Flawed (30 page)

‘I think we can do anything,’ Noah said stoutly.

‘When we're on the same team.’

‘We were
always
on the same team,’ insisted the child.

‘I kicked some own goals,’ admitted Marianne.

‘Don't know a striker who hasn't,’ said Noah matter-offactly.

Brodie was rolling her eyes. ‘Any more of the homespun philosophy,’ she grated, ‘and this baby's going to be born in your garden.’

She was right: there was no time for philosophy, and no time for debate. ‘We won't all get in my car,’ said Marianne. ‘Where's Mrs Farrell's?’ Noah pointed. ‘Will you stay with them while I fetch it?’ He nodded.

She hesitated only a moment longer. ‘I am so proud of you.’ Then she was running.

It wasn't born in a garden, it wasn't even born in a car. It was nearly born on a trolley in Dimmock General, about half way between A&E and Maternity. But then unaccountably it changed its mind. The contractions stopped as if it had all been a mistake, there wasn't a baby in there after all, it was a bit of wind and too much pasta.

So after a few minutes Brodie, who had been lying prone on the trolley, clutching the sides and yelling unrestrainedly at shorter and shorter intervals, sat up cautiously and looked round at the porter and demanded,
‘Now
what?’

*  *  *

‘They're safe?’ repeated Adam Selkirk. ‘You're sure?’

‘Yes,’ said Deacon. ‘They're in the waiting room at Dimmock General. You can pick them up there.’

‘Both of them?’

‘Both of them. They're fine, Mr Selkirk. Nobody got hurt. Well,’ he amended in the interests of honesty, ‘Hood managed to stab himself – don't know how; must have gone off as he was cleaning it – and Mrs Farrell nearly had her baby in the middle of all this, but there's nothing for you to worry about. Your son and his mother are both unharmed.’

The lighthouse beam of Selkirk's gaze swept Deacon's office until it came to rest on DS Voss. ‘No thanks to you.’

It wasn't the first mistake Charlie Voss had made, wouldn't be the last. It might be the one that gave him most nightmares: the one that brought him closest to being responsible for an avoidable disaster. ‘I was wrong,’ he agreed in a low voice. ‘I'm sorry.’

Selkirk feigned a look of surprise. ‘That's it, is it? You accused me of abusing my twelve-year-old son. You accused me of beating him and lying about it. I'm a
solicitor,
Sergeant Voss. Have you any idea how much damage your mistake may have done me?’

Deacon waited for DI Hyde to say something. When she didn't, and Voss didn't, he cleared his throat and favoured Selkirk with a bleak little smile. ‘Damage? I thought lying was what you were paid for. It'd be a damn sight more damaging professionally if it got about that you couldn't tell porkies to save your life.’ And before Selkirk could object he added, ‘The other thing to remember is, if you'd told us the truth at the start we could have done a better job of protecting all three of you.’

They were old adversaries; out of court they were almost friends. Selkirk was angry but he wasn't stupid. Some of this he'd brought on himself. He could accuse Voss of harassment but he couldn't make the accusation stick, and he wasn't going to start any proceedings that were doomed to failure. But nor was he going to forget.

‘If you're waiting for me to say this was all my fault,’ he growled, ‘bring a packed lunch. On the basis of a flawed assumption – an idea you only picked up and ran with because it would have suited you down to the ground if it was true – you people have put my son in serious danger. If you think we're going to shake hands and forget that, Superintendent, you're living in cloud cuckoo land.’

‘It was an honest mistake,’ said Deacon. ‘Which could have been rectified in a minute if you'd taken us into your confidence.’

‘Maybe it was an honest mistake,’ agreed Selkirk tersely. ‘Detective Sergeant Voss is a young man, he's entitled to make the occasional honest mistake.’ He was on his way to the door. ‘And to pay for them, Superintendent Deacon. And to pay for them.’

Daniel spent four hours on a drip, replacing the blood he'd spilt standing between Marianne Selkirk and the abyss. He passed much of the time in a daze, neither sleeping nor awake, in limbo, feeling exactly what he was – drained.

And sadly disappointed. By the time his vital signs were sufficiently improved that the intravenous needle could be removed – painfully: he yelped – it was late in the evening. Hours had passed since Marianne stall-turned Brodie's car in
front of Dimmock General and Noah went running for help. Almost his last clear memory was Brodie saying she was about to give birth, so he expected it was all over by now: that he'd missed the event the last months had been building up to, and he'd find the pair of them tucked up and glowing like a kind of NHS nativity. He was devastated. He doubted he'd ever have the chance now to be present at the birth of a baby.

He was wrong. When he was detached from his tubing he followed directions to her room but there was only Brodie, still lumpish and bad-tempered, sucking ice-cubes and plotting a lurid revenge on the man responsible for her condition.

‘Should I call him?’ asked Daniel. ‘I'm sure he'd come.’

‘What would I want to see
him
for?’ she demanded irascibly. ‘This is all his fault.’

It wasn't strictly true but Daniel knew better than to argue. ‘Have they said when…?’

‘Nope,’ grunted Brodie. ‘When it's ready. When it feels like it. Some time in the next two months. The little sod isn't even born yet, and already it's giving me the run-around.’

‘It's probably better that it stays in there a bit longer,’ said Daniel, hoping to mollify her. ‘Seven and a half months must be awfully early.’

‘Don't blame me,’ she snapped. ‘I wasn't trying to evict it – it
said
it was coming. It said it was coming right there and then, and never mind how inconvenient and downright undignified it was going to be. It was urgent, it was imminent, and everyone had to drop everything to get it safely delivered.

‘Only
then,’
she went on, her voice thick with fury and frustration, ‘it got distracted. Called away. More important things to do. Just remind me: whose child is this?’

Daniel risked a careful smile. ‘Yours. That's why it's doing things its own way and making the rest of us fall into step.’

Brodie snorted a little laugh, and a stab of pain caught her. Not a contraction: just a pain.

Daniel saw her wince. ‘Do you want me to leave?’

She shook her head fiercely, and he pulled up a chair with his good hand and sat down. ‘Then I'll stay.’

‘So now I'm stuck here overnight while it decides what it wants to do,’ said Brodie. ‘You're right – it'll be better if it goes to term. It may have been a false alarm. If the contractions haven't started up again by morning they're going to send me home.’

It had been a hard day for Daniel too. After ten minutes Brodie noticed him drooping. Her first instinct was to shake him, make him keep her company. But his body craved rest, and actually there was nothing he could do for her awake that he couldn't also do asleep. He was there if she needed him. She'd have no compunction about rousing him if the contractions started again, and if they didn't she'd be fine on her own. When she saw his head tipping forward she pulled out one of her pillows and padded her knee for him; and like that, in a casual intimacy that was a cypher for their entire relationship, they both slept.

At ten to six in the morning Brodie woke with a gasp and the sensation of a vice clasping her innards, and drew herself up in the bed so convulsively Daniel almost fell off his chair.

He hadn't taken his glasses off before he slept so they were skew-whiff over one ear. His pale eyes were foggy and alarmed. ‘Is it…?’

‘Yes,’ said Brodie tightly.

Stupidly, he asked, ‘You're sure?’

‘Yes!’
insisted Brodie.

‘What should I…?’

‘GET HELP!’ yelled Brodie.

She was in labour for thirteen hours: long enough to go through all the possible outcomes, especially the bad ones. The baby was coming too soon – it would be stillborn. It would live just long enough for her to hold it. It wasn't
a
baby at all: it was twins, or triplets – they'd heard the ultrasound coming and carefully lined themselves up like soldiers. All sorts of improbable scenarios racked her through the long, unproductive hours.

Daniel stayed with her. Twice more he offered to call Deacon: both times Brodie refused. At four in the afternoon the midwife ushered Daniel out of the delivery room and he thought they were on the last lap. But it was another two hours before the baby was born, time in which he paced the waiting room and spun every time a door opened, for all the world as if the child was his.

Finally, at five past six, a doctor came. He was new to Dimmock General or he wouldn't have said what he said. ‘Congratulations, Mr Farrell. Your wife's had the baby and she's recovering well.’

Daniel felt a curious urge to hand out cigars. But the truth mattered. ‘She isn't my wife.’

‘Oh.’ That was hardly unusual these days. ‘Sorry. Your partner. Give her a minute to get her breath and then you can see her. And your son.’

The air caught in Daniel's throat. But… ‘It – he – isn't my child either.’

This was slightly more unusual. ‘Ah. Er…’

Brodie always said, when Daniel smiled it was like the sun coming out, it dispelled anxieties for fifty metres all round. ‘We're friends. And of course I want to see them.’

The doctor nodded. ‘Good. But there's something I need to explain first.’

Two middle-aged men sitting on a park bench, so wrapped up against the cold their own mothers wouldn't have recognised them. Nor, and this was important, would anyone else.

One of them said, ‘With the image of a brass monkey coming irresistibly to mind, I do hope you've got a good reason for this, Johnny.’

‘Don't call me that,’ growled the other. ‘Nobody calls me that.’

‘Det…’

‘Don't call me that, either!’ snarled the second. ‘Jesus, why don't you make a video on your phone and send it to Division?’

The first smiled into his muffler. ‘When did you get so paranoid? Keep looking over your shoulder like that and folk'll think you've got a guilty conscience.’

The second and larger man shrugged himself deeper into his overcoat, fighting the urge to look round again. There was nobody close enough to hear, and nobody further off was paying them any heed. T need you to tell me something.’

‘OK.’

‘What do you know about the death of Achille Bellow?’

The narrow strip between the muffler and the cap blinked at him in surprise. ‘About as much as I knew about his life. What the Sunday papers told me. That he was a small-time Balkan gangster until the easing of European border restrictions gave him the urge to travel. That he was found dead on a French beach last summer, and the world has not in any real sense mourned his passing.’

‘Did you kill him?’

Bushy eyebrows climbed in the visible strip of face. ‘What kind of a question is that?’

‘An important one,’ growled the second man. ‘If you didn't, I need to hear you say it.’

The first gave a little snort that was half a chuckle. ‘That's easy. I didn't.’

‘You didn't take him out into the Channel and chuck him off
The Salamander?’

‘Ah.’ The first man gave his scarf a secret smile. ‘That's actually two different questions.’

The second man stared at him.
‘How?’

The first man thought for a moment. ‘OK,’ he said again. ‘I'm going to tell you a story. Like all the best stories, this one isn't true, and anyone who thought it was, let alone tried to prove it was, would be laughed out of court. To coin a phrase.

‘Once upon a time there was a nasty little Serb who knew there were girls in his own country who would pay him to get them jobs at the wealthy end of the continent, and men there who would pay him to provide them with girls. He thought there was a tidy profit to be made. He didn't tell the girls exactly what kind of work he'd got them, or what was generally considered a fair rate of pay, and he kept them in
conditions you'd think were rough for a dog, but he did make a lot of money.

‘Of course, he wasn't endearing himself to the local business community whose trade he was poaching. But what were they going to do – call the police? They turned a blind eye. The nasty little Serb with his half-starved amateurs was never going to cream off the profitable end of the business, and they thought it was only a matter of time before the local CID got wind of him and solved the problem for them.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘It's true, isn't it? You can never find a policeman when you need one. The local Detective Superintendent didn't even know the Serb was working on his manor.

‘What happened next was that some of the local toms met some of the Serbian girls. You might think that would be a recipe for a cat-fight, but no. When they saw the state the foreigners were in, and found out what they were having to do and what they were getting paid – and they didn't even want to be in the business, they wanted to go home, but they weren't allowed to, and some of them were beaten for asking and some of them had actually disappeared…well.’

He gave a little shrug. ‘A tom's pretty much like any other girl: she's got a heart, and she's got a sense of fair play. A couple of the locals started helping the Serbians get away. They took up a collection and sent the youngest ones home. Some they found other work for. And a couple left the nasty little Serb and threw their lot in with the local toms.’

An elderly woman walking a King Charles spaniel took a minute to pass the bench. The first man fell silent until she was out of hearing-aid range. Then he continued where he'd left off.

‘You can imagine how cross the nasty little Serb was. With his own girls, but even more with the locals that he couldn't intimidate in the same way. So one day him and a couple of associates grabbed two of the local toms and cut them. They cut their faces with a razor blade.

‘At which point,’ he said as if it were self-evident, ‘something had to be done. People who thought it wasn't strictly their concern when one foreigner was mistreating some other foreigners couldn't take the same view when it was their own girls who were getting hurt.