Closer Still, page 15
part #8 of A Brodie Farrell Mystery Series
‘Evie not off yet?’ asked Brodie.
Faith looked terribly harassed. She mopped her brow with the back of her wrist. ‘She 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. ‘Mum, I need …’
‘No,’ said Faith immediately. ‘You don’t.’
‘But …’
‘Evie! 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 – however bad-temperedly – will. ‘How’s she travelling?’
‘A friend’s taking her,’ said Faith distractedly. She gazed at the pile of bags in despair. ‘Lord knows where this lot’s going.’ Abruptly she turned her back on it, headed out through the kitchen. ‘Come 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. ‘They’re lovely,’ she said, genuinely impressed.
‘Thank you,’ said Faith. ‘Is that what you wanted to see me about?’ She sounded hopeful.
“Fraid not,’ said Brodie honestly. ‘It’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. ‘Look, 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. ‘OK, 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.
‘What question?’ Faith’s voice was rough, the words dragged from her.
‘Was Joe Loomis Dev’s father?’
Faith Stretton blinked. Brodie thought, with sinking heart, that her surprise was genuine. ‘Dev’s? You think Dev is Joe’s son?’ And then she laughed; though in truth there wasn’t much humour in it. ‘Mrs 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!’
‘Joe wasn’t exactly lily-white either.’
‘You can say that again!’
‘I mean, he was dark – 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.
‘Maybe that’s what I saw in him,’ said Faith sardonically. ‘I got one nice kid with a dark-skinned man – maybe subconsciously I was looking for another.’
Brodie’s teeth had caught a corner of her lip and her nose wrinkled in embarrassment. ‘You’re telling me I’m wrong.
‘Yes,’ said Faith with heavy emphasis. ‘That’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. ‘See 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.
‘And my point is this,’ she said, turning Brodie to face her. ‘Not 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?
‘Well, I don’t know any either. Those people freezing on their mountaintops weren’t strangers – 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.
‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘It seemed – 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 …
She felt her cheeks flaming all the way back to her car.
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.
‘Send 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. ‘What do you know already?’
‘You know what I know already – 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.
‘I can’t tell you that,’ rumbled Deacon. ‘It 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. ‘You know The Sentinel’s position – 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. ‘I 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?’
‘Not usually,’ said Sessions. ‘I 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. ‘Terrorism.’ And, as Sessions’ eyebrows soared, he added quickly, ‘We 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?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s all you’ll write?’
‘Well, that’s harder,’ said Sessions. ‘Other people may have things they want to say.’
‘Is it your job to do everything anyone wants?’
‘No. But then, it’s not my job to do everything you want either.’ Undeterred by Deacon’s scowl, he went on: ‘Superintendent, 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. ‘Mr 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.’
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 – always the first reaction to any crisis – 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. ‘It’s started.’
Deacon heard him out, answered with a disparaging sniff. ‘It’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.’
‘True,’ agreed McKinney. He knew parts of Dimmock where you got grief for having a Scots accent. ‘This 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.’
‘Is he all right?’ asked Deacon. ‘Gul?’
‘I think so. Cuts and bruises, shock, and it didn’t do his suit much good. But it’s a warning, Jack. Not to him – to us. People are scared. And scared people do stupid things.’
Deacon glowered at him. ‘What do you want me to do about it?’
Sergeant McKinney was one of the few people in Battle Alley Police Station who wasn’t intimidated by Jack Deacon. He was older than Deacon, he’d been doing the job longer, and he was still in uniform because he chose to be. He’d seen scarier things than Deacon every day when he worked in Glasgow.
‘Wrap it up,’ he said firmly. ‘Until we can tell people the danger has passed, things like this are going to keep happening. In fact, they’re going to get worse.’
He was on his way back to the stairs, but turned and said over his shoulder: ‘Do you know the really stupid part? Ashok Gul is a Hindu. He’s about as likely to belong to al-Qaeda as you are.’
Things only got worse after nightfall. All at once the bands of young men, and some of young women, who always hung about on street corners in the evening stopped looking merely idle and started to look menacing. After the Gul incident, the ones who felt most menaced were young Asians, who in consequence made a point of sticking together when they went out. The consequence of that was worried phone calls to Battle Alley about gangs of al-Qaeda bombers taking over the streets. It didn’t matter how often Sergeant McKinney explained that that’s not how bombers work, people were too nervous to listen. Police patrols saturated the town centre, keeping apart people whose mere proximity was making one another anxious.
That wasn’t the only problem. Although two days remained of the school week, dozens of uneasy parents decided this was the perfect time to pay unscheduled visits to out-of-town grannies. Dimmock had a perfectly good road system for all normal purposes, but the ebb-tide of people carriers heading anywhere that wasn’t Dimmock soon turned into traffic jams.
As a catalyst to this volatile mix of genuine concern and unjustified panic, around midnight a bunch of teenagers had the bright idea – as bunches of teenagers will: there’s no situation so fraught that it can’t be made worse by a bunch of teenagers – of setting off some fireworks. Mayhem ensued. People stuck in traffic abandoned their cars and ran for shelter, and after that the traffic lights changed and changed in vain – nothing could move. The air was abuzz with the wails of exhausted children, frightened parents shouting instructions no one was in a position to carry out, and volleys of screams as triple-strength bangers went off in the side streets. The sounds melded and mounted to a crescendo that poured over the town in a tidal wave of fear.
Police reinforcements were drafted in from neighbouring towns. In a stroke of ruthless genius the normally mild-mannered Superintendent Fuller, senior officer at Battle Alley, commandeered a bulldozer to shift obstructing vehicles and get the traffic flowing again. The roving bands were shepherded homeward, the stranded were helped, the frightened were reassured and anyone found in possession of a bit of blue touch-paper was slung in the back of a police car. Gradually the chaos gave way to some semblance of order. By three-thirty in the morning the town was quiet.
Jack Deacon, who’d been directing traffic for the first time in twenty years, slumped exhausted in Superintendent Fuller’s office. ‘It’s official. They’re all mad. We work for a community of lunatics.’
Fuller lacked the strength to smile. ‘Go home. Get some sleep. Tomorrow will be worse.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Turning the media spotlight on Dimmock changed everything. It was no longer possible to weigh competing evils one against another. Public opinion demanded that Something must be done, even though there was no consensus as to what or how it would help.
It wasn’t that anyone had done anything wrong. It was the job of The Sentinel to report what it knew, however disconcerting. It’s the job of the national media to pick up the big stories. And it’s the job of governments to protect their citizens against threats, so when the front desk at Battle Alley was inundated with phone calls from people demanding to know if the danger was real, if it was imminent and what the police were doing about it, the callers weren’t doing anything wrong either.
With the superintendents too busy to talk, the sergeants fielded most of the calls – which is pretty much the way police stations work normally. They agreed on a tone of cautious reassurance, telling people that the risk of an attack is still a long way short of an actual attack and advising them to be watchful as they carried on with their normal routines. But even as they said it they knew they were wasting their breath.
Because to the people of Dimmock – to most people in the civilised world – the word terrorism that had once meant an IRA bomb in an English pub now conjured images of a city block in ruins. Of innocent, uninvolved, undeserving people slaughtered not by the handful, not by the score, but by the thousand. Of tall buildings full of men and women, most of whom had never done or wished harm on anyone, burning and falling.
They say a picture speaks a thousand words, and it’s true. A powerful image etches itself on the retina as if with acid. But you can’t tell a story with pictures. There are no nuances, no balance, often not much information. So people see and remember, but what they remember is – quite literally – a snapshot of a moment. A falling man who never lands.
