Em started to cry, little sobs that flooded the button-bright eyes, stole her breath and bounced her up and down on her chair. “John-n-n-y…” she wailed. If she hadn’t a huge conversational repertoire, she could at least wring the maximum number of meanings from one word.
For a second the older girl seemed determined to hold out. Then she sucked in a deep, unsteady breath and turned hot eyes on the angry woman beside her. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “Really. I don’t know why I keep saying such horrible things. I don’t know where they come from. Please don’t leave us. We can’t manage alone …”
For a second Peris was torn between the entirely human temptation to push her advantage for all it was worth and a sudden unexpected welling of almost maternal sympathy. Then she shook her head in despair, threw a plump arm round each of them, and groaned, “Why would I do that? When we’re having such fun together?”
When the girls had left the table, with little diffident smiles she found almost as hard to deal with as the sniping. Peris spread her palms flat on the tablecloth and looked over them at Daniel. “Nicky Speers. I never saw that coming. I suppose we believe them?”
Daniel was as taken aback as she was. “We can’t afford not to. They could be mistaken, but they seem pretty sure. They could be lying but I don’t know why they would.”
“Because they blame a lot of what’s happened on Nicky Speers?” suggested Peris. “They’ve lost their mother, to all intents and purposes they’ve lost their father, they’re going to lose their home, and the most obvious cause is a farm-boy who couldn’t keep his trousers on in the presence of another man’s wife. You can’t blame them for hating him. And they’re two young girls who do a thorough job of hating. I can imagine them trying to make trouble for him.”
Daniel puffed out his cheeks like a bemused chipmunk. “Well, it’s not something we can deal with. I’ll call Superintendent Deacon, see what he makes of it. I just hope …” His voice petered out.
“What?”
“I just hope they’re not making more trouble for themselves than, even in the circumstances, they can expect to be forgiven for.”
Rather to Daniel’s surprise. Deacon took the girls’ accusation seriously Partly because he felt it wasn’t safe to do anything else. But also because some of the things that hadn’t quite fitted might be explained if Nicky Speers was the intruder. He was a regular visitor to Sparrow Hill, and while he seemed mostly to have met Serena in the cottage it was entirely possible that he had acquired a key to the house. She may have given it to him or he may have pocketed it, tempted to see if he could share in the wealth of the Daws family.
The policeman interviewed both girls again, one at a time, in the presence of their aunt. They each told him exactly what they’d told her and Daniel. Johnny was unable to identify the intruder, although she could give a physical description that matched Nicky Speers. Em still insisted that she’d seen his face well enough to recognise him.
“Why didn’t you tell me this when we were talking earlier?”
Em’s eyes dropped to the bony knees under her pinafore. “Don’t know.”
“Maybe you weren’t sure then,” suggested Deacon, surprising not only Peris but himself with his patience. “Maybe it was only when you were talking to your sister later on that it struck you who it could have been.”
But Em shook her head, the pale floss of hair bouncing. “I knew who it was. I didn’t think anybody’d believe me.”
“Why wouldn’t we believe you?”
“I’m eleven,” she said with devastating logic. “Nobody believes you when you’re eleven.”
He grinned at her and she ventured a shy grin back. “Em, being eleven doesn’t make you less trustworthy than somebody older. But people of all ages make mistakes, and it can matter tons if they say that somebody did something bad when he didn’t. I’m not saying you’re mistaken about Nicky Speers. But I want you to think really hard before you say you’re sure. Was it Nicky? Or could it have been someone who just looked very much like him?”
She did as he asked and gave it more thought. Then she nodded. “It was him. Really it was.” And then, as the obvious way of confirming it occurred to her: “Why don’t you ask him?”
“Don’t worry,” said Jack Deacon, nodding earnestly. “I intend to.”
Chapter Thirteen
Deacon went straight to the farm but Nicky Speers had finished for the day. Philip Poole directed him to a cottage a mile up the road where the peeling front door was answered by a middle-aged woman with bad teeth.
“Are you Mrs Speers?”
‘“s.” She didn’t ask who he was or why he wanted to know.
Deacon produced his warrant card anyway. “I need a word with your son Nicky. Is he home?”
This time he didn’t get even a single consonant in reply. She turned from the open door, and taking this as an invitation he followed her up rickety stairs to a room in the eaves. She didn’t knock but pushed the door open and left him standing there, unannounced and unexplained. Deacon sighed and got out his warrant card again.
Nicky Speers, sprawled on his unmade bed in unconscious echo of Serena’s painting, surrounded by posters of motorcycles, looked puzzled and then, when he realised who his visitor was, afraid. But Deacon had been a detective too long to think that a fear of the police was the prerogative of the criminal classes. Mostly it worked the other way round. Career criminals dealt with the police all the time, knew how to conduct themselves, knew it was easier to know who was responsible for a particular occurrence than to prove it. It was the law-abiding majority who tended to panic at the sight of a police-car in the drive.
Speers gave a statement to DS Voss the day after the murder but this was the first time he and Deacon had met. He got up from the bed, unfolding under the low ceiling like a stick-insect emerging from a chrysalis, and kept wary eyes on the policeman as if there was a prospect of violence. “What do you want?”
“I want to talk to you. About events at Sparrow Hill/’
The boy drew an unsteady breath. “It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t make her do anything. She … made the running.”
Deacon snorted with malicious humour. “What—she jumped your bones?”
“Yes! Well, sort of. I mean … ”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” said Deacon heavily. “I take it you’re not accusing her of rape?”
“No. ‘Course not.”
“Of course not,” agreed Deacon. “Then you were consenting adults and the responsibility was shared between you. I suppose you could argue that she was the one with a family to betray, but do you know, I doubt if those little girls see it like that?”
Nicky stared at his feet and mumbled, “Suppose not.”
“So.” Deacon turned slowly on the spot, looking at the posters. “Motorbikes, hm? Is that yours at the gate?” Nicky nodded. “Nice. Expensive. A lot of bike for a farm labourer to be knocking round on.”
“I saved up,” said the boy defensively
“Yeah, right,” said Deacon ironically. “Nicky, if you started saving your pocket-money when you were ten years old you still wouldn’t have the deposit for a bike like that. She helped you, didn’t she? Mrs Daws.”
He shrugged, six feet of barely adult awkwardness. “So? I helped her.”
Sheer astonishment made Deacon laugh out loud. “Nicky, you got her killed! You messed around with a married woman until her husband was so angry he stabbed her. Thirteen times. Then he jumped up and down on the phone so she couldn’t call an ambulance, then he left her body for her little girls to find. Just exactly how does that count as helping her?”
Nicky Speers was blushing furiously. “That’s not what I meant! She wanted to paint me. I… you know … posed for her. She wanted to pay me. For my time. She paid the deposit on the bike.”
Deacon nodded and sniffed. “I see. Well, I suppose it’s nice to have a memento of her. Something else that’s out of your league to take for a ride.”
There aren’t many careers in which there would be any up-side to this, so perhaps it was fortunate that Deacon had found one. Occasionally his spikes nailed to the wall someone even nastier than he was, and then people who normally tried to avoid being in the elevator with him were full of slightly appalled admiration. Deacon himself, in those rare moments when he engaged in introspection, recognised it as both a strength and a weakness, but it never occurred to him it was something he could change. Be a bit slower with the poison darts and quicker to praise. If challenged, which he never was, he’d have said he spoke as he found and people could take him or leave him. Practically, though, it’s hard to ignore a six-foot-two, fifteen stone Detective Superintendent with the power to lock you up without your shoelaces.
Nicky Speers, at the tender age of not-quite-twenty, had taken a fair bit of stick over his relationship with Mrs Daws. When friends or workmates goaded him he gave as good as he got. But he had no way of dealing with the invective of a senior police officer, so he stood there and took it. His lips trembled and tears spilled onto his hollow cheeks.
“For pity’s sake,” grunted Deacon disgustedly—some of his disgust was possibly for himself—“if you’ve got the morals of a ferret you’d better develop a hide to match.” Unaccountably this didn’t seem to make the boy feel any better. Deacon shrugged and moved on. “Where were you last night?”
“Last night?” Nicky had thought they were talking about the murder. “Here, at home/’
“From what time?”
“About eleven.”
“Until?”
“Until I left for work at five to eight.” He wiped his sleeve across his face. “Why?”
“Because I want to know,” said Deacon shortly. “Was anyone else here?”
“My mam.”
“What time did she go to bed?”
If a lie would have served he’d have lied. But Cissie Speers hadn’t been a nighthawk when she was her son’s age: now she was mostly tucked up with a mug of cocoa half way through the evening. “About nine o’clock.”
“So you can’t actually prove you were here at, say, four o’clock this morning?”
Nicky stared at him blankly “Can anyone?”
Deacon bristled. “Don’t get smart with me, sonny. Not when I’ve got witnesses who put you somewhere else. Somewhere you’d no business being, at four o’clock this morning or any other time.”
“Where?”
It was a natural enough question. Deacon supposed, though to someone who had genuinely been in his own bed it should have been immaterial where anyone else thought they’d seen him. “Sparrow Hill.”
If the boy’s eyes opened any wider they’d pop out. “I haven’t been near Sparrow Hill. Why would I, now—you know? Last night? I was here last night. Why would I go to Sparrow Hill?”
Deacon didn’t answer. “Do you have a key?”
“Not to the house.”
“Do you have one to the cottage?”
Nicky hesitated and his gaze flickered. “I did have.”
“Where is it now?”
“I threw it away. After—” Again, the gap left for the unsay able.
“So you could have had a key to the big house too, and thrown it away at the same time.”
“I didn’t!”
“But you could have.”
“Serena gave me a key to the cottage because that’s where we met. Why would she give me a key to her house?” His voice vibrated with the need to be believed.
“Maybe she didn’t. Maybe you took one.”
“Me?”
Deacon gave him a cynical look. “Robert Daws is a wealthy man. There are valuable things in his house. Now, I don’t suppose you expected Serena to leave him and come and live with you and your mother in a labourer’s cottage, so at some point you knew she was going to get bored and show you the door. If you had a key to the house you could come back and help yourself to a retirement package.”
“I’m not a thief!” exclaimed Nicky Speers indignantly
“Jesus, Nicky,” growled Deacon, “this whole thing happened because you couldn’t keep your hands off another man’s property.”
The boy’s brow furrowed as he tried to make sense of it. “Is that what they’re saying? That I went to the house last night—this morning—to steal things? That somebody saw me?”
Deacon nodded. “Pretty much.”
“It isn’t true.”
“My witnesses are lying?”
“Yes! What was taken?”
The policeman pursed his lips. “They’re still looking round.” It wasn’t exactly a lie; anyway, he didn’t mind lying.
Nicky spread gangling arms. “Do you want to search my room? You can do. If you can find anything that belongs at Sparrow Hill you can arrest me here and now.”
“Actually,” grunted Deacon, “I could do that anyway. But since you offer …” He lifted the eiderdown and looked under the bed. Then he straightened, shuddering. “Do you know there’s half a pizza under there?”
“Is there?” From his tone Deacon suspected he’d haul it out and eat it when he was alone.
He didn’t expect to find anything in Nicky’s room and he didn’t. “Shall we have a look downstairs now?”
He ended up checking every room in the house, and then the garden shed. He found no goods which looked to have come from Sparrow Hill. Of course, none had been reported missing. It was just too good an opportunity to miss: a suspect inviting a policeman to inspect his property.
They were finished in the shed and Deacon was about to turn off his torch when a tiny glint caught his eye. He shone the beam into the dark corner to see what it was. Then he took a plastic bag out of his pocket and carefully, deliberately, picked the thing up through it.
“You want to tell me what this is?”
Nicky blinked. It was, after all, fairly obvious. “It’s a knife.”
“In fact, it’s a kitchen knife.” Deacon’s voice was expressionless. “What’s it doing in your garden shed?”
“Somebody must have dropped it.”
“You?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve never seen it before.”
Deacon considered. “Is there a lot of passing traffic through your garden shed?”
“My dad used to come in here. My mum does. Look, it’s an old kitchen knife. Somebody was using it in here and dropped it. What’s the big deal? You’re not telling me that was stolen from Sparrow Hill last night?”
Deacon shook his head. “Not last night, no. But I’ve seen something like it before, Nicky. Do you know where? In a little drawing the Forensic Medical Examiner made for me after he’d done the autopsy on Serena Daws. She wasn’t stabbed with one knife, Nicky, she was stabbed with two. One of them we found at the scene, one we didn’t. It was smaller -about this size. And narrower—about this shape.
“Nicky, let’s go and get your coat, and tell your mum that you’re coming into town with me. I want us to talk some more at the police station. I want you to explain to me how a knife that corresponds with some of the wounds in Serena Daws’ body came to be dropped in your garden shed.”
Peris Daws knocked diffidently on the cottage door. Inside Daniel’s voice said, “It’s open.” She glanced back at the kitchen door of Sparrow Hill, resplendent with its new glass, and the two girls hovering on the doorstep waved encouragement. So she did as he said.
Once inside it was clear why he hadn’t come to the door. He had a star-chart as big as a rug spread across his knees, with open books located strategically within reach.
Peris frowned and shook her head. “Whatever … ?”<
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Daniel waved an apologetic hand, and one of the three small books he was holding in it like playing-cards slid onto his knee. “Sorry about the mess. I can’t work out what it is I’m seeing. In Cassiopeia, just south of Shedir. It’s not its companion: I know what that looks like, and this is brighter than ninth magnitude. I’m thinking, comet? Rogue asteroid? Nova? The Milky Way runs through Cassiopeia, it could be a major event on the far side of the galaxy
“And then I’m thinking, certainly. None of the observatories have reported it, none of the big comet-hunters have picked it up, but I’ve spotted it with a second-hand telescope cobbled together out of garden canes and old spectacles.”
About then he realised he was boldly going entirely alone. With a wry grin he put aside the books and papers that covered him like leaf-mould and gave her his full attention.
Peris was still frowning. “I have no idea what you just said.”
He took her to the terrace where the telescope was pointing at the sky. Of course, the sky had moved while he was inside with the star-charts: he adjusted the alignment and showed her. “That white spot, just to the left of the reddish star?”
“Fly-speck?” she hazarded.
“It wouldn’t be the first time an amateur astronomer has tried to give his name to a bit of dust on his mirror,” admitted Daniel. “What can I do for you?”
They went back inside. Peris glanced around the living room. Packing away Serena’s belongings had lightened the oppressive mood of the cottage. “You’re quite comfortable in here, aren’t you?”
Daniel nodded, wondering what was coming.
Peris wasn’t good at subterfuge. She gave a gusty sigh. “I’ve been sent with a message—though it’s only fair to add I’m not happy myself. After what happened last night -whatever it was—and with Hugo away, we’re three poor defenceless women alone in a big spooky house with night coming on. We wondered if we could persuade you to move into the main house. We’ve got a guest-room ready, and we’ll help you shift your stuff, and …”
Reflections Page 11
