Echoes of Lies

Read Echoes of Lies Online

Authors: Jo Bannister

He'd never heard a grown man scream. Still the sound had a terrible familiarity. In a remote part of his brain, insulated from shock by shock itself, he pondered the enigma.
Despite what was happening there was time. Every second stretched as if racked, leaving space between heartbeats for philosophy. Curiously, the same time was also somehow compressed, the questions hammered at him too fast now to answer or even understand, the pain running seamless as a river, the cries wrenched from him an endless litany of anguish and despair. He had lost track of time. He wasn't sure if this had been going on for hours or days, or if he'd been born to it, spent his whole life ground between unintelligible questions and insupportable pain.
But deeper than the pain and distress, deep in the inner sanctum of his mind, part of him was puzzling how something never before experienced could resonate like a memory. The only explanation was that it came down to him with his genes.
It was a long time since human existence had been like this - a struggle against powerful and implacable forces ending in a flurry of beast and blood - but part of the brain remembered. The cognitive cortex, the intellectual overlay that made Daniel Hood a recognisable individual, was devastated by what was happening to him: throbbing with terror, untouched by comprehension, incapable of resistance, despoiled and defeated and adrift on a killing ocean. But at the core of him, deep in the old brain he had from his forefathers, he knew about dying in agony. The knowledge was instinctive: no previous experience was necessary.
Which was as well, because Daniel had never experienced anything like this. The wantonness of it was almost as shocking as the pain. One moment he'd been letting himself into his flat, the next the floor was coming up to meet him and when he woke it was here, like this - naked, blind, spread-eagle on a table, with
men he couldn't see stripping his humanity away an inch at a time.
As the pain mounted he thought they were killing him. But he didn't die. It went on and on, and still he didn't die. His screams faded to sobs, exhausted by the unrelenting brutality. Whimpering like a child he begged them to stop. They said he had to help them first. But he couldn't; so it went on. How long he had no way of judging.
But he knew, even after pain had robbed him of the capacity for rational thought, that he'd come to a place you couldn't walk away from. No one in this room was going to walk away unchanged. Daniel wasn't going to walk away at all.
First they tried threats and then they tried violence. Isolated by his blindfold, he got no warning of it; which hardly mattered since he had no way to avoid it. Blows like cudgels in his face and belly left him gasping for breath and for mercy. But he couldn't give them what they wanted, so finally it came to this. Hurting him. Hurting and hurting and
Please, not again, no more, I can't take any more, why are you doing this? I don't know where Sophie is. I don't know who Sophie is. Please stop.
But they didn't, and deep down he knew they wouldn't. That they couldn't. They'd gone too far to stop. You could beat a man and dump him by the roadside; you could break his bones and smash his knee-caps. But this … You didn't do this to someone you meant to survive. You didn't want anyone walking round - or hobbling round, or crawling - knowing you were capable of this. When they were sure, when they were finally and utterly sure that he had nothing to tell them, they would take a gun, or a knife, or an iron bar, and cut loose the knot of suffering humanity that had been Daniel Hood; and the only hope left to him now was that it would be soon.
There were other men in the room with him. One of them had never heard a man scream either, and wavered between horror and a dreadful fascination. Another last heard it twenty years before when an accident with a block and tackle tore a stevedore's hand apart.
And the third heard it all the time, was a connoisseur of men's
screams, knew what they meant. “He isn't going to tell you anything. He doesn't know anything.”
“That's absurd,” said another roughly. The oldest of the three, he was looking at a point midway between Daniel Hood and his tormentor, found it difficult to look at either of them directly. “Of course he knows. He was the look-out.”
The interrogator snapped shut the briefcase in which he carried the tools of his trade and straightened with a sigh. “You hired a professional for a job you didn't want to do yourself. Well, my professional opinion is that you got the wrong man.”
“No. Try something else.”
They were new to this business, they didn't understand. He tried to explain. “Not everyone talks. Whatever you do, whatever you throw at them, there are some people who'd rather take it than talk. They're protecting friends or family, or perhaps a principle. There are people who would die in agony for an idea. But nobody dies in agony for money. If you were right about him he'd have talked long ago. He honest-to-God doesn't know what you're on about.”
“I don't believe that.” Desperation was audible in the old man's voice. If he was wrong about this … He
couldn't
be wrong. “He watched it happen, for God's sake! He was part of it, and he can lead us to her.”
The interrogator shook his head. “If he was one of those people, who can see their bodies destroyed without saying the words that'll stop it, I'd know.”
“You can't give up. If you give up we'll lose her!”
“People who hold out for a principle do it because they're better than the man interrogating them. Stronger, more enduring, above all morally superior. That's what keeps them going. But they need you to know. Once it's too late for lies, they need you to know they could stop you with a word and they're not going to. If you really thought it might be a mistake they'd lose that. Their willingness to suffer rather than betray would never be recognised. Whatever you say, however you treat them, they know they have your respect. They know they're doing something you couldn't do.”
The third man spoke, for the first time in hours. He had to lick his lips to moisten them. “Have you … ?”
The interrogator looked at him with disdain, then at the man on the table. “Gone through that? Don't be ridiculous. I don't have any principles worth going through that for.”
“So what now?” The old man still didn't believe what he was being told, that it was over.
“Now,” said the interrogator briskly, “you put a bullet in him and you take him somewhere he won't be found for a long time. And either you give up and pay up, or you look for someone who really does have some answers.”
Polar eyes flared in the lined and weathered face. “I'm not shooting him! That's your job.”
“No,” replied the other levelly, “my job's interrogation. And it's done, and whether you like it or not I've got out of him all the information he has. I'm sorry it isn't what you were expecting, but it is the truth. Now, to protect us all, you have to finish it. If I do that as well it'll be too easy for you to panic if the police come to your door. If you kill him you'll keep your nerve because losing it would cost too much.”
For as long as two minutes the only sound in the room was of racked breathing from the table. But the interrogator wasn't leaving until this was resolved, and he wasn't going to yield. It was too important.
There was more argument, then the interrogator and the third man left together, footsteps ringing on cobbles. It wasn't a room but a stable: after this was finished they'd power-hose the walls and floor, and burn the sturdy old kitchen table, and no evidence would remain of what had been done here.
The old man was left alone with Daniel Hood. He felt no impulse of pity. After a moment he reached out a hooked finger and tore off the blindfold. Daniel blinked, dazzled by the sudden light. His eyes were pale grey, terribly bloodshot, exhausted and devoid of hope.
“You don't fool me,” grated the old man. “I know you're part of this. I know you can take me to her. I don't know why you'd rather die.”
The whispered reply was too weak for him to catch. He leaned forward. “What?”
Daniel tried again. All through the hurting, when he'd have given anything to lose consciousness, his senses had remained crystaline. Now it was over the darkness was crowding in. He struggled to make himself understood. “Why? Why me? Why
this
?”
The old man shook his head impatiently. “There's still time. I can save you. Tell me where she is.”
“Sophie,” whispered Daniel.
“Sophie.”
“Please. I can't …”
“I'll protect you. Whoever they are, I can protect you from them. Tell me how to find her. I'll look after you.”
Daniel's voice was a breath from the abyss. “I don't know who you're talking about.”
The old man struck him in the face. As if someone who'd come through so much might in the end be unmanned by the sting of a hand on his cheek.
It might only have been another sob, but the old man thought it was a chuckle. He hit him again. The ravaged face turned unresisting under his hand. Daniel Hood was finally safe from him.
A moment later tyres rumbled in the yard and the others returned. A moment after that the sound of a gunshot echoed and re-echoed between the brick walls.
Detective Inspector Jack Deacon was looking at the photographs when the front desk called. A woman to see him; claimed to know something about the Hood business.
When he put the phone down he fanned the pictures out and regarded them impassively. It was nine-thirty on Tuesday morning, he'd had twenty-four hours to come to terms with what they showed. But even as revulsion subsided, anger had grown. People had no right to treat one another like this. People who thought they could had to be found and stopped. Deacon put the photographs back in the file, speaking to them as if Daniel Hood were there in person.
“It's not over yet, lad,” he said softly. “Somebody knows what happened to you. Maybe she's at the front desk right now.”
He went downstairs to find out.
Quite close friends thought her first name was Brodie. But because this was official - so official it could end up on a charge-sheet - she'd announced herself in all her glory: Elspeth Brodie Farrell. They could call her whatever they liked, right now she had more important things to worry about. She paced the floor. Framed by a cloud of dark hair, her face was so pale it was almost luminous.
There was a chair but she couldn't sit still. Her agitation was the first thing Deacon saw when he entered the room. He noted that she was tall, aged in her early thirties, smartly dressed; certainly striking, possibly even beautiful though he wasn't an expert. He was interested in what she knew, not how she looked.
He noticed the long dark hair, curly as a gypsy's and tidied away behind a bandeau, and the brown eyes, deep-set under narrow knitted brows, but mostly he was aware of her distress. She wasn't crying, but tears would have been superfluous. Every line of her body, every movement she made, spoke of disquiet.
Deacon felt a small hope stir behind his breastbone. Something
had upset Elspeth Brodie Farrell profoundly. Maybe she did know about Daniel Hood.
He took her to his office. They might end up in the interview room, but that would mean tapes and solicitors and all the paraphernalia of impending prosecution, and he didn't know yet if that was appropriate. Maybe she was just here to help him with his inquiries. God knows, he thought, I could use some help.
He steered her to the chair facing his desk. “All right, Mrs Farrell, what's this all about?”
She knew what she had to say. Still it took her a moment to get it out. He saw dread holding her like a net. “I think I've been part of a conspiracy to murder.”
The policeman felt one eyebrow climbing, scarcely managed to stop it before it disappeared into his hairline. He peered at her face, but nothing he saw there suggested it was a joke. “Don't you know?”
She nodded. “Yes, I'm afraid I do.
Now
- I didn't until this morning. Until I saw this.”
She had a copy of the morning paper. She put it on the table and removed her hand quickly, as if it might burn.
Deacon had been studying pictures of this man for twenty-four hours, but none of them looked like this. They were forensic photographs, documenting the damage. Right now Jack Deacon knew the body of Daniel Hood better than his mother did. Right now Daniel Hood's mother wouldn't recognise him.
This was not a forensic photograph but a snapshot. When he first saw it in the paper Deacon thought it had been taken by a friend. It seemed to offer a peephole into a moment's intimacy: Hood was laughing, glasses pushed up so he could wipe his eye on his wrist, and the wind had made silken tangles of his fair hair.
But when he checked with the paper Deacon learned that the photograph had been taken by a thirteen-year-old with a throw-away camera during a school outing. Hood had taken his class up onto the Firestone Cliffs to teach them the principles of trigonometry. For some reason that troubled the policeman. He'd got some comfort from thinking that, before his life deteriorated so abruptly, Hood had
been enjoying the days of his youth with someone who made him laugh like that. He was sorry when it turned out to be only one of his pupils; as if Hood had been robbed of his past as well as his future.
So far as Deacon could establish there was no significant other, no close friends. He'd been in Dimmock less than a year. Everyone who knew him agreed that Hood was a pleasant young man, likeable and easy to talk to, but no one pretended to know him well. His principal said he was a good teacher. The general concensus was shock at what had happened to him.
He was twenty-six. But he'd been one of those people on whom time sat lightly: the photograph made him look about eighteen. When he was genuinely eighteen he'd have had trouble getting served in pubs; as late as last week he could have made use of student discounts. This week, though, the years that had been turning a blind eye suddenly remembered and dropped on him from a great height. When Daniel Hood was found in a rubbish skip with a bullet in his chest and the marks of abuse all over his body, he looked like an old man.
“Do you know him?” asked Deacon.
“No. Well - yes. Sort of.” Brodie swallowed, tried again. “We've never met. But the moment I saw that picture I recognised both the name and the face.”
Deacon waited a moment but she was going to need prompting. “How?”
She took a deep, shaky breath. “Thursday. That's when it began; at least, my part in it. On Thursday afternoon a woman came to my office.”
 
 
It wasn't a big office. There was room for a desk, a couple of filing cabinets and a small sofa. She liked the sofa, it put clients at their ease. Also, it took up less space than two chairs, and if she ever finished unpacking space was going to be a problem. There was no reception desk and no waiting room, but that was all right because
she couldn't afford a secretary and never got clients more than one at a time.
The little office in Shack Lane, a hundred metres from Dimmock's shingle shore, had two major advantages. It was cheap and it was on the ground floor. The card in her window could be read by those heading for the antiques shops, craft shops and second-hand book emporia packed into The Lanes as if with a shoe-horn, and among the hundreds who passed were a handful who were indeed looking for something.
That was what she'd called the business:
Looking For Something?
Her name was there too, on a classy slate shingle. But Brodie Farrell could be anything: a solicitor, an architect, an estate agent, even a discreet hooker.
Looking For Something?
both caught the eye and hinted at the nature of the service she offered.
People called in on spec; or they noted her number and phoned later. Invariably they began with the words: “Have I got this right - you find things?”
 
 
“What kind of things?” asked Jack Deacon.
Brodie lifted one shoulder in a distracted shrug. “Anything one person needs enough to pay another to find. I used to work in a solicitor's office” - she wondered about elaborating, decided against - “and half my time was spent looking for things. Legal searches, property conveyancing; researching case law for relevant judgements; looking for disappearing clients and witnesses who really didn't want to testify. I got pretty good at it. The internet added a whole new dimension: there's a world of information out there for someone who knows how to look.”
“You can make a living like that?”
Brodie sniffed. “If I can't I've wasted good money on an office.”
“What sort of things do people pay you to find?”
She was growing impatient. This wasn't what she was here to talk about. She was a Londoner, the idea of a finding agency wasn't as bizarre there as it seemed to be here on the south coast. “China.
People break bits of Grandma's tea-set: they can't go into a shop and buy some more, they ask me to find replacements. Missing pairs. A pair of anything is worth more than twice as much as one: people give me photos of what they've got and ask me to find another. Houses. They know what they want, they aren't getting anywhere with the estate agents, they ask me to help. Locations for television and film work. Costumes and period cars for same; or for weddings or parties. Horses. People sell them, then a couple of years later they wish they hadn't but they've gone through too many hands and they can't trace them. Books. An out-of-print favourite that got lost: can I find another? Paintings. Great Aunt Martha was once sketched by Modigliani …”
“I see,” said Deacon before she could cite any more examples. “And five days ago a woman came to you - looking for what?”
Brodie glanced down at the newspaper and quickly away again. “Looking for him.”
 
 
The woman in red tapped on her door and said, “Have I got this right - you find things?”
Brodie nodded. She'd been tidying up: she hid a feather duster behind her back.
“People? Could you find him?”
Brodie had traced missing persons often enough for the legal profession. But she wanted more information before she would do it for someone who came in off the street. “What can you tell me about him?”
The woman snorted. “I can tell you he's a liar! The name I knew him by, the address where he claimed to live, were both invented. He's a con-man, and he's made off with fifteen thousand quid of mine. I don't like being made a fool of, Mrs Farrell.”
“Surely it's a police matter?”
The woman looked at her sidelong. “I suppose it is, strictly speaking. He got the money under false pretences: that's theft or fraud or something. But …”
Brodie prided herself on her ability to read between the lines. “But you'd rather avoid a court case.”
The woman nodded. “I don't need to see him in prison. I want my money back, and I'd like to give him a piece of my mind, but I can't afford to make a big issue of it.” She glanced down at the gold ring on her left hand.
On the whole people were easier to find than first editions. Brodie reminded herself that she didn't have to get involved in any unpleasantness: all the woman wanted was a name and address. “Twenty percent.”
“What?” As well as red, the woman wore rather a lot of make-up, and thought it made her look younger than her forty-odd years.
“That's what I charge. If I succeed; if I don't all it'll cost you is two hundred pounds. For that I'll start the search: if I don't think I can get anywhere I'll let you know and there won't be anything more to pay. If I think I can find him I'll continue at my own risk. If I succeed you'll owe me three thousand pounds less the start-up fee.”
“Three thousand pounds is a lot of money,” the woman said doubtfully.
Brodie nodded. “Twelve thousand is a lot more. That's what I may be able to save you.”
She thought about it but not for long. She took money out of her handbag, counted out two hundred pounds.
Brodie blinked. “A cheque would do.”
The woman shook her head crisply. “I don't want my husband to know about this.” So it wasn't just her money the man in the photograph had taken.
Brodie studied it. It was a terrible likeness. “Did you take this?”
The woman shook her head. “He had it in his wallet. He said it was for his mother but I asked him to give it me instead.” She didn't blush: she looked up, defiantly.
“It's not very clear,” said Brodie, sticking diplomatically to business. “Do you have any other pictures?”
The woman shook her head. “He hated cameras. Now, of course, I understand why. I think he had that grainy little thing specifically to
fob me off with. He must have thought it would be no help to anyone wanting to trace him. Was he right?”
Brodie sucked on her teeth. “It certainly makes it harder. On the other hand, a photograph's usually better at confirming someone's identity than finding that person anyway. Tell me what you know about him.”
“I know his name isn't Charles Merrick and he doesn't have contacts in the bloodstock industry. Weatherby's had never heard of him, nor had any of the big sales. I think now he wouldn't know a Dubai Cup prospect from a dray-horse, but that was the story - that he was putting together a syndicate to buy an undervalued two-year-old.”
“You know something about horse-racing?”
The woman scowled. “Not enough, obviously. He was plausible, I'll give him that. He'd done his homework. He seemed absolutely genuine. We spent two days together, planning the campaign. Then he went off to buy the colt, and I never heard from him again.”
“You called at his address?”
“A dog-food factory on the Brighton Road.”
“The money you gave him was cash too?”
“For the same reason.”
Brodie looked again at the photograph.
The one thing all con-men have in common is that they look respectable. They don't wear kipper ties and pushed-back hats, they look decent and honest and trustworthy. Oh yes: and charming. Most people wouldn't lend money to even a respectable stranger. To succeed, the con-man has to circumvent his target's natural suspicions, charm his way under her guard.

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