by Jo Bannister
“I owe you an apology,” he said calmly. “Well, several probably, but one in particular. I obtained your services under false pretences. I did suffer from agoraphobia once, for about three months, but that was years ago. Now I go anywhere I want. But I needed a reason to hire you. I had to make myself part of the furniture of your life. I needed you to think of me as harmless.”
“Until now,” said Brodie tautly.
“Until now,” he agreed. “How’s your head? I’m sorry about that, too. I thought you might get hurt if I had to wrestle you all the way here.”
“My head’s fine,” she growled, though there was still an odd thickness behind her eyes. “Where’s here?”
“A place I know,” he said off-handedly. “Somewhere we won’t be disturbed. It’s not exactly salubrious but you’ll be safe here.”
“Until?”
He didn’t understand. “Until what?”
“Until you knock me out again? With a shovel this time?”
She’d managed to wipe the smile off his face. “I won’t hit you.” He sounded a little offended that she’d wondered.
Her chin came up pugnaciously. “Then this is your idea of a love-nest. I don’t mean to be picky, Geoffrey, but shabby chic is so last year.”
He straightened, taken aback. “Mrs Farrell – I didn’t bring you here to rape you!”
“So what does that leave? Ransom? My friends might pass a hat round, that’s about the best you can hope for.”
“No,” he said slowly, “I think your friends will care more than that. I think Jack Deacon will care far more than that.”
So Deacon had been right: he was the target all along. But why?
Why depended on who: who the man in front of her was. “I keep calling you Geoffrey,” Brodie said roughly, “but I don’t expect it’s your name. Who are you? What’s this all about?”
For a moment he regarded her without reply. He seemed to be weighing his options. Then he said, “My name is Michael French.”
She searched her memory but there was nothing there. “I don’t know you!” she exclaimed petulantly.
“No, you don’t.” His voice had lost the irritating heartiness without resuming the hang-dog tones she associated with Harcourt. The transformation was complete. He was a different man: younger, stronger, more decisive and much more dangerous. “I will explain,” he promised. “But there’s something I have to do first. Otherwise we’re going to be eating our cake waist-high in water.”
When he came back French freed her left hand so Brodie could feed herself. If she’d seen half a chance to break free she’d have kneed him somewhere sensitive and taken it, because even if he caught her she’d never be more at his mercy than she was right now. But he knew better than to give her a chance. There was never a moment when both her hands were free. She might have hurt him but she could not have escaped. She bided her time, hoped an opportunity would come.
“So Geoffrey Harcourt wasn’t real. The man with the model in the Woodgreen estate wasn’t real either, was he? You gave me an address that would take me under that walkway, and I told you when I’d be there. You dropped the brick on me.”
French nodded. “I didn’t mean to hurt you – I was aiming for the back of your car. I was never any good at ball games either – no hand/eye co-ordination.”
“What were you trying to do when you burnt my car?”
“Funnily enough, that wasn’t me. I suppose it really was the local yobbos. You shouldn’t have gone back asking questions. They didn’t know it wasn’t one of their own they were protecting.”
“My handbag?”
French gave a slow smile. “Yes. I followed you into town. I had coffee and croissants at the table behind you and you never even noticed.”
“Why did you want my handbag?”
“I didn’t. I wanted to unsettle you.”
“And it was you at the library. And in my house.”
“Yes,” said French again, “that was me.”
“You put my husband in hospital!”
“Ex-husband.” He said it as if it made a difference.
Brodie was getting angry enough to forget the danger she was in. “Will you tell me what it’s about? Or is keeping me in the dark part of the fun?”
French sliced the cake, keeping his knife out of her reach, and poured the milk into two plastic mugs. He looked up sombrely. “Believe me, Mrs Farrell, none of this is fun. But it is necessary. I owe it to someone.”
“Jack Deacon.”
The man shook his head. “My wife. Millie.”
Brodie sounded surprised. “Millie was real? Among all the lies you told me, Millie was real?”
French nodded.
“And she really is dead? Or was that part of the fiction and actually she ran off with the milkman?”
“She’s dead,” French said in a low voice. He resented Brodie’s bitter levity but not enough to break his word and hit her. After all, she was entitled to be annoyed. “She killed herself. Things happened to her that she couldn’t live with. I promised that some day, somehow, I’d get justice for her.”
“By kidnapping me?” Brodie’s voice soared.
“Yes.”
“Jesus!” she swore, “it’s the Christmas presents all over again. Men have no bloody idea what women want!”
“Well, that may be true,” French acknowledged with a smile. “And no, if we could ask her I doubt if Millie would want this. But I want it for her. I’m sorry to involve you. It would be naive to ask your forgiveness, but I am sorry. I never wanted to hurt you.”
“Hurt me? You damn near killed me, Geoffrey! – Michael, whoever the hell you are. Now you’ve got me tied up in a damp cellar and it’s a toss-up whether pneumonia or Weil’s Disease will get me first. What do you mean, you don’t want to hurt me?”
He accepted her rebuke. “Then let’s say, if I did want to hurt you there’ve been plenty of opportunities. I know this is hard on you, Mrs Farrell, and I know it’s undeserved. Life is unfair sometimes, and right now it’s being unfair on you. Accept the situation. It won’t be for long.”
Her ears sharpened at that. “How long?”
He shrugged. “That rather depends on Mr Deacon. I called on him an hour ago but he was too busy to see me. Admittedly, I didn’t announce the purpose of my visit.”
In Brodie’s eyes his face had acquired a sort of duality, as if split by a prism. She knew it; it was quite familiar to her, she’d paid several visits to Geoffrey Harcourt. She’d liked his kind, sad eyes and self-deprecating sense of humour. She’d thought him a decent, unlucky person and almost a friend.
At the same time, offset from that image by the least amount, a mere line of spectral light, was the face of Michael French who had spent a fortnight reducing her to a nervous wreck and then abducted her. There was nothing kind or sad about his eyes. They were steady and intelligent, and if she could detect no cruelty in them there was a degree of resolve that was almost as worrying.
She didn’t know how much to fear him. Part of her thought hardly at all – that this was another of his faintly absurd pastimes, like collecting models of obsolete machinery. But her brain, now firing on all cylinders, said there was every reason to be afraid. He hadn’t done this on the spur of the moment. He’d mounted a campaign of terror which he was now bringing to some kind of finale. He was untroubled by the fact that she knew who he was. He was even prepared to talk to Deacon about it. He wasn’t expecting to get away scot-free: he wanted to do it anyway. That made him a fanatic, and fanatics are always dangerous.
She kept her voice level. “What is it you want?”
French shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand. There’s too much you don’t know.”
“But you expect Jack to understand.”
He didn’t have to think about it. “Oh yes.”
“He didn’t the last time I talked to him.”
“Well, that’s why I need to see him. If he hasn’t worked it out yet, I’ll hel
p him.”
“And then he’ll arrest you.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you care?”
He pursed his lips. “Mrs Farrell, to all intents and purposes my life ended five years ago. From the day my wife died I’ve been waiting to meet you. You are in no way to blame for what happened, but you are the key to resolving it. All I can do is apologise again for the inconvenience.”
“But it is almost over?” Brodie wanted to be clear on that point.
“Eleven hours,” nodded French. “Try to be patient for another eleven hours. I’ll have to leave you alone for a while, I’m afraid, but you have my word that by three o’clock tomorrow morning it’ll all be over. You’ll have been found and I’ll be behind bars.”
“I’ll freeze to death before then!”
“No, you won’t.” His tone rebuked her for exaggerating.
She sniffed. “What’s so special about three o’clock tomorrow morning?”
“Nothing. If Deacon had seen me earlier it would all be over now.”
Which was reassuring. Though it’s hard to feel much confidence when you’re attached to a wall by something less like a shackle and more like the master lock to the Tower of London.
Brodie gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Eleven hours is a lot of time to fill. Tell me about your wife.”
She’d managed to surprise him. “Millie?”
Brodie nodded. “Tell me about Millie.”
20
Sometimes, when you conduct a search for evidence, you come up against the plain fact that there’s nothing to find. And sometimes there’s so much that the problem is separating the bright specks of investigatory gold-dust from the mountains of silt.
Deacon found himself stymied on both fronts. The house at River Drive was empty. He knew there was nothing to find before he even started – the place was bare walls and floorboards. But he didn’t dare lock up and join the team at the storage depot. There could be something crucial here. The only way to be sure there wasn’t was to act as if there was. He gritted his teeth and got on with it.
Meanwhile, on the ring road, most of his people were unpacking crates and opening drawers, putting aside anything that might conceivably help. They made the goal wide because they didn’t dare make it narrow, so this material soon overflowed the trestle table allocated to it. Deacon had asked them to look for documents and there were documents; and correspondence, old newspapers, photograph albums, old postcards used as bookmarks, two filing cabinets, several box-and concertina-files, some bunches of keys. There was a forgotten wallet with ten pounds and some family snaps in it. There were travel brochures – if French had been to some of these places before he might go back to evade the hunt for him. There were books – stacks of books – and it was impossible to know which if any might cast light on his intentions.
At five o’clock Deacon declared the search at River Drive fruitless and moved everyone to the depot. He began to pick through the eclectic collection on and around the table. He was appalled how much there was, how much time it would take to sort it properly.
At half-past five there was the scrape of someone drawing up a kitchen chair to the other end of the table, and when he looked Charlie Voss was patiently disembowelling a filing cabinet, starting at A. One eye was swollen shut but the other was scrutinising every order, every invoice, every business card ever dropped in there.
Deacon stopped work and regarded him in silence for a moment. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Voss considered carefully. “I think I’m going through these files.”
Deacon shook his head. “No, you’re going home. I’ll get someone to take you.”
“I’m all right, chief.” The way he said it, it could almost have been the truth.
“You look like shit.”
Voss gave a cautious shrug. “Damned motorbikes …”
“You’ve had a busy day, Charlie. Get some rest.”
“I’ll rest tomorrow,” promised Voss. “When Mrs Farrell’s safe.”
Deacon said no more. But his heart was making notes in indelible ink.
“Tell me about your wife,” said Brodie.
French was oddly reluctant, as if the memory was too precious to share. But he knew he owed Brodie something, and an explanation wasn’t a lot to ask.
“She was working as a nursery school assistant when I met her. She was nineteen. I was twenty-seven, and that’s a big age gap when you’re young. Also, we moved in different circles. I had my own business, with eight people on the payroll. I had a flat on the seafront and a BMW, and if you must know I had a pretty high opinion of myself.”
The picture of himself at that age made him smile. Like most young men he’d thought he knew everything. It was curious how, with every passing year, he’d found more to learn. All the certainties that surrounded him then had softened and mutated since, except this. Of what he was doing now he remained unbendingly sure.
“Millie lived with her parents and cycled to work. She wore her hair in a ponytail and only put on a bit of lipstick if she was going out in the evening. She was doing an evening class in home economics and saving for a holiday in France. She hadn’t been abroad before.”
“How did you meet?” asked Brodie.
“At a concert. I’d never been to one before – I was only at this one to please a client whose daughter was in the orchestra. She played the French horn. It could have been a comb and a bit of tissue-paper for all I knew or cared. I was just hoping the second half would be shorter than the first.”
Oblivious of the damp and garbage he sat on the floor beside her, the torch in his lap distorting her view of his face. Brodie concentrated on the tone of his voice. He sounded wistful. He still sounded like a man in love.
“But there was this girl. In fact there were two of them, sitting just in front of me. I noticed them because, while most of the audience were middle-aged and blase, these girls were as excited as if the first violin had been a pop star. I found myself eavesdropping during the interval. They’d saved for the tickets for months.
“When we were leaving I saw them again, in the foyer. There were CDs for sale and Millie wanted one but she hadn’t got enough money. She had her friend turn out her pockets to try to make up the difference. A goddamned CD, and between the pair of them they couldn’t afford it.”
French’s smile was audible in his voice. “I don’t know what came over me. You couldn’t have given me a CD of the damned concert, the only souvenir I wanted was the horn player’s dad’s signature on a contract. But there was something about these girls and their sheer enthusiasm; and then, maybe I was still trying to impress my client. I sauntered up to the till and slapped down a twenty-pound note and told them to enjoy the thing. They were too startled to argue.
“But outside Millie caught up with me. She wanted my name and address so she could reimburse me out of her next pay-cheque. That was the word she used – reimburse. What kind of a nineteen-year-old says reimburse?”
“The smart kind?” Brodie suggested. Listening to him was like being with Geoffrey Harcourt again. She had to keep reminding herself that he wasn’t a nice, odd, sad man who was pathetically grateful for the scraps of friendship she threw him, and that the feelings of affectionate tolerance she still harboured for him were no longer appropriate. That she was his prisoner.
“She was smart,” French agreed, “in a head-girl sort of way She wasn’t sophisticated. All sorts of things took her by surprise. Wine-waiters. The smell of leather in a car. The fact that, if you have money, people want to give you things for free. She disapproved of that, believed in paying her way. If I took her somewhere nice on a date, the next time she’d bring a picnic and feed me. It was … charming. I couldn’t decide if she was old-fashioned or very modern, and anyway it didn’t matter. By then I was in love.”
“Yes, you were, weren’t you?” There was a note of envy in her voice that startled Brodie. She’d been in love too – she married for love.
But it wasn’t like that. She loved John Farrell for being dependable and safe, for the home he could give her and the father he would be to her children. In the event, of course, the safe pair of hands dropped the ball. But even before that she didn’t remember feeling about her husband the way French obviously felt about his wife. Perhaps she’d forgotten. Or perhaps the Farrells just weren’t as good at love as the Frenches had been.
Perhaps the Frenches had been too good. “What happened to her?”
He still didn’t turn the torch her way. Perhaps because if he could see her properly it would be impossible to ignore the fact that he was talking to a woman whose right wrist he’d shackled to the wall. He’d spent days designing and fashioning those shackles. He’d been pleased with the result – she wouldn’t break out of them however long he left her alone, it would take cutting equipment. But the intellectual exercise was one thing: using them to imprison someone, someone he knew and liked, was another.
Finally he said, “That depends on who you ask. According to the coroner she committed suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed.”
“And if I asked you?”
“I call it murder,” he said bitterly. “She’d be alive today but for the actions of two men she had no reason to fear. And what William Saville did to her was over in minutes and didn’t even leave bruises. But what Detective Inspector Deacon did – I’m sorry, it’s Detective Superintendent Deacon now, isn’t it? – went on for weeks, and stripped her naked again and again, and left her bloody and humiliated. He was supposed to protect her. He’s a policeman, for God’s sake, and she was the victim of a crime. And he brutalised her.”
His breath was coming fast and ragged. The sheer impotent rage had in no way diminished with time. Perhaps time had fed it. The rage had filled the gap left by the loss of his wife and he no longer had any reason to fight it. If it faded it would leave him empty.