by Jo Bannister
She sighed. “I’m overdoing it, aren’t I? The caring bit. It’s just, this whole situation is way outside my experience. Tell me what you want me to do.”
He wasn’t as tall as her and the roomy dressing-gown emphasised the slightness of his frame. But his hands were a size bigger than expected, as if he still had some growing to do. They sketched a gesture of impatience before he could fold them tightly across his chest. “I don’t know! I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what I’m doing any more. This place is driving me crazy!”
“Daniel, you’re not crazy,” Brodie said quietly. “You’ve been through hell. You nearly died. Of course your emotions will be in tatters for a while. You’re right, you need to talk. I can find you a professional in the field of victim support” - she saw his face fall, changed horses in mid stream - “or you could talk to me. I’m not a bad listener. Yell, stamp, bang the table if it helps. You’ve every right.”
The look he threw her glanced off into a corner of the room. His voice was thick with feelings he didn’t know how to express. Nothing in his life before had given him either the practice or the vocabulary. “No, I just want to talk. Only, I don’t know what it is I want to say.”
Brodie considered. “You want to say you’re angry.”
“Yes.”
“Then say it. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Not your anger, not your pain. You have the right to express them. It’s not an imposition, asking someone to listen.”
Daniel nodded, the Adam’s apple bobbing in his thin throat. “That’s how it feels. Like I’m - trading on it. Like I’m droning on and on when good taste and simple good manners say it’s time to drop it. That I’ve become a bore and an embarrassment, like someone’s aunt who’s always on about her operation.”
Brodie’s chuckle was rewarded by a flicker of wry humour crossing Daniel’s face. It was a pleasant face: not handsome, not striking or distinguished in any way; just the nice, amiable, honest face of someone it would be easy to spend time with. A face to inspire more friendship than passion, but the kind of friendship that can last longer.
A face someone had spent big money finding and two days reducing to a gaunt mask. It was still incredible to her. What could a man like Daniel Hood have done to incur such wrath?
She said softly, “I don’t think the rules of polite conversation apply. I think if you try to put this out of your mind you really will go crazy. What happened to you was too big. Rules designed for normal social interactions are no help when the sky’s fallen in. You’re hurting, you need to grieve.”
She heard herself then, the women’s magazine philosophy, and the colour raced up her cheeks. “Oh Daniel, I don’t know enough to advise you. I’m talking as if you were a friend whose marriage was in trouble, whose kids were going off the rails. But this isn’t something we can fix over a cup of tea. I shouldn’t even be here. You need a proper counsellor.”
Daniel’s lips pursed on a question mark and his fair brows knitted. The distress swilling behind his eyes was not enough to mask the fundamental intelligence of his gaze. “But I thought … Isn’t that … ?” He swallowed, almost as if he had a premonition what the answer would be. “Mrs Farrell, if you aren’t a counsellor - or a psychiatrist or something like that - who exactly are you?”
Brodie’s mouth opened and closed twice and nothing came. She had to tell him. She couldn’t lie, not about this. But she couldn’t find the words. Or rather, the only words that would serve seemed likely to destroy them both.
It was too late to turn back. She couldn’t leave him unknowing any more than she could lie. She took a deep breath and told him. Who she was, where she fitted in; what she’d done.
She watched the fragile new strength that had been growing in him turn to ashes in his face. The faint new colour in his cheeks fell in seconds to the bleach of bones. Behind the glasses his eyes grew huge and smoky with anger, and the breath sawed in his throat.
Brodie hoped he’d turn away, or order her from his sight. He must want to. But he went on regarding her fiercely, the grey eyes at once stunned and implacable, refusing to release her until the worst was told. When she’d finished, with the silence between them stretched until it seemed something had to rip, with the bath of his gaze seering her skin like acid and her mind screaming for him to say something - something harsh, something hateful, anything would be better than this dearth - finally he sucked in an unsteady breath and rasped, so low she could hardly make him out, “I don’t know how you have the nerve to come here.”
“Do you want me to go?” she whispered.
“I didn’t say that.”
They went on sitting, a metre apart, eyes on one another’s faces. If Daniel had struck her it would have broken the tension. Brodie ached to be away, dismissed in her shame; but she wouldn’t leave unless it was what he wanted. She owed him the chance to tell her what he thought of her. She went on sitting, hands knotted in her lap, and didn’t notice when the filling of her eyes spilt onto her cheek.
Daniel said, “You didn’t know what they intended?”
“No.”
“Is that the truth?”
She blinked, spilling another tear. “Everything I’ve told you is the truth. Dear God, you think I’d make this up? You think there’s something worse I could be hiding?”
He went on looking at her. Eventually he shook his head. “No.”
She nodded, unsure whether to be grateful. “I wish …”
He stopped her with his eyes. “Please. Just … don’t say anything for a minute.”
Hunched in misery she obeyed. The silence folded them.
Suddenly Daniel stood up and moved to the window, looking across town towards the silver line of the Channel. He drew the dressing gown tight around his bones. “They hurt me!” he cried.
“I know,” Brodie murmured.
“You helped them. They couldn’t have done it without you.”
“Daniel, I know! I’d give anything to turn the clock back and change things, but I can’t. Not my stupidity, and not the price you paid for it. I know I can’t make amends with an apology, but I don’t have anything else to give you. I’m sorry.”
He turned and stared at her again. Every breath shuddered through his body like a spasm. His voice cracked. “It’s not enough!”
“I know that too.” The tears were streaming down her cheeks now but she would not hide from him. “But then, what could be?”
Daniel’s brow furrowed as if she were some kind of conundrum, a puzzle he couldn’t fathom, another question he couldn’t answer. He cupped his hand across his mouth, his eyes burning over the top of his fingers. The silence returned.
At length he drew another deep, shuddering breath and let it slowly out. If he’d found some kind of an answer, Brodie could only wait to be told what it was.
“All right,” said Daniel, his voice thin. “I won’t pretend I’m OK with this. I’m not. I thought, whoever they were, they were history and I was never going to have to deal with them. I thought, if I treated it as something like an avalanche or lightning, something impersonal, then I could get past it and go on. There’s no point stoking your hatred for an Act of God.
“Now - what you’re telling me - that makes it personal. Now I have a face to put on it: yours. And suddenly hating seems the appropriate response again.” He blinked, seemed to see her tears for the first time. Astonishingly, there was compassion in his eyes. He shook his head. “And that isn’t fair either. It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have guessed what they meant to do. You thought you were helping someone who’d been cheated and humiliated. You couldn’t know it was a lie.”
“I could have checked,” stumbled Brodie.
Daniel shrugged towelling shoulders. “We take things on trust. We have to: we can’t cross-check everything, life’s too short. Unless you’ve reason to think otherwise you assume people are telling the truth. Hindsight’s a great invention, it’s easy to be w
ise after the fact, but I don’t think you did anything you should have known was wrong. I don’t think I have any right to hate you. Them, yes. But you’re not part of them.”
Brodie buried her face in her hands. Now she understood. This was what Marta had sent her here for: the agony of confession, the relief of absolution. Catharsis. It closed a door on the past, made it possible to open one on the future.
When finally she lowered her hands her voice was a reed. “You have no idea what that means to me.”
Daniel’s expression was rueful. “There’s not much satisfaction in hating the wrong person.”
“People do it, all the time. When hating the right person would be too difficult or too dangerous.”
A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “I’m a mathematician,” he said simply. “I like things to add up.”
With the unspeakable thing between them confronted, now Brodie felt no great urge to leave. She waited for some cue from Daniel that he was finished with her. But he came and sat down again. “Tell me again what it is you do.”
So she did. She told him about Mrs Campbell-Wheeler’s cranberry glass épergne, about Flossie the pony, about the relatives lost touch with and the paintings sold and the vintage Hispano-Suizes that would make or break a television serial.
“It must be interesting,” said Daniel. “Never knowing what’s coming next.”
“Up to last week it was. Now I think I’ll go back to clerking.”
Daniel frowned. “Give up the business? Because of me?”
“Because of what happened to you, yes.”
“You were unlucky,” said Daniel, quite without irony. “It was a fluke, a chance in a million. You can’t give up something you’ve worked for because of that.”
“I don’t think I have a choice,” said Brodie softly. “I can’t do the job if every time someone comes through the door I ask myself whether they’re lying, what they really want from me, what they’re going to do with the information I give them. I won’t risk this happening again.”
He didn’t dismiss her fears but thought for a moment. “You can’t eliminate all risk from life.”
“There are risks and risks,” said Brodie tightly. “I’ll take my chances with the occasional careless driver and iffy curry, but I don’t ever again want to feel the way this has made me feel.”
“Me neither. I just don’t think it’s a basis on which to live your life. Do you know what probability math is?” She shook her head. “It’s a means of estimating the likelihood of an event based on the ratio between its occurrence and the average number of cases favourable to its occurrence taken over an indefinitely extended series of such cases.”
Daniel recited it like a mantra; then he saw her face and his smile lit the room. “Sorry. It’s a way of predicting the mathematical likelihood of something happening. Mathematically, you’re more likely to be kicked to death by a donkey than get involved in anything like this again. You don’t know where things are going to lead. You can’t. You take reasonable care, and then you get on with it. You don’t give up something you’re good at because of one bad experience. You made a mistake. You’ll make others, but you won’t make this one again.”
Brodie felt her heart swell at his generosity. “What makes you think I’m good at it?”
Daniel smiled. “If you weren’t we’d never have met.”
Chapter 7
Deacon phoned her at the office the next morning. “You’ve been talking to Daniel.” It was half a question, half an accusation.
Brodie saw no need to apologise. “That’s right.”
“Twice.”
“I was there when he woke up. Yesterday he wanted to see me again.”
“Why?”
“He needed to talk to somebody. He had the idea that was my function.”
“And did you tell him what your function in all this actually was?”
Brodie didn’t like his tone. One of those people with more skill, and possibly more goodwill, than good manners, this seemed to be how the policeman reacted to anything he couldn’t immediately categorise: with hectoring aggression. As if making people defend themselves was a short-cut to finding out who they were and what they knew.
A couple of days ago she’d have been upset. But now Brodie had faced her demons, and making her peace with Daniel left her strong enough to cope with Inspector Deacon. “As a matter of fact I did,” she said calmly. “No one else had put him in the picture so I did. I told him everything I know.”
Whatever Deacon was expecting, it wasn’t that. Her honesty put him off his stride: it took him a moment to recover. “And how did he feel about that?”
“He was shocked and he was hurt,” said Brodie. “And then he thought about it, and how it had happened, and he forgave me. I’m sorry, Inspector, but if you were hoping to keep playing the guilt card you should probably have kept us apart.”
There was a long pause, then a harsh barking laugh. “I’ll say this for you, Mrs Farrell - you have guts. So what did he say?”
She frowned. “About what?”
“About what happened! What did he tell you?”
She looked at the telephone as if she’d dropped it in something nasty. “Inspector Deacon, I’m not your spy. I didn’t ask him about what happened, and he didn’t volunteer. And if he had I’m not sure I’d be reporting our conversation to you. Daniel Hood isn’t your suspect, he’s the victim. If you want to know what it was all about, ask him.”
“I did,” said Deacon gruffly. “He said he didn’t know.”
“Then why don’t you believe him? If he knew who’d treated him like that, don’t you think he’d want them caught? What reason could he possibly have to protect them?”
Deacon gave a disparaging sniff. “I won’t know that until I know everything else.”
“Well, it’s no use thinking I can help you. Daniel didn’t tell me anything new.”
“So what were you talking about?”
Brodie took some satisfaction in her reply. “Probability math.”
Having got nowhere with Brodie, Deacon returned to the hospital. He was startled to find Daniel dressed and packing his belongings into a carrier bag. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Home,” said Daniel.
“You can’t.”
Daniel didn’t look round. “Funnily enough, that’s what the doctor said. He was mistaken too.”
Deacon breathed heavily. “Daniel, we’ve been through this. If you go home, they’re going to know you’re alive. They tried to kill you once, they may do it again.”
“Sometime I have to take that risk. I’m not spending the rest of my life running from shadows.”
Jack Deacon was coming to realise that the man before him was not at all who he appeared to be; except that he looked exactly like a teacher. He also looked callow, unformed and malleable, and Deacon had thought he would be easy enough to bend to his bidding. That he’d be grateful to be told what to do and when to do it in return for the policeman’s protection.
But beneath the damaged exterior and even the gentle, bruised spirit lay buried a sliver of adamant. Perhaps Deacon might have guessed. Hood was a mathematician: he thought things through to their logical conclusions, which he then invested with a kind of sanctity.
Numbers aren’t like words: they always mean the same things. It makes mathematicians at once scrupulous and unbending. No amount of argument would persuade Daniel Hood that one and one could make anything but two, or that any other conclusion he’d reached by pure logic should be subject to external variables. Like doctors and policemen telling him what to do. Like the possibility of murderous madmen hunting him. It wasn’t exactly courage, more a kind of intellectual obstinacy.
Deacon chewed his cheek for a moment and forebore to comment. Then he nodded. “You’re right. Who the hell are they to tell you what to do? You stand up to them, dare them to do their worst. It’ll make a terrific epitaph.”
Behind the round glasses Daniel
’s eyes widened and then narrowed to a smile. “You’re saying, it’s not worth risking my life for a principle.”
“Yes,” said Deacon.
“You wouldn’t.”
“No …” He saw the trap just too late.
“Inspector, we both know that if that door burst open now and armed men rushed in, they’d have to go through you to get at me.”
Deacon didn’t deny it. “That’s different.”
“Not really. The bottom line is, if decent people take the path of least resistance, violent people win. You resist them your way, I’ll resist them mine.”
“Your life is a high price to pay for self-respect.”
Daniel nodded. “It would be. I very much hope it won’t come to that. But Inspector, I’d rather take the risk - I think I’d even rather pay the price - than settle for the crumbs of an existence they left me.” His expression softened. “With all your questions, you haven’t asked one thing. Who they were, what they looked like, what they said, what they wanted, what they did. But not how it felt.”
“I can imagine how it felt,” Deacon said in a low voice.
Daniel shook his head; not with reproof but as if being honest mattered more than being polite. “No, I don’t think you can. I don’t think anyone could. Maybe, just maybe, the pain - we all know what pain feels like, we can just about handle the concept of pain for its own sake, deliberate and unrelenting.
“But it wasn’t just the pain. It was how they made me feel. Like nothing. Like I was so worthless they had a right to treat me like that.” A tear trembled on the lip of his eye. “But they hadn’t. They were wrong: I’m worth more than that. I might have to keep reminding myself, but I know it’s true.”
Deacon still didn’t understand. “You’re going to risk your life to prove it?”
“No. I’m going to live my life to prove it. I’m going home, I’m going to get well, I’m going back to work and I’m going to achieve something. This is not going to shackle me for the rest of my life. I’m not going to be their victim forever. For two days they used me like they owned me, but they’re not going to rule my existence for the next ten, twenty, fifty years.”
