Echoes of Lies (23 page)

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Authors: Jo Bannister

BOOK: Echoes of Lies
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She didn't go into much detail. “Sophie's had rather a nasty time. She had to stay with some people she didn't like very much. She was glad to get home. Her daddy thought she deserved a treat, and he asked you and me to go too.”
Paddy nodded absently. She seemed more interested in the sun-hat, but Brodie knew she was filing the facts away for future reference.
Just when she thought matters were settled, Paddy asked the question Brodie had been avoiding. “What about Daniel?”
Brodie caught her breath. “What
about
Daniel?”
“Is Daniel coming too?”
Brodie shook her head. “Daniel's gone to London for a few days.”
“Won't he be back in time?”
It seemed an easy way out so she took it. “I don't think so.”
“I like Daniel,” the child said firmly.
“I like Daniel,” said Brodie.
“Daniel had a nasty time too. Daniel got burnt.”
“I know,” Brodie said softly.
“Doesn't Daniel deserve a treat?”
“Of course he does. But darling, going on holiday with two little girls isn't
everyone's
idea of a treat. When we get back we'll take Daniel somewhere nice - how's that? Where shall we go?”
“The Museum of Farming,” Paddy replied without a moment's hesitation. “I can show him the tractors.”
They were flying out on Saturday. Brodie spent Thursday and Friday tying up loose ends.
She drove to Newmarket with the owners of Flossie the pony, witnessed a tearful reunion and returned to Dimmock with a happy glow about her heart and a cheque in her handbag. On the way back she made another trawl of the Brighton bookshops, coming up with a small but profitable handful of the editions on her list. She broke the bad news to a man who was seeking to buy back his father's old Riley from a film company, that those scenes of it going off Beachy Head were not in fact special effects.
In between times she phoned those clients whose affairs could not be settled, explaining that she'd be away for a few days. Fortunately, time was not critical to any of them; still she gave them the option of instructing someone else if they preferred. No one did, although a couple couldn't resist the chance to grumble. She bit her tongue and made regretful noises. She wasn't in a position to offend any of them, even the unreasonable ones.
It was Friday evening before she'd done all she could and went home. Marta had fed Paddy, so Brodie got down to the packing. Laying out all their things made her laugh. Under the latest cruisewear they were both going to be wearing knickers so old they'd be lucky to last the fortnight. She refused to care. Where they were going, extra ventilation was a bonus.
A little after nine, with the job almost finished and Paddy fast asleep and dreaming of porpoises, the phone rang.
It was Daniel. “Can I come round?”
Brodie was surprised, found herself glancing at the clock. But she wouldn't tell him it was too late, not after how they parted. “Of course. Is everything all right?”
“I'm fine,” he said; and though that was what she'd meant it wasn' t what she'd asked, making her wonder what it was that was less than all right. “I'll be there in ten minutes.” In the background she
heard the distorted mutter of a public address system. He was calling from the station.
It didn't take ten minutes - at that hour there were taxis to spare - but it was time enough for Brodie to construct whole shooting-scripts as to what had happened to take him first to London and then, like this, back here. He said he was all right, which was reassuring. But something was going on that she didn't know about.
Brodie heard the taxi and had the door open before he could knock. “Daniel, before we say anything else, I want to apologise for what I said to you. It was unfair and unwarranted. I was going to call and say so, only then I got your message.”
He shook his head, the bright hair dancing. “It doesn't matter.” His manner perturbed her. He seemed distracted, avoiding her gaze. “Can we go inside? I've got something to show you.”
Puzzled, Brodie waved him in. He was carrying his battered khaki rucksack, the only bit of luggage he seemed to own. He dumped it on the dining table, unaware of Brodie's wince, and took out two folders which for the moment he left unopened. He dropped his parka on a chair.
He seemed unsure how to start. He looked at Brodie and back at the table. “OK. Er - OK. Like I told Marta, I went to London. I had an idea to follow up, some research to do. The internet's great, but some things you have to do in person.”
Brodie was watching him with concern. “Daniel, you look exhausted. You should be pottering round the park, not beating the mean streets of London. Have you eaten today?”
He spared that a scant moment's thought. “Probably. Yes, I'm tired and a bit sore, but I'm fine. I just - We need to talk about this. Let me explain, and then I'll eat all you like.”
She nodded uneasily. “Go on.”
One of the folders was red, the other was green. He opened the green one and took out a large number of photographs, fanning them across the table. There must have been thirty or forty of them, some coloured, some black-and-white. They were all of women.
Brodie frowned. “What is this? Who are they?”
Daniel chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Well, most of them are
perfectly nice, decent women that neither of us will ever have heard of. But it's possible that one of them kidnapped Sophie Ibbotsen. You met her - you're the only one who has. I'm hoping you might recognise her.”
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.”

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