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Authors: Jo Bannister

BOOK: True Witness
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They met on the shore. Both wanted it though neither intended it. Daniel thought Brodie was right when she said it was too soon to express his regrets to Chris Berry's mother; and Frances Berry didn't even know Daniel's name. She went to the pier because something deep in her was saying that she knew how and where her son came into the world, she ought to see where he left it; and alone because she didn't believe anyone would understand.
Charlie Voss had arranged for a police-car to take her home. But she'd had it drop her here, said she'd make her own way. WPC Meadows wasn't happy and she didn't think DS Voss would be either. But the woman was calm, apparently in control of herself, and giving someone a lift somewhere they don't want to go is kidnapping. Jill Meadows told her to call the station again if she needed them, gave her the number of a taxi firm, and left her on the promenade.
Daniel was on his way home. He sat in Brodie's office, sipping her coffee, until she got busy, then he left. It was a five minute walk from Shack Lane to the netting sheds, but half way he was suddenly so tired he could go no further. He dropped onto a bench and stared out to sea, and didn't notice his eyelids growing heavy.
He may have dozed for a few minutes or an hour. He woke cold and stiff with a small woman in a grey coat watching him. He started, thinking he'd done something stupid; and then he knew who she was. It was the quality of her gaze that told him: plummetingly sad, and yearning, as if she wanted something from him. He stood up, unsure what to do with his hands. “Mrs Berry?”
She nodded. “You're him, aren't you? The man who tried to save my son.”
Daniel nodded, a shade reluctantly. “I'm Daniel Hood.”
“I asked Mr Deacon to thank you for me – for Chris's family. I'm glad to have the chance to do it myself.” The words were coming out just a little faster than they should have done, but
Daniel marvelled that she could hold an intelligent conversation at all.
“I'm so sorry it wasn't enough,” he said, his voice low. “For a while I thought I'd got to him in time. But –”
When his voice faltered her gaze turned compassionate. Eight hours after the event, and those few minutes of exhausted slumber on a promenade bench were clearly all the sleep he'd had. He looked drained and grey, and despite her own misery – perhaps, in a way, because of it – her heart went out to him. “I'd like to talk to you, if that's all right. Is there somewhere we could go? I'll buy you a coffee.”
For an instant he saw himself through her eyes – frail, pathetic even, running on empty, too weak to make it home – and winced. This woman had raised a big, strapping, athletic son with endless strength and energy. Even at his best Daniel was not an impressive physical specimen. Today the contrast between the man who died and the one who lived was painfully acute.
He gestured awkwardly. “My flat's just here. Come inside, I'll put the kettle on.”
While he assembled the cups she stood in the kitchen door, still with her coat on, and began talking to him as if to herself. Anyone would have served: a friend, a stranger, the cat. Daniel let her talk, only responded when a response seemed necessary.
“I can't go home,” she said. It wasn't a plea for sympathy, merely a statement of fact. “If I go home the reality that Chris isn't there, that Chris is never
going
to be there, will be unavoidable. As long as I keep moving – going to the hospital, going to the police station, coming here – I can keep it at arm's length. I'm doing something useful; I'm helping. If I go home, and sit down, and stop, it's going to break over me like one of the waves out there.”
It wasn't the happiest analogy. The picture it conjured made her mouth tremble. She ploughed on determinedly. “I'm treating my husband very badly. Chris doesn't need me
any more but Bill does. He needs to put his arms around me and feel mine round him. He needs us to hold one another and cry.
“I'm not ready for that. If I start I won't be able to stop. I need to do everything that needs doing first. Like coming here, talking to you. I don't know why it feels more important than going home and grieving with my husband, I only know it does. There'll be time for that. This needs doing now.”
Daniel carried the tray into the living-room. Mrs Berry took a seat, hugging her coat around her. The flat wasn't cold, she was in shock.
She bit her lip. “Now I'm here I don't know what to say to you. Thank you, obviously, but …”
Daniel thought for a moment. “It happened very quickly. He was on his feet and running, then he was in the sea. I think it was all over at that point. I don't think there could have been much pain.” He wouldn't lie to her, lies would demean what she was going through, but he knew as he said it he was being less than honest. The boy was running for his life. He knew he'd taken a wrong turn, that the pier was a dead end, and that the man behind him would kill him if he caught him. No pain? Chris Berry had been hunted to his death, must have spent the closing minutes of his life in an agony of terror.
But even Daniel, who had a zealot's reverence for the truth, saw no need to bludgeon a stricken woman with it. If he couldn't make things any better for her, he could at least try not to make them worse.
She looked at him with haunted eyes but a tiny tremulous smile. “You're very kind. If there's a grain of comfort in this, Mr Hood, it's that my son didn't die alone with his killer; that there was someone nearby who cared enough to try and help him, and he just may have known that.”
Daniel didn't know what to say. He'd let Brodie persuade him it was too soon for this meeting in part because he was
afraid how Mrs Berry would react. He was overwhelmed that in her desolation she could find the strength to be gracious to him. He sipped his coffee in silence.
Frances Berry belonged to a generation that believed in self-reliance, in picking yourself up and dusting yourself off. She was fighting to stay positive. She sat up straight and pushed her shoulders back. “Inspector Deacon is hopeful of making an early arrest.” She sounded more like a press release than a bereaved parent.
“Yes?” murmured Daniel, not looking at her.
“He said you saw him. The man who …” For a moment the blackness bent over her, the chaos loomed and her composure faltered. She sucked in a sharp breath, fingernails digging into her palms. “The murderer.”
“Yes,” Daniel said again. “Um –”
It would be days before she knew if she was warm or cold, hungry or full, tired or rested. But in this one matter her awareness was crystaline. She heard the hesitation in his voice and knew it was significant. “What?”
His only choice was between hurting her now and hurting her later. He thought it would be cruel to give her false hope. “Inspector Deacon had a suspect. Maybe he's right but …”
“But?”
“I don't think his suspect is the man I saw.”
The room went perceptibly cooler and stiller. The mutter of the shore receded, the rumble of traffic on the promenade sank to a whisper. Daniel felt the woman's eyes fixed in his face like talons.
“You're not going to identify him?” She was holding her voice level by an effort of will.
“I am,” protested Daniel. “When I see him again.”
“But surely,” said Frances Berry, struggling to understand, “Inspector Deacon
knows
who did this. He's already interviewed him, he's searching his house. He told me he expected to make an arrest.”
Daniel nodded. “I know he does. I think he may be mistaken.”
“May be?” echoed Mrs Berry
“May be?”
He knew his delicate conscience was like a knife twisting in her side. He tried to explain. “Mrs Berry, it won't help to go after the wrong man. I'm sure Inspector Deacon has good reason for his suspicions. But you don't want to see somebody who might have killed Chris, who could have done it, behind bars. You want the man who actually did it. I saw that man. I'm sure Inspector Deacon will find him. It just may take a little time.”
She was staring at him like a hawk at its prey. All the empathy between them had dissipated. A note of revelation in her voice, she stated: “You're afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“You saw a man commit murder. You think he saw you too. You're afraid of what he'll do to silence you. You think if you refuse to identify him he'll realise you're no threat and leave you alone. My God! You're going to let a killer go free because you're afraid he'll do to you what he did to my Chris.”
Daniel shook his head unhappily. “I swear to you, if I thought the police had the right man –”
She wasn't interested in his excuses. “I thought you were a brave man, Mr Hood,” she said imperiously. She stood up. “I see I misjudged you.”
She didn't slam the door behind her. She closed it precisely, with a crisp click that ricocheted through Daniel's brain, and bloomed on his cheek, like a slap.
Daniel Hood never was a social animal. For one thing, he had better things to do with the dark hours than sit in smoky clubs listening to music he didn't like and unable to hear people he did. He had always been self-contained. He liked people and on the whole people liked him, but he had never craved companionship.
So it was bizarre suddenly to be the centre of attention. Hardly had he recovered from Mrs Berry's parting shot than there came another knock at the door and it was Tom Sessions from
The Dimmock Sentinel.
Daniel groaned but let him in anyway. He owed Sessions a favour.
The reporter looked him up and down and said with characteristic candour, “You look like shit.”
Daniel chuckled and waved him to a chair. “Do you want some tea?”
“I'd sooner have some information.”
“Take the tea,” advised Daniel, “so you won't have wasted your journey.”
The kettle was still hot. Sessions took the mug, but he also got out his tape-recorder. “I take it there is at least some truth in the rumour.”
“What rumour?”
“That you've taken to changing into tights and a cape in telephone kiosks.”
Daniel laughed out loud. He found Sessions' attitude oddly bracing. There was no malice in the man, he was just a natural cynic. “You heard about last night.”
“I heard
something
about last night. I thought I must have got it wrong. Did I?”
“I don't know how much I can tell you,” said Daniel. “Deacon's talking about arresting someone.”
“Really? I bet that put a smile on his face.”
“Well … not the last time I saw him.”
Sandy brows knit over Tom Sessions' keen eyes. “Daniel – what is it you're not telling me?”
So Daniel told him.
The reporter whistled at the ceiling. “Oh, you
must
be popular with Dimmock CID!”
“I don't understand,” complained Daniel. “Surely he wants to arrest the right man? Why's he trying to tell
me
who the murderer is when I'm the one who saw him?”
“Because of the history,” said Sessions. “Do you know the background to all this?”
“I know something happened ten years ago. I didn't live round here then.”
“Well, I did,” said the reporter, “and it was a bad time. I thought you'd be interested so I brought you a paper. Well, a photocopy, of an article I wrote when things were at their scariest.” He put a manilla envelope on the table.
“Give me the highlights.”
There were three victims. The first was sixteen, so when he failed to return home one night there was much winking and elbowing and references to hormonal overload. Even three days later, when it was clear that something had happened, the police were still thinking in terms of a young man off to see the world, or just possibly an unreported accident. Then a body was discovered at the end of the pier, naked, battered, ravaged and finished off with a volley of blows to the head with an iron bar. The sense of shock reverberated around Dimmock like TNT.
“George Ennis was DCI in Dimmock then, Jack Deacon was his deputy. They used all the manpower and all the science available to them, but none of it gave them a suspect,” said Sessions.
“Four months passed, and if the chances of solving the crime seemed to have passed too, so did the danger. We all thought it was something you might see once in a career, if you were unlucky, and whether it was inspired by rage or
passion or drugs, whoever was responsible had gone back where he came from. Either it was the result of a brainstorm in someone who'd then returned to his ordinary life reading meters or serving groceries or whatever, or – and this was favourite – it wasn't a local man at all, it was someone who'd been passing through when the madness struck.”
That comfort vanished when a second body turned up at the pier. In those days there was still a summer season, but from the end of October until Easter there were no concerts in the concert hall and no fortune teller in the booth. The pier was just a wooden cul-de-sac sticking far enough into the Channel that something left there could go unnoticed for days.
“That, presumably, was why he took them there,” said Sessions. “It was handy, and out of season it was deserted; and George Ennis reckoned the killer got a kind of thrill out of performing under the very noses of Dimmock's notoriously respectable citizens. Dumping the boys up on the Downs wouldn't have been nearly as much fun.”
Daniel shuddered. He'd seen what this man's fun meant a lot closer than Sessions had. “Were they killed here?”
Sessions shook his head. “Apparently not. Ennis thought they'd been killed where they were kept, and the bodies brought here late at night when no one was about.”
“Kept? For how long?”
“Jamie Wilton – the first boy – probably died the night he disappeared, though the body wasn't found till a couple of days later. The second boy, Peter Krauss, was missing for four days and probably alive for three of them. He wasn't on the pier all that time, but the police never found out where he was instead. He vanished while buying chips for a family supper. In the middle of town, in the middle of the evening, no one saw a thing. And no one saw when his body was returned four days later.”
“In the same state?” asked Daniel softly.
Sessions nodded. “Ennis had the pier watched from then
on. Nothing. For five months, and then a lorry driver tipping at the foot of Chain Down saw an arm sticking out of a pile of rubbish. No one had heard or seen anything amiss, and the site was covered with tyre-tracks anyway so that was no help. The pathologist reckoned the body'd been there a couple of weeks.”
“Another boy?”
“Gavin Halliwell, also sixteen, also raped and battered to death. He'd been missing for eight days and no one had even told the police. The family thought he really had gone to London to seek his fortune. Apparently he'd talked about it, he'd had a bust-up with his father, they thought he'd better get on with it. Only he never got as far as London. He was tied up somewhere long enough for the abrasions on his ankle to fester, and the killer had hacked his leg down to the bone before finishing him off. This time he left the murder weapon behind. A wheel-brace was found with the body.”
“A wheel-brace,” murmured Daniel. “Is that what I saw?”
Sessions shrugged. “I don't know. Is it?”
Daniel bit his lip. “What's a wheel-brace?”
Despite the gravity of what they were discussing, the reporter couldn't help but grin. Daniel Hood was clearly a very intelligent man, just not all the time. “An iron bar with a kink in it. You use it to change a wheel. On a car.”
Daniel nodded slowly. “That's what I saw.”
By now the town was panic-stricken, the police under massive pressure to make an arrest. “To give them their due,” said Sessions, “they didn't just go through the motions, pick up the usual suspects and wait for the heat to die down. They didn't want just anyone in the cells, they wanted the right guy.”
But there were no leads. No witnesses, no physical evidence, no forensics. He'd brutalised three teenage boys, held two of them captive for days, without leaving anything that could be traced back to him. Which meant he was not a man tormented by urges he couldn't control. He could control
them well enough to take his pleasures only after he'd protected himself. He was going to be hard to find and harder to convict.
“Nine months into the investigation, with three teenage boys in the morgue and not a single viable lead, the police were reduced to seeking suggestions. They did an appeal on television. Of course they were inundated with suggestions. Many were well-meaning but checked out as groundless. Some were people settling scores. But there were also a handful of names that couldn't readily be dismissed.
“One of them was Neil Cochrane. Four different people advised the police to interview him. He was a farmer, a single man in his forties running sheep up on Menner Down. No family, no friends, no social life at all that anyone knew of. He used to drink in
The Rose
on a Friday night, and that was all anybody knew of him.
“But there was something about him that made people uneasy. I know: I felt it too. I saw him in
The Rose
a time or two, and he was always on his own. I don't mean he came in alone – people left a space round him. I never saw him make trouble, but he gave off the sense that this was someone you didn't want to know any better. If the place was full, people who didn't play darts went to play darts rather than sit with him.”
Daniel shrugged uncomfortably. “People who live alone – sometimes we get a bit – eccentric … ?”
Sessions nodded. “It could have been that. But Neil Cochrane wasn't the only single man living in Dimmock ten years ago. But he was the one that people kept suggesting the police should visit.
“When they did, they started to think they were finally onto something. The first of the boys had done some work on Cochrane's farm a few weeks before his death – which didn't prove anything except that the two knew each other. Of course, a lot of boys help on a lot of farms at harvest time: it didn't have to be significant. The police searched the
farmhouse and Cochrane's Land Rover and found nothing. They had him in for questioning and got nothing out of him.
“But I know for a fact that George Ennis thought he'd found his killer, and so did Deacon. They questioned him for every minute that the law allowed, and maybe a few more. But they never found a scrap of physical evidence connecting Cochrane to the boys, and they never managed to break his story.”
“He had an alibi?”
Sessions shook his head. “He said he was at home, alone except for his sheep, on all three occasions. He didn't remember the boy who'd worked for him, or any of the boys who'd helped him. Boys were boys, he said, they charged too much for doing too little, but a couple of times a year he needed help on the farm. His only interest in boys was how many beets they could lift.”
“Could it have been the truth?”
“Of course it could. If you spend your evenings in pubs there's a good chance someone will remember seeing you: if you spend them lambing ewes there isn't. Just because you can't prove you weren't abducting teenage boys doesn't mean you were.”
“Then why were the police so sure?”
Sessions shrugged. “You'd need to ask Jack Deacon. Maybe because Cochrane fitted the profile. They had a mental picture of the man who did this, and it looked like Neil Cochrane. Maybe they were wrong. Maybe he was never more than an dour outsider who made people uncomfortable. But when I heard who was under investigation, I can't say I was surprised.”
Daniel nodded slowly. He knew about being an outsider. There was hardly a community, a concept or a belief to which he subscribed.
He wandered to the window and looked across at the pier. In the twelve months he'd lived here it had never been dressed with fairy lights, the concert hall at the end packed
with trippers. Until today it was just a pile of rotting timbers a hundred metres up the shore and the vague concern that an equinoctial gale could one day send a bit of it through his basement. Now it had acquired a presence, almost a personality, like a sea-monster resting its bones along the beach. Waiting. Speculating on what his next move might be.
“It's not my move to make,” he said softly.
“Sorry?” Tom Sessions looked puzzled.
“Thinking aloud,” Daniel said apologetically. “Mr Deacon doesn't really confide in me. Ever, but especially not now. I'm not his favourite person.”
“You're his witness.”
“Yes. I'm
not
the German Shepherd on his parcel-shelf: I won't nod whenever he nudges me.”
Sessions was good at his job partly because he was good at hearing what hadn't been said. “He's leaning on you? To make Cochrane?”
“That's not entirely fair,” said Daniel, who cared about being entirely fair. “He thinks Cochrane did it, and he thinks I saw him do it. He thinks I'm being over-cautious.”
“And are you?”
“No. It's not that I'm only eighty percent sure it was him. I really don't think it
was
. Unless he's changed a lot since the photograph was taken.”
Sessions put down his mug and stood up. “Daniel, don't tell anyone else what you've told me. It doesn't matter if Deacon's pissed off with you, but there are other people in this town who won't be restrained by the Police & Criminal Evidence Act. You don't want them thinking you could have put a monster behind bars if you'd wanted to.”
Daniel turned to him in astonishment. “I did want to! I still want to. But none of the faces I was shown were the man I saw on the pier.”

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