I shut my eyes briefly and brought back Simone’s bitter flood of words like they were permanently written to the hard drive in my head. “She said, ‘He killed him. I saw him do it. I loved you. I trusted you. You bastard. You utter fucking bastard.’“ I repeated the words devoid of emotion and opened my eyes again. “That was it. At the time I thought that when she said, ‘He killed him,’ she was talking about Jakes.”
“But how come she said that she loved and trusted Lucas when we know he was such a bastard to her when she was a child?” Matt said. He had his hands in his lap, fingers locked together until his skin had turned white.
“If we now assume that she was furious because she remembered her father killing her mother’s boyfriend, why did she shoot you and not Lucas?” Neagley asked.
“Look, as far as we know, Simone had never picked up a gun before that night,” Sean said, moving over to the open-plan kitchen area and pouring himself another cup of coffee from the pot. “Maybe she knew she wasn’t good enough to hit him and not Ella at that distance and she couldn’t risk getting it wrong.”
“But that doesn’t explain why she shot Charlie instead,” Neagley persisted.
Sean looked at me over the rim of his cup. “Charlie had the chance for a shot at Lucas and didn’t take it,” he said. “We’ve already established that Simone was beside herself with rage. Perhaps she saw him getting away-literally with murder-and she just… snapped.”
We lunched on takeaway pizza. I managed half a segment before the rich greasiness of the food dawned on my stomach and I had to leave the rest. While we ate we kicked around some theories on what might be going on, although without seeming to advance very far in the process.
Felix Vaughan’s role bothered me. I’d already told Sean about the enforced meeting I’d had with him at the restaurant the night Simone was killed. I kept going over his parting shot about Simone finding out the truth about Lucas. What did that mean?
‘After the way Lucas was acting-like a bloody coward-and the fact that the photo message you sent me just didn’t seem to compare all that well, I would have bet almost anything that the DNA test was going to come back a total mismatch,” I said, watching the three of them fighting over the last piece of pizza.
Sean shrugged. “Well, it didn’t,” he said. “And from what Young and Bartholemew told us at the hospital, they’ve had it verified by their own lab, so there’s no doubt.”
“But all the stuff about his behavior in the army,” I said, still frowning, “and what Simone’s mother told you, Matt, doesn’t seem to fit the
guy.”
“People change I suppose,” Matt said dubiously. “But he was an SAS thug, wasn’t he? No changing a warped personality like that.” He missed the slight eyebrow quirk that Sean fired in my direction. “But he’s been out a long time, and maybe Rosalind had a settling influence on him, though she seemed a bit of a dragon to me.”
“She can’t have been that good an influence on him-not if he was behind my partner’s car crash,” Neagley said, wiping her hands on one of the paper napkins and taking a swig of Tab. She’d laid in a private supply in the fridge.
I shrugged, carefully. “It just doesn’t fit somehow. I wish I knew what Vaughan was hinting at that night. And why he was so anxious to get us out of the way.”
“Well, I’ve put out some queries about him with my contacts,” Neagley said. “We know he’s ex-military which gave me a good place to start looking. Soon as they get back to me, we might have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”
I sat back against the sofa. What were the Lucases mixed up in with him that made them so scared of him? Why had he been so against Simone staying in North Conway in the first place, and so keen on me taking her away? It couldn’t have been a coincidence that he’d had me picked up on the very night Simone had gone rushing to confront her father. So did that mean Vaughan was involved in some way in the shooting? I couldn’t see how.
Jakes had been a good man, but I wished I’d been the one who’d gone with her. If I had … yeah, right, said the sarcastic voice in my head, because you managed things so well after you did finally get there.
I mentally shook myself out of that downward spiral. The police were convinced it was an open-and-shut case as far as the “who” was concerned. What was driving me mad was trying to work out the “why.”
“Have you got any further with tracking down this guy Oliver Reynolds?” I asked.
Neagley shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “Maybe you scared him off when you grabbed him. Or maybe he injured himself getting away. He did have to jump through a window, after all.” She glanced at her watch, then at Sean. “We ought to get going,” she said.
Sean nodded and rose, gathering the empty pizza box and folding it in half. “Neagley and I are going to go and do some digging around,” he said.
Matt jumped to his feet. “What do you want me to do?” he said, eager.
Sean’s eyes drifted over me. “You two just stay put here,” he said, like I’d been contemplating going out jogging. When Matt opened his mouth to object, Sean added, “Why don’t you make some calls — see if you can find yourself a decent legal man. Won’t Harrington help out?”
Matt looked crestfallen. “I asked. He said he couldn’t be seen to be taking sides and if it came out-,” he began.
Sean took a business card out of his pocket and handed it over. “Call Parker Armstrong,” he said. “He was Jakes’s boss. He and I know each other-we’ve worked together in the past. He’s a good guy and he’s offered to help us get to the bottom of this.”
Matt stood there for a moment, fingering the card in his hands. “I don’t know what to say,” he ventured at last. “I don’t know how to thank you for-”
“There’s no need,” Sean cut in, lifting his jacket from the back of a chair and shrugging his way into it while Neagley grabbed her own coat and picked the car keys out of her pocket. They’d almost reached the door before he stopped and glanced back. “Besides, we’re not doing it for you.”
After Sean and Neagley had gone out, Matt got straight on the phone to Armstrong in New York, who in turn put him onto a firm of lawyers specializing in child custody cases who worked out of Manchester, New Hampshire.
There wasn’t much I could do to help other than sit and listen to one side of the conversation. Besides, I soon realized that without the others to act as a buffer Matt was still uneasy around me. Eventually, I clambered to my feet, picked up my crutch, and mouthed, I’ll be in my room, to him. He clamped his hand over the phone mouthpiece and nodded distractedly at me.
I hobbled back into the bedroom and shut the door behind me. I’d only been out of bed for a couple of hours but it was looking decidedly welcoming. I switched the TV on low, picked a news channel, and lay down on top of the covers to watch. I think I’d nodded off before the end of the first item.
I woke up with a start that sent my breath out in a hiss. The news anchor still seemed to be rattling on about the same story, but the clock in the corner of the screen showed I’d been out of it for about three-quarters of an hour.
My mouth felt terrible after the coffee and pizza, but the glass of water Sean had put out for me earlier was empty and I was damned if I was going to shout Matt and ask him to bring me another. I struggled up off the bed and limped slowly across the room, realizing that I was finding it a little easier to use the crutch now, if nothing else.