The Depths of Solitude

by Jo Bannister

  Brodie pursed her lips, considering her response. The words she chose were important. Nothing stood between her and a man half-mad with grief except her own wits.

  “I understand how you could feel that way,” she said quietly. “You were both upset and needed someone to treat you with sensitivity, kindness. What you got was Jack Deacon. Jack has many good points but sensitivity isn’t one. He thinks crime is about criminals, not victims. He thinks by the time he’s involved it’s too late to do much for the victim – but the next victim might be saved if he’s good enough, and sharp enough, and quick enough. I think maybe you got run over in the rush.”

  She could have agreed with every word he said. With her safety at stake Deacon wouldn’t have wanted her to defend him, and Brodie had no qualms about saying anything that would get her out of here. But she didn’t think validating French’s bitterness would achieve that. The more he hated Deacon, the easier it would be to hurt her. She thought her best hope was an appeal to reason. If Michael French was obsessed, he was not in any clinical sense insane. She could get through to him. She just needed to find the argument to which he was open.

  “You suffered a terrible, life-altering experience. If Millie had survived you’d have helped one another through it, pooled your strengths, supported each other when the going got tough. But you were left to deal with the anger and the pain alone. Finding someone to blame is a coping strategy.

  “And let’s face it, Jack Deacon’s easy to dislike. He’s curt, bad-mannered, short-tempered, and he thinks the term for someone who disagrees with him is Stupid Bastard. It’s easy to take him for a thug. A lot of people much less vulnerable than you and Millie have gone away with that impression.”

  She drew a steadying breath. “But if it’s justice you want, you need to recognise the truth. Jack Deacon isn’t a thug. He isn’t much of a people person, but he’s a good man and a good policeman. He tries to stop dangerous people and protect innocent ones, and he’ll put himself on the line in the process. I’m sure whatever distress he caused you and your wife was inadvertent.”

  “Really?” snapped French. “So telling her friends and family that Millie was a liar and a whore was just his little way, was it? My wife was raped twice, Mrs Farrell. Once by a man I was stupid enough to introduce her to, and then again by Detective Inspector Deacon.”

  Apart from the house at River Drive, French no longer owned any property. For eighteen months after his wife’s death his business, neglected and rudderless, had lost direction, lost profitability, and finally lost the will to live. On the verge of bankruptcy he sold up to a competitor and since then had been living on the proceeds. But Deacon could find no evidence that he intended them to last beyond this week.

  Even though they had belonged to someone else for three years he wanted to search French’s business premises. He had no time to apply for another warrant but the new owner could have no objection to admitting him. Leaving Voss at the warehouse he packed his car with bodies and drove back to town.

  The Wayland Foundry had been in existence almost as long as Dimmock. It dated back to the same period as Deacon’s house and was no distance from it, tucked away behind the bus-station.

  When he saw it Deacon’s heart began to race. The place was abandoned. The purchaser had stripped out the machinery, taken over what remained of the order book and locked the door. French might not have any legal access to it now, but nor was there anyone around to keep him out.

  Deacon didn’t suppose for a moment that the front gate with the fancy padlock was the only way in. French would know every rat-run in the place – how to get in if you lost your key, the windows that had to be nailed shut to keep local children out, the doors that could be opened with a judicious kick. But Deacon didn’t, and didn’t have time to learn. He opened the front gate with the front bumper of his car, to a sharp intake of breath from the assembled constabulary who were afraid they should be stopping him.

  It was a bigger place than it looked from outside, the original workshop extended by add-ons and lean-tos made of iron frames and galvanised sheeting. Age-blackened, oil-blackened machinery still occupied some of the bays, half-buried now under discarded rags and draught-blown papers – too old, presumably, to be worth the cost of carting away. Deacon couldn’t identify what it was all for, though he recognised the banks of crucibles along the back wall.

  But he wasn’t here for the industrial archaeology. He was looking for somewhere you could imprison someone, and neither the crucibles nor the furnace pits below them were big enough. He hurried on through the building, shouldering open doors sealed by rubbish, checking above and below and behind anything big enough to conceal a body.

  He found nothing. Not Brodie, and no evidence that she was ever here. No evidence that anyone else had been here recently. Thick grey dust lay like ash, undisturbed on every surface. When he saw this place Deacon had believed he’d found French’s redoubt. He didn’t think that now. Disappointment writhed in his stomach like a parasite.

  Again he left people behind to do a thorough job, to apologise if an indignant owner turned up, and then to make the premises secure. The sourness of bile in his mouth, he returned alone to Battle Alley.

  Daniel was sitting on the steps like a foundling. “I couldn’t think where else to go.”

  Deacon looked him up and down and grunted. “Come on up. I’ve brought some stuff back from the warehouse. You can help me go through it. You might spot something I wouldn’t.”

  Daniel followed him upstairs.

  “So you loved her, and married her, and then you lost her,” said Brodie. A detached part of her brain that was editing everything she said noticed a grain of impatience creeping in, warned her it might be better to maintain a degree of empathy with him. Although undermining his grudge could also pay dividends. “And you blame Jack Deacon. But you aren’t honestly telling me he raped her, are you?”

  French said roughly, “He might as well have done. He certainly violated her. Even Saville didn’t do the damage to her that Deacon did.”

  “Will you tell me what happened? Or would you rather not risk it? I mean, the last thing you want is someone convincing you that the grievance you’ve nursed all these years wasn’t justified.”

  If he hadn’t heard the impatience in her voice before he certainly heard it then. His chin came up sharply, dissecting the beam of the torch. It made him look like something glimpsed from a Ghost Train. Brodie supposed she had the same gaunt, unearthly, chiaroscuro look.

  “I expect you to defend him,” French said tartly. “If you had no feelings for one another you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Having feelings for someone doesn’t blind you to their failings,” she said pointedly. “Jack’s no saint; but he’s not the monster you need him to be either. He’s done too much for too many people. Too many people are safe because of Jack Deacon for you to be right about him. I’m sorry about your wife, but I don’t believe Jack’s done anything to deserve what you’re doing to him. Or to me.”

  She was only making French angry. He’d come this far on righteous indignation. It had got him through the bereavement and the abiding sense of loss, the crushing loneliness; through the three months when he never wanted to see the world again; through the collapse of the business that was his life before Millie was, and the years since when the hope of revenge was the only thing that got him up in the mornings. It wasn’t a campaign so much as a crusade: there was an element of sanctity to it. And she was telling him he was wrong.

  If Millie French had lived, the uncritical adoration her husband retained for her, which fuelled his very existence, would have been impossible. You don’t feel that way about people you see every day, who snore and drop egg on their tie and forget to buy milk. You don’t love them less for being human but you’d feel silly worshipping them. They’d feel silly letting you.

  By dying in the bloom of her youth, before he had time to realise that marriage is a marathon not a sprint, Millie made
it possible for him to preserve her memory in amber – unaging, unchanging, safe from assault. But it had never grown, never developed, never had its corners rubbed to a comfortable roundness; never learned to laugh at itself and discovered the power of tolerance. She’d cut him adrift in the heat of their love, and stronger men than Michael French, men with better instincts and a fuller understanding of themselves, would have struggled for equilibrium. French had struggled and failed. He’d found strength of a kind in anger, and the hatred that it spawned provided him with a stanchion, a fixed point that endured though his world fragmented around him. He needed the hatred, couldn’t afford to wonder if it was warranted.

  “You think Millie died because Jack Deacon was unkind to her?” asked French savagely. “That her life was so little it could be snuffed out by simple mean-spiritedness? That he made a bad call, and she was too weak and self-centred to rise above it? You wouldn’t think that if you’d known her. She was full of life. It took him weeks to kill her.”

  He was panting with anger. He took a moment to compose himself. “You want to hear the gory details? I’ll tell you. You ought to know why this has happened to you. And then, we have a little time to kill.”

  21

  The tale was neither long nor complex, and not – except for the ending – the Greek tragedy he seemed to think. If Millie French hadn’t been young enough to believe the present more important than the future, that how she felt now was how she would always feel and that her pain wouldn’t heal, the crime against her would have been all but forgotten by now. It shouldn’t have had the power to spoil their life together.

  Oddly, French seemed not to bear William Saville the enmity he bore Deacon. It was as if he were a force of nature that hurled through their lives and then passed like a storm. He worked for a company that made rolling-stock. French used some words that Brodie didn’t know but she gathered that the Wayland Foundry wanted the contract to cast some parts. It sounded a routine enough bit of business but from French’s manner, as well as what came next, it must have been a big deal to him.

  Wanting to make a good impression, he had Millie meet them for lunch. He asked her to make an effort and she did: she and Saville got on well. In the afternoon the men talked specifications and costings, and in the evening French booked a table at the best restaurant in Dimmock.

  At ten to eight he got a call to say there’d been an accident at the foundry and the Health & Safety inspectors wanted to see him. He left Millie to carry his hopes with their guest.

  She returned home at one in the morning. It took her an hour to tell him what had happened. It took him till daybreak to persuade her to tell the police.

  “She was afraid.” French’s voice had fallen lower as he spoke; now it was barely audible. “Of being humiliated again. She knew there’d be examinations and questions. She knew Saville would deny it, point out that she went to his hotel room voluntarily. He offered her a nightcap and she thought it would be rude to refuse. She knew I wanted his business. Perhaps she was naive, but it was a situation she hadn’t met before. She didn’t know how to rebuff him without giving offence. She thought the best thing was to have a drink and then leave.”

  “But he wouldn’t let her,” murmured Brodie.

  “He acted as if it was a joke – blocked the door and said the toll was a kiss. Of course, he’d been drinking. Millie wasn’t finding it very funny but she still thought it was the best way out. Better than causing a scene. She let him kiss her.”

  “But he didn’t stop at one kiss.” Brodie might have been there, watching it happen. Indeed, Brodie had been there, more than once. She’d discovered that when a kiss doesn’t work, a sharp upward jerk with one knee mostly does. Millie’s tragedy was that she never had the occasion to practice before she had to do it for real. “Did he hurt her?”

  “He raped her!” shouted French. His voice barrelled off the damp walls and went chasing away through the darkness.

  “I know. But were there any injuries? Did she fight him?”

  “He was twice her size! If she’d fought him he’d have killed her.”

  But without injuries it was her word against his. Perhaps the man genuinely thought he was being offered more than a good meal for his custom. Perhaps polite, nicely brought up Millie was still starting sentences with “I’m not sure this is a good idea” when she should have yelled “Get the hell off me!”

  And criminal charges must be proved. It’s not enough that the jury sympathises with one party or the other: they have to be convinced beyond reasonable doubt. Millie French had dinner with William Saville in an expensive restaurant, then she went to his hotel room. They had drinks and she kissed him. He didn’t hit her or restrain her forcibly enough to leave marks. She claimed it was rape, but there was no supporting evidence and the man’s account had to be heard too. At that point it could come down to who made the best witness.

  “Was Saville acquitted?” asked Brodie softly.

  “No, he wasn’t acquitted,” snarled French. “He wasn’t charged. Deacon put my wife through physical examinations, hours of interrogation and weeks of anxiety, then he phoned to say he wasn’t going to charge Saville. She’d gone through all that for nothing. She didn’t want revenge, she wanted to stop him attacking another woman. But a man who cared more for his batting average than the safety of young women on his streets told her he didn’t believe her and no one else would either.”

  Brodie knew that wasn’t what Deacon had said, but it might have been what the Frenches heard. “And that’s when …?”

  “Yes, Mrs Farrell. That’s when my beautiful girl who’d promised to spend her life with me walked down Dimmock beach, took off her shoes at the water’s edge and walked into the sea. People saw her do it. They thought she was paddling. The water was up to her waist before they realised their mistake. Some of them tried to reach her but they were too far away – by the time they got there she was gone. The lifeboat searched for two days without finding her. Her body washed up under the Firestone Cliffs three weeks later.”

  By painting him in highlights and shadows the flat glare of the torch stripped his face back to its core elements of bone, skin and passion. Brodie could read his helpless rage clearer on that naked scaffold than on a face seen plainly by daylight. He had become a surrealist portrait, the distorted lines and colours serving to focus attention on the distilled essence of him, the seminal purpose.

  His voice was a whisper. “I had to identify the body. My wife’s body. My beautiful girl, who’d been three weeks in the English Channel. It’s one of the busiest waterways in the world, did you know that? With Atlantic traffic passing east and west and local shipping heading north and south. Something had run her down – chewed her up. Then the crabs got to work. The woman at the hospital pulled back a sheet and said, ‘Is this your wife?’ And I didn’t know. It didn’t look like a human being.”

  Despite everything Brodie was moved to pity for him. “You have to remember,” she said quietly, “all that happened after she was dead. None of it touched her. She drowned in just a few minutes. Nothing that happened afterwards could hurt her.”

  “It hurt me!” yelled French, his face tracked with silver tears. “He did that – Jack Deacon. Took my lovely girl and gave me fish-food in return! I hated him more that day than I ever hated anything before. And I hate him more today than then.”

  Among the items Deacon brought back to Battle Alley was a cardboard box full of photographs. Feeling like a voyeur, Daniel picked through them.

  He pushed one across the desk. “Is that Millie?”

  Deacon glanced, nodded, looked away. Then he made himself look again. All this was happening because he hadn’t given the girl the consideration she deserved. The decision he’d made on her case had been correct: he couldn’t have persuaded the Crown Prosecution Service to proceed, and if he had the case would have failed. But he could have given her more time, more care. He could have made sure she understood that not charging Saville di
dn’t mean he thought she was lying. The girl might be alive now if he had, and Brodie wouldn’t be in the hands of a man dehumanised by grief.

  So he looked at her. At first she looked entirely unfamiliar. It was only a snap-shot, like the other snaps of smiling people posed against picturesque back-drops, and in all the time he’d spent with her she hadn’t managed even a wry grin. She’d seemed broken by her experience, never began getting over it. It was as if her life stopped in that hotel room and nothing afterwards meant anything to her. So when she finally mustered the strength to take command of her situation, the action she took was entirely predictable. It hardly counted as suicide when her life was already so shrunken and etiolated.

  But if her death had been so predictable, Deacon wondered now, why hadn’t he prevented it? He must have seen how vulnerable she was, how the effort of going on had worn her almost to transparency. Her death wasn’t inevitable. She was twenty-three years old – every cell in her body was burgeoning with life. Only the soul-deep hurt made it possible for her to contemplate a state of unbeing. He should have guessed. He’d seen enough victims in his time. He should have helped her. Held her, kept her from falling.

  And not only because Brodie would have been safe if he had. Millie French would have been safe too. The girl with the long, straight, fair hair posing self-consciously by the river would be alive and well and raising a brood of children by now. Her husband would be running his company, working to balance the demands of a business he loved and a family he loved more, instead of stoking the furnaces of hatred in a desperate attempt to cauterise his misery. He’d served them all badly. His failure had already cost one young woman’s life. At this moment there was no way of knowing how much was yet to pay.