Liars All

by Jo Bannister

  He headed not for the shore but for Chiffney Road. Daniel was surprised. ‘Why Brodie’s?’

  Deacon scowled. ‘Because she said so.’

  ‘Ah.’ There seemed nothing else to say.

  ‘Did you see the car before it hit you?’

  ‘I didn’t even see it after it hit me.’

  ‘So you don’t know if there was one man in it, or two, or half a rugby team.’

  ‘If Jane hadn’t seen it I wouldn’t have been sure it was a car.’

  Deacon sniffed. ‘Some witness you are. OK. You walked up to River Drive?’ Daniel nodded. ‘Were you followed?’

  Behind the crazed lens of his second-best spectacles Daniel’s eyes were astonished. ‘Who’d follow me?’

  ‘Duh?’ sneered Deacon. ‘People who wanted to smear you along a wall? They followed you because they wanted to know if you’d taken their friendly warning to heart. If you had – if you were taking Mrs Campbell-Wheeler another bit of that pink glass – they’d have let you get on with it and you’d never have known they were there. But you went to Mrs Sanger’s and talked to Jane Moss. That’s why they hit you.’

  ‘Because of the necklace.’ Daniel was confused. ‘But they must know I’m never going to find it. So why do they care if I talk to Jane? What do they think she might tell me?’

  ‘Somebody’s very nervous about this whole business,’ said Deacon, lips pursed. ‘Nine months after the event, with Carson doing his time in silence, anyone who might have been implicated should have drawn a line under the whole business. But someone’s still anxious enough to keep tabs on what’s happening. And when he learnt that you – not even me,’ he added with unconscious hubris, ‘but you – were sniffing around, instead of giving a shrug and getting on with his day he thought he had to stop you. And I have to ask myself why? What danger could you possibly pose to a man like that?’

  ‘A man like what?’

  It was a good question. ‘Well, he’s not the blagger – we know who that was. Even if Carson had a partner we never heard of, he’d have been in the same league. Small-time. Vicious, but essentially small-time. This business of watching you, putting the frighteners on you, trying to distract you with a few broken bones – that smells… bigger. Like someone with more clout.’

  ‘Broken bones,’ echoed Daniel weakly. ‘They weren’t trying to kill me then?’

  Deacon shook his head. ‘You’d be dead if they were, or at least in ICU. This was like the thing at the netting shed, only more so. Carson was willing to kill people in order to line his pocket. This guy’s more worried about protecting himself. But he’d rather not kill you in the process.’

  ‘That’s…reassuring,’ murmured Daniel.

  ‘Don’t get smug,’ warned Deacon. ‘If you push him, he’ll push back. He wouldn’t have started this if he wasn’t prepared to finish it.’

  ‘I’m not pushing anyone,’ protested Daniel. ‘I don’t know who to push. I’m not sure I’d know how to. Jack… if he’s feeling so vulnerable that my bumbling about is making him paranoid, he’s in this up to his eyebrows. And he knows there’s a trail linking him to Carson and the necklace, and that if you get wind of it you’ll follow it all the way to his door.’

  The car had come to a standstill. Deacon was staring at him as if he was talking in equations. But though his first instinct was always to slap Daniel down, the detective in him – and Deacon was nearly all detective – was already racing ahead. He might not like being beaten to an inference by a teacher of mathematics, but he was too good a policeman to ignore it out of pique. He knew that, along with the other traits that drove him mad – the quiet obstinacy, the self-righteousness, the fundamentalist approach to the truth – Daniel possessed an incisive intellect. He was the original class swot; and though nobody likes a know-all it’s just plain stupid to ignore what he has to say.

  All the evidence had pointed to Robert Carson as a lone gunman. His brief had told the court he was acting alone – that he’d hung around The Cavalier on spec, picked a likely target and been startled to find himself in possession of some valuable bits of jewellery. But if that was true, who was so worried about Daniel Hood’s Boy’s Own investigations? It was beginning to look as if, after all, someone had been standing on the grassy knoll.

  He was still staring speechlessly at Daniel when Brodie tapped red talons peremptorily on the window. ‘What are you waiting for – a kiss goodnight? Come inside. I want to talk to you.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Deacon declined her offer. ‘I need to get back. There’s something I have to do.’

  Brodie didn’t argue. The invitation hadn’t been aimed at him. And it hadn’t actually been an invitation.

  All the same, the sight of Daniel with mud on his clothes jolted her. She installed him on the living room sofa and surveyed him critically. ‘Are you all right?’

  He nodded, a shade gingerly. ‘Jack reckons it was mostly meant to scare me.’

  ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘Who?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘That’s the mystery. It’s beginning to look as if someone was pulling Carson’s strings all along.’ Daniel eased his bruised bones against the softness of the cushions. ‘Was that what you wanted to talk about? I know I’m not making much progress. But I’m not ready to give up just yet.’

  For once she wasn’t thinking about the accounts. ‘Someone hit you with a car because you went to see Jane Moss. What are they going to do when they realise even that hasn’t put you off?’

  Even when he was being stubborn, Daniel wasn’t stupid. He knew he was in danger, and that not knowing quite why made it difficult to protect himself. But like a stubborn horse, the harder he was pushed, the more he dug his heels in. ‘I’ll be more careful. And I think Jack’s got interested in what’s going on. When whoever’s doing this finds out, the last thing he’ll be worrying about is me.’

  He had a point. ‘All the same, you have to remember this is a business,’ said Brodie, ‘not a crusade. People pay us to find things. Nobody pays us enough to risk our necks.’

  Which was a bit rich, coming from her. ‘You’ve risked yours often enough.’

  She scowled. ‘Not intentionally. I mean it, Daniel. We can’t afford to get emotionally involved. When it starts looking it could cost us more than we’re going to earn, we walk away.’

  ‘I’m not emotionally involved,’ he said firmly. Then, with just a little doubt, ‘At least, I don’t think so. But I don’t want to walk away if I can help these people. Not just the client – Jane Moss is desperately in need of some kind of closure too. She’s so angry… Well, of course she is, she’s been terribly hurt. She tries not to let it show. She won’t let people help her. But she needs to let go of the anger. I think I can help her find a way. I think, at some point, she might let me.’

  Brodie’s lips sketched a tiny smile. ‘You like her.’

  ‘I admire her,’ Daniel said, choosing his words carefully. ‘She’s been through hell and come out the other side, and though I didn’t know her before I bet she’s still pretty much who she always was. It hasn’t broken her.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘How could you not admire someone who’s been through all that and emerged essentially intact?’

  Brodie nodded agreement. ‘And you like her.’

  ‘She crawled on her belly to help me when she thought I might need it.’

  ‘And you like her.’ Brodie chuckled. ‘Don’t bother denying it. It might be unprofessional but that’s not why I wanted to see you.’

  ‘No?’ His muddy cheek paled. ‘Is it Jonathan? Has something happened?’

  ‘No,’ she said quickly, reassuringly. ‘Or rather yes, but not a bad thing.’

  They went into the kitchen. Difficult things, important things, they always discussed at the old deal table rather than in the comfort of the living room. Daniel took the mug he was offered, noting how it had stewed as she’d heated and reheated the coffee while she waited
. ‘Tell me.’

  So she told him. About Hester Dale and how they met in the hospital chapel. About faith and the strength some people drew from it in adversity. About Hester’s kindness, and how she wanted to use the strength of her faith to try to help Jonathan.

  Daniel listened in silence; more than that, in stillness. Every word grated on his conscience. It wasn’t merely nonsense to him – it was offensive nonsense. The same nonsense that made people fear, despise, hate and finally kill other people exactly like them except for the shape of the symbol they worshipped under. It was the same nonsense that made people who would resist any other form of oppression set about oppressing themselves. It was the ultimate get-out clause, that sanctioned anything, however terrible – even better than I was following orders. A man might burn another man because his superiors commanded it, but only belief in a god could make him sing as he did it.

  Yet he understood how watching her child sicken beyond the aid of medicine would make Brodie look for miracles. Try anything that might offer any hope, however remote, of halting the decline. He’d understood when she trailed Jonathan across continents in pursuit of a solution. As time went on and he saw what the quest was taking out of both the baby and his mother, Daniel had stopped thinking it was the right thing to do, but he hadn’t said as much to Brodie because it was her decision to make and hers to live with.

  He still felt that way. The very idea of faith healing – intercession, remote prayer, whatever snake-oil name you cared to give it – might light a brimstone fire under his temper and make this gentle man want to bang heads together. But that was his creed: much as he might want to, he hadn’t the right to impose it on others. Not even Brodie. Perhaps especially not Brodie, and especially not now. So he listened; and the stillness was that of someone using half the strength of his body to stop the other half throwing things.

  He waited until he thought she’d finished. Then he spent a little longer working out what he wanted to say. Finally, quietly, he responded. ‘You don’t need my approval to do anything you think might help Jonathan. Not for a surgical procedure, not for a medical treatment, not for this. If it’s my opinion you want, you can have it. But I’m pretty sure you know what it is already.’

  She was nodding, almost nervously. Almost as if there was something more. ‘I know. To you this seems like primitive superstition. You’re a scientist, you want proof. You want a hypothesis that can be tested. Faith has no appeal for you. You don’t want to put your trust in anything you don’t know to be true.

  ‘But Daniel, what if you’re wrong? What if there is something more? What if there’s a power – don’t call it God if you don’t want to – operating above the laws of science? What if enough people believing in something strongly enough for long enough can make it real? Couldn’t that mean there’s a way of helping Jonathan when even the best doctors and surgeons can’t? I know, there’s no proof. But absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.’

  ‘On that basis,’ murmured Daniel, ‘you might as well trust to advanced aliens beaming Jonathan up to their spaceship to fix him there. We don’t know there aren’t people cleverer than us jetting round the galaxy. There seems every chance that there are. We’re starting to find planets capable of sustaining our kind of life – it’s reasonable to suppose some of them may be older than ours, their civilisations more advanced. That strikes you as fanciful. But an invisible, intangible, undetectable but still omnipotent God doesn’t?’

  ‘People have believed for generations,’ Brodie reminded him. ‘Strongly enough to die for their beliefs.’

  ‘They died from measles, septicaemia, bad water and childbed fever as well,’ said Daniel promptly. ‘Mostly, as cultures progress, they learn to manage their affairs better and stop dying unnecessarily. A thousand years ago, when there was so much about the world that people didn’t understand, maybe there was an excuse for believing in God as an explanation for events that were beyond their comprehension.

  ‘But we are no longer those people. We’ve grown, and we’ve learnt. We can look into the depths of the galaxy where the stars are not only impossibly far away, they’re also impossibly old. We can look into the core of living material and see the moment at which conception takes place. But wherever we look, however powerful our lenses, we never find the fingerprint of deity. Certainly we find new mysteries – but if we can’t solve them, our children will. Or their children will. If there was something like a god in the universe, don’t you think we’d have found some proof by now?’

  Brodie was still nodding anxiously, nervously. ‘You’re probably right. Daniel, I admit it – you’re probably right. It’s probably just a primordial instinct that’s somehow survived the Age of Reason the way our appendixes survived evolution. But what if you’re wrong? What if there is a power, and it can be reached? What if it could help Jonathan, and we didn’t ask it to?’

  Daniel ran distracted fingers through his yellow hair. ‘I don’t want to persuade you of anything. If this makes sense to you – if you think it might help – do it. If Jonathan starts getting better, we aren’t going to know or even care why. We can send flowers to Hester Dale, his doctors, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dalai Lama, and I’ll pay for them. I don’t need to believe. Do what you think is best. You know I’m behind you.’

  ‘Are you?’ Brodie asked, her head tilted to one side like a troubled bird’s. ‘Really?’

  He didn’t understand. ‘Of course. I always have been. I always will be.’

  ‘Then there’s something more I have to ask of you.’

  ‘Anything.’ When he said it, he thought he meant it. Then, in her face before she got the words out, he saw what she was about to say. The demand she was about to make of him. The pit fell out of his stomach. He felt the blood drain from his face. ‘Brodie…’

  ‘I have to,’ she said, dogged with despair. She knew exactly what she was asking of him. She had before she started. ‘It’s part of it. There have been studies – they keep a record of results. Sometimes the statistics seem pretty significant. Hester said her group was convinced that involving those nearest to the patient made a difference to the outcome. That the group praying could improve someone’s chances by maybe ten per cent – but if family and friends were praying as well, that figure could jump to fifteen per cent. I know, fifteen per cent is still only fifteen per cent. But it’s so much more than nothing. This is the only chance he has left, Daniel. You can’t refuse.’

  There were statistics on that too. In the four years they’d known one another, both of them would have struggled to remember a time he’d refused her anything. Brodie was counting on it. She couldn’t believe he’d choose now to start.

  Daniel had risked his life for her. He’d risked his liberty, his future, his sanity. She’d never asked him for his soul before.

  He didn’t think she understood that. And if after four years she still didn’t, he doubted he could find the words to explain. He said, gruff and a little breathless, ‘Brodie – what possible good could the prayers of an unbeliever do? Even if there was something in it, which I know and I think you know there isn’t. I understand that right now even the long shots seem worth taking, if only so that you know you’ve tried everything. If it’ll do even that much good, do it. But don’t ask me to join in. It would be a mockery. Of everything I believe in, and everything Hester Dale believes in.’

  ‘But what harm can it do?’ demanded Brodie, caught between anger and tears. ‘So it’s a mockery. So it’ll make you feel stupid. So what? Are your beliefs that important? This is my child’s life we’re talking about! I don’t care if it makes you feel like an idiot. Do it anyway.’

  He didn’t think she knew how much she was hurting him. But if she had known, he was pretty sure she’d have gone on hurting him if it meant getting what she wanted. All mothers are single-minded when it comes to their children. Brodie Farrell could be single-minded about the precise colour of paint she wanted on her front door. She didn’
t compromise. If she was going to start compromising, it wouldn’t be over something that mattered as much as this.

  And in a way he could see that she was right. Compared with Jonathan’s well-being, his conscience was of no importance. If giving the child a kidney would have saved him Daniel would have done it. The difference wasn’t that what she was proposing seemed unlikely to work. Many medical procedures are begun more in hope than expectation. The difference was that the horns of this particular dilemma were the two principles he’d cherished, to exactly the same degree, all his adult life.

  He believed in what he could see, or experience, or logically infer, or trust to the genius of better brains than his. He didn’t buy a can of beans without knowing where they came from, who made them, what they put in them and how the price compared with beans canned by other manufacturers. He wanted information, not dogma. He took nothing on faith.

  And he told the truth. He didn’t lie, even when the cost of honesty was greater than the value of what it was protecting. The truth itself was his holy grail.

  To do as Brodie asked would mean abandoning one of those principles. Either persuading himself that the scientific rigour he applied to every other aspect of his life should be put aside on this one occasion, or going through the motions with his fingers crossed behind his back in a pantomime of belief.

  For Brodie, for Jonathan, he could have bent to the need if either of those principles had meant a little less to him. She wasn’t asking him to do something wicked. What he was being asked to believe was believed in by millions of people all over the world; many of them seemed to suffer no obvious harm and most insisted it was good for them. Or he could tell a little white lie. Recite the words in the sure and certain knowledge that they meant nothing because there was nothing out there to pray to. The only difference between his prayers and Hester Dale’s would be that Daniel knew that. The snowiest of white lies, that hurt no one and made someone close to him feel a little better.