by Jo Bannister
While Deacon was otherwise engaged and Voss was on his way to The Diligence, an hour’s intelligent work at the computer led DC Meadows to Thomas and Ellen Vincent, parents of Michelle Rollins, sometime of Bexhill and now resident in Chapel St Mary. And likely to remain so: it was one of the largest cemeteries in the area.
‘They were in a car crash last year,’ said Meadows when her superintendent returned. ‘Both killed instantly.’
‘Never mind,’ said Deacon, crossing as he often did the boundary between single-minded and crass, ‘we can get an exhumation order and get DNA that way.’ Something in the constable’s silence drew his gaze. ‘Unless of course ..’
Meadows nodded. ‘They were cremated.’
‘Any other children?’
She shook her head. ‘Mr Vincent had a brother. He was a radio officer on a Panamanian supertanker.’
‘Was?’ echoed Deacon suspiciously.
‘Yes, sir: she broke up in a typhoon in the Pacific in 1991. To prove the body is Michelle’s you’d need to test a close blood relative, and she doesn’t have any left.’
‘Of all the rotten luck,’ growled Deacon.
‘I know,’ said Meadows. ‘How unfortunate can one family be?’
He stared at her. ‘I didn’t mean theirs. I meant ours.’
Eric Chandos met DS Voss at the front door and steered him down the garden like a rodeo clown distracting a bull. He’d left Fry upstairs but that was no guarantee he’d stay there, and Chandos didn’ t want him talking to policemen.
Sergeant Mills was back at the trench, still taking measurements and samples. Voss couldn’t think what more a hole in the ground could tell anyone, but that wasn’t the point. All excavation is destruction. Open a grave and you get one chance to hear everything it has to say. A detective can go back weeks later to re-interview a witness and get as much as, or more than, he did the first time. But a hole in the ground fills with water, fills with mud, fills with nature, and will never again be as it was when first opened. Anything it has to say you have to hear at the start. A week later is too late.
The Scenes of Crime Officer nodded amiably to Voss as he and Chandos came down the lawn. ‘You got my second-best wellies, Charlie?’
Voss considered. ‘Should I have?’
‘Reg Vickers said he’d send them up with whoever was coming next. These have sprung a leak.’ He lifted an enormous foot out of the trench to demonstrate.
‘He didn’t know I was coming,’ said Voss. ‘I’ve got mine in the car. What size are you?’
‘Thirteen,’ said Mills proudly.
Voss could have got both his feet into a size thirteen Wellington boot. ‘Sorry.’ He and Chandos walked on. ‘I wanted to ask how you first heard about The Diligence.’
Chandos shook his head. ‘I didn’t. Mrs Farrell saw something about it in the local paper. There was a planning application to build some more flats and the locals were protesting. She thought the developers might be glad to wash their hands of it. She asked if we were interested, and the rest is history.’
History was certainly what interested Voss. ‘Was that the first you’d heard of the place?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Souls For Satan stayed at The Diligence Hotel eight years ago.’
Chandos could not have looked more surprised if Voss had slapped him. His eyes went to the trench where Sergeant Mills was once more labouring leakily. ‘Eight years?’
‘Yes,’ said Voss. And then, in the interests of honesty: Actually, a little more. In September 1996.’
‘Really?’ Chandos was thinking. ‘But you think she died the following summer.’
Voss nodded. ‘It may have no bearing on the case, it just seemed strange. That you stayed here for a week and nobody thought to mention it.’
Chandos understood. ‘I dare say that does seem odd. It’s because of how we work. I book the hotels but I don’t travel with the band. I’m up ahead at the next venue, getting ready for the next gig.
‘By September ’96 the band was making a name for itself but it wasn’t mega-big. We didn’t need special security or police escorts. I probably picked the hotel because it was midway between two venues. If I look back at the records I could tell you which. Before they set off I’d brief the roadies on where they had to be when, where they were playing and where they were staying, and that would be the last I’d hear of the place. I was never here until Mrs Farrell brought me. Maybe I should have remembered the name, it’s unusual enough, but I didn’t. It was just an hotel booking – one of maybe a hundred I made that year and every year since.’
‘But Fry stayed here for a week,’ said Voss reasonably. ‘He should remember it.’
Chandos chuckled. ‘When we do a European tour there are whole countries Jared doesn’t remember. He remembers gigs. He remembers audiences. The stage is pretty much his whole life. An hotel room is just somewhere to sleep. He’d get in a bit before dawn and sleep most of the day. He may never have seen it in daylight until we moved in.’
Voss nodded slowly. It seemed plausible in the circumstances. ‘I expect that’s it. I’ll have a word with Mr Fry, see if I can jog his memory.’
‘Sure,’ shrugged Chandos. ‘Though I don’t see how it’ll help.’
Voss gave a wry grin. ‘Making sense of things is pretty much my whole life. I find something weird, I have to find out how it fits. Sometimes it doesn’t, but I need to know that. It’s kind of an occupational illness: we live in fear of missing something. We’d rather waste days ruling something out than dismiss it too soon. I’ll have a word with Mr Fry before I go back to town. It’s the first thing Mr Deacon’s going to ask me.’
‘I’ll go find him,’ said Chandos. ‘I’ll get Miriam to bring you some tea in the sitting room.’
Charlie Voss had been a policeman for nearly ten years, he knew when he was being got rid of. He didn’t want Chandos coaching Fry on what to say. If he wanted to; if there was any need to. Voss was aware of another reason Chandos might want to see Fry before the detective did. He needed a tactful way to say he wouldn’t search Fry for banned substances even if he found him playing air guitar and singing The Good Ship Lollipop in a slurred falsetto.
‘That’s all right,’ he said, ‘I’ll come with you. Who knows, he might be sober enough to answer a few questions.’
The manager cast him a slightly uncertain grin and led the way back to the house.
Chapter Fourteen
Sometimes fate takes a hand.
Night long, unsleeping, Daniel had thought of nothing but Brodie’s revelations. He felt – not just emotionally but somehow physically too – as if he’d been kicked senseless. His mind raced and froze by turns. His body ached.
He couldn’t explain it, even to himself. Brodie was his friend, she owed him certain kinds of loyalty but not that. He had no claims on her sexuality. Seeing her on Jack Deacon’s arm hadn’t pained him like this. He had no idea why he felt betrayed, but that was it. Through the endless dark it sawed at his heart. What made it worse was that she had no idea, and never would know, how her actions had affected him.
Before dawn he washed and dressed, and made breakfast, and watched while it went cold. He sat motionless, unaware of the Channel breeze picking up or the turn of the tide, recycling the same facts and feelings until they slumped to acid sludge in his brain.
Finally he realised he had to get out of the house. He gave himself a couple of tasks to do – going to the bank was one, shopping for food another. Neither was urgent: he was trying to take his mind off things.
The money he drew at the bank he spent at the supermarket on things that he didn’t need and, later, wouldn’t know why he’d wanted. He arrived on the pavement with his arms full and a fifteen minute walk through busy streets ahead of him. So when the area car from Battle Alley pulled up and PC Vickers offered him a lift, he took it.
Police cars aren’t meant to be used as taxis. But every cloud has a silver lining and events of the last fifteen
months had left him on friendly terms with the local police. For that, right now, he was grateful. He put his shopping on the back seat and climbed into the front.
‘Are you in a hurry?’ asked Vickers. ‘Only I’ve a call to make on the way.’
‘Suits me,’ said Daniel. Anything was better than sitting alone at home, pondering developments and the unexpected feelings they had stirred in him. ‘Where are we going?’
‘I’ve got something to take to The Diligence.’
If the next traffic lights had been red Daniel might have bailed out, leaving a month’s food behind. They were green. Vickers kept driving, unaware of his passenger’s dilemma.
And when his heart steadied and his brain was making sense again Daniel realised he was over-reacting. He would wait in the car. Even if he saw Chandos, the only awkwardness would be in Daniel’s head. There was no reason for Chandos to suppose he knew what had happened. It was none of his business. He could stay out of the shambles Brodie was making of her life without avoiding large chunks of the Three Downs.
Vickers parked behind The Diligence and ferreted under Daniel’s shopping for a pair of white rubber boots. ‘I’ll just take these down to Billy Mills. Shan’t be five minutes.’
Left alone Daniel opened the door and swivelled sideways, tapping his feet on the cobbles. He needed the air.
A voice close at hand made him start. ‘What are you doing here?’
By daylight Jared Fry looked even worse than he did at night. His face was drawn, pallid but for dark smudges like bruising under his eyes, his frame skeletal under his clothes. But his gaze was placid, his mood amiable. Daniel guessed why.
‘I got a lift home with a policeman,’ he said. ‘We’re taking the scenic route.’
Fry didn’t question that. Curiosity is not a feature of drug addiction. ‘They’re everywhere,’ he shrugged. ‘I’m avoiding them.’
‘That’s probably a good idea.’
‘And Eric. I’m avoiding Eric as well.’
Daniel sighed. ‘Me too.’
Fry gave him a conspiratorial grin. ‘Come with me.’
Daniel gestured weakly at the car. ‘I’m waiting for Constable Vickers …’
‘Got something to show you.’
He wasn’t off his head – after so long it took a lot to do that: too much, not much less than it would take to kill him – but he was clearly intoxicated. It was like talking to a child, thought Daniel: the short attention-span, the simplistic thought-patterns. Fry took drugs to expand his consciousness but what they actually did was shrink his world. It was the man’s tragedy That, and having talent but perhaps not quite enough.
In the end Daniel did as he was bid. He could see what Fry wanted to show him and be back before Vickers was ready to leave.
The demon rocker – but there wasn’t much demonic about him now, a forlorn figure with his baggy clothes and thin jauntiness – led the way through the high hall of The Diligence and up the stairs. And up, and up: through the first floor with its range of bedrooms and on through the roof, terminating in a single room perched on top of the house, more window than wall, a glass cage with views across the Three Downs to the distant sea.
It wasn’t a bedroom, although plainly someone slept here sometimes – on the beanbag sofa, amorphous enough to make the tight turns of the stairs, were jumbled cushions and a quilt. Instead of curtains, lengths of shimmering voile like saris whispered in the breeze. There was a television on the floor in one corner, a mismatched music system in another. A guitar leaned drunkenly against a low table.
‘This is my room.’ Fry slumped onto the beanbag, leaving Daniel nowhere to sit.
‘It’s your house.’
“Course it is,’ agreed Fry. ‘But this is my room. No one else comes here.’ On the table were a tray, a plate, an empty vial and a used syringe.
Daniel nodded. ‘I see.’ His lips were tight but the heart within him gave a little twist. It wasn’t a bedroom so much as a retreat. The beanbag sofa, the old quilt, the pretty fabrics, the spare TV and stereo: in all his multi-million pound house, this attic room with its bedsit scraps was where Jared Fry felt safe.
‘They won’t find us here,’ he said as if it mattered.
The guitar was like the rest of the junk-shop furnishings: cheap and unremarkable. Not a demon rocker’s instrument, wired to the moon for decibels to make an otologist weep, but a scratched and battered acoustic guitar with the ends of strings protruding from the keys like untrimmed whiskers. Daniel nodded at it. ‘Play something.’
Fry’s mind might be fogged by what was in his bloodstream but the short strong fingers knew their job. From a slow start they moved with mounting tempo up and down the frets and across the strings, trailing increasingly complex threads of sound, chords piled on chords, notes throbbing and soaring like a wailing child.
Daniel knew nothing about music. Marta Szarabeijka had tried to teach him some basic piano but he never progressed beyond Chopsticks. She said he had a tin ear but that wasn’t true. He could appreciate music. He knew that this impromptu concert on a cheap guitar was something rock fans the world over would have killed for. He knew that Jared Fry was a genuine musician. When the lights went down, the make-up came off and the band went home, you could argue he was no longer a rockstar, but he was still a musician. Daniel was impressed, and sorry it didn’t make Fry happier.
With no sign of Vickers returning, he lowered himself cross-legged on the wooden floor, rested his chin on his arms across his knees and listened.
‘That’s what you were playing at the party,’ he said when Fry finished. ‘When I …’ Embarrassed, he fell silent.
Fry nodded. ‘Crucifiction. It’s a kind of signature-piece. It’s what most people want to hear.’
‘Is it new?’
‘I wish. No, it’s from way back. When I was eighteen I wrote songs to die for but nobody listened. Now I dash them off so quickly I don’t even remember writing half of them, and people throw money at me. Where’s the sense in that?’
‘Where do you get your ideas?’
Fry gave a lazy, druggy smile. ‘There’s this warehouse in Walthamstow – you send them a fiver and they send you four ideas, one of them a guaranteed show-stopper …’
‘All right, stupid question,’ acknowledged Daniel with a grin. ‘Look, I’m a mathematician, I’ve never had an original thought in my life. I can’t imagine how you create something entirely new. And not just once but time and again. Is your brain wired differently to mine? Am I not using mine properly? Were you born able to write songs – is it something you learned – if so, how?’
Jared Fry had heard the question a thousand times. Only very occasionally did he think the answer might be understood. ‘It’s like evolution. Your brain is a primaeval soup with proto-ideas swimming round in it. They collide all the time and nothing happens, but every so often the right two meet and start to reproduce. If you were a biologist you’d understand.’
‘It happens in physics too,’ said Daniel. ‘That’s a chain reaction. It’s what makes nuclear bombs explode.’
Fry snorted. ‘Sex and death, hey? Where else would demon rock get its ideas?’
‘Play some more.’
Chandos was ready to admit defeat. He turned to DS Voss with a wry smile. ‘I think he’s given me the slip again.’
‘Is his car gone?’
Chandos speed-dialled Tommy the driver who was polishing chrome in the garage. ‘Nothing’s missing. He must be about somewhere.’
They were back in the stable-yard. Suddenly the sound of the guitar hit them like a missile arriving. Tight-lipped, Chandos glared up at the glass turret. ‘Jared, get the hell down here now!’
The man was worth millions. He was the beating heart of a business that employed a lot of people, including the one in the yard. But when Chandos raised his voice, Fry stopped mid-riff like a child caught raiding the fridge. Daniel looked at him in surprise and saw two expressions flit across his face. The first was
guilt, the second fear.
Fry put down the guitar and unfolded from the beanbag, glancing awkwardly at his guest. ‘We’d better go down.’
‘Why?’
‘Eric …’ The hand that had been thumping out music to wake the dead and make the dying cheer waved a sheepish gesture towards the stair. ‘He’s looking for me.’
‘I think he’s found you. I imagine, if you don’t go down, he’ll come up.’
Fry gave a rueful grin. Then he headed for the stairs. Sadly, Daniel followed.
Chandos met them with his arms tightly crossed. ‘I was calling you. Didn’t you hear me?’
‘No.’ Fry didn’t look at him. ‘I was …’
‘I know what you were doing,’ interrupted Chandos. ‘Dear God, there’s a brand new state-of-the-art studio in the house, and you play on a matchwood guitar on a roof!’
‘Daniel wanted to hear …’
‘If Daniel wants to hear you he can buy a CD like everyone else! Detective Sergeant Voss wants a word with you. Try to give him what he needs and save him the trouble of coming back.’
There aren’t many places where you’ll see one grown man berate another publicly. A police station is one, and Voss was less taken aback than Daniel was. He’d seen Jack Deacon lay into errant DCs as viciously and with not much more excuse.
It wasn’t quite the same, though. Mistakes by detective constables can have repercussions out of all proportion to their scale, and sometimes the fear of a superior’s anger is more effective at focusing the mind than the evanescent risk of letting an offender escape. Also, while Deacon might blow off steam at those who answered to him, Voss had never heard him swear at Superintendent Fuller.
There were lines not to be crossed. While everything was going smoothly, Battle Alley was like any workplace where the staff were friends as well as colleagues and rank was a secondary consideration. But when the shit hit the fan, suddenly the formalities applied because they protected all concerned. Lower ranks were protected by those above them taking control; those in authority were protected by knowing their orders would be carried out without question. So while Deacon might humiliate a deserving constable in front of his colleagues, if he wanted to argue with Fuller they did it behind closed doors.
