Twelve

‘Are you serious about asking Patrick to help?’ Naomi asked.

‘I am, why?’

‘Harry might not like it. Alec, we don’t know what’s going on here. I don’t want Patrick involved in any more drama because of us.’

‘If necessary I’ll take the hard drive to him. I don’t think Harry could object to that.’

Harry, Patrick’s father, probably wouldn’t, Naomi mused, but in the last couple of years Patrick had been forced to cope with a great many things, the latest being the suicide of a close friend. It was a lot for a seventeen year old to cope with, but then again Patrick had helped out before with computer-related stuff.

‘I suppose his exams are over and his school has broken up now for the summer,’ she conceded.

It had rained while they’d been chatting to Marcus and the air smelt fresh and clean. Napoleon snuffed and snorted at the freshly revealed smells and hoovered at the pavement as they wandered slowly back to the hotel.

‘What do you make of the notes Rupe left in the book? It sounds odd.’

‘It sounds as though he hid them in a hurry,’ Alec said. ‘Or is that allowing my imagination to run away with me?’

‘Maybe.’ Naomi frowned. ‘Marcus was rather eager to get out to Fallowfields. Or is that just me being over imaginative too?’

She felt him shrug. ‘I think we’re both a little guilty of that,’ he said. ‘Blame Marcus, he got us seeing foul play where no one else did.’

‘Marcus didn’t imagine the men that came to the house.’

‘No,’ Alec agreed. ‘I wish he had. I wish Rupert’s death had been just due to a stupid mistake on his part but …’

‘Looks less likely now.’

‘Much less,’ Alec agreed.

The phone rang and Marcus hesitated before picking up.

‘They’ve left then,’ the voice on the other end said.

‘Clever of you to state the obvious.’

‘Don’t try to be smart Marcus, or pretend you’re not shit-scared. What did they say?’

Marcus sat down heavily. ‘Not a great deal,’ he admitted. ‘They’ve been out to where Rupert died and they still can’t find his laptop.’ He heard the man swear and then turn away from the phone to mutter something he could not quite catch.

‘So, what are you going to do about it?’ the man said.

Marcus sighed. ‘I’m going out to Fallowfields with them tomorrow. They want me to help out, see what you and your friend might have taken, I mean,’ he continued, a sudden surge of anger momentarily overcoming his fear. ‘What were you thinking of, threatening Naomi like that. I could have gone there at any time, quite legitimately.’

‘My friend is impatient,’ he was told. ‘Anyway, you had your chance and you didn’t deliver. My friend also gets impatient with people who let him down.’

The phone went dead and Marcus replaced the receiver with a hand that shook so much the plastic rattled against the cradle. He sat very still, staring at it, afraid it might ring again. He should have told them he had given Alec the mobile phone and the notes, he thought, though he had no idea if either would be relevant anyway. ‘Not good to hold things back though,’ he said softly. ‘Oh Rupert, what a mess you’ve got us into.’

Back in the hotel room Alec began to lay out the contents of the bags he had taken from the shop. The only area big enough was the floor and Napoleon wanted to help, sniffing loudly at each object as Alec extracted them.

‘Sorry, old man, but you’re going to have to shift,’ Alec said, shoving the large black dog away. ‘This is evidence, don’t you know, not a feast for canine senses.’ Napoleon snorted and flopped down in the patch of sun beneath the window.

‘Maybe we should give him something to sniff and take him back to the crime scene,’ Naomi suggested half seriously. She sipped at the tea Alec had ordered and felt for the plate of biscuits he had placed on the dressing table.

‘If I thought it would do any good I’d do that,’ Alec told her.

‘So, what do we have?’

‘Well, nothing unexpected. A pair of grey flannel trousers, shirt, shoes and socks. Contents of pockets are: keys, pocket change, a wallet …’ He opened it. ‘Money and cards still there,’ he said in surprise.

‘’Course they are. Whoever he was with wanted an accidental death not a robbery.’

‘True. I wasn’t thinking. Small pocket diary,’

‘Anything for the day he died?’

‘No, nothing. Odd appointments for the week before. I’ll have to cross-check with his notes and ask Marcus about them later. Flicking through there’s nothing that seems to turn up regularly and most of the entries are just times and initials.’

‘Maybe he kept more details elsewhere. Or maybe they were such regular meetings he didn’t need more detail.’

‘Um, well, we shall have to just slog through, see what we can find out.’ He continued with his inventory. ‘Folded pocket handkerchief, comb. That would seem to be it.’

‘That’s odd,’ Naomi said.

‘What is?’

‘Well, the amount of stuff he had with him. There’s too much there for trouser pockets and he wasn’t wearing a jacket.’

‘You may have a point,’ Alec said. ‘I’ll talk to Fine, see where these things were actually found. Not that it tells us much, just adds a level of mystery.’

‘What are the keys?’

‘There are three, on a ring that has a fob for a local garage. Probably where he had his car serviced.’

‘Car keys?’

‘No, but it makes me wonder if someone took his ignition key from the ring. There’s one here that looks as though it might be to a desk drawer. It’s like the one back at Fallowfields. No door keys, at least …’ He got up and Naomi heard a metallic jangle as he took his own set of keys from his jacket pocket so that he could compare the two sets. ‘I’m making a guess that one is the garage key, it looks as if it would fit a padlock, and I never did find that back at the house. Then there’s an old fashioned looking thing that might open the side gate. Nothing for the house.’

‘Why not just take the lot?’

‘Well, as you pointed out, it wasn’t meant to look like anything but a tragic death.’

‘Then why take the car key?’

‘Presumably so they could get away. They needed the car.’

‘But wouldn’t that kind of give the game away. I mean, wouldn’t people then start to ask how he got out there?’

‘Well, no one but Marcus did, did they? DS Fine was saying they all assumed he’d parked up at some other point and walked on to the Peatlands trail from there. They were surprised, he said, but everyone they interviewed attested that Rupert was his own man, did his own thing, and still loved to walk. Everyone knew about his research and the assumption was he was out there soaking up the atmosphere.’

‘Soaking up the rain, more like.’

‘He never minded the rain,’ Alec said. ‘But …’ He fell silent and Naomi could sense the sudden tension even across the room.

‘But what?’

‘Fine said it rained all day, didn’t he? All the more reason for wearing a coat.’

‘Yes. He said the ground beneath Rupert’s body was still wet. Alec, what is it?’

‘They weren’t looking so they didn’t see,’ Alec said. ‘They didn’t see.’

‘See what?’ Naomi demanded.

‘His shoes, Naomi. There’s no mud on his shoes. Just a smear on the heels where he’d been lying on the ground, but there’s no splashed mud on his trousers. Nothing. Just a pattern consistent with him lying on his back on wet ground. I’ll lay odds Rupert didn’t walk there or even drive himself. He died elsewhere and his body was dumped up there on the moor.’

Derek sat in his car about a mile from the barn and called Sharon on his mobile. He needed to hear a friendly voice and Sam Kinnear certainly didn’t qualify. Sam had been furious at Marcus’s failure to turn up the goods and at the way the woman had behaved that morning. But then, Sam Kinnear was always furious.

But he had really disgusted Derek that morning, although it had been a little thing, he supposed. It was the jacket Kinnear had worn, the Harris tweed, lightweight for the summer, but still too hot in Derek’s opinion. But it wasn’t that, it was the fact that it had belonged to the old man.