True Witness (18 page)

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Authors: Jo Bannister

BOOK: True Witness
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Concussion destroys the sense of time, but certainly an hour must have passed and it was unlikely Cochrane was still on the downs. But Deacon couldn't take it on trust. If by chance he was it would be possible to cut him off before he vanished into the wider countryside because all the lanes of the Three Downs funnelled together into half a dozen roads. A car at each would prevent the Land Rover leaving.
The police-cars struggled to turn and then sped off in directions indicated by Deacon's stabbing finger. George Ennis left too: the van was in the way and he knew Brodie would want to go with her friend. When Deacon had calmed down enough to see that he ought to be in hospital.
There was a lot of engine noise, a bit of shouting, the flare of headlamps, then suddenly there were just the three of them – Daniel, Brodie and Deacon.
The policeman stood with his arms crossed on his chest, looking down at the young man hunched on the verge, his face grey between the bruises and the blood. He shook his head. “Daniel, what in hell am I going to do with you?”
Daniel had been hurt and he'd been frightened. But he wasn't frightened now. “You're going to listen to me, Inspector. Because you're not looking for a murderer any more. You're looking for two.”
 
 
At Brodie's insistence he told his story in the car on the way to Dimmock General. There was a brief hiatus while he was in Radiography, and he finished the telling while having his head stitched up.
There was no fracture but he'd taken a beating and the doctor wanted to keep him overnight for observation. Since his own bed was ashes he raised no argument, knowing he'd sleep as soon as his pounding head hit the pillow.
But Deacon wasn't ready to let him sleep. He wanted to know everything Daniel knew. He wanted to go over it again and again until he had every detail nailed in his mind. Neil Cochrane killed Jamie Wilton, Peter Krauss and Gavin Halliwell. And he didn't kill Chris Berry.
“You believed him?”
“Yes,” said Daniel. “I know he wasn't the man on the pier. And if the rest of it wasn't true, why would he say it?”
“Why say it anyway? What did he have to gain by confessing to three murders? What did he want you to do with the information?”
But Daniel couldn't help him. “I thought he wanted me to be his biographer. But he never asked. Then I thought maybe he just wanted to put the facts on record. He thinks he can stay ahead of you, but if he's never caught he never gets to tell his story. What he did, how he stopped doing it, how it wasn't him when it started again. He's bitter about that. Outraged. He hoped I could tell him who it was.”
“Was that the reason?” wondered Brodie. “He thought you could tell him who'd squandered ten years of his life, but only if he explained why it mattered so much?”
“Maybe,” Daniel nodded slowly. “He was deeply offended that someone had used him like that. He was much more upset at what had been done to him than at what he'd done. I was glad I couldn't help him.”
Deacon raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
Daniel cast him a furtive glance. “If I'd known who it was at the pier, I'm not sure I could have kept from telling him. I said I wouldn't let him hurt anyone else, but … He really wanted that name, you know, if he'd thought I had it … I don't know what he'd have done to get it.”
Brodie stood up abruptly. “It's time we left you to rest,” she said pointedly. “Mr Deacon, can I impose on you for a lift? I left my car in town.”
Deacon hadn't finished questioning Daniel, except that he
rather suspected from Brodie's tone that he had. “So how did you get to the downs?”
“In George Ennis's van. We were out looking for Daniel too.”
She'd succeeded in surprising him. “Ennis?”
“I'll explain while you drive me home.”
 
 
“So you were both right,” she said as Deacon drove. “You were right about Cochrane being a murderer. Daniel was right about him not killing Chris Berry.”
“You mean, I should have listened to him sooner,” said Deacon ungraciously.
“Maybe he should have listened to you too. He wouldn't have got his head beat in if he had.”
“But he didn't get his head beat in, did he?” said Deacon pensively. “Not actually. I wonder why not.”
“Because he can identify the killer. The other one.”
“Why should that matter to Cochrane? Even if we find the man, what good does it do him? – he's going to be either in prison or on the run. It's academic what happens to the other guy now.”
“He doesn't think it's academic,” said Brodie. “He thought it was worth blowing a cover that served him for ten years. Cochrane doesn't see how he can carry on here now; so his first priority is making sure that the man who put him in that position pays the price. That's why Daniel's still alive: so when you find the killer you'll have the means to convict him.”
Deacon gave a disheartened little snort. “He has a touching faith in my abilities.”
“He knows how good you are at this. He knows how close you came to him. If you'd had a witness ten years ago you'd have got him. He's hoping you'll be as dogged when you get your teeth into the man who killed Chris.”
“If,”
he said heavily. “
If
I get my teeth into him. If Cochrane
didn't kill Chris Berry I have no idea who did. And I've no idea how to find out.”
Jack Deacon wasn't a man whose soul benefited from confession. But something about Brodie Farrell prompted him to candour. He wasn't trying to impress her: lies would have served better than honesty if he had been. He had no illusions about himself. He knew that, on the thinking woman's wish-list, men like him came just below cystitis. He had no class, and no aspirations to it. He wouldn't even describe himself as a rough diamond: anyone chipping away at his rocky exterior would end up with only blisters. He was nothing other, and certainly nothing more, than he appeared to be.
But if he had had the power to attract women, Brodie Farrell was the sort of woman he'd have liked to attract. Perhaps because she was the sort of woman he had least experience of. Apart from other police officers, the only people policemen meet are criminals, victims and barmaids and Brodie was none of these. There was a strength about her, a self-possession, which he admired. She looked life in the eye and dealt with both the good and the bad. Deacon envied her cool aplomb, and never suspected that every trait he admired in her was the result of two years' dragging herself back from the brink of despair. As much as Daniel, she was the product of her own efforts, the realisation of her own blueprint.
Brodie didn't know what was going through his mind. But she recognised a compliment when she heard one, and Jack Deacon opening his heart to her certainly qualified. She liked him better than he might have guessed. She smiled at the troubled, irritable side of his face. “Do you have to get back? Or have you time for a coffee?”
He drove home with one foot on the accelerator and the other one kicking himself. His face was set in hard, bitter lines and his eyes were smoky with self-loathing.
“Memo,” he said to himself savagely. “When a beautiful, sophisticated woman asks you in for coffee you say yes. If she offers you meths, you say yes!”
Brodie watched him go with a smile. She thought, If I ever need to blackmail you I'll threaten to tell people you're shy. Then she went inside.
They let Paddy sleep. Marta made some supper. “Daniel – he's all right?”
“Yes, he is. He got knocked about a bit but he'll be fine.”
The tall Polish woman nodded thoughtfully. “So he was right.”
“About what he saw? Yes, he was.”
“So who
did
kill the runner boy?”
“We don't know, Marta. Daniel doesn't and the police don't. If they come up with another suspect he can tell them if they're right. Until then I don't see what any of us can do.”
Marta sniffed. “I know what I can do. In the morning I give you your child back, and Daniel can have my spare room.”
 
 
It was midnight before Brodie fell into bed. In a state of nervous exhaustion she didn't expect to sleep. But she did. For eight hours straight, and when the alarm went off she was dreaming about George Ennis's van.
There was nothing particularly odd about that. In her time she'd dreamed about walking statues, space travel and the Isle of Wight, so it was only when the dream refused to fade, kept intruding on her waking thoughts, that she began to think someone was trying to tell her something, and it was her.
Brodie didn't believe in precognition. She did think that sometimes, in the middle of the night when everything was quiet and the demands on it were minimal, the brain set about spring cleaning – solving problems, resolving concerns,
tidying up left-over anxieties – and that dreams could be an expression of that. They couldn't predict the future. They might cast light on past events and present worries.
But a van? She didn't have unfulfilled yearnings for a truck-driver. She didn't ache to throw off her responsibilities and hit the road. She had, as it happened, made love in the back of a van and had found it more uncomfortable than erotic. So what was she trying to tell herself? To what was she trying to draw her own attention?
But the harder she chased the faster the spectre fled; the quicker she turned, the more rapidly the shadow behind her dissolved. Annoyed, she shook her head and tried to catch up on some work.
At ten-twenty Marta phoned to say she and Paddy had been in a taxi to collect Daniel from the hospital, he'd fallen asleep on the sofa and now Paddy was sitting on the floor beside him in case he woke up needing to hold someone. Not for the first time Brodie wondered how on earth she and John, two essentially ordinary people, had managed to produce a child at once so innocent and so knowing.
She wanted to talk to George Ennis, partly to thank him for his help the previous evening, partly to apologise for running out on him, most of all to make sure he knew what Daniel had discovered. That he'd been right ten years ago. That Neil Cochrane was the killer he believed him to be.
Jack Deacon might have called him. They'd worked the case together, no one understood better than Deacon the frustration of their failure or the horror when it returned to haunt them. But Deacon would be busy. Ennis needed to know that he'd been right ten years ago, but failing to prove it hadn't cost any more lives.
Brodie thought he'd probably call her after Deacon called him. When she hadn't heard from him by eleven, she shut the office and walked up Fisher Hill to
The Attic Gym.
There was a car parked out front, a silver hatchback with eight-year-old plates and a dented wing. Nathan Sparkes
was working out in the otherwise empty gym, brow lowered in concentration, beating the stuffing out of a punchbag.
He didn't notice her come in and, reluctant to distract him, she headed upstairs to the flat. He wasn't just exercising his muscles, he was exorcising his ghosts. In his own head that wasn't a punchbag he was hitting.
He must have glimpsed her out of the corner of his eye, or heard her step on the stair, because he stopped punching and staggered back, panting. Brodie turned to say, “It's all right, it's only me.” And then she saw his face, and his hands.
So Ennis reckoned he was all right, did he? Calmer? The boy was fragmenting before her eyes. His face had fallen to a death-mask, sallow skin stretched taut over the high bones, hollow-eyed. Driving himself to exhaustion wasn't ridding himself of his demons, it was laying him open to them. They had a bit in his mouth and were riding him. He couldn't stop any more, didn't know how to. He threw himself back on the bag, pock-marked with blood from his ungloved knuckles, and his eyes were stricken with the knowledge that, however hard he hit it, it wouldn't hit back.
Brodie hurried to him, put her arms around his shoulders. His vest was saturated, the sweat cold on his skin and pooled in the hollows of his collar-bones. He hadn't got like that in a few minutes. He could have been standing there, battling his hags, since the place opened.
“Nathan, stop it. Stop now. Please, Nathan – you have to stop.”
By degrees her voice, authoritative and insistent, penetrated the darkness in which he'd cocooned himself. There was no strength left in his arms, the well-oiled machine running on fumes alone. The punchbag hardly moved when he hit it. Slowly his eyes slid back into focus and he saw where he was and what he was doing. Brodie saw them flicker with confusion and despair.
His knees buckled under him. Brodie wouldn't let him
fall: she went down with him, still holding him, steadying his head against her. She heard his racked breath turn to sobs.
She wasn't far from tears herself. “Nathan, this is
crazy
,” she insisted, her voice cracking. “You
can't
believe Chris would want to see you like this. You mourn lost friends, you don't immolate yourself over them. What happened was a tragedy. But so is this, Nathan. So is this.”
His strong young body went to butter in the compass of her arms, melting into the contours of her. She held him tight. She couldn't think what else to do for him. “What is it? Why are you doing this?”
“My fault,” he whined into the shoulder of her jacket. “My fault.”
Brodie shook her head. “Everyone feels that way when they lose someone. Something dreadful happens and everyone tries to blame themselves. You think if you'd done something different Chris would still be alive. If you'd been with him, if you'd stayed in instead of going to the pub, or …”
She wasn't helping. The sobs were turning him inside out. It was as much as he could do to form a few words. “The car,” he stammered. “The damned car …”
She struggled to understand. “You had it that night? That doesn't make it your fault! You couldn't have imagined –”
But that wasn't it. He pushed her away, rocking back on his heels. His ravaged face was streaked with tears, the eyes swollen with guilt. “I trashed the wing. Four hundred quid's worth. I hadn't the money to get it fixed.”
He swallowed. Brodie didn't try to help. He needed to get this said, to tell someone what was tormenting him. When he was able he went on. “We argued. Chris said it was my problem, he wasn't going to bail me out. But I hadn't got the money so I kept on at him to pitch in.” His breath was coming faster, the words tumbling over themselves.
“So it was off the road when the day came that it mattered? If you hadn't bent it, or if you'd got it fixed, he'd have
been driving instead of walking and would never have met his killer?” It crossed Brodie's mind to wonder why the thing, still dented, was obviously road-worthy now. But pinning the details down mattered less than getting through to him that he was not responsible for his friend's death.
“Nathan, that's exactly what I'm saying. There are things in all relationships that we'd regret if the worst happened. Every action we take could conceivably lead to disaster. That doesn't make us responsible. There was no way you could guess that not having the car that particular night would lead to Chris's death. You don't even know he'd have been driving. If he'd had a couple of drinks he'd have left it and walked home, wouldn't he? And the same thing would have happened. You're not to blame, Nathan. You have to stop crucifying yourself.”
Upstairs a door opened and closed. The woman and the boy, both on their knees, looked up.
Brodie breathed a sigh of relief. She was saying all the right things but she wasn't sure Nathan was hearing them. If he wouldn't believe her, perhaps he'd believe his coach. Both hands occupied, she raised her chin in greeting. “George. Can you – ?”
But Nathan stiffened in her arms. He gave a little plaintive cry and shoved himself away from her, rolling to his feet in a fluid motion that a moment earlier he had not seemed capable of. Brodie was surprised enough to let him go. “Nathan?”
He ignored her. His eyes locked with Ennis's for a second, then he spun and ran. He crossed the gym in a couple of strides, fumbled briefly with the door and was gone.
Ennis came down the stairs two at a time, his eyes ablaze. “What was that about?”
Brodie rose to her feet, spreading her hands in a gesture of confusion. “Beats me.”
“What did he say?”
“He was telling me about the car. He blames himself for not getting it fixed. He reckons if he had Chris wouldn't
have been walking on the seafront at two in the morning. I told him no one can read tea-leaves that well, it wasn't his fault, but he was in no mood to believe me. He'd beat himself stupid on that damned punchbag. Did you see his hands?”
But Ennis wasn't worried about bloody knuckles that would heal in a few days. He was worried about losing another of his golden boys. There had been nothing he could do to help Chris. But Nathan was teetering on the edge of undoing, and there was just time to snatch him back, if he'd allow himself to be saved. “Come on,” Ennis said roughly, “we have to find him.” The black van was in the back yard. Despite the urgency it took vital seconds extricating it.
Brodie climbed up beside him, her eyes on his face. “You don't think he'd hurt himself?”
“I don't know,” gritted Ennis. “A week ago I'd have said he could take anything the world could throw at him. Now? I really don't know. He's been torturing himself over what happened. It didn't help that you kept raking over the coals.”
That was unfair, but a worried man's aim isn't to be depended on. Brodie shrugged. “I was trying to help my friend. I'm sorry if I hurt yours.”
He looked at her then and couldn't justify his anger. “No, I'm sorry. I'm doing the same as Nathan: failing to distinguish between reasonable actions and unforeseeable consequences.” He twitched a brief smile. “I always seem to be apologising to you.”
Brodie smiled too. “You don't have to. If I'd been through what you have I'd be behaving a great deal worse.”
They reached the street. The silver car had been pointing down the hill and Ennis turned towards the seafront. He said quietly, “If you thought too much about it you'd fall apart. You get through by concentrating on one thing at a time. You don't let yourself look at the whole picture. You deal with the details, one at a time.”
Brodie bit her lip. “Where do you think Nathan's heading?”
He spared her a sharp glance. “Well, that's the sea and the pier's just up there. Where do you think?”
As they reached the esplanade the silver car came into view. Martin had driven as far as the pier and pulled off onto the paved concourse. Once it had been populated by candyfloss machines and Laughing Policemen, and people counting out their pennies to pass through the turnstiles onto the pier. Now the sweet-sellers were gone, the turnstiles were gone and the policemen hadn't much to laugh about. All that stood between Nathan Sparkes and the place where his friend died were the notices forbidding entry and a plank barrier that was more rot than wood.
When the van drew up behind him Nathan put his foot hard down on the accelerator and the car took off like a racehorse, smashing the plank into matchsticks.
Brodie's jaw dropped and her eyes rounded in astonishment as the little car sped out along the wooden deck.
For a split-second Ennis hesitated. Then he pumped his own accelerator and the van surged forward through the splintered barrier.
For the same split-second Brodie couldn't bring herself to believe what he was doing. Shock paralysed her mind and her muscles. Then she shook free, grabbing for his arm. “George! No. You'll kill us all!”
“It'll hold,” he grated, still accelerating.
Brodie couldn't imagine why he thought so. The decking had huge holes in it where timbers had fallen through. It seemed to her that the vibration of two vehicles travelling up it at speed would shake the rotton pier apart. “It may hold
him,
” she shouted, still clutching his arm. “But this thing weighs twice as much as a car. If you bring it down about our ears, Nathan will die too.”

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