Reflections

by Bannister, Jo

  Deacon remained on the steps while Voss walked to the car. It was as if he wanted to say something else.

  “Superintendent?” said Daniel.

  Deacon pursed his lips. “You know, it’s probably not too late. I can find you a therapist. It might be helpful to talk it all through—shine some light in the dark corners, stop it festering. You wouldn’t expect physical trauma to heal without medical intervention, so why should psychological damage? Even broken bones will knit in a fashion, eventually. But unless they’re set well at the start they’ll never be as strong and straight as they could be.”

  Daniel nodded pensively. “I’ve been considering that. It’s not really my responsibility, but I’m sure Mrs Daws would agree if I said it was something we ought to arrange. You think it is, then? You don’t think we should wait and see how they’re coping in another week’s time?”

  Deacon was staring at him uncomprehendingly Then he gave his head a weary shake. “I wasn’t talking about the girls, Daniel. I was talking about you.”

  By mid afternoon Brodie had gone as far as she could with Serena’s address-book. She’d called everyone in it, excepting only tradesmen, and called back everyone who was only there in the evenings, and now she’d called again to round up the last few stragglers.

  No one had seen Constance Ward in fifteen years. No one remembered Serena talking about her. She hadn’t been at the christenings of either of her nieces. The last positive sighting was at her mother’s funeral, back in the eighties. After the Peyton Parvo house was sold it might have been expected that Constance would visit her sister from time to time, but if she did none of Serena’s friends was aware of it.

  No one was aware of a falling-out either. But Constance had vanished entirely from her sister’s life, and even moving to Australia couldn’t explain that. Hugo Daws, six thousand miles away in Johannesburg, had heard of the family’s tragedy and arrived to take charge within forty-eight hours. Only a deliberate severing of contact seemed to explain the rift between Serena and her sister.

  Brodie had had high hopes of that address book. She’d thought it would be tedious but expected it to pay off. When it failed to she threw it down on her desk and glared at it for a traitor.

  Then she picked it up again. Her perfectly shaped eyebrows drew together in the faintest of frowns. She had no idea what it was, but something in there didn’t add up. Nothing to do with Constance; nothing to do with Serena’s friends. Then who, and what? The only other numbers in there were tradesmen, and Brodie doubted if the local plumber knew where Constance was.

  But she’d seen something that didn’t chime, something unusual… She leafed through the despised book with mounting exasperation.

  And then she had it. Serena Daws had two doctors. Well, it was mildly unusual but hardly suspicious. The Dimmock number was probably her GP, the other one a specialist of some kind. A gynaecologist maybe.

  But it wasn’t a dialling code Brodie recognised, so it wasn’t the south coast and it wasn’t London. She pulled out the phone-book to check. Then she sat back, wondering what use a woman living the south of England had for any kind of specialist who practised in the Midlands. A dull tingle at the back of her knees said this was significant. After a moment she rang the number.

  Dr Spedlow was not a gynaecologist but the senior medical officer at a psychiatric hospital in Warwickshire. The secretary who answered the phone professed not to know why Serena Daws would have the number in her address book.

  “She was never a patient of his, then?”

  The woman’s voice stiffened. She intoned, “Patient confidentiality—”

  “Is only an issue,” finished Brodie briskly, “if Mrs Daws was indeed Dr Spedlow’s patient. So you’re telling me she was?”

  The woman stumbled, for once let down by her mantra. “Perhaps you should speak to Dr Spedlow yourself.”

  “Perhaps I should,” agreed Brodie.

  She was expecting a crusty middle-aged man’s voice full of port, cigars and self-importance. Instead she found herself speaking to a woman, crisp and professional and probably not much older than herself. “Marion Spedlow,” said the doctor. “How can I help you?”

  Brodie introduced herself in return, steering a middle way between burdening the psychiatrist with extraneous information and leaving her unsure of her caller’s motives. “I realise this is difficult for you so let’s keep it simple. Whatever your connection with Mrs Daws, you ought to know that she’s dead. She died as a result of domestic violence ten days ago. As her husband is missing I’m trying to reunite two little girls with their closest blood relative, Mrs Daws’ sister Constance. If you can help in any way, you’ll understand the importance of doing. This isn’t a frivolous request.”

  There was a slight pause. Then Dr Spedlow said, “I do understand that, Mrs Farrell. And I know you understand that I cannot divulge information on my patients to third parties, however legitimate their interest.

  “So let me see if I can help you without doing that. No, Mrs Daws was never a patient here. But I met her on a number of occasions when she visited the hospital. I’m terribly sorry to hear what’s happened, and Tm sorry I can’t give you the information you need to help her daughters. For what it’s worth, it wouldn’t solve your problem if I could.”

  For a few moments Brodie said nothing more, digesting what she had been told and what it meant beyond the immediately obvious. “I see,” she said then, slowly “Dr Spedlow, I think I’ve got this right, but since it is so important I wonder if I could just run it by you. I’m sure you’ll tell me if I’m too far off the mark.

  “You run a residential psychiatric hospital for people suffering from disabling mental conditions. Your duties bring you into contact not only with your patients but also with their relatives. Since most of your patients find it difficult to organise their own lives successfully, you probably couldn’t recommend any of them as guardians for two vulnerable young girls. Is that about the size of it?”

  She could hear the warmth of Dr Spedlow’s smile. “That’s exactly the size of it, Mrs Farrell.”

  “One more thing,” said Brodie. “I imagine a lot of patients have been under your care for quite a while?”

  “Oh yes,” said Dr Spedlow softly. “Fifteen years, some of them. Some of them less, of course, and some more.”

  “I see. Well, thank you for your time.”

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to answer your questions,” said the doctor, her voice carefully expressionless.

  “Never mind,” said Brodie. “It would be awful if patients got the idea their personal information could be accessed by any Tom, Dick or Harriet.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Brodie called Jack Deacon. “Well, I’ve found Constance Ward. But she isn’t going to be any help to anyone. She’s in a psychiatric hospital outside Birmingham—has been for fifteen years. If she isn’t capable of looking after herself she certainly can’t look after the girls.”

  Deacon swore softly down the phone. “Then Social Services step in and place them somewhere. We’ll just have to try and speed things up, get them cleared for South Africa as soon as we can.”

  “How long’s that going to take? Weeks? Months?”

  But he didn’t know. “It’s not a problem I’ve hit before. But you can’t send somebody’s children abroad without legal authority. I’ll have a word with my tame magistrate, find out what the procedure is and get it under way. But I can’t see it being completed in a couple of weeks.”

  “Still no sign of Robert?”

  “Neither hide nor hair. We’re beginning to wonder if he’s driven deep into the woods somewhere and french-kissed his exhaust pipe.”

  It wasn’t the crude levity an outsider might have taken it for. It was the gritty realism that got Jack Deacon and every other police officer through the scenes of horror and heartbreak that waited behind every taped-up door. To do the job they had to be able to consider the facts dispassionately; and if they couldn’t alw
ays do that, at least to pretend that they could. They made grim little jokes not out of disrespect but necessity: some of the situations they encountered were too difficult even for professionals to confront head-on. Irreverence was a device to get them past the otherwise intolerable. Brodie knew this, had done even before she knew Deacon. It didn’t trouble her. If a man has a dirty and dangerous job to do he needs protective clothing. A warped sense of humour was CID’s answer to the Noddy-suit. Some things you have to laugh about because the only possible alternative is to cry

  “If he did, he went to a lot of trouble not to be found.”

  “People do,” said Deacon resignedly “People taking their own lives fixate on the oddest things. They take a hotel room for the night so they won’t leave blood in their own bath. They wear their best clothes. They water the pot-plants. They’re about to kill themselves, and they’re afraid the FME will comment on their tired underwear and neglected begonias!”

  Brodie shrugged. “They’re tidying up loose ends. It’s what suicide is very often about, anyway. Things have got messy, sorting it all out is going to take too much time and effort, it’s easier just to call it a day. Not even despair so much as sheer exhaustion.”

  Deacon paused a moment, and afterwards Brodie wasn’t sure if he’d changed the subject or not. “Daniel had me a little worried today”

  He told her what had happened. What everyone agreed had happened, what he believed had actually happened, and what, for a time, Daniel thought had happened.

  Brodie wasn’t quite sure what it was he wanted her to know. “But you’re satisfied he was wrong?”

  “That Robert Daws returned under cover of darkness to murder his little girls? Yes,” he said heavily, “I’m satisfied he was wrong. But doesn’t it bother you that he even thought that? I’ve never understood what was going on in his head, Brodie, you know that. If that’s an example, though, he’s in more trouble than I ever guessed. He’s hanging onto reality by his fingertips. If he was my friend and I had an ounce of influence with him, I’d get him an appointment with a psychiatrist.”

  Two things astounded Brodie: his assessment of Daniel’s mental state, based it seemed to her on very little evidence, and the extent to which he seemed to care. She was resigned to the fact that the two men in her life were so diametrically different that neither would ever see what she liked in the other. She was used to Daniel looking nervous when Deacon was mentioned, and Deacon looking exasperated when Daniel was.

  She was familiar with his habit of deriding what he didn’t comprehend, and on a couple of occasions she’d cut him off in mid-tirade when he overstepped the bounds of what she was prepared to hear about someone else she cared for. But he had never said, or so far as she knew thought, anything like this before. She stared at the phone. “Jack—what are you saying? That Daniel’s losing his mind?”

  “I think he’s under a lot of strain,” said Deacon forcibly. “Even more than we knew or should have suspected. I think he’s having trouble separating reality from fear. It’s no bloody wonder, given what’s happened to him in the last six months, but if he doesn’t get himself looked at soon I’m afraid the damage may be past repair. I know he’s your friend, Brodie, that’s why I’m saying this to you. If you can’t or won’t make him get help, I doubt if anyone else can.”

  When the girls reappeared for tea they had something to say. Daniel too had things he wanted to talk about but thought he’d let them go first. Then he realised he wouldn’t need the list of tactful questions he’d been preparing for the last hour.

  Johnny began. She glanced at Peris but spoke to Daniel. “We’ve been talking. Upstairs. About what happened. There really was someone, you know.”

  “Yes?” said Daniel encouragingly.

  “That policeman thinks we made it up.”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t. He may think you made a mistake. A lot of people tell the police things which they believe to be the truth but which turn out to be wrong.”

  “He grabbed me,” said Johnny stubbornly. “I didn’t imagine it. He grabbed me and pushed me down, and pulled my hair. I didn’t see his face, but I know he was real.”

  Daniel nodded. “What about you, Em? Did you see him?”

  Em looked up from the table, eyes bright in her pinched little face, and said, “Yes.”

  The adults exchanged a glance. Peris said, “There wasn’t much light in the hall. Not till I found the switch.”

  “No,” Johnny said coldly, “but there was some. The moon must have been out—there was light coming in at the windows and through the kitchen door. If there hadn’t been I’d have had to switch on the light to go downstairs.”

  “The moon’s just about full,” Daniel confirmed softly. “And it was a clear night.”

  “All right,” said Peris. “So what did you see?”

  Still Em smiled her brittle smile round the table. Her sister poked her in the leg with the toe of her shoe. “Go on, tell them. Tell them what you told me.”

  “I know who it was,” said Emerald.

  “Who?” It was Peris. Both girls looked at her for a long moment, and then looked away in a manner so dismissive it must have been a deliberate insult. Daniel saw the woman’s jaw clench, and felt himself blush with shame. It was intolerable how these two young girls treated her. For their sake and no other reason she’d crossed the world to keep house in a chilly English town. Perhaps she hadn’t stayed when Hugo left for the thanks it would earn her, but common courtesy was the least she was entitled to. Instead they treated her like a servant.

  While for some reason they regarded Daniel, who was in their family’s employ, with the kind of adulation most young girls reserve for the lead singer with a boy-band. No one in his entire life had ever mistaken Daniel for a pop-singer. He’d had friends but never fans before. But he wasn’t flattered so much as deeply uneasy. If the information they were waiting, shiny-eyed, to present him with had been less important he’d have made it wait while he spelled out the minimum standards of behaviour he was prepared to accept from them.

  But it was important, and he didn’t want them to clam up with resentment before they had shared their knowledge. He hoped Peris would understand that this was justice delayed rather than denied. He said quietly, “Your aunt asked who it was that you saw.”

  He thought Em was going to say it was her father. He thought he’d been right all along and Jack Deacon had been wrong. That they weren’t prepared to tell the police but wanted him to know seemed like confirmation.

  A very small feather moving on a very light breeze would have floored him when Em said, “It was the man in the paintings.”

  He stared at her until the little girl started to cringe and look to her sister for support. “Johnny …!”

  “I’m … I’m sorry,” stammered Daniel. He passed a hand across his mouth. “But are you sure?”

  “She should be,” said Johnny acidly, “she’s seen him often enough. We both have.”

  Daniel hardly knew what to say. He looked at Peris, mainly to check that his ears weren’t deceiving him, but all the reply she could manage was a helpless shrug.

  He leaned forward and made Em look at him. “That’s a serious thing to say about anyone. How sure are you? Do you mean, he reminded you of the man in the paintings? He was a tall man, a young man, it could have been the man in the paintings? Or are you telling me in all honesty that you saw his face well enough to say that was him?”

  “I did,” the child insisted. “He looked up when I screamed and I saw his face. It was all silvery in the moonlight but I know who it was.”

  “Nicky Speers,” said Daniel. He didn’t want there to be any doubt about who she meant. “The labourer from the farm across the road? Your mother’s friend.”

  “Her toy-boy,” Johnny said disparagingly “We know who he is.”

  “What, to see? In the flesh?” He realised he could have put that better and winced. “I mean, you don’t just know him from the pictures—you�
�ve seen him in person?”

  “All the time,” shrugged Johnny negligently. “She’d send us to do something in the house, but if we kept an eye on the studio we’d see him sneaking in. Then sneaking out again half an hour later and, hey, maybe what we’d been sent to do wasn’t half done but suddenly it was done well enough and it was time to come downstairs again. Like we were stupid. Like we didn’t know what the two of them were doing.”

  Daniel breathed lightly. “You know, kids aren’t the only ones who behave badly sometimes. Adults do too. And it can matter more.”

  “You can say that again,” said Johnny bitterly. “She fancies a bit of rough, and we end up in a scene from ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’!”

  Peris’s capable hands hit the table so hard it, and all around it, jumped. She wasn’t exactly shouting. She was actually whispering very loud. “I have had just about enough of this.”

  “So have I,” said Daniel with absolute certainty. “Johnny, you apologise right now. Your Aunt Peris is the only thing standing between you and a children’s home. She’s left her own home, her family and her country six thousand miles away to help you through a difficult time; and if the best you can do is snipe and sling insults at her, I can’t imagine why she’d stay And you needn’t think I’ll take her place. If she leaves, so will I. Think about that. But don’t think about it very long.”

  Em caught her sister in a panicky look. “Johnny … !” she whined again.

  Even Johnny seemed aware that she’d overstepped the bounds of what tolerant people who felt sorry for her would take. A dull flush travelled up her cheek and her fierce gaze dropped. She kept her eyes on the tablecloth. “I’m sorry.”

  But having finally been roused to anger. Peris wasn’t ready to be mollified. “I’m sorry too, but it’s not enough. If you have problems with the colour of my skin, until you can find someone white to look after you you’d better keep them to yourself. Tm not your servant, and Tm sure as hell not your slave. I’ve tried to behave like family to you. If you resent me so much, maybe I should go home. Maybe you’d sooner live in an orphanage. And maybe I don’t much care what you’d prefer.”