Reflections

by Bannister, Jo

  “And?”

  “And if you don’t, we’re going to move in here with you.”

  When Brodie arrived at Sparrow Hill to deliver the bad news about Constance, sounds like a party in progress greeted her through the sitting-room window. She identified the voices of two adults and two children, playing some sort of word game. From the speed of play and the level of excitement she judged the scores were pretty even.

  The game, she knew, would be Daniel’s idea—he had a huge repertoire of the things kept in reserve for last-days-of-term—but he wasn’t good at any of them. If whoever had drawn him as a partner thought she’d got the inside track, by now she’d be feeling rather disappointed. He thought too much instead of firing from the hip. When they did this at her flat Brodie always beat him. So, actually, did Paddy.

  She rang the front door bell. Peris answered it, standing in the block of light escaping from the hall. “Mrs Farrell? Oh—have you some news for us? Come in, we’re through here.”

  “Can we talk privately for a moment? You may want to think about what you’re going to tell the girls.”

  Puzzled, Peris pursed her lips and glanced back at the sitting-room door. And then it was too late, because the door opened and Emerald bounced into the hall with her sister a couple of strides behind.

  Johnny said, “It’s your turn. Peris,” and Em said, “It’s Daniel’s friend.” Then Daniel came out into the hall as well and she had the full set.

  She nodded to him over the top of the girls’ heads. “I got somewhere with that job I was working on.” Then she said, “I’m parched. Does anyone mind if I make a cup of tea?”

  “I’ll make it,” Peris said significantly, leading the way into the kitchen. Brodie followed.

  Daniel steered the girls back into the sitting-room. “I’d better see what she wants. You play for me, Em, and Johnny can play for Peris. And no cheating. And no words you wouldn’t use in front of us.”

  They beamed and went back inside, and he shut the door and followed the women to the kitchen.

  “I’ve found Constance,” said Brodie. “But she won’t be able to help. She’s been in a mental institution for fifteen years.”

  Peris put a hand to her mouth. “Damn!” Then, suddenly embarrassed, “I mean—”

  But Brodie wasn’t shocked. The two women had never met, Constance’s condition was the misfortune of a stranger, but its implications for Peris and her charges were profound. No wonder her own problems weighed heaviest in her mind. “Damn’s putting it mildly. I sat and swore for five minutes after I got off the phone.”

  “How did you find her?” asked Daniel. She told them about the two doctors in the address-book, and the carefully choreographed discussion she had with the second one.

  Daniel sighed. “There doesn’t seem much doubt, then.”

  Brodie shook her head. “I’m sorry, Mrs Daws. There was always the risk that, when I found Constance, she wouldn’t be able to help.”

  Peris was pulling herself together by sheer strength of will. “Of course there was,” she said briskly. “You’ve done all we asked, Mrs Farrell, and sooner than we hoped. At least now we know we’re on our own. I’ll call Hugo, decide what we do next.”

  “Are you going to tell the girls?” wondered Brodie.

  “I don’t know.” Peris looked to Daniel. “What do you think?”

  His narrow shoulders lifted in a helpless shrug. “Maybe we should. They know Brodie’s here, they know she was looking for Constance, when they think about it they’ll guess it’s not good news or we’d in there sharing it with them. I think if they work it out for themselves they’ll to be more scared than if we come clean. I don’t want them thinking they can’t trust us.”

  Peris nodded slowly. “It’s better that we’re honest. Even if they’re upset, even if they get angry. Daniel…”

  He knew what she was going to say. “Do you want me to tell them?”

  Her eyes were grateful. “They’ll ask me questions I can’t answer, at least until I’ve spoken to Hugo. Tell them I’ll stay as long as I can. Tell them we’ll take them home as soon as we can.”

  “Tell them Jack’ll expedite things as much as he can,” added Brodie. “He couldn’t say how long it would take but he’s already onto it. Tell them they’ll be all right, wherever they end up. It won’t be for long, and you and I will still be around. We’ll make sure they’re OK.”

  Daniel nodded and reached for the kitchen door. “If you hear the sound of flying furniture, come and rescue me.”

  He paused outside the sitting-room. It wasn’t going to be easy to bring them up to date without scaring them. But he didn’t believe in secrets. He thought sometimes children needed a simpler version of the truth than adults, but the truth itself was a kind of basic human right, that no one had the right to deny to anyone else.

  He could hear their voices inside, still playing the game. There was more animation in them, more enjoyment, than at any time since they first met. His smile was edged with regret. They’d made a start on the road back, and already someone was ready to knock them into the gutter; and it was him.

  When he’d told them Em looked at Johnny, seeking a cue as to how serious it was. Johnny got up from the sofa and stalked over to the uncurtained window, head down, fists deep in the pockets of her denim skirt. “Of course,” she muttered bitterly. “Why would we expect anything different? Our mother’s dead, our father’s missing and our aunt is shovelling cornflakes into her ear in a lunatic asylum. Isn’t that what they mean by ‘par for the course’?”

  “You’ve had some rotten luck,” Daniel acknowledged quietly. “But it’s not all doom and gloom. Hugo and Peris want you to go and live with them. It’ll take a little time to organise but then you’ll have an exciting new country to get to know.”

  Johnny turned and stared at him in astonishment. “We’re not going to live in South Africa! This is our home—why on earth would we want to go to South Africa?”

  This was being harder than he’d expected. “You’re too young to live alone. Until you’re old enough to take responsibility for Em you have to be in the charge of an adult.”

  The girl shrugged. “Peris is an adult.”

  “Peris can’t stay forever! She has her own life to get back to. She’d be good to you, you know. As you get to know one another better, learn to respect one another, it’d get easier.”

  Johnny was frowning. “We don’t need her forever. We don’t want her forever. We only need her to stay until my father gets back and sorts things out.”

  If she’d hit him in the face with a cricket bat Daniel could hardly have been more stunned. He’d known their understanding was incomplete, their emotions in turmoil. He hadn’t realised that the basic facts of what had happened had somehow passed them by. He hadn’t asked if they realised that their father had killed their mother, and neither had anyone else.

  He dropped into the deep armchair, his knees suddenly gone to string, with the eyes of both girls expectant on him. “Oh dear God,” he whispered, sufficiently disturbed to forget for the moment that he was an atheist. “You think he’ll come back, and then everything’ll be how it was?”

  “Hardly,” sniffed Johnny. “Our mother’s dead. Murdered. She wasn’t the easiest woman in the world to live with, but it’s a bit harsh to suggest she won’t be missed.”

  Daniel’s brain was tripping over itself in the effort to catch up. “Who-o-o—?” He swallowed and tried again. “Who do you think killed her?”

  The girls traded a fast look. “We don’t know,” Johnny said firmly, “we didn’t see. But Daddy went after him. When he gets back he’ll be able to tell us.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  A nineteen-year-old male is a mass of contradictions. He has the body of a man. Sexually he’s at his peak. Physically his strength-to-weight ratio is as good as it will ever be—he may gain in strength over the next few years but he’ll have more mass to move around as well. He’s fast on his feet, hi
s reactions are superb, and he can go all day on chips and the odd can of lager.

  The reason that even men whose careers hang on their physique don’t reach their maximum potential for another ten years is that most nineteen-year-olds are emotionally still boys. They’re old enough to fight and die for their country, to marry and have children, to vote for their government and drive a car, but emotionally they are not yet men. Few of them are genuinely independent, psychologically or financially Few of them are ready to take full responsibility for themselves much less anyone else. More of them than would admit it are still constrained in their actions by what their mothers would think.

  In addition, their experience of the world is severely limited. As athletes progress through their twenties, their thirties and even sometimes their forties, their fund of experience coupled with their greater maturity offsets their declining physical prowess. Their minds work faster and better. They may have less energy but they also waste less. The confidence that comes from having overcome most challenges is worth more to them than the naked strength of the younger man.

  Nineteen is therefore a bad age to be accused of murder. Nicky Speers sat in the interview room at Dimmock Police Station, with Detective Superintendent Deacon eyeing him across a table that was nowhere near wide enough, and trembled with the adrenalin flooding his muscles because his still-immature brain thought this was a situation that could be resolved by fight or flight. It wasn’t. Even Nicky knew it wasn’t. But his head was full of cotton-wool while his hands itched for action. He knew if he left them to their own devices they’d rip the tape-recorder off the wall and toss it at someone’s head, and that would be as good as a signed confession. He was concentrating so hard on controlling them that he genuinely didn’t understand half of what Deacon was saying to him.

  The superintendent sighed. “It’s a simple enough question, Nicky. Where did the knife come from? Did you buy it? What did you buy it for?”

  “I’ve never seen it before!” insisted the boy, a whine in his voice that wasn’t far from a sob.

  “Yet it was in your shed. What are you suggesting—that shortly before you and I went out there, Robert Daws decided your shed would be a good place to dispose of one of the knives he stabbed his wife with? That he sneaked past your cottage so quietly that neither you, me nor your mother noticed, then sneaked away again after he’d left it where it could be found? Is that how you read it?”

  By and large—there are exceptions—farmers don’t do irony. The sense of humour on agricultural premises inclines to the broad. A working farm is the last place in the civilised world where nailing someone’s Wellingtons to the floor is considered the height of wit. Nicky had no experience of repartee. He thought Deacon was looking for a rational explanation. “You can get in over the back wall…”

  “The back wall!” exclaimed Deacon, leaning back in his chair, his eyebrows arching in admiration. “I never thought of that. Tell me, how high is your back wall?”

  Nicky shrugged. “I can see over it. I can climb over it.”

  “Five foot?” suggested Deacon. “Six?”

  “Maybe five foot.”

  “And you can climb over it. Of course, you’re nineteen. Robert Daws is forty-six. And he’s a fat man, so I’m told, and a grocer. OK, a big nationwide sort of grocer, but still a grocer. Do you know, I can’t see a fat forty-six-year old grocer scrambling over your five-foot back wall even if he wanted to. And I can’t for the life of me see why he’d want to.”

  That at least seemed pretty obvious. “To shift suspicion onto me!”

  Deacon nodded pensively. “Well, yes, he might want to do that. Only, if a man runs away from a murder scene and lies low for ten days, it’s a bit late to try to persuade people it was all a misunderstanding, it was actually someone else holding the knife. You know? And this is an intelligent man, Nicky, a man who makes big money out of guessing right. I can’t see him staking everything on a wild card like that.”

  “Fine,” snapped Nicky, his patience and his voice wearing thin. “It wasn’t Daws, it was someone else. But it’s not my knife, and I didn’t know it was there. You spotted it because you were looking for something suspicious. All I’m looking for when I go in the shed is a saw, or a hammer, or some oil for a squeaky hinge. I find it and go. I don’t spend a lot of time poking round on the floor!”

  “You’re saying it could have been there for a while and nobody noticed it?”

  “Yes!” exclaimed Nicky, relieved finally to be making some progress.

  “So it could have been there since the day of the murder.”

  Too late Nicky saw the pit yawn for him. Even back-pedalling for all he was worth he felt himself sliding into it. “How would I know? I never saw it before. It isn’t my knife!”

  “It’s a kitchen knife,” said Deacon. “You buy them in sets, four different sizes.”

  “So maybe you should ask my mam.”

  “You think it might have come from your kitchen?”

  “It might have.”

  “You think she might have the other three?”

  “She might have. Ask her!”

  Deacon pursed his lips. “What if she’s only got two?”

  Again the sensation of the ground crumbling under the boy’s feet. “What?”

  “Well, we assumed the weapon she was killed with came from the kitchen in Serena Daws’ cottage. Now you’re telling me it could have come from yours. If the two knives she was stabbed with match, and match other knives in your kitchen, and one of them was found at the scene of the crime, you have to admit that won’t look good.”

  He couldn’t remember admitting anything. He couldn’t remember saying that either knife came from his house, let alone both of them. He gritted his teeth to stop them chattering. “I didn’t kill Serena. I never hurt Serena. I never would have.”

  “So why were you in her house last night?”

  Nicky stared at him, aghast. “I wasn’t in her house last night!”

  “Nicky, you were seen! Give me a reason. Tell me you dropped your dear old dad’s watch last time you were there, or you wrote her some love-letters you wanted to recover, or even that you wanted one of her paintings as a keepsake. Make something up if you have to, but don’t tell me my witnesses imagined bumping into you in their hall in the middle of the night!”

  “They did!” he exclaimed, his young voice soaring. “Who did?”

  “For pity’s sake,” growled Deacon, exasperated, “the whole bloody household was there. If you weren’t returning to the scene of your crime, what were you doing?”

  Nicky’s eyes, white-rimmed with panic, flicked round the room as if seeking a way out, as if he was about to make a run for it. He wouldn’t, of course, have got three paces. Deacon would have stopped him before he reached the door; if by any chance he managed to evade the superintendent, his sergeant would have given chase; and if he made the corridor he didn’t know the way out. It was absurd. It was a measure of his desperation that he even considered it.

  He didn’t know what else he could say. He’d denied everything he’d been accused of, and he hadn’t been believed. He said thickly, “She wasn’t killed in the house. She was killed in the cottage.”

  The way Deacon looked at him, that was a mistake. “So she was,” he said gravely, “so she was. How did you know?”

  “Everybody knows!” yelled the anxious youth. “It was in the goddamned papers! Mr Poole found her there and called the police. Everyone in Dimmock knows she was killed in the cottage!”

  There are two kinds of police interrogation. One is handled like a scalpel, delicately, precisely, teasing out information, dissecting down through the layers of deceit to the kernel of the truth. The other is more like a bludgeon, swung with more strength than accuracy, hitting hard enough to lift the suspect off his feet. In this kind of interview the quality of the questions is less important than the number and the way they just keep coming, from a variety of angles and too quickly for the suspect t
o know which are relevant, which should be answered with particular care. The purpose is to unsettle him, to get him angry, to make him say and do things he wouldn’t if he were calm.

  Jack Deacon was an expert in the latter type of interrogation. Not because he couldn’t use a scalpel but because he enjoyed hitting the table hard enough to see the pots fly. “But everyone in Dimmock wasn’t seen prowling late at night in the home of his murdered ex-lover!”

  Charlie Voss knew what Deacon was doing. He knew he hadn’t made a single claim that couldn’t be brushed aside by anyone calm enough to analyse it. But Nicky Speers wasn’t calm. He thought he was in a trap, and he was too spooked by Deacon’s confidence to appreciate the paucity of his argument. He thought he was going to be charged with murder, and after that the trial was a mere formality. He thought Deacon had the power to lock him up until he was an old, old man.

  He came to his feet with a rush, with a sound that was half a roar and half a wail, that made the hair stand up on the back of Voss’s neck, and his long arms flailed about him more as if he were swatting flies than fighting policemen. His eyes rolled wildly in the sweaty pallor of his face, and he looked as if he’d try to dig his way out through the wall if he couldn’t reach the door.

  In a way this was what Deacon had been aiming at. He wanted to break the boy’s nerve, to strip away his defences and leave him naked, without a lie to cover him. He should, thought Voss, have looked happier at his success. Instead, still sitting, he pushed his chair back from the table and said gruffly, “Calm down.”

  But it was too late. Nicky no longer had control of either his mind or his limbs. He threw his fists about like a shadow-boxer, then turned and slammed himself against the wall. “I can’t stay here,” he cried desolately into the dingy beige plaster. “You can’t keep me. Let me go.”

  Afraid he might hurt himself, Voss moved to restrain him. But Nicky threw him off with enough force to spill the sergeant onto the table. More surprised than hurt, Voss picked himself up for another go. But Deacon waved him back with a hand the size of a Sunday roast.