True Witness (17 page)

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Authors: Jo Bannister

BOOK: True Witness
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“Then someone with his own agenda took that from you. The sense of atonement, of closure. He made a bonfire of your hopes to fuel his desires. I understand your anger.”
Neil Cochrane searched Daniel's smeared face intently. He hadn't been this close to another human body for ten years and it took an effort of will to ignore the sensations it awakened. “Do you? Maybe you do.”
“What I don't understand,” said Daniel, “is why you didn't take what I offered. I believed in your innocence. You should have let me go on believing. You'd have been safe. I'd never have known any better.”
“You would,” said Cochrane, his voice low. “You'd have worked it out. I got careless. You weren't a policeman, I didn't think you were any danger to me, and I got careless. I don't think you noticed, but it was there in your head. You wouldn't have forgotten, or decided it was none of your business. Sooner rather than later you'd have wondered what it meant, and worried away at it until it came unravelled. I couldn't let you go.”
Daniel licked swollen lips. “Are you going to kill me?”
Murderers, even psychopathic murderers, can seem as normal as the next man. It would be handy if those who'd done what Neil Cochrane had done moved in an aura of evil, because then they'd be easy to find and easy to stop. If Cochrane had looked wicked or insane Daniel would not be here now. He didn't. For most of the time he seemed no odder than his lonely lifestyle explained.
But the look behind his eyes was not normal. Like the facets of a fly's eye it comprised individual fragments that
did not add up to a cohesive whole. Something was missing. He saw the same world other people did, comprehended it well enough to make it work for him, but there was no empathy. He didn't feel for other people. He knew the difference between right and wrong, but didn't feel the urge to be better rather than worse.
Three young boys had sat in the straw here, and asked the same question, and met that barren gaze for a reply. It wasn't that Cochrane was incapable of emotion, more that all his feelings were for himself. What he needed, what he wanted, what angered him. He'd looked on those boys as a hungry man looks at steak.
Dazed, afraid, chained and helpless, Daniel's situation was not so different to theirs. Like him they must have hoped against reason that somehow they could survive. That an opportunity for escape would arise, or a search-party would stumble on this ruin in the hills. So they'd endured what he'd done to them and waited for the split-second when they could snatch back their lives.
But the moment had never come. Cochrane ended the waiting with a wheel-brace. Now Daniel wanted to know if his own story was going to end the same way. He thought he was ready for the answer, whatever it was.
But Neil Cochrane wasn't ready to give it. His intense but still oddly detached gaze, unplumbable depths hidden by impenetrable shallows, scanned Daniel's face as if what he saw there puzzled him. “You want to live?”
It was the sort of question that could be answered only very briefly or at immense length. Daniel said softly, “Yes.”
“How much?”
Chills gripped his spine. “What?”
“How much do you want to live? What are you prepared to do to survive?”
Daniel swallowed. He knew the answer, he just wasn't sure it was what Cochrane wanted to hear. But how was he to judge? He couldn't second-guess a mind like that. For all
he knew the truth
would
set him free. He said, “Almost anything, but not quite.”
Cochrane went on staring at him for perhaps half a minute. Then, incredibly, he laughed. “I don't know if you're a brave man or a fool, Daniel Hood.”
Daniel's voice shook. “Neither. I'm a frightened man who sees no point in lying.”
“All right. Then, what
wouldn't
you do? Remember, this is your life we're talking about.”
There was a danger that he could give Cochrane a target to aim for. But he knew too much about suffering to overestimate his capacity for it, so the list was short. “I wouldn't hurt someone else. I wouldn't let you hurt someone else.”
“Who?”
Daniel blinked. “Anyone.”
Cochrane raised a sceptic eyebrow. “You'd die to protect a stranger?”
Reduced to a sentence it sounded absurd: gallant and foolish and improbable. But Daniel knew both his strengths and his weaknesses, even if he wasn't always sure which were which. He knew this was something he could do, and that saving himself at another's expense wasn't. “Yes,” he said simply.
Cochrane was nodding slowly. “A killer?”
His heart stumbled. “What?”
“The man you saw. The man who wasn't me. Would you tell me who he was? – if you knew.”
“I don't know.”
“But if you did.”
“I'd tell the police.”
“Yes. But would you tell me?”
He was determined on an answer. Daniel felt his gaze penetrating like knives. Finally he had to say something. He whispered, “No.”
There was no common ground between them: a man who felt nothing for other people and one who would, if need be, lay down his life. It would have been easy to discount as
hyperbole. But Neil Cochrane was unaccountably impressed by Daniel Hood. He didn't understand him, but then he didn't understand anyone except on the most superficial level. He didn't know why Hood in particular troubled him.
He sniffed. “Suppose I let you go. Would you tell the police about me?”
The answer was obvious, which meant Cochrane was testing him. “Yes.”
“You'd tell them everything I told you?”
“Yes. Of course I would: you
must
know that. Whatever I say now, you must know that if you let me go I'll tell the police what happened. Everything that happened.”
Cochrane shook his head in disbelief. “And you think that, knowing that, I'm going to let you walk out of here?”
Daniel's voice was barely audible. For just a moment he'd dared to think there could be a way out of this. The disappointment was unbearable. “No.”
“Turn round.”
Daniel's eyes flared. “What?”
“You heard me. Turn round.” When Daniel still didn't move Cochrane dragged him to his feet and shoved his face against the straw wall. “Keep still. This won't take a moment.”
When someone with the power of life and death over you issues an instruction, the natural instinct is to obey. Daniel knotted his fingers in the straw, pressed his hot cheek against its spiky roughness, squeezed his eyes shut and waited, shaking with fear.
He could hear Cochrane behind him. The man seemed to be looking for something. “Here we are,” he said mildly. “Now –”
But Daniel wasn't a dumb beast, waiting at an abattoir with no hope beyond the skill of the slaughterer. He was a man, and he wanted to live, and he didn't care if he angered his murderer. He'd made a credo of facing his enemies: he turned in defiance to face Cochrane.
He met the knotted end of a wheel-brace coming the other way.
George Ennis said, “Of course we looked for a bolt-hole. At the farm, out on the downs, even here in town. But we never found where he took them.”
“He has Daniel there now,” said Brodie.
Ennis breathed in and then out. “Then he's dead.”
“No!” She wouldn't let herself think that. “You don't know that. He's alive until we find out different.”
Ennis knew what he thought: that when Daniel Hood went alone to Manor Farm he gave himself up to a power neither he nor Cochrane could control. To Ennis he was already a shape on the ground with a chalk-line round him. But he could see the state Brodie was in, saw no reason to make it worse for her. “All right, then he's alive. Jack Deacon's looking for him, and he has all the information I ever had. I don't know how you think I can help.”
“Neither do I!” wailed Brodie. “But someone has to.”
Only when Ennis offered his handkerchief did she realise the tears were coursing down her face. Embarrassed, she took it and dried her eyes. “I'm sorry. I don't know what I'm doing here. I couldn't think where else to go.”
“I'd help if I could.”
“I know.” She pulled herself together with an effort and a watery smile. “How's Nathan now?”
“Nathan? Why?”
“He was pretty upset last time I was here. You were having a go at me and he thought you were having a go at him.”
“Oh. Yes.” He seemed to have forgotten. “He's better now. Calmer.”
“It must have been a terrible shock. At that age you think people live forever. Losing a close friend like that –”
“Yes,” Ennis said again. “Look, I'm not sure how much
good it'll do, but sitting and waiting is the hardest part. If you want we could join the search. We might get lucky.”
She knew he didn't think so. He was humouring her, trying to help her through this. The tears welled again. “That's very kind of you. I could go alone?” The question-mark expressed the hope that he wouldn't take her at her word.
“No, I'll come. If we stumble on something there ought to be two of us.” Also, he didn't think she should be driving. He shepherded her to his van. Extricating the big vehicle from the yard behind the gym took time and skill.
“Nathan must be a pretty good driver,” said Brodie.
Ennis glanced at her. “Why do you say that?”
“For you to trust him with this last night. Most eighteen-year-olds have their hands full with the family hatchback.”
Ennis shrugged. “You do what you have to when someone's in danger. It's only a van: if he'd put a dent in it, too bad. Machines are easier to fix than people.”
He drove not to Menner Down where Deacon was concentrating his search but to the adjacent Frick Down. “We can broaden the search without getting in Jack's way.”
Brodie nodded anxiously. She didn't dare speculate on the chances of success. If she had she'd have known they were minimal. She didn't look at Ennis for the same reason: it was in his face that he believed Daniel was already dead. But he was right, it was better to be doing something than nothing. Brodie threw herself into the search with the unreasonable dedication of the desperate.
But after they'd been threading the darkness for forty minutes, quartering the hillsides by lanes and tracks that twisted and doubled back and had them lost within half a mile of the main road, she knew they were never going to find Daniel this way. If he was alive he was a captive somewhere; if he was dead in a ditch they would drive past in the dark and never know. “We're just wasting time,” she said hopelessly.
“Do you want to go home?”
But she couldn't bring herself to quit. It felt like abandoning Daniel to his fate. “Soon.”
So they just drove, not even looking any more, going through the motions. At some point they crossed from Frick Down onto Chain Down. Further on they could see the lights of many vehicles.
“Jack's lads,” said Ennis.
Brodie found the sight oddly comforting, asked him to stop so they could watch. They couldn't see the cars, only the wash of headlights along hedges as they twisted and turned. Brodie counted eight of them. “They're doing their best, aren't they?”
“Of course they are,” said Ennis. “They're looking for a murderer.”
The breath caught in her throat. “I thought they were looking for Daniel.”
The man beside her winced. “If they find one they'll find the other.”
But Brodie knew what he'd meant, and her heart stumbled. She was acting like a fool. Everyone else knew her friend was dead. She said wistfully, “I wish Daniel could see this. He thinks Jack Deacon hates him.”
Ennis chuckled bleakly. “Jack Deacon hates everybody. It doesn't stop him being a damned effective police officer.”
He went to start the van again. Brodie's hand caught his wrist. “Look.”
He followed her gaze but couldn't see anything new. “What?”
For a moment she didn't answer. She wanted to be certain she wasn't imagining it. She watched the little fireflies sketch the meandering of the lanes, and for another minute she really wasn't sure.
Then she was. “They're all heading the same way. George – they've found something!”
 
 
Constable Vickers who found the body hurried back to his car to call it in. Then he took the blanket from the boot and spread it gently, and settled down to wait for Detective Inspector Deacon to find him.
A minute later his blanket groaned and sat up.
 
 
By the time Deacon arrived Daniel was more or less conscious. Vickers had bound his bloody head with half the First Aid kit before calling for further instructions. The duty sergeant in Dimmock told him to proceed carefully to the hospital. Deacon told him to stay where he was.
Three false turns later he finally found the area car. Vickers tried to make his report but Deacon wasn't interested. He brushed past to where Daniel was sitting on the verge, huddled in the blanket, enough bandage round his head to turban a Sikh. “Where is he?”
Daniel looked blearily at him. One eye was bloodshot and he thought Deacon was leaning to the left. Actually it was him that was tilting. “Who?”
Deacon's fists knotted as if clinging to his patience by a feat of physical strength. “Cochrane! That is who you were with?”
Daniel thought for a moment then nodded, carefully. “I don't know where he went. I don't know when.”
“What happened?”
“I thought he was going to kill me.” Daniel's voice was a low monotone, drained of emotion. Partly it was concussion, partly anticlimax. He'd expected to die, not to wake with a thumping headache. “He hit me with that wheel thingy. When I woke up he'd gone. But the chain was unlocked so I started looking for civilisation. This is as far as I got.” He flicked a tired smile. “I don't know how long it took. I kept passing out.”
Deacon looked around but the only lights were the cars. “Where were you? A house?”
“There was a house,” agreed Daniel. “Empty – derelict. And a barn. That's where he kept me. And yes,” he added, answering the next question, “it's where he kept the others too.”
An expression perilously close to triumph washed across Deacon's face. “I
knew
it! Where? Tell me where.”
“I don't know,” said Daniel wearily. “Not far. I might be able to find it in daylight.”
But Deacon couldn't wait. He stuck one arm behind him, snapping his fingers. Voss, who was fast learning to read his mind, put a map in his hand and he leaned down to read it by the light of a headlamp.
After a moment he straightened up angrily. “Where are we?”
Constable Vickers indicated the spot with a tactful fingertip. Deacon looked again. “There isn't a building within a mile of here. You think you walked a mile?”
Daniel shook his head. “No.”
“Then it's not on the map.” He slapped the offending item down on the car bonnet. “That's how he got away with it. He evaded us for ten years because some bloody map-maker didn't think it was worth recording a derelict farmhouse! He killed four boys, three of them while we were looking for this place.”
He caught Voss's expression then, and it wasn't critical – because an ambitious Detective Sergeant doesn't criticize his superiors in public, even by the look on his face – but it was guarded. “Well?” demanded Deacon sharply.
“Nothing,” said Voss quickly. “Nothing.”
Deacon knew better. The hint of surprise behind Voss's eyes was nothing to the sensation in the pit of his own stomach. He knew what Voss was too polite to ask. His own conscience was asking the same thing. “You want to know why we trusted to the map. Why, when it mattered so much, we didn't come and look on the ground.”
“Well – yes,” admitted Charlie Voss.
Deacon clasped his fingers behind his head, tightly
enough that the knuckles turned white and ached. He looked away over the dark landscape, dotted by an occasional distant light. His voice was bitter, and beneath that Voss heard despair. “Because every investigation is a compromise between time being spent and progress being made. We had everyone available looking everywhere we could think to look. There was no reason to suppose there
was
anywhere else. The map said not. Nobody mentioned a derelict property. We thought we'd done a thorough job, and he was keeping them somewhere else. In town, maybe, or an hour down the coast.
“How do you set about finding a derelict barn that's not on the maps and isn't visible from the road, when you don't even know it exists? Follow every ploughed-out lane on the Downs? There are hundreds of them. Every time two farms become one, half a dozen lanes fall into disuse. At first there's a wired-up gate; then the gate gets used somewhere else and a wire fence goes up; then the stone walls are robbed out to repair a more important boundary. Grass grows over the tyre-tracks, and within a few years there's nothing to see. If we'd thought to look, maybe we'd have found it. But we'd have had to take people off other leads that seemed more promising at the time.”
At least he was defending himself to someone who understood the practicalities of police work. When the Press got hold of this they'd want an explanation too – only none of them would have experience of organised searches, for evidence or missing persons, where the manpower was never enough and the time was always too short. They wouldn't know, as Voss did, that it takes hours –
hours
– for a crack team to thoroughly search one room. Menner Down stretched across fifty square miles. If you couldn't trust the maps …
He looked back at his sergeant. Voss wasn't judging him. He knew how easy it was to make a mistake, and how much one mistake could matter. If Deacon had known the look of
compassion, he'd have recognised it now. He said, with a kind of quiet despair, “A helicopter would have found it.”
Voss nodded sombrely. Then he shrugged. “It was ten years ago. Did you even have helicopters … ?”
“Of course we had helicopters,” snapped Deacon. “At least, we could call on them. For emergencies. Accidents, people in danger, missing children. I don't know if I'd have been given one to fly a search-grid over Menner Down on the off-chance an old barn had disappeared from the map.”
Voss risked a tentative grin. “I'm not sure you'd get one for that today.”
Deacon breathed out, nodding slowly. There had been a chance to stop Cochrane ten years ago; he hadn't realised; but maybe no one else would have done either. Not Divisional HQ, not the Assistant Chief Constable (Crime), not even the Press. Perhaps it had been a mistake on his part; but perhaps it was just the wonderful twenty-twenty vision afforded by hindsight.
Daniel was getting left behind. “Four?”
“Four?” echoed Deacon, puzzled.
“You said, he killed four boys.”
“That's right, you couldn't know. The boy at the brewery wasn't one of Cochrane's after all.”
“Neither was Chris Berry,” said Daniel.
 
 
When the lane snarled up with cars Ennis stopped. Before he had the handbrake on, Brodie was out of the van and running. It was too late to stop her, and anyway there didn't seem any reason to. The height of the van meant he could see over the tops of the cars, over the heads of the gathered officers, to the focus of their attention. And it was sitting up and arguing.
Brodie didn't know whether to hug Daniel or box his ears.
Jack Deacon couldn't remember the last time he felt the urge to hug someone, and he didn't now. He was keeping
his hands off Daniel's throat only by concentrating on more urgent matters. He was setting up road-blocks.

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