Breaking Faith

by Jo Bannister

  Rollins had been unwise enough to ask where he’d got with his inquiries.

  Deacon’s voice was barred with import. ‘To the point, Mr Rollins, where I now know you’re lying to me. Where we go from here is one of two ways. You tell me the truth, the whole truth and all that crap, and maybe it’s not as bad as it looks, and even if it is we can start dealing with it. Or you keep pissing me around, in which case I charge you with murder and set about proving it.’

  ‘Murder!’ yelped Eddie Rollins, screwing his apron in his hands.

  Deacon considered. ‘Yes, I think so. Drunk in charge of a bicycle wouldn’t really cover it. Not when I’ve dug a body out of your garden!’

  ‘But – murder? I haven’t murdered anyone!’ Regaining a little control of his expression allowed him to knit his brows in a frown. ‘Who do you think I’ve murdered?’

  Deacon breathed heavily. ‘Your wife. Michelle. Remember her? Blonde girl, a cheery word for everyone, a negligee for every occasion. One day she’s here, the next she’s gone, a week after that you tell the students next door she’s left you. How was that again?’

  ‘I told you,’ hissed Rollins with a kind of fierce terror. ‘She took off with a lorry driver.’

  ‘Mr Rollins,’ said Deacon disappointedly, ‘you’re selling yourself short. It was a much better story the first time round. It was the lorry driver who brought your new suite, he was an Italian, and his name …’

  ‘ … Was Luigi,’ finished Rollins insistently. ‘That’s all I know. Except I also know it wasn’t her in the garden.’

  ‘Can you prove it?’

  A hunted look. ‘No! How?’

  ‘Didn’t she leave you a note?’

  ‘I destroyed it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because …’ He had to think about that. ‘I was angry.’

  ‘Naturally enough,’ allowed Deacon.

  ‘Damn right! I’d worked every hour God sends to buy a nice home for her. I’d even forked out for the Italian suite she wanted. And the day it came …’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Deacon, ‘a man would be angry about that. Angry enough to burn her note.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Angry enough to burn her clothes?’

  Eddie Rollins couldn’t see the trap being laid for him. ‘No, but I threw them out. Everything she didn’t take with her.’

  The directness of Deacon’s gaze was like a finger in his eye. ‘Angry enough to kill her?’

  Rollins’s cheek was white. ‘No! I told you, she left me …’

  Deacon shrugged. ‘It didn’t take much to kill her. One blow. Maybe not even a blow so much as a slap. You slapped her, she stumbled, she hit her head on the corner of the hearth … It was only when you told her to stop being such a drama queen and get up that you realised she wasn’t going to, ever.’

  ‘No …’ whispered Eddie Rollins.

  ‘Look,’ said Deacon, suddenly – and disconcertingly – kind, ‘can I give you a bit of advice? Obviously we’re going to move this down to the police station, and you’re going to want your solicitor there and everything you say is going on the record. I’ll caution you in a minute, and after that we’re into the formalities. So let me say this first. The sooner you come clean about this, the easier it’s going to be for people to see your side of the story.

  ‘You did your level best for the woman right up to the moment you lost your temper and hit her. You didn’t beat her: you hit her once. She shouldn’t have fallen, let alone died. Even angry, you didn’ t mean to harm her. She was playing around, you struck out in a moment’s fury, the next thing you knew she was dead. That isn’t murder. It’s manslaughter, and it’s not the worst case of that. People will understand. Set the record straight and give us the chance to make it easy for you. You may do a couple of years. You might not, if you tell the truth now.’

  ‘But it isn’t the truth!’ wailed the hardware tycoon. ‘I didn’t kill her. I didn’t hit her. She left me. And …’ He swallowed, hard. ‘And I can prove it.’

  Deacon blinked. ‘Really?’

  Rollins’s eyes dipped. ‘You’re right, I lied. About a couple of things, but not that. To the best of my knowledge Michelle is alive and well and living with Luigi. I’ve had postcards from her. I don’t know why I kept them but I did. I also kept the note.’

  Deacon was staring at him in rank disbelief. ‘You have the Dear John? And you didn’t produce it even when you were suspected of murder?’

  Rollins shook his head wearily. ‘I didn’t seriously think I was. I know that isn’t Michelle you found, I thought you’d know it too in a day or two.’

  ‘You could have eliminated yourself from the inquiry. You could have saved me and my officers time and effort as well, and we’ll get back to that later. Oh no, Mr Rollins,’ said Deacon, ‘I’m not buying this. A man who can prove his innocence leaps at the chance. What possible reason could you have for pretending to have burnt Michelle’s note when you were in a position to produce it?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Rollins in a low voice. ‘It’s in the dresser with the postcards. Read it for yourself, then you’ll see.’

  The postcards were Italian tourist scenes – the Trevi fountain, the Ponte Vecchio, Vesuvius – written in a schoolgirl hand in scratchy biro. It appeared to be the same hand each time. The signature was Michelle and the postmarks were seven, six and four years old.

  The same hand and signature appeared on the note. It was undated, written hurriedly on the back of an invoice. When Deacon turned it over it was the invoice for the Italian suite.

  He read it, then read it again. Then he looked at Rollins, who looked away. Deacon read the note a third time.

  ‘Now do you see?’ muttered Rollins.

  ‘Not entirely.’

  ‘She was married to him!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Before she married me. They never divorced.’

  ‘That makes her a bigamist. Why would it make you risk being charged with murder?’

  ‘We bought the flat as husband and wife. Every penny I had went into it, and I put both our names on it because I loved her. The mortgage was in our joint names.’

  Deacon still didn’t get it. ‘You didn’t tell the bank?’

  ‘I told them she’d left. I didn’t tell them we were never married.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’d have lost everything! The flat and the money I’d put into it. I couldn’t face that. I told them she’d left me but neither of us was seeking a divorce at present.’ He looked up with a tiny flicker of wan humour. ‘At least that was true.’

  Deacon was trying very hard not to shake him. ‘You thought the bank would foreclose?’

  ‘That’s what I was told.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘A man I know. He knows about financial matters.’

  ‘He’s a banker?’

  ‘He’s a house remover. I see him down the pub sometimes.’

  After a long moment in which he held his tongue, Deacon said, ‘You’ve been lying to your mortgage company for eight years, and you’ve risked being arrested for murder, because of something a white van man said to you in a pub?’

  ‘He knows about financial matters,’ said Rollins again, defensively. Then, belatedly: ‘Do you think he was wrong?’

  ‘I think,’ shouted Deacon, ‘that if he knew much about financial matters he wouldn’t be driving a van! Yes, I think he was wrong. I think the bank will have a form that you fill in to say your circumstances have changed from when you first applied for your mortgage, and after that all they’ll be interested in is whether you can meet the repayments each month.’

  Clearly, Rollins hadn’t dared hope as much. ‘Really?’

  ‘Look,’ snarled Deacon, ‘I don’t own a white van so I’m not qualified to give financial advice. Talk to your solicitor. Go see your bank manager. Tell him you believed you were married when you took out the mortgage – you had the ceremony and the certificate to show for it
– only it turned out Mrs Rollins had married abroad and never divorced. None of it’s your fault. You hadn’t done anything wrong until you started lying about it.’

  Slowly it was dawning on Eddie Rollins that the nightmare was over. He’d resisted selling the flat at The Diligence because it meant reopening the issue of his mortgage. He’d believed that if the bank found out the loan was granted on the basis of a lie they would demand immediate repayment. He’d thought Michelle’s fib was going to bankrupt him. A tear trembled on the lip of his eye. ‘No …’

  Finally, when the fear had passed and so had the euphoria that followed it, Deacon was able to pursue his investigation with the man, not now as a suspect but a witness. Rollins was pathetically eager to help. He made coffee for his visitor, and put lashings of cream and too much sugar in it. And Deacon, bemused by the turn events had taken, drank it without complaint.

  Rollins cast his mind back to the early months at The Diligence. ‘The students next door threw a party most weekends so there was no shortage of girls around. I imagine some of them stayed over but I don’t think any of them moved in, even temporarily. I used to grumble about the noise but there was never anything nasty.’

  ‘Do you remember a girl with a guitar? Slight, fair, about the same height as your …’ Deacon stopped himself just in time. ‘As Michelle.’

  Rollins thought hard. ‘No.’

  ‘Then did you see anything odd, at any time? That girl probably arrived at The Diligence either just before you did or soon afterwards. She didn’t walk down the garden – somebody carried her or drove her. And he brought tools and spent quite a while digging a hole under the trees. Did you see any of that?’

  Again the dutiful pause while Rollins thought. He shook his head and started to apologise. Then he stopped mid-sentence, his expression changing.

  ‘What?’ asked Deacon.

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing, probably. But one night there was a van, and I never did know who it belonged to.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  It was a Monday night in the middle of June. Rollins had begun stock-taking at the store where he worked. Michelle hadn’t liked his being out late when she was alone at The Diligence – Miss Venables and the students had yet to arrive – but he had no choice. He got in a little after one o’clock to find the house in darkness. Supposing Michelle was asleep and not wanting to wake her he parked beside the stable-block. As he crossed the yard he noticed a van parked at the bottom of the garden.

  ‘In the morning it was gone. I assumed it belonged to the builders. I asked Mr Wilmslow what it was doing there but he said it was nothing to do with him, he didn’t have a black van. We decided it must have been a courting couple who hadn’t realised the place was occupied again. I haven’t given it a thought from that day to this.’

  ‘What kind of a van?’

  ‘It might have been a Ford Transit. I’m not sure – the only light down there was moonlight.’

  ‘And you think it was black.’

  ‘Dark, anyway.’

  ‘And it was where we found the body?’

  ‘More or less. I didn’t look that closely. I thought it was one of the builder’s vehicles, I just wanted to check that he wasn’t doing anything down there that wasn’t on the plans.’

  Deacon nodded slowly. ‘OK. Well, if you think of anything else, give me a call. If I think of anything else I’ll pay you a visit. And for pity’s sake, Mr Rollins, get yourself a financial advisor who doesn’t shift second-hand furniture on the side!’

  As he walked to his car he checked his phone. Brodie’s number came up, a couple of times. He thought as soon as he’d got a minute he’d call her.

  Chapter Sixteen

  By close of play Deacon had confirmation that Michelle Rollins (sic) was alive and well, living in Naples with Luigi and four children, and astonished that anyone might think she’d been murdered.

  Which left Sasha Wade.

  It didn’t mean the body had to be Sasha. There were no clothes, no personal effects, no help from DNA or dental work, no old injuries. If the girl at The Diligence had wanted to stay anonymous she could hardly have done a better job.

  Finally Deacon remembered Brodie. It was almost six o’clock: he thought he’d give her a nice surprise and drop by instead of phoning.

  As soon as he saw her face he knew they were in trouble. In spite of that she had to spell it out before he understood what kind of trouble it was, and say most of it again before he believed her. The first time he thought it was a bad joke: that if he waited and didn’t panic she’d suddenly grin her boyish grin and admit as much. So he stood frozen, refusing to react, waiting for the punch-line; and she, her heart riven, had to go through it all again, a sentence at a time, giving it time to sink in. What she’d done. With whom. Why. At least that part of the story was soon told. She could offer no reason.

  Finally Deacon believed what he was hearing. Anger, and even more than that shock, locked him rigid. For much of their relationship he had been afraid of losing her, but not like this – to an affair so casual it hardly merited the name. An animal coupling between strangers, a mere scratching of mutual itches, in an office where the paperwork overflowed the desk and the sofa was barely five feet long.

  But the wall was eight feet high.

  She saw him recoil as the thought hit him. ‘When was this?’ His voice was like gravel.

  ‘Yesterday afternoon.’

  The magnitude of her treachery rocked him. ‘You were with me the night before!’

  ‘Yes,’ she said simply.

  ‘And again this morning …’ He looked around the little office incredulously. ‘Right here. You asked me …’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ Brodie said. ‘I needed you.’

  ‘What, for comparison?’

  She’d told Daniel he wouldn’t hit her: now she almost wished he would. She thought anything would be better than the dumb pain in his face, and the knowledge that he loved her and she’d done that to him, for no reason. On a whim. A chance presented and she’d taken it without regard for the hurt it would cause. They weren’t married, but after a year together it was disingenuous to consider herself single. Jack Deacon was her partner, she owed him fidelity She could end their relationship with a word, but until then she wasn’t free to respond when another man’s hormones serenaded hers.

  When her husband told Brodie there was someone he loved more than he loved her it was as if the earth had opened. As if nothing could be trusted any more. She’d screamed and cried; she’d berated him from the depths of her terrified soul; she’d begged him to stay. She’d reduced him to tears too – because John Farrell was a good man and only love would have made him let her down. He’d gone beyond scrupulously fair to guiltily generous in the divorce settlement, and when he was free to do so he’d married his plump little librarian. If there was scant consolation for Brodie in that, at least it proved his reason for hurting her wasn’t trivial.

  She hadn’t fallen in love. She hadn’t agonised for weeks over how to square the circle, to be fair to all concerned. She’d felt a surge of lust for an attractive man, and instead of burying herself in her VAT returns till it passed she’d grabbed him and impaled herself on him as if nothing in the world mattered more than satisfying her desire. She’d behaved like a bitch in heat. She was ashamed of herself in a way she had never been before. As if she’d been caught shop-lifting, she was mortified by her own dishonesty.

  ‘There is no comparison,’ she said, as calmly as she could with her voice breaking. Jack, I know it can’t seem so right now but I care deeply for you. And I feel nothing for Eric Chandos, and I didn’t even before he used my name as a weapon. Maybe that makes it worse: I don’t know. I don’t know why it happened. I know whose fault it was, but I don’t understand why I did it. I was never unfaithful to you before. You’ve no reason to believe me but it’s true.’

  If she was hoping he’d contradict, say roughly that of course he believed her, she was doomed to disapp
ointment. He said nothing. His face was graven with deep gullies of anger and pain, and his eyes were hot.

  Brodie struggled on. However difficult it was, she had to get this said. ‘I didn’t want to hurt you. I wasn’t thinking one second ahead. It was as if I was caught up in something outside my control. I didn’ t just forget about you: I forgot about me too – who I am, what I want, where I want to be. It was like being run down by a truck.

  ‘And no.’ She saw the thought burrowing like a worm in his raw flesh and squashed it. ‘It wasn’t that I had no choice. He didn’t force me, and he didn’t make me think he was going to. I think he was as startled by what happened as I was. But your quarrel isn’t with him, Jack, it’s with me. Eric Chandos didn’t owe you better.’

  They’d been standing here maybe fifteen minutes by now and Deacon had hardly spoken. He was going to have to, and both of them were afraid of what he would say when he did. Even in normal circumstances he wasn’t a man who weighed his words carefully. He caused a lot of offence by saying what he thought. Here and now, saying what he felt would throw up a barrier between him and Brodie that might block all future communication.

  Angry as he was, hurt as he was, Deacon knew that there was more at stake here than his outraged dignity. That he hadn’t lost Brodie yet, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to.

  It broke her heart to see him doing what he never did: treading cautiously, considering the consequences, trying to ignore his pain because once he acknowledged it his only choice was between vengeance and acceptance, and each would diminish him and put an end to them. There was nothing she could do to help. She had already betrayed his trust and injured his pride: telling him what to do now would strike at his very manhood. He might eventually forgive the rest, but not that.

  After a long time he managed a tiny, deeply uncharacteristic little smile. ‘I have no idea where we go from here.’

  ‘You could tell me how you feel,’ murmured Brodie.