by Jo Bannister
So the two women were not exactly social equals. It was hard to imagine Edith Timoney having a social equal. What she did have was a good eye for glass. Brodie never knew where she found it or how much she paid, only that it would be less than Brodie gave her for it and an even smaller proportion of what Mrs Campbell-Wheeler would give Brodie. If the leading light of Dimmock Ladies’ Lunch Club but knew it, most of her admired collection of Victorian cranberry glass had passed through the hands of dumpy, grubby Miss Timoney.
Most of the local dealers would phone Brodie if they had something to interest her. Miss Timoney didn’t have a phone. She didn’t have electricity either, and there was scant evidence that she had a water-supply. When she wanted to see Brodie she sent a message with Wee Maurice who did her Heavy Lifting and was accompanied everywhere by a cat on a length of string. People assumed the string was to prevent the cat wandering off. Brodie suspected it was to stop Wee Maurice wandering off.
It was a half mile climb up a steep hill: Brodie took the car and told herself she’d need it to carry her purchases. Miss Timoney didn’ t disappoint her. They dickered over the price but Brodie took the lot. She’d feed it to Mrs Campbell-Wheeler a piece at a time over the next few months, giving the impression that she was constantly scouring the market on her client’s behalf and earning every penny of her commission.
When she turned back into Shack Lane, her first thought was that someone had left her a parcel. Her second was that it was a bin-bag dumped in her doorway. Only after she’d parked the car did she recognise it as a human being. She had her phone out to call the police and have it moved before she realised this bit of human detritus was someone she knew.
Or at least, someone who’d recently given her a cheque for a great deal of money. Though their business was done, it seemed ungrateful to betray a demon rocker in a highly illegal state to his natural enemies. Brodie stepped over the mumbling body, unlocked her front door, put a hand on his collar and yanked.
She’d seen drunks before. She’d seen people out of their heads on assorted drugs. The sight of Jared Fry passed out on her office floor annoyed rather than alarmed her. She phoned his manager.
When Chandos didn’t answer his mobile she phoned The Diligence. PC Vickers picked up. ‘That you, Reg? It’s Brodie Farrell. I’m looking for Eric Chandos.’
‘I haven’t seen him today,’ said Vickers. ‘Hang on a minute while I check.’ She heard voices in the background, then the constable was back. ‘He’s up in London. The housekeeper isn’t expecting him back till late.’
‘Thanks, Reg. It’ll keep.’
Actually, though, it wouldn’t. She had to get rid of Fry before Deacon arrived. He’d asked her to stay over again and she’d refused; she’d asked him to tea with her and Paddy and, if grudgingly, he’d accepted. If Fry was still here in half an hour so that Deacon tripped over him he’d wake up in a cell. Since that would be the end of any repeat business she might get from him, Brodie looked for options.
She put on the kettle in the tiny kitchen behind her office and brewed coffee so strong the smell was enough to make Jared Fry open his eyes. But the pupils remained distant and unreactive, and after a moment the heavy lids fell again. He mumbled indistinctly into his chest.
Brodie hauled him into a sitting position against the wall, his head colliding with the plaster. She knotted her fingers in his lank black hair, tipped his face back and dribbled some of the fearsome liquid between his lips. When he coughed most of it down his front she repeated the process.
Finally she saw the beginnings of reason in his eyes. She sat back on her heels. ‘Jared, do you know where you are?’ He nodded. There was no way of knowing if it was true. ‘So what are you doing here?’
‘Leave. Leave him alone. He’s mine.’
Even with her brows knitting Fair Isle Brodie couldn’t make sense of that. ‘Leave who alone?’
‘Eric,’ mumbled Fry. ‘He’s mine. I need him. Leave him alone.’
‘I haven’t got him,’ she snorted indignantly. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I know what you’re up to.’ Enough of the caffeine was reaching his brain that he was starting to make sentences, if not sense. ‘You think you can flash your … flash your …’ Just in time he opted for discretion as the better part of valour. ‘Flutter your eyelashes at him and he’ll fling himself at your feet. You don’t know anything. I’ve known him for years. I’ve made more money for him than you’ll see in your lifetime. He’s never going to dump me for the likes of you.’
Brodie’s eyebrows arched sharply. For a moment she felt herself getting competitive with a demon rocker for the soul of a man she didn’t even want. Probably didn’t want. She took a deep breath. ‘So why are you here?’
The ravaged face twisted in a scowl. Fry was just alert enough to see he’d strayed into a trap, too woolly to get out of it. ‘I’m telling you,’ he slurred fiercely. ‘Telling you. Leave him alone. He’s no use to me if the only thing he can think about is you.’
Brodie blinked at him in astonishment. ‘Me? Eric Chandos is thinking about me?’
‘Brodie this, Brodie that. Brodie says. Like a kid with his first girlfriend.’ His tone was bitter. ‘I need him. I need his mind on his job. Get out of his head.’
Brodie wasn’t often lost for words. But this was … unexpected. It took a moment to regain her balance. ‘You’ve misunderstood. Nothing is going on between Eric and me. I haven’t seen him since the party.’
‘What party?’ Then Fry remembered. ‘At the house. Yeah. You found me that house.’
‘That’s right,’ said Brodie, hoping he was now circling the airstrip ready to touch down.
‘You’re good at finding houses.’
‘Thank you, Jared,’ she said.
But it wasn’t a compliment. ‘Find yourself a new one. In another town. I’ll make it worth your while.’
Even knowing the state he was in, Brodie couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘Jared – are you telling me Dimmock isn’t big enough for the two of us?’
But to Fry it was no laughing matter. ‘Get out of my life. Out of Eric’s life. I’ll pay you. Or you can wait for the fire insurance to come through.’
Brodie had been threatened before. Most threats can safely be dismissed as wishful thinking; one in twenty is serious and warrants immediate police intervention. She wasn’t sure about Fry’s. Possibly he knew and no doubt he could afford that kind of help, and right now he seemed disturbed enough to want to hurt her. But he was a junkie: he was threatening her from a position half-prone on her office carpet because he hadn’t the strength or co-ordination to get up. Whatever threats he slurred at her now would be forgotten by the time he was sober enough to do something about them.
As a kind of acid test she asked herself if she felt in danger from him, and the answer was no.
Still, she had to do something about him. She reached for the phone. ‘You remember my friend Daniel. He had a funny turn at the party and you helped him.’
Fry sniffed, curling his lip in way that reminded her of Deacon. ‘He didn’t like my music.’
‘That’s because he has post-traumatic stress disorder, not conductive deafness,’ explained Brodie as she dialled. ‘Daniel? It’s me. Listen, I need a favour …’
It was a few minutes’ walk from Daniel’s house on the beach to Brodie’s office. For fifteen months that had been a constant source of pleasure to him. It made it easy to drop in on one another unannounced, and share a fisherman’s lunch (like a ploughman’s but with added sand) sitting on his iron steps, and talk about the myriad things that amused or troubled or interested one or other of them in the course of a normal week.
Just occasionally, though, there was a downside, and this was it. Like many people who enjoy more than their fair share of personal magnetism, Brodie could impose shamelessly on those who were attracted to her. Neither Deacon nor Daniel had ever found a way of saying no to her that (a) didn’t sound churlish and (b) s
topped her in her tracks. Mostly she proceeded as if they’d said yes so the end result was the same.
It was the exam season and Daniel was busy tutoring, devoting hours each day to preparing and giving lessons. He had pupils with him when the phone rang, a couple of fourteen-year-old girls who’d come to him struggling with long division and were now at home with logarithms and Pythagoras. He tried to explain that he couldn’t just evict them but Brodie wasn’t listening.
Finally the girls took pity on him. One of them leaned over – a little closer than was strictly necessary – and whispered in his ear, ‘Give us an extra half hour next week.’ They packed their books away, and their feet rang on the iron steps and their laughter on the salt air.
Daniel sighed. ‘I’ll be there in five minutes.’
Brodie had the nerve to sound faintly aggrieved. ‘I knew you were only pretending to be busy!’
‘I’ve been pouring coffee into him but he isn’t sobering up much.’
Daniel stood with his hands in his pockets and his chin on his chest, gazing at the dishevelled heap on Brodie’s sofa. ‘I don’t think he’s drunk.’
Brodie nodded. ‘Me neither, I just couldn’t think what else to do. What do you suppose he’s taken?’
‘What am I, a sniffer dog?’ Daniel took Fry’s arm by the wrist and slid the cuff of his black shirt above his elbow. Fry watched disdainfully and did not resist. Daniel winced. ‘Whatever it is, he’s injecting.’
‘I don’t know what to do with him,’ said Brodie. She was the least helpless person Daniel knew so when she played for sympathy he felt a little as Androcles must have when the lion held up its paw. ‘I can’t take him to The Diligence, the place is full of coppers, and I can’t get hold of Eric. And Jack’ll be here in ten minutes. I’d dump him on Marta but she’s got Paddy. I can’t just chuck him out, not in this state. I wondered …’
Daniel knew exactly what she’d wondered. ‘Bring the car round. I’ll keep him out of harm’s way till Scotty beams him down.’
Deacon hadn’t quite given up on Plan A, which to his mind was a great deal better than the Plan B Brodie had countered with. It was why he wasn’t driving to her house but begging a lift instead. He’d told her the Area Car would pick him up sometime between Paddy’s bedtime and his. Of course, if the Area Car was busy elsewhere she’d ask Marta to step downstairs again and run him home. And once there … Deacon wasn’t a man to count his chickens, but he’d had a shower and changed his shirt and his underwear in the locker-room before leaving Battle Alley.
It was twenty past six now, so he had ten minutes to get to Shack Lane. He was spending them trying to forestall the myriad emergencies that might lead to urgent phone-calls, mumbled apologies and a night spent kicking himself. It was, he was well aware, optimistic trying to run a social life and a murder inquiry at the same time. The only thing that made it possible was that, whoever she was, the girl at The Diligence had been dead for years.
It’s the first forty-eight hours that matter. That’s when the body will speak almost as clearly as it did in life, when the scene will yield real clues, when neighbours will remember seeing an argument under the street-lamp, when a panic-stricken killer will stumble home with blood on his clothes and never realise he’s leaned against the gatepost, the door and the hall wallpaper.
For forty-eight hours you throw as much manpower at the problem as you can muster, talk to everyone you can find, whistle up every specialist you can think of and subject every piece of evidence to every scientific method you know, because if you want to crack this every hour counts. With the clock ticking you don’t stop for meals and you don’t stop to sleep: you snatch both in bite-sized chunks at your desk, in your car or occasionally in the autopsy room, and the first one to call his wife is a sissy.
This long after, the need to find out what happened at The Diligence was no less but the urgency was. Whoever killed the girl wouldn’t still have her blood under his fingernails. He could be on the other side of the world by now; and if he wasn’t it probably meant he wasn’t going anywhere. It would take time to get to the bottom of this, but after so much of it time wasn’t really the issue.
Except for that bit of it between six-thirty and about eleven tonight, when any untoward breakthroughs – welcome as they would be at any other time – could quickly render the clean underwear superfluous.
So he spent a last few minutes checking that all the bases were covered. Detective Sergeant Voss was in Deacon’s office, which was the best insurance against interruption he could arrange; partly because Voss was capable of dealing intelligently with most things that might arise, and partly because he knew how long Deacon could hold a grudge.
As Deacon was finally heading for the door the phone rang. Voss beat him to it by a split second, waving him on his way. Deacon didn’ t go, hung around anxious and scowling like a bogie-man when someone’s vacuuming under the bed.
It was Dr Roy. ‘I’ve done the autopsy on your girl.’
Another reason Voss was good at covering for Deacon’s absences was that he could think very quickly if the need arose. ‘Hello, Aunty,’ he said. ‘Listen, I keep telling you, you shouldn’t call me at work.’
Deacon gave a gruff little chuckle, mimed ‘You’ve got my number’ and headed downstairs.
‘Sorry, Dr Roy,’ said Voss. ‘Mr Deacon was just on his way out. Should I call him back?’
‘No, no,’ said Aditya Roy amiably. ‘Just a bit more detail to flesh out the bones. Sorry,’ he added, the avuncular smile audible in his voice, ‘pathologist’s joke.
‘So. She was in good physical health and always had been – no signs of old injuries, or any around the time of death except that bump to her temple. I’m not convinced it killed her, although it’s hard to be sure with head injuries. People head-butt cars and walk away; others die because a book fell off a high shelf.’
‘You think someone hit her?’
‘It could have been a blow,’ agreed Roy. ‘Or a fall, or she might have walked into something. It could have been an accident, only why then was she buried in secret?’
‘What about the time of death? Can you narrow it down any?’
‘A little. I’d say she was alive in 1995 and dead three years later. And she went into the ground in summer.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘The little beasties,’ said Roy cheerfully. ‘Different beasties at different times of year. The ones that started work on this girl are active in summer: June to August, depending on the weather.’
Voss was taking notes. Anything to help identify her?’
‘Sorry, Sergeant. Not a stitch of clothing on her and nothing in the grave. Unless she was a nudist, she was stripped before she was buried.’
On the face of it Roy’s information wasn’t much help. She was still an unknown girl who died in one of three months in one of three years in a manner that was uncertain. All the same, the time-window was progress. Now CID could establish who was at The Diligence in that period and start asking questions. A detective with no one to question is one of the saddest spectacles in nature.
On the desk was a list of the eight residents with whom Brodie negotiated the purchase of The Diligence flats. She’d made a note of how long each had lived there, probably because it affected how much money she’d offered them. Voss had a lot of respect for Brodie Farrell, not least because he knew an operator when he saw one.
As he read down the print-out he saw something else, and for a couple of minutes wasn’t sure if it was a help or a hindrance. Actually it was neither, but it was useful to know. None of the residents at The Diligence had been there as long as ten years. Ten years ago it was still The Diligence Hotel.
Some of the names on Brodie’s list had lived there for eight years, some for seven. More recent arrivals than that Voss felt justified in dismissing from the inquiry.
He wasn’t going to do anything about it tonight. But first thing tomorrow he would contact the developers who conv
erted The Diligence to flats and ask them for dates and details. When the hotel closed, when they moved on site, how long the work took, and when the first purchaser moved in. It occurred to Voss that, if you had a body to dispose of, a building-site was a good place to do it.
What he could do this evening was start a systematic search through the various data-bases for fair 163-centimetre-tall girls in their late teens or early twenties who were reported missing in the summer between 1995 and 1998.
It sounded simple. But Voss had done this too often to expect a quick result. One complicating factor is how many people are reported missing every year. And the other is that, as most murders are domestic, not all disappearances are reported.
Chapter Eight
For most people, waking from a drugged sleep in a place they didn’t know to a face they barely recognised would be the worst kind of nightmare. For Jared Fry it was routine.
As his system metabolised the heroin his body came back to him. He was cold and his mouth tasted like an old sock. He had a vague recollection of climbing some stairs, or being dragged up them, but couldn’t work out where he was.
He knew he wasn’t at The Diligence: neither in the cellar which Chandos had invited the music press to photograph, nor in his actual bedroom, nor even in the solar on top of the house where he commonly slept – still in most of his clothes as often as not, an old quilt pulled around him, the heavy metal thumping from the music centre numbing his mind, keeping him from thought till exhaustion intervened. He knew that someone came into the airy moonlit room about then, turned the music off, took his boots off, lifted his legs onto the sofa and tucked the quilt around him, but he didn’t know who it was. Chandos perhaps, or Miriam the housekeeper. He’d never asked.
