by Jo Bannister
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Contents
Jo Bannister
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jo Bannister
The Primrose Switchback
Jo Bannister
Jo Bannister lives in Northern Ireland, where she worked as a journalist and editor on local newspapers. Since giving up the day job, her books have been shortlisted for a number of awards. Most of her spare time is spent with her horse and dog, or clambering over archaeological sites. She is currently working on a new series of psychological crime/thrillers.
Chapter One
“Explain this to me just once more,” said Dan Sale, glancing sidelong over his granny specs as he cornered the big car at roughly twice the urban speed limit. “With particular emphasis on why it has to be you rather than the SAS, and what use you‘re going to be to my newspaper with your throat cut.”
The editor of the Skipley Chronicle was a spare, slightly stooped man in his fifties with a manner as dry as sticks and less hair than he once had. Those who only ever saw him behind a desk supposed the Mercedes was a status symbol. But Sale learnt his trade before mobile phones, when the ability to drive like Jehu could mean the difference between hold-the-front and a page-two filler, and when the need arose he could still burn rubber like a Hollywood stuntman.
Rosie Holland waited for gravity to return her to her seat beside him before attempting to reply. Her broad, capable hands were fisted white-knuckled in the seatbelt, and not just because of Sale’s driving. She enjoyed a good roller coaster, would venture any ride whose safety bars would accommodate her ample frame. But this wasn’t a fairground thrill, engineered for the maximum of terror with the minimum of danger. Sale was driving like this because, just possibly, a life depended on it. And what he wanted to know was why he was risking his licence to rush his paper’s famous Agony Aunt into a battle zone when anyone with a titter of wit would be speeding in the opposite direction.
And there was an answer, even one that he would understand. It had to do with a notion as old-fashioned as Sale himself: personal responsibility.
“This is my fault,” said Rosie, as calmly as she could though the frank brown eyes in the apple-cheeked face were rimed with fear. At forty-seven, five foot eight and fourteen stone – on a good day – this was not a woman who was easily intimidated, but she was worried now. “I misread the situation and now there’s a woman being held at knife point in her own house who doesn’t know where else to turn.”
“She could try the police,” said Sale shortly. “It’s a police matter. The knife makes it a police matter.”
“He’s her son, and he’s eighteen years old, and that makes it a family matter,” insisted Rosie. “She might be sick and tired of the mess he’s making of his life – sick enough to want to wash her hands of him, desperate enough to seek support from a so-called professional counsellor. But that’s a long way from wanting to see him in the remand wing at Winson Green.”
“That may still be the best solution for all concerned,” grunted Sale. “Whatever feelings she has for him, the woman has no right asking you to risk your safety to keep a drug addict out of jail.”
“No?” Rosie sounded doubtful. “I think I gave her the right when I presumed to advise her. If she’d asked her mother or her sister or her best friend what to do about young Robbie, about his drugs and his thieving and his bad friends, she might have gone on losing sleep – and money from her purse – but he’d never have pulled a knife on her. Instead she asked me; and I told her that all that was left was Tough Love. I told her to bag his gear and sling it on the street, to change the locks and take the phone off the hook. I told her he had to take the consequences of his own choices until he was ready to acknowledge her needs.”
She sucked in a deep, unsteady breath. “And God help me, that’s exactly what she did. Only I didn’t anticipate that he’d come back armed with a sledgehammer and a flick knife, and tell her to get Aunty Rosie with her big nose and her big mouth round for a heart-to-heart. Maybe I should have done; maybe if I was as good at this job as people seem to think I would have done. Whatever, I can’t leave Marjorie Miller to cope alone. I can’t walk away now it’s got messy.”
“It could get messier if you don’t,” growled Sale. “Robbie Miller isn’t really going to stab his mother. He wouldn’t be waiting for you to arrive if he was. What he’s waiting for is the chance to stab the woman who told her it was time to damn him and put herself first.”
Rosie acknowledged that with a rueful sniff. “That’s why I need you here. Or someone I can rely on, anyway, and with Matt and Alex away for a dirty weekend …” She shrugged. “I do have friends,” she added, a shade defensively, “but not many I’d trust with my life.”
“There’s Prufrock.” It wasn’t an altogether serious suggestion – in fact Sale would have been offended if she’d asked anyone else – but the old man had taken so heartily to the role of her amanuensis that Sale was a little surprised he wasn‘t in the back seat right now, chipping in with his unsought advice.
Rosie snorted. “If I need help I’ll need it fast. Arthur doesn’t drive, and every time he uses a mobile phone he gets the weather forecast. I’d sooner not be bleeding while he’s struggling with the complexities of push-button dialling.”
“You mean, you’ll bring in the police but only after you’re hurt?” Sale’s nostrils flared impatiently. “Rosie, that makes no sense. Let me stop the car and call them now. They won’t stop you talking to him. If you can talk him out, fine – but nobody’s going to get hurt if you can’t.”
“She is,” said Rosie stubbornly. “Mrs Miller. I owe her better than that. Dan, you didn’t hear her. She was terrified, but she begged me not to call the police. She’d rather deal with him alone, even in that state, than let the police have him. What could I do? – I gave her my word. This isn’t some passing maniac we’re talking about, it’s her son. She knows what he is, what he’s done. She knows she can’t do anything more for him, and if she wants any life for herself she has to put him out of it. But she doesn’t want to destroy him as well.
“Once the police are involved, all the options vanish. There’s only one way the courts can deal with a man who steals from his mother to buy drugs and comes back with a knife when she throws him out. Whatever he’s done, he’s eighteen years old and she doesn’t want him doin
g four years with the block barons selling his rectum every Saturday night!”
Rosie realised from the quality of his silence that she’d succeeded in shocking Sale. Normally this would have been a cause for satisfaction; now she felt a pang of regret. She sighed and touched his hand on the steering wheel. “I’m sorry to get you involved. If the shit hits the fan nobody’ll be surprised that I was in range, but you have a reputation to lose. If you don’t want to stay you can drop me at the house and—”
Before he’d been worried; now she’d made him angry. He didn’t shout: his voice dropped from gruff to gravelly. “Is that what you think of me? You won’t leave this woman to deal with her own violent son, but you think I’d leave you? You’re willing to risk your skin for her, but you doubt I’m willing to risk my reputation for you? You’re right, Rosie, you do have friends. I’m one of them. I hoped you might have noticed.”
It was dirty pool, and in any other circumstances she’d have knocked him off his high horse with a raucous laugh like a bar-room parrot’s. But there was just the chance, and both of them knew it, that they might regret anything they left unsaid now. She said simply, “You, Matt and the Chronicle are the best things that have happened to me in ten years. I know you’re worried about me. I’m not sure I deserve it, but I like it.
“I’m not aiming to get hurt in there. I think I can defuse the situation. If I can’t, maybe I can disarm the little sod. He’s only eighteen, and junkies are mostly physical wrecks. Anyway, I have to try. For my own peace of mind, and because I want to go on doing this job and I don’t think I could if you, me and the punters knew there was a point beyond which I couldn’t be counted on. But if I’m wrong, Dan, there is nobody I would rather have watching my back.”
If he’d thought it would do some good Sale would have kept trying to dissuade her, found other arguments, even made it an order. But he knew he’d be wasting his breath. Once her mind was made up Rosie Holland never yielded to any form of restraint that didn’t have buckles on the sleeves. “At least let me come in with you.”
She shook her head, untidy curls dancing on her broad brow. She affected the kind of hairstyle that most people avoid after their mothers stop doing it. “That wasn’t the deal. He’ll let me in if I come alone. If he sees anyone else he might hurt her. And I really don’t think that’s what he wants. She’s still his mother, probably the only person in the world who actually cares about him. I think he was just shocked to find that even her tolerance has limits.”
“He’s a drug addict. You don’t know what he’ll do.”
“He’s an eighteen-year-old boy. If he gives me a hard time I’ll pick him up and spank him.”
Sale barked a desperate little laugh. “I don’t think you’ve any idea of the size of eighteen-year-old boys these days!” Then, thinking again: “Ah … Perhaps you have.”
Actually she knew more about the physical structure of eighteen-year-old boys, and everyone else from babies to old ladies, than anyone who hadn’t spent twenty years dissecting them. She knew that her previous incarnation as a hospital pathologist still caused him unease, that he preferred to think of the author of the Chronicle‘s advice page The Primrose Path as a doctor. The fact remained, the patients on whom she’d bestowed most of her medical expertise were all dead.
She bit her lip. He would never know how easy it would have been to let herself be persuaded, how difficult being this stubborn really was. “The bottom line is, I’m doing this and you’re helping me. We might both wish we were spending the night some other way, but the phone went and this is it. I’m going inside, and you’re waiting out here in case the thing goes pear-shaped. Give me half an hour. If you haven’t heard from me by then, call the cops. If you hear screams, call them sooner.”
Brindley Road was built between the wars of comfortable semi-detached houses set back behind leafy front gardens. Sale slowed the car, looking at the numbers on the gates. Then he stopped.
There wasn’t much time – partly because of what might be happening in the house, but mainly because if Rosie intended to do this she couldn’t afford to think about it much longer. But a few seconds couldn’t matter. In the open door of the car she paused. “Dan, if this goes wrong, don’t blame yourself. I didn’t give you any choice. Remember that.”
He nodded tersely. No one would query it; everyone who knew her had been cajoled, coerced or bullied into doing something unwise by Rosie Holland, and they all forgave her because everything she did came straight from the heart. But he wouldn’t forgive this in a hurry, however it turned out.
And because he didn’t know how it would turn out, he couldn’t let her go without a word. He leaned across the car. “And there was nothing wrong with the advice you gave. You remember that.”
The driveway in front of the house was dark. Only the glow of the street lamps, dim through the trees, showed her the way. At two in the morning there were no lights in any of the houses. Rosie took a deep breath, tasting the October frost, then set her jaw determinedly and went through the gate.
Marjorie Miller was a teacher, fifty-two, a divorcee with two daughters and a son. An ordinary middle-class family, except for one thing: the youngest child was a drug addict.
She wrote to The Primrose Path more because she needed to talk about her situation than in any hope of a solution. She’d done everything she could think of to rescue the boy but he wasn’t interested. When she found an addiction clinic he wouldn’t stay; when she made appointments for him with a psychiatrist he wouldn’t go. He lost his job; she found him another one; he lost that too. She fed, clothed and sheltered him; she gave him pocket money. It wasn’t enough: he stole from her to buy drugs. Once she came home to find he’d sold her television.
Rosie considered the dilemma at (for her) some length before asking Mrs Miller if, since she was clearly nearing the end of her tether, she was desperate enough to take the Tough Love approach.
She’d heard of it, thought it was some American fad with little relevance to the Midlands. On the contrary, said Rosie, it was increasingly being seen as an option by responsible people who’d tried everything else. Nor was it just an exercise in damage limitation. In a significant number of cases removing the safety net – ‘I can always go home, I can always get money at home, they won’t see me suffer’ – was the jolt that made addicts, thieves and other black sheep face up to their problems. When a severe talking-to, a serious heart-to-heart, a few lost tempers and cutting the plug off the television set had failed, it was time – for some people – to start thinking in terms of Tough Love.
Robbie Miller was legally an adult, no longer entitled to be provided for as of right. He was in no stronger position in his mother’s house than a lodger, said Rosie, and could be asked to leave at any time. If he refused to go, the 1988 Housing Act gave her the right simply to change the lock on the front door and deny access other than for the purpose of removing personal property.
The factor Rosie had overlooked was that the letter of the law probably wasn’t much of an icon to a drug-addicted thief.
It was a little after one when Rosie’s phone rang. This was not unusual: she gave her home number to people she thought needed it, was quite capable of dealing with those who abused the privilege. She would rather lose sleep talking to a desperate correspondent than have his suicide splashed across the front page of the Chronicle while The Primrose Path inside was advising him to stop being so pathetic and pull himself together.
Mrs Miller was certainly desperate, so desperate she was hardly making sense. It took Rosie minutes to get a straight tale from her: that Robbie had returned, had beaten in her back door with a sledgehammer and had a knife at her throat. He was demanding to see this Primrose Holland who’d splashed his private business all across her column and told his mother it was all right to sling him out.
“I’ll call the police,” Rosie had said, already grabbing for her clothes.
“No – please – don’t do that.” As far as Rosie c
ould tell through the terror catching up her voice, Mrs Miller was not merely saying what she was told to. “Don’t worry, I’ll sort it out. He’ll calm down soon. I’m sorry I troubled you, Ms Holland. It’s just … well, putting him out of the house was one thing. Putting him in prison is another.”
“All right,” said Rosie quickly; “all right. I’ll come, and I won’t call the police. But you tell him from me: if anybody gets hurt he’s going to do hard time. And the way they get you off drugs in prison isn’t how they do it in those fancy clinics.”
She’d already dialled Matt Gosling’s number before she remembered he was out of town – not, in fact, for a dirty weekend but for a conference on the economics of small-scale publishing. Matt became a newspaper proprietor recently enough to think other people in the industry had a clearer idea of what they were doing and might share that knowledge with him. In another year he’d realise they were all doing it by guess and by God.
Her secretary, Alex Fisher, was at the same conference. Matt didn’t have a PA, and wouldn’t employ one while Alex would fill in. His first career, as a soldier, had taught him a stalker’s patience: he knew about taking the high ground and waiting for the quarry to come to him. When Rosie asked Alex about Matt she said, with just a hint of surprise in her beautifully modulated voice, that they were friends and colleagues. When she asked Matt about Alex he said she was the girl he was going to marry.
So she’d called Dan, and he – to her eternal gratitude – had put the questions on hold until he’d collected her. Then, of course, he tried to talk her out of it, but that was all right – she quite liked the idea that someone thought she was being absurdly brave.
Brick walls loomed above her. She’d brought a torch: she shook it to try to beef up the weak orange beam. She found the side gate. Come to the back door, she’d been told, it’ll be open. Knowing that it had been attacked by a junkie with a sledgehammer, Rosie could have guessed as much.