by Jo Bannister
At length the voice changed, stopped hectoring and took on a note of regret. He’d tried to avoid this but Daniel had left him no choice. What happened now was his own fault. He could stop it, but only one way.
Daniel tried to say that he couldn’t, he didn’t know the missing woman or where she was; but half way through the sentence pain like he’d never imagined seered his breast.
Even after what had gone before it came as a shock. He screamed and his body convulsed. Patiently the voice repeated its questions. Daniel gulped for breath, stammered an apology - he was sorry, he was sorry but he didn’t know, truly he didn’t know … This time the unseen flame tongued his navel and he screamed again.
So it went on, for a period Daniel had no way of measuring. The same questions that he couldn’t answer; the same response that somehow managed to be shockingly different each time. He never learned to anticipate or to brace himself. Every mark on his body was a little savagery as devastating as the first. There were breaks, not for his benefit, then it started again.
Finally he grew aware that it had stopped; that a discussion was taking place and that he wasn’t part of it or the decision it was leading to. A door opened and footsteps receded; he was left alone with one of the men. Not the man who’d asked the questions: by the voice, an older man.
He recounted to Inspector Deacon every word that passed between them. The man slapped his face. His consciousness was sinking fast then, but he heard the footsteps return and the first voice - the voice he’d never forget, fading now into the background - say, “Do it.” And the world stopped.
“Danny - Danny! It’s all right. You’re safe here. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Broad and strong, Deacon’s hands reached him through the burgeoning panic and brought him back to the present. He blinked in the light as if he really had been blindfold a moment before. He looked around, confused. Somehow he’d found the strength to push himself up the bed and hard against the wall.
“They shot me,” gasped Daniel Hood. “Oh Christ. Oh Christ. They shot me.”
“You were lucky.” Jack Deacon watched the young man with compassion and hardly registered the absurdity of what he’d just said. “If they’d known you were still alive they’d have finished it. They took you to a building site and left you in a skip. The builders found you on Monday morning. Sunday night was frosty: the cold kept you from bleeding to death.”
Daniel hugged himself. The room was hot and stuffy but the memories were like ice. “And you don’t know why.”
Deacon shook his head. “I’ll find out.”
“Will they come back?”
That was the big one. But the answer depended on why they’d come in the first place and was thus far unknowable. “They think you’re dead,” said Deacon. “That’s what I told the papers. If they learn otherwise they may come back. Or not, depending on why they wanted you in the first place. We’ll do our best to protect you. But I’d be lying if I said we could keep you safe indefinitely. The best way to do that is to put them behind bars.”
“But if you don’t know who they were … ?”
“Exactly,” nodded Deacon. “Well, I have one good witness, somebody who was there throughout. Maybe something you heard or saw will help - something that hasn’t come back to you yet but will do. If anything occurs to you, whether or not you think it matters, call me.”
“I’ve told you everything.”
“No you haven’t,” said Deacon without rancour. “No one ever does. You’ve told me everything you’ve remembered so far. But there is more. There has to be. There’s a reason for what they did, and somewhere behind those mental barriers you know what it is. You must do. Whether or not you understand why, you’re the key to all this.”
“I think they made a mistake,” murmured Daniel. “I don’t think it was me they wanted.”
“They didn’t think they’d made a mistake.”
“They thought I knew something about this Sylvia or Sophie or whoever.” His brow cleared suddenly, his eyes surprised. “Sophie. The woman they were asking about - she was called Sophie.”
“There you are,” said Deacon approvingly, “that’s something we didn’t know five minutes ago. And it won’t be the last thing. Keep thinking about it. I’ll get onto the Police National Computer and start looking for a missing Sophie. In the meantime, is there anything you want?”
Daniel considered for a moment. “An explanation. Catch them if you can, but I’d settle for knowing why. And …”
“Mm?”
In the circumstances his smile was unbearably tender, like the first blink of spring sunshine, the first tremulous birdsong. When Deacon first saw Daniel Hood he thought he looked like an old man. Cleaned up, warmed up, fed, healing and with his pale face lit by that unexpected smile, he looked not just younger but oddly ageless. And androgynous. Ambiguous.
Daniel said, “And, for none of this to have happened. I want to be who I was a week ago. I liked my life then; I liked me. Now I don’t even know who I am.”
Deacon’s gaze dipped, hiding his confusion. He wasn’t a man who was easily touched by other people. He was pragmatic and objective, and many people thought him hard. It was how he saw himself. He was startled by the feelings this young man stirred in him.
There was nothing wrong with them. Even by his own rather narrow terms of reference there was nothing wrong with feeling compassion for someone who’d suffered as Daniel Hood had. He just wasn’t used to responding to people on an emotional level. He dealt in facts, in evidence, in forensics. He was disturbed to find himself empathising with someone he didn’t know, didn’t need to know, only needed to do his duty by.
He stood up, turned away and headed for the door. “I’ll try and get you the explanation, anyway.”
Chapter 6
The computer had nothing helpful to offer. Deacon was appalled by just how many people were missing nationwide. But though there were a handful of Sophies of various ages being sought by their families, none was a recent disappearance and none came with the sort of baggage that might explain what happened to Daniel Hood.
Two scenarios occurred to him, though he knew there could be more. Sophie might have been abducted or she might have run off with someone. In either case the moving force was someone close to her - a father, a husband, a lover; jealous or distraught.
Jealous? Someone had spent two days torturing a young teacher out of jealousy? Perhaps. An abduction would appear on the computer but a girl leaving one man for another wouldn’t. Had Sophie fallen for another man? Not Daniel - Romeo wouldn’t have taken two days like that for Juliet - but someone he might be expected to know about? Then why didn’t he? Maybe he couldn’t help, however desperately he wanted to, but he should at least have known what he was being questioned about.
Could he have been a victim of mistaken identity as he claimed? It wasn’t totally impossible. Deacon had been a police officer for half his life, he knew that jealous angry people make more mistakes than calm rational ones. They misread situations, lay the blame in the wrong place, crave vengeance out of all proportion to the harm they’ve suffered. They kill people they love - wives, husbands, children. They maim them, scar them for life, do things that can never be forgiven. Oh yes, jealousy could certainly have been the motive.
This was the second man: not the man who tortured Hood, the one who paid. The one Deacon had a chance of finding. The one who, when Sophie disappeared, threw large sums of money and no morality at the problem. He paid Brodie Farrell to find Hood and the interrogator to pick him up. Deacon knew the pro was on the team by then from the way Hood was taken, the way he was kept blindfold even though there was no intention that he would escape with his life.
A keen amateur might have thought of these points as he laid plans in the calm and quiet of his own sitting-room, but he’d have made more mistakes carrying them out. In the panic to get Hood under cover at the start, and later on when the mayhem he’d nerved himself to commit fa
iled to have the desired effect. Most rages would abate over two days, most jealousies subside. But whoever did this continued for forty-eight hours despite the fact that he was getting no answers, the growing certainty that he would get none. Not for anger, or jealousy, or revenge. He stuck at it because he was being paid.
But the man paying him was also there. Hood had heard him giving the orders; he’d even seen him, in a manner of speaking, right at the end when in a fever of frustration he ripped the blindfold away. But Hood couldn’t describe him: partly because he was by then palpably close to collapse, but mainly because he didn’t have his glasses on. Deacon shook his head in weary incredulity. Sometimes he believed in God simply because there had to be someone up there messing him around. If Daniel Hood hadn’t been as blind as a bat wearing sunglasses in a cellar at night, he might have made an arrest by now. Instead of which he was hunting through the PNC for missing Sophies and earlier occasions on which someone had extracted information from unwilling communicants by means of a few simple items purchased from a tobacconist.
Well, Deacon couldn’t start arresting smokers. Maybe the money was the significant thing here. Whoever wanted Sophie back had spent a serious amount of it. He’d hired the woman in red to approach Farrell, Farrell to find Hood and the interrogator to rip the truth out of him.
“But you couldn’t tell them what they wanted to know,” murmured Deacon; not exactly to himself, he had the forensic photographs spread on his desk again. His brow made a little frown as if he thought they were holding something back. “I know you’re telling me the truth about that, Danny - you must be. If you’d known where Sophie was you’d have talked; and if you’d talked this” - one finger flicked at the prints as if he still couldn’t credit what they showed - “wouldn’t have gone on for two days. Of course, if you’d talked sooner they might have been in less of a hurry to wrap it up and you mightn’t still be alive. Funny old world, isn’t it?”
The money. Whoever ordered this paid Farrell three thousand pounds; maybe he paid the woman in red another thousand. But two days’ torture would have come pricier; probably dearer than murder. The man Sophie had fled - if that was what happened; Deacon had to remind himself that he didn’t know that yet - had the resources, both of money and of anger, to spend fifteen or twenty thousand pounds to get her back. Other deserted husbands and lovers might care as much but have to settle for an advert in the personal column of The Dimmock Sentinel. This wasn’t just an angry man, he was a rich one.
And more than that, he had contacts that the average millionaire-next-door didn’t. The go-between might just have been an out-of-work actress, hired over the phone and paid with a manilla envelope under the door, but the interrogator was a professional in a highly specialised field. His number wasn’t printed in The Yellow Pages or pasted up in phone-boxes: probably the only way to find him would be through personal recommendation. The man who hired him, the man with the money, knew the kind of people who knew this kind of people. He wasn’t just rich and angry: he was rich, angry and dirty.
“What are we talking here,” Deacon asked himself softly, “the mob? Drug money?” It would go some way to explaining what happened, but not why it happened to Hood. Someone had run off with a Mafioso’s squeeze? - well, reckless but not impossible. But someone had run off with a Mafioso’s squeeze and there was reason to think a comprehensive school maths teacher knew where they were? That really was straining the bounds of credulity. They were two worlds that hardly ever collided.
He needed to see Hood again. There had to be a connection, however tenuous, between him and someone with that kind of power. If he knew about Hood, Hood should know about him. He couldn’t possibly know so many rich, angry, ruthless men that he wasn’t sure which of them had had him turned inside out.
Breathing heavily, Deacon filed away the photographs. “Either you’re being dim, Danny, or you’re being deceitful. Let’s have another little natter, see if we can work out which it is.”
But though he spoke to Hood three more times over the next thirty-six hours, he still wasn’t sure.
A point comes in any convalescence where recovery seems to stall. The better you get the worse you feel. Daniel reached that point when he’d been in hospital for four days. Physically he was making good progress: the burns were healing, the hole in his chest was closing to a scar and he was gaining strength visibly.
But the mending of his body was not matched by a healing of his spirit. At first just staying awake was an effort, when he had energy to spare for thought he didn’t get much further than amazement at what he’d survived. He had neither the physical nor mental resources to dwell on those responsible: when Detective Inspector Deacon made him try he found his thoughts glancing off, like shot deflected by armour. It was too hard, too painful, and he didn’t persevere. Almost he was resigned never to knowing who they were or why they used him as they did.
By Thursday, however, he was able to think about his ordeal in greater depth, and the relief at being safe gave way to a fury that filled him to bursting-point. Anger wasn’t a natural emotion for Daniel, so it overwhelmed him easily. When the flash-backs came, which they did increasingly, hatred raced through him like nausea. The calm man who hurt him. The angry man who could have stopped it and didn’t. The third man who watched and hardly spoke until the end. He wanted to kill them. He was a gentle man, a teacher, a man who respected other people and their ideas. And he wanted to take something heavy and smash their unseen faces to pulp. He lay on his bed, lungs pumping and heart pounding, and thought he was going mad.
When the rage abated, leaving him shaking and with sweat pooled in the hollows of his eyes, he searched desperately for an anchor to cling to when the tempest returned. But nothing offered. He had no family to speak of; he had friends but none he could share this with. He’d always been happy: until now he hadn’t realised how essentially alone he was.
Even if there had been someone he could call it might not have helped. Perhaps no one who’d known him before could help him now. He’d come a long way this last week from where and who he’d been: nothing from that past had any rôle to play in this present. Daniel was surrounded by people, all of them well-meaning yet none of whom seemed apt to help. The detective who called at intervals to ask if he’d remembered anything new had no answers, only more questions, and Daniel had suffered enough questions for a lifetime.
Then he remembered the woman. He still wasn’t sure who she was, thought she must work in the hospital. Mrs Farrell. He remembered her as someone kind, who’d sat with him when the mere presence of another human being was what he needed most, who’d listened when he needed to talk and answered when he needed answers. He was a private man, self-contained, but now he needed contact with someone and Mrs Farrell’s had been the first kind voice he’d heard, the first gentle touch he’d felt, since before this began. He dared to wonder if she could help him now.
Brodie had finally found a cranberry glass épergne. It was a good match, a good price, and it was hers if she could be in Worthing before the shop shut.
She was on her way to the door when the phone rang again. She picked it up in flight, meaning to take a number and call back. The sound of his voice stopped her dead. She lowered herself onto the desk and took a moment to answer him. “Mr Hood. Of course I remember you. What can I do for you?”
Incredibly, he sounded embarrassed. “I wondered - I mean, not if you’re busy - but if you have the time … It’s just, my head’s full of stuff and there’s nobody I can talk to. The nurses are interested in my temperature, the doctors in my wound, Inspector Deacon in a whole bunch of things I don’t know, and I just need to talk to somebody. But if you’re busy … ?”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.” The cranberry glass épergne was going to have to wait.
Daniel looked both better and worse than Brodie expected. He was out of bed, wrapped in a towelling dressing gown, curled in a chair. A little colour had seeped back into his face and he rose
to greet her without much difficulty. Two days earlier he couldn’t lift his head.
The biggest difference was the addition of a pair of large circular wire-rimmed spectacles. Through them he was able to focus on her as he had not before. The people who took his clothes, his dignity and almost his life had not thought to throw his glasses into the skip with him when they were finished. Someone had been to his home for another pair. Brodie might have thought of that. After all, she knew where he lived.
But his physical progress was not mirrored in his mental state. He was troubled, restless and ill at ease. It was no wonder, but it turned the knife in Brodie’s heart. This too was her responsibility. It didn’t end when Daniel woke up, wouldn’t end when he went home. The nightmare never going to be entirely over, for either of them.
She drew up a chair beside Daniel’s. She owed him a smile. “I’m glad you called.”
Immediately his eyes dropped. “Inspector Deacon thinks I could tell him more about this if I tried. I can’t. I have tried: there’s nothing more.”
Brodie shook her head dismissively. “Inspector Deacon can ask his own questions. I’m not his gopher.”
“Then … ?”
She shrugged. “I was just glad to hear from you. I kept wondering how you were.”
“I wasn’t sure I should call. You must be busy.”
“Daniel,” she said firmly, “you’re the most important thing any of us has to deal with right now. Sure I’m busy, but if you want to talk we’ll talk. You want to play snakes and ladders, we’ll do that. If I can help, in any way, I want to.”
He blinked behind the thick lenses. Belatedly, Brodie wondered if maybe that wasn’t what he needed either. Maybe he’d been the centre of attention long enough and what he really needed was the resumption of normal services; which in the case of a comprehensive school maths teacher probably meant being ignored for much of the time.
