by Jo Bannister
‘Putting a slant on the facts is one thing. Accusing an innocent man of trying to kill you is very much another!’
‘If he hurt her and she’s paying him back, it may seem like justice by other means.’
Daniel watched her. ‘Would you do that?’
‘If I did, I wouldn’t tell you!’
‘Seriously.’
She considered. ‘No. If someone hurt me enough I’d want revenge, and at some point I’d probably take it. But lie to the police about him? It’s too likely to backfire.’
‘That’s the only reason?’ He sounded disappointed.
Brodie laughed. ‘I’ve told you, Daniel, don’t look to me for high moral standards. I’m a pragmatist. And for a pragmatist, that is not a sensible way to proceed. I’d look for something with a much higher benefit-to-cost ratio. Of course, Alison might feel differently. You may not be an expert – and just for the record, men never are, especially those who claim to be – but even you must know that all women do not think and act the same way.’
He shook his head. ‘You and Alison might think and act the same way. You have a lot in common.’
Brodie’s dark eyes widened indignantly. ‘You said she was difficult, obstinate and self-deluding!’
Being unfair to people was another kind of lying: Daniel took pains to avoid doing it. ‘Two out of three ain’t bad.’
Chapter Nine
A week after they died the bodies of the Hanson brothers had given up all the information they could. The funeral was held on Tuesday.
DS Voss made sure he was there: to show his respects, and also to see who else was there. He spoke to all the teenagers present, and found a lot of them had been at the party in the Woodgreen Estate. Now, reeling from watching two of their number shovelled under ground, was a good time to get their cooperation – to get them to talk about things of which yesterday or tomorrow they would have feigned ignorance. He asked them about the drugs scene in their particular age-group and circle. Who was taking, who was buying, who was selling. And he showed them a photograph of Alison Barker.
By close of play he had some answers for Detective Superintendent Deacon, though they weren’t particularly helpful. None of the youngsters he’d spoken to had seen or even heard of Scram before the elder Hanson boy produced them from his pocket and handed them round. Treating them, he’d said. Try this, he’d said, it’s new. It’s the best ever. After this, he’d said, you’ll never take anything else.
‘So they couldn’t give you a description of who was peddling the stuff?’
Voss shook his head. ‘I expect it was one of the usual suspects - the guys who always peddle drugs to kids at parties. If we found him he wouldn’t tell us who supplied them. It’s more than his life is worth, he’d rather do the time. Anyway, it’s not the dealers we need. All right, nice bonus, wouldn’t say no, but what we need to stop these deaths are the people who’re manufacturing Scram. We need the factory.’
‘Horsefeathers,’ said Deacon pensively.
Voss had long ago decided that taking offence at his governor’s casual rudeness would be a full-time occupation. ‘Well, if you know a better way …’
Deacon breathed heavily at him. ‘That’s what Forensics call it. Pay attention, Charlie Voss – you told me that! Horsefeathers: the German tranquillizer. That’s the long thin neck where we could take the head clean off. It’s the vital component, it’s hard to get hold of, it only comes from one source and it has to be smuggled into the country. If we find out how they’re doing it we close them down like that.’ His fingers were a bit thick for snapping: he had to try twice, which rather spoilt the effect.
‘Nobody’s going to share information like that with a bunch of teenagers.’ Voss blew out a disconsolate sigh that lifted his front hair. ‘One more thing. None of them remembered seeing Alison Barker.’
Deacon was unimpressed. ‘There were a couple of hundred kids in that clubhouse – what are the chances you’d ask one who saw Alison?’
‘That’s kind of the point,’ said Voss, ‘they were kids. Average age about sixteen. A girl of twenty-two would stand out.’
‘Maybe,’ conceded Deacon. ‘So maybe she wasn’t at the party. But she got Scram somewhere. Maybe she knows someone on the inside – someone who’s involved in producing this stuff.’
And he gave her some tabs without telling her what constitutes a safe dose? And she waited until she was alone before experimenting?’
‘It doesn’t sound too likely, does it? Oh God,’ Deacon growled, ‘I’m going to have to interview her again, aren’t I?’
‘Or I could,’ suggested Voss.
Deacon eyed him suspiciously. ‘Are you going to bully her? Are you going to stand over her and shout a lot, and convince her the only way she’s going to get rid of you is by telling you what you want to hear?’
Voss was a good policeman who was also a decent human being. He looked both startled and shocked. ‘Of course I’m not!’
‘Didn’t think so.’ Deacon sniffed. ‘Better do it myself, then.’
‘Nothing?’ Either Alison Barker was genuinely taken aback or she’d anticipated this moment and prepared an expression for it. ‘There was nothing in the food except food?’
‘Nothing,’ said Deacon. ‘Forensics knew what they were looking for and they looked carefully: they wouldn’t miss it.’
‘I was so sure …’ Alison was still in hospital but out of bed and dressed now, waiting for the word to go home. A certain pallor was all that remained from her brush with death.
‘Do you remember what you ate that evening?’
She tried to. ‘I didn’t cook. A cheese sandwich, I think, and a packet soup. Later I had a cup of tea and a biscuit.’
‘Any alcohol?’
‘A can of cider out of the fridge.’
All of which accorded with the analysis of what was pumped from her stomach. Except that somewhere along the line she’d taken four tablets of Scram as well.
‘A new can?’ asked Deacon.
She didn’t understand, answered with a puzzled frown.
‘I’m asking if you opened the can before you drank from it,’ Deacon explained patiently, ‘or if it was already open.’
Alison tried to remember. It was several days ago now, it was a minor detail, and a lot had happened to her since. But she knew that it mattered. ‘It was open. I’d had some at lunchtime and sealed the can with clingfilm. It was a bit flat but it was OK.’ Her gaze steadied on him. ‘Except that it wasn’t, was it? That’s where it was – dissolved in the cider.’
‘It’s possible,’ said Deacon diplomatically. ‘To drug your drink, though, someone would have had to get into your house and there are no signs of a break-in. It’s much more likely you came by it outside. Did you go out that evening? Before you were taken ill, I mean.’
Alison wasn’t interested in an alternative theory. ‘If it was in the can, Forensics should have found traces.’
Deacon checked back his notes to confirm what he was saying. ‘My Scenes of Crime Officer didn’t find a cider can.’
‘For pity’s sake!’ she exploded in exasperation. ‘I didn’t put an empty can back in the fridge! Didn’t he check the rubbish?’
‘He checked both the kitchen bin and the wheelie-bin in the yard. There was no cider can.’
Her expression flickered as she thought about challenging that, realised it would be foolish and moved on. A little hollow note of shock sounded in her voice. ‘He’s been back. He went back to the house after he thought I was dead and removed the evidence.’
Deacon resisted the urge to break his pencil. ‘You think he broke in not once but twice, still without doing any damage?’
‘I think if he managed it once he could do it again, yes,’ she retorted sharply.
‘By he you mean Johnny Windham,’ said Deacon.
‘Damn right I do.’
If they were back to this they might as well confront it and deal with it. ‘Did he know where you
were living? Have you seen him since you moved there? The person whose house it is’ – he checked his notes again – ‘Bella Goss, is she a friend of Windham’s? Might she have given him a key?’
Alison was shaking her head. ‘Bella doesn’t know anyone in the horse world. I’ve known her since school. She’s the only friend I have I didn’t meet through the business.’ There was no mistaking the bitterness in her voice. ‘Perhaps that’s why now she’s the only friend I have.’
‘OK.’ Deacon put down his notebook and looked at her levelly. ‘So you’re still insisting that the only way you could have taken these drugs is if a man who all the records show was abroad at the time traced you to a house that you don’t own, that’s owned by someone he doesn’t know, and forced an entry in order to doctor your food – and broke in again in order to tidy up after himself so well that neither my Scenes of Crime Officer nor the Forensic Science Laboratory could find any sign that he was ever there. Is that what you’re saying, Miss Barker?’
She wasn’t blind to the weakness of her story. ‘Sounds likely, doesn’t it? But yes, that’s pretty much what I’m saying. I can’t think of any other way I could have taken drugs without knowing it.’
‘And you’re adamant that you didn’t take them knowingly.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I am. Look, Superintendent – if it wasn’t Windham then two different people killed my father and tried to kill me. That’s even more bizarre.’
Deacon went on regarding her for a moment longer before responding. ‘Miss Barker, I don’t know what happened to you. I’m trying to work it out, because if someone is trying to kill you I don’t want him to succeed. But it occurs to me there’s one possible alternative. Do you want to hear what it is?’
With a spread hand she invited him to continue.
‘A lot’s gone wrong with your life in the last six months. Your family business failed. You had to sell a bunch of horses you were obviously attached to, and that left you without a proper job. You had to sell your house, and then your father died. A person would need a heart of stone not to succumb to depression after that lot.’
She looked away quickly, suggesting he’d scored. Deacon nodded. ‘You got through it somehow, but I think it took more of a toll on you than you realise. I think you’re suffering from depression now. I think you were depressed on Tuesday night – deeply depressed, sick of the whole sorry business – and you went out looking for something to cheer you up.
‘You’re not a big drinker, are you? One can of cider in the fridge and you didn’t finish that at a sitting. So if you needed a boost, maybe you thought you’d try tablets. Maybe you’d never tried them before, but the way you were feeling there’d never be a better time.’
He was watching her closely, waiting for the flicker of an eyelid, the intake of breath, that would indicate he was hitting close to home. It didn’t come, not yet. He pressed on.
‘You found someone who was dealing, and you didn’t know what to ask for so you took what he had. It happened to be Scram, and it happened to be stronger than either you or he realised. Once you’d got the stuff you couldn’t wait to take it and stop feeling the way you did that night. I don’t think you ever got home. I think you took those tablets in the street, and within minutes the world was spinning. And that’s the only reason you’re alive, Miss Barker. You collapsed in the street instead of behind a closed door.’
He wasn’t sure what he was expecting. Not arms round his neck, a flood of tears and a tremulous apology: he didn’t think Alison Barker was the dissolving-in-tears type. But if that was anything like the truth he’d offered her a way out. She could retreat from her accusations against Windham under the cover of emotional confusion, and rather than be charged with wasting police time expect nothing but sympathy. It would be interesting to see if she took it or not.
For a moment she seemed to consider it. But it involved too much of a retreat: she shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Superintendent. If I had a satisfactory explanation I’d give it to you. I haven’t. But you haven’t either.’
Deacon was watching her through narrowed eyes. ‘I will have,’ he said grimly ‘If I keep looking into this I will get to the bottom of what happened, and who did what to who, and then I’ll charge everyone who’s committed an offence. Is that what you want, Miss Barker? Do you want me to investigate what happened to you?’
With barely a hesitation she said, ‘Yes.’
The John Farrells were back home so Paddy was staying with her father the next night. She’d been looking forward to it for a week. So had he. So had Brodie. But Deacon had most of all.
Deacon’s house was a small stone building under the shelter of the Firestone Cliffs that had been built in Georgian times as Dimmock’s jail. It still had some of the original ironwork. Dimmock wasn’t a very big town then so it wasn’t a very big jail: by the time a kitchen and bathroom had been installed, and the guardhouse turned into a living-room, there were only enough cells remaining to adapt as one large bedroom and one small one.
In the large one, in the large oak bed, under the enormous feather duvet, at one o‘clock in the morning, Brodie – who should have had her mind on other things – said pensively, ‘I keep coming back to the horses.’
Deacon stopped what he was doing as if shot with a gun. ‘What?’
‘Horses,’ she repeated, gratified by his interest. ‘I mean, Dimmock isn’t Newmarket. It isn’t even Exmoor. When did you last have a conversation about horses with anyone? And yet they keep cropping up.’
With a restraint remarkable in the circumstances, Deacon put his best moves on hold while he dealt with this unwelcome distraction. ‘Because that’s the business Barker & Walbrook were in. If they’d been taxidermists the recurring theme would have been tiger-skin rugs; as they were horse dealers it’s horses. Alison Barker rode them because she was Stanley Barker’s daughter. Johnny Windham transports them because that’s how Alison knows him. Everyone Alison knows does something with horses. She told me that herself.’
‘What about the tranquillizer?’
‘Horsefeathers? That’s just what Forensics are calling it. It doesn’t prove anything except they’ve got a funny sense of humour and way too much time on their hands.’
‘But it is a veterinary tranquillizer used for large animals. Which means, the odd circus camel aside, cattle and horses.’
Brodie was right, there was a thread running through these events which might be considered to connect them – but where it wasn’t lumberingly predictable it was diaphanously tenuous. The only real puzzle, the one thing that they knew for sure had happened and still couldn’t explain, was that somehow Alison Barker had taken Scram. Except for that she was just a neurotic girl with a history of misfortune. But even if the attacks she complained of were illusory, the drug that almost killed her linked her to real and important crimes. The possibility that Alison Barker was his key into that secret world was all that stopped Deacon consigning everything he knew on her to the round file.
‘All right,’ he allowed. His elbows were getting sore so he shifted onto his back beside her. ‘Suppose there is a connection through the horse trade. Somewhere in Germany a vet is rerouting an experimental drug he’s supposed to be using on horses and cattle – and the odd circus camel – and passing it on as spare parts for Scram, to be assembled in England, probably not too far from here. If his social circle is as limited as Alison’s, maybe it’s people in the horse world who are smuggling it over here for him.’
Brodie liked that. ‘There’s a fair bit of coming and going, isn’t there? Horses competing at shows all over Europe. Big lorries carrying loads of gear. You could probably smuggle fifty gallon drums of the stuff if you wanted to.’
Deacon shook his head. ‘Customs weren’t born yesterday. If they’ve reason to, which includes not having done it for a while, they’ll take every bit of cargo off any kind of carrier and strip it down to the chassis. Live cargo won’t stop them. They have people perfectly comp
etent to off-load some horses.’
‘You suppose they’ve had a look in Johnny Windham’s lorry?’
‘I’d be surprised if they haven’t. If he’s crossing the Channel regularly he’s bound to have had a shakedown from time to time. But if you’d something to smuggle, particularly if you could do it in small quantities, you’d farm it out to people whose faces weren’t known, driving family hatchbacks with a couple of kids and a stack of suitcases in the back.’
‘I suppose.’
He waited for her to say something more. When she had a bone she tended to worry it to the marrow. But Brodie remained silent. Thinking, possibly.
After a minute Deacon cleared his throat. ‘So, if we’ve dealt with that, do you think we might possibly get on with … um?’
She was, she was thinking. His polite enquiry brought her back with a start. ‘What? Oh, yes – of course. Sorry. I was just … Sorry.’
He waited for her to get with the programme. When she showed no signs of doing so he vented a heavy sigh. ‘Do you think a little enthusiasm might be a possibility?’
‘Switching to enthusiasm mode right now,’ she promised him. And to be sure, he had no grounds to call her a liar.
But over breakfast she said, ‘I think I might pay Johnny Windham a visit.’
Deacon froze with his coffee halfway to his face. ‘Why?’
‘Why not?’
‘He hasn’t done anything. The only person who thinks he’s done anything wrong is Alison Barker, and he can prove he didn’t do what she thinks he did. He has proved it. We have no further interest in Johnny Windham.’
‘Then I can’t possibly cause you a problem by visiting him, can I?’ Brodie replied smoothly.
‘But why would you want to?’
‘Because his name’s come up and I don’t know where to file it. You’re probably right and he’s the innocent victim of a one-woman smear campaign. But just in case Daniel’s right and there’s some truth to what Alison’s saying, I’d like to meet him for myself.’