by Jo Bannister
Daniel pulled up his shirt gingerly to examine the brace of semicircular imprints on his middle. ‘How do you know if you’ve cracked a rib?’
‘You can’t breathe well enough to talk about it,’ said Brodie briskly.
‘Is everybody all right?’ asked Deacon, moving round the little clusters of people. ‘Is anyone hurt? Do we need an ambulance? Daniel?’
‘I’m fine,’ said Daniel — adding, sotto voce and with a sidelong glance at Brodie, ‘Apparently.’
‘Miss Barker?’
‘Me too.’
‘What about the pony? Do we need a vet?’
‘Yes. I don’t think she’s burnt, at least not seriously, but she’ll be in shock — she’ll need fluids. We’ll need transport for her too.’
He nodded and made the calls. He also summoned a fire engine, though he doubted it would arrive in time to save the van which was now ablaze from breast-bar to breaching. Only once help was on its way did he get round to checking what he thought he already knew. ‘I don’t suppose anybody got a shot into the bastard who did this?’
A chorus of shaking heads all round. No one had fired at all. The only glimpse anyone had had of him was the leaping figure silhouetted against the flames. After that there was no time to look for him.
‘Daniel. You spent a couple of hours with this guy Kant. What can you tell me about him?’
‘He’s the vet, the one with access to the tranquillizer. We were right about how they were doing it. He put the packages into the pony in Belgium, and they’d just come out the other end when you people announced your arrival with a marching band.’
Ally blushed, her cheeks bright as the flames. ‘That was me. Sorry.’
‘Don’t worry, you redeemed yourself.’ Daniel grinned, and she beamed back.
Deacon dragged them back to the matter at hand. ‘So he got what he was waiting for and he left. Where would he go?’
‘To the factory, I think. He was still intending to deliver the stuff. But that was before you guys showed up. Maybe by now he’s on his way home by the shortest route.’
Deacon thought about what Kant had already done, about what Windham had said about him. ‘And leave the job unfinished? When he’s got a rare and valuable chemical in his pocket? When to bring in another consignment he’d have to face Customs again? I don’t think so. He’ll do what he said – make for the factory. This could be their last batch of Scram for a while: they’re not going to waste it.’ He turned expectantly towards Daniel.
‘You’re going to ask me where the factory is, aren’t you?’ guessed Daniel ruefully. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know. He didn’t volunteer the information, and I was too scared to press him.’
Deacon gave a gruff little chuckle. ‘Don’t worry about it. I would have been too.’
Daniel appreciated his kindness, unexpected as it was, but he didn’t believe him for a moment. ‘He said if I stopped annoying him he’d let me go. I don’t know if he meant it. He might have done, because he didn’t tell me anything that you wouldn’t already know or could guess. Except …’ And then he stopped.
‘What?’ asked Deacon.
Watching him, Brodie knew he was struggling with something. Her voice was soft. ‘What is it, Daniel?’
On reflection he didn’t see why he shouldn’t come straight out with it. It was, after all, what the girl had thought all along, and been told wasn’t possible. Told, in essence, to go away and come to terms with the fact that she hadn’t lost her father, he’d left her. In time she’d be glad to know that he’d had no choice. ‘He said — he gave me to understand – that they killed Stanley Barker.’
Ally took a breath so sharp it sounded like ice cracking.
Deacon pursed his lips reflectively. ‘Did he indeed? That was supposed to have been investigated.’
‘It was important to them that it looked like an accident,’ Brodie said simply.
Deacon sniffed. ‘It seems we owe you an apology, Miss Barker. So it was Windham after all? How the hell did he manufacture an alibi that put him on another landmass?’
Daniel shook his head, sprinkling ashes of burnt straw like dandruff. ‘I don’t think he did. At least, that’s what the vet – Kant? — said. He said it wasn’t him either. Which means someone else is involved.’
So Voss had been right and he had been wrong. With Kant extracting supplies of the tranquillizer in Germany and Windham transporting it to England, they’d needed a third man to make the pills. Deacon caught himself pretending to have thought so all along: the scowl was for his childishness. ‘I suppose, if we find the factory we find the third man. But now we’ve lost Kant, where do we look for the factory?’
‘Windham knows,’ suggested Brodie in a low voice.
Deacon chuckled darkly. ‘What, you think I’m going to take him behind the bicycle sheds and find out? It doesn’t work that way, Brodie. Even playing by my rules it doesn’t work that way.’
‘He told you about Kant. And about this place.’
‘He told us what he had to when the alternative was becoming an accessory to murder. He wasn’t turning Queen’s Evidence – the only one he was trying to help was himself. Now Daniel’s safe he’ll clam up again.’
‘He’s already an accessory to murder,’ said Ally tightly. It was the first thing she’d managed to say since Daniel’s revelation. ‘My dad’s. If this other guy killed him, why wouldn’t he say so?’
‘Because he doesn’t have to,’ Brodie said patiently. ‘He can prove that he didn’t kill your father. He can afford to wait and see how much the police have or manage to get. Of course he’s implicated – we know it, and he knows we know it. It may come down to what can be proved. He may claim he was just driving the lorry: where he drove it, and what was in it, was down to Kant. That he never knew what he was carrying.’
‘Nobody’s going to believe that!’ exclaimed Alison in amazement.
‘No, they’re not,’ agreed Deacon. ‘But proving the extent of his involvement may be difficult if that’s how he plays it. His story may be that he was peripheral to the operation, he wasn’t trusted with all the details. That he doesn’t know who else was involved, or where the factory is, or anything except that he was told to hold onto particular animals for two or three days and then someone he didn’t know came and mucked out their stables for him. Of course the jury won’t believe him. But they’ll ask me to prove that he was in it up to his neck, and I’m not sure that I can.’
‘You mean they’ve beaten us?’ Brodie was staring him straight in the face. ‘You mean, after all we’ve done, all we’ve been through – all right, all Daniel’s been through – they’ve achieved exactly what they set out to achieve: they’ve smuggled another consignment of tranquillizer in from Germany and right now it’s on its way to their factory to be turned into Scram, and nothing we’ve done has stopped them or even slowed them up?’
‘Welcome to my world,’ sighed Deacon wearily. ‘We’ve got a word for operations like this.’
‘What word?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s not a good out-loud word.’
She let it pass. ‘Roadblocks?’
‘He’s not on the road. He’s travelling across country, with everything he needs in his coat pocket. If it takes him two days to reach the factory, that’s no problem to him. He’ll do everything necessary to stay out of sight – not exactly hindered by the fact that there’s still nine hours of darkness ahead.’
‘Bloodhounds, then?’
‘Went out with deerstalker hats and really big magnifying glasses.’
‘There must be somethingwe can do!’
‘There is. I can wrap up here and start interviewing Windham. Miss Barker, I’d like you to stay with the pony until the vet arrives, but after that the three of you can go home. Take my car, someone’ll give me a lift.’ Then he looked around him. The fire was already dying back, letting in the chill of the night. ‘Has anybody seen my coat?’
The on-call vet agreed with A
lison’s assessment. Brodie was the tallest: he had her hold the bottle above her head as he ran liquid into the pony’s veins. There was some singeing to the coat but no burns to the skin. He administered a sedative, got a warm rug onto her and loaded her – with surprisingly little resistance, in view of what had happened last time she was on a box – into the trailer that arrived soon after he did. The driver asked Deacon for a destination.
For a moment Deacon was nonplussed. He’d have known what to do with a car which had been used to smuggle drugs, but you can hardly book a pony into a police garage. ‘Brodie, where were you going to have this thing delivered?’
‘Appletree Farm, in Cheyne Warren,’ she replied. ‘But I don’t know if he’ll be able to take it tonight. Windham was supposed to keep it for three days first. Dieter may not have a stable ready.’
Deacon chucked his head and snorted, a bit like an irritable horse himself. ‘Which kind of raises another point, doesn’t it? If Windham has horses in his yard, do we need to make arrangements for them now we’ve arrested him? Or does he have a wife or a partner to look after them?’ He was looking at Ally.
She shook her head. ‘He lives alone. But he’s abroad with the lorry a lot – he has a couple of local girls coming in to feed and exercise.’
‘OK. So we could take the pony there.’
‘There won’t be anyone there in the middle of the night. I could go with her and get her settled in – put down a bed and make up a meal that’d hold her until the girls show up around eight – but I imagine the yard’s locked up.’
Which wasn’t what Deacon wanted to hear. ‘Well, I can’t put it in the Evidence Locker until morning. Will somebody offer me a sensible alternative?’
So Ally did. ‘Why don’t we take it to Peyton Parvo? I expect Mary’s in, but if she isn’t I have a set of keys – I can do everything that’s necessary.’
It was as good a solution as Deacon could have hoped for. ‘Do it.’ He thought a little longer. ‘I don’t suppose it’s in any danger now? I shouldn’t post a guard on it for fear of someone turning up to …’ He wasn’t quite sure what, let the sentence hang around until it faded.
Ally smiled. ‘What, silence it? Stop it attending an identity parade, prevent it from taking the witness box? I don’t think so, Mr Deacon. It’s only a pony. It stopped being of any value to anyone the moment it took a million dollar dump.’
He was watching her with half a smile on his lips. He’d misjudged Alison Barker in a number of different ways, but this casual indifference wasn’t fooling him. ‘Only a pony? So why did you risk your neck for it?’
She hadn’t really an answer. ‘It was Daniel’s idea.’
‘It was Daniel’s idea that you risk your neck in a burning horse-box while he watched?’
‘Don’t be silly!’
‘So it was Daniel’s idea to risk his neck in a burning horse-box, and your idea to help him.’
She couldn’t argue with that. ‘I suppose.’
He shook his head, and if there was disbelief in his gaze there was also respect. ‘What is it with women and horses? I know that was a cheap one, but even a better one wouldn’t have been worth as much as a family car. You wouldn’t have risked being burnt to save a car!’
The girl laughed out loud. ‘Of course not. A horse is a living creature. It has a value quite apart from what someone might be prepared to pay for it. An animal’s life is cheap, but not to the animal — it’s the only one it has. If you want them, you owe it to them – or perhaps not even to them but to whoever’s keeping score – that there’s something in it for them. You look after them. You treat them decently. You don’t watch them burn if there’s something you can do about it.’
Deacon went on regarding her for a moment – dirty, soot-stained, her hair tangled in her face. ‘Your father teach you that?’ She nodded. ‘I’d have liked your father.’
She nodded. ‘A lot of people did. He was a decent man, a man with a lot of friends. Right up to the moment that he was found face-down in a pond, at which point all the people who’d liked him, all his friends, and all the professionals whose job it was to find out what happened to him, decided he was actually a bit of a coward who’d commit suicide rather than deal with failure. A lot of people let him down, Mr Deacon. The police among them.’
He wasn’t a man who took criticism graciously, least of all from members of the public who – this was the irony – he would have given his life to protect. Brodie held her breath.
But Deacon didn’t jump down Ally’s throat. ‘Yes. But we’re not done yet.’
Alison travelled with the pony while Brodie drove Deacon’s car. Daniel sat so quietly beside her she wondered what he was thinking. Then she realised he wasn’t thinking – he was asleep.
He woke with a start as they left the main road and headed into the Three Downs. Are you all right?’ asked Brodie.
For a second he seemed not to know where he was. Then he let out a ragged sigh. ‘Fine.’
‘Really?’
He smiled at her. His smile, coming out of a frankly homely face, still did things to the backs of her knees. ‘I think so. It got a bit hairy for a while there, but it’s over now.’
‘He didn’t hurt you?’
‘He knocked me out. I’ve still got wool where my brain ought to be. But no – for a drug-smuggler and accessory to murder, he was a civilised man.’
Brodie thought a little while. Then she said, ‘You do know what you did back there?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Daniel tiredly. ‘I’ve got the singed eyebrows to prove it.’
‘Seriously. You walked into a fire.’
He shook his yellow head. ‘That wasn’t the clever part. The clever part was walking back out again.’
She stopped the car and put on the interior light so she could look at him properly. ‘I’m not sure either was particularly clever. Clever isn’t the issue. The point is, you managed to do it. Six months ago you couldn’t have done. Six months ago you couldn’t have toasted marshmallows over a bonfire.’
He shrugged his narrow shoulders awkwardly. ‘With marshmallows you have a choice. When someone – something — something alive is in pain, you don’t. You do what has to be done. That’s all it was.’
But Brodie knew better. ‘Six months ago you couldn’t have done what you did tonight if it had been me trapped in a burning trailer! You’d have wanted to, you’d have tried to, but you couldn’t have done it. I don’t think you realise how much better you are these days. How much stronger.’
He hadn’t given it any thought. Now he did he had to concede she was right, and a faint smugness crept into his smile. ‘Maybe I’ll end up working as a fireman.’
‘Fireman be damned. Maybe you’ll end up working as a teacher.’
For the first time in two years it was possible to contemplate. He enjoyed his tutoring and it paid the bills, but it wasn’t what he’d wanted to do since childhood, what he’d trained for, what he’d been good at. Last time he tried to return to the classroom the panic attacks had unmanned him. Now there seemed a chance that next time he tried it might go better.
It was gone midnight when the horse-box turned into Barker & Walbrook’s yard in Peyton Parvo. There were no lights showing. Alison disappeared around a corner and a moment later three big lamps high on the walls came on orange and started brightening first to pink and then to white. She returned to the car. ‘Stay here a minute. I’ll let Mary know what’s happening, then I’ll sort out a stable.’
Another minute and a light came on in the flat above the office. The visitors waited while Mary Walbrook climbed into her working clothes and then she and Ally set to with bales of straw and feed buckets and hay-nets. In no time Gretl was installed in her stable, a little drowsy from the sedative but essentially unharmed by either her long journey or her close shave.
In a fit of largesse Brodie wrote a cheque for the transport. She thought she’d be able to claim it back from Deacon, but if not it was probably
the least she could do to make up for the wasted effort of, so it seemed, half the police on the South Coast. It had been an expensive debacle, always one bee short of a sting.
When the trailer had left, the four of them stood at the stable door watching Gretl eat.
‘Let me get this right,’ said Mary. ‘They were smuggling drugs inside her?’
Daniel nodded. ‘In rubber canisters about so big.’ He spread the fingers of one hand.
‘How many?’
‘Three. At least, three came out the other end, and he seemed satisfied with that.’
‘He?’
‘Kant. The vet who was working with Windham.’
The woman shook her head bemusedly. ‘I never heard the like of it. I wonder how long that had been going on?’
‘As long as we were getting sick and dead horses from Johnny Windham,’ Ally said bitterly.
Understanding dawned. ‘You think that’s why …’
‘Some of the canisters leaked,’ said the girl shortly, ‘and some of them split open. When the horse got a trickle of tranquillizer into its gut it got sick. When it got the whole load it died.’
‘But the vet blamed a virus.’ Mary thought about that. ‘Of course, they always blame a virus if they don’t know what’s going on. And we never suspected …’
‘You never suspected,’ said Alison. ‘Dad did. That’s why they killed him.’
Mary put an arm around her shoulders. ‘Alison, you know what the police said …’
‘Actually,’ said Brodie, ‘Ally’s right. She was right all along, only no one was willing to listen. It seems Stanley got suspicious about the sick horses and either he worked it out or he was so close to doing that they had to shut him up. Kant as good as said so.’
Mary Walbrook stared hard at Daniel. ‘Is that true? He told you they killed Stanley?’
Daniel nodded. ‘Not in so many words. But that was his meaning, yes. He wanted me to know.’
‘Why?’
