After Caroline Walsh disappeared into her house Deacon settled Jonathan back in his car seat. But instead of driving off he found himself indulging in some outside-the-box thinking.
If Terry Walsh had done what Deacon wanted him to have done, he must have had a damn good reason. It had been out of character: first, to have any dealings with a jumped-up mugger like Bobby Carson; secondly, to make the kind of mistakes that left him exposed to the risk of discovery; finally, to protect himself in a way that actually drew attention to what had gone before. In ten years' hard looking, Deacon hadn't seen Walsh make those kinds of bad business decisions.
So maybe Voss was right and it wasn't business. He knew it was nothing to do with the bulk paper trade; the paper was only a fancy wrapping for how Walsh made his money. Drugs, gambling, girls, and dry-land piracy. When Terry Walsh stole from someone, it wasn't their wallet and their fiancée's necklace, it was a juggernaut full of cigarettes or whisky that left the motorway one junction short of its destination and turned up twelve hours later
and a hundred miles away, empty but for the driver locked in the back in his underwear. Terry Walsh was
good
at business. If he'd made the kind of errors that waymarked the Carson case, he'd never have stayed ahead of Deacon for ten years.
But no one's judgement is foolproof when his emotions are involved. A lot of the things Deacon knew about Walsh he couldn't prove, but there was ample evidence for the fact that he was a good husband and father. If his family were threatened, Walsh might do anything, however ill-advised, to protect them. Perhaps, for once, the man was thinking with his heart, not his head. It wasn't much of an edge, but it might be the best Deacon would get. If he couldn't use it, he might as well resign himself to having Walsh around.
He found his gaze straying up the Walshes' drive. Caroline was a woman who wore jewellery. Deacon thought he'd never seen her without at least a strand of pearls and a pair of earrings. And a good watch, and of course her rings, andâ¦
Never in a hundred years had Caroline Walsh hired Bobby Carson to hit someone with a car because she fancied her necklace. No one acts
that
far out of character.
What about the daughter, Sophie? As the keeper of Terry Walsh's genes it was possible that she took a direct approach to taking what she wanted. But Deacon had met her, and she didn't strike him as vicious. Anyway, it made no sense. If either of the Walsh women wanted a new necklace, all she had to do was pout prettily and ask for Terry's credit card. If he was unable to refuse his daughter
the horses that could kill her, he certainly wouldn't draw the line at jewellery.
Deacon was sure he was missing something. If Walsh was involved, somewhere there was a touchstone that transformed his actions from bizarre and illogical to wholly understandable. Petty crime may be as casual and shallow as an airport paperback, at once undisciplined and oddly predictable, but a serious career criminal produces work like a classic novel â well thought out and skilfully executed. Terry Walsh didn't do sloppy work. He didn't start things on a whim, get bored halfway through and leave them unfinished so that an unravelled edge might trip him later on. He took a pride in what he did. If this was him, something had happened to undermine his meticulous professionalism.
But though Deacon, sitting in his car outside the Walshes' house, explored all the byways of possibility â including those that were overgrown with nettles and ended in a rusty gate, padlocked with a chain and a sign saying
My bull can cross this field in eight seconds
â the image his mind's eye kept seeing was Caroline Walsh in her string of pearls.
âI must have been mistaken,' insisted Henry Daimler. âIt was only a picture in a newspaper. It was just, it looked like my father's workmanship.'
âAnd it was this necklace?' Jane pinned the insurance photograph to his counter with her finger insistently enough that Daniel feared for the glass.
âNo,' said Mr Daimler firmly. âIt couldn't have been. I
mean, it was a charity luncheon or somesuch. Who wears stolen jewellery to a charity do, when they know the papers might be there? I mean, that's the point, isn't it? You rope in a few local celebrities in the hope that other people will show an interest too. Nobody goes to a charity do who doesn't want to be seen. Nobody goes wearing something they don't want to be seen wearing.'
âDid you keep the paper?' asked Daniel.
âAfraid not,' said the jeweller. He was a man of about fifty with thinning hair and the greyish complexion of those who spend too much time indoors. âIt wasn't important. I just saw a necklace in a photograph and thought,
That looks like one of Dad's
. That's all. I never gave it another thought until today. Even when we were talking about star sapphires on the phone.'
âCorrect me if I'm wrong,' Jane said slowly, looking at the gems on their velvet pad, âbut even to me they all look different. How the star is positioned. The way the rays shoot out of it. The depth of colour. I think
I
could recognise my stone, and I'm no expert. If we could find the newspaper, I bet you could compare the two pictures and know if it was the same necklace.'
Daimler rocked a hand. His hands were precision tools, slim but strong. âNot the stone, not from a newspaper cutting. I could probably identify the setting. Every one is a work of art,' he said with the quiet pride of a man who'd seen the best and made some of them. âOnce you've seen enough you start to recognise the hand of the man that made it. I thought the necklace in the newspaper was made by my father. And maybe I was right â he must have made
hundreds in his career. But it can't have been the same one.'
He looked again at the photograph of the Sanger necklace, and though his words said one thing the doubt in his eyes said something else.
âDo you remember which paper it was?' asked Daniel. âAnd when?'
âIt was
The Sentinel
,' said Henry Daimler. âBut it was a long time ago. Could have been a year.'
âNo, it couldn't,' said Jane Moss quietly.
âGetting on for, then.'
So they went to
The Sentinel
. Like many of Daniel's acquaintances, senior reporter Tom Sessions looked forward to seeing him with a Coliseum mix of pleasure, curiosity and trepidation. They'd known one another for four years, since the day Sessions found himself talking in the street to a man whose death he had already reported. Since then they'd moved in and out of one another's orbits, developing something bordering on friendship, so that Sessions would have been glad to see Daniel even without the professional interest in what kind of a drama he'd got involved in this time.
And the first thing he noticed was that it was fundamentally different to usual. It wasn't Brodie Farrell he was following around today, a small yellow-haired comet circling its glamorous sun, but a scarred girl in a wheelchair. The chair was, of course, a clue, but he'd have recognised her anyway. He interviewed Jane Moss for the first time while she was still in hospital, then again when she went home to River Drive. He even remembered what she was wearing that day â a T-shirt printed with
the legend
People in wheelchairs do it
. His first thought was that unfortunately the punchline hadn't printed. When he realised that the whole thing was the punchline he'd grinned, and Jane saw what he was grinning at and grinned too.
âHow are you keeping?' he said now.
âNot so bad,' she nodded. âYou?'
âFine.' He hesitated. âIs this about the Carson case?' He assumed the answer was yes. He couldn't think what else she'd want to see him about. He was just breaking the ice.
âYes,' said Jane, âand no. Not about the court case. It's dealt with â he's gone where I won't have to look at him for a while, and there's nothing I want to say about that. This is about the necklace. We may know where it is.'
The reporter's attention sharpened. âReally? When neither the police nor the insurers could find it? How?'
âDanielâ¦' And then she stopped, glancing at him uncertainly, unsure how much to say.
Daniel realised with a flicker of appreciation that she was concerned for his integrity. Part of his job â when he'd had a job â was discretion. Jane wasn't going to tell a reporter who he'd been working for and it was hard to tell the story without. He stepped into the hiatus. âA commission I was working on brought me into contact with Miss Moss,' he said carefully, âand then a third party who believed he'd seen her necklace. He could have been mistaken, but there are good reasons to trust his judgement.' He gave a rueful little shrug. âSorry I can't be more specific.'
âThat's OK,' said Sessions. He was a tall, somewhat gangly man of about forty who always wore the same
tweed sports jacket. âHow do you think I can help?'
âThe witness thought he saw the necklace in a photograph in
The Sentinel
. We wondered if you could help us find it.'
In common with newspapers everywhere, they called it The Morgue. Once it had been a storeroom full of boxes and files containing every item ever printed on the thousands of people in and around Dimmock who might one day do something else worthy of note. For many of them this second fifteen minutes of fame would be their obituary, hence the name. These days it's more efficient to keep a morgue digitally, so the room contained just a couple of computer terminals and some fireproof boxes for storage. Although the new technology made life infinitely easier for journalists, many of them still miss the good old days when hunting through The Morgue involved flicking through files of crinkly, yellowing paper.
Sessions remembered the IT revolution. He remembered how many man-hours had been wasted doing what a computer now did in a matter of seconds. He logged on at one of the monitors and turned to his visitors. âDo we know what issue we're looking for?'
Daniel shook his head apologetically. âNine or ten months ago?'
âIt couldn't have been before October the twenty-second,' Jane said quietly.
Sessions didn't need to ask why. âAll right, let's start with the issue of October twenty-seven.' A few deft keystrokes and he had a miniaturised front page. âDo we know who it was a photograph of?'
âPossibly a charity do. That's not very specific, is it?'
âIt'll do for now.' More keystrokes and the page disappeared, to be replaced by ranks of tiny photographs. âWe'll get rid of the sports, the weddings, the cutesy kids, the prize vegetables and the dog-and-pony show.' Suddenly there were a lot fewer photographs, and he increased the scale so it was possible to see what was in them.
âIf your informant thought he recognised a necklace, we're looking for a woman or a group with a woman in it. She was in evening dress, or at least formal daywear, and she wasn't across the room from the photographer.' He got rid of half the photographs on his monitor.
Which left him with about a dozen pictures of people attending the kind of functions where good jewellery is worn. Many of them had charitable connections. One by one he blew them up bigger than they'd have appeared on the page, and Jane examined each of them minutely. But she couldn't find her necklace, or anything that looked vaguely like it.
She looked at Daniel with soul-wrenching disappointment. âIt isn't there.'
âPatience,' said Sessions, âwe've only just started. Let's try the next edition.' They repeated the procedure, with the same result. And again, and again.
Then Jane pushed herself back from the terminal and turned away. âHe must have been wrong. Either that, or it wasn't
The Sentinel
he was reading.'
âWe're only up to the end of November,' Daniel pointed out.
âBut Bobby Carson was in custody by the end of
October,' said Jane. Her voice was dull with regret. âThe police had circulated a list of everything he'd stolen round half of southern England. No one would have risked selling the necklace after that, no one with any sense would have bought it, and if someone had been stupid enough to wear it in public it would have been noticed.'
âThen what was it that he saw? Our' â Daniel glanced at Sessions â âwitness.'
Jane shrugged. âWho knows? Maybe it was one of the nationals he was reading. Maybe he had an away day to Penzance and picked up the local free-sheet down there. And maybe, whatever he saw, wherever he saw it, he was wrong. He only thought it looked familiar. If it wasn't in
The Sentinel
, suddenly the odds on it being my necklace are a lot longer.'
But Sessions wasn't ready to give up. âLocal papers work differently to the nationals. On the nationals, if you miss a deadline, that's it â even yesterday's news isn't usually worth printing. With us it's local interest that counts. On a busy week, less urgent kinds of news get bumped to the next issue. But they don't get binned. Sooner or later we find a slot for them. A photograph of the great and good at a charity function is a good example. We'd certainly print a picture, but it wouldn't take precedence over a genuine news story. It could hang around for weeks before making it into print. Let's keep going. The Christmas and New Year editions are always crying out for fillers â anything that was waiting for a space would be a God-send then.'