Legacy of Lies (12 page)

‘Vertigo. That's all.'

‘I'm not listening.'

She got up from her seat by his bed and kissed him. ‘Nothing is ever simple, is it?'

‘No,' Alec agreed regretfully. ‘It never is.'

They left the ward and collected Napoleon from his place in the waiting room. Patrick took her arm and Naomi reflected that he seemed to have grown again. She thought of the shy fourteen year old he had been when she had first met him three years before, small for his age and terribly unsure of himself. Patrick had grown up.

She paused to switch her phone back on and found she had a missed call: Marcus.

Of course, she hadn't told him what had happened to Alec.

Once in the taxi she called him back. ‘Are we still on for Fallowfields today?' he wanted to know.

She had, she realized, forgotten all about the promised search. To be reminded now was irrationally and absurdly irritating. ‘No,' she told him. ‘It won't be possible.' Quickly and perhaps more acerbically than his enquiry had warranted, she told him why.

Marcus was shocked; she could hear it in his voice, but to her astonishment, once he had expressed his horror and his sympathy he asked again, ‘So we won't be going to Fallowfields today?'

‘No, Marcus. Frankly, that's the last thing on my mind just now.'

‘Naomi dear, if you gave me the key, I could make a start. One less job for you.'

Naomi frowned. ‘For one thing, Marcus, it isn't just a question of the key. The police secured the doors and windows. It will take more than a key to get in. For another, I'd much rather wait until Alec is up and about before we do anything more.'

Silence on the other end of the phone. She could feel Marcus working out what to say next. Why so impatient? she wondered. What was so important?

‘Marcus? Are you still there?'

‘Of course. I'm sorry, of course. You must be too concerned about Alec to want the bother of such secondary things.'

‘I'll call you, let you know.'

‘Problems?' Patrick asked as she rang off.

‘I don't know,' Naomi told him, wondering at the tension in Marcus's voice. It came to her again that there was something Marcus wasn't telling.

T
wo days later they returned en mass to Fallowfields. Harry had been as good as his word. New locks secured the front door and the French windows had been reinforced and re-glazed with a deadbolt added.

‘Best we could do with that.' Harry was apologetic. ‘Anything more would have meant replacing the entire lot and that's a major undertaking. Be a shame, anyway, to take the French windows away and replace them with one of those patio things.'

Naomi stepped out on to the terrace. She listened to the garden noises as she had on the day the men had broken in. Somehow, she had expected them to have changed, to have registered the aggression and violence that had interrupted the peace of this garden, but the birds sang and the trees whispered and the scent of roses continued to fragrance the air. She breathed deep and tried to relax.

She hadn't wanted to come back here and her palms felt clammy, sweat trickled down into the waistband of her linen trousers. Her head felt as though a band had been tightened around it; a band with extendable rods that reached down to press upon her shoulders.

‘We started to clear up the mess,' Patrick said, ‘but we only did enough to make the floor safe for Napoleon. There was broken glass and stuff.'

Napoleon, Naomi smiled, not her. Patrick had his priorities right.

‘We thought we should leave it in case the stuff they chucked about might give us a clue to what they were looking for.'

‘Did they go upstairs?' Marcus asked.

‘Um, yes,' Harry said. ‘Into the study.'

‘The study?' Naomi was puzzled. ‘No, the police arrived. They didn't have time to get into the study.'

‘Which means they came back later.' Alec's tone was flat, emotionless. He had been discharged the evening before and spent a restless night at the hotel. He was still in pain from his ribs, Naomi knew, but more than that, he'd had time for the implications of the attack to sink in and to consider what might have happened to Naomi had the police not arrived.

He was not a happy man.

‘Fine didn't know about the second break-in?'

‘Fine secured the place as best he could but he didn't have the resources to keep anyone on watch. Harry, did you notice anything when you got here? Was the place secure?'

‘The front was and the side gate. To be truthful I didn't take a good look round the back. DS Fine sorted out the locksmith and the carpenter and I just waited for them to arrive and left them to it. I mean, I did stay, but I sat in the car and listened to the radio, I'm afraid. I didn't like to, you know, go inside until I had you with me.'

Harry and his old fashioned sensibilities, Naomi thought.

‘Well, we should let Reg Fine know,' Alec said. ‘And meantime, everyone keep out of the study. I doubt there'll be prints but you never know.'

‘But the study …' Marcus began. ‘Surely that is likely to be … Anyway, don't you already have prints from that terrible man?'

‘We've identified one,' Alec said. ‘We know there were two. Until the crime scene investigator's had another chance to look around we keep out.'

‘What state's the kitchen in?' Naomi asked. ‘If Patrick gives me a hand I'll make us all some coffee.'

Setting Napoleon free to wander in the garden, she and Patrick made their way back through the dining room and into the kitchen. She could hear Alec taking charge and allocating tasks. ‘Watch the steps,' she told Patrick. ‘The kitchen is on a slightly lower level.' She reflected that to an outsider it might sound odd to be giving that advice to a sighted person but she knew Patrick. He'd grown fast lately and seemed not to have worked out yet where his newly extended limbs ended. She closed the door behind them.

‘Open the back door, will you, Patrick. Let some fresh air in. Then you can tell me what you don't like about our friend Marcus.'

Patrick laughed. She heard him release the bolts on the heavy door. ‘They didn't come through here anyway,' he said.

‘Good to know.' She found the kettle, filled it. ‘We'll need extra mugs. Second cupboard on the right. No, your other right. So, Marcus?'

She heard him open the cupboard and remove china, placing it on the counter with extra care. ‘I don't really know,' he said. ‘It's just a feeling. I don't think he's actually lying and I really do think he's cut up about Rupert dying and he's genuinely afraid that it was foul play …'

‘But?'

‘But. Big but …' Patrick paused as though thinking it through.

He was good at reading people, Naomi thought. He wasn't so good at taking notice of what he read, but there was nothing wrong with his actual perception.

‘I don't think he's saying everything. I think he knows … knew about those men before Rupert died and that's really what made him suspicious, what scared him. And I think he's very scared, Naomi. I think he's trying very hard to hide it but I think if he thought he could get away with it he'd have skipped the country well before now.'

‘Skipped the country?' She was amused by his choice of phrase. Then more seriously she asked, ‘So, what's stopping him, I wonder?'

‘You agree with me?' He sounded surprised.

‘I think I do. Question is, why he is hiding what he knows.'

‘He's more scared of them than he is of you.'

‘Fair enough. Except he's never encountered Alec, not when he's got the bit between his teeth. Next question is, did he get Rupert involved with them or was Rupert the link?'

‘Rupert,' Patrick said with confidence. ‘Bet you a fiver.'

She nodded. Much as she disliked the thought of damaging Alec's rosy memories of his uncle, she felt pretty sure that Patrick was right.

The day passed slowly and inconclusively. It would have helped, Patrick observed, if they had any idea what they were looking for.

By the time Marcus had left it was after four. SOCO had been and gone, their promptness leading Alec to comment that either Reg Fine had pulled a lot of strings or that this must be an amazingly crime-free county. Patrick and Naomi had joined the search, Patrick describing what he found, Naomi telling him whether to return it to where he'd found it, or to keep it to add to the growing stack of documents and notebooks Alec had gathered on the kitchen table.

Harry and Naomi cooked while Alec and Patrick sorted through what they had recovered.

‘Diaries,' Patrick said. ‘Going back to 1983. I don't think he threw anything away. A couple of old address books from the study and the one from by the telephone in the hall.'

‘More notes for his book,' Alec went on. ‘More names to add to the list of interviewees. Plans for volume two of his Fen Tigers thing. Bank statements, credit card statements, usual stuff. It's going to take weeks to check up on all this.'

‘Then we prioritize,' Naomi said. ‘Look for unusual transactions on the statements or anything regular that isn't a utility or named. Cash withdrawals, that sort of thing.'

‘I'll do that,' Patrick volunteered.

‘Feel free,' Alec told him. ‘I'll go through the phone bills and cross-reference with the address books. Harry, could you give Patrick a hand after dinner? There's miles of the financial stuff and an accountant's eye …'

‘Be glad to. You didn't say, was there anything of interest on the computer disks?'

‘Of interest, yes. Relevance, not that I could see. The stick drive had a back-up of his book. It looked to be about ninety percent complete.'

‘How can you tell?' Naomi wondered. ‘Harry, how do you want your steak?' She prodded it with a finger. ‘It feels medium rare.'

‘How do you work that out without seeing it?' Harry wanted to know.

‘Oh, there was this chef on television. He said if you pressed the base of your thumb then what that felt like, when you prodded steak, was medium. The ball of your thumb felt like well done.'

‘Presumably if it felt like the knuckle it meant you'd burned it,' Alec mocked. ‘You must have asbestos fingers. I'd like to find that laptop. And, as to how I know the book was ninety percent done, he's already got a table of contents. Twenty-five chapters and most already written.'

‘Um. Right. There might not be anything more on the laptop, you know,' Naomi pointed out. ‘He might just have used it for his writing.'

‘Perhaps so, but it would be nice to be certain. So far there's nothing that remotely links Uncle Rupert to Samuel Kinnear, or anyone else of his ilk.'

He paused. ‘I have a very vague memory that Rupe lived in London for a short time but …'

‘Your dad would remember?'

‘Probably. Naomi, I'm going to have to leave for a couple of days. Will you be all right?'

‘Leave? For where?'

‘London. Follow up on some of the information Fine gave me.'

‘You're not fit enough for that. Can't you call?'

‘No, I can't do this over the phone. I'll be OK. Harry and Patrick are here or I'd insist you went home.'

‘Like to see you try.'

‘Who are you looking for?' Patrick wanted to know.

‘I have a few contacts there but I also want to go to Colindale.'

‘Colindale?'

‘Newspaper archive. Sometimes it helps to look beyond the official records. Fine's given me some directions to look and a couple of names.'

‘It all sounds a bit vague,' Naomi objected, not happy about Alec going anywhere, especially while he was still so obviously in pain. She couldn't see him wince when he stretched or pulled the damaged ribs, but she had slept in the same bed last night. Or rather, lain awake while he tried to find a position in which he could comfortably sleep.

‘It's all vague,' Alec confirmed irritably, but nothing they could say could dissuade him from leaving the next morning.

Later, Patrick and Naomi wandered into the garden and through the gate in the back wall that led to what Alec had called the meadow.

‘What's it like?' she asked.

‘Um, I don't know. Rough grass, little trees and a hedge with bigger trees growing in it.' He turned, scanning the boundary. ‘It's big,' he said. ‘Big for a garden, looks more like a field.'

‘Any way anyone could get through the hedge?'

He left her side, Napoleon bounding after him. Naomi stood, listening to his commentary. Patrick was very good at remembering to tell her what was going on.

‘The hedge is taller than me,' he said. ‘It's mixed, which means it's old. There's thorn and elderberry and what I think might be wild roses. There's rose hips. Nettles like you wouldn't believe and a couple of ash trees.'

‘So, quite a barrier.'

‘Yes, that is. Ah, maybe not.'

‘Oh, what do you see?'

‘Hang on a minute, I'm trying to find a way past the blasted nettles.'

‘Be careful.'

‘OK. There's … well, it's not exactly a gap. There's a fence just here. A bit rotten looking but low and climbable.'

‘Look as if anyone's climbed it lately?'

‘Hard to say. No obvious scuff marks or mud on the rails, but, Naomi, it's pretty low. Easy.'

‘What can you see over the fence?'

‘I'm getting to that. It's a field with cows. No, bullocks, not cows. After that there's a farm. House, barn, couple of other buildings. Hedge all round the field, but I can see a gate across the other side and a car's just gone by so that must be the road. It sort of loops round. But if someone did come across here they'd have to come all the way across the field and then over the wall.'

‘No, the gate wasn't locked, remember. Just latched. I'll get Harry to put a bolt on it, I think.'