Breaking Faith

by Jo Bannister

  Voss accepted that. ‘Thanks for your time, Mr Wilmslow. I’ll get back to you if I need to.’

  ‘Do you know who she was yet?’

  ‘We will,’ Voss said with more confidence than he felt. ‘We’ll find out who she was and what happened to her.’

  Chapter Ten

  The sign over the shop read Edward Rollins Hardware. In the window were trays of tools, pyramids of paint, brushes in every imaginable size and shape, and a garden parasol from the days of the Raj. And it was all new. The name, the window, the stock. Rollins had taken the money from the sale of his Diligence flat and put it into this shop.

  No, thought Deacon, looking at it, he probably called it a store. Not unreasonably: it bore as much resemblance to a corner hardware shop where you could buy a pound of mixed nails and a mousetrap as McDonalds did to a chip-van. A year ago Eddie Rollins ran the hardware department in the Dimmock outlet of a national home supplies chain: today he had his own store. For a man passionate about hardware it was the realisation of a dream.

  Somehow, he didn’t look like a man living his dream. When Deacon introduced himself he reacted with a startled glance. After a quick word with the girl on the till he ushered the policeman into a back office. ‘We can talk in here. It’s quieter.’

  Out front the store was all bright and shiny and eager to please: in here half the office equipment remained to be unpacked and the manager’s chair was a garden seat with the price-tag still on it. There was nowhere else to sit. Rollins offered Deacon the garden seat, himself leaned against the wall looking wary.

  ‘Business doing well?’ asked Deacon, hoping to put the man at his ease.

  On the television, Deacon had noticed, it was immediately clear who the murderer/rapist/forger/diamond thief was because policemen made him nervous. In reality, being questioned by the police makes perfectly innocent people nervous. Those who remain calm are those who’ve had the most practice.

  Perhaps Rollins relaxed a little. He was a man in his late thirties, of average height and spare build, with a thin face and receding hairline. He’d gone for a corporate image of white drill apron (businesslike, knowledgeable) over denims (casual, approachable) but it worked rather better on the young woman at the till than it did on him. He looked like a trendy butcher.

  ‘Pretty well,’ he said. ‘We’ve only been open a month, we’re still at sixes and sevens, but we’re getting plenty of people in. Sales are better than I expected this soon.’

  ‘It was a good decision then,’ said Deacon. ‘To put the money from your flat at The Diligence into this place.’

  Rollins nodded. His face was closed, uncommunicative. ‘It’s something I’ve wanted to do. Selling the flat made it possible.’

  ‘You made a good deal there,’ said Deacon. ‘Better than the people who settled sooner. Comes of being a businessman, I suppose – knowing how long you can hold out without killing the deal.’

  Rollins shrugged. ‘I wasn’t keen to move. It was only when my so-called friends and neighbours put the pressure on that I gave it any real thought. They wanted the cash, which meant my moving out too. So I considered my options. Staying put with seven households hating my guts was the least attractive, so I made the best deal I could.’

  ‘Where do you live now?’

  Rollins gestured upwards. ‘It was a house before it was a shop. There’s another two floors up there.’

  ‘Plenty of room for a family,’ said Deacon. ‘Do you have children?’

  ‘Actually,’ Rollins said stiffly, ‘I’m on my own.’

  Deacon glanced at his notes. ‘I’m sorry, I understood you were married.’

  ‘We’re separated. We have been for years.’

  ‘But you were together when you bought into The Diligence.’

  ‘Just about.’

  Deacon raised an eyebrow that indicated Rollins should elaborate.

  There was a quiet savagery in the man’s eyes. ‘Six weeks after we moved in she moved out. She left me for an Italian truck-driver. I promised her a new suite for the living room. She picked something in Italian leather. It came in a lorry all the way from Turin. She left the same way. I got home from work to find a new suite, an empty wardrobe and an apologetic note. His name, apparently, was Luigi.’

  Not trusting himself to find an appropriate expression, Deacon concentrated on his notebook. ‘I expect you heard what’s happened at The Diligence. We’re trying to establish when the body was buried and if anyone saw anything suspicious. You and Mrs Rollins were the first to move in, you saw the other residents arrive. Do you remember a teenage girl or maybe a woman in her early twenties visiting any of them?’

  Rollins considered. ‘Your best bet would be Corin Hurley. He moved in at the beginning of July. He was a student, his parents bought him the flat to finance his course. He rented rooms to two other guys and between them they went through a lot of girlfriends.’ He looked up quickly. ‘I’m not suggesting they murdered any of them. They were decent enough lads. Noisy, a bit heavy on the late-night revels, but decent. But they were much the youngest in the house, then and since. If your girl knew someone there, it seems likely it was one of them.’

  Deacon nodded. ‘Of course, we’re not sure yet that she knew anyone at the house. Someone may just have thought an overgrown garden behind a building-site was a good place to leave her.’

  ‘You think she was buried during the redevelopment?’

  ‘Possibly. Or maybe the following summer.’

  Rollins frowned. ‘I don’t think that’s possible. There were over twenty people living there from the autumn of 1997 onwards. Someone would have seen something.’

  Deacon made a note. ‘What about the builders? They were on site for some time after you moved in. Did they give you any problems?’

  Rollins shook his head. ‘There was a fair bit of noise and mess, of course, vans parked all over the place and lorries delivering materials, but I expected that. We wanted to get in, that was the price we had to pay. And before you ask, I wouldn’t have thought Norman Wilmslow was the sort to go burying people on his building sites.’

  Deacon flicked him half a smile and didn’t comment. ‘There’s nothing else you can tell me that might help?’ Rollins shook his head. Deacon handed out another of his cards. ‘If anything comes to mind, give me a call.’ He turned to leave.

  With his hand on the door he turned back. ‘One thing more: I’ll need Mrs Rollins’s phone-number. I don’t expect she saw anything strange either but I’ll need to ask her.’

  Mention of his wife made Eddie Rollins’s expression shut like a box. He spoke through his teeth. ‘I don’t have a number for her. I haven’t communicated with her since she left.’

  Now Deacon’s eyebrow angled upwards, surprised. ‘You never filed for divorce?’

  ‘I don’t know where she is.’

  ‘There are procedures …’ But it was clear from Rollins’s face that he didn’t want the information. ‘If you ever want to remarry you can chase it up then. So the suite came from Turin. Maker’s name?’

  Rollins didn’t know. ‘It’ll be under the sofa. But …?’

  ‘With the maker’s name and the date I can find the carrier. They’ll give me Luigi’s other name, and maybe Luigi can tell me where your wife is. What’s her first name?’

  ‘Michelle.’ He said it as if it was a terminal disease.

  It was becoming something of a habit, Brodie thought, getting back to the office to find someone waiting on her doorstep. At least this one was fully conscious. Eric Chandos looked up quickly at the sound of her step. ‘Can we talk? I owe you an apology.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ she said calmly. She’d seen the white car – he still didn’t believe that parking restrictions applied to him – as soon as she turned the corner so she was ready for him. She wasn’t going to be startled into a schoolgirl blush and end up apologising to him instead.

  She reached past him to unlock the door. Only then did she look him full in the fa
ce. ‘That was it? Very well, I accept your apology. Good afternoon.’

  She must still have had him on the back foot or he’d have followed her, relying on his strong arm and stronger charm to get him inside. Instead he hovered uncertainly on the step. ‘Brodie …’

  Relenting, she held the door open. ‘Come on in then. But make it quick: I’ve got things to do before I can call it a night.’

  Dropping her bag on the desk she went through to the tiny kitchen and put the kettle on. For a moment she hesitated, then put two cups on the tray. Now she’d let him in she couldn’t really do anything else.

  Chandos stood in the middle of the office, and if he wasn’t exactly shifting his weight from foot to foot he looked distinctly ill at ease. Brodie gestured at the sofa, herself sat behind her desk. ‘Did you round up your golden goose?’

  He nodded. ‘Last night you called him a milch-cow,’ he said, subdued.

  She remembered. ‘So I did. Is he all right?’

  ‘He’s fine. As much as he ever is. He takes heroin; and other stuff. I imagine you guessed.’

  ‘I realised he was on something. For how long?’

  ‘Nine years, on and off. Mostly on.’

  ‘Why?’ Brodie brought the coffee.

  Chandos sighed. ‘Because the whole industry’s riddled with dope and Jared has an addictive personality. Some people can take it when they want it and stop before it becomes a problem. Jared isn’t one of them. The only question is how much he’s taking: just enough to prevent withdrawal or sufficient to paralyse an ox. Yesterday was an ox day.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Brodie again.

  ‘Too much going on at The Diligence, and too much of it out of his control. Policemen coming and going make most people nervous – but Jared doesn’t just get nervous, he shoots up. Maybe if I’d been there I could have kept him either calm or out of sight, but the first anyone knew he was sprawled at the foot of the stairs, grinning a silly grin and waving a loaded syringe, pretending to inject everyone who went past.

  ‘Miriam – our housekeeper, you’ve met her? – did what you did and tried to call me but she couldn’t get through either. So she and Tommy the driver decided the next best thing was to get him off the place before the joke got out of hand and he found himself behind bars, coming down fast with nothing to break his fall.’

  Chandos drank the coffee fiercely. ‘They put him in the back of the car. Tommy was going to drive round for a couple of hours to give Jared the chance to sleep it off. It seemed to be working: Tommy thought he was out for the count. So coming through Dimmock he stopped in the Promenade car-park for a smoke and a leak. When he returned to the car Jared had gone. Tommy drove around town for an hour looking for him, without luck. Eventually he went home.’

  ‘He couldn’t spot him,’ said Brodie, ‘because we had him off the street by then. I found him passed out on my doorstep a bit after six. Jack was on his way round: the best I could do was put Jared somewhere he could surface in his own good time. I thought he’d call you when he did.’

  ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ Chandos put his cup down with a weary sigh. ‘He doesn’t know my number. He dropped his phone in the car, and he didn’t know either my number or his own home-number.’

  ‘If he was high …’

  ‘No, not because he was high. Because he’s Jared. Because he’s the great Jared Fry, the famous Jared Fry, Jared Fry the demon rocker, and he always thinks sorting his mess out is someone else’s job. I suppose it is: I suppose it’s mine. But I can’t be in two places at once, and you shouldn’t have to watch a grown man as if he was a child.’

  Brodie hadn’t wanted to forgive his rudeness but found herself doing so anyway. He’d been frantic when he got home after midnight and found Fry had been missing for six hours. Knowing the condition he was in when he vanished, and the trouble he could get into like that. In the same circumstances she might not have opened conversations with ‘Hello, how are you, how was your day?’ either.

  She pursed her lips, wondering how much to say. ‘I’m not sure why he came here. I think he was warning me off.’

  Chandos looked surprised. ‘Off what?’

  Actually, off you.’

  His eyes dropped quickly and he had the grace to blush. ‘When he’s like that he doesn’t know what he’s saying.’

  ‘He’s afraid you might leave him.’

  ‘I work for him,’ Chandos said shortly. ‘I manage his career. We’re not married.’

  ‘He’s dependent on you. I think he feels too dependent on you.’

  ‘He’s nothing to worry about. I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘Eric?’ She waited till he looked at her. ‘He had the idea that you and I were …some kind of an item. Did you give him that idea?’

  Finally he admitted it. ‘We were talking about you the previous night. I was talking about you. At length, I suspect. I must have given him a false impression. I’m sorry. I’d had a drink, it was just wishful thinking – I never imagined it would get back to you.’ He peered at her through the parted curtain of his hair. ‘You could try taking it as a compliment.’

  Brodie gave a scornful laugh. ‘You’re right: it’s pathetic when a grown man behaves like a little boy.’

  He chuckled too, uncomfortably. ‘I am sorry. For that – for everything. I don’t usually behave like this.’

  ‘No. You don’t usually apologise. Where’s Jared now?’

  ‘I took him home first thing this morning. He needed a fix by then but he’s OK. Your friend looked after him pretty well.’

  ‘Daniel’s good at looking after people. Which is why I impose on him the way I do. Have you tried to get Jared sorted out?’

  ‘A couple of times. No, more than that, but a couple of times we got him clean and kept him that way for six months. But it’s a life’s work, beating an addiction, and his heart isn’t in it. He thinks what it gives him is worth what it costs.’

  Brodie frowned. ‘What can it possibly give him that’s worth that?’

  ‘His music. He’s at his most creative when he’s high. When he’s clean the spark is missing. What he writes is …pedestrian: you and I could write it. You want people in half the civilised world to listen to what you have to say, you need that spark. It’s Jared’s tragedy that he’s never been able to reproduce sober what he can do when he’s on drugs.’

  ‘A lot of addicts feel that way. It isn’t usually true.’

  ‘For him it is. I don’t know where he goes on a fix, but he comes back with words and music running out of him. At least …’ He stopped.

  Brodie finished the sentence for him. ‘At least, he used to.’

  Chandos nodded wryly. ‘What he writes now is good enough for someone who’s already got a name. It isn’t good enough to make one.’

  Whatever the morality of the situation, it was hard not to sympathise. ‘Do you think he knows?’

  ‘He knew before I did.’

  Brodie got up to make more coffee. Chandos thought it was his cue to leave and clambered out of the sofa. They met in the narrow space beside her desk.

  It wasn’t a big office. Even though she spent limited time here, it wasn’t big enough for the job she needed it to do. She was trying to acquire the building behind in order to extend. In the meantime she told clients that her other office was a Richard Rogers – which amused her, even when she had to explain the joke.

  But the narrowness of the space had never seemed so acute as it did now, and never less of a problem. She felt the man’s proximity as an elemental force, hot and electric. She was intensely aware of how he filled the room, invading her personal space. Of the scent of his body. Of the power emanating from him, making the air swell and throb.

  Whatever chemical reactions were burgeoning in the little office, Chandos was as much aware of them as Brodie was. She saw it in his eyes, a mixture of surprise and urgency. His shoulders widened and curved, enclosing her body with his. His face tipped to meet hers: when a lock of his
hair touched her cheek her whole body jolted.

  She opened her mouth to say something sensible, something humorous and situation-defusing. She got as far as, ‘Er …’ Everything after that he swallowed.

  Chapter Eleven

  Detective Sergeant Voss was studying his computer screen when Deacon got back to Battle Alley. There was nothing unusual about this. Deacon had noticed that the younger policemen tended to think crime could be solved online. Not a bad detective in many ways, Charlie Voss was still the wrong side of thirty and so liable to be led astray by a sexy piece of electronics flashing her bits at him.

  ‘Turn off the Playstation,’ Deacon growled as he passed Voss’s open door, ‘and come and tell me what you got out of Wilmslow.’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Voss, neither moving nor looking round. ‘But I think I’ve got something here.’

  Deacon back-tracked. ‘Where?’

  ‘It’s the Missing Persons index on the PNC. It turned up a few possibilities but this is the front-runner.’

  Leaning over his shoulder, Deacon studied the file with him, all the while wishing it was a printed page. Sensing his superintendent’s discomfort, tactfully Voss read off the relevant information. ‘She’s in the right age group – nineteen – and she disappeared in the summer of 1997 – last seen June 14th. She’s the right height and build, she has short fair hair and she lived in Brighton.’

  Deacon was looking at the photograph. It wasn’t big enough to identify her from, even if she’d still been alive. Dr Roy would need something better to work with. But some sense of her was there, and there had been times in the past when Deacon had looked at a fuzzy family snap and known what he was still days and detailed forensic tests from being told officially.