Free Echoes of Lies by Jo Bannister Page A

families, none was a recent disappearance and none came with the sort of baggage that might explain what happened to Daniel Hood.
    Two scenarios occurred to him, though he knew there could be more. Sophie might have been abducted or she might have run off with someone. In either case the moving force was someone close to her - a father, a husband, a lover; jealous or distraught.
    Jealous? Someone had spent two days torturing a young teacher out of jealousy? Perhaps. An abduction would appear on the computer but a girl leaving one man for another wouldn’t. Had Sophie fallen for another man? Not Daniel - Romeo wouldn’t have taken two days like that for Juliet - but someone he might be expected to know about? Then why didn’t he? Maybe he couldn’t help, however desperately he wanted to, but he should at least have known what he was being questioned about.
    Could he have been a victim of mistaken identity as he claimed? It wasn’t totally impossible. Deacon had been a police officer for half his life, he knew that jealous angry people make more mistakes than calm rational ones. They misread situations, lay the blame in the wrong place, crave vengeance out of all proportion to the harm they’ve suffered. They kill people they love - wives, husbands, children. They maim them, scar them for life, do things that can never be forgiven. Oh yes, jealousy could certainly have been the motive.
    This was the second man: not the man who tortured Hood, the one who paid. The one Deacon had a chance of finding. The one who, when Sophie disappeared, threw large sums of money and no morality at the problem. He paid Brodie Farrell to find Hood and the interrogator to pick him up. Deacon knew the pro was on the team by then from the way Hood was taken, the way he was kept
blindfold even though there was no intention that he would escape with his life.
    A keen amateur might have thought of these points as he laid plans in the calm and quiet of his own sitting-room, but he’d have made more mistakes carrying them out. In the panic to get Hood under cover at the start, and later on when the mayhem he’d nerved himself to commit failed to have the desired effect. Most rages would abate over two days, most jealousies subside. But whoever did this continued for forty-eight hours despite the fact that he was getting no answers, the growing certainty that he would get none. Not for anger, or jealousy, or revenge. He stuck at it because he was being paid.
    But the man paying him was also there. Hood had heard him giving the orders; he’d even seen him, in a manner of speaking, right at the end when in a fever of frustration he ripped the blindfold away. But Hood couldn’t describe him: partly because he was by then palpably close to collapse, but mainly because he didn’t have his glasses on. Deacon shook his head in weary incredulity. Sometimes he believed in God simply because there had to be someone up there messing him around. If Daniel Hood hadn’t been as blind as a bat wearing sunglasses in a cellar at night, he might have made an arrest by now. Instead of which he was hunting through the PNC for missing Sophies and earlier occasions on which someone had extracted information from unwilling communicants by means of a few simple items purchased from a tobacconist.
    Well, Deacon couldn’t start arresting smokers. Maybe the money was the significant thing here. Whoever wanted Sophie back had spent a serious amount of it. He’d hired the woman in red to approach Farrell, Farrell to find Hood and the interrogator to rip the truth out of him.
    â€œBut you couldn’t tell them what they wanted to know,” murmured Deacon; not exactly to himself, he had the forensic photographs spread on his desk again. His brow made a little frown as if he thought they were holding something back. “I know you’re telling me the truth about that, Danny - you must be. If you’d known where Sophie