by Jo Bannister
‘Complications.’ Fry seemed to be trying the word for size. Then he jerked a nod at Chandos. ‘Can I – I don’t know – say goodbye? We were friends for a long time.’
Deacon shrugged. ‘Make it quick.’
Fry moved close enough to Chandos to shake his hand but then didn’t. His fists were in his back pockets. His voice was low. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll see you again.’
‘Don’t be too sure,’ Chandos drawled lazily. ‘You might come through this.’
Fry smiled. It was an odd smile: those watching saw different things in it. Deacon saw bitterness, Voss saw regret. Brodie, rather further away, thought that despite all that had happened she saw a kind of affection. Daniel saw resolve.
Then Fry took his hands from his pockets and raised them awkwardly, as if to clasp the taller man’s shoulders. Instead, at the last moment, his expression mutating to what everyone saw as implacable, he punched him under the ear.
It wasn’t that savage a blow. For a moment no one understood the look of sheer God-forsaken shock that swamped Chandos’s expression or the way his body went weak and tottered before he fell to his knees. Fry opened his hand and something fell light on the cobbles.
Daniel, too far away to see what it was, nevertheless knew. ‘Oh no.’ And Brodie, absorbing the knowledge directly from his mind in that near-telepathic way they had that drove Deacon crazy, put her hand over her mouth.
‘What the hell?’ Deacon had hold of Fry before he even knew what had happened, because experience told him it wasn’t a surfeit of emotion at a comradely punch that had downed Eric Chandos. Voss moved to support the stricken man.
Daniel said tightly, ‘Ambulance.’ And when Brodie went on staring in unmoving horror he reached out and shook her fiercely. ‘Ambulance! Quickly.’
With his free hand Deacon reached down and picked up the plastic syringe which had fallen from Fry’s grasp onto the cobbles. It was a large syringe, and it was empty.
Chapter Thirty
It was late evening before Deacon called it a day.
There had been a lot to do. He’d booked Jared Fry into the custody suite on a charge – for the moment: this could change – of attempted murder, but it was soon evident he couldn’t stay there. The police surgeon wanted him on suicide watch in a secure psychiatric unit as soon as it could be arranged.
‘You’re serious? You think he could top himself?’
Dr Galbraith pulled down his lower lid with a fingertip. ‘Look closely. Am I laughing?’
Deacon had no reason to debate the point. ‘It’s your call. But I’d have thought he’d had enough excitement for one day.’
Galbraith was a big man, a little shorter than Deacon but fatter, substantial in every way. He nodded. ‘Enough for a lifetime even. That’s the problem. He’s burned all his boats, razed his bridges, cut the only lifeline he’s known for ten years. When the reality of that strikes him he’ll wish he’d emptied that syringe into himself.’
‘Any word from the hospital?’
‘Chandos is alive – well, no one’s pronounced him dead. He’s on a ventilator while they try to clean up his blood. No one will speculate on how successful that’ll be. The needle grazed his carotid artery. If his brain had taken the full load he’d be dead now but it got some of it. Best guess? – he won’t wake up. He might remain in a persistent vegetative state or he might die when they pull the plug on him. I don’t think there’s much chance of a significant recovery.’
‘So Fry’s going down for murder.’
Galbraith shrugged. ‘Unless Chandos keeps on ticking over. But every way that counts it was murder.’
Deacon shook his head, half bitterly, half in wonder. ‘This bloody job. You start off with a body and a guy who deserves to be done for murder, only it turns out he probably didn’t kill anyone; and you end up with another guy who probably will be charged with murder and maybe doesn’t deserve it.’
‘Unless it was a bizarre accident where Mr Chandos tripped and fell on a loaded syringe,’ said Dr Galbraith severely, ‘whoever shot heroin into his neck is responsible for his condition. Murder is, of course, a legal concept.’
It had been a pretty half-hearted attempt to defend the demon rocker and Deacon gave it up without further argument. ‘Oh, it was murder all right. It was deliberate and premeditated, and it wasn’t self-defence, and whether or not Chandos is still breathing a year from now, Fry ended his life. The only’ – he managed just in time to avoid saying good – ‘thing about it is, it was Chandos’s actions which reduced Fry to the state in which he committed that crime. A good brief will make a touching plea in mitigation. He won’t get Fry off but he’ll halve the time he has to serve.’
Galbraith was watching him. ‘You seem to have a degree of sympathy for this young man. You’d be glad to see him out sooner rather than later?’
Deacon knuckled his eyes wearily. ‘He isn’t coming out at all and we both know it. There’s no way Fry will serve five years in prison. It’ll be a major achievement keeping him alive long enough to stand trial. And yes, since you ask, I’m sorry for that. It may not be saying much but he was a better man than the man he stabbed. But I’m only the detective, thank God, not the judge or the jury. My role in all this is almost done.’
He walked home. He threw his coat at the rack in the hall and missed. He fed the cat. He stood in the kitchen watching it eat for a minute, head bowed, chin on his chest. Then he picked up his coat and went out again.
He wasn’t sure where he’d find them except that they’d be together. He swung by the netting-shed but Brodie’s car was nowhere to be seen so he walked on, up through the town to Chiffney Road. At the end of the drive he hesitated. It was too late to be calling on anyone he wasn’t planning to arrest. He should go home and see her tomorrow
A light burned over the front door. Now another came on in the hall, spilling onto the gravel as the door opened. ‘Jack. Come inside.’
It was Daniel. Deacon hesitated a moment longer, then trudged up the steps. ‘Where’s Brodie?’
‘She went to bed an hour ago. She took a sleeping pill.’
‘You’re staying here tonight?’
‘I said I would.’
Deacon didn’t enquire any deeper; didn’t need to.
‘Any news?’
‘No,’ said Deacon. ‘Nor likely to be until they need the plug for the vacuum.’
Daniel often found it hard to know when Deacon was pretending to be a callous sod and when he was actually being one. ‘And Jared?’
‘Being watched. I suppose, being treated.’
‘You suppose.’
The big man shrugged. ‘I catch them, somebody else deals with them. Galbraith says he’s in the right place. That’s good enough for me.’
‘Prison, even a prison hospital, will be hard on him.’
‘What’s the alternative? He may have been provoked, he may have done the world a favour, but he still stabbed a hypodermic needle into somebody’s neck and pumped his brain full of heroin. I’d give the guy a medal but I doubt a court’ll feel the same way.’
‘Did you get the story out of Chandos first?’
‘Pretty much. I’ll want to talk to you and Brodie in the morning, you can fill in anything I missed, but I think I got most of it. He said it was an accident. Sasha Wade’s death. That it was an accident and he wasn’t even in the room.’
‘He told us the same thing,’ said Daniel.
‘Did you believe him?’
‘I had no reason not to. He seemed to be telling the truth. He didn’ t think he was in too much trouble.’
The irony of that was too keen to need comment. Deacon sighed. ‘I’ll go see the Wades tomorrow. It isn’t the news they want but maybe this long after it’s better than none.’
Daniel only nodded.
They were in Brodie’s sitting-room. Deacon made no move to go. ‘How did she seem?’
Daniel gave a helpless little shrug. ‘You know Brodie – it can be hard
to tell. She was shocked – of course she was, we all were. I never saw it coming. I knew how distressed Jared was but it never occurred to me he’d do something like that. Maybe it should have done. An hour before they’d been punching one another round the hall floor. And I knew there was heroin upstairs. I just never thought …’
‘Of course you didn’t,’ said Deacon. ‘I knew all that too, but I didn’t realise what was happening until Chandos hit the deck. None of us has any reason to beat ourselves up over this.’
Daniel said quietly, ‘Brodie thinks she has.’
Deacon considered. ‘Well, maybe Brodie has.’
Daniel bit his lip. His opinion wasn’t being asked and he’d no right to offer it. But Brodie’s happiness mattered to him, too much to jeopardise it for the sake of politeness, so he gave it anyway. ‘Jack, you have two options. You can forgive and forget – and I do mean both – and get on with your lives as if this never happened. Or you can nurse the grudge and lose her. I don’t think there’s a third way.’
‘What does she want?’
‘Ask her.’
‘You know.’
‘So do you.’
Deacon straightened up against the back of the sofa. It was a big room in a big Victorian house: even so he seemed to fill it. He fixed the younger man with an eye like a spear. ‘And what about you, Daniel? What do you want?’
Daniel was surprised. ‘What do you mean? I don’t come into this.’
Deacon barked a bitter little laugh. ‘Can I have that in writing?’
‘Yes, if you want,’ said Daniel. ‘This isn’t about me. None of this is about me. Something happened between you and Brodie, and it’s you and her that have to resolve it. Talk to her about it, not to me.’
‘Hm.’
There is a thing in seismology called a Long Period Event. It’s the deep subterranean sound a volcano makes when it’s getting ready to blow. If you could put your ear to the ground at just the right moment it would sound pretty much like Hm.
‘I will,’ said Deacon. ‘Tomorrow. As soon as she gets the Mickey Finn out of her system. We’ll talk and we’ll sort it out, and maybe I can’t promise it’ll be like it never happened but I will bury the hatchet and I won’t mark the spot. Will that do?’
It was more than Daniel had hoped for. ‘Yes.’
Still Deacon kept sitting.
‘What?’
Deacon sighed. At least, you’d have to call it a sigh because there aren’t any other words, but there was nothing wistful about it, nothing gentle or piquant. A sense of foreboding surrounded the sofa. ‘You want the God-honest truth, Daniel? I’m a little afraid of you. Of what you’re going to cost me.’
For a split second Daniel tried not to understand. To react with astonishment, his pale brows climbing, his pale eyes wide. But even before the new expression had settled on his face he’d rejected it as disingenuous. He might wish he didn’t know what Deacon meant but in fact he did and to pretend otherwise – even by the flicker of an expression – was tantamount to lying. He swallowed and his gaze dropped. His voice was low. ‘I’ve told you. You have nothing to fear from me.’
‘Yes, you have told me that, haven’t you, Daniel?’ said Deacon. ‘And I know it’s the truth because you wouldn’t lie to me. Not to me, not to anyone. Not for anyone. But then, it’s not entirely up to you, is it? Maybe you can control your own feelings, but you can’t control Brodie’s.’
‘I know exactly how Brodie feels about me,’ Daniel said softly. ‘And it’s no threat to you.’
‘And when she realises how you feel about her?’
‘She’s not going to hear it from me. And you can’t – you simply cannot – be stupid enough to let her hear it from you.’
Big, strong men in powerful positions don’t often get called stupid. Perhaps, not often enough. Deacon felt his muscles contract as if violence was an option. He made a determined effort to relax them. ‘I’m not sure it would be stupid. I think it might be the only responsible – the only decent – thing to do.
‘But you’re right, I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to gamble when the stakes are this high. It does nothing for a man’s pride, but if the only way I can keep her is by keeping from her the fact that she could have you instead, that’s what I’ll do.
‘But Brodie is nobody’s fool. You and me deciding to keep her in the dark is no guarantee she won’t find the light-switch. If she does, the shit’s going to hit the fan big-time. She’s bound to feel used. Again. I can’t see her forgiving either of us.’
‘Then I’ll tell you what I told her,’ Daniel said, and his eyes as they came up were hard. ‘If she asks you’ll have to tell her the truth. Make sure you never give her reason to ask.’
Deacon went on staring at him, taking that in. A flurry of tiny urges hit him like hail. For a second he wanted nothing so much as to walk away from this and not be beholden to anyone for his happiness. For a second he wanted to wake Brodie, put the facts before her and make her choose. For slightly longer, and not for the first time, he wanted to knock Daniel Hood into the middle of next week. He resisted them all, aware that whatever satisfaction they might afford him would be transient and every one would leave him – leave them all – in a more difficult position than where they were right now.
Yet doing nothing seemed only a temporary solution too. Deacon’s voice was the growl of a distant avalanche. ‘You’re in my way, Daniel. Everywhere I look I see your shadow over my future. You may not mean to come between me and Brodie: you say that isn’t what you want and I believe you. But I’m afraid you’re going to do it anyway. I’m afraid that one day it’s going to be you and me rolling round the hall floor, punching one another bloody.
‘And while I know I can beat the crap out of you, I’m not sure I can win.’
BREAKING FAITH. Copyright © 2005 by Jo Bannister. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby Limited
eISBN 9781466810006
First eBook Edition : January 2012
EAN 978-0-312-34301-9
First U.S. Edition: August 2005
