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Authors: Jo Bannister

Tags: #Mystery

BOOK: The Depths of Solitude
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“The funny thing is,” he said, “at first I didn’t notice. I didn’t want to go out; I didn’t want to see people. I thought it was my choice. I found a store that delivered so I didn’t have to go shopping, and I’d sold the business by then so I didn’t have to go to work, and I thought I was just taking some time out and would get back on track once I’d got my head sorted. Only the longer it took, the harder it got. My life had closed in around me while I wasn’t looking. And the rest” – he darted her a fugitive smile — “you know.”
Brodie nodded sympathetically. “But you are getting better.”
He couldn’t see it. His eyebrows canted sceptically. “How do you figure that? I lost it today. Totally. I got a taxi into town, and I was pleased with that. I just needed to get the train as far as Chichester, he was going to meet me at the station. But suddenly the enormity of it hit me. The people – the noise, the bustle. I needed to buy a ticket but I couldn’t get myself to the booking office. I know it sounds absurd – I can’t explain. I stumbled into the phone-booth mostly to get away from all the people.”
“But you got there,” she insisted. “And when you got into trouble, you dealt with that too. Geoffrey, when you first contacted me two months ago, it took you three phone-calls to introduce yourself and say what you wanted. Do you remember? When I came to your house to talk about it, it took you ten minutes to open the door. From there to even thinking you could visit someone in another town is a quantum leap.”
Harcourt hadn’t looked at it like that. Brodie saw him consider and begin to draw a little comfort from it. “I hadn’t realised. You’ve been good for me, Mrs Farrell.”
Brodie was glad he thought so. “I have another friend
who has panic attacks, so your condition is nothing new to me. It doesn’t embarrass me. I’m happy to help.”
“You’re very kind.” Harcourt thought for a moment, then he unzipped the canvas bag. Brodie saw the gleam of oiled brass. “All the same, I want you to bill me for your time. No.” He stopped her protest with a lifted finger. “I insist. If you won’t let me pay for your time I won’t be able to call you again, and if I can’t come to you for help I wouldn’t know where to turn.”
Brodie was used to being paid for her time but not like this. It made her uncomfortable, that she couldn’t perform an act of simple kindness without putting a price on it. There was a fine line between businesslike and mercenary, and sometimes she worried that she didn’t tread it as surely as she should. “Put your money away. Next time I find something for you I’ll factor it in, all right?”
He smiled. “All right.”
“What’s in the bag?”
He opened it a little more, so she could see. “The man with the Spinning Jenny – I was taking this to show him.”
Brodie recognised it. “That’s the one you showed my daughter.”
“I just finished it,” he nodded. “The old Solitude tide-mill, on the Windle. He asked what I was working on, I said I’d bring it to show him. I was showing off, I’m afraid. But it is a pretty good model. Of how it used to be – now it’s so derelict you can hardly make sense of it. I wanted to record the automation before it was impossible to work out how it was done.”
“Automation?”
“The most important part of a tide-mill,” Harcourt assured her, warming to his favourite subject. “The wind blows day and night, and rivers run round the clock. But high tide only comes twice daily, the times vary with the
moon, and for half the year at least one high tide will be during the hours of darkness. You had to make it more convenient – by storing the energy of the tide until you were ready to use it, and with automatic systems that could run while you slept.”
He pointed out the tiny brass features with a finger that looked too thick for such delicate work. “Rising tide filled the lagoon through one-way sluices. Another sluice sent the water down to the mill, turning the wheel from about half-tide until the lagoon was empty. You could mill for up to eighteen hours a day.
“But some of that would still be at night. Things were rigged to start up automatically. As long as the miller refilled the grain hopper, emptied the flour-bins and reset the sluices, the mill would start work again at the next rising tide. Flour mills were capable of the highest degree of automation. It’s harder to pour spades.”
Brodie looked at him, puzzled. Harcourt gave a sad smile. “Sorry. Engineers’ jokes tend to be rather obscure.”
“I had a t-shirt once,” said Brodie helpfully. “It said, ‘Engineers do it with precision’.”
The way Harcourt looked at her, she thought he was going to ask: “Do what?” Instead he just nodded.
“Milling was hard and dangerous work,” he said, faintly reproachful. “One or two men were harnessing enormous natural forces to run heavy machinery: there were some dreadful accidents. Runaway wheels were common. If you were lucky they just stripped the teeth from the pit-wheel. If you weren’t they ripped your arm off.”
“You should add that to the model,” suggested Brodie. “A tiny miller being torn apart by a rogue wheel. Paddy would love it.”
Harcourt did the sad smile again.
“How did you get into all this?” she asked.
“I’ve been interested in machinery since I was a little boy. My father was a locksmith. I had my own business by the time I was twenty-five: people told me what they wanted and I designed and constructed a lathe or a loom or a press or a specialist security lock: whatever they needed. I had a certain talent,” he said wistfully.
“And then you lost your wife,” murmured Brodie.
“And then I lost Millie,” he agreed. “And nothing else mattered. I let customers down, I let the business fail, I wallowed in misery for two years. By the time I realised I had to get a grip on myself, that Millie wouldn’t have wanted me to waste my life in mourning, the business was gone and I was no longer a recluse from choice.”
“And now,” Brodie said positively, “you’re mending. You’re going to get over this, Geoffrey. You’ve come so far already. Get your breath back, then when you’re ready try again. Only this time call me first and I’ll come with you.”
He regarded her sombrely. “You’re quite something, you know that?”
She smiled. “I can bear to hear it again. Listen, we have to move. People will be wondering where I’ve got to.” She started the engine.
“Of course.” He drew the canvas bag up round the model and zipped it closed. Then he opened it again and took a handkerchief out.
When Deacon left Superintendent Fuller, Voss was out of the office. He’d told DC Winston he had someone to see in town and would be back soon. Deacon gave him fifteen minutes, then tried his phone. It was switched off. He waited ten minutes longer and tried again, with the same result.
He prowled into the long CID room where half a dozen Detective Constables worked, often ate and occasionally slept, and which in consequence resembled a pig-sty, and lowered one haunch onto the desk in front of Winston’s. “Where did Charlie say he was going?”
“He didn’t,” said Winston. “A phone-call came in, he took it and he said he was going out.”
“On his mobile?”
“Your office phone.”
Deacon called the switchboard. Yes, a call had been put through to his office some forty minutes earlier and answered by DS Voss. The caller gave his name as Walsh.
Deacon was looking up Walsh’s number when the mobile warbled in his pocket. He didn’t recognise the number but he always found it hard to ignore the peremptory summons of a ringing phone. There was no knowing what fun a man could miss that way.
It was Voss’s fiancee, Helen Choi. “Charlie asked me to call you.”
“He did?” Deacon scowled at the phone. “I’ve been looking for him. Do you know where he is?”
“He’s here. At my flat, in the nurses’ building behind the hospital. Can you come? I’ll meet you at the main door.”
Jack Deacon didn’t get invited to young women’s flats so often that he knew the protocol. “You want me to come there?”
“Yes, please,” she said. “I think you should.”
“Put Charlie on.”
“No, Mr Deacon,” the girl said quietly. “I want you to come here, as soon as you can. You can talk to him then.”
Two-metre rugby players with broken noses and police-issue semi-automatics didn’t say “No, Mr Deacon” to him. For a moment he couldn’t think what came next. “Er … all right,” he conceded weakly. “Give me five minutes.”
She was waiting for him, compact and businesslike in her blue uniform with her glossy black hair scraped back in a bun. “I’m sorry to be so mysterious. But Charlie needed to see you before anyone else finds out what’s happened.”
Deacon stared down at her. “What
has
happened?”
“This is my flat.” Helen opened the door.
When his eyes fell on Sergeant Voss, Deacon’s jaw dropped and then damped tight shut. So tight that he had to force the words out between his teeth. “What fell on you?”
 
The Rose
in Rye Lane was an old pub – bits of it dated back to the original Tudor inn. The lane was narrow, the windows small and the low ceilings carried on dark oak beams so that even in the middle of the day there was barely enough light to read by. Conveniently,
The Rose’s
patrons were not big readers on the whole. Page Three, the sports section and the statutory declaration on a Legal Aid form: a man who could read those could, they reckoned, read enough. And low lighting has advantages in a villains’ pub. When men in pointy hats ask what you’ve seen, it’s nice to be able to say in all honesty that you saw nothing.
Charlie Voss took a deep breath before he went inside but he didn’t linger in the doorway. A man with enemies waiting in the dark is better not silhouetting himself against the light. He moved calmly towards the bar. “I’m looking for Joe Loomis. He’s expecting me.”
The man behind the bar and two customers leaning on it looked at him as if someone had found him on a shoe. “Mr Loomis is?” The barman’s voice was a heavy blank with undertones of disbelief, just about as offensive as a man with illegal substances about him wants to be to a police officer. If he’d used that tone with Deacon he’d have been scraping his nose off the bar by now. “Are you sure, Mr Voss?”
“Tell you what, Wally,” said Voss amiably, “why don’t you ask him?”
Whatever reason Wally Briggs had to stop short of picking fights with the police paled into insignificance beside his overwhelming need not to annoy Joe Loomis. It wasn’t just that his livelihood might depend on it: his neck might too. However unlikely it seemed to him that the nastiest thug in Dimmock wanted to see a police officer, he couldn’t afford to trust his instincts when the consequences of being wrong could be grave. “I’ll ask.” The man ducked under the bar and disappeared into a back room.
A minute later he returned, holding the door open. “He’ll see you.”
His heart in his boots, Voss managed a good-natured nod. “I thought he might.” He left the comparative safety of the public bar and entered the secret bowels of the old building, and the oak door shut behind him.
Joe Loomis was not a big man, would never have hired himself out as a bouncer. He was shorter than Voss and though he was ten years older he was no broader. He was
a local man down to the accent, but legend had it that his people were from Ireland. His black hair was thinning alarmingly, and he glued it down with gel and drew the eye away from it with a thin moustache.
“Mr Voss,” he said – politely, cautiously. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Mr Deacon couldn’t come.”
One thin black eyebrow arched in surprise. “Doesn’t he think what I have to say is important enough?”
“It’s not that,” Voss said evenly. “I didn’t tell him.”
For a moment Loomis said nothing. Then the ghost of a smile crossed the neat dark features, fastidious and cruel as a cat’s. “Why not?”
“Because you’ll want paying for your information, and I don’t want Mr Deacon having to choose between his career and his lady.”
Now Loomis was smiling openly. “You think you can – what? – treat him? We’re not talking about a round of drinks and a tandoori chicken afterwards: we’re talking about information that could save somebody’s life. You think it’s going to come cheap?”
“I doubt it,” said Voss honestly. “But then, Jack Deacon’s my boss and my friend. And I don’t come cheap either.”
Loomis wasn’t sure what he was being offered. His smile was uncertain around the edges. “What are you suggesting? I tell you what I know, and sometime when I really need a favour you’ll lose me a parking ticket? No offence, Mr Voss, but sergeants are ten a penny. But a detective superintendent would be worth getting chummy with.”
“You were never going to get chummy with Mr Deacon,” Voss said with certainty. “He wouldn’t sell out to you or anyone like you. But if this goes badly he could
spend the rest of his life wondering if he should have done. Me, I’m open to offers. I won’t always be a sergeant: the time may come when the knowledge that you can end my career may be worth something to you.”
Loomis was at least thinking about it. Already he’d spotted the flaw. “For what? You ask for information in connection with a police inquiry and I give it to you. What’s my hold over you? You’ve done nothing wrong. Jesus,
I’ve
done nothing wrong!”
Voss nodded. “Then I’ll do something wrong. Don’t get your hopes up — I won’t give you a get-out-of-jail-free card. Prison’s the right place for you, I won’t help you stay out, not even for this. But who knows what the future holds? There may come a time when you’d give your eye-teeth for a handle on me – for the ability to make a phone call and know it’ll result in my suspension. That’s why I’m here. Prove this meeting took place and whoever I am by then, however senior, I’m history. And the proof is what I’m about to tell you. If Divisional HQ ever learn that when I was a DS in Dimmock I passed on operational data to a prime suspect, they won’t care how trivial it was, they’ll hang me out to dry. That’s what I’m offering you. That’s all I’m offering you.”
“What proof?”
“Our codename for you. The label on any intelligence we receive about you, any action we plan against you.”
“I could get that anywhere,” said Loomis dismissively.
“No, you couldn’t. If you could you would have done, and you’d have told me what it is by now.
“Police stations aren’t very secure places – you put your pen down and it’s gone, you put your wallet down and someone treats the office to tea and buns with your fiver. But some secrets we’re good at keeping, and the reason
is that people who can’t keep them don’t stay. You can’t have Jack Deacon at any price. You can’t have me in your pocket. But you can have me in the garbage disposal with your finger on the button. For information of no value to anyone else, that’s a good deal.”
Joe Loomis had one of those smooth, closed-in faces which ration out expression like a taxi-driver giving change. Even people who knew him well could rarely guess what he was thinking. A minute ticked by and still he said nothing.
Voss waited. He had no illusions about this. He was mortgaging his career to a man he wouldn’t have lent his car to. If he’d thought about it any longer, maybe he wouldn’t have done it. But maybe he would, because there was a lot at stake and he wasn’t a man to stay safe while other people were getting hurt. He’d risked his life to protect the paying customers before now, he expected to do it again. Beside that, the chance this might one day cost him his job seemed an acceptable gamble.
Depending on how his career — and Loomis’s – developed he might never have to pay up. But if he did it wouldn’t have been for nothing. Brodie Farrell’s welfare concerned him, both because it was his job to be concerned and because he liked the woman. But that wasn’t why he was dancing with the devil. He was doing it because Jack Deacon couldn’t, and if it came to a straight choice he put a higher price on Deacon’s professional survival than his own.
Finally Loomis came back from whatever mental counting-house he’d stopped off at and his smile broadened. “Mr Voss, I can’t see the day coming when that would do me any good. The moment you thought it might you’d go to your superiors and say what you did and why you did it. Maybe you’d have to resign anyway but that wouldn’t
stop me going down. I don’t think what you’re offering is worth squat to me.
“But then,” the little thug went on, “I never expected to come out of this with Dimmock CID in my pocket. It’s a nice thought but a man has to be realistic. You’re right: Mr Deacon wouldn’t sell me his soul even to save his fancy piece. He wouldn’t have offered as much as you have. That’s not why I suggested meeting. I wasn’t hoping to leave here with his future in my hands. Just his blood on my boots.”
Loomis watched his words register in Voss’s face. He saw the younger man stiffen, then deliberately relax. This wasn’t a fight-or-flight situation. Voss could leave any time he wanted, just open the door and walk out. He didn’t because he’d come here for something and he wasn’t leaving without it.
Slowly Loomis nodded his approval. “All right. Well, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. I’ve got a bit of business to attend to. I’ll be back in – oh, let’s say ten minutes. If you’re still here I’ll tell you what I know.”
Voss said nothing. Nor did he move. Loomis left the room, closing the door behind him.
After twenty seconds it opened again.
 
“Never mind that,” said Voss wearily. “I got it. The name. The man who was asking questions about Brodie in the Shalimar Club. Only I hope it rings more bells with you than it did with me. French. Freddy the bouncer said his name was French.”
“French.” Nothing much was happening in Deacon’s brain either. But then, it was still struggling with the evidence of his senses: what he could see and what he could infer. “French?”
“You know him?” A thin trickle of blood ran from
Voss’s nose down his broken lip. It was an effort to raise one hand and wipe it away.
Deacon shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’ve never arrested anyone called French …” It was no good, he couldn’t keep his eyes off Voss’s face, and he couldn’t look at it and talk about anything else. Helen had cleaned him up before Deacon got here, so there was less blood than there would have been half an hour ago but more swelling. His best friends would have had trouble recognising him now: in another half hour it would be a matter of dental records. “You should be in hospital,” Deacon said, his voice both soft and rough.
Voss shook his head, wincing. “I couldn’t. I couldn’t have kept a lid on it once people had seen me. Same way I couldn’t turn up at Battle Alley. I had to see you first.”
“Charlie,” said Deacon fiercely, “you could be bleeding inside. You can beat a man to death, you know – well, this is what it looks like. How many were there?”
“I’m all right,” muttered Voss. “They knew what they were doing – it wasn’t in anybody’s interests to have me pass out and wake up in A&E. Nothing’s broken. I’ll be stiff for a few days, after that I’ll be able to show my face back at work.”
“
That
face? We’ll need to come up with a bloody good explanation!”
Voss already had. He’d been thinking about it since Helen picked him up in her car from the alley behind Rye Lane. The secret to thinking clearly when you’re in pain is to concentrate on one thing at a time. “I fell off a motorbike. A mate let me have a go on his scrambler and I wasn’t very good. Chief, you shouldn’t still be here. Get back to the office, find out who French is. Find out where he is.”

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