Secrets (13 page)

‘This is Nathan,' the man said. ‘Get yourself cleaned up and changed and I'll have some food sent in for the pair of you.'

He closed the door then and Annie was left alone with the boy and the beeps of the electronic game and, at last, the sudden, overwhelming desire to cry.

T
he phone rang at two and Molly didn't reach it in time. It rang again a half hour later, just as she was passing through the hall. She grabbed the receiver and rattled off her number as she always did. Silence on the other end of the line.

‘Bloody auto-diallers,' Molly muttered to herself. Then more loudly, ‘Look, if I wanted double glazing or insurance I'd find someone else to buy it from. It sure as hell wouldn't be anyone like you, shower.'

She paused and listened, thinking vaguely that this didn't sound like an auto-dialler. There was emptiness on the other end of the line. ‘Who is this?' Molly demanded. ‘Get off my phone.'

Impatiently, she slammed the receiver down and headed for the kitchen, only to have it ring again just as she reached the door.

‘I'll disconnect the bloody thing. See if I don't.' She turned and lifted the receiver again, listened once more to the silence. ‘Oh bugger off, whoever you are,' she told them and reached out to unplug the phone from the wall.

‘That's not very polite, Molly. I thought you had better manners than that?'

Molly felt her chest tighten and for a moment she couldn't breathe enough air even to frame her reply. ‘Well,' she said, ‘If I'd known it was you, I'd have cursed with a bit more imagination.'

The man laughed. Molly knew that laugh so damned well. Soft and mellow and utterly, utterly humourless. ‘Your boy came to my house,' she said. ‘But I seem to still be in the land of the living.'

‘For now.'

‘He killed himself,' she told him. ‘Is that standard operational procedure, now? If so, I can only say it's bloody wasteful.'

Silence met the comment and now Molly's irritation grew beyond her fear. ‘Look,' she said. ‘I'm old, not stupid. If you want me dead, then I suppose I'd better start on the funeral arrangements, but I'm damned if I'm going to play your games. Like I said before, you can bugger off. I just don't want to know.'

Before she could lose her nerve and wait for a response, Molly slammed the receiver down again and then unplugged the line. She stood in the hall, breathing heavily and staring at the phone.

So, Molly thought, it really wasn't over yet. Even when she'd seen the tattoo, even when the man had died on her landing, she'd still kept that tiny scrap of belief that this was something else; that this was nothing to do with
him
. That the whole thing was some insane coincidence.

‘Right,' Molly said and squared her shoulders. ‘So that's the way it is.' Well she would die as she had always lived and not let the fear get the better of her. Whatever else happened, Molly would go down fighting.

On the outskirts of Grantham was a modern estate, approached via a roundabout and a left turn at the Muddle Go Nowhere pub. Typically, Alec and DI Barnes missed the turn and sailed on down a long, curving hill with no easy place to spin around. Alec glanced at the Victorian and Edwardian houses set on either side of the road. They looked prosperous and comfortable, nicely settled into their gardens and set back from the road. He caught himself looking out for the ‘For Sale' signs.

At the bottom of the hill the traffic bottle-necked at a mini roundabout, the main road swinging off to the left and on into the market town, the right heading off the roundabout and into a supermarket car park. Barnes took the supermarket option and they turned around and headed back up the long sweep of the hill.

‘Isaac Newton,' Bill Barnes said.

‘What?'

‘He was born here. It's a pretty little town once you manage to get into it. Might be worth a look while you and Naomi are still wandering.'

Alec added it to his list. They'd talked of very little of any consequence on the way here and Alec sensed that not only was Barnes a little embarrassed by Stevie's attitude, but was also still not entirely comfortable with Alec's exact role in the investigation. Alec, in his shoes, would have felt exactly the same. Perhaps in response to this, they had talked of random things in the hour and a bit journey from Newark to Grantham. Hour and a half if you included their last little detour.

The housing estate at the top of the hill was modern and ubiquitous, contrasting with the more historical town below. It was OK, Alec thought, but definitely not the kind of thing he and Naomi were looking for. He chided himself again for slipping back into house hunting mode when he should have been focusing on a murder investigation, then changed approbation to vague congratulation; it just went to prove that he'd made the right decision. Alec the serving officer was slowly but surely sliding into a box marked ‘old Alec' and although he wasn't yet sure how to define ‘new Alec' he did feel that he was making progress.

Barnes pulled up outside a brick semi with shallow bay windows and a neat scrap of lawned garden. ‘This must be it,' he said.

They were a little later than they'd estimated in their phone call and the front door opened as they walked up the truncated path between the lawn and the off-road parking space in front of the white garage door. The front door was white too, Alec noted. That UPVC stuff he could see the point of but didn't really like. Barnes was apologizing for their lateness to a woman with pale hair and an even paler complexion. She looked like an older version of Tricia, Herbert Norris's girlfriend, whose photographs Alec had seen in his flat. The mother, Alec supposed.

‘It's OK,' she told Barnes. ‘She's in the living room. Go through and I'll make some tea or something.'

She had, Alec thought, the look of a woman worn out by someone else's grief. Tired, and then guilty about being tired and then even more guilty about being tired
of
… Alec smiled at her. ‘Tea would be great,' he said. She nodded briefly and fled down the hall, and closed the kitchen door.

Tricia Needham sat close to the window, curled up in a red armchair and with an old-fashioned patchwork quilt spread out across her legs. She was even paler than her mother; hair, skin, even eyes a washed-out blue. She had been crying, her eyes reddened and the pallor blotched with red so vivid they looked like incipient bruises.

Bill Barnes introduced them both and asked if they could sit down. She nodded and pointed to a chair opposite. Barnes seated himself there and left Alec to choose between the sofa some feet away from the girl they had come to see or the odd looking, large, upholstered stool set right in the bay window. He decided on the sofa. He was planning on leaving most of the talking to Bill anyway.

The room was long and quite narrow, a flat screen television occupying the far corner and a mock Adam fireplace not quite managing to be the focal point of the room, halfway along the wall. Family photos crowded the mantelpiece and Alec noticed one of Herbert Norris and Tricia. They seemed to be at the seaside, leaning against a railing on the promenade. He noted that all of the family photos were mounted up in very similar wooden frames whereas this one was in a much more elaborate curling metal. Had she brought this with her? Alec wondered. It didn't look as though it really belonged.

‘I've read your statements,' Bill said quietly. ‘We wondered, was there anything you'd like to add? Anything more you can think of?'

She shook her head. No.

‘Herbert's behaviour in the week or two before he was killed. Did he seem any different? Worried about anything? Had he had any unusual phone calls or visitors?'

Again the vehement shake of the head.

‘When did you last see him?'

‘That's what's so bad,' Tricia said and Alec could see the tears had threatened again. ‘I'd not seen him for a couple of weeks. He said he'd got to go away on a buying trip, but he never went. The neighbour said they saw him and Syd who runs the shop when he's not there. She said he came back two or three times when he'd told me he'd be away for the whole time. That's why I'd gone to the flat. He was supposed to be coming back and I went to cook him a meal. Surprise him, like, and I found him, just lying there.'

The tears began in earnest just as her mother returned with a tray of mugs and a teapot. Alec caught her expression as she set the tray down, the look of resignation and also irritation, soon concealed and no doubt stimulating yet another layer of guilt to grow.

‘Tricia?' Alec asked. ‘There were two photographs missing. The frames had been left but the pictures were gone. Can you remember what they were pictures of?'

She stared at him for a moment, a look of surprise on her face as though he'd shocked her by asking the wrong question. She sniffed loudly and her mother handed her a box of tissues. Alec couldn't help but wonder how many she'd got through.

‘He said they were family,' she said. ‘There was an old woman and a little girl, in one. A black woman and a white kid with red hair. She looked about five or six, I suppose. He didn't talk about them much. He said they'd died.'

‘And the other picture?'

She shrugged. ‘Two men. I don't know. He said one was his brother, but the guy was Asian. When I asked him about it he said something about brothers not always being blood. He was funny like that, always talking about family but not real family like aunts and uncles and so on. I think he was an orphan.'

‘You think?'

That shrug again. ‘He never talked about it. He didn't like to talk about himself or his family. He said we should live in the present and not in the past.'

‘You said two men?'

‘The other was older.'

‘Asian as well?'

‘No, a white guy. He was a bit fuzzy, like he'd been looking at something and moved his head. Older, though.'

‘Did he ever tell you their names?'

‘I … maybe … I don't remember.'

‘Herbert could be a little odd about some things,' Tricia's mother said. ‘He was a nice enough young man, but he was … private, I suppose. Very generous, though, very nice …' she trailed off as though trying to think of something more useful to say and failing.

‘Did you often let yourself into the flat? You didn't live with Herbert, did you.'

A look of embarrassment passed between mother and daughter.

‘He didn't know Tricia had the key,' her mother said. ‘She
borrowed
his keys and had it cut one day. I think she just wanted to surprise him, like she said.'

‘He was shutting me out,' Tricia blurted. Pain and anger now winning out over the grief. ‘I mean he didn't even have our picture up in the flat, not even after he promised me he would. I'd been going out with him two years or more and he … he … then I go there and I find him dead on the floor.'

She gave in to the tears again and her mother sighed, then crossed to her, perched on the arm of the chair and hugged her tight, a resigned expression in her eyes.

‘I think you'd better go now,' Tricia's mother said. ‘She's told you all she knows.'

That was probably very true, Alec thought as they took their leave. He'd be willing to bet that Tricia hadn't known Herbert at all, not really.

‘You think he was trying to keep her out of the way,' Bill suggested as they got back into the car. ‘Lying to her about going away for that two weeks?'

‘Either that or they'd broken up and she'd not noticed,' Alec agreed. ‘Have you looked through the photo albums? Anything else that sounds like the woman and child or the two men in the missing pictures?'

‘Not that I remember. It was mostly pictures of the happy couple, with and without accompanying friends. I get the feeling Tricia made up the albums. She was certainly in most of the pictures.'

Alec nodded thoughtfully.

‘Look,' Bill Barnes said. ‘If you think it would be OK with your wife, Stamford is only forty minutes from here, down the A1. Fancy a trip?'

‘I'll let her know,' Alec said. ‘I don't think she'll mind. She's made friends with a local historian and I think they plan a trip to the local cemetery or something.'

Barnes laughed. ‘Some people really know how to enjoy themselves,' he said.

Naomi was, in fact, enjoying herself very much. Liz was good company and the fact that from time to time she seemed to forget altogether that Naomi couldn't see actually scored points in Naomi's opinion. She could cope with occasional neglect far more easily than with overweening attention.

‘This is an ancestor of mine,' Liz was telling her. ‘He was an industrialist, a mill owner. Apparently he made broadcloth, heavy stuff used by sailmakers and theatrical painters?'

‘Why would they need it?' Naomi asked.

‘Backdrops. They painted scenes on it. I suppose that makes sense really. You wouldn't want to be running into seams all over the place. Well that's what I've been told anyway. Someone else told me that sailcloth is a particular weave and maybe wouldn't have been so good for painting on so it's on the list for winter research.'

Naomi laughed. ‘Is winter your research time, then?'

‘Oh yes. October through to March you'll find me tucked up warm with my books and my computer or else ensconced in some corner of a library. I do my best writing in winter.'

‘I miss libraries,' Naomi said. ‘I miss books, actually. Alec is great and so are our friends and audio books are a godsend, but I do miss being able to browse the shelves and that moment when you find an author you've never heard of, but is right up your street, you know. And I miss the book shop experience, I used to love second-hand book shops. You know there's nothing quite like the smell of old books.'

‘Apparently they're fermenting,' Liz said. ‘It's some kind of fermentation process, breaking down the pages. That's what the lovely smell is.' She laughed. ‘I like to think it's possible to get just slightly drunk inhaling the scent of old books.'