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Authors: Jo Bannister

BOOK: True Witness
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“Terrible business,” said Jack Deacon without much sincerity. He plainly thought Daniel had brought this on himself.
“Did you catch them?” asked Brodie through her teeth.
“We made some arrests. Not sure yet if we got generals or grunts. Doesn't matter: if we got grunts they'll give us the generals.”
“How organised was it?” Daniel's voice was thin with shock.
“Well, it wasn't the Berlin airlift. On the other hand, people don't go to a pub armed with their best darts
and
five litres of petrol. The beer inspired some tough talking, then they started egging one another on. They were just drunk enough to worry more about losing face by backing down than losing their liberty by carrying on.”
“They could have
killed
him!” exclaimed Brodie.
“When they sobered up they'd have been sorry about that.”
Daniel knuckled his eyes. “But –
why
?”
“You know why.”
“No, I don't. This isn't because when I pulled Chris Berry out of the sea he was already dead. It isn't because of the murder of another boy none of them cared about when he was alive. It's because you haven't made an arrest. Why aren't they burning your house down?”
The policeman was never sure if Daniel's logic was very simple or very sophisticated, but it caught him off balance every time. “They know I'm doing my best. They don't think you are.”
Daniel's voice soared till it cracked. “If I could do what you asked, if I could do what they want, don't they think I would?”
Deacon sighed. When he had the men who did this in the interview room, one at a time, sober and with no one to reinforce their prejudices, he'd make them feel like shit, not only for behaving as they had but for thinking as they did. But in fact he understood it. He too believed that Neil Cochrane killed Chris Berry and Kevin Sykes. He was also aware that Cochrane and Daniel Hood looked dangerously like natural allies.
They were both loners. They lived alone – Cochrane in his rambling farmhouse out on the Downs, Hood on the shore. Neither had any family that anyone knew of, neither could boast many friends. Cochrane showed his face in
The Rose
once a week, mostly to prove that he wasn't afraid to. Daniel's social needs seemed to be satisfied by a platonic friendship with a sharp-tongued divorcee five years his senior.
They were outsiders, Cochrane with his sheep and Hood with his stars, and in the smoky tap-rooms of Dimmock it seemed more than a coincidence that the one would be having a confession beaten out of him at the police station but for the protection offered by the other.
Deacon didn't believe that Daniel was shielding a man he knew to be a murderer. But he saw how it could look that way to people who didn't know him. He couldn't condone their actions but he understood their frustration. And fear. Ten years ago they lived through a nightmare. Now it was back and they were afraid. They were sorry about Chris Berry, they were even a little sorry about Kevin Sykes, but they were afraid for their own sons. No one's thought processes are impeccable when their children are in danger.
But he wasn't going to explain any of this to a man standing in the ashes of his home. It didn't alter anything. Whatever the reason for it, what happened here was, briefly,
mob rule and Detective Inspector Deacon wasn't going to be their apologist. Understanding where it came from was part of his job. If he sympathised, just a little, that was no one's business but his own.
“I think,” he said carefully, “that they're frightened people looking for someone to blame, and you're here where they can see you and the guy who's actually responsible isn't. I think it would be sensible, when you're looking for somewhere to stay, to look outside Dimmock.”
“He's staying with me,” Brodie said flatly.
Deacon opened his mouth to argue. But Daniel rendered the argument redundant. “No, I'm not.”
Brodie frowned. “Have the spare room. I've put you up before.”
He was pale but adamant. “Brodie, I'm not setting foot in your flat until this is finished. What happened here could happen again, wherever I go. You think I'm going to bring it to you and Paddy?”
She knew he was right. “You have nowhere else to go.”
“That's what hotels are for: people who have nowhere else to stay.” He turned to Deacon. “Can you get me in somewhere tonight? I've no money. I'll go to the bank tomorrow, get something organised.”
Deacon thought. “Hastings. I know someone in Hastings who'll take you in.”
But Daniel shook his head. “I'm not running away.”
The policeman's brow darkened. “Daniel, now is not the time. Those men from
The Rose,
they didn't mean to kill you but they could have done. If you stay in Dimmock, someone else in a flush of alcohol and righteous indignation might finish the job. I'm not suggesting you live out your life under a false name and a false nose. I'm asking you to avoid provoking any more trouble for the next few days.”
It was only sensible. Brodie willed him to agree, but she knew he wouldn't.
He shook his head again, doggedly, the yellow hair spun
by the breeze. “If someone's determined to see me dead they'll find me in Hastings, Halifax or Honduras. Everyone else can get used to the idea that I haven't done anything wrong and I'm not running away. If I go now I'll never come back. It'll go down in Dimmock mythology that I fled because I was guilty of something. I like this town, I want to stay here. I don't want everyone I meet for the next ten years to wonder where they've heard my name before, and then remember and hurry away.
“Besides, I have things to do, things to sort out. I don't have a car, and you can't do everything by phone. I need to find somewhere to live. I need to go shopping, and before that I need to get some money. So I need to convince the bank that it's mine, and I don't know how to set about it when everything that proves who I am has just gone up in smoke!”
“Don't worry about that,” said Deacon grudgingly, “we'll sort you out. I won't see you on the streets.”
“
You
won't see me at all!” exclaimed Daniel, turning on the policeman because he didn't know how else to vent the emotion building in his breast. “I wasted the whole day waiting to hear from you. God knows why but I'm still trying to help with your inquiries. I told your sergeant, he said you'd call me.”
“I've been busy,” growled Deacon.
“Busy getting nowhere!” snapped Daniel. “Use me, for pity's sake! I may not be the witness you hoped for but I'm the only one you've got. Put your suspect in a line-up, let me see him. Maybe I was wrong: maybe it was him. But I can't tell from photographs. Let me see his face.”
“You already have,” muttered Deacon.
For a moment the silence was so complete they could hear not only the waves creaming on the shore but the hiss and spit of the few hot-spots left in the debris.
Brodie looked at Daniel but his face was blank. She said, “When?”
The policeman looked at Daniel. “This morning, at the nick. When Voss was showing you out and we met in the corridor. Neil Cochrane was the man with me. You didn't recognise him.”
“No,” breathed Daniel.
Deacon couldn't quite leave it at that. “You want to give it a bit more thought? Now you know?”
Brodie had been a solicitor's clerk: every instinct was outraged at what he was doing. She spat: “You can't – !”
He turned on her fiercely. “Shut up! There are lives at stake here. And his is one of them, and yours isn't, so stay out of it.”
She was so astonished she fell silent.
Daniel didn't know what to say. His breath was unsteady, his eyes devastated. Finally he managed, “You didn't
trust
me?”
“It's not a question of trust,” said Deacon dismissively. “If you'd recognised him without help I could have used it as evidence. I can't do that now; but you can still tell me if I'm looking at the right man. If I am, I'll find the evidence.”
For long seconds Daniel's expression didn't alter. Then he blinked and moistened his lips, and Brodie saw him trying to remember. To strip away what had come afterwards and get back to what he had seen, what he knew.
But it was too hard. Too much had happened; too many stones had been thrown, disturbing the surface of the pond which was the mind's mirror. He shook his head and his voice was defeated. “I don't know. I don't think so, but I'm not sure any more.”
Deacon breathed heavily at him. His jaw clenched and unclenched, and Brodie thought that if there'd been a dog handy he'd have kicked it. But he didn't kick Daniel, or even look as if he might. Under the granite veneer she glimpsed compassion.
And it was the moment for it. If he was only going to do one kindness this year, no one needed it more than Daniel.
He was diminishing visibly before them, the moral courage that was his only defence slipping away. He could face his enemies: what he couldn't handle was the uncertainty. He no longer knew where he stood, who he stood beside or where he was going. Turning helplessly in the ruins of his home he looked like a lost child. “I don't know what to do,” he whispered.
Deacon sighed. There were only the three of them here: there was no reason this should get back to Voss, who he hoped still thought of him as a bastard. He set strong hands on Daniel's shoulders and stopped him, and steered him away from the smouldering wreckage towards his own car. “Come home with me for now. We'll sort something out tomorrow.”
Perhaps as a respite from his own troubles, Daniel spent the short drive wondering what kind of place was home to a man like Jack Deacon. Did he live alone, or was there an extensive family and a noisy chaotic kitchen where children tripped over pets and vice versa? Was he into industrial chic or overstuffed Victorian comfort? Or was his house just a box for living in until he could go to work?
Whatever he'd decided,
chez
Deacon would have taken him by surprise. It surprised people who knew the policeman much better than Daniel did. Detective Inspector Deacon lived in the single-story square stone structure between The Lanes and the foot of the Firestone Cliffs which was once Dimmock's gaol.
Earlier owners had removed some of the grimmer trappings but Deacon had restored as many as he could. There were grills in front of the windows and the wood-plank front door was studded with nails. “Nice,” murmured Daniel, sidling round a wrought-iron hall stand that might have served as a gibbet.
A snarling hiss behind made him startle and Daniel found himself being eyeballed by the biggest, meanest cat he'd ever seen, its mottled coat a cloak of darkness, its ears flat against its wedge-shaped head, its fangs like scimitars. He thought they might actually be dripping saliva but wasn't prepared to get close enough to check. “Nice moggy,” he ventured.
“His name's Dempsey.” Deacon showed every sign of pride. “Don't try to stroke him.”
Nothing was further from Daniel's mind.
Deacon opened a door on the far side of the kitchen. “The spare cell's through here.”
The tiny room was rather pleasant. The iron bedstead bolted to the floor was clearly original, as were the bars at the
window, but the stone walls were whitewashed and there were a few pieces of simple furniture. Deacon turned on a radiator under the window and after a minute the heat began to come through.
“Get some sleep,” he advised, “we'll talk in the morning. If I'm not back by then, make yourself some breakfast.”
Daniel blinked. “Where are you going?” It was after one o'clock.
“Back to work. I've got some arsonists to interview, remember? And I've still got two murders to solve.”
It seemed odd being left alone here by a man he hardly knew. “Is there anyone else in the house?”
“Just Dempsey.”
He was on his way out of the door. Daniel said, “This is good of you.”
Deacon grunted as if he'd been accused of something.
 
 
There's nothing like a killer at large to stop people fretting about trivia. Last week Brodie was rushed off her feet looking for first edition books, rare china, settings for a TV period drama, a suitable retirement home for a superannuated greyhound and, of course, authenticated representations of Mrs Trimble's bottom. This week the work had thinned to a trickle. Fortunately
Looking For Something?
produced enough cashflow these days that the odd quiet week was more bonus than disaster. Anyway, Brodie would have put her work on hold while she tried to help her friend.
Not since the earliest days of their acquaintance had she seen him so unsure of himself. As when Paddy came to her in tears, she ached to make things right for him, to wipe the hurt from his eyes and see the secret smile stray across his face.
His smile did things for her. He had a very ordinary face, amiable but quite unremarkable; but his smile played on her heart-strings. It said that the world, with all its failings, was
still a wonderful place. It made an optimist of her, and she liked knowing it was there for the having whenever she needed cheering up. Her life was richer for knowing Daniel Hood and she hated seeing him shrink before her eyes like someone wasting from a sickness.
The attacks on him made matters more urgent, but in fact he'd have felt as bad if no one had cared who he saw or what he remembered. The quiet resolve that motivated everything he did had been undermined; emotionally he was on his knees. The fear that he'd made a mistake with terrible consequences was racking him. Brodie wasn't sure she could heal his misery, but perhaps she could shorten it.
She could only see two alternatives. Either Deacon's suspect killed Chris Berry, in which case Daniel's failure to recognise him contributed to the death of the Sykes boy, or someone else did. In which case Chris was murdered not by a stranger for his strong young body but by someone he knew for reasons which would have made perfect sense to him had he lived to explain them.
Brodie didn't have to find either the reason or the killer. That was Deacon's job. If she could show that the runner's death was unconnected with that cluster of ten-year-old crimes then the lonely end of unloved, unwanted Kevin Sykes, street-kid, social outcast and whore, more brutalised by his life than by his death, was – what, exactly? A coincidence? Brodie didn't know, only that it wasn't Daniel's fault. If he was right about the man on the pier he had nothing to reproach himself for. Brodie wanted to give him that more than anything. If she could restore his self-belief, Deacon could take all the time he needed to find the actual killer.
Chris Berry. If he wasn't a random target then he was the key to what happened. His family could help her get into his life, see events from his perspective, begin to infer what he might have known. So could his friends. Brodie closed her office and headed for
The Attic Gym.
 
 
This time the door at the foot of the area steps was locked. Brodie stood back and looked up at the building, rising two storeys above her. There was at least one flat up there, and since the windows weren't dusty she assumed it was occupied. If the gym was Ennis's baby there was a sporting chance he lived over the shop, and that there was a private entrance at the back.
Brodie walked up Fisher Hill until she found an entry. Behind the houses were a series of iron stairways serving the first-floor flats. She had counted her way along: now she counted back and, finding a paved yard filled to capacity by a black van with the words
The Attic Gym
inscribed on the side, climbed to the door and rang the bell.
It wasn't Ennis who came to the door, it was Nathan Sparkes. He seemed startled to see her, the dark eyes widening in the pallor of his face. But when she asked for the coach he dipped his head and stood back to let her in. “I'll call him.”
He left her in the hall and disappeared through a door. She heard feet on another stairway, presumably leading to the gym. Feet again and Nathan was back. “He'll be up in a minute.”
Brodie tried to put him at his ease. For all his height and strength, what was watching her warily was a little boy wondering if he was in trouble. “I didn't get the chance to thank you properly last night,” she said.
He shrugged awkwardly. “Thank George. I wouldn't have known what to do.”
“Between you, you got my friend out of a death-trap. I suppose you've seen it? – there's nothing left.”
Nathan nodded without meeting her gaze. Suddenly Brodie knew what the problem was. He wasn't used to talking to women. Girls his own age, and his mum, of course, but mostly his time was spent with other men. He worked with
them, trained with them, competed against them. Women were an alien species and he hadn't yet worked out if they were dangerous.
The door opened and George Ennis came in. “Mrs Farrell. Is everything all right?”
“More or less,” she said, “thanks to you two. Daniel's keeping his head down for the moment, but he asked me to say how grateful he is.” Brodie had no reservations about bending the truth any time it served her purpose. “He could have died last night.”
“It was a sheer fluke,” said Ennis, showing her into the sitting-room. She thought he'd been cleaning down in the gym: he'd changed before he came up but she could smell the faint tang of disinfectant. “Nathan and I had been for a run – we couldn't settle to doing anything else. On the way back we passed
The Rose
. A couple of people stopped us to say how sorry they were about Chris and asked us in for a drink.
“There was only one topic of conversation in the whole place, of course, but that was understandable. But even as we stood there the mood of the place started changing, getting mean. When I realised what was coming I sent Nathan to get Mr Hood away from his flat. It's only a couple of minutes from
The Rose
to here at the speed Nathan runs, and the van was in the yard – I thought he could reach the shore before anyone else. While he did that I called the police.”
“Thank God you were there,” said Brodie, “realised what was happening and knew what to do.”
“I was a policeman for a lot of years,” shrugged Ennis. “Which meant that when I told the station there was going to be trouble, they believed me.”
“Even so,” said Brodie, “they weren't able to reach Daniel's house ahead of the mob. If Nathan hadn't got there first he could be fighting for his life in the hospital burns unit right now.”
She leaned forward earnestly. “Mr Ennis, I came here to thank you – both of you and also to apologise for my
manner earlier. But there's something else I need to discuss with you. Would you think it impertinent if I asked you about Chris? Daniel's troubled about what happened. That he wasn't able to help, of course, but also that he hasn't been able to help Jack Deacon. Everyone in Dimmock reckons to know why Chris was murdered, and quite a few think they know who did it. And maybe they're right. But there are other possibilities, and if I knew more about Chris maybe I could work out why the man Daniel saw doesn't seem to be the man everyone's blaming.”
George Ennis sat back, away from her, the craggy brow lowering over his pale blue eyes in a prelude to refusing her request. She hastened to stop him. “I realise this is difficult for you. Would you rather talk to Daniel? Whatever's happened since, in the early hours of Monday morning he earned the answers to a few questions.”
Ennis pursed thin lips. Brodie saw Nathan glance at him but he didn't return the look. At length he said, “You're right, of course. Your friend risked his life for Chris, and the fact that he couldn't prevent a tragedy doesn't detract from that. Of course I'll answer your questions. What do you want to know?”
Brodie wasn't entirely sure herself. “I suppose, what kind of a lad he was. I know he was eighteen, that he worked for his father and that he was a top-class fell-runner. That's about all. What was he like as a person – cheerful or dogged? Did he run because he enjoyed it or because he refused to be beaten? Did he play other sports? Did he have a lot of friends or a few good ones? Did he go on holiday to Ibiza with his drinking buddies, or did he prefer museums and art galleries and history? Talk about him – I'll stop you if I need more detail.”
After a moment Ennis nodded. He collected his thoughts and then began. “To tell you about Chris I have to start by telling you something about me. Why I set up the gym, what I had in mind.
“It goes back those ten years, to the first murders. I was at a
crossroads in my life – I could go on as a CID officer or take my pension and do something else. I hadn't considered leaving the force until then. But when you've worked a murder case for thirteen months only for your prime suspect to walk away, you start seeing things afresh. I hadn't the heart to go on.
“Then there were the boys. I interviewed a lot of teenage boys in those months. I knew as I was doing it that in due course I'd see a lot of them again, in custody themselves next time. This is a nice town in many ways, but not for young people. Not now, and less so ten years ago. There was nothing for boys who were too old for woggles and too young to have family responsibilities. They spent their time on street-corners and in amusement arcades, and moved into the local pubs as soon as they were old enough.
“The gym wasn't an original idea. Other people, a lot of them former police officers, were trying to involve young men in worthwhile interests at that time – renovating cars, outdoor pursuits, community service. I didn't know about any of those things, but I did know about physical fitness. I was a good boxer in my day and not a bad runner, and I'd always done a bit of coaching. I looked into the possibilities and, when the time came, I took the pension and bought this place. It took me six months to knock it into shape, work out what to do with it, then I opened for business.”
He smiled at the young man who had lowered himself carefully onto the arm of the sofa. “I remember the first day I saw Nathan and Chris. Chris's mum brought them down. They'd been caught joy-riding – neither of them took the car but they hadn't the sense to stay out of it either. They were fourteen years old. She bought them each a three month subscription and said if they wasted a penny of it they'd have to answer to her.
“They were typical adolescent boys, their bodies growing faster than their brains, their hormones shouting louder than their common sense. They'd fallen in with some older boys
who thought shop-lifting was clever and joy-riding was fun. They resented Mrs Berry's interference, were sullen with me. I told them not to come if they weren't prepared to work, they'd already made me as much money as they were going to. But they were afraid Mrs Berry would box their ears if she had to stand on a milk-crate to do it.

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