Changelings

by Jo Bannister

  ‘You could probably have got home without a hole in your side,’ Sarah Turner suggested softly.

  He never found it easy to talk about himself. He shrugged awkwardly. ‘There never seemed to be a moment when there was a choice. Some things you don’t ever do. You don’t turn your back on people who need your help. Once you accept that, the rest kind of follows. If you can’t walk away, you have to find a way through.’

  Donovan remained uncomfortable with her regard. He’d been considered a hero before. But what he remembered of the events in question was feeling scared all of the time. It betrayed a curious naivety in the pit of his soul, a place where he’d never quite grown up, that he couldn’t see anything remotely admirable in that.

  He changed the subject. ‘Your husband runs the business?’

  Mrs Turner shook her head. ‘I’m a widow – Robert died fourteen years ago. His son manages The Flower Mill now’

  ‘That’s Simon? Elphie’s father.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You never felt like retiring to the south of France when the next generation took over?’

  Sarah Turner hooted with mirth. ‘What – lie on a verandah stirring a daiquiri? Not really my scene, Cal. I’m too old to circulate, too young to vegetate. Besides, who’d look after Elphie? No, my place is here. I mightn’t have been born in the village but I fully intend to die here.’

  Donovan wasn’t much of a social animal either. He didn’t understand the rules of conversation. He thought it was about exchanging information, didn’t understand why the people he did it with tended to get a glazed expression and edge away. He made people feel they were being interrogated when all he was doing was passing the time until he could leave without causing offence.

  He said, ‘Doesn’t Elphie’s mother live here then?’

  He saw at once it was the wrong thing to say. Sarah Turner’s gaze turned from friendly to glacial, then back again, in less than a second. If he hadn’t been looking right at her he’d have missed it. If he hadn’t been a professional investigator, trained to see and experienced enough to trust what he saw, he might have thought he’d imagined it. But, however brief, it was intense enough to token some real, abiding grievance in the woman’s life. Her anger wasn’t at Donovan for prying, it was older and deeper and cast in concrete. Mere mention of Elphie’s mother made her see red. It had for a long time and it always would. Probably people round here knew better than to provoke her, so his transgression had shock value as well.

  But Sarah Turner was a civilized woman for whom good manners were not an optional extra. Seeing his puzzlement she felt obliged to explain. Salvaging a rather cool smile she said, ‘Elphie’s mother has never taken care of her. She abandoned the child when she was just a baby, as soon as it was clear she was going to need special looking after. I don’t know where she is now, and I have no wish to know. We don’t have a lot of time for Elphie’s mother in this house.’

  Donovan knew he’d hit a raw nerve. He didn’t know if he’d make things better or worse by apologizing. He settled for a lopsided shrug and a grunt of ‘Families!’

  Sarah relaxed and nodded agreement. ‘Families indeed. Oh well, I’ve been pretty lucky in mine. And I include Elphie in that. My life would be so much poorer without her.’

  So there was something wrong with the child. But if she wanted him to know what she’d tell him: he had no right to ask. The sharp little pixie face, the piping voice, the fascination with people she didn’t know and the lack of any discretion around them, that so far as Donovan knew could have been quite normal in a child her age, were in fact symptoms of something amiss. He felt an odd little pang and wanted to ask – and even he knew better – whether Elphie would be all right or if she was living on borrowed time.

  He found something innocuous to say. ‘What’s Elphie short for?’

  ‘Elizabeth.’ Sarah laughed. ‘But you have to admit, Elphie suits her better.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘She’s eight. She’s small for her age, and she won’t get a lot bigger, but that doesn’t stop her filling the house.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about kids,’ confessed Donovan. ‘She brightens the place up, but.’

  You don’t get many compliments on a handicapped child. Sarah Turner recognized that as one and beamed, and didn’t bother herself with the peculiar Ulster syntax. ‘You’re an only child, Cal?’

  A blind dropped behind his eyes and for a moment he seemed unwilling to answer. Then he gave an ambivalent half-shrug. ‘I am now. My sister died when she was twelve, in the car bomb that killed my mam and dad. My dad did a bread run, but he drove the same sort of car as the police reservist three doors up. The Provos offered their apologies, so that was all right.’

  The irony didn’t fool her: she felt his pain. Her hand crossed the table between them and closed on his wrist, feeling the tension in the long tendons like wires under the skin. ‘I’m so sorry. When was this – how old were you?’

  ‘I was sixteen,’ he said. ‘That’s when I came to England. My brother was a woodentop with the Met, I went to live with him.’ He saw her bewilderment and translated. ‘A London policeman.’ He gave a slightly shaky sigh. That surprised him: he didn’t know these events still had the power to move him. ‘Two years later he was dead too. In a car chase: he thought he was as good a driver as the guy in front, and he was wrong.’ He forced a chuckle. ‘And people say motorbikes are dangerous!’

  Sarah Turner felt a surge of compassion for the gangling Irishman, long and thin as string, with his peculiar accent and his haunted eyes. When they brought him here she’d seen him as a burden; when they found his warrant card she’d been alarmed, wondered what it meant, what he was doing here. They’d agreed to care for him and she’d undertaken the task with application if no enthusiasm. But it had proved difficult to go on thinking of him as a threat as he lay sweating with pain and fever upstairs.

  Still it was only now, talking to him, that she began to see him as a real person with a place in the world beyond the fen, a life of his own that sometime he’d want to return to. It raised fresh questions and made the solutions more difficult. Thus far they had acted in their own best interests. Now he was awake it was going to be impossible to continue ignoring his.

  They could have left him on his boat. He would probably have died, but at that time his death would have come at no cost to Sarah or anyone in East Beckham. Two things made them intervene. One was the possibility of a reason for his being here beyond his untimely illness. The other was Elphie. Everyone else involved might understand the need to turn their backs on so problematic a stranger but Elphie never would. It was hard to explain, but Sarah understood instinctively that if they’d let Donovan die, something in Elphie would have died too.

  Dr Chapel decided the matter, as he’d decided so many in the past. He was an old man now, his position in the community mostly honorary, but the years which had bent and weakened his body had not dulled his mind. Difficult decisions in East Beckham were always taken to Dr Chapel; and Dr Chapel advised keeping the stranger at the big house. That way no bridges had been burnt. If he was here on police business someone would come looking for him; if he wasn’t there was time to decide their next move. If they let him die and in due course be found, the police would certainly come to The Flower Mill, whether or not they were interested in it before. They would be puzzled that no one from the village had investigated the boat tied so long to their towpath; and curious policemen wandering round the place was the last thing East Beckham needed. One policeman, glad of their help and too weak to be inquisitive, was a much safer bet.

  Dr Chapel had not said, though the inference hung in the air like marsh gas, that if it turned out they would have been better to let him die after all, there would be another chance. A canal on the cusp of winter offered opportunities enough for a fatal accident. It wasn’t only motorbikes that could be dangerous.

  But Sarah found herself hoping, not only for E
lphie’s sake, that no such measures would become necessary. It was hard enough to have one death on your conscience; she didn’t need another.

  4

  ‘Sir, sir – sir! Isn’t your missus a detective, sir?’

  Brian Graham had been waiting for this, and it came as no surprise that it arrived courtesy of 3b. He reminded himself that patience is a virtue before replying. ‘That’s right, Darren.’

  ‘Corr!’ said the Dracula impressionist, impressed. ‘Is she after him then, sir?’

  ‘After who?’ Brian knew it should be ‘whom’ but considered it pretentious. He also knew who Darren meant.

  ‘Plagueman!’ The boy’s eyes were shining.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It’s what they’re calling him, sir,’ said Maureen long-sufferingly. ‘You know, like Superman. Batman.’

  ‘VAT-man,’ offered Darren, to general derision.

  ‘Yes, of course she is,’ said Brian. ‘Everyone at Queen’s Street is trying very hard to find him, before anyone else gets hurt.’

  ‘Taking long enough,’ observed Chuck Burchill dourly. (He was Charlie until his voice broke during the summer holiday.)

  Brian shrugged apologetically. ‘These things do take time. If it was easy to catch criminals nobody’d ever take the risk of being one. But they mostly get caught in the end.’ This was a somewhat generous interpretation of the crime statistics, but one of a teacher’s duties is to try and prevent his pupils joining the Mafia.

  ‘It can’t be that hard; sniffed Chuck. ‘All they’ve got to do is find someone who was in them two shops and here at school.’

  ‘Those two shops’, Brian corrected automatically. He put aside his box of slides, prepared a quick maths lesson instead. ‘All right, let’s think about that. Stand up, everyone who’s been in Sav-U-Mor since Friday.’ Virtually the whole class rose. ‘Yes, me too. Now, those who’ve also been in Mr Simpson’s the chemist’s since then, stay on your feet – the rest sit down.’ Most of the class, just a little disappointed, took their seats. Brian remained standing with the others.

  ‘Yes, I’ve been in there too. OK, now how many of you’ – he counted quickly – ‘four were in school on Monday afternoon?’ For a moment Darren forgot himself and sat; he rose again quickly, with guilt all over his face. Kindly, Brian pretended not to notice. ‘Everybody? Excellent. So in fact, five out of twenty-seven of us meet Chuck’s criteria of being in all three places at relevant times. If we did the same with the rest of the population of Castlemere, we’d find that an awful lot of them were in both shops, and some of them had a perfectly good reason for being at the school. A lot of people work here. Some parents came to the sports matches, others came to collect their offspring after class.

  ‘Do you see what I’m saying? – everything that’s known about this man also applies to an awful lot of other people. Five of us in this one classroom. It isn’t enough that any of us could have done what was done. The detectives at Queen’s Street have to find the one person who did do it. That’s what takes the time. Not just finding someone, but finding the right someone.’

  When he came out of school at five to four he found the paintwork dribbling off his car in bubbly streaks that smelled of acetone.

  He knew teachers who had, but he’d never been the victim of real vandalism before. He’d had one class whitewash his blackboard, and another go through his art books stamping inky fig leaves in all the appropriate places. But those were just pranks fuelled by a juvenile sense of humour. This was malice fuelled by fear. The paint-stripper flung over his car could as easily have been flung in his face.

  His knees started to quiver. He turned round and walked back inside, and sat for ten minutes in the now empty staffroom before picking up the phone and calling his wife.

  ‘How the hell did this get started?’ demanded Liz furiously. ‘It wasn’t one of your jokes, was it?’

  This was monstrously unfair. Brian Graham wasn’t one of life’s jesters. His humour was piqued by entirely more subtle stimuli.

  He was still shaking. He’d left the car where it was: Liz called the garage and arranged for them to collect and repair it as soon as SOCO had finished dusting for fingerprints. Brian thought that was going a bit far. Almost certainly some of the kids were to blame, and though he’d expect them to pay for their fun he couldn’t see himself pressing charges.

  ‘Liz, you know as much as I do. I was at the school when the shower incident happened. I use the supermarket and the chemist where the other stuff turned up. We were talking about it in school and I said as much. I was just pointing out how hard it’ll be to find the culprit when so much of what you know about him applies to half the town. Yes, me included. I didn’t see any need to pretend otherwise.’

  ‘Mitchell Tyler said I should warn you. Even he’d heard your name mentioned. I thought he was crazy.’ Her voice went thoughtful. ‘As far as I know, the only one Tyler had talked to at that point was Tony Woodall. Why would Woodall try to cast suspicion on you?’

  ‘To divert it away from him?’

  She pictured the American flinging strong men around like dolls inside the Gents under the castle. ‘That’s understandable. He knew Tyler’s reputation, he was scared of him and anxious to get him off his back. You can’t blame him for that.’

  ‘I can!’ exclaimed Brian.

  Liz gave a tight smile. ‘Come to that, so can I; but I can understand it. It may not be significant.’

  Brian sniffed. Now his nerve was steadying he had the surplus emotional capacity to feel resentment. ‘On the other hand, if Woodall is responsible, and he did want to divert attention away from himself, that’s what he would do’

  Liz groaned. ‘Oh God, Brian, what’s happening to this town? One psychopath has turned a bunch of perfectly ordinary people – people we know, that we see in the street every day – into a panic-stricken mob. They’ve done damn near as much damage as the man they’re so afraid of. They nearly killed the boy with the syringe: if this goes on much longer they will kill somebody. Can’t they see they’re a bigger danger to one another than the maniac we’re looking for?’

  ‘You said it: they’re frightened. Frightened people aren’t rational. They cling together for the same reason fish shoal: there’s more inside where they’re protected than outside where they’re exposed. They feel safer. They seem not to have noticed that nature responded to the shoaling instinct by producing the shark.’

  Liz chewed on her lip. ‘Brian – would this be a good time to visit some relatives?’

  He stared at her; concentrating on her driving, she avoided looking back. ‘What relatives?’ Their Christmas card list was no longer than Donovan’s: Liz’s father was the only surviving parent and neither of them had siblings.

  ‘Evesham’s pretty in the autumn,’ Liz ventured.

  ‘Your dad thinks I stopped you making a good marriage. I never see him without being told the Master of Fox Hounds was after you.’

  It was quite true. Two more different men than Liz’s father and husband would be difficult to imagine. Edgar Ward, at the age of seventy-two, had only this spring retired as secretary of the hunt: now he walked puppies for it instead. Brian Graham wasn’t a militant vegetarian but nor would he deny his principles in the interests of a quiet life. Meetings between them were always fraught: however pretty Evesham was in autumn, evacuating Brian to his father-in-law’s probably wasn’t a great idea.

  ‘All right, then – what about these art history courses you’re always on about?’ They had great difficulty choosing holidays. Liz craved action, Brian sought culture. ‘Couldn’t you take one of those for a fortnight?’

  ‘I can’t go anywhere for a fortnight. Not to Evesham, not on an art history course. Liz, I have a job! I can’t just walk out on it because somebody vandalized my car.’

  ‘Your job is teaching,’ acknowledged Liz tightly. ‘And some of your pupils threw acid over your car, and they did that because they think you used them as ammunition in a campai
gn of terror. Just how effective a teacher can you be in those circumstances?’

  ‘Slightly more effective,’ he retorted, nettled, ‘than if I get known as a guy who’ll run a mile at the first sign of trouble. Damn it, Liz, I don’t know where you get the nerve to suggest it! I have sweated blood over some of the things you either had to do or felt you had to do. Do you think, because I didn’t ask you to stay home, that it didn’t worry me? Do you think I could see you in danger, and hurt, and shrug it off because after all it was only part of your job?

  ‘I’ve gone to bed and cried because of the things your job makes you do, the risks it makes you take. But I don’t think I’ve ever reproached you for it. I’ve certainly never asked you to give it up. So what gives you the right to ask me? Do you think your job is more important than mine? Or that you love me more than I love you? Because if that’s it, you’re wrong on both counts.’

  She let the car coast to a halt by the kerb because she couldn’t drive and give him the attention he deserved. She felt a tremor in her forearms and gripped the wheel to still it. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry. I never, never meant to suggest that what you do is unimportant. As for who loves who most, I’ve never thought of it as a competition.’

  Mollified, Brian touched her arm. But he wouldn’t change his mind. ‘I’m not going anywhere. If I’m not at school on Monday morning, that’ll be it: every pupil and half the staff will think I’ve run because I have something to hide. Unless you catch this man they’ll go on thinking that. They’ll think I’m someone who’d threaten kids, who’d hurt unsuspecting shoppers, for money. I don’t want that hanging over me. I don’t want to spend the rest of my career being thought of as the man who got away with murder.’

  She leaned her body into his. ‘God Almighty, Brian Graham, I love you so much!’