Sins of the Fathers by Patricia Hall Page B

so quietly that the two police officers could barely hear him. ‘But she wouldn’t budge.’
    ‘Do you think he could have found out about your relationship with Linda?’ Mower asked. ‘If you were so careful? Do you think she told him?’
    Foster drew a sharp breath.
    ‘That’s not very likely, is it?’ he said, his voice hoarse. ‘That’s the last thing she’d do. Apart from owt else, he’d have been as likely to come after me as her, and there was no sign of that, thank God. I’ve told you. The man’s violent. The man’s crazy. Anything could have set him off. He was like a volcano waiting to blow. But he didn’t seem to be coming in my direction.’
    ‘Well, I can tell you for a fact that someone did guess, somaybe Christie worked it out as well,’ Thackeray said. ‘Did you know he had a handgun?’
    ‘No, of course not,’ Foster said. ‘I knew he had a shotgun. Linda mentioned him going after rabbits once. Lots of folk round here do that. But I knew nowt about any other guns.’ He hesitated for a second. ‘Not that he might not have known about them,’ he said.
    ‘What makes you say that?’ Thackeray asked sharply.
    ‘Well, she talked about them living in Portugal before they came here. The little lass, Louise, was born out there. But Linda hadn’t liked the climate there, or the people, something made her unhappy, any road, and I think she persuaded him to come back to this country. She never talked about anything before Portugal. Except once, when she said something about the lad missing his father when he’d been in Ireland. Then she stopped dead, and wouldn’t say owt else when I asked her what he’d been doing in Ireland. It was like a shutter coming down. She looked scared witless and she went off home that night without letting me take her up to the moor for our usual little rendezvous.’
    ‘Was Gordon Irish?’ Thackeray asked sharply. ‘Did he have an accent?’
    ‘He did, a slight accent, but I’d have said it was more Scottish than Irish. Linda never said where she came from but she sounded like born-and-bred Yorkshire to me. Not broad, like round here, but not your southerner, rhyming grass wi’ arse. Know what I mean?’
    Mower smiled faintly, possessing a few of the despised vowels himself, but Thackeray was still fixed on the landlord’s story.
    ‘She never said anything else about his background?’ he asked.
    ‘Nothing,’ Foster said. ‘But she did make me think I was right about something else. I always suspected he was ex-army , though he never said. I was in the Green Jackets myself for eight years, and there was something about him that made me think he’d been there, done that, know what I mean? If he was, it could be that’s what did his head in. It happens, especially in Ireland. They’re supposed to sort you out before they let you out again, but it doesn’t always work. I’ve seen it before with mates of mine. What do they call it? Post-traumatic stress, is it?’
    ‘Being paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you,’ Thackeray said. ‘Do you think someone was out to get Gordon Christie?’
    ‘I haven’t a clue,’ Foster said. ‘But he looked as if he thought they were. What I do know is that Gordon was out to get Linda one way or another. And it looks as if he succeeded, doesn’t it? I only wish to God we’d had this conversation a week ago and maybe she’d still be alive.’
    Later that afternoon the phone on Thackeray’s desk rang and snapped his mind back to reality. He had been sitting in his office ever since he had come back from a canteen lunch he had done no more than pick at, brooding over what the sudden reappearance of Vince Newsom in Bradfield might mean. His own contact with him several years earlier, when he had first met Laura Ackroyd, had been brief. Newsom had already left the Bradfield Gazette, and moved out of Laura’s flat, by the time Thackeray had reluctantly recognised the attraction between himself and