Breaking Faith

by Jo Bannister

  Chapter Nine

  Brodie took an almost malicious pleasure in watching Deacon with her daughter. Paddy enjoyed the company of adults, even the grumpy detective, but Deacon – with no children of his own – was never sure how to treat her. As a pet? As a rather short person of limited vocabulary? As a different species entirely? At various times he’d tried being jolly – a seriously scary prospect – and he’d tried ignoring her, which went down as well with the daughter as it did with her mother. Now he was like a man walking to work across an area marked on the map as ‘former minefield’: not confident, but a little happier every time he got away with it.

  While Brodie was putting Paddy to bed, Deacon shifted onto the sofa. When she returned – story read, bedclothes tucked in, child and dragon companion dutifully kissed – she sat down beside him, leaning into the warmth of his bulk.

  The awkwardness that had crept into their dealings with one another had begun to ease in the last few days. She was glad but she was left wondering if it was entirely due to the time she’d spent with Eric Chandos or if she and Deacon had reached a natural cooling-point in their relationship. In a way it was a wonder it had lasted till now. It would be hard to imagine a man less like the husband she’d chosen and been happy with for five years than Jack Deacon. He was a lot older than her; also he was rough in his manner, stubborn, bad-tempered, often crude and occasionally cruel. He was not a nice man by any conventional yardstick. He wasn’t a rough diamond: he was a rock.

  In spite of which he was a good man. It was the only thing he and John Farrell had in common; and that was surprising too. Brodie hadn’t known she was drawn to probity. It wasn’t the sexiest attribute in men or women. When you meet someone who sets your blood racing, you might be attracted to their looks, their physique, the power they wield or the wealth they’ve accumulated, but you don’t normally go weak at the knees over their integrity. It’s an attribute you only discover – or sometimes miss – in people you’ve known for a while.

  And the reason is that it’s irrelevant to a passing fancy, however intense. Where it comes into its own, and in doing so overshadows all the more obvious kinds of appeal, is when you contemplate marriage.

  The recognition that at least part of her was thinking along those lines hit Brodie like a sock full of wet snow. The inference was that, without consulting her conscious, choice-making self, her instincts were sizing up Deacon as husband material. Now she understood her sense of confusion. When her brain got wind of what her heart was up to it locked the doors and windows, took the phone off the hook, packed a bag and had someone bring its car round.

  But she didn’t want the emergency exit: only panic was suggesting she did. She wasn’t afraid of commitment, just didn’t want to be rushed into it. She could imagine herself settling for Jack Deacon. She wasn’t sure she was ready to settle yet.

  Spending last night with him – and it wasn’t just the sex, it was the talking and not talking and simply being together – had helped. The unease she’d been feeling in his presence, that she was sure he must be aware of, began to dissipate. They ate at Deacon’s favourite restaurant, where Deacon gave the wine waiter a lesson in distinguishing the genuinely good from the merely pretentious and the wine waiter gave Deacon tips on solving murders. Her arm linked through his, they strolled back to Deacon’s house as the restaurant closed, and were still chuckling together after the last of the clothes were off.

  Today she felt more relaxed in his company than she had for weeks. She leaned into his solidness and after a moment his arm went around her. His voice was a bear’s growl in the pit of his stomach. ‘Better now?’

  ‘Mm.’

  After a while he felt emboldened to raise Plan A again. Brodie hugged his arm but he didn’t get the answer he wanted. ‘I can’t ask Marta again.’ She felt his disappointment and smiled. ‘But Paddy’s going to her father’s this weekend.’

  Deacon’s ears pricked at that. ‘Saturday? Sunday?’

  ‘Friday night to Monday morning.’

  Deacon’s expression was pontifical. ‘I think it’s important to let a child spend quality time with her father.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Brodie. ‘So will John when I tell him.’

  About eleven Deacon called to ask where the Area Car was, and was unsurprised to learn it would be passing Chiffney Road shortly. Brodie kissed him goodnight and headed for bed.

  She was taking her make-up off when her phone rang. She glanced at the clock, and wouldn’t have answered except that she recognised the number. ‘Eric? I was trying to get hold of you earlier.’

  ‘I know. I’ve been up in London all day.’ He didn’t sound apologetic so much as alarmed. ‘I was going to call you tomorrow. Then I got home and found Jared’s missing, and I’m hoping like hell you know something about it.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she reassured him, ‘he’s fine. He’s with Daniel. If he hasn’t come home yet it’s because he’s staying there. Do you want to phone Daniel to check?’

  Chandos took the number. But he plainly didn’t understand. ‘Why’s he with Hood, again?’

  ‘Because he couldn’t stay with me and I couldn’t reach you,’ said Brodie. ‘He turned up at my office as I was closing up. He was out of his skull, he’d no idea what he was doing. I’d have driven him home, but The Diligence is full of policemen – I was afraid that if he rolled up there singing Puff the Magic Dragon they’d throw him in a cell for his own protection. So I called Daniel. I tried to let you know.’

  ‘You didn’t try very hard!’

  She bristled. ‘I phoned you: you didn’t answer and you didn’t get back to me. So I made other arrangements. Keeping your milch-cow from straying is your job, not mine. I’ve done what you paid me for, I have no further responsibilities to Jared Fry. I could have left him stoned in the street, in which case he’d certainly have ended up in the Battle Alley bed-and-breakfast. I got him safe and out of sight – and if that isn’t good enough, maybe you should invest some of his money in a babysitter. One who won’t leave him wandering the streets in a daze waiting for someone to take pity on him!’

  From the quality of his silence she suspected people didn’t often shout at Eric Chandos. After a moment he said, chastened, ‘Yes, OK. I’m sorry I woke you. I’ll call Hood.’

  ‘You do that,’ she snapped; and added, for no better reason than devilment, ‘But just for the record, we weren’t sleeping.’

  For an hour after he’d rung off she lay awake in the dark, wondering why she’d said that. Why had she felt, let alone succumbed to, the urge to make Eric Chandos jealous?

  First thing on Wednesday morning Deacon and Charlie Voss divided Brodie’s list in half.

  Cynthia Bush owned The Diligence Hotel for twenty-two years until it closed at the end of the 1996 season. It was then purchased by the Ferndale Partnership who put their plans in the hands of local builder Norman Wilmslow. The first flats were finished the following summer and bought by Mr and Mrs Edward Rollins, Mr Corin Hurley and Miss Agnes Venables. The rest were completed by the end of the year. It made sense to begin by interviewing those who were at The Diligence at the earliest time the girl could have gone into the ground – summer 1995 – and work forward chronologically.

  ‘I’ll take Mrs Bush,’ said Deacon. ‘And …’ He was going to say the builder but thought better of it. ‘And the Rollinses. You take Wilmslow and Hurley. He’ll be the hardest to find – he was only at The Diligence for three years, God knows where he is now.’

  ‘What about Miss Venables?’

  ‘God knows where she is too,’ said Deacon, ‘but actually so do I. She died three years ago. She was a local councillor, it was a big funeral. She must have been in her late sixties when she went to The Diligence. I think we can probably discount her as a murderer of young women.’

  ‘Stranger things have happened,’ said Voss. He considered. ‘Though probably not many.’

  ‘In all likelihood,’ said Deacon, ‘none of the residents w
as involved. She probably moved in before they did, when the hotel was lying empty and the grounds were overgrown. Her killer could have chosen worse: she went undiscovered for years, it was a fluke she was found when she was. But we’ve got to start somewhere. Someone may have seen something – disturbed earth in the garden, the tracks of a vehicle, a suspicious visitor. If we ask the right questions we might jog memories.’

  ‘It would be easier if we knew who she was.’

  ‘Only if she was murdered because of who she was: somebody’s wife, somebody’s girlfriend. If she was a random victim – a girl he met in a pub, a hitchhiker he picked up on the road – identifying her won’t help us find him. Except that it’ll narrow the time-frame.’

  Voss nodded. ‘I’ll make a start then.’ He glanced at his notebook. ‘You’re sure you don’t want Wilmslow? After Mrs Bush he was the next person to spend much time at The Diligence.’

  Deacon shook his head like a Newfoundland emerging from a river. ‘The more time I spend with those people’ – he didn’t mean the builders – ‘the more likely it is I’ll deck one of them. No, I’ll leave hob-nobbing with the celebrities to you. I’ve always thought you were a bit of a hippy, Charlie Voss. You should blend right in.’

  Detective Sergeant Voss was a hippy in the same way that Eddie the Eagle was a ski-jumper: only someone with no experience of the real thing could have been confused. But he’d been called a great deal worse in his time. ‘Yo man,’ he said obligingly, and went down to his car.

  Mrs Bush closed The Diligence Hotel only when she saw no way to keep it open. Ten years ago the walkers and cyclists who for most of her incumbency had thought a country hotel on the South Downs a desirable holiday base began heading for more exotic climes.

  ‘I tried to sell as a going concern,’ she told Deacon as they sat in the conservatory of her retirement bungalow beside the River Barley. ‘I didn’t want to make my staff redundant. But the sums worked out the same for everyone else. What we were doing made more sense in the 1960s than the 1990s. Finally I had no choice. We saw out the summer of 1996, then shut the door. Most of the staff found work pretty quickly, which was a relief. I knew I’d be able to sell the building – it was a good piece of real estate.’

  She was a widow in her early seventies with a floss of soft white hair and a sugar-almond complexion. She was softly spoken, too, but there was something about the way she said ‘real estate’ that told Deacon she was a businesswoman to the bone.

  ‘The period we’re most interested in,’ he said, ‘is from 1995 onwards. Can you remember back ten years?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Mrs Bush, happy to confound his expectations. ‘I’ve also kept my books. I can tell you everyone who stayed there until we closed. Would that be helpful?’

  A slow smile softened Deacon’s craggy features. ‘Indeed it would, Mrs Bush.’

  Which gave him another list of names, but no reason to set the dogs on any of them. Mrs Bush recalled nothing untoward happening around that time.

  ‘Could someone have got into the garden without being seen?’

  Mrs Bush nodded. ‘If he came through the wood. The only boundary between our bit of it and the rest was a split-rail fence. There’s a wall there now, the new residents wanted their privacy, but I liked people wandering in from the wood. I used to sell them afternoon tea.’

  So a man burdened with a girl’s body could have parked his car down the road and walked through the wood looking for a place to bury her. ‘But why your garden? The fence would have warned him he was entering private property. Why not bury her in the wood?’

  ‘You’re not a countryman, are you, Superintendent?’ observed Mrs Bush. ‘I can think of two good reasons. The roots make it hard to dig under trees. Your girl was buried on the edge of the wood – which happened to be in my garden but was a good hundred yards from the hotel on the far side of the stable-block. Even if we’d still been there we wouldn’t have noticed anyone down there late at night. But we would have seen the damage to the lawn the next day. I think she was buried after the hotel closed.’

  ‘And the other reason?’ Deacon wasn’t being polite, he wanted to know what she thought. The woman knew the area better than anyone: she might easily set him on the right track.

  ‘Dogs,’ said Mrs Bush briskly. ‘People walk their dogs in the wood. A body in a shallow grave wouldn’t stay buried for long.’

  Deacon nodded. Mrs Bush had given him a much clearer picture of what was going on at The Diligence around that time than he’d had before. And she didn’t believe the girl could have been buried while the hotel was open, which meant summer 1997 at the earliest. That took two years out of the time-window. ‘You’ve been very helpful. Call me if you think of anything else, however trivial.’

  ‘I will,’ she promised. ‘But I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything.’

  ‘I bet you haven’t, Mrs Bush,’ said Deacon.

  Voss phoned The Diligence to see if the builder was still there, but with the pool on hold he’d taken his digger elsewhere. PC Batty had his mobile number: Wilmslow answered from the top of the Firestone Cliffs, overlooking Dimmock from the east.

  He was waiting beside his digger, looking worried, when Voss drove up. ‘Should I have gone back to The Diligence this morning? I did ask – they said there was no point. So I came here. They want security gates putting up.’ He looked doubtfully at a stack of wrought-iron.

  The builder was, thought Voss, the perfect example of the self-employed tradesman. The overalls that came in contact with the big Case digger were oily and disreputable, but underneath he wore – in deference to his status as proprietor – a crisp white shirt which his wife washed and ironed daily. Voss had a lot of time for people like Norman Wilmslow. If he was in the gutter it was only because he was repaving the thoroughfare. His eyes were on the stars because he’d taken someone’s roof off to install a skylight.

  Voss was quick to reassure him. ‘No, that’s fine. You can’t hang around all day waiting for someone to think of a question to ask you. I’ve got one now, though. I understand you did the work when The Diligence was sub-divided.’

  ‘I did. And that,’ added Wilmslow pointedly, ‘is all I did.’

  ‘Can you give me some facts and figures? How long you were there, how many people were working on the site, when you went home at night and how you locked up – that sort of thing.’

  Wilmslow Construction had done a lot of work for the Ferndale Partnership and they’d told him they’d need him at The Diligence before they’d actually bought the place. He moved onto the site with a crew of five in February 1997 with four months to convert the first three flats.

  ‘We nearly did it, too,’ he added with a touch of pride, as if nearly doing what he’d contracted to was a rare mark of distinction.

  ‘How nearly?’ asked Voss.

  ‘The first flat was ready for occupation at the end of May, the third by mid-August.’

  Voss wrote it down. ‘Were they occupied right away?’

  ‘Pretty much. The first couple moved in while we were still snagging. Eddie Rollins and his missus – he’s in hardware. They’d been living in digs, reckoned it was worth putting up with us still on site in order to get in. She was a right bobby dazzler, that Mrs Rollins,’ he remembered with a slow smile. ‘She used to bring out tea and biscuits, and her in a dressing-gown that wouldn’t have kept a babby decent.’

  Voss grinned. ‘One of the perks of the job.’

  ‘No,’ said Wilmslow carefully, ‘the only perk of the job. Unless you’ve got a use for second-hand sanitary ware.’

  ‘So the Rollinses moved in at the start of June. Until then your crew were the only people at The Diligence?’

  ‘Pretty much. Except for the Ferndale people, of course – and the architect, the building inspector, the suppliers, the estate agents and people looking at the flats. I wasn’t responsible for everyone who came on the site between February and June.’

  ‘But you probably sa
w more of them than anyone else. Did you see anything odd? Suspicious?’

  ‘What, like some bugger down the back garden with a roll of carpet over his shoulder and a shovel in his hand?’ Irony thickened Wilmslow’s local accent. ‘Sorry, Mr Voss, but if I’d seen that I’d have mentioned it before now.’

  Voss nodded apologetically. ‘I’ve got to start somewhere and you’re probably my best witness.’ He thought for a moment. ‘So what happened at night?’

  ‘We knocked off about six mostly. You can work later in summer but long days mean people getting tired and that’s when accidents happen. At the start of the job we worked from eight till four, and maybe a few of us would stay on to catch up with some inside work.’

  ‘Until the Rollinses moved in the site was vacant overnight?’

  ‘We used to lock up, of course,’ said Wilmslow. ‘But you can’t turn it into Fort Knox. To start with we still had people wandering in from the woods looking for a cream tea. That stopped when we put the wall up, but we still had stuff go missing. It’s the same everywhere. You lock away the small valuable stuff, and the big stuff is too hard to filch, but you always lose lengths of timber, enough bricks for a barbecue and any tools that didn’t get put away at the end of the day. We had mesh up till the Rollinses moved in but it won’t keep out a determined thief.’

  But it wasn’t a thief they were concerned with: it was a man with a body over his shoulder, who wouldn’t have been interested either in climbing a two metre wall or breaking down Mr Wilmslow’s mesh fence. If the girl arrived that summer she came in via an open front gate, almost certainly in a car. ‘Do you remember seeing any vehicles on site that you didn’t recognise? Or tyre-tracks down the garden that shouldn’t have been there? Any freshly turned earth?’

  Norman Wilmslow was a patient man, and the death of a young woman was important enough for him to try to answer honestly however foolish the question. ‘I don’t remember seeing any vehicles I couldn’t account for. But tyre-tracks – Mr Voss, have you never been on a building site? The whole damn thing’s a mass of tyre-tracks, there’s no way you’d notice extra ones. Same goes for holes. I never noticed someone had been digging down the garden, but there were so many trenches and ditches and heaps of earth round the place I couldn’t swear to it.’