Closer Still (5 page)

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Authors: Jo Bannister

BOOK: Closer Still
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You can get spyholes for a front door, so you need never open it without knowing what's on the other side. Brodie had considered installing one, and dismissed the idea. She was in business here, she was constantly admitting people she didn't recognise – a covert glance at them first would tell her nothing. And instinct warned her that the best defence against most dangers is the kind of tangible self-confidence that's undermined by nervous measures like spyholes.
So she got no warning, when she opened the door, that it wasn't Deacon on her front step with his knuckles raised to knock. It wasn't a potential customer either, or a passing friend looking for her or for Daniel. It was Joe Loomis, and he was drunk.
He staggered in as she opened the door, and Brodie gave a little breathy yelp of alarm. But immediately she knew she was in no danger from him. He could hardly stay on his feet. Unless he had a gun, and some superglue to keep the business end stuck to her anatomy, there was nothing he could do that she couldn't deal with. As the shock subsided she felt the surge of adrenalin diverting to its default function, which was anger.
‘What the hell do you think you're doing here?' she demanded, her voice shaking with fury.
Loomis either couldn't remember or couldn't string enough words together to reply. He leant on one arm on the wall and shook his head slowly, as if trying to dislodge the fog without rattling his brain.
There wasn't much room in the entrance hall – there wasn't much room in the entire office – so Brodie squeezed past him to check outside. But he was alone. He must have given the minders the night off, assuming he could cope alone with a mother of two.
But in that case
, she wondered,
why the Dutch courage?
She had to duck her head to snarl into his face. ‘You've got ten seconds to leave under your own steam. After ten seconds I throw you out. Is that clear?' All the response she got was a mumble she couldn't interpret. She amended her ultimatum. ‘Unless you fall over before your ten seconds
is up, in which case I'll get Jack Deacon to help me throw you out.'
As if it wasn't bad enough that he'd given her a turn and was now cluttering up her doorway, he was also leaving dirty fingerprints on the wallpaper. It was a dark red flock, to go with the burgundy front door and the velvet curtain, so she hadn't noticed immediately; but he'd obviously been in the gutter on his way here and brought some of it with him. With a cluck of disgust she pulled out a tissue to try to mitigate the damage.
She stared in frozen disbelief as the tissue turned crimson.
She looked at him again. And smelt him. He didn't smell of drink; at least, not enough to explain his condition. His face was white and beaded with sweat, his eyes half-hooded, and his breath came fast and faint between his teeth. If it hadn't been Joe Loomis leaning on her wall, if she hadn't known who he was and what he was capable of and in consequence been just a little afraid of him, she'd have recognised shock the moment she saw him.
‘Joe?' It didn't come naturally, calling a gangster by his first name, but anything else seemed odder. ‘Are you hurt? Come and sit down. I'll get some help.'
But he didn't want to move. And when she put her arm round him to steer him inside he let out a thin wail that shivered along her nerve endings.
‘What is it?' she gasped. ‘Where are you hurt?'
He couldn't tell her. But when she looked closer she saw it emerging from his left armpit like a monstrous growth: the hilt of a knife, gleaming softly with mother-of-pearl.
However long the blade was, the whole thing was buried inside him. The blood was a thick flood down his left side, soaking the cloth of his jacket and his trouser-leg and even his shoe, pooling on the navy carpet where he stood.
‘Oh, dear God!' She hesitated no longer but flew inside and snatched the phone off her desk. She didn't even phone Deacon: she called 999 and asked for an ambulance and the police. Then she hurried back to Loomis.
‘They're on their way,' she said, speaking clearly into his face. ‘Five minutes, that's all. You just have to hang on for five minutes. You need to lie down, Joe – right here, just slide down the wall and …'
It may have been her help and guidance; it might simply have been that he'd lost the strength to stay upright. He did as she said, slumping slowly to the floor. Brodie suspected he'd have been better lying flat, but he stayed hunched up against the wall and she was afraid of doing him more damage by moving him. She fetched cushions from the office sofa and tried to make him comfortable. When her fingers brushed accidentally against the knife, Loomis keened again.
‘I'm sorry! I'm sorry,' she stammered, recoiling.
Under the thin moustache his bloodless lips were moving. Brodie couldn't hear a word. She leant closer. ‘What happened? Who did this to you?'
She thought he was trying to say something. His eyes closed with the effort to concentrate. ‘D …D …'
‘A doctor?' she hazarded. ‘The ambulance is on its way. Just a few minutes more, Joe. They'll sort you out – you'll be all right. Just hang on in there.'
Joe Loomis shook his head. There were things he knew that she didn't, and one of them may well have been how long it takes to bleed to death. He tried again, as hard as he could, but still couldn't get past that stuttered initial.
Brodie nodded encouragingly. ‘Detectives? Yes, I called them too, they're on their way. Tell me who stabbed you, Joe. They're going to want to know who did this.'
But he'd said all he could. The life was pouring out of him: five minutes was just too long to wait. He reached for her wrist with long thin fingers, and she hadn't the heart to deny him whatever comfort that gave him. He was a bad man; but perhaps even bad men shouldn't die alone. ‘D …' he whispered just once more, and then he was still.
So was Brodie. Not because a dead man gripped her wrist but because fear gripped her heart. She'd asked him who killed him, and he'd told her. Someone beginning with D.
Brodie's office was barely big enough for the job it had to do normally. If clients arrived two at a time they had to share the sofa, and it wasn't a big sofa.
When Charlie Voss arrived, with Detective Constable Jill Meadows in tow, one of them had to step over Joe Loomis and view the scene from the other side. When the ambulance arrived a minute later, paramedics and their kit pouring into the narrow hall, the detectives were displaced into the inner office and Brodie was shunted into the kitchen.
They had to try – even for Joe Loomis they had to try – but Brodie was as sure as she could be that the man had gone where no warrant could follow. Within a couple of minutes the paramedics had reached the same conclusion. But anyone can be wrong, and Loomis was alive too recently to be sure he was irretrievable. They threw him onto a stretcher and into the back of the ambulance, and screeched off with the siren wailing.
Which made a bit more space in Brodie's office. Conveniently, because when Jack Deacon arrived as the ambulance wailed off he expanded with sheer fury. Because Voss was handy, Voss took the brunt of it.
‘You let them take my body? You let them
take
my
body?'
Voss, who'd been shouted at before, remained stoic. ‘No one was prepared to say it
was
a body. They thought there was just a chance it was still a patient.'
‘It was Joe Loomis,' yelled Deacon. ‘Even if he
was
alive, who's going to want their blood donations wasted on
him?
'
Charlie Voss filled the same role for Deacon that Jiminy Cricket filled for Pinocchio. If he'd thought it mattered he'd have put the moral argument and risked his superior's wrath. But nothing hung on it. Voss had seen a number of dead bodies by now – not as many as Deacon, but more than most people – and Loomis had looked as dead as any of them. He wasn't coming back. The paramedics could in good conscience have left him on Brodie's hall carpet to have a chalk-line drawn round him.
But in fact Deacon was yelling from habit. No vital evidence had been compromised by the decision to give Joe Loomis one last chance. Brodie's office may have been where he died but it wasn't where he met his death. When Deacon looked he found Loomis had left a route-map marked with his own blood. It ended on the bit of waste ground behind Shack Lane which Brodie used as a car park. Loomis's car was there, painted like a Comanche steed with bloody palm-prints.
By now Billy Mills, the Scene of Crime Officer, had arrived, resplendent in his white suit, and he set about preserving it. He was the only man in Dimmock – possibly the only man in Christendom – brave enough to shoo
Jack Deacon away from a bloodstain.
Finally Deacon remembered Brodie. She'd been barricaded in the kitchen when he arrived. When he returned to the office he found her sitting at her desk.
She saw him ponder how to approach this. Where to start. The angel that looks after fools and children steered him in the right direction so that at least his first question was the correct one. ‘Are you all right?'
She nodded weakly. ‘Fine.'
‘He didn't hurt you. That's not …?' He was indicating her hand.
She looked, without surprise or any other emotion. ‘It's not my blood. He didn't touch me. I touched him.'
‘We found where it happened. In the car park. Was his car there when you arrived?' Brodie shook her head. ‘What time was that?'
‘About twenty to ten.'
‘Were you expecting him?'
Her brow lowered at that. ‘You mean, did I come here to meet him? No, Jack, I didn't. Actually I came to see you, but you weren't at home. I came in here to' – she did a bit of editing – ‘pass a few minutes, then I heard him outside. I thought that was you too, so I opened the door and he fell inside. I thought he was drunk. Until I saw the knife.'
‘Would he have known you were here?'
Brodie shrugged. ‘He could have seen the light on. I suppose he just might have been following me, but it's a hell of a coincidence – he was following me and someone was following him. Maybe he used the car park to meet someone because it's dark and it's private and nine times
out of ten there's no one there after the shops shut.'
Deacon nodded slowly. It seemed probable. And when Loomis found himself in need of help, he staggered into Shack Lane and made for the first light he saw. ‘You didn't see anyone else? Someone running off? Or a car?'
‘Nothing.' She gave an apologetic little smile. ‘But then, I was kind of occupied.'
‘Did he say anything?'
Brodie hesitated. ‘He …was trying to.'
‘What did he say? A name? Think, Brodie. Maybe he was trying to name his killer.'
‘Maybe he was,' she agreed softly. ‘He was certainly trying to say something. He tried several times before he died.'
‘A word? A syllable? A letter? Give me something, for God's sake.'
She thought before she replied, but she didn't think long. They weren't alone. Voss was there, so was Jill Meadows. Both of them would have heard what she said.
‘I'm sorry, Jack. I couldn't make any sense of it.'
 
By the time she got home Daniel was asleep on her sofa. Brodie didn't want to disturb him, quietly turned the lights off. But then, instead of going to bed, after she'd checked that Paddy too was sleeping she went back to the living room and curled up in one of the armchairs. Even unconscious, Daniel was balm for her soul.
And this was how they'd met – almost four years ago – him lying unconscious and her watching over him, worried sick and feeling guilty. And if the reason for it was
different, the feeling of guilt was the same.
Perhaps because he always – so far as Brodie knew – slept alone, awareness of her proximity percolated down to him and Daniel stirred. Her dark-adjusted eyes saw him groping blindly for the lamp switch and his glasses.
‘It's all right,' she said quietly, ‘it's only me.' Because there had been an occasion when he'd woken like this, not alone, and it had been people who hurt him.
By the time he had his glasses on he was fully functional and his concern was only for her. ‘Are you all right?'
She smiled tiredly. ‘I'm fine.'
Which was what she'd told Deacon. Unlike Deacon, though, Daniel didn't move on to his next question but waited for her to answer this one honestly.
‘No,' she admitted then, ‘not fine. But not hurt. By the time he got to me he wasn't capable of hurting anyone. At least, not …'
She hadn't decided to tell him. In fact, she'd decided not to – Daniel's devotion to the truth made him a difficult confidant on occasions when Brodie considered dishonesty the best policy. But a part of her needed to share her fears. And Daniel never needed an open door, just a crack to push against.
He leant forward earnestly, mild grey eyes searching her face. ‘Not what? Not physically?'
Brodie shrugged uncomfortably. ‘He wasn't a nice man, Daniel. Dimmock's a better place without him.'
‘Except that now there's a killer running round. I'm not sure that's much better.'
‘Oh, it is,' she said, too quickly. ‘Believe me.'
Daniel went on watching her, not crowding her into confiding in him, just somehow expecting it. These last three years, of course. If they'd taught him anything, it was that he and Brodie couldn't keep secrets from one another and shouldn't try. ‘Of course I believe you. What's bothering me is how you know.'
If she really hadn't wanted to talk about this she'd have been more careful. She let out a long, broken sigh. ‘I spy, with my little eye, someone beginning with D …'
Whatever she was doing, Daniel knew it wasn't a game. ‘Me,' he said immediately.
Brodie shook her head. ‘You've got an alibi. You were with Paddy. Someone else.'
She saw the answer lodge in his head, widening his eyes. ‘
Jack
?'
So she told him everything. Everything she hadn't told Deacon. Which was also a recurring theme these last three years.
Daniel heard her out, then shook his yellow head firmly. ‘No. Jack wouldn't do that.'
‘Sometimes,' she whispered, ‘Jack's not a nice man either.'
She didn't need to remind Daniel. At the same time, he wasn't emotionally involved; or not with Deacon. ‘Jack has a temper,' he acknowledged. ‘One day he could kill someone. But it would be with his fists, not a knife.'
‘He was angry. Loomis threatened us – me and Jonathan. I think, if he thought we were in danger …'
‘ …That he'd ambush him in a dark alley and stick a knife in him?' But he did her the courtesy of thinking about it.
Perhaps it wasn't absurd. Deacon had had as difficult a day as Brodie had. She'd gone home to friends and family: he'd gone home alone. Was it beyond the bounds of possibility that the fury at Loomis's threats had built up in him until he could sit still no longer, had to do something about it?
With a knife?
‘You need to talk to Jack.'
Brodie's eyes flared in alarm. ‘No!'
‘You have to. He needs to know what Loomis said.'
‘He didn't say anything! He couldn't. He couldn't get past the first letter …'
‘Which was a D. Jack may have had a motive of sorts, but if he was at Battle Alley between nine-thirty and ten, someone else killed Joe Loomis. And Jack needs to know that Loomis recognised his killer, and tried to say his name.
Brodie mumbled something that he didn't hear. ‘Hm?'
‘I said, Jack wasn't at Battle Alley. Charlie Voss arrived five minutes before Jack did.'
‘OK, so he was at home. Someone may have seen him leaving.'
‘He wasn't at home either. Not when I knocked on his door twenty minutes earlier.'
‘Then …' Daniel couldn't come up with another alternative. ‘He could have been anywhere. He could have been in The Belted Galloway. He could have been walking on the Promenade. Wherever he was, he can probably prove it if he knows he has to.'
She made one last attempt at avoidance. ‘No one else was there. No one else heard it. If we're sure Jack's not
responsible for this, why bring it up at all?'
It really didn't need saying but he said it anyway. ‘Because it's evidence. Because at some point that one letter Loomis was able to say will mean something to someone. Because Jack needs to play this with a full deck. And because he doesn't need you to compromise yourself to protect him.'
Brodie was nodding slowly. She managed a wry smile. ‘You're right. I'll call him in the morning.'
‘Call him now.'
 
When he asked what she wanted, she refused to say over the phone. He asked if it was important enough to drag him away from a murder inquiry and she said it was. Naturally, his first thought flew to his son.
When Brodie met him on the front steps of the big Victorian house in Chiffney Road, his big craggy face was fish-belly white. ‘There's some news? What? Is he all right? Brodie, tell me!'
It was reassuring that his first thought, his immediate fear, was not for himself. ‘Jonathan's fine, Jack. This is about Loomis. Come inside, we need to talk.'
Daniel offered to leave them to it. But both for their different reasons wanted him to stay: Brodie because his quiet presence helped her stay focused, restrained her from saying things she didn't mean and would later regret; and Deacon because this was business and he'd listen to anything anyone had to contribute. And he knew from bitter experience that Brodie would have discussed this with her friend before coming to him. Daniel might remember details she'd forgotten.
But since he was there, Daniel made a point of watching Deacon's face as Brodie spoke. So far as he could tell the big man never saw the punch-line coming. Even after she'd repeated Loomis's abbreviated last words, it took a moment for their import to sink in.
Then his jaw dropped slowly. His heavy, intelligent eyes saucered. There was a long silence, perhaps half a minute, while he considered the implications of what she'd said. Then:
‘You thought I stabbed him.'
‘No!' And then, ‘Really, I didn't. But in all the circumstances I didn't feel I could keep it to myself. Only I didn't want to say anything in front of anyone else, just in case …'
‘In case I'd lured Joe Loomis to a dark car park and buried a knife in his armpit?' finished Deacon tartly. ‘Thanks, Brodie. I appreciate your consideration.'
‘Don't be like that.' Increasingly she was convinced it was a coincidence, that Deacon had nothing to hide. For the moment it made her tone conciliatory. Before long, though, that would give way to the annoyance that was her default position. ‘I was shocked and scared. I wasn't thinking clearly. I needed to talk to you alone first. Just in case. I'm sorry if that feels like an insult. It wasn't meant as one. I just … Dead or alive, Joe Loomis means nothing to me. You do. I wanted to be sure.'

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