by Jo Bannister
She gave a grim chuckle. “As long as that’s all it is. It’s beginning to feel personal.”
His eyes were wary. “You’re joking, right?”
“Of course I am.”
And it was only a joke when she said it. Given voice, though, it took on a kind of reality. The car, the bag – they might be no more than random misfortune but they could be connected. Behind her eyes she was considering the possibility that someone was doing this to her. Someone with a grudge, too cowardly to face her, content to snipe from deep cover. The idea was a nasty taste in her mouth and she made a face.
“What?” asked John.
She shrugged. “Nothing. I’m just in a foul mood.”
“No change there, then,” he said with a careful grin.
Nine months ago she’d have had his head for a remark like that. Now she only wrinkled her nose and shooed him away.
It wasn’t even true. She’d been a good wife to him. She’d been a much nicer person then than she was now. But that was all right too because being a bit of a cow was more rewarding. She liked people handling her with caution.
She gave Julia a wave. “Thanks for taking Paddy.” If it was true that John was a better-looking man than Jack Deacon, she thought complacently, shutting the door, she never had to worry about comparisons with the second Mrs Farrell. Nice woman, kind; a librarian. Dull as ditch-water, comfortable – and the same basic shape – as a pillow.
When she collected the car at ten o’clock on Monday, instead of returning to the office she headed for the Woodgreen estate. She had no excuse. She called Geoffrey Harcourt looking for one but he didn’t answer the phone. She drove out to Woodgreen anyway.
She was very aware of the walkway as she passed under it. If there’d been a way to avoid it she might have done, although she might not. She didn’t like feeling scared, but on the whole she’d rather be scared than scared off. In any event there was no one on the walkway. She parked at the foot of the eastern tower block and went looking for someone to chat to.
Once upon a time, old people and young mothers would have been the only ones about during the day, the men at work from before eight until after six. But things change. Unemployment in Woodgreen affected one in three, many of them young men who’d never had a job. Young mothers, on the other hand, left their babies with relatives in order to work, while the old people had mostly been shuffled off into residential care.
Drifts of purposeless men and teenagers imparted an air of casual menace to the places where they congregated. Even the locals were careful where they parked their cars, noticed who was walking behind them, and often thought better of using the lifts even when they were working.
Brodie set her jaw, gripped her second-best handbag tight under her elbow and kept her keys in her hand for use as a weapon if the need arose. Noticing a group of youths watching from a balcony, she headed their way. She began by telling them lies. “I’m looking for an address but I can’t seem to find it. This is Senlac House? Then where’s number 258?”
They traded downcast glances and giggled: not because they meant her harm but because they had no idea how to behave around someone of a different age, sex and socio-economic group to themselves, and were embarrassed.
Finally one found his tongue. “There isn’t one.”
“There must be. Mrs Taplock, 258 Senlac House. See?” Brodie showed him the piece of paper she’d readied on the way up.
The youth shrugged. “Somebody told you wrong. You’re on the right landing but the numbers stop at 30.”
“Damn!” she said with well-feigned astonishment. “Well, thanks for saving me some time. I’ve obviously taken the address down wrong. I’ll have to wait for her to call again.” As she turned away she seemed to notice the walkway for the first time. “Is that …?”
“What?”
“Some poor woman got stoned here over the weekend, didn’t she? I heard someone dropped a boulder on her.”
“It was half a brick,” volunteered one of the boys.
Brodie shuddered. “It’s a hell of a height to drop it on someone’s head. Was she all right?”
The boy shrugged. “Never heard that she wasn’t.”
“The filf was here.” If he’d had better teeth she’d probably have guessed his meaning before the second youth added, “That big bastard in the mac. But they didn’t stay. They’d have been back if she croaked.”
“Who’d do a thing like that?” Brodie asked them.
“Why? Was someone angry with her, or was she just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Was it a joke and they were too dim to see what the consequences could be?”
More shrugs and blank stares. Brodie thought the idea of foreseeing consequences was an alien concept to them too.
“Dunno who did it,” said the first boy. “Could have been kids. Could have been anyone. But I know why. Boredom.”
“Boredom? They stoned someone because they were bored?”
Brodie was growing too vehement, making them wonder at her interest. The swelling of her lip had subsided in the last twenty-four hours but the first boy had noticed the stitches. “Looks like you’ve been nutting bricks yourself, missus.” There was a suspicion in his voice that hadn’t been there before.
Brodie touched a delicate fingertip to her lip. “Ah yes. My husband. But you should see what he did to Mr Taplock.” While they were puzzling over that she beat a retreat.
Unless the boys were better liars than she thought, it wasn’t common knowledge in Woodgreen who smashed her windscreen. Maybe it wasn’t disaffected local youth after all. So maybe it wasn’t a random attack – maybe it was personal. And now he had her handbag as well. Private things: her diary, photographs of Paddy, the names and addresses of friends, letters she meant to reply to. It was an uncomfortable feeling that someone was picking over the details of her life.
She emerged from the stairwell into a cloud of smoke. It was dense, it was oily, it stank and she couldn’t see through it. She edged along the wall into the clearer air where a crowd was gathering. Across the estate she could hear the distant wail of a fire engine.
It would take ten minutes for the firemen to put the blaze out and longer than that to establish what had caused it. They should have asked Brodie, because she knew right away. It was her car, and it had been started by someone wadding a burning rag into her petrol-tank.
5
Deacon was trying very hard not to say “I told you so.” Unfortunately, he wasn’t trying hard not to think it, or to keep what he was thinking from showing in his face.
Brodie shrugged his coat around her shoulders. She’d been shaking when he arrived. “I know.” The odd flatness of her voice was disturbed by the slightest of tremors. “You told me to stay away”
“I did,” nodded Deacon quietly. He’d have been angrier if she’d been less shocked. “I said, as I recall, that making a big deal of a comparatively minor incident could result in someone getting hurt.”
“They burned my car.” She looked up at him, a little life creeping back into her eyes. “The sods burned my car!”
“I’m glad that’s all they burned. They could have hurt you, Brodie. I could be here investigating an attack on you. Or worse. What in God’s name were you thinking of?”
It was a good question. Of all the places she might have gone after taking Paddy to school, the Woodgreen estate should have been the last. Brodie Farrell would have had trouble naming a single soul who wished her harm, but someone here had damn near killed her forty hours before. Even if it was a random attack, her car just the one that was under the walkway at the critical moment, whoever dropped the brick would not take kindly to seeing her back so soon. Her behaviour was reckless and provocative, and Brodie knew it as well as Deacon did.
But there was another consideration, and when he gave it some quiet thought Deacon would know as well as Brodie did. As much as he and his officers, she had to be able to move freely in order to do her job. She would never have to face
down riots and petrol-bombs because she could do what Deacon could not: turn tail at the first sign of trouble. But she couldn’t afford to get selective about where she would go on the basis of perceived risk. Once she started asking herself if she was safe going alone into this estate or up that street, or knocking on unfamiliar doors, she might as well put up the shutters at Looking For Something? because she’d be unable to do the work that running a finding agency entailed. It was all about going places other people hadn’t thought to, or hadn’t wanted to.
Going back to Woodgreen might not have been sensible but it had been necessary. She’d been getting back on the horse that threw her. She hadn’t expected it to throw her again, and then to jump up and down on top of her. She said in a low, stubborn voice, “Someone’s having a go at me.”
Deacon frowned. “You think these incidents are connected?” The idea hadn’t occurred to him.
One perfectly shaped eyebrow canted in the familiar, faintly disparaging fashion that reassured him she was essentially unharmed. “Don’t you? I’m not rich or famous - even cranks have better things to do than threaten me. But three times in as many days I’ve been a victim of crime. Twice could be bad luck. After three times it would take real arrogance not to think it’s because somebody hates me.”
Deacon flicked her a little grin. Humour was another good sign. People who are being genuinely ground down don’t see the funny side.
Which didn’t necessarily mean she was right. In his expert opinion they were three quite different types of incident. “All right,” he allowed, “this and what happened on Saturday are linked, at least to this extent – if you hadn’t lost your windscreen on Saturday you wouldn’t have come back here to lose your car today. And OK, that may not be the extent of the connection, but it could be. This isn’t one of the more law-abiding parts of Dimmock. People do throw stones at cars here, and do set them on fire. It might have been the same people, it might not.
“Either way, I don’t think the theft of your handbag is part of it. You were in the middle of town, you were off the street, and if whoever torched your car wandered into The Korner Kaff he’d have stood out a mile even before he tried leaving with a woman’s handbag. It doesn’t add up. This” — he indicated the smoking wreckage behind him – “may be a warning not to start a war over your windscreen. But the bag was just bad luck.”
A certain amount of paranoia is a survival trait. If there’s no one out to get you it’s no handicap, if there is it gives you an edge. Brodie accepted that Deacon, a policeman for quarter of a century, a senior detective for twelve years, probably had some idea what he was talking about. She hoped she was reading too much into this: it wasn’t something she wanted to be right about. If she was wrong, probably her problems were over.
She nodded slowly. “Maybe. Yes, I can see that. So what do we do about the car?”
“We,” he said pointedly, “do nothing. I’ll have someone take you home. Make yourself a cup of tea and then call your insurers. Again. Meanwhile I’ll start asking questions, all the while hoping that no one will give me a name I’ll have to follow up. Because if they do I’ll have to arrest him, and that could be like chucking a hand-grenade into an arsenal.”
“Yes.” Brodie sucked in a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Jack. Coming back wasn’t clever. I may have made a lot of trouble for you. I was angry and worried, and – well, you know what I’m like, I hit back first and size up the other guy afterwards.”
Deacon chuckled. She was not only the best-looking woman he’d been out with, she was also the most surprising. She constantly wrong-footed him. She looked like a geisha, thought like a samurai and talked like a sumo wrestler. Even now she confounded his expectations at every turn, smart and sharp and perceptive, with a sure intuition for how people behaved and a lion-like courage when nothing else would serve. She drove him mad and scared him witless, and he wouldn’t have changed a thing about her.
“No harm done. Except to your car, of course, but that’s what insurance is for. Go home, have a hot bath and get your breath back. It’s no wonder you’re feeling shell-shocked, but it’s over now. Stay away from Woodgreen for a few days while the dust settles. After that, if you need to come back, I don’t suppose anyone’ll remember your face.”
Actually, he thought to himself, that’s probably not true. It wasn’t the sort of face that blended into crowds, that well-meaning eyewitnesses had trouble describing. But he still didn’t buy her conspiracy theory. He thought she’d been unlucky, and was in no more danger than anyone else in Dimmock.
Marta Szarabeijka disagreed. Of course, Marta disagreed with most people — particularly policemen – on principle. She believed in global conspiracies: a trashed car and a stolen handbag presented her with no difficulties. The angular Polish woman lived in the flat above Brodie’s, gave piano and violin lessons, and acted as a kind of surrogate granny to Paddy. The child adored her and had learned from her an extensive repertoire of middle European folk songs and swearwords.
“You got to be careful,” she told Brodie over tea in her flat. Though she’d been in England for thirty years she still pronounced her Ys as Js. “Somebody’s mad at you. Give them time to calm down.”
“Jack thinks it was a coincidence,” said Brodie, keeping her voice low. Paddy was playing in the next room. While Brodie wasn’t keeping the day’s disaster from her – much dimmer five-year-olds than Paddy Farrell would have noticed the sudden disappearance of the family car — she didn’t want the child to think it was anything more than a nuisance. “He reckons the car was a bit of mindless thuggery by local kids while the handbag was the work of a professional thief.”
Marta could invest a simple shrug with a lifetime of scorn. “Jack thinks -! Jack Deacon’s a policeman, what does he know?”
Cheered as always by the older woman’s subversive pessimism, Brodie forbore to answer.
After a moment Marta saw the flaw in her argument. “OK, maybe I rephrase that. What I mean is, this stuff he sees every day. It’s not personal to him. Maybe he’s right. But suppose he’s wrong? I’m telling you, be careful for a while. Don’t take no chances. Stay in town, work in the office.”
“Until I can get myself some new wheels I haven’t much choice.” Brodie nodded. “I know what you mean. It won’t do any harm if it was a fluke, and if it was more than that, well, maybe he’ll settle for scaring me off.”
Marta regarded her frankly across the table. “Are you scared?”
“No!” Then, more honestly, “Well, maybe a bit. Uneasy, anyway. I’ll be glad to get a quiet week behind me.”
“You got any idea who it is?”
Brodie gave a helpless shrug. “No. If it is deliberate someone’s gone to a fair bit of trouble. It’s not like a rude message on the answering machine – he’s been watching me, following me, waiting to catch me off guard. You don’t do that on a whim. I can’t think of anyone I’ve annoyed that much.”
“Ex-lovers? Dissatisfied clients?” It’s hard enough to be accurate when you’re speaking a foreign language, almost impossible to be subtle. At least, that was Marta’s excuse.
Brodie was taken aback, but she gave it some thought before answering. “Ex-lovers, no. You know better than anyone, before Jack I had neither the time nor the inclination. As for dissatisfied clients – sure, there’s always the guy who quibbles about the bill. There’s always the guy who pays me to find something only to see the same thing cheaper the day after he signs the cheque. But it’s a far cry from being miffed to persecution. I don’t recall causing anyone that much grief.” Or rather, she did, but not someone who would react that way. There was a pause while she followed the train of thought. “I wish …”
She didn’t finish the sentence, but then she didn’t have to. “Me too,” said Marta quietly. “He’s still not answering the phone?”
Brodie shook her head. “He isn’t there. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know if he’s all right.”
“His brother sai
d –”
“His brother didn’t know and didn’t care! I told him Daniel was missing – he wasn’t concerned. It was as if the milkman hadn’t turned up: a bit odd but he’ll probably come next week and if he doesn’t someone else will take over the round. They’re family, Marta, and nobody cares what happens to him. And I didn’t even know he had a family.”
Marta said knowingly, “There’s been a falling-out.”
It hardly seemed an adequate reason. “Daniel wouldn’t cut his mother and three brothers out of his life just because they pissed him off!”
“Maybe he didn’t. Maybe they cut him.”
Brodie stared at her in disbelief. “Don’t be absurd! You think in his whole life Daniel’s done anything to make someone disown him?”
Marta couldn’t see it either. But then, they clearly didn’t know everything about Daniel Hood. They’d become important to one another in a short space of time, but the fact remained that twelve months ago they hadn’t known he existed. “He lived with his grandfather, yes?”
“Until he died a couple of years ago. So?”
“So it’s not normal, is it? If he had a mother and three brothers, what for is he living with his grandfather?”
Brodie had no answer. Nothing Daniel had said to her, directly or in an unguarded moment, made sense of it. “Something’s gone wrong, hasn’t it? Someone’s done something someone else couldn’t forgive. But Marta, this is Daniel we’re talking about! There are amoeba that give more offence than Daniel.”
It was true in a way, but it was also an over-simplification and both women knew it. You only had to know Daniel for ten minutes to know he was a kind, gentle, decent man. But when you’d known him a little longer you began to see that he was also a very determined man, as stubborn in his own way as Jack Deacon, as Brodie herself. He believed in right and wrong, and if he thought he was in the right he would stick to his guns even if it meant dying in the last ditch.
Brodie didn’t want – didn’t dare – to think any more about that. She retreated to safer ground. “A dissatisfied client? Someone I’ve let down? Someone who holds me responsible for something – either a financial loss or a personal one. I’ll punch up the records, Marta, see what I can find.”