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Authors: Jo Bannister

BOOK: Echoes of Lies
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“You have to catch him! Stop him.”
Deacon gave a weary chuckle. “I intend to try. But Mrs Farrell, we have to be realistic. If he's been doing this for years and nobody's caught him yet, it can't be as easy as deciding we ought to. Looking for him may not be the best approach. It'll be easier to find the person who hired him.”
Brodie glanced uncertainly at the bed. “If he wakes up.”
“That would be a big help,” agreed the policeman. “But even if he doesn't we may be able to work it out. There can't be
that
many people sufficiently pissed off with him to do this.”
“The
Sentinel
said he was a teacher.”
“Grounds,” admitted Deacon, “but possibly not grounds enough. He must have been pissing people off in his spare time.”
Brodie's eyes sharpened. “You think he really is a conman?”
“Maybe.”
“Then what Mrs Doyle said …”
It wouldn't have cost much to let her think so. But Deacon had never salved his own conscience with convenient lies and saw no reason to let anyone else. “About the racehorse? A cover story, designed to gain your sympathy and explain why she was telling you instead of me. If it had been true Hood might have ended up shot but nobody'd have tortured him first. If he had the money he'd have given it back; if it was gone they might have beaten him up, they might even have killed him, but that? No. It was about something bigger than money.”
They left the same way they came in. Outside the rear entrance he held the car door for her. Jack Deacon would have thumped anyone who accused him of being a gentleman, but a part of him his mother would still have been proud of thought Brodie Farrell was a lady.
She paused in the open door and regarded him hesitantly over
the top. “Inspector - will it be all right if I visit sometime? Just to see how he's doing? If he's supposed to be dead I can hardly ask at Reception.”
“You can call me,” said Deacon. “Good news or bad, I'll tell you.” Then with a sniff he relented. “But yes, if you want to bring him a Get Well card I don't see why not. Be discreet, I don't want people wondering what you're doing here with half the flower shop. If it gets out that he's still alive I'll know who to blame. But if you're careful it won't do any harm. I'll leave word that if you turn up alone you're to be admitted.”
“Thank you,” said Brodie.
Finishing at the police station in mid afternoon, Brodie returned to her office. There was still the post to deal with. She'd abandoned it when she opened the newspaper. There might also be a queue of impatient clients awaiting her services, though she doubted it.
It was early days yet. But what, as a sideline, had seemed to occupy an inordinate amount of her time and provide a comfortable extra income was proving erratic as a full-time job. A steady trickle of work kept her head above water, but the better jobs that represented her profit margin were like buses: either there were none or they all came at once. It hadn't mattered when she could afford to turn some of them down. Now
Looking for Something?
was it: what it didn't pay for didn't get bought.
There was no queue, no messages and nothing much in the post. So she resumed the search for a cranberry glass épergne to grace the other end of Mrs Campbell-Wheeler's three metre dining table.
She phoned the antiques dealers who clustered along the south coast from Bournemouth to Brighton, but although there were épergnes aplenty, and no shortage of cranberry glass, no one had what she needed. She made sure they each had her number and made a note in her diary to try again before the weekend. Mrs Campbell-Wheeler was getting tetchy, but even Brodie couldn't find what wasn't there. And after today's events it was hard to get excited about a Victorian ornament. If the woman had wanted a pair she shouldn't have bought one in the first place.
Then she phoned a horse dealer in Newmarket, on the trail of a Welsh pony called Flossie. She'd been loaned out two years ago while the family waited for their younger child to get bigger; and loaned on again when the child of the second family lost interest; and somehow there'd been a misunderstanding. When the child of the third family broke her arm, Flossie was sold.
Now Brodie was trying to track one fifteen-year-old white Welsh pony among thousands, with no guarantee that if she found her
the new owner would be prepared to sell her back. She was promised her own fee if she found the pony, whether or not the complexities of ownership could be resolved, and the eight hundred pounds they'd agreed on was probably as much as the pony was worth; but she was part of somebody's family and you can't put a price on that.
The news was good: the dealer thought he knew where Flossie was and could buy her back. If the family that sold her would pay him as the price of their mistake, and if the family getting her back would pay Brodie, and if the family that loaned her on without permission would reimburse half of that, everybody would be satisfied - even if it meant that middle-aged pony had ended up costing as much as a decent hunter.
She phoned Flossie's owners and fixed a time for them to inspect the pony, and accepted their tearful gratitude as if it was a lost child she'd found for them, and then moved on to the next item on her list: a navy-blue Ford Anglia in showroom condition for a young man who'd been unwise enough to take his mother's pride and joy to a rave.
Between phone-calls and e-mails, most of them fruitless but some worth following up, Brodie kept herself occupied until seven o'clock. Then all at once she'd had enough, and she shut up the office and headed home. Flossie would pay some bills and restock the larder, and tomorrow was another day.
It had come as a bit of a culture-shock, having to worry about bills. All her life she'd been financially secure; even now she could be if she hadn't let pride come between her and her dues. She'd accepted John Farrell's provision for his daughter; but the house was his family home, she didn't feel entitled to half of it, proposed instead a settlement which bought her a comfortable flat in a Victorian merchant's house with enough left over to start the business. The courts might have given her more; John offered her more; but she didn't want his charity. There was more pleasure in denying him the opportunity to be generous. Leaving him in her debt salved her angry soul better than a new car and a dress allowance.
But now she was having to pay for her pride. Almost with every
post, it seemed. For the first time in her adult life she had to set priorities: a Sunday roast or a night out, new shoes or new brake-shoes. But she'd gone into it with her eyes open and wouldn't reopen negotiations at the first sign of hardship. For one thing she wouldn't let John think she couldn't manage on what she'd asked for. For another and better reason, self-respect demanded that she succeed at something soon. Her marriage had failed; and she'd long ago abandoned her career, which was clerking for the man who was now her ex-husband. Her self-confidence needed a boost.
She'd thought that running her own business would do that; and so it might, if she could get through the difficult start-up period. She hadn't expected it to be so uncertain for quite so long. Six months. Of course, in a seaside town the winter was always going to be harder than the summer. The seasonal influx brought extra work for everyone, not just the cafes and trinket-sellers. It was March now: in two months The Lanes would be full of people, and some of them would have need of her services.
Looking for Something?
was a good idea, she knew she could make it work. The money situation would improve if she just kept at it.
Money! Dear God, she hadn't until that moment wondered what to do with Mrs Doyle's three thousand pounds. She'd already lodged it in the bank but it couldn't stay there. It had been earned - heaven knows it had been earned! - you could argue that it had been earned honestly. But much as she needed it, Brodie knew she couldn' t touch a penny. She could hand it over to the police. If he recovered she could offer it to Daniel Hood - and stand there while he slapped her face. If he died, or if he wouldn't ease her conscience by accepting it, it could go to charity. She'd bankrupt herself before she'd take blood-money.
She collected Paddy from Mrs Szarabeijka upstairs and tried to put the affair to the back of her mind, at least until the child was in bed.
But Paddy Farrell was the daughter of a lawyer and a woman who made a profession of being inquisitive, and though she was only four years old she knew that something was wrong. “Bad day, Mummy?” she asked with heart-rending solicitude.
“Rotten day,” Brodie said feelingly, holding the child tight against her until they both needed to breathe. “Getting better now.”
While Paddy was there, under her feet as she did some desultary housework and prattling about her day with Marta Szarabeijka - “We went shopping and then we went to the park. There was a dog chasing the ducks. Mrs S swore at it in Polish and it ran away. Then she swore at the ducks” - it was possible to distance herself from what was already feeling like a bad dream.
Last year Brodie Farrell was so typical a middle-class housewife and mother she could have starred in the adverts. Good family, good education, satisfying but not overly demanding job, marriage to a professional man; gave up work to have her child and look after her nice house in the better part of Dimmock and go to coffee mornings and charity lunches with other women who were exactly like her.
But even then she hadn't lived in an ivory tower. In seven years working for a solicitor she'd met every kind of criminal - and people who struck her as even less desirable, people she'd have climbed five storeys rather than share a lift with. But the sight of Daniel Hood's injuries had shocked her to the core. She hadn't known there were people capable of such atrocity. Now she'd seen it and still couldn't quite believe it. While Paddy was splashing in the bath and swearing in Polish at the yellow plastic duck it was almost possible to think she'd imagined it.
When Paddy was clean, dry, bundled up in her pyjamas and tucked, improbably angelic, into her bed, still Brodie put off the moment when she would be alone with her thoughts by reading not one but two stories from the
Big Book of Dragons
. For the child of two essentially conventional people, Paddy Farrell had shown an early streak of individuality. Not puppies and kittens but dragons; not dolls but tractors. She knew the difference between a John Deere and a Massey Ferguson three fields away. Kind people on trains who noticed her interest in “the big twactors” were apt to get a lecture on the subject.
But whatever her mental age, her body was just four and she was asleep before the second dragon had found a way to palm the nagging princess off on a gullible knight. Brodie went into the living
room and tried to watch television. Unwanted images drifted between her eyes and the screen. She went into the kitchen to make a cake. She wasn't a serious cook but she did rather pride herself on her marmalade cake.
She weighed, she measured, she sifted, she rubbed. The necessary precision of the mundane activity occupied her mind. She scorned the mixer and buried her hands to the wrists, rubbing and blending until her shoulders ached. She made so much mixture she wasn't sure she'd have enough baking tins. It hardly mattered. The cakes were the end-product but not in fact the purpose of her industry.
The last scrapings shoe-horned in, she began to load the oven as carefully as if the cake had been Minton going into a kiln. That was her undoing. In thinking about the logistics she forgot the fundamental rule of cooking: ovens are hot. She burned her hand.
It wasn't a bad burn. She hissed, shoved the last tin in any old way and put her hand under the cold tap. After a minute she pulled if out to see if it was working. Heat mounted immediately in the red spot on the back of her hand. More cold water and she tried again; same result.
Then she thought of the burns on the body of Daniel Hood. All the little burns, not one of them life-threatening but each of them the source of more pain than this was giving her. And no cold running water to take the worst away; and not even the knowledge that time alone would eventually bring relief. For Daniel Hood, time had just brought more little burns - dozens of them, she hadn't counted but there had to be dozens of them, scores of them, jostling for space on his cringing skin, spreading like a pox. And it wasn't an accident, the unhappy result of a moment's carelessness. Someone had
done
this to him: done it hour after unbearable hour.
Brodie burst into tears, sobbing into her arms on the kitchen table as if her heart would break.
When she regained control she let herself quietly out of the flat and went upstairs.
Marta Szarabeijka was watching television. A music teacher by profession, she had remarkably eclectic tastes. Sometimes when
Brodie came up here she was listening to the Berlin Philharmonic, sometimes she was watching
Emmerdale.
Brodie suspected this was where Paddy got her taste for tractors.
Tonight it was a game-show. Beside herself with excitement, Marta waved Brodie to a chair. “Sit down, sit down - one more inflatable reindeer and he gets to go to Lappland!”
Brodie remained standing. “Marta,” she said faintly.
Marta Szarabeijka knew a real crisis from a show-biz one even in the sound of a word. She turned off the television and put her arm about Brodie's shoulders in the same fluid movement. She was a tall, bony woman in her fifties, as strong as a mule and about as obstinate, and Brodie's life would have been poorer with almost anyone else living upstairs. Marta was her child-minder, her signer-for-unexpected-parcels, her confidante, her friend. The generation separating them was no obstacle: they enjoyed a kind of pick-and-mix relationship that was partly that of sisters, sometimes more like mother and daughter, most often that of a couple of college girls. They laughed together, complained about men to one another, dried each other's tears when the need arose.
Marta peered into Brodie's red-rimmed eyes with real concern and said quietly, “What happened? Is Paddy all right?”
“Paddy's fine,” Brodie nodded. “Though I'll have to get back. I came to see if you've got anything for burns.” She held out her hand. The red spot was barely visible but the word destroyed her. She fell on her knees on the carpet, hugging herself and rocking, and crying and crying and crying.
Marta dropped beside her, folding her in long bony arms, talking softly into Brodie's hair. “Is all right,” she crooned in her oddly gruff and accented voice, “is all right. Marta's here. Cry as much you want. Then we go downstairs and you tell me what this is all about. A little burn like that? - I don't think.” But before they left her flat she collected a jar from the bathroom cabinet.
Brodie had got her breath back enough to start feeling guilty. “What about the reindeers? Come down when it's over.”
“Fock the reindeers,” said Marta Szarabeijka briskly, shutting her door.
Paddy was still asleep, dreaming of combine harvesters. They tiptoed back into the living room and Marta turned her attention to Brodie's hand. “You want to tell me what happened?” She pronounced her Ys like Js.
Brodie wanted desperately to tell her what happened. But DI Deacon's warning echoed in her ears. She'd have trusted Marta with her life, but she'd given her word and wouldn't break it to get a little sympathy.
“I can't tell you much,” she mumbled. “I promised, and someone's safety could depend on it. But I did something in good faith that helped someone else do something terrible.” She looked down at her hand, comforted by Marta's potion. “Somebody got burned. I was trying so hard to rationalise it - I didn't know, there was no way I
could
know what they intended. And then I did this, and somehow it didn't matter who was to blame, what I knew and didn't know, only the pain. They couldn't have found him without me, and when they did they hurt him so much …

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