by Jo Bannister
The exchange he’d just witnessed told Voss two things: that Chandos was a bully, and that Fry was his man, not the other way round. Neither had, so far as he knew, any relevance to his inquiries; all the same he wouldn’t forget.
He said, ‘Something odd came up and I wondered if you could explain it. It seems you stayed here when The Diligence was still an hotel.’
Fry’s face was blank. ‘Did I?’
‘According to the hotel register. Eight rooms booked for six days to Souls For Satan in September 1996. Mr Chandos says he wasn’t there so that would be you, the band and the roadies, would it?’
‘Probably.’
‘You don’t remember?’
‘One week in an hotel eight years ago? Jesus, I’ve forgotten way more important things than that!’
‘You didn’t remember it when you moved in?’
‘No.’ But something was stirring in his eyes: not memory but alarm. ‘Eight years ago? Are you saying I had something to do with that girl? You’re crazy! I never met her.’
‘If you don’t remember being here,’ asked Voss reasonably, ‘how can you be sure?’
‘I’d remember if I’d killed someone!’ yelled Fry. ‘A hotel’s a hotel, it’s just somewhere to sleep, I don’t remember any of them. But if something happened here – if someone got hurt – that I’d remember.’
It could have been the truth. Police work is full of coincidences: a man could go mad trying to incorporate them all into an Integrated Theory of What Happened. Sometimes the dog did nothing in the night because it never woke up. ‘All right,’ said Voss, shutting his notebook. ‘Well, I expect I’ll be back at some point but that’ll do for now’
‘We are trying to help, sergeant,’ Chandos pointed out. ‘If it doesn’ t always seem like it, that’s because we don’t know anything.’ He walked Voss to his car. ‘Perhaps you’d give Mr Hood a lift back to town.’
‘Sure. Daniel?’
Daniel hadn’t moved. He appeared to have no intention of moving.
Most of the time Daniel Hood seemed so deeply unremarkable he was easy to overlook. People said things in front of him that they shouldn’t because they forgot he was there. In normal circumstances he didn’t make much impact on the world.
But Voss had known him long enough to realise there was another side to him: a kind of moral obstinacy that made him stand his ground against all odds when he thought he was right. It didn’t make the quiet, gentle, unassuming Daniel a deceit, but it did temper one’s view of him. Voss knew him better than Chandos and had some idea what was coming.
‘I’ll hang on here for a while,’ said Daniel. ‘If that’s OK, Jared?’
Chandos turned slowly, looking not at Daniel but at Fry. ‘You and I have work to do.’
‘Then I’ll wait till you’re free.’
‘We may be some time,’ said Chandos coldly.
‘I can wait some time.’ Now there was no missing that tiny, polite steeliness in Daniel’s tone.
A small crowd was gathering. Reg Vickers was helping to carry Sergeant Mills’s samples to the car. SOCO’s civilian staff assistant, a girl actually called Trisha but universally addressed as Morticia, was there too. Miriam the housekeeper, constitutionally unable to see a new face without trying to feed it, was taking orders for lunch and the gardener was crossing the yard with a strimmer over his shoulder and his eyes averted, trying not to notice the mess these people had made of his lawn.
If there’s one thing a bully can’t resist, it’s an audience. ‘Hell’s teeth.’ Framed by the beard, Chandos’s smile was a thing of cruelty. ‘You’re a God-botherer. You want to save his soul.’
Daniel shook his yellow head. ‘No.’
‘Oh yes. I’d know that Jesus Saves expression anywhere. I bet you’ve got a Bible by your bed. I bet you say your prayers every night – properly, down on your knees. I bet you ask God to make you a better person.’
‘You’re mistaken,’ said Daniel quietly.
‘No,’ said Chandos confidently, ‘I know your type. Youngest child, yes? Parents a bit long in the tooth by the time you came along? Their idea of a night out was polishing the altar-rails. Proudest day of their life when you joined the choir. I’m guessing now but tell me if I’m right: your first solo was Jesus wants me for a sunbeam.’
Daniel smiled. ‘Guess again.’
‘Don’t be embarrassed – the world’s full of people like you. Small and afraid. You believe in God in the hope that’ll make God believe in you.
‘And you think you’re going to convert Jared Fry. That would be the ultimate, wouldn’t it – bringing the quintessential demon rocker to God! Your name would be spoken with awe wherever prayer-books are dropped. There’d be Daniel Hood Halls in the backstreets of small northern towns and a Daniel Hood Scholarship to one of the less popular seminaries. You’d finally have done something to justify the space you take up on the planet.’
His expression hardened. Daniel glimpsed a bitter disappointment, as if Chandos had tried to salvage Fry once and failed. ‘Only it isn’t going to happen. Jared doesn’t have a soul. He sold it years ago and shot the proceeds up his arm. There’s a vacuum there now. Take away the devil’s music, the foul mouth and the glitter make-up and you aren’t left with Jared Fry – you’re left with nothing. You couldn’t make a worthwhile person of him if he wanted you to. A demon rocker isn’t just what he is. It’s all he is.’
That Chandos was irritated with Daniel, Voss could understand. Almost everyone who met him wanted to slap him sooner or later. There was a kind of intellectual superiority about him that got under people’s skins. Many of them would have applauded Eric Chandos’s attack on him.
What was astonishing was how the vitriol had spilled over. Fry was his employer and his meal-ticket, and Chandos had ripped him apart in front of people he hardly knew to show that he could. To show that Fry would take anything Chandos doled out, because behind the wealth and fame he was too weak to survive alone. It reminded Voss of the lion act in a circus, where a man with a whip reduces the king of beasts to a shambling spectacle: up on the stool, roar for the people, jump through the hoop, back in the cage.
Daniel was white with fury. He didn’t shout when he was angry, he didn’t throw either objects or punches. Behind the thick glasses his eyes went diamond-hard, and regardless of the risk he went for the throat. He didn’t say things he didn’t mean. He sometimes said things which would have been better left unsaid precisely because they were true. When he was angry the truth stopped being his shield and became his morning-star.
Deliberately he turned his back on Chandos. His voice was quiet but utterly serious. ‘You don’t have to take this,’ he told Fry. ‘You have options.’
That thought seemed to trouble Fry more than the abuse. Voss saw expressions form and dissolve in his face, as if he didn’t know how to feel or didn’t dare let the feelings show. His lips started to frame words that then eluded him. His gaze strayed round the yard, unable to look either Daniel or Chandos in the eye. He looked trapped. Like an animal caged so long it has become afraid of the outside.
Finally, a dull flush on his hollow cheek, he marshalled a few mumbled words, his eyes dipped to the cobbles. ‘It’s all right. He doesn’t mean it.’
‘Yes, he does,’ said Daniel flatly. ‘Jared, you’re entitled to better than this. The least he owes you is respect. If you’re not getting it – well, you’re not married to him, and if you were you could get divorced! Don’t let him grind you down because you haven’t the guts to walk away. Call your solicitor. Whatever contractual obligations you have, meet them – but get rid of him. He’s eating you alive.’
Voss saw Chandos knot his fists by his sides and suspected that, but for his own presence, Daniel would be eating dirt by now. But if the thought had occurred to Daniel it did not stay him. He plunged on, reckless with righteous indignation.
‘You want to know why you can’t write any more? Because he’s sucking the life out of you. He�
��s a parasite: he’s got his teeth into you and he wants you to think you can’t do without him. But you don’t need him to get you work – you’re a star, promoters will queue up to stage you. In the short term all you need is a secretary to handle the paperwork and an accountant to handle the money. Hell’s bells, I’ll do it myself until you get organised. You’re the success, Jared – you and the band. This man wants you to think otherwise because you’re worth a fortune to him. And a good manager’s worth his cut. So try to find one.’
Chandos’s face was like thunder and his voice, when he found it, venomous. ‘He’s right, Jared, you do have options. Maybe you should think about them. You can ask me to throw Hood out, then stop behaving like a spoilt child and get back to doing what you’re good at. Or you can ask me to leave. You won’t have to ask twice. I’ll have another job by the end of the month, but you’ll never play in public again.’ It was more than a threat: it was a prediction.
‘Hood has no idea what it takes to get a rock show on stage, but you have. You know you can’t do it, and you sure as hell know he couldn’t. He’s an unemployed teacher, for God’s sake! And he’s telling you to throw away your career. Be clear about that. If you want to find out if he’s right, it’s your call. But I won’t hang around waiting to rescue you. It’s time to make your choice.’
He sucked in a deep breath, fighting down the anger. ‘Look, I know I’m hard on you. You know it’s because I want the best for you. I want to see you achieve everything you’re capable of, not slip into obscurity for lack of proper guidance. Maybe I go too far sometimes, but you wouldn’t last ten minutes without me.’
Daniel knew he’d lost – saw it in Fry’s face – before Chandos had finished speaking. It wasn’t that he’d thought and decided that, after all, Eric Chandos was the best he could do. He was afraid to think about it. He was bound to the stronger man and lacked the courage to break free. Ashamed and embarrassed and quite unable to help himself, Fry said to the cobbles, ‘Eric knows what he’s doing. We’ll be all right.’
There was nothing more to say. He’d offered to help and been rebuffed. Daniel shook his head regretfully. ‘Every battered wife who’s ever been through A&E said the same thing.’
Chandos laughed out loud. It was impossible to hear it without thinking of a cock crowing on a dunghill. ‘I only said you had no soul. He thinks you’ve got no balls!’
Daniel was halfway to Voss’s car. He paused and turned round, and said quietly, ‘If you hurt him I will be back.’
It was so absurd a threat that the only thing keeping all who heard it from laughter was the certainty that he meant it. The thing you have to remember about David and Goliath is that David won.
If Chandos had held his tongue another ten seconds those few brave words would have been all that remained of his enemy and the field would have been his. But he wouldn’t give even that much quarter. Pitching his voice to be heard he said, ‘Don’t think I don’t know why you came here. Jared thinks you’re concerned for his welfare, but you and I both know that your only interest in him is as a weapon against me.’
Daniel said nothing. He turned away and waited for Voss to get in the car, and wished he’d hurry.
His face puzzled, Fry asked the fatal question. ‘Why would Daniel want to hurt you?’
Chandos had known someone would ask. He was prepared to volunteer the information, but he knew people well enough to know someone would make it easy for him. ‘Because I’ve had what he hasn’ t been able to get in a year of trying,’ he sneered. ‘He thought that made her unobtainable: the virtuous woman whose price is above rubies. Now he knows different. She wanted it. She just didn’t want it from him.’
Chapter Fifteen
Daniel phoned Brodie from the car. ‘Are you in the office?’
The urgency in his voice startled her. ‘Yes. Why?’
‘I need you to do something for me. And I need you not to ask questions. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Until then, don’t open the door or answer the phone.’
‘If I don’t answer the door,’ she said reasonably, ‘how will I know you’ve got here?’
‘Brodie, please! I can’t explain now but it really matters. Humour me.’ He sounded close to tears.
‘All right,’ said Brodie. ‘We’d better agree on a special knock.’ But he’d already rung off.
Voss drove and said nothing. Once he stole a sidelong glance at his passenger, and Daniel had his glasses off and the heels of both hands pressed into his eyes. Apart from using the phone, he hadn’t spoken since leaving The Diligence. But he looked as if Chandos had taken him behind the stable-block and kicked seven bells out of him.
When the car stopped in Shack Lane Daniel reached over the seat back to collect his shopping. His hands were unsteady and cans kept rolling out of the plastic bags. Voss said quietly, ‘Leave them. Give me your key, I’ll drop them off.’
Daniel only had one key. He stared at it in confusion until Voss took it from him. ‘I’ll leave it under the wind-vane on the gallery, all right?’ Daniel nodded.
Brodie had heard the car and opened the door as Daniel went to knock. Whatever she’d promised him, she wasn’t about to check out her callers through a chink in the curtain. He pressed her inside and shut the door behind him, then he went to her desk and took the phone off the hook, all without a word.
A quiver of unease caught her under the heart. ‘Daniel, whatever’s the matter?’
So he told her.
Midway through the telling Brodie’s long-fingered hand, the nails bloody talons, stole to her face, covering her mouth. Above, her eyes were stretched with horror. Her breast rose and fell as she took the air deep into her lungs, fighting panic.
When Daniel was done the silence in the little room grew until it packed every corner, muffling the sound of the street and the steady tick of the clock, probing every cavity with tendrils that swelled to fit, like fog or rot. The silence enveloped them.
Finally Brodie broke it with ragged words that caught in her throat. ‘Daniel – how could you?’ Her eyes, that had not left his face, nailed him to the wall.
‘I didn’t,’ he mumbled unhappily. ‘At least, I didn’t mean to. I didn’ t mean to go there. I wasn’t looking for Chandos and I wasn’t looking for a fight. But Jared was getting hurt – either I had to say something or watch it happen. I expected him to hit out at me. I didn’ t expect him to bring you into it.’
‘No,’ she said slowly, ‘I don’t suppose you did. Who would? Why would he do that to me? In front of people I know – people Jack works with.’
‘That’s why I didn’t want you answering the phone,’ said Daniel. ‘I didn’t want you talking to Jack before I’d had the chance to explain. I didn’t want you to find yourself denying it out of sheer surprise.’
‘Well, this is it, isn’t it?’ She braced herself. ‘Decision time. If I know anything about police stations, it’ll be canteen gossip by now and Jack will have heard within the hour. I have to talk to him first.’
Daniel agreed. ‘However bad it gets, it’ll be worse if he hears it from anyone else.’
‘What do I tell him?’
‘What you told me. That you don’t know why it happened. You didn’t want Eric Chandos before, you don’t want him now, but for a moment something in your body chemistry took over.’
‘Will he believe it?’
‘It’s the truth, isn’t it?’ She nodded disconsolately. ‘The question isn’t whether or not he’ll believe you, it’s what he’ll do about it.’
Her head came up quickly. ‘Jack would never hit me!’
‘I don’t think he would. I do think he might go up to The Diligence and take a swing at Chandos, and if he does that he’s probably looking for a new career.’
‘Oh God,’ moaned Brodie. ‘I never wanted to hurt him, Daniel. If I’ve robbed him of what matters most to him in all the world – more than me, more than what we have together – I’ll never forgive myself.’ She reached for the ph
one. ‘I have to talk to him, right now, face to face. Here, where if he blows up there’ll be no one to see, where I can keep him from storming out and heading for Cheyne Warren.’
When there was nothing else to admire, Daniel could still admire her courage. ‘Do you want me to stay?’
She thought for a moment then shook her head. ‘It’ll be difficult enough with just the two of us. Having a witness won’t make it any easier for Jack, and he’s the one who matters. In the end we’ll do what he wants. The most I’m hoping for is to buy some time for him to calm down and make a rational decision.’
‘I’ll be at home: call me if you need me. If Jack needs someone to shout at …’
‘Thanks, Daniel, but I think you’ve done enough already.’
Brodie didn’t mean it as a slap in the face but that was how it felt. He nodded quickly and let himself out onto the street before she saw his eyes fill.
It was amazing, he thought as he walked, how two people who were important to one another could manage to keep hurting each other. He didn’t think he was to blame for Brodie’s present distress but he knew he was the cause of it. He knew she didn’t mean to punish him by what she’d said, but it had slid under his ribs like a dagger.
What she hadn’t said had, if anything, cut deeper. She hadn’t even asked if Chandos had stumbled on the truth.
Back in Shack Lane, oblivious of how the ripples of her actions had spread to hurt someone else she cared for, Brodie was dialling Deacon’s mobile number. She got voice-mail and her heart stopped. He didn’t turn his phone off when he was driving or at night, only when he was dealing with a transgressor.
Deacon was not, as Brodie feared, on his way to The Diligence with his heart full of mayhem. He was in the flat above Eddie Rollins’s hardware store, looming over the man like a storm and trying to put the fear of God into him while still complying with the PACE regulations. To the letter: the spirit of them troubled him not at all.
