Closer Still, page 18
part #8 of A Brodie Farrell Mystery Series
‘So it was Dev he went to meet?’
When Daniel screwed up his face like that he looked like a twelve-year-old struggling with long division. ‘Dev, or someone like Dev.’
Brodie frowned. ‘Meaning?’
‘It was personal, not business. If Joe had been meeting someone on business he’d certainly have taken back-up because he’d have expected the other party to take back-up too. He went alone because he didn’t expect to need help, but also because he didn’t want his minders to know what he was doing. He didn’t want them gossiping about a private matter.’
‘Donna knew.’
‘Donna’s different. She was about the closest thing Joe had to a friend. And all she knew was that Joe had a child, and he wasn’t interested in it.’
‘If he knew about the child, maybe the child knew about him,’ suggested Brodie. ‘Joe slapped Faith’s face in a public place: Dev was bound to ask why. Maybe that’s when she told him. That he wasn’t who he’d always thought he was, he was the son of a vicious little drugs baron instead. Imagine how that made him feel. Before he’d had time to come to terms with the idea, and recognise that Faith had been right all along to keep the pair of them apart, he’d called Joe and told him to meet him. And Joe came because if they couldn’t discuss it in private it was going to happen in public.’
‘You sound pretty sure that it was Dev.’ Daniel was sorry about that.
‘I think it had to be,’ said Brodie. ‘The elements are all there. We know Faith knew Joe back in the Eighties. Well, if you’d had a child by Joe Loomis, you’d want to hide the fact too. So she invented a Kashmiri father-figure, and that worked fine for a quarter of a century. Daniel, you were there when she as good as told Joe that’s what she’d done – I don’t mind people thinking I slept with an Asian as long as they don’t know I slept with you! But then he slapped her, and people saw, and back home Dev wanted to know why and wouldn’t take her evasions for an answer any longer. So she told him.’
Daniel was nodding slowly. ‘But then, why didn’t Dev report the fight to the police?’
Brodie shrugged. ‘Shock? This isn’t the kind of situation he’s familiar with. And he’s still reeling from the discovery that he’s son and heir to a thug, and his own father’s just pulled a knife on him. Dev wouldn’t be firing on all cylinders at that point. And maybe he didn’t realise how seriously Joe was hurt. Once he’d calmed down a bit, perhaps he’d have gone round to Battle Alley to explain what happened. Only by then he’d heard that Joe was dead. If he told the truth now, it was all going to become public property. Maybe Faith’s the one he was trying to protect.
‘And nobody had come looking for him. The only one who knew Dev was Joe’s son was his mother, and she wasn’t going to turn him in. Maybe he thought he’d wait to see what happened next. He didn’t feel like he’d murdered anyone. All he did was defend himself against an attack.’
Daniel took up the narration. ‘And nine days passed, and not only did the police not come knocking at Dev’s door, they lost all interest in the killing. There’s a full-scale terror alert going on. And at that point Dev finishes his packed lunch and breaks into his employers’ explosives bunker? Why on earth would he do such a thing?’
Brodie couldn’t imagine either. ‘Is it possible Dev’s involved in terrorism as well?’
‘Islamic fundamentalist terrorism?’ She nodded. ‘But haven’t we just decided Dev is Joe’s son? What possible interest could he have in jihad?’
‘Well …’ said Brodie slowly. ‘Because until Faith told him about Joe a fortnight ago, Dev thought he was half Kashmiri. That’s why he went out to help after the earthquake. Maybe he got involved with fundamentalism while he was there – maybe he was involved in a plot to bomb Dimmock long before he stabbed Joe. Maybe that’s why he was angry enough with Joe to stick a knife in him – that he’d put his whole future on the line to support a cause he’d come to believe in passionately, only to discover it wasn’t his fight after all. He’d been lied to. He wasn’t a member of an oppressed culture at all: he was the illegitimate son of an Irish drug dealer.’ She considered. ‘I can see how he’d be a bit miffed about that.’
‘All right,’ said Daniel, accepting her version for the moment. ‘So he was angry with Joe because he felt cheated. Then he thought about it some more and decided that the accident of his conception wasn’t a good enough reason to give up on a cause that, a few days earlier, he’d believed in strongly enough to die for. So he determines to go on with the bomb plot. But Daoud is now dead and the Dhazi cousins are in custody. Is that why he tried to steal explosives? Because the guy who knew how to make them out of common household chemicals was dead?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Brodie slowly. ‘He’d psyched himself up to be a suicide bomber – and even after he discovered he had the wrong genes, he was still crazy enough to want to go through with it. He had to find a new source of explosives – it was all he had left, all that mattered to him. Even if he wasn’t who he thought he was, if he went out with a bang he’d always be remembered as an Islamic martyr. He’d had the title stolen from him – he had to win it back. And though he maybe didn’t know how to blow things up with hair bleach and chapatti flour, he did know where there was a stock of blasting explosives.’
‘So what went wrong?’ asked Daniel.
Brodie didn’t understand. ‘Nothing went wrong. He got past site security because he knew his way round and everyone there knows him. Then he broke into the bunker and …’ Now she had it. ‘Ah.’
‘And now he’s sitting there inside a police cordon and while he could make a big bang if he wanted to, blowing up a shed in a field is never going to strike a hammer-blow against Western imperialism. So what has he gained?’
‘It went off half-cocked,’ said Brodie weakly.
‘Sure it did. He broke into an explosives bunker in the middle of a working day, with people who knew him all around. Of course they called the police – what else were they going to do? It was entirely predictable that it would end in a siege. A siege doesn’t get him anywhere. So why did he do it that way?’
‘He panicked,’ Brodie supposed. ‘Everything was going wrong, he couldn’t carry out the original plan, he thought this was the only way he could carry out any plan at all and he could only do this if he acted before the police caught up with him. He was making it up as he went along.’
But Daniel didn’t buy it. ‘How panicked would you have to be to do it in broad daylight? He could hardly have drawn more attention to himself if he was trying. At night, knowing his way around, knowing what security there was, he had a chance of getting hold of the explosives and staying ahead of the police long enough to use them. Why didn’t he wait till dark?’
‘The guy’s planning on blowing up half Dimmock and probably himself as well,’ Brodie reminded him. ‘Maybe getting away with it didn’t seem that important.’
‘But he had to stay free long enough to do what he planned, or what was the point? It’s not the suicide that’s the aim of a suicide bombing, it’s the bombing. The target. People, important buildings – something that will send shockwaves through the ranks of the enemy. He can’t do that on a building site in the middle of Menner Down.’
‘So he’s a bad suicide bomber,’ shrugged Brodie. ‘I suppose it’s a skill you don’t get much chance to practise.’
Daniel thought about that. ‘Maybe. But he’s been good at everything else he’s done. Brodie – what if it’s not that he’s a bad suicide bomber? What if it’s that he’s a good diversion?’
Real silence isn’t just the absence of sound: it has substance, it expands to fill the space available. That’s why we talk of breaking a silence. It isn’t nothing. Sometimes it’s almost tangible, a physical obstacle to overcome.
This was one of those silences. Brodie’s eyes grew round and her lips formed a startled O but no sound came. Like having to fight your way out of a sleep paralysis, she had to force the first meaningless grunt out of her throat before the silence pulled back enough to let her speak.
‘You mean – while every policeman within a twenty-mile radius is here, preventing the escape of someone who has no intention of going anywhere, something’s going to happen that they might be able to prevent if they were where they should be?’
Daniel gave that awkward little half-shrug that was the souvenir of a broken collar-bone. His plain round face was troubled. ‘It would make a kind of sense. It would make sense of some of the things that don’t make sense otherwise.’
‘But he’ll never get away with it! He’s surrounded, he isn’t walking away from this. The moment the town hall or whatever hits the stratosphere, Jack’ll know what he did. He’ll spend the rest of his life behind bars!’
‘These people are happy to die hurting what they think of as the enemy,’ Daniel pointed out quietly. ‘I don’t think they’d be glad to blow their stupid heads off but draw the line at going to jail.’
‘My God!’ whispered Brodie. ‘Daniel, what do we do?’
There was only one answer. ‘We have to tell Jack. Maybe he’s already thought of it, in which case he’ll shout at us, but if he hasn’t he needs to. Phone him. He’ll take a call from you.’
She nodded, fumbling for her phone. Only with her finger on speed-dial she hesitated, intimidated by the implications. ‘What if we’re wrong?’
‘What if we’re right?’
She nodded and dialled. The network was down. ‘I’ll try the landline.’
She still couldn’t get Deacon’s mobile. She tried the other number she knew by heart, that of the front desk at Battle Alley. This time she got the engaged signal. She tried again. Still engaged.
‘Stupid bloody people,’ she hissed, dialling again, with the same result. ‘It’s not enough that they clog the roads for miles in every direction, they have to overload the phone system as well!’ She tried again. Still engaged.
Daniel stood up. ‘Brodie, this could really matter. If no one else has had time to think it through, we could be the only ones who’ve stumbled on what’s actually happening. What’s going to happen. One way or another, we have to get a message through. You keep trying the phones. I’ll run down to Battle Alley.’
‘Run down?’ She hadn’t intended that note of incredulity. But Daniel wasn’t much of an athlete.
‘I can walk it in twenty minutes – I should be able to run it in ten.’
‘Or give yourself a heart attack in five!’
‘Maybe I’ll get lucky. Maybe I’ll find a policeman with a working radio. We can’t just wait for the bang!’
And of course he was right. It might be bizarre that in the communication age circumstances could ensure that vital intelligence could only travel a little over a mile the same way it would have got there two thousand years ago, in the hands of a running man. But that was the situation they faced. And however unfit Daniel was, Brodie was even less likely to finish in the medals.
‘OK,’ she said briskly. ‘Do it. I’ll get on the computer, see if I can raise them by email. And Daniel’ – he turned back in the doorway – ‘don’t take no for an answer. We might be wrong about this, but it really doesn’t matter. That can be sorted out later. If we’re right and we can’t get anyone to listen, there may not be a later.’
He’d been right about the car. At the end of Chiffney Road he met a scene like something from a post-apocalyptic movie. A sea of abandoned cars filled the road from side to side, as far as he could see in either direction. They’d been trying to get out of town up the Guildford Road, but as gridlock began to bite panic had set in and fuelled an inventive reinterpretation of the Highway Code. Cars had tried overtaking on the left, and also on the far right. They’d tried driving up the footpaths, oblivious of the trees growing through the pavement every thirty metres or so. The thing about a big tree is, it barely notices if someone drives into it. Crumpled cars squatted round the trunks like dogs looking for squirrels. It would be a crane job to move some of them – when you could get a crane within reach.
There were still people in some of the cars, but most of those who’d got this far had waited a couple of hours and then given up, returning on foot the way they’d come. It was like a weird mechanical still life, or a metal ocean breaking on a suburban shore.
Daniel turned down the hill towards town and picked up an unpractised jog. People still in their cars watched him pass with a kind of uninterested misery; except for one woman who peered in the direction he’d come from and demanded querulously, ‘Now what?’
It could have been worse, he thought – he could have been running up this hill. Even so, by the time he’d gone a few hundred metres he was sweating and his glasses were misting up.
A mile and a bit, mostly downhill. Anyone could run a mile and a bit. Anyone with lives on his shoulders could run it fast. With urgent fingers he smeared portholes in his foggy glasses and picked up the pace.
Brodie fired off an email with no idea whether it would be read or not. Then she sent another to Division. But they had no reason to take her seriously, while Deacon had. She kept trying to get him, always with the same result. Every failed attempt confirmed Daniel’s wisdom in leaving when he did. She kept checking her watch. He’d be a quarter of the way there by now, she told herself. He’d be halfway there. If nothing happened to stop him. If the overstressed officers at Battle Alley, all of them struggling to deal with a situation they were never trained for, all of them worried for friends and family, half of them drafted in for the emergency, would take time out from the crisis and give a fair hearing to a man who thought, just thought, they were doing it wrong.
And there was nothing she could do to help. She was besieged in Chiffney Road by the rock-solid traffic jam, unable to leave or to contact anyone closer to the action. Brodie hated being out of the loop. She hated feeling that events could go on happening without her assent.
Thinking about that, she realised there was something she could do. She could call Faith Stretton. If there was now a police presence at the Stretton house, they could use their radio network to forward a message to Deacon. Even if the police weren’t there yet, out in the wilds of Chain Down Faith wasn’t subject to the same strictures as Brodie. She was also a lot closer to the Crichton Construction site. If she made her way there and introduced herself as the mother of the terror suspect – in the circumstances suspect hardly seemed the right word – she could be quite sure of speaking to Detective Superintendent Deacon.
The phone rang twice before someone snatched it up. ‘Dev?’ It was Faith. Which meant the police had yet to arrive. If they had, they’d be answering the phone.
‘No, it’s Brodie Farrell.’ Despite the urgency she was trying to keep her voice calm. ‘Faith – do you know what’s going on at the construction site?’
If they’d been face to face she’d have seen Faith’s expression close like a box, tight, impenetrable. Instead she heard it in the quality of her silence. ‘You do, don’t you?’ And as the silence continued, turning to granite, she added softly: ‘In fact, you know more about it than I do.’
Faith got the words out like squeezing the last bit of toothpaste from the tube. ‘Brodie – stay out of it. This is none of your business.’
This was never a good line to take with Brodie. ‘Your son’s going to take Dimmock into the space race! That’s everybody’s business!’
‘He isn’t.’ Faith’s voice was low. ‘Nothing’s going to happen. Believe me.’
And, oddly enough, Brodie did believe her. But the truth isn’t always reassuring. ‘This isn’t about Dev and what happens up on the Downs, is it? It’s about what happens somewhere else while the police are fully occupied and the population are running round like headless chickens.’
Again the silence. She might as well have said Yes.
‘Faith, no one’s going to make a distinction! No one’s going to say, “But Dev’s bomb didn’t go off – it was his mates’ bomb that killed all those people.” They’re going to say, “This was a conspiracy to commit mass murder and Dev Stretton’s actions were central to it. If he hadn’t done what he did, none of the rest would have been possible.” They’re going to say, “He was one of us. He was born and raised here, he got a good education and had a good career. And that makes what he did worse. He wasn’t stupid, he wasn’t ignorant, he wasn’t desperate. He made a choice. He killed a lot of people, to make a point.”’
‘Brodie.’ Faith’s tone had changed again. She sounded genuinely surprised, and genuinely afraid. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. No one’s in any danger. Dev doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He hasn’t got any mates who want to hurt anyone either.’
‘Then what the hell’s he doing?’ yelled Brodie, frustrated beyond endurance.
‘What he has to,’ said Faith, with a kind of flat despair. ‘What he chose to. He’s a good man, my son. He puts himself at risk for other people. I know what this is going to cost him. He knows what it’s going to cost him. He thinks it’s worth it. I just hope he’s right. I know I’m more proud of him than I can begin to tell you.
‘And now I have to go.’ And with that she put the phone down, and though Brodie hit redial immediately no one picked up.
Chapter Twenty-Four
‘We’ve sent someone to the cottage,’ said Deacon conversationally. ‘Your mother will be here soon. Assuming the Area Car can get through the traffic. You’ve caused a right old snarl-up out there, you know.’
‘I don’t want to talk to my mother!’ exclaimed Dev Stretton through the crack of the door. ‘Leave her out of this.’
‘Bit late for that,’ shrugged Deacon. ‘Like it or not, we’re all involved. The time to think whether you wanted to embarrass your mother was before you broke into an explosives bunker.’
