True Witness (24 page)

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Authors: Jo Bannister

BOOK: True Witness
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“I dare say he is. Teach him to do as he's told.”
“I mean, he can't get up.”
Cochrane spared him a glance. Daniel was an untidy knot where he'd hit the wall and fallen. He might have been dazed but he wasn't unconscious. His glasses had come off and his light eyes blinked owlishly.
“Get up,” said Cochrane.
He tried again, sank back with a moan.
“Do as you're told,” growled Cochrane. “I don't care if it hurts. Get up.”
He'd hit the wall with enough force to shatter his collar-bone. One arm hung uselessly. Whining in his teeth, he somehow got his feet under him and pushed himself up the wall. He stood swaying, whey-faced, cradling his right arm with his left.
“Now let's try that again,” said Cochrane. “The man responsible for all of us being here is in this room right now. Point him out.”
Daniel shook his head. The pain grated.
“For pity's sake, man,” hissed Deacon, disgust twisting his lips. “He isn't going to do what you want. Are you going to kill him an inch at a time?”
Cochrane looked at him. Deacon thought that if the farmer could have been sure of reloading he'd have shot him right there and then. But he wasn't. And he wasn't going to risk what he'd gambled everything for just to stop Deacon's mouth.
Instead he grabbed Daniel's sleeve and swung him between himself and the room. “You keep prodding me, Mr Deacon, and you're going to regret it. What am I going to do? I'm going to get what I came here for. From him, or from you.”
What stretched the thin lips wasn't a smile. It was cold, and cruel, and intelligent, but there was no humour in it. There's no satisfaction in hurting a man who's chosen martyrdom. He just wanted to finish this, and he thought he saw how. “And I'm getting pretty bloody tired of holding this gun.” Calmly, deliberately, he dropped the heavy barrels onto Daniel's right shoulder.
Daniel gasped and his knees buckled. Cochrane shook him. “Stand up! Fall down now and by God you'll never get up. Now talk. Somebody, start talking.”
It was nasty and brutal, and it was clever. It isn't easy to watch someone in pain when you have the means to end it. Every muscle in Deacon's body clenched. But if he jumped Cochrane he'd be risking the lives of innocent civilians. And a broken collar-bone was only a broken collar-bone. It was the sort of injury little girls get tumbling off ponies. You could fairly expect a grown man to set his jaw and deal with it.
Deacon had no idea what a shotgun weighed, but it would feel more resting on broken bone. A lot more; too much. Cochrane moved it around and Daniel tried not to whimper.
Deacon was trembling with impotent rage. Cochrane watched him over the gun, his eyes speculative. They both knew he'd have ripped Cochrane's throat out with his bare hands to stop this, and they both knew he dared not try. There was only one thing he could do to end Daniel's pain, and all his instincts and all his training forbade him to do it.
In spite of which he took a deep breath and said, “All right-”
“All right,” said George Ennis, stepping out of the ragged line-up.
Daniel had known him the moment he came into the room. He had said nothing until he'd inspected every man standing with him because that was what Deacon told him to do. Even sick with pain he could say nothing again, because he wouldn't be any man's executioner. But if Ennis intended to confess … But why would he – now, when it was clear how Cochrane meant to repay what he'd done? Perhaps he had another lie prepared. Or was he just trying to get close enough to grab the gun? Daniel tried to stay with the action because if something happened to alter the balance of power, however briefly, he didn't want to be busy fainting and miss it.
Ennis reached out carefully and lifted the steel barrels off Daniel's shoulder. His eyes held Cochrane's over the
younger man's head. “I'll tell you what happened. Leave him alone. I'll tell you everything.”
“I don't need to know everything, Mr Ennis,” growled Cochrane. “I just need to know one thing. Who killed Chris Berry?”
As the pain eased its grip Daniel sagged. Ennis caught him before Cochrane could jerk him upright again. “Hang on in there,” he said softly, “this won't take much longer.”
To Cochrane he said: “The man who killed Chris Berry isn't here. He isn't anywhere you can hurt him. Vengeance, however, is still an option. But you'll have to hear the story to understand how.”
Cochrane acceded with a bad grace. “Go on. But don't take all night. If I lose interest I just might fire a few shots to relieve the boredom.”
Ennis nodded. “I'll remember that. You remember this. You've thrown away everything you had for the information I'm about to give you. If you don't pay attention you may not get another chance.”
“Tell your damned story.”
They were two young men, drawing wages in their first full-time jobs, at last with a bit of disposable income. It was inevitable that wheels would be high on their list of priorities.
Because they were friends, because they spent virtually all their spare time together, it made sense to combine forces. It was still an elderly car, but either buying alone would have had to wait another year.
They obeyed Chris's mum's injunction and were sensible about it, agreeing in advance how they'd share the use and the expenses. But because they were young men and thought they were great drivers, they never considered the possibility that one of them would make a silly, expensive mistake. It could have been either of them but it happened to be Nathan, driving home from his girlfriend's house late one evening, who saw a builder's skip too late and reduced the nearside wing to tinfoil.
The car was – Mrs Berry had insisted – comprehensively insured. If it had been a write-off, probably they would have stayed friends. But the damage came to £400: too little to justify a claim so early in their insurance history, too much to be easily found. So they quarrelled. Chris insisted that the kitty was to pay for unavoidable expenses like tax, insurance and maintenance, not for careless mistakes on the part of one of them. Nathan argued that the repair of damage too small to claim from the insurers
was
maintenance, and anyway he hadn't the means to pay it out of his own pocket.
Chris was adamant. The mistake was Nathan's, the damage his responsibility. He wasn't prepared to subsidise his friend's bad driving.
They had been friends most of their lives. They had done things for one another that money couldn't buy. But a £400
dent soured the relationship. Chris couldn't let the subject drop. If Nathan didn't have the money, could he borrow it somewhere? The car needed fixing, it would only deteriorate until it was done.
Nathan would have paid up, if grudgingly, had he had the means to do so. But his savings had gone into buying the car, he had nothing more. His family didn't have any money to spare, even as a loan. There was no one else.
There was one person. He asked George Ennis.
Ennis thought about it. He'd lent money to athletes before, mostly for kit or competition expenses. Repairing a bent car was a bit different; but the three of them had been important to one another for a lot of years now, Ennis didn't want this to come between two young men who needed one another's support to achieve all they were capable of. So he gave Nathan the money and they agreed to call it a loan until he'd worked it off – cleaning the gym, fetching and carrying, helping with classes. And he could start that very night. A busy weekend had left the place a tip.
Nathan was still working at twelve-thirty. Finished or not, he was about to knock off because he started work in the carpet warehouse at eight. Then Chris turned up looking for him, wanting to know what was happening about the car.
Chris had seen him, as Nathan had seen Chris, in all kinds of extremes – exhausted, in pain, in the humiliation of defeat. He'd seen him in tears. He had not, before now, seen him cleaning the ladies' lavatories.
They were young men, there were things they hadn't yet had time to learn. Things like discretion, kindness and the ability to laugh at oneself. If the same events had taken place in another year or two the ending would have been quite different. But Chris saw Nathan wielding the mop, and instead of feeling humbled by what his friend was prepared to do to keep his regard he laughed.
Nathan slapped him in the face with the wet mop.
The tragic thing was, they weren't angry. Even after the
fight began, both of them knew it was more than half a joke. They were rolling on the wet floor, wrestling like they did when they were children, when a fight could last an hour and end with giggles and not a mark on either party.
But time had passed since they last did this. They were men now, physically at least, with the strength of men, and when they landed a blow it hurt. Instead of dissolving in tears and threatening to involve their bigger brothers, they responded with adrenalin-fuelled determination. They were two competitive individuals. At some point, as the fight moved out of the ladies' changing-room, across the hall and into the gym, it stopped being a joke and became a contest. They still weren't trying to injure one another. But they each wanted to win.
The blood ran high, the sweat poured, the muscles swelled and strung. The violent ballet took them the length of the gym and back again; and with every step the humour of the situation, the friendliness of the challenge, was buried under ever deeper layers of effort until the struggle was entirely serious.
Even so, they fought not as enemies but as gladiators, men with something to prove. The wet mop remained their only weapon, wrested by one from another and snatched back, until by chance Chris used it to send Nathan spinning against the rack of weights by the lifting bench.
No thought came into it. As he fell his hand closed on the metal bar, and he surged to his feet panting with exertion, swinging it.
Chris never saw it coming. His teeth were still bared in triumph when one end of the bar smashed him across the temple with all the force of Nathan's strong, angry young body.
While all this was going on George Ennis was in the flat upstairs. He was used to the sounds that percolated up when athletes were working out. The first warning he had that something was terribly amiss was a low, drawn-out howl that barely sounded human in its horror and distress.
He got downstairs to find Nathan Sparkes on his knees on the gym floor, bent over and keening, the broken head of Chris Berry dragged into his lap.
 
 
George Ennis had been a policeman for thirty years. He knew when he was in the presence of death. He knew immediately that nothing they did now would alter the stunning reality that one of his golden boys had just killed the other.
“It was too late to do anything for Chris,” he said softly. “My next priority was Nathan. He couldn't believe what had happened. It took him ten minutes to tell me: he kept going into some kind of spasm. Shock, of course. He couldn't get the words out. He couldn't let go of the body: I had to pry his fingers apart and drag him away. I didn't dare leave him to call for help. I thought his heart was going to burst. I thought I could lose him too.”
If he'd been able to get to the phone and call Deacon right away he'd have done it. It wouldn't have occurred to him to do anything else. But for twenty minutes he sat on the floor nursing Nathan Sparkes through a storm of emotions so violent they threatened to rip him apart, and after that it was no longer quite so obvious what he should do next.
“I couldn't alter what had happened,” Ennis said with a quiet urgency, as if it mattered to him that they understood that. “Chris was beyond help. But as I held Nathan to stop him dashing his brains out on the wall, slowly it dawned on me that there were two boys involved in this tragedy, two promising young men with families who loved them and futures waiting, and maybe the other one could still be saved.
“He'd go to prison for what he'd done. It was more than half an accident, but the court would see one boy with his head stove in and the other swinging a weight bar, and Nathan would go to prison. He was eighteen years old: I
knew what would happen to him. He'd be brutalised. He wasn't going to the Olympics. He was going to get some corrective dentistry and a new walk, and when he came out he'd drift into crime. Those boys were the best athletes I'd ever had the privilege of coaching, and now one was dead and the other was never going to run again. Unless I helped him.”
There were better coaches in the country, Ennis freely admitted; there were better men. But possibly no one else could have done for Nathan Sparkes what Ennis did next. He wrapped the body of Chris Berry in a foil sheet, partly to contain the blood but mostly so that Nathan wouldn't have to look at what he'd done while they carried their burden out to the van. Ennis located his wheel-brace, then he drove to the pier and slowly, quietly, moving the barrier and avoiding the gaps, to the end of it.
His sole intention at that point was to hide the actual cause of death under damage he knew Jack Deacon would recognise. Chris's body, accompanied by a passable blood-spatter pattern, would be found by some angler or dog-walker, and ten minutes later Deacon would on his way to Manor Farm.
Ennis laid Chris gently by the ruins of the concert-hall, wrapped himself in the foil blanket and – gritting his teeth and hating himself – delivered four or five massive blows with the wheel-brace, mumbling apologies to the dead boy as he did, explaining why the desecration was necessary.
“I knew what I was doing was wrong,” he murmured. “I hoped maybe it wasn't
as
wrong as letting the law run its course. But one thing I was certain of was that Chris would have wanted me to try. He might have been pretty pissed off at what happened but he wouldn't have wanted his best friend to pay for an accident with the rest of his life.”
It couldn't have taken half a minute; it felt like hours and left Ennis spattered with blood and filled with shame. He took off the blanket, bundling it carefully inside out, and
returned to the van, meaning to leave the scene and never return. He thought he'd done enough. The part of him that was still a policeman knew he'd done far too much.
“Then I saw a light come on in one of the netting-sheds. My first thought was that someone had heard the van and I was about to be discovered. I thought Nathan and I were both going to jail. Then I remembered who lived there.”
He glanced at Daniel. But Daniel was taking minimal interest: if Ennis had let him go he'd have slid to the floor. In a way that made it easier to continue.
“I didn't know him but I read the papers, I knew who he was. I knew what he did on starry nights when sensible people are in their beds. I guessed that if I waited a few minutes he'd come outside with his telescope.”
All at once the time of which there had seemed so much was racing. Mere random chance had presented him with an opportunity he couldn't refuse: an eye-witness to tell Deacon what he had to believe. The discovery of a young man's body on the pier, bludgeoned about the head by a wheel-brace, certainly suggested a fourth murder in the ten-year-old series. But Jack Deacon was an experienced detective, he wouldn't necessarily jump to the obvious conclusion. He'd wait for the forensics, want to know if Chris had died at the pier or been brought there, want to know what the blood-spatter pattern revealed. And it just might raise questions Ennis didn't want asking.
Now he glanced at Deacon. “But if a reliable witness told you he saw Chris die at the end of the pier, and he saw the killer silhouetted by starlight and described a tall rangy individual, I couldn't see you waiting for the forensics. I thought, even if they came back with some inconsistencies you wouldn't be too worried. You'd reckon you knew where Chris died, when he died and how he died; and you'd be pretty sure who killed him.”
It was almost as if he'd forgotten that Cochrane was standing there, pointing a gun at them. He was explaining himself
to Deacon, not the man he'd made his scapegoat. As long as he talked Cochrane did nothing to stop him, but Deacon was aware of fury building in the man as vulcanologists are aware of the magma chamber filling beneath their feet.
Ennis had no idea how long an amateur astronomer would stay outside on a cold night. Perhaps only a few minutes. Quickly, before Daniel came outside, but also as quietly as he could he drove off the pier and back to Fisher Hill and
The Attic Gym.
He found Nathan where he'd left him, curled on the floor, sobbing as if his heart was broken.
But there was no time for that. Ennis dragged him out to the van and explained why as he drove back to the seafront.
He parked away from the pier this time, checked that Hood was now outside, then shook some steel into Nathan's backbone and pushed him out onto the pavement. They both knew what they had to do, it was too late to start discussing it now; anyway, Nathan Sparkes couldn't have framed a sentence to save his life. But he could run. He could always run. He ran away up the pier, feet thundering on the suspect timbers, and Ennis gave chase.
In case the sound of running wasn't enough, Ennis threw in a few shouts, some angry, some afraid. When he looked across at the netting-shed the astronomer had already left his telescope and was approaching the pier. As if this was a playground dispute that had got out of hand. Ennis raised the wheel-brace with a roar of anger and Nathan cried out in terror.
Neither of them found the acting hard. Nathan
was
terrified, had every reason to be; and George Ennis was angry. God alone knew how angry: with the boy cowering under his raised arm and the other hidden close by. A golden future had slumped to ashes in a second, in an argument over a dented car. He wanted to knock their stupid heads together. He wanted to scream at them to see what they'd done. Their lack of discipline had quite possibly destroyed three lives.
Unless Ennis could make this credible, in which case two of them might yet be redeemed.

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