Alternative outcome

by Peter Rowlands

  I lifted my hands in frustration. “There’s no point in blaming me just because he’s good at keeping his head down.”

  “But how do I know this isn’t a load of bullshit?”

  “For Christ’s sake, do you think I would come here inviting trouble for myself just to give you a load of bullshit? Give me some credit.”

  “So if I go to this man’s house tonight, will I find him there? Will he say, ‘Hello Mr Flynn, would you like a nice cup of tea?’”

  “I’ve no idea whether you’ll find him or not. I’ve told you all I know.”

  “And dare I ask how you came by this information?”

  “Yes you can. Indirectly I got it from the police. They already know who he is, or they think they do. But they’re not sure. I hope you’re happy with that.”

  “Oh, great, so they’ll be sitting waiting for me to turn up, will they? Very nice.”

  “No, so far as I know they won’t. I haven’t set this up with them. I’m speaking to you completely on my own behalf. I’m fed up with you hassling me and fucking about with my life, and I want it to stop. So I’m telling you what I know in good faith – which is a hell of a lot more than you’ve ever shown me. If Stone has skipped it, I can’t help you. It’s down to you to find him. I’ve told you everything I know.”

  He gave me another long hard look, then rose slowly to his feet. “In that case you’ll probably want to be on your way.”

  “First I want to hear from you that you’re done with me and my friends. Forever. Whatever happens, there’s nothing more I’ll be able to tell you about this. Case closed. Can we agree on that?”

  I looked carefully at him, and he gave the faintest nod of acknowledgement as he ushered me to the front door. He gave me a final expressionless stare on the doorstep.

  “Drive safely.”

  Chapter 72

  “I think it worked!”

  I’d rung Ashley as soon as I got back to John and Joanna’s.

  “Really?”

  “He’s obviously a really tough bastard. You hear about people like him and see them on TV, but you never expect to meet them in real life. He was very difficult to read, but I think he got the point.”

  “I don’t know how you had the nerve to confront him in his own home.”

  “Nor do I!”

  “Do you think he’ll go after this man Stone?”

  “I’m sure he will, but I don’t know what good it will do him. Stone will presumably be long gone.”

  “Do you feel guilty, prompting him to skip bail?”

  That was an interesting question. It opened up yet another moral dimension to this puzzle. I said, “In a way I do, but in another way I feel guilty about handing him over to these other people in the first place. At least this way I’m being even-handed.”

  “It’s a no-win situation. You’ve done what you had to.”

  “I hope so.”

  “At least maybe you’ll be able to get your life back now. You can have a bit of normality again. You certainly deserve it.”

  * * *

  Normality, it soon dawned on me, posed its own set of challenges. I sat in Joanna’s living room the next morning, confronting the mundane issues that had come up in recent days.

  My house was a mess, and would presumably cost thousands to repair – and I had all the hassle of insurance to deal with. My car was in Chesterfield, and the repair bill for that would probably also be far higher than I was expecting. I would lose my no-claims insurance bonus over the back-end shunt, and I might even be prosecuted.

  Then there was my freelance life. An email from Jason Bright sat in my inbox, offering me two feature articles to write in the next fortnight. I was apparently back on track with him, yet the prospect of actually doing the work depressed me.

  The upside, of course, was Ashley. She trumped all the hassle by a massive margin, and the very thought of her made me smile. But I wasn’t deceiving myself. I knew our emerging relationship would inevitably mean negotiation, decisions. We still lived nearly three hundred miles apart, and she had a happy and settled existence where she was. How could we orchestrate some arrangement that would allow us to live in the same place full-time?

  Meanwhile, what was I to think about Trina? I’d sent her two emails since we’d met, trying to reassure her that the events in that car park had nothing to do with her secret past. She hadn’t replied to either of them. A single phone call had been diverted to her anonymous voicemail.

  At least after last night’s events I could tell her with confidence that she wouldn’t be pursued or hassled again by Flynn’s people. I wasn’t sure whether that would persuade her to restore contact with me, or in fact whether this had ever been on her agenda in the first place. But at least I could try. I wrote:

  Trina – I hope you received my previous emails, but even if you ignored them, please read this one.

  I simply want to reassure you that you won’t be hassled again by those people you ran into in the car park in Chesterfield. As I said in my last, they weren’t after you personally, and didn’t even know who you were. In fact I happen to know that they thought you were someone else. Now they know different. I’ve made sure of that.

  You might think it strange that I should be tangled up with people who would do anything like this. I think so too! The story of how it came about is pretty weird, but I’d love to tell it to you some time, and I sincerely hope you’ll give me the chance.

  The bottom line is that I didn’t betray your trust or give away your identity to anyone, and so far as I’m aware, you’re no more at risk now than you were before I met you last week.

  It seemed the best I could offer for now. I clicked Send.

  Five minutes later the garage at Chesterfield rang me to say my car was ready for collection at a body shop round the corner. Could I pick it up as soon as possible? They said their premises were surrounded by streets with double yellow lines, so they couldn’t park it outside, and they had limited room to store it inside the body shop.

  Tomorrow was a Saturday, but they said they would be open if I could turn up by one o’clock. I thought I might as well get the job done, so I said yes. Then I logged on to a ticket web site and bought a one-way train ticket to Chesterfield.

  Then Ashley rang.

  “Mike, you know you were saying that two or three weeks was too long to wait before we meet up?”

  Immediately I felt a surge of anticipation. “I do.”

  “Well, what if I were to come to London again – for the weekend, I mean?”

  “Really?” A smile surged through my entire body. “But what about Jack?”

  “Well, to be honest he can do most things for himself now. But more to the point, he’s going to stay with my parents for a few days.”

  “Really?”

  “He’s always been a favourite with my mum. They’ve kept inviting him over ever since his injury. They know the score between him and me. I think my mum wants to reassure him that they’re not going to cut him off just because I have.”

  “I can see I might have a mountain to climb with her.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  I was doing some fast thinking. “Look, I’ve just arranged to go up to Chesterfield tomorrow to collect my car. I’ve already bought the train ticket.”

  “I could come with you.”

  “Really? You’d be willing to spend all that time in a train from Truro, then head off on another train the very next day?”

  “If you’d like me to.”

  “Absolutely! In fact I’ll pay for your ticket.”

  “Mr Stanhope, your generosity knows no bounds.”

  I thought some more, then said, “What if we stay somewhere in Derbyshire tomorrow night? A country hotel or something? Make a proper weekend of it. Could you stay over Sunday night and go back to Cornwall on Monday?”

  “Not really, but – yes, sod it! Just book it.”

  * * *

  I did some internet trawling
and found a country hotel in the Peak District that seemed to fit the bill. I phoned them and made a booking for the following night. Then I logged on to the ticket web site and bought a ticket to Chesterfield for Ashley.

  At lunchtime Joanna bustled in, and I told her Ashley was coming to London again. “I’m sorry for the imposition. We could always stay over at my house.”

  “Don’t you dare. Do you want to drive the girl away before she’s even got to know you properly?”

  “Well, I was hoping you would say that.”

  “Do you want to bring her to dinner with us?”

  I started to protest, then realised I was being over-protective, and maybe also slightly selfish. Ashley could hold her own perfectly well against Joanna, and I’d have her to myself later on. I said, “That would be great, but she may not be here till mid-evening.”

  “Not a problem.”

  I wondered briefly about trying to contact Trina again. After all, I was about to take a trip back into her territory. It would be an ideal opportunity for us to meet up so that I could clear the air. I could even introduce her to Ashley.

  I quickly dismissed the whole idea. She didn’t want to meet Ashley, and Ashley probably wouldn’t want to meet her, except perhaps out of curiosity.

  Chapter 73

  I borrowed Joanna’s car again to pick up Ashley from Paddington. It wasn’t strictly necessary, and the long drive to the station through the late Friday evening rush hour took forever. I just had to do it. Her smile as she approached me from the barrier was reward enough.

  As we headed up on to the Westway flyover I said, “We’re due to have dinner with Joanna and John tonight. I hope you don’t mind. She wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  “They’re lovely people. It’ll be great.”

  We shot down the dual carriageway past the giant Westfield shopping centre, then crept round Shepherd’s Bush Green. Ashley commented, “It’s amazing the way you know all these streets. There’s so much of it. I don’t think I could ever get used to it.”

  I wondered if there was a message for me here.

  She continued to examine the environment with evident wonder, then turned to me and commented, “Do you think Joanna fancies you?”

  “Joanna? No!” I reflected for a moment. “Really?”

  “She treats you like a second husband. She talks to you more than she talks to John.”

  “She’s been a good friend to me. I couldn’t have got through the last couple of years without her. But it’s all completely platonic. For a start, she’s your biggest fan. She’s over the moon that you’ve turned up in my life.”

  I glanced over at her, and she gave me a mischievous grin. “Maybe I’m helping her live out her secret fantasies vicariously.”

  “West Country girls aren’t supposed to know long words like vicarious.”

  She reached over and rapped me on the arm. “Watch out, Mr Stanhope. I might ask to be put back on a train back to Cornwall if you’re not careful.”

  “You’d better not.”

  We continued for a while in amicable silence, then she said, “I must tell you a rather strange thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, I gave Jack a lift to my parents’ house at lunchtime. They weren’t there, but I was looking for something in my father’s study, and I happened to glance at his desk. And there were loads of notes on a pad about Trina Markham and her mother and father. Stuff about Altrincham, and her father’s company, and even the word Chesterfield.” She gave me a perplexed look. “How could he possibly know about that? You only found out where she lived the other day.”

  I turned to look at her, baffled. This didn’t make any sense. Had her father known where she was all this time? How could he have? Trina had given me the clear impression that she and her family had made a clean break with their past lives, so how could Gordon Renwick have kept track of them? And why would he want to? He’d told me on more than one occasion that he barely even knew them.

  I said, “That’s bizarre. I can’t think what it can possibly mean.”

  “I suppose I can ask him next time I see him, but I’m not sure I should. He would realise I’d been peeking around among his notes.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe we’ll think of a way for you to bring it up innocently.”

  * * *

  Jeremy had somehow managed to force his parents to let him wait up to greet us, so we had a shy exchange as he hovered round Ashley. Clearly she had made a big impression on him.

  Then John served up the casserole and we sat putting the world to rights. Ashley held her own valiantly against Joanna’s oblique scrutiny, and I silently applauded her. It must have been easy for her to see through Joanna’s transparent plot to tease out her commitment to Cornwall and her life there, but she took it in good part. The occasional private glances between us were enough to fend off any kind of inquisition.

  Finally bedtime was declared, and we were able to slip away. Up in the spare room I opened my computer while Ashley was in the bathroom, and called up the scans of those photos Patrick had found of the Fairmile Hotel.

  I stared at the group photograph of Trina with various adults. They included Gordon Renwick, Desmond Markham, a woman who was presumably Shirley Markham, and another couple I didn’t recognise.

  I looked more closely. The unknown man looked vaguely familiar from somewhere. On an impulse I did a web search for Robert Stainer. I wanted to find a picture of what he’d looked like when he was younger.

  It didn’t take long. There was a lot of information about him on a variety of web sites, and many photographs. And there he was – a good-looking younger man, just as Trina had said: the same man in the photograph at the Fairmile.

  In itself this told me nothing. He and his friend Desmond had holidayed there together. So what? Well, I now realised that the answer lay in the picture itself. That warm smile on the face of Gordon Renwick told the story. He was looking not at the camera but at Desmond Markham and his wife and Robert Stainer. It was the smile of friends sharing a private joke. Whatever Gordon might have told us, it seemed clear to me from this picture that they knew each other well.

  I wanted to ask Ashley about this, but when she walked in I forgot any thoughts of conversation. We had another agenda, and it wouldn’t wait.

  Chapter 74

  I sat in the lounge next morning staring into space. I was wishing we could just forget about going to Chesterfield and stay here – preferably in bed.

  My phone burst abruptly into life in my hand, shaking me out of my trance.

  “Mike.” Not a regular caller, but the voice struck a distant chord. “It’s Jack here. Jack Forbes. Ashley’s …” He was presumably going to say fiancé, but at the last minute checked himself. “I was trying to get hold of Ashley.”

  “She’s in the shower. She probably didn’t hear you.”

  “Oh, right. Well, Mary gave me your number. I hope you don’t mind? I think Ash must have left it with her.”

  “Of course not.”

  “The thing is, could you give her a message?” He seemed to be unsure exactly what he wanted to say. “Could you just tell her that her father has gone charging off in his car, and Mary’s a bit concerned?”

  “How do you mean exactly?”

  “Well, if Ash gets back to me, I’ll probably be able to explain it better to her.”

  “OK, I’ll get her to call you.” I nearly asked him about his ankle, but stopped myself just in time. We weren’t about to become best buddies.

  I recounted this to Ashley, who fetched out her phone and called him straight back. I listened as she talked to him with growing concern. Finally she disconnected and turned to me.

  “This is completely bizarre. According to Jack, my father got up at about six o’clock this morning, which he never does, and announced to my mother that he was driving up to Sheffield. Mum didn’t seem to know what to do, so Jack thought he ought to contact me.”

  “Did your father
say why he was going there?”

  “No, but the point is that he never ever does anything like that. He always plans everything beforehand, and keeps my mum in the picture. They do things together.”

  “What’s in Sheffield?”

  “Nothing, as far as I know. I doubt if they’ve ever even been there, and I’ve never heard of them knowing anyone there.”

  “So what do you think your mum will expect you to do about this?”

  “To be honest, I don’t know.” She was already opening her contact list. “I’d better phone her and see.”

  She talked to her mother for a couple of minutes, then I waved my hand to interrupt her. “Ask her about Desmond Markham. Ask what she knows about him.”

  She looked at me for a moment, then said into the phone, “Mike says I should ask you about Desmond Markham. Did you know him?”

  She listened for a moment, then said, “OK, OK. I’ll speak to you later.” She clicked to end the call. “She says there’s nothing to say about him.”

  We went through to the kitchen to get some breakfast. Joanna wandered in, and we all stepped round each other in that strange dance of friends thrown unexpectedly into a shared space. My mind was whirring the whole time.

  Finally we were seated at the breakfast bar, and I said to Ashley, “You know I told you about Robert Stainer, the man who forced Trina’s father to go into hiding?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, he was at the Fairmile at the same time as Trina and her family. He was the other man in that picture you found for me. And I think your father knew them both.”

  “He said he didn’t.”

  “I know. But suppose he did. What would that mean?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve no idea. What are you getting at?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m just trying to think it through.” I put my mug down. “I’m certain this has to do with Desmond Markham and Robert Stainer. Your father was making notes about Markham, wasn’t he? That more or less proves he knew him. I just don’t quite get the significance.”