Breaking Faith

by Jo Bannister

  Fry didn’t flinch. He gave Deacon a tight little smile and shook his head. ‘You have nothing on me. If you had you wouldn’t be playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey like this. Yes, I could have killed that girl, and if I had maybe some of the things I’ve done in the last eight years would have been significant. But I didn’t, and you’re trying to make a pattern out of random decisions. Buying this house. Digging in the garden. Whoever had bought the house would have dug in the garden: would you be accusing him of murder? The only reason …’

  He caught the thought in time to keep from voicing it but not quite quickly enough to prevent Deacon hearing it. The detective felt his skin prickle. ‘Is what, Mr Fry?’

  Even with the panic-demons of withdrawal beginning to shout in his head, Fry had too much sense to answer.

  Deacon would have answered for him except that common sense finally caught up with him too. If he had – if he’d rapped out, as he almost did, ‘The only reason you’re here is that your manager seduced my girlfriend: is that what you mean?’ – he’d have put two things on tape that would come back to haunt him: Brodie’s infidelity and the fact that it was affecting how he did his job.

  Shocked at how close he’d come to disaster, for long moments he said nothing more, sitting at the table fighting the fury that had almost betrayed him. He saw Fry’s ashen face, the dew of sweat breaking on it and the unsteady rise and fall of his chest, and the shabbiness of his own behaviour tasted bitter in his mouth. He had no case against this man. Fry was only here because Deacon abhorred his choice of friends.

  If he’d genuinely suspected him of murder Deacon would have been justified in continuing this until he got at the truth, and if that meant getting Fry medical attention that’s what he’d have done. But he had no such excuse. There was no reason to suspect Fry. What seemed like an odd coincidence was probably nothing more than that. Which made his behaviour unconscionable. It wasn’t reasonable to subject Fry to the pain of uncontrolled withdrawal, it wasn’t clever, it wasn’t even helpful. It was mean-spirited and Deacon was ashamed of himself.

  He drew a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. ‘Do you know, Mr Fry, I think we’ve achieved as much as we can for one day. I’ll have a car take you home.’

  There was time for him to see the flicker of hope in Fry’s gaze as he looked up, to see the desperate tension of his spare body begin to soften in anticipation.

  Then a knuckle beat a quick tattoo on the door and Detective Sergeant Voss was in the room, keen-eyed, looking between Deacon and Fry, looking at the tape. ‘You’ve finished?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Deacon, surprised. Generally speaking a senior officer’s interview is safe from interruption by excitable young detectives, especially those who, had they any sense, would still be steering clear of said senior officers. ‘Mr Fry’s helped us all he can for the moment. Will you organise a car for him?’

  ‘No,’ said Charlie Voss.

  Deacon blinked. This was a triumph of mind over matter: he could hardly have been more astonished if Voss had produced a ghetto-blaster and commenced to strip to the strains of … well, Deacon didn’t know what it was called but he’d seen The Hull Mounty and he’d recognise it if he heard it. And it wouldn’t surprise him as much as DS Voss coming in here uninvited and refusing to do what he was told. One of Deacon’s bushy eyebrows climbed. ‘No?’

  Voss knew he needed to explain. But first he needed to make sure Fry didn’t leave while he was doing it. ‘Did he tell you he knew Sasha Wade?’

  ‘He told me he didn’t know Sasha Wade.’

  ‘It’s a lie,’ said Voss. ‘He knew her. I can prove it. He’s been singing her songs.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Voss returned to Battle Alley deeply uneasy about what Brodie was doing yet aware he had no power to stop her. If he’d thought she was putting herself in danger he’d have gone to Deacon. But that was a high-risk strategy: he could end up with both of them after his blood.

  Still, when he heard Chandos arrive at the police station in a flurry of raised voices and banged doors his immediate reaction was relief that he wouldn’t be at The Diligence when Brodie got there. But his misgivings remained. He was no longer even sure it was Brodie he was worrying about. Something was rasping away at the edge of his consciousness, persistent as the Count of Monte Cristo armed with a nail-file, and he couldn’t work out what it was.

  Trying to ignore the itch in the back of his brain, to focus on questions which had answers even if he didn’t know what they were yet, he found himself leafing through Sasha Wade’s songbook. Afterwards he was never quite sure why. Sheer chance, his fingers that might have passed the time drumming on the scarred desk-top turning the pages of the exercise-book instead? Or something smarter, the bit of his brain that had spotted the anomaly despairing of getting him to listen and communicating directly with his fingers instead?

  Either way, the moment Voss saw the handwritten pages he knew what it was that had been troubling him. He’d read the book before, of course, thoroughly enough to recognise that the missing girl was a serious and talented songwriter. If Daniel had quoted accurately, and hadn’t attributed them to Jared Fry, he’d have recognised the lines right away.

  Voss pored over the scratchy handwriting for another minute, wondering what it meant. Another coincidence – an innocent misunderstanding – something significant? After that he picked up the phone.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ asked Daniel.

  ‘Something you said. Something Fry said, about men crucifying women. Was it from a song, do you know?’

  ‘Yes. Crucifiction. He calls it his signature-tune.’

  ‘And it was definitely that way round – “We crucify women”. Not “Men crucify us”.’

  ‘Yes.’ Daniel frowned. ‘It would be a rum song for Jared to sing if it was the other way round.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Voss. ‘But not for Sasha Wade to write.’

  The words were there in front of him, unedited, the way they sprang from her mind. Men crucify us whenever they love us – a song written by a woman, for a woman to sing. In the cheap exercise-book that Sasha Wade left at home when she disappeared. She might have written it any time up to June 14th 1997. She could not have written it since. ‘I need to know when Fry first sang it.’

  But Daniel couldn’t help. ‘Ask him. Or Chandos.’

  ‘I don’t want to ask either of them until I know the answer.’

  ‘Ask Jason Wilmslow.’

  For a moment Voss couldn’t think who he meant. ‘The builder’s son? Why?’

  ‘He lives and breathes this stuff. He may have every rock album ever sold. I talked to him a couple of times when his dad was working on my house, and rock music was his only topic of conversation. I imagine the reason he was labouring at The Diligence was in the hope of meeting Jared.’

  ‘Where do I find him – where does he work?’

  Daniel sighed. ‘He’s seventeen years old with a GCSE in art and a stereo system that interferes with broadcasts to shipping. Midday Friday? – he’s probably just getting up.’

  Norman Wilmslow had been a builder for thirty years. He was reliable, cost-effective and unimaginative, a combination which made him enduringly popular in Dimmock. Ten years ago he built himself a sturdy, unimaginative mock-Tudor house on River Drive ten minutes from the centre of town.

  Jason was indeed at home. In his extensive collection was the first Souls For Satan album to feature Crucifiction. Voss checked the copyright imprint. The song was accredited to Jared Fry in 1999, two years after Sasha Wade disappeared.

  ‘That’s when it was published – the earliest anyone but a close friend should have heard it,’ said Voss rapidly. They were in the corridor outside the interview room and Deacon was listening to every word he said. ‘But Sasha had the song in her notebook, that she left at home when she went missing. Even if she was in the habit of copying down songs she liked and passing them off as her own, it was two years too soon.’

 
Deacon was trying to catch up. ‘You’re saying Fry stole it from her? That he read the notebook she left with her parents? And they never mentioned it?’

  Voss was shaking his head. ‘I don’t think that’s what happened. I think they knew one another before Sasha disappeared. Either they corroborated on the song – and came up with slightly different versions, hers for a woman and his for a man – or she wrote it and sang it for him. She wanted to break into the business, remember. The day she went missing, with an overnight bag and her guitar – what if she was going to meet Fry? What if she sang Crucifiction for him?’

  ‘And he liked it so much he killed her?’ Much as he wanted to charge somebody – anybody – from The Diligence, Deacon was unconvinced. Even accepting that, in the music business, a good song is the worth a lot of money, it didn’t ring true. ‘Sasha finished her audition with a last triumphant chord and Fry hit her over the head with his second-best Yamaha? Even if he was desperate for the song, why wouldn’t he just buy it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ admitted Voss. ‘I don’t know that he did kill her. I do know that they knew one another – the song proves it. So why is Fry still denying they ever met?’

  Deacon went on staring at him from under gathered brows for another half minute. Then he nodded. ‘Let’s ask him. Er – good work, Charlie Voss.’

  In the few minutes since Voss’s interruption things had changed. Fry had thought he was about to be released; now he knew he wasn’t. He must have thought that, whatever their suspicions, the police had no evidence against him. Now he knew they had. He’d thought he was just a short drive and a minute’s privacy from being able to feed his craving. In the space of a few words, that hope died.

  Deacon had interviewed a lot of drug-addicts in his time. In some ways it was difficult, in some ways very easy. Uniquely among suspects, you could put the fear of God into them by promising to do nothing to them but talk. And talk, and talk, while the fingers on the clock crept round and the counter on the tape machine clicked up and the chemicals in their blood and brain ebbed and thinned and told them they were going to die in agony. Then, usually, they’d say anything you wanted. It didn’t have to be the truth, just what they thought you wanted to hear.

  If all you were interested in was the clear-up rate you could get a lot done in that window of opportunity between desperation kicking in and physical collapse. But if you wanted the truth, a withdrawing addict was the worst kind of suspect: one who no longer knew what it was. Deacon wanted to know what Jared Fry remembered, not what he’d dreamt or hallucinated or wanted to be true or was afraid might be true or knew wasn’t true but might get him bailed.

  Deacon went back to the table and sat down again. His eyes took in Fry’s pallor, the slick of sweat on his skin, the hunched attitude as the abdominal cramps kicked in, and decided enough was enough. They weren’t playing at this any more. Fry wasn’t just an overpaid lout with a bad habit: he was a man facing a murder charge. He needed protecting, and so did the process.

  Deacon said, ‘I think you need to see a doctor, Mr Fry. I’m going to suspend this interview until the surgeon’s had a look at you. I’d recommend you to be frank with him. On the basis of information we now have, you could be with us for some time.’

  Fry swallowed. His eyes were at once apprehensive and fierce. ‘I don’t need a doctor. I don’t need to score. I’d like to, but I don’t need to. What I need is to get this sorted out. You may think you have evidence against me, but you can’t have because I didn’t do what you think it proves.’

  Deacon frowned. It was a good impression of an innocent man. ‘Are you sure? It’s no use to me if, by the time we’ve got your statement typed out, you’re not capable of signing it.’

  Fry barked a gruff laugh. He knew what he was doing. He knew he’d feel worse before he felt better. But instinct warned against letting himself be typecast. If it went on record that he couldn’t get through an interview without chemical support his credibility would be gone. No one trusts the testimony of an addict. Even if it cost him, he had to challenge that perception of him.

  ‘Superintendent,’ he gritted, ‘let’s cut the crap here. I take heroin. I’ve taken it for a long time. I like what it does for me and I’m not interested in quitting, except for today. Because what it’s going to do today is convince you that under its influence I could do anything – however stupid, however vicious – and have no memory of it. So today I do without. It won’t be much fun for either of us so I suggest we get on with it. If I want a doctor I’ll tell you; if I want a solicitor I’ll tell you. If I pass out on the floor you’ll have to do whatever the Police Manual says, but until then I don’t want to see anyone or do anything that’ll spin this out. Whatever the song may say’ – he flicked a taut smile – ‘time is not on my side.’

  Deacon would have suffered dismemberment rather than admit it but he felt a twinge of admiration for this scarecrow of a man, sunken-eyed, sallow-skinned, his health broken by the self-indulgence of his lifestyle. Jared Fry was everything that Jack Deacon despised; and yet … He had no idea if Fry could do what he said. Perhaps he didn’t understand how hard it would get. But most addicts have tried to quit, some of them repeatedly, so probably Fry had some idea of what he was letting himself in for. Try as he might, Deacon couldn’t avoid feeling a certain respect for him.

  ‘All right,’ he nodded. ‘But you can change your mind any time. And even if you don’t, I’ll call the surgeon any time I become concerned about your ability to continue.’

  ‘You worry about the questions,’ grated Fry. ‘I’ll worry about not dribbling while I answer them.’

  Brodie had her foot on the bottom tread of the police station steps when someone linked an arm through hers and swung her in a surprised parabola back onto the street. ‘Keep walking.’

  ‘Daniel? What … ?’

  ‘I mean it. Keep walking.’

  He didn’t let her go until they’d turned the corner, out of sight of the CCTV cameras above the station door. When he did she turned to face him. ‘Well?’

  ‘You can’t go in there. Charlie’s found a connection between Jared and the missing girl. Jack’s questioning him and Chandos is shouting the odds at the front desk. If you go in there now it’ll be like spraying petrol on a bush-fire.’

  ‘And … ?’ Brodie was looking for the down-side.

  ‘Did you see Chandos?’

  ‘Yes. We barely got to talk, though, before he heard the news, jumped in his car and headed down here. I followed. Daniel, I’m not going to sit out the fireworks display in an air-raid shelter. I want to know what’s going on.’

  ‘That song of Jared’s – Crucifiction? Sasha Wade wrote it.’

  Amazement knocked the breath out of her. ‘You’re kidding! So he did know her. Do you know, I really didn’t think he was lying about that.’

  ‘Or me. I suppose there’s no other way of reading it?’

  Brodie couldn’t see one. ‘So that’s what Eric was covering up. That Fry was telling the truth about things we thought were lies and lying about things we thought were the truth.’

  Daniel didn’t follow. She explained, her voice on the cusp between sorrow and anger. ‘We thought he was pretending to be mad, bad and dangerous. We also thought he was a great songwriter.’

  ‘So I’ll ask you again, Mr Fry,’ Deacon said wearily. ‘Did you know Sasha Wade?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then can you explain to me how you’ve spent the last six years singing her song?’

  That made him bridle as even the suspicion of murder did not. ‘That’s my song. I wrote it – every word, every note.’

  Deacon shook his head. ‘Not according to this.’ He had Sasha’s exercise-book open in front of him. He turned it with the points of two fingers so Fry could see. ‘Read it. Tell me if that isn’t, in every essential, the same song.’

  Half way through Fry’s gaze skipped aside disparagingly. ‘She copied it. She heard a song she liked and rewrote it
so she could sing it. That’s my song, Superintendent. Ask anyone.’

  ‘The problem is – your problem is – Sasha left this book in her bedroom at her parents’ house when she went missing, two years before you first sang it in public.’

  ‘That isn’t possible,’ Jared Fry said flatly.

  ‘It isn’t arguable,’ said Deacon. ‘Unless you’re saying her mother copied the song down, in a skilful imitation of Sasha’s handwriting, more than two years after her daughter disappeared. Is that the basis of your defence, Mr Fry?’

  ‘Don’t be bloody silly.’

  ‘Then how did it get there? If you wrote your song first.’

  ‘You’re the detective, you work it out!’

  Deacon smiled. ‘I think I have. I think Sasha Wade came to you with some songs she thought you’d be interested in. And you were. You realised there was some good material in there and offered to buy it. Unfortunately, she knew what she’d got as well. She didn’t want a few quid in her pocket: she wanted to be famous. She wanted her name on the songs. She wanted to be up there singing them with you.

  ‘But you didn’t want a partner. A nineteen-year-old girl was no part of the hellfire image you were creating. It was a great song, but only if it was your song. And Sasha wasn’t interested in being your ghost-writer.’

  He sighed. ‘You know, Mr Fry, it should be pretty easy to see you as a murderer. You’re a rockstar, a Satanist and a heroin addict – I shouldn’t be asking myself if you murdered this girl, I should be wondering how many others there were. But the fact is, I don’t think you’re an evil man. I’ve known evil men and I don’t think you’re one. I don’t think you killed Sasha Wade because she stood between you and a good song.’

  This was Jack Deacon’s trade and he knew it well. He knew Jared Fry wanted nothing in the world so much as to ask what he thought instead, but didn’t dare to. Deacon was in no rush to give him what he wanted, left Fry hanging. Even when he was ready to proceed he began with a question.