by Jo Bannister
“So he came to Dimmock and made a new life for himself as a teacher. Now that’s gone. But there was me. I owed him, and I promised I’d always be there for him. But I let him down. He’s alone again. And I know he has guts to spare, but if he doesn’t want to go on that may be what gets him from making the decision to carrying it out. Suicide takes courage too. Most people who wish they were dead never do anything about it.”
“Daniel Hood is not going to kill himself,” said Marta firmly. “You got my word. If you ever believe anything I say, believe that. So he’s acting crazy – but not that crazy. Maybe he wants a fresh start. There’s not much keeping him in Dimmock now. Maybe he’s thought of something else to do with his life.”
“And he won’t tell me about it? Even though he knows how worried I am?”
Marta gave a bony, expressive shrug. “Brodie – you don’t think, when you called him a murderer, you lost the right to be consulted about his plans?”
Brodie’s cheek flamed as if her friend had slapped it. “I didn’t – !” And she hadn’t, not in so many words. But she as good as did. She’d reached in and ripped the heart out of him. She could have lied. She did it often enough when it hardly mattered, but not to salve the battered soul of a man she cared for. Deacon was right and so was Marta. What Daniel did was justified; what she did was not. She fought back tears.
Marta’s long arm went consolingly about her shoulders. Brodie shook it off more roughly than she meant. “I’m sorry. I know you’re right. About me, anyway – I just hope you’re right about Daniel. But if you are …”
“What?”
Brodie’s long-fingered hands were prayer folded before her mouth as she thought it through. “Tell me I’m stupid. Tell me I’m wrong about this too. That it’s a coincidence, that nobody goes to that much trouble, that there are simpler, quicker and more satisfying ways of hurting someone .”
The older woman frowned and shrugged. “No. Maybe if you said it in Polish, but …”
Brodie knew she wasn’t making much sense. She hoped it was because the whole idea made no sense. But there was some logic to it that she couldn’t quite dismiss. “Suppose you’re right, Marta. If you are, maybe when Daniel left Nottingham he came back here. There was nowhere else for him to go, and no reason. He’d decided to leave Dimmock but not like a thief doing a moonlight flit. He had the estate agents to deal with. Maybe he meant to deal with me too. He came back a week ago. But somebody got to him before he came to us.”
Marta’s forehead was like corrugated paper. “What are you saying, Brodie? That he’s been kidnapped? Again?”
Brodie gave a desperate snort though it was no laughing matter. “It doesn’t seem entirely fair, does it? Lots of people go their whole lives and never get kidnapped once.”
But it wasn’t a joke and Marta knew it. “Spit it out, Brodie. You think someone’s hurt him? Who? Why?”
“The same person who’s doing the rest of it. If someone wants to hurt me, harming my friends would be a good way.”
Now she understood Marta’s thin brows rocketed. “The stalker? You think he’s got at Daniel?”
Brodie felt sick with fear. “It’s a week since anyone saw him. Simon thought he was coming home. Maybe he did, or at least tried to. Maybe he’s lying dead in a ditch somewhere, and not because of anything he’s done but because of something I’ve done. And I don’t even know what!”
For long seconds Marta just breathed in and out through the O of her lips. But behind the stunned mask she was thinking. There had been times in Marta Szarabeijka’s past when her life depended on being able to think fast and get the right answer, and she’d never lost the knack.
“What’s the point?” she asked. “If someone killed Daniel to hurt you, he’d need you to know. To see what he’d done. Why hide the body when he needs you to see it?”
“You think he’s safe?” Brodie’s voice was as small as a child’s begging for comfort. “Really?”
“I got no reason to think he’s not,” said Marta flatly. “I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing, but I think he does. I think it makes sense to him. You just have to wait till he’s ready to talk to you.”
It was the least-worst option, and Brodie wanted to believe it. “Yes. This is his way of punishing me. For what I did and didn’t do. He’s had enough of my moralising. He’s turned his back and walked away, and he doesn’t care that I may never know whether he’s dead or alive.” Brodie looked up, hollow-eyed. “It’s over.”
Since leaving Nottingham she’d weighed every possibility she could think of. She’d thought Daniel might kill himself, and been afraid that someone might kill him. She’d even wondered if her cruelty had driven a damaged, vulnerable young man to strike back at her.
Twenty-four hours ago she wouldn’t have wasted thought on it. But twenty-four hours ago she hadn’t known of his mother’s descent into obsession that had laid the pattern for his life from before it began. Half his genes were hers: if Elaine’s madness was Daniel’s inheritance, the conditions were there for it to prosper. With his world trembling to its foundations he’d found something to cling to only to be rebuffed once again. Had she left him nothing to believe in? Had her pious treachery stripped him back to where he was nothing but his mother’s son, raw and angry, wanting payment for his pain in hers? It was possible.
And the other possibility was that their friendship had simply run its course. Logically, it should never have been. They should have been unable to surmount the circumstances that brought them together. Somehow they’d met one another’s needs for a time; and if occasionally they added to one another’s burdens, still not until now had Brodie thought the friendship could end. They’d had arguments before and mended them; there’d been misunderstandings that they’d resolved. Not this time. This time it was over. She’d hurt him too much and he’d gone.
“I don’t want to lose him,” she whispered brokenly. “Marta, I’d do anything to make him stay.”
Marta tried again with the arm and this time it wasn’t rejected. She stroked the dark curls of Brodie’s bowed head. But she was no good at meaningless platitudes. And sometimes when her emotions were involved her command of the English language was devastatingly accurate.
“Brodie, darling,” she murmured. The G came out as a K. “I think you had the chance, and you blew it.”
9
She got no sleep. She rose at six, quietly to avoid disturbing Paddy, and made coffee and toast, and let them go cold unaddressed. She sat at the kitchen table, turning in her mind the steps she could take to re-establish contact with Daniel. She would not accept that a friendship which had been important to both of them could be ended by a simple disagreement. Of course, she was being disingenuous. What had come between them was too big to ignore, to gloss over or pretend it never happened. Brodie was trying to believe this was possible only because the alternative was unbearable.
By eight she had exhausted all the options. There were no steps she could take. She had found his family, that a week ago she hadn’t known about, and they didn’t know where he was either. He had no job, no car, no mobile phone to leave a trail she could follow. He had, so far as she knew, no friends beside her and Marta – and Deacon, if you wanted to stretch the definition – to whom he might turn in a crisis. He passed through the world alone, leaving no wake and few ripples, and if he’d chosen to move on she might never know to where.
There was nothing she could do. If she heard from him again it would be his decision.
Finally she was able to accept that it was the end of something but not the world. Life would continue, so would the need to make money. Brodie turned her attention to other things that needed finding, that grateful clients would pay her to find.
Clients like Geoffrey Harcourt. She could do a trawl of the south coast curio trade, see if she could spot something to interest him. There was also Mrs Pangbourn’s collection of nineteenth century linens, which would dovetail nicely. The antiques trade,
at least at the lower end, is much more eclectic than people suppose. For every Sheraton sideboard there are a dozen Victorian chamber-pots (one careful owner), tippling sticks (one careful toper), unattractive Staffordshire fairings, late copies of unattractive Staffordshire fairings, sepia prints of The View From Beachy Head, watercolours of sheep in meadows by artists who should never have been allowed to pick up a brush, tin trays advertising Guinness, tinplate automata with the key missing, cut-glass decanters with the stopper missing, collections of Famous Footballer cigarette cards with Stanley Matthews missing, and Whitby jet necklaces that turn out to be Bakelite.
For Brodie, the satisfaction was in sifting the dross to find a small gem. Not a big gem – even junk-shop owners knew too much to display a Fabergé egg with sundry Easter commemoratives or sell off a Modigliani cheap because the artist forgot to paint the eyes. But with her books now full of commissions she didn’t often leave a shop empty-handed and everything she bought paid her a profit.
But first she was going to have to buy a car. A true replacement would have to wait until the insurance came through, but there was enough in the emergencies fund – all right, her building society account – to buy a tolerable second-hand car to keep her mobile in the meantime. After she’d taken Paddy to school she headed for a likely dealer.
All she wanted was something safe and reliable that would run for a few months with no trouble. She settled for a six-year-old hatchback with seventy thousand on the clock and a three-month warranty. The salesman, who thought it was Christmas when a well-dressed woman with no male companion walked into his yard, mopped his brow and settled for clearing fifteen percent on his outlay, which was about half what he’d been hoping for even without the warranty. It would be a while before he saw a good-looking woman in the same light again.
Before she set off for Brighton Brodie called at her office to collect her messages. There was one from Daniel.
It was a long time starting, as if he couldn’t decide whether to speak or not. Finally he stumbled a few words. “It’s … kind of awkward. Can you meet me? We need to talk. The library? I’ll wait for you. Thanks.”
For a couple of minutes, which is a long time when nothing is happening, Brodie just leaned against the office door, staring at the machine. Only when her eyes started to smart did she remember to blink. So he was safe, and back, and he wanted to see her. But not here, nor at her home or his. The library was a neutral venue, and he may have hoped the signs would discourage her from shouting at him. Which suggested he had something to say that she wouldn’t want to hear.
Another time she might have worried about that. After yesterday she was so relieved he was all right she could have burst into tears.
All thoughts of the flea markets dissolved instantly. The message was an hour old: he could have been waiting for her most of that time already. He could have got tired of waiting and left. But he’d said he wouldn’t do that, and his word was good. He’d wait if he had to wait all day.
Brodie wiped the machine, slammed the office door and ran out to her new car.
Dimmock’s public library was on the top floor of a new building overlooking the park. For years there had been arguments over how this desirable site should be used, with competing causes lobbying the council. Finally someone came up with the obvious solution: build it tall enough to meet everyone’s requirements. The social services department had its offices on the first two floors, with the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, Help The Aged and Women’s Aid above. But the library on the fourth floor had the best view: across the park and the lower town to the Channel.
There were flowers in the vestibule and two lifts. One had an Out of Order sign hanging from the button. Brodie thumbed for the other. At ten-fifteen on a Thursday morning she had both vestibule and lift to herself.
The first indication of something amiss was when the lift failed to stop at the fourth floor, the bulb marked Library flashing briefly on and off as the car continued up into the roof-space where it stopped.
The doors remained shut. Brodie blinked at them, perplexed. Of course the attics would be used for something, if only storage, and it would be inconvenient to carry everything up a last flight of steps. And if the lift had a button marked Attics then every sub-teen in Dimmock and quite a few of their grannies would disappear into the roof-space for hours at a time. A staff key would give access to the restricted levels. All that had happened was that the last person to use it had disengaged too quickly. She pressed the Library button again.
The lift whined into action and descended. It did not, however, stop at the floor below but continued down through the building to the basement. Eyeing it severely, Brodie pressed the Library button once more. After this, she thought, I’m getting out and using the stairs.
This time it stopped between floors. She tried the Library button again, then each of the others in turn. Nothing happened. She tried the Open Doors button: still nothing.
Fortunately, Brodie had no particular phobias. She didn’t like spiders, and she’d never learned to swim, but neither bugs nor water caused her unreasonable alarm. Being stuck in a broken lift only worried her because, when she failed to arrive, Daniel might decide she’d declined his invitation and leave.
Of course, if he tried to take the lift he’d find her. Or she could hit the Emergency Assistance button. She hit the Emergency Assistance button.
After that, nothing she did had any effect on the lift. It accelerated up through the building before slamming to a halt moments before (so it felt) it would have shot out through the roof. It descended in a series of spasms, the elevator equivalent of a learner driver. It froze, ignoring all instructions, for up to a minute at a time, then took off like an electric hare with every greyhound in the White City on its tail.
And actually, it wasn’t at all funny. She was locked in a steel box, the thing was clearly out of control, and no one knew she was there. She hammered on the walls though she had no idea if she could be heard. Now the box fell abruptly: when it stopped she lost her footing and sprawled on the floor. The doors opened. She was, thank God, back in the vestibule. She climbed to her feet and headed for safety – but the doors snapped shut like jaws and the lift shot upwards again. Brodie let out a cry of frustration and, now, fear.
Twice more she rode the roller-coaster through the building. The next time she hit the floor she stayed there, limbs splayed, eyes wide as if there was something other than polished steel to see. All she knew about lifts was that they were safe. If they failed, they failed safe. She had no idea how this one had managed to override its programming, or how long it could continue throwing itself around like this before crashing to its destruction. And hers.
Bizarrely enough, she found herself doing sums. Four storeys – six including the attic and basement. Four metres per storey? A free-falling object accelerates at thirty-two feet per second … Daniel would have been proud of her, but actually she was less interested in the math than the bottom line. Could she survive if the lift tore itself free and dropped from the top of the building into its foundations?
She didn’t know. The building was no skyscraper, even by Dimmock standards. But people died falling off chairs. If this thing piled into the ground she doubted she would dust herself down and walk out of the wreckage with just a broken heel to show for it. Legs, hips, pelvis, spine, ribcage – the impact would crush her like a runaway truck. A horror of dying like that, perhaps even more of living like that, ripped from her a wail that joined the scream of machinery gone mad in a manic crescendo.
Between one moment and the next the sound changed. The lift stopped hurling itself around like a toddler in a tantrum, straightened its clothing and went back to doing what it was meant to: travelling at a sensible pace, halting smoothly, opening its doors where it should for its passengers to disembark.
Except that its passenger was still on the floor, her hands pressed flat against the steel walls, her eyes vast with fear. Two men, one in a suit, one in overalls
, hurried to help her up. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
Brodie was shaking too much to stand. She took the proffered hands and let them guide her out. Someone brought a chair and sat her down. The man in the suit brought her a glass of water. “Are you hurt? Should I call an ambulance? Maybe I should anyway …”
Brodie shook her head, spilling water over the lip of her glass. “Not hurt. Just … shaken.”
The man in overalls was bemused. “I have no idea what that was all about,” he said flatly. “It not only isn’t supposed to do that, it isn’t supposed to be able to do that.”
He was the caretaker, responsible for maintaining the building’s services. The man in the suit was the social services manager. When passers-by heard the lift reverberate like a drum they alerted both men. The caretaker accessed the panel on the ground floor to get the thing under control. It didn’t resist. He could see no reason for it to go ape in the first place.
Though Brodie was still trembling in every muscle, at least her mind was clearing. “It didn’t just happen. It was sabotaged. Will someone call Detective Superintendent Deacon?” She gave the manager his mobile number.
For a moment, understandably, the man hesitated. “Will a Detective Superintendent be interested in a rogue lift?”
“Trust me on this,” said Brodie.
Deacon was there in eight minutes, which wasn’t quick enough to stop someone who didn’t want to be seen leaving the building. But while she was still too shocked to stand, Brodie knew what to do. She had the social services manager shut the main doors, making what explanations he could to those inconvenienced within and without, and the caretaker secure all exits at the rear of the building. But though the task was completed before the police arrived, it wasn’t soon enough. When he got there the caretaker found one of the fire-exits swinging open.