by Jo Bannister
‘I think you should.’
Policemen come to the front door, not the servants’ entrance. These days it’s less of an issue than it was in the nineteenth century, when the landed classes genuinely believed they should be above the law, but it was a tradition Deacon followed scrupulously. He’d left muddy footprints across some of the best Persian rugs on the south coast.
Usually, though, if he was calling on business, he didn’t have a baby in his arms.
Caroline Walsh was putting away her shopping when she was surprised – not startled, it took a lot to startle her – by a rap at the door she’d come through five minutes before. When she opened it, Jack Deacon held out his baby as if she’d won it in a raffle. ‘I need to see Terry.’
She’d been speaking to him only a few minutes ago. Something had happened in the brief space between then and now, and his attitude was different – harder, intense, brittle as a diamond. She was astonished to hear herself stammering. ‘I-I’m not sure he’s…’
‘His car’s in the garage,’ said Deacon shortly. ‘He’s not in the garden so I’m guessing he’s in the study. I know the way.’ He left her, frozen like Lot’s wife, holding her improbable winnings, and beat a heavy tattoo across the parquet flooring of the hall. In deference to their long acquaintance, he walked round the Persian rug.
Walsh must have heard him coming. Herds of buffalo don’t signal their approach more clearly than Deacon on a mission. But he turned, still at his desk, with an expression of mild surprise as the door opened abruptly and then shut again, just one decibel short of a slam, leaving the detective superintendent looming over him. ‘Jack? Everything all right?’
‘Bobby Carson was working for you.’
‘No,’ said Walsh, ‘he wasn’t.’
‘Bobby Carson was working for you when he mowed down two young people with a car outside The Cavalier on Chain Down. He brought Jane Moss’s necklace to you, and you gave it to Caroline. Terry, what the hell were you thinking? Did you actually have to wash the blood off it first?’ His voice was quaking with anger.
Walsh kept his own low and calm. ‘You’ve got it wrong, Jack. Bobby Carson didn’t work for me. He was a vicious little amateur, and I didn’t, and wouldn’t, have any dealings with him.’
‘Careful, Terry,’ snorted Deacon, ‘that was almost an admission. That you only work with professionals. Men like Lionel Littlejohn.’
‘Yes, Littlejohn worked for me, for a time,’ said Walsh levelly. ‘I believe he’s retired now.’
‘Only as far as the taxman’s concerned. For you, Terry, he’s always available. Even if it means driving the length of the country to lean on someone who’s asking inconvenient questions. That’s almost the most offensive part, do you know that?’ Deacon’s glare would have stripped paint. ‘That you thought Daniel Hood might get to the truth when I’d failed to. That’s the bit I really can’t forgive. That, and making Caroline your accomplice. Haven’t you made enough dirty money down the years that you could afford to buy her clean jewellery? Did you have to give her something that had been stolen by a murderer?’
Terry Walsh measured the words out one at a time and pegged them out on the space between them. ‘Bobby Carson was nothing to do with me. I never hired him, I never used him, I never bought anything from him or accepted anything in payment or as a gift. He told the court he was working alone, and he was. He was a loose cannon, and it’s more dangerous working alongside one of those than it is to be in the firing line. I’m sorry, very sorry, about what happened to those kids. But I wasn’t responsible, not in any shape or form, and I have nothing to feel guilty about.’
Deacon’s eyes were hot. ‘Then explain to me how Caroline was photographed wearing Jane Moss’s necklace three days after it was stolen from her. While she was in ICU and Imogen Sanger was organising her son’s funeral.’
Not a muscle moved in Walsh’s face. That, more than anything, told Deacon he’d struck gold. It stopped being conjecture, or a promising theory, right then. Walsh wasn’t shocked. He’d known the photograph existed. He’d hoped the necklace would never be recognised, but he’d known that one day it might be. And he’d known what his response would be. ‘Prove it.’
‘The picture was published in a newspaper! Forty thousand people saw it!’
‘They saw my wife wearing a necklace. What kind of a necklace? Who’s going to know from a picture in a newspaper? It may have been something like the one that was stolen. It may even have been very like it. But you’ll need to prove it was the same one.’
‘Oh, I can prove it all right,’ snarled Deacon. ‘I have the jeweller whose father made it. If we give the newspaper shot and the insurance photograph to a photo analysis lab, they’ll be able to say with absolute confidence that they’re one and the same thing. This wasn’t mass-produced, remember – it’s a signature stone mounted in a setting made in his own workshop by a craftsman. There won’t be another one exactly like it anywhere.’
Behind Terry Walsh’s eyes the cogs of his brain were whirring. Deacon wasn’t bluffing. Now his back was against the wall. If you invite a policeman to prove something and he can, that’s pretty much the end of the game.
But Walsh hadn’t stayed ahead of that game – ahead of Deacon – for all these years by being Second XI. He started with natural talent, and the more he played the better he got. He wasn’t ready to pull the stumps up just yet.
‘All right,’ he said quietly. His gaze was steady. ‘I’m going to have to tell you what happened. Maybe it won’t make much difference, except to your opinion of me – and funnily enough, Jack, that actually matters to me. Have you got five minutes?’
‘I’ve left Caroline holding the baby.’
‘Literally?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. That’s him safe and her occupied. We shouldn’t be interrupted.’ He gestured Deacon to a club armchair. After a moment, grudgingly, Deacon took it.
‘I haven’t lied to you. Well…not about this.’ Walsh’s grin carried all the old charm but not quite the old confidence. ‘I wasn’t involved with Carson before he stole that necklace. I didn’t mean to be involved with him afterwards. As it turned out, though – as I discovered too damn late – there was blood on that stone.
‘It took you, what, about two days to realise it was Bobby Carson you were looking for, another three to find him. By then he’d fenced everything he’d stolen and dumped the car in a reservoir. There were no forensics to tie him to the crime. It was Jane Moss’s evidence that nailed him. That’s an impressive young woman. If you were on a jury you’d believe her. If I was, I would.
‘So Carson had five days to turn his takings into cash. In fact it didn’t take him twenty-four hours. Before you were even looking for him he’d laid the stuff off with someone – I’m not going to tell you who – who’d laid it off with someone else, who took it to a disco looking for a buyer. The usual story: he needed cash quickly, it belonged to his late mother, he’d have liked to keep it but… You know the routine.’
Deacon was looking at him with overt disbelief. ‘You’re not telling me you fell for that? You didn’t honestly think that a man selling jewellery in a disco had any legal title to it?’
Walsh gave a wry shrug. ‘I knew there was a possibility it wasn’t entirely legit. But I’d no idea what the thing was. You hadn’t publicised it as stolen at that point. I’d heard about the hit-and-run but I had no reason to connect that with this. I’m not a jeweller – I didn’t recognise what I was being offered as genuinely valuable. I thought it was probably one of a hundred identical necklaces in a box that fell out of the back of a van. I thought it was costume jewellery – good costume jewellery, good enough for a birthday present for my wife, but still not the kind of thing there’d be a hue and cry over. I gave him eighty quid for it.’
‘Eighty quid?’ Deacon’s voice soared. ‘Tom Sanger died and Jane Moss will spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair for eighty quid?’
Walsh shuffl
ed uncomfortably. ‘I didn’t know that. You can believe me or not, Jack, but it’s the truth. If I’d known – if I’d even suspected – do you think I’d have given it to my wife? Do you think I’d have let her wear it in public?’
And, reluctantly, Deacon did believe him. A successful middle-aged man, Walsh was still what he’d always been – a wheeler-dealer, a man with an eye to the main chance, a man who didn’t need to buy iffy jewellery from someone in a disco but probably couldn’t resist the temptation. Deacon could see him in a shadowy corner of the noisy establishment, surrounded by people who had no idea what he was up to, cheerfully hammering the price down because both he and the vendor knew that stolen goods are a buyer’s market.
‘Did Caroline know how you got it?’
‘No.’ He said it firmly enough but Deacon was unconvinced. He liked Caroline Walsh but he had no illusions about her. She couldn’t not know how Terry had made his fortune. She knew, and she enjoyed it with him, and whether she’d ever held up a tobacconist at gunpoint or not, she was in every way that mattered a gangster’s moll. If Walsh had told her about the man in the disco, she’d probably have worn the necklace at the first opportunity, out of devilment.
Right now, though, that wasn’t the point. Right now – here, in the man’s study – Deacon was where he’d spent the last ten years working to be: with a case against Terry Walsh that would open up his affairs as a judicious stab opens a clam. Because it wasn’t just the necklace. Maybe all Walsh did was buy questionable jewellery from someone he met in a disco. He wasn’t going down for murder, or as an accessory to murder. But handling stolen goods is a serious offence, and that was all the leverage Deacon needed to crack the ripe nut that was Walsh’s business empire. He knew what he’d find. All he needed was a lawful excuse to look.
‘Do you want to tell her, or shall I?’
There were things about Walsh which were almost admirable. There had to be, or the fact that they had grown up in the same London neighbourhood would never have tempted Deacon to tolerate a personal acquaintance that had the potential to damage him professionally. One of them was that he was an intelligent man. He didn’t shrink from violence – Deacon knew he didn’t, though he couldn’t prove it – but he used it sparingly, as a last resort, and never as a substitute for thinking. He was thinking now, trying to see a way through this, not panicked but intensely focused.
‘I will,’ he said. ‘If I have to.’
Deacon snorted a gruff little chuckle, half amused, half indignant. ‘Oh come on, Terry! You’re not going to appeal to my better nature, are you? You know I haven’t got one.’
Walsh gave another microscopic shrug. ‘We’ve known one another a lot of years. I’ve always thought of you as a friend.’
‘Really?’ Deacon looked at him closer. ‘That’s interesting. Because I’ve always thought of you as a pimp, a thief and a thug.’
Unoffended, Walsh laughed out loud. ‘No, Jack, don’t spare my feelings – tell me what you really think.’
That flicker in the cragginess of Deacon’s expression might almost have been a tiny smile. ‘I think that you and I have been chasing one another around this merry-go-round for too many years for you to think I’m a soft touch. You’re not going to try to bribe me, not because it’s illegal or immoral but because you know it wouldn’t get you anywhere. So that’s not what this is about. There’s something else you need. Something you think I just might help you with.’
He tilted his head to one side. When Brodie did that she looked like a curious magpie that has seen something glitter in the grass. When Deacon did it he looked like a vulture wondering how long something would take to die. ‘What is it you’re not telling me, Terry? If what you’ve told me already was the truth, why are you still keeping secrets?’
Walsh spread his hands innocently. ‘I’m not. I told you what happened. I feel bad about it – of course I do. It was just a bit of fun. I thought someone had pulled a fast one and Caroline was going to get a nice little trinket because of it. If I’d thought for one moment that people had got hurt, I wouldn’t have touched it with a bargepole. If I’d known Bobby Carson was involved, I wouldn’t have. You know me, Jack. You know that’s the truth.’
Deacon went on regarding him speculatively. The trouble was, he did know Walsh. He didn’t think he’d sent Carson to wipe out a couple of young lovers for the sake of their valuables, and he didn’t think he’d have handled those valuables if he’d known how Carson acquired them. So maybe he hadn’t. The hit-and-run, the death of the boy and the terrible injuries to the girl, had been widely reported, but details of the robbery weren’t released until four days later. That had been Deacon’s decision. He’d thought his best chance of finding Carson was if he tried to fence the goods, which he wouldn’t if their description had been widely circulated. As it turned out, Carson had passed the goods on while the blood was still wet in the road. They’d gone through maybe three different handlers before Walsh bought the necklace from a man in a disco.
A man in a disco? He knew they were rather different types of men. For instance, Walsh had a social life that went beyond the occasional meal with friends in a nice French restaurant. But they were the same age, and from Deacon’s experience – gained mostly from arresting people with amusing substances in their back pockets – the average age of those frequenting discos was about nineteen. Wouldn’t Terry Walsh have been a little conspicuous among the teeny-boppers?
‘What disco?’ he asked.
‘Scarlett’s, on the Brighton Road.’
Deacon knew the one. It was about half a mile from The Dragon Luck. ‘Were you there alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Anyone see you?’
‘Lots of people. I don’t know how many would remember seeing me. It is nine months ago.’ He frowned then, perplexed. ‘Wait a minute. I’ve just confessed to a crime, albeit an unwitting one. Now you want me to prove it?’
‘Can you?’
‘I don’t have to! You don’t have to. I confessed. If you don’t believe me, great – pick up your baby on the way out and I’ll see you down The Belted Galloway sometime. But you asked me how Caroline came to be wearing Jane Moss’s necklace and I told you. I didn’t fence the thing for Bobby Carson. But I bought it in circumstances that made it unlikely to be kosher, and if you want to hit me with that, go ahead. You know my solicitor. By the time he’s polished my defence, Adam Selkirk will make me seem like an innocent abroad and you like a bully for taking advantage of me.’
He took a long, slow breath. ‘And I just wonder if there isn’t another way of dealing with this. If Miss Moss gets her necklace back, and my company undertakes to support her financially for the rest of her life, wouldn’t that do more good than you and Adam shredding my reputation between you as you try to convince a court that I’m some kind of criminal mastermind and he tells them I’m a simpleton who shouldn’t be allowed out alone?’
As bribes go, it was better than most. At least Deacon didn’t feel the urge to knock him down for offering it. Of course, he couldn’t accept it. He didn’t think Walsh thought he might. ‘Miss Moss will get her necklace back. After it’s done its job as evidence.’
Walsh regarded him coolly. ‘Serious money isn’t to be sneezed at, Jack. Not many people can afford your kind of scruples. I can make a big difference to that young woman’s life.’
Deacon sniffed. ‘You could anyway. As a kind of apology. From jail.’
Walsh laughed at him. ‘I’m not going to jail for an injudicious purchase in the back row at Scarlett’s!’
‘That’s cinemas, Terry,’ Deacon growled, exasperated. ‘If you’re going to lie, get the details right. Discos don’t have a back row, and anyone who’d been in one in the last twenty years would know that. Wherever you got that necklace, it wasn’t in Scarlett’s. So why would you say that? Why would you tell me something so wildly improbable, when the man with the capacious overcoat could just as easily have been selling his wares in The Drag
on Luck where you’d every reason to be?’
Walsh looked away. He still appeared quite nonchalant, but Deacon’s experienced eye detected a growing unease. ‘I’ve told you what happened.’
Deacon didn’t think at lightning speed, but what he lacked in rapidity he made up in perseverance. There was something else he’d always admired about Walsh. He was a good husband and father. Deacon had known that Terry Walsh would gladly lay down his life for his partner and his offspring long before he knew that, actually, he would too.
‘Yes, I rather think you did,’ he said slowly. ‘Except that it wasn’t you at Scarlett’s, was it? And I don’t think it was Caroline. Sorry to be so blunt, but you’re both too old. It was Sophie, wasn’t it?’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
‘No,’ said Terry Walsh.
He’d been lying for long enough, and not just over trivial things but in circumstances where getting it wrong could cost him his freedom or his life, to know he had to keep his tone light. He’d have hacked his own arm off with a penknife to keep Jack Deacon away from his daughter. But right now she didn’t need his blood so much as his skill as an actor. He didn’t wring his hands. He didn’t beg Deacon to believe him, either with his words or his eyes. He just shook his head and said calmly, ‘No.’ And waited.
But Deacon had dealt with lots of different kinds of liars in his time. Urgent ones, sullen ones, and some whose eyes shone with bright honesty as they told him that black was white. Civilians, and young policemen, think there’s a magic to it. That you can spot a liar by the way his eyes drift off to the left, or right; by the tremor, or perhaps the unnatural steadiness, in his voice; by the unnecessary complications in his account, or else by the lack of detail. But there is no magic trick. Experience had taught Deacon to focus on the facts. If he was being lied to, sooner or later the facts wouldn’t add up. Honest people make mistakes too, but they’re different kinds of mistakes.
By and large – remember this if you’re asked to take part in one – that’s what reconstructions are for. They’re not, as you’ll be told, meant to jog the memory of an onlooker. They’re an opportunity for someone to settle the question of whether he’s a witness or a suspect by doing something he simply couldn’t or wouldn’t have done. Taking a seat on the blind side of a station café, for instance, when his statement said he’d checked the time on the platform clock.
