Echoes of Lies

by Jo Bannister

  “That’s all right,” said Brodie off-handedly, as if she hadn’t given it a thought. “I suppose it was asking a lot, for you to sit down with the old thug. Is it right what he said - that you’re not going to shop him to Deacon?”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “Pretty much. It isn’t true?”

  Daniel sighed. “I suppose it is. I said I wouldn’t lie to the police, but I wouldn’t send them round with a Black Maria either.” He smiled gently. “They don’t have Black Marias any more, do they?”

  “Not in your lifetime,” grinned Brodie.

  “She was all right?” It wasn’t a non-sequitur: it was the only thing worth talking about, everything else was just conversation. And it was only half a question: he wanted reassurance more than information.

  Brodie nodded. “She’s fine. Like I told you last night.”

  Daniel brought the coffee. “I should have waited. I - they - It was difficult.”

  “I can’t get over the old sod asking you to cover for him,” snorted Brodie. “The way he was talking yesterday morning, if he could just get Sophie back wild horses wouldn’t keep him out of Jack Deacon’s office.”

  “I suppose the richer you are the less attractive prison looks. When Sophie was safe he could afford to worry about himself.”

  “David said -” She thought better of it. “They were both keen to offer any kind of recompense they thought you’d accept.”

  “I know.” He looked at her. “I’m really not interested in their money.”

  “I know that.” Conscience pricked and she tried again. “David wants me and Paddy to join them on this Caribbean cruise.”

  Daniel made no reply. He sipped his coffee.

  “You think it would be a bad idea,” prompted Brodie.

  “I didn’t say that.” His grey eyes caught her gaze and held it. “You like him, don’t you? David.”

  “Maybe.” She considered some more. “Yes, I think I do. Not enough to excuse what he was part of, but … Daniel, he swore to me he was only aware what was happening when it was almost over.”

  “Yes?” Daniel returned his attention to his mug.

  “I wouldn’t go,” said Brodie, “if I thought you’d be hurt.”

  “You don’t need my permission.”

  “I know.”

  “Or my blessing. And if you want an unbiased view on whether it’s a good idea to accept Ibbotsen hospitality, you’ve come to the wrong place for that, too.”

  Brodie turned away, obscurely disappointed. Of course he wasn’t going to wish her luck. She didn’t need him to: she was a grown woman, she made her own luck and her own decisions. What she was hoping, she realised with a twinge of discomfort, was for Daniel to make one more sacrifice in someone else’s interests. To tell her it was all right, it didn’t matter, he didn’t mind. And that wasn’t reasonable. Of course he minded. He was just too decent to say so.

  “Well, I don’t have to decide today,” she said, finishing her coffee and getting up. “I must get back to work. And you should get some more rest.”

  He said, “I thought I might go in to school.”

  Brodie’s eyebrows rocketed. “Daniel, you’re not ready! It could be weeks before you’re fit enough.”

  “Not to work,” he said. “Just to show my face. And there’s something in the library I want to check.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  “I’ve nothing else to do. I can’t spend all day in my dressing-gown. I need start getting back to normal.”

  She never afterwards knew what made her return to the loft when she shut the office at one. She bought some sandwiches, told herself she was making sure he kept his strength up, but that was only the excuse. From midday on she felt a mounting unease that no amount of common sense would quash.

  That sense of something amiss sharpened as she climbed the steps to find the front door unlocked. She didn’t even knock: she threw it open and hurried inside. “Daniel?”

  “In here.”

  She found him in the kitchen. The sink was full of cold water; his sleeves were rolled up and his face and forearms were wet. Without his glasses he looked as she had first seen him, white and vulnerable.

  “What’s happened?”

  He reached for a towel. He tried to smile but didn’t pull it off. “Going back to school,” he said in a thin voice. “Not a good idea.”

  At first it had seemed so. The stolid unchangingness of the place had been reassuring. A week be damned: he could have been away for a year and it would still have felt utterly familiar as he opened the door. The smell of disinfectant hiding the smell of something worse; the clatter of feet, the thump of falling books; the groan of unslammable doors being slammed anyway; Charlie Monroe standing in the corridor outside the principal’s office.

  He’d timed his visit carefully. Apart from Charlie, the children were in class: he wouldn’t have to cope with pointing fingers, staring eyes and tactless questions in his first five minutes back; except of course from the staff.

  Nodding amiably to Charlie - Daniel was supposed to teach the boy but he saw much more of him in this corridor - he tapped the door and went inside to speak with Mr Chalmers. The man deserved to know that his school wasn’t haunted, that reports of Daniel’s demise had been premature.

  Then he went to the library. There was an undertone of peering and whispering; he nodded amiably and logged on at the computer. He could have used the PC at home, but he had access to additional data here and it would be quicker. As well as giving him a reason to come.

  He’d been working for ten minutes, the disturbance his arrival had created had subsided and the information he wanted was beginning to come in, when the whole enterprise started to go horribly wrong.

  For once it wasn’t Charlie who started the trouble. It was his sister Marilyn.

  “Charlie Monroe has a sister Marilyn?” echoed Brodie faintly.

  Daniel dried himself and waved a weary hand. “I know, I know. We’re all so used to it now it doesn’t even sound funny any more.”

  “What did she do?”

  “I think she must have bunked off. She was there for registration, nobody saw her afterwards. Tricia Weston, who had her for PE, was trying to track her down. God knows why but she looked in the library.”

  “And she wasn’t there?” Brodie still wasn’t sure what he was telling her. But it was clear from the state he was in that whatever had happened had floored him.

  “No, she wasn’t. But a bunch of third-formers she hangs out with were, so Tricia went to ask them.”

  Tricia Weston had once played hockey for England. She didn’t do anything discreetly. Her voice was trained to carry across sports pitches in the teeth of a gale - even when she was trying to obey the “Quiet in the Library” signs it had the penetrative power of a Cruise missile.

  She leaned over the table where the girls were sitting. “I’m looking for Marilyn Monroe. Have any of you seen her since registration?”

  They adopted the tactics which serve thirteen-year-old girls in the face of authority all over the world: they played dumb. “Marilyn, Miss? She isn’t here, Miss. Doesn’t she have PE, Miss? Didn’t she turn up, Miss? No, Miss, we don’t know where she is. Did you try the canteen?”

  Tricia Weston breathed heavily. “Yes, I tried the canteen. It was full of Flappers practising their can-can for the end-of-term show. I tried the bicycle sheds, all four toilet blocks and the art room, and she wasn’t in any of them. The last person who saw her, saw her with you four. Now where is she? Did she bunk off?”

  “Don’t know, Miss. We haven’t seen her since first thing this morning, Miss. We don’t know where she is.”

  The PE teacher was breathing heavily. Three laps of the running track didn’t get her this hot under the collar. “I want to know. Where is she? I’m not leaving here until you tell me. Where is she? Where is she?”

  Busy with their own confrontation, none of them saw Mr Hood’s face drain to parchment
and his eyes stretch as the words hammered at his brain. In an instant the book-lined room around him dissolved, leaving him cold, naked and blind, spread-eagled on a table, the same words fired at him like bullets, the agony of seared flesh the price of having no answer.

  He stumbled to his feet, the library chair tumbling behind him. Tricia Weston looked round in surprise. “Daniel? Do you know where she is? Where, then? Where is she? Daniel?”

  Backing towards the door, blind with panic, groping for it with desperate uncoordinated hands, he heard another, younger voice ask, with puzzlement and even genuine concern, “What’s the matter with him then?” Then he was in the corridor, running.

  “I couldn’t get out,” he whispered. “I got lost. I’ve worked there for twelve months and I couldn’t find my way out. I kept running, and I couldn’t seem to work out where I was. I just wanted to get outside. But I couldn’t find a door. I tried every corridor I came to, and every flight of stairs, and I knew everyone was staring. They were calling after me. I even knew they’d help me get out if I could just stop running, but I couldn’t. I lost it. I mean, completely. If you’ve ever seen a headless chicken …”

  But it wasn’t a joke. There was nothing funny about it. Brodie said softly, “What happened?”

  “I ended up outside the head’s office again. There’s a glass wall where the corridor overlooks the playground. Apparently” - he couldn’t look at her - “I was trying to break it with my bare hands. The fact that it’s on the second floor mustn’t have occurred to me.”

  He swallowed. “Before he was a teacher, Des Chalmers was a Royal Marine. It’s the perfect training for the job. He came out of his office to see what the commotion was, saw me beating my head in against his wall and decked me. I came to my senses sitting on the corridor floor with Des Chalmers holding me and Charlie Monroe offering me the grubbiest hankie you ever saw because I was crying like a baby.”

  If it was OK for an ex-Marine it was good enough for her. Brodie steered him to the sofa, sat down beside him, put her arm round his narrow shoulders. He was still shaking. “And then you came back here? Daniel, you need help. It’s too soon, it’s all still too fresh.”

  “Des thought so too. He wanted to take me to the hospital. I made him bring me home instead. You only just missed him.”

  “You shouldn’t be alone. Won’t you let me call someone?”

  He cast her a furtive glance. “I’m all right alone. It’s other people I can’t seem to deal with.”

  “A psychiatrist could -”

  He wouldn’t let her finish. “If I get into their hands I’ll never be free of them. I can do this alone.”

  Brodie thought she owed him the truth more than kindness. “What happened today, Daniel - it will happen again. And again, and again.”

  He shook his head doggedly. “It won’t. I’m not going back.”

  “What, never?”

  “There’s too much baggage. Too many people, and too many of them likely to be looking for one another too often.” He forced a smile. “Maybe I’ll join the Marines.”

  Brodie saw nothing to smile about. “Daniel, you’re a teacher. You couldn’t lift a submachine-gun. You like teaching.”

  “I’ll have to find something else to like. I can’t hack it any more. Whatever I do, it needs to be something I can walk away from if I have to. Without upsetting dozens of kids and having to be rugby-tackled by the head teacher. I can’t be stuck in a classroom any more. Ah -” He caught his breath.

  “What?”

  Daniel looked broken, as if it were the last straw. “I left some stuff in the library. Unless somebody thought to shut me down I’m still logged on.”

  “I’ll pop round for it,” said Brodie. “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

  Mr Chalmers helped her. Pushing fifty now, he still looked more like a Royal Marine than a head teacher. When she explained her purpose he was full of concern.

  “How is Daniel? I was most unhappy about leaving him in that shed but he insisted. He said if I tried to take him to hospital he’d get out at the traffic lights.”

  Brodie nodded her understanding. “Mules have nothing on my friend Daniel.”

  Mr Chalmers picked his words carefully. “He explained - before the incident in the library - a little of what happened during his absence. He didn’t go into much detail. Would I be right in assuming you know rather more?”

  “Perhaps. But I don’t intend to swap notes with you.”

  He didn’t take offence, just went on regarding her over his desk. “I’m worried about him, Mrs Farrell. If you’d been here forty minutes ago, you’d be worried about him too.”

  She sighed. “I am worried about him, Mr Chalmers. But you can only offer someone your help, you can’t force it on him. Daniel’s determined to deal with his problems his own way. I’ve given up trying to advise him: now I settle for helping him do what he wants to do.”

  The principal nodded pensively. “Stubborn little son-of-a-bitch, isn’t he? When he first came here I thought the kids would eat him for breakfast. I mean, there’s not much of him, and what there is doesn’t shout authority. Then, when he’d been here about a week, there was an incident in the playground. One of the twelve-stone thugs who pass for fifth-formers round here pulled a knife. Daniel took it off him.”

  Brodie pursed her lips. “Was he hurt?”

  “No one was hurt. Everyone was astonished.”

  They went to the library. The computer at which Daniel had been working was still on line. Chalmers perused it briefly. “Suppose I print this stuff off? Take it to him, and if he needs anything else he can phone me. Tell him not to come back until he’s ready. Tell him his job’ll be waiting for him.”

  Brodie thanked him, gathered up Daniel’s papers and left.

  It wasn’t until she was back in her car, propping the folders on the front seat so that they wouldn’t spill their contents on the first corner, that she saw what he’d been working on.

  Chapter 22

  Brodie was too angry to knock. She stormed up the steps, the doorknob turned under her hand and she was inside before there was time to wonder if she had any right.

  Daniel had fallen into an uneasy slumber, on top of the bed, still in his damp clothes. The rap of her footsteps on the wooden floor broke in on his sleep but there wasn’t time for him to gather his wits. “Wha’?” He pushed himself off the pillow and searched myopically for the cause of the disturbance.

  He saw the shape of her in the bedroom door but couldn’t make out the details. “Who is it?” He groped on the table beside him but his glasses weren’t there. “Brodie?”

  His glasses must have fallen off the bed: she saw them on the floor. She neither passed them to him nor told him where to find them. Nor did she answer to her name. Later she would be ashamed of that. The last people who came in here without an invitation snatched him away to purgatory. Though his conscious mind knew no repetition was likely, the nerve-endings under his skin must have been alive with fear. She could have rescued him with a word. Even in her current mood Brodie didn’t like herself for not doing.

  Daniel’s increasingly urgent search located the missing glasses and he crammed them on. “It is you. Brodie, you scared the life out of me! What - ?” He saw her face then, and the sheaf of papers in her hand. His expression stilled. “Ah.”

  “You want to explain?” she asked tightly.

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “But not while you’re ready to hit me. I’ll put the kettle on, let’s -”

  “Screw the kettle!” Brodie hurled the papers at him: they fanned out in midair, covering his legs and his bare feet like snow. “I want to know what this is about. You can’t get this sort of information legitimately: you’ve been hacking into confidential sources, and the word for that is spying. Why? Because I said I might go on holiday with him?”

  “No,” said Daniel indignantly. He pushed himself upright at the end of the bed, coincidentally putting more distance between them. �
�Although -”

  “No Although is the same as Yes,” spat Brodie. “What the hell did you think you were doing? You think you can dictate who I see, who I go away with? Who I like?”

  “Of course not. I just - I don’t want you to make a mistake.”

  “Who do you think you are,” she yelled, “my mother? It’s none of your damned business! We were thrown together by circumstances, we’re not even friends in any real sense. A fortnight ago I didn’t know you existed; another fortnight and you’ll have gone back to what passes for your normality and I’ll have gone back to mine. We both got hijacked by events beyond our control. Maybe I owe you something, Daniel, but not this - not a say in my life. You have no right to spy on someone I like because you don’t approve of him!”

  “That wasn’t the reason.”

  “No? Jesus, Daniel, look at this stuff! If you wanted to know how much David Ibbotsen is worth you should have asked him - he’d probably have told you. What were you thinking? - that if he could afford to take me to the Caribbean he could buy you a new telescope? Were you trying to work out how much to ask for?”

  She could hardly have said anything more hurtful. Daniel’s jaw dropped and his eyes saucered behind the thick lenses. He was too astonished to deny it. Brodie took his silence for consent.

  “God knows they owe you something, but at least have the courage to tell them face to face. This” - she flicked a disdainful glance at his research - “is like rooting round in the rubbish bins. Anyway, you won’t get anything out of David. All the money belongs to his father. If it hadn’t been this business would have been over as soon as it started, you wouldn’t have got hurt, and you and I would never have met.”

  Daniel moistened his lips. “Neither would you and David.”

  “Me and David is nothing to do with you! Daniel, I understand that you resent him. That you hate them both. You have every right. If you want to change your mind and turn them in to the police, I won’t try to stop you. But don’t tell them it’s over and then hack into their personal data behind their backs. It isn’t worthy of you. If you want to punish them for what they did, tell them. But don’t use me as a stalking horse.”