by Jo Bannister
Deacon’s heavy brows gathered speculatively. It was a sight that many a criminal had cause to rue. ‘OK, spit it out. What’s on your mind?’
So Voss told him. About his interview with Walsh, and Walsh’s parting comment. ‘He meant it. You may not think of him as a friend but he thinks of you as one. If there’s a chance he could help Jonathan, maybe you shouldn’t put him where he won’t be able to. Not right now. You’ve waited for ten years. You could wait a little longer.’
Deacon rocked deliberately in his chair in a manner that it was never designed to cope with. ‘He said the same thing to me. I thought he meant it as well. But you know, and I know, and I think Terry knows, there are no circumstances in which I could accept his offer, however genuine. Perhaps it’s as well there’s never going to be a moment when it might matter.’ His face was the craggy grey of old lava.
Compassion twisted Voss’s gut. ‘Chief…I’m sorry. I didn’t realise things had gone so far. I don’t know what to say.’
Deacon forced a smile. ‘Nothing to say, Charlie. Top and bottom of it is, the poor kid drew the short straw right at the start. Nothing anyone could have done after that would have saved him. I know that, because I know that everything that could be done has been done. Which is what the last six months have been about. Brodie said that when we got to this point, we’d want to know that. And she was right. It helps. Not a lot, but it would be worse if we were losing him and thought it was our fault.’
Detective Sergeant Voss wondered if he should be discussing something this personal with his senior officer. But he was aware that Deacon didn’t have many people he could discuss it with. ‘Have they given you any idea’ – he swallowed – ‘how long…?’
Deacon shrugged. ‘Nobody knows for sure. Best guess is weeks rather than months. Do you know what the worst part is?’ He fixed Voss with a steely gaze like pinning a moth to a cork board. Voss shook his head mutely. ‘The worst part is, I can’t wait for it to be over. Knowing he’s going to die, watching him die by inches, and knowing there’s nothing I can do about it – it’s like there’s a cancer eating away at me as well. At me, at Brodie, at whatever chance we have of a life together. And I want it to stop. I want that badly enough to wish my son would hurry up and die.’
Chapter Twenty
The woman at the door was as tall as Brodie, with friendly eyes and collar-length curly hair in a pleasant indeterminate shade between fair and grey. ‘I’m Imogen Sanger,’ she said, showing Daniel to the front room. ‘I expect you guessed.’
Jane was waiting for them, her gaze raised expectantly. She wasted no time on preamble or even a greeting. ‘Well? What did she say?’
Daniel sighed. ‘I’m sorry. She can’t face it. When I tried to tell her it would be good for both of you she fired me.’
Imogen had the grace to look faintly concerned. Jane glared imperiously at him. ‘She couldn’t face it? I thought this was about making amends? About making me feel better?’
Daniel gave an apologetic shrug. ‘I suppose everyone reaches a point they can’t get beyond. That was Margaret Carson’s. Don’t…’ He let the sentence tail off, aware it might seem impertinent.
‘Don’t what?’ demanded Jane. ‘Be unkind? Forget she’s had a difficult year?’
Imogen put out a restraining hand. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger,’ she murmured.
But Daniel’s metaphysical shoulders were broader than his actual ones. If the girl needed to vent her frustration on someone, he didn’t mind it being him. Except that wasn’t what she needed. Like Margaret Carson, she needed a way to move forward. However much satisfaction she might derive from snapping at Daniel, it wasn’t helping her to do that.
He said quietly, ‘Don’t underestimate the courage it took to get her this far. She didn’t have to do any of this. She could have spent her money moving to a different town, or taken a holiday somewhere till all the papers reporting her son’s crimes were chip wrappers and someone else was Antichrist of the Week. She could have sold her story to the Sunday tabloids.
‘She didn’t go down any of those routes. She put herself in the way of pain, humiliation and expense in the hope of restoring a fraction of what had been taken from you. She didn’t have to but she thought she should. She came to me because she was desperate to say how sorry she was, and this was the only way she could manage it. Don’t despise her for lacking the strength to do it the way you’d have done it, face to face.’
There he ground to an embarrassed halt, the centre of an astonished silence. He’d done it again. He wasn’t a social animal: most of the people he spoke more than a few casual sentences to were friends. They were accustomed to the way he could be quiet and retiring and hardly say a thing all evening, then give a sudden insight into how his mind worked by unleashing a torrent of powerful, passionate ideas. In order to like him – and it was hard not to like Daniel – friends had to resign themselves to a number of odd little ways. This was just one of them. And if they could resist the urge to slap him long enough, often they found his ideas intriguing.
But he tried not to do it in front of strangers. It made them nervous. Eyes lowered, he mumbled, ‘Um…sorry.’
Imogen recovered first. She gave a little smile. ‘Don’t apologise. It was fascinating. Like being in an Ibsen play.’
‘I just meant…’
‘We know what you meant,’ said Jane shortly. ‘You express yourself perfectly well. Not succinctly, but well. You want me to walk a mile in Margaret Carson’s shoes before I criticise her. You know something, Daniel? I wish I could. Since I can’t, and she can’t or won’t face up to that, we’ll have to move on to Plan C. Yes?’
Her directness threw Daniel off balance. He said again, ‘Um…’
Imogen gave him a clue. ‘Say yes. She’ll only bully you until you do.’
‘Then…yes,’ Daniel said cautiously.
There was a laptop on the table. Jane wheeled herself deftly into position and her hands danced over the keys. ‘Guess what I’ve found.’
‘On the internet?’ She nodded. ‘Cheap flights to Alicante? Half a Royal Doulton tea set? Lord Lucan? How would I know?’
She double-clicked and leant back with an air of triumph. ‘I’ve found my necklace.’
And there it was on the screen. Not in truth a necklace, but a smooth round stone the colour of thunderclouds, with a point of brilliance at its heart from which radiated a dozen thin jets of golden light. It was breathtaking. Just sitting on a piece of white card, with none of the jeweller’s art to complement it, just a smoky polished stone perhaps two centimetres across with a star gone nova in the middle of it, it was a thing of startling beauty.
Imogen Sanger’s husband had given it to her because he loved her. She’d given it to her son because she loved him. And he’d given it to Jane. It could have been much less distinctive, much less valuable, and still infinitely precious.
Daniel stood frozen, staring at the thing. He couldn’t believe she’d found it. He was meant to be the expert, the one being paid to find things, but it was something he’d never thought of doing. It never occurred to him that someone in possession of a valuable, distinctive and above all stolen jewel would think to sell it on eBay. He wouldn’t have believed anyone could be that stupid.
Thinking about it now, he still didn’t believe anyone had been that stupid. ‘Are you sure?’
Imogen touched his arm. ‘Sit down, Daniel, you’re going to be here some time. I’ll make the tea.’ She left them alone.
Jane looked contemptuously at him. ‘Of course I’m sure. I entered the keywords star and sapphire and stolen and up it came. Don’t be so dim. It’s a 42-carat black sapphire with a twelve-ray gold star, it was mined in Chanthaburi in Thailand, and a perfectly respectable American dealer is asking the price of a second-hand car for it. Add in the cost of making the mount, and Mrs Carson can buy off her conscience for about three thousand pounds. A bargain, I’d have said.’
Daniel was still struggling
to catch up. ‘You mean, that isn’t actually your necklace?’
‘No, Daniel,’ Jane agreed with heavy patience. ‘But if I buy the stone and have the setting copied by a decent goldsmith, and you tell Mrs Carson you’ve managed to track down the real thing, and she pays you for it and sends it round to me, then it’ll be mine.’
‘But …but…’ Daniel was aware he was stammering idiotically. ‘What good is that? If it’s not the one Tom gave you, why would you even want it?’
‘Because I’m a greedy cow and I’ve seen the opportunity to profit from my misfortune.’ The challenge in Jane’s eyes was diamond tipped, and it scored.
‘I don’t believe that,’ Daniel said flatly.
The expression in her scarred face softened a little. ‘No, you’re right. That’s not the reason.’
‘Then what is?’
She shrugged carelessly. ‘I’m not sure I can explain.’
‘Try.’
Jane’s brows drew together in a scowl. ‘Daniel, I don’t want to be rude but I don’t have to explain anything to you. I don’t answer to you. I don’t answer to Margaret Carson either. The situation is this. She wants to spend some blood money making me feel better. Well, this would make me feel better.’
‘Lying to her?’
Jane’s eyes widened in surprised indignation. She wasn’t used to having her judgement challenged.
There are plenty of ways in which being in a wheelchair limits your autonomy. Jane had decided early on that needing certain kinds of help made it important to fight for every vestige of independence left to her. She’d been an independent young woman before she was crippled; and before that she was an independent child, curious and adventurous. She’d always believed the word no applied mostly to other people.
And most other people learnt to avoid that jolting look of surprised disappointment by letting her do as she chose. They called it letting her make her own mistakes. In fact, she made very few mistakes. As well as curious she was intelligent and incisive, and though it seemed she was doing things without much thought, in fact she was thinking them through first, just very quickly. Even the mistakes she turned into learning experiences.
More recently people had avoided saying anything that might seem discouraging. So being called a liar by a man she hardly knew came as a bit of a shock. Her head tilted back so she could look down her nose at him. ‘That’s right, by lying to her. By telling her something she needs to hear before she can draw a line under the whole sorry episode. So she’s happy, and I’m happy – and frankly, Daniel, who gives a damn whether you’re happy or not?’
‘Tea,’ said Imogen brightly, returning with the tray.
Daniel took a cup mainly to occupy his hands while he thought. He’d believed he was at the end of the road. Jane was offering him a way forward. But there was no way under the sun he could go along with her deception. He owed a duty of care to his client that would be fatally compromised by selling her a fake stone.
Finally he said, ‘I can’t lie to her. I can’t tell her this is the stone from your necklace when you and I both know it isn’t.’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘Of course we do!’
‘No, we just know that the odds against it are pretty long. So far as I can see – so far as Imogen can see, and she had it much longer than me – it’s identical. If it was in an ID parade it’d be convicted every time. It’s the same size, the same quality so presumably the same value as the one Margaret Carson’s son stole and she wants to buy back. Nobody’s being cheated.’
But it didn’t feel like that. Not to Daniel, who lived by the sanctity of his word. Even if the woman hadn’t been paying him, he couldn’t have told her something which he knew was a lie and which, if she found out, would cause her infinite distress.
Appalled, he looked to Imogen Sanger. He couldn’t stop his voice from soaring in a way that suggested the only possible answer. ‘Are you comfortable with this?’
She didn’t answer at once. She sat down, poured herself a cup of tea, sipped it reflectively. ‘Comfortable isn’t the word I’d choose. I’m not comfortable with anything that’s happened. Not with the death of my son, or the fact that the young woman I was already thinking of as a daughter, who I hoped would give me grandchildren, is now in a wheelchair. Not with the idea that a necklace given to me by the man I loved most in all the world has been sullied, and has vanished into the black market because no decent man would want to own it and no decent woman would wear it.
‘Most of all, I’m deeply uncomfortable with the possibility that I triggered these events. That what happened was my fault. I gave the necklace to Tom to give it to Jane. If I hadn’t, maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe Bobby Carson wouldn’t have noticed them in The Cavalier, would have run some other couple down instead. Comfortable? No, I can’t honestly say I am.’
She looked Daniel in the eye. ‘But if you’re asking whether Jane’s proposition makes me more uncomfortable, then no, it doesn’t. I’m neutral. We’re not going to get my necklace – Jane’s necklace – back. I’m not sure how I’d feel about a copy, whether it would remind me more of good times or bad ones. Maybe, in years to come, we’d start to forget its exact history and remember only that my husband and Jane’s fiancé loved us enough to give us something beautiful.
‘Or maybe not. Maybe it would always have blood on it, and remain at the back of a locked drawer till both of us are dead. I don’t know. Anyway, my feelings are immaterial. The decision is Jane’s. I’d already given my necklace away before any of this happened.’
Daniel turned slowly back to Jane, waiting expectantly. His voice was low. ‘Please. I need to understand. Why do you want to do this?’
Because she wasn’t used to being challenged, she wasn’t used to arguing her point. Like Deacon, she was better at knowing what she wanted than explaining why. But Daniel kept looking at her, and his pale-grey eyes were unhappy and uncertain but she didn’t think they were judging her or, worse, making allowances because he felt sorry for her. After she’d dismissed her first inclination, which was to throw him out again, and her second, which was to go for an easy lie rather than a complicated truth, she knitted her brows and started looking for the right words. She didn’t think Daniel would understand but that wasn’t why she was doing it. She wanted to explain it to Imogen. To an extent, she still needed to explain it to herself.
‘I can’t bring Tom back,’ she said quietly. ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing I do or don’t do will bring Tom back. If getting out of this thing’ – she slapped the arms of her chair – ‘and running after him would do it, I’d find a way. Do you believe me?’ She was looking at Imogen.
Imogen’s eyes brimmed. ‘Yes,’ she said simply.
Jane swallowed. ‘Good. Because I can’t prove it. We can’t ever have him back. But that necklace meant so much to all of us – you, Tom and me. I only had it for an hour, but what it meant… I can’t find words big enough to say what it meant that he wanted to give it to me. That you wanted me to have it. It sounds stupid, but if real, honest-to-God love could be distilled down, poured into a mould and polished up, that’s what it would look like.’
She took a deep, unsteady breath. ‘But the necklace is gone, and I don’t think we can get it back either. Whoever has it, they’re keeping it out of sight until their children can enjoy it in fifty years or so. They’ll never risk selling it. As far as we’re concerned, it’s lost.’
Finally, she looked at Daniel. ‘Unlike Tom, though, it is only a thing. A beautiful thing, a rare and precious thing, but still only a thing. And though people can’t replace one another, things can. I think…I think… that if I find a stone that looks like Imogen’s stone, and have it mounted in a necklace that looks like Imogen’s necklace, though I’ll never forget it isn’t the same one, when I get it out it’ll remind me how much Tom and I meant to one another.
‘If there was a photograph of the pair of us with that necklace, I’d treasure it.
There isn’t. I think that a copy would be like a photograph. I don’t think I’d ever want to wear it. I do think I’d like to look at it sometimes and remember.
‘Not with bitterness. I am bitter about what happened, but it wasn’t the stone’s fault.’ Her eyes, bright with tears now, returned to Imogen. ‘And it sure as hell wasn’t your fault. It never occurred to me that you thought it might be. Imogen, we know whose fault it was. It was a hugely generous gift, and I’ll never forget that you thought enough of me to make it. That’s another reason I’d like to have it, even if all I can have is the copy. It was yours, and it was going to be mine, and I’m damned if I’ll let trash like Bobby Carson deprive me of that too.’
In an instant the women were clinging together, sobbing on one another’s shoulders; and for a moment Daniel felt like throwing his arms around them and crying too. He restrained himself. But he no longer doubted Jane’s motives.
Imogen produced a handkerchief, mopping her streaming eyes. Her voice was tremulous with emotion. ‘My dear girl. Let me buy it for you. It would give me such pleasure. You don’t need to have anything more to do with the Carsons. Let me do this, for both of us.’
But Jane wasn’t ready to give up her plotting. ‘That’s so kind, Imogen. If there was only us to consider I’d jump at it.’ She extricated herself from the embrace and looked at Daniel, her face streaky and defiant. ‘But there isn’t, is there? You think there’s someone else whose feelings should be taken into account. You think – I’m not sure why – we owe it to Margaret Carson to try to make her feel better. How does that work again?’
Daniel dropped his gaze, embarrassed. ‘It’s not that I think you owe her anything. It’s just that she’s hurting too, and I’d like to find a way to help her.’
‘And she won’t meet me, which would come free, but she will buy the necklace if you can find it?’ He nodded unhappily, knowing what was coming next. ‘Then what’s the problem? She doesn’t have to know that the jewel she bought was a substitute. The only thing standing in the way of a solution that’ll satisfy all our needs is your delicate conscience. You say you want to help the woman. Well, this is how. You finish what you were hired to do, and never let on that the sapphire you found is not the one Tom’s father gave to his mother but its identical twin.’
