Daniel's phone didn't often ring in the small hours of the morning. So when it did he had a pretty good idea who it was going to be. âHi, Brodie,' he yawned.
âDid I wake you?'
He considered. But he was too sleepy for wit. âYes.'
âSorry. I've been thinking.'
âYes?'
âI know who Joe Loomis's son is.'
He realised she was waiting for a fanfare. But he was still having trouble making the words connect, couldn't provide a musical accompaniment as well. âWho?'
âDev Stretton!' Somehow, she knew that the silence which followed wasn't awestruck admiration. âDaniel?'
âDev Stretton's father is Asian.'
âBut do we actually know that?' demanded Brodie.
âI
thought
I knew that,' said Daniel. âThere's his name, for starters. And what Faith Stretton said to Loomis before he slapped her.'
âBut it works,' insisted Brodie. âShe had a relationship with Loomis back in the Eighties, and Dev's â what? Twenty-five? He even looks like Joe.'
âBrodie â he's Eurasian. He
looks
Eurasian.'
Unseen at the end of the line, Brodie was shaking her head. âNo. He's olive skinned. Joe was olive skinned. A lot of Irish people are â there's Spanish blood from the wreck of the Armada. They call them the Black Irish. Joe Loomis and Faith Stretton could easily produce a child with Dev's colouring.'
âWell â maybe.' Daniel sounded less than convinced. But he did sound more awake. âSo what are you suggesting? When Dev found out who his father was he went and stuck a knife in him?'
âMaybe,' said Brodie warmly. âMaybe that's what Faith and Joe were arguing about when you saw them â she wanted him to stay clear of Dev. But maybe Joe thought a bit more about what Donna had said and decided he wanted to get to know his son. Faith told him â you
heard
her tell him â she'd rather have people think Dev's father was someone else. That's when he slapped her.
âDaniel, maybe that's what started the ball rolling. Maybe until then Dev didn't know who his father was. It was only when she had to explain her bruises that she finally told him the truth. It would have come as a terrible shock. Particularly when he found out he was a different race to what he thought. And then he found out that his long lost daddy was a sleazeball who'd been living a few miles away all his life.'
She was developing the theory even as she talked. âSuppose he called Joe and asked to meet him. Anyone else he expected trouble from, Joe would have taken back-up. But he's not going to take heavies to deal with his son. He thinks there may be shouting, even fisticuffs, but he's
no reason to expect anything worse. He won't admit he needs protection from his own child.'
Almost against his better judgement, Daniel was getting drawn into the hypothesis. âOr maybe he does,' he said slowly. âHe was the one who brought the knife, after all.'
Brodie was nodding. She had Jonathan on her knee, the phone cradled between her shoulder and her ear. âAnd he was glad he had. The meeting went badly. Dev's a lot bigger than Joe, and he was angry about the way his mother had been treated â not just that week but for twenty-five years. Joe thought he was going to get a thrashing so he produced his knife.'
âBut Dev's been around a bit too,' suggested Daniel. âHe's worked on construction sites here and abroad. He must have learnt how to look after himself. Instead of backing off he grabbed for it. They struggled, and it ended up in Joe's side.'
âAnd Dev found himself wondering how much it really mattered,' continued Brodie. âIf Joe survived he wasn't going to tell the police he'd been stabbed with his own knife by his own son. And if he didn't, who cared? We'd all assume that one of Joe's deals had come back to haunt him. No one but Faith even knew there was a connection between him and Joe. So Dev walked away, leaving Joe in a rapidly spreading pool of his own blood, and thought there was a good chance no one would ever ask him about it.'
There was silence as they pondered it. There was no proof. But so many things, things of no consequence, things no one would have thought to fabricate, made sense
if this was how it happened.
Daniel frowned. âWhy did she call him Dev? It's not an English name.'
âShe
told
you why,' said Brodie impatiently. âShe didn't want people to know she'd got up close and personal with Joe Loomis! She was breaking the trail. From before that baby was born, she didn't want it linked to Joe. And boy, was that a good decision!'
Starting with not much more than a gut feeling, Brodie was startled at how far she'd travelled in the space of a phone call. Of course, this was Daniel. They were two minds so well attuned they were capable of networking like computers, and the thinking power produced was greater than the sum of the parts. âI'd better call Jack,' she said.
âBrodie, it's the middle of the night. It's waited a week, it can wait till morning. Go back to sleep.'
âI wasn't asleep,' she said carelessly. âJonathan was a bit restless. I made us both a snack, then I started thinking. No, I'll call Jack while this is fresh in my mind.' And with devastating thoughtlessness she added impishly, âHe's woken me up often enough. Now it's my turn.'
Â
Deacon had rolled into bed, with some of his clothes still on, and immediately fallen unconscious forty minutes before. When the phone rang it split him in half. Half his brain knew it had to be hugely, urgently important or Battle Alley would have let him sleep. The other half decided
nothing
was that important, and tried to go on sleeping anyway.
The dichotomy left him imperfectly prepared for a
conversation with Brodie about Joe Loomis.
âI think I know who killed him,' she said without preamble. âI think I know how it happened, and I think I know why.'
Deacon felt like a spectator at a tennis match suffering a mild concussion from a wayward smash. âWhat?' he mumbled. âWho?'
Brodie breathed heavily at him. âJoe Loomis. For heaven's sake, Jack, try to keep up! I'm telling you I've solved your murder case. Well â manslaughter, probably. Or since this was Joe, rat-slaughter, but it'll still look good in the crime statistics. The least you can do is concentrate.'
Deacon blinked owlishly at the phone. And then he replied.
He didn't tell her of the night he'd had, or how recently it had ended. He cut straight to the headlines, which were that (a) right now he didn't care who killed Joe Loomis, and (b) he was pretty sure she was wrong anyway. Only he didn't say
pretty sure.
âThat's nice language to use in front of your son!' she said indignantly. âIf he grows up to stick a knife in
you
, don't blame me! And don't expect me to turn him in, either.'
If she'd had an ounce of sensitivity in her she'd have heard the exhaustion in his voice. âBrodie, I'm past knowing what to expect of you. You seem to think my job is a kind of party game and anyone can have a go. These are real people we're talking about. If it turns out it wasn't the butler with the candlestick in the dining room, you don't just shrug it off and have another guess. You can
wreck people's lives. You don't go round accusing people because they look shifty and you don't know that they
couldn't
have done it.'
Brodie was piqued by the criticism â the more so, probably, because he was right. It was the difference between his job and hers. If she was hunting for a lost painting, she did the detective work pretty much the same way â but if, when she snatched aside the curtain triumphantly, it turned out to be not an early Alma-Tadema but a Beryl Cook print she could wipe the egg off her face and leave. No one went to prison. No one's family were left thinking,
But maybe he DID â¦
She said snidely, âI thought that was exactly how you worked.'
He yawned. âBrodie â¦'
âSo you're not prepared even to listen? Someone died and someone else killed him, and I've a good idea who, and you don't want to know? You're the senior CID officer in this town, and you'd rather catch up on your sleep than solve a murder.'
Old acquaintances were amazed at how Jack Deacon had learnt to bridle his temper around Brodie. It had to be love, they decided, or something like it. Which was not to say there were no limits to his newfound patience, and he reached them sooner when he was tired than when he was fresh. When he was tired he didn't care that, rigid with umbrage, she could one day stalk out of his life. When he was this tired he almost wished she would.
âBrodie, I can't deal with this right now. I have to get
some sleep. If things calm down in the next day or two, I'll give you a call and we'll discuss it. But not in the middle of the night.'
âThe next day or two!' exclaimed Brodie, astonished. âWe're not talking about a parking ticket here. We're talking about a killing!'
âNo,' said Deacon forcibly, âwe're not. You want to go on talking about it, talk to someone else. Hey â call Daniel, he's never anything better to do at four in the morning. Talk to Daniel, work out exactly who did what, then nip round and ask the murderer to sign a confession. And tell him I'll be round in a day or two.'
Â
The next day was Wednesday. About half past eight Brodie trotted upstairs to ask Marta Szarabeijka if she'd mind Jonathan till Daniel arrived. She could have taken him with her when she took Paddy to school, but then she'd have had to bring him back and Daniel would want to know where she was going next. And she didn't want to tell him. She wasn't expecting trouble â she wasn't actually going to ask Dev Stretton to sign a confession â but Daniel would try to dissuade her.
Marta glanced at her watch. It was an oversized man's watch that covered much of her strong, bony wrist, but Marta didn't do dainty. As a young woman she left Poland two steps ahead of an arrest warrant for political agitation. Now in her mid-fifties, still refusing to bow to convention, she wore her long grey hair in a plait, had a toy boy in Littlehampton and bought watches she could read without putting her glasses on.
âI got Graham in half an hour.' Then, relenting: âHe got no talent. He rides a motorcyle â give him a spanner and he knows what he's doing, give him a nocturne in D-major and it might as well be “Chopsticks”. I can rock the baby
and
teach him more piano than he's ever going to play. Sure, bring him up.'
Jonathan had finally settled down about six o'clock and now wasn't waking for anyone. Brodie hadn't gone back to sleep: she'd spent the rest of the night considering her next move. She could wait until Deacon was in a better frame of mind, or at least had fewer distractions, and try again to tell him the conclusion she'd reached. She could shrug it off as none of her business. No one who knew her even slightly would have expected her to take either course. She didn't pander to Deacon's moods, he pandered to hers. And she never, ever thought that anything was none of her business.
And Deacon's manner on the phone still annoyed her. She accepted that he'd been tired. She knew â a sanitised version had been released to the media â that Charlie Voss and another officer had been injured and a third man killed in an incident in Romney Road the night before, and that meant he'd hardly slept for forty-eight hours. But his dismissive tone still rankled, and the best revenge she could think of was to sew his case up for him. An act of subversive kindness, that would sting and sting and leave him nothing to complain about.
Everything depended on her intuition having been right â that Dev was the result of that brief, unwise, regretted
relationship between Faith Stretton and Joe Loomis. If he was, everything else made sense. But she needed to know for sure before she put this in front of Deacon.
She was going to ask Faith. She believed that if she asked face to face, woman to woman, Faith would tell her.
There were bags piled in the hallway. Brodie's heart lurched and raced in the five seconds it took her to realise that one of them was pink and had glitter stickers on it, and however desperate he was to flee the scene of a murder Dev Stretton would probably still rather be caught than make a run for it with girly luggage.
âEvie not off yet?' asked Brodie.
Faith looked terribly harassed. She mopped her brow with the back of her wrist. âShe keeps thinking of something else she's going to need. I swear to God, Drake circumnavigated the globe with less baggage! When I was her age, I was hitching across Australia with all my worldly goods in a backpack. Evie's luggage is bigger than she is!'
The girl appeared at the top of the stairs. âMum, I need â¦'
âNo,' said Faith immediately. âYou don't.'
âBut â¦'
âEvie! What you need is to get finished and get off. If you've forgotten something vital you can buy it at the other end. If you've forgotten something trivial you can manage without it.'
The girl turned away with a flounce. Brodie supposed
she was about seventeen: a child and a woman at the same time. Old enough to reproduce, not old enough to vote. Old enough to drive, not quite old enough to understand that trains and aeroplanes won't wait for you the way parents â however bad-temperedly â will. âHow's she travelling?'
âA friend's taking her,' said Faith distractedly. She gazed at the pile of bags in despair. âLord knows where this lot's going.' Abruptly she turned her back on it, headed out through the kitchen. âCome into the studio. We can get a bit of peace.'
Faith's studio was smarter than Brodie had imagined. Her wheel and workbench were in one corner, a powerful modern kiln in another, and the rest of the space was showroom. Faith indicated a couple of chairs beside a coffee table, but Brodie couldn't resist looking round first. There were commemorative plates and rustic dinner services and art pieces whose method of construction was not at all obvious. âThey're lovely,' she said, genuinely impressed.
âThank you,' said Faith. âIs that what you wanted to see me about?' She sounded hopeful.
“Fraid not,' said Brodie honestly. âIt's more personal than professional. And you're going to think it's none of my business, and you're right. The only thing is, if you talk to me now you might avoid having to talk to the police later.'
Faith's expression shut down like a firewall. She volunteered nothing, left Brodie to doggy-paddle through an icy sea of silence. âLook, Faith, we haven't known one another very long, but we have a lot in common. I think
we talk the same language. Believe me when I say it's time to talk about this. Keeping the secret any longer can only make things worse, for you and your family.'
Still there was no response from Faith Stretton. She might have said, frostily,
Talk about what?
But she wouldn't offer even that much encouragement. She sat rigid in her chair, implacable-eyed, challenging her visitor to say what she had to.
Brodie sighed. âOK, make it hard. I know you want me to go away. I will, but not till you answer me a straight question. Or refuse to, which will tell me as much.' This time she waited.
âWhat question?' Faith's voice was rough, the words dragged from her.
âWas Joe Loomis Dev's father?'
Faith Stretton blinked. Brodie thought, with sinking heart, that her surprise was genuine.
âDev's?
You think Dev is Joe's son?' And then she laughed; though in truth there wasn't much humour in it. âMrs Farrell, you have met my son, have you? He's Eurasian. Of mixed race. There are paint cards the same colour as Dev, and they're called things like
Bombay Nights
!'
âJoe wasn't exactly lily-white either.'
âYou can say that again!'
âI mean, he was dark â dark hair, olive skin. He could have had a child with Dev's colouring.' Even to herself Brodie sounded like she was fighting a losing battle.
âMaybe that's what I saw in him,' said Faith sardonically. âI got one nice kid with a dark-skinned man â maybe subconsciously I was looking for another.'
Brodie's teeth had caught a corner of her lip and her nose wrinkled in embarrassment. âYou're telling me I'm wrong.
âYes,' said Faith with heavy emphasis. âThat's exactly what I'm telling you. Dev is twenty-five years old. He was at school when I met Joe! Look.' She took Brodie's hand fiercely in her own and dragged her to the desk in the corner. âSee those photos? That's Dev in Kashmir. He spent two years there, helping after the earthquake. A hundred thousand people died, and two and a half million were made homeless. And Dev's a civil engineer, he knows how to clear wreckage safely and build bridges and buildings that don't fall down when the ground shakes. So that's what he did. Three days after the earthquake Dev was on a plane heading for Pakistan, and he stayed for two years.
âAnd my point is this,' she said, turning Brodie to face her. âNot that Dev's a good guy, although he is. Not that he's a good engineer, although he's that too. My point is, how many young men do you know who'd give up two years of their life, at the crucial early stage of their career, to help a bunch of strangers?
âWell, I don't know any either. Those people freezing on their mountaintops weren't strangers â they were Dev's family. Kashmir is where his father came from, and that's why he went. Dev is exactly what he appears to be, and his father and I are very proud of him.'
Brodie hardly knew what to say. She didn't often get things this wrong. And she'd been so sure. She and Daniel both ⦠And then she remembered that, actually, all they'd been talking about in the early hours were possibilities.
The theory had been entirely hers. All Daniel had done was agree that the sums added up. He never said she'd given him the right figures in the first place.
âI'm sorry,' she mumbled. âIt seemed â I thought ⦠I was barking up the wrong tree, wasn't I? Faith, you'll have to forgive me. I've been thinking too much about this, the shadows started looking like something real. I should leave now, and let you finish Evie's packing. I hope by the time I see you again this is starting to look funny. At least to you â¦
She felt her cheeks flaming all the way back to her car.
Â
Phone lines crackled between Dimmock, Division, Scotland Yard and the Home Office. No one in the loop was confident that the threat had passed. At the same time, no one was happy to issue a public warning. This wasn't hypocrisy but a recognition that the threat of terrorism makes ordinary people panic, and panicky people hurt themselves and one another.
But while the authorities were still debating the pros and cons behind closed doors and over scrambled phones, events overtook them.
There are places in the world where you can fire guns in the early hours of the morning and the neighbours just pull a pillow over their ears and go back to sleep. But Dimmock wasn't one of them. By six o'clock on Tuesday morning, Tom Sessions of
The Sentinel
was phoning his story to the national media. He wrote about drug-runners and policemen in a dead-of-night gun battle, and how it ended with two in hospital, two in custody and one in the
morgue. And he thought that was pretty much the whole story.
Thirty hours later, having talked to people in Romney Road and elsewhere, he was beginning to think he'd had the wool pulled over his eyes.
The last thing Deacon wanted to do right now was talk to Tom Sessions. And he didn't have to. He could send word to the front desk that he was too busy and the reporter would leave. But he wouldn't stop being a reporter. If CID refused to talk to him, that would be the story. Keeping the secret was no longer an option. And letting people in on it an inch at a time, by means of rumour and speculation, was no way to ensure calm and cooperation. If you can't contain news, Deacon had long ago learnt, the next best thing is to manage it.
âSend him up,' he growled.
Sessions was a tall thin man in his late thirties who always wore a tweed jacket. Deacon had known him for ten years, and except for once a year at the Civic Ball he'd never seen him wear anything but cords and a tweed jacket.
And a succession of ambivalent expressions: interesting combinations like polite authority, amiable determination and open-minded obstinacy. This morning his expression said clearer than words:
You don't have to talk to me, I don't have any strings to pull to make you talk to me, but I'll do my job with or without your help and this is your chance to have some input into the story I tell and how I tell it.
Deacon got right to the point. âWhat do you know already?'
âYou
know
what I know already â it was on the TV
yesterday! Today I'm starting to think half of it was lies. You want to tell me I'm wrong, Mr Deacon?' He sounded angry.
âI can't tell you that,' rumbled Deacon. âIt may be the truth. I'm hoping it is. But there's a possibility that there's more going on than that. I needed time to try and find out: that's why I didn't tell you everything. I
still
need time, and I'm still not going to tell you everything. I'll tell you what I can. I'd like to think that'll buy me some cooperation.'
Sessions was starting to look mollified. âYou know
The
Sentinel's
position â that if we can help you do your job without compromising ours, we will. But I don't like being lied to. Even more, I don't like discovering that I've lied to other people.'
Deacon nodded. âI understand. But I have higher priorities than being frank with you, and in a minute you're going to understand
that.
Some of what I'm going to tell you would have some reporters writing excited headlines with lots of exclamations marks. Are you one of them?'
âNot usually,' said Sessions. âI can't promise until I know what we're talking about.'
He could pussyfoot around it first, but in the end Deacon would have to come out and say it. âTerrorism.' And, as Sessions' eyebrows soared, he added quickly, âWe think. There is actually some doubt. Which is why I don't want this going off half-cocked. If I tell you as much as I can of what we know, what we think and what people ought to do about it, is that what you'll write?'
âYes.'
âAnd that's
all
you'll write?'
âWell, that's harder,' said Sessions. âOther people may have things they want to say.'
âIs it your job to do everything anyone wants?'
âNo. But then, it's not my job to do everything you want either.' Undeterred by Deacon's scowl, he went on: âSuperintendent, you and I have worked this town for a lot of years. There may have been times you wished I was working some other town, but on the whole we've been on the same side. Dimmock needs us both. This sounds like one of those occasions when you need to look back over the last ten years and decide whether you trust me or not.'
Deacon went on scowling at him for perhaps twenty seconds, then he snorted a little laugh. âMr Sessions, I wouldn't choose to trust anyone with this. But I don't have much choice. So I'll tell you what I can. But let me draw your attention to one consequence of that. Up till now, if this thing went pear-shaped and people got hurt, it was going to be my responsibility. After you leave this office, it could be yours.'
Â
It went out with the lunchtime news. The man shot dead the previous day in a small south coast town had been linked to al-Qaeda. Police were seeking the assistance of the local community in assessing the terrorist threat.
By five past one the phone lines into Battle Alley were jammed. By half past the roads were growing busy as people who felt they ought to be doing something checked up on friends and relatives and â always the first reaction to any crisis â stocked up their freezers. At ten past two the first
unprovoked attack on a person of Asian appearance was reported.
He was Ashok Gul, a twenty-two-year-old trainee accountant, and he was returning to work after lunch when he was set upon by four or five white men with fists, boots and his own briefcase. It was all over in three minutes, after which they ran away leaving him shocked and bleeding on the pavement. Onlookers dialled 999.
Sergeant McKinney despatched a couple of constables, then went upstairs to see Deacon. âIt's started.'
Deacon heard him out, answered with a disparaging sniff. âIt's not the first time someone's been done over for the colour of his skin. Dimmock isn't exactly the beating heart of liberal democracy.'
âTrue,' agreed McKinney. He knew parts of Dimmock where you got grief for having a Scots accent. âThis was different. It wasn't drunken yobs on their way home on a Friday night. It happened in broad daylight, in the middle of town, with people watching. The guy was wearing a suit. All that tells me it happened because of what was on the news an hour ago. And if I'm right about that, this isn't the end of anything, it's only the beginning.'