Flawed (25 page)

‘Have you spoken to Noah's school?’

I have, sir,’ said Voss. ‘They weren't aware there was a problem. At least…’ Unsure how much to say in front of Selkirk he ground to a halt.

Unconcerned for himself, Daniel dispensed with discretion
and finished the sentence for him. ‘Des Chalmers wasn't aware there was a problem until I told him. I asked him to keep an eye on Noah, to see how many more bits of furniture he was going to be careless enough to walk into.’

Adam Selkirk was already too flushed to redden further. But there was vitriol in his eyes.

‘I see,’ said Deacon. ‘So what happened yesterday?’

‘I got a phone call, after midnight. I went to their house and found Mrs Selkirk bleeding and Noah terrified. I took them home with me.’

Deacon looked at Selkirk. ‘Where were you?’

Again the slight pause. ‘I went for a drive.’

Deacon had been a detective for a lot of years: he'd heard just about every falsehood, every half-lie and every improbable truth it's possible to tell. But his eyebrows climbed as if he'd never heard the like of that. ‘In the early hours of the morning? Leaving your wife bloody and your son in hysterics?
Why?’

‘We'd been arguing,’ growled Selkirk. ‘Marianne and I. We both needed the space to calm down. I drove up and down the coast for an hour. When I got back the house was empty.’

‘What did you do then? Call us? Call the hospital?’ Selkirk shook his head. ‘Why not? You left your wife upset and bleeding, and when you got home she'd gone. Didn't it occur to you she might have gone to the hospital?’

‘He knew she wouldn't have gone to the hospital,’ said Daniel tersely. ‘She never had before, she wouldn't this time. She left him a note to say she was spending the rest of the night with a friend and would be in touch shortly. Unless he's suggesting she wrote it at gun-point, there was never any
question of her leaving the house unwillingly.’

Deacon was still nodding – slowly, hypnotically, like a plush bulldog on somebody's parcel-shelf. ‘Who called you?’

Daniel didn't want to say. But Selkirk already knew. ‘Noah.’

‘Did you hear him make the call?’ asked Deacon.

‘No. But it wouldn't be Marianne, and arguments don't wake the neighbours in River Drive.’

‘So there was a domestic going on, Noah called Daniel for help and Daniel went round and found Mrs Selkirk hurt and Noah terrified. He offered to put them up for the night and they accepted.’ He stabbed Selkirk with a lancet eye. ‘What the hell do you find so objectionable about that?’

The solicitor gave a sniff that curled his lip. ‘About that, nothing. About the assumptions he's been making, plenty, but that's another issue. What's worrying me now is that I can't find either of them. Noah's not in school and Marianne's not at work. Both of them have mobile phones: both of them are switched off. They're not at his house’ – he couldn't bring himself to say Daniel's name – ‘I checked, and I couldn't see any of their things there either. And he knows where they are, and he won't tell me.’

Deacon swivelled. ‘Daniel?’

‘That's right,’ Daniel said evenly. ‘I won't help him find them and hurt them again.’

Deacon looked back at Selkirk. ‘In the circumstances, it's a reasonable attitude.’

‘You don't know the circumstances,’ grated Adam Selkirk. ‘I do. And I'm telling you my son is in danger right now.’

Daniel felt confident enough of his ground to call his bluff. His yellow head tilted back so he could look the solicitor in
the eye. ‘I really don't see how that could be, Mr Selkirk. He's with his mother and you don't know where they are. That's all that boy needs to be safe.’

‘According to you.’

‘According to me, and anyone else with an eyeball in his head,’ said Daniel acidly.

Selkirk found himself squaring up to a man who barely came up to his chin and could have camped out in his jacket. ‘You arrogant little bastard! What do you know of my family? What do you know of me, that you can say that about me? You're a failed teacher who tried to give him a bit of help with his maths. And maybe you mean well, and maybe you were worried about him, but you haven't the skill, the knowledge or the authority to rip my family apart in an effort to help him with anything else. Now you've hidden him and his mother away where not only I but no one else can check that they're OK.’

Adam Selkirk drew a deep breath before committing himself – before saying that which, once out, could never be private family business again. And then he said it.

‘What if I tell you that you misread the situation from the start? That it isn't me who hits the child when the pressure of work builds up. It isn't me that gets so frustrated I lose all control and lay into whoever's nearest with anything that comes to hand. It's Marianne. It's his mother.’

For a moment the sheer effrontery of it stole Daniel's breath away. He was aware of gaping at the man like a stranded goldfish. Finally he managed, ‘That is the most
outrageous
thing I ever… And you're supposed to be this high-priced
lawyer with the gift of the gab? I can lie better than that!’

‘It's the truth,’ gritted Selkirk.

Deacon wouldn't have admitted it, but the fact that he left it at that, didn't try to embellish it with evidence for the defence, impressed him somewhat. The biggest mistake people make when they're lying is not knowing when to stop. They try to prove everything they say. Their alibi is never that they were having a bath: they were always in a busy pub with five friends.

Of course, anything Deacon knew about the criminal mentality, Selkirk knew too.

‘I
saw
her!’ cried Daniel. ‘Her nose was bleeding. There were bruises on her forehead. There were bruises on her wrists.’

‘I grabbed her by the wrists.’ Selkirk's voice was low. ‘She headbutted me.’

‘Don't be ridiculous!’ snorted Daniel.

‘Why is it ridiculous?’ demanded Selkirk. ‘Because she's a woman? Because she's small and looks fragile? If you knew a thing about her, Hood – if you knew anything about any of us – you'd know Marianne's tough. Mentally and physically. She has to be to do her job. It doesn't just involve sitting at a desk making plaintive phone calls. Sometimes it involves trekking out to disaster areas and living in a tent on a bottle of water and a packet of biscuits a day. Sometimes it involves cornering dictators – war-lords, men with armies at their backs – and telling them to sell the second-best executive jet and feed their people on the proceeds. She risks her life on a regular basis, and millions of people survive because of it.

‘But it takes its toll. Sometimes she gets back from one of these war zones and it's as much as she can do to walk from the taxi to the front door. I've carried her upstairs before now. I've undressed her and put her to bed. I've held her in the night when things she's seen come back to haunt her, and they don't even go away when she wakes up. My wife isn't fragile, but she is under the kind of stress that nobody here has ever experienced – can even imagine.’

Deacon cleared his throat. ‘Actually…’

Daniel knew what he was going to say and broke in quickly. ‘I don't doubt it. What I don't believe is that
that
makes her want to come back and beat the living daylights out of her son.’

‘Of course she doesn't
want
to hurt him!’ spat Selkirk. ‘She loses control. That's what it does to her – all the suffering, and knowing that she can make a difference, and knowing that she can never do enough. It eats her up, and when she can't bear it any more she explodes. Sometimes it's just the crockery. Sometimes it's me. Well, that's all right, I'm a lot bigger than she is and I love her, and if I can absorb some of her pain that way I will. But sometimes it's Noah. And he's willing too, but he's a lot smaller than I am and sometimes she hurts him. He denies it, but I know she does. I try to keep them apart when she's in danger of losing it. Most of the time I succeed, but not always.’

Both his voice and his gaze hardened. ‘And you've set them up in a cosy little home-from-home somewhere, and nobody knows where they are and nobody's going to disturb them. And next time the demons come there'll be nobody to know, and nobody to hold her wrists until the rage passes.’

The silence in Deacon's office was so profound that traffic noises came up from the street and the murmur of someone on the phone from the floor below. Almost, they were spellbound. None of them knew whether it was the truth. But it was a credit to Adam Selkirk's skills as counsel that they were all thinking about it. Thinking what it meant if he wasn't lying.

Daniel's voice was hollow. If this was the truth… He couldn't
afford
for it to be the truth. ‘Then why did you leave them alone? On Monday night. Why did you go for a little drive and leave them alone?’

‘Because that's what works,’ said Selkirk, almost too tired now to continue hating him. ‘That's what experience has taught us is the best thing to do. Her fury is like a fever: it mounts until it breaks. After that there's no question of anyone getting hurt, she just needs some time alone to pull herself together. And by then, so do I. I go for a drive. When I get back we don't speak of it again.’

Daniel had no answer. If Adam Selkirk was telling the truth, Marianne was lying – and he didn't know the difference.

Deacon said, ‘Where did she headbutt you?’

Selkirk replied without thinking. ‘In the kitchen.’

‘I mean, where on your body? Your face?’

The solicitor shook his head. ‘I'm a lot taller than Marianne, Superintendent. She got me in the chest.’

‘Show me.’

He pulled down his tie, undid a few buttons. His sternum was stained every colour between yellow and black.
Every
colour. Some of the bruises were old.

Deacon considered for only a moment longer. Then he
nodded. ‘I don't know if you're telling the truth, Mr Selkirk. Your wife could have done that attempting to defend herself. But I'm not willing to wager your son's safety on my guessing right. We need to find them, and then we'll sort out who did what to who. Daniel – where did you take them?’

Daniel felt every eye in the room coming round to him, felt the weight of their expectation, knew as a dull ache in the pit of his belly that he was about to draw to himself all the hostility that had been going Selkirk's way. It wouldn't be the first time and it didn't have to matter, there were higher priorities than making this easy for him, but he took a moment to recognise the irony. For a mild and unambitious man, it was remarkable how often he found himself being struck off people's Christmas lists.

‘Jack – I'm sorry, but it's not good enough. I think he's lying. I think if he knows where to find them he'll hurt them again. Maybe this time he'll do worse than hurt them.’

Deacon frowned. ‘You saw his chest. He's not Tarzan – that isn't a self-inflicted injury.’

‘But what does it prove?’ demanded Daniel. ‘That he was involved in some kind of violence. He took blows to the chest. Look at him, Jack, look at the size of him! He's bigger than you. If he was beating his wife, who's my size, or his son, who's half my size, don't you think they'd try to defend themselves? Pick something up and swing it at him? A saucepan, maybe. He says this happened in the kitchen. If Marianne swung at him with the saucepan to keep him off Noah, and he grabbed her arms and hit her in the face, wouldn't the physical evidence be the same? And isn't it a damn sight more likely that it happened that way?’

Pursing his lips, Deacon looked again at Selkirk. Then at Daniel. Short of giving them pistols and standing them back to back, he couldn't think of a way of deciding who was right. And it mattered. If he guessed wrong, someone was going to suffer. If Daniel was right, he was about to take an abusive husband to Marianne Selkirk's last refuge. If Selkirk was telling the truth, he was leaving Noah with a violently unstable mother.

Alix Hyde had said nothing since the confrontation began. Her primary concern was still nailing Terry Walsh, and drawing together those strands of evidence that would help her do it. She had a vested interest in not believing Adam Selkirk. If he was telling the truth he was an honourable man doing his best in a difficult situation and she'd lost her hold on him. If Daniel Hood was right he was a vicious bully and it didn't matter if he gave Terry Walsh an alibi because no one would believe him.

It occurred to her that the best thing that could happen was if Selkirk put his wife in hospital. Nothing too serious – a broken nose, a broken wrist, something that would heal quickly. But something of which a record would remain.

She said quietly, ‘If we don't know who to believe, we have to assume that Noah could be in danger right now. Mr Hood, you'll have to tell us where they are. If they need protecting, we'll protect them.’

‘How?’ cried Daniel. ‘How will you protect them? Will you keep them under twenty-four-hour guard for the foreseeable future? Of course you won't, it'd cost a fortune. And all he needs is ten minutes alone with them. In ten minutes he could kill them both.’

‘That's not your responsibility,’ said DI Hyde firmly. ‘Tell us where they are, and we'll take it from there.’

‘Of course it's my responsibility – he won't find them without my help! I promised I wouldn't tell him where she is. I won't break that promise just because he spins a plausible yarn.’

‘And if it isn't just a yarn?’ asked Deacon, his voice low.

‘Then…’ It was no good – there was no safe default. The consequences of getting this wrong were equally serious whether Selkirk was lying or telling the truth. The only question for Daniel was whether he trusted someone else's judgement better than his own. ‘I can't do it, Jack. I don't believe him, and I won't let him hurt them again. I said I'd keep them safe.’ He sounded close to tears.

‘But it isn't your call,’ insisted Hyde. ‘It may have escaped your notice but this is a police station. This is now a police matter. You have information we need to carry out our duties: failing to divulge it amounts to obstruction, which is an offence. You tell me what I want to know, Mr Hood, or you'll be the one facing charges.’

If she'd asked, Deacon could have told her that was not the best approach with Daniel. He might look as if a stiff breeze would bend him: in fact there was a vein of adamant running up his spine. The more he was pushed, the more he resisted. It was one of those nexus points where his virtues tipped over into vices. Brodie described it as moral courage: Deacon considered him an obstinate little shit. And both of them were right.