The Depths of Solitude

by Jo Bannister

  6

  As good as her word, Brodie spent Tuesday in her office. First she caught up on her paperwork, sending out invoices and a couple of mildly threatening letters where earlier invoices had been ignored, then she turned the scanning electrons of her mind to a new project. Solicitors say that the man who represents himself has a fool for a client and a rogue for a lawyer but Brodie didn’t see it that way. She thought that a professional finder who couldn’t discover who was terrorising her should find another job.

  At six o’clock she shut the door but kept working. She had reviewed every file she’d opened since starting Looking For Something? and copied the name of anyone who might have been left with a grudge to a spread-sheet. Now she was arranging them in order of probability. At the bottom of the list were those who were least likely to be behind her recent difficulties, at the top a handful who were credible suspects, if only just.

  A little after seven the doorbell rang. Knowing the sound of Deacon’s thumb the way morse operators once knew one another’s fists, she got up and opened the door.

  By way of greeting he said shortly, “You weren’t at home. I was worried.”

  “I got involved in something. Marta has Paddy, I thought I’d finish while I had some peace and quiet.”

  “A job?”

  “In a way. I’m trying to figure out who’s yanking my chain. Dissatisfied customers. People I’ve crossed in the process of satisfying my customers.”

  He leaned over her shoulder, peering at the screen. Brodie knew he had a pair of reading glasses: sheer vanity prevented him from using them. “Who are they? What happened?”

  Brodie realised she was about to incur his wrath. “Jack, I can’t tell you anything except that I doubt if any of them are involved. Yes, there were harsh words. But none of them threatened me, and none of them made me feel threatened without actually saying the words.”

  Deacon nodded. “Do me a print-out, I’ll see if we’ve got anything on them.”

  Brodie reached for the keyboard and the screen went blank. “I can’t. Whatever the circumstances, I can’t open my files to the police. Not without consulting the clients first – which would rather defeat the object, wouldn’t it? You know as well as I do that some of them come to me because it would be difficult to go to you. They pay me rather than take your help for free because I promise confidentiality. I’m not going to break that promise.”

  Deacon couldn’t have looked more surprised if she’d slapped him in the face with a kipper. “Brodie, this isn’t a game! You’ve had property damaged and stolen, and you could have been seriously hurt. Last time we talked you thought someone was stalking you. That’s a serious crime, and if I didn’t know you from Eve I’d still expect you to co-operate in finding the criminal.”

  “Well, no,” she corrected him mildly, “that’s what you’d want but not necessarily what you’d expect. You’d expect that a professional with a duty of confidentiality towards her clients would require you to produce a search warrant before she’d surrender her files. I can’t put my own interests ahead of the paying customers’ without one.”

  Airships could have hangared in his mouth. His eyes were incredulous. “Someone is terrorising you,” he said, very distinctly. “He knows where you live, where you work, what kind of a car you drive – drove – and when you stop for coffee. Since he started by dropping a brick on you from an overpass it’s safe to assume he’s prepared to inflict serious injury. So you’ve gone through your records and put together a shortlist of people who could be doing this – but you won’t show it to me unless I get a search warrant?”

  “No, I won’t.” The ethics of the situation seemed clear enough to Brodie. So did the financial implications. “If I did I’d be doing his job for him. If he’s trying to put me out of business, making me turn my files over to the police would do it. Try to understand, Jack. My clients are mostly decent people because I try not to work for those who aren’t. But some are people who need an alternative to the police, not because they’re involved in something illegal but because their situation is sensitive. I can’t put their private business into the public domain simply because someone’s leaning on me. I owe them better.”

  “One of them torched your car!”

  “I’m not convinced. In all my files I’ve found about a handful of cases that could have left someone nursing a grudge against me. But not on this scale! If someone had painted rude words on my window, maybe. But attempted murder? Honestly, Jack, I can’t see it.”

  “So give me the names and let me see what I’ve got on them. People who behave like this don’t do it just once. If one of them’s done something like it before, I bet you’d find that pretty convincing. Those who check out need never know.”

  Brodie breathed heavily. These days – unmarried, self-employed, head of her household with her only child just five – she didn’t often have to justify her decisions. “Jack, I know you mean well. I know you’re looking out for me. I’d do as you ask if I could. Maybe no harm would come of it. Maybe one of these names would ring a bell with you, and you’d pull him off the street before he was able to do any more harm, and I’d be eternally grateful and no one else would know.

  “But you might not be able to keep it secret. If you couldn’t find a prime suspect you’d want to interview them all, and you’d have to tell them why. The innocent ones might think I was justified in talking to the police about their private business, but I wouldn’t count on it. If they disliked me to start with, can you imagine how they’d feel then? They could make a lot of trouble for me.”

  “Trouble?” echoed Deacon. “More trouble than firebombing your car, you mean?”

  “Oh yes,” said Brodie with conviction.

  The policeman had had to make victims accept his help before now but he hadn’t anticipated having a problem with Brodie. He regarded her in disbelief. “So you’re going to sit on a list of suspects until one of them burns your house down?”

  “No,” she said evenly. “I’m going to speak to them myself. If one of them’s involved, I’ll tell you.”

  “If he lets you!” shouted Deacon.

  Brodie squinted along her nose at him. “Don’t take me for a fool, Jack. I won’t meet them on the beach at midnight. I’ll see them in public places with people all around, and I’ll be perfectly safe with most of them because they never meant me any harm, and with the guilty party – if there is a guilty party – because this time I’ll be expecting him and he won’t be expecting me. He’ll be flustered and angry, and I’ll know. And you’ll know soon afterwards.”

  Deacon still thought she was risking her safety for a quixotic principle. A man with powerful principles of his own, he was never able to see why other people felt as strongly about theirs. He was like a zealot who thought his beliefs were religion and all others superstition. But he was marginally reassured that she wasn’t going to put her head on the block in order to satisfy her curiosity as to who was swinging the axe.

  Still, he couldn’t resist one more try. “You need someone to watch your back. I’ll come with you. I’ll stay in the background – unless you need help no one will know I’m there.”

  Brodie laughed out loud. “Jack, the background hasn’t been invented against which you’d disappear! You go into a room, you fill it; you go into a city and the seams start creaking. You were cut out for undercover work the way octopuses were made to roller-skate!”

  She had a point. “How about Charlie Voss? He wouldn’t look like a policeman if you put him back in uniform and made him direct the traffic. Take him with you. For my peace of mind?”

  It wouldn’t have been a huge concession. Voss was good at blending. He could sit in the corner of a bar and the barmaid would take him for a regular; he could sit on a park bench and only the pigeons would notice. If she asked him to stay out of sight, none of those she met would see him.

  But she’d still be breaking a confidence, and Brodie would know if no one else did. It felt wrong.
She didn’t think that being scared was a good enough reason to default on the contract she had with all her clients, past and present.

  She shook her head. “I don’t want anyone there. I don’t need anyone there. I’m going to cause enough offence as it is, approaching five men who hoped they’d seen the back of me. I’m not going to risk them spotting Charlie, or you, or anyone else. I’m not going to get hurt, Jack, I’m not going to give them the chance. But I’m not going in mob-handed either. I can do my job without police protection.”

  Deacon knew he wasn’t going to persuade her. But it was hard for him to watch her make a bad decision. He headed for the door, his boots all outraged dignity.

  Brodie let him go. In this mood he couldn’t be talked to: when he calmed down he’d come back.

  With his hand on the door ready to slam it he delivered his parting shot. “I know one thing about your precious list. There should be six names on it.”

  Brodie was confused. “You don’t know who’s on it.”

  “No. But I know who isn’t.”

  Six names. It was so absurd she wasn’t going to dignify it with consideration. The five she’d listed were improbable enough: the sixth was downright ludicrous. She’d have dismissed the whole idea, only Deacon’s reaction made it impossible. Now she had to open the clattery cupboard and let the skeletons out because the alternative was to have him shoulder the door in.

  This list was a record of the things that had gone awry since Looking For Something? opened for business. The jobs she’d got wrong, or taken when she shouldn’t have done, or gone on with after she should have stopped. The ones where people got hurt.

  She looked at the first name on it: Trevor Parker, who lost a good job because of information Brodie provided to his employers. The information was correct: Parker was diverting company funds into another firm’s account. But after he was sacked it emerged the beneficiary was a key supplier: when it folded due to cash-flow problems, Parker’s successor had to spend even more money finding a new source of parts. The arrangement was unauthorised and improper, but Parker had been acting in the best interests of his company. It was a gamble, and he should have come clean instead of trying to lie his way out of trouble, but perhaps he had a right to feel aggrieved that it had cost him his job.

  Was that reason enough to want to hurt her? To destroy her property, endanger her life? For some people – for some people Brodie had known – perhaps it was. If Trevor Parker had been the man she initially believed, it might have been enough for him. But he wasn’t that man. He was a tolerably respectable businessman, and if he sailed close to the ethical wind at times, and took risks at times, and sometimes took short-cuts, he knew and ultimately respected the boundaries of legality. If he’d had a case he might have dropped his lawyers on her from a great height, but not half a brick.

  Then what about the second name? David Ibbotsen. Ah, yes. Ibbotsen just might have resorted to physical attacks on her. His grudge was personal, and if he decided to repay it a brick off a bridge was just the sort of way he’d choose. But that was the problem with Ibbotsen as a suspect: he was too much of a coward to risk being caught and punished. Cowardice had got him into the difficulties Brodie had caught him cheating his way out of. On Saturday nights in a Rio bar he might dream – he might even talk – of killing her for wrecking his plans. But the lead would go out of his pencil long before he caught a plane home. Not so much from fear of her, or even Deacon, but because Dimmock was where his father lived, and what scared David Ibbotsen more than anything else was the old pirate who fathered him.

  And third on the list was … actually, even less credible. This was getting her nowhere. She wasn’t going to confront any of these men. The ones who had cause to resent her were too decent to drop bricks on her, the ones who’d like to were too scared. She’d annoyed a lot of people in her time, but this was too much: a malice born of fury and frustration. Whoever was doing it couldn’t find any other way to relieve his feelings, and she hadn’t caused that kind of hurt, either deliberately or unintentionally, to any of the men on her list.

  Except that Deacon was saying the list wasn’t long enough. And while it might be ridiculous, she knew what he meant. It wasn’t the first time he’d said it. She knew he was a man who bore grudges himself. He was full of flaws, she just liked him anyway. It had seemed in recent months that the enmity the detective bore the other man she cared for had begun to fade. But no; it was still there to be resurrected when he had a use for it. It wasn’t even Daniel he was angry with this time, it was her. Because when he’d said Jump she hadn’t asked, How high?

  It was too laughable to be offensive. Daniel didn’t hurt people. Not her, not anyone; not ever. Daniel took punishment himself rather than see other people hurt. With Gandhi dead, no one on the planet made a less credible thug.

  Which was perhaps as well, thought Brodie slowly, because she’d never given anyone as much reason to hate her as she’d given Daniel Hood.

  She shook her head to dislodge the memory of the first time she saw him, his abused body clinging to life in ICU at Dimmock General. But it kept coming back, along with the knowledge that she had put him there. Not deliberately or maliciously, but carelessly and for money. She’d believed a woman who professed a good reason to want him found. But she was lying, and Brodie’s success almost cost Daniel his life.

  Which was an abiding grief to her, but didn’t alter the fact that he’d suffer torture again before he’d hurt her.

  Something dripped onto the desk causing a perfectly round translucent spot. After a moment another joined it. Brodie drew a ragged breath and pressed a tissue to her eyes as if staunching blood.

  She didn’t believe for a moment that Deacon suspected Daniel. She’d annoyed him and this was what he’d hit back with. And Brodie would accuse every man on her list, jointly and severally, in public and on their own doorsteps, before she’d give it serious consideration. It was hard to say exactly what the relationship between them was – or had been, until it foundered – but she knew Daniel too well to think he’d ever want to frighten her. He was a gentle, peaceable man, a kind man; a maths teacher and amateur astronomer; unremarkable by every standard.

  Until she sold him to his enemies. In a very real sense his life had ended there, before Brodie even met him. What survived was changed in every way. Things that had mattered to him, that he’d been good at, were now impossible. He was a man with no future, not much of a present, and a past he didn’t dare look back on.

  Oh yes. She’d given him reason enough to hate her.

  But hatred was alien to Daniel. He hadn’t managed it when they met in the hospital and she confessed her role in his nightmare. He forgave her long before she forgave herself.

  But forgiving was one thing, forgetting another. He’d never forget – how could he? – one moment of what was done to him. It was there in his head, inescapable. He kept it confined, harming no one but himself, mainly for her sake. Now the relationship between them had changed, might that alter how he felt about what she’d done?

  But if he wanted to cause her pain he must know that all he had to do was go out of her life and never tell her where. He didn’t have to risk the wrath of the law, not to mention the fury of Jack Deacon. He just had to vanish.

  His house was for sale. He’d visited his brother, then disappeared. Brodie’s messages went unanswered. If he wasn’t trying to hurt her, it felt as if he was.

  But Daniel in his right mind would never –

  And that went to the heart of it. In his right mind Daniel would rather die than hurt her. But he’d been through so much, and when he needed her most she wasn’t there for him. Had her delicate conscience proved the wheel that broke him? Was Deacon right, and in the end the pain had proved too much and Daniel had to start giving some of it back?

  All her senses argued with it. That wasn’t the man she knew. But a weasel voice inside her said that that was the point – that Daniel had held himself together so long
thanks to Brodie’s support. Without it he’d torn himself apart like one of Geoffrey Harcourt’s models with a head of steam and the brake off. If her friend survived at all he was locked deep in a prison of pain and rage and inexpressible grief, screaming himself hoarse where no one could hear.

  Brodie straightened herself, squaring her shoulders, dropping the damp tissue contemptuously in the bin. Deacon was right about one thing: Daniel should be on her list. He should be top of her list. Until she’d found him, until she’d tried to make things right between them, and found someone to help him if it was too late for her to, she had no business even wondering about these other men.

  But if one of them was her stalker, she’d make him work for his fun. Tomorrow he was taking an away day to Nottingham.

  7

  She took the train. There were a lot of faces she recognised on Dimmock station, and several she could put names to, but nobody seemed to be taking an abnormal interest in her and by degrees her level of alertness fell. She looked again as they boarded the train to see if anyone followed her, but there was no unseemly shuffling in her wake. Brodie found a seat facing back down the carriage where she could expect to see any unusual activity after the train moved off, and there was none.

  Until, two stations up the line, Trevor Parker got on the train, cast around for an empty seat and picked one across the aisle and two rows down from her.

  Brodie had the bizarre sensation that, even though the train was picking up speed, time inside the carriage was standing still. Her insides clenched with something that wasn’t exactly fear but wasn’t exactly not. Until last night, combing the old files for someone who might want to hurt her, she hadn’t given this man a moment’s thought since she reported his creative accounting to his employers. And this morning he was on her train. She stared at him, daring him to look up, and at length he did.