by Jo Bannister
After a moment Brodie nodded.
‘So they needed somewhere to talk where they wouldn’t be disturbed,’ continued Deacon. ‘Not Windham’s place – he knew he was under surveillance before they arranged this. Somewhere else. Somewhere he could park a horse-box without anybody asking why, and stay for — I don’t know how long a horse’s gut is! – maybe a day or so.’
What had begun as an attempt to find some reassurance for Brodie was actually raising his own spirits. ‘You know, there’s time left in the programme. This man isn’t going to kill Daniel out of panic — he has no reason to panic. He’s somewhere he feels safe enough to sit and wait, and he knows he’s going to be there for maybe another day He knows we’re watching Windham, but so does Windham — he’s not going to lead us anywhere. As long as he can keep Daniel secure – and let’s face it, he’s not the Incredible Hulk — he doesn’t need to do anything else.’
Brodie could see that. ‘But the time will come when he has to make some kind of a decision. He can take his package and run, and leave Daniel to be found. But Daniel’s a witness against him — the only one who can tie him into this business. Why would he risk leaving him alive?’ Her voice was desolate. She was desperate for an answer but she didn’t think there was one.
‘I don’t think he will,’ Deacon replied honestly. ‘But that point could be twenty-four hours away. He won’t kill him before he’s ready to leave. You never know what the future holds and he’ll want to keep his options open. If we catch up with him he can use a live hostage in a way that he couldn’t use a corpse.’ He’d done it again, and again he kicked himself at the flicker of pain that crossed her face. ‘Brodie, we have a whole day to find them in. Don’t tell me I can’t find two men, a horse and a horse-box with twenty-four hours to look.’
He wasn’t making this up. Policemen aren’t used to having time on their side: in a situation like this, a day’s grace was an unexpected luxury. But if he’d been talking to Voss rather than Brodie he’d have acknowledged that even one district of a small and over-populated island is dauntingly large when it comes to making a thorough search.
An experienced team would take a day to search one house thoroughly enough to be sure nothing had escaped their scrutiny. To search every wood, every barn, every garage or factory building that could hide a small horse-box was an impossible ambition – even if they confined themselves to a ten-mile radius of Dimmock, and there was no reason to suppose the box had travelled no further than that. It could be travelling still. Twenty-four hours was enough time to conduct a proper search only if they knew where to start searching.
Despite his efforts to shield her, Brodie was thinking pretty much the same thing. But at least she was thinking. ‘They’ll have taken him somewhere they feel safe. Somewhere Windham knows but thinks we’ll never find. But what about Ally? She’s spent all her life with people like Johnny Windham, going the places they go. If he knows a secret hideaway, maybe she knows it too.’
Deacon turned and looked at the girl who was once again asleep on the sofa. ‘You want to ask her?’ he said doubtfully.
‘With Daniel’s life on the line? Damn right I will.’
First she went into the bathroom and turned the shower on. With the regulator turned right down the water was icy. She went back into the living room and fixed Deacon with a determined eye. ‘It might be better if you’re not here for this bit. Do you want to nip out and buy some triple-roasted Colombian coffee?’
He knew that what she was protecting him from was not the sight of Alison Barker in a wet T-shirt but the elevated eyebrows and disapproving looks of his superiors. As a civilian and a woman, she could get away with things that he, as a detective superintendent and a man, could not. But Deacon was always interested to learn just how much he could get away with. ‘Daniel’s decaf’ll do.’ He helped her lift the sleepy mumbling girl and steer her into the bathroom.
Brodie was taller than Alison Barker, and when she was this determined she was strong. But even she still couldn’t hold the girl at arm’s length. Without a second’s thought she kicked off her shoes and shed her jacket, and otherwise fully clothed she stepped into the bath and under the pounding water dragging Ally with her.
The chill of it flayed her, making her gasp. It had a similar effect on Alison. From soporific and barely able to stand, the girl in her arms turned wildcat in an instant, kicking and writhing and swearing in a high, shocked monotone. Brodie hung on, forcing her head under the icy blast, yelling in her ear. ‘Wake up, damn you! Wake up and listen to me. Daniel’s in danger, and it might not be your fault but you’re the reason it’s happened, and even if you weren’t you’d be the only person who can help him. Wash that cotton-wool out of your head. I need you to think!’
Daniel lived alone: there weren’t enough towels in the airing cupboard to dry both of them. Brodie stripped and shrugged herself into his dressing gown. Then she sat Ally on the side of the bath, flooding the floor, and toweled her vigorously through her pyjamas. While she toweled she explained.
‘Where would they take him? It must be somewhere Windham knows – the other guy’s a foreigner. Windham phoned him and told him where to find Daniel, and he also said where to take him. Come on, Ally – think. Private, big enough to take a horse-box, no nosy neighbours. Preferably no one within shouting distance. It can’t be anywhere we’d know about, which rules out his place and yours. But this is your world – chances are, any place Windham knows, you know too. Try to think. If you had a horse and a hostage, and you didn’t want anyone finding either of them for twenty-four hours, where would you go?’
Alison was shaking with the cold. But she was awake enough now to know what was being asked of her, and to understand that it was important. Her pinched face was rigid with the effort of thinking.
Suddenly it cleared. She looked up through the rat-tails of her hair with a burst of intelligence like sunrise in her eyes. ‘There is a place. I don’t know what it’s called. I don’t know how to find it. But I know where to start.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
Detective Sergeant Voss was on his way back from Windham’s yard on the edge of Romney Marsh. Deacon turned him round. ‘Change of plan,’ he growled. ‘Discretion just stopped being an option. Pick him up and bring him in.’
‘On my own?’ Voss didn’t mind the occasional black eye. But he was worried that, in a straight fight, Windham might win and get away.
‘I haven’t time to send up reinforcements,’ snarled Deacon. ‘Just get on with it. Are you a man or a mouse?’
‘Yes,’ Voss answered firmly. ‘So why exactly are we ditching everything we’ve done so far and going at him like a bull in a china shop?’ The miles between them notwithstanding, he winced when he realised he’d said that out loud. It was the sort of thing he thought a lot but didn’t usually say to Detective Superintendent Deacon.
Deacon didn’t usually waste time explaining himself to junior officers. Voss was different. He was certainly Deacon’s junior but also his partner. They worked best when they worked together. Though he’d have died rather than admit it, Deacon had considerable respect for his sergeant. He wasn’t just a good policeman, he had a good mind. Right now Deacon needed the help of good minds. So he brought Voss up to date.
‘I’m on my way,’ said Voss. His voice was altered, quiet and focused. ‘I’ll have him at Battle Alley in about ninety minutes. If I can get anything out of him before that I’ll call you.’
‘If he knows the game’s up he could turn nasty,’ warned Deacon.
‘With any luck at all,’ said Voss.
Deacon put his phone away with a grin that was unexpected enough for Brodie to notice. ‘What?’
‘I think Charlie Voss has been working for me too long.’
While he’d been making phone calls, Brodie had had Alison Barker poring over a road map, trying to work out where she lost her virginity.
‘It’s getting to be a long time ago,’ she muttered. ‘I was fifte
en. The last thing on my mind was the grid reference!’
Brodie understood that. ‘So tell me how it happened.’ Ally’s eyebrows rocketed. ‘I mean,’ she elaborated, ‘where you were going, where you’d been. How long you’d been on the road. We can narrow it down from there.’
The girl nodded. ‘We’d been to the Bath & West. Horse Show,’ she added, remembering she wasn’t talking to someone from her world now. ‘We were there for two days. My dad had to get back to meet a client, I stayed with the horses. We dropped someone off in Winchester and after that it was just Johnny and me.’
Despite everything that had happened since, the memory made her smile. ‘I thought it was my lucky day, driving through the night beside Johnny Windham and nobody else awake. What did I know? I was fifteen.
‘After the sun came up he said he was going to have to take a break and did I mind? Mind? I’d have spent all day sitting on the hard shoulder with him. But he said he knew a place where we could get out and stretch our legs. Five minutes off the main road, he said, though I think it was a bit more. There was a gate. Big curly thing – it must have been grand once but it was patched with tin and off its hinges. He drove the lorry between some overgrown bushes and there was this house. Huge, but derelict. Gutted – you could see through from the front windows to the back. Johnny said there was a fire years before and they’d never had the money to rebuild.’
‘And that’s where it happened,’ said Brodie softly.
‘Yes,’ said the girl crisply, ‘that’s where it happened. On a horse-rug on the grass, wet with dew, and he said he loved me. And I was fifteen and believed him.’
‘And you never told anyone? Mary thought you had a schoolgirl crush on him. What about your father – did he know?’
Ally shook her head. ‘At the time I had no reason to tell him. I had a secret lover – what girl wants to share that with her parents? By the time I realised it was over, which was three months after everyone else knew, it seemed childish to complain. I wanted him when I thought it meant something — I wasn’t going to scream “Rape!” when I found it didn’t. I felt used, and foolish and embarrassed. I just wanted never to see him again – and even that wasn’t going to happen unless I was prepared to say why.’
Deacon steered them back onto the subject. ‘So we’re looking for a derelict mansion not far from the A272. How long after you’d left Winchester?’
Brodie stared at him as if he’d said something gross. Then she realised he was right: for a moment she’d forgotten what had led to this.
Ally blinked, pulling herself back to the present. ‘Winchester?’
‘You dropped off some of your load in Winchester, yes? How long did you drive after that before Windham turned off?’
She tried to think. ‘I don’t know. Quite a while – at least an hour, maybe two.’
‘Which — one or two? An hour is what, thirty miles in a horse-box? Somewhere around Petworth. Two hours would have taken you to Hayward’s Heath. There’s a lot of southern England in between, Miss Barker. Try to be more specific.’
‘I wasn’t watching the dashboard!’
Brodie was doing what she did best: extrapolating from what she knew to what she wanted to know. ‘You’d recognise this house if you saw it again?’
‘Yes. But isn’t that the problem – that we don’t know how to find it?’
‘I know how to find it.’ She was on her feet and halfway to the door. ‘Come on, we’re taking this to my office. Give me half an hour on the Internet and I’ll show you a picture you can recognise.’
‘How?’
Brodie paused just long enough in the doorway to throw back a smile of infinite hubris. ‘By being very good at what I do, Ally. I find things, yes? Well, this is how I do it. Watch, learn and be impressed.’
In fact it didn’t take her half an hour. Her fingers moving almost fast enough to deceive the eye, she flicked from one specialist website to another – National Trust, English Heritage, great houses, lost gems, architectural salvage. After twenty minutes they’d trawled through what was essentially a brick-by-brick survey of the architectural history of the South Downs. A couple of times Ally had sat up straight in her chair only to subside, disappointed, once she’d had a better look.
Finally she let out a squawk. ‘That’s it!’
Deacon, perching awkwardly on the edge of Brodie’s desk, his neck craned to see over her shoulder, almost fell off. ‘You’re sure?’
The girl looked him full in the face. ‘You’re a man – you probably don’t even remember your first time. I do. It was there.’
He believed her. At least, he believed she thought so. He couldn’t be sure she was right, and he couldn’t be sure that, even if she was, Windham had also remembered the place when he came to need somewhere to hide a horse-box. But it was their best chance to get ahead of the game. Unless Johnny Windham was overcome by a sudden urge to confess all to Charlie Voss, it was their only chance. ‘Where? What’s it called?’
Brodie hit the printer button, at the same time reading the details aloud. ‘Sparrow Hill. A Regency mansion south of Guildford. Reduced to a shell by a fire shortly after the First World War. A picturesque rather than important site, now largely overgrown’ — her voice sharpened – ‘by the rhododendrons lining the driveway! That’s it, all right, Jack. It’s exactly how she described it.’
Deacon was taking down the map reference. ‘You drive. I’m going to be on the phone.’
Voss was still twice as far from Sparrow Hill as Deacon was: there was nothing he could do to help. Except that he had Windham with him, and Windham knew things that even Brodie was only guessing. Rather than speeding up, which was why Deacon had called him, he let the car slow to a crawl and then pulled over.
He turned on the interior light and swivelled in his seat to look Windham, handcuffed in the back, full in the eye. ‘We’ve found them.’
Windham gave an elaborate sigh. ‘I still don’t know who you’re talking about.’
‘No, I know,’ said Voss evenly, ‘You don’t know anything about a white horse-box. You left the pony in Belgium because it was unwell and as far as you know it’s still there. So this’ll come as news to you. It isn’t. It’s in a small white horse-box no great distance from here, with somebody feeding it all the prunes it can take.
‘Now, I know that you know who that is. He’s a friend of yours and you’re working together on this. But we don’t need to argue about it just now. Because there’s someone else there too, and he’s a friend of mine, and if he’s been hurt, or if he’s going to get hurt, you’re the one in custody — you’re the one who’s going to pay. Not to put too fine a point on it: if Daniel Hood ends up dead, you’re looking at a life sentence.’
He paused, waiting for some reaction. There was none. Windham continued to gaze at him impassively.
Voss nodded. ‘You’ve probably heard of life sentences that work out at just a few years and you’re thinking it’s not too big a risk to take. We nail you for manufacturing and distributing drugs, you’re going down anyway—what’s the difference?
‘The difference is, you kill someone in the process of making and distributing drugs – and not someone who got in the way of a shoot-out or a speeding car but someone who was taken from his house because you thought he had information you needed — and you’re no longer looking at eight years, you’re looking at twenty. You’ll be pushing sixty when you get out.’
For the first time Windham’s gaze flickered. He brought it back quickly, defiantly, but Voss had seen. Encouraged, he pressed on. ‘You don’t want to believe that holiday-camp line either. Any time in prison is hard time. Twenty years of it is like climbing Everest on your hands and knees. Harder men than you have been broken down, bit by bit, until there’s nothing left but dust.
‘Frankly, I don’t much care what happens to you. I don’t care if you spend every night of those twenty years face-down on an iron bedstead with a queue of men paying for you in snout and
phone-cards. That’s not why I want your help. I want it for my sake, and my friend’s sake. But the real politik of the situation is, you help me and there are things I can do to help you. Less time, and easier time. Don’t pass up on that unless you’re sure you want to.’
Windham came from that same middle-England background as most people involved with horses: neither aristocratic nor entirely plebian, not rich on inherited wealth nor dependent on benefits. His natural forebears were the yeomen of England, independent farmers, men of substance and self-reliance, men who worked hard for what they had and defended it jealously, even against kings. He did not spring from criminal stock, with an inbred knowledge of and stoicism about the consequences of failure. He didn’t grow up knowing where to catch the bus for Durham and Parkhurst. Career criminals do everything they can to avoid prison but don’t fear it in the way that essentially law-abiding people do. They know what doing time involves. They know that, left with no choice, they can do it.
In many ways the white-collar criminal, the man who gets into it because he has a talent or an idea that can be exploited more profitably on the wrong side of the law, is harder for the police to deal with. He may have the money, the connections and the education to use the law to shelter him from justice. He never uses the words, ‘It’s a fair cop, gov.’ But if he has a weakness, it’s that anything which pricks the bubble of his ego, that undermines his sense of being in control, may tip him into disaster. He won’t, as the career blagger would, fall back on sullen silence as his last defence. He will lie like a trooper in the attempt to maintain the image of innocence, and sooner or later he will knit a rope to hang himself. That was Voss’s hope: that once panic set in and Windham started talking, whether or not he began with the truth, he wouldn’t be able to stop.