The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [141]
“Then let’s hope there’s salt water in its lungs,” he said, standing up and helping me into my jacket.
FROM MANCHESTER I drove down to Holyhead in North Wales to meet the ferry from Dublin. I saw Dan before he saw me. He looked no different from the day we’d parted at Baghdad airport—big, weatherbeaten, slightly crumpled—but the sight of his well-remembered face gave me such a jolt of recognition that I had to retreat behind a pillar until my schoolgirl blush faded.
Back in Dorset, Jess and he tolerated each other for my sake but neither understood what I saw in the other. It was like introducing a boisterous grizzly bear to a cautious feral cat. There were no such problems with Peter. In no time at all, he and Dan were playing rounds of golf together, and stopping off for a jar at the local hostelry. Each told me the other was a “good chap,” and I wondered why men found it easier than women to strike up a casual bond and move on without regret.
I wouldn’t be able to do that with Jess. The ties we had ran too deep.
EPILOGUE
THERE’S LITTLE ELSE to tell. A few days after Dan returned to Iraq, part of an arm washed up on rocks about fifteen miles down the coast. It was spotted by a group of fishermen on their way home from catching mackerel. Enough of a fingerprint was retrieved to link the remains to MacKenzie, and a DNA test, using saliva from a glass in my parents’ flat, confirmed the indentification.
There was some debate about how the arm had become detached from the rest of the body, and why it had survived relatively intact after a long immersion in water. It appeared to have been wrenched apart at the elbow but there were no obvious marks on the skin to show how that could have happened, although it was noted that three of the fingerbones were broken. There was talk of shark attacks but they weren’t taken seriously. The benign coastal waters of the west country were occasionally home to plankton-eating basking sharks, but not to man-eaters.
Police divers explored the sea bed for several hundred metres around the rocks, also a couple of areas to the west where experts on tidal-drift suggested MacKenzie might have gone in, but nothing else was found. Jess, Peter and I were asked to attend a rather bizarre inquest, where the arm was pronounced dead from misadventure—along with a presumption that the remainder of the body had died similarly—and both Alan and Bagley closed their files.
There were several column inches in the press, detailing what was known of MacKenzie, but the full story was never revealed. Bagley was satisfied with a verdict of misadventure—any man who was watching his back for a police pursuit could easily lose his footing on the cliffs in the dark—but Alan wouldn’t commit himself. As he said, there was nothing to be learnt from a forearm except the name of the owner and the fact that he was probably dead.
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” I asked. “Confirmation.” He, too, had attended the inquest, and I’d abandoned Jess and Peter to take him to a tea shop near the Coroner’s Court in Blandford Forum.
Alan nodded. “But I’ll always be curious, Connie. It may be coincidence that he died of drowning after fending off a dog and machete attack…but there’s an interesting symmetry to it.” He stirred his tea. “Even his arm was detached in the same place that the prostitute’s was broken in Freetown.”
“It wasn’t a machete,” I corrected amiably. “It was an axe.”
“Near enough.”
We were sitting opposite each other and I examined his face to see how serious he was. “I don’t believe in an eye for an eye, Alan. It’s a crazy form of justice. In any case, if I’d wanted the perfect revenge, I’d have kept MacKenzie in a crate for three days.”
His eyes creased attractively. “It crossed my mind.”
I laughed. “Bagley would have found him. There wasn’t an inch of Barton House that wasn’t searched at least twice.”
“Mmm.”
“You don’t really think I’d do something like that, do you?”
“Why not? He was a killer. A sadist. He liked hurting people. He boasted about what he’d done to your father…humiliated your