The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [115]
The newswires are short on detail. They’re all naming MacKenzie and describing him as extremely dangerous and wanted for questioning re abduction and murder in the UK, Sierra Leone and Baghdad. But there appears to be a blackout where you’re concerned. Is this at your request? Or is it something the police have imposed because you’re still being questioned?
An answer ASAP would be helpful, as I’m already fielding questions re my piece on the Baycombe Group which named MacKenzie/O’Connell re passport fraud. How little/much should I say? Do you want it known that MacKenzie held you in the cellar? Or have you asked for anonymity under UK rape legislation?
AAGH! I can’t believe what a tosser I was. I keep remembering that I told you to play-act some tears and milk the sympathy vote. I am SO sorry, C. Will you see me if I come to England? Or have I burnt my boats? I’m due some time off.
Love, Dan.
PS. Sorry to be the journalist but do you have any updates on MacKenzie? Have there been any sightings, or do they think he’s fled the country?
20
“WHAT’S THE SECOND REASON?” Inspector Bagley asked, after reminding me that I’d said a man wouldn’t understand why I was so calm. “You said, ‘In the first place, my parents aren’t dead.’ What comes next?”
“Jess and Peter?” I suggested. “I wouldn’t be remotely calm if anything had happened to them.”
“No one would. Why should a man have trouble understanding that?”
“He wouldn’t. It’s what I thought of MacKenzie that he might have problems with. For a kick-off, I couldn’t get over how small he was. He’d been in my head for so long as something monstrous that to find he was just a dirty little runt was…strange. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t frightening…but I had him in perspective for the first time, and it felt good.”
“Was?” he echoed. “Had? Felt? Is he dead, Ms. Burns?”
We’d been this route several times already. “I don’t see how he can be,” I said. “I might wish it…I might earnestly pray for it…but he was alive the last time I saw him. It depends on whether broken fingers can kill you…but I wouldn’t have thought so.”
“If that’s all that was wrong with him.”
I shrugged. “Peter said it was.”
“You and Ms. Derbyshire were alone with MacKenzie for thirty minutes. A man can suffer a lot of damage in that time.”
“Then where is he? Why haven’t you found him?”
“I don’t know, Ms. Burns. That’s what I’m trying to discover.”
I showed my irritation. “How about I turn the questions on you? What sort of police force allows a man to escape as easily as MacKenzie seems to have done? He can’t have left the house much before you arrived…but it was two hours before you started searching the valley. He could have been anywhere by then…on a ferry out of Weymouth…on the train to Southampton airport. Have you checked those places?”
He gave an impatient nod as if the question didn’t warrant an answer. “We’re more interested in your father’s BMW, Ms. Burns. That was his obvious choice of transport. It was parked less than half a mile down the valley—he could have been out of the area before anyone knew it was missing—yet he didn’t return to it. I find that strange.”
“Me, too.”
Bagley hated it when I agreed with him. He seemed to think it was a form of mockery. “Perhaps you have an explanation,” he murmured sarcastically. “You seem to have explanations for everything else.”
“I expect he got lost,” I said. “It happens to me all the time…and I only go walking in the daylight. It’s a big valley. If you lose your bearings and take the wrong footpath, you end up at the Ridgeway instead of in the village. I suppose you’ve checked the empty houses in Winterbourne Barton? Perhaps he’s holed up in a weekender’s cottage, eating their food and watching their telly. Or maybe he went the other way and fell off a cliff?”
There’s no question Jess and I sparked an intense suspicion in Bagley. He knew we couldn’t have magicked MacKenzie out of existence in half an hour, but our attitudes offended him. I was too glib, and Jess was too mute. According to Peter, who heard it from a friend on the force, she was