Requiem for a Dealer: A Brodie Farrell Mystery

Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Other titles in the Brodie Farrell series

Copyright Page

Chapter One

Now they were committed, Brodie found herself wondering if she’d made a terrible mistake. There are some things that even friends, even good friends, shouldn’t do for one another. Things that are better left to the professionals. Professionals who had seen it all before, and wouldn’t laugh when you got it wrong.

But it was too late for second thoughts. Daniel would be hurt if she changed her mind. It had been, she knew, a long time since he tried this: if she put him off now, gave him instead the number of a girl she knew, left him with the impression that she had no confidence in his ability to come up with the right moves after so long, she thought he might never find the courage to try again.

She took a deep breath and tried to make herself comfortable. A dew of sweat was on her brow, which was ridiculous. There was nothing to be embarrassed about: this was something she did all the time. But not with him, and not giving a running commentary on how to do it.

At least he wouldn’t be criticising her technique. Daniel had told her candidly that he hadn’t been much good at it even when he was getting a bit of practice. When Brodie suggested giving him a refresher course, at first he was doubtful. Then he seized the opportunity with enthusiasm. As he said, who knew when he would get another? So she really had to go through with it. It would be over soon enough.

‘OK,’ she said, hoping she sounded calmer than she felt, ‘let’s do this. Gently but firmly. There’s no rush, but don’t think it’s going to bite you either. Take a firm grip and push it in …that’s it, that’s good …and then, gently, let the clutch out …’

As the car moved forward with barely a lurch, intense concentration furrowed the brow between the top of Daniel’s glasses and his mop of yellow hair.

‘Relax,’ Brodie said softly, ‘you’re doing fine. Keep an eye on the mirror and check your position on the road.’

‘Drive,’ muttered Daniel.

Brodie misunderstood. ‘You want me to take over? So soon?’

‘No. I mean, we aren’t on the road yet – we’re still in your drive.’

Brodie started to laugh. The things they’d been through together, the things they’d survived, and this was what had reduced them to grunted communication through clenched teeth. ‘I thought we’d save that for the second lesson.’

She wasn’t exactly laughing at him, but Daniel wouldn’t have minded if she was. He brought her car to the most controlled of halts, put on the handbrake and got it out of gear before he turned to look at her. ‘You really don’t want to be doing this, do you?’

She linked her arm through his and hugged it. ‘Of course I don’t,’ she chuckled honestly. ‘Let’s do it anyway.’

‘On the road this time?’

‘On the road,’ she nodded. ‘You’ve got your licence, the car’s insured, and you’re not suddenly going to throw a handbrake turn at me, are you? You’ve every right to be on the road. Daniel, you know how to drive a car. You passed your test when you were eighteen. All you need to do is get your eye in again.’

‘It’s been a while,’ admitted Daniel. He reached for the gearstick, eased it into first. ‘As the actress said to the bishop.’

Brodie had her mouth open to correct him but then let it pass. Either they could discuss the respective lifestyles of the apocryphal couple or they could get on with the driving lesson. ‘Exactly. Now, check the road and if there’s nothing coming, turn left. And somewhere along here you might want to try second gear.’

He tried second gear, then third. He made a right turn. He overtook a woman on a bicycle. The tense corrugations of his brow began to soften and a boyish grin lit his face. ‘I’d forgotten how much fun this is …’

As if a malicious God had heard him, disaster shot out of a side street. They’d turned up Fisher Hill, passing Shack Lane where Brodie had her office. The short autumn evening had turned dark a couple of hours before and a fine rain was falling. There were street lights on Fisher Hill, but not many of them, and those that were working produced more glow than illumination. Neither Daniel nor Brodie saw more than a glimpse of the figure that, running in the rain, emerged from an alley between the old houses and went to cross in front of them. But the resounding bang off the nearside wing left no room for doubt.

The car was only doing fifteen miles an hour and Daniel braked to a standstill almost instantly. He spared a second to look at Brodie, the eyes of both of them wide with shock. ‘I’ve hit someone,’ he said quietly. Then he was out of the car. In another moment Brodie had found the handle on her side and joined him.

Her first thought – and she recognised immediately that it was a selfish one – was that they’d never had a chance of avoiding the accident. Someone who dashes in front of a car on a wet night wearing a long dark mackintosh is responsible for their own misfortune. Even now it was hard enough to make out what the thing beside the car was. It didn’t look like a human being. It didn’t even look like a bundle of clothes. Mostly it looked like a black plastic bag blown into the road.

Daniel was bending over it, wondering if he dared touch it or if it would only make things worse. ‘We’re going to need an ambulance,’ he said over his shoulder. His voice had the flat, hollow sound of someone refusing to panic.

Brodie nodded jerkily and reached back into the car for her phone.

But before she could dial the black plastic bag gave a sudden spasm and sat up. Brodie saw a white face spattered with mud down one side and a white hand held up shakily to fend off the stooping man. A woman’s voice rose in a tremulous crescendo. ‘Get away from me!’

On the bright side, thought Brodie, she didn’t sound like someone hammering at death’s door. She put her phone down on the car seat and went to see if she could help. ‘It’s all right, don’t be afraid. You’ve had a bit of an accident but we’ll take care of you. Are you hurt?’

As soon as it was out she thought it was a bloody stupid question: the woman had bounced off a moving vehicle and hit the road, of course she was hurt. She wasn’t sitting in the gutter because she liked the view from down there.

And then she wasn’t sitting in the gutter at all. With remarkable strength for someone who’d just head-butted a car she staggered to her feet and backed away until she met the wall of the Fisher Hill cottages. They came in various colours: this was a pale pink one, rosier than usual in the soft-focus light from the street lamp.

By contrast the woman – or maybe she was only a girl, late teens or early twenties – had no colour at all. Her face was ashen, her long wet hair dark, her long wet coat black. But there was no blood that Brodie could see, and none of the crippling awkwardness that betrays a broken limb.

Brodie reached a hand towards her. ‘Won’t you sit down for a minute? Sit in the car while we work out if we need an ambulance or if we can safely take you to A&E ourselves. What do you think – is there much damage done?’

Afraid the girl might have injuries she was not yet aware of herself, Brodie touched her shoulder with no more than a fingertip, to guide her to the car. The girl’s reaction was out of all proportion. Unable to retreat further she spun sideways, her eyes staring wildly, keeping close to the wall. ‘Stay away from me!’ she yelled again, her voice cracking.

By now the noise was attracting attention. They didn’t twitch net curtains on Fisher Hill – they opened their front doors and stood on the steps, watching with undisguised interest.

‘You need to calm down,’ Brodie said, allowing a trace of firmness to creep into her voice. ‘You need to calm down and sit down, and I’ll call the police and let them know what’s happened.’

‘Yeah, right!’ snorted the girl. The shock was giving way now to anger: such anger that she shook and panted with it. ‘With half a dozen witnesses I don’t suppose you’ve much choice. Well, tell them what you want. Tell them it was an accident; tell them it was my fault. They’ll believe that – they think my whole damn family’s suicidal. But I know who sent you. Give him my regards. Tell him, better luck next time.’

Daniel was peering at her through his thick spectacles, his plain round face bewildered. ‘I don’t understand. Are you saying …you think I hit you deliberately?’

The girl managed a wild, half-hysterical laugh. ‘Whatever would make me think a thing like that?’

‘I don’t know you. Why would I want to hurt you?’

‘I don’t think you wanted to hurt me,’ spat the girl. Hatred vibrated in her voice. ‘I know what you wanted to do. And I know why you wanted to do it. And who knows, maybe next time it’ll all work out for you. But think about this. That’ll leave you as the last soul alive who knows what Johnny Windham is capable of.’

And with that she was away, running, across the road and into another of the Fisher Hill entries, vanishing in the darkness.

For what seemed a long time Daniel and Brodie looked at one another, and at the woman in the floral pinny and the man in the sleeveless pullover who’d come to the door with his dish-mop still in his hand. Finally Brodie gave herself a shake. ‘I suppose I’d better tell Jack about this.’

Daniel’s frown was disapproving. He was embarrassed by Brodie’s habit of bending people to her use. ‘Jack’s a detective superintendent – this was a traffic accident. I’ll go round to Battle Alley and report it to the duty sergeant.’

Brodie shrugged. ‘It’ll go in the book.’

‘It should go in the book. That girl could be hurt. Someone ought to find her, make sure she’s all right.’

‘She looked all right,’ sniffed Brodie, using a long-fingered hand to push the cascade of dark curls away from her face. ‘You know what vets say – you don’t have to worry about patients you can’t catch.’ He went on regarding her with that quiet reproach that was harder to ignore than an argument. ‘Oh, all right, let’s do the thing properly. Do you want to drive or …?’

But he was already in the passenger seat and refused to meet her gaze.

Sergeant McKinney saw them on the CCTV, put down the mug of tea he’d been looking forward to and went out to the front desk. There would be other tea-breaks. But a man who took an interest in events in and around Dimmock couldn’t afford to take his eye off this pair for too long. ‘A problem, Mrs Farrell?’

Brodie explained what had happened.

‘And Mr Hood was driving?’ Daniel nodded. ‘Can I see your licence and insurance?’ Daniel produced the one, Brodie the other. ‘Well, that seems to be in order. She ran out of Hunter’s Lane, you say?’

Daniel gave his lopsided shrug. ‘She must have. She was running, and there was nowhere else she could have come from. But I didn’t see her until she hit the wing.’

‘Me neither. You know what the lighting’s like up there,’ said Brodie. ‘And she was wearing a long dark coat of some kind.’

‘And afterwards she got up without assistance?’

‘Got up and ran off,’ nodded Brodie. ‘Into The Ginnell. Whether she had a car parked up there or was making for one of the cottages I don’t know. I was too surprised to follow.’

‘And you didn’t get her name.’

‘There wasn’t much time,’ said Daniel apologetically.

‘Then it’s hard to see what more you could have done,’ conceded Sergeant McKinney. ‘I’ll check with the hospital to see if she turned up there. But it sounds to me it was more her fault than yours and there was no great damage done anyway. If she makes a complaint I’ll get back to you; otherwise you should probably forget about it. Only next time you fancy a driving lesson, Mr Hood’ – he lowered one eyebrow meaningfully – ‘perhaps a nice sunny day would be more suitable than a wet night.’

‘We’ll bear that in mind,’ said Brodie, a shade tartly. She still thought they could have met the letter of the law by recounting the incident to her partner. ‘Can we go now? My babysitter will be wondering where we’ve got to.’

After they’d gone Constable March, who was manning the desk, said, ‘Wasn’t that …?’

‘That’s right, son,’ said Sergeant McKinney, deadpan.

‘She’s a bit of a looker, isn’t she?’

‘Out of your class, that’s for sure.’

‘And she and Detective Superintendent Deacon …?’

‘Exactly.’

’And the guy with her – Daniel Hood. He’s her …bit on the side?’

Sergeant McKinney bent a censorious eye on him. ‘You’re new around here, lad, so I’ll give you a word of advice. Mrs Farrell and Mr Deacon are an item, Mrs Farrell and Mr Hood are not. They are friends. Nothing more, nothing less. You don’t have to understand it, I don’t have to understand it. We don’t even have to believe it. But those of us who don’t want to wake up with a crowd round us and the imprint of Mr Deacon’s fist on our noses would do well to remember it.’

Chapter Two

Twice the following day Daniel phoned Battle Alley, and seemed surprised to learn he wasn’t the subject of a manhunt. Both times he was assured there were still no unexplained bodies in the morgue at Dimmock General Hospital, and that pending any such development there was nothing more he could or should do.

But Daniel was a born worrier and couldn’t dismiss the accident as part of life’s rich pageant. He blamed himself. He thought that someone who’d kept his hand in behind the wheel, who’d driven a car more than half a dozen times in the nine years since passing his test, would have reacted quicker or more appropriately and managed to avoid the girl running out of the rain at him. He knew he hadn’t been speeding. He thought he’d been careful. But he ended up hitting someone, and now she’d disappeared so he couldn’t even be sure she was all right.

And then there was what she said. What was that all about? Did he look like someone who ran people down deliberately? Why should she think such a thing? He knew – of course he did, panic was a subject he was intimately familiar with – that people say strange and stupid things in the heat of the moment, with the adrenalin flowing and the blood pounding in the temples. She could have called him all the names under the sun and he’d have understood, even agreed with her. But she’d accused him of trying to kill her. Even though she was wrong, whatever had happened in her life to make her think that? What explained the transfixing hatred in her eyes when she looked at him?

Daniel couldn’t begin to understand it. But he knew someone who just might.

Brodie recognised his light step on the Shack Lane pavement and opened her office door as he went to knock. She left it locked as a matter of habit. The services she offered were confidential and often required a degree of discretion: she didn’t encourage people to wander in off the street. Either they made an appointment, or they knocked and waited until it was convenient for her to see them.

This Tuesday she was alone, working on the phone and the Internet, doing the business equivalent of housekeeping which had built up over the weekend. As a one-woman firm Brodie couldn’t always manage a nine-to-six five-day week, but she kept Saturdays for the sort of expedition she and her six-year-old daughter could enjoy together. Combing the antiques markets of the south coast, perhaps, or anything that involved animals or machinery. These trips, and Paddy’s Sunday morning riding lesson, were highlights of the week for both of them.

But the housekeeping didn’t do itself, it waited until she got round to it. By Tuesday afternoon she was glad of a distraction. She waved Daniel to the tiny sofa. ‘Do you want coffee?’

‘Thanks.’

‘You know where the kettle is.’ She waved him towards the tiny kitchen. ‘What’s up?’

‘I’m worried,’ he admitted.

‘What about?’

He stared at her. ‘Gee, I don’t know, Brodie. It’s not like anything unusual just happened!’

‘The girl? Daniel, you’d have heard by now if there were going to be repercussions. Anyway, it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t hit her, she hit you.’

Daniel thought that was probably true. It was no help with the other thing. ‘She thought I was trying to kill her!’

‘She was wrong.’

‘But why did she think it?’

‘Because she’d just seen her life flash in front of her eyes. Because she was in a state of shock and she wanted to blame someone. Hell, Daniel, that close a call’s enough to make anyone tetchy. I’d have shouted at you too.’

Her friend considered. ‘You shout at people all the time, Brodie, me included. I’m not sure that proves much.’

‘I don’t shout!’ retorted Brodie indignantly. Then, because she tried not to lie – at least not to Daniel, at least not when she wasn’t going to get away with it: ‘I may express my opinions forcefully from time to time. I may occasionally allow an understandable irritation to show in my voice. If the need arises, I see nothing wrong with putting my foot down with a firm hand …’

As always, being with her was helping him get things into proportion. As far as Daniel could see, nothing worried Brodie. She saved her energy for changing things that needed changing and enjoying things that were fine just as they were. Where he dwelt on the past, she lived in the present and looked to the future. Her attitude was the perfect antidote to his. He could feel the burden of anxiety lifting from his shoulders as she talked.

That didn’t mean he was going to let her get away with lying. A moderate and a liberal in every other respect, he took a zealot’s view of lying. He didn’t do it himself, even when he really needed to, and he disapproved of it in others. ‘Brodie, you shout all the time. You can do it without raising your voice. You shout at people for stopping at traffic lights. You shout at people for being old.’

She thought for a moment. ‘Only when it makes them really slow,’ she conceded then, eyes lowered. All right, Daniel, so I shout. I have no patience. That’s who I am. I can’t help it.’ She risked a sly grin. ‘It’s why you love me.’

‘No,’ he said sternly, ‘it is not why I love you.’ But he couldn’t resist her grin. ‘I love you in spite of it.’

She ducked forward over her desk and kissed him. On the brow; breaking his heart.

He turned away, just quickly enough that someone with a quite modest degree of sensitivity would have wondered why, and busied himself with cups in the kitchen. ‘You think I’m worrying for nothing, then?’

‘I’m sure you are. But then, you always do. It’s why I love you.’

A person of any sensitivity at all would have wondered at his silence. But Brodie just wished he’d hurry up with the coffee.

Only in the sense that this was when he worked was Detective Superintendent Deacon a twenty-first century policeman. Now in his late forties, many of the developments which had turned criminal investigation from an art into a science had come too late for him to learn with the job. He’d had to study them, to ponder their implications, to work out how to use them and how far he could trust them and when to trust instinct instead.

The problem with that, of course, was that even his instincts were resolutely twentieth century ones, involving intimidation and the occasional haymaker.

Now he was looking at a piece of paper – and it was only a piece of paper because he’d insisted on having a printout rather than peering at a computer screen – covered with a lot of letters that formed no words he could recognise. He turned his heavy head slowly and fixed his sergeant with a jaundiced eye. ‘This is it?’

DS Voss nodded. ‘That’s it. The full chemical breakdown. Like we thought, it’s a new compound – so new Forensics are still putting together a profile on it. But it’s what killed the Hanson brothers and put three other kids in Intensive Care, so it’s likely we’ll be seeing more of it.’

Deacon didn’t doubt it. In a world of few certainties, one thing you could count on was that a new designer drug would always have teenagers queuing up to try it. There would be more weeks like this one, going from one pleasant middle-class home to the next, searching children’s rooms and reading their diaries and asking their parents about their friends and social activities; and waiting patiently and asking again when the disabling tears had passed, although the bottom line was that whatever they knew hadn’t been enough to keep their children from harm.

Deacon had done a lot of these interviews in his career. He’d asked grief-stricken parents where their sons and daughters might have got hold of heroin, cocaine, LSD, Ecstasy. Even in his experience, this week had been difficult. The Hansons had produced an heir and one to spare, and lost them both during the longest two days of their lives. The fifteen-year-old went gentle into the good night in the early hours of Monday morning, the seventeen-year-old fighting a rearguard action for another ten hours before he too finally succumbed.

At that point no one could even tell the Hansons what had killed their sons, except that it was pretty obviously a drug overdose, apparently taken at a party in the Woodgreen Estate on Saturday night. Their parents found them collapsed in their rooms the following morning.

Deacon tapped the sheet of paper with a blunt fingertip. ‘These letters and numbers. Chemicals. If the doctors had had these on Sunday – had known what they were dealing with – would it have made a difference?’

‘Probably not,’ said Voss. ‘The biggest problem with this is not that it’s different from anything else on the market, but that it’s so powerful. The biggest difference between the boys who died and their friends who’re still holding their own seems to be the number of tablets they took. A lot of kids tried them out on Saturday night – they were new, they wanted to give them a test-drive. I talked to some of the Hanson boys’ friends. Those who took one tablet experienced visual disturbances, euphoria then hallucinations before losing consciousness. Some came round before the party was over and got themselves home, some were taken home by friends. Sick and hung over, but none of them needed detoxing.

‘Judging from the blood-work, the kids in Intensive Care took two apiece. The Hanson boys apparently took three each. Even if the toxicology had been available then, it’s likely that Sunday morning was already too late to save them.’

So even picking it apart and nailing its components to a printed page wasn’t enough to stop it killing people. Deacon’s jaw clenched till his teeth ached. Which made it his job. Wasn’t it always? Defending the general populace from sudden death was always the job of some tired and frustrated policeman. Even when they were asking for it. Even when, God help their stupid souls, they were paying for it.

He scowled at the jumble of letters in front of him. ‘Why are we getting bodies? Whoever’s selling this stuff, it’s not in his interests to wipe out his customer-base. Is the stuff contaminated? Or is that the compound itself is intrinsically lethal?’