understood how they’d got here either. “Yes!” she gasped, pale face suddenly aglow. “My daddy Bring him here. I want my daddy. Bring him here now!”
“It’ll take a little time,” stammered Daniel, wrong-footed by the abrupt change of mood. “Not long. But you’re going to get cold out there. You don’t want to get cold and fall before he gets here.” He dared a step forward. “I’ll help you get Peris inside.”
Em was too excited to listen. “How long? I don’t want to wait! Tell them to bring him. Tell them now.” Already she was dancing and shuffling on the parapet, oblivious of the life she held in her small cold hand, certain she’d miss him if she wasn’t ready to greet her father at once. “Now!”
Johnny wasn’t excited. Johnny was utterly still, her eyes clamped on Daniel’s face, boring a well to test the truth. He flinched under the intensity of her gaze, and she drew a deep, tremulous breath. Her voice was an accusing ghost. “You liar!”
He knew then that it was over. That they would jump—at least, that Johnny would and Em would follow as she always did—and there was nothing he could do to stop them. With both hands, with people running to help, he couldn’t hold them all.
So there was a choice to be made. It wasn’t a difficult choice. Two of them were here of their own volition, one was not; two were free to save themselves, one was not. But exercising it would be difficult. Because the other thing he saw in Johnny’s face, besides shock at his deceit and hatred of the deceiver, was the absolute determination that, even if she could no longer win, she would see him choke on the ashes of his victory.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Of the kind of time measured objectively by watches, only minutes had passed since the girls pushed their hostage under the rail and joined her on the outside of the bridge. Daniel had been pleading with them only a few minutes, and it was less time than that since Detective Sergeant Voss ordered the traffic to be stopped. It was just beginning to slow. Voss understood that it took time. Hundreds of vehicles travelling at seventy miles an hour can’t be stopped in their own length without risking more lives than he stood to save. But regardless of what his watch said, there/^/f to have been time enough. He felt to have spent half his life on this damned bridge, watching the unfolding of a tragedy he was powerless to prevent.
If someone had asked her, Brodie would have said she cared little for the fate of two mad children who thought their own unhappiness could be redeemed by other people’s blood. She cared more for the terrified woman in their hands; but she had known Peris Daws for mere days, had spent barely an hour in her company, could sympathise with her plight without feeling it as a wound to her own heart.
But Daniel was her friend, one of half a dozen people in the world whose well-being genuinely concerned her, and she knew that what was about to happen, that she would need a stiff drink and a hug from her daughter to put behind her, Daniel would agonise over in mind-destroying detail for months to come. It was who he was: he could suffer for England. Other people’s tragedies pierced him to the core. In the wake of the imminent disaster he would flay himself, and his pain would hurt Brodie in a way that the events themselves would not. She stood at Voss’s side, aching to be at Daniel’s side, frozen by the knowledge that any action of hers could only hasten what he dreaded.
Across the bridge Jack Deacon was imposing on his Good Samaritan. With the tourniquet doing its job he was feeling steadier. He was consumed by the need to know what was happening on the bridge, that he’d had to leave in the hands of Charlie Voss and a couple of constables he wouldn’t have trusted to see his cat across the road. “Help me up.”
The nurse, whose name was Mrs Parsons, misunderstood and gave him a reassuring smile. “No, Mr Deacon, you stay where you are. The paramedics are big strong lads, they won’t have any trouble lifting you.”
“I don’t care if they’re the front row of the London Irish,” snarled Deacon, “I’m not sitting in the mud waiting for them when matters of life and death are being decided thirty feet above my head. Help me up. I want to see what’s happening.”
Mrs Parsons continued to protest until he started clawing his way up the wire-mesh fence, at which point she decided it was better to help than watch him fall and start bleeding again. When he was on his feet she pulled the mesh aside and they moved out of the shadow of the bridge to watch the drama enfold.
“Good Lord!” she exclaimed. “Are they going to jump?”
Deacon nodded grimly. “I rather think they are.”
“But—they’re children !”
Deacon sighed. “No, Mrs Parsons, they’re a couple of little psychopaths. We think they’ve killed one person already; we know they’ve tried to kill others. Maybe you shouldn’t watch this. I’ll be all right now.”
The woman looked at him like slapping his face. “If they fall there may be something I can do.”
Deacon looked at the traffic, only now slowing perceptibly. “I doubt it.”
Brodie, who was closest, saw Daniel lean forward and speak to Peris. Even in her terror the woman looked perplexed. But it must have mattered because Daniel insisted on an answer.
Brodie nudged Charlie Voss. “Something’s happening/’
Daniel spoke to Johnny then. Whatever he said, the effect was electric. She swayed away from the rail as if he’d struck her, one hand going to her mouth as if to stifle a cry.
Voss saw Peris’s face split in a wail of terror as, cut adrift, she began to swing. He saw Daniel grab for her, and though she was heavier than him he braced himself against the rail and hung on, stubbornly denying the claim of gravity.
Deacon saw clear air between the girls and their hostage, then they were falling. There seemed to be time for him to wonder where he’d seen that before, and remember it was the solid fuel boosters dropping away from a Space Shuttle launch vehicle.
Mrs Parsons saw two young girls fall ten metres into heavy traffic. She saw one bounce off the bonnet of a red jeep and land on the white line, and the other crash in the middle of the fast lane. The driver of the truck that went over her had neither time nor space to avoid her; but by then it was probably all over anyway.
From both ends of the bridge policemen were running. Batty grabbed Daniel and Vickers grabbed Peris; together they hauled her to safety. Then they had to break Daniel’s grip on her shoulder-bag. His hand was fisted so tight on the strap that he couldn’t let go.
By the time Brodie reached them, Daniel and Peris had sunk in a heap on the concrete. When Constable Vickers freed her arms Peris flung them round the young man and held him as if he were more in need of comfort than she. All Brodie could do was stand over them, waiting for a bit of Daniel to emerge from the clinch so she could touch him too.
It took a while, but finally Peris mastered herself and put him down. Batty helped her to her feet and, draping his tunic round her shoulders, guided her gently from the scene.
Before she went, though, she took Daniel’s chin in one hand and made him look at her. “I heard nothing,” she said.
and though her voice shook with reaction her resolve was iron. Then she went with the constable.
Ten metres below the traffic rumbled and slewed to a halt. Even before it was stationary Mrs Parsons was dancing between the mudguards to reach the casualties.
A cursory glance was enough to establish that Johnny Daws was beyond help. But Em had bounced on something a little more yielding than tarmac, and though her eyes were wide with shock they weren’t blown yet. “This one!” the nurse shouted to the paramedics.
Deacon reached her first, slumping leadenly beside her. He wasn’t a doctor but he’d seen a lot of injured people and a few dying ones, and he didn’t think the paramedics needed to rush. His craggy face softened in a smile. “Hi, Em.”
She recognised him. Her answering smile was unshadowed by any recollection of enmity. “Hello, Mr Deacon.”
“That was a bit of a fall.”
For a little while she seemed to drift, sometim
es closer, sometimes further away, mumbling. He stroked the floss of pale hair back from her brow and told her she was going to be all right. At length she gathered her strength and looked him full in the eyes. “Where’s my daddy, Mr Deacon?”
“Your daddy’s fine, Em. I saw him just a few hours ago. Try to rest. I bet, when you wake up, he’ll be there.”
She smiled again, gratefully, and shut her eyes; and when the paramedics scrambled down the bank with their stretcher there wasn’t the hint of a pulse left in the small broken body.
Brodie took Daniel home. She left Paddy with Marta, not wanting her to witness his distress. She kept saying to him, “You saved Peris. She’d be dead but for you.” But he would not be comforted. He huddled on the sofa, his knees drawn up to his chest, his head on his arms, mute with grief. At other times he roamed the flat like a caged beast, unable to rest.
Brodie crumbled sleeping pills into half an inch of brandy and kept prompting him until it was gone. She stayed with him until unconsciousness stilled him.
Deacon phoned from the hospital around noon the next day. He had some heavy-duty stitches in his leg and a drip in the back of his hand, and he was uncomfortable and impatient with weakness, but when Brodie tried to commiserate he brushed it off. He hadn’t called to talk about himself. “How’s Daniel?”
“Not great,” she admitted. “I had to slip him a Micky Finn to get him to sleep last night. At nine this morning he looked like a zombie; by ten he was bouncing off the walls again. He’s gone out. He mumbled something about seeing the builders, but I think he was just desperate to get out of the house.”
There was a pause. Then Deacon said, “I don’t want to alarm you, Brodie, but I don’t think he should be on his own. He probably thinks he doesn’t want company right now, but it’s what he needs. He needs to know he’s not to blame for what happened.”
Brodie was slow to respond. When she did her voice was different: not louder but sharper, with an acuity he knew would be matched by the intelligence in her eyes if he’d been present to see. “Jack—what is it you’re not telling me?”
He parried with a question of his own. “What has Daniel said?”
“Nothing! Until right now I didn’t know there was anything else to say. But something happened, didn’t it?—something more than what I and everyone else saw. And Peris knows, and you know, and Daniel’s torturing himself over it but for some reason he can’t tell me. Why? Why does he think last night was a calamity when I saw him save a woman’s life?”
“He wanted to save them all,” said Deacon.
“And I wanted to marry Richard Gere,” snapped Brodie. “Being a grown-up means recognising what’s possible.
Daniel’s a grown-up too—he isn’t crucifying himself over something that was never within his grasp. What happened? What did he say?”
Now Deacon’s tone sharpened. “What makes you think it was something he said?”
So she was on the right lines. “Peris made such a point of telling him she heard nothing that it had to be a lie. The woman nearly died. She saw her two nieces kill themselves, knowing they meant to take her with them. But when she was safe, the first words she spoke were to tell Daniel that what passed between them would go no further. Why? Why did it matter so much to her? Why did she think it would matter that much to him?”
Deacon said quietly, “You have to understand, Brodie, there are things I don’t know. That I can’t know, because if I did I’d have to do something about them. If you want to know more you’ll have to ask Daniel.” He thought for a moment. “If it’s any help, you can tell him that—even though I don’t know what happened -1 do understand.”
Brodie was doing what she did best: reading between the lines. Sometimes it was possible to guess what was missing from the shape left by its absence. She was getting an idea of what was being kept from her more from what Deacon wasn’t prepared to say than what he was. “And you’re happy with that?”
She heard him shrug. “Happy’s hardly the word, but I don’t have any problem with it. Any other outcome would have been worse. Remember, there was no future for them. Both parents are dead, and how and why would have dogged them forever. They could have spent the rest of their lives behind bars. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.
“And suppose they were released at some point. How long would it have been before someone else upset them? They’d have done it again. Someone else who’s only crime was to cross them would have ended up maimed or dead. It’s my
professional judgement that the world’s a safer place without them/’
She couldn’t fault his logic. But somehow Brodie was still shocked to hear him say it. “What about your superiors? Will they feel the same way?”
“My superiors,” he said tersely, “will hear nothing of this. All they need to know is that Emerald Daws was dying with a massive head injury, she was lapsing in and out of consciousness, nothing she said could be relied on. If they press me I’ll say I couldn’t make any sense of it. If you like, you can tell Daniel that too.”
“And then he’ll tell me what it is that you won’t?”
“I don’t know,” said Deacon honestly. “But he needs to.”
Brodie was still mulling over the conversation as she drove to the shore. If she wasn’t entirely sure what it had been about, she did know how important it was. To Daniel; but also, and more than she would have guessed, to her. Deacon had called up spectres she couldn’t just banish to an unused comer of her mind.
Work on Daniel’s house was progressing at its customary pace. Mr Wilmslow told her he hadn’t seen his client for days. Brodie’s sense of unease grew as she walked towards the pier. From there she could see the length of the shingle shore until it vanished under the bluff of the Firestone Cliffs to the east and into the blue blur of distance to the west. None of the handful of people on the beach looked like Daniel.
She was returning to the car when she saw him—under the pier, propped against one of the timber piles, watching her. She leaned back against the car and crossed her ankles, waiting for him to come to her. After a minute he did.
“I wondered where you’d got to,” Brodie said softly.
“Not far,” said Daniel. Walking in the fresh air seemed to have eased his agitation. Apart from the hours of drugged sleep, this was the quietest she’d seen him since last night.
He leaned against the car beside her, hands in his pockets, chin on his chest.
Brodie said quietly, “We need to talk/’
He shook his head once, with conviction. “No.”
“Tell me what happened. On the bridge.”
“You saw what happened.”
“I saw it. I want to know what I wasn’t close enough to hear.”
A tremor shook him from head to foot. “Who says—?”
“Daniel,” she sighed, “you know you’re going to tell me eventually. Peris knows. Jack knows—”
“Deacon?” That startled him.
“Yes. I could get it out of either of them, but I’d rather hear it from you.”
He couldn’t look at her. His gaze veered unhappily between his shoes, the English Channel and the black finger of the rotten pier. After a long moment he said, “I killed them.”
“Of course you didn’t kill them,” Brodie said shortly. “They jumped off a bridge. They were always going to jump—everyone but you knew it. They had nothing to come back to.”
“Maybe.” He shuddered. “I don’t know. All I know—”
She drew a calming breath and, without looking at him, gazing out to sea, said it again. “Tell me what happened.”
He knew it was over. That they would jump and there was nothing he could do to stop them. He couldn’t hold them all.
He scanned Peris desperately for something he could hang onto. The light coat she was wearing would tear under her weight. Her hands were behind her back, her arms too plump to grasp. Across her chest—
“Peris,” he said urgently, “this is impor
tant. Your bag: is it leather?”
None of them understood. Johnny frowned. Em paused in her excited little jig and put her head on one side. Peris stared at him wildly, her face contorted by fear. “B-bag—?”
“Is it leather?” he said again. “Peris! Your bag. Is it real leather?”
“Y-yes. Yes.”
Leather was strong. Plastic would break, but a leather strap across the woman’s shoulder might hold until help arrived. Easy to grab, easy to grip: if he braced against the rail with all his strength he could stop her falling until bigger men arrived to pull her inside.
What he couldn’t do was hold her on the ledge with two other people pulling her off.
“I had to make them let go,” he mumbled. “I couldn’t hold them all. And the girls could have come inside anytime they wanted. I didn’t -1 didn’t—It’s not as if I pushed them…”
“Tell me, Daniel,” said Brodie, gently insistent.
“I had to … shake them. I thought, if I could jolt them enough they’d let go of her. I knew they might jump. Damn it!” He rolled his eyes skyward, refusing even the scant solace of ambivalence. “I knew they would jump. It didn’t have to matter. I couldn’t see any other way to save Peris.”
His voice cracked. He hung his head, panting softly until he could continue. “I had to distract them. It was her only chance, if I could make them forget about her for a moment. And there was only one thing I knew that they didn’t…”
That was it, that Deacon had refused to tell her. Brodie felt the strength leach from her body into her shoes. “You told them about Robert.”
“I told them he was dead. That he drove his car into a lake because he couldn’t live with what they’d done. That, after the fight, he came back and found them pushing knives into their mother’s body.”
There was a long silence between them. The tide made glockenspiel noises on the shingle. A dog barked quarter of a mile away; nearer at hand Mr Wilmslow hit his thumb with a hammer and swore.
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