The Depths of Solitude

by Jo Bannister

  Daniel’s face went still. But as she watched Brodie saw the shadows of expressions flitting through his eyes. Finally he said, “I didn’t know you knew about Simon.”

  “I didn’t until I found him. Don’t look so shocked,” she said tartly, “this is what I do for a living.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “You, of course!” she snapped, exasperated. Then, more circumspectly, “You ought to call him. I was worried sick when we spoke, I may have left him with the impression that … well, that you were putting your affairs in order.”

  He just went on looking at her for a minute. Then, without a word, he got up and went looking for the phone.

  “All right,” he said when he came back to the kitchen. “Now you know that the Hood family history is half Greek tragedy, half Whitehall farce. Where does it get you?”

  She sat facing him, the coffee on the table between them. “I didn’t mean to prγ. I was afraid something had happened to you. I kept digging because I couldn’t understand your brother’s attitude.”

  Daniel shrugged tiredly. “You were expecting normal behaviour from a Hood: of course you were disappointed. We’re emotional cripples, the lot of us.”

  But she wouldn’t have that. “Daniel, you’re the kindest man I know. I’m sorry about … about your mother, but somehow all that managed to produce a son most women would kill for. A man with the strength to be gentle and the courage to do what’s right rather than what’s easy. Don’t underestimate yourself, Daniel, you’re a class act. Why do you suppose I was combing the country for you?”

  “And in spite of that,” he said, very softly, “you thought I meant to hurt you.”

  She couldn’t apologise for that, could only try to explain. “I was scared and desperate. I was stupid. Are you going to hold it against me for the rest of my life?”

  The ghost of a smile touched his lips and he shook his head. “We probably have enough obstacles to surmount without piling another one on top.”

  Brodie regarded him levelly through the steam curling from the mugs. “No, we haven’t. Not from where I’m sitting. Daniel, when I thought I wasn’t going to see you again, I couldn’t believe how much I’d lost over how little. I’m sorry I handled that so badly. Dead or alive, the Daws girls weren’t worth sacrificing our friendship over. If that’s what I’ve done, if you can’t forgive me, I won’t try to change your mind” – she flicked him a sad little smile in return — “but I will regret it as long as I live.”

  Daniel didn’t answer at once. Brodie told herself this was a good sign. It was who he was: he thought about everything, tried to get things right. Brodie hurt people she cared about with smart remarks she was clever enough to think of and too stupid to hold back, but Daniel never did. He never said anything he wasn’t prepared to stand over. And when he did take a stand, dynamite wouldn’t shift him. Not in one piece.

  At length he said pensively, “I didn’t tell you about my family not because I’m embarrassed but because it’s complicated, and there seemed no point. You can’t start afresh if you’re going to take your ghosts with you. But we’re all products of our history – who I am was shaped before I was born by who my mother was, what she wanted, and how much. With another family I might have been another man. I might be married now, have children, a steady job. You and I might never have met.”

  He looked at her then, both strong and defenceless in the candour of his gaze. “What I’m trying to say is, I don’t wish I was that other man. There have been things in my life I’d wish undone, but not many. Even …” His eyes flicked down his shirt front where the scars lay pale and shiny beneath. “Of course I wish that hadn’t happened, those were the worst hours of my life. But you can’t take things in isolation, and from that came you. You and Paddy and Marta: people I cared about who cared about me. Maybe it doesn’t sound much, but it made me happy.”

  He swallowed. “And I thought it was over. I thought we’d reached a point where we could only hurt one another the more we tried. I thought it was best to walk away before we ripped each other’s hearts out. I still thought that an hour ago when I went to your house. I wanted to tell you to your face – it seemed the honest way.”

  A tear spilled down Brodie’s cheek and met the long-fingered hand cupped across her mouth. She ignored it. “Is that still what you want?”

  Daniel didn’t answer. “When I went to see Simon I was thinking of going back to Nottingham. I thought I was done here. I thought if I went back, maybe I could pick up the threads where they were still intact. I went to see my old school.”

  She waited, her heart split in two. What she wanted for him and what she wanted for herself. If he could return to a time and place before he was damaged, where the horror that changed him had yet to cast its shadow, she would lose him. She knew she ought to want that. She cared enough about him to hope there was a way back, but the cost to herself would be high. She would pay it to see him whole again; but maybe it wasn’t wicked to hope she wouldn’t have to.

  He saw the dilemma in her eyes, shook his head again. “I only got as far as the gates. I stood there for an hour – I’m sure they took me for a pervert. But I couldn’t go inside. By the time I saw Simon I knew I’d made a mistake. We made small-talk for an hour, he bought me lunch, he took me back to the station.

  “I didn’t have a return ticket. I looked to see where the trains were going. I ended up in Penzance. I had a holiday there once, it seemed easier going somewhere I knew. All I really wanted was somewhere to be quiet and think for a few days. You see, I’d thought I was going back. And now I knew I couldn’t, and I had no idea what to do instead.”

  He sighed. “Maybe you never can go back. Not because the past is different but because you are. Events change you, you no longer fit the slot you left. There was nothing for me in Nottingham. I could no more teach there than here, and my family … well. Let’s say I embarrass them more than they embarrass me. The past is another country. And it’s got my face plastered up at all the airports, and it won’t take me in even as a refugee.” He smiled, piercing her heart.

  “You’re talking as if you don’t belong anywhere,” said Brodie softly. “You do. You belong here, now. You don’t have to go anywhere. Dimmock’s a small town but it’s big enough for two people, even two people who’d rather not meet. If you want me out of your life, I’ll go. But I’d a hundred times rather think you’re knocking around nearby than not know where you are.

  “Don’t do something you’re going to regret. If you still want to leave in a month’s time you can sell the house then, but if you sell now it’ll be too late to change your mind. Keep your options open till you’re sure.”

  Daniel nodded gravely, went on watching her. Brodie couldn’t read what was in his eyes. “You thought I might kill myself?”

  “I …”She shook her head. “Daniel, I didn’t know. It sounded like you were tying up loose ends. I was afraid. You should have called me.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, that was cowardly.” It was as strong a censure as his vocabulary ran to. He thought cowardice was a mortal sin. If she’d considered it calmly she’d have known he’d feel the same way about suicide.

  After a long time in which they just sat in silence, sipping coffee and healing, Brodie said quietly, “I keep wondering how you feel about her.”

  Daniel didn’t understand. “About who?”

  “Your sister. Samantha? Do you feel you had a twin sister? Or does it feel like it was nothing to do with you?”

  It was hard to interpret his gaze. She didn’t think he resented the question. He said, “I don’t think anyone’s asked me that before.”

  Brodie believed him. “Who in your family could risk doing so? They didn’t dare ask the question for fear what the answer would be. Damage limitation must have taken all the energy anyone had to spare.”

  Something in Daniel’s eyes seemed to say that, however imperfectly she understood him, she still did it better than anyone else.
“You mustn’t think I had a miserable childhood. I didn’t. I loved my grandparents, and there was a lot of laughter in our house. I didn’t even realise how weird it all was until I was eight years old. I didn’t know about Samantha until then. I didn’t know she ever existed, let alone that people blamed me for her death.

  “How do I feel about her? Like I’ve lost something and I can’t quite remember what. I feel very slightly incomplete.”

  14

  By the time Deacon located him, John Farrell was sitting on a hospital trolley with a dazed expression and five stitches in his scalp. The x-ray showed no fracture: A&E wanted to keep an eye on him overnight but expected he’d be going home in the morning.

  The man was still too shaken to give a statement. But Deacon wanted the essence of what he knew while the events were fresh and the perpetrator might still be close enough to find. “Tell me what you remember.”

  He’d watched Brodie go up the front steps and seen the lights come on. He’d been about to turn the car when someone tapped on his window.

  “Did you see who?”

  “A man,” said Farrell. “I couldn’t see his face, just the shape of him standing by the car. I thought it was you.”

  “Me?” frowned Deacon.

  “The police. No one else had any reason to be there.”

  “I didn’t leave anyone on watch.” Deacon regretted that now.

  “I realised my mistake,” said Farrell gently, “when I got out to speak to him and he floored me. Jack, is Brodie all right?”

  Deacon nodded. “She’s fine. She’s at your house, with Paddy. Daniel’s there too.”

  “Daniel?” Farrell wasn’t expecting that.

  “He turned up at Brodie’s place while all this was going on. I think that’s what scared the intruder away. He thought, when he’d dealt with you, he’d got Brodie on her own. He couldn’t handle two people at once.”

  Farrell breathed steadily for a moment, absorbing the information. “I’m sorry, Jack. I thought she was safe while I was watching the house.”

  “It’s not your fault,” said Deacon — which was something of a first: he was a great distributor of blame normally. “It’s not your job to protect her, it’s mine. I’m sorry you got hurt.”

  “Are you any the wiser as to who it was?”

  Deacon shook his head. “Unless he introduced himself before hitting you.”

  “‘Fraid not,” said Farrell.

  “You didn’t see his face?”

  “Just stars.”

  Julia elected to stay at the hospital with him. She asked Deacon to put her house at Brodie’s disposal. He found himself warming to the second Mrs Farrell. Until now he hadn’t begun to understood what Farrell saw in her, but now he did. She might wear gathered skirts and the last twin-set in England, but there was a fundamental kindness to her that was rare enough to be noticed. She wasn’t a bit like Brodie. Oddly enough, she did remind him of Daniel.

  First Deacon swung by the house in Chiffney Road. Voss had found nothing alarming. Sergeant Mills was once more dusting for prints in the near certainty that he would find nothing helpful. Which meant doing it the hard way: hunting through the files for someone who might bear Deacon this much enmity and had the nous to do what was done.

  “An electrical engineer,” suggested Voss.

  Deacon’s unlovely face was downright grotesque when screwed in thought. “Not necessarily. There are all sorts of applications for electronics – you don’t have to be a pro to know about printed circuits. People strip systems down and rebuild them for fun. Lego was cutting edge technology when I was a kid: these days ten-year-olds build robots. If you could do that, or wire up a radio-controlled plane, or put a computer together from a box of parts, you could probably hijack a lift.”

  “So it’s a paper-chase after all. Can I help?”

  Deacon squinted along his nose at his sergeant. It was a generous offer – there’s not much pleasure to be had trawling through ten years’ worth of files – that shouldn’t have been taken advantage of. On the other hand, there’s no point being a superintendent if you can’t take advantage of sergeants. “Indeed you can, Charlie Voss. I’ll go so far as to say I couldn’t do it without you.”

  Voss was easy to get on with, easy to like, but he was nobody’s fool. The eyes narrowed either side of his freckled nose. “You’re going to make me do it all, aren’t you?”

  “I am, Charlie,” Deacon nodded, unabashed. “You should always play to a man’s strengths. You are a swot and know how to operate the computer. I, on the other hand, have a natural talent for bullying people.”

  Deacon had gone through a number of sergeants in a short space of time before DS Voss arrived. Although he hadn’t liked any of the earlier ones, his heart sank. Voss was twenty years his junior, which is a big gap between two men working this closely. Deacon took an immediate dislike to his ginger hair, to the fact that he looked smarter in casual clothes than Deacon did in smart ones, and to his open, attentive expression as if he’d have listened to Deacon even if he wasn’t being paid to.

  It was only as time passed that he realised Voss really did want to learn from him. It wasn’t flattery: he’d listen as long as Deacon would talk. With any encouragement he would talk back, and Deacon was disconcerted to find that his thinking was pretty smart too. Deacon started to appreciate his sergeant at the point at which most senior officers would have become suspicious of him.

  Now they enjoyed a relationship that crossed the boundaries of rank without challenging them. Voss knew he could still learn a lot from Deacon; Deacon suspected that he’d learned a certain amount from Voss. He also suspected that Voss knew him better than anyone else, including Brodie. Voss was the only officer in Battle Alley - not excluding Superintendent Fuller – who knew that sometimes Deacon was just being himself, but sometimes he was being a satire on himself. Why this amused him Voss wasn’t sure, but he knew it did.

  Voss lowered a sandy eyebrow and committed an act of unprovoked grammar. “Bullying whom?”

  Deacon smiled nastily. “Oh, I never have much trouble finding someone.”

  This was pure evasion: he knew exactly who he wanted to talk to. He drove up onto the Firestone Cliffs and stopped in front of Terry Walsh’s wrought iron gates.

  They were high and wide, heavily ornamented, but the main thing about them was that they were locked. They weren’t actually there to look expensive: they were there to keep people out. Deacon didn’t believe honest people needed that much security. He thumbed the intercom and, when a woman’s voice asked him to identify himself, just thumbed harder.

  She was a Scot, probably the housekeeper. She said with asperity, “If you keep that up much longer, young man, I’ll call the police.”

  “Good idea,” snarled the visitor. “Ask them to send Detective Superintendent Deacon.”

  There was a chuckle at the other end and a man’s voice cut in. “Is that you, Jack? Come on up. Just give me a minute to put the good spoons away.”

  Terry Walsh wasn’t exactly a skeleton in Deacon’s cupboard. They’d been friends growing up in the East End of London, then they’d gone their separate ways. The next time they met Deacon was a Detective Inspector at Dimmock CID and Walsh was moving into his new cliff top property: seven bedrooms, four reception rooms, three bathrooms, snooker room, jacuzzi, triple garage, hot and cold running housemaids. Deacon knew there was no lawful way he could have made it that big. More than that: he knew there was no lawful way of making it small that would appeal to Walsh. But the man had thus far managed to elude criminal charges. As far as anyone could prove he turned Norwegian trees into paper for a living. Deacon had heard him referred to as the Teflon Cockney. He suspected Walsh coined the nickname himself.

  Walsh took the policeman into the garden room on the south side of the house. In daylight it commanded an extensive view of the Channel; at night the inky blackness was punctuated by the navigation lights of ships. He was proud of his house, got considera
ble pleasure from his ill-gotten gains; got as much pleasure from knowing that Deacon knew they were ill-gotten and couldn’t prove it.

  He pressed a drink into Deacon’s hand. “What can I do for you, Jack?”

  Proof or none, Deacon didn’t make a habit of drinking with criminals. This was an exception. “Somebody’s having a go at me, Terry. It’s personal – he’s hurt my lady. Tonight he was in her house. Someone happened by and scared him off, but he’ll be back. I think he’ll keep coming until either I catch him or he kills her. And I don’t know who he is. Have you heard anything? Anything that would give me an idea where to start looking.”

  It took a lot to startle Terry Walsh but that did it. Deacon wouldn’t have asked him to fill a bucket if he was on fire. But there was a lady involved. Jack Deacon had a lady he cared about enough to abase himself before a man he despised. Deacon. It was like finding Mother Teresa had a toy boy.

  All his instincts were to laugh out loud. Deacon expected him to laugh. He hadn’t come here until he’d run all the likely scenarios through his head and decided he could live with them, and all of them involved being laughed at.

  But actually, Walsh wasn’t amused. He was a family man – Deacon’s predicament ceased to be humorous the moment he put himself in the policeman’s shoes. He’d upset at least as many men as Deacon in the course of his own career, and a lot of them were vicious too. Any of them could have targeted his wife or daughter to pay him back. Despite the security, any of them could have broken into this house and terrorised his womenfolk when he wasn’t here. There was no funny side to it, even if it was Jack Deacon.

  “Is she all right?” he asked.

  Deacon blinked. He’d been ready for jokes – he hadn’t expected honest concern. “A few bumps and bruises, and she’s scared, but so far she’s been lucky. But I don’t know how long I can keep her safe. I need to find him. Find him and stop him.”

  “And you’ve no idea who?”

  “Terry,” sighed Deacon, “if I had, do you really think I’d have come cap in hand to you?”