Breaking Faith

by Jo Bannister

  Deacon considered. ‘No, I don’t think I’d better. I think if we go down that road I’ll end up wrecking your office.’

  ‘If it makes you feel any better …’

  ‘It wouldn’t, though, would it?’ He wasn’t shouting. His restraint was worse, in the same way that a rumbling volcano may be more disturbing than one in eruption. ‘It’s not your filing cabinet that dumped on me.’

  ‘I am so very sorry,’ said Brodie softly. ‘I don’t expect that helps much right now but I still want you to know.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I imagine you are. And no, it doesn’t help much. I thought … I thought we were strong. I don’t know about permanent, but I thought we were going somewhere. It felt like something real. To me: that’s how I felt. And you felt it could be put aside for half an hour, for a man you didn’t even care about. What does that make me, Brodie? Someone who matters less than a man you don’t care about?’

  Brodie shook her head. Her voice was shaking too, now. ‘You do matter to me, Jack. If you didn’t we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I wouldn’t be feeling this way. If I can I want to put this right. If it’s going to take time I’ll wait. Anything it’s going to take I’ll do. But if what you want is not to see me again, I’ll understand and I’ll do that too.’

  ‘Feeling what way?’

  ‘Like trash,’ she said honestly.

  Deacon nodded. ‘You should.’

  The silence grew about them again. Brodie didn’t want to be the one to break it. She watched the ghosts of expressions flit through Deacon’s face as his emotions churned. She knew he wanted to rage at her and didn’t dare. She knew he could see no further ahead than getting outside without breaking something.

  Until this moment she’d had no sympathy for battered women. She’d thought anyone who submitted to violence as the price of a relationship was unworthy of compassion. Now she saw how it might work. How the black eye, the split lip, the bruised ribs might seem a price worth paying to clear the air. She found herself thinking, ‘If that would do it – if after that we could get back to where we were – if he’d settle for that …’ And her blood ran cold at what she was reduced to.

  Finally Deacon pushed the hair off his brow with a thick hand. ‘I can’t think about this any more. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

  ‘Promise?’

  That was a mistake. She saw the anger he’d managed to suppress, the huge justifiable rage he hadn’t dared give rein to, kindle in his eye. His voice was harsh. ‘You don’t have the right to ask for promises.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed, subdued. ‘But I’m going to ask for another one.’

  ‘Well?’

  She thought he knew what it was. ‘Don’t go anywhere near Eric Chandos.’

  He almost managed to laugh at her effrontery. ‘I thought you didn’ t care about him! Now you’re worried I might ruin his pretty face?’

  ‘You’re entitled to be angry,’ she shot back, spurred by his tone, ‘but not stupid. I don’t give a damn what happens to him. I care what happens to you. Pick a fight with him and he’ll get a bloody nose but you’ll blow your career. He’s not worth it. I’m not worth it.’

  He almost said that she was. He almost said that even when she let him down, even when she hurt him, she was the best thing in his life. He came palpably close to saying, ‘We’ll get through this, because what happened yesterday matters but not as much as everything that went before.’ He almost got it right.

  Words and tears would have saved them. But Deacon had no fluency with either. On the brink of redemption he balked. Afraid of demeaning himself, of delivering himself into another person’s hands – because if he took this from her there was nothing he couldn’t take, couldn’t be expected to tolerate – he stepped back both literally and figuratively and reached for the door behind him. ‘I’ll call you.’

  ‘Jack …’ Her voice was a plea.

  ‘I won’t go looking for him. But he’s involved, if only marginally, in a murder inquiry and I won’t avoid him if it means not doing my job.’

  Perhaps it was as much as Brodie could have expected. If she’d felt any confidence in either man’s desire to avoid a confrontation she might have let Deacon go with a grain of hope in her heart that tomorrow they’d do a better job of talking about it. But she hadn’t. Her heart was telling her that tomorrow was indeed another day, and it had the potential to be worse than today.

  Deacon returned to Battle Alley with a fox gnawing at his vitals.

  ‘What’s your gut feeling?’ asked Voss. ‘We know it isn’t Michelle Rollins. Is it Sasha Wade?’

  Deacon’s instinct said that it was. In his experience names didn’t come from nowhere: once someone’s name comes up in connection with an inquiry – as a suspect, a witness or a victim – the odds are they’ll turn out to be involved. With Michelle out of the frame he put the probability at around eighty percent. The chances that he was wasting his time concentrating on Sasha were only one in five.

  He could have said that. He didn’t have to bite his sergeant’s head off for asking an entirely reasonable question. But sarcasm was his default position. ‘Gut feeling? I’m a detective superintendent, sergeant, not a god-damned clairvoyant. I’m waiting for some evidence of her identity. With all the experts on the payroll it shouldn’t come down to guesswork!’

  People who knew him less well than Voss thought Deacon was always difficult, bad-mouthed and hard to please. Voss knew he was all those things, but not all the time. He also knew why his fuse was burning so short at the moment.

  ‘Maybe we have to proceed on an assumption for now. If we can find someone with a reason for killing Sasha Wade, he can tell us whether he buried her at The Diligence.’

  ‘Of course he can,’ agreed Deacon nastily. ‘He got away with it for eight years, he must have thought he was in the clear, the way we’re carrying on he probably still thinks that – but if we put it to him straight I’m sure he’ll take pity on us and confess. Maybe we don’t even have to find him. We could put an ad in the personal column of The Dimmock Sentinel and see if he replies.’

  ‘Murders got solved before there was forensic science,’ said Voss evenly. ‘We work with what we have. You told me that.’

  ‘You talk like you remember when detective work was what solved crimes,’ mocked Deacon. ‘No one under thirty has a notion what “we work with what we have” means!’

  Even Voss, who was famously even-tempered, was starting to pique at his superintendent’s rancour. He knew he didn’t deserve it; he knew Deacon didn’t think he did; he knew sniping at him was displacement activity for taking a meat-cleaver to Eric Chandos. He could take a bit of abuse in a good cause, but he needed Deacon thinking more like a detective and less like a cuckold. He allowed the least edge to sharpen his tone. ‘Then perhaps this would be a really good chance to show us, sir.’

  People didn’t often talk back to Deacon: even this mild rebuke was enough to make him blink. He took a deep breath, ready to give Voss both barrels. Then he remembered that the detective sergeant was not only not his enemy, he was actually his friend. He sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Charlie. I’m in a foul mood. It’s not your fault. Problems at home.’

  ‘I know.’

  It wasn’t a conscious decision in the sense that Voss weighed up the pros and cons before speaking. But nor did it slip from him in an unguarded moment – stunned at receiving an apology, perhaps. Either he had to pretend ignorance or admit to knowledge, and he respected Deacon too much to lie to him even if it would have been easier.

  Deacon stared at him, heavy brows gathering. ‘Yes, you do, don’t you? How?’

  ‘I was there when Chandos blew his mouth off. Just for the record, it wasn’t Daniel’s fault. He didn’t bring it up, and he didn’t give Chandos a reason to bring it up.’

  Deacon knew what had happened at The Diligence. He knew he had officers buzzing round the place like wasps. Until that moment he hadn’t put the two facts together. Now he did, an
d the sum of the parts crashed through his expression like an avalanche. ‘God damn! And you weren’t there alone, were you?’

  Silently, Voss shook his head.

  ‘Who else?’

  But Voss wouldn’t say. ‘A couple of people.’

  The ripples had stopped spreading. Deacon’s expression hardened. Now as he looked at Voss his eyes were dark with resentment. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘It was none of my business.’

  ‘Didn’t you think I’d want to know?’

  ‘I thought there were better places to hear it.’

  ‘You were waiting till the canteen gossip reached me? Thanks, Charlie, that’s just how I want to hear I’ve been made a fool of! Christ, what it is to have friends!’ He shook his head in disgust.

  Voss hung onto his temper. ‘Did you hear it in the canteen?’

  ‘No, I heard it from Brodie.’

  ‘Who was the right person to tell you. It wouldn’t have made it easier for either of you if I’d told you before she could. I heard something that shouldn’t have been said in front of me, and I didn’t consider it any part of my job to pass it on. I thought I owed it to you and Mrs Farrell to say nothing. As far as canteen gossip goes, I don’t think there’s been any.’

  He’d managed to knock the wind out of Deacon’s sails. ‘You told them to sit on it?’

  ‘No,’ said Voss, ‘I didn’t have to. Everyone reached the same conclusion – that gossip would only make things worse. As far as friends go, I think you have more of them in this nick than you care to admit.’

  Deacon’s experience of detective sergeants was that they were, on the whole, a necessary evil. The more responsibilities an officer had, the less feasible it was for him to see each of them through personally and the more necessary it was to delegate. The advantage of sergeants was that you could delegate the donkey-work without them coming over all pre-menstrual when you wanted the interesting bits for yourself. The disadvantage was that they were either on the way up, in which case they saw senior officers as competition, or had already fulfilled their ambitions and were marking time till they could draw their pension. Prior to Voss, Deacon had gone through detective sergeants the way beat coppers used to go through boot-soles.

  Voss was something else: a DS who was certainly on his way up but in less of a hurry than some of his contemporaries, an intelligent man taking every opportunity to learn. In a profession more notable for the broadness than the sophistication of its approach, Voss was an unusually subtle detective and it took Deacon twelve months to realise there was more going on behind his amiable expression than the red hair and freckles suggested.

  These days, if he was honest with himself, he recognised that Voss brought almost as much to their partnership as he did himself. This in no way blurred the distinctions between them, but it did remind Deacon of his good fortune in finally acquiring a DS he could work with.

  It in no way prepared him to be lectured by a man young enough to be his son. He felt his jaw drop and a flush rise in his cheeks. What Voss had said was hardly insubordination; nonetheless Deacon felt himself diminished by it. He knotted his hands on the desk and his voice was thick. ‘Get out.’

  ‘Sir.’ Voss left the room quietly, closing Deacon’s door behind him.

  Deacon sat alone in his office until his fury abated. At that point a more gracious man would have begun to feel embarrassed and looked for a way to apologise. Deacon looked for someone else to vent his anger on.

  He’d told Brodie he wouldn’t go out of his way to confront Chandos, and he had no reason to interview the man at this point. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat. If Deacon’s weak spot was Brodie, Chandos’s was Jared Fry. Deacon picked up the phone.

  Left alone, Brodie locked the office and went home. She collected Paddy from Marta and made tea while she listened to the child chatter about her day; with one ear because the other was listening for the phone. She hoped Deacon would call.

  The phone remained silent but a little after eight, with Paddy tucked up in bed, the doorbell rang. Brodie whispered, ‘Thank God,’ hurried out into the hall and threw open the massive front door.

  It wasn’t Deacon. It was Chandos.

  He wasn’t expecting much of a welcome. For a moment, before her expectations adjusted, Brodie’s face glowed with hope. A man as proud as Eric Chandos could not fail to notice how that changed when she recognised him. It said something that he went on standing there, his head bowed.

  In the moment that she saw him, sandwiched between disappointment and bitter recrimination, she felt a twinge of shame. She had to remind herself it was he who betrayed her, not the other way round. In front of Deacon she had every reason to be ashamed. In front of Chandos she was entitled to be angry, and her gaze turned to knives as she drew herself up tall.

  His voice was low. ‘We need to talk.’

  With her little girl in the back bedroom Brodie didn’t want to start shouting. ‘Do you know, Eric, I think you’ve said enough already.’

  ‘You heard then …’

  She stared at him in disbelief. ‘Since you boasted of getting into my knickers in front of friends of mine, I’d have been surprised if I hadn’t.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to …’ He stopped as if she’d interrupted him. But she hadn’t. She was quite interested to hear what it was he hadn’t meant to do.

  ‘Do please explain. What exactly was it you were trying to say that, due to a slip of the tongue, came out as “Brodie Farrell is a tart”?’

  ‘Please.’ His voice was supplicant. ‘Can’t we talk inside?’

  ‘Oh Eric, that’s so touching. You’re concerned for my reputation.’ But she stood back from the door and let him into the hall. No further. Not into her home and her child’s.

  ‘I let him goad me into …’

  ‘Daniel?’ Her voice soared. ‘Daniel doesn’t goad. Daniel’s never goaded anyone in his entire life. And everyone else who was there,’ she added, and although it wasn’t exactly true she didn’t expect him to deny it, ‘reckons Daniel was leaving when you hurled my name at his back.’

  He didn’t attempt to say otherwise. And she needed no corroboration to know Daniel had told her the truth.

  ‘I was angry by then. We argued. He was telling Jared he’d be better off without me. I just … lost it. I didn’t mean to involve you. I didn’t know what I was about to say until I’d said it. If there’d been any way of taking it back …’

  Brodie didn’t believe him. She thought he’d found himself armed with a weapon against which his enemy had no defence and used it with purpose and relish. She thought it was as off-the-cuff as an Oscar Wilde riposte and that he’d do it again, and as often again, as would serve him. She thought her behaviour in succumbing to his charm had been breathtakingly, culpably stupid.

  She said briskly, ‘Well, there isn’t. I gave you something precious to hold and you smashed it. It was my fault – I shouldn’t have handed it to anyone else and I sure as hell shouldn’t have trusted you with it. I’ll deal with the consequences: just don’t expect me to care that you feel bad about it. You should feel bad.’

  Chandos said, ‘I suppose Deacon heard … ?’

  ‘Of course Deacon heard,’ retorted Brodie. ‘I told him. Daniel told me and I told Jack. And he hasn’t spoken to me since, and I don’t blame him. Look, Eric – why exactly are you here? To apologise? Fine, you’ve done it. If you want me to forgive you, you’re wasting your time. And I don’t think we’ve anything else to talk about.’

  But he made no move to go. He darted furtive glances at her but dropped his gaze before she could meet it. There was something on his mind but Brodie was damned if she knew what.

  Finally Chandos said what he’d come to say. ‘What happened … I’m not sure where it came from but it wasn’t just sex. It meant something, at least to me.’

  ‘I know exactly what it meant to you! A trophy. And the thing about trophies is, they’re for public display. For pu
tting on the mantle-piece.’

  He was shaking his head stubbornly. ‘I know that’s how it must look. I don’t blame you for being angry. But I wasn’t using you. Something happened between us that neither of us had the power to control.

  ‘I’m not used to feeling out of control, Brodie. I don’t like it and I don’t know how to handle it. What I said to Hood was partly because I was feeling overwhelmed. The point is, whatever it was we both felt it. We both responded to it. I’m not sorry it happened. Maybe you want to make up with Deacon but I don’t want you to. I don’t want him to forgive you.’

  Now their eyes met, and Brodie felt the pit dropping out of her stomach as if she’d boarded an express elevator. His gaze devoured her. She had no way of knowing if it was the truth or just what he wanted her to believe, but the words were enough to make the blood thump in her temples and her juices run. Being this close to him was like venturing too near a precipice: one more step and she was going to fall …

  ‘Forget Deacon,’ he urged, ‘forget Hood. You don’t need them. I don’t think you need anybody, but I need you. What we felt: we didn’ t imagine that. We shouldn’t run away from it because it scares us. We have to follow it through.’

  Waves thundered and creamed at the foot of the precipice. Gravity sang its siren song. If she fell, the rocks at the bottom would smash her. But for a few seconds first she’d be flying.

  ‘Tell Deacon you’re sorry. You can tell him I’m sorry if you like, but tell him you’re with me now.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Somehow, in the middle of a murder inquiry, DS Voss found himself with nothing to do except stay out of Deacon’s way. For half an hour the next morning he sat in his office with his fingers laced behind his head, going through what they knew.

  He was aware as he did it that Deacon was probably doing the same thing next door and they should be doing it together because – like painting a wall – two people thinking at different angles get better coverage. For the moment, though, Deacon’s mind was elsewhere. Voss hoped the anger between them would pass in time, but nothing he knew of Deacon suggested he would be quick to drop the grudge.