Alternative outcome

by Peter Rowlands

  Fury is the best way to describe Sasha’s immediate reaction to my sudden appearance on her doorstep: fury at me, at herself, at her situation. I could see it all in her eyes in that fleeting moment of first contact.

  It was followed quickly by surprise, bafflement, and finally resignation. Which is how come we were sitting in her kitchen ten minutes later, and she was handing me a cold drink.

  “I don’t normally invite total strangers into my home.” She spoke with an Australian accent.

  “I should hope not.”

  “If you hadn’t mentioned Polperro I would have been calling the police by now.”

  “I can understand that.”

  She looked at me carefully. “I know about you. You’ve been running a Facebook campaign in the UK, trying to find me.” She shrugged. “And now you have. So what do you want?”

  I said, “Nothing. I just thought it would be amazing to meet you again, after all these years.” It had seemed such an imperative, yet now it sounded so weak.

  She gave me a hard look. “And you’ve come all the way from England just for that?”

  I nodded mutely.

  “Jesus. You must be some kind of moron.” She looked me up and down. “Well you’ve met me. Will that do?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “Clearly you’ve joined the dots. You know why I’m here in Australia, and what happened to my family.”

  “Some of it, yes.”

  She looked around her. “Well, this is my life now. I’m Sarah, and I don’t have anything to do with any of that any more. And I’d have preferred it if you hadn’t come interfering.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you thinking of going to the police or the press? If you do, you’ll ruin my life. You do understand that, do you?”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t.”

  “I hope you mean that.”

  Chapter 67

  It was after eleven in the evening when I finally got back to London from Chesterfield. Joanna was agog for information about my meeting with Trina, but I managed to fend her off and slip away to the spare room – now strangely vacant without Ashley in it. I put my mobile on charge and immediately rang her. I knew she might be with Jack, and she might have gone to bed. Too bad.

  In fact she was about to leave her parents’ house. “My mum bought some things for Jack, so I’m taking them over to him.”

  I gave her a run-down on my lunch with Trina, and she listened with fascination, stopping me frequently to ask for more details. Finally she said, “Just a minute,” and I could hear her moving to a different room.

  “So are you in love with her all over again?”

  I smiled to myself. “I was never in love with her in the first place, just smitten.”

  “That’s what you say now.”

  “Don’t worry, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “Ha.”

  I said, “She remembered you. She thought you were a precocious brat.”

  “I think I’m liking this woman less every minute.”

  We chatted on for a while. I said, “I’m due down at Latimer’s again for a catch-up meeting in a couple of weeks’ time … but it’s too far ahead.”

  “Yes it is.” She paused to reflect. “What’s to be done?”

  “I don’t know. I could come to Cornwall, but I don’t see how we could meet. You can hardly ask Jack for a night off.”

  She chuckled at this, then said, “This is terrible, thinking of running around behind his back.” But she didn’t sound as if she thought it was so terrible. “I’ll only be there for another two or three weeks, then I’ll get my life back.”

  “Maybe you could make up some event in London that you have to attend?”

  “Probably best not to be caught in a lie.”

  “You’re right.” I took a deep breath. “Aarrggh!”

  * * *

  Next morning I sat in Joanna’s lounge with my laptop open on her coffee table. My first call was to the garage in Chesterfield where my car had been taken. I was told there would be no chance of looking at it until next week, and it was unlikely to be Monday.

  Next I organised a plumber to repair the cold water tank at my house and a joiner to repair the window. Then I called Dave Matthews, who didn’t answer, but rang me back an hour later.

  “Dave, I wondered what happened about my house?”

  “I went round there myself, as it happens. Charming lady, your friend Joanna.”

  “Ah, it was you she was talking about. So what did you find?”

  “Nothing much, frankly. They broke in through your kitchen window, and they must have taken tools to extract the ball valve from your cistern. All very neat. No damage to the house that I could see, except water damage. It’s starting to dry, but you’ll probably need a few new ceilings, and maybe some new carpet. Oh, and you need to get that back window repaired.”

  “In hand. Thanks, anyway. I owe you yet again, needless to say.”

  “All part of the service.”

  Ignoring the irony, I said, “Did you get any joy with that surname, Slater? Did it tie in with any of the likely suspects behind all this harassment?”

  “Afraid not. No apparent connection with any of them. Also, the people from the original robbery all seem to have solid alibis for the night you were kidnapped. We haven’t been able to link it to anyone specific.”

  I sensed a small hesitation. “But?”

  “Well, if my money were on it, I would be looking at a guy named Derek Flynn. Devious bastard. His wife evidently alibi’d him, but what value is that?” He paused. “Mind you, most of them used that kind of alibi. What can you expect when these are middle-aged men, and you’re asking them about something that happened in the middle of the night?”

  * * *

  I wondered about Harry Slater from the reading group. Maybe I’d got this wrong. Just because he came from somewhere east of London, he didn’t necessarily have to have gangland connections. I was being over-simplistic.

  But who else could have passed on the lead to my book? That man had definitely talked about “my nephew”. Who could that be?

  I rang Eric, the reading group chairman, and today he answered at my first attempt. I asked if he could give me contact details for Amelia, and he readily provided them. Amelia’s surname, it turned out, was Henderson, and she lived in Wandsworth.

  At the end of the conversation Eric threw in, “I hope you’re not canvassing my members to start up a rival reading group or something?”

  “Don’t worry – not a chance. This is just something private.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  I rang Amelia’s number, and she picked up straight away.

  “Mike! What a nice surprise.”

  “Look, I hope you won’t mind me asking this, but I’m trying to track down people who have read my book. It’s a long story, and I promise I’ll tell about it one of these days, but for now I just wondered if you happened to know anyone else who might have read it?”

  “To be honest, no. You did say you didn’t want anyone at the reading group to know about it, so I took you at your word.”

  “And I’m really grateful. I wasn’t suggesting that you’d dobbed me in to the group. I just wondered if you’d mentioned it to someone in the outside world.”

  “No, not really.” She paused. “Apart from my son Alec, that is.”

  “Your son?”

  “Yes. He’s fifteen. You wouldn’t think he would be interested in anything I’m interested in, but he actually likes mystery novels. He read your book on his tablet, through my account. So it was free – sorry!”

  I hastily processed this information. It would hardly be politic to ask Amelia if any of her relatives were jewellery thieves, but there was one thing I could ask.

  “Do you know if he happened to tell anyone else about the book? A friend, possibly?”

  “No, but I can ask him. He’s at school, but he’ll be back later.”
/>
  “That would be excellent, thanks.”

  “He said he liked your book, by the way. It was quite interesting.”

  Damned with faint praise.

  Chapter 68

  My house looked much worse to me than Dave Matthews had implied. Carpets in the upstairs rooms were still sodden, there were tide marks of receding water on several rugs, and chunks of ceiling were dangling by a thread in two places. Perhaps most dispiriting was the pall of dampness – already with overtones of mould after just one day.

  I risked turning on the electricity, which seemed to work normally. Both tradesmen turned up during the afternoon to carry out the repairs, and both charged a massive premium for an emergency call-out on a Saturday. At least by the end of the afternoon I had a house I could live in again – if you discounted the sodden bedclothes and the depressing aura hanging over everything.

  I hadn’t yet tried to contact Trina, to explain to her what had happened when she was attacked yesterday. I couldn’t think of anything acceptable to say. The kidnap attempt had come about because of me – that was the long and short of it. It might well have resulted from an ongoing misunderstanding, but what consolation was that? As far as she was concerned, the reason was irrelevant. It would surely confirm that she should never have trusted me in the first place.

  I was tempted to report the attack to Dave Matthews, simply to reinforce the message that something needed to be done to stop these people. But I couldn’t, because it would mean breaking faith with Trina in an even bigger way. Once Dave knew the score, he would surely have to report what I’d told him, and that would be the end of Trina’s new identity.

  I went back to John and Joanna’s, marvelling at the contrast between my own increasingly soulless home environment and the warmth and vitality of theirs.

  “Can I live here all the time?” I asked Joanna.

  “Course you can – but Ashley might have something to say about that.”

  “You liked her then?”

  “Need you ask? She’s an absolute gem! I don’t know how you managed to hypnotise her into liking you, but you should consider yourself very lucky.”

  “I do.”

  She leaned forward confidentially. “If you want to know, she thinks you have kind eyes.” She gave an ironic smile. “I didn’t put her right on that.”

  My phone buzzed in the middle of supper, just as Jeremy was building up to the climax of a story about his day at school. I saw that it was Amelia’s number, and excused myself to the kitchen.

  “Mike, I don’t know if this is any use, but I asked Alec if he’d told anybody about your book, and he said he’d mentioned it to one of his best friends, a boy named Danny Watson.” She hesitated. “But you’re not going to try to contact him or anything, are you? I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”

  “God, no, nothing like that.” I felt I needed to offer her some alternative explanation. “I’m just trying to get a feel for the ripples of interest, to work out how the word gets around.”

  “OK, well I’m glad if I’ve helped.”

  * * *

  Up in my bedroom that evening I opened a browser window on my laptop and started searching the reports on the security van robbery for anyone named Henderson, Amelia’s surname. No luck. Then I tried the same thing with Watson, her son’s friend’s surname. Still no luck. Maybe it was another blind alley.

  Idly I started searching on various permutations of Watson, Danny and Wandsworth. There were thousands of finds of all kinds, and it seemed a pointless exercise, but for want of a better idea I kept on following links.

  Suddenly I had a small breakthrough: I tracked down the correct Danny Watson. There was a picture of him with a boy called Alec Henderson, who had to be Amelia’s son. This encouraged me, and I kept on trawling. And that’s when I found it – a page for Danny Watson’s parents: Rory Watson and Gillian Flynn.

  Derek Flynn was one of the security van robbers – the one Dave had felt was a good candidate for having organised all these assaults on me. So if Gillian Flynn was related to him, that would make Danny his nephew – or great-nephew, or at any rate some kind of nephew. It was too much of a coincidence not to be true.

  I checked my watch: 9.30. Not too late to ring Dave and run this past him. I caught him at home, apparently having just finished eating. He was impressed by my success in identifying Danny Watson, but dubious about the usefulness of the information.

  “It confirms to you and me that Flynn must be the man behind all this, but it’s extremely tenuous evidence, given that the man has an alibi for the night in question.”

  “But can’t someone start looking harder at his friends and associates? I mean, he must have links with the gang who actually pulled me off the street. Isn’t this part of an evidence trail?”

  “Well, I can run it past the people in Essex, and see if they’re willing to follow it up, but I had a hard enough job getting their support in checking alibis. I’m probably not their favourite person at the moment.”

  “Where does this bloke actually live then?”

  “A place called Warley.”

  “Maybe I should go and see him myself.”

  “That would be a very stupid thing to do. Forget it, Mike. These are very nasty people.”

  “You think I don’t know?”

  Neither of us spoke for a moment. I was wondering what I might say if I actually did speak to Derek Flynn. Finally I said, “Could I ask you one more favour?”

  He sighed deeply. “Yeah, OK, what is it?”

  “Could you find out what happened to Liam Stone, the man who turned up in Oxfordshire with a gun? I mean, have the police confirmed his identity, and are they going to prosecute him?”

  “Dare I ask why you need to know?”

  I reflected for a moment. “Call it a moral issue.”

  “You’ve lost me there, I’m afraid.”

  “I’ll explain next time I see you. All I need is to know what happened to him.”

  “OK, if I find out anything I’ll get back to you tomorrow. But don’t hold your breath.”

  Chapter 69

  It was two days before Dave got back to me with news of Liam Stone. He rang me on Monday morning as I was debating whether to go home to work or stay in Joanna’s sunny sitting room.

  “Stone, if that’s his real name, has been released on bail.”

  “What?”

  “It’s an option in this kind of case. The police weren’t helped by the fact that they couldn’t find the gun he was allegedly using.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me! It wasn’t alleged. I saw it!”

  “Well, be that as it may, it’s disappeared. Also, it seems your Mr Ashton doesn’t want to press charges. That doesn’t mean this man gets off scot free, but it does make the police case more complicated.”

  “But don’t they want to find out if he really is the missing robber?”

  Dave sighed patiently. “It’s not as simple as that. For a start, it sounds as if he’s covered his bases really carefully. To all intents and purposes he really is Andrew Davidson, not Liam Stone.”

  “Surely they can dig through all that?”

  “Eventually they probably can, but it’s taking time. Also, you have to remember that even if he’s found to be Liam Stone, there may not be any solid proof that he was actually implicated in the robbery in the first place. There’s anecdotal evidence, suspicion, hearsay, but it was all a very long time ago.”

  “Huh.”

  “Look, I haven’t seen the case files. I don’t know what they’re thinking up there. I’m only telling you what I know.”

  * * *

  I sat back on Joanna’s sofa and tried to think through my situation.

  Point one: It very much looked as though the person behind my kidnapping and break-ins was convicted robber Derek Flynn – yet the police didn’t seem to think they had enough evidence to pull him in.

  Point two: All along, Derek Flynn had believed I knew ho
w to contact the escaped robber Liam Stone. Initially he’d been mistaken, but quite miraculously, I now did know.

  Point three: If I were to find out how to track down Derek Flynn, and I told him where to find Liam Stone, theoretically that should get him permanently off my back.

  Point four: But if I did that, it would be a bare-faced betrayal of Liam Stone.

  The moral implications of this were dizzying. Did I owe any loyalty towards Stone? Of course not. But did I have any right to sabotage his life even further than he’d already sabotaged it himself with the gun escapade? That would be the likely outcome of giving him away to Flynn. I wasn’t so sure.

  My first priority, surely, was to myself. Why should I be flung from pillar to post in the furtherance of some long-standing gangland dispute? And why should it affect people like Trina, who simply happened to have strayed into the crossfire?

  Yet at the back of all this, I was aware that my book had sparked this whole thing off. Indirectly, and quite unintentionally, I was responsible.

  I wondered what kind of life Liam Stone had led. Was it as bleak, as compromised, as that of the escaped robber in my story? It didn’t sound like it. He’d lived life to the full in Australia, then come back to Britain and become a prosperous member of society. Why should I feel sorry for him? Then again, what if I set Flynn on to him, and my actions resulted in him being seriously injured or even killed?

  * * *

  I decided the first thing to do was see if I could find some way of contacting Derek Flynn. There was no phone number listed for him in Warley, and I wasn’t sure where to look next. However, I’d only been trawling the net for a couple of minutes when I found some photographs taken at the time he was released from prison. I felt sure they held a clue.

  They were part of a press interview he did, along with his still glamorous wife, and the two of them were shown standing in front of their own house – a substantial modern property with distinctive period-style lanterns on the front. I knew they now lived in Warley, so assuming they were still in that same house, presumably I could find it on Streetview or some other mapping web site.