by Jo Bannister
‘To scare the living daylights out of me,’ said Daniel honestly. ‘Got to say, it worked.’
But Mary was looking at Alison. ‘Ally – I don’t know how to apologise. I thought it was just the grief talking. I thought you were looking for a conspiracy because the truth hurt too much. I am desperately sorry. You had the right to expect better from me.
The girl linked an arm through hers, hugging it. ‘It’s all right. It was a reasonable thing to think. You were kind to me, and maybe that mattered more than believing me.’
‘But the rest of it … They tried to kill you. And still we kept telling you — I kept telling you – you were making it up.’ Her voice was hollow with regret. ‘I can’t imagine how that must have made you feel.’
The girl chuckled. ‘Pretty crappy. But it’s over now. I suppose.’ She looked questioningly at Brodie. ‘Or will it all start again as soon as the dust has settled?’
Brodie pulled a face. ‘I can tell you what you want to hear, or I can tell you the truth.’
‘The truth.’
‘Yes, it’ll happen again. Someone else will produce the same drug by the same means and smuggle it in the same way. There are enough horses travelling between Britain and Europe, and more than enough profit in the equation, that someone will try to make it work where Kant and Windham failed. Maybe the German authorities will be able to tighten up access to the tranquillizer, but it’s a legitimate drug – you can’t expect them to take it off the market because some acid-heads in England are getting high on the stuff.’
‘So what did we achieve?’ asked Alison softly.
‘It’ll be someone else. Not Kant and not Windham. Kant’ll be on the run, because if he goes home the police will be waiting for him. He won’t be able to practice, and if he can’t practice he can’t get hold of the tranquillizer. We’ve put him out of business. And we’ve put Windham behind bars. That’s what you set out to do, and you’ve done it.’
‘For taking a backhander to look the other way.’ She sounded at once angry and disconsolate. ‘It isn’t enough.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ agreed Brodie. ‘It won’t be enough for Jack either. He doesn’t want to promise you something he’s not sure he can deliver, but he’ll do everything in his power – and probably some things beyond his powers – to bring Windham to justice. For drug-smuggling, and for complicity in your father’s murder. Even if he didn’t push him in the pond, he had common cause with whoever did and Jack’ll prove it.’
The girl nodded and looked away. ‘So I may never know who killed my father. I know why – we all know why now, no one’s going to go on thinking it was the act of a coward, and that’s worth having. But if it wasn’t Windham and it wasn’t Kant then it was the third man, and we don’t know who that is. What if we never know? The chances are that, when somebody finds a fresh supply of that tranquillizer and sets about manufacturing Scram again, it’ll be him. The man who murdered my father. And it’s probably someone I know.’
Brodie wished she could tell her she was wrong. But she couldn’t.
She caught Daniel yawning. She’d had a long day but his had been even more trying. ‘Come on, it’s time I got you home. Ally, are you coming or are you going to stay here?’
‘I’ll stay here, bring Mary up to date on all the details. If that’s OK?’
‘Of course,’ said Mary Walbrook. ‘Listen, this changes things. If your father died trying to protect this business, you’re entitled to more than if he’d given up on it. We’re going to have to talk that through, with solicitors if you want. I never wanted to deprive you of anything that was fairly yours.’
‘I know that,’ said Alison Barker quietly. ‘I always knew it. Don’t worry: you’re not losing equity, you’re gaining a partner.’
Brodie took Daniel by the shoulders and steered him towards the car. ‘Come on, PyroMan, before your spark goes out.’
He was asleep before she reached the road.
Twenty minutes later, as the lights of Dimmock hove into sight over the last swell of the Downs, he was awake again. Brodie was aware of him stirring beside her, lifting his head as if it was heavy, hauling himself out of his slump. ‘Nearly home,’ she said.
Under the fringe of bright hair his forehead was creased. His lips formed a sort of question mark. ‘Brodie,’ he said uncertainly, ‘stop the car.’
‘Feeling sick?’ she asked sympathetically, doing as he asked. ‘It’s just reaction.’
But he made no move to get out, just sat there knitting his brows, puzzling away in the depths of his intelligent light grey eyes. He shook his head slowly. ‘Something’s wrong.’
‘What sort of something?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘OK.’ Brodie Farrell wasn’t the most patient woman on the planet so it wasn’t simple kindness keeping the sarcasm from her voice. She was giving him room to do what he did best – think — and keeping an open mind while he did it.
Perhaps it was that open-mindedness, that state of receptivity that she reserved for Daniel and almost no one else, that occasionally allowed what he was thinking to resonate in her own brain and give the impression to outsiders that she was psychic. It irritated the hell out of Deacon when they did this.
She said slowly, ‘We should have brought Ally with us.’
Daniel was nodding, carefully. ‘I think so too. But why?’
‘Because she isn’t safe where she is?’
That was what Daniel’s gut was trying to tell him. He struggled to understand. ‘Why should anyone hurt Ally now? Now everything she believed has been shown to be true? She was a danger to them while she was trying to get the police to investigate her father’s death, but she isn’t any more. With Windham behind bars and Kant on the run, the only one who could threaten her now is the third man. And he’d be crazy to stick his head above the parapet when none of us knows who or where he is. Ally should be safer now than she’s been for months.’
‘But she isn’t, is she?’ said Brodie softly. ‘We’re not imagining this – if we both feel this way it’s for a reason. Something we’ve seen or heard is ringing alarm-bells in both your brain and mine.’
‘What are we going to do?’
Brodie gave a weary sigh and cranked the steering-wheel round. ‘What do you think? We’re going back.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Brodie found herself driving faster and faster, even though she didn’t understand why. It was enough that some part of her brain had worked it out, at least as far as knowing what needed to be done. They could work on the reason together as she drove.
‘Something doesn’t fit,’ she insisted. ‘Somebody said something or did something that should have meant something to us. To us - both of us, we were both there. And neither of us picked it up.’
‘Not the vet, then,’ said Daniel, flinching as she took a corner fast enough to leave some of Deacon’s tyre-rubber behind. ‘Alison herself?’
‘Or Mary.’
‘Mary?’ Daniel echoed doubtfully. ‘What could she know that we don’t?’
They thought about it. That was important: they thought about it and didn’t dismiss it out of hand. But everything they knew about Mary Walbrook painted her as a largely benign and in any event peripheral figure in the drama. Alison Barker’s father’s partner, her last remaining friend, who’d visited the girl in hospital and seemed worried about her and …
And given the impression that nothing Ally said should be entirely trusted.
Brodie said slowly, ‘Mary Walbrook was there or thereabouts all the time this was going on. Maybe Windham deceived her too.’
Daniel looked straight ahead, down the track of the lights. ‘That’s possible,’ he said carefully.
There were, of course, other possibilities. Brodie said, ‘Or maybe she was in on it with him.’
Though he rather liked the woman, Daniel tried to put that out of his mind and made himself concentrate on what they knew or could reasonably infer. ‘This has
been going on for several months at least. From when Barker & Walbrook first started having problems with horses Windham was bringing them from Europe. But she and Barker were partners for fifteen years. Why would she turn her back on that to go in with Windham?’
To Brodie the answer was so obvious she was embarrassed having to spell it out. She wouldn’t have had to for anyone else she knew. But to Daniel, loyalty was something so precious he couldn’t imagine anyone casually throwing it aside.
‘The money of course,’ she said. ‘There was the potential to make a great deal of it. I mean, a real, genuine, never-work-again fortune. And then, Stanley Barker was a fat man in his fifties, and Johnny Windham is a fit man in his thirties.’
Daniel stared at her. ‘You think they’re lovers?’
Brodie shrugged. ‘Why not? They’re two attractive people – unless you have problems with their morals, and obviously they wouldn’t have with one another’s. It would explain why Windham gave up Kant but wouldn’t give up the third man. The third man isn’t a man, he’s a woman. Mary Walbrook.’
Daniel hadn’t got past the thought of them as lovers. ‘She’s older than him.’
Brodie laughed out loud. ‘So? Women wear better than men. Haven’t you figured that out yet? We’re stronger and we live longer. As toyboys go, Johnny Windham is already pushing his sell-by date.’
Daniel said nothing.
Brodie left him to ponder, followed her own train of thought. ‘The problems with the horses may not have been confined to Barker & Walbrook but they certainly bore the brunt of them, to the point that they almost destroyed the business. Why? Not because Windham had a grudge against Stanley but because he had a friend in the yard who could collect the canisters and cover for any problems. Makes sense?’
She waited for a response but he wasn’t ready to give one yet. That didn’t stop her speculating. If Daniel was too reluctant to think the worst of people, perhaps Brodie was too ready. ‘But Mary wasn’t the senior partner. When Stanley realised what was going on he was going to put a stop it. He didn’t call the police precisely because it was Mary who was involved, and he couldn’t shop Windham without shopping her too. So he threw Windham off the yard and then he had it out with her.’
Daniel had dragged himself back to the present and rejoined the conversation. ‘And five days later he was dead and she was running the business. We know where Windham was, Kant says he was at home – but Mary was on the yard the night Stanley died. She was the one who found him.’
Brodie’s cheeks were pale and hollow. ‘Damn it, it does all hang together, doesn’t it?’ Then her eyes flared wide. ‘So Mary not only killed Stanley, she tried to kill Ally!’
Daniel was nodding slowly. ‘She had access to the house where Ally was staying. She brought her some clothes to the hospital, and later she left her a note on the kitchen table. She had a key. Ally hasn’t many friends left: she left a spare key with one of the few she thought she could depend on.’
And then, almost before he’d finished the sentence, he slid away from it: tuned out, left the building and went to that place in his head where facts buzzed round like uranium atoms in a nuclear pile, banging off one another in their urgency to create a chain reaction.
Noticing, Brodie frowned. ‘Daniel?’
He stopped her questions with a spread hand. ‘Just a second. That’s it – that’s what was bothering me. She knew I’d talked to Kant. Rather, she knew he’d talked to me and wanted to know what he’d said. How did she know that?’
‘I told her,’ said Brodie.
He shook his yellow head – a little too emphatically: sparing him a sideways glance Brodie saw his eyes flicker as the barbs of concussion twisted in his brain. He didn’t let it distract him. ‘No, you didn’t. You were talking about what we knew, what we’d found out. But she looked straight at me and asked what he’d said. The only way she could have known I’d spent the evening with him was if he told her.’
‘Kant?’ Brodie’s voice soared. ‘You think he phoned her?’
‘If they’re partners, I think it’s the first thing he’d do after he got away from Sparrow Hill. To tell her there’d been trouble, but he’d got the consignment and he’d deliver it as soon as he could make his way to Peyton Parvo. Brodie — that’s where the factory is. A warren of outbuildings, power, running water, and now nobody around the place except herself. She didn’t move into the flat there because she couldn’t afford to live anywhere else: she did it because that’s the centre of operations and she couldn’t afford not to be there. And she couldn’t have Alison move in there, even temporarily, for the same reason. Alison asked her after she lost the house and Mary said no.’
Brodie was struggling to take it all in. ‘But tonight she didn’t argue when Ally suggested staying over.’
‘She wasn’t really in a position to. We were bound to wonder why if she did. Also, this thing is moving towards the end-game. Windham’s under arrest – she can’t count on him protecting her forever – and Kant’s on the run. She needs to tie up the loose ends quickly – take what she can salvage and get out. And Kant’s on his way there right now I don’t think Ally’s life is worth tuppence to either of them.’
She couldn’t in all conscience drive any faster – Ship Coomb dived away from the side of the road into a boulder-strewn chasm and if she killed them both Alison was as good as dead too. She glanced at her watch. They were still minutes from Barker & Walbrook’s yard. Werner Kant might still be an hour away, or he might already be there.
‘Call Jack,’ she said, fumbling for her phone. ‘He may be closer than we are.’
When she wasn’t driving, Brodie could make a call on autopilot, her fingers going to the right buttons of their own accord. The last man in the civilised world not to own a mobile phone, Daniel always viewed the little thing with deep suspicion and looked to her for prompts, and seemed surprised when someone answered.
Expecting to hear Brodie’s voice, Deacon was irritated to hear Daniel’s. ‘Now what?’
Daniel didn’t have the mental stamina left for an argument. If he told Deacon what to do, either he’d do it or he wouldn’t; but Daniel knew Deacon pretty well by now and he thought he’d do it and ask questions, and probably do a lot of shouting, afterwards. ‘We’re heading back to Peyton Parvo and we need you to meet us there. ASAP. Mary Walbrook’s involved in this. I think Kant’s on his way there too, so you should probably bring some fire power.’ Daniel had never used the term fire power before. It was oddly invigorating. ‘And we left Alison there, and I think they’ll want her dead.’ Then he rang off and – first asking how – switched off the phone.
Then he cast Brodie a worried little glance. ‘We’d better be right about this.’
She was past caring. ‘If we’re wrong and Jack turns up with the Seventh Cavalry, it’ll be embarrassed smiles and apologies all round. If we’re right and do nothing, Alison’s going to die.’
Because that was the only likely outcome if she was there when someone who’d set fire to a horse-box with a man and a pony inside arrived with a consignment of illegal drugs. They couldn’t hope to make her death look like another accident. But they had eight or nine hours before she’d be missed, which was time enough to dismantle the chemistry-set that was the Scram factory and pack it into Mary Walbrook’s trailer hitched to her Land Rover. These were, Brodie had realised, immensely versatile little vehicles. A pony, a corpse or an illicit cottage-industry: if it needed moving and you didn’t want it on show, a horse-box was your transport of choice.
‘We’re not wrong,’ said Daniel in a low voice. ‘It’s the missing link, the bit that explains all the other bits that didn’t quite fit.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like half an hour ago, when we drove into her yard with two strange cars and a trailer she wasn’t expecting, and turned on all the lights, and even after that Ally had to get her out of bed. She lives alone there, quarter of a mile from the nearest neighbours, with a yard fu
ll of valuable animals. She should have been at the front door with a double-barrelled shotgun before we’d got out of the car.’
‘She was asleep,’ said Brodie reasonably.
‘Like hell. If one of those horses coughs in the night she’ll hear it. She was pretending not to have heard us because she didn’t want it to look as if she knew we were on our way.’
He was right: it made sense. ‘So the factory was in the yard all along?’
‘I think so. She ran the yard, after all – Stanley lived in his big house miles away but Mary had a cottage just down the road. Like Windham, she probably had a local girl coming in to help with the horses, but nobody’d think to question her if there was a locked shed somewhere that only she had the key to. Certainly not after Stanley was dead and Alison was living in Dimmock.’
The scenario was evolving in his mind even as he described it. ‘That’s why it took months from the first supplies of the German tranquillizer being smuggled in – and we know when that was because it was the start of Stanley’s problems with sick horses – to the first casualties of Scram overdose arriving at Dimmock General. Production had to be put on hold because the police were looking into Stanley’s death. Even after they left, Alison was still insisting he’d been murdered. That’s why they had to try and shut her up. If somebody listened to her, the police would come back and turn the yard upside down.’
‘Mary was never going to persuade anyone that Alison fell into the water jump too,’ said Brodie, picking up the thread. ‘But people always assume a drug overdose is misadventure. If she was found dead in a house in Dimmock where she was living alone, depressed and irrational after her father’s supposed suicide, and the autopsy found Scram in her system, the only reason the police would even talk to Mary would be to express their condolences. If she’d died when she was supposed to, the Scram operation would have run for year after profitable year.’
‘But she didn’t,’ said Daniel, ‘and now they’re going to lose everything they can’t actually carry away with them. Except that the idea is still good. Give them time and they’ll reappear in another part of the country under other names, and instead of dealing they’ll be keeping show-jumpers or eventers or brood mares: anything that might go abroad on a regular basis. They’ll find someone else on the continent who has access to the catalyst - after all, it won’t be on trial forever, pretty soon it’ll be widely available – and six months from now they’ll be back in business. And the first anyone will know is when the clubs are suddenly flooded with tabs of Scram.’
