The Depths of Solitude

by Jo Bannister

  Not until Julia Farrell phoned had Daniel made the transition from mild unease to real anxiety.

  She was a polite woman and it was a polite call but clearly she was annoyed. She asked for Brodie: when Daniel said he was expecting her back Julia asked him to convey a message.

  “I know things are difficult at the moment and she’s having to prioritise, but some things you have to take care of regardless. It’s not as if I’ve nothing else to do. I have my husband in bed with concussion thanks to –” An eminently reasonable woman, she fielded the thought in midair. “No, that’s not fair: what happened to John isn’t Brodie’s fault. But saying she’d collect Paddy and then not doing is. Suppose I hadn’t been here when the school called? Who’d have collected her then?”

  Chills were racing up Daniel’s body from below his ribs to the base of his throat. “Is Paddy with you now?”

  “Yes, she is. But –”

  “Can you keep her?”

  “Yes. But Daniel, that isn’t …” Her voice petered out mid-plaint. She whispered, “Oh Daniel – you don’t think something’s happened to her?”

  “To leave Paddy alone in the playground long enough for the school to try to contact her, fail, and then phone you? Yes, I think it may have done.”

  He knew the seriousness of the situation, really didn’t need Deacon shouting at him to underline it.

  “You said you’d stay with her! You said she’d be safe with you!”

  “I thought she was safe. I left her at my house, there was no reason for anyone to look for her there. I was only gone forty minutes. But she went out.”

  “Went? Or was taken?”

  “Went, I think. The note she left seemed normal enough. I was expecting her back about twenty-past two. At half-past Julia called.”

  “Try your phone,” said Deacon, “see if anyone called while you were out. Call me right back.”

  Daniel did as he was told. “No one.”

  “All right.” He held the phone away from his ear for a moment, shouted for Voss, remembered, shouted for Winston, told him what to do. He told Daniel, “We’ll get onto the phone company, access her mobile records. If someone’s got at her, that’s probably how – phoned her and lured her out.”

  “If – ?” His voice was faint.

  “Just being tactful, Daniel,” growled Deacon. “Of course someone’s got at her.”

  He got the information he needed but it wasn’t much help. Brodie’s mobile was last called from a public phone on Dimmock railway station at 1.02 pm. The call lasted a minute and a half. She must have left the netting shed just minutes before Daniel got back. That was an hour and a half ago.

  DC Winston had found the file. The accused man was called Saville. Deacon took it without a word of thanks, hunting for the Frenches’ address. River Drive – no. 22. Perhaps French was still there, perhaps he wasn’t. Deacon could make enquiries or he could go round there and pound on the door.

  Jack Deacon always took the pounding option.

  The house in River Drive was empty. It looked to have been empty for some time, for the lawn was overgrown and the furniture gone. But there was no For Sale sign.

  Deacon found a neighbour. “Yes,” said Mrs Haynes, “poor Mr French moved out a couple of months ago.”

  “Poor Mr French?”

  “He was never the same after his wife died,” she confided.

  “Where did he go? Did he leave a forwarding address?”

  Mrs Haynes shook her blue rinse regretfully.

  “Did you see the removal van? Was it a local firm?”

  She brightened. “Yes. What are they called – Watkins? Watsons? Navy blue van with white letters.”

  “Warwicks,” said Deacon, and Mrs Haynes beamed agreement.

  But the trail ended at Edward Warwick & Sons’ depot in the small industrial estate on the eastern fringe of Dimmock. They had no new address for Mr French either. He asked them to clear the house and store his furniture and paid for three months’ storage in advance. There was still a month to run.

  Moments like this Deacon missed Voss. There’s a lot of thinking involved in being a detective, and recently he’d noticed that he did his best thinking aloud. Unless a man wanted to be considered for early retirement this involved having someone to think aloud to, and for some reason Voss seemed good at it. (Any year now Deacon would make the leap of intuition and recognise that this was because Voss didn’t just listen, he contributed – quite substantially, just subtly enough that Deacon hadn’t noticed.) Mulling things over in the privacy of his own head didn’t work as well. But lacking an alternative, he gave it a try.

  Two months ago Michael French put his furniture into storage and left his house. He told no one where he was going, but he thought three months would be enough for what he had in mind. He didn’t put the house on the market because he didn’t want estate agents bothering him, but he didn’t expect to return there or he’d have left his furniture where it was. A nice house at the better end of Dimmock, it could be worth half a million pounds. And he’d turned the key and walked away, and put the furniture into storage to save someone else the trouble. A neat man who tied up loose ends, who didn’t leave others to pack up his life after he’d finished with it.

  A man bent on suicide? Or one with no hope of being able to return home after he’d done what he’d spent the last five years planning?

  Deacon hurried back to Battle Alley. Daniel was waiting. “Any news?”

  “I know who’s behind this.” He summarised what he’d learnt in a few sentences.

  “Michael French has Brodie?”

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “Why?”

  Deacon looked at the younger man. Then he looked away. “I can’t imagine.”

  Daniel’s light brows gathered behind the thick glasses. “There must be a reason. He’s gone to a lot of trouble. He had a photograph of her but he didn’t know who she was, so he went round asking in bars until someone recognised her. Why would he want to hurt a woman he didn’t know?”

  Having Daniel on your case was like being tracked by a spaniel: he never looked like he was going to bite but he never gave up. Deacon knew he might as well come clean. “To get at me,” he gritted.

  Daniel blinked. “All right. Then why does he want to hurt you?”

  “He blames me for what happened to his wife. It wasn’t my fault, but maybe he thinks it was.”

  “What happened to his wife?”

  He drew a long breath. “She killed herself.”

  Daniel’s eyes saucered. “Because of you?”

  Deacon’s lip curled at him. “Of course not. But French may think it was because of decisions I made.”

  “What decision?”

  “Not to take her case to court. She claimed she was raped, I didn’t think there was enough evidence. If Michael French is doing this, that’s why.”

  There was a long pause. Then Daniel said, “Was it a good decision?”

  Deacon looked surprised. “Actually, yes. There was no chance of a conviction. The defending counsel would have torn her to shreds and the jury would have thrown the case out. I don’t know for sure what happened. I do know we couldn’t prove it was rape.”

  Daniel believed him. “So what can I do?”

  “Nothing,” said Deacon. “Really – there’s nothing you can do. Go home. I’ll call you when there’s some news.”

  “How are you going to find her? How are you going to find French?”

  “We’ll find them.” Deacon had no idea how he got that note of confidence into his voice. “I’ll look at his furniture for starters, see what that tells me. If he has another property somewhere, we may find a reference to it.”

  “Another property?” Then Daniel understood. “Somewhere he could be keeping her.”

  “A lock-up, a house, a warehouse. He owned a factory once – I’ll establish whether it’s still in business and where the premises are.”

  “He’ll hardly have tak
en her back to his office!”

  Deacon scowled at him. “In fact, stranger things have happened. But what’s more likely is that there are outbuildings somewhere that he has access to. If I can find his books there may be an entry for rental or something.”

  “That could take hours!”

  Deacon forbore to tell him it would certainly take days, maybe many of them. “It’ll take what it takes. Daniel, you’re not the only one who wants to see Brodie safe. I’m not going to be cooling my heels. I’m not going to be taking tea-breaks. Now do what I say and go home. If I’m talking to you I’m not looking for her.”

  When Daniel had gone Deacon put his head through Superintendent Fuller’s door to bring him up to date. He said he would need a warrant to examine French’s furniture. He told him DS Voss had fallen off a motorcycle and asked for some help.

  “A motorcycle,” echoed Fuller.

  Deacon couldn’t tell if the man knew he was being lied to. “So I understand.”

  “Is he in hospital?”

  “It was a nurse who called me,” Deacon replied, deadpan.

  On the way back to his office Deacon finally remembered someone was waiting for him downstairs. He called the front desk to say he was free for a minute if they could make it quick.

  “He gave up twenty minutes ago,” said Sergeant McKinney. “He said you were obviously busy and he’d catch you another time.”

  Deacon wasn’t sorry. “Did he leave a name?”

  “French,” said the duty sergeant. “Michael French.”

  19

  Where she was it was cold and dark and dank, reeking of time and rot. Her clothes were wet with it, slimy against her skin. Her hair hung in rat-tails around her face and she’d lost her shoes.

  She didn’t know where she was and she wasn’t sure how she’d got here. The last thing she remembered clearly was being in her car with Geoffrey Harcourt. He’d had his bag across his knees and he’d gone to blow his nose. Only something unexpected happened. And now she was cold and leaden-limbed, and her head ached and felt like it didn’t belong to her and wasn’t her size. Which suggested … yes. He hadn’t felt a sneeze coming on. He’d pulled out a handkerchief soaked in chloroform and clamped it to her face, and her first startled gasp had drawn the gas deep into her lungs.

  Sometime after that she was vaguely aware of movement - of being dragged around the way Paddy dragged Howard. She must have been at least half-conscious: enough that he didn’t have to carry her, not enough to have any idea where he’d brought her or how long it had taken or why it was so dark. Only in the last few minutes had her brain-cells started phoning round the neighbours and reached some sort of consensus as to what was going on.

  Harcourt had pushed her across the car-seat and got behind the wheel. After driving for a time he hauled her from the car and steered her, staggering, in here. They walked some distance and it involved steps. Finally he let her slump in this corner. He fastened her wrists behind her and also to the wall, then he left. She had no way of judging how long he’d been gone, couldn’t remember if he’d said he was coming back.

  She tried to work out how long she’d been out of touch. If the darkness meant night it had been hours. But if it had been that long, she should have wandered longer in the twilight zone between sleep and waking. She thought she’d been fully conscious about ten minutes, and was perceptibly clearer now than at first. She didn’t think she’d been AWOL for hours.

  So it wasn’t dark outside, just in here: not enough daylight penetrated to dissipate the cold and the damp. And by God it was cold – even with her coat on she was shivering. She might be underground – a cellar, an air-raid shelter, a sewer even. It smelled bad enough.

  But as she strove to assess her situation calmly she realised that there was a minimal amount of light present: a hint of grey in the blackness that enveloped her, as if a few persistent photons got in here by bouncing around determinedly until they did. Which meant it wasn’t dark outside, and she hadn’t lost hours, and service to her brain had been suspended only temporarily.

  This was good. It didn’t improve her situation but it did make her feel marginally more positive about it. Of course she was afraid: she wasn’t stupid. But with her brain back in business she knew she was capable of things no one ever expected. If she waited, clear-headed and patient, her chance would come and she’d be ready to take it.

  Armed with the search warrant Deacon led his team to Warwick & Sons’ depot to carry out a detailed inspection of everything Michael French had left behind. The accumulated detritus of two people’s lives was packed into crates and piled in a corner module of the storage facility. Spread out it would cover the warehouse floor. Deacon had brought extra people because he knew he hadn’t much time.

  The only absentee, apart from Voss, was Detective Constable Winston who’d gone to the railway station. He phoned as Deacon supervised the unpacking.

  “She was here, all right. About ten past one. She met a man and they went down the steps and got into her car.”

  “Description?” said Deacon.

  “Unremarkable,” said Winston.

  “Slightly fuller description, Constable,” Deacon prompted tersely.

  “Sorry, sir, there isn’t one. A middle-aged man in a tweed jacket. Thickset, thinning on top. Aged anywhere between thirty-five and forty-five. A bit of a stoop. Someone thought he was distressed. Mrs Farrell went into the station, met the man at the phones and they left together.”

  “In what direction?”

  “Into the traffic,” said Winston wryly.

  At least they knew where she’d gone when she left the shore. She’d collected a man from the station and driven him away in her car. It didn’t sound like an abduction.

  So the abduction came later. Because come it had: abduction and wild horses were the only things that would have stopped her being at the school gates when Paddy came out.

  A thickset, balding, stooped middle-aged man in a tweed jacket who seemed distressed. He didn’t sound much like an abductor. He didn’t sound much like Michael French, although Deacon’s recollection of the man remained vague.

  But whether the man on the station was French or an accomplice, Deacon was now convinced that Brodie was in French’s hands. Assuming she was still alive. Strong fingers gripped his heart and kneaded.

  But this wasn’t about Brodie, it was about him. About hurting him – punishing him for Millie’s death. French went to Battle Alley because he wanted to tell Deacon what he’d done and didn’t give a damn what happened after that. But he hadn’t waited. Why not? He was going to prison for most of the rest of his life – could he really begrudge an hour spent in a police station waiting room? No, his presence was required elsewhere. And Deacon didn’t see how that could be if Brodie was already dead.

  He knew he could be kidding himself. He knew you can want something so much that any alternative seems impossible. But he couldn’t make sense of French coming to see him and then leaving because he was busy if he’d already accomplished everything he purposed. Maybe he did mean to kill her, but he hadn’t killed her yet.

  He had to find French. He had to find out where French would go if he couldn’t go home.

  “What exactly are we looking for?” asked PC Huxley. Everyone in the warehouse was thinking it, but Huxley had the immune system of a bull buffalo and never suffered from tact.

  “We’re looking for a missing person,” Deacon told the room at large. “That means a secure place. Keys. Bills or other paperwork referring to premises other than River Drive. Correspondence. And photographs – I still need a good picture of Michael French. Not that picking him up is likely to be a problem,” he added bitterly, “the guy’s tried to turn himself in once already.”

  But not now, he reflected in some confusion. An hour ago was fine, no doubt he’ll be back later, but right now isn’t good for him. Why not? What is it that changes?

  A metallic clang away to her left warned Brodie she was no long
er alone. Then she heard footsteps, and then that rumour of light was eclipsed by a shaft of brilliance that made her flinch. Her belly tightened with fear.

  A voice said cheerily, “I’m back. Listen, I have something to do outside. I won’t be a minute. Then we’ll have some tea. Well – milk and cake, actually, there’s no way to boil a kettle, but I don’t expect you’ll mind. You must be starving.”

  She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing she was afraid. “No,” she said haughtily. As her eyes adjusted to the glare of his torch, for the first time she could see something of her surroundings. It wasn’t a room exactly, more a bay. The floor was covered with years of rubbish, wet-rotten. Behind him, lost in shadows, was a corridor of sorts. The way out.

  “Nonsense,” he said briskly, “you’ve got to keep your strength up. I don’t want anyone thinking I mistreated you.”

  “Whatever would give them that idea?” she snorted. Harcourt chuckled. She’d never heard him chuckle before. He came closer. “It’s a pity about all this. I like you, Mrs Farrell, I wish we could stay friends.”

  “We were never friends, Geoffrey,” she said dismissively. “You were a client. I took your money in payment for my services and never gave you another thought. My friends cost me money on the whole, but they don’t lie to me, they don’t drug me and they don’t tie me up in damp cellars. You want a friend, Geoffrey, buy yourself a dog.”

  Without the sad bear stoop, and now he’d stopped combing his hair to emphasise his bald spot, he looked ten years younger. That wasn’t the only change. “And you’re fairly getting on top of the agoraphobia, aren’t you?” she added sniffily.

  Geoffrey Harcourt smiled – not the wry self-deprecating smile that was his trademark but something altogether more confident. Physically he was as she had always known him. He was wearing the same tweedy brown clothes. But everything else about him – his manner, the way he moved, the way he spoke, the very space he occupied – was so different that if the circumstances had been more ambivalent she might not have recognised him. And the reason for that was, as she now realised, that he’d been playing a part for as long as she’d known him.