Lifting the Lid(48)

‘You never know,’ she said, injecting a caring, agony auntish tone into her voice. ‘I might be able to help. I’ve got some pretty important friends in the Force.’

Okay, she had one, and he wasn’t that important either, but Trevor didn’t need to know that. Whatever, the little white lie seemed to do the trick, and he launched into his story without any further prompting. Perhaps he was stupid enough to believe she really would help, or perhaps he just wanted to get it off his chest. But she didn’t much care why he opened up so easily. The important thing was that she got the information she wanted.

He told her how his wife, Imelda, had disappeared more than eighteen months ago and hadn’t been seen since. There’d been an investigation at the time, but it had been abandoned after only a couple of weeks, and he’d heard nothing more about it until the police knocked on his van door at eight o’clock that morning.

‘So they’ve re-opened the case?’ said Sandra.

‘Because my dear batty old mother told them I’d murdered her.’

‘Your wife?’

He explained how his mother had never made any secret of the fact that his older brother, Derek, was always her blue-eyed boy, and when he’d died in a car accident eight years ago, she’d seemed to blame Trevor for his death even though she hadn’t said it in so many words. Perhaps that was why she’d developed the absurd notion that he’d murdered Imelda – some kind of bizarre transference thing.

‘The cops don’t seem to think it’s an absurd notion,’ said Sandra, relieved that the police’s interest in Trevor appeared to have no connection with the job in hand.

‘Maybe they have to follow these things up as a matter of… routine. Maybe they don’t realise quite how batty she really is.’

‘Well they let you go, so presumably they must think you’re innocent.’

‘Who knows?’ said Trevor. ‘We didn’t actually get that far.’

‘What do you mean?’

He told her how another officer had interrupted the interview to tell one of the detectives there was an urgent message for him, and he’d left the room.

‘A few minutes later, he came back and said I could go.’

‘Just like that?’ Sandra frowned but kept her eyes on the road ahead. ‘No explanation?’

Trevor shook his head. ‘He didn’t give me one, and I didn’t ask. All I cared about was getting the hell out of there before he changed his mind.’

‘Hmm.’ Sandra’s relief of a few seconds earlier was in danger of spontaneously combusting.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Sounds like MI5 again,’ she said. ‘I can’t think why else the police would go to all that trouble and then suddenly release you for no apparent reason.’

‘MI5 told them to?’

Sandra responded with a shrug and tooted her horn at the back of a battered old truck which was weaving in front of her and spewing out clouds of black smoke from its exhaust. Aroused from her sleep, Milly sat up on the back seat, her eyes darting this way and that as if trying to locate the source of any new stimulus. Trevor twisted round in his seat and stroked the top of her head a few times before resuming his position of staring out of the side window, his face an unhealthy shade of pale grey, rather like the colour of snow as it’s just beginning to turn to slush.





CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE



MacFarland lay on the double bed, propped up with a couple of pillows, reading Guns and Ammo. He held the magazine in his right hand while he flexed the fingers of his left. His face contorted from the occasional stabs of pain, but at least the blood had stopped seeping through the heavy bandage.

When he realised he had read the same sentence four times, he looked up at the source of his distraction. The voice from the enormous television screen on the opposite wall had reached an almost deafening level of hysteria, and MacFarland watched as three horses galloped towards the finishing line with barely a length between them. Seconds later, the commentator shrieked out the news that Cosmic Dancer had won by a short head.

‘Any good?’ said MacFarland without taking his eyes off the screen.

‘’Fraid not,’ said the man lying in a similar position on the other double bed. ‘Fourth.’ He dropped his folded newspaper onto the bed and replaced the cap on his pen.

‘Ye ever win?’

‘I have my moments.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Mostly when I get a tipoff that the race has been rigged.’

‘That happen often?’

‘Not often enough,’ the other man said and stood up from the bed. ‘You fancy something from the mini-bar?’