Changelings

by Jo Bannister

  But she passed the Posset Inn late Monday afternoon. The proprietor recognized her livery of black and green. He’d expected Donovan to tie up further down the towpath and come in that evening, but he never appeared. When he walked his dog down the towpath the next morning there was no boat and no sign that one had been there.

  So the narrowboat had turned up one of the spurs between Posset and Sinkhole Fen, and Donovan had tied up and gone below to nurse his cold. Three days later he was still there. Morgan hadn’t given much weight to DI Graham’s misgivings about the Philbert’s Remedy, but now he was beginning to feel a twinge of unease himself. Three days was a long time to sit in the same dead-end spur, going nowhere and seeing no one; particularly in weather like this. The rain was more intermittent now but the landscape he was travelling through was so wet it was hard to be sure sometimes whether he was looking at the canal or a flooded field.

  Morgan stopped the car and pulled the map out of the glove compartment. It was a good map, it showed all the minor roads, all the hamlets and a lot of the individual farmhouses. And it showed the canal in all its navigable reaches. It did not, however, show all the individual cuts and spurs dug by individual landowners two hundred years before to link their own properties with what had promised to be the transport network of the age. Many of them had disappeared entirely now, filled deliberately or by neglect. Others still existed as ghosts of their former selves, clogged by weed, overgrown by willow but still wide enough and deep enough to take a boat if the helmsman knew where to look. Donovan would know them all. Morgan grew up in Castlemere, knew the canal like an old friend. Donovan had been here nine or ten years and knew it like a lover.

  If the road had run parallel to the water the search would have been much easier. But it didn’t: largely they ignored one another, made their own ways even between the same points on the map. Occasionally the canal appeared as a line of willows separated from the road by a single field. More often they drifted apart by anything up to a couple of miles, and access was down side roads and farm lanes and often only on foot.

  Searching ten miles of canal like this would take all day, and even then would leave large stretches uninspected. Morgan drove back to the Sinkhole engine house, and they provided him with a launch and someone to handle it.

  It was cold and wet everywhere, more like November than early October; on the water it was especially raw with a dank chill that hung above the surface and penetrated the bones. Morgan wished he were more suitably dressed, eyed his companion’s parka and oiled-wool sweater with envy. It was five o’clock: the afternoon was already over, soon night would fix its claws in the fens in a grip that would not relax for twelve hours.

  ‘I hope we can spot him before it goes dark.’

  ‘We have to,’ said the boatman, ‘we’ll never spot him afterwards. Not if he’s gone up one of the spurs. They’re hard enough to find in daylight, we’d be wasting our time in the dark. Pass him ten metres away and never know he was there.’

  Fate dealt them one small kindness: the rain stopped again, immediately improving visibility and with it the chances of success. Morgan felt the stirrings of hope.

  In the middle of Sinkhole Fen, a couple of miles from the engine house, the boatman steered the launch close against the northern bank and slowed the engine to idle. ‘Something’s been through here.’

  Morgan still couldn’t see an opening. Bullrush and reeds the height of a man crowded the margin of the water. But there was a break in the trees behind them. ‘Where does it go?’

  ‘There’s a bit of a lake at the back there. It helps keep the water level up. You can get up into it in something the size of this: I don’t know about a narrowboat.’

  ‘I bet DS Donovan knows,’ said Morgan.

  They turned into the cut, nosing through the reeds. Then Morgan saw what the boatman had seen first: that some of them were broken. The hollow stalks tapped against the sides of the launch like fingers drumming on the hull.

  After about fifteen metres the reeds began to thin, the glint of light on water appearing through the waving heads. The launch emerged into the open. It wasn’t a lake by normal standards: it was a mere, the shape of a teardrop, perhaps half a kilometre through its longest axis.

  There were no jetties, no buildings, no farms within sight. There were no muddy trampled areas where cattle came down to drink. There was just the long teardrop of water, the blond sedges fringing it round, the pewter sky above. And ducks, and a pair of swans in the middle of the mere.

  ‘There.’ The boatman was pointing the length of the little lake. Against the far shore, half swallowed by the reeds, was a boat. She wasn’t moored, she’d buried her stern in the bank and was peeping out of the vegetation like a child playing hide-and-seek. The hull, like the hulls of all narrowboats, was black; the superstructure was picked out in green.

  ‘That’s her,’ said Morgan. The engine note deepened as the launch picked up speed.

  Closing with Tara confirmed their first impression, that no attempt had been made to moor the boat. Her warps were still coiled neatly on the tiny foredeck. She’d drifted on the lake until the wind and the rain pushed her into the reeds.

  The boatman helped Morgan aboard. At the sound of their feet on the deck the chain locker beneath them exploded with a paroxysm of furious sound. ‘It’s that bloody dog of his. No!’ Morgan exclaimed urgently as the boatman reached for the hatch. ‘Letting him out would not be a good idea.’

  They moved aft over the cabin roof, dropped into the well with the great swan-neck tiller, and Morgan rapped on the cabin door. ‘Skipper? It’s Dick Morgan. Are you in there?’

  There was no reply that he could hear. He opened the door. ‘Skipper?’

  Dick Morgan felt like the men who found the Mary Celeste. There were signs that Donovan had been here, but he wasn’t here now. The bed hadn’t been slept in but the sofa had: there was a mug of scummy cold cocoa on the floor beside it, cushions with the impression of a head piled at one end. There was also a small brown bottle, empty and overturned on the rug.

  There was nothing else. Morgan searched the boat from stern to stern – well, all except for the chain locker and he knew what that contained – but Donovan was no longer on board.

  9

  They were racing the day to make even a rough search of the area around the mere before the light went. Inevitably they were beaten; but not before those who had done this before had all reached the same conclusion.

  Dick Morgan voiced it. ‘I don’t think he went ashore.’

  Without wanting to, Liz was extrapolating from that conclusion to the next, which was as obvious as it was unwelcome. The effort to avoid it made her unreasonable. ‘How can you possibly say that?’ she demanded.

  Morgan had no illusions about what he was telling her. He explained simply and without inflection. ‘There’s deep silt all the way round the water’s edge. You’d churn the bank up clambering out so there’d be no missing it.’

  ‘You missed the way in,’ Liz pointed out nastily. ‘A damn great narrowboat came through and you couldn’t even see there was a channel.’

  She was upset, Morgan didn’t take it personally. He explained that too, patiently. ‘The boat pushed the reeds aside: when it had passed they sprang back into place. But to get ashore you’d be trampling on them and you’d break a lot. You’d leave a scar of black mud and broken reeds that a child couldn’t miss. There’s nothing like that here.’

  Liz blinked and nodded jerkily. She knew she was blaming him for something that wasn’t his fault. She hoped they knew one another well enough for him to forgive her. ‘I know, Dick; I know.’ She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘All right. He’s not on Tara, and he didn’t go ashore. So there’s only one place he can be.’ She looked around her where the mauve and orange twilight glinted on the water. ‘First light tomorrow we’ll put the divers in.’

  They were already at the scene. Shapiro had asked for a team from Division. While there was still
a chance of finding the missing man unconscious in the thick sedges around the lake they’d searched on foot with everyone else. But they’d worked in situations like this before, they knew before Morgan did that they weren’t going to find Donovan on land. Quietly they’d dropped out of the search line and suited up.

  Sergeant Warren, in her wetsuit and with her mask pushed to the top of her head, was sitting on Tara’s coachhouse roof while Liz and her constable talked in the well. Now she spoke up. ‘There’s no need to wait till morning, ma’am. There’ll be no visibility down there: we’ll be working by touch anyway. We’ll get started.’

  Liz nodded gratefully. They were talking about searching for a body, there was no longer any urgency. They were willing to go down in the cold and the dark and begin a job that might take days not for Donovan but for her. ‘If you can do it safely,’ she said. ‘Don’t take any risks. You can’t save anyone’s life here.’

  Warren nodded. She was a slender woman in her late twenties, in the wetsuit she looked like an otter. ‘We’ll be careful.’ She slid into the mere with hardly a splash. Three more sleek dark shapes followed her.

  Liz said, ‘I’ll tell the chief.’

  ‘We don’t know anything yet,’ said Morgan stolidly. ‘Not for sure.’

  She managed a sombre smile. ‘Dick, we do. We know he came here on this boat, that he isn’t on it now and that he didn’t leave on foot. His jacket’s over the chair in the saloon, and his wallet’s in one pocket and his phone in another. Where do you think he went without them? We know he was ill, and he was swigging that poisonous damn remedy. We don’t know when he left Tara, but we know that the last night he was here he slept on the sofa. There’s only one way to read that: he was sick and getting sicker. Too ill to make the boat fast, too ill to look for help or even to get to bed. Sometime in the last three days, disorientated, delirious even, he stumbled up on deck, missed his footing and went over the side. He’s dead, Dick. If we’re lucky we’ll find his body. Even that may be too much to expect.’

  There was a long silence. Then Morgan, pragmatic as ever, said, ‘What do we do about his dog?’

  One thing was certain: Liz wasn’t going to open the chain locker. ‘Lucy Cole will take him. She feeds him when Donovan can’t get home. I’ll have her brought out here.’

  ‘Will you tell her? About the skipper?’

  She looked round again, taking in the desolation of the spot – the vast and barren sky, the bleached reeds keeping up their endless whispering campaign like malicious old women, the cold water still and brown as an oil slick. ‘Dick, I think she’ll guess.’

  Shapiro was white. Even though the stairs still gave him trouble he met her at the back door and ushered her up to his office, sitting her down and plying her with coffee without saying a word. For a couple of minutes they sipped in silence. It was hard, terribly hard, to break it. They both understood the situation. But they couldn’t discuss anything else until they’d dealt with this.

  ‘What a stunner,’ said Shapiro eventually. His voice was hollow with shock.

  Bemused and incredulous, Liz shook her head. ‘I can’t believe it. I mean, I believe it – I accept it, I know he isn’t going to come walking in the door going Fooled you! But in here’ – she laid one palm flat on her chest – ‘it isn’t real. I can’t get my head round it. He was on holiday, for God’s sake! He was going to be back by the weekend.’

  ‘It’s the’ – Shapiro struggled for a word – ‘banality of it I can’t come to terms with. I mean, yes, Donovan was always going to die young. Was going to rush in somewhere that angels fear to tread; or come a cropper on his motorbike; or – you know. Something dramatic. Push his luck too far, take one risk too many. But this? He got sick, fell off his house and drowned? How does that happen to a man like Donovan?’

  ‘It didn’t.’ She stared at him, her eyes behind the swollen lids glinting like mica. ‘Frank, it didn’t. He didn’t get sick. Somebody poisoned him. He was murdered. This isn’t a case of blackmail any more, it’s a murder inquiry.’

  Of course she was right. Somehow that was more likely; that he could believe in. ‘We’ll need the body to prove it.’

  ‘They’re looking. In the meantime we have the bottle. It’s on its way to Forensics now.’

  ‘Was there a warning?’

  ‘Not on the bottle. I couldn’t find the packaging. He must have thrown it away.’

  ‘I’ll ask Kenneth Simpson if Donovan bought it from him.’

  ‘Simpson’s is the nearest chemist to Broad Wharf. It’s the obvious place for Donovan to shop.’ The sound of his name on her lips brought her up short and choking. ‘I can’t believe what it is we’re talking about. Donovan being dead. After all this time, all those close shaves – but this time it’s for real. He isn’t going to wake up with a crowd round him this time. He isn’t going to wake up at all.’

  Shapiro touched her hand, as much for his own comfort as hers. ‘Until we find the body we can’t be quite sure that’s what happened. I know – how it looks is usually how it is, probably I’m clutching at straws and we’ll have to get used to the idea that he’s gone. Only, until we find him, there is still a tiny chance …’

  She didn’t fall for it. Neither did he.

  A bit after ten Shapiro stuck his head through her door to say he was going home. Liz nodded. ‘I shan’t be much longer myself.’ But it was another hour before she could drag herself away from her desk and the mounting paperwork – witness statements, forensic reports, photocopies of the warning labels and the ransom demand. By then she’d been staring at it for three hours and she hadn’t had a single fresh, useful thought. Half the time she hadn’t even been thinking about the frightened people of Castlemere.

  She’d been thinking about the detective sergeant from hell. She hadn’t chosen Donovan and she hadn’t wanted him. He’d been wished on her, like a deceased relative’s Labrador. She’d inherited him from her predecessor, which is rarely satisfactory. In this case Shapiro had been quite candid about his reasons: Donovan would give him fewer problems as a sullen second fiddle to the new DI than as a loose cannon. She’d taken him as a favour, and for Shapiro’s benefit alone she’d put up with his moods, his temper, his blatant disregard for the formalities of police service. She’d given him three months, promised herself more congenial assistance if her efforts to knock him into shape failed to bear fruit by then.

  That was three years ago. She hadn’t given up trying to knock him into shape, but somewhere in those first months she became aware that good policemen come in different guises and behind the bloody-mindedness, the grim determination to raise as many hackles as possible, was a man struggling to do the job well. He wasn’t a natural, he didn’t find it easy; but he cared so much that it was possible to understand and even forgive much about him that had seemed inexcusable. If he was short with the failings of others he was deeply intolerant of his own. If he lacked charm, he also lacked guile; without discretion, he was also without deceit. What you saw was what you got; what he said was what he meant. None of that made him easy to work with, but you always knew where you stood. He didn’t agree with you to your face and undermine you when you weren’t looking. He’d cover your back if the only thing he had to do it with was his own.

  He was going to be a hard act to follow.

  Brian was already asleep. Liz woke him crawling into bed. He asked, mumbling, still drowsy, how the inquiry was going. She told him how she’d spent the evening. She was astonished to find herself crying.

  Wide awake now, Brian held her close, her body shaking against his chest, murmuring trite words of comfort into her hair.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m carrying on like this,’ she sniffed as her sorrow abated. ‘God knows it’s something that happens. I’ve lost colleagues before. I don’t know why it feels so – personal – this time.’

  Brian stared at her. ‘Liz, Donovan was more than just a colleague. You three – you, him and Frank – were a team. You didn�
�t just work together, you looked after one another. You were closer than most families. Of course it hurts that you’ve lost him. It’ll hurt a lot more once you’re over the shock. Don’t deny what he meant to you. You need to accept it in order to grieve, and you need to grieve in order to move on.’

  ‘Grieve!’ she exclaimed, almost managing a chuckle, almost managing to suggest that the death of her sergeant was just another bit of bad news in a bad news week. But then she heard herself, heard herself devaluing him. There weren’t many people for whom the death of Detective Sergeant Cal Donovan would have been a personal loss, but she was one and she owed him better than to pretend otherwise.

  ‘How’s Frank taking it?’ Brian asked gently when she’d allowed herself to cry.

  ‘He was stunned,’ said Liz. ‘He didn’t know what to say – neither of us did. It was so unexpected. You see someone off on a week’s holiday, it doesn’t occur to you they’re not coming back.’

  ‘So what happens now?’ He meant, was there someone at Queen’s Street who could do Donovan’s job or would Division send them someone.

  She misunderstood; but it really didn’t matter. Getting her to talk about it, to face up to what had occurred and what it meant to her, was the important thing.

  Her eyes glinted like winter sun on icicles. ‘What happens,’ she said in her teeth, ‘is that we find this bastard before he decides to give us another demonstration of what he can do. He’s a killer, Brian; more than that, he’s an indiscriminate killer – he doesn’t care who dies as long as someone does. He didn’t know Donovan, probably never met him. All he knew, all he cared, was that someone would buy that flu remedy and get very, very sick at about the time he put in his demands. A lever: that’s all Donovan’s life meant to him. He wasn’t angry at him, he didn’t hate him, he didn’t want to destroy him. He just wanted to damage somebody, and Donovan would do. It was the same with Sheila Crosbie’s baby: he wanted to burn somebody and a baby would do as well as anyone. He’s a psychopath, Brian, nobody’s safe until we have him behind bars.’