‘This is conjecture,’ Gwen Hislop said, yet it was not said with the fervour of someone defending her client against the evidence. Isaac could see that she believed the man’s guilt, and it had been her sister that he had been willing to throw to the wolves.
‘It’s murder,’ Isaac said. ‘Mr Mason, you will be formally charged with murder.’
‘I had to, you must realise,’ Mason said feebly. He was a broken man, yet neither Isaac nor Larry could feel any sympathy for him. He was a man who would have let his wife be punished for what he had done to keep her.
Outside the interview room, Isaac phoned Jenny. ‘Give me one day, and then we’re off to the airport.’
One day wasn’t enough to complete all of the paperwork, Isaac knew that, and he would have stayed if he could, but this time, he’d break the habit of a lifetime. He would leave it to others to complete. He would leave it to his team in Homicide. He knew they would not let him down.
The End
Six Years Too Late
Phillip Strang
Chapter 1
Marcus Matthews knew of three certainties as he looked out of the room’s small window. The first was that he was at the lowest point in his troubled life; the second, that he was the wealthiest he had ever been; and the third and most crucial, he was dead.
How had this come about, those who had never met him might have asked, but to Matthews life had always been a challenge.
The circumstances of his birth: a homeless shelter in the north of England, a mother who was a heroin addict when she became pregnant at the age of sixteen. He was six months old when she died, prostitution the only way she knew to feed her habit and her child.
When the teenage Marcus reached the age of sixteen, a woman had knocked on the door of his adoptive family’s home. Her name was Molly, the effects of a hard life all too visible.
‘Gwen, that was her name, although you must have known that,’ Molly said. That much Marcus knew. ‘She loved you,’ Molly continued. ‘I was there when you were born, when she died.’
An adolescent teen who had developed a penchant for graffiti and wanton vandalism did not respond to ‘love’, but he was interested enough to listen to the woman as she talked.
Marcus’s adoptive parents, Brenda and Gavin, sat quietly. They had always known that one day he would learn something of where he had come from; where he was heading back to if he did not mend his ways.
Brenda ruled the household. Marcus liked her more than Gavin, a well-meaning pen-pushing civil servant. Each working day, he would depart the house, and each night as his wife watched the numbingly boring television with its quiz shows and their inane questions, there he would be at the dining room table, checking figures, fretting over them. And then the money he brought home each week, a pittance. Marcus knew this because he was a thief, and he regularly helped himself to some of the contents of his mother’s purse, his father’s wallet. Not once did they complain, which meant to the unruly Marcus one of two things: either they overlooked what he did, or they were stupid.
On his twenty-fifth birthday, his luck had finally turned. He’d had a succession of pointless jobs, a result of failing to take notice at school. A fish and chip shop that produced the worst tasting food in the world, each and every day spent sweating over the hot fat, and the potatoes cut into chips, the fish that tasted of anything but fish. From there, a job in a metal fabricating shop, the constant hammering having almost destroyed his hearing, and even a turn at driving a taxi, but he got lost too often, eventually wrapping the vehicle around a telegraph pole late at night.
And then, there she was, two weeks later, next to him at the bus stop, his driving licence having been suspended. The bus trip was short, but they had started talking; he, a man with little prospects; she, a vision of loveliness in his eyes. Three months later, Marcus and Samantha were married in a registry office, with a reception at the pub, an argument later that night, a baby in a cot within seven months.
It was Samantha’s father, Hamish, who had made the decision about the wedding. ‘No daughter of mine is going to have a child out of wedlock,’ he had said, but he didn’t attend the wedding.
Hamish McIntyre was in jail for a botched robbery; there was no way that he was getting out of prison to do his duty by his daughter.
‘You made her pregnant, you marry her, and if you harm her, just once, you’d better hope that you can be like a chameleon, because I’ll find you, no matter how long it takes. Do you understand me?’ McIntyre had said when Marcus had visited the depressing prison to ask his permission to marry his daughter; a formality as a phone call from the prison a week earlier had sealed Marcus’s fate.
‘I understand,’ Marcus had replied. He would have said that he loved Samantha with all his heart, but the father was not a man for sentimentality. Apart from his daughter and the ugliest dog that Marcus had ever seen, he loved nothing else.
‘One word from Samantha and you’re dead meat, don’t you forget it,’ the parting words as Marcus left
