Closer Still (14 page)

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Authors: Jo Bannister

BOOK: Closer Still
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Donna shook her head. ‘No. I mean, little everyday things – who's creaming the profits, who's pilfering the goods. Nothing to get killed over.'
‘Was he at loggerheads with any rivals?'
Donna immediately became wary. ‘I don't know.'
‘He and Terry Walsh had a longstanding mutual dislike,' said Brodie. ‘Any developments on that front?'
That was easier to answer. ‘Not that I heard.'
‘Did he owe anyone money?'
‘Always. No more than usual.'
Brodie was running out of questions. ‘What about his personal life? Would you have known if he was seeing another woman?'
Donna laughed out loud. ‘Of course I'd have known. He'd have told me. We weren't married – we weren't even living together. If he'd found someone who actually liked him I'd have been happy for him. There was no one. I don't think he was looking for anyone. I think nights with his feet up in front of my telly suited him fine.'
Donna was making it sound like
The Little House on the Prairie,
not a criminal and his cathouse madam. Brodie frowned. ‘If he had no enemies, why is he dead?'
‘He must have had an enemy,' agreed Donna. ‘No, that's stupid – he had lots of enemies. But they were old enemies – he knew them, knew what they were capable of. He wouldn't have let any of them close enough to stick him. Someone took him by surprise. Whoever it was he went to meet.'
‘He went to meet someone?'
‘Must have done,' said Donna. ‘That place where they found his car – there was no other reason for him to be there. But that's funny too, because if he'd felt in any danger – any at all – he'd have taken muscle. He took
muscle if he was going down the betting shop. He took muscle if he was buying a birthday card. If he went alone he knew who he was going to meet and he wasn't expecting any trouble.' She looked up with a tremulous little smile. ‘The last mistake he ever made, yeah?'
Brodie twitched her a smile in return. But she was struggling with an incredible image. ‘Who the hell did Joe Loomis buy birthday cards for?'
The woman winced as if she'd been struck, and Brodie was immediately contrite. ‘I'm sorry, that was rude. It's nice that he bought you a card. It's nice that he had someone to watch television with. I didn't imagine him having much of a home life.'
‘He hadn't,' said Donna honestly. ‘He spent time with me because there was no one else. He'd reached a point in his life where he didn't even want anything more. Coming to me was easy, cheap, comfortable and undemanding.'
‘So he had no family.'
Donna's thin eyebrows drew together. ‘Actually, he had. He had a kid. But they never saw one another.'
For some reason Brodie was surprised. ‘A son or a daughter?' But Donna didn't know. ‘Who was the mother?'
But Donna shook her head. ‘I never knew her. Before my time, Joe said.'
So it wasn't a baby. It could be a teenager, or a grown man or woman. ‘And he had nothing to do with it?'
‘That was stupid,' Donna said sadly. ‘He could have kept in touch. He should have made the effort. I said to him, “It's not too late. You're the only father that kid's got,
and it's not like you've got any others. You should get in touch – get to know one another, make up for lost time.” And he said …he said …'
And Brodie watched in astonishment as this tough, intelligent woman wept over the memory of a vicious thug. ‘What did he say?'
‘He said,
Over my dead body!
' wailed Donna Sugden.
‘So Joe Loomis had a child.' Daniel sounded almost bemused.
‘Apparently,' said Brodie. ‘It wasn't part of his life. Donna said he wanted nothing to do with it.'
When she didn't get a response Brodie peered at him. But Daniel was off in his own private world and maintaining radio silence. ‘Daniel?'
Albert Einstein was asked once to explain how radio works. ‘Wire telegraphy is a kind of very, very long cat,' he said. ‘You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. And radio operates exactly the same way. The only difference is that there is no cat.'
There was an invisible cat connecting Brodie and Daniel too. When you stroked his back his head purred; when you pulled his tail he spat. Perhaps the cat had got longer and more relaxed than he once was, perhaps whole weeks passed now where you hardly noticed him at all. But there was always a cat. They had a way of knowing each what the other was doing, what the other was feeling, that drove Jack Deacon mad.
And Brodie felt like a hatpin to the heart the thoughts preoccupying her friend. ‘Daniel …'
He didn't try to deny it. Not just because he didn't lie, but because Brodie would know what he was thinking whether he lied or not. He gave a painful little smile. ‘It's all right. It's just, every so often it strikes me. That even a thug like Joe Loomis can produce something as perfect as a child. And I'm …really good with numbers.'
If this had been about anything else she'd have reached for his hand. But she was afraid of hurting him. She said softly, ‘If that's what you want – children – you have to find someone to have them with.'
Gentle and stubborn as always, he shook his yellow head. ‘Nobody gets everything they want. You try too hard, you lose what you have. Yes, I'd like a family – but not just any family. Everyone's choices carry a cost. There's a saying, isn't there? –
Take what you want, says God, and pay for it
. Well, this was my choice, this is the price tag. It's worth it to me. If it wasn't I'd do something else.'
His honesty transfixed her. There was no one in the world, not even him, to whom she would have revealed herself like that. Even when she felt that way, about her husband in the early years of her marriage, she never declared it; and the way the marriage ended seemed to prove her wisdom. Not even to punish him – and there had been a long time when she wanted desperately to punish him – would she have had John Farrell know just how much losing him had hurt. She would have suffered agonies rather than confess her weakness. In Daniel, though, it hardly seemed a weakness. His honesty about wanting something he could never have seemed almost like a strength.
‘If there was anything I could do …' she whispered.
‘I know.' His smile tore her heart out by the roots. ‘Brodie, this is the story of my life. The wrong time, the wrong place, the wrong person. I'm used to it. And wanting more out of this than you do doesn't blind me to the fact that I already get more out of it than I ever expected. I get you. Not all of you, but quite a bit. I get your children. I get people I care about caring about me. Don't underestimate that. A lot of people go their whole lives and never come close.
‘And one of them,' he added, giving himself a kind of mental shake and returning to the subject, ‘was Joe Loomis. He had a child – but he didn't know it and he didn't want to. How lonely is that?'
‘He had Donna,' mumbled Brodie, struggling to move on. ‘Without her I think he'd have been entirely alone.'
‘Well, I don't think having a child is what got Joe killed. Knowing him and what he did for a living, there have to be grimier secrets in his coal cellar. The mother might have set the Child Support Agency onto him – she wouldn't have stabbed him in the heart.'
Brodie thought he was probably right. Which left her without a lead to follow. ‘I've only found two people who had any kind of a personal relationship with him, and one of them was twenty years ago. Both of them thought Joe died because of the business he was in, because that's how gangsters die. I don't think there's anything more I can do. I'm not getting involved in a gang war!'
‘I'm very glad to hear it,' Daniel said as if he'd wondered.
‘But if that's what's going on, why isn't Jack more interested?'
‘Maybe he has bigger fish to fry.'
‘Bigger than a gang war?!!'
‘It doesn't sound like Jack, does it?' admitted Daniel. ‘I don't know. Ask him.'
 
Detective Sergeant Charlie Voss had been in tough spots before. He'd been beaten bloody. He'd been threatened with knives, guns and disciplinary action. He hadn't actually been shot before, but in fact the bullet crease to his thigh was not the cause of his current discomfort. This was the first time he'd been interviewed in bed by his senior officer, and even that he could have carried off with some residual dignity if he hadn't been wearing a T-shirt printed with the legend
Policemen do it with caution.
It was his fiancée's idea of a joke.
Someone else might not have noticed. But Deacon scrutinised the inscription as if it might have been a clue. Then he peered at Voss; then for a moment he shut his eyes. Only after that was he ready to move on. ‘Tell me what happened. Everything that happened.'
Voss supplied all the detail he could remember. A lot depended on what Deacon did next.
Deacon listened carefully but didn't interrupt, saving his questions until Voss had finished. Then: ‘Was Daoud here to blow things up?'
Voss hadn't realised there was a doubt. ‘He was a bit trigger-happy for a guy visiting friends!'
Deacon nodded ponderously. ‘I'm getting two stories,
Charlie, and I don't know which is right. The Dhazi cousins are telling me they were into drugs, not explosives. That they didn't know Daoud was a terrorist. He came to Dimmock from Pakistan with a suitcase full of heroin which they were going to sell to Joe Loomis.
‘But Dave Salmon is telling me – mostly by sign language, he's got so many tubes stuck in him it's like talking to a pipe organ – that Daoud graduated from drug trafficking a long time ago. That the only thing big enough to bring him here now was the prospect of killing infidels. That the Dhazis are lying – their house was being used by a terror cell, only they were still waiting for the stuff they were going to need and they think they can bluff their way out if they just keep insisting they know nothing about any bombs.'
Deacon pulled up a chair with his foot. ‘And I don't know which story's right. I know the Dhazis have every reason to lie and Salmon's telling me what he believes to be the truth. But lives depend on getting this right. Forensics say there's been no HMTD in the house. But if Daoud came to set up a bomb factory, until he got started there wouldn't be anything for Forensics to find.'
‘Then, if Daoud's dead and the Dhazis are in custody …?'
Deacon finished the sentence for him. ‘Are we in the clear? Maybe we are, Charlie Voss, maybe we are. Maybe it doesn't matter what Daoud was up to, maybe whatever it was died with him.
‘But the other possibility is that it didn't. That there's another house in Dimmock where intense young men
think it's more important to kill other people's children than live long enough to raise their own. Maybe all that's necessary to flatten the town centre is sitting in a garage somewhere right now, just waiting for someone to do the chemistry. When word gets back to whoever sent Daoud, they'll send someone else. So yes, it matters that we know what we're dealing with. I know what Salmon thinks. I want to know what you think.'
Voss didn't want to say. He didn't want to be part of a decision that could cost lives. But it was his job. He took a deep breath and forced himself back to Romney Road.
‘He didn't know there was a problem until he came upstairs. We were behind the bedroom door, just waiting for him to pass before we took him. But something warned him. I don't know what: good instincts, I suppose. Anyway, he knew we were there, and he knew he was in trouble – he didn't think we were just the Dhazi boys waking up. He came through the door gun first. He was ready to deal with any trouble he met.'
Something occurred to him. ‘If you're smuggling drugs, you know you're going to be in trouble if you're caught – but only if you're actually carrying them. Was he?'
Deacon shook his head. ‘Nothing. There was nothing in his rucksack but a change of clothes. According to the sniffer dog, there'd never been any drugs in there. Mind you, the other sniffer dog said there'd been no explosives in there either.'
‘OK,' said Voss. The point he was getting to was this. ‘A drug runner is only a drug runner if he's carrying drugs, but a terrorist is still a terrorist if all he's carrying is a well-formed
idea. There was no need for him to react as he did if he really had got separated from a suitcase full of heroin.'
Deacon was watching him intently. ‘You think he was here to make things go bang?'
‘Yes,' said Voss. ‘That's what they were talking about – him and DI Salmon. Dave told him I was an IRA bomb expert, and he questioned me about that. Why didn't he just say, “Leave me out of this, all I'm interested in is the drugs?” Why get involved in a conversation about the relative merits of HMTD and Semtex if your specialist subject is the opium poppy?'
Finally Deacon exhaled. There was no sense of relief in it. ‘So we still have a problem. We may have knocked them off their stride, we may have won a bit of time, but there are still young men living in the quiet streets around Romney Road who want to advance the cause of world peace by wiping out half the population of Dimmock.'

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