by Jo Bannister
It wasn’t an accusation but he defended himself as if it was. ‘She just seemed so – alone. So angry and alone. And I was afraid that she was in danger.’
‘Like I said, she became very difficult. She thought the world was against her.’
‘She was fantasising?’ said Daniel. ‘You’re sure?’
‘As sure as I can be. When her father died she wanted the police to launch a murder inquiry. They listened politely to what she had to say but there was no sense in it, no basis in fact. They were sorry for her too, but they couldn’t give her the kind of help she wanted and she wasn’t interested in the kind of help she needed. I begged her to go for counselling. It was the closest we came to a bust-up. She slapped my face. It was good advice but I knew before I opened my mouth that she wouldn’t take it.’
They’d reached the front of the hospital. Mary Walbrook led the way to her car. Daniel was expecting something racier than this elderly Land Rover. He caught himself staring and looked away, hoping she hadn’t noticed. Of course, she had. ‘There are two reasons I don’t drive a Ferrari. One is, it wouldn’t tow a horse trailer. The other is, I can’t afford it.’
‘Do you ride horses too?’
‘Not so much these days. The ground gets harder once you pass thirty. That’s why I stopped competing and started dealing.’
Daniel knew nothing about horses, and it seemed he knew nothing about dealers either. He thought they were men in flat hats, checked suits and canary-coloured waistcoats. He thought smoking cigars was probably compulsory. ‘In show-jumpers?’
‘Competition horses generally. What we’ve started calling sports horses – they’re worth more that way. Show-jumpers, eventers, dressage horses, hunters. All the way from the Hickstead or Badminton hopeful down to children’s schoolmasters. There are a lot of horses out there, but most of them are rubbish. You can waste a lot of time and money looking for a good one. Or you can pay me to find it for you.’
Daniel laughed. Mary Walbrook raised a surprised eyebrow. Chastened, he explained. ‘I have a friend who does the same sort of thing. Not with horses but just about everything else. She calls her business Looking For Something? and uses exactly the same sales-pitch.’
‘That’s because it’s true.’ Mary pulled out of the car park and onto the ring road. ‘The average person wanting to buy a riding horse will travel a thousand miles to look at half a dozen. There’ll be something wrong with five of them. None of them will match the advertised description. The 16.2 warmblood will be a 15.3 Thoroughbred ex-hurdler with no mouth that won’t go anywhere on its own. The nine-year-old all-rounder will be fifteen with spavins and navicular disease. The promising new – comer, potential in any sphere, needs bringing on, will have been overworked and overfaced before it was six and now needs a JCB to shove it into a ring.’
Daniel smiled. ‘You exaggerate.’
‘Not even slightly,’ said the woman. ‘In fact, there’ll be things wrong with the sixth horse too, but after the other five he’ll look great and you’ll heave a sigh of relief. You’ll ride him round a couple of times, and when he doesn’t try to hang you in a tree and the vet says he’s got the right number of lungs you’ll hand over your hard-earned cash and think you’ve done pretty well. The likelihood is, though, he’ll have problems that either limit what you can do with him or mean he’ll be on the market again within a year. He might be a good enough horse, just not right for you. He might be a nice horse but not up to the standard you want to compete at. Or he might be monster once he’s taken away from a yard where it habitually took three professionals to get the tack on and sedatives to get him shod.’
‘That happens?’ asked Daniel, shocked.
‘All the time. There are a lot more ways of getting this wrong than getting it right. And it matters. More than buying the wrong car or even the wrong house. You don’t just stand to lose money on the wrong horse – it can kill you. You buy through me and it’ll cost you more but you’ll end up with an animal that’s suitable for the job you want it to do. Long term it’ll save you money. And you’ll have a lot more fun with it.’
Daniel thought it was probably good advice though there wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance he’d ever have a use for it. Paddy’s riding school pony came up to his hip and was rarely caught with both eyes open, and even it made him nervous. But then, he was a mathematician. If you could plot all the world’s pleasures on a graph, horses with their mad brains, lightning reactions and iron-clad extremities would come at one end and numbers weaving pretty patterns on a page at the other.
He said, ‘What happened to Alison’s father?’
The woman must have decided to answer his questions. ‘I told you: we had a run of bad luck. We thought we were going to the wall. Only while I was working my butt off and calling in every favour I was owed, and asking people who didn’t owe me a thing to let me owe them for a bit, Stanley was drowning his sorrows. First he drowned them in whisky, then he walked down our back field and drowned them in the water jump.’
Daniel recognised that her flippancy was a defence against the brutal reality. ‘Suicide?’
She shrugged. ‘He might just have stumbled around until he fell in and been too drunk to climb out again so the police called it an accidental death. Ally didn’t believe that either. She didn’t want to believe that it was Stanley’s own actions which led to his death and the business going into free fall. She still believes he’d have fought for it – for her – to his last breath.’
‘But you didn’t agree.’
She considered for a moment. ‘Well, I knew Stanley Barker better than his daughter did. We were business partners for ten years; for some of that time we were partners in every sense. He was a good man, a kind man, but he wasn’t a strong man. And then, he was a lot older than me. I think he couldn’t face losing the business and having to start over.’
Her eyes shadowed with the memory. After three months it had begun to settle into the background, to lose its edge and inch towards history. Having to explain these events brought them back into the forefront of her mind. ‘It takes a lot of work, a lot of energy, a lot of self-belief to build something from scratch. In your thirties, even in your forties, you know it’ll be worth it – you have time to get where you want to be and then sit back and enjoy it. When you’re pushing sixty the figures stack up differently. I think he was too tired and disspirited to do it all again, and too ashamed to take the easy way and go bankrupt. Maybe it was an accident, but it’s my belief that he sat on the log over the water and drank himself insensible, knowing there was every chance he’d never wake up.’
There was a thread of anger underlying her voice that Daniel wasn’t sure she was aware of. They’d been partners, they’d faced hard times, and he’d left her to deal with it alone. And she’d succeeded: she’d saved the business. But it would have been easier, less traumatic, to have done it together. She hadn’t forgiven him for running out on her.
They had reached The Promenade. Daniel indicated the netting-shed on the beach. ‘This is where I live.’
Mary Walbrook stopped the Land Rover and regarded the stubby black tower rising out of the shingle shore. ‘Of course it is.’
‘Will you come in for a coffee?’
She shook her head. ‘I’d better get back. I’ve a shipment due in from France this afternoon. I need to be there when they arrive.’
‘Thanks for the lift. And …’
‘Mm?’
‘If Alison’s feeling better next time you see her, wish her well for me.’
‘Will she know your name?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘Will she remember you at all?’
Daniel smiled. ‘Probably not. Do it anyway.’
Chapter Five
All he had to do was leave it alone. It was none of his business: everyone was agreed on that. He’d had a reasonable explanation of Alison Barker’s state of mind from someone close enough to her to know. He’d been told the police had investi
gated her allegations and found nothing to suggest she was genuinely in danger.
At that point a wise man would have backed away gracefully, maybe sent some flowers and a Get Well card, been sorry for her unhappiness but glad it wasn’t his fault. Perhaps he would have taken some guilty comfort from knowing he wasn’t the most screwed-up person on the south coast after all, but after that he would have forgotten her.
Daniel wanted to help her. He asked Brodie what she thought.
‘I think you’re insane,’ she said frankly.
‘No, really,’ he said with a ghost of a smile. ‘Don’t be polite, tell me what you really think.’
Brodie gave a little snort that was half exasperation, half affection. ‘Look, Daniel – I know what’s going on here. I know where this is leading. You’re going to do what you always do. You’re going to get involved in somebody’s troubles – offer her a shoulder to cry on and an ear to rabbit into – and you’re going to get dumped on. Again. There’s a reason why some people have no friends and no luck – they’re bad news. They are the authors of their own misfortune. They can’t – won’t, even – be helped. I don’t doubt that people who know Alison Barker better than you do and owe her more tried to sort her out and failed and had to give up long before you came along.
‘But you always think you can do better, don’t you? That other people didn’t try hard enough, or tried too hard, or didn’t go about it the right way. Your way. You always have to get involved. Hasn’t it struck you by now that you’re not a very good judge of character?’
Usually when Brodie subjected him to one of her tirades it meant she was worried about him. He tried not to take it personally. Plus, he couldn’t actually argue with anything she’d said. ‘I’m not planning to adopt her. I just want to make sure she’s OK.’
‘But she isn’t OK. We know that. We knew it before you talked to Mary Walbrook. She’s – let’s be kind here and call it unstable. Now, maybe she’s unstable because of things that have happened to her, and maybe things have happened to her because she’s unstable, but either way it isn’t the services of a maths teacher that she needs right now! If she wouldn’t let her friends help her, what makes you think she’ll let you?’
Daniel considered for a moment. ‘A man gets thrown into prison for a crime he didn’t commit. He writes to everyone he knows, asking for help. His doctor writes back enclosing a prescription for Valium. His priest sends him a prayer. His MP says he’ll vote for the next Criminal Justice Bill.
‘Someone else he wrote to turns up at the prison and yells at the guards until they throw him in the same cell as his friend. Who is, as you can imagine, pretty disgusted. “A lot of help you are,” he shouts. “Now there’s two of us in here!” His friend gives him a wink. “But I’ve been in here before,” he says. “I know the way out.”’
Brodie went on looking at him, still waiting for a punchline she could understand.
Daniel sighed. He knew he shouldn’t tell anecdotes: he was no better at them than at slang. He explained in words of few syllables. ‘I know Alison Barker isn’t making much sense right now. I know she’s exhausted every friendship she ever had. I know she thinks the whole world’s against her and every random misfortune is part of a global conspiracy. I know she took enough Scram to kill a donkey, and that probably wasn’t a mistake.
‘But Brodie, that place where she is – I’ve been there. Someone helped me out, and I want to help Alison. Not because I owe it to her but because I can. Please help me.’
Most people don’t know how to say please. Either they whine or they make a demand of it. When Daniel asked a favour he did so with a kind of quiet dignity that made you feel like a rat for refusing. So mostly he got what he asked for. Not only from her, Brodie had noticed, but from other people as well. Even Deacon, though he might spit and storm first, tended to end up doing as Daniel asked. It was no wonder, she reflected, that the big man resented him so.
She gave a gusty, ungracious sigh. ‘What do you want me to do?’
He hadn’t expected her to acquiesce so quickly, didn’t have an answer ready. ‘I suppose the most important thing is to rule out the possibility that she’s right – that her father was murdered and she’s in danger too. Mary said the police dismissed her claims. But did they look into them thoroughly or just decide she was hysterical?’
‘You mean, is she completely off her head or just mildly paranoid,’ Brodie paraphrased.
If she was going to help him, Daniel could forgive her the odd unkindness. ‘I suppose. Until I know that, how can I help her?’
‘How indeed?’ She sniffed. ‘Leave it with me, I’ll see what I can find out.’
There’s no point sleeping with a detective superintendent if you can’t get access to the Police National Computer when you need it. She asked Deacon what he knew about Alison Barker.
But all he knew or cared was that she’d taken Scram and was in no condition to tell him where she’d got it.
‘You know she thinks her father was murdered.’
He reared his thick body up on one elbow to look at her. ‘He was a horse dealer. He fell in a pond.’
‘His daughter thinks he was pushed.’
‘Still? I thought she’d probably come to terms with it by now. That’s – what? – a couple of months ago?’
‘Three. You’re sure it was an accident? Or, at least, that nobody else was involved?’
‘There was no evidence to suggest anyone was with him when he died. His partner found him in the morning and called us. The PM showed he’d been drinking heavily. It may have been an accident, it may have been suicide. I do know he wasn’t murdered by the man Alison Barker blamed. He was driving a lorry in Europe at the time. His tachometer was a pretty good witness for the defence.’
‘OK, so the girl’s paranoid. But Daniel’s concerned. If you could just reassure him that there’s nothing to worry about …’
‘Oh – Daniel’s concerned, is he?’ Everything about Deacon – the craggy face, the heavy body, the gruff and venomous voice – was built for sarcasm. ‘You should have said sooner. Of course I’ll drop what I’m doing to make enquiries about some druggy girl who’s so scared someone’s trying to kill her she thinks she’ll save them the trouble! It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do. Anything at all urgent.’
‘You think it was a suicide attempt?’
‘Actually, I doubt if it was,’ he conceded. ‘Suicides don’t usually go for a walk while they’re waiting for a drug to take effect. They try to avoid being found while there’s still time to save them.’
‘What if she wanted to be found?’
‘The cry-for-help thing? It’s possible,’ said Deacon. ‘Maybe insisting her father was murdered was the same sort of thing. She wanted someone to pay her some attention.’
Almost against her wishes Brodie found herself empathising with the troubled girl. ‘The poor kid’s had a packet to deal with in a short period of time. Before she lost her father she lost just about everything else.’ Then annoyance tacked up the corner of her mouth. ‘It doesn’t say much for society, does it, that a girl her age can be so alone this is the only way she can get someone to listen to her.’
‘It’s working, though,’ growled Deacon. ‘She’s not even awake yet but she’s got Daniel’s attention. That’s as much being listened to as would last most people a lifetime.’
Brodie grinned. Although it gave her problems from time to time, the antipathy between the two men in her life was an endless source of amusement. Except it wasn’t exactly antipathy, more a total and mutual lack of understanding. Jack Deacon could understand the deep, dark workings of violent minds; Daniel Hood could understand people whose own mothers had given up on them; they just couldn’t understand one another. The harder they tried – and they had tried, for her sake – the wider the gulf yawned between them.
‘I know. Well, look at it this way – better she wastes his time than yours. So for everybody’s sake, especially m
ine, can I tell him that she really hasn’t any reason to be afraid? That you’re convinced the murder only occurred in her imagination?’
‘Yes,’ said Deacon. ‘Look, people get drunk and have fatal accidents every day of the week. Not all in Dimmock, thank God, but you know what I mean. There were no suspicious circumstances. His business had been failing for months. He’d sold everything he owned – horses, house, everything – and it wasn’t enough. He didn’t know where else to turn. So he turned to drink, and maybe to thoughts of suicide.
‘If Daniel’s looking for a worthy cause, maybe Alison Barker qualifies. She might even benefit from his undivided attention. But he needs to be careful, because this girl could be a disaster looking for someone to happen to. If she isn’t actually suicidal she’s certainly reckless. She’s accused a plainly innocent man of murder, she’s run out in front of a moving vehicle and now she’s taken a lethal dose of Scram. To me, that sounds like someone out of control. Now, maybe Daniel can get her feet back on the floor. But he needs to be careful that she doesn’t draw him into her fantasy world instead.’
Detective Sergeant Voss believed passionately in the place of women in the modern police service. He didn’t think they should be kept for domestic abuse and child protection cases: he thought they should be represented in every department. Particularly CID. Since the arrival of Detective Constable Jill Meadows he was no longer the only person on the top floor of Battle Alley who could work the computers.
On Friday morning she was the only detective working in the squad room. Voss walked the full length of it to ask if she was making any progress with the task he’d given her.
Her fellow constables had freed her a desk beside the coffee machine. At first it gave them an excuse to keep wandering past her. Later, when the novelty had worn off, they thought she could bring them top-ups. That didn’t last long either. Even Huxley, who was slowest on the uptake, got the message after he’d had to go home to change his shirt three days running. Meanwhile his colleagues had run a sweepstake on whether he’d still be optimistically calling for a strong one with three sugars while he waited for his skingrafts to take.