by Jo Bannister
“How about it?” asked Vickers diplomatically. “Do you want to talk to someone? Superintendent Fuller’s still in the building – just about everyone else has gone to the river.”
As soon as he’d said it he realised he probably shouldn’t have. But the lack of a reaction from French reassured him that the search-party wasn’t wasting its time.
French blinked uncertainly. For five years the prospect of having Deacon at his mercy, of paying him back, had been what held him together. With that gone it was almost possible to see his personality fragment. “Why would I want to see Superintendent Fuller?”
Vickers hung onto his patience. “To make a statement? To get your account on record before Mr Deacon comes back and says his girlfriend’s safe, and no one’s interested in anything you have to say.”
“They’ve found her?” It was as if the idea had simply never occurred to him.
“They will have by now,” said Vickers. “There were a dozen of them, they’ll have searched everything on the river, floating or sunk, by now.”
Something extraordinary was happening behind French’s eyes. The debris which had tumbled there, the building-blocks of his world, were slowly reassembling themselves and mounting up, like film of a demolition run backwards. His face and his body were very still, his expression frozen, but behind his eyes a new edifice was growing. He said – and his voice was still too but the kind of still that vibrates, that is the only possible alternative to an explosion – “Boats. They’re searching the boats. In the mud-berths on the Barley.”
Vickers knew now he’d said too much. Or perhaps not, because if French was about to tell him they’d got it wrong, that was something Deacon needed to know. “You’re saying they aren’t going to find her?”
And French smiled. “Of course they’re going to find her,” he said with a kind of avuncular calm. “Just not there, and not in time.”
They’d come to a halt in the middle of the corridor. Now Vickers got things moving again. He hustled French to his cell, shouting to the custody officer, and headed for the radio room at a run.
For a few seconds longer Daniel remained glued by thought to the bench where he’d been sitting unnoticed by the two men debating Brodie’s life three paces away. Then he rose and went upstairs, and let himself back into Deacon’s office.
On the third boat he tried, Deacon’s shouts were answered by a frantic hammering deep within the hull. It was a steel boat – possibly some kind of a landing-craft, then a pleasure-boat, now a derelict vanishing twice daily beneath the English Channel – so the sound came at him like drums. His heart leapt in concert and he turned, muddy and triumphant, to those behind him. “She’s here. We’ve found her.”
The stern of the craft was already under water. But the bows stood a little higher and the hold wouldn’t fill until the creeping tide reached an open hatch in the forepeak. When it did the sea would pour in like Niagara. The decks were awash as far as the waist.
Deacon ran, his boots sliding from under him in a mousse of mud and water, keeping his feet by grabbing what was left of the handrail except for twice when there was nothing left. Then he measured his length in water up to his ankles. It hardly slowed him. He surged forward, on his hands and knees when he couldn’t stand, racing the incoming tide.
The hammering from below had stopped. Deacon shouted her name again but Brodie didn’t answer. But he reached the hatch before the sea did and he thought she was safe.
As he thrust his head through the hatch there was an explosion of white immediately below him and something at once soft and muscular hit him in the face and bowled him backwards, rolling once more in the liquid mud. Startled and uncomprehending, it took him a moment to focus on the swan rowing away up-river, a metre above the waves.
Then his heart hit rock-bottom. He stood up, trembling with reaction, and gestured DC Winston towards the hatch. His voice was rough and cracked. “Check it anyway. But I doubt that bird would have been in there if anyone else was.”
They kept searching, the orange boat ferrying officers between the disappearing hulks until nothing remained above water but masts. Somehow they’d managed to check every boat before it was covered. Brodie was on none of them. There was no sign that she had been on any of them.
Unsurprisingly, Deacon’s phone wasn’t working. Voss’s was. It was PC Vickers, calling from Battle Alley. “I don’t think you’re in the right place. I thought French was going to give it up, but when he realised where you were he backed right off again. He didn’t say much, only that you’d got it wrong, but I believe him. I saw his face. He didn’t reckon he was beat.”
Edwin Turnbull of Turnbull, Fitch & Stewart had been asleep for three hours when his wife Doreen prodded him in the ribs and hissed in his ear, “There’s a drunk in the garden.”
It wasn’t so much a garden as a front step with a few pot-plants. But Mr Turnbull liked living in town. He could walk to work and didn’t spend every Sunday mowing the lawn. The only drawback to living close to his office was that occasionally people looked at the photographs of houses for sale in his shop window and couldn’t wait until he opened for business.
Grumbling, he rolled out from under the quilt and went to the window. At the same time the lion’s head knocker on his front door began to thunder. The estate agent pushed up the sash and stuck his head out. “Go away! It’s two o’clock in the morning, for pity’s sake!”
The yellow head beneath him turned until he could see a round white face in the glow of the street-lamps. “Mr Turnbull, I’m so sorry about this. I tried to phone but I got your answering machine. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t a matter of life and death.”
Turnbull grunted, somewhat mollified by the politeness of the disturbance but with no intention of opening his door. “Matters of life and death are the province of the police,” he said loftily. “Do you want me to call them?”
“I’ve just come from there. Mr Turnbull, I have to speak to you. You know me – Daniel Hood. Please let me in.”
The estate agent blinked in surprise and peered closer. He hadn’t been expecting that. But he was, first and foremost, a businessman. There was a hopeful note in his voice. “You’ve decided to sell after all?”
“Let me in, Mr Turnbull,” Daniel begged desperately.
“Just a minute.”
The sound of running water was stronger now, and closer. Brodie groped in the darkness around her but couldn’t find the source. She put her ear against the stone wall behind her and thought she felt a kind of vibration, as if a stream ran on the far side. But it hadn’t run there before. What kind of a stream only flowed sometimes?
And when she put it that way, the answer was obvious. It was tidal. Her heart sank. However close it came it would do nothing to sustain her. The only thing seawater does for thirst is magnify it.
So she was near the shore, a big derelict building within the tidal range. Big enough to have cellars. A warehouse? Something to do with the fishing industry which petered out here thirty years before? She pictured her way along Dimmock’s seafront and east and west along the coast, puzzling what it might be, but nothing fitting that description came to mind.
So had she been unconscious longer than she supposed? Had there been time for French to drive beyond the area she knew? If so, the chances of Deacon finding her must be much diminished. He would start looking where she was last seen. If she was nowhere near Dimmock, the search could last a very long time.
Except that French said it would be over by three o‘clock. She didn’t think that could be much more than an hour away. She could stick it that long. If he was telling the truth. If that was what he meant, that she could expect rescue by three o’clock.
There were, of course, other possible endings.
And once she’d thought that there was no going back. Independent of will, her mind put the pieces together. The stream that only flowed sometimes. The dank walls and damp floor of her prison. Her jailer’s ability to say with s
uch precision, hours before, when she might expect her ordeal to end.
She wasn’t here to be rescued, she was here to drown. Wherever she was, the rising tide would fill this space and, chained in place, she would die here. Only the rat, free to move, would leave and live.
She wanted to scream but her throat was too tight. She wanted to cry but the tears wouldn’t come. If she’d been a praying woman, or a swearing woman, now would have been the time. She had perhaps an hour to live, and after that a few desperate minutes to die, and the fact that people were looking for her was scant consolation. There was little chance of them stumbling across her when even she didn’t know where she was. This was the furthest extreme, the deepest despair, of her life, and she knew what was coming, and she couldn’t find an appropriate response.
Until she thought of Paddy. That she wouldn’t see her child again. That the last goodbyes they said were only little ones, good for the length of a school day at best, in no way adequate for two people whose existence, centred in one another, was about to be sundered. That she was leaving a five-year-old motherless, and if it wasn’t her fault it was because of choices she’d made.
Then the tears came. Tears poured from her, flooded down her cheeks. Broken sobs racked in her throat, and she gave herself up to despair.
25
Mr Turnbull couldn’t find his glasses. He remembered reading the paper in bed and went back upstairs for them.
Doreen was sitting with the quilt pulled under her chin and she clamped his wrist in a grip of iron as he reached for the bedside table. “You’ve let him in?” she hissed. “You’ve let a drunk into the house in the middle of the night?”
“It isn’t a drunk,” Mr Turnbull explained patiently, “it’s a client. At least –” It was too complicated for two o’clock in the morning. “I know him, he’s harmless. But he is very upset. Someone’s in trouble and he thinks I can help. I couldn’t send him away.”
“You? Help? How?”
Mr Turnbull was an estate agent and so not a naturally sensitive man, but it was difficult to take that as a compliment. He sighed. “I’m not sure, dear. If you’ll let go of me I’ll go and find out.” He went back downstairs with his glasses.
It was a photograph he was being asked to look at: nothing elaborate, just a holiday snap, and he didn’t recognise the woman in it. She might have been in her early twenties. Apart from Sharon in the office, he didn’t know any young women. “I’m sorry, I’ve never seen her before.”
Daniel knew he wasn’t making much sense. Anxious as he was, he was still deeply embarrassed at getting someone from his bed at this time of night. “Not her. The place. The building. You told me you had a derelict mill on your books – a tide-mill. Is that it? No one in the police station recognised it but I hoped you might.”
Mr Turnbull frowned and took back the photograph he’d been returning. He tried with his glasses on and he tried with them pushed up his high and wrinkled forehead. “I don’t think so. That’s quite pretty, isn’t it, a bit of a beauty-spot. The place we’re selling – I shouldn’t tell you this, but you’re really not planning to buy it, are you? – is derelict. It might have looked like that once but not for years. It’s all overgrown and neglected.”
Daniel felt his last hope spiralling away. Disappointment clenched on his insides like talons. “Are you sure? That could be ten years old – a lot of weeds can grow in ten years.”
“Really?” The estate agent looked again. “We’ve had it for about two years. There was someone living there till the nineteen-eighties, I think. There was talk of restoring it, but the cost was prohibitive and the owners finally decided to sell. Ten years?” He pursed his lips, tried to picture it before the paths closed over and the weather-boarding began to rot. “It could be the same place. I’m not sure. I never saw it looking like this, but that could be Solitude.”
“Solitude?” echoed Daniel faintly.
“The Solitude Mill, on the River Windle. I think maybe it is.”
“Can you take me there?”
Mr Turnbull’s eyebrows rocketed. “Now?”
“You know the way,” Daniel said miserably. “Searching for it will take too long. If my friend’s there, she’s in mortal danger. High tide’s in an hour’s time and I think she’ll be dead by then. Minutes count. Please, Mr Turnbull, I need your help. No one else will do.”
Edwin Turnbull sighed again: not this time the resignation of a little man who knows the world wouldn’t miss him but the quiet pride of someone who can do something no one else can. “I’ll just tell Doreen.”
He threw some clothes on top of his pyjamas, then he picked up his keys and led Daniel out to his car. As he drove past the house the bedroom light snapped off indignantly three floors up. But Turnbull didn’t care that his wife could hold a grudge for months. Tonight Edwin Turnbull the estate agent was racing to save someone’s life.
“This friend of yours,” he said when they were on their way. “Is it Mrs Farrell we’re talking about?”
Daniel was taken aback. “How did you know?”
It was quite hard to come up with a tactful answer. “How many friends have you got?” was bound to cause offence, so was “You two are a standing joke in every pub in Dimmock.” “We talked when she was trying to find you. Also, I take the Dimmock Sentinel.”
“Oh. Yes,” said Daniel. “I suppose we’ve had our fifteen minutes of fame this last year.”
“You could say that,” murmured the estate agent. “And now she’s in trouble?”
“Yes.” Daniel smiled wanly. “It was her turn.”
Turnbull gave a sympathetic chuckle. But he knew it wasn’t a joke, not to the young man slumped in the seat beside him. The aura given off by misery is unmistakable and Daniel Hood was sick with it: miserable and scared. For the first time in years Turnbull thought, Speed limits be damned. “We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
Daniel looked at his watch. “Two twenty-six. High tide’s at ten after three.”
“Three-quarters of an hour,” said Turnbull stoutly. “Plenty of time to find her.”
“I hope so. Oh God, I hope so.” Suddenly Daniel sat bolt upright, eyes wide behind his thick lenses. “I haven’t called Jack. Jack Deacon – he’s the investigating officer, he thought he knew where she was but he’s gone to the wrong place. The wrong damned river! I need a phone. Have you got one of those … mobile … thingies?”
Turnbull regarded him for so long he almost left the road. “You mean, you haven’t?”
“I live alone, I haven’t got a job, who the hell needs to contact me in a hurry? Please, can I use yours?”
Turnbull passed it to him. Then, seeing his difficulty, without a word he took it back and switched it on. “Just dial the number.”
Daniel was a mathematician: numbers he could do. He could remember the phone numbers of people he’d only ever called twice. He dialled Deacon’s mobile.
He got the unobtainable message, which was pretty restrained in the circumstances. If there’d been a recording to say “The silly sod dropped it in the sea” he’d have got that instead. So he called Battle Alley and they patched him through to DS Voss.
Voss was asleep in the front passenger seat. Deacon stopped the car and extricated the phone from his jacket without waking him. “He isn’t here,” he growled softly; which as an alibi works rather better with static phones than mobile ones.
“Jack? It’s Daniel. Where are you?”
“I’m just taking Charlie to the hospital. We didn’t find her, Daniel. She wasn’t there.”
“I know where she is. At least, I think I do. I’m on my way there now. You have to meet me.”
“Meet you where?”
“Solitude Mill, on the River Windle. Mr Turnbull can give you directions.”
“Mr – ?” Then he thought, Don’t even go there. “The Windle? That’s a whole other river.”
“But subject to the same tides. It’s a tide-mill, Jack. And French knows it – he a
nd Millie went there, it’s where that photograph was taken. And now it’s derelict. It’s been empty for years. He could have Dagenham Girl Pipers tied up down there and nobody’d know.”
A detective for more than twenty years, Jack Deacon had good instincts and knew to trust them. Common sense told him it was a long shot, that in a coastal region there must be many places that would inundate with each tide and a derelict mill was only one of them. But instinct said it was exactly the sort of place French would choose. A forgotten beauty-spot, neglected and overgrown; a place where he was once happy with his young wife; a place where a man could conscript the forces of nature to do his dirty work while he sat resolved and complacent in a police station, watched the face of his enemy and waited for comprehension to dawn.
With less than an hour to high tide it was instinct or nothing. He knew if he returned to Battle Alley Michael French would not give him the information he needed in time to save Brodie’s life. He’d wait until it was too late and then tell him. If Daniel was wrong about this, probably it would be too late to save her any other way. Even if he was right they might be all out of time. All he could do was hurry and hope.
A taxi was coming from the hospital. Deacon stopped it, flashed his warrant card, apologised briefly and insincerely to the fare who’d thought she was going home, and poured Voss onto the seat beside her. “Accident & Emergency, and tell them to keep him in.” As the taxi headed back the way it had come he shouted after it: “Tell him I’ve got his phone.”
The rare impulse to behave like a Good Samaritan had paid dividends. From the ring road adjacent to Dimmock General Hospital he was ten minutes closer to the Windle than if he’d returned to Battle Alley with the rest of the team. Once he’d got Turnbull’s directions he called for back-up but he had no intention of waiting for it.
He turned the car by crashing across the central reservation and headed west again, his foot hard down on the accelerator, ignoring speed limits and traffic lights and the occasional other vehicle. At its end the bypass filtered into the old Shore Road and still he drove hard, registering as a different kind of road-song where his wheels crossed the bridge over the Barley. He’d come this way two hours before and turned left towards the sea. Now he drove on, watching his dashboard. Another mile, another minute; another mile, another fifty seconds. At this speed a few wet leaves under a tree would put him off the road. But speed was the only thing he had to give her, the only thing that might help, and he wouldn’t stint it to save his life.