Liars All (19 page)

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Authors: Jo Bannister

BOOK: Liars All
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So they kept looking.
The Sentinel
didn't skip issues.
The Sentinel
had never
skipped an issue. During various strikes it had produced some late ones, in times of paper shortage it had produced some skimpy ones, and once during a protracted power cut it printed courtesy of a tractor on the other side of a hole in the wall. The barren week between Christmas and New Year, that many publications incorporate into a Bumper Holiday Edition before or after, got its own issue of
The Sentinel
, although it was thin and padded out with items that barely qualified as news even in Dimmock.
One of them was the presentation of a cheque for £400 raised by an estate agents' fun run on the Three Downs in aid of the Chinese earthquake relief fund. Normally, this worthy but small event would have warranted a paragraph on page two. But this was the holiday week, and the editor was desperate for anything that would stop the adverts bumping into one another. He hadn't sent a photographer to the presentation supper, but one of the estate agents had submitted a picture and, knowing his dead week was coming up, the editor had kept it. Blown up, it filled almost a quarter of the editorial space on page four, and if it wasn't exactly hot news, at least the five people in it would buy extra copies for their relatives.
Two of them were Timothy Li, senior croupier at The Dragon Luck casino on the Brighton Road, and his wife Pearl, coordinators of the local effort to send relief to the victims of the earthquake in Sichuan Province. Also pictured were Edwin Turnbull, senior partner at Turnbull, Fitch & Stewart, and his wife Doreen, and though neither of them were fun runners he was presenting the cheque in his role as chairman of the local association of
estate agents. The fifth member of the group was one of the management team at The Dragon Luck where the presentation was made.
Jane leant closer to the monitor. She took the insurance photograph from her wallet again and laid it on the desk. The eyes of all three of them skipped from the screen to the photograph to the screen to the photograph to the screen.
Finally Jane said, ‘That's it. Isn't it? That's what Daimler saw. He thought it was the same necklace, and so do I.'
Daniel didn't even wince at her indiscretion. All at once he had much more to worry about than maintaining Henry Daimler's privacy.
‘Who's that wearing it?' asked Jane, reading the caption under the picture.
‘She's one of the major shareholders at The Dragon Luck,' said Sessions. ‘She's also the wife of one of Dimmock's more prominent businessmen. You know her, don't you, Daniel? That's Caroline Walsh.'
Daniel liked to do things by the book – except on those rare occasions when he threw the damn thing out the window and leapt after it yelling ‘Minnehaha!' He thought they should go to Battle Alley and put their findings to the senior detective on duty.
But the book Jane worked by was
String Theory
by Brodie Farrell – the theory being, if you can reach a string, pull it. ‘You know Detective Superintendent Deacon,' she said impatiently. ‘Call him.'
Daniel would have resisted for longer if he hadn't thought that it was what Deacon too would want. He knew Deacon was officially on holiday. He also knew that Deacon's definition of a holiday was something you do if you can't find anyone to arrest. He'd want to hear, immediately, about any developments in the Carson case, particularly if it involved the Walshes.
‘All right.' They were back on the pavement outside
The Sentinel
building. Daniel moved to the kerb. ‘But I'll stand over here. Get him at a bad moment and his language can knock you off your…' He winced. ‘Blow your wheels off?' he finished lamely.
‘Daniel,' said Jane Moss firmly, ‘if you're going to stick around you have to get used to the idea that my legs don't work. I don't
like
being in a wheelchair. It's a damned nuisance, it makes everything harder than it ought to be, and I resent like hell the fact that someone did this to me. But it doesn't embarrass me. It doesn't say anything about me except that I was unlucky. If you're going to be around me, you have to stop being so coy. I'm stuck in a wheelchair, and it's looking more and more likely that I always will be. I'm sorry if that freaks you out, but protecting your finer feelings is not my highest priority. Get over it.'
Daniel stood looking down at her for perhaps a minute while the commerce of Dimmock flowed unheeding around them. Then, not oblivious to the curious stares of passers-by but braving them, he unbuttoned his shirt.
Jane's first thought was that, always somewhat eccentric, he'd finally gone mad and she ought to back away as quickly as her wheels would carry her. But his face, though pale, was composed and his mild grey eyes were steady on hers. Puzzled but intrigued, she looked at what he was showing her.
Her eyes widened. She leant closer. ‘What the hell is that? Smallpox?'
Daniel shook his head. ‘Burns. I'm told there were about three hundred of them. I lost count. They've healed pretty well. Four years on, these scars are all that's left. The doctors thought the worst ones might need skin grafts, but they didn't.'
What he was saying made no sense. ‘Those aren't burns,'
objected Jane. ‘They're way too regular. They look like…'
‘Daisy chains,' nodded Daniel. ‘I know. The guy doing it got bored. For most of a weekend all he had to do was ask one question, and I didn't know the answer. In the end he was just going through the motions. Doodling.'
He'd managed to knock all the breath out of her. ‘Daniel…'
‘Yes,' he said calmly. ‘I was tortured. I didn't deserve it – not that anyone ever does, but I wasn't even who they thought I was. So it doesn't say anything about me, either, except that I was unlucky. But I
am
embarrassed. I don't usually show this to people. I don't like having to explain it. I don't like seeing the expression on their faces. So I keep it covered up.'
‘Then…why…?'
‘Why show it to you? Because… I think, because hiding it isn't as good a way of dealing with it as having it out in the open where people can see it and know about it and accept it as part of who you are. The way you do. It's more honest and it's more dignified. I'm not embarrassed by you, Jane, I admire you. You're a stronger person than I am – maybe stronger than anyone I know. I want to be honest with you because it's starting to matter to me what you think of me.'
Jane breathed lightly, getting a grip on her emotions. Someone had done that to him. Three hundred times. It had taken most of a weekend. She cleared her throat. ‘I can't keep my shirt buttoned up over my misfortune.'
He flicked her a fragile smile. ‘I don't think you would if you could.'
She shrugged. ‘We'll never know. One thing I am sure of: we're not getting into the competitive suffering business.'
He gave a gusty little laugh. ‘No. That really would be crass. I just… I wish we'd known one another before you were injured. I don't want you to think I'm sorry for you. Well…I am, of course I am, I'm terribly sorry about what happened, to you and to Tom. That's not what I mean.' He heard himself succumbing to verbal diarrhoea, made himself slow down. ‘What I mean is, what I see is someone in a wheelchair, not a wheelchair with someone in it. Am I making
any
sense?' he wondered, awkward as a schoolboy asking for a date.
‘No.' Jane gave a thin chuckle. ‘But I think it was a nice thing to say.'
‘So…I'll call Jack Deacon, shall I?'
‘I think you should.'
Policemen come to the front door, not the servants' entrance. These days it's less of an issue than it was in the nineteenth century, when the landed classes genuinely believed they should be above the law, but it was a tradition Deacon followed scrupulously. He'd left muddy footprints across some of the best Persian rugs on the south coast.
Usually, though, if he was calling on business, he didn't have a baby in his arms.
Caroline Walsh was putting away her shopping when she was surprised – not startled, it took a lot to startle her – by a rap at the door she'd come through five minutes
before. When she opened it, Jack Deacon held out his baby as if she'd won it in a raffle. ‘I need to see Terry.'
She'd been speaking to him only a few minutes ago. Something had happened in the brief space between then and now, and his attitude was different – harder, intense, brittle as a diamond. She was astonished to hear herself stammering. ‘I-I'm not sure he's…'
‘His car's in the garage,' said Deacon shortly. ‘He's not in the garden so I'm guessing he's in the study. I know the way.' He left her, frozen like Lot's wife, holding her improbable winnings, and beat a heavy tattoo across the parquet flooring of the hall. In deference to their long acquaintance, he walked round the Persian rug.
Walsh must have heard him coming. Herds of buffalo don't signal their approach more clearly than Deacon on a mission. But he turned, still at his desk, with an expression of mild surprise as the door opened abruptly and then shut again, just one decibel short of a slam, leaving the detective superintendent looming over him. ‘Jack? Everything all right?'
‘Bobby Carson was working for you.'
‘No,' said Walsh, ‘he wasn't.'
‘Bobby Carson was working for you when he mowed down two young people with a car outside The Cavalier on Chain Down. He brought Jane Moss's necklace to you, and you gave it to Caroline. Terry, what the hell were you thinking? Did you actually have to wash the blood off it first?' His voice was quaking with anger.
Walsh kept his own low and calm. ‘You've got it wrong, Jack. Bobby Carson didn't work for me. He was a vicious
little amateur, and I didn't, and wouldn't, have any dealings with him.'
‘Careful, Terry,' snorted Deacon, ‘that was almost an admission. That you only work with professionals. Men like Lionel Littlejohn.'
‘Yes, Littlejohn worked for me, for a time,' said Walsh levelly. ‘I believe he's retired now.'
‘Only as far as the taxman's concerned. For you, Terry, he's always available. Even if it means driving the length of the country to lean on someone who's asking inconvenient questions. That's almost the most offensive part, do you know that?' Deacon's glare would have stripped paint. ‘That you thought Daniel Hood might get to the truth when I'd failed to. That's the bit I really can't forgive. That, and making Caroline your accomplice. Haven't you made enough dirty money down the years that you could afford to buy her clean jewellery? Did you have to give her something that had been stolen by a murderer?'
Terry Walsh measured the words out one at a time and pegged them out on the space between them. ‘Bobby Carson was nothing to do with me. I never hired him, I never used him, I never bought anything from him or accepted anything in payment or as a gift. He told the court he was working alone, and he was. He was a loose cannon, and it's more dangerous working alongside one of those than it is to be in the firing line. I'm sorry, very sorry, about what happened to those kids. But I wasn't responsible, not in any shape or form, and I have nothing to feel guilty about.'
Deacon's eyes were hot. ‘Then explain to me how
Caroline was photographed wearing Jane Moss's necklace three days after it was stolen from her. While she was in ICU and Imogen Sanger was organising her son's funeral.'
Not a muscle moved in Walsh's face. That, more than anything, told Deacon he'd struck gold. It stopped being conjecture, or a promising theory, right then. Walsh wasn't shocked. He'd known the photograph existed. He'd hoped the necklace would never be recognised, but he'd known that one day it might be. And he'd known what his response would be. ‘Prove it.'
‘The picture was published in a newspaper! Forty thousand people saw it!'
‘They
saw
my wife wearing a necklace. What kind of a necklace? Who's going to know from a picture in a newspaper? It may have been something like the one that was stolen. It may even have been very like it. But you'll need to prove it was the same one.'
‘Oh, I can prove it all right,' snarled Deacon. ‘I have the jeweller whose father made it. If we give the newspaper shot and the insurance photograph to a photo analysis lab, they'll be able to say with absolute confidence that they're one and the same thing. This wasn't mass-produced, remember – it's a signature stone mounted in a setting made in his own workshop by a craftsman. There won't be another one exactly like it anywhere.'
Behind Terry Walsh's eyes the cogs of his brain were whirring. Deacon wasn't bluffing. Now his back was against the wall. If you invite a policeman to prove something and he can, that's pretty much the end of the game.
But Walsh hadn't stayed ahead of that game – ahead
of Deacon – for all these years by being Second XI. He started with natural talent, and the more he played the better he got. He wasn't ready to pull the stumps up just yet.
‘All right,' he said quietly. His gaze was steady. ‘I'm going to have to tell you what happened. Maybe it won't make much difference, except to your opinion of me – and funnily enough, Jack, that actually matters to me. Have you got five minutes?'
‘I've left Caroline holding the baby.'
‘Literally?'
‘Yes.'
‘Good. That's him safe and her occupied. We shouldn't be interrupted.' He gestured Deacon to a club armchair. After a moment, grudgingly, Deacon took it.
‘I haven't lied to you. Well…not about this.' Walsh's grin carried all the old charm but not quite the old confidence. ‘I wasn't involved with Carson before he stole that necklace. I didn't mean to be involved with him afterwards. As it turned out, though – as I discovered too damn late – there
was
blood on that stone.
‘It took you, what, about two days to realise it was Bobby Carson you were looking for, another three to find him. By then he'd fenced everything he'd stolen and dumped the car in a reservoir. There were no forensics to tie him to the crime. It was Jane Moss's evidence that nailed him. That's an impressive young woman. If you were on a jury you'd believe her. If I was, I would.
‘So Carson had five days to turn his takings into cash. In fact it didn't take him twenty-four hours. Before you
were even looking for him he'd laid the stuff off with someone – I'm not going to tell you who – who'd laid it off with someone else, who took it to a disco looking for a buyer. The usual story: he needed cash quickly, it belonged to his late mother, he'd have liked to keep it but… You know the routine.'
Deacon was looking at him with overt disbelief. ‘You're not telling me you fell for that? You didn't honestly think that a man selling jewellery in a disco had any legal title to it?'
Walsh gave a wry shrug. ‘I knew there was a possibility it wasn't entirely legit. But I'd no idea what the thing was. You hadn't publicised it as stolen at that point. I'd heard about the hit-and-run but I had no reason to connect that with this. I'm not a jeweller – I didn't recognise what I was being offered as genuinely valuable. I thought it was probably one of a hundred identical necklaces in a box that fell out of the back of a van. I thought it was costume jewellery – good costume jewellery, good enough for a birthday present for my wife, but still not the kind of thing there'd be a hue and cry over. I gave him eighty quid for it.'
‘
Eighty quid?
' Deacon's voice soared. ‘Tom Sanger died and Jane Moss will spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair for eighty quid?'

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