True Witness (7 page)

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Authors: Jo Bannister

BOOK: True Witness
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“You don't suppose,” ventured DS Voss, in the tone of someone about to gamble with his life, “that Hood could be right? That it wasn't Cochrane he saw?”
In his own way, Jack Deacon was as honest a man as Daniel. He didn't make a fetish of it. He was happy for people to think of him as Jack-the-lad, a hard man, a believer in ends over means. But when the time came to give each thing its name he was as straight as a die. He didn't bear false witness, even against those he knew deserved it; he didn't use his fists unless someone else started it; he didn't massage the statistics by coaxing men who were going down anyway to have unsolved crimes taken into consideration. Brodie was right: he was a good policeman. By most definitions he was a good man. He just didn't like word getting around.
He glared at Voss with an exasperation that the sergeant, who had been working for him for about a month now, was beginning to recognise as displacement activity for doubt. “You still haven't read the CID handbook, have you? Inspectors do the thinking; sergeants do the running after people and getting thumped.”
Voss grinned. People had commiserated when he'd drawn the short straw, but actually he rather liked working for the man known throughout Dimmock Police Station as The Grizzly. It was never boring. “I read the first chapter. You know –
Constables Make The Tea?”
Deacon found himself grinning too. Charlie Voss was younger and more cheerful than his last sergeant. He'd thought that was a drawback. He was beginning to wonder if he'd been wrong. But that was the only thing he thought he might have been wrong about.
“Daniel Hood is an arrogant little sod. He thinks too much, and he thinks that being clever makes his opinion more
important than other people's. He doesn't lie – I've told you about that, haven't I? – not because he thinks it's wicked but because he thinks it's beneath him. I never see the man without wanting to give him a slap.
“In spite of which, or perhaps because of it, I know he's trying to describe accurately what happened at the pier. He isn't being difficult deliberately: he genuinely didn't recognise Cochrane as the man he saw.
“But you know as well as I do, Charlie Voss, that eye-witness testimony is about the weakest evidence you can have. Honest reliable people with no axe to grind make mistakes all the time. Both ways: they ID people who couldn't have dunnit and miss people who did. It's not easy to remember a stranger's face, glimpsed briefly in the midst of chaos, and recognise it from a still photograph taken under duress. It's like passport photos only worse. The wonder is that anyone ever spots a villain that way.”
“I know,” said Voss. “I just wonder if we should consider the possibility that he's right.”
“Well, of course there's a
possibility
,” said Deacon nastily. “There's a
possibility
that the Liberal Democrats will form the next government, that Elvis Presley was abducted by aliens and that if you opened my bottom drawer you'd find back issues of
Men in Tights: the Official Organ of the Transvestite Community.
Anything's possible. But in the real world, things make sense. This looks like Neil Cochrane's work because it is.”
Voss hadn't been in Dimmock ten years ago. Ten years ago he'd still been at school. “It's that good a match?”
“Pretty much,” said Deacon. “The victim was a couple of years older than the others but that's the only difference. The scene of crime was a place Cochrane used before; the murder weapon was the same he used before; and he smashed that boy's skull in exactly the same way he did the other three.”
“The other three were raped.”
Deacon shrugged. “Chris Berry was a bad choice.
Cochrane couldn't overpower him as easily. He got away, and Cochrane had to give chase because otherwise Chris would have come to us. He needed to silence him. At two o'clock in the morning he didn't expect to be seen.”
“But the fact remains that he was – at least the killer was – but Hood doesn't think it was Cochrane he saw.”
Deacon's thick eyebrows canted. “So it's a coincidence? Somebody else has taken to preying on Dimmock's teenage boys, taking them to the pier and beating their heads in with a wheel-brace? Somebody of about Cochrane's age, size and build?”
“But not with Cochrane's face,” murmured Voss. “According to Hood.”
“Daniel Hood is a stubborn man who can't deal with the possibility that he might be wrong,” growled Deacon, and never even saw the irony of what he was saying.
 
 
Brodie'd had a funny sort of a day. It started ridiculously early with a corpse on a beach; it got quite bracing at lunchtime when she thought she was going to put those sixth-form self-defence lessons to a purpose for which they were never intended; and at quarter to five in the afternoon a woman she'd met twice wrote her a cheque for eight thousand pounds.
As word began to spread of the service she offered people came to her with an ever wider range of problems. She would find, or try to, anything for anyone who could meet three conditions. They needed a lawful reason for wanting what they sought – early on someone had asked her for three Uzis and a Kalashnikov. It had to be a thing, not a person – the one time she'd agreed to find someone rather than something events had run horribly out of control. And they had to be able to afford her help. Where the item had a significant monetary value she took a commission of twenty percent.
Where the value was more sentimental she put a price on her time. Either way, eight thousand pounds was the most profitable job she'd done so far.
Of course, Selena Trimble had stood to win or lose a sum which even today might be counted a fortune. Her claim to it hung on whether it was her mother's posterior immortalised in a painting entitled “Bathsheba In Flagrante” by the sought-after Hastings artist Cedric Wymes. His will included a sizable bequest to “his Bathsheba” or, should she predecease him, her children: if the posterior was indeed that of Mrs Trimble, the money was Selena's. However, artists use many models, all of them have posteriors, and one may look very much like another.
Of course Ms Trimble had photographs of her mother, but they showed only her face and the painting showed everything else. Selena soon realised that a comparative analysis of 1950s models' backsides would quickly run through even forty thousand pounds. Failing to find a solicitor who would take the case on a no win, no fee basis she decided that Brodie Farrell working for twenty percent was her best bet.
Brodie didn't rate the odds much higher than the solicitors had. But she didn't have partners to explain herself to, and the problem amused her enough to take a gamble. If she failed she'd settle for the start-up fee and a good laugh.
In fact she soon realised that the mission was achievable. She visited every gallery and art dealer on the south coast, and used the internet to call up as much information as she could not only on Wymes but on other artists working on the south coast in the same period. She ended up with a stack of images comprising the definitive study of the female nether regions in post-war Britain.
And since many artists were more diligent about recording who was modelling for them than Cedric Wymes, she was soon able to compile a dossier on Mrs Trimble's person as viewed from every angle. Happily, even behinds have distinguishing features, and Mrs Trimble's had a trio of small
moles formation-flying across it. Two other artists had noticed the same peculiarity that Cedric Wymes reproduced on Bathsheba, with Mrs Trimble on record as the model on each occasion. The bottom line was that the executors were satisfied and Selena Trimble got her bequest.
Brodie felt about
Looking for Something?
much as Charlie Voss did about working with Jack Deacon. No two days were the same. She locked up at five o'clock with a smile on her lips.
But it had been a long day by any standards. By the time she reached the car-park she was yawning, looking forward to a quiet evening at home with her daughter. Almost the last thing she wanted to see was Daniel Hood waiting by her car with that shy, stubborn expression she knew so well half-hidden by his straw-coloured fringe and a manilla envelope under his arm.
She sighed. He was her friend, and he'd had a harder day than she had. If he wanted to talk they'd talk. “Come up for tea,” she suggested.
He had the grace to look faintly embarrassed. “I didn't mean to invite myself for another meal. I just wanted to pick your brains.”
Brodie opened the car. “My brain's five pounds of wet spaghetti right now. You want to pick it, try again when it's eaten.”
Driving across town she said, “How long were you waiting for me?”
“Oh, maybe” – sometimes lying would be so easy! – “twenty minutes.”
She took her eyes off the road long enough to stare at him. “Why didn't you come to the office?”
“Because that's where you work. I make enough demands on your time without invading your working day as well.”
One of the most irritating things about Daniel Hood was how hard it was to stay angry with him. Unless you were Jack Deacon, of course.
Brodie felt her heart lift. They were two people with nothing in common who'd met in circumstances which should have been impossible for them to transcend. But somehow they'd forged a real friendship, and this was what Brodie got out of it: Daniel made her feel good. She'd read somewhere that owning a dog made people feel so much better about themselves that it was reflected in their state of health. Well, knowing Daniel did the same for her.
He caught her grin and frowned. “What?”
Brodie had no compunction about lying when it suited her. “Just thinking about Selena Trimble's mother's bottom,” she said airily. Then of course she had to explain.
Paddy had already had her tea with Marta Szarabeijka, the Polish music-teacher upstairs. She curled up in front of the television, leaving Brodie and Daniel to talk over reheated casserole.
“So what's in the envelope?” asked Brodie.
It was lying on the kitchen table beside then. Daniel looked at it but didn't pick it up. “An article Tom Sessions wrote for
The Sentinel
ten years ago. About the killings. About the victims.”
“Ah,” said Brodie softly.
Daniel was still looking at the envelope rather than her. “It doesn't make pleasant reading. And I can see why Mr Deacon assumed that whoever committed those murders also killed Chris Berry.”
“A lot of similarities?”
“An awful lot. But …”
“Daniel?”
Finally he looked at her. “Differences, too. Will you read it? I may be kidding myself and I'd like an unbiased opinion. But I think there are enough discrepancies to back up what I told Deacon: that the man I saw wasn't who he expected.”
Brodie bit her lip. She knew what he was doing. “Daniel, you don't have anything to justify. It's not your job to make sense of what you saw, it's Deacon's. And if he can't, well, he
couldn't ten years ago either. Maybe
because
he was wrong about his suspect. Maybe what you saw will finally set him on the right track. But for heaven's sake don't get any deeper involved. You've done your bit.”
Daniel knew she was right. If half of Dimmock had seen what he'd seen, and everyone else agreed that Deacon was right about the killer, he wouldn't have been persuaded. He would rather make an honest mistake than tell a fortuitous lie. But he'd much rather be right than wrong.
“Will you read the article?” he asked. “Tell me what you think? It won't change anything, but I'll sleep easier tonight if …” He let the sentence peter out.
Brodie finished it for him. “If you don't think you're standing between justice and a killer.”
 
 
It had been a huge news story spread over thirteen months, from early 1991 into 1992. Tom Sessions was a junior reporter when he wrote this resume, but already he knew how to handle difficult, important material without hitting the parallel verges of sensationalism and triviality. He'd worked a wealth of detail into the text without losing the narrative thread. It was the sort of work that won awards for young reporters and set them on the road to the nationals, where for the most part everything they had learned, all the skills that had earned them advancement, had to be set aside.
Which was why Tom Sessions, and a lot of other good reporters, continued to work on smaller papers for smaller wages when they could walk into prestigious jobs if they didn't mind leaving their principles at the door.
By the time he was writing this, all three deaths had occurred and most of the facts that would emerge were already known. This wasn't a breaking news story, it was a recapitulation. It told Brodie everything she'd have known if she'd come to Dimmock twelve months before she did,
including something about the victims. There were also photographs. Jamie Wilton on a canoeing holiday in France; Peter Krauss with his Afghan hound; Gavin Halliwell on a speedway bike.

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