by Jo Bannister
The look he gave Brodie carried a new respect. “How did you know someone did this?”
“You knew,” she pointed out. “You said, lifts don’t behave like that.”
“But they don’t behave like that if you try really hard to make them, either.”
Deacon hurried across the vestibule and hunched down in front of her, peering into Brodie’s face. She was pale, a little dusty from the floor, and tomorrow there would be bruises on her knees, but she’d escaped essentially unscathed. Perhaps she had been meant to. Or perhaps she’d been lucky.
“This is getting out of hand,” gritted Deacon. “It has to stop before you get seriously hurt. Have you thought any more about that list of suspects?”
“I don’t have to,” she said in a small, tight voice. “I know who did this.”
He stared at her incredulously. Then, as the name passed from her brain to his by a process akin to osmosis, he shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”
Brodie didn’t want to either. She saw no alternative. “You told me to add his name to the list.”
“I was winding you up,” said Deacon dismissively.
“Maybe, but you were right. Jack, he phoned me. He asked me to meet him here. There was an out-of-order sign on the other lift” — she looked across the vestibule but the sign was now gone – “so I took this one. No one else knew I’d be here this morning. I didn’t know myself an hour ago.”
Still Deacon was unconvinced. “You talked to Daniel?”
“No, he left a message on the machine at work.”
“What did he say?”
She remembered word for word, inflection for inflection.
Deacon nodded slowly. He straightened and walked into the lift and looked around. He came back. “Why did you think it was Daniel?”
Until then she hadn’t even asked herself. She started to say “He said so” – but actually he hadn’t. She started to say “I recognised his voice” – but now she thought about it she wasn’t sure of that either. She’d been aching to hear from him, wanted to believe he’d called. She had noticed that he was ill at-ease and mumbling, and rationalised it. In fact, as she now recognised, it could have been anyone.
“This is pretty technical stuff. He’s tapped into the electronics and effectively operated the lift on remote control. I couldn’t do that.” Deacon turned to the caretaker. “Could you?”
The man shook his head. “I can change a fuse, I can grease a bearing, I can switch it on and off. Anything more complicated than that, I phone the service engineer.”
“All right,” said Deacon. He was looking at Brodie again. “You know him better than I do. Is Daniel the sort of kid who played with Meccano? Who built robots and crystal radio sets? Could he tap into an electronic circuit and make it do something it wasn’t programmed to?”
Brodie said weakly, “He’s a mathematician …”
“Yes. A theorist. What’s he like with electrical equipment?”
Brodie bit her lip. “He keeps thinking his video’s broken when he’s activated the child lock.”
Deacon rolled his eyes. “Why am I not surprised? So he knows what’s going on in the hearts of stars on the far side of the galaxy but the video remote remains uncharted territory. This wasn’t him, Brodie. It was a mechanic, an electrician, maybe a model plane enthusiast, but not Daniel.”
A flush was creeping up Brodie’s cheeks, and some of it was embarrassment but a lot of it was relief. “I’m the answer to a stalker’s prayer, aren’t I? He doesn’t even need to follow me, he just tells me where to go.”
Deacon chuckled, proud of her resilience. “If it wasn’t Daniel on the answering machine, was it someone else you know?”
She tried out different voices in her mind. She tried Trevor Parker’s. But all she could hear was Daniel’s. “I don’t know.”
The policeman knew the answer before he asked the question. “And the recording …?”
“Yes,” nodded Brodie ruefully, “I wiped it.”
“Come on, let’s get you home. Not yours,” Deacon added as he helped her, still wobbly, into his car, “mine. I don’t want you on your own till we’ve sorted this out.”
It was a kind offer but it wasn’t practical. “What about Paddy?”
“Paddy’s five years old,” he said with heavy patience, “she can’t be expected to act as your bodyguard.”
Brodie gave a shaky laugh. “I mean, where are we all going to sleep? I like your house, Jack, but it’s not very big.”
He didn’t understand the problem. “She can have the spare room.”
Brodie pursed her lips. “Jack – I’m not sharing your bed with Paddy in the next room.”
“Oh.” He didn’t know whether he should be offended or not. “Er –”
“I’ll call John, ask him to have her for a few days. He’ll jump at the chance.”
Deacon finally decided he was rather offended. “And while she’s there, I suppose John’ll banish Julia to the living-room sofa.”
“Of course he won’t,” said Brodie. “It’s different. They’re married.”
“When did you get to be so old-fashioned?”
She shook her head. “There are some things you don’t need to explain to a little girl. Not when you know that, every Monday, she gives the class a brief discourse on interesting things that happened over the weekend.”
Deacon considered. “Call John,” he said, “by all means.”
10
No sooner had Brodie made arrangements for Paddy than she started worrying about Marta. If the house in Chiffney Road was unsafe for her and her daughter, how could she leave her friend there alone?
Deacon was about to insist that if they couldn’t share a bed with Paddy in the next room they certainly couldn’t with Marta there when the Polish woman resolved the dilemma herself. “I got a Standing Invitation,” she announced with a lewd wink. “I’ll have me a dirty weekend in Littlehampton.”
All right, it was only Thursday; and Littlehampton didn’t have the same cachet in the dirty weekend stakes as Brighton or even Bognor Regis; but if it meant Marta wouldn’t be alone in a house where someone might go with malicious intent, Brodie was prepared not to enquire too deeply. Certainly Marta seemed to think that having a Standing Invitation to Littlehampton put her right up there in the front rank of fifty-five-year-old swingers.
Julia offered to collect Paddy’s bag when she picked her up from school. But Deacon said he’d be passing and would deliver both the child and a week’s clothing packed into a tiny pink suitcase. It didn’t occur to Brodie until later that it was impossible to pass both Paddy’s school and John’s house on the way from anywhere to anywhere else.
So he wanted a word with John. Lunchtime was a good chance to find him at home, even on court days. Magistrates like their meat-and-two-veg as much as anyone, which means that solicitors are mostly free between one and two-fifteen.
When Paddy bounced off upstairs with Julia to unpack, Farrell took Deacon into his study. “What’s going on, Jack?”
Deacon told him. There seemed no point not doing, especially when he wanted his help. “Can you think of anything from when Brodie worked for you that might have left someone feeling this bitter towards her?”
If the answer had been yes, Farrell would have had a problem. Solicitors owe their clients a duty of confidentiality more rigorous than any other profession’s. Many of their clients are criminals who wouldn’t dare claim the legal representation they’re entitled to if the police could access what passed between counsel and defendant. Even to protect the mother of his child he would have no right to breach that trust.
In the event, though, Farrell had no difficulty answering. “No. I doubt if there’s anyone who feels that bitter towards me. And if they did, why would they attack my ex-wife when they could as easily attack my present one?”
Deacon hadn’t expected to wrap up his case that simply, it was just a line of inquiry he had to exhaust before looking else
where. “OK.” But he made no move to leave.
“There was something else?”
“Actually, yes.” Deacon pursed his lips thoughtfully, unaware this made him look like a hopeful troll loitering under the mistletoe. “Until we find out what this is about and put a stop to it I don’t want Brodie on her own. Even in public places. I’m going to leave a woodentop” – he meant a Police Constable – “at my house when I’m not there during the day, in case the security measures aren’t enough.” There had always been security measures at Deacon’s house: it was the old Dimmock Jail. “She can work there instead of her office. Evenings, if I have to go out I’ll try to get someone else in. But if I can’t, would you keep her company for a couple of hours?”
John Farrell hadn’t done many things he was ashamed of in his life; which for a solicitor is a major achievement. But he was ashamed of how Brodie had ended up paying for his happiness with Julia. He hadn’t wanted to hurt her, had tried hard not to, but he knew he had. He still felt it a debt against him. He nodded immediately. “Call when you need me.”
Deacon wasn’t surprised at the man’s willingness to co-operate; but then, nothing Farrell did would ever surprise him. John Farrell was the stupidest man he knew. He’d been married to Brodie and fallen for someone else. “If I need you. I’ll wrap this up as quickly as I can. But until then, it would be a weight off my mind even if Brodie thinks I’m fussing.”
Farrell nodded again. He knew the policeman would throw all the resources he could at the mystery. “Have you told Brodie you’ve booked a baby-sitter?”
Deacon cast him a look that, on anyone else, you’d describe as hunted. “I thought I’d phone from the office.”
In fact he was more cowardly than that. He left it to Constable Vickers to explain when he turned up at the house under the Firestone Cliffs half an hour later.
Vickers knew where the Detective Superintendent lived but he’d never been past the front door. He was intrigued, in that faintly prurient way that attends unexpected insights into other people’s lives.
It was, as he discovered when Brodie let him in, almost an exaggeration to call the place a jail. It was a lock-up, consisting of two cells and two rooms where the jailer had lived with his family. Stone-built before 1800, it was also the Georgian town’s pound for stray livestock with a byre at the back. Deacon got the lot for £50,000 four years ago. He’d spent as much again making it habitable. Now it consisted of a large, low-ceilinged living-room, one big bedroom and one small one, a galley kitchen and a bathroom with bars at the small high window, the whole linked by a dark, rough-plastered corridor with unpleasant penal hardware on the wall. This was Deacon’s idea of decor.
When Brodie saw Vickers on the doorstep she guessed why he was here. Irritated, touched and amused in equal measure, she showed him through to the living room and listened politely to what he’d been told to say. Halfway through, a banshee scream sent Vickers leaping from the sofa, but it was only Dempsey marking his disapproval at yet another strange human in his house. Dempsey was Deacon’s idea of a cat.
“You know this isn’t necessary, don’t you?” said Brodie. She and Vickers knew one another well enough not to have to be discreet.
Vickers shrugged. “If it was my girlfriend, I’d want to know she was safe.”
“There’s safe,” said Brodie, “and there’s being under twenty-four hour guard. Well, I can humour him for a day or two, but he needn’t think I’m spending the rest of my life like this. No offence, Reg, but I’m not looking for a Siamese twin.”
“None taken,” said Vickers amiably. “Like you say, a few days may do it. The Super isn’t pulling any punches: the station was humming like there’d been a murder when I left.”
Which might have been a degree of overkill, but Brodie was secretly pleased that the campaign of terror against her – because that’s what it was now, it may have started as mere harassment but now she was afraid – was being given priority. Even if it meant acceding to Deacon’s arrangements for her safety.
But the afternoon hung heavy. With her paperwork up to date, all that was left was the phone. She began calling all the little shops along the coast, which first thing this morning she’d planned to visit. She negotiated a price on an embroidered Victorian nightdress for Mrs Pangbourn - sight unseen, but the shop-keeper did too much business with her to palm her off with rubbish – and persuaded another dealer to put a working model of what he insisted was called a Nodding Donkey under the counter until she could take a picture of it for Geoffrey Harcourt.
Then there was the matter of Miss Minniver’s dog.
For seventeen years the constant companion of this unmarried lady of a certain age was a Jack Russell terrier called Maud. There was an album of photographs of the pair walking in the Lake District or cycling through the Yorkshire Dales, Miss Minniver in the saddle and Maud up front in the wicker basket. As they got older they took less strenuous holidays, painting and playing croquet. Finally there were snaps of them side by side in deck chairs or celebrating one another’s birthdays with a cake.
Thirty-four cakes down the line, which is as much love as most human beings ever know, Maud died. Miss Minniver grieved, but in due course she saw that the greatest compliment she could pay her old friend was to find another dog to love.
This should not have been a difficult task. Miss Minniver could have gone into any rescue centre and changed the world for some unvalued scrap of canine misery. She could have approached a breeder and bought a dog whose pedigree was longer than her own. But Miss Minniver wanted another Maud – another little bitch who looked at you as if she knew what you were thinking, and didn’t entirely approve but was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt because her Christian upbringing taught her that no soul is irredeemable.
Miss Minniver was not the crackpot that many people believed. She wanted help picking her next dog because she knew herself too well. If she started visiting kennels, the first dog that told her a hard-luck story would come home with her, whether it was a good choice or not. In her sixties now, Miss Minniver couldn’t give a young dog the exercise it needed. She would be better with a mature animal that would settle on the sofa and watch TV with her. But she didn’t want to be seduced into taking an old or ailing dog: this was likely to be her last pet, she didn’t want to lose it in the next couple of years and have to tackle the whole business again.
So she’d spent an hour describing her ideal dog to Brodie, then left her to find it. Brodie was confident that when she turned up on the doorstep with a little bitch in her arms Miss Minniver would take it and look after it and love it until one of them died. With the power to make two people (using the term loosely) happy, Brodie took the brief as seriously as any other, even if Deacon thought the old duck was certifiable and Marta reckoned she should have had Maud stuffed.
Brodie liked Miss Minniver. Of course she was eccentric but she was a kind woman, and on the scale of human ambitions a little dog she could love as much as the last was little enough to ask. Brodie was happy to help. She compiled a list of rescue organisations along the south coast and phoned every few days, as she phoned about Mrs Pangbourn’s linens and Mr Harcourt’s models, in case anything suitable had come in.
Today she got lucky. Pet Rescue in Peyton Parvo, a small village nestling in the folds of Chain Down, had been asked to re-home a Jack Russell (probably) bitch whose owner had gone into care. He’d put it off as long as he could for the sake of the dog, but when he fell and broke his wrist his children put their collective foot down. Unfortunately, none of them was able to offer Dorothy a home.
“Dorothy?” echoed Brodie faintly. Dorothy Minniver – it had a certain ring …
“Dorothy,” said the kennel-maid with a note of apology. “Not Dotty or Dolly. He was most insistent.”
“How old is she?”
“Four. We’ve had the vet look at her – he says she’s in lovely order.”
Brodie wondered how to phrase the next questio
n. “Don’t put the phone down, I’m really not a dangerous lunatic, I’m just looking for a dog for someone who had a very special relationship with her last one. So tell me: how does Dorothy look at you?”
The girl at the other end giggled. “As if she’s seen your end-of-term report and it was really rather disappointing.”
“I’m on my way,” said Brodie.
No one had said anything to Constable Vickers about jaunts in the country. He was fairly sure Detective Superintendent Deacon wanted Mrs Farrell to stay indoors. On the other hand, making someone stay indoors when they don’t want to is false imprisonment. Brodie was happy for him to accompany her to Peyton Parvo. He could hold the dog on the way back.
Dorothy was everything Brodie had hoped: a little dog with a sweet but reserved nature and a face to soften hearts much tougher than Miss Minniver’s. She phoned from the refuge to make sure that her client hadn’t changed her mind, then the girl signed Dorothy over.
“We usually do the home inspection first,” she said. “But if you’re sure everything will be all right, we could call in a day or two.”
“If Miss Minniver’s home isn’t good enough for Dorothy,” said Brodie, “I shall move in with her myself.”
The pleasure in Miss Minniver’s face made Brodie forget the trials of the last week. That’s a lucky little dog, she thought. And by God, next time someone makes fun of old ladies and their pets, I’m going to deck him.
It was early evening before they were back in Dimmock. “I’ll drop you at the police station,” Brodie told Vickers. “There’s no point you walking back.”
“Are you sure? I don’t mind.”
Brodie shook her head. “Jack’ll be home when I get in. Listen: thanks. Will I see you tomorrow?”
“Me or someone.”
“Try to make it you. We could go to look at a Nodding Donkey.”