Liars All

by Jo Bannister

  Deacon was sure he was missing something. If Walsh was involved, somewhere there was a touchstone that transformed his actions from bizarre and illogical to wholly understandable. Petty crime may be as casual and shallow as an airport paperback, at once undisciplined and oddly predictable, but a serious career criminal produces work like a classic novel – well thought out and skilfully executed. Terry Walsh didn’t do sloppy work. He didn’t start things on a whim, get bored halfway through and leave them unfinished so that an unravelled edge might trip him later on. He took a pride in what he did. If this was him, something had happened to undermine his meticulous professionalism.

  But though Deacon, sitting in his car outside the Walshes’ house, explored all the byways of possibility – including those that were overgrown with nettles and ended in a rusty gate, padlocked with a chain and a sign saying My bull can cross this field in eight seconds – the image his mind’s eye kept seeing was Caroline Walsh in her string of pearls.

  ‘I must have been mistaken,’ insisted Henry Daimler. ‘It was only a picture in a newspaper. It was just, it looked like my father’s workmanship.’

  ‘And it was this necklace?’ Jane pinned the insurance photograph to his counter with her finger insistently enough that Daniel feared for the glass.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Daimler firmly. ‘It couldn’t have been. I mean, it was a charity luncheon or somesuch. Who wears stolen jewellery to a charity do, when they know the papers might be there? I mean, that’s the point, isn’t it? You rope in a few local celebrities in the hope that other people will show an interest too. Nobody goes to a charity do who doesn’t want to be seen. Nobody goes wearing something they don’t want to be seen wearing.’

  ‘Did you keep the paper?’ asked Daniel.

  ‘Afraid not,’ said the jeweller. He was a man of about fifty with thinning hair and the greyish complexion of those who spend too much time indoors. ‘It wasn’t important. I just saw a necklace in a photograph and thought, That looks like one of Dad’s. That’s all. I never gave it another thought until today. Even when we were talking about star sapphires on the phone.’

  ‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ Jane said slowly, looking at the gems on their velvet pad, ‘but even to me they all look different. How the star is positioned. The way the rays shoot out of it. The depth of colour. I think I could recognise my stone, and I’m no expert. If we could find the newspaper, I bet you could compare the two pictures and know if it was the same necklace.’

  Daimler rocked a hand. His hands were precision tools, slim but strong. ‘Not the stone, not from a newspaper cutting. I could probably identify the setting. Every one is a work of art,’ he said with the quiet pride of a man who’d seen the best and made some of them. ‘Once you’ve seen enough you start to recognise the hand of the man that made it. I thought the necklace in the newspaper was made by my father. And maybe I was right – he must have made hundreds in his career. But it can’t have been the same one.’

  He looked again at the photograph of the Sanger necklace, and though his words said one thing the doubt in his eyes said something else.

  ‘Do you remember which paper it was?’ asked Daniel. ‘And when?’

  ‘It was The Sentinel,’ said Henry Daimler. ‘But it was a long time ago. Could have been a year.’

  ‘No, it couldn’t,’ said Jane Moss quietly.

  ‘Getting on for, then.’

  So they went to The Sentinel. Like many of Daniel’s acquaintances, senior reporter Tom Sessions looked forward to seeing him with a Coliseum mix of pleasure, curiosity and trepidation. They’d known one another for four years, since the day Sessions found himself talking in the street to a man whose death he had already reported. Since then they’d moved in and out of one another’s orbits, developing something bordering on friendship, so that Sessions would have been glad to see Daniel even without the professional interest in what kind of a drama he’d got involved in this time.

  And the first thing he noticed was that it was fundamentally different to usual. It wasn’t Brodie Farrell he was following around today, a small yellow-haired comet circling its glamorous sun, but a scarred girl in a wheelchair. The chair was, of course, a clue, but he’d have recognised her anyway. He interviewed Jane Moss for the first time while she was still in hospital, then again when she went home to River Drive. He even remembered what she was wearing that day – a T-shirt printed with the legend People in wheelchairs do it. His first thought was that unfortunately the punchline hadn’t printed. When he realised that the whole thing was the punchline he’d grinned, and Jane saw what he was grinning at and grinned too.

  ‘How are you keeping?’ he said now.

  ‘Not so bad,’ she nodded. ‘You?’

  ‘Fine.’ He hesitated. ‘Is this about the Carson case?’ He assumed the answer was yes. He couldn’t think what else she’d want to see him about. He was just breaking the ice.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jane, ‘and no. Not about the court case. It’s dealt with – he’s gone where I won’t have to look at him for a while, and there’s nothing I want to say about that. This is about the necklace. We may know where it is.’

  The reporter’s attention sharpened. ‘Really? When neither the police nor the insurers could find it? How?’

  ‘Daniel…’ And then she stopped, glancing at him uncertainly, unsure how much to say.

  Daniel realised with a flicker of appreciation that she was concerned for his integrity. Part of his job – when he’d had a job – was discretion. Jane wasn’t going to tell a reporter who he’d been working for and it was hard to tell the story without. He stepped into the hiatus. ‘A commission I was working on brought me into contact with Miss Moss,’ he said carefully, ‘and then a third party who believed he’d seen her necklace. He could have been mistaken, but there are good reasons to trust his judgement.’ He gave a rueful little shrug. ‘Sorry I can’t be more specific.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Sessions. He was a tall, somewhat gangly man of about forty who always wore the same tweed sports jacket. ‘How do you think I can help?’

  ‘The witness thought he saw the necklace in a photograph in The Sentinel. We wondered if you could help us find it.’

  In common with newspapers everywhere, they called it The Morgue. Once it had been a storeroom full of boxes and files containing every item ever printed on the thousands of people in and around Dimmock who might one day do something else worthy of note. For many of them this second fifteen minutes of fame would be their obituary, hence the name. These days it’s more efficient to keep a morgue digitally, so the room contained just a couple of computer terminals and some fireproof boxes for storage. Although the new technology made life infinitely easier for journalists, many of them still miss the good old days when hunting through The Morgue involved flicking through files of crinkly, yellowing paper.

  Sessions remembered the IT revolution. He remembered how many man-hours had been wasted doing what a computer now did in a matter of seconds. He logged on at one of the monitors and turned to his visitors. ‘Do we know what issue we’re looking for?’

  Daniel shook his head apologetically. ‘Nine or ten months ago?’

  ‘It couldn’t have been before October the twenty-second,’ Jane said quietly.

  Sessions didn’t need to ask why. ‘All right, let’s start with the issue of October twenty-seven.’ A few deft keystrokes and he had a miniaturised front page. ‘Do we know who it was a photograph of?’

  ‘Possibly a charity do. That’s not very specific, is it?’

  ‘It’ll do for now.’ More keystrokes and the page disappeared, to be replaced by ranks of tiny photographs. ‘We’ll get rid of the sports, the weddings, the cutesy kids, the prize vegetables and the dog-and-pony show.’ Suddenly there were a lot fewer photographs, and he increased the scale so it was possible to see what was in them.

  ‘If your informant thought he recognised a necklace, we’re looking for a woman or a group with a woman in it. She was in eve
ning dress, or at least formal daywear, and she wasn’t across the room from the photographer.’ He got rid of half the photographs on his monitor.

  Which left him with about a dozen pictures of people attending the kind of functions where good jewellery is worn. Many of them had charitable connections. One by one he blew them up bigger than they’d have appeared on the page, and Jane examined each of them minutely. But she couldn’t find her necklace, or anything that looked vaguely like it.

  She looked at Daniel with soul-wrenching disappointment. ‘It isn’t there.’

  ‘Patience,’ said Sessions, ‘we’ve only just started. Let’s try the next edition.’ They repeated the procedure, with the same result. And again, and again.

  Then Jane pushed herself back from the terminal and turned away. ‘He must have been wrong. Either that, or it wasn’t The Sentinel he was reading.’

  ‘We’re only up to the end of November,’ Daniel pointed out.

  ‘But Bobby Carson was in custody by the end of October,’ said Jane. Her voice was dull with regret. ‘The police had circulated a list of everything he’d stolen round half of southern England. No one would have risked selling the necklace after that, no one with any sense would have bought it, and if someone had been stupid enough to wear it in public it would have been noticed.’

  ‘Then what was it that he saw? Our’ – Daniel glanced at Sessions – ‘witness.’

  Jane shrugged. ‘Who knows? Maybe it was one of the nationals he was reading. Maybe he had an away day to Penzance and picked up the local free-sheet down there. And maybe, whatever he saw, wherever he saw it, he was wrong. He only thought it looked familiar. If it wasn’t in The Sentinel, suddenly the odds on it being my necklace are a lot longer.’

  But Sessions wasn’t ready to give up. ‘Local papers work differently to the nationals. On the nationals, if you miss a deadline, that’s it – even yesterday’s news isn’t usually worth printing. With us it’s local interest that counts. On a busy week, less urgent kinds of news get bumped to the next issue. But they don’t get binned. Sooner or later we find a slot for them. A photograph of the great and good at a charity function is a good example. We’d certainly print a picture, but it wouldn’t take precedence over a genuine news story. It could hang around for weeks before making it into print. Let’s keep going. The Christmas and New Year editions are always crying out for fillers – anything that was waiting for a space would be a God-send then.’

  So they kept looking.

  The Sentinel didn’t skip issues. The Sentinel had never skipped an issue. During various strikes it had produced some late ones, in times of paper shortage it had produced some skimpy ones, and once during a protracted power cut it printed courtesy of a tractor on the other side of a hole in the wall. The barren week between Christmas and New Year, that many publications incorporate into a Bumper Holiday Edition before or after, got its own issue of The Sentinel, although it was thin and padded out with items that barely qualified as news even in Dimmock.

  One of them was the presentation of a cheque for £400 raised by an estate agents’ fun run on the Three Downs in aid of the Chinese earthquake relief fund. Normally, this worthy but small event would have warranted a paragraph on page two. But this was the holiday week, and the editor was desperate for anything that would stop the adverts bumping into one another. He hadn’t sent a photographer to the presentation supper, but one of the estate agents had submitted a picture and, knowing his dead week was coming up, the editor had kept it. Blown up, it filled almost a quarter of the editorial space on page four, and if it wasn’t exactly hot news, at least the five people in it would buy extra copies for their relatives.

  Two of them were Timothy Li, senior croupier at The Dragon Luck casino on the Brighton Road, and his wife Pearl, coordinators of the local effort to send relief to the victims of the earthquake in Sichuan Province. Also pictured were Edwin Turnbull, senior partner at Turnbull, Fitch & Stewart, and his wife Doreen, and though neither of them were fun runners he was presenting the cheque in his role as chairman of the local association of estate agents. The fifth member of the group was one of the management team at The Dragon Luck where the presentation was made.

  Jane leant closer to the monitor. She took the insurance photograph from her wallet again and laid it on the desk. The eyes of all three of them skipped from the screen to the photograph to the screen to the photograph to the screen.

  Finally Jane said, ‘That’s it. Isn’t it? That’s what Daimler saw. He thought it was the same necklace, and so do I.’

  Daniel didn’t even wince at her indiscretion. All at once he had much more to worry about than maintaining Henry Daimler’s privacy.

  ‘Who’s that wearing it?’ asked Jane, reading the caption under the picture.

  ‘She’s one of the major shareholders at The Dragon Luck,’ said Sessions. ‘She’s also the wife of one of Dimmock’s more prominent businessmen. You know her, don’t you, Daniel? That’s Caroline Walsh.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Daniel liked to do things by the book – except on those rare occasions when he threw the damn thing out the window and leapt after it yelling ‘Minnehaha!’ He thought they should go to Battle Alley and put their findings to the senior detective on duty.

  But the book Jane worked by was String Theory by Brodie Farrell – the theory being, if you can reach a string, pull it. ‘You know Detective Superintendent Deacon,’ she said impatiently. ‘Call him.’

  Daniel would have resisted for longer if he hadn’t thought that it was what Deacon too would want. He knew Deacon was officially on holiday. He also knew that Deacon’s definition of a holiday was something you do if you can’t find anyone to arrest. He’d want to hear, immediately, about any developments in the Carson case, particularly if it involved the Walshes.

  ‘All right.’ They were back on the pavement outside The Sentinel building. Daniel moved to the kerb. ‘But I’ll stand over here. Get him at a bad moment and his language can knock you off your…’ He winced. ‘Blow your wheels off?’ he finished lamely.

  ‘Daniel,’ said Jane Moss firmly, ‘if you’re going to stick around you have to get used to the idea that my legs don’t work. I don’t like being in a wheelchair. It’s a damned nuisance, it makes everything harder than it ought to be, and I resent like hell the fact that someone did this to me. But it doesn’t embarrass me. It doesn’t say anything about me except that I was unlucky. If you’re going to be around me, you have to stop being so coy. I’m stuck in a wheelchair, and it’s looking more and more likely that I always will be. I’m sorry if that freaks you out, but protecting your finer feelings is not my highest priority. Get over it.’

  Daniel stood looking down at her for perhaps a minute while the commerce of Dimmock flowed unheeding around them. Then, not oblivious to the curious stares of passers-by but braving them, he unbuttoned his shirt.

  Jane’s first thought was that, always somewhat eccentric, he’d finally gone mad and she ought to back away as quickly as her wheels would carry her. But his face, though pale, was composed and his mild grey eyes were steady on hers. Puzzled but intrigued, she looked at what he was showing her.

  Her eyes widened. She leant closer. ‘What the hell is that? Smallpox?’

  Daniel shook his head. ‘Burns. I’m told there were about three hundred of them. I lost count. They’ve healed pretty well. Four years on, these scars are all that’s left. The doctors thought the worst ones might need skin grafts, but they didn’t.’

  What he was saying made no sense. ‘Those aren’t burns,’ objected Jane. ‘They’re way too regular. They look like…’

  ‘Daisy chains,’ nodded Daniel. ‘I know. The guy doing it got bored. For most of a weekend all he had to do was ask one question, and I didn’t know the answer. In the end he was just going through the motions. Doodling.’

  He’d managed to knock all the breath out of her. ‘Daniel…’

  ‘Yes,’ he said calmly. ‘I was tortured. I did
n’t deserve it – not that anyone ever does, but I wasn’t even who they thought I was. So it doesn’t say anything about me, either, except that I was unlucky. But I am embarrassed. I don’t usually show this to people. I don’t like having to explain it. I don’t like seeing the expression on their faces. So I keep it covered up.’

  ‘Then…why…?’

  ‘Why show it to you? Because… I think, because hiding it isn’t as good a way of dealing with it as having it out in the open where people can see it and know about it and accept it as part of who you are. The way you do. It’s more honest and it’s more dignified. I’m not embarrassed by you, Jane, I admire you. You’re a stronger person than I am – maybe stronger than anyone I know. I want to be honest with you because it’s starting to matter to me what you think of me.’

  Jane breathed lightly, getting a grip on her emotions. Someone had done that to him. Three hundred times. It had taken most of a weekend. She cleared her throat. ‘I can’t keep my shirt buttoned up over my misfortune.’

  He flicked her a fragile smile. ‘I don’t think you would if you could.’

  She shrugged. ‘We’ll never know. One thing I am sure of: we’re not getting into the competitive suffering business.’

  He gave a gusty little laugh. ‘No. That really would be crass. I just… I wish we’d known one another before you were injured. I don’t want you to think I’m sorry for you. Well…I am, of course I am, I’m terribly sorry about what happened, to you and to Tom. That’s not what I mean.’ He heard himself succumbing to verbal diarrhoea, made himself slow down. ‘What I mean is, what I see is someone in a wheelchair, not a wheelchair with someone in it. Am I making any sense?’ he wondered, awkward as a schoolboy asking for a date.

  ‘No.’ Jane gave a thin chuckle. ‘But I think it was a nice thing to say.’

  ‘So…I’ll call Jack Deacon, shall I?’