Requiem for a Dealer

by Jo Bannister

  ‘You have them in view?’ asked Deacon anxiously.

  ‘Well, no. The lorry’s on the cargo deck. But it’s not going anywhere. He won’t be able to move until everything off-loads in Dover.’

  Deacon looked for the flaw in that but couldn’t see one. ‘Fair enough. Customs are standing by. They’ll pull him over as soon as he clears the ramp and impound his load. They’ve organised lairage and there’s a vet on call to hurry things along. I suppose we are sure there’s something in there to find?’

  ‘I don’t know why he’d have stopped near Antwerp otherwise. There was no room on the lorry for another horse. And he was in there just about the time we were told it would take. I can’t vouch for it, sir, I didn’t see him shove something down that pony’s throat. But he’s doing everything we anticipated he’d do, which probably means he’s up to what we think he’s up to.’

  ‘He hasn’t made you?’

  ‘I don’t see how he could have. And surely if he had he wouldn’t have boarded the ferry. It’s too late to change his mind now. We have him.’

  Deacon and Voss were in position half an hour before the ferry was due to dock. Cross-channel ferries are not known for running early, and even if this one raced in on a following wind Customs were ready. They didn’t need Dimmock’s senior detective telling them how to do their job. But Deacon was bad at delegating even to his own officers. He started every day with the suspicion that the sun might not rise if he wasn’t awake to supervise it.

  So he sent Voss to watch the foot-passengers disembarking – just in case, he said. He didn’t expect Windham to abandon his lorry and come ashore as part of a Lacemakers’ Guild day-trip to Bruges, but just in case that instinct for self-preservation which is keen in all living things and honed to a fine edge in drug-smugglers should knee him in the groin and tell him to drop everything and get out. Deacon himself took up a position at the ramp from where he could see the vehicles being ushered off the ship.

  He saw Windham’s lorry emerge from the gloom of the cargo deck, the tall red vehicle unmistakable long before the name emblazoned across its white flashes could be read. There were still lorries all around it. Even if he’d wanted to make a dash for it – and there are good reasons why The Italian Job was filmed with Minis rather than horse-boxes – it was a physical impossibility. When the Customs officer stepped out in front of him he had only two choices: stop, or run the man down and then stop. He stopped.

  It was not, after all, the first time he’d been in this position. He’d got away with it before, must confidently have expected to get away with it again. He must have thought that all he stood to lose was time. And indeed, as things stood at this moment, whatever Deacon believed and however well the jigsaw seemed to fit together, that might be all he stood to lose. Daniel’s leap of intuition might have been wrong.

  Jack Deacon allowed himself a little inward grin. He wasn’t one of the world’s great philosophers, but actually he knew himself better than most people gave him credit for. If this worked it would be a successful police operation. If it didn’t it would be because Daniel Hood was mistaken.

  Soon after the red lorry was pulled aside a silver car came up the ramp and followed it into the Customs shed. Deacon hurried to meet it.

  He told himself afterwards that it wouldn’t have made any difference if he’d stayed where he was, watching everything that came off that ferry. If he’d even noticed the white van, which among so many he might not have done, he wouldn’t have asked himself what it was carrying or where it was going. So far as he knew, so far as anyone involved in the investigation knew, it was a red lorry they were after, not a white van.

  And there it was, surrounded by Customs officers by the time he got there. One of them was talking to the driver. Brodie and Jill Meadows abandoned rather than parked their car and came over to watch the action. They all arrived beside the lorry in more or less the same moment.

  After the Customs officers had inspected his documents they asked Windham to drop the ramp. He climbed down with just a hint of exasperation in his manner. ‘You do know I’ve got a lorry full of horses?’

  ‘We’ll take care of them,’ promised the officer.

  Windham shrugged and went to the back of his lorry. The ramp was secured by a complicated system of bolts that slid up and sideways. He manoeuvred them out of their keepers and lowered the ramp, and pulled aside the two gates that enclosed the last stall.

  And the stall was empty.

  Brodie stared at it open-mouthed. She knew that Gretl had been there: she’d seen the video footage of the pony being loaded. Onto this lorry, into that stall. Now there was just some straw on the floor and a hay-net.

  Windham noticed her standing among the on-lookers. ‘Mrs Farrell?’ He managed to sound surprised. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you here. But I was going to call you. I’m afraid I had to leave your pony behind. She wasn’t very well. I was a bit uneasy about her coming through Belgium, so I tracked down a local vet and took her to his place. He’s holding onto her for a few days. It’s probably nothing serious but I couldn’t risk travelling her any further. As soon as I’m done here we’ll phone him, ask how she is. All right?’

  By eight o’clock the last of Daniel’s students had packed away their maths books and headed for home, their footsteps chiming on the shingle beach, their laughter drifting back to him on the wind. He sighed and shut the door.

  He was a good teacher. He was good at breaking down the terror barrier that is all that stands between most people and the ability to do everyday maths. He took students who couldn’t do long division and got them through their GCSEs. But what he couldn’t seem to do was share with them the beauty of the subject.

  To Daniel, mathematics was like a gallery full of Old Masters, a riot of colour and meaning, a treat for the intellect, a world of possibilities that got his blood flowing and his ears singing. But he could never explain that well enough that his students believed him, and were inspired to struggle on through the murky complexities until the glorious dawn burst upon them. He believed that it was his fault, that he was failing them. He didn’t know how he could call himself a teacher if he couldn’t get his students to see what was, to him, as plain as day.

  But then, they didn’t come to him for a life-altering experience. They came because they needed to pass maths in order to study what really interested them, and as soon as they reached the required standard they would throw their books in the back of a cupboard and never open them again. That wasn’t failure. He’d done what they needed him to do. So what if they were left unmoved by the wonders of fractal geometry? Even at his most buoyant, Daniel never felt that his own life had been such a resounding success he should encourage others to emulate it. Most people, especially teenagers, had more important things to think about than the square root of minus one. They had friends to meet, careers to choose, partners to find, families to build. They had lives to lead that would quickly reveal his for what it was: half Greek tragedy, half Whitehall farce. They didn’t need his pity or his regrets. They probably thought he needed theirs.

  In fact, he reflected, they would be wrong. He liked his life. Most of it, for most of the time, which was probably all that most people could say. Maybe it was childish but he got a real buzz out of fractal geometry. Sometimes he wished he knew a bit less about maths and a bit more about people, so that when he was alone he could be sure it was from choice. But one thing he knew for sure was that the worst forms of loneliness have nothing to do with being alone.

  When the sound of laughter had faded he went downstairs and tapped on Alison’s door. His odd little house had been more upside-down than ever since the rebuild. He’d taken the opportunity to incorporate the ground-floor boathouse into the living accommodation, which gave him two extra rooms. But he liked living above the heads of those walking on the beach, so he used the new space as a study and a spare room. It meant guests traipsing upstairs if they wanted a bath, but fortunately there weren’t many
of them and they never stayed long.

  There was no reply from inside. He tapped a little louder and then opened the door a crack. ‘Ally?’

  She was there. She was asleep. Daniel listened to her breathing for a moment but it was perfectly normal, even and relaxed. He left her rolled up in her duvet like a hibernating dormouse, turned off the bedside light and shut the door.

  Which left him with an evening with no commitments in it. He had things he should be doing. Boring, everyday things like housework and laundry and defrosting the fridge, all the things that tended to get neglected when Brodie was around and there were more interesting demands on his time. She had come to fill his life, to an extent he could hardly explain and in ways that would have surprised her had he tried. His ear was always half-cocked for the sound of her heels on his iron staircase. His world had been much simpler before she came into it, but he never wanted it back.

  But a glance out of the window told him what he already knew instinctively: it was a clear night. And a clear night sky always took precedence over housework. Daniel hated dirt and wouldn’t live in squalor, but he knew from experience he could clean the house from top to bottom in an hour once the stars had clouded over. He took the telescope out of its corner and set it up on the gallery, his fingers working on autopilot, too accustomed to the job to need the guidance of his eyes. Instead he looked around the sky, locating the objects of his current interest. He’d been taking some measurements of the Cepheid variables. It wasn’t cutting-edge astronomy, there were no Nobel Prizes to be won doing it, but it was a harmless way to pass a happy hour on a cloudless night.

  He was comparing Mira Ceti, midway through its forty-seven week period, to a couple of sixth magnitude stars close by when he heard footsteps on the shingle below and someone called his name. He groped for his glasses – it was easier to use the telescope without them and there was more than enough magnification to compensate – and waited for the imprint of the stars to fade from his retinae. ‘Up here.’

  A man was halfway up the steps. There was just enough backwash from the street lamps on the Promenade to pick out the clipboard in his hand. ‘I’ve got a delivery for you. I’m going to need a signature, and also somewhere to put it.’ He spoke good colloquial English with a European accent.

  A white van was parked at the top of the beach. Daniel frowned. He wasn’t expecting anything. ‘What is it?’

  ‘A pony. Forgive me,’ added the driver, ‘but this does not appear to be a farm.’

  ‘No,’ said Daniel, stupidly, aware something had gone wrong and trying to work out what it was, ‘it’s a beach. You weren’t supposed to bring it here.’

  ‘You are Daniel Hood?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then it’s your pony.’

  Daniel couldn’t argue with that. He’d agreed, however reluctantly, to let Brodie name him as her client which meant that, technically, the carrier was right. It was no use trying to explain to the man that (a) he was supposed to be an Englishman called Windham and (b) he was never meant to get this far – he should have been arrested by Customs at Dover. Daniel didn’t know what it meant that that hadn’t happened: a change of plan Brodie hadn’t thought to mention to him or a major cockup that she wasn’t even aware of yet. Either way, the man with the clipboard seemed blissfully unaware he should have been talking to his lawyer by now.

  Daniel tried to think. ‘A stable’s been rented for it in Cheyne Warren. Can you take it there?’

  The man shook his head regretfully. ‘I cannot take it any further – I am out of hours. I must unload it. It’s a nice quiet pony – you could tie it to the railing until morning.’ He turned and began crunching up the beach to his van.

  ‘I’m not tying it to my house!’ exclaimed Daniel indignantly. ‘It’s a pony, for God’s sake – it needs feeding, watering. Hang on a minute, will you? There must be someone we can call to sort this out. Your boss?’ He trotted up the shingle in pursuit, determined the man wasn’t dumping a pony on him when he had nowhere to put it, no way of moving it and twelve hours of darkness ahead.

  The man shrugged without breaking his stride. ‘You can call my boss on the cab phone. All I know is, I cannot take it any further when I’m out of hours. This is where I was told to bring it. You should not have said to bring it here if you wanted it somewhere else.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ insisted Daniel. ‘There’s been some kind of a mix-up. For one thing, Mr Windham was supposed to keep it at his place for three days – quarantine or something. I think you must have misunderstood your instructions. Look, get him on the phone, will you, and let me talk to him.’

  ‘Very well.’ The phone was on a curly cord: he lifted it down and dialled. Then he held it out for Daniel to hear. ‘We must wait a moment – the number is engaged.’ An idea occurred to him and his face brightened. ‘Would you like to see your pony while we wait?’

  ‘We’re not unpacking it.’ Daniel was fairly sure that wasn’t the right word.

  ‘You can see it from the groom’s door.’ The driver opened a small door in the side of the lorry and stood back.

  There was a lamp on inside. A smell like flowers and sweat – and more pleasant than that probably sounds – spilled out along with the light. Daniel found himself studying an animal the same colour as the hay it was eating, with curious dark eyes and warm breath that hung on the air.

  He found himself smiling. ‘Isn’t she pretty?’ he said – proving, if any proof were needed, that he had Nelson’s eye for a horse. He reached up an uncertain hand and the pony bathed it in her breath.

  What happened then was hard to explain. It was so quick, so unexpected, that he pretty well missed it. The world stopped for a second, like a skipped heartbeat, then flipped over, and then began settling gently around him like snowfall. For some reason he was sitting on the kerb beside the white van, with his head bowed and slow drops like dark tears falling in his lap. He thought, ‘Blood …’ but couldn’t organise his brain enough to take the next step and work out what that meant.

  It wouldn’t have made much difference if he had. He was sitting on the kerb because he couldn’t stand, and he still couldn’t have stood if the man had been armed with a Kalashnikov rather than a brass-handled walking stick. His consciousness was fading as slowly but inexorably as a winter sunset.

  Before he passed out entirely the driver lifted him to his feet and pushed him through the little door in the side of the van. Daniel’s body was as slack as a length of well-chewed string: when the man released him he sprawled in the straw. The driver picked up his feet and pushed them inside. Then he closed the door, got back in his cab and drove off.

  Chapter Nineteen

  People whose experience of the world comes largely through a television screen must think that human consciousness is a little like an electric lightbulb. Turn off the power and you’re asleep; and when somebody flicks the switch again, instantly you’re awake. Awake, hell – five minutes later you’re off shooting Liberty Valance.

  In fact it’s not like that. Human consciousness is not a power circuit such as an electrician would recognise. There is no switch. The traditional way of taking it off-line is to inflict the kind of blunt trauma that causes brain damage. With a brass-handled walking stick, for instance.

  And while brains can be surprisingly resilient and survive, even recover from, damage that would scramble a computer irreparably, they don’t just shrug it off and get back to work as if nothing had happened. There’s a half-lit wasteland between unconsciousness and being fully aware in which the mind wanders, stumbling and confused, as it tries to work out where the world went.

  That wasteland was where Daniel found himself now: with enough self-awareness to know that something bad had happened but insufficient command of his senses to work out what.

  The first faculty to firm up was his hearing. He could hear an engine close by – so close it rumbled up at him through the very floor. Not a car engine, too rough and deep, but still more
like that than anything else. Also, the floor was too close and shaking too much. It was on the move, and he was lying on it.

  Nor was he alone. He could hear someone else moving softly nearby. An unhurried rustling sound, the occasional dull thud, and a slow rhythmic grinding that was almost soporific. Nothing threatening but all of it alien. By degrees his aching brain put it together. The pony: standing in straw, occasionally shifting its weight from one foot to another, chewing away at its hay-net with the methodical application of an animal that likes to spend sixteen hours a day eating.

  The image of the pony coalescing pixel by pixel in his mind somehow kick-started his vision – encouraged his eyes to report in. There was light in here, and colours, even if most of them were shades of brown. Shapes were less distinct, at least until his groping fingers located his glasses lying in the straw beside him and returned them to where they could do some good.

  Then the rumbling little world around him gained some dimensions that helped him identify it. It was a horse-box, en route to God knows where. He and the blonde pony were the only passengers.

  At that point he remembered the man with the clipboard. ‘Do you want a look at your pony?’ ‘Isn’t she pretty?’ Then … He didn’t know what had happened then. He knew something had taken him down – not so much pain, which takes longer to cut in than consciousness takes to fade, more the terrible sick feeling of something dreadfully amiss. Confusion, alarm. The slow falling. He didn’t remember how he got in here but he could guess. He’d made the classic mistake of turning his back on someone he should have watched like a hawk, and his reward had been the reward for trusting souls since the year dot: a brisk clip behind the ear with a blunt instrument.

  And now he’d been kidnapped? He couldn’t imagine why. That might have been the concussion but he didn’t actually think so. He assumed this development was connected with Brodie’s trip to Germany, but even if the man in the cab was a drug-runner there was nothing Daniel could tell him. Not with a gun pressed to his temple, not under torture. A spasm of primitive fear wound through his gut like a parasite. Having no useful information wouldn’t save him if no one believed him. It hadn’t before.