Reflections Read online

  “How can you say that?” Peris snatched her hand away to dash antiseptic into a bowl. He thought she was embarrassed, as if it was she who had lost her temper and done something unforgivable. “You’ve treated those girls with more kindness and understanding than what’s left of their own family. But for you I’d have gone home and they’d be in care. Maybe that’s where they should be. Maybe people trained to look after disturbed children would know when they’ve tried hard enough and it’s happy-pill time. Maybe we should hand them over to the experts. Say the word, Daniel, and I’ll make the call.”

  “Because of this?” His smile went impish around the corners. “You want me to admit to the world that I got beaten up by a little girl? Honestly, it’s not that important. Worse things than that happen in schools every week. I’ve had kids pull knives in class, I’ve had them throw chairs. With much less excuse. Please, Peris, let’s deal with it ourselves. They’ve lost their mother and their father. Hugo had to leave. If they lose you and me too, they’re going to think that nobody in the world cares about them.”

  She stared at him, the capable hands falling still. “And that wouldn’t be true, would it? Because you do.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I do. Partly because it’s my job to—it’s what you’re paying me for. And partly because—”

  She waited but he didn’t finish. “Well?”

  He darted her a fugitive glance. “Because things have happened to me that only make sense if they were a kind of preparation. If they were to help me help them through this.”

  She went on regarding him, both angry and deeply touched, until she felt tears prick her eyes. Then she tore off a chunk of cotton-wool and tilted his head roughly towards the light. “Keep still.”

  He yelped as the antiseptic hit raw flesh. “Isn’t there any of the stuff that doesn’t hurt?”

  She banged the bottle down in front of him. “This is the stuff that doesn’t hurt! Keep still/’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Persuading Peris that it was his job to talk to Johnny, not hers, took time but confirmed in Daniel’s head the certainty that he was right. The woman was too angry, there was too much potential for things to be said which could never be forgiven. If these people were to see one another as family that had to be avoided. Daniel, on the other hand, could walk away any time he felt he was causing more problems than he was solving. That was his strength. Also, he was the calmest of the three of them.

  Before he went upstairs he went into the sitting-room. Em was huddled on the hearth-rug, hugging a cushion. She looked up at the sound of the door like a startled forest creature, ready to run.

  Daniel gave her an amiable grin. “You OK?”

  She nodded wordlessly, eyes like saucers on his cheek.

  “Me too,” he said. “I’m going upstairs to make sure your sister is. But Peris is a bit upset. I don’t think she’s used to people losing their tempers. It’d be nice if you went back in the kitchen and gave her a hand with the washing up, and told her everything’s going to be all right.”

  For a moment she stayed where she was, crouching by the fire. Then she threw the cushion aside and rocked to her feet with the unthinking agility of the very young, and ran to the door. As she passed Daniel she paused just long enough to give him a hug. Then she was gone. Cheered, he proceeded upstairs.

  Johnny was seated at the school-room table, watching the door. As it opened she sprang to her feet, retreating towards the window. When she saw who it was she seemed first surprised, then shocked. She couldn’t tear her eyes off his raked face. Her voice trembled like a reed. “Oh God! Daniel… I’m sorry …!”

  He closed the door and took the nearest chair. “Come and sit down,” After a moment she did. They faced one another across the sturdy table.

  “This,” he said carefully, “is not the end of the world. It matters, but not as much as you think and possibly not for the reasons you think. Can you tell me why it happened?”

  She was still having trouble believing that it had happened. Her eyes were raw. “I don’t know. I don’t know! Oh God, your face!” Her fingers ventured tentatively towards him, as if a gentle touch could repair the damage they had done, before she snatched them back, fisting her hands tightly on the tabletop.

  “Do you resent me? Do you want me to leave?”

  “No!” He thought she meant it. As if to leave no doubt she said it again. “No. Please.”

  “Did you want to hurt me?”

  “No,” she said again; and then, reviewing that with an honesty that impressed him, “Actually, yes. For a moment. I don’t know why. I don’t know what I’m doing!” Panic thickened her voice.

  He wanted to take her clenched hands, to hold her, to tell her he understood and it was all right. But it had been drummed into him in his earliest days of teacher training that male teachers are vulnerable to the overcharged emotions of pubescent girls, and anything that could be misconstrued must be avoided. He probably shouldn’t be alone here with her; he certainly shouldn’t be alone here with her behind a shut door; if he gave her the hug she so desperately needed he could probably wave the remnants of his career goodbye.

  It wasn’t right. Being in loco parentis should mean exactly that, and a father who wouldn’t hold his daughter at a time like this was unworthy of the name. But he’d followed the rules for too long to feel comfortable ignoring them now. Also, he couldn’t risk confusing her any more. He stayed where he was and kept his hands on his side of the table, and hoped she knew he felt for her.

  “You’re trying to deal with an horrendous situation that you didn’t create and which you don’t have the power to resolve,” he said quietly. “If the strain overwhelms you sometimes and you strike out at someone who isn’t to blame but who is handy, that’s neither surprising nor dreadfully wicked.

  “All the same, I meant it when I said that what you did matters. Not because of this”—he made a negligent gesture towards his face—“but because it shows what’s going on inside you. And it’s scary. You need to regain control. There’s a lot that’s out of your hands, but that only makes it more important to stay on top of things where you can. None of what’s happened is your fault, but it may start feeling like it if you give yourself reasons to feel guilty Self-respect requires self-control. Lashing out feels great for a split-second, but after that you feel like trash.”

  She nodded mutely, choked by tears.

  “And you’re not,” Daniel insisted. “The world is full of people who’d struggle to cope with what you’re facing. I’m one of them. I wish I could help you more. Maybe you don’t need a tutor so much as a counsellor. If you like I’ll find you one. If you’d find it easier to talk to a professional, maybe a woman—anyway, someone other than me—”

  “No!” From the speed of her response, the way her head jerked up and her eyes flared, she meant it. “Daniel, there’s no one I’d rather talk to than you. If you weren’t here I really would go mad. Like—” Her eyes dropped, guilt-stricken.

  “Like?” And then he knew. “Like Constance?”

  She dared to meet his gaze. “She is mad, isn’t she?”

  “She’s ill,” said Daniel quietly

  “She’s been locked up for fifteen years, and she can’t be let out even to take care of us,” said Johnny flatly. “Whatever you want to call it, that’s mad.”

  He didn’t argue with her. There was more than words at stake. “Johnny—are you afraid you’re going to end up the same way? Because you lost your temper once?”

  She shrugged in mounting agitation.“I’ve lost my temper lots of times. That doesn’t scare me. Hurting you: that scares me.”

  “It really isn’t that big a leap from shouting and banging the table to slapping someone’s face. You’re reading too much into it.”

  “But I hurt you!” Unable to sit still any longer, she jerked to her feet and went pacing about the room. “I hurt you. For no reason. Maybe that’s how it starts.”

  “Maybe it is,” said
Daniel, “for some people. But for most people it’s just an isolated, mildly embarrassing episode. Johnny, most of us have hurt someone at some time in our lives. And mostly it’s people we care about. Take it as a warning. Learn to recognise when your temper’s getting out of hand and have a strategy for controlling it. Count to ten, or leave the room and go for a walk round the garden, or tell people what’s happening and let them help. But do something. Emotions are our strength. But they make better servants than masters.”

  “And if I can’t? If I try to stop it and can’t? That’s when we make a block-booking at the lunatic asylum?”

  Daniel laughed out loud. “Johnny, as long as you can make jokes about it there’s no need to worry. Yes, your aunt Constance obviously has a problem with her mental health. That doesn’t mean she goes round hurting people. People with psychiatric illness are much more likely to hurt themselves than anyone else; and most people who come before the courts accused of violence are not mentally ill. It’s come as a bit of a shock, I know, and I wish either you’d known about it sooner or it hadn’t come out at all. But there’s no reason to suppose that whatever Constance’s problem is will ever affect you.”

  “Things run in families,” she insisted. “Mummy and Aunt Constance were known as the Wild Wards. Now one of them’s in a lunatic asylum and the other was murdered by -1 don’t care what you say!—by a dirty farmboy she brought to the house. And now it’s Em and me, and Em’s crying all the time, and I hurt people who try to help me! I think we’re all Wild Wards, all cursed. It’s history repeating itself.”

  He no longer cared about the rules. He got up from the table and had his arms round her before she could put in another frantic lap of the room. Her body was rigid with despair.

  “No,” he said firmly, “it’s not. Constance is ill. Your mother was unlucky—what happened to her is incredibly rare. People have affairs all the time, it doesn’t cost them their lives. Sometimes it costs them their marriage, usually it just costs them their dignity. I’m desperately sorry that your family was the exception, but I’m sure there’s no kind of curse at work. You and Em are two different people to your mother and her sister. Nothing that happened to them will happen to you.”

  Her voice was tiny, buried in his shoulder. “Promise?”

  If he’d been another man, who didn’t hold the truth in the kind of reverence usually reserved for gods, he’d have promised and she’d have been comforted. Daniel had to find another way. “I can give you the mathematical probability. It’s rather less than winning the National Lottery. Maybe about the same as being eaten by an alligator.”

  She snuffled against his shirt. It might have been a chuckle. “An alligator?”

  “A one-eyed alligator,” he elaborated, “answering to the name of Sidney. That’s pretty long odds.”

  He put her back in her chair, returned to his own. “Johnny, you’re the last person in the world who should worry about turning into someone else. I’ve never known anyone with such a distinctive individuality. Yes, you have your mother’s genes. You also have your father’s. But the sum of them is you and you alone, and I can’t imagine a force powerful enough to tug you away from the core of your own being.

  You’re not a copy or a reflection of anyone. You’re your own person. You’re strong. You’ll get through this. You’ll be happy again.”

  But she didn’t believe him. Her lip trembled. “I want my daddy”

  His heart cracked. “I know.”

  They sat in ashy silence for a while. Then they went downstairs together.

  Deacon had been increasingly of the opinion that Robert Daws was dead. That he died by the same hand that killed his wife and not long afterwards. That he found himself some quiet spot where he could be sure of being undisturbed, and remained undisturbed yet.

  The more days that passed without any sight of him, the more confident Deacon grew. He sent patrols to check local woodlands, quarries and lakes. He asked for a police helicopter to do an aerial search. Talk about the south coast and people think of Brighton on a Bank Holiday. But there were great wild tracts of the Three Downs where a small army could escape notice for weeks on end, where a body in a car might not be found for a year. Deacon wanted this wrapped up before then.

  Finding the knife made him reassess everything. One of his assumptions was wrong. If Robert Daws was dead then Nicky Speers was not the confused innocent he appeared. But if the knife was planted to make him look guilty, then Daws was alive and still in the neighbourhood.

  Which meant Deacon had to think again about Daniel’s flight of fantasy: that the intruder at Sparrow Hill was in fact its owner. Deacon still didn’t believe he was there to silence his daughters, but Daws may have had another purpose. The missing knife only turned up after the excitement at Sparrow Hill: could he conceivably have left it behind after the murder, not in the studio with the other one but in the main house? And have returned to recover it so he could

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  plant it where it would implicate the boy he blamed for his predicament?

  Deacon wasn’t convinced. But he’d known intelligent men do stupider things, and he wasn’t ready to dismiss the possibility until he had something better to replace it with. At the end of another day he had nothing new.

  Soon after midnight his phone rang, waking Deacon and annoying his cat. It was Charlie Voss.“I’m at the hospital, sir. Nicky Speers has just been brought in. He rode his motorbike into a stone wall.”

  By the time Deacon reached the hospital he’d had time to consider the options. He found Voss in A&E, sipping stewed coffee from a polystyrene cup, and greeted him with a single word. “Suicide?”

  Voss ignored the curious glances of the night’s other casualties and reminded himself that, even if an easy mastery of the social niceties wasn’t one of them. Deacon had some admirable qualities. “Not yet, sir. They’re still working on him.”

  “But it was a suicide attempt?”

  Voss didn’t like giving an opinion when he didn’t have all the facts but there didn’t seem to be much doubt. “As far as we can tell, no other vehicle was involved. It’s not a straight road at that point, but there are no sharp corners. There was no reason for him to leave the road.”

  “Where did it happen?”

  “About a quarter of a mile from his cottage.”

  “On Poole Lane?”

  “Yes.”

  “On the road that he drives from home to work and from work to home most every day?”

  “Yes, sir. He must know it like the back of his hand.”

  Deacon nodded pensively. “Do we know what speed he was doing?”

  “The speedo on the bike was stuck at just over fifty. Which is a pretty good speed for even a sweeping bend on Poole Lane.”

  “Which way was he heading?”

  “Towards home. He hit the stone wall on his off-side.”

  “Brake-marks?”

  “There’s a small skid-mark on the nearside where he turned. And he braked just before he hit, but it was too late to do him any good.”

  Deacon nodded again, picturing the scene. “Damage to the bike?”

  “Comprehensive, but all from the wall. Nothing else hit him.”

  “Who found him?”

  “Philip Poole. He was coming the other way, heading home after visiting friends. He saw the bike in pieces and Nicky lying in the road. He called it in at eleven-forty. The ambulance was there in ten minutes and they had him here in twenty. He was still alive when he went into theatre.”

  Absent-mindedly Deacon took the cup off his sergeant and drank the coffee. “Am I wrong, Charlie? Did he do this? Did he stab Serena Daws—because she was getting difficult and demanding, or because he was scared of her? Did he go back to Sparrow Hill looking for the missing knife, not realising he’d dropped it in his own shed? And when he realised he was in the frame, did he know that sooner or later we were going to get enough to make it stick and decide to take the emergency exit?�
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  Voss shrugged apologetically. “That’s how it looks.”

  “Where had he been? Dimmock?”

  “Probably. There was alcohol on his breath, though we don’t know yet if he was over the limit.”

  “Even if he was, if he was capable of riding the bike at all, why would he suddenly turn it into a wall? Unless he meant to.”

  But Voss didn’t have an answer. He thought that was the answer.

  Deacon button-holed a passing doctor. “Nicky Speers, RTA. I need to know how he’s doing.”

  The woman looked down her nose at him. “He hit a stone wall at fifty miles an hour. He’s not very well.”

  The detective bristled. “He’s not very well as in he’ll be in here for a week? Or, he’s not very well as in I’d better spot-clean my black tie?”

  He was saved from shocking the waiting-room further by the arrival of one of the theatre team. “Superintendent? You’ll be looking for an update on Nicky Speers.”

  “Yes,” said Deacon heavily.

  They walked down the corridor. Deacon, finishing the coffee, gave the cup back to Voss.

  “We’ve got him stable,” said the surgeon. “I think he’ll be all right. He’s got multiple injuries, internal as well as fractures, but I think we’ve done all the repairs necessary There doesn’t seem to be anything that won’t heal.

  “What we won’t know, possibly for some days, is how much brain damage he’s sustained. There’s severe concussion but no skull fracture. He owes his life to his helmet. Even so, until he’s awake and lucid we won’t know how badly he’s been affected. He might remember everything or nothing. He might not know his own name. He might not know which way is up. At this point I don’t know and can’t guess.”

  “Try,” suggested Deacon.

  “The first thing they teach you about head injuries,” said the doctor, “is that none is so trivial it may be discounted and none so serious it should be despaired of. The difference between leaving a neurological ward to return to work and leaving it in a persistent vegetative state may be just millimetres. Which bit of the brain was damaged. How deep the damage went.