Chapter 52
Elizabeth Makepeace and Peter Flack had died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Not deliberate, not in the garage with a hosepipe attached to the exhaust of a car, but because of a faulty gas fire turned all the way up on a cold December night.
According to the police, there were no suspicious circumstances, or any indication of a third party being involved.
Foul play had been ruled out, so there was never a criminal investigation.
I wonder, as I reread the article, whether Peter Flack might have had a sibling, a child, some other relative who had come out of the woodwork after all these years to do…
what, exactly? Was it the watch, had it originally belonged to him?
But there’s no mention of wider family in any of the articles.
I replace the microfiche sheets in their cardboard folder, switch off the machine, and head out, keeping a wary eye out for the gray-coated man all the way up the hill.
A police patrol car pulls up to the curb outside my house as I’m putting my key in the front door.
And, once again, I find myself sitting in my lounge opposite PC James although he’s with a different partner this time, a stern forty-something who introduces herself as Sergeant Okoro, both of them festooned with equipment, cuffs, radios, spray, batons, pouches, and body-worn cameras.
I take them through the events of Saturday night as James makes notes in a small pad and Okoro listens, asking pointed questions now and again.
“So,” she says eventually. “Just so I’m clear on the facts: there are no indications of forced entry, no damage to the property, and nothing was stolen from the property during this power cut.”
“Only because they didn’t find what they were looking for.”
“And what was that?”
“Some items that were left behind when we moved in.”
“Valuables?”
“Well… no. Not exactly.” I stand up. “But I can show you.”
She holds up a hand. “But this individual ignored the laptop, car keys, and wallet that were in plain view on the kitchen counter?”
I sit slowly back down on the armchair. “They weren’t interested in any of that.”
“And you’ve got no exterior CCTV, none of your neighbors saw anything, and your wife didn’t hear anything either?”
I look from one officer to the other. “There was someone in my house. They kicked me down the cellar stairs. I’ve got nine stitches in the back of my head to prove it.”
“I noticed the bottles by the front door put out for recycling,” she says. “Had you been drinking at all on Saturday night?”
“A few glasses of wine,” I say. “A couple of beers.”
“Anything else?”
“Like what?”
“Spirits?”
“One small whisky before I went to bed.”
She nods slowly. “And anything else that you might have consumed on a… recreational basis?”
“I wasn’t high or hallucinating, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I’m not interested from an enforcement point of view,” Okoro says. “Just gathering all the facts.”
“I don’t do drugs.”
“But you were intoxicated?”
“Not… I mean. Maybe a little, yes. But not falling-down drunk. Maybe a bit disoriented at being woken in the middle of the night.”
“And you’re not able to give us a description of this supposed intruder beyond the fact that you think they had a black balaclava on.”
“It all happened incredibly fast, and the lights were still off. I was dazzled by the torch, and the next thing I knew I was coming around on the floor of the cellar.”
“I see.”
James flips to a fresh page of his pad and continues to write in his tight, neat handwriting. When he’s finished, I show them into the dining room and then the kitchen, where they do a cursory inspection of the doors and windows.
I indicate the door to the cellar. “Aren’t you going to look for fingerprints or something?”
The sergeant gives me a long-suffering smile.
“We’d need to bring in our colleagues from scientific support for that.
They would tend to look at areas of obvious entry and exit from a scene, specific areas that a suspect is likely to have had contact with in commission of a crime, that kind of thing.
As you can imagine they’re very busy boys and girls, and their time tends to be allocated according to the gravity of an offense and whether there is a reasonable prospect of detecting, arresting, and successfully prosecuting an offender. ”
“Is that a roundabout way of saying no?”
“It’s just how things are, I’m afraid.” She holds a hand up. “I don’t like it either, but the staffing rotas are already cut to the bone. They do a hell of a job but there’s just not enough resources, not enough staff to go around.”
I blow out a breath. “Sounds familiar.”
“How about your security system?” Okoro says. “Could that have logged a breach, or recorded anything downstairs before you were woken up?”
With his pen, James indicates the motion detector dangling from the corner of the kitchen wall, cracked plastic and trailing wires, where Dom and I had levered it off its mount last week.
He says: “You think the individual did that to evade detection, do you?”
“Oh,” I say, my cheeks reddening. “No. That was me.”
The younger officer frowns. “You broke your own burglar alarm?”
“It didn’t work, anyway. The main alarm system, I mean. And there were cameras hidden in a couple of the units.”
“Cameras,” James repeats. “Right.”
“Do you want to see them?”
The two officers exchange a quick glance. James finally puts his notebook away in a Velcro-strapped pouch over his stab vest. Okoro’s face is a picture of neutrality but I can see the skepticism lurking just below the surface.
“At this stage we’ve probably seen enough, sir.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” I say. “You think I was just stumbling around half asleep, half drunk during a power cut, and I fell down the stairs in the dark.”
“I didn’t say that,” she says. “But… is there a possibility that you fell? I think you mentioned that you’ve only been in the house a few days, and it can be very disorienting to be in an unfamiliar environment, in the dark, for the first time.”
“The person who came in here,” I say, “they’ve already threatened me. Threatened my family. It’s not the first time I’ve had to call the police.”
This seems to get the sergeant’s attention. I find the message thread on my phone and show it to her, starting from the first contact on Tuesday last week and ending with today’s message: Next time we bring petrol and matches.
“I can see why you might be concerned,” she says, scrolling through the texts. “It may be worth everyone’s while if we pay this individual a visit. Have a quiet chat with them, calm things down a little. Have you got an address? Name?”
“No, sorry. They used the name Mason at one point but I think that was probably bogus.”
She hands the phone back to me.
“You’ve been in contact with this individual but you don’t actually know who it is?”
“No.”
“Makes it rather tricky for us to follow up.”
“I know, I just…” I shrug. It occurs to me that I’ve not even mentioned the “to-do” list under the names of Parker and Barrow. But I don’t think it would make much difference at this stage; they seem to have made their minds up. “I thought there would be something you could do to help.”
Her radio crackles into life and she has a brief exchange with a brusque male voice at the other end, both she and James standing up and moving toward the door in response.
I follow them out.
“So what now?” I say. “Is that it?”
Okoro turns, gives me an apologetic look.
“Best thing you can do for now is to remain vigilant, keep all your doors and windows locked, and get the burglar alarm back online. If you see anything—anything—suspicious, you give us a call straightaway. Until then, you can see why we’re struggling, right?
There’s not a lot that’s concrete in any of this, not much for us to work with. ”
Her radio crackles again with another urgent voice, and the two of them hurry back down the drive to their patrol car without another word.