by Jo Bannister
She thought she understood. ‘I’ll pay you for the phone-call, as soon as I find my clothes.’
She wasn’t being sarcastic: she thought it might matter to him. Daniel wasn’t going to take offence where none was intended. ‘There’s no rush. Don’t go anywhere, I’ll be right back.’
‘Funny guy,’ she growled. But there was the hint of a smile in it.
Chapter Seven
Deacon heard that Alison Barker was awake soon after Daniel did. His first thought was to send Voss to interview her, perhaps accompanied by Jill Meadows because – so he’d heard – women were good at these things. At reassuring the frightened and encouraging the reluctant. At probing deeper by pushing gently than by shoving hard. At not losing their tempers when obstructions were put in their way. Deacon had heard these things about women often enough to believe they were probably true, although – the woman he knew best being Brodie Farrell – he couldn’t vouch for them from personal experience.
But then he thought that perhaps the gentle touch wasn’t what was called for here. Alison Barker wasn’t in any real sense a victim, except of her own foolishness. She had taken a drug so new that virtually nothing was known about its effect, let alone its side-effects. Presumably she had done so in a spirit of adventure. Well, she could look on this interview in the same light. He took his coat and headed for the car park.
Staff Nurse French saw him coming and fell into step with him. ‘You won’t have to stay too long. She’s still very disorientated. You may find she simply doesn’t remember what you need her to. She almost died. Nobody’s brain comes out of a coma in the same condition it went in.’
Deacon gave her a crocodilian smirk. A lot of people have trouble remembering things when I first talk to them. You’d be surprised how much better they do with a little help.’
Sharon French had been a nurse for twelve years: she saw scarier things than Jack Deacon every day. She said without rancour, ‘You want to use thumbscrews, you wait till she’s off my ward.’
He tried to look hurt. ‘Staff Nurse French, you know we don’t do things like that.’
He’d forgotten she worked with Charlie Voss’s fiancée. ‘Where was it you lost that monkey wrench again, Superintendent?’
He dropped his chin onto his chest and gave his tie a secret smile. ‘Let’s put it this way. The vaseline must have worked or he’d have needed your help to get it out.’
The nurse left him at the entrance to the ward. Over her shoulder as she went she said, ‘Daniel’s about somewhere.’
It was a bit like having mice in the attic. At first it drives you mad and you try everything to put a stop to it. But when the poison and the traps and the swearing fail, left with nothing else you start coming to terms with it. The noise doesn’t annoy you any less but it doesn’t distress you in the same way. Daniel Hood was the mouse in Deacon’s attic. He no longer felt his whole body clench at the sound of Daniel’s name, but the way his life overlapped with Deacon’s in so many varied and unexpected areas was a constant irritation.
‘Never mind,’ he said with restraint.
Anyone who knew this girl a week ago would have been shocked at the sight of her, her face white and strained, her slender body, that in health looked only fit and toned, so diminished by illness that it barely lifted the sheet off the bed. But when Deacon last saw her she was teetering on the edge of the abyss, and he was surprised how much better she looked today.
He told her who he was, then he told her what he wanted to know. ‘Where did you get the pills, Miss Barker?’
She couldn’t have sat up without the support of the pillows and her voice was wafer-thin. But it seemed her mind was clear enough to understand the question, and even to evade it. ‘I didn’t.’
Deacon breathed heavily at her. ‘We don’t really have to do this, do we? Pretend that you’ve no idea what I’m talking about until I produce the blood-work and we discuss it like intelligent people? I know what you took. I want to know where you got it.’
Some people you can bully, some you can’t. If he’d thought about it rather longer Deacon would have realised he was unlikely to intimidate a girl who threw half-ton horses at five-foot fences for fun. Even lying half-prone in the bed, Alison Barker managed to glare back at him. ‘Superintendent Deacon, watch my lips. I didn’t take any drugs. I know – I’ve been told – they got into me somehow, but I didn’t take them. I didn’t buy them, I don’t know where they came from and I don’t know how they got into my system.’
Deacon sighed. He pulled out the chair recently vacated by Daniel and sat down. ‘Miss Barker, are we back to this “There’s a murderer on the loose business?”
She was no stranger to scepticism. She’d seen the look that was on Deacon’s face now too often to go on being surprised. On the faces of friends and of professionals – people whose job it was to listen, to understand and to help. Some of them policemen. She bared her teeth in a smile that would have been fierce if it hadn’t been so frail. ‘That’s right. He killed my father and now he’s tried to kill me.’
‘That’s what you said when you ran into Daniel’s car,’ Deacon pointed out, not unreasonably.
Alison nodded. ‘I was wrong about that.’
‘Perhaps you’re wrong about this.’
‘You mean, perhaps I spent money I don’t have on drugs I don’t want and took them without noticing?’
One thing was clear: she hadn’t much in the way of brain damage. ‘Then how do you explain it?’ asked Deacon.
‘My food was spiked. It’s the only way.’
‘Who by?’ Deacon hadn’t a lot of time for grammar.
‘Johnny Windham.’
‘The livestock transporter?’
Alison hadn’t expected him to remember. She’d imagined that once the file was stamped No further action recommended, everyone who’d handled it would forget. She nodded.
‘You’ve seen him recently?’
Alison shook her head without lifting it off the pillow. ‘He knows better than to let me see him. He must have broken into the house when I wasn’t there.’
Deacon wondered if she had any idea how foolish she sounded. ‘Miss Barker, when you accused Mr Windham of murdering your father we had a good look at him. We found out exactly where he was the night of the accident. He was in Germany, collecting a lorry-load of horses. He’d been there for thirty-six hours and he stayed there another day. There is no way he could have been involved in your father’s death. Which makes it kind of silly to keep accusing him.’
‘You don’t know him. I do. I know what he’s capable of.’
Deacon wasn’t prepared to go down that road again. He was only here because he’d hoped she could help with his Scram inquiry. If she wasn’t going to, his detective’s instinct was to move on and leave her to the hospital psychiatrist. What stopped him was the outside chance that there was a grain of truth in what she was saying. That she was in danger. Also, Scram had got into her system somehow. Whether he liked it or not, what had happened to her was part of his investigation.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Tell me why you think Windham tried to kill you.’
For a moment she didn’t answer. He felt her eyes assessing him. ‘Because you’ll do something about it? Or because, once I’ve got it off my chest, we can talk about the drugs?’
Deacon suspected Alison Barker had a history of making it hard for people to help or even like her. ‘Because you seem to believe it, and I want to be sure you’re a crank before I bin it.’
Alison gave a little snort with something like a chuckle in it. ‘At least that’s honest.’
‘They say it’s the best policy. Especially, I suppose, when you’re a policeman.’
‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll tell you. But why should you believe me this time when you didn’t three months ago?’
In fact Deacon hadn’t interviewed her himself. Stanley Barker’s death had never seriously looked like a crime. ‘Maybe I won’t,’ he agree
d. ‘But I’m willing to listen, and you’re not going anywhere …’
Dead on cue, the mouse in the attic started to scratch. Daniel came back from the phone. ‘Jack,’ he said warily, keeping his distance.
‘Daniel,’ growled Deacon.
‘Is this official? I can come back later …’
Deacon would have accepted his offer but Alison waved him to the end of her bed. ‘Superintendent Deacon wants to know why I think Johnny Windham wants me dead. I expect you do too.’
It took a moment to organise her thoughts. ‘Don’t suppose I don’t know how this sounds. People I’ve known most of my life won’t talk to me any more. They think my dad’s death somehow turned my head. That’s what Mary thinks.’ She caught Daniel’s eye with her own. ‘She told you as much, didn’t she?’
He didn’t answer. He didn’t make a habit of betraying confidences.
Alison took his silence as consent. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said tiredly, ‘you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. Mary’s been a good friend to me, but I know she thinks I dreamt this up because I needed someone to blame for Dad’s death. But then, she thinks he killed himself. I know better.’
‘What do you think happened?’ asked Deacon, his voice wiped of expression.
‘I think he was murdered,’ said Alison bluntly. ‘If you tell me there was no way Johnny could have done it himself, I believe you; but he was behind it. Dad stopped using him after the problems he caused us, and word got around. Windham Transport ended up in nearly as bad shape as us. He was reduced to local moves and ferrying people to shows and things – which was a come-down for someone who was used to spending half his time in Europe.’ She couldn’t resist a small, vindictive smile.
‘I heard them arguing about it a few days before Dad died. Johnny wanted to carry our horses again so people would think they’d resolved their differences and follow suit. He offered Dad a discount, to help with some of his losses and to bury the hatchet, but Dad wasn’t interested, not at any price. He said he wouldn’t let Johnny carry his horses for free, and if people thought that was because he didn’t trust him that was fine by him.’
Her voice grew hard. ‘I heard him say that, Superintendent, and five days later my father was dead. I don’t much believe in coincidence. I think when Johnny couldn’t get Dad on-side again he settled for shutting him up instead.’
Daniel could see she was tiring herself. She took a moment to rest. ‘I know everyone else thinks it was suicide. But I know he wouldn’t have killed himself. He wouldn’t have left Mary and me knee-deep in debt.’
Deacon wasn’t buying it. ‘Even if you were right, and there’s no earthly reason to suppose you are, why would Windham want to kill you?’
Her answer was disarmingly candid. ‘Because I have a big mouth. Just because I couldn’t get him charged with murder didn’t mean I was going to forget. I made sure everyone I met heard what had happened and whose fault it was. I lost my home and my horses, and Mary nearly lost the business, because Johnny Windham is a lazy, good-for-nothing cheapskate. And I lost my dad because he thought his poxy reputation mattered more than a good man’s life.’
Deacon blinked. ‘You want to explain that?’
‘In this business, reputation is everything. If people buy a horse from us and it works out well, they talk and we get more business. But if they have trouble they don’t just talk, they shout it from the rooftops. This is a word-of-mouth business: dissatisfied customers are bad for a dealer’s reputation. Enough dissatisfied customers can wipe him out.’
‘That’s what happened to Barker & Walbrook?’
‘We lost two horses in transit. We delivered another three that were sick and one of them died. All in the space of two months. After that the yard was like a ghost-town. Nobody was buying from us, nobody was selling to us. The average horse is in our care about a fortnight, some of them just a few days. If we can’t keep them safe till their new owners take delivery we’re doing something wrong. By the end of those two months, I wouldn’t have used us either.’
‘Did you work out where the problem was?’ asked Daniel.
‘Don’t you listen?’ snapped the girl. ‘We were using Windham Transport when we’d have been safer ferrying the horses around in clapped-out old beast-boxes. The guy’s supposed to be a professional. It’s supposed to be a professional operation – we were certainly paying professional prices. And he was delivering us sick and dying horses.’
‘What killed them?’ asked Deacon, becoming interested despite himself
‘Different things. One was a twisted gut. One was a bad reaction to a sedative. Others were blamed on a virus.’
And these things shouldn’t kill horses?’
‘These things kill horses every day, Superintendent. We’d lost horses to every one of them before. What shouldn’t have happened was so many incidents in so short a time, and every one of them involving Windham Transport. It had to be something he was doing, or not doing. He wasn’t cleaning the lorry out properly between loads. He was setting off with horses that were already unwell and should have been put back in their boxes till the vet passed them fit. He wasn’t feeding or watering them when he said he was, or else he was being rough and getting them upset. I don’t know what he was doing, Superintendent Deacon!’ she cried. ‘But I know he was doing something, and because of it our clients lost some good horses and we lost a lot of good clients.’
Deacon nodded. “And – this being a word-of-mouth business – you said so. Loudly and publicly.’
‘Of course I did,’ said Alison fiercely. ‘People thought it was something we were doing. That we were passing off sick animals as sound. That we couldn’t spot when a horse needed a vet, or we were trying to avoid call-out fees. The business was heading down the pan. People we’d had dealings with for years wanted nothing more to do with us. I had to sell my own string to meet the bills.’
She swallowed. ‘When Dad died, people we knew – people who’d respected us – started saying that proved who was to blame, that he’d killed himself rather than face the consequences. I wanted them to know what Johnny Windham had done. It mattered more than anything.’
It might be absurd – Deacon knew it was absurd, Windham hadn’t killed anybody and it wasn’t the sort of thing professional assassins get involved in – but he thought Alison Barker believed what she was saying. ‘And now you think he’s had a go at you. Broken into your house – or rather, a friend’s house, somewhere you don’t usually live – and put the latest designer drug into your cornflakes.’
Her eyes were disappointed. As if, just for a moment, she’d allowed herself to hope she was finally getting a hearing. ‘I knew you wouldn’t believe me.’ She looked at Daniel but Daniel was keeping his thoughts to himself. She shook her head, angrily. ‘If I’m imagining all this, how the hell did I end up overdosed on drugs?’
Deacon nodded. ‘Which was the first question I asked you.’
Alison’s lip curled. She wasn’t a pretty girl, except that most people – boys and girls – look pretty good at twenty-two. But there was character in her narrow face, a kind of mental toughness. ‘Tell you what, Mr Deacon. Go to my house – my friend’s house in The Ginnell. Take samples from all the food packages. And when you find traces of your drug, come back here and we’ll talk some more.’
Though Detective Superintendent Deacon was not in the habit of allowing himself to be dismissed, he saw no point in remaining longer. He wasn’t going to get the answers he wanted from her. Either she didn’t know where she’d come by the Scram or she wasn’t telling. He nodded. ‘All right.’
Surprised, Daniel watched the big man walk down the ward and out of sight. Then he looked back at Alison. ‘Will he find something?’
She shrugged. ‘Will he look?’
Daniel considered. ‘Yes. He won’t want to risk missing something that might be significant.’
‘Not because he believed every word I said, then,’ the girl said sourly.
‘He’s a policeman,’ said Daniel apologetically. ‘I don’t think he sees it as his job to believe or not to believe what he’s told. He’ll try to find proof.’
She went on looking at him in that disconcertingly direct way she had. ‘You’re not a policeman.’
He smiled. ‘No. I teach maths.’
‘Do you believe me?’
It was a very simple question. There were only two, possibly three, answers. Still he hesitated. ‘The honest truth?’
‘It’s the only kind that’s worth a damn.’
‘Then yes. Yes, I rather think I do.’
He’d knocked her down, he’d seen her afraid for her life, he’d seen her waking in a strange place with no idea what she was doing there or what had happened to her. For the first time he saw tears in her eyes. ‘Thank God,’ she whispered.
He went to offer her a handkerchief. Instead she took his hand in both of hers and held it as if she’d never let go. ‘Thank God,’ she said again; and then again. ‘Thank God.’
Daniel was right. There was something about Alison Barker that made Deacon want to get to the bottom of her story. Partly because, if by any chance what she was telling him was the truth, the girl had shown courage and Deacon admired courage. And partly because if he found illegal substances in her biscuit barrel it would be a lead into the Scram network which he hadn’t had before. He’d need to take another, closer look at Windham Transport.
So as soon as he left the hospital Deacon had Billy Mills – until his retirement Sergeant Mills, now civilian Scenes of Crime Officer Mr William Mills – head over to the house in The Ginnell with his satchel full of sample bottles.
It would be tomorrow, and probably late tomorrow, before the samples came back with a full-spectrum analysis for all likely narcotics, hallucinogens, amphetamines and barbiturates. But Deacon knew that Billy Mills, whose experience of places where people had done unpleasant things to one another was unrivalled, would have a fair idea what to expect from the state he found the place in. He had a nose for a crime scene as good as a sniffer dog’s. As soon as he got back to Battle Alley Deacon called him to his office.
