perpetrators, most of whom had spent many years in prison. No Hawkins among them.

  Then I looked among the back-stories and deep-level investigations – and suddenly I had my answer. Terry Hawkins, a former police officer, had been a known associate of Simon Bartleby, who was reckoned to have masterminded the robbery. And Hawkins had disappeared forever during the week of the robbery.

  Chapter 44

  Rick Ashton rang me first thing on Monday. “Michael, good news my friend. It looks as though our new funding is in place.”

  I asked for details, but he was evasive. “The bean counters are still firming up the details,” he said. “We’ll be putting out a press release, but maybe not for a few days, so I’d be glad if you said nothing yet. I just thought I’d give you a heads-up.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  Actually, though, I wondered if this was just another delaying tactic. How long was I supposed to wait before this news was made official? Still, he’d presented me with the story from the horse’s mouth, so I had to take him at his word. At least it released me from pursuing the lead in other directions – for the time being, at any rate.

  * * *

  I reviewed the work I’d taken on for Latimer’s. I had to write a string of press releases, some of which meant contacting Latimer customers to get quotes and testimonials from them. Others were more routine, involving announcements of new depots or extra staff.

  Unexpectedly, the work struck me as a refreshing change. It meant defining news from scratch – expressing it the way I wanted it expressed. In some ways it reminded me of creative writing, though of course the underlying stories had been fed to me. I wasn’t allowed to make them up.

  By lunchtime I had several themes going, and felt moderately pleased with my progress. It was the first time in an age that I’d actually felt enthused by what I was doing. Was this my true calling then? Not so much probing journalist as jobbing feature-writer? Or was it just that the whole endeavour was indirectly connected to Ashley Renwick?

  I felt I’d earned a break. I reopened the email from Trina Markham, if that’s who she was, and read it through several times more.

  I quickly realised that my doubts about its authenticity had increased since the previous week. Phrases that had seemed merely evasive the first time round now struck me as downright contrived.

  The hotel “was in a very pretty location, and made a good base for heading out to see the other wonders of Cornwall,” I read. That sounded more like text from a travel guide than something written from lived experience.

  “I got to know a few of the other children there.” Plausible, but it seemed oddly unemotional and barren of detail.

  But what did this mean? Was the message not from Trina at all? If not, who would want to deter me from looking for her? And if it really was from her, why did it sound like a message written by numbers?

  I did a web search on “Trina Powell” and “Catrina Powell”, which I’d neglected to do last week. There were plenty of finds for both, and I trawled idly through a few of them. Several could possibly be the person who’d sent this email – except that the most likely ones seemed about as far away from a “private person” as you could get. There were photographs, discographies, profiles, comments, blogs. If people were prepared to share this much of their lives online, it seemed a reasonable bet that they would be happy enough to pick over childhood memories. Yet my Trina evidently wasn’t.

  I studied the photographs with particular interest. Did any of them bear the faintest resemblance to the Trina of my childhood – of whom I now had several photographs? The answer seemed to be a fairly convincing no. But then, if she was a private person, her picture probably wouldn’t be on show in the first place.

  What about the woman I’d crossed paths with at Euston a couple of years ago? Did any of these pictures remind me of her? The problem was that I didn’t really remember her properly any more. At any rate, none of the images brought her back to my consciousness.

  I wondered what I could do to keep the search alive. If this really was Trina and she genuinely didn’t want to communicate with me, it would be discourteous of me not to take her at her word. But I was becoming increasingly convinced that it wasn’t.

  I opened a new email window, but I hesitated before I wrote anything. My initial thought was to send an apparently bland message with some trap in it – a reference to some fake memory that a false Trina wouldn’t pick up on. If she bothered to reply, I might get confirmation that she was an impostor.

  Then I dismissed the idea. It was too devious; it was childish. Quite the opposite, I would throw in something to prove to her who I was. My thoughts crystallised as I wrote.

  This is a message for Trina

  I was delighted to receive the reply to my email last week.

  I realise I’ve been asked not to get into extended correspondence with you, and I don’t want to seem as though I’m ignoring this.

  I just wanted to say this. I really am Mike Stanhope, and hope you might vaguely remember me from your time at the Fairmile. Nobody else has asked me to contact you, and I have no hidden agenda. My most vivid memory is of nearly walking into you one day, and of talking nonsense at you instead of just saying hello. Your mother gave us some lemonade.

  I admit I have wondered why you seem to have disappeared for all these years, but I realise it’s not my business. I just wanted you to know what a big impression you made on me at the time. Being honest, at the back of my mind I also wondered whether I even registered on your radar. But perhaps you have already answered that.

  As I said in my previous message, I don’t want to be a nuisance. After this you needn’t ever hear from me again.

  With the very best of intent,

  Mike

  I felt slightly uneasy about the claim that there was no hidden agenda. There was, wasn’t there? My original thought was to make some kind of editorial mileage out of all this: hardly an innocent motive. But I told myself not to be concerned; I would respect Trina’s wishes. Assuming this really was her.

  Overall, I was rather pleased with my message: nothing too heavy or demanding, just a barely coded indication that I thought the original reply wasn’t from Trina, and a modest show of frankness. Yes, I was surely a writer. People just didn’t appreciate me.

  Chapter 45

  In the afternoon there was a knock at the front door, and my policeman friend Dave Matthews stood grinning at me.

  “Can I have your autograph please?”

  It was his second-ever visit to the house, and this time it seemed the call was only semi-official. I led him through the lounge and out on to the patio, and waved him towards a rickety garden chair. The late summer sun still had surprising warmth in it.

  “So you read the book then?” I said as he sat down.

  “Indeed I did. Very impressive.”

  I looked warily at him. “And the list of mistakes …?”

  “Too numerous to mention.” He smiled, affirming that that he meant no malice.

  “But you managed to struggle through it anyway?”

  “Well, I could see what you were getting at.”

  I brought two coffees out to the patio. Dave was looking round at the modest climbing roses on the patio walls, but turned to me as
I drew up a chair. “So why exactly did you want me to read your book? Apart from the ego boost, that is.”

  “Ah. Well. You might think this is a ridiculously long shot, but I’ve been wondering about the security van robbery aspect.”

  “Right.”

  “You’ll realise it’s loosely based on the real robbery around that time?”

  He smiled ironically. “I picked up that much, yes.”

  “So in my story, one of the thieves gets away, and keeps back a significant amount of the loot. He stashes it somewhere for a rainy day.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, I have no idea if that’s what happened in real life, but some people think it might be. So here’s what I’m thinking. What if someone in the real world, someone connected to the real robbery, has read my book, and thinks I actually know where the stash is? Or at least, that I know where to find the people who could tell them? What if that’s what’s behind all these break-ins? What if they’re trying to find out what I know?”

  Dave looked at me for a moment. There was deep scepticism in his gaze.

  “Well, I thought it was at least worth considering.”

  He gave one of his resonant laughs. “Life meets art, you mean?”

  “There’s a kind of logic to it, don’t you think?”

  He sat for a moment without replying, squinting against the sun as he reviewed this notion. Finally he said, “So how did these hypothetical people find out about your book?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not exactly on the best seller list, but it’s not a secret either. It’s out there on the internet. You wouldn’t necessarily find it unless you went looking for it, but let’s just assume for a moment that someone did.”

  “OK, so what makes these people think this fictional story, which has completely different characters, locations and plot from the real events, has anything whatever to do with their own miserable lives?”