Liars All

by Jo Bannister

  So Deacon was listening not to the timbre of Walsh’s voice, not to the presence or absence of a tremor, but to what he was being told. He was being told that an intelligent, hugely successful career criminal had bought stolen jewellery from someone he didn’t know in a discotheque frequented almost exclusively by Dimmock’s teenagers. And that simply couldn’t be true.

  ‘What were you doing in Scarlett’s?’

  ‘The pubs were closed and I fancied a drink.’

  ‘Not the quietest place for a quick tipple.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t. I won’t be going back.’

  ‘Were you driving yourself?’

  ‘Certainly not.’ Thus spoke the family man, indignant at the suggestion. ‘Colin was driving. You know Colin.’

  Deacon knew Colin would say he’d driven his boss up to the front door of Buckingham Palace if that’s what he was told to say. ‘Didn’t we do him for speeding a couple of years ago?’

  Walsh nodded. ‘I believe you did. I had a severe word with him at the time.’

  ‘It must have made an impression,’ said Deacon, straight-faced. ‘If he’s now driving so slowly that you couldn’t wait for him to cover the half-mile between Scarlett’s and The Dragon Luck, where your wife is a major shareholder and I don’t doubt the drinks are both better and free.’

  Walsh shrugged. ‘And where there’s always someone with a problem they want my advice on or a tale of woe they want me to listen to. Sometimes it’s nice not to be related to the boss.’

  It was plausible. But Deacon wasn’t buying it. ‘So the necklace was for Caroline’s birthday, was it?’

  ‘That’s right. It was the next day. She wore it that night at the function at the casino.’

  ‘An eighty-quid necklace bought from a man in a disco? Isn’t that a bit tight for a man of substance?’

  ‘It wasn’t the only thing I bought her. As a matter of fact I bought her a new car. It’s out on the drive now, if you want a look.’

  ‘Seen it.’ Deacon was thinking. ‘What did Sophie buy her?’

  Walsh blinked. It was that Cuba moment, when the protagonists were eyeball to eyeball with the missiles ready to fly, and finally one of them blinked. ‘Er…’

  ‘Come on, Terry. You’ve only got two children – you must remember what they sent. Your son’s in New York, isn’t he? He probably got his secretary to send flowers. You bought Caroline a car and an iffy necklace. What did Sophie give her? If you can’t remember we’ll ask Caroline. Better still, let’s ask Sophie.’ He had his phone out. ‘What’s her number?’

  There was a tiny whine in Walsh’s voice. ‘It’s nine months ago, Jack!’

  ‘But Caroline hasn’t had another birthday since. I bet she and Sophie both remember. Come on, let’s ask.’

  Walsh said nothing. He made no move towards his phone.

  Deacon’s voice dropped softer. ‘How old’s your daughter now? Twenty, twenty-one? She works in a riding school, doesn’t she?’

  ‘An eventing yard,’ murmured Walsh.

  Deacon nodded. ‘For what it’s worth, I approve. It’s good for the kids of wealthy families to go out and earn their own crust. Gives them a sense of values. Only thing is, working with horses never pays well, does it? Which maybe isn’t the highest priority if you’re doing something you enjoy and learning on the job, but it does leave you without much disposable income. I mean, you buy a present for a member of your family and it’s a car or a holiday or maybe a horse. Sophie hasn’t got that kind of spending power. You told me yourself, she likes living within her means, so I expect she’d rather not come to you for a sub.

  ‘In that context, a pretty necklace bought from a man in a disco for eighty quid makes perfect sense. It was all she could afford. And Caroline was so proud she wore it at the first opportunity, to the charity bash at the casino. She thought it was just a trinket, but it was something her daughter had bought with money she’d sweated for instead of heading up to town with your credit card, and that made it precious to her.’

  In a way Deacon was making this up as he went along. Except it was more like solving a crossword puzzle: every word he got right helped him find half a dozen more. He kept going, with mounting confidence. ‘Then a few days later you heard where it had come from. How it had been stolen. You told Caroline, you disposed of the necklace, and you hoped Sophie wouldn’t wonder why her mother wasn’t wearing it any more. Then you hunkered down behind the firewall and waited to see if there’d be any repercussions.

  ‘As the days and weeks passed, you felt increasingly secure. Caroline only wore the thing in public once, and if anyone had recognised it they’d have said so when the newspapers were full of the outrage at The Cavalier. The only potential danger was a picture taken by an estate agent at the casino that turned up in The Sentinel two months later. But it was just a snapshot; the chances of anybody noticing what Caroline had round her neck were pretty minimal. Bobby Carson was caught, charged and convicted, and still your name never came into it. It had been a close shave, but nine months later you were pretty sure you were safe.’

  There was nothing cheery about Deacon’s smile. ‘Except then Daniel Hood started taking an interest. You’d no idea why, but he was asking questions in the very places where a connection could be made between Carson and Sophie – among the not-quite-honest, not-entirely-crooked local dealers who’d passed it among themselves, muddying its provenance each time, until one of them sold it to Sophie in Scarlett’s. And you know a little about Daniel, but maybe not quite enough. You know that he’s stubborn and smart, and if he was determined to find out what happened to Jane Moss’s necklace he just might succeed. And you know that a private citizen can be scared off much more easily than a policeman. He doesn’t have to fill in forms in bloody triplicate to explain why he isn’t following up on a lead that looked promising right up to yesterday.’

  He raised an interrogative eyebrow. Walsh made no response, by word or gesture. Deacon shrugged and carried on. ‘So you called Lionel Littlejohn. You had a good relationship with him before he retired; he probably said if you ever needed him he’d come. You didn’t want to use local muscle because of the risk of association. Also, you could trust Lionel not to get carried away and do the sort of damage that can’t be hushed up. You didn’t want Daniel hurt, just scared enough to find something safer to do with his time.

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ Deacon said then, ‘about knowing Daniel a bit but not enough. I wouldn’t have put the frighteners on him. I’d have known that there was nothing better guaranteed to keep him looking. You knew he was stubborn – you had no idea how stubborn.

  ‘Running him down with a car puzzled me,’ he admitted. ‘That almost put me off the scent. It seemed… out of character. What happened? Lionel exceed his authority? Or did someone else, who was sent to watch Daniel, get a sudden rush of blood to the brain and think he could earn a Christmas bonus by using his initiative?’

  Still Walsh didn’t react. Deacon thought that was probably all the answer he needed. If that wasn’t exactly what had happened, it was pretty close.

  ‘You almost got away with it,’ he said. ‘I suspected you, but then I suspect you when someone trips over a paving stone or the weather takes a turn for the worse. I had no evidence. I thought I was going to see you get away with this too.

  ‘But there was that photograph. I didn’t know there was a photograph, but you did. When it turned up in The Sentinel you must have pored over it with a magnifying glass, trying to decide if it mattered – if the stone was recognisable. But it was just a few pixels in the local rag. If I’d seen the paper I wouldn’t have recognised it, and I had a picture of the Sanger necklace on my desk. It needed a very particular eye, and a very particular interest, to spot that someone in a newspaper photograph was wearing a specific piece of jewellery.

  ‘You were desperately unlucky.’ Almost, Deacon sounded sympathetic. ‘Among the people who saw that snap in The Sentinel was probably the only man in the country
capable of identifying it. Even that mightn’t have mattered, because he didn’t know that the necklace his father made thirty years ago and the one Tom Sanger was killed for were the same. In the days following the murder we circulated pictures of it round Dimmock’s jewellers, but we didn’t know about this guy handcrafting individual pieces essentially on his kitchen table. He takes discretion to a whole new level. He doesn’t advertise, he isn’t in the Yellow Pages, and the slate by his front door doesn’t mention jewellery. We missed him.

  ‘Daniel found him. He wanted to get a copy of the necklace made, so he went back to the workshop that made the original for Tom Sanger’s parents. He produced a picture of what he wanted, and the rest’ – he smiled lugubriously – ‘is history.’

  While he was talking Walsh had been planning his campaign. After all, he didn’t have to listen too closely – he knew what Deacon was going to say. A lot of it was speculation, but once he was on the right track he would inevitably come to the right conclusion. Walsh needed to know how he was going to deal with it. Before Deacon had finished, he did.

  Even so, he took his time. He’d get one chance at this – a maximum of one chance. If he got it wrong the consequences would be unthinkable. He leant back in his chair, weighing Deacon up. ‘There’s only the two of us here, Jack,’ he said quietly. ‘No witnesses. Not even Caroline; not even Jonathan. Nothing either of us says need go any further – and couldn’t in any event be proved. Unless you’re wearing a wire. You’re not, are you?’

  Deacon answered his slow smile with one of his own. ‘You know I’m going to do my job, Terry. You know that.’

  ‘Yes. Your job is catching criminals. Right now you have the chance to catch one you’ve been after for quite a while. I can make it easy for you, Jack. Not so easy that people will suspect, but easy enough that you’ll get what you want. You want me in prison? You can have it.

  ‘I can do time,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve always known I might have to at some point, and this is it. I’ve told you what happened. All you have to do is believe me. If you do, everyone else will too.’

  ‘But that’s the problem, isn’t it?’ said Deacon softly. ‘I don’t believe you. It wasn’t you who bought that necklace for Caroline, it was your daughter. It was Sophie.’

  ‘It was me,’ insisted Walsh, and his face was like stone.

  Deacon found himself in a terrible quandary. Walsh was right – this was what he wanted above everything else. Or nearly everything. They got Al Capone for tax evasion, and if he could get Terry Walsh for handling stolen goods it would do just as well. That was only the beginning. Everything else would follow.

  But it wasn’t right. He knew it wasn’t right. He knew Walsh was never in Scarlett’s, and since he believed that the story he’d been told was essentially the truth, that meant Walsh didn’t buy the necklace. He’d undoubtedly handled stolen goods at regular intervals over the last forty years, but not this. Not the Sanger necklace. That was Sophie. Her father wanted to take the rap for her.

  Which is a father’s prerogative. You try to shield them from harm, even if it means taking the hit yourself. Deacon understood what he was doing. And he so wanted to let it happen. But it wasn’t right. To charge Walsh with handling these particular stolen goods he was going to have to lie. And to his surprise he found he was no more willing to do that than Daniel would have been.

  He said slowly, ‘It’s not that I don’t appreciate the offer. But you know – you must know – that you being charged with handling stolen goods and Sophie being charged with handling stolen goods are entirely different things. You’re a professional. You do this – don’t bother to deny it – for a living, and you have done most of the time I’ve known you. We get you in court, you’re going down for a very long time.

  ‘Whereas Sophie’s a decent, respectable, hard-working girl who made a silly mistake. She’s not responsible for who her parents are – I don’t hold that against her and neither will the judge. He’ll see a twenty-year-old girl who had too much to drink in a disco and did something foolish. He’ll accept that she didn’t know what the necklace was. She should have guessed it was stolen, but not that it was evidence in a murder case. I’m guessing she’ll get probation or community service. Jane will get her necklace back, and you and I can go on chasing one another’s tails for a bit longer.

  ‘I will have you behind bars, Terry. But I’d like to have it clean. I don’t want to cheat, even if it is only you and me that know.’

  ‘You can’t have Sophie,’ Walsh said softly.

  ‘I don’t want Sophie,’ growled Deacon. ‘But she’s the one who did this so she’s the one I’m going to charge. It’s not a huge deal. She’ll get a slap on the wrist and be told not to be such a silly cow in future.’

  ‘It’s a huge deal to me,’ said Walsh fiercely. ‘Because if she ends up with a criminal record, everything she’s achieved is for nothing. She worked hard at school. She’s working hard now. She’s putting distance between my background and her future. Don’t think she’s ashamed of me, because she’s not. She loves me. She knows…not everything but enough. And she knows she doesn’t want to live like that. She doesn’t want a life of privilege paid for, even in part, by my ill-gotten gains. That’s why she’s shovelling horseshit for a living. She loves me, but she doesn’t want to be like me.

  ‘You charge her with handling stolen goods, all that goes down the tubes. For the rest of her life, no one will ever believe that she wasn’t a fully paid-up member of the Walsh family business. One silly mistake shouldn’t cost her everything.’

  He sat up straight in his chair. ‘Well, I can do something about that. If she was anyone else’s daughter caught buying a stolen necklace, like you say, it wouldn’t be any big deal. She’d do her community service and stay out of trouble, and that would be the end of it. But Sophie is my daughter. I’ve put her in a situation where one stupid mistake could get her stuck with my reputation for the rest of her life. And I’m going to get her out of it. Turn a blind eye, Jack. It’s good for her, good for you, good for me. Let it happen.’

  Deacon actually found himself thinking about it. But he shook his head. ‘I can’t.’

  They stared angrily at one another, two strong stubborn men, both doing what their consciences demanded. If the Cuban missile crisis had been down to them, the world would have burnt.

  The study door opened. Caroline Walsh came in, still cradling Jonathan, carrying the post. ‘A letter for you,’ she said quietly, proffering it to her husband.

  Deacon had been a policeman for thirty years, a detective for twenty-five of them. Also, he wasn’t stupid. He saw that the envelope had been opened. Either Caroline Walsh had taken to checking her husband’s mail or it hadn’t just arrived. So she wanted Deacon to know what was in it.

  Walsh looked quickly at her, took the envelope but put it on the desk, face down. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I think you should read it,’ said Caroline, her quiet voice with its cut-glass accent implacable.

  Still Walsh hesitated. ‘Now?’

  Deacon breathed heavily. ‘Go on, Terry, it’s obviously part of the show. Let’s by all means see what’s in it.’

  Walsh bit his lip. Then he took out the letter and pushed it, still face down, across the desk to Deacon. Deacon picked it up and read.

  He felt his heart thumping, the blood darkening his face. He clenched his teeth to stop himself saying something precipitate. He read the letter again, to make sure it said what he thought it said. Finally he lowered it, regarding Walsh over the top. His voice was thick with gravel. ‘This is pretty low, Terry, even for you.’

  ‘I was afraid you’d think that. Which is why I wasn’t going to show it you. Not right now.’

  ‘Some things can’t wait,’ said Caroline Walsh, gently rocking the baby.

  ‘When were you going to show me?’ demanded Deacon. ‘After you’d given up trying to bribe me any other way?’

  ‘I suppose,’ admitted Walsh reluctan
tly, ‘in a way. It was never meant as a bribe. I never expected to be having this conversation with you – not now, hopefully not ever. When I started looking into this it was as a friend.’

  ‘A friend?’ exploded Deacon. He picked up the letter in order to slap it down again. ‘You saw it as an act of friendship, to make me choose between my duty and my son?’

  Walsh passed a troubled hand across his eyes. His wife looked uncertainly at him. ‘The timing’s unfortunate,’ murmured Walsh. ‘I never meant to link this offer to anything you might do for me, now or in the future. Believe that or not, as you like, but it’s true.

  ‘The problem is, events don’t happen in isolation. Things affect one another whether we want them to or not. Whether I like it or not, right now your child’s future is the only weapon I have to fight for my child’s future. It’s crap but we can’t get round it. I won’t let you hurt Sophie while I can do anything to protect her. And right now I don’t care about the Geneva Convention.’

  Softly, persuasively, Caroline said, ‘Please consider it, Jack. For Jonathan’s sake, and for Brodie’s. Terry’s telling the truth. When he contacted the clinic in Uppsala he was just trying to help. He’s supported their research for twenty years – it would be a poor show if he couldn’t get a friend’s child onto a drugs trial. He thought it was a last chance Jonathan wouldn’t get any other way. He didn’t do it because he wanted your gratitude – he did it because he was in a position to help a sick baby and he wanted to.

  ‘But as he says, events have a way of taking over. Now, something that it would have been our pleasure to offer you as a gift we have to put a price on. I’m sorry about that,’ she said, her eyes low. ‘It is pretty despicable. But then, the way you feel about your son, that’s how we feel about Sophie. That we’d do anything to protect her. Even this.’