by Jo Bannister
‘Any luck fleshing out the background on the Barker case?’
Jill Meadows liked Charlie Voss. Everybody liked Charlie Voss: he was a gentleman in an age, and indeed a profession, not noted for them. Even Detective Superintendent Deacon seemed to have a soft spot for him. When he wanted to shout at Voss, quite often he closed the door first.
‘Luck,’ she said with a smile, ‘had nothing to do with it.’ She printed off a couple of tightly-packed pages.
When he’d read them Voss knocked on Deacon’s door. Correctly interpreting the snarled ‘Now what?’ as an invitation, he went inside.
‘Jill’s put together a history on the Barkers, father and daughter.’
Almost against his better judgement, Deacon had been spurred into taking a fresh look at the death of Stanley Barker. He had no reason to suspect foul play, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a crime for him to investigate. Alison Barker had bought a dangerous drug and somebody else had sold it to her, almost certainly on the streets of Dimmock. That made it his business. In all likelihood knowing more about her wouldn’t help him to find out where she’d got her Scram, but he wouldn’t be sure until he’d tried.
‘Anything we didn’t know and should have done?’
Knowing he was busy, Voss tried to keep it short. But it wouldn’t make sense if he edited too ruthlessly. ‘You have to go back about five months. Stanley was the senior partner in a business buying and selling horses, with a yard in Peyton Parvo. They had a run of bad luck – a couple of horses died in transit, the yard was hit by a virus – anyway, word got around that they were unreliable and they lost a lot of clients. The business started going under.
‘Up to that point Alison Barker had led every little girl’s dream-life. But with the business failing her own horses had to be sold. Everything went. The Barkers’ house, Mary Walbrook’s cottage – everything. They used the equity to pay off their debts, but there wasn’t much left. Miss Walbrook moved into a flat above the stables but Stanley and Alison had nowhere to go when the sale of their house completed. They paid off their debts but it cost them everything they had.’
‘And Stanley hadn’t much relish for starting again,’ mused Deacon.
‘Apparently not.’
‘Except Alison didn’t think it was suicide. She thought it was murder. And said so, loudly and frequently, to anyone who’d listen. Us first, then everyone else. Her friends, casual acquaintances, then shopkeepers and people she met in the street. She couldn’t bear the truth.
‘There’s nothing unique about that,’ he said, settling deeper into his chair. ‘Faced with a tragedy, people behave in one of a fairly limited number of ways. Number five is, Externalise. Blame everything on a third party. If there isn’t a third party available, make one up.’
Voss was impressed. As it happens, there was a third party available. It took a leap of the imagination to blame him for Stanley’s death, but Alison managed it.’
‘The lorry driver. What was his name again?’
‘Johnny Windham. He runs the transport firm that carried Barker & Walbrook’s horses. Alison blamed him for their problems. If he’d been more careful they wouldn’t have lost horses in transit, they wouldn’t have got the virus, their business would be thriving, she’d still have her competition string and her father would still be alive. The whole lot was Windham’s fault. She overheard them arguing. She believed Windham came back later and pushed Stanley in the pond.’
‘But she was wrong,’ said Deacon.
‘She was certainly wrong about that. We know he was abroad when Stanley Barker went swimming in his water-jump. I don’t know, maybe Windham let them down, or maybe they were just unlucky. But the general rule is that if you have livestock, from time to time you have deadstock. Their real mistake was overextending themselves – they hadn’t a buffer to see them through a sticky patch.’
Deacon sucked his front teeth. ‘And Barker died rather than deal with the situation, and now his daughter’s turned to drugs for pretty much the same reason. God, what a mess.’
For a policeman, Voss had an improbable optimistic streak. ‘Sometimes people have to hit rock bottom before they can start to climb back. Maybe ending up in hospital with an overdose was what needed to happen to Alison Barker. Maybe now she’ll get the help she needs.’
‘Maybe she will, Charlie Voss, maybe she will.’ Deacon’s face darkened. ‘But maybe she’ll get Daniel.’
Chapter Six
Deacon told Brodie what Voss had told him, and Brodie told Daniel. He listened carefully, without interrupting. She wasn’t sure if he was persuaded or not until she’d finished.
Then he sat back – he’d been leaning forward with his elbows on the table between them, the remains of lunch pushed to one side – and nodded slowly. ‘I’m very grateful,’ he said simply. ‘You’ll thank Jack for me? It doesn’t sound as if she’s in any danger after all. Except mentally, of course, and there’s not much I can do about that. At least I’m not going to open The Sentinel next week and read that she’s been murdered.’
Brodie regarded him with her head tilted slightly to one side, the dense dark curls clustered on her shoulder. The driftwood greys of Daniel’s living-room provided a foil for her dramatic, almost gypsy beauty. Everyone she knew considered her a strikingly handsome woman, and though she demurred in public, privately she was inclined to agree. ‘You really thought that was a possibility?’
‘Yes,’ admitted Daniel. ‘I know it sounds melodramatic, but what she said scared me witless. I couldn’t get it out of my mind.’ He looked at her with hunted eyes. ‘I kept thinking how awful it would be if something happened to her, after we’d had the chance to help and hadn’t taken it. If she’d known someone was trying to kill her, and she’d told me, and along with everyone else I dismissed it as an over-active imagination. If there was a moment when I could have saved her and I let it go by.’
These days Brodie wasn’t much bothered by thoughts of what might have been. She fended off such problems as she saw coming and dealt with those she didn’t, and if she got herself, her child and her business through the week without any major disasters she reckoned she’d done well enough. She wasn’t prepared to feel a failure because she couldn’t see into the future.
Curiously, when her marriage had been on track – or at least she’d thought it was – she took small upsets much more to heart and blamed herself for everything that went awry. Though the divorce was the last thing she’d wanted, in some ways it had been good for her. She’d learned it’s the big things that matter, not the minutiae. She would never again worry whether her ironing was up to scratch. And when something went badly wrong, she exhausted all the alternatives before even wondering if it was her fault.
But Daniel agonised over every decision and every mistake, like a pocket Atlas carrying the sky, and while she considered it stupid and told him so, his open-ended sense of responsibility was one of his more endearing qualities. It might be a foolishness, a conceit even, but it wasn’t done for effect. He really did care about things like right and wrong and the suffering of strangers. She knew it was no exaggeration when he said he’d been worried sick; that it was quite likely he hadn’t slept since the incident on Fisher Hill.
‘Repeat after me,’ she said calmly, ‘you’re a blithering idiot.’
‘I’m a blithering idiot,’ Daniel said obediently. And you’re a princess to put up with me. And Jack …’
Brodie stopped him there. ‘I think, if we’re wise, we won’t accuse Jack of philanthropy. We both know what was in his mind when he did it. Let’s just say you got what you needed because he thinks the world of me and I think the world of you.’
It was one of those now-or-never moments. Either he said something or he put the thing irretrievably out of his mind – walled it up, locked it up, buried the key in concrete and dropped the concrete off the Forth Bridge. Daniel didn’t lie. He despised lying. But he was coming to realise that concealing the truth for as long as
he’d now been doing it was hardly any better.
He’d known for months that what had begun as a close platonic friendship had somehow – with no encouragement from him, when he wasn’t even looking – evolved into something else. But only on his side. He knew Brodie didn’t feel the same way about him: she took his hand, kissed his cheek, made pronouncements like the one she just had far too easily. Not that it wasn’t true when she said she loved him – he knew it was. He’d felt the same way about her, not that long ago. He wished from the bottom of his heart he still felt that way. Friendship he could do – he was good at friendship. This other thing made him foolish.
And it wasn’t even a secret any more. Somehow Deacon had guessed. He hadn’t said anything to Brodie yet, because Daniel had begged him not to, but Daniel knew that one day he would. It was vital that he get it said first, if only to kick it into touch. To let her know that he didn’t harbour any ambitions in that direction. That he wasn’t going to sacrifice their friendship, which was the most important thing in his life, in the vain hope of having something more.
They were alone. This being Saturday, Brodie had brought Paddy for what Daniel had come to think of as family lunch, when he did Proper Cooking instead of getting something from the freezer. But now the food was gone the child was on the gallery, looking out to sea and pretending the wooden house was a ship. Daniel took as deep a breath as he could manage with his chest constricted and said, ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
Brodie had started clearing away the pots. ‘Something urgent?’
‘No, not urgent,’ he said. ‘In fact, it’s been on my mind for a while.’
‘Important, then?’
That was harder. ‘Not history-book important. Not even front page of The Sentinel important.’
There was a but implicit in that, but she was in too much of a hurry to hear it. ‘Well, if it isn’t important and it isn’t urgent, could it wait? Paddy and me are doing the antique fair in Eastbourne this afternoon. Do you mind if I leave you the washing-up? Pop round tonight if you want a natter.’
She had the front door open and in a moment she would call her daughter and be away. And he’d never pluck up the courage to start again, and she would never know.
‘Brodie,’ he said, his voice taking on the stridency of desperation, ‘the other day. When I said I love you? I meant it. In every way.’
She turned in the doorway with a smile as brilliant as starfire. She took a quick step back into the room and dropped a kiss on top of his yellow head. ‘Of course you did, sweetie.’ Then she was gone.
Daniel not only hadn’t got the response he wanted, he hadn’t even got the response he expected. It was, he conceded as he reviewed the exchange in his mind, entirely predictable that when he finally took the plunge and said that to someone he would be so cack-handed as to give the impression she was right there on the list of “Things I Love” with shaggy dogs and home cooking and a nice bottle of Chianti. When it came to the life of the heart he was a disaster area.
He once told Brodie his whole family were emotional cripples, but that wasn’t quite it. He was not lacking in emotions. He was not without sensitivities. His feelings were, he imagined, similar to everyone else’s. It was in giving expression to them that he failed so comprehensively. You could blame lack of practice, but he was articulate enough when it came to finding words for other people’s hopes and fears. Yet when he tried to describe his own he ended up getting a motherly kiss from the woman of his desires!
In spite of which, and curiously, he felt better for having said it. The fact that Brodie had misunderstood altered very little. Indeed, if she’d taken him up correctly she would have been embarrassed and unsure what to say next time they met. It was probably better that she hadn’t followed his meaning. There was still a degree of satisfaction in having got it out, however incoherently. When he was an old man, and still alone, at least he could console himself with the knowledge that, just once, he tried to break the mould. That he may never have won the race but he did, at least once, get as far as the starting-blocks. It took some of the burden of failure off him, left him oddly cheered.
He was in the kitchen, washing the pots – which Brodie always left for him – when the phone rang. It was the hospital.
They didn’t have a next-of-kin for Alison Barker, and she’d received only two visitors. One was a woman none of the staff knew or knew how to reach. The other was a young man whose contact details were on the computer and whose blood type they knew by heart.
Alison was awake, groggy and disorientated, distressed and confused. What she needed was someone she knew to come and sit with her and talk to her and help her to sort through the maelstrom that was her mind. ‘But we couldn’t find one,’ said Staff Nurse French. ‘We wondered if you’d do it.’
Daniel was taken aback. ‘I’m not a relative. I’m not even a friend. We only met when Brodie was giving me a driving lesson and I ran her down. I apologised, she shouted – that was it.’
‘You cared enough to come and see how she was. It would help her if you’d come again.’
Daniel could never refuse an appeal to his better nature. ‘All right. Of course. Now?’
‘As soon as you can make it. Thanks, Daniel.’
She didn’t even recognise him. He saw her eyes light on him as he walked down the ward towards her, and explore him anxiously for signs of familiarity, and slide away disappointed when she found none. What she wasn’t was alarmed.
Daniel didn’t know whether to be offended or relieved. It was beginning to look as if he was the only one to take Alison Barker’s fears seriously, Alison included.
But then, today she wasn’t half the girl he’d seen that night, running too quickly for her own good, fast and agile and angry. But nor was she the unconscious girl he’d seen here on Thursday, still in the bed but for the odd restless twitch, white, blind and hung around with tubing. Her eyes were open now and intelligent if confused. The nurses had raised her head a little so she could see something other than the ceiling.
Daniel smiled in what he hoped was a reassuring manner and refrained from pulling out the chair until she asked him to sit. ‘My name’s Daniel Hood. We met a few days ago, on Fisher Hill. You were crossing the road, I was driving up it.’
Alison Barker frowned so carefully it must have hurt. ‘I know you?’
Daniel remembered this: waking from a nightmare only to find that reality had nothing much to recommend it either. That the world had changed fundamentally while you were asleep, and it was alien and scary and you didn’t know how it worked, and right now you couldn’t see anyway of catching up.
‘Not really,’ he admitted. ‘I knocked you down.’
For a second she shrank from him and her eyes were afraid. He hastened to explain. ‘It was an accident. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
Her eyes were brown, like peat-pools in the pallor of her face. Daniel watched the fear in them subside and a kind of puzzlement take its place. Her voice was a breathy murmur, rusty with lack of use. ‘I remember …’
‘We wanted to call an ambulance,’ said Daniel. ‘My friend and I. But you dashed off, and I hoped that meant you were all right. And then I heard you were in here.’
It was difficult to judge if she was remembering or just taking in what he was saying. ‘An accident. That’s why I’m here?’
So no one had told her. He wasn’t sure if it was his job or not. But he wasn’t going to lie to her, and he couldn’t think of a good reason not to answer so he did. ‘Well, no. The police think you overdosed on – I can’t remember the name, some drug. Scat or Scratch or something.’
For the first time he got a flash of the girl he’d met in the rain. Her eyes spat contempt at him. ‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘I may have got the name wrong …’
‘I drink coffee. I drink wine with a meal. I don’t smoke and I don’t take drugs.’
Daniel didn’t know what to say. ‘Well, I’m pretty
sure that’s what they’re treating you for.’
‘Drugs?’ The confusion in the girl’s face slowly gave way to anger, and behind that a resurgence of the fear. ‘Dear God. So he found a way.’
Daniel bit his lip and said nothing.
Finally she noticed that he was standing at the end of the bed as if expecting to be thrown out at any moment. She jerked an unsteady hand at the chair. ‘Sit down, will you, before someone hangs a drip from you.’
Daniel did as he was told. Alison Barker went on watching him for perhaps half a minute. Then she said, ‘I don’t understand what you’re doing here.’ Her voice was frail and fractious, impatient with her weakness and with him.
He gave a shrug. ‘I’m not entirely sure myself. When you started waking up the staff wanted to find you a familiar face. I was the best they could do.’
‘The guy who knocked me down.’ She laughed at that – bitterly, immoderately enough to trigger a coughing fit that racked her abused body. Daniel helped her to sit while she caught her breath. When she could speak again she said roughly, ‘Which says pretty much all there is to say about my life.’
‘That’s silly,’ Daniel chided gently. ‘I know you have friends. One of them was here – Mary Walbrook? But the staff nurse knew where to find me and didn’t know where to find her. She’ll be back. She said she’d bring you some things.’
‘Mary was here?’ Alison nodded fractionally. ‘She is a friend. She’s been a good friend to me, and I’ve been bloody ungrateful. Will you call her for me? I know the number.’
‘Of course I will. I’ll go find a phone now, if you like.’
The girl looked puzzled again. ‘Find one?’
He got this from Brodie too. ‘I know. It’s just, I try not to clutter my life up with things I don’t need.’
