by Jo Bannister
‘Are your cousins into horses too, Mr Townes?’
‘No,’ he said levelly. ‘One is an accountant, one works in a brewery, two are academics at the university.’
‘Veterinary science?’ hazarded Deacon, who saw what was always a thin lead withering by the moment.
‘Media studies and archaeology,’ said Dieter Townes.
Deacon made himself smile. ‘Well, thank you for your insights. I’m sure we’ll find them very helpful. If we should need another word with you …?’
‘I’ll be here. I always am.’
She’d said an hour. When two had passed and Alison still wasn’t back Daniel put his books away and walked up Fisher Hill to The Ginnell.
He was expecting to find her there, with a suitcase open on the bed, debating what to bring and what to leave, unaware how much time had passed and how uneasy he had become. Instead he found the house empty and no sign of an old banger outside.
All Daniel’s instincts were telling him something was wrong. Even so, before he did anything he made himself stop and think. There were a lot more likely explanations than that she’d been abducted in broad daylight. She might be on her way down to the shore right now, just not the way he’d come because she’d parked the car facing up the hill. If he walked home he might find she’d got there first, was sitting on his steps like an orphan because she hadn’t got a key.
By then, though, she’d have been adrift for two and a half hours. Twelve days after what she claimed was an attempt on her life, would she have left him to worry for that long, when all she had to do if she’d been delayed was pick up the phone? If she knew his number. Daniel couldn’t remember if he’d given it to her or not.
He turned round and headed home. If she was there, or there was a message on his phone, well and good; if not he was going to have to call the police. The chance that Alison was in trouble outweighed the risk of making a fool of himself
In the event, Brodie walked out of Shack Lane as he hurried past. With Paddy at her father’s for tea she’d taken the opportunity to do a couple of hours’ work. So intent was he on getting home that Daniel didn’t even see her: she had to call his name, with some asperity, before he stopped.
‘Not talking to me, Daniel?’
They hadn’t parted on the best of terms, but in fact he was desperately glad to see her. He explained the situation in a few sentences.
To her credit, whatever her feelings about Alison Barker and however irritated she was with Daniel, Brodie put that aside while they dealt with the crisis. ‘I’ll get the car. We’ll check your house, and if she’s not there I’ll call Jack.’
She wasn’t there. Daniel’s heart plummeted. But while Brodie was dialling a decrepit car pulled up behind Brodie’s. Daniel touched her arm.
Immediately Brodie’s annoyance, her sense that something valuable to her had been stolen by this girl, returned. She was all set to give Alison a piece of her mind as soon as she came inside. But she didn’t come inside. She didn’t get out of the car. They could see her bent over the wheel, not moving. With a sudden surge of fear they hurried down the iron steps and up the shingle together.
Alison was uninjured. But she was crying as if she’d never stop.
Daniel wanted to touch her and didn’t dare, afraid she might shatter like crystal. Brodie had no such reservations. She ducked down beside the weeping girl and put her arms around her, and guided her out of the car and down to the netting-shed. Feeling rather foolish – thieves aren’t that desperate, even in Dimmock – Daniel locked the car and followed.
Brodie didn’t even try to get any sense out of her until Alison was installed in an armchair with a mug of hot sweet tea pressed into her trembling hands. Then she said, ‘Tell us what happened.’
In all honesty, what had happened barely explained the state she’d worked herself into. She had done as she’d told Daniel she intended: walked up to the house on The Ginnell. On the kitchen table she’d found a message from Mary Walbrook saying she’d popped by and found the house empty, and would Alison call to say where she was staying and that she was all right.
‘I was going to phone. Then I thought, the car’s out there, I’ll drive out to the yard then she’ll know I’m OK.’ She packed what she was taking down to Daniel’s, then headed for Peyton Parvo.
Half a mile from the yard, on a road that went almost nowhere else, she met one of Windham Transport’s lorries with Johnny Windham at the wheel.
‘I thought … I thought … I don’t know what I thought! I thought she was my friend. I thought if Johhny offered her the same deal he offered my father she’d throw him out. I didn’t think she’d be willing to forget everything that had happened for the sake of some cheap transport! But I was wrong.’
‘And you were upset,’ said Brodie softly.
‘Upset?’ The girl’s voice soared. ‘Mrs Farrell, I know you don’t believe me. I know Superintendent Deacon doesn’t believe me, and I’m not sure Daniel does. But Johnny Windham is a killer, and he’s talked Mary into hiring him again. What’s in it for her is cheap transport. What’s in it for him is her standing up and saying that no, what happened to Barker & Walbrook – what happened to my father – wasn’t his fault. The people we know will understand what it means when they see him delivering to our yard again. They’ll understand it means Mary’s backing him, not me.’
Daniel tried to find a little consolation for her. ‘I suppose it was a business decision. She’ll have had to make some difficult ones to keep the yard going. She probably felt this was another occasion when she just had to bite the bullet and do it.’
Alison pushed away the mug – most people don’t actually like hot sweet tea – and put both hands to her face. But she wasn’t crying any more. She was trying to say this without sounding hysterical in the hope of finally convincing someone who mattered. Daniel was sweet to believe her, but she had come to realise that Daniel had problems with his own credibility. She desperately needed a big gun to back her up.
‘I’m not talking about yard politics here. I’m not angry because Mary’s taking his side not mine. Well, I am, but that’s not what this is about. It’s about the fact that Johnny Windham thinks he’s entitled to remove any obstacles in his way by any means that suit him. I’m afraid for her. I’m afraid that once the novelty of cheap transport has worn off she’ll remember what kind of a man he is and want nothing more to do with him, and he won’t let her walk away.’
Her chin cupped in one hand, Brodie regarded the girl without speaking for some moments. Finally she said, ‘Can we put our cards on the table here, Alison? Say what we think?’ Ally nodded. ‘Then, there are a lot of things about your story that don’t make any sense. But things that make no sense happen every day, and a lot of them I could just about believe with a following wind. Do you know what I can’t believe? That Johnny Windham – that anyone – would want to kill either you or your father over a business dispute.
‘All right, your father blamed him for the damage to some horses, and Windham blamed your father for costing him some customers. It’s the sort of thing that happens every day – you lose one customer over a disagreement, you gain another who’s just fallen out with his last supplier. You don’t go back a week later and push him in a pond, and you certainly don’t go back three months later and try to murder his daughter!’
The girl shrugged. Sitting there in his living room, hunched over as if expecting blows, Daniel was conscious of how very slight she was. He knew she was strong too, she had to be, but maybe a lot of her strength was mental rather than physical. Nobody is as strong as a horse. Maybe she was good at pretending to be strong, the way he was good at pretending to be brave. If the pretence was good enough, no one challenged it. You yourself knew it was a sham, but if you never let on maybe no one would guess.
‘I can’t help that,’ Ally said quietly. She had her fingers laced together, gripping tightly. ‘I’ve told you everything that happened, as it happened. Of course no one
believes me. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I didn’t know this man and what he’s capable of.’
‘Mary knows him too,’ Brodie pointed out. ‘And she lost almost as much as you did. But she doesn’t blame Windham. Not for your business difficulties and not for your father’s death.’
‘But then, I know him better than Mary does.’
Brodie noted that without pursuing it. ‘There’s something missing. That argument: are you sure it was about the horses? They couldn’t have fallen out over something else?’
‘They didn’t have anything else in common.’
‘Tell me what happened. What they said to one another.’
Even remembering was a pain to Alison Barker. Her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. ‘I’d never seen my Dad so angry. He kept saying, “I used to have a reputation round here. People respected me.” I didn’t know whether he was going to hit Johnny or have a stroke first. I thought Johnny was going to knock him down. I think they would have come to blows if I hadn’t come round the corner at the critical moment. Then they backed off like a couple of scrapping dogs, snarling insults and threats at one another. Dad said if he caught Johnny on the place again he’d call the police, and Johnny said “Don’t think this is over” and “You’re going to pay for this”. Then he got in his lorry and drove away, and five days later my father was dead. So tell me: what would you have thought?’
Sorry for her as he was, Daniel still couldn’t see it. ‘I think I’d have thought he was sick and tired of all the problems crowding in on him, and that he picked a dangerous spot to go on a blinder.’
‘OK,’ said Brodie, still trying to shape this into a narrative she could believe in. ‘Stanley and Windham had a blazing row and ended up trading threats. There’s nothing terribly unusual about that in the business world. Believe me: I know. Sometimes it takes mediation to sort out who owes who what, sometimes it takes solicitors. But it’s a hell of a way from the threat of fisticuffs to cold-blooded murder. People don’t kill one another over things like that.’
Actually that wasn’t strictly true. There are really only two reasons people get murdered. One is anger, the other is money. People do die in business disputes, only such murders tend to be either crude and obvious or clever and unsuspected. This fitted neither template.
‘You weren’t there,’ insisted Ally.
But Brodie had got to the bottom of a lot of mysteries she hadn’t actually witnessed. It was partly intuition, partly her analytical brain, partly the sort of thought processes that make people good at crosswords, and partly that she knew the comparatively small number of ways that people behaved and was good at judging what they would and wouldn’t do in a given set of circumstances. ‘Just suppose,’ she said slowly, ‘that what they were arguing about wasn’t just some horses that got sick in transit.’
For once Daniel, who could read her mind like a book, let her down. He frowned. ‘What then?’
She scowled disappointedly at him. ‘Suppose they were arguing about how Windham was using Barker & Walbrook’s horses as a cover for drug running?’
Chapter Fourteen
‘I don’t think Townes is involved,’ said Deacon.
‘Despite the German connection?’
Because it was Sunday he and his sergeant were talking shop in The Belted Galloway instead of the CID offices on the top floor of Battle Alley. In the labyrinth of Deacon’s mind this counted as “Having Sunday Off”. Each man had half a pint of weak shandy in front of him.
‘Coincidence,’ said Deacon. ‘Everyone’s parents come from somewhere.’
‘My grandmother’s Irish,’ volunteered Charlie Voss.
Deacon had always taken his red hair as a personal affront. ‘Why am I not surprised?’
‘If Townes isn’t, does that mean Windham is?’
‘I don’t think it works quite like that. But he does keep popping up, doesn’t he? Just when you think you’ve laid him to rest – the guy had a bit of bad luck, not even so much with the horses as with that damned hysterical girl – up he pops again. And now he’s back working for Barker & Walbrook.’
‘I suppose that’s Walbrook & Barker now,’ ruminated Voss.
‘That’s certainly how Mary Walbrook sees it. It seems fair enough,’ said Deacon, ‘I doubt there’d still be a business without her grabbing hold of it and refusing to let go.’
‘She buys a lot of horses on the continent,’ said Voss. ‘Whoever carries them will be constantly crossing the Channel. If Windham is up to no good, her business would give him a cast-iron reason to bring a big vehicle full of neurotic animals through Dover as often as he needed to. He could be carrying more than horses.’
Deacon had been thinking along the same lines. He thought that meant Charlie Voss was reading his mind, never considered the possibility that he’d learned to read Voss’s. ‘Get the registration numbers of his lorries and check with Customs if they’ve given any of them a shakedown recently. Ask them if they had a reason or was it just his turn. Ask them …’
These two men had worked closely together for three years now. They spent hours a day in one another’s company. The relationship was a lot like a marriage, and had already lasted longer than some. They knew one another pretty well.
Deacon knew that while Charlie Voss might not make a song and dance about it, he was an astute, intuitive and hard-working police officer who was customarily one, if not two, steps ahead of the game. He knew what it meant that Voss wasn’t nodding and reaching for a phone, was just waiting quietly for him to finish. ‘You’ve already done it, haven’t you?’
Voss nodded apologetically. ‘They’ve had both his lorries in for a check in the last two months, one a down-to-the-chassis job. They didn’t find anything.’
‘Did they expect to?’
‘No.’ Voss didn’t sound totally confident of that. ‘Well, yes and no. The way it was put to me, they had no reason to suspect him – no tip-offs, no intelligence – they just felt a shade uneasy about him. Just enough to keep an eye on his comings and goings. They hoped to find something but weren’t surprised when they didn’t.’
‘And they emptied that particular lorry and stripped it right down?’
‘No false floor, no secret panels, no hidden storage inside the diesel tank. They’re as sure as they can be that if he’d been carrying anything apart from horses they’d have found it.’
Deacon gave a glum scowl. ‘Maybe he just wasn’t carrying anything that day.’
‘If there’d been any secret compartments, even empty ones, they’d have found them too. I suppose the driver could always fill his Thermos, but that’s not why you take a six-horse transporter to Europe. Easier and safer just to hire a few mules.’
‘And he’d been in Germany?’
‘He always seems to visit Germany. Well, a lot of good horses are bred there, and a lot of them come here. There’s nothing suspicious about him doing regular runs to Germany.’
‘There’s not much suspicious about him at all, is there?’ said Deacon lugubriously. ‘Let’s be honest: we wouldn’t be looking at him at all if it wasn’t for that crazy girl.’
‘That crazy girl who nearly died of a Scram overdose,’ Voss reminded him.
‘There is that. But we only have her word for it that she didn’t feel like a pick-me-up and buy it from a street-dealer. We’d never have looked at Windham if she hadn’t accused him of trying to kill her. But she’s levelled accusations at him before, and they were investigated and dismissed as a mixture of grief and malice.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Voss. ‘You don’t think we should have investigated Stanley Barker’s death a bit more thoroughly?’
Deacon thought he was probably right. There had seemed no reason to treat the incident as suspicious at the time – except for his daughter’s protestations, and no one is at their most logical when there’s been a death in the family. They had taken what she had to say with rather more than a pinch of salt. That wasn’t an unreasonable decision, but i
t meant Deacon couldn’t now look back on the matter of Stanley Barker’s midnight swim and state with confidence that nothing had been missed. ‘We’re going to have to do it again, aren’t we?’
‘If only for our own peace of mind.’
‘Peace of mind be damned,’ grunted Deacon. ‘If she was right all along, we missed a murder and left a killer at large to try to kill again. This is not a matter of dotting i’s and crossing t’s. It’s what we’re paid for.’
‘And we earn every penny of it,’ Voss said stoutly. ‘We’re bloody good at what we do, just not quite infallible.’
Deacon speared him with a disapproving eye. ‘Have you never heard it said, Charlie Voss, that pride is a sin?’
‘I’ve always thought that lack of pride was a greater one.’
Deacon went on regarding him: not so much with disfavour now, almost – this was worrying – with affection. If he’d realised he was doing it he’d have stopped immediately. Voss recognised the look and said nothing. He’d taken enough stick from his governor in the early months, he thought he’d earned a bit of respect by now.
‘OK,’ said Deacon. ‘Let’s suppose, just for the moment, that Stanley Barker’s death wasn’t as clear-cut as we thought, was neither accident nor suicide. He didn’t fall, he didn’t jump – he was pushed.’ The words verged on the flippant but his tone was utterly serious. ‘If Windham was using his lorries to smuggle in drugs, or components for drugs, losing Barker’s business would have been a blow to him. Hence the argument that Alison overheard. If he came to the conclusion that he wasn’t going to talk Barker round, maybe he thought he’d find it easier to charm Mary Walbrook. She was his partner – with Barker out of the way she’d make the decisions. You could call that a motive for murder.’