The Moor (DCI Ryan Mysteries, #11)(44)

He lifted a shoulder.

“I learned from Ryan,” he said, because it was true. “I don’t know anybody better at being able to shut it all down, to pack away his emotions. It’s frightening, how well he can do it.”

As they turned off the main roundabout leading into the centre of Newcastle from the west, they fought their way through the early evening traffic along Neville Street and then took the first left along Dean Street, which was the road leading down towards the Quayside from that part of town. Halfway down the road, there was a large multi-storey car park which served the working population as well as tourists and daytime visitors who didn’t want to walk too far to the main shopping district or to the river.

Now, its access road was closed to the general public and was being manned by a small army of local police who were, by the looks of it, having a difficult time holding off angry motorists who wanted to retrieve their vehicles from within the multi-storey. Unfortunately, the body had fallen almost directly in front of the pedestrian access route, judging from the position of the forensic tent that Faulkner was in the process of erecting.

Lowerson parked on the kerb and they made their way through the crowd.

“What’s the problem, here?” he said, in what he hoped was a commanding tone. “Stand back from the police cordon, please.”

“Are you the one in charge?” somebody demanded. “Can you tell your minions to let me get my car? I need to go home and he’s blocking the way.”

“Detective Constable Lowerson,” Jack said, flashing his warrant card the way he’d seen Ryan do it. “Unfortunately, a person has died, and there are certain procedures we have to follow to ensure their body is properly taken care of. Now, if you’ll be patient for a short while longer, we’ll see about creating a one-way system using the other set of barriers and everybody can be on their way.”

To his surprise, that seemed to do the trick.

“Ever thought about running for office?” Yates joked. “With charm like that, the voting public would be putty in your hands.”

As she slipped under the barrier to speak to the first responders, he found himself wondering whether he might be able to apply that so-called charm to other areas of his life.

Then again, he couldn’t work miracles.

*

Neither, it seemed, could MacKenzie.

No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t figure out how to set up the parental controls on the new television Phillips had bought, after experiencing a rush of blood to the head on what should have been a routine trip to the nearby supermarket.

“I can help, if you like,” Samantha offered, taking pity on the elderly.

“No, no, it’ll just take me a minute—” MacKenzie muttered, pressing buttons at random on the remote control, which itself looked like something from the space age.

“You do it like this,” Samantha said, plucking it from MacKenzie’s hands. “What password do you want to use?”

MacKenzie opened her mouth to say something, then waggled her finger.

“Nice try,” she said.

“You know, I’m not really interested in the telly,” Samantha continued, as MacKenzie went about the laborious task of entering a password, letter by letter, using the remote control, while she looked away.

She would bet anything that she’d chosen ‘FRANK’ as the password.

“I don’t really watch it, very much,” she continued. “I’m too busy with the horses.”

“Who taught you how to look after them?” MacKenzie asked, once she’d discarded the remote. “Your dad?”

“I sort of remember my mum liking horses,” the girl said, playing with the zip on her new red hoodie. “But I was too young to remember. My uncle, Duke, showed me how to brush them down, how to muck out and all that. He helps out when he’s not performing.”

“What does he perform?”

“Oh, he’s the clown,” she said, with a smile.

“It sounds as though you like your uncle.”

Samantha’s lips twisted.

“He’d be okay if he wasn’t trying to impress my dad, all the time. He never stands up for himself, and it gets on my nerves. One time, he saw…well, he saw my dad giving me a smack, and he didn’t say anything. He just watched, then looked away.”

She gave a sad little shrug.

“He’d probably jump straight off the Tyne Bridge, if my dad asked him to. Some people are strong, and some people are weak, I guess.”

MacKenzie nodded, because it was only the truth.

“I think you’re very strong, Samantha,” she said. “It can’t have been easy to walk away from your family.”

Samantha had worried about it, as they’d strolled along the beach earlier in the day. Every time she’d started to feel happy, she’d worried her dad would appear out of the blue, ready to drag her home.

At first, she’d thought the police would find her mother’s killer and then she’d go home, and things would go back to normal. But she was starting to understand that there were very different kinds of ‘normal’ and, now that she’d seen another kind, she wasn’t sure if she could ever go back.

“Tell me about some of the other people at the circus,” MacKenzie asked, in the comfortable silence. “Who do you like?”