The Fourth Friend (DI Jackman & DS Evans #3)(20)
‘What about the CCTV in the street?’
‘That end of Lytton Alley doesn’t have any.’ He twisted a pen around and around in his fingers. ‘Clever. Oh, and the car hadn’t been forced. He used a key. How do you suppose he got hold of that?’
‘Obviously from Leah, without her knowledge. A party maybe? Someone nicks her keyring and either gets a copy made or finds where she keeps the spare and “borrows” it.’
‘This makes him a contemporary of hers. Maybe even a college mate? Maybe I was right. It’s some infatuated prat who hasn’t got the balls to confess he has the hots for her.’
Marie spoke quietly. ‘Attraction. Obsession. Destruction.’
‘The three stages of stalking,’ added Carter. ‘I wonder if the super is thinking about that right now. If she is, she must be hurting.’
‘I’m sure she’s thinking about nothing else.’ Marie felt a chill creep through her. ‘She must be beside herself with worry.’
She hated stalkers. There was something unhinged about them, so out of control and unwholesome. She’d told Carter it had never happened to her, but it had. It left her looking over her shoulder for months. She knew just what Leah was going through. Right now, she would give a month’s wages to get her cuffs around the stalker’s dirty little wrists.
CHAPTER SIX
Somewhere a skylark soared on the evening air. Carter heard its song across the marsh, all the way to Silas Breeze’s cottage. He often saw Silas at a distance, a dark silhouette against the twilight sky. Silas flitted about the marshes like a shadow, impossible to touch.
Like its owner, Silas’s ramshackle cottage was part of the landscape. It blended into the reeds and shrubby trees like a part of the earth. It had stood there for decades before Carter was born, even withstanding the great flood of 1953.
He called out. His voice echoed across the water and faded into silence. No answering bark from Silas’s dog. The cottage door was unlocked. Carter peered around it and smiled, transported back to his childhood and his father’s gamekeeper’s lodge. It was the smell, a potpourri of old leather, freshly cut kindling wood, bunches of herbs and stored root vegetables. Blood, too. That particular stink of a skinned rabbit or a recently hung pheasant. The good times. Times spent away from his father.
The old man’s belongings lay scattered across the old oak table. Carter made out the stained and yellowing covers of old books, an old cigar box full of handmade fishing flies, a half chewed marrow bone, three empty milk cartons and a set of scales with a pile of rusted weights.
Two overstuffed armchairs pressed close to the soot-stained fireplace. Beside one was a tiny circular wooden table holding a grubby whisky glass and a pair of binoculars. The other wore a check blanket covered in hairs. Carter pictured Silas and Klink the dog sitting opposite one another of an evening like an old couple.
Carter noticed the picture hanging above the cluttered table. It was slightly faded by the sunlight, and speckled with the bodies of tiny thunder flies. Carter remembered his younger self carefully removing it from a pile of other framed paintings in the attic of their house. It was an old watercolour, depicting a shabbily-dressed old man lifting a salmon from a river. At the man’s side was a reclining dog, some fishing tackle and a large bag. It was titled “The Poacher,” and the young Carter was certain it represented Silas. He had waited for his father to go off on one of his business trips, wrapped the picture in an old horse blanket and taken it to Silas’s place out on Carrion Fen. Silas had looked long and hard at it, and then nodded to Carter. It had stayed with him ever since.
Carter closed the door. He’d walk back to the Eva May and watch out for the old man’s return from there.
Outside, Carter found he was reluctant to leave. He sat down with his back against the lichen covered wall and turned his face to the cool evening breeze. He felt almost “normal.” The accident had tainted most of his existence, but there were parts of his childhood that seemed to have remained unscathed. Days spent with Silas and his brother Eli.
He gazed along the inlet to the point where it met the river, and saw a ripple forming on the surface of the water. A boat was coming.
Carter stood up, brushed moss from his trousers and saw Silas’s small weather-worn dinghy ease its way into the inlet. He waved a greeting, and Klink responded with a joyous bark.
‘Nothing wrong is there, young’un?’
‘Nothing wrong, Silas. Just needed to see a friendly face, and maybe talk you into having a small drink with me?’ He removed a half bottle of malt whisky from his jacket pocket and waved it in the air.
Silas’s face broke into a mass of wrinkles when he smiled. ‘Well now. I’d say it’s a fine evening for a bit of a magg, wouldn’t you?’ The smile widened. ‘Ee-yah, tek this.’
Carter took the wet rope from the old man and tied it deftly around the mooring post. Klink leapt from the boat and hopped madly around Carter’s legs. ‘Hello, fellow! How’s tricks?’ He fondled the old dog’s ears. Such a soft beast. Yet he could terrify the life out of a stranger.
They tramped up to the cottage. Silas proceeded to clear some gardening tools from an old wooden bench, while Carter went inside to hunt for usable glasses. It was too nice an evening to be stuck indoors, and Silas knew that enclosed spaces made Carter uneasy.