Reflections

by Bannister, Jo

  “Sir?” Voss wasn’t sure what he intended, but he knew Deacon was physically capable of ripping the hysterical youth off the wall and bouncing him off the ceiling if he thought it necessary. He’d never seen Deacon use violence on a suspect who hadn’t started the fight himself, but there was that about the big man that suggested that one day, with enough provocation, he might. The aura of threat was more valuable to him than a truncheon; but it only worked while it seemed credible. If even Voss didn’t know for sure, it was certainly that.

  “Stand aside, sergeant,” Deacon said distinctly “You don’t want to have to explain a black eye to Superintendent Fuller, do you?”

  Nicky saw him coming and thought he was going to be hurt. He was literally crying with fear. At the end of his long arms the clenched fists swung out of control, easy to dodge. Deacon ducked under them and his own hands shot out, powerful and precise. Voss winced and wondered again if he should try to intervene.

  But they’d both misunderstood. Deacon grabbed the boy by the shoulders, pinning his arms to his sides. Still his fists flailed, desperate and uncoordinated, and his nose ran and his lips trembled and tears flooded down his ashy cheeks.

  With an abrupt movement Deacon turned the boy in the ambit of his arms, and closed his hands over Nicky’s fists, holding him still against his broad chest. “Steady,” he said quietly into the boy’s ear. “It’s all right. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Calm down.”

  Voss watched in amazement and respect as the man known throughout Dimmock Police Station as The Grizzly went on holding the terrified boy, and talking quietly to him, until the rigor of absolute panic passed, his long body relaxed and his wild eyes stilled and then closed.

  In the corridor outside Deacon, unaware that he’d managed to surprise his sergeant yet again, shook his head irritably “He didn’t kill her. And I don’t think he was in the house.”

  “What about the knife?” asked Voss.

  The big man shrugged. “Maybe it is a coincidence. Maybe his mum dropped it after tying up her tomatoes.”

  “Dr Roy will be able to tell us that.”

  “Call him,” said Deacon, “ask if he has anything for us yet.”

  When Voss came back five minutes later. Deacon knew the answer from his expression. “Nicky’s knife matches exactly the unexplained wound in Serena Daws’ thigh. And there are traces of her blood still on it.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Brodie stared at her friend in dismay. “They don’t know. Everyone’s assumed that, because it was obvious to us … But they don’t know!”

  Shock had knocked all expression out of Peris’s face and voice. “Should we tell them?”

  Daniel had no idea. Either way those two young girls had a whole lot more grief waiting for them. The only question was whether they would be better facing it now, or waiting till their father was found and charged, or waiting for understanding to dawn on them gradually. And for once Daniel couldn’t see what was the right thing to do. “I don’t know.”

  Brodie had a qualification neither of the others possessed: she was a parent. She found their eyes settling on her. “God damn it, don’t look at me like that! Yes, I’ve got a little girl of my own. But I’ve never had to decide whether or not to tell her that her father murdered her mother! Daniel, you’ve had hundreds of children in your care, you must have had to break bad news before now.”

  “Yes,” he nodded slowly, remembering. “But only when there was no choice.”

  “Do we have a choice?” asked Peris.

  “Actually, we do,” said Brodie. “We’re talking as if we know Robert is a murderer, and the girls are the only ones who don’t. In fact, none of us knows. We have a pretty good idea, we’ll be astonished if he proves us wrong, but it’s still conjecture. Maybe, if it comforts them to hold onto an illusion, it’s too soon for us to take it away.”

  “It’ll get easier?” asked Peris dubiously.

  “It’ll never be easy,” said Daniel. “But Brodie’s right: until we can tell them there’s no doubt we have nothing to tell them. They’re as entitled to their view as anyone else.”

  That Peris could accept. “Well have to remember, though. We’ll have to be careful what we say around them.”

  “Like walking on eggshells,” nodded Brodie.

  “Eggshells with landmines under them,” said Daniel weakly.

  Deacon spent another hour with Nicky Speers, an hour entirely wasted. All the questions had already been asked and answered. Everyone present was too tired to think up new ones.

  In a way, finding the knife changed little. The Speers’ garden shed was not a secure private place in the way that a house or even a garage might be: anyone could have planted the knife there. Even if Robert Daws wasn’t up to scaling high walls, he could have sneaked up the garden path any time in the last ten days to avenge himself on his rival.

  Deacon was uncomfortably aware that, if someone was jerking his strings, he was responding exactly as required. But what choice had he? The knife he found in Nicky’s shed was previously in the body of Serena Daws. If its presence on his property didn’t prove the boy’s guilt, it certainly put him up there on the list of suspects. And it was a very short list.

  On the other hand, there was no evidence that Nicky had ever handled the knife. It had been both wiped and washed so that all remained was a few grains of dried blood between blade and handle. Voss had returned to the cottage to speak to Mrs Speers but discovered nothing helpful. She said she didn’t recognise the knife, but then she would. She didn’t have two others like it, but she did have a drawer full of assorted kitchen implements collected over a lifetime. There was no way of knowing if the two knives now in the possession of the police had been among them or not.

  Unless—It was a long shot but he got SOCO out to take samples of the dust and fluff gathered at the back of the kitchen drawer. If there were traces of corresponding gunge on the knives, that would connect them physically to the inside of locked premises occupied solely by the Speers family and Nicky would go to prison because his mother was a slattern.

  Meanwhile time was passing, the clock ticking away the hours Nicky could be held for questioning. Already Deacon was up against the law of diminishing returns. At midnight he phoned Superintendent Fuller. “I’m going to send him home. The time is more valuable than anything I’m doing with it.”

  There was a silence in which he could feel Fuller blinking owlishly at the phone. “But you have physical evidence connecting him to the crime.”

  “It’s tenuous,” said Deacon, shaking his head as if someone could see him. “We have nothing tying him to the knife. He’s right, it could have been put there by someone wanting to incriminate him. I can’t show that it wasn’t. It makes no sense to go on holding him at this time. He might as well sleep in his own bed, and leave me with extra hours to question him if I turn up something to shake his story.”

  “You don’t think he’ll do a runner?”

  Deacon shrugged. “I doubt he knows many people with private planes. He has a motorbike so he could hit the road. He could, even without it. But I don’t think he will.”

  “Why not?”

  “Three reasons. If he runs he makes it pretty plain he has something to hide. If he doesn’t get far enough he’s in a worse position than he is right now. And …”

  “And?”

  “And actually, sir, I don’t think he did it. I think we know who did it: Robert Daws, who hasn’t been seen since his daughters saw him slashing his wife’s paintings a few minutes before she was stabbed to death. Unless we believe in a conspiracy between her husband and the boy she was bedding, I don’t see any room in this for Nicky Speers. He didn’t need her dead, and as far as I can make out he didn’t want her dead. If it was all getting too heavy for him he could just walk away. He’d got his bike by then, he had nothing to stay for—and he certainly wasn’t going to get any more out of her after she was dead. She wasn’t likely to have mentioned him in her will/’


  Fuller thought about it, the phone silent but for a soft rasping sound Deacon finally identified as Mrs Fuller asleep beside him. “All right,” Dimmock’s senior police officer said then. “Let him go. But keep an eye on him. If he tries to run, we charge him.”

  Deacon thought, “With what?” but didn’t say it aloud. It had taken him a while but he’d finally learned that, once you’ve won the argument, you stop arguing. “Yes, sir.”

  Compared with the Post Office, the bush telegraph that operates in rural areas is efficient and cheap. It’s also quick, but it isn’t instantaneous. So news of Nicky’s arrest didn’t reach Poole Farm until hours after he had in fact been freed without charge. It took a little longer again to cross Poole Lane and arrive at Sparrow Hill. It was Saturday morning: with no lessons the girls were playing in the lane when they heard the tidings. They tumbled into the kitchen like excited puppies, hardly able to get the words out.

  Peris listened without comment, then went to the foot of the stairs and called to Daniel. He was in the schoolroom, preparing the next week’s work. “Can you come down here for a minute?”

  When he arrived Peris said to the girls, “Tell Daniel what you just told me.”

  They both wanted the honour; unable to reach a compromise they only succeeded in drowning one another out. Finally Johnny claimed the privilege of the first-born. “Nicky Speers is in prison,” she announced proudly. “That policeman interrogated him all last night, and in the end he confessed!”

  “To breaking in here?” Daniel sounded perplexed.

  “Oh, that too,” said Johnny dismissively “But mostly, to murder. To killing my mother!”

  Em had been left with very little of the story to add, but she wasn’t going to be excluded like that. “Our mother,” she muttered rebelliously.

  Daniel felt his jaw drop unstoppably. He knew from the burning sensation that it was time he blinked and couldn’t seem to do that either. He looked at Peris, and she too appeared to have been hit behind the ear with a sock full of wet sand. Her lips were pursed as if there was a question on its way but she couldn’t decide which one.

  Finally Daniel got his brain in gear enough to ask, “Where did you hear this?”

  “They were talking about it across the road,” said Johnny, chattering in her excitement.

  “They stopped when they saw us,” said Em honestly, “but we’d heard enough by then.”

  Daniel folded his hands before his mouth and breathed lightly into the arch of them. “Well—maybe. No, listen,” he added, seeing their delight turn to indignation, “I don’t mean you’ve got it wrong. But the men on the farm might have got it wrong.”

  “And they might not,” insisted Johnny, her colour rising, ready to fight for a version of events that chimed so perfectly with her needs. “Did you think she stabbed herself? He ruined her, he broke our family, then he killed her. It’s so obvious I can’t think why it’s taken eleven days to arrest him!”

  Daniel wasn’t sure if she genuinely believed that or if she wanted to believe. If he’d seen it as part of his job to disabuse her he could have asked where, in that case, did she suppose her father was? If he raced off in pursuit of Serena’s killer, why had Nicky been around since the tragedy while Daws was still missing? But Daniel saw no justification for poking holes in a frightened girl’s parachute. He said quietly, “Shall I phone Superintendent Deacon? Then we’ll know the facts.”

  Johnny tossed her hair haughtily. “If you want to.” So far as he could judge she had no reservations about what she’d overheard.

  He knew, when he returned from talking to Deacon, that the truth would provoke a fury that would fall largely on his own head. But they had to be told. “The police found a knife in Nicky’s shed. They’ve linked it to the murder, but they can’t actually link it to him. Nicky says he never saw it before. He says he didn’t stab your mother and he didn’t break in here. Mr Deacon believes him. He doesn’t think it adds up. He thinks the knife was planted.”

  For a few seconds there was silence. Then, characteristically, Em began to cry and Johnny to shout. “Believe him? Believe a dirty thieving animal like that? He’s got the knife. He found it in Nicky Speers’s shed. And he still doesn’t think he did it? Who does he think did it? Us? Daddy?”

  Neither of them was quick enough with an answer. Almost any answer would have done; just telling her to mind her language might have distracted her long enough. Instead they froze, and sought the reassurance of one another’s eyes, and avoided Johnny’s. The last word she’d said hung in the air like an accusation.

  Her face changed as she realised what the silence meant. Her eyes and her mouth opened wide; the colour blazing in her cheeks drained so suddenly she looked she was going to faint. She actually staggered and one hand went to the back of a kitchen chair to steady herself. Her voice was a ghost, a stunned whisper. “That’s what you think? That my daddy stabbed my mother, and that’s why he hasn’t come back?”

  Daniel found a voice, and tried to find something to say with it that wouldn’t make matters worse. “It’s what the police think, Johnny…”

  “The police!” she spat, chestnut hair flying as she turned on him. “What do they know? They had the killer and they let him go!”

  “That isn’t the end of it,” Daniel said quietly “They only have so long to question someone. They may be saving some of that time for when they know more. They could pick him up again tomorrow.”

  “What are they going to know tomorrow that they don’t know today?” yelled the infuriated girl, all control gone. “Who are they going to question that they haven’t already questioned?”

  Her rage had taken him by surprise. Daniel tried not to flinch before it. “They haven’t questioned your father yet. They think he killed your mother, you think he saw someone else do it. Either way, it’s vitally important they talk to him.”

  Emerald was softly crying. Peris eased an arm round her. But the child seemed to find no comfort in it, went on sobbing in quiet desolation, chin on her chest, as if she were alone in the room. Peris looked at Daniel in despair, but he was fully occupied with the elder sister. He felt as if she was drifting beyond his grasp. He was afraid that by the time she was willing to take his hand she wouldn’t be able to reach it.

  But she was running on fear and outrage, unaware of the danger. His mild acceptance only angered her more. “For the love of God,” she screamed, “what more do they want? They know what he is. Everybody knows what he is—a dirty animal who couldn’t keep his hands off somebody else’s wife. He took her money, he broke my daddy’s heart, he broke up our family, he killed her—and then he came back to her house to see what else he could take! How can anyone believe he’s innocent?”

  She didn’t really want an answer, and Daniel didn’t offer one. He just wanted to make contact with her. He thought the storm in her breast would go on building until something earthed it. He reached out a hesitant hand to her heaving shoulder. “Johnny—”

  But she didn’t want his hand or the comfort he offered: she threw it off with a roar of anger and a mighty shudder like disgust. And then, as if afraid she hadn’t hurt him enough, she lunged at his face.

  Johnny was as tall as Daniel and possibly as strong, and she was very, very angry. Peris saw his eyes widen in surprise, then his glasses flew off and he gave a little grunt and his head turned under the blow. He stumbled against the table and went down on one knee, his left hand pressed to his cheek.

  Em blinked and the tears stopped on her face. Peris held her breath. Even Johnny froze, her right hand raised, astonished at what she’d done, waiting for the sky to fall. The only sound in the kitchen was Daniel softly panting.

  As his breath steadied he straightened up, one hand on the table for support. Peris said faintly, “Daniel …” There was blood on his face, three deep parallel scratches that filled until the blood dripped from his jaw. Johnny hadn’t just slapped him, she’d clawed him.

  Peris dragged i
n a deep breath and took control. She indicated first Emerald, then Juanita. “You: sitting-room. You: the school-room. Don’t stick your head out until I come. Daniel, sit down while I see what there is in the bathroom cabinet. I’ll be back in a minute.” Before she went, though, she bent and passed him his glasses.

  Johnny, who’d fled upstairs ahead of her, heard her coming and opened the door a crack. Peris yanked it shut. “I’m not ready to deal with you just yet. There’s a good man bleeding on the kitchen floor who takes priority. By the time I’ve dealt with him I may have calmed down a little. It’s in your interests to hope so.” She stalked downstairs with an armful of salves, plasters, disinfectant and enough bandages to wrap a small mummy.

  Daniel had wadded kitchen towel against his cheek and the bleeding had all but stopped. He looked sheepishly at Peris as she spread her booty on the table. “That could have gone better…”

  “I don’t know what to say,” she said flatly. “From the moment you arrived you’ve done your best to help and comfort them. And all the thanks you get is one of them trying to rip your face off.”

  He sighed, a little shakily. “It’s not as bad as that.”

  “She could have had your eye out!” snapped Peris. “She could have blinded you, Daniel. It’s only dumb luck that she didn’t. You could be on your way to hospital right now, and she could be behind bars. And maybe that’s where she belongs!”

  “Peris.” He took one of her hands in his own, halting her angry busyness and making her look at him. “It’s all right. There’s no harm done. It’s only skin, it’ll heal soon enough.”

  “But she attacked you! You’re her teacher, and she attacked you.”

  “She’s a frightened, unhappy fourteen-year-old girl,” said Daniel patiently. “She’s still struggling to come to terms with what happened. Her emotions are out of control, but she’s not to blame for that. Maybe if I’d handled the situation better she wouldn’t have got that upset.”