Flawed

by Jo Bannister

  Voss sniffed in a manner he'd picked up from Deacon. ‘People always do. No one ever thinks, We've got a little problem here let's get the police in before it turns into a disaster.’

  Chalmers grinned. ‘I thought your days of seeing little old dogs across busy roads were gone.’

  ‘Dogs, yes,’ said Voss. ‘Children, no. We still go to a fair bit of trouble to keep them safe.’

  Chalmers nodded. ‘So what is it you want me to do?’ Nothing wrong–foots a detective like someone genuinely trying to help. For a moment Voss couldn't think of a thing. All he'd wanted to achieve by coming here was to be seen coming here.

  Meadows stepped in to fill the gap. ‘Actually, sir, you've already done it,’ she said smoothly. ‘We wanted to know if you were aware there could be a problem, and we wanted to ask you to keep an eye on the boy. And to call us if you've any reason to be concerned.’

  ‘Of course I will. To be honest,’ said the Principal, ‘I'm glad to have this made official. As I told Daniel, the moment I saw something definite I was going to take it up with our designated person for child protection. But that carries the tiny risk that the first thing you see is an obituary. Keeping children safe is a minefield. You can get it wrong both ways –keep a watching brief for too long, or start a train of events that'll leave the kid worse off than before you knew. You're very welcome to the hot potato.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Charlie Voss sourly.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Voss gave careful thought to where he should confront Adam Selkirk. But the more he considered, the clearer it was to him that actually there was no decision to make. It couldn't be anywhere public, because not making a song and dance about it was what he had to offer Selkirk in return for the truth about his little sailing trip – i.e., that it was a week earlier or later than claimed, or perhaps never took place at all. If everyone whose opinion mattered to Adam Selkirk already knew that he'd been beating his twelve–year–old son, the incentive to cooperate would be gone.

  There were good reasons, too, why he shouldn't take this to the man's home. Voss didn't propose to arrest Selkirk and lead him away in handcuffs, which meant that after he'd told Selkirk what he knew and intimated what it was going to cost him, he was going to leave the house in River Drive and Adam Selkirk would be alone with his wife and son. Afraid, perhaps, but also very, very angry. The least Voss could do was ensure he had some time to think, to calm down and work out the least painful option before he went home to his family.

  So it was the offices of Selkirk &c Fine, Solicitors at Law, in Butterfield Square. Dimmock didn't really have a smart area, but if it had this would have been it: three ranks of Georgian stucco houses in the middle of town, ranged around one end of the park. For a hundred years it had been a residential area. But even before the First World War these tall, many–roomed buildings were proving difficult to run without staff, and some were divided into large comfortable flats and some were adapted to commercial use. Adam Selkirk and his partner Miriam Fine had the whole of one four–storey house in the middle of the western terrace, looking down the park to the monument. It was gracious accommodation for successful professionals.

  Successful professionals who could afford the best help. The receptionist didn't ask the detectives if they had an appointment: she knew who they were. She called Selkirk's office and he came downstairs and showed them to a conference room that had nothing in common with the interview rooms at Battle Alley.

  Selkirk saw them seated before settling himself at the head of the walnut table. ‘To coin a phrase,’ he said, his low voice musical with good humour, ‘should I call my client?’

  Meadows smiled dutifully, Voss not at all. ‘We're not here to discuss Mr Walsh, sir,’ he said, face and tone void of expression. ‘It's possible you may wish to have your own solicitor present. Though I'm guessing not.’

  The expansiveness of Selkirk's welcome had frozen on him like wet clothes on a winter washing–line. Only the mental activity behind his eyes continued unabated. Voss could almost see the cogs whirring, the belts running, the machinery of the brain processing information and churning out thoughts and conclusions and plans of action. The man was still because the brain was racing.

  Finally he said, ‘I think you'd better tell me what this is about, Sergeant.’

  Voss nodded. ‘We've just come from Dimmock High School. Are you aware that your son's head teacher is concerned about him?’

  Selkirk managed to look surprised. ‘No. As far as I know he's doing well at school. Except’ – the machinery behind his eyes changed gear – ‘that's not what you mean, is it? However good or bad, a twelve–year–old's marks in design and technology are never going to attract the attention of CID. So what's happened? What's the little sod been up to?’

  Charlie Voss didn't often feel the urge to thump someone. But he felt it now.

  Meadows stepped in quickly enough that she must have guessed. ‘What makes you think it's something Noah's done? Most parents finding a policeman on the doorstep need reassuring that their child is safe. But you immediately jumped to the conclusion that Noah was in trouble. Why is that, sir? Does he have a history of getting into trouble?’

  Selkirk was regarding her with basilisk eyes. ‘I'm not most parents, Constable,’ he said, his tone barely the right side of objectionable. T deal with police officers every day of my working life. And I'm perfectly well aware that if some harm had come to Noah you'd be handling this interview in a quite different way. So somebody's in trouble. I haven't murdered anyone this week, so I'm guessing it's Noah. So I'll ask you again: what's the little sod done?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing,’ said Voss firmly. ‘I haven't seen him. It's not his behaviour I want to talk to you about.’

  That was the moment that Adam Selkirk knew why they were here. In his eyes Voss saw all the whirring machinery stop dead, as if a girder had been thrust among the cogs. The weight of understanding dragged down the corners of his mouth. But he said nothing, just watched Voss with still eyes and waited for the sky to fall.

  ‘Good,’ said the detective softly. ‘Now, how do you want to do this? Do you want to tell me all the ways a twelve–year–old boy can collect bruises? Or shall we talk about what happens in the leafy fastness of River Drive when you come in at the end of a hard day and the housekeeper goes home?’

  ‘I don't hit my son,’ Adam Selkirk said, as precisely as if he was chiselling the words in marble.

  Voss sighed, disappointed. ‘All right. So tell me about the time he fell off his bike, and the time he walked into the patio door, and that time you played American football in the park and didn't make enough allowance for the fact that you're bigger than he is, and…’

  ‘You're not listening to me, Sergeant,’ said Selkirk, with the kind of quiet force that Deacon employed when he was too angry to shout. ‘I don't hit my son. I love my son.’

  ‘The little sod must be glad to know it,’ said Voss stonily. Surprise made Meadows look away from Selkirk and quickly at the Sergeant. She'd never heard him speak like that to anyone, including thugs and drug dealers. He was famously even–tempered, polite even in the face of provocation. He didn't work at it: it happened naturally, it was who he was. Now all at once he was starting to sound like…

  She hesitated, and edited the thought in the privacy of her own head. No, it wasn't Detective Superintendent Deacon he was starting to sound like. It was Detective Inspector Hyde.

  Again she pushed the verbal equivalent of a shoulder between the two men. ‘Sometimes, though, it isn't a question of love. People do hit children they love dearly. And wives and lovers. Some people find it difficult to control their anger. Everybody shouts at their family sometimes, and feels guilty about it afterwards. Some people find it difficult to stop at just shouting.’

  Selkirk looked down at her in such a way that even Meadows, a fit and well-trained young policewoman who believed she could probably take him if she had to, felt the pressure of intimidation. For
his wife and his son, trapped with the big angry man in their charming, desirable, above all private home, the pressure must have been crushing. Waiting for him to explode. Never being quite certain what would set him off this time.

  ‘Constable,’ he said, and his tone was so low it rumbled like the voice of an elephant, ‘I spend half my life in courtrooms. I know at least as much about domestic violence as you do. In fact, I know more. I know you're accusing me of something I haven't done. Ever. I have never laid a violent hand on my son. Who told you that?’

  It wasn't a question the detectives wanted to answer just yet. ‘I'll tell you who it wasn't,’ volunteered Voss. ‘It wasn't Noah. And it wasn't his mother.’

  ‘I know that,’ Selkirk said with towering disdain. ‘Neither of them would say anything so absurd. You say you've been to Noah's school? But I don't think this came from the school. I know where this came from. That meddling little…maths teacher.’ He managed to invest the words with a venom more usually associated with terms like paedophile and vivisector.

  ‘I'm not prepared to disclose the source of our information at this stage,’ said Voss stiffly. ‘Someone who was concerned for Noah's well-being drew our attention to what was happening, and we're taking it from there.’

  Whatever else Adam Selkirk was, he was an intelligent man. Even this angry he was capable of quality thinking. Now he was thinking beyond the accusation that had been made, beyond even who had made it, to why it was being investigated at precisely this time in precisely this manner. The low stridency in his voice softened. ‘Yes, you are, aren't you?’ he said. ‘Not Social Services, not Child Protection – you. The Criminal Investigation Department.’

  ‘Child abuse is a criminal offence,’ Meadows pointed out.

  ‘Of course it is,’ he agreed. ‘But it's not – how shall I put this? – the most rewarding kind of investigation. The kind that leads to plaudits and promotions and the prospect of a division of one's own some day. Unlike, for instance, Serious Organised Crime. Now there's a way to make your name -taking down criminal masterminds when other policemen, good policemen, have failed. There's a way of getting noticed. Don't you think so, Sergeant Voss?’

  So he knew what they were doing. So much the better, thought Voss, who hadn't looked forward to explaining it. ‘We do our best to deal with all the crimes that come to our attention,’ he answered, deadpan.

  ‘I just bet you do,’ sneered Selkirk. ‘So what's the deal here? I suddenly remember I wasn't on Salamander the last weekend in June and you let me get on with thumping my kid?’

  If he'd thumped Meadows she could hardly have been more astonished. It was an extraordinary thing for anyone under investigation to say, let alone a man whose career depended on verbal aplomb. He couldn't really think there was a deal like that on offer – or that, if there had been, it wouldn't have been dressed up an awful lot more carefully, since one party couldn't be seen offering such a trade and the other couldn't be seen needing it.

  Which meant that Adam Selkirk wasn't in the market for a deal even had one been available. He thought they had nothing on him. He thought they were bluffing and he could afford to call them.

  Voss said evenly, ‘Am I to take that as an admission, sir?’

  Selkirk smiled coldly. ‘You can take it any way you like, Sergeant. You and I both know this conversation is never going to be reported in court. That's not why you're here.’

  ‘Why do you suppose we're here?’

  ‘To put me on notice, Sergeant Voss. To make me aware that I can look after Terry Walsh's best interests or I can look after my own but I can't do both. To tell me what you know, or think you know, about things that might be happening within my family. To give me to understand that if I mend my ways now -all my ways – this need go no further, but if you feel the need to talk to me again it won't be in the privacy of my offices. And finally, to put it on record that I've been the subject of a police investigation and should therefore be considered a flawed witness in any future prosecution.’ His head lifted, the broad jaw jutting. ‘Have I missed anything?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Voss, considering, ‘I don't believe you have. I'll just underline the salient points again, should I? Tomorrow, and every day next week, and every day if needs be until he turns eighteen, someone will make it their business to check that Noah's in school, that he's all right and that he hasn't had any more of those unfortunate little accidents. And if he isn't, he isn't or he has, I'll know about it within ten minutes. That's when we stop trying to help you find alternative methods of stress management and charge you with child abuse.

  ‘And if I can arrange to do it on the courthouse steps on a Wednesday morning, with half the town's legal profession and maybe a television camera looking on, that's exactly what I shall do. Now,’ he said, holding Selkirk's eye with his own, ‘is there anything I missed out?’

  It was a cloudy night. Daniel did a bit of housework, failed to find anything riveting on the TV and went to bed early. For an hour, though, he lay sleepless, thinking, turning over in his mind the situation he found himself embroiled in.

  No, that wasn't entirely true – and Daniel put a lot of value on the entirety of truth. To a large degree he'd embroiled himself. Noah Selkirk had come to him for a little advice, not to hire a dragon-slayer. He didn't want the dragon slain. The boy didn't want to hurt his father, he just wanted Selkirk to stop hurting him. And he only wanted that if it could be achieved without destroying his family. If it came to a straight choice between a black eye every weekend and seeing Selkirk taken away in a police car, Daniel had no doubt Noah would exhaust every excuse in the book and then start back with the patio doors again.

  In which case, had Daniel the right to force help on him? Perhaps he had both the right and the duty. A twelve-year-old boy can't be expected to take rational decisions on matters of such immediate personal importance. Daniel believed fervently that nothing Adam Selkirk had to offer in return -not expensive holidays, not top-of-the-range toys and computers, not even the good days when he wasn't too stressed to remember that he loved his son – was worth the reddened print of a hand on the child's face. But Noah Selkirk was an intelligent boy. If it was worth it to him, was it possible Daniel was wrong?

  Because if he was, this whole thing was in danger of spiralling out of control. With nothing but the child's best interests at heart, he'd spoken to his school and he'd spoken to the police, and the genie wasn't going back in that bottle without a fight. If this ended in tears – if the Selkirk family broke up over it – it wouldn't be his father that Noah blamed.

  Well, Daniel had broad shoulders – philosophically if not physically – he could carry the responsibility if he was sure he'd done the right thing. But the blame game wouldn't stop there. Noah would be painfully aware, and would carry the burden for the rest of his childhood, that Daniel didn't come from nowhere in a puff of red smoke, like the demon king in a pantomime – that it was Noah's own actions which brought him in contact with the Selkirk family. In the fullness of time he would come to understand that both he and Daniel had done what was required of them. But before that coming of maturity lay a childhood of self-loathing Daniel would have spent blood to save him from.

  So had there been another way? Was there still some other choice to be made that safeguarded Noah without threatening his family? And of course there was, but it wasn't for Daniel to make. If Adam Selkirk could control himself long enough to see that he was being given a chance for a better relationship with his son, to break the cycle of anger and abuse and move forward, this could still be a win-win situation. But what if he couldn't, or didn't? Armies were on the move now, significant forces with their own rules of engagement, and the one thing every commander knows is that it's easier to start a war than to end one.

  So Daniel lay awake until after midnight, anxieties like the gallopers on a carousel chasing one another round and round and getting nowhere. Some time after that he slept.

  The phone kicked him awake at
ten to one. He lifted it with his left hand, scrabbling for his glasses with his right. ‘Wha'? Who…?’ He tried again as some of his scattered wits returned. ‘Hello?’

  ‘This is your fault,’ cried the piping little voice, high with panic and accusation. ‘You shouldn't have interfered. Nobody asked you to. Now they're angry and they're fighting again, and it's all your fault!’

  Daniel was wide awake now, didn't need to ask who he was talking to. He kept the alarm he felt out of his voice, went for low and authoritative. ‘Noah. Are you safe where you are?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Go to the bathroom and lock the door. Don't open it till I get there. I'm on my way. Do you understand? Don't open that door however much he shouts. Give him time to calm down.’

  ‘My mother…’

  ‘I know,’ said Daniel briefly, the heart twisting within him. ‘But if you're safe she only has herself to think about. Do as I say. I'll be there in ten minutes.’

  He knew as soon as he'd put the phone down he couldn't keep that promise. An athlete might have run from the shore to River Drive in ten minutes, but Daniel was no athlete. Which wouldn't have mattered if he'd had a car. He tried the numbers of the local taxi firms but got only recorded messages. With most of his ten minutes already gone, he did what he always did when disaster loomed. He called Brodie.

  And she did what she always did in a real emergency. As a matter of habit she might be caustic, she might want for patience, she might take rather more pleasure than necessary in having her own way and the means by which she got it, but in a crisis all that went by the board. She would stint nothing to get matters under control, and he wouldn't hear a word of criticism until the dust had settled and there was time for an inquest.

  At which the verdict would be – he knew as if it had already sat – that he'd been stupid and she'd saved his sorry ass; but he could forgive all that because when he phoned her at one in the morning and said he needed her car, she didn't even ask why. Seeing a light still on upstairs she explained briefly to her long-suffering neighbour and was on her way while Marta was still settling herself on Brodie's sofa with a mug of hot chocolate and a lurid paperback.