Changelings

by Jo Bannister

  He was looking downright embarrassed. ‘Did you call Donovan?’

  She frowned. ‘Call him?’

  Shapiro was practically squirming. ‘You know. Just to make sure he’s all right. With him using the same stuff Wingrave had. You said you were going to call him.’

  She hadn’t, but she wasn’t going to call Shapiro a liar. ‘I’ll do it right away.’

  The mobile rang – the gremlins must have been on holiday too – but Donovan didn’t answer. That meant nothing. Probably he just wasn’t within reach. Halfway through a lock was a bad time to knock off for a chat. Liz thought she’d try again later, if she got a spare moment.

  Then she thought she’d make a spare moment.

  Donovan heard the phone ring. It wasn’t that it didn’t suit him to answer, more that he couldn’t get his head round what it was. He knew he should recognize the sound. It was coming from his jacket, draped over a chair. He wondered what it might be, and why it was ringing bells in his mind as well as in his ears. Then it fell silent and he forgot it.

  His slowly roving eyes recognized the saloon, making him wonder why wasn’t he in bed. Well, because it was day – he could see the chair with his jacket on it. But he hadn’t been to bed, he’d spent the night here; he thought he might have been here longer than that. He thought it was probably time he moved.

  But thinking was as far as he got. Gravity must have been turned up a couple of notches during the night: when he went to sit up it spread a firm hand against his chest and pressed him back into the sofa.

  And he had the uneasy feeling of having forgotten something – possibly, something important. He thought about it, hunting it doggedly through his consciousness until he had it. The pain. Remembering brought it back, rested, refreshed and eager to get on with its day; in spite of which he managed a wan smile. How could he have forgotten that? It had clung to his side like Prometheus’s eagles, talons fixed in his flesh, hooked bills tearing at his innards, for as long as he could recall. Weakly he pawed the T-shirt away from his ribs, was surprised not to see blood.

  Another sound touched the edge of his consciousness – not the ringing, perhaps a voice? His eyes travelled the saloon again, slow and disorganized, seeking clues. They passed over the stove, the table, the companionway, the chair – and then went back, blinking, knowing that couldn’t be right and fully expecting it to be gone when he looked again.

  But it wasn’t. There was a fairy sitting on the steep wooden steps down from the deck. It had pale kapok hair, so fair as to be almost white, as susceptible to combing as candyfloss. It had long eyes guarded by pale lashes, and a small sharp triangular face. It sat on the steps with its pointed chin in one long-fingered hand and regarded him with calm, inhuman interest. It spoke again, and though he couldn’t understand the words the voice was high and light, musical like a tapped crystal.

  He tried again to rise, pushing his long legs off the sofa. But between them gravity and the eagles defeated him. The talons redoubled their assault on his flesh so that the breath caught in his teeth and he sank back helpless, knowing he couldn’t leave this sofa to save his life. Detective Sergeant Cal Donovan had exposed himself to a variety of assaults in his life, confident in his ability to defend himself against most of them. Today he was at the mercy of anyone, or anything, that thought to pass some time by wandering in here and slitting his throat.

  The realization grew on him that he was sick. He hadn’t been well for days; sometime yesterday, maybe the day before, the deterioration had gathered pace. He’d tied up somewhere and lain down on the sofa with a hot drink and his little brown bottle, and waited for the worst to pass. He was distantly aware that may have been a mistake. Particularly if now he was seeing things.

  He shook his head – fractionally, every movement hurt. ‘Who are you? What are you?’ Even to himself his voice sounded frail and breathy, incapable of reaching across the room. So he wasn’t surprised when the fairy made no answer but, raising itself on long limbs, turned and sprang up the steps and vanished, the hatch banging behind it.

  Donovan went on watching the steps for some time, expecting it to return, possibly bringing with it something even odder and less welcome. The fairy didn’t; but the darkness did. It had never entirely gone from the corners of the room: now it began encroaching again, like dusk falling. Even in his current state he knew another whole day could not have passed. The gathering dark was more to do with his illness. He retained enough sense, just, to be afraid of it. He tried to fight it, push it back into the corners, hold it off until the day returned. Whimpering with the eagles in his side, the weight of the world on his chest, somehow he managed to raise himself on shaky arms, at least to face the danger sitting up.

  The darkness wasn’t impressed. It wasn’t just creeping out of the corners now, it was pouring out of the walls, flooding the saloon. He was going to drown in it. He fought to stay afloat, to stay conscious, but he hadn’t the strength to fight for long. Exhaustion intervened. His last conscious thought despair, a last desperate obscenity on his lips, he let it take him.

  7

  When danger threatens people stay indoors. Even if the threat is of earthquake, vulcanism or nuclear fallout, enemies before whom walls might as well be made of paper, people feel safer in their own homes than anywhere else.

  But if the enemy is one which strikes in the home, which lurks in the larder or bathroom cabinet, which can come through the plumbing or – who knows? – up through the gaps in the floorboards, where dwells safety then?

  For the people of Castlemere, at least those not gainfully employed so that they had the choice as to how they spent their day, it dwelt in numbers. A force like magnetism, that they felt but didn’t recognize as fear, drew them together, gradually combining the knots on street corners and the groups that formed outside the pubs and bookies into a crowd that filled Castle Place and made it difficult for the buses to get through.

  Anywhere there’s a crowd there’s someone ready to address it. This time it was a brickie’s labourer called Ron Budgen, father of five children and a familiar face around The Jubilee. He wasn’t out to make trouble today, though he’d made enough in the past: he was genuinely concerned about the safety of his family.

  He blamed the police. All the taxes people paid – well, a lot of people paid – and the only time you ever saw them was if the Road Fund Licence on your van inadvertently fell off and got replaced by a beer label! When you needed them, when people were getting hurt and people’s kids were being terrorized, where were they then? They were doing their shopping while homicidal maniacs left notes under their windscreen wipers, that’s where!

  The crowd had spread out by now, swelling into Queen’s Street, so that a taxi on its way there had no choice but to halt behind the snarl of buses and cars in the north end of the square. The passenger waited a minute, tapping broad fingers in staccato impatience on a worn leather briefcase. He glanced at his watch, which like the briefcase was old but good. Then he got out of the taxi, hefting a battered suitcase behind him, and set off to walk.

  ‘Oi!’ complained the cabbie. ‘What about my fare?’

  ‘I didn’t hire you for half a journey,’ growled the passenger. He was an American.

  ‘’S not my fault the square’s blocked!’

  ‘Or mine. But if I’m walking I’m not paying.’

  ‘I’ll get the police!’

  Mitchell Tyler looked back at him with contempt. ‘If you were capable of getting to the police you could have earned your goddamned fare!’ Carrying his luggage, he shouldered his way into a crowd that, without appearing to notice him, still somehow contrived to keep out of his way.

  In the same way Bert Fry the taxi-driver decided against pursuit. He was as tall a man as the American, and as bulky; still the quiet voice of reason in his head told him you couldn’t buy a lot of orthodontistry with a three-pound local fare. Perhaps he’d see the American again later, when he had his mates with him. But the same whisper of
sanity suggested that they, like this crowd, would move out of his way as the Red Sea parted before Moses, and leave Bert standing there with egg, or more probably blood, on his face.

  Tyler carried the heavy case as if it contained only a change of underwear. An astute observer would have noted that the bulk filling his light grey suit was almost all muscle. The crowd hardly impeding him, he crossed Castle Place and turned down Queen’s Street, looking for something like a Seattle precinct house.

  What he found was two large Victorian villas knocked into one, with a blue lamp on a wrought iron bracket above the front door. Nice touch, he thought sardonically. That must put the fear of God into the local Mafia. The thought that the Mafia might not have heard of Castlemere didn’t occur to him.

  He climbed the steps and found himself in a hall bisected by a counter with a fat, elderly man in uniform behind it.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’ rumbled Sergeant Bolsover in his deep thick peaty Fenland voice.

  It took a lot to surprise Tyler these days, but back home the guy would have been working in the police museum. As an exhibit. ‘You know you’ve got a riot brewing out there?’

  Speaking slowly was in Sergeant Bolsover’s genes; so was thinking quickly. ‘That’s not a riot, sir. That’s the populace exercising its democratic right to free assembly.’

  The American grinned without much mirth. He was a man in his late forties, but though he was gaining forehead at an alarming rate nobody ever called him Baldy. ‘Mitchell Tyler. For Detective Superintendent Shapiro.’

  Shapiro sent Mary Wilson downstairs for him. She looked at Tyler; he looked at her. She offered to carry his suitcase. He laughed like a bull elk belling and dropped it in a corner before following her upstairs.

  When the two men met, each was exactly what the other was expecting and yet still, somehow, a surprise. Shapiro struck Tyler as an academic, quite possibly hot stuff on the theory of crime but maybe less conversant with its hard realities. Tyler reminded Shapiro of Donovan’s dog.

  They didn’t so much exchange pleasantries as mark out their territories.

  ‘I’m not here to tell you how to do your job,’ said Tyler briefly. ‘I’m here to protect Sav-U-Mor’s interests.’ Long practice allowed him not to flinch as he said his employers’ name.

  Shapiro nodded gently, hypnotically. ‘Good. Since that’s pretty low down my list of priorities we should hardly get in one another’s way at all.’

  Tyler barely flickered an eyelid. ‘And the other thing is, I like to get things moving.’ The unspoken inference was clear: You won’t get in my way, I’ll be out ahead of you.

  Shapiro sighed. ‘Mr Tyler, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you all the things you won’t be allowed to do during your stay here. We don’t carry guns as a matter of course, you certainly won’t be able to. You won’t be able to question anyone who doesn’t want to answer. If you have any information, or any suspicions, you will bring them to me and I will investigate them. I understand that you have a job to do, but I won’t tolerate private armies, even very small ones. Lay a finger on anyone in this town and I’ll have it off at the knuckle.’

  Tyler smiled coldly. ‘Superintendent, I’m a businessman. That’s all. I deal in information. When I find out who’s threatening my company you will be the first to know. I have no interest in your judicial procedure: all I’m here to do is find him and stop him. The sooner I can do that the happier we’ll all be: me because I can go home, you because you’ll be rid of me, Sav-U-Mor because they’ll still have some customers. We’re on the same side here, Superintendent. It would be a pity to waste effort disliking each other when we could be looking for this bum.’

  Shapiro blinked. But perhaps now wasn’t the time to point out that slang doesn’t travel well. ‘I think we understand one another, Mr Tyler. Do your job and good luck: you find him before I do and I’ll be delighted and relieved. But don’t expect me to turn a blind eye if the way you do that contravenes our law. I won’t. This police station may be small by your standards but I have more than one cell at my disposal.’

  As Shapiro saw him out he couldn’t resist alluding to the delay in Tyler’s arrival. ‘Sorted out that business with the Grand Jury, did you?’

  Tyler bared his teeth in a pit-bull grin. ‘They decided it was self-defence. I showed them where he got me with the blowtorch.’

  Liz was coming up the front steps as Tyler, reunited with his case, was going down them. They didn’t exchange a word. But their eyes locked, momentarily, and Liz was taken aback by the sheer physical presence generated by the man.

  In Shapiro’s office she said, ‘That had to be Mitchell Tyler.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Shapiro heavily. ‘Interesting man. I think he was saying, if I watch my step he’ll let me stay on the case.’

  Liz chuckled. ‘You must be doing something right then.’

  He thought for a moment. ‘Find out where he’s staying. I’d like to be able to get hold of him at short notice.’

  ‘You mean, if we need his help?’

  ‘I mean, if people with broken fingers start turning up at Castle General.’

  She tried Donovan’s mobile again. Now it was unobtainable; so he’d turned it off in the last couple of hours. At least he wasn’t lying unconscious in the bilges of his boat. She’d try again later. Maybe she’d get him next time.

  She called Sergeant Tripp. ‘Any word from Forensics on that bottle we sent them? The one Wingrave got cholera from?’

  Even on the phone she could see him roll his eyes. ‘There’s been a little slip-up.’

  ‘How little a slip-up?’

  ‘They seem to have confused our little brown bottle with somebody else’s.’

  Which meant the chain of evidence was already broken, rendering it useless in any court case which ensued. For now, though, she’d settle simply for the information it contained. ‘Get on to them, Sergeant, chase them up. Get them to find the damn thing and analyse it.’

  ‘I thought we knew what was in it.’

  ‘We do; probably. But I want it confirmed. I don’t want to be chasing all over the country looking for a source of cholera if it turns out the label was just another threat and actually Martin Wingrave overdosed on curry.’

  Tyler was staying at the Castle Arms in the square. (It wasn’t really a square, it was a diamond, and the signs said Castle Place, but locals referred to it as The Square.) The Castle Arms wasn’t the most expensive hostelry in town but it was the classiest. Tony Woodall had reserved a room as soon as he knew his company’s troubleshooter was on the way. He thought if he had the room booked he wouldn’t be asked to put Tyler up at his house.

  The big American checked in, had a shower and ordered a steak sandwich. He’d been travelling for fourteen hours, his body clock had no idea what time of day it was, but it never said no to a steak sandwich. The vegetarian revolution had passed Tyler by entirely.

  Then he called Woodall. ‘We need to talk.’

  ‘Of course. Do you know where we are?’

  ‘No. But I expect you know where the Castle Arms is.’

  The last time Tony Woodall knocked on a door with such trepidation was when his high-school headmaster summoned him to discuss a missing poodle.

  They went over the same ground he had with Shapiro; perhaps a little quicker because he knew what the questions would be and how much detail would be helpful. Also, he hadn’t had the same sense of urgency about getting out of the Detective Superintendent’s office.

  ‘So basically,’ Tyler summed up when he’d finished, ‘the yoghurt in the store could have been tampered with by a member of staff or a customer. The baby lotion and the flu remedy could have been doctored by a member of staff or a customer, and the school showers could have been fixed by a member of staff, a student or a parent there for one of the matches.’ He looked up from the notes he’d taken and the teeth were showing again. ‘And you’re a member of staff at Sav-U-Mor, a customer at the pharmacy, and a parent at Castle
mere High who was present during the shower incident because your son was playing – rugby.’ He had to read that out. It might have been jai alai or buz kashi to judge from his expression.

  Woodall heard himself blustering. ‘That’s the kind of town Castlemere is. There are only eighty thousand inhabitants: of course we all use the same shops, have kids at the same schools. It’s not significant. I could find you half a dozen other people in the same position.’

  ‘Name one.’

  For a horrible moment he thought he wasn’t going to be able to. When inspiration struck he beamed with relief. ‘Brian Graham. He’s a teacher at the school, he was supervising the hockey match that afternoon. Hockey – that’s a girl’s game,’ he explained, daring a little impertinence. ‘He shops at Sav-U-Mor once or twice a week, I know him to nod to. And I’ve seen him in Simpson’s the chemist.’

  Tyler nodded. He might have been satisfied, he might just have been saving his powder. ‘Maybe I should talk to Brian Graham.’

  ‘Maybe you should,’ agreed the under-manager. ‘You can get his home address from Detective Inspector Liz Graham, Frank Shapiro’s second-in-comman. He’s her husband.’

  Tyler looked at him sharply. ‘Tall woman, about forty, long blonde hair? I saw her at the station house.’

  Woodall was definitely feeling braver. ‘Round here it’s called a police station.’

  Tyler eyed him unblinkingly for ten seconds, long enough for Woodall to feel his own eyes starting to water. Then he did the smile again. ‘So Tony – Tony? that’s right, is it? So tell me about the poodle.’

  When Woodall finally escaped from the Castle Arms he sat in his car, shaking, trying to determine his best course of action. Flight had much to recommend it, except that Tyler would follow. That left going home and locking himself in, or telling the police.

  The latter course had two things to recommend it. It would break Tyler’s hold on him, and was the obvious thing for a law-abiding citizen to do. Also, he could walk to Queen’s Street from here, which was safer than driving when he was as edgy as a ginger cat at a Boxing Day hunt.