Requiem for a Dealer (26 page)

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Authors: Jo Bannister

BOOK: Requiem for a Dealer
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‘You always travel a single in the offside stall,' she explained briefly. ‘Until they reached the Channel, that was the left-hand side. So we go up the right side and duck under the breast-bar. I'll use my coat as a blindfold and untie her. There won't be room to turn her, she'll have to back off. Daniel, you'll need to keep the fire off both of us for as long as you can. If we can calm her down, it won't take half a minute. If we can't we won't be able to do it at all.'
For just a second longer he didn't move. ‘Why are you doing this?'
‘The same reason you helped me,' she said. ‘Because I can.'
‘I don't want you to die paying me back.'
‘I don't intend to,' she retorted, half laughing, half crying. ‘If this isn't going to work you won't see me for sparks.'
He tried to grin back, couldn't. Sick with anticipation, he nodded. ‘All right.'
When they reached the rear of the box Brodie was there too. Daniel shook his head. ‘Not you.'
‘Why not?' she demanded, ready to be offended.
‘Because of Paddy.'
She accepted that. ‘I'll do the gates, and wait for you here.'
They weren't the only people round the box, but everyone else was watching the flames at the front, and listening to the screams and desperate kicking of the pony inside, and cringing. Perhaps no one else realised there was a bigger door at the back. Certainly no one saw them move towards it. Someone would have stopped them if they had.
Ally was right: Daniel would never have worked out the slide-bolts for himself. She touched the metal cautiously but there was no heat in it yet, which was a good sign. Then she gripped and yanked, and the ramp came down. Even before it touched the cobbles, without further instruction Brodie was reaching for the gates. As she dragged the first one aside Daniel was doing the same with the second.
Just for a second, God knows how, he'd forgotten what it was they were trying to rescue. The flying hooves that had been
hammering on the gate didn't stop when the gate was moved – they hammered on Daniel instead, driving into his ribs with enough force to bowl him down the ramp.
‘Careful!' yelled Ally.
‘Uh-huh,' grunted a winded Daniel.
Then they were inside. Daniel tried to tell himself the situation wasn't as bad as it looked from the courtyard, that the fire which had flared up quickly in the nest of dry straw prepared for it was now growing more slowly as it had to find its own fuel. But there was no doubt that it was growing. Another interesting point was that this was a van, not a trailer. Somewhere, possibly under their feet, was a fuel tank. Daniel had no idea if the van ran on petrol or diesel, but he knew that when fuel tanks explode they go not with a whimper but a bang. Halfway through the box he hesitated.
Ally crashed into him from behind, driving him forward. ‘Keep moving!' she yelled. ‘We haven't time to think about this.' So he did.
Trying to get away the pony had stretched her rope to a bar like iron. She'd been loaded by professionals: it was fastened with a quick-release knot, but it couldn't release under pressure like that. Ally tugged and tugged at the end and nothing happened. ‘She needs to take a step forward.'
Daniel looked at the fire in the front of the box, licking up the timber-lined sides and curling back under the roof, and his eye was white-rimmed like the pony's. ‘She's not going to do that!'
‘She has to. Or she's dead.'
She flung her coat over Gretl's head and tied the sleeves under her chin, a bit like a baby's bonnet. Daniel couldn't see how blinding the poor creature would help, but it did. Some of the panic went out of her. Her cries turned to desperate gasping snorts, and she stood shaking, stamping her feet; but she stood. Alison, as if unaware of the flames climbing over her, stroked her face and her neck where the butterscotch coat curled with dripping sweat, and spoke gently to her.
Daniel was doing the best he could to fight the fire with his sweater. It wasn't much of a weapon and the fire was winning. ‘Now,' he gasped. ‘Ally, it has to be now. There is no more time.'
But all Ally said was, ‘Shhh.'
All Brodie could see from the rear ramp was the flickering of a fire occulted by its own smoke and by figures moving through it. She couldn't hear their voices over the wild trampling of the pony. She kept her word and stood at the gate, and counted the seconds and the tenths of seconds, and still they didn't come.
Finally she could bear it no longer. She shouted into the burning box, with as much authority as she could muster with her voice quaking, ‘You have to come out now, Daniel. You did your best — you have to come out now. Grab Ally and leave. Now! Daniel — please!'
Someone grabbed her elbow tight enough to hurt and it was Deacon who'd hurried to the back of the box, drawn by her yells. Lit by the red and yellow flames his face was gargoyle-twisted with incomprehension. ‘They're in there?
You let them go inside?'
She knew he was going to follow them. She didn't want him to. She thought she was losing Daniel, and that would be unbearable. But what if she lost Deacon too, trying to save him? She hung onto his arm with all her strength. But his strength was the greater, and he cast her off.
His foot was already on the ramp when something changed: the quality of the light coming from the box. A patch of darkness appeared in the middle of it, and grew, and took on the shape of figures. Three of them. Out of hell walked – one of them backwards – a man, a girl and a pony.
Someone found a tank of rainwater in the courtyard and, dunking a coat in it, laid it over the animal's back. It wasn't until later that Deacon discovered the coat was his.
Daniel pulled up his shirt gingerly to examine the brace of semicircular imprints on his middle. ‘How do you know if you've cracked a rib?'
‘You can't breathe well enough to talk about it,' said Brodie briskly.
‘Is everybody all right?' asked Deacon, moving round the little clusters of people. ‘Is anyone hurt? Do we need an ambulance? Daniel?'
‘I'm fine,' said Daniel — adding,
sotto voce
and with a sidelong glance at Brodie, ‘Apparently.'
‘Miss Barker?'
‘Me too.'
‘What about the pony? Do we need a vet?'
‘Yes. I don't think she's burnt, at least not seriously, but she'll be in shock — she'll need fluids. We'll need transport for her too.'
He nodded and made the calls. He also summoned a fire engine, though he doubted it would arrive in time to save the van which was now ablaze from breast-bar to breaching. Only once help was on its way did he get round to checking what he thought he already knew. ‘I don't suppose anybody got a shot into the bastard who did this?'
A chorus of shaking heads all round. No one had fired at all. The only glimpse anyone had had of him was the leaping figure silhouetted against the flames. After that there was no time to look for him.
‘Daniel. You spent a couple of hours with this guy Kant. What can you tell me about him?'
‘He's the vet, the one with access to the tranquillizer. We were right about how they were doing it. He put the packages into the pony in Belgium, and they'd just come out the other end when you people announced your arrival with a marching band.'
Ally blushed, her cheeks bright as the flames. ‘That was me. Sorry.'
‘Don't worry, you redeemed yourself.' Daniel grinned, and she beamed back.
Deacon dragged them back to the matter at hand. ‘So he got what he was waiting for and he left. Where would he go?'
‘To the factory, I think. He was still intending to deliver the stuff. But that was before you guys showed up. Maybe by now he's on his way home by the shortest route.'
Deacon thought about what Kant had already done, about what Windham had said about him. ‘And leave the job unfinished? When he's got a rare and valuable chemical in his pocket? When to bring in another consignment he'd have to face Customs again? I don't think so. He'll do what he said – make for the factory. This could be their last batch of Scram for a while: they're not going to waste it.' He turned expectantly towards Daniel.
‘You're going to ask me where the factory is, aren't you?' guessed Daniel ruefully. ‘I'm sorry, I don't know. He didn't volunteer the information, and I was too scared to press him.'
Deacon gave a gruff little chuckle. ‘Don't worry about it. I would have been too.'
Daniel appreciated his kindness, unexpected as it was, but he didn't believe him for a moment. ‘He said if I stopped annoying him he'd let me go. I don't know if he meant it. He might have done, because he didn't tell me anything that you wouldn't already know or could guess. Except …' And then he stopped.
‘What?' asked Deacon.
Watching him, Brodie knew he was struggling with something. Her voice was soft. ‘What is it, Daniel?'
On reflection he didn't see why he shouldn't come straight out with it. It was, after all, what the girl had thought all along, and been told wasn't possible. Told, in essence, to go away and come to terms with the fact that she hadn't lost her father, he'd left her. In time she'd be glad to know that he'd had no choice. ‘He said — he gave me to understand – that they killed Stanley Barker.'
Ally took a breath so sharp it sounded like ice cracking.
Deacon pursed his lips reflectively. ‘Did he indeed? That was supposed to have been investigated.'
‘It was important to them that it looked like an accident,'
Brodie said simply.
Deacon sniffed. ‘It seems we owe you an apology, Miss Barker. So it was Windham after all? How the hell did he manufacture an alibi that put him on another landmass?'
Daniel shook his head, sprinkling ashes of burnt straw like dandruff. ‘I don't think he did. At least, that's what the vet – Kant? — said. He said it wasn't him either. Which means someone else is involved.'
So Voss had been right and he had been wrong. With Kant extracting supplies of the tranquillizer in Germany and Windham transporting it to England, they'd needed a third man to make the pills. Deacon caught himself pretending to have thought so all along: the scowl was for his childishness. ‘I suppose, if we find the factory we find the third man. But now we've lost Kant, where do we look for the factory?'
‘Windham knows,' suggested Brodie in a low voice.
Deacon chuckled darkly. ‘What, you think I'm going to take him behind the bicycle sheds and find out? It doesn't work that way, Brodie. Even playing by
my
rules it doesn't work that way.'
‘He told you about Kant. And about this place.'
‘He told us what he had to when the alternative was becoming an accessory to murder. He wasn't turning Queen's Evidence – the only one he was trying to help was himself. Now Daniel's safe he'll clam up again.'
‘He's already an accessory to murder,' said Ally tightly. It was the first thing she'd managed to say since Daniel's revelation. ‘My dad's. If this other guy killed him, why wouldn't he say so?'
‘Because he doesn't have to,' Brodie said patiently. ‘He can prove that he didn't kill your father. He can afford to wait and see how much the police have or manage to get. Of course he's implicated – we know it, and he knows we know it. It may come down to what can be proved. He may claim he was just driving the lorry: where he drove it, and what was in it, was down to Kant. That he never knew what he was carrying.'
‘Nobody's going to believe that!' exclaimed Alison in amazement.
‘No, they're not,' agreed Deacon. ‘But proving the extent of his involvement may be difficult if that's how he plays it. His
story may be that he was peripheral to the operation, he wasn't trusted with all the details. That he doesn't know who else was involved, or where the factory is, or anything except that he was told to hold onto particular animals for two or three days and then someone he didn't know came and mucked out their stables for him. Of course the jury won't believe him. But they'll ask me to prove that he was in it up to his neck, and I'm not sure that I can.'
‘You mean they've beaten us?' Brodie was staring him straight in the face. ‘You mean, after all we've done, all we've been through – all right, all Daniel's been through – they've achieved exactly what they set out to achieve: they've smuggled another consignment of tranquillizer in from Germany and right now it's on its way to their factory to be turned into Scram, and nothing we've done has stopped them or even slowed them up?'
‘Welcome to my world,' sighed Deacon wearily. ‘We've got a word for operations like this.'
‘What word?'
He shook his head. ‘It's not a good out-loud word.'
She let it pass. ‘Roadblocks?'
‘He's not on the road. He's travelling across country, with everything he needs in his coat pocket. If it takes him two days to reach the factory, that's no problem to him. He'll do everything necessary to stay out of sight – not exactly hindered by the fact that there's still nine hours of darkness ahead.'
‘Bloodhounds, then?'
‘Went out with deerstalker hats and really big magnifying glasses.'
‘There must be
somethingwe
can do!'
‘There is. I can wrap up here and start interviewing Windham. Miss Barker, I'd like you to stay with the pony until the vet arrives, but after that the three of you can go home. Take my car, someone'll give me a lift.' Then he looked around him. The fire was already dying back, letting in the chill of the night. ‘Has anybody seen my coat?'
 
 
The on-call vet agreed with Alison's assessment. Brodie was the tallest: he had her hold the bottle above her head as he ran liquid into the pony's veins. There was some singeing to the coat but no burns to the skin. He administered a sedative, got a warm rug onto her and loaded her – with surprisingly little resistance, in view of what had happened last time she was on a box – into the trailer that arrived soon after he did. The driver asked Deacon for a destination.
For a moment Deacon was nonplussed. He'd have known what to do with a car which had been used to smuggle drugs, but you can hardly book a pony into a police garage. ‘Brodie, where were you going to have this thing delivered?'
‘Appletree Farm, in Cheyne Warren,' she replied. ‘But I don't know if he'll be able to take it tonight. Windham was supposed to keep it for three days first. Dieter may not have a stable ready.'
Deacon chucked his head and snorted, a bit like an irritable horse himself. ‘Which kind of raises another point, doesn't it? If Windham has horses in his yard, do we need to make arrangements for them now we've arrested him? Or does he have a wife or a partner to look after them?' He was looking at Ally.
She shook her head. ‘He lives alone. But he's abroad with the lorry a lot – he has a couple of local girls coming in to feed and exercise.'
‘OK. So we could take the pony there.'
‘There won't be anyone there in the middle of the night. I could go with her and get her settled in – put down a bed and make up a meal that'd hold her until the girls show up around eight – but I imagine the yard's locked up.'
Which wasn't what Deacon wanted to hear. ‘Well, I can't put it in the Evidence Locker until morning. Will somebody offer me a sensible alternative?'
So Ally did. ‘Why don't we take it to Peyton Parvo? I expect Mary's in, but if she isn't I have a set of keys – I can do everything that's necessary.'
It was as good a solution as Deacon could have hoped for. ‘Do it.' He thought a little longer. ‘I don't suppose it's in any danger
now? I shouldn't post a guard on it for fear of someone turning up to …' He wasn't quite sure what, let the sentence hang around until it faded.
Ally smiled. ‘What, silence it? Stop it attending an identity parade, prevent it from taking the witness box? I don't think so, Mr Deacon. It's only a pony. It stopped being of any value to anyone the moment it took a million dollar dump.'
He was watching her with half a smile on his lips. He'd misjudged Alison Barker in a number of different ways, but this casual indifference wasn't fooling him. ‘Only a pony? So why did you risk your neck for it?'
She hadn't really an answer. ‘It was Daniel's idea.'
‘It was Daniel's idea that you risk your neck in a burning horse-box while he watched?'
‘Don't be silly!'
‘So it was Daniel's idea to risk
his
neck in a burning horse-box, and your idea to help him.'
She couldn't argue with that. ‘I suppose.'
He shook his head, and if there was disbelief in his gaze there was also respect. ‘What is it with women and horses? I know that was a cheap one, but even a better one wouldn't have been worth as much as a family car. You wouldn't have risked being burnt to save a car!'
The girl laughed out loud. ‘Of course not. A horse is a living creature. It has a value quite apart from what someone might be prepared to pay for it. An animal's life is cheap, but not to the animal — it's the only one it has. If you want them, you owe it to them – or perhaps not even to them but to whoever's keeping score – that there's something in it for them. You look after them. You treat them decently. You don't watch them burn if there's something you can do about it.'
Deacon went on regarding her for a moment – dirty, soot-stained, her hair tangled in her face. ‘Your father teach you that?' She nodded. ‘I'd have liked your father.'
She nodded. ‘A lot of people did. He was a decent man, a man with a lot of friends. Right up to the moment that he was found face-down in a pond, at which point all the people who'd liked him, all his friends, and all the professionals whose job it was to
find out what happened to him, decided he was actually a bit of a coward who'd commit suicide rather than deal with failure. A lot of people let him down, Mr Deacon. The police among them.'
He wasn't a man who took criticism graciously, least of all from members of the public who – this was the irony – he would have given his life to protect. Brodie held her breath.

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