Second Shot

“When people get killed it rarely has a whole lot to do with sense,” Young said shortly. “I’ll be in touch.” She nodded sharply to us in dismissal. “In the meantime, stay away from the Lucases. If there’s anything going on here, we’ll take care of it. We do not need some goddamn vigilantes stepping in, you hear me?”

Sean rose, effortlessly, his face carefully expressionless. “Loud and clear, Detective.”

He showed her out and the rest of us sat and listened as the front door slammed behind her.

“Simone must have remembered something,” Matt said, almost to himself. He lifted his head, focused intently on me. “You told us she said that he’d killed him-but killed who? Her mum’s boyfriend?”

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.