The man who wasn't Charles Merrick was a lot younger than the woman in red. She'd found his attentions flattering. And though he wasn't particularly good-looking he had that soft-focus boyishness that some middle-aged women find hard to resist. Oh yes, he'd seen her coming, all right.
“Can you tell me anything that might help me find him?”
“Not much. If I'd known where to start I'd have gone after him myself.”
“Where did you meet?”
“Up on the cliffs. You're supposed to be able to see the French coast: I'd taken my binoculars to give it a try. He asked to borrow them; from glasses he steered the conversation onto racing; you can guess the rest.”
“When was this?”
“Sunday morning. He was clever, I'll give him that. He didn't just throw the bait at me. He was rather diffident: I had to squeeze it out of him. At least, I thought that's what was happening. When pressed he said he wondered if I might be interested in a sporting proposition.”
She chuckled, without much humour. “By then I'd have been interested in a collection of dirty postcards if it meant seeing him again. He told me about the horse. He said thirty thousand pounds - no, guineas, he said - was a steal, but he couldn't find it all himself. We met again the next day, talked about it over lunch; and on Tuesday he took me to Newmarket to watch the thing on the gallops.”
“He introduced you to the trainer?”
The woman shook her head. “No, we watched from the road. He said he didn't want to push the price up by showing an interest.
Now,
of course, I realise he didn't
know
the trainer - he just spotted a likely looking prospect on the gallops and pointed me at it.
“I fell for it like a fool. Fifteen thousand quid? - I'd have mortgaged my soul if he'd asked me to.
“He set off with the money yesterday morning, promised to call me within a couple of hours. He didn't. When I tried to call him there was no answer. I made some calls but nobody knew him. This morning when he still hadn't phoned I went to what was supposed to be his home address. Right enough, they knew about racehorses - they were canning slow ones. So I went to the police station.” She fell silent.
It didn't take a leap of intuition. “But you didn't go inside.”
“I sat in my car for an hour; then I came here. I realised if they found him it would eventually become public knowledge and my husband would find out. I remembered seeing this place. I thought,
if I hired you I'd have more control of the situation. I might get my money back without it costing me my marriage.”
Brodie said, “If you decide to go ahead, I'll do what you want me to do and stop when you want me to stop; and whether or not I find him, no one'll ever hear about it from me.”
“That's what I need.”
Brodie nodded. “Did he tell you anything about his background? Where he went to school, where his family come from? People he'd worked for, places he knew?”
“Nothing! I see
now
how evasive he was being. But he said the deal had to be put together quickly and quietly or somebody'd get in ahead of us, and I believed him.”
“Of course you did,” said Brodie kindly. “That's how he makes his living - by making lies sound like the truth. He'll have taken a lot of intelligent people for a ride before he tried it with you. But maybe this time he picked the wrong person.”
“I do hope so,” said the woman fervently. “What do you think - is there a chance?”
“There's always a chance,” Brodie said firmly. “Give me a day or two to look into it and I'll be able to say how good a chance.”
“Quicker is better. I'd like that money back in my account before my husband misses it.”
It might have been impossible. There were people who came to Brodie with quests so plainly futile she wouldn't take their money. But there was something in the photograph that just might help. She didn't want to draw attention to it: too much honesty could cost her three thousand pounds. She'd get the magnifying glass out after the client had left.
She lifted a pen. “I'll need your name and address.”
The woman's eyes flared. “Is that necessary? I'll be paying cash.”
“I'm sorry, it is necessary. But don't worry, I really will treat the matter with absolute confidence.”
“Oh, very well.
Mrs” -
she emphasised the word just slightly - “Selma Doyle, 57 River Drive, Dimmock.”
“You won't want me calling you,” said Brodie. “Call me here tomorrow afternoon. I should be able to tell you then if I can help.”
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“I take it you could,” said Jack Deacon.
“Oh yes,” said Brodie Farrell bitterly. “Helpful is my middle name.”
“How? With just a bad photograph?”
“I was right,” said Brodie, “there was something else in the picture. When I put it under a magnifying glass I could see what it was.”
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It was a telescope. Quite a big telescope: as tall as the man, with an aperture as broad as his fist.
Brodie faxed a copy of the photograph to the Astronomical Association in London. Though it was a bad picture to start with and would be worse by the time they saw it, they might still be able to identify the subject.
And so they did. “Your photograph shows a 100-millimetre skeleton reflector of Newtonian design, apparently home-made. Suggests the owner is a serious amateur. This is about the largest telescope that would be conveniently portable: anything bigger would be on a permanent mounting.”
So the man she sought, the man who wasn't Charles Merrick, was serious about astronomy. He would be known in places where star-gazers met.
The “Yearbook of Astronomy” alerted her to three forthcoming meetings within a thirty mile radius of Dimmock. Brodie took the grainy picture along to the first, a lecture in Eastbourne that evening.
There she learned his name. Daniel Hood wasn't present but people who recognised him were. Or rather, people who recognised the telescope. Faces seemed to be just so much wallpaper to them, but a 100-mm skeleton Newtonian reflector, well, you don't see one of those every day.
“Where would I find him?” she asked.
They weren't sure. They only ever saw him at gatherings like this. They supposed he had a home and a job somewhere, but those were
things that took place in the daylight and astronomers mostly come out at night.
Armed now with a name, she trawled the membership lists of astronomical societies across southern England until she found him. And where she found him was only quarter of a mile from where she was sitting: a flat converted from a netting loft on Dimmock's shingle shore.
She was less than honest with the club secretary. She claimed they were cousins, she'd promised to look him up when she moved to the area only she'd lost his address. “What does he look like? I'd hate to fling myself at the wrong Daniel Hood.”
The secretary thought for a moment. “Mid twenties, small, fair. Terrible eyesight, which is a major problem to an astronomer. You need your glasses to find what you want to observe, then you take them off to use the eyepiece. But the finderscope isn't lined up, so you put them back on to adjust it. Then you take them off to look through the telescope again. And it's dark, you see, so if you put them down you have to remember where ⦔
“Oh yes,” said Brodie with certainty, “that's cousin Dan.” The bottle-bottom glasses had been clear even on that photograph.
A scant twenty-four hours had passed. When Mrs Doyle phoned immediately after lunch Brodie was able to pass on the good news; and on receipt of the fee the name and address of the man who cheated her. And she thought that was the end of it.
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“Then this morning,” Brodie said, and both her voice and the hand she pointed shook, “I saw that.”
Her first desperate thought was that it was a coincidence. But even then she didn't believe it. She grabbed the phonebook; the Doyle family weren't listed so she hurried out to her car. But the River Drive houses ended at number 56.
“Then I knew,” she whispered. “I don't know how much of what she told me was true - maybe none of it. But she wanted him for something, and she used me to find him. I never suspected! I swear
to you, I never guessed she meant to do anything like - like ⦔ She hadn't the words. She folded in her chair, defeated.
The telephone rang. Detective Inspector Deacon answered it. The other party did most of the talking; Deacon said “Yes” and “I see” a couple of times, and once he said, “Right.” Then he put the phone down and turned his attention once more to Brodie Farrell.
“Well now,” he said, and waited for her eyes to come up before going on. “Is there anything else you can tell me? About this Mrs Doyle, for instance.”
“I met her twice, for perhaps thirty minutes in total. I have a good picture of her in my mind. If I could work with the E-fit people ⦠?”
“Yes, I'll organise that once you and me are finished. I'll also want a statement from you. But let's be sure, first, that we've covered everything you'll want to put in it.”
She knew what he was suggesting: that she'd been less than frank. “Inspector, if I knew any more - about Selma Doyle, about any of it - I would tell you. I've nothing to hide. I'm ashamed of my stupidity, appalled by what I've been a party to, but I never guessed how the information I gathered would be used. I don't think I've committed an offence, although right now that isn't much comfort. What happened to Daniel Hood would have been impossible without my help. I don't know if he did what the woman calling herself Selma Doyle said he'd done; I'm not sure it matters. Nothing he did could have justified what was done to him. I'm here to help find the people responsible.”
“People?”
“The only one I had any dealings with was Mrs Doyle,” said Brodie. “But Inspector, surely to God you don't think that a middle-aged woman who'd lost her money and her dignity to a toyboy would hit back like this? Torture him, shoot him and dump him in a skip?”
“Hell hath no fury ⦔ murmured Deacon.
“Perhaps not, but she was a plump forty-year-old woman, not Arnold Schwartzenegger. She couldn't have lifted a man's body into a skip. She must have had help.”
“Yours, for starters.”
Tears started to Brodie Farrell's eyes. She wanted to throw the
words back in his face, but they were true. She dipped her head. “I didn't know what I was helping her to do.”
“You really thought she was just going to give him a piece of her mind? And that, as a result of that, he'd return her money?”
“I suppose so. I didn't give it that much thought. I did what I was paid for, it was up to her how she used the information.” She heard how that sounded and flushed. “I never expected her to use it like that!”
Deacon wasn't sure what to make of her story. There were things he didn't understand, things he'd want clarified. But he didn't have the sense that he was talking to a cold-blooded killer, and if she wasn't that then perhaps her account was true.
He stood abruptly. “Mrs Farrell, will you come with me, please.”
She looked up, took a deep breath. “If you're going to charge me I'll want to call my solicitor.” Her eyes were full of misgivings, but still the threat of prosecution didn't seem to disturb her as much as knowing what she'd contributed to.
“I'm not charging you; not yet. I want you to come to the hospital with me. There's something I want to show you.”
She had no idea what to expect. But she was familiar enough with Dimmock General Hospital to know that the mortuary was in the basement. Detective Inspector Deacon parked at an unmarked rear entrance and led her upstairs. At least she was to be spared the ultimate humiliation of seeing what her unthinking cleverness had led to. All the way over here she'd been afraid he wanted to show her the body.
He knew where he was going, twisted and turned without hesitation until a shut door blocked their way. A policeman sitting in the corridor rose to his feet. “Sir?”
“I'm letting Mrs Farrell in on our little secret,” said Deacon heavily. One hand pushed the door open while the other, firm in the small of her back, pressed Brodie inside.
Inside were all the trappings of intensive care but only one bed and one nurse who looked up at the sound of the door. She recognised Deacon and nodded a greeting.
“Any change?” he asked.
“Not a lot.”
“That's good? Bad?”
She shook her head. “I'm sorry, Inspector, I can't tell you anything more than the doctors already have.”
The bed was occupied but Brodie could see almost nothing of the patient. High-tech medical equipment clustered around his head like old women gossiping about what had put him there. Tubes ran up his nose, down his throat and into his veins, and his eyelids were taped shut. On a dark screen a blue line described a series of peaks and valleys. A monitor ticked off every heartbeat with audible relief.
Heartbeats. Shallow, irregular, the sort of pulse to make an insurance assessor blanche, but heartbeats for all that.
Brodie Farrell turned to DI Deacon with fury in her eyes. “You animal!” she cried. “He's alive! He's alive, and you didn't tell me.”
Jack Deacon had been called worse with less reason. He bore her
anger stoicly. “Mrs Farrell, you're only here because I don't think you're responsible for this. If I did I'd have let you go on believing that the paper got it right and Daniel Hood died of his injuries.
“That wasn't careless reporting, it's what I told them. There'll be hell to pay but I don't care. I don't want whoever did this to know he's still alive. If they think he's dead he's safe, and maybe he'll get well enough to tell me who they were and what it was all about. If they knew he was alive they'd come back. They were professionals; the evidence is written all over him, and I don't want my officers risking their lives against professional killers if there's an alternative.”
Brodie hardly knew what to think or how to feel. She thought she'd helped strangers to murder a man she'd never even met, for money. She hadn't guessed that was what she was doing, but for the last two hours it was what she believed she had done. Now it seemed no one had actually died; at least not yet.
But why had they come here? Why was Detective Inspector Deacon taking such a gamble? “Inspector,” she managed, “what do you want from me?”
“What we talked about: a statement and an E-fit.”
“We can't do either of them here. What am I doing
here
? What is it you want me to see?”
Deacon debated with himself for a moment. What he was contemplating wasn't nice but it might be helpful. It was reason enough. He stepped over to the bed and, before Brodie could anticipate what he intended or the nurse protest, threw back the sheet. “This.”
If he'd expected her to faint he was disappointed. But she did, finally, cry. She knew Daniel Hood had been tortured before he was shot; but
The Dimmock Sentinel
was a family newspaper and hadn't wallowed in the gory details. So Brodie wasn't ready for what Deacon wanted her to see: a young man's body so pock-marked with burns that his doctors had had trouble finding enough undamaged skin to tape their monitors to.
There wasn't a critical injury among them: the treatment he'd received, which seemed to consist in part of wrapping him in clingfilm, was already bearing dividends. By the time the bullet-wound
healed the lesions spreading like an obscene rash across his body would be shrunk to mere fingerprints of shiny pink skin. But there were so many of them. They represented hours and hours of agony.
The tears streamed down Brodie's cheeks. So this was what it looked when one person really wanted to know what another really didn't want to tell. The urge to turn away was strong, but she owed him better than that. Grief welled under her breastbone, and she cried silently for the horror and the hurt.
Jack Deacon had meant to shock her: it was why he'd brought her here. He hoped that when he confronted her with what she'd done she'd go weak at the knees, slump on his shoulder and tell him everything, even the bits it had seemed politic to forget. But she didn' t even look away. After a minute Deacon began to feel himself diminished by her courage. He took out his handkerchief, offered it gruffly. “Here.”
Brodie looked at him, her eyes enormous. “
Why
?”
“I'm still hoping you can tell me that.”
“And you thought this would
help
? You thought, unless I saw this I wouldn't try hard enough?”
“I had to impress on you how serious it is.” Even to Deacon it sounded like an apology. “It isn't just his life at stake, it's yours too. The people who did this know who you are. And you're the only link between them and him.
“So far as I can make out, they took him the same afternoon you gave them his name and address. No one saw him between leaving school at quarter to five on Friday and turning up in a builders' skip at eight-fifteen on Monday morning. The doctors reckon he was there most of the night, so these people had him about forty-eight hours. They wanted something from him - wanted it badly. But they didn't get it.”
“How do you know?” Brodie's voice was a whisper.
Deacon shrugged. “Look what they did to him. If he could have stopped it he would have done. He couldn't. But it was two days before they'd accept that. They must have really wanted what they thought he could give them. They only shot him when all hope was gone.
“The man interrogating him was a professional, but the man who shot him wasn't. A pro would have shot him in the head, and the chances of the bullet missing anything vital would have been just about zero. Also, a pro would have made sure he was dead. But they shot him in the chest, didn't even notice that the bullet had travelled along the ribcage and out through his armpit - there was a lot of blood and they thought that was what mattered. They dumped him in the skip and reckoned they'd done enough.
“With any luck at all they'd have been right: he'd have bled to death before he was found. But it was a cold night. The paramedics have a saying: They're not dead until they're warm and dead. When they warmed Danny up he was still alive.
“So that's two mistakes they've made. They thought he was dead, and they thought you'd keep quiet. Real pros would have done a proper job on him and then come for you. But they thought the damage you could do them was minimal - the woman you met was probably just a go-between, she won't know much more than you do. Anyway, the chances of you ever seeing her again are remote. You didn't see anyone else, you don't know anything else.
“And they thought you'd be too scared to report the little you do know. Why risk being treated as an accessory to murder when there's so little you can say? They thought you'd keep your head down and your mouth shut. If they find out they underestimated you, Mrs Farrell, the next bullet will be for you, and this time they'll wait long enough to take a pulse afterward. I needed you to understand that. Not just to hear it but to understand. Now you do.”
Brodie was slowly shaking her head. “No. That's part of it: the part that sounds defensible. But mainly you hoped to shock me into saying something I wouldn't otherwise have said. You thought I was holding something back; at least, you weren't sure I wasn't. This was a way to find out. You thought I'd see - this - break down and confess all. You thought you could achieve more in five minutes this way than with three hours of patient questioning.”
She lifted her head to look Deacon in the eyes. He was a big man, with strong features and an air of repressed violence about him like a prize fighter. He was forty-six years old, and a detective inspector,
and he was still the first person everyone at Dimmock Police Station thought of when there was a brawl in the front office.
The expression in Brodie Farrell's gaze scourged his cheeks. “Well? Was it worth it? Did you find what you were looking for? You upset me, you used him - but it would be worth it if you know something now that you didn't when we left your office. Do you?”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, hard-faced, “I do. I know there's nothing more you're going to tell me. Either you can't, or you've too much to lose to blurt it out.
“So I'm going to assume I was right first time and you really weren't involved. But if I'm wrong, I should warn you I'm not a good loser. If I find you were in deeper than you've said, or you know more than you've said, you're going to pay for it. I'll see you in prison if I can. And if I can't - well, there's more than one way to skin a cat. If I think you bear any responsibility for this, I'll destroy you.”
Having rearranged her patient's sheets the nurse was watching open-mouthed, scarce able to believe what she was hearing. But Brodie had spent much of her working life with police officers, sometimes on the same side, sometimes not, and she knew that even the best sailed close to the wind at times. When their actual powers were unequal to the task before them, sailing close to the wind was the only way to progress.
She wasn't afraid of DI Deacon, she didn't even resent his threats that much. Except for the man in the bed, no one had a better reason than her to hope he'd find the truth. She just hoped he was now convinced of her innocence. He was entitled to think she'd been stupid but she didn't want him wasting time persecuting her.
He couldn't prove she was responsible for this in any legal sense because she wasn't. But he could squander valuable time trying, time in which cruel and violent men would be covering their tracks. So it mattered that he believe her. If her reaction to the brutalised body of Daniel Hood had helped then what he'd done was, if not justified, at least forgivable.
She breathed steadily. “Inspector, I'm not lying and I'm not holding anything back. I'm as horrified by this as you are. Maybe more - you
may have seen things like this before but I haven't. We're on the same side. If there's anything I can do to convince you of that, tell me. If there's anything I can do to help, tell me.”
Finally Deacon believed her. Believing left him free to be a little ashamed of himself, though not to admit it. He growled, “Help? How?”
Brodie shrugged. “Information is my business. I may be able to ask questions you can't.”
Deacon shook his head. “Stay out of it, Mrs Farrell. This isn't an intellectual exercise: if the people who hurt Hood have any reason to come back I could lose both my witnesses. I don't want them thinking you're a threat to them. Leave it to me. I'll find them; and when I do they won't come after me with a cigarette-lighter.”
He turned and headed for the door. “There's nothing more we can do here. Let's go back to the station and complete the formalities.”
But Brodie was still looking at the unconscious man. “A cigarette-lighter? Is that what they used?”
Deacon frowned, not understanding why she needed to know. “Some of the time. And some of the time, presumably for a bit of variety, they used the cigarettes.”
She made herself look long enough to see the distinctive small, perfectly round lesions that made daisy-like patterns on his weeping skin. Whoever did this had been bored enough to doodle. More shocked by that than anything that had come before, Brodie said faintly, “It hardly seems very professional.”
Deacon disagreed. “You think he should carry stainless steel instruments in a black leather bag? And maybe wear a black velvet hood with the eye-holes punched out. So the first time he's stopped by a zealous wooden-top for breaking the speed limit or going through a red light, and he's asked to open the bag, his only choice is between shooting his way out and trying to explain why he's equipped like an extra from
The Rocky Horror Show.
No, Mrs Farrell, real professionals don't need props. It's not about inspiring terror, it's about inflicting pain, and a few domestic implements such as you'd find in any kitchen or garage will do that every bit as well and much more safely. The man who did this can open his bag for every
policeman, customs official and security guard who asks. If he couldn't, he'd be behind bars by now.”
Brodie stared at him. “You mean, this isn't the first time ⦠?”
Deacon shook his head. “This is how he makes his living. People will pay him ten thousand pounds a throw to do it. He probably does it all over the world.”