by Jo Bannister
She stared at him in utter astonishment. “Daniel - how on earth have you got hold of a photograph of the kidnapper?”
He gave an awkward little shrug. “I don’t know that I have; and if I have I don’t know which of them it is. Sit down with them, take your time. I know she was muffled up to the eyeballs, but one of them may look familiar.”
Not for the first time he’d succeeded in knocking the breath clear out of her. She had to sit down anyway: she did as he asked, sat at the table and started picking through the photographs. None of them meant anything to her. “Daniel,” she said, her voice a plaint.
“Please. Just look. If it doesn’t help, maybe I’m wrong. I’ll have wasted a couple of days, you’ll have wasted half an hour. Either way there’s no harm done. I’ll make you a deal: while you’ll look I’ll make something to eat.”
She’d learned better than to argue with him. “Empty the fridge if you like, just leave me a pint of milk for breakfast. Anything left after that will spoil anyway.”
“Ah,” he said softly. “Yes.”
So she looked. After a while a cup arrived with biscuits in the saucer. She sipped and she nibbled and she looked.
None of the women was known to her, but she started to form an impression of them as a group. They were all between perhaps twenty-five and thirty-five; all good-looking in their different ways; so far as she could judge from photographs, all with a certain amount of financial security. Some of the photographs had been taken out of doors, the women in cords and Barbours posed against rolling countryside, and others in nightclubs clad in expensive chic. Every picture was a portrait of the woman on her own. Wavy edges showed where another person had been cropped out of several. A couple included an extraneous hand.
“Who are they?” Brodie asked again, deeply curious.
“Can I explain later?” asked Daniel. “After we know if one of them was the woman you met in the wood?”
“I’m not sure I will know that. For obvious reasons, she didn’t want me to see her that well.”
Daniel nodded. “I know: the woolly hat, the scarf. Still, giving a description of someone is harder than recognising them. It’s not just faces: it’s the way people stand, the proportions of their bodies. All sorts of clues help us spot someone we know while we’re still too far away to see a face. I know it’s a long shot. But can we try?”
“I’m trying,” protested Brodie, “I’m trying.”
Like playing Solitaire, she arranged the photographs in an order that made some sort of sense to her. Some of them she was sure - she could not have said why - were not the woman she had met, and those she pushed aside. Some were slightly more promising, and others began to look vagely familiar. “Some of these are of the same people.”
“Yes,” said Daniel.
“Do you know who they are?”
“Yes,” said Daniel.
She drank more tea, ate another biscuit. She let her gaze wander over the table-top as the glass wanders over a ouija board. And in the same way she found it beginning to hang a certain way, gently tugging her towards particular photographs.
She separated these from the others and concentrated on them. After another minute she returned two of them to the discard pile and went on staring at the others, more closely as the field narrowed.
Daniel didn’t join her at the table. He took his cup and a sandwich and lowered himself into an armchair, with his back to the table and no view of what she was doing. He didn’t speak. He didn’t eat or drink much either. He sat hunched in his chair, failing to fill it, and by degrees his head lowered on his chest. It might have been sheer tiredness, but it looked like dread at what was coming.
Finally Brodie straightened up. “It was dark and her face was covered. I couldn’t make an identification that would stand up in court. I couldn’t even put my hand on my heart and say I think this is her. But it could be.”
Still Daniel didn’t come over. “What did she say to you?”
Brodie frowned. “Why?”
“Listen to it in your mind. See if it goes with the face in front of you.”
It sounded silly but she did as he asked. Certainly she had no difficulty remembering what that passed between them.
“Get out of the car and come up here.”
“Come closer. You won’t be able to see from there.”
“Of course she isn’t dead.”
“The rope is tied in a slip-knot. One good yank and she drops like a stone.”
“The last thing you’ll hear will be the the first barrel of a double-barrelled shotgun.”
The strangest thing happened. As Brodie rehearsed the words, the image in front of her moved. The body frozen by a camera shutter became vital again, the head moving in staccato irritation, the hands gripping to punch home the message, the chin rising at a challenge, dropping on an agreement.
Brodie took a couple of the discarded photographs and, turning them over, used the white card to mask off the upper and lower parts of the face. She was left with a pair of eyes, the bridge of the nose, cheekbones and a little fair hair escaping its knitted prison.
She took a deep breath and sat back. “I still couldn’t vouch for it in court. Will I need to?”
Daniel shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Then, with that proviso, this is her. Who is she? How on earth did you find her?”
He stood up. It took an effort. He opened the second folder and leafed through its contents. “I followed a hunch.” His voice was dead.
He found what he was looking for, passed her another photograph with a name on the back. “Melanie Fields,” Brodie read aloud. The name meant nothing. “Is this her?” She turned it over.
Her blood ran cold. The iciness crept from her soul, up her spine and into her brain. She was very aware of her own breathing which was unnaturally soft and level. She put the picture down beside its partner, her gaze encompassing both, and fought for control.
Because she knew that if she lost it she wasn’t just going to hurt Daniel’s feelings, she was going to knock him halfway across the room.
When she believed she could say what she wanted to and nothing more she turned to face him. “You’re sick. You know that, don’t you? You’re sick, and you’re obsessed.”
He wouldn’t meet her gaze. “I didn’t pick out the photograph,” he muttered stubbornly.
“No. But you made it very easy for me to. What else have you got in there?” She took the red folder from his unresisting fingers, spilt its contents on the table. “Oh I see. So it really wouldn’t have mattered which of these women I thought I recognised, would it?”
The folder contained another twenty or thirty photographs. Brodie shuffled through them, nodding. They were the same photographs, showing all the same women but this time in their uncropped state with the man who’d been edited out. By then even his identity came as no surprise.
Brodie pushed them away disdainfully. “Daniel, what are you expecting? That I’ll shed a little tear and start unpacking? That I’ll be so grateful at being saved from a terrible mistake that I’ll fall into your arms and we’ll live happily ever after? It’s not going to happen. You played a trick on me, and I have to say it was a pretty low one. But that’s all it was. A sleight of hand. This?” - she tapped the photograph with an impatient fingernail - “means nothing. I’m supposed to be shocked that David’s had women friends before? I have news for you: I’ve had men friends before him. Damn it, we’ve both got children! Anyone seeking a virgin partner might have taken that as a hint.”
“You’re missing the point,” said Daniel, chewing a thumb-nail. “None of the others matter. But you thought that was the woman you spoke to in the wood. The kidnapper.”
Brodie breathed heavily. She wanted to slap some sense into him. “Having been involved in more court cases than you’ve done sums, I can tell you something about eye-witness testimony. It’s the poorest evidence there is. Honest reliable witnesses make mistakes all the time.
They fail to identify the culprit; they pick out the solicitor’s clerk instead; they get heights, ages, even colours wrong. People just aren’t that good at recognising other people.
“Context is all. Tell a witness you’ve put together an identity parade and she’ll assume that the man she saw will be there. She’ll try to spot him. Random chance gives her odds of six-to-one. Backing racehorses at six-to-one, you’d get a fair number of winners.
“That’s all this” - a disparaging flick at the litter on the table - “amounts to. You told me you might have a photograph of the kidnapper and asked me to pick her out. I did my best. The woman in that picture is like the woman I met. But we can go into any bar in Dimmock and I’ll find you someone just as similar. It wasn’t fair. Not to me, and not to her.”
Her voice hardened. “Most of all, it wasn’t fair to David. ‘One of these women could be the kidnapper’ - and they’re all women he’s known? Talk about loaded dice! How did you get these photographs, anyway?”
“From picture libraries in London. They supply shots of the rich and famous, to newspapers mostly.”
“You asked them for photographs of David Ibbotsen with different women? What kind of a maniac did they take you for?”
“The kind who was paying cash,” shrugged Daniel. “They really weren’t interested in my motives. He’s a public figure, they had photographs of him at various functions, they sold me copies of them. There was nothing underhand about it.”
“You think not?” Brodie heard her voice soaring and capped it. “How far back do these things go?”
“Five years.”
“Five years? You asked them for every photograph they had of David Ibbotsen with a woman taken in the last five years, and they didn’t ask why? My God, it’s true. There’s somebody who’ll do anything for enough money!”
When she heard what she’d said, the colour started rising from somewhere around her knees. Because it was true, there was. She’d given him into the hands of his torturer for money. The times he could have thrown that in her face and hadn’t! Mortification struck her dumb.
Daniel took advantage of the silence. “I know how this must look to you,” he said hurriedly. “You think I fancy my chances with you and for that reason, and others, I want to hurt David Ibbotsen. You’re wrong, but I can see how you’d think it.
“And I know you can’t make a firm identification of a woman you met once, in difficult circumstances, from a photograph. But you thought it was her - Melanie Fields. You can’t want to leave it there any more than I do. To think that you may have identified the kidnapper of a five-year-old girl and never know for sure. Maybe if you met her in person?”
Brodie didn’t answer. But when she’d thought about it her eyes said Maybe.
Daniel followed up the advantage. “Then, can we ask David to introduce you?”
“What?!!”
“I know - you think I’m mad and so will he. I don’t care. He reckons to owe me something for what happened: well, this is it. I’m mad, I’m sick, I’m obsessed - but I want you and Melanie Fields to meet. That’s all I want, if I get it he’ll never hear from me again. Is it too big a price to ask? For peace of mind? For drawing a line under an unpleasant piece of family history?”
Brodie shook her head. “No,” she said softly, “it’s a bargain. If it’s what you want, Daniel, I’ll ask him. But I’m damned if I know what I’ll say to the woman.”
“You won’t have to say anything. You won’t actually have to meet. If David looks at you strangely and then sets it up, and Miss Fields turns up, obviously I’m wrong about this. I’ll make my apologies and leave, and you can all laugh at me when I’ve gone. But if I’m right the meeting won’t take place.”
The thing was, he didn’t sound mad. He looked tired and ill, and perhaps he was obsessed, but he’d gone to a lot of trouble and he’d come up with a photograph that said something to her. Brodie knew that if she threw him out she wouldn’t forget what he’d said. And whatever his motivation, however misguided, she didn’t think it was malice. He wasn’t a malicious man.
“All right,” she said in a low voice, “let’s talk about this. What are you saying? That a woman that David loved and left got her own back by kidnapping his daughter?”
He blinked behind the thick glasses, then he nodded. “It’s possible.” His eyes on her face were intense.
Another question formed in the maelstrom of her mind and bubbled to the surface. “Why do you think this? You said, something I said … ?”
“A few things,” he said, “including something you said. There was the video tape. Remember the moment Sophie saw someone she recognised in the car?”
“But she didn’t recognise the woman who had her by the hand.”
“No. But there were two of them, and she did recognise the driver.”
“What else?”
“The box of hair. You said that wasn’t the act of a ransom kidnapper. You thought of the mother: it wasn’t her, but it was someone who knew the child too well to want to hurt her.”
“All right,” Brodie allowed softly. “What else?”
“The exchange. It was designed to protect the kidnappers, but they also took care not to hurt or even frighten Sophie. As if she wasn’t just a meal-ticket to them. Has anyone talked to her about what happened?”
“David did. She couldn’t tell him much that we didn’t already know. She talked about a man and a woman, and a cottage in the country.”
“Was she able to describe the woman?”
Brodie shrugged. “She’s only five. Everything that goes for adult eye-witnesses goes tenfold for small children. They forget things we can’t imagine them forgetting; they confuse the real with the imaginary; they focus on irrelevant aspects of things. Ask a five-year-old to describe someone and she’ll say she wore pink shoes. It’s not wrong, it’s just no help. She may have spent longer with her than I did, but you can’t count on Sophie ID-ing her kidnapper either. Is there anything else?”
“Not really.” Still Daniel’s eyes didn’t leave her face.
“It’s pretty thin,” said Brodie.
“It would be,” he nodded. “Without the photograph.”
“I told you about that. You asked the question that would give you the answer you wanted. Don’t read too much into it.”
“But if Melanie Fields refused to meet you … ?”
“It still won’t prove anything. If they’re an ex-item, meeting with David and me is about the last thing she’ll be willing to do! If my ex-husband asked me to meet up with him and his new wife I’d fetch him one with the poker!”
Thinking about it, a new demon came. Her eyes flew wide. “Daniel, we know what Lance Ibbotsen does to people he thinks have harmed him. If we throw this woman’s name into the ring, can we be sure he won’t do to her what he did to you?”
A shudder ran the length of Daniel’s frame. “I won’t let that happen. I’ll tell Inspector Deacon everything before anyone else gets hurt.”
Brodie pushed his theory round her head like Paddy pushing sprouts round her plate. It could be just so much kite-flying, and she could take refuge in that. He had nothing approaching proof. But proof was a legal hurdle; what mattered at this point was probability. Was there a realistic chance that, looking for a way to drive a wedge between her and David, he’d somehow stumbled on the truth? Identified Sophie’s abductor in a way that explained the odder aspects of the case?
She made herself consider it in detail. If Melanie Fields felt about the Ibbotsens the way Marie Soubriet did, she might indeed have wanted to hurt both David and his father. But she knew Sophie; she was willing to use her but drew the line at hurting her. The little girl might well have been confused as to whether she’d been kidnapped or not.
Daniel’s theory fitted the known facts too well for it to be safely dismissed as the figment of a troubled mind. He might still be mistaken but neither of them was in a position to judge. If they wanted to be sure she was going to have to
meet this woman, and that meant involving David.
“All right,” she said unsteadily. “It matters to you to know if an old flame of David’s kidnapped Sophie Ibbotsen. I dare say he’d want to know as well. I’m not sure how I feel. I think, that as it stands right now everyone’s safe and the worst is over. If we tell the Ibbotsens we suspect Melanie Fields took Sophie, that may not still be the situation tomorrow. You say you won’t let her get hurt, but realistically the most you can promise is to tell the police if she gets hurt.
“Suppose you’re wrong. If I’m ready to consider the possiblity that you’re right, you have to think about what happens if you’re wrong. I’ve got fond of David, but I’m not blind to his failings. The biggest of them is never standing up to his father. He stood by while Lance had you hurt, and even when he tried to kill you. He turned away, he threw up, but he didn’t try to stop it. He couldn’t stand up to Lance then and he won’t now. If you’re wrong you’ll have set a mad dog on an innocent woman. Daniel, that won’t make you feel any better.
“I hope you are wrong, because I don’t know how it’ll all end if you’re right. You think it’s going to come between David and me: well, maybe it will. But how much satisfaction is that going to give you? You’re not a vindictive man, I can’t see you getting any pleasure from making people unhappy.
“But it’s still your call. It’s a can of worms, but if you want to open it I won’t stop you. Shall I call David? Or should I get Marta down here so we can pay him a visit?”
Daniel was white. A couple of times he seemed about to say something but then didn’t. He reached for his parka and his photographs. “It’s like the internet. Some things you have to do in person.”
Chapter 25
The gates were shut. A dim bulb illuminated the intercom. Brodie pressed the button and waited.
After a minute a gravelly voice demanded, “What time of night do you call this?”
Brodie gave her name. “Is David there?”
“He’s busy. With Sophie. Call him tomorrow.”
Brodie felt her temper rising. She’d done too much for these people, been through too much, to be moved on like a brush-salesman.
