Closer Still, page 8
part #8 of A Brodie Farrell Mystery Series
‘Good,’ she beamed. ‘Then will you look after Jonathan? I need to see Daniel.’
He might not have been in. The job took him out and about a lot. She didn’t phone first because she couldn’t face the disappointment if she’d got the answering machine. If he was out she could find something to do in the office while she waited for him to get back. It was better than listening to Deacon stammering.
Luck was with her. Daniel was on the phone. He raised an eyebrow in a slightly puzzled greeting but finished the call. He was on the scent of some cranberry glass for Mrs Campbell-Wheeler.
‘Where’s Jonathan?’ he asked when he put the phone down.
‘He’s fine,’ said Brodie airily. ‘He’s with his father. Daniel, I have a question for you. I want you to answer it honestly, not tell me what you think I want to hear. The question is, do you like doing this job?’
She’d succeeded in surprising him. Again. He had to think quite quickly to remember what he’d said when he asked her to trust him with her business. Because he almost never lied, it didn’t come naturally. He’d said he needed a job, and she needed someone to cover her maternity leave, and could they kill two birds with one stone? He hadn’t said that he’d already been offered the job he really wanted at Dimmock High School. That was the bit he had to avoid letting slip.
‘Er …sure. I mean, it’s not what I trained for, it maybe wouldn’t have been my first choice, but it’s interesting and I like working with you. Why?’ he asked then, his face clouding. ‘Am I making a mess of it?’
Brodie smiled. ‘Of course you aren’t. You’ve done what no one else could have done for me – kept it safe and ticking over while I couldn’t be in two places at once. I’d have lost it without you, Daniel. I’d have had to shut the door and see everything I’d built fall down. I know it isn’t what you want to do with your life. I’ll always be grateful that you were willing to put your own hopes on hold till I was able to come back to work.’
He wasn’t sure what she was telling him. ‘You mean, now?’
She nodded. ‘If we can sort out the details. I’ve imposed on you once: I’m not going to steamroller you now. If you’re thoroughly enjoying the work I’ll think again. But if you’re not – if you’re really only doing it because I needed you to …
Like a mirage before a man dying in the desert, Daniel saw the image of a classroom, the scrawl of maths symbols on a board, floating in front of him, almost within reach. But if he snatched, would it disappear? And anyway, was it practical?
‘Brodie – nothing’s changed. You’ve still got a baby who needs looking after. What are you proposing to do – bring him to work with you? Cart him round the salerooms? Park him in a corner of the Public Records Office?’
Brodie beamed. ‘Of course not. Jonathan will still need looking after. But maybe he doesn’t need me looking after him all the time now. Now he’s had his op and hopefully he’s on the mend, maybe he’d be just as happy with someone else.’
‘Like who? Jack’s not going to be on leave forever. They’ll find out who killed Loomis, or at least eliminate Jack from the inquiry, and then he’ll be back. And Jonathan’s not just any baby. He needs special consideration. People whose voices he knows. Would he get that at a nursery, or with a childminder? Would you be happy with that?’
‘No,’ she admitted.
‘Then who’s going to look after him if you come back to work?’
You could have started forest fires with the sparkle in her eyes. ‘I hope you are.’
Chapter Ten
‘Don’t be absurd!’ exclaimed Daniel.
‘What’s absurd about it?’ demanded Brodie. ‘You like him, he likes you. You don’t particularly like this job. I, on the other hand, love this job and – without wishing to sound ungrateful – I’m better at it than you. It makes sense for us to swap.’
‘I’m not a childminder!’
‘Neither’s Marta, but she’s had Paddy often enough. Come to that, so have you. You don’t need qualifications to look after a child in its own home.’
‘But …I don’t know anything about babies. I teach secondary level maths. What am I supposed to do with a six-month-old baby?’
‘Very basic maths?’ hazarded Brodie. ‘One rusk plus one rusk equals two rusks? Daniel, you don’t have to do anything with him. Feed him. Change him. Talk to him. Stick him in his buggy and take him for walks. You’ve been doing all those things since he was born. All I’m suggesting now is that we make it official.’
‘And what’s Jack going to say?’
‘Well – Jack’s going to be a bit surprised,’ conceded Brodie. ‘Look, Jack’s the problem. He’s driving me insane. He’s got nothing to do all day so he thinks he’ll spend time with me. But all he talks about is work. I know every D in the Oxford English Dictionary by heart! Daniel, if you don’t help me I’m going to end up committing murder!’
Daniel shook his yellow head in bemusement. ‘I don’t know what to say. Of course I don’t mind looking after Jonathan. And yes, I know you run Looking For Something? better than I do. I was only ever filling in until you were able to come back. Only …will it work?’
‘It’ll work if we make it work,’ insisted Brodie. ‘You will do it, won’t you? You’ll enjoy it. You can take him to the Science Museum. You can set up your telescope and describe sunspots to him. He’ll be much more interested than anyone else. Also, a pram is a real babe magnet.’
Daniel looked at her. She looked at Daniel. Finally he said, deadpan, ‘And that’s what you reckon I need, is it? A babe?’
Brodie shrugged. ‘Couldn’t hurt. Come on – what do you say?’
‘You want me to be your nanny.’
She gave up the unequal struggle with a smile. ‘I suppose that’s exactly what I want. We could come up with another job description, if that’s what’s bothering you. Home Management Executive. Infant Care Operative. Please, Daniel? Can we at least try it? For a week, say? Or until Jack goes back to work, whichever comes soonest.’
When it came right down to it, he could never refuse her anything, and both of them knew it. Brodie was aware that she exploited his love shamelessly, and always had it in mind to stop. But there was always one thing more he could do for her first.
Nor was Daniel blind to the way she used him. It wasn’t cynical, it was just how she was – if there was something she needed she asked for it. He could always say no. But his relationship with Brodie had become the most important thing in his life. It was even when they both still thought of it as a friendship, and it still was now that – at least on his side – it had grown into something more. He didn’t want to say no to her.
‘I am not,’ he said firmly, ‘positively not, wearing a starched pinny.’
Detective Sergeant Voss was slumped in front of the screen when DI Salmon checked in on him. Before his eyes flickered a succession of staccato images of such unsurpassed ordinariness they could have been used to cure insomnia.
Salmon came bearing coffee. ‘Thought you might need a break.’
Voss accepted the polystyrene cup gratefully. Though it was impossible to make a positive ID, the liquid inside was brown and hot and if he told himself it was coffee it would taste something like coffee. Anyway, he appreciated the gesture. He leant back in his chair and stretched like an old stiff horse.
‘Any luck?’ asked Salmon.
‘Yes,’ said Voss, sipping cautiously, ‘and no. I’ve got Loomis going into The Rose, I’ve got him coming out of The Rose. Four separate times on the day he died. Well, that’s no surprise, it’s where he worked. Except in the eyes of the licensing authority, which thinks it’s owned by a respectable elderly aunt of his, The Rose was Joe Loomis’s pub. As well as Joe, and what you might laughingly call his normal clientele, I’ve got other people coming and going. Some I recognise, some I don’t. One of them may know what happened to him, but none of them’s going to knock on our door and tell us about it.’
‘Anyone beginning with D?’
Voss shook his ginger head. ‘Not among those I recognise. We could send the others to the PNC, see if anybody knows them. Though the images aren’t great. The camera’s at the bottom end of Rye Lane.’
‘Why? When one of the local godfathers is doing business out of the pub in the middle?’
‘Because when it was positioned closer to The Rose it kept getting broken,’ said Voss, deadpan. ‘Local kids found out that a well-aimed bottle was worth twenty quid a time.’
‘And now Loomis is dead and we may have a picture of his killer but the camera wasn’t close enough to ID him,’ said Dave Salmon with some satisfaction. ‘Who says there is no God?’ He pulled over a spare chair. ‘Want to run some of the mystery men for me?’
Voss’s fingers skipped over the keyboard. ‘These are just that day. If you want to go back further, you’ll need a more comfortable chair.’
In a perfect world, he thought, watching the little figures hurry Chaplinesque across his screen, DI Salmon would immediately stiffen, point and say, ‘But that’s Mac The Knife McManus, I arrested him last year for stabbing a rival East End gangster, he only got off on a technicality!’ Unfortunately, real life is seldom that elegant. Most unidentified bystanders who might know something about a crime remain unidentified and you just have to hope they didn’t know much.
Only a few minutes into their joint vigil, though, Salmon did indeed stiffen and lean closer to the screen. ‘Can you run that again?’ Voss obliged; and again when Salmon had watched the five-second clip intently and wanted to see it again. Then he had it frozen.
‘Well now,’ he said softly, ‘what are you doing here?’
Voss looked at him in astonishment. ‘You know him?’
‘Yes,’ said Salmon. If he remained in any doubt it didn’t show. ‘He’s an Arab called Daoud. I first came across him when I was working with Drugs Squad.’
‘Daoud with a D?’ Voss gave a whistle. ‘So it was about the drugs after all. Except …’ He scrolled back and forward a few times. ‘That isn’t a drugs delivery. He doesn’t take anything in and he doesn’t bring anything out. Joe Loomis wouldn’t be interested in the sort of quantities you can carry in your pockets.’ He checked the time. ‘That’s a couple of hours before Joe got stabbed. If there was a problem with the deal, maybe they arranged to meet later on neutral ground. But then Joe would have taken back-up …
‘I don’t think it’s anything to do with drugs,’ said Dave Salmon.
Voss was surprised. ‘What else? We know Loomis was distributing the stuff, and we know he was doing it from The Rose. And you know the mule. But he hadn’t got the goods with him. He’d stashed them somewhere while he tried to renegotiate the price. Joe wouldn’t play ball, and they ended up in a knife fight in which Joe came second.’
‘Well – maybe,’ said Salmon. ‘If we’re very, very lucky, maybe that’s all it is.’
Voss felt his skin prickle and his blood slowly freeze. Dimmock was no metropolis: it wasn’t often the war on drugs produced a salient here. If Battle Alley made a breakthrough and apprehended a murderous drug-runner, that was going to be a big news day. He was afraid to ask what Salmon suspected that was even bigger.
But he had to. ‘And if we aren’t that lucky?’
Salmon looked at him like a doctor breaking bad news. ‘It’s five or six years since I was with Drugs Squad. I moved on, so did Daoud. Last time I saw him he was up north, recruiting suicide bombers for al-Qaeda.’
Chapter Eleven
Jack Deacon had been accused of many things in his time, but terrorism wasn’t one of them. The new information cast the Loomis case in an entirely new light. He hadn’t died because he’d made threatening noises about anyone’s family. He’d died because somehow he’d got involved in the war on terror.
A couple of Saturday morning phone calls was all it took to bring Deacon’s gardening leave to an abrupt end. Division recognised, however grudgingly, that if Dimmock was facing real danger there was no one better equipped or more ready to defend the dowdy old broad than Jack Deacon.
The first thing he did was pull Dave Salmon and Charlie Voss into his office and shut the door. ‘Who knows what?’
‘In this nick? You’re looking at them,’ said Salmon. ‘As soon as I realised what we’d got I went straight up the line. You’ll want to go public at some point, but when is your call.’
Deacon nodded his approval. ‘Good. I don’t want this descending into a general panic. I don’t want Mrs Aziz’s 8-Till-Late on the corner of Edgehill Road burnt to the ground because, although she speaks with a Birmingham accent, her father came from Pakistan. I don’t want brown kids having to fight their way home from school and white kids scared to use the buses for fear of what’s been left under a seat.’
‘The problem is,’ murmured Voss, ‘if someone’s intending to plant a bomb here, people need to know. General vigilance is our best chance of finding the terrorists before they’re just an interesting pattern on the side of a broken building. Also, they have a right to know.’
Deacon scowled. Not because he disagreed with anything Voss had said, but because he didn’t like hearing the words people and rights in the same sentence. To Deacon, the general public was an animal very much like a sheep. It needed looking after. It needed protecting. It needed saving from its own stupidity, and very often the task fell to him. But it only confused matters if you started thinking of it as an intelligent creature with rights and obligations. Deacon saw no reason to invest it with the former until it proved better at shouldering the latter.
‘They’ll panic. They’ll all decide to visit their Auntie Vera in Wigan, and jam the road so none of them can go anywhere. And we won’t be able to get about either.’
Salmon nodded. ‘There’s no such thing as an orderly evacuation. Once this is common knowledge, life won’t go on as before except that people will be a bit more alert. There will be panic and there will be accidents. People will probably die. We want to be sure there’s a credible threat before we go that route.’
‘Is it our call?’ asked Voss. ‘Won’t Division decide when to make the announcement?’
‘Division are doing what we’re doing right now,’ rumbled Deacon: ‘trying to work out if the threat justifies the cost of going public. Only, being Division, they’ll talk a lot more, and break off for lunch, and they won’t reach a consensus much before tonight. And hell, it’s the weekend – they might not actually get round to doing anything before Monday morning. That’s our time. Until they call the play, we can do our job without interference. Blowing yourself up in a built-up area is a crime, and we’re detectives. Let’s get out there and find ourselves a criminal.’
He raised a questioning eyebrow at DI Salmon. Though Deacon was the senior officer, Salmon was the expert in the field – if he’d argued for a different approach Deacon would listen. But Salmon only nodded.
Voss said, ‘How many bodies do we need? Who are we going to tell?’
Deacon looked at him as if he was mad. ‘Nobody. You know what it’s like trying to keep a secret in a police station. We tell Uniform – hell, we tell the rest of CID – and yes, they’ll be a big help getting out and door-stepping people. But most of them will tell their nearest and dearest first. They’ll tell them not to pass it on, but they will. They’ll tell their mothers and their sisters, and that nice old lady across the road who’s going to need a taxi, and half an hour after I stand up in the canteen it’s going to be public knowledge.
‘We’ll do that – we’ll have to – if we think there’s going to be a terror attack in the next forty-eight hours. But it’s not a cost-free option. People will be terrified, and frightened people do stupid things. We’ll have road accidents as they try to leave town, we’ll have fights over tinned food in the supermarkets, we’ll have normally responsible citizens attacking one another because of the colour of their skin. If we have to do it, I want us to be ready. We’ll have to manage the announcement – tell people not just about the threat, but what we’re doing to counter it. Until we have a plan in place, we keep this between ourselves. You, me, him.’ He stabbed his thumb at each in turn. ‘Yes?’
He didn’t expect an argument and he didn’t get one. But he’d been in this job a long time, he’d seen good people make bad mistakes. ‘Charlie, what will you tell Helen?’
‘Just …’ He caught the treacherous sentence in a word, but even one word could have been too much if it had been his fiancée he’d been talking to. He coloured to the roots of his ginger hair. ‘Nothing, boss.’
‘Right. If this goes pear-shaped she’ll be as safe in the hospital as anywhere else. And even if she wasn’t, we both know she’d stay there. Helen hears when Uniform hears, and the rest of Dimmock hears soon afterwards.’ He turned to Salmon. ‘I don’t know what your chief'll want you to do. But I’d like you to stay. This isn’t something I’ve any experience of, thank God. Anything you can tell me, any advice you can give, I’ll be glad of.’
Salmon nodded. ‘You’ve got it. But there’s something I should put on record first. The reason I recognised Daoud is that I was five months in deep cover with Counter Terrorism Command. He’s the reason I had to come out — four years earlier I arrested him for drug-running. I don’t think he remembered me, but I’d taken enough risks for one lifetime. It’s always a bit hairy under cover – staying down when one of my marks could have a Damascus moment at any time would have been plain crazy.
‘That’s not what I was going to say,’ he said with a hint of impatience. ‘The reason I was in deep with these guys – the reason I got away with it for five months – is, it wasn’t all an act. My family are Sunni Moslems from Iran. My father’s name was Suleiman – he changed it when he came to this country, to make things easier for his children.’ He looked at his forearm, between the white of his cuff and the strap of his watch, then up again. In his dark eyes was a kind of humorous challenge. ‘That didn’t come from a sunbed.’
