Behind Dead Eyes (DC Ian Bradshaw #2) - Howard Linskey Page 0,150
destroy him. Every time he came out with another flustered rebuttal, Bradshaw met it with a cold, hard question. How could he explain the photograph? Why would anyone wish to destroy a man who had already stepped down? What really happened to his daughter? Who killed Diane Turner?
Tom took a step back and left the two men to argue it out. He knew Jarvis was never going to confess and they were still no closer to understanding what really happened to his daughter. All the while Bradshaw was talking, Tom Carney remained quiet, even as Councillor Jarvis’s denials grew ever more desperate.
Tom felt they were still missing something. Each time he tried to visualise Sandra’s murder at the hands of her own father the whole scenario seemed to break down in his mind. There were cases of a man killing his own daughter but these were incredibly rare and always seemed to involve the father’s loss of control over his offspring, where a man was unable to accept that his child was an actual person, with the freedom to make her own choices – but Frank Jarvis had made a point of instilling independence in his daughter and encouraging her to question authority. Sandra’s school career, her tutorials at university, her work with damaged children all spoke of an independent young woman free from the shackles of her parents. Of course if she had confronted her father about Diane Turner and her knowledge of the photograph, it would have been a shock. Flustered by her accusations he might have snapped and … what? Murdered his own flesh and blood?
That was what Tom kept coming back to. The one, simple phrase that reverberated with him and contradicted everything else: Sandra was Frank Jarvis’ flesh and blood. It was beyond dispute that not many men could bring themselves to kill their own daughter. Their first reaction would be to protect a daughter beyond all sense of personal safety. Tom was going round in circles. Jarvis had an evil secret; his daughter had discovered this and confronted him then Jarvis snapped and … once again the train of thought broke down. How could he have done it to his own flesh and blood?
That thought triggered a memory, something Tom had been puzzled by at the time so he had stored it away in a recess of his mind. Until now, when all of a sudden it broke free and he finally understood.
He could picture her now. The mad old lady, Frank Jarvis’s mother-in-law, sitting in her armchair with that sly look on her half-senile face as she told Tom, ‘That one, she’s a little cuckoo.’ Jarvis’s wife had snapped at her to shut up. Tom had not understood her then. He thought she was questioning the sanity of her own grandchild – but no. He finally realised what she meant and the mist began to clear.
‘Oh my God,’ he said aloud and because this was the first time he had spoken in a while, both men stopped and turned to listen. Tom looked Jarvis in the eye then said, ‘She’s not yours.’ He spoke the words quietly but they landed on Jarvis like a blow.
‘What?’ asked Jarvis as if Tom had said something ridiculous, but his voice wavered and it was enough to give him away.
‘Sandra is not your daughter,’ and Tom shook his head at his own foolishness, ‘even the dates add up. All this time, I thought that affair years ago was you cheating on your missus but it was the other way around, wasn’t it? Sandra wasn’t the happy outcome of you patching up your marriage. She wasn’t born prematurely. She was the product of your wife’s affair, not yours.’
‘That’s a damned lie!’
‘Is it? We’ll ask your wife then shall we?’ and Frank Jarvis opened his mouth to protest but he couldn’t think of any response. ‘That’s why she drinks, isn’t it? I don’t mean she feels guilty because she slept with another man and had a daughter by him. That’s a common enough tale. Every extended family has at least one cuckoo, as your mum-in-law eloquently put it. I thought she meant your daughter was mentally unstable, but what the batty old dear was really trying to say was that Sandra had been planted in the nest by someone else. So who was he, Jarvis?’
But Jarvis had run out of words all of a sudden. He shuffled towards the bench and seemed to slump into it.