Blood Ties (23 page)

Driving out to Eddy's cottage, Brian made a decision. He would tell Gavin he no longer wanted any part if this and he'd tell him why. That his father had not just driven drunk and caused a crash, but he'd probably been responsible for killing someone who might have survived. In some crazy way that Brian couldn't quite justify, that made it all ten times worse: that he could have done something to make the incident just a fraction less tragic than it had been, but he had failed to do so.

He turned into the short drive and saw Gavin's car already there.

‘What kept you? I've been here a bloody hour!'

‘I'm not stopping. I just came out to tell you I've done with this.'

‘Yeah, right.'

Gavin turned away and headed into the house. It seemed he had already unlocked the door, and Brian wondered why he'd waited outside.

Reluctantly, he followed. ‘Hey, I mean it, you know.'

Gavin took no notice of him. He walked ahead, going through the house and turning on the lights. He wore no gloves, Brian noticed, and didn't seem to care that someone driving by might notice the lights being on.

‘Gavin, what the hell are you doing?'

Gavin paused, turned to face him and Brian knew that if he was wise, he should get out now and go and find the nearest policeman.

‘Looking,' Gavin said.

‘Looking for what?'

‘Whatever there is.'

They were in the kitchen at the back of the house and Gavin turned away from Brian and started to open cupboard doors, slamming them back as far as they would go and peering in. A swipe of his arm brought the contents crashing out and on to the floor.

‘Gavin!'

‘What?'

‘I'm going.'

‘No. You're not. You're going to help me look.' Suddenly he was beside Brian, a knife from the block on the counter in his hand.

‘What the hell? Oh, you've lost it big time, you really have.'

He backed away and Gavin followed him into the hall.

‘Look,' Brian said. ‘Let me talk to Susan, she'll see reason. She'll understand what your dad went through, what Eddy did to him. She's soft like that. We can settle this, all come out of it with what we want. Now put the bloody knife down.'

A thought struck Brian and he wondered why it had waited until now to appear, it was so obvious. ‘Did you kill Eddy?'

‘Old fool tried to fight me so I gave him a shove.'

‘Did you want him dead?'

Gavin shrugged. ‘Eventually. I'd have liked to make it slower, just like he made my dad die slowly. You should have seen him when he was younger, Bri. Just so full of it. Yeah, he drank, but he was a good dad. He played footie with me, he took me out with him, he didn't take no rubbish from anyone. Eddy took him away from me. He changed after that; died a bit at a time and Eddy made it happen. I wanted him to feel it, to know what he put us through, but I shoved him and he fell. We don't always get what we want, do we?'

Brian wanted to leave. That was what he wanted. He backed away towards the front door, glad he'd not bothered to close it. His hand in his pocket found his keys and he pressed the fob, hearing the familiar beep of the lock disarming.

‘I'm leaving,' he said, trying to keep his voice as calm as possible. ‘This is over. Now.'

‘Not now, not ever,' Gavin said.

TWENTY-FIVE

N
aomi dozed in the car as Alec drove. She'd had a bad night – and not enough of it, anyway.

Susan had been hysterical by the time they reached The Lamb, telling them that Gavin had arrived just after eight and that he'd clearly been drinking, but had also clearly decided to try a different tack, buying drinks for anyone that would accept one and asking questions about his Uncle Eddy.

‘He was weird.' Kevin's verdict was unequivocal.

‘Maybe just because of the drink?'

Kevin shook his head. ‘Nah, not drunk weird, just weird.'

Several people had accepted a pint from him – why not? Kevin said. He was paying. But it seemed there were strings. Gavin asked a lot of questions about Eddy, about his research and his treasure maps and what he'd found. The locals, predictably, began to wind him up.

‘They were telling him, like, Eddy struck gold.' Kevin didn't know if to be amused or annoyed. ‘They kept telling him, like, Eddy was a treasure hunter. I told him that Eddy was a serious historian, but he'd stopped listening by then. He just got mad, wanted to know where the maps were and what Eddy had found, and when Susan said he'd found nothing valuable he accused her of wanting everything for herself.'

‘I stopped serving him,' Susan said. ‘I let him have one drink, then told him he had to go, but he just got more and more abusive. Ken and Larry threw him out later and Kevin hung on with me and said he'd follow me home.'

Which is what he'd done later, after Naomi and Alec had smoothed the ruffled feathers and told her, again, that she had to report the incident to Dean or Blezzard and to Mr Cole, and after which Naomi and Alec had tried to get some sleep.

‘How far is it now?' Naomi asked, rousing to find that the smooth rhythm of motorway driving had given way to the frequent gear change demands of a B road.

‘Ten minutes, maybe a bit less. You feeling any better?'

‘Not really. Are you OK?'

‘When we've seen DI Bradford, we'll find ourselves a café and I'll stoke up on coffee.'

‘OK.' She fell silent, listening to the changing note of the engine and the tyre noise on the uneven road. ‘I hope he's in, after all this.' They'd been unable to reach him by phone but had decided to come up anyway.

‘Well, we'll soon know.' He slowed and she assumed they were now in a village. She heard the satnav tell him to turn right. Moments later, they stopped.

‘We're there?'

‘Yes. Hang on and I'll help you out; I've pulled on to a verge.'

Naomi waited until he came around to her side, releasing Napoleon from the back seat first and then helping Naomi out on to the soft verge. The air smelt of recent rain and the damp was chill against her skin. She turned her head, catching the scent of winter honeysuckle.

‘OK?' Alec led her through a small gate. She heard the latch fall back again as it closed behind them. They walked up a gravel path and Alec knocked on the cottage door. It opened only seconds later.

‘My friend Matt Blezzard called,' a voice said. ‘Told me I should expect you. I told him it was about time someone came looking. About bloody time.'

‘When Eddy had been a much younger man he had felt certain there was a solution to everything. Life had fallen into place for him. Good degree, good job, happy marriage, wonderful child, even though she'd been a little late coming on to the scene. From such a height of grace it seemed inevitable, that the fall should be so heavy and so far.

‘Cancer, the doctor said. Then, that it had metastasized. Then, that there were only months – and then weeks, and nothing that had fallen so neatly into place before could compensate for the chaos that those few words had brought.'

‘And then Martha was dead,' Alec said.

‘Martha died and there was worse to come. I remember breaking the news about Karen, saying to him, I'm sorry, sir, but your daughter, Karen. There was a car accident. I'm afraid . . . I'm afraid she's dead. And he just stood and looked at me like the words didn't make a scrap of sense. It was as though he could not comprehend a world in which such a mess of grief could be thrown at him. The fall from grace was complete, and none of it of his making or in his power to change.

‘Eddy disintegrated. There is no other word complete enough to explain what happened to him. He dissolved into the morass that was grief and loss and emptiness, and when he finally climbed his painful way back out again, it was as though that man of certainty he had been was a mere shadow of a memory.

‘He wrote to me. He said, “I have lost all purpose. I am empty, a vessel that has been spilled out on to the ground.” But he found something to fill that space and I'm not saying it was a good thing, just that this is what he did, and if I'd known all of it then I might have intervened. As it was, I knew Eddy now had something that was driving him, something that made it worth him getting up in the morning, and I told myself that it was his research. We joked about his treasure hunts and about what he'd do if he found his millions buried in some muddy field. If I'd known the truth, I think I would have acted.'

‘You think?'

‘I don't know. That's just it. I really, really don't know. I only realized what Eddy was doing in the few weeks before he died.'

‘And you discovered that he'd been persecuting the man he believed was responsible for his daughter's death.'

‘Yes, I discovered that.'

‘How?' Naomi asked. She shifted position in the too comfortable armchair. The fire was warm and the quiet room conducive to sleep. She wanted to maintain the very opposite of that. The cup she was holding rattled in the saucer and she steadied it carefully. ‘Did he tell you?'

‘No, the dead man's son, Gavin Symonds, followed the same trail you've done.'

‘
Gavin
Symonds? What does he look like?'

‘Brown hair. He had his hair cut short when I met him. Just a bit too short. It made his jaw look very heavy for his face, just like his father's was. He's five ten, maybe. Just a bit under the six foot mark, anyway, and not heavily built, but he looks as though he knows his way around a gym. Why?'

‘Because someone claiming to be a nephew of Eddy's has turned up. He calls himself Gavin Thame.'

‘Ah. And the description fits?'

‘Can I show you a picture?'

‘Please do.'

Naomi heard Alec get his phone and scroll through the images. ‘Here. Is this Gavin Symonds?'

‘Yes, I do believe it is. The hair's grown and he has a bit of five o'clock shadow in this picture, but otherwise, I'd have to say yes.'

‘Thank you,' Alec said. ‘That clears up a lot of questions. Why did he come to you?'

‘He found out somewhere that I'd been the officer in charge of the investigation, that at one point I'd taken his father in for questioning. He turned up here one day with a bag full of . . . evidence, he called it. Birthday cards and Christmas cards. News clippings, presents all wrapped up in tissue and ribbon. Gavin had opened some. His father had stopped after the first few years, but he'd kept everything and he'd left a suicide note, which the police had found after he killed himself, but which Gavin had seen too, confessing that he'd been drunk on the night those young people died, had been driving too fast and had come up behind them on the bend.

‘Apparently the driver swerved to try and get out of the way – accelerated, Symonds thought – somehow rolled the car and then hit the tree. He told his son that he thinks he clipped the back end of the other car; and he probably did, because there was glass from a headlamp found at the scene.'

‘Wasn't it compared to the car Symonds was driving?'

‘Of course, but that was it, you see. Symonds wasn't driving his own car. It was his wife's car. He dumped it somewhere and walked for a bit and then got a taxi and went and had another drink. Then he got his own vehicle and drove back out to the scene. By then our lot had arrived, and the ambulance, so he turned around and headed for home and that's when he was picked up. But the timing seemed to be wrong and he was in an undamaged car, so there was nothing to tie him to the crash.'

‘But you did.'

‘Yes, I did. You know when something nags at you? Something you can't put your finger on but it nags and festers until you have to take notice of it?'

Naomi laughed softly.

‘Oh yes,' Alec said. ‘We all know that feeling.'

‘And then James Symonds killed himself by driving into a wall. He drank a skinful first. His GP had been treating him for depression and his marriage had broken up some time before. Cause of death was obvious and so was the evidence of suicide. Case closed.'

‘Except that Gavin knew there was more to it.'

‘He did, or thought he did. He arrived here very distressed and I believe the distress was genuine. I made him a cup of tea and I listened. I thought I owed him that. There didn't seem to be anyone else willing to listen. His mother, he said, didn't want to know. She'd got herself a new man and a new life, but I think what really got to him was that he now understood something.'

‘What was that?' Naomi asked. ‘No, no more tea for me, thank you.'

‘Well, he said his father changed. Went from being a good dad and his best friend to being a stranger, and he said that it happened almost overnight. Gavin was eight years old when the accident happened and Karen and her friends were killed. He didn't understand why his parents started rowing but he remembered the police coming round and his dad being angry, and then, he said, things started to settle down a bit . . . and then it all fell apart. James Symonds became the opposite of what he'd been. The drinking got worse, and he became violent towards Gavin's mother and towards Gavin. He remembered the arguments developing, with his mother accusing his dad of having an affair. The little gifts Eddy sent in his daughter's name could well have seemed like that, I suppose. But the upshot was that Gavin saw Eddy as being responsible for ruining his parents' marriage, his childhood and ultimately taking his father's life.'

‘That's a lot of anger,' Naomi said.

‘It is indeed. I tried to make him see reason, but he became angry and I had to ask him to leave. I said I'd call the police if he came back again but I don't think he cared. In fact, I think the only thing that stopped him coming back is that I couldn't tell him any more. My official involvement ended twenty years ago. I'd had no contact with his father after that.'