by Jo Bannister
Daniel laughed, his mild grey eyes fired with battle. ‘No, don’t be tactful, Mr Chandos – say what you think.
‘You keep getting me wrong, don’t you? I don’t envy you because you’re richer than me, more successful than me, better looking than me and a more accomplished philanderer than me. I don’t envy you at all. I despise you. I find you despicable.’ He paused just long enough to let the words sink in.
‘You like to think you’re dangerous, and in a way you are. You corrupt weak people with the glamour of badness. Call it demon rock and stick nails up your nose, and alienated youngsters will be shocked and thrilled and want to be just like you. But you aren’t real. You’re a paper demon.’
‘You know a man’s running out of arguments when he plays the religion card,’ drawled Chandos. ‘Though I have to admit there’s something diverting about hearing you preach. It’s like Johnson’s dog walking on its hind legs: it’s not that you’re any good at it, it’s just amusing to see you try.’
Daniel showed his teeth in a surprisingly wolfish grin. ‘You’ve accused me of religion before. Really, you couldn’t be wider of the mark. That’s why I can see you for what you are. Christians think Satanism is the antithesis of faith, but actually it’s just a different expression of it. It’s believers who turn to devil worship. Atheists know that whether you’re talking about the inside of a box or the outside of a box, it’s the same box.’
‘And I keep telling you,’ Chandos said lazily, ‘all we do is music. He makes it, I sell it. It’s good music, and lots of people buy it, but that’s all it is. Just music.’
Daniel shook his head knowingly. ‘But that isn’t all you’re selling, is it? People who buy a Souls For Satan album are buying into a whole philosophy of Do what you want and the devil take the hindmost. Of course, most of them never try to put the philosophy into practice, but they think you do. They see you as a standard-bearer for rebellion.
‘But it’s just an act. You’re no more a Satanist than I am. That’s the slogan on the packet, but when you get the wrapper off there’s nothing inside. It’s painting-by-numbers Satanism. The great necromancers of the past must be revolving in their unmarked graves at how easy it is to pass as an Antichrist these days.’
Chandos shrugged. In similar circumstances Brodie had felt the confidence radiate from him: now there was a defensiveness. ‘Of course we’re not real Satanists, any more than ballerinas are real swans. We’re entertainers.’
‘You’re liars,’ said Daniel contemptuously. ‘You say, Look at us: we’re outlaws, we don’t obey the rules; buy the over-priced T-shirt and you can be an Antichrist too. But it’s just words. You haven’t the commitment to be genuinely evil so you settle for mere nastiness instead. It has a certain shock value for the emotionally immature, and you can’t be done for it.’
‘What are you accusing me of?’ Chandos was starting to speak through his teeth. ‘Being wicked or not being wicked enough? And why should I care what you think? You’re a confused little man: an atheist with a Church of England soul. You want to believe in goodness without believing in God. Make up your mind, sonny, you can’t have it both ways.’
Brodie had never seen Daniel so focused. He seemed unaware of anything except Chandos and his own argument. ‘Goodness has very little to do with God,’ he shot back. ‘Societies thrive on the innate decency of most of their members, not the fear of a beard in the sky. Ethics don’t stem from a belief in God. Ethics make God redundant.
‘You aren’t a threat to society, Mr Chandos. Society is strong and pragmatic, and most of it knows better than to take a bully at his own valuation. The only danger you pose is to people with some growing up to do who think you are what you purport to be: a real alternative, occult souls serving a different theology. But you’re nothing of the kind. You’re a fraud. A sham.’
Chandos flushed and tried to respond but Daniel was nowhere near finished. ‘That cleric from Cheyne Treacey is more dangerous than you. Because he believes something quite terrifying: that people are less important than their God. That our place is in the mud while His is in the sky. It’s a disastrous philosophy that not only makes a virtue of mud but deprives human beings of the rights and obligations of free will. If there’s a God up there, no one has to think; no one has to take responsibility for his own actions, to hammer out for himself the meanings of good and evil. If there’s a God, we are nothing more than children and the last word in any attempt to explore the essence of our existence will always be, Because I say so.’
Brodie had to remind herself to breathe. Of all the possible outcomes of this confrontation, this was the least likely – that Daniel Hood would challenge Eric Chandos at word-play and win. Of course, he had the advantage of believing what he was saying. But the eloquence that was suddenly at his command knocked her sideways. It was as if everything he felt, everything he knew in his bones, had backed up behind a dam and the sluices were condensing it into perfect jets of words.
He still wasn’t shouting. But every syllable he spoke rang clear with conviction. ‘Human beings are the bravest, strongest, most ingenious, indefatigable creatures the world has produced in four billion years. We can achieve anything we can imagine. Without God, man is alone in the darkness. But he can make fire.
‘Of course,’ he added scornfully, ‘a real Satanist is another kind of religious fanatic and so deeply dangerous. But you’re just playing the part, aren’t you? Well, at the end of a play the actors come in front of the curtain and take a bow. They don’t pretend to be the remarkable people they portray. So take a bow, Mr Chandos – it’s time to leave the stage.’
Dimmock is not a city like London, humming with industry and enterprise and the sheer electricity of many lives being lived in close proximity all the time, and Battle Alley hadn’t much in common with New Scotland Yard. There were quiet times. There were periods during the day when no one was entering or leaving the police station, or walking in the street or past the end of the street. There were times when there was no traffic noise, and even the dulcet tones of Detective Superintendent Deacon berating a junior officer were not wafting from an upper window. There were moments, sometimes whole minutes, of calm.
Even so, Brodie had never heard the street fall so silent. Now Daniel was done, his extraordinary tirade spent, no sound of any kind escaped any of the four of them. Not a word, not a gasp, not the scraping of a foot on the stone steps. She looked at Daniel’s face and saw a blissful, almost arrogant satisfaction; at Chandos’s and saw monstrous rage; at Fry’s and saw fear.
Of all of them it was Fry who tried to break the terrible silence, avert the coming storm. He reached out a bony hand to touch Chandos’s sleeve. ‘Eric …’
Chandos pushed him aside. There was no need: his grip was too frail to detain a grown man, Chandos could have freed himself with one of his elegant shrugs. Instead he swept Fry aside with enough force to send him sprawling down the stone steps, fetching up in a heap against the balustrade. And then, as if the sudden movement had released a tiger that wouldn’t be penned, that was going to feed before it went back in its cage, he packed all the strength of his upper body into a piston that exploded, firing off a fist.
Daniel never saw it coming. He tried to catch Fry as he stumbled past, failed, and when he turned back he met the hay-maker coming the other way. By accident or design – possibly the former, Daniel was shorter than most people Chandos might have had occasion to strike – the blow connected not with his jaw but with the cheek-bone immediately below his eye. Blood spurted as the broken-spider frame of his glasses ground into his flesh. His vision exploded in a firestorm of red and black, and for a moment the universe got its strong and weak forces confused so that gravity worked sideways while up and down squabbled over who was driving. When they sorted it out he hit the ground.
Brodie was on her knees beside him, filling her lungs to summon help, when she saw Jared Fry’s face. He knew what she was going to do, and what it would mean. More interviews
, more statements. More time before he could deal with the dragon in his veins. His eyes were smoky with despair.
‘Jared.’ She caught his hollow gaze. ‘Go. This is nothing to do with you. Get out of here.’
He looked at her, and at Chandos. He looked at Daniel, vacant and bleeding. His voice, that had filled hearts and lifted roofs, was something between a moan and a whisper. ‘I can’t.’
Brodie stared at him in disbelief. She opened her mouth to swear at him. But what was the point? He knew what he was. No abuse she could pile on him would add significantly to the burden of his self-contempt. He knew he was pathetic. He knew he’d had, and squandered, a talent that those who paid to see him would have sacrificed limbs for. He knew the only redemption left to him was the traditional one of dying young, and even that was slipping daily beyond his reach.
He saw himself through her eyes – a ruined idol with feet of clay reaching all the way up to his armpits, stripped of everything that makes a man, even the ability to answer his own most pressing needs – and wished he could have died first. His gaze dropped and he knelt on the steps, his head bowed, his life past amending.
She’d given him one chance more than he deserved: it wasn’t Brodie’s fault he was incapable of taking it. Again she filled her lungs to call for assistance.
Even without his glasses Daniel had seen enough to understand what had passed between them. The difference between him and Brodie was, Daniel was no good at letting others pay for their own mistakes. She was broadly content to let people make their beds and lie in them; he was constantly trying to tuck them in. He was, she freely admitted, nicer than her. At regular intervals he paid the price of that.
‘Let it go,’ he said softly.
Still crouching she turned and stared at him, blood and dirt on his face. ‘What?’
‘I’m all right. We don’t need to involve the police.’
‘Involve them? He just knocked you down their front steps! They’ve undoubtedly got it on CCTV.’
‘What if they have? I don’t need their protection. From him? You don’t take something like that to court – you wipe it off your shoe and get on with your day.’
‘Daniel, you’re bleeding! He broke your glasses and cut your face. He could have had your eye out.’
‘But he didn’t. All that happened is he ran out of arguments and used his fists as an exit strategy. If he was a child he’d have stamped; if he was a teenager he’d have slammed a door. You want him charged with being sad in a public place? Forget it. I made my point. That was him acknowledging it.’
‘But he hit you! Assault occasioning actual bodily harm. Malicious damage to a pair of spectacles. He shouldn’t get away with it!’
Daniel was up, wiping the dirt off his face with the back of his hand. ‘He isn’t getting away with anything. You know what he is, I know what he is, Jared knows what he is and even he knows what he is. Would it make any difference if we told a magistrate what he is? If I make a complaint we’ll have to go inside and make statements about it, and Jared doesn’t need that and neither do I. I don’t need to waste another hour of my life on this man. Another hour that isn’t coming back – that I could be washing my pots and vacuuming my rug and putting Germalene on my haemorrhoids. He isn’t worth it. Let him go.’
So they let him go. Wordless, mortified, he walked away as quickly as a man can without people saying he’s running. Jared Fry glanced back at them once with an mixture of gratitude and desolation, then they were gone.
Brodie drew a deep, steadying breath and looked at Daniel. ‘I didn’ t know you had haemorrhoids.’
Daniel started laughing; and having started, was helpless to stop. ‘I haven’t. It just seemed to be where the rhetoric was going.’
For no reason she could understand Brodie found herself smiling too. ‘Daniel – that was a lie!’
‘More a literary device,’ he demurred.
‘So said the man tap-dancing at the top of the slippery slope.’
‘I know,’ sighed Daniel. ‘I’m a real hell-raiser, me.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
Before Sergeant McKinney had decided what to do about the fracas on his doorstep it was over. Two of those involved were away down the street, the other two were leaning on the stone ballustrade, weak with laughter and searching their pockets for tissues.
He frowned at the TV screen a moment longer, then he picked up the phone and called Deacon. ‘You probably want to have a look at this.’
Deacon didn’t understand what he was seeing on the CCTV recordirig either. But he thought he needed to. Three of those involved had good reasons to keep him in the dark; the fourth might talk if provided with the right incentives. Subtlety was not something the detective was famous for but he could do it if he had to. And he’d thump anyone who said different.
So when he left work around nine o’clock, instead of walking round the corner to his house Deacon cut across to the Promenade, crunched down the shingle and clanged up the iron steps of the netting shed.
As he lifted his hand to knock Daniel’s voice, slightly muffled, called to him. ‘Come on in, Jack, it’s not locked.’
Deacon let himself into the living-room. ‘How did you know it was me?’
Daniel may have been too polite to laugh or just too sore. ‘It was you or Nelly the Elephant, and the other circus is out of town.’
He was holding a packet of frozen peas to his face. When he lowered it Deacon understood why he sounded muffled. ‘I won’t ask what happened to you because I saw the Director’s Cut. Anything broken?’
Just my second-best glasses.’ Daniel’s cheek-bone jutted like a cow’s hip, stained with bruising. Without the familiar frames his face looked undressed, vulnerable. But his pale grey eyes were still perceptive though Deacon knew they saw so poorly his own face was a blur. Daniel looked at his visitor largely from habit. ‘If you saw what was happening, why didn’t you intervene?’
Deacon sniffed. ‘Just because I’m not allowed to deck you doesn’ t mean I can’t enjoy it when someone else does. Plus, it was over by the time I got there. What was it about?’
Again the astute, clouded glance over the frozen peas. ‘Have you asked Brodie?’
‘Do you think she’d tell me if I did?’
Daniel considered. ‘She might. It wasn’t about you, if that’s what you’re wondering.’
‘Was it about the murder?’
‘No. Oh, it’s no secret. I told Eric Chandos what I thought of him. I called him a sham and he punched me in the eye. A predictable enough reaction, when you think about it.’
Deacon thought about it, stopped when he found himself smirking. ‘Was it worth it?’
Daniel’s blind smile was seraphic. ‘Oh yes.’
‘Why was it worth it?’
‘He had it coming. He’s a powerful man, and powerful men don’t hear the truth about themselves often enough. He’s damaged decent people’s lives. I wanted him to hear the truth for once, and I wanted Jared to hear it too.’
Deacon regarded him speculatively. ‘You wanted him to hit you. You provoked him until he did.’
Daniel shrugged. ‘I suppose.’
‘And you wanted Fry to see it.’
‘Yes.’
‘And Brodie.’
Instantly Daniel sensed danger. He wished he had his glasses on. He looked at the blob that spoke with Deacon’s voice and wished he could see its expression. ‘Er …’
‘Because’ – this was the reason he was a detective – ‘you were afraid she still felt something for him. You wanted her to see him for what he is.’
‘I didn’t say that.’ Daniel’s voice was low, his gaze wary.
‘You’re not denying it either,’ Deacon observed quietly. ‘You knew what had happened: that something outside her control had taken hold of her. You were afraid Chandos could turn the charm on and have her back. You knew what he was but you were afraid she couldn’ t see it. That even if you reminded her how he’d used her al
ready she might forget if he looked at her a certain way. But she’d never forget seeing him beat you bloody. That’s what you wanted.’
‘Put that way it doesn’t sound very noble, does it?’ admitted Daniel. ‘I was worried. She couldn’t seem to cut free of him. Even today, knowing all she did, she was still looking for a reason to see him. She said there were things she could ask him that no one else could. But if they’d been alone together for any length of time, I don’t know what would have happened.’
‘You think she’d have gone with him.’
Daniel shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I know that isn’t what she wants.’ He stopped, tried to order his thoughts. ‘She was happy before she met him. He took that from her, and not even because he was in love and couldn’t help himself. Jack, I think everything that’s happened was part of a plan. I think Chandos made a play for Brodie as soon as he realised you two were a couple.’
He’d lost Deacon completely. The big man spread his hands in bewilderment. Daniel realised he would have to explain. ‘I think he went after Brodie to distract you from doing your job. Because there’s something he doesn’t want you finding out.’
Deacon’s jaw was hard. ‘About the girl in his garden?’
‘I can’t see how. I wondered if it was something to do with Jared’s addiction, or maybe the band’s finances. Whatever it is, I think he was scared that once you started asking questions you were going to uncover something he was desperate to keep secret.’
‘So he made a play for Brodie?’ Deacon’s tone was doubtful as he tried the thought for size.
‘You’re a very effective investigator. He was afraid of you. He had to stop you thinking like a policeman.’
