“If he’d made a run for it he might have got away.”
“And left everything behind? His home, his children, his business? I guess he decided it wasn’t worth it. That he no longer had a life worth living.”
Voss was a young man: he couldn’t imagine death ever looking more attractive than life. “He could have done his time. He’d have come out eventually.”
“Sure he would,” said Deacon. “Old, broken in health, homeless, disowned by his family, deserted by his business contacts. On the other hand, if he went into the lake he might never be found. And he will never be convicted: we might know what he did but legally he remains a murder suspect. If they choose to, the girls can refuse to believe that he killed their mother. That just may have mattered to him.”
“Or else he couldn’t live with what he’d done.”
As a young man, Charlie Voss was also a romantic. Deacon, who’d been trying to teach him better, breathed heavily “There’s no evidence that he felt guilty. What looked like a frenzied attack on his wife was actually fairly calculating—he didn’t stick two knives into the same hole by sheer luck. After he was finished he smashed the phone to deny her any chance of help. Then he planted the second knife in Nicky Speers’ shed, and set a trap to make the boy’s murder look like suicide. Guilt doesn’t come into it. He just felt he’d achieved everything he needed to.”
Voss frowned. “I still don’t understand the business with the knives. Why he needed two. And why he left one at the scene if he was going to plant the other on Nicky Speers.”
“Me neither,” said Deacon honestly. “And now he’s dead I don’t expect we ever will. I doubt if it matters very much. He isn’t going to hurt anyone else. If that isn’t the perfect ending, it’ll do.”
Voss frowned. “I thought you didn’t believe he was a threat to the girls.”
“I didn’t. I don’t.” He shuffled crossly inside his raincoat. “Look, maybe Daniel was right and maybe he wasn’t, but now we know for sure that Robert Daws isn’t going to hurt his daughters. The kids will get his money and can go off and join their aunt and uncle in South Africa. We can close the file on Serena Daws. If that isn’t exactly a triumph of police detection, at least it’s tidy.”
Voss found himself looking at the way the body slumped in its seatbelt. Like all corpses it didn’t look like a dead person so much as something that had never been alive. But Voss was obscurely touched that a man intending to kill himself by driving into deep water had put his seat-belt on first. Because it was the law, and apart from murdering his wife and attempting to murder her lover Robert Daws had been a law-abiding man.
Deacon followed his gaze but not his thought processes. “Stupid sod,” he sniffed. “Now, will somebody turn that Land Rover round and give me a lift back to my car?”
Chapter Twenty
“I know how he did it,” said Brodie. She was breathless, as if she’d run from the crash scene on Poole Lane. “Robert Daws. Like I said, it was all done by mirrors. Just not the one we were looking for.”
She’d lost Daniel. But whatever her revelation, he wanted to hear it himself before the girls did. He glanced round but the kitchen and hall were empty. He thought the girls were upstairs. Peris, he knew, was shopping in Dimmock. “Come in,” he said, “and tell me what this is all about.”
But she didn’t want to come in. She wanted him to come to the studio with her. He asked why but she refused to explain. “Easier to show you than tell you.” Daniel took the key off its nail by the kitchen door and followed her across the courtyard.
He opened the cottage door and put the lights on—it was dark now. Brodie made a bee-line for the cupboard where Serena’s art-work had been tidied away. She pulled out canvases until she found what she was looking for.
“The picture Robert slashed—Jack has the remains as evidence?”
Daniel nodded, waiting patiently to understand.
“But give or take a few details—Nicky standing up, Nicky lying down, Nicky—” She looked at the last canvas and blinked. “Yes, well. But apart from those details, these are the same?”
“I think so,” said Daniel. “I never saw the one they fought over, but I gather it was the same sort of thing.”
“What’s he lying on?”
With just a hint of distaste Daniel looked closer. “Some sort of silvery fabric? It could be baking foil for all I know.”
“It could indeed,” agreed Brodie. “Or one of those foil blankets the emergency services wrap you in after accidents.
Hill-walkers carry them too, you can get them at any outdoor pursuits shop/’
Daniel didn’t doubt it though he’d never had the occasion to ask. He wasn’t really an outdoor pursuits sort of person, except in so far as astronomy is mostly pursued out of doors. “So?”
She breathed heavily at him, although she’d have been annoyed if he’d made the connection quicker than she had. “Heat-reflective, yes?”
“Yes.”
“And what will reflect heat…”
Now he had it. His eyes shot wide and he gave a startled gasp. “…Will reflect light. The mirror!”
“Exactly,” said Brodie, satisfied. “A mirror light enough for one man to move around quickly and easily—put it up where it can do its job, pull it down once it has. The back of his car? He could have shoved it up the back of his jumper.”
Daniel hadn’t seen what she had seen. “But it wouldn’t stand up. How would he—?”
“Hung with string from a branch sticking out over the road. Then he tugged it down, but the strings are still there. There’s even a comer of foil tied up in one of them.”
Daniel ran the sequence of events through his head in the light of this new information. His eyes flared again behind the round glasses. “That’s what he was doing here! He’d seen the pictures, knew Serena had a foil sheet that she used as a backdrop. He knew I was in the cottage so he thought he’d check the house first. Either that or he knew where she kept it.”
“Yes,” said Brodie. “He could hardly nip into Camp Followers in town, could he? At four o’clock in the morning he thought he could search every drawer and cupboard in the kitchen and scullery and never be challenged.”
“So it was Robert,” said Daniel softly “Not Nicky”
“No. Emerald was wrong. She saw what she expected, even wanted, to see. To her Nicky is the archetypal intruder: if he’d stayed away from her house she’d still have a family”
Daniel was nodding slowly. “I hope—” He didn’t finish the sentence.
Brodie didn’t like mysteries. “What?”
“I hope that’s all it was. An honest mistake. I hope she wasn’t trying to punish him.”
“For the damage he did here?”
“It’s natural enough that she’d want to. We know the girls don’t believe Robert stabbed Serena, that they were waiting for the police to arrest Nicky. When they let him go, maybe the girls thought they needed a prod in the right direction.”
“So when they bumped into their father in the hall they lied—to shift suspicion away from him and onto Nicky?” Brodie gave a little grimace. “It’s possible. There was time to think it through—it wasn’t till later that Emerald claimed to have recognised the intruder. Oh but Daniel, they’re two young girls! It’s pretty sophisticated thinking for two young girls.”
“Is it? Girls their age can be highly manipulative. I’ve known teachers suspended because pubescent girls came up with entirely fictional but plausible allegations against them. Anger a boy of the same age and he might take a swing at you, he might even pull a knife. But anger a girl and she can nurse the grudge until she finds a way of hurting you that doesn’t put her in danger. Even if she isn’t believed, her claims may be impossible to disprove. The idea stays at the back of people’s minds that they could be doing her an injustice, that there was something in what she said. That’s the situation we’re in now. We don’t think Emerald saw what she says she saw. But we’d rather think t
hat she was mistaken than lying.”
“All right,” said Brodie, “so maybe she was lying. So what? In a way she’s right—a lot of this was Nicky’s fault. Maybe she thought she was just making that clear to everyone. In the circumstances, can you find it in your heart to blame her?”
‘Tor accusing someone of a crime she knew he didn’t commit?” His voice was quiet, his tone adamant. “Oh yes.”
Brodie shrugged. “Well, we’ll never know for sure. She could have been mistaken. For everyone’s sake I think you should leave it at that.”
Daniel thought so too. “I’m not going to accuse her of something I can’t prove. She’ll deny it, and where do we go from there? All the same …”
“What?”
“Doesn’t it bother you? Knowing what they’re prepared to do to get what they want? Doesn’t it make you wonder what they’ll do next time someone crosses them?”
Brodie’s smile was affectionate but also concerned. “Daniel, you’ve got too close to this. I warned you about that. Now you’re seeing conspiracies where there are just two unhappy little girls. They’ve had a hard time, and it isn’t over yet. OK, maybe they don’t always behave perfectly. Name me someone, adult or child, who—in the same circumstances—would.”
He thought she was probably right and he was being unreasonable. He thought she was probably right and he’d become too deeply mired in the tragedy at Sparrow Hill. He thought it was because he wasn’t up to his job—or no, that wasn’t fair: his job was tutoring, he’d taken on himself the role of counsellor and guide—that he was seeing danger where none existed.
“So what’s happening? Is Jack meeting you here?”
“When he gets my message,” said Brodie. “He and Voss were out on a call.”
“Stay for tea,” suggested Daniel. “Peris is going to be late back, I said I’d run something up. Or do you have to feed Paddy?”
“No, Marta’s got her. Neither of them will miss me. What are you making?”
Spending time in Peris Daws’ company was having its effect on Daniel. He said with a hint of pride, “Mushroom risotto.”
“Count me in!” said Brodie.
The risotto was ready and still Deacon hadn’t called. The girls came downstairs and Daniel served.
At first the conversation was stilted. There was only one thing in Brodie’s mind but she knew better than to make any reference to it in front of the man’s daughters. There was only one thing in Daniel’s mind, and he didn’t see how he could raise it without provoking a furious argument he couldn’t win.
Relief came from an unlikely source. “Daniel says you’ve got a daughter, Mrs Farrell,” said Johnny, scrupulously attentive. “How old is she?”
Brodie smiled. “Paddy. She’s five now. She’s heavily into dragons and tractors.”
Both girls laughed. “I don’t think we’ve got a tractor,” said Em. “Have we, Johnny?”
“I’ve never seen one. Unless there’s one upstairs. This was Daddy’s house when he was a little boy,” she explained. “Daddy’s and Uncle Hugo’s. Most of the toys in the attic were theirs. Our things are mostly in our bedrooms. Except for the things we had when we were little,” she added with the nonchalance of the recently teenaged.
“There’s a rocking-horse,” volunteered Em. “And a puppet theatre. We found it when we were showing the policeman around. I don’t remember seeing it before.”
“I do,” said Johnny. “It was put away when you were small. You didn’t like the crocodile.”
“I love rocking-horses,” said Brodie. “We never had one at home, but a cousin of mine had one. I always meant to get one for Paddy, but I haven’t really the room for it.”
“You should bring her up to have a ride on ours,” said Johnny.
Brodie was touched. Four days ago these girls could barely tolerate her presence. “I’d love to. Is it very old, do you know?”
Johnny shrugged. “It’s big, I know that much. And dapple-grey. The tail’s a bit threadbare. That’s how we used to make him go faster—whoever wasn’t riding would stand behind pulling the tail.”
“He had a name,” Em remembered suddenly. “What was it, Johnny? What did we call him?”
“Dapple?”
“Yes,” said Em slowly, “but that wasn’t all. He had a proper name. It was on a label on the saddle.”
Johnny’s beam lit her face like sunshine. “I’d forgotten! It was the maker’s name, but when we were little we thought it was what the horse was called. Gregory Birkinshaw.”
It was the first unshadowed laughter the house had heard in a fortnight; perhaps for longer than that. “I have got to meet Gregory Birkinshaw,” said Brodie.
Daniel’s culinary efforts done proper credit, they trooped upstairs. Their feet echoed like gunfire on the last, uncarpeted flight. Johnny turned on the landing light and led the way into the first of the attic rooms.
Gregory, dappled and dusty, stood in the middle of the floor, a splendid Victorian steed caparisoned in red leather and mounted on a great bow-shaped rocker. Perhaps his long white tail was a little thin; perhaps his flanks were scratched by generations of children who thought kicking would make him go faster; perhaps the fire in his eye was dulled by cataracts woven of cobwebs. Brodie didn’t care. He was the most perfect rocking-horse she’d ever seen. She wouldn’t have thanked Philip Poole for the gift of Blossom, but this fabrication of wood and paint and scraps of leather filled her with longing. She let out a gasp of sheer delight.
Daniel watched in private amusement as she walked round stroking it, patting its insensitive rump, holding her hand under its bared teeth as if it might take a sugar-lump—if she’d had a sugar-lump. Most of the time she intimidated him with her sophistication. She was intelligent, confident, elegant, admired and respected: a successful professional, a genuine grown-up. But show her a dusty old rocking-horse and twenty years fell away and the cloud of dark hair gravitated towards plaits.
“Oh, go on,” he said with a grin, “take it for a trot.”
Brodie shook her head emphatically. “Don’t be absurd!” But she didn’t walk away.
“Oh, do!” said Em, dancing up and down and clapping her small hands in encouragement.
“I think you should,” said Johnny, straight-faced. “You want to make sure he’s not too fresh for Paddy to ride.”
Brodie waved an admonitory hand at them. “Oh, hush.”
But they took her hands and positioned them on Gregory’s withers and the back of his saddle. “Left foot in the stirrup,” said Johnny, “and up you go.” Before she could protest further Brodie found herself atop the padded saddle with the arch of Gregory’s neck capped with its flowing mane rising to his sharp ears before her.
For five minutes she was a child again. But not the child she had been, pretty and neat and circumspect, playing with dolls until she was judged responsible enough to have a kitten. No, the child she should have been—the child who’d have grown into the Brodie Farrell she was now, Daniel Hood’s friend. Jack Deacon’s lover, brave and strong and sure of heart and mind. She rode like a natural—like a Wild Ward—spurring on whenever the great bows seemed to flag, the wind of her passage tearing through her hair and making the blood sing in her cheeks.
When she finally dismounted she felt obscurely bereft. As if she’d had a glimpse of something wonderful and then someone had drawn the curtain.
“Are you all right?” Daniel’s face was briefly anxious as he searched hers.
Brodie nodded. “Dizzy.” She clung to his arm, and his eyes cleared and he laughed.
The girls were thrilled with Gregory’s success. Before the rocking-horse had quite come to a halt they were dragging out other ancient toys for their guest’s inspection. Johnny found the puppet theatre, and Em demonstrated once and for all her contempt for crocodiles by letting it bite her nose. Then they put on an impromptu performance of Snow White and the Only Three Dwarfs We Could Find.
After that there was no stopping the
m. Johnny found a toboggan, and laid it aside against the coming of the snow. Daniel winced: he knew they wouldn’t be here when the snows came. Em found a hobby-horse made from a sock and trundled it up and down as if riding a Derby winner.
There was a dartboard with real darts, none of that sucker-on-the-front rubbish but real heavy, pointy darts guaranteed capable of putting an eye out; and Daniel impressed the girls and astonished Brodie by landing a twenty, a double twenty and a bull’s eye.
“I’m the Sultan of Araby,” said Em, appearing in a turban and a curtain.
Johnny found a circular arrangement of pictures drawn on the inside of a cylinder with a series of slits in it. “What is it?”
“It’s a zoetrope,” said Daniel. “It’s about the earliest way of making moving pictures. You turn the handle and look through the slit, and it looks like film of a very short boxing-match.”
”Rocky Minns Three,” said Johnny with a grin, and Daniel grinned back.
“Now I’m the Duchess of Thick Twist,” announced Em, having changed into a wide flower-decked picture hat and a plum silk dress that probably belonged to her great-grandmother. She looked like a blueberry muffin.
“Where are you getting this stuff?” asked Brodie, setting aside the wooden farm she’d been laying out and following the dumpy duchess into the next room.
“The dressing-up box,” said Em, sliding a hand into hers. “Mummy used to keep things for us to dress up in. Mostly when we were younger, but …” The little voice petered out.
Brodie squeezed her hand. “If I’m not too old to ride a rocking-horse, you’re not too old to dress up. What else have you got in this box?”
Em beamed and threw back the lid.
Next door they’d got the zoetrope going and Daniel was explaining how it worked when suddenly Johnny seemed to freeze. She jerked to her feet—they’d both been lying on the floor propped on their elbows—and stammered furiously, “I need to—go see—” She was gone before she could finish the sentence. He heard her scurrying along the landing. “Em, leave that now. Come and give me a hand …”
Reflections Page 18