by Jo Bannister
There was genuine distress in her voice that Daniel could not have ignored if she’d come to him with a much more shocking tale than this one. She needed comfort, and when she was calmer she might need some advice. Of course, he knew the reason she felt able to ask his advice on her sex-life was that she saw him as a disinterested party, outside the boundaries of the electric triangle, and it was hard to take that as a compliment. But she was his friend, and if this was the help she needed from him he was glad she’d come. ‘Pheromones,’ he said.
She blinked. ‘What?’
‘Pheromones. Chemicals given off by one individual that affect the behaviour of others. They’re part of what makes us attractive to one another – or not,’ he added wryly. ‘I imagine Eric Chandos produces pheromones that match the receptors in your brain.’
Brodie stared at him open-mouthed. ‘You’re telling me love is a matter of chemicals?’
‘No, I’m telling you sex is. For casual sex, or for someone to fertilise an egg for you, pheromones are probably a good guide to choosing a partner. If the biology is favourable you’re more likely to have a strong baby. I dare say most animals don’t think any further than that.’
He looked at her sidelong. ‘Some people don’t either, but most do. Most people want a partner who makes them laugh. Someone who respects them, someone who’s kind. They aren’t really survival attributes and I don’t expect you can give off a chemical that says, “Hey girls, drop everything, here comes the best mower of lawns, mender of domestic appliances and picker-up of dry cleaning you’ll ever meet.” But if you’re looking for someone to spend your life with, those things matter.
‘Which is why it’s a good idea to get to know someone before starting with the biology. Sexual magnetism is just your hormones telling you the bits are going to fit. By the time you’re ready to think in terms of love your brain’s ticked off a check-list and is confident you’re compatible in a lot more ways, and a lot more important ways, than just chemically.’
Brodie managed a shaky little laugh. ‘Daniel – is there anything I could throw at you that you couldn’t put me straight on?’
He did the rueful one-shouldered shrug. ‘Nothing you can get out of books, anyway.’
She didn’t ask herself if he was right: it made too much sense. It explained why her body kept doing things that she – Brodie Farrell, mother, businesswoman and person in her own right – didn’t approve of. Iron filings don’t ask themselves if they love the magnet: they feel the pull and react. It was like that. She was addicted to a chemical as much as Jared Fry was.
‘So what do I tell Jack?’
She thought he’d tell her, Everything. Daniel’s addiction was the truth: he had to have it even when he knew it was bad for him. He surprised Brodie by thinking long before answering. ‘How do you want this to end?’
‘The same way I did last time you asked. I’ve no interest in Eric Chandos. I don’t know if I love Jack but I like being with him. I want to be with him after this is history.’
‘Is that what he wants?’
‘I think so.’
‘I think so too. What do you think will happen if you tell him?’
Brodie didn’t have to think. ‘It would finish us. He wouldn’t forgive me for being unfaithful. He might want to, he might try to, but he wouldn’t succeed.’
Daniel chewed his lip. ‘Is there any chance you’re pregnant?’
That at least she knew the answer to. ‘No.’
‘Then I think, if you tell him, the one who’ll suffer most from all this is the one who had no responsibility for it. I think if you told him you’d be doing it not for Jack’s benefit but for yours, to clear the air.’
She was astonished. ‘You think I should lie to him?’
‘No,’ said Daniel with conviction. ‘I think if he asks you have to tell him the truth and take the consequences: what happens next is his call. But splitting up will hurt him more than it’ll hurt you. I think what you have to do – and do to the best of your ability, put your heart and soul into doing – is make sure he never has a reason to ask.’
She sat quietly, taking it in. It wasn’t an easy way he was offering her. She’d have her conscience to deal with as well as her addiction, and she couldn’t let Deacon see she was troubled by either. It couldn’ t be a factor when they argued: she could never, ever say, ‘I don’t need this crap, there are other fish in the sea,’ for fear he’d answer, ‘What fish?’ However long the road they travelled together there would be potholes every mile, and the job of avoiding them would be hers.
It would be easier to tell him what had happened, apologise, and shovel up the debris after the explosion subsided. But Daniel was right: she wasn’t the one who stood to lose the most. She could walk out of this relationship and into another whenever she chose. Deacon couldn’t. He’d been alone for eleven years before she knew him. She knew how much making a go of this meant to him. Not enough to humiliate himself, but perhaps enough to wonder if he should.
‘All right,’ she said quietly. ‘Yes. Thanks. Daniel, I don’t know where I’d go if I couldn’t come to you.’
‘Any time,’ he said with a sort of thin breeziness that, if she hadn’ t been so wrapped up in her own concerns, she’d have recognised as grief. ‘Any time you need to tell someone how you’ve shafted one guy by sleeping with another, I hope you’ll think of me.’
Brodie laughed. She thought it was a joke. She kissed him lightly on the cheek, then she was on her way down the iron stairs. ‘I’m going home now. I’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks again, Daniel.’
He heard her footsteps up the shingle beach, soon afterwards he heard her car. He went on sitting in the darkness for a long time, oblivious now of the stars or the cold. Finally he realised he was shivering, and climbed out of the deckchair and went inside.
He went straight to bed. But he didn’t sleep. Alone in the dark, with the galaxies westering unconcerned beyond his ken, with the duvet pulled about his chilled body, with his glasses on the bedside table and his eyes wide with images he had not sought but could not escape, he lay silent until the tears came. Then he wept as if his heart was breaking.
Chapter Thirteen
Like a manic depressive Deacon swung between opposite poles.
For twenty minutes at a time he was convinced that the girl at The Diligence was Sasha Wade. Still in search of fame and fortune she hitched her wagon to the wrong star and paid with her life. She left home with her guitar, her credit card and a change of clothes, and went to meet someone who’d offered her the world. It didn’t work out that way. It turned out what he was actually offering Sasha didn’ t want. She tried to leave and he hit her. Maybe that was all it was: one blow. There were no signs of a sustained attack. It was too late to know if there had been a sexual assault.
Whatever happened, she died and left her killer with a body to dispose of. If he wasn’t a local man he had another reason to know about The Diligence. A man with a body in his car doesn’t go for a drive looking for somewhere he can dig. He goes to a place he knows, and he knew about the empty hotel in its wooded grounds. Possibly he knew about the builders whose activities would soon erase all trace of his.
Security on the site had never been absolute. By June 1997, with the first flats ready for occupation, there was nothing to stop the killer driving round the back of the building and down to the bottom of the garden where he pulled a pick and spade from his car and dug a hole as close to the trees as the roots would allow. If he drove over it a few times after he filled it in, anyone who noticed at all would blame the builders. Anyone who saw his car there late at night would think the same thing. It was a brave move, but in fact he’d have attracted more attention in a more secluded spot.
His gamble paid off. No one disturbed him as he buried his victim, no one even noticed, and for eight years nothing came to trouble her or threaten him. Finally it was only bad luck that led to her discovery. Even if he was a local man he might have moved on in eight y
ears; if he was just passing through there might be nothing linking him to the area. If the girl was Sasha Wade, Deacon thought her killer had probably got away with murder.
But after twenty minutes or so the pendulum swung back and he was drawn to the possibility that the body was that of Michelle Rollins. Bubbly, uninhibited Michelle. In that case he knew who the killer was: her husband Eddie, dour and hardworking, who found while the ink was still wet on his mortgage that he was busting a gut to make a home for a trollop. Perhaps he caught her in flagrante, perhaps in an angry moment she threw her infidelity in his face. He reacted with a fury that startled them both and Michelle ended up dead on the carpet.
It was the only reason for Eddie to lie about her disappearance. Luigi the truck-driver indeed! Rollins should be behind bars for that alone. Michelle was the right age, build and colouring. She moved into The Diligence with her husband in May 1997 and a few weeks later, one way or another, she moved out again.
The builders were still on site, only one of the other flats was occupied and that by three students. Rollins would have had the place to himself most evenings. He put his wife’s body in one of Wilmslow’s wheel-barrows, trundled her down the garden and buried her on the edge of the wood. He’d seen the plans, he knew no one else would be digging down there.
But why did he stay? He could have sold up soon afterwards, citing his wife’s desertion, and put miles or countries between them. But then, as long as he stayed he had some control over the situation. If his neighbours had wanted a swimming pool there, or any construction that meant excavating, he would have vetoed the proposal and suggested an alternative site. Miles wouldn’t save him if Michelle came back. Keeping her underground was the key to his safety.
And Rollins was the one who held out longest. Who wanted to stay when all his neighbours wanted to sell. Who only succumbed when his obstinacy began making him conspicuous.
Deacon was going to have to contact Michelle’s parents for a DNA sample. He didn’t know her maiden name, and didn’t want to ask Rollins for fear of alerting him. But the marriage would have been registered and these wonderful new computers should be able to get him the information. Jill Meadows was computer literate. She was also his newest DC and still glad of an opportunity to please Sir.
Of course, finding Michelle Rollins’s parents wouldn’t help if the body was that of Sasha Wade …
He was about to page Meadows – he did this by the simple expedient of filling his lungs and bellowing ‘Meadows!’ – when Charlie Voss wandered in from his office next door with an odd expression and a large book. ‘I’ve found something funny.’
‘Oh good. I could do with a laugh.’
Voss didn’t respond to his sarcasm. Often these days he didn’t even notice it. ‘It’s Mrs Bush’s register, from when The Diligence was an hotel.’
‘I’m sure a lot of murders get planned on holidays,’ said Deacon bleakly. ‘I dare say a few get committed. Ten days of rain and she says “We should have gone to Miami” once too often. But you wouldn’t bury her in the hotel grounds.’
Voss opened the ledger on Deacon’s desk. ‘The hotel closed at the end of September. All that last month there were only a handful of bookings – except for six days when all eight rooms were booked to one account.’
Deacon tried to read the script without his glasses. ‘A conference? A small one?’
‘A band.’
Deacon stopped peering at the book and stared at Voss instead. ‘You’re kidding me!’
‘No. Souls For Satan stayed at The Diligence Hotel for six days in September 1996.’
It was hard to know what it meant. They sat and stared at each other, neither offering an opinion. It might be no more than one of those off-the-wall coincidences that do occur, even in murder inquiries, that seem at first to be of deep significance but turn out to be nothing more than fate taking the piss.
‘After all,’ ventured Voss at length, ‘both the girls we know about were alive then, and for at least nine months afterwards.’
‘But why hasn’t somebody said something?’ demanded Deacon. ‘We weren’t interested in Fry because he’s only just bought the place. Wouldn’t it be natural for him to say, “Of course, I was here once before”?’
‘Maybe he thought it was irrelevant,’ suggested Voss. ‘If he knew we were interested in what happened after the hotel closed.’
‘I’m the investigating officer,’ snarled Deacon, ‘I’ll judge what’s relevant. And if he knew we wouldn’t be interested, why hide the fact?’
‘He may not be hiding it. He may genuinely not have thought to mention it. Do you want to ask him about it?’
Deacon hesitated. ‘I’ll have a word with Brodie first, see if she knows. If she does it’s not a secret, Fry just didn’t mention it. If she doesn’t know – if she spent three months negotiating the purchase of a property for the man and he never told her he stayed there once – you’d have to wonder why.’
‘But if he’s hiding something, what is it? He didn’t kill anyone when he stayed there. And if he came back the next summer with a body to bury, why buy the place eight years later? He should have severed any connection he had with The Diligence. He certainly wouldn’t have had someone digging holes in the garden if he knew what they were likely to find.’
Voss was right: it made no sense. Bizarre coincidence was a likelier explanation than a killer behaving that stupidly.
Voss went to leave, taking the ledger with him. In the doorway he slowed to a halt. ‘She took her guitar.’
‘What?’
‘Sasha Wade. When she disappeared, she had her guitar with her.’
‘Yes. And a change of underwear and sixty pounds.’
‘She’s a singer, and she set off carrying her guitar – and the next time anybody sees her she’s buried in the grounds of what used to be an hotel and was once visited, and is now owned, by a rock star. There’s a pattern there.’
Deacon thought about it. ‘If the body’s Sasha. Do you think it is?’
Voss had momentarily forgotten there was some doubt. ‘If she’s still alive, why haven’t her parents heard from her in eight years?’
‘She could be dead without being dead at The Diligence. She could just have gone her own way. People do.’
‘You think it’s Michelle.’
‘The situation’s simpler if it’s Michelle,’ said Deacon judiciously. ‘Any word from the Italians?’
‘I’ll go chase them up.’
He could have phoned Brodie. It was a one line question demanding a one word answer: if the telephone had never been invented he could have done it by semaphore. But Deacon welcomed an excuse to get out of the office for half an hour. He walked the short distance from Battle Alley to Shack Lane.
Brodie knew his knock and answered promptly. ‘You’re not busy then?’ he asked.
‘Paperwork,’ she said. ‘I’d rather see you.’
When he first started dating Brodie Farrell he was on tenterhooks waiting for the second shoe to drop. He couldn’t believe that a woman like her was interested in a man like him, and he steeled himself for the disappointment when he found out what she was up to instead.
As time went on it became clear that she enjoyed his company in the same way that he enjoyed hers. He didn’t know why. Given her choices, he wouldn’t have spent much time with him. These days he didn’t look into the mystery too deeply. He was just glad to be able to knock on a door and have an attractive woman drag him inside.
‘I can’t stay long,’ he said. ‘I’m still trying to put a name to this body. And Voss has found something odd. When you first showed The Diligence to Fry and Chandos, did they tell you they’d been there before?’
‘No.’ She sounded surprised and her brow gathered in a frown. ‘Though to be fair, I never did show it to Jared. He bought it, believe it or not, sight unseen.’
‘Did he indeed?’ There was a significant note in Deacon’s voice. ‘He left it to his manager to find a place
and he only saw it after the deal was done?’
‘Yes. Crazy or what? But that’s what they wanted to do so that’s what we did.’
‘Was Fry pleased with it?’
‘Eric said he was. I can’t say it was obvious. Jack, what’s this all about?’
He had no reason not to tell her so he told her. ‘It might mean nothing. But it struck us as odd, and I wondered if they’d said anything to you.’
‘Nothing. Of course, it is nearly nine years ago. I imagine a band stays in a lot of hotels in nine years.’
‘Yes. But I can’t see why they wouldn’t mention it. In the course of conversation. Over one of those dinners you had with Chandos,’ he added unnecessarily. ‘All he had to say was, “You know this house you’ve found for us? We stayed there, years ago when it was an hotel.” End of mystery. Why wouldn’t he say that?’
‘Ask him.’ Her voice was a fraction strained: Deacon wondered if she and Chandos had had words.
‘I will. Or maybe I’ll get Charlie to do it. He gets on with these long-haired types better than I do.’ He sniffed disparagingly. ‘I suppose I’d better go do some work.’
‘Right now?’
He didn’t understand. ‘Right now?’
‘I mean, is anybody going to die or suffer unreasonable hardship if you don’t go right now? Is anybody going to get away with murder, mayhem or sedition?’
He considered. ‘Probably not. Why do you ask?’
‘Because there’s something I need you to do for me.’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘What?’
‘I need you to make love to me. Right here, right now.’
His expression hardly flickered. ‘Right now?’
‘This very minute.’
He looked round the little office critically. ‘Your sofa can’t be more than five feet long.’
‘No,’ said Brodie, expressionless. ‘But the wall is eight feet high.’