The Power of One (6 page)

‘Everything of significance was left to his brother,' Mac was told. ‘There are a few small bequests, mostly personal items, books and the like, left to friends, but let's just say, it's a very simple will.'

‘Nothing to the sister-in-law?'

‘Yes.' Geoffrey Bliss laughed. ‘A first edition of A.A. Milne's
When We Were Very Young
. It seems like an odd little bequest, but presumably she will understand.'

Presumably she would, Mac thought.

Next stop, Paul's flat.

Paul de Freitas had sunk just about all his disposable income into his boat. His flat was modest; a top floor of an Edwardian house not far from the local secondary school.

Andy pulled up outside the house. He was staring into the rear-view mirror.

‘Something wrong?'

Andy shook his head. ‘I don't know. The car that just parked up behind us, it's been with us since you went to the solicitor's office.'

Mac glanced over his shoulder; nothing remarkable about the dark-green Rover with the two male passengers. ‘Are you sure?'

‘I'm sure.'

Mac got out of the car, Andy trailing after, and headed towards the house. He was somehow unsurprised when the two men followed him. Only slightly less surprised to find that the police seal on Paul de Freitas' door had been broken and someone was already inside. He could sense Andy's unease.

The man sitting in Paul de Freitas' favourite leather, wing-backed chair rose as they entered and held out his hand. ‘You must be Inspector McGregor.'

Mac shook the hand, eyeing its owner carefully. Expensive suit, a plain white button-down shirt that was oddly like those in Paul's wardrobe. The man was, Mac guessed, in his late fifties. Greying hair, light tan to the skin. Manicured fingernails that made Mac immediately self-conscious of his own. Not that he bit them or anything, but the odd attack of clippers and nail file didn't exactly do a lot to improve their appearance.

‘And you are?' He glanced at the two men who had followed up the stairs. ‘You are aware that this is a crime scene?'

‘I am, yes. The late Paul de Freitas did some work for us. You'll understand that we needed to be sure he hadn't left anything here that shouldn't be.'

‘Work for you? And who exactly are you?'

The grey-haired man produced his ID. Mac studied it. ‘And I should believe that?'

He was aware of Andy craning round him trying to see and of the young man saying, ‘Cool,' as he read the legend MI5.

Grey hair smiled. ‘My name, as you can see, is William Hale. Your superintendent will be in touch once you get back to your HQ, but feel free to call him if you like. He'll confirm my identity, but in the meantime there are a few things of which you should be aware.'

‘The second victim was one of your people,' Mac guessed.

‘He was. Yes.'

‘And am I to know why Paul de Freitas needed a minder?'

‘I'm afraid not. No.'

‘And if that information is pertinent to his death? I remind you that I am conducting a murder investigation.'

‘And we are aware of that. Our interests no doubt run parallel, Inspector.'

Mac frowned. ‘Andy.' He pointed to a door behind William Hale. ‘We'll start through there, I think. Any objections, Mr Hale?'

‘As you will.' He stood back, let Mac and Andy go past into what turned out to be Paul's bedroom.

Mac closed the door.

‘Won't they have already searched the place?' Andy whispered.

‘Of course they will, but we may find something they judged unimportant and, besides, I'm not letting some jumped-up pseudo official tell me I can't investigate my own murder.'

Andy grinned at him. ‘Pseudo official?'

Mac didn't reply. He knew there was something off here. Hale might well be MI5, might be from another department acting under their auspices. May be something else again but he just hadn't figured it out yet. He directed Andy towards a low chest of drawers that stood in the bay by the window and Mac took the bedside cabinet.

‘We looking for anything in particular?'

‘Personal papers, anything relating to
The Greek Girl
. I don't know, Andy, but we're not leaving here empty-handed.'

For a while they worked in silence, moving methodically through the room and then going back into the main living room with a handful of papers and photographs in plastic evidence bags, Mac viciously aware that the place had already been ransacked. Oh, not in an untidy way, or so the casual observer or even someone who knew the place reasonably well would notice, but the search had taken place all right and it had been thorough.

Hale was back in the winged chair close to the fireplace. No fire in the hearth now, of course, the August weather behaving for once, but Mac could imagine that in winter this would be a friendly, comforting position in which to sit and read. His two attendants seemed to have departed; obviously, Mac thought, they didn't expect him or Andy to cause any trouble. He felt a little put-out at such a slight.

A check of the kitchen and bathroom revealed little and they returned to the living room. Hale had not moved.

A small portable television sat on a table with barley twist legs that Mac recognised as a Victorian aspidistra stand. Old bookshelves lined the whole of one wall and a roll-top desk stood beside the window, a modern office chair the only jarring element. Dark floorboards were covered in one large and a couple of smaller rugs, and instead of curtains the window was dressed with wooden, slatted blinds. Mac, watched by Hale, took time to check each book, flicking the pages and looking behind. Paul had possessed eclectic tastes and cheap, well-thumbed paperback thrillers rubbed shoulders with poetry and classics. He had a small collection of first editions, including the A.A. Milne the solicitor had mentioned.

He'd had a habit, Mac noted, of tearing scraps of paper from the margins of magazines or newspapers with which to mark his pages. Some of the paperbacks still had their improvised markers stuck between the pages, their position telling Mac that they'd been replaced at random and with some degree of impatience. Still more of these lay on the shelf between two volumes of poetry, together with three or four ‘real' bookmarks advertising local bookshops or an online dealer Mac had also used on occasions. A couple more such markers lay between the pages of the 1919 first edition of W.B. Yeats'
The Wild Swans at Coole
, and an ageing gazetteer of the south-west.

Mac moved on to examine the stack of papers on the bottom shelf but found them to be paid bills and bank statements, all mixed in with printouts of directions and leaflets from the local takeaways. He bagged them anyway, reflecting that if the state of Paul's personal filing system reflected that of his business papers, it was no wonder Edward did not rate him as a businessman.

Andy focussed on the roll-top desk, flicking through notebooks and photographs and the assorted detritus that gets pushed into the cubbyholes of desks and is then forgotten. Once or twice he called Mac's attention to something and Mac, erring on the side of caution, told him to bring it all; they'd sift through it later. Hale had made no comment. He sat with his fingers steepled, elbows resting on the arms of the leather chair, his face a noncommittal blank. Mac, feeling increasingly foolish, stuck to his firkling and ferreting, Hale's pale eyes burning into the back of his neck.

‘Andy?' Mac straightened up.

‘About finished.'

‘Good.' Hale rose to his feet. ‘Then we can all be off. I'm sure you both have better things to do.'

Mac made no comment. Pride caused him to re-seal the door once they had all left.

‘What now?' Andy said as they got back in to the car.

‘We make a call on the de Freitas's, then Frantham,' Mac said. ‘You park up, I'll get the coffee.'

Andy turned to look at him, eyes narrowed in expectation. ‘You went and found something, didn't you?'

‘I might have done,' Mac admitted. He dug out his phone and made a few calls. Was unsurprised, but chagrined to find that Hale was to ‘be given every cooperation'. Then he put in a call to forensics.

‘You're getting the CSIs in?'

‘Hale wasn't wearing gloves. Either he's confident he won't show up in the system or he thinks I'll be too impressed by his credentials to bother.'

‘Superintendent Aims won't like you doing that. Not if he's already been briefed.'

‘Well, Andy, we definitely
haven't
been briefed, have we? We don't know those men from Adam.'

Andy laughed but he sounded a trifle nervous. ‘What did you find then?'

‘Maybe nothing, but there was a prescription packet in the medicine cabinet, and it wasn't Paul's. Then there was a scrap of paper, wedged in one of the books. It looks as though Paul de Freitas folded it up and used it as a bookmark, which is probably why no one took any notice of it, and there might be nothing to take notice of but …'

‘But you think …'

Mac sighed, suddenly deflated. ‘I think I'm rather desperate for them to have missed something,' he said, but, offhand, he couldn't think of any good reason why an obvious book lover would mark a first edition with a scrap of folded newspaper. And added to that anomaly was the fact that the book was
When We Were Very Young
by A. A. Milne, the one the solicitor had told him was promised to Lydia in Paul's will.

T
hey had driven halfway to Frantham when Mac's phone rang. It was Miriam and she had disturbing news. Someone had taken Paul's laptop.

‘An official someone?'

‘Hell no, Johnny got in this morning and it was gone. He checked the evidence locker and with other colleagues, thinking they might have already started on it, but it is most definitely gone.'

‘Nothing else taken?'

‘Yes, a PDA, but it was totally unrelated to our case. In fact, it belonged to one of the techs. He is not a happy bunny. Of course, we have the last laugh on them. Whoever it was doesn't know how we work.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Well you never work on the original hard drive. You make an image first, and work from that. They might have taken the laptop, but we've still got the information.'

‘Miriam, is there any chance …'

‘Already done. On the QT of course. I had Johnny make a copy of his copy. Of course, anything we find is inadmissible and, frankly, I don't know what on earth you think we can do that Johnny can't but … Anyway, he says you owe him dinner at the Palisades. He wants to see Tim's act.'

‘Dinner it is then.'

Andy had been listening in. ‘This is too unreal!'

‘You're enjoying this?'

‘Too right. It's like being in a James Bond film.'

‘I hope not. In the average Bond film half the locations get blown up and most of the cast die well before the final credits.'

‘Yeah,' Andy agreed reluctantly, ‘but that's fiction, ain't it. This is for real.'

R
ina had been about bright and early and walked along the cliff path to the de Freitas' house. She found Lydia alone.

‘Do you mind if we go through to the kitchen?' Lydia asked. ‘It's Margaret's day off and I was just making some tea.'

‘Is Edward not here?' Rina asked.

Lydia shrugged. ‘I think he went out.' She led the way to the sunny kitchen and Rina sat down at the scrubbed wooden table, as like the one in her own kitchen as to be its twin. This kitchen was definitely more modern than her own though, melamine and faux granite instead of old pine. It was, Rina thought, strangely at odds too with the rest of the house which had been furnished with an eye to quality and luxury. This was off-the-shelf utilitarian and a little tatty and tired at that.

Lydia must have noticed her appraisal. ‘This will be the last room to be done,' she said. She opened a drawer and then dropped some sample books on the table. ‘I'm trying to decide whether to go for country kitchen or seventies retro. Margaret wants a proper hob and split-level cooker and a better dishwasher, and I suppose seeing as she's the one that uses it most, she really should have her way but I'm kind of drawn to …' She sat down suddenly, and looked at Rina with a stricken expression on her pretty face. ‘Oh, God, Rina, what does it matter? Really, what the hell does any of it matter?'

Rina reached out across the table and took Lydia's hands. It was evident that the younger woman was bursting to tell someone whatever it was that
did
matter, but Rina knew she mustn't rush things.

‘It's been an awful shock,' she said gently. ‘Such violence. It really isn't what you'd expect in a place like Frantham.'

Not, she thought ruefully, that Frantham had exactly been free of such violence this last year, though Rina preferred to think of this as a statistical blip rather than a growing trend.

‘You must be devastated,' she went on. ‘To lose someone like that … and of course, the man who was on board with Paul; from what I've heard they still don't know who he was. Just imagine what his family must be going through. They don't even know yet.'

Lydia stared at her and Rina knew she was on the verge of revelation.

‘Imagine,' she went on. ‘Someone goes missing and you don't know where to start looking and then you find out that they've been murdered. Shot dead.'

Lydia's eyes had filled with tears.

‘Do you know who he was?' Rina said.

Lydia shook her head. ‘I already told that policeman I don't know his name.'

‘So you did,' Rina agreed. She thought for a moment, weighing the woman's reply. ‘But, Lydia, you may not have known his name, but do you know
what
he was?'

‘Oh God.' She buried her face in her hands and wept noisily. Rina got up and switched the kettle back on. Tissues were nowhere in evidence but she found a kitchen roll and tore off several sheets, handed them to Lydia and, with surprising gentleness, stroked the younger woman's shoulders and back.