That he had done little other than hold cover behind a doorframe as the one-and-only shot at them was fired was neither here or there.
Back at the station, Rose echoed Grey’s own instruction to Cori, but backed his with authority. Ordered not to show his face again till morning, Grey couldn’t quite cope with home yet, even with it being not far off a normal worker’s knock-off time. Despite being put on strong painkillers that forbade drinking, and it being too early for him to start anyway, he needed company, faces, voices, and so walked the short walk to the Young Prince Hal Tavern.
‘Pint Grey?’ asked Bill Blunt at the bar.
Grey showed and rattled the plastic pillbox, Bill pouring him a pint of lemonade. His barmaid Janice, wiping a glass distractedly nearby, smiled at him before returning her gaze to the news rolling silently across the flatscreen television hoisted up above the door.
‘Lord, we’ve made the BBC,’ said Grey. ‘It must have been a slow day.’ That the TV was even on in the Prince Hal at any time other than a national sporting event was itself a turn up, Bill not a lover of technology in pubs.
‘Steak and eggs for The Holdup Hero?’ he offered. Grey gave him an equally sarcastic smile as he nodded and fell into a cushioned chair.
Chapter 28 — Loose Ends and The Cedars Again
Friday
The next day was far from the rush Cori foresaw. After a straight five hours of report writing, form checking and statement rereading (for several of those he’d spoken to had since come in to go on record) Grey found himself hitting lunchtime; and what for him was a time of day that, with nothing happening to distract or excite him, could prompt a fall into a mid-afternoon lull. Cori was in a similar situation along the corridor with her own pile of paperwork.
Throughout the day new information had come in: reports on the plant matter found around Stella’s injuries proved inconclusive; though the walking stick was definitely covered in blood, and there seemed no way it wouldn’t be found to be Charlie Prove’s. However, in a shock move it later appeared that none of this fact checking might prove vital after all, a visit by Superintendent Rose to see and Patrick Mars, with his solicitor at his bedside, bringing the news that Mars would sign a confession if it saved his daughter Esther and second wife Ludmila from the trouble of a court appearance.
Perhaps Mars had loved the women in his life all along, pondered Grey; before realising that of course he had, it was letting this love show through the gauze of suspicion and distrust cast by his father that had always been the problem, and the confusion caused by this inner-conflict that had seen him lash out so violently.
He wrote a note of thanks to Kehoes, wishing Stacie the best with her studies; and made a mental note to speak with and thank Campbell Leigh next time his business with the Hills Estates Community Forum brought him to the station. The archive file on the killing of Eunice Prove sixteen years ago was also on his desk, to be looked at in detail when time allowed.
Grey then rang Andrea the solicitors’ secretary to make an appointment with Raine Rossiter for any time she was free the next week; for there was business in that office that he felt could still use going over. He worried later though that Raine might interpret his appointment as a wish to see her for herself. This wouldn’t have bothered him so much had he not from somewhere gained the impression that however married she may be, she would be quite willing to forget this fact while it remained inconvenient. He meant no offence to the woman, rejecting this imagined possibility, she was simply not his type.
He stopped and examined his feelings here: how was she not his type? He couldn’t say, in fact imagined she might be quite jolly company, once they were far enough from town and sure that no one she knew was seeing. Perhaps he simply didn’t want the tangled situation; and realising how free he suddenly felt not to be having to manage such a clandestine affair brought a wave of relief that felt like a man trapped below ground breathing fresh air.
He realised he had played this whole drama out in his mind based on nothing, and was suddenly embarrassed at what she might think in their meeting could she read his mind. He’d also assumed she would have noticed him that way to begin with; and anyway, for any woman to believe he had engineered a situation to meet her again assumed he was any good at making such moves.
He knew why he was thinking such speculative things, and it was down to no greater fact than that of his mind being again free to do so. The end of ‘the Mars case’, as he had begun to name it in his mind, was a mental liberation, for him and all his colleagues: a freedom from every thought, every decision, potentially meaning someone’s life and death. Soon he would have to take up the less-pressing cases put aside for this emergency: the minor frauds and pub punch-ups, the family feuds and smashed car headlights. He would face these Monday. Meanwhile, was there anything left pressing re: Mars?
Sifting through the paperwork on his table, something came to hand that reminded Grey of a conversation he had had earlier with his boss.
‘There is still the question of what to do with friend Waldron,’ was how Superintendent Rose had put it during their briefest of chats after his returning from Mars’ bedside. ‘The way I see it, it all rather comes down to this letter he left you.’
The police had little room for relativity in their operations: a crime was a crime, their job simply to investigate and apprehend. Yet what hung over the Super’s desk between them that morning was the question: what harm had the self-styled ‘unlikely avenger’ of Stella and Charlie’s memory actually achieved?
Rose spoke the unspoken, ‘Your letter makes it clear he meant to kill Mars, all that stuff about landing “one lucky blow”. Without it we don’t even know that that screwdriver wasn’t just in his pocket when he went out, or that he was doing any more than — I don’t know — conducting his own ham-fisted investigations at Stella’s old house.’
‘Before getting into a scrape with Mars?’
‘Exactly.’
Grey felt the notepaper still in his pocket where it had been for twenty-four hours, it having felt more personal than anything he’d want to log as evidence. In truth, he’d put off the decision.
‘You’re offering him a way out of trouble, sir?’
‘How old is he now,’ asked Rose. ‘Late Sixties? You’re fine after your knock-out drops, so’s that housekeeper I’d imagine.’
‘Duty Manager.’
‘Quite. And after seeing Mars I don’t think he’d have the gall to claim assault, not with all his deeds weighing heavy on the other side of the scales.’
The Superintendent continued, ‘You know, this morning Mars seemed really quite placid about it all, now he knows he’ll never see another member of his family ever again.’
Replaying this talk in his mind reminded Grey that he had meant to go and see Natasha sometime that day, though he remembered now that there weren’t visiting hours again before seven that evening. Picking up the papers that had interested him from the pile, he gathered himself for one last walk to the Cedars.
To the sound of lady blackbirds singing in the trees, Inspector Rase walked one last time along Cedars Avenue. The spring had seemed to break through at last, and he held his jacket over his arm. As he arrived at the building he had known only glancingly until three days ago, he took a last look at the frontage as approached; at its three rows of six large windows, each the portal to the life of a person or couple, and now he could have given you many of the names.
Top row, end but one, was Stella Dunbar’s room, the first they had been called to; while somewhere on the first floor was Charlie Prove’s, though Grey couldn’t quite place which. Easier was Derek Waldron’s, it being the nearest to the edge of the building that the path and service road ran around, and which Grey now took to bring him to the rear-side and the doors and the dayroom.
It was a familiar scene that greeted him there, of Ellie and the other orderlies arms full moving between chairs and tables, and of residents who recognised him by sight now wishing him good afternoon.
‘Look who’s here, Derek. I told you they’d be coming to take you away.’ Rachel Sowton was sat at a table in
