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  He paused, thinking just how mixed up that metaphor was and also whether this was one of those times when whatever was going on would be resolved by negotiation or by violence. From the look of things, it was not going to be one of the former occasions. Hopkins might well be proved correct in her assumptions.

  “Did you catch who did it? Who killed the wife?”

  “We had a suspect and we had someone go to jail for the offence, not necessarily the same thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Our main suspect was Kyle Sykes. Our main scapegoat was a man called Ronald Hardwick. He was known to be violent but had the intelligence of, I don’t know, maybe a five-year-old on a good day. He was found covered in blood, with the murder weapon in his hands, his footprints and fingerprints all over the scene. Circumstantial evidence was overwhelming and what’s more, he confessed to it. Though whether he was mentally capable of making a confession is another story. He’s now banged up in a secure psychiatric unit, doubtful if he’ll ever make it out into the world again, but there you go. A result.”

  “But if the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming, what makes you doubt it?”

  “When you have half a day to spare, you can read through the case notes for yourself. But the fact is, the man was well known to Kyle Sykes, he was an impressionable soul, and by the time we got to him he was so jacked up on drink and drugs he would have confessed to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.”

  “France who?”

  Clarke shook his head in mock despair. “What do they teach you at school these days? Anyway, Kyle Sykes was behind it. Jennifer Sykes had been having an affair. She thought she’d been careful and discreet but nobody is careful or discreet enough around our Kyle. The man she was having the affair with also turned up dead two days later. It’s likely he’d been killed at the same time, but his body had been dumped in the canal and he was lucky. Just a bullet to the head.”

  “How had she been killed?”

  “Same way as those three men in the morgue.”

  “Jesus!”

  Clarke wanted to tell her that Jesus had never been a suspect but he wasn’t sure that she had that sense of humour. “Quite,” he agreed. “It was the daughter who found her, in the garage of their old house. Found her and found Ronald Hardwick bending over her. Not unreasonably, she started to scream the place down, turned and ran, and of course in moments, Hardwick was surrounded by Sykes’s men, we were called, and so it goes.”

  “How old was the kid?”

  “She was eleven,” Clarke told her. And now there’s no sign of her, he thought. We still have no idea where’s she’s gone. If she’s gone. “But after her mum was killed, she went to stay with Harry Prentice and his wife, Jean. Her dad made a big fuss about not being able to live in their old house anymore and had this current one built. She didn’t go back home until he’d moved in. He spent the eighteen months in a luxury hotel. She spent it with Harry and his wife.”

  “And now she seems to be missing, and Harry Prentice’s house was burned to the ground.”

  “And four men are dead, including Charlie Perrin. Word is, Lauren Sykes and Charlie Perrin were going to be man and wife. Two families joined in hellish matrimony.”

  “But she’s just a kid. He was old.”

  “Older, not old,” Clarke objected. “He was younger than me.”

  “Sorry, did I touch a nerve?” She grinned at him, then looked worried as though she might have offended him.

  “Older,” he conceded, smiling back at her. “A lot older than Lauren.”

  “So maybe she’s run off to avoid getting hitched.”

  “Hell of a coincidence that he’s wound up dead.”

  He glanced at Hopkins, seeing her taking this in. “You think she killed him?” Hopkins laughed.

  “I think we have to consider anything and everything,” he told her. And, he thought, there’s a hell of a lot to consider.

  Chapter 17

  They had not discussed it, but by some sort of tacit agreement they had both settled in front of the television for the evening news. Harry had checked the internet several times that day and knew that the story was growing. The burning of his house was not likely to have made national level, but the murders of three men already had. Lauren had sensed Harry’s mood darkening throughout the day. Now she curled up beside him on the settee and held his hand.

  The report he was expecting was the third item, coming after political visits and bombing raids and the number of civilian dead overseas. “The bodies of the three men found close to the Grand Union Canal where it passes through Wandsborough have now been named.”

  Cue footage of an all-too-familiar place. On one bank of the canal where redevelopment had taken place, old warehouses were now luxury apartments. On the other was still waste ground, surrounded by loose chain-link fence but easily accessible from the towpath. The buddleia and the birches had moved in, evidence that it had been derelict for about a decade. Kids from the local high-rise played there, avoiding the syringes and condoms. Harry had known it before the rows of terraced houses had been demolished. Lauren would have passed it on her way to school most days, but he doubted she’d ever actually been there.

  Photographs of three men replaced the landscape. Two looked like mug shots and the third looked more like a passport photo. All three had been depersonalized, the immediate message being these men might have deserved to die. Who knows what they might have been getting up to?

  Beside him, Lauren shifted uneasily. “It’s not fair to the families to use pictures like that. They should use family pictures, you know, Harry. They were still human beings. They still had people who loved them.”

  ”I know,” Harry said. “I know.” He knew that she was remembering the news reports from when her mother had died. Her mother had no criminal record, being from a respectable background, so initially most of the newspapers had carried images either of her wedding day, or of her at some social gathering or other. It was only much later when newspapers began to speculate about her husband and report that Kyle Sykes was involved in darker dealings that the images changed. The media seemed to pick those pictures in which her mother was no longer beautiful, no longer innocent.

  “I know them, don’t I, Harry?” Lauren said suddenly. “The younger white guy often worked on Dad’s cars, I think sometimes his dad helped too. The other man visited our house a couple of times to sort out the computers — Kristy. He was nice. Netflix kept crashing out on my laptop. He got it working. And he said my computer had got a virus so he cleaned that up and installed some software to stop it happening again.”

  She sat forward, scrutinizing the television — it was important to her that she recall every tiny detail. These were not just pictures on a TV screen, pictures calculated so that the general public would dismiss them.

  “If we get killed, no one’s going to care, are they, Harry? Because of who my dad happens to be. It’ll be just ‘That old lag, Harry Prentice’ and ‘That slut of a kid.’”

  “No one will think anything bad about you, pet.”

  “Oh, no? Harry, if you’re gone, there’s no one to tell them anything else, is there? I’ve got no real friends. My dad doesn’t give a shit, he just wants me dead. Who’s going to tell them any different?”

  Harry gripped her hand but didn’t really know what to say. Would they get the same treatment? Would their deaths be seen as unimportant just because of who her father happened to be?

  Probably, Harry thought. And on his own behalf, he couldn’t argue with that, but Lauren deserved better, she really did.

  He realized the report had gone in a new direction, and that he was looking at the burned-out ruins of his own house. Lauren gasped. “Your house, Harry.”

  “We knew it had happened, love.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” Until she saw the footage, it hadn’t seemed real.

  No details were released about how the men were killed, only that the police were treating this
as a triple murder enquiry. The report went on to outline the petty criminal careers of the two Sterns, father and son, and to hint at the criminal activities of Kristy Young — small-time hacking when he was a teenager, petty theft and a troubled childhood.

  Charlie Perrin’s death did not seem to have made the national headlines, at least not in the evening news. Either no connection had been made or this had been restricted to local interest only. After all, from what they’d read on the internet, Charlie’s death was being treated as an accident.

  Harry stood up and switched off the television. “Come on, let’s get ourselves something to eat.” He was forcing himself to sound casual, but one look at Lauren’s face told him that he wasn’t fooling anyone. He didn’t have to tell her that this was definitely something to do with what they had done, she in killing Charlie Perrin and he in helping her to run away.

  “They were friends of yours.”

  “I knew them all, yes. Kristy was a good lad. He made mistakes but he was never violent. It was me who brought him in, to give the lad some work. Stupid. Stupid thing for me to do.”

  He was relieved that she didn’t waste her breath telling him that it wasn’t his fault. But she did ask one more thing, and he realized that, perceptive as she was, she had been conscious of a sense of relief from Harry. “You expected it to be someone else, didn’t you?”

  Harry cast a fierce glance in her direction, then nodded. “I was afraid your dad might have gone after old Joe. We’ve been friends since we were kids. We were close at one time.”

  Lauren looked back at the television, as though the empty screen might tell her something more. She followed Harry back to the kitchen and helped to prepare a meal. Neither of them spoke — there wasn’t a lot that they could say.

  Four deaths now, Harry thought, and there will be more.

  “Should we go back, Harry?”

  Harry almost laughed. Go back? Face her father, give themselves up to his anger? He’d kill her, and Harry knew that Kyle would kill him, too. There would be two more deaths if they went back, that was for certain. But would there be more?

  “Your dad wouldn’t stop, not until he was properly satisfied. And your blood won’t satisfy him, mine neither. He’ll use this as an excuse for all the times he didn’t act, didn’t get payback. He’ll use it as a diversion and an excuse. Anyone who’s ever slighted him, they’d better watch out. I’ve seen it before, pet.”

  “After Mum died.”

  Harry nodded. He remembered it all too well and he knew that Lauren did, too. Her father had started drinking the day of the funeral and not stopped for . . . well, Lauren wouldn’t really know that because she was at Harry’s just after that. But Harry knew she’d heard the rumours, the gossip, the fearful whisperings in corners. His wife had betrayed him. She was dead. The man she’d had the affair with, he was dead. The sister-in-law who had tried to protect them, she and her husband disappeared, their bodies never found, but Lauren must have realized that they were gone. Others had run, some were rumoured to have run, but Harry doubted they’d got far. But of course, Kyle Sykes was alibied for every single incident. Drunk for most of them, though Lauren and Harry both knew that didn’t stop him. All the drink ever did was break down what few boundaries he observed on a day-to-day basis.

  Lauren was watching Harry frying eggs.

  “You want fried bread?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Don’t think I can eat anything, Harry. The smell of bacon’s making me feel sick.”

  He took the pan off the stove and came over to her. “You’ll sit down, and you’ll eat. You’ll keep up your strength. You keep up your normal, OK? The way we survive is to keep up our normal, you got that?”

  She looked a little scared. He’d been louder than he’d intended. “I’ve got that, Harry,” she told him. But what the hell is normal anymore?

  Chapter 18

  Clarke called at the local supermarket on his way home, realizing rather late in the day that he had no food in his flat. As he pushed his trolley down the aisle, collecting bread, milk and ready meals, and a bit of fruit, just to balance the whole thing out, he was surprised to see a familiar face. Sam Barker turned down the aisle he was in, inspecting apples and pears. Beside her stalked a tall, well-built, mixed-heritage man. Chinese, white British, maybe. Clarke caught himself classifying. Occupational hazard.

  The man touched Sam’s arm and pointed something out and she laughed. Clarke watched as they shared what was obviously a private joke. They’re a good-looking couple, he thought. This must be her physiotherapist boyfriend, Marty Baines.

  “Good evening, Miss Barker,” Clarke said.

  She looked up, startled and he could see that it took a moment before she recognized him. “Oh,” she said. “You’re that inspector.”

  “Guilty,” he laughed. Marty Baines was observing him with interest, but there was no caution from either of them, and that in itself was unusual, Clarke thought.

  Baines put out a hand. “Marty,” he said. “Sam was telling me about everything. It’s a bit of a bugger, isn’t it? I knew Charlie got a bit careless, but I never expected anything like this to happen.”

  “You knew Charlie Perrin well?”

  Marty Baines laughed. “No, I did not. To Charlie Perrin, I was just one of the hired help. I give his father physio three times a week, more if he has a lot of pain.”

  “What you do the rest of the time?”

  Marty raised an eyebrow. “Do the police always carry out their interrogations in Sainsbury’s? The rest of the time I work in my specialty, which is sports medicine. I’m attached to the Colbert Academy, it’s part of the university complex now. I work with athletes, and I also work with some ex-military personnel. The Colbert has a rehab unit attached. Mr Perrin paid for the building.” He grinned at Clarke. “And, yes, I know it’s probably dirty money, but it’s for a good cause, so frankly, I don’t give a damn.”

  “So you have no illusions about your boss, then.”

  “He’s not my boss. He’s my patient or client, or whatever you want to call it, three times a week.”

  “But you live in a house on his estate.”

  “I live in a house he happens to own. We’ve come to an arrangement, a business arrangement if you like. Effectively we pay no rent, and I give him physio three times a week. It might be unconventional, but it goes through the books via my accountant. She found some way to make it simple — I bill him, he bills me, and the amounts cancel each other out.”

  “Convenient.”

  Marty laughed again. “Actually it is. Mr Perrin owns a lot of property. Most of it legitimate, though you probably know that. He owns two gymnasiums, a hotel and I believe he part owns the golf course at Amerby. I am fully aware that he’s dodgy, but I’m just his physio.”

  Cocky, Clarke thought. He enjoys his little brush with criminality. Probably even boasts about it to his friends — “Oh, you know, Gus Perrin’s not so bad once you get to know him . . .”

  He’d seen it all before. It was the same attitude, the same naivety that got young kids involved in selling drugs or teenagers believing someone actually loved them when they were being groomed for sex. But a man like Marty Baines should really not be that stupid.

  He bit back on a direct challenge. “And you, Miss Barker, are you as sanguine about Mr Perrin and his contacts and connections?”

  She frowned, as though the question was offensive. “I work for Mrs Josephs. I’ve worked for Carole for two years now, and I’m very happy. She’s an extremely talented artist and she allows me to use the studio for my own practice. I’ve only ever met Mr Perrin a few times. And, no, I didn’t know Charlie well, either, though of course with him living just across from Carole, I did see him quite often.”

  Marty Baines, Clarke thought, had been almost amused by his questions. Sam Barker was definitely getting more irritated. “It must have been a terrible shock for Mrs Josephs, finding her brother’s body like that.”

&nb
sp; Sam regarded him coldly. “I don’t think they were close,” she said. “Not everybody is close to their siblings.”

  “Nevertheless, finding a dead body is not a pleasant experience. Though I suppose growing up in the Perrin household, that will have been inevitable at some point.”

  Marty Baines laughed at that. He was looking critically at Clarke, but seemed genuinely amused by him. Sam, on the other hand, was bristling.

  “Carole is a respected artist and a good woman,” she said. “She’s not her father. And now, we have shopping to do, so if you’ll excuse us, Inspector Clarke.”

  “I’ll no doubt see you both sometime soon,” Clarke told them. Interesting, he thought, as they both walked away. At first, she had seemed mildly surprised to see him there, had seemed almost to not realize who he was. And then, when Marty had started to chat to him, she had grown more discomfited. So at what point had Marty said something that had caused her to become concerned? Clarke reran the conversation in his mind as he finished shopping and went to the checkout. He decided that Sam had become a little colder when he’d asked about the arrangement with the house and Marty had been open in explaining it. He made a mental note to look into this, to see how legal it actually was. He guessed that he would find it was above board, if a little unusual. He found he was still irritated that Marty actually found it entertaining, on some level, that he should be working for a crime boss, and perhaps that he enjoyed the imagined kudos of acknowledging that dirty money had gone into the building of the rehabilitation unit, that it had come to some good in the end. Not a healthy attitude, Clarke thought. It will come back to bite him in the end.

  The rehab unit, Clarke remembered, was a charity. How would they square this? He had heard of a great many charities turning down money that came from questionable sources and no doubt the investment in these good works was a convenient way of laundering this dirty money. Had the charity hesitated? But then, it occurred to him, who would want to say a direct no to Gus Perrin? Who would take that kind of risk?