Charisma

by Jo Bannister

  He stood beside the canal, his eyes narrowed as if to cut out the daylight, desperately thinking back to last night. He’d heard nothing. He’d been on board, he’d been reading till the early hours; the boat had been quiet, the wharf had been quiet; he’d been only fifty metres away. And he’d heard nothing. A killer had consigned the body of a girl to the water so close he might have felt the ripples of it, and he’d known nothing.

  His only comfort was what the pathologist had said, that she was already long dead. He might have seen, even caught, her killer. He could not have saved her life.

  It made no difference that he had been close enough to see or hear something and had not. If she’d gone into the water close to the James Brindley he wouldn’t have blamed Martin and Lucy Cole for not knowing: he’d have understood that they had things to do with their evenings. If her killer had tramped across the deck of the Warwick Castle with her in his arms no one would have expected Clay Pottinger to notice: Pottinger was famous for sleeping through anything, including his own parties.

  The fact that Donovan was a policeman was irrelevant. It didn’t make his hearing sharper or imbue him with a sixth sense, something like a smoke alarm that went off in the presence of crime. It just meant he’d kick himself harder for missing the action, and that when he stopped there’d be somebody happy to carry on.

  With only a little sigh he turned away from the boats and looked at the wharf. It was about ten metres wide at this point, lined with warehousing. The building on the right was a garden supplies centre, that on the left a timber yard. Both had their frontages on Brick Lane and now goods arrived by road rather than by water the rear access to the canal was rarely used. They kept their dustbins in the alley between them, and often there was a skip there too or a pile of scrap wood.

  An uncomfortable thought occurred to him. He began walking towards the alley just to reassure himself it was unfounded; but before he got there he knew in his heart that it was worse than he’d feared. Charisma hadn’t just gone into the canal within earshot of where he’d slept, she’d spent the day between her death and her committal to the waters here too. He called over some of the searching constables to guard the marks on the quay and those he expected to find among the stacks of timber. Also he thought they’d be useful for the heavy work.

  In the event it didn’t take much effort. He knew what he was looking for and went straight to it: a sheet of faded tarpaulin, long past keeping the rain out but still good enough to hide something, which was bundled up and stuffed under an overhang of planks. Handling it carefully, though he doubted the bleached canvas could yield a useful fingerprint, he pulled it into the open and unfolded it gingerly.

  At the first sign of blood he stopped. ‘Get Mr Shapiro back here.’ There was blood on the ground too. So this was where she died.

  From the alley between the buildings to the mark on the edge of the canal was a direct line. Donovan walked it, a little to one side, looking for a footprint or other sign. He found nothing more. But when he straightened up and looked past the timber yard to the great canvas on Broad Wharf, he saw something that jolted him to his heels. Only for a moment, then the man was gone.

  He might have been mistaken. There was nothing remarkable about him, a lean man of average height with dark hair starting to recede now he was into middle-age. Any gang of labourers would have contained two or three such, similarly attired in faded jeans and black singlet, similarly occupied in fetching and carrying. He was carrying stacking chairs from one of the vehicles into the tent.

  There was no reason Donovan should have given him a second glance. Except that Donovan knew him. Was sure he knew him, would have known him if twice the thirteen years since he last saw him had passed.

  ‘Brady!’ Shock rooted him to the ground. Even with the constables’ eyes curious upon him it was a moment before he could shake himself and start breathing again. Then he shook his head once, decisively. ‘Coincidence? In a pig’s ear.’

  4

  ‘Who is he?’

  Like the constables, Liz was curious. Though she hadn’t known Donovan long she’d worked with him in circumstances which had put a strain on them both and thought she had probably seen the best and the worst of him. He was dour and uncompromising, ruthless in pursuit of what he wanted. He was also a talented detective, dogged and perceptive. She had seen him risk his life to achieve a result. She had seen him hurt for it.

  And she had not seen then what she saw in his eyes now. It wasn’t just the surprise. It had taken them forty minutes to finish with Pierce and return to the waterfront; however startled Donovan had been to see this ghost from his past amid the grime of Broad Wharf that had already passed. What remained in the dark hollows of his eyes, where he may not have been aware that it showed, was a wariness bordering on fear.

  ‘Liam Brady,’ said Donovan. They were in Tara’s long saloon. Donovan’s first instinct, as soon as he recovered from the shock of seeing Brady, was to avoid being seen by him. By now he’d rationalized this as the wisdom of letting the man think himself unrecognized. He mightn’t remember Donovan as clearly as Donovan remembered him, but if he got a good look he’d know him. ‘That’s his real name, the one Special Branch’ll have. He must have been travelling under an alias or he’d have been picked up coming into the country.’

  ‘Special Branch?’ Shapiro’s voice was sharp. If he hadn’t been wedged in what was essentially a beanbag he would have strode to the cabin window and peered up the wharf. ‘What’s their interest?’

  Donovan’s eyes widened, not altogether respectfully. ‘With a name like Liam Brady, what do you think? – he was welfare officer for the Ulster Protestant Action Force?’

  ‘IRA,’ said Liz. The cypher slipped between her lips like a low whistle. Murder was one thing, she was trained to deal with that. Terrorism was something else.

  Donovan nodded. ‘All the time I was a kid in Glencurran, Liam Brady’s da was the local commandant. Everybody knew it – you needed to, there were always things you needed to know in Glencurran to keep your head from getting blown off. Liam’s about twelve years older than me, he was on active service’ – he twitched Liz a bleak grin – ‘sorry, he was a working terrorist – when I was at school. The RUC used to pick him up at regular intervals; they knew what he was about, the problem was getting witnesses into court.

  ‘They shot him once, rather the Army did. His da got him across the border and had him patched up there. For a time after that he was fund-raising in the States, and after that I don’t know where he went. I never saw him again, till today.’

  ‘I wonder where he teamed up with Reverend Michael Davey. Europe, I suppose – aren’t they just back from France? There are probably worse ways for a known terrorist to travel than as an evangelist’s roadie.’ Shapiro looked at Donovan. ‘You knew the man – how he worked, what he was capable of. Could he have killed the girl?’

  ‘He could, no question about it.’ Donovan uncurled from the low furniture with the fluid unconscious grace of a cat and padded over to the window. ‘He’ll have killed people before. He’d need a reason – he’s not enough of a mad bastard to go round killing girls for fun – but all the same, a reason’s easy come by. She worked this neighbourhood, she’d introduce herself as soon as a gang of strange men arrived. She may have seen something she shouldn’t have. Whatever Brady’s here for, it’s not putting a tent up and passing round a plate. He’s up to something. That’s a lot of equipment they have: there could be anything tucked away in it.’

  ‘What, guns?’ Liz was aware of a throbbing at her temple that meant her pulse was racing.

  Donovan shrugged. ‘Or drugs. One thing’s for sure: Brady isn’t here to spread the gospel.’

  ‘All right,’ decided Shapiro, ‘we can’t handle this on our own. Go back to the office and get on to Special Branch. It might be as well to tip off Customs & Excise, too, in case you’re right about there being more in those lorries than appears on the manifest.

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nbsp; ‘Liz, you come with me. For the moment this is still the murder of a prostitute we’re investigating. Let’s see what the God-botherers have to say: what they heard, what they saw. Brady won’t suspect anything if we talk to them together. After all, they were parked fifty yards from where this poor kid spent yesterday wrapped in a tarpaulin. Only my sergeant was closer. Oh, don’t look like that, Donovan,’ he added briskly, ‘nobody’s blaming you. Give me a hand out of this bloody chair before I take root.’

  There were seven men in the road crew and they lived in a twelve-metre caravan that had the words ‘Reverend Michael Davey Gospel Crusade’ painted down one side and ‘Face The Future With Faith’ down the other in bold red letters. Liz was amused to see that the sign-writer hadn’t used enough undercoat: the legend ‘Mahout Hassan & His Amazing Dancing Elephants’ was still clearly visible.

  They’d been told to keep themselves available and were passing the time setting out chairs in the tent. There must have been five hundred of them stacked along the canvas wall. Liz considered that wildly optimistic. Castlemere wasn’t the kind of town to turn out in droves for a peripatetic preacher. The only time a local church filled was for a televised Songs of Praise.

  The crew were something of a broad church themselves: three Englishmen, including the ganger, two Irishmen including Brady, a burly Breton with a beard and a Dutch boy. Liz jotted down all their names and didn’t look up when Brady gave his as Joseph Bailie. In age they ranged from eighteen to fifty. Apart from the Dutch boy who was still learning the job, they were all powerful men, their bodies trained by hard physical labour to a state that left gym-freaks breathless with envy. Muscles bulged in the arms and necks of their singlets and filled the thighs of their jeans. They made a wildly improbable bunch of evangelists.

  And of course that wasn’t their job. Their job was to transport the great marquee, erect its masts, raise its canvas and fill it with chairs. It was their job to see that it stayed up whatever weather an ungrateful God threw at it, then take it all down, load it in the trucks and go through the routine again in the next town. It was a job, like many jobs, in which periods of intense back-breaking activity were punctuated by spells of utter boredom.

  If Charisma had waited another week to be murdered they’d have welcomed the diversion. Once Davey got to work they’d have little to do, barring a storm or a breakage in the rigging, but tidy the site, drink coffee and play cards. But right now they had enough on their hands. The first meeting was tomorrow night, by then everything had to be ready, and they resented being held up by a policeman investigating the death of a tom.

  Shapiro talked and Liz watched. Mostly she watched Brady. Like Donovan, she had limited faith in the power of coincidence. Perhaps even a man like Brady wasn’t responsible for every crime committed within five miles, but his history made a presumption of innocence downright silly. While Shapiro was talking to the crew Liz was watching Brady to see if anything that was said struck chords with him.

  ‘It seems likely,’ Shapiro was saying, ‘she was put in the canal last night while it was dark. We’ve found the place, about fifty yards from here. Have you moved your vehicles since last night?’ The ganger shook his head. ‘Then fifty yards from where you were supping your cocoa someone was staggering across the wharf with the body of a sixteen-year-old girl. Did anyone hear anything – a car, footsteps, a splash?’ A chorus of shaking heads. ‘Did anyone go outside?’

  The ganger was the oldest of the crew, a broad grizzled man like a chunk of Pennine granite chiselled off for a monumental statue that was never completed. He was a Geordie and his name was Kelso. ‘I went out about midnight to look at the lorries,’ he offered, his voice a bass rumble like a cave-in at a coalmine. ‘We’ve got some valuable gear, I don’t want nobody messing it about.’

  ‘Right, good,’ said Shapiro. ‘Was there anyone on the wharf?’

  ‘Nobody I could see.’

  ‘How long were you outside?’

  The man gave a mountainous shrug. ‘Five minutes? I walked up one side of the lorries, back down the other. Then I went to bed.’

  Shapiro nodded resignedly. Even if it was true it didn’t mean that the killer wasn’t there at midnight. There were too many dark places to hide. There was a light on the back wall of the timber yard, there might have been lights on some of the houseboats, that was all. It was only enough to emphasize the pools of inky shadow between. Any number of murderers could have been humping any number of bodies up and down the wharf all night and still gone unnoticed.

  ‘What about earlier? Did you go out for a meal, to the pub maybe?’

  Again Kelso shook his head. ‘Bailie went down the chippie for us. It’d been a long old day: we got the night ferry out of Ostend, got into Dover about dawn, up here for breakfast. We spent most of the day unloading the gear and getting the masts up. By evening we was ready to put our feet up.’

  Shapiro looked around him. ‘You carry all this round with you? Can’t you hire tents?’

  ‘It’s easier having our own,’ said Kelso. ‘We’re on the road most of the year, here and on the Continent. It’s one man’s job to make sure there’s always a tent waiting. We used to hire, when I was first with Reverend Mike. It was a nightmare. We’d get to a site with two days to get everything ready, then find that the last man who had the tent went bust and it was still in a field at the far end of the country. Or he had a use for half a mile of good rope and replaced it with the stuff he tethered his donkeys with. Or there was an accident with a gas-stove that he forgot to mention so there was a damn great hole with half a gale whistling through it. It’s a mug’s game. It even costs less having your own gear when you use it as much as we do.’

  Shapiro nodded slowly. ‘You’ve been doing this a while then – moving Mr Davey around.’

  Kelso did some sums. ‘This is the sixth year. For the first couple, like I said, we hired. Then Miss Mills, his business manager, bought this stuff off a travelling circus. Till then we’d stayed in Britain, but once we had our own gear we started going over to Europe as well. France, Belgium and Holland mostly. Last summer we did Germany as well.’

  ‘Have you all been together those six years?’

  Either Kelso couldn’t see where this was leading, or he could and he didn’t like it. He frowned. ‘Varies. I’ve been with him six years, Miss Mills for five, young Rom’s on his first trip. Why? How does that tell you who pushed some bimbo in the canal last night?’

  For the first time Brady offered a contribution. He had a quiet voice, the accent both like and unlike Donovan’s: softer, lightly ribbed with humour. ‘It doesn’t. It tells him a bit about us, if we’re the sort of guys to go around knifing prostitutes. The answer, Chief Inspector, is that we’re not. But for the record, the guys know one another better than they know me. I’ve been with them seven months just. But they can surely tell you I haven’t killed anyone in that time.’

  It was a gentle joke to defuse the tension that had crept in round the edges of the interview. But Shapiro didn’t smile: after all, it was only funny if it was true. ‘Good. Well, with luck we won’t need to see you again. But I imagine we’ll find you here if we do?’

  ‘For a week or so.’ Kelso gave a granity smile. ‘Depends how many sinners Reverend Mike finds to save.’

  ‘Oh, Castlemere has its share of sinners,’ allowed Shapiro. ‘I just don’t know how susceptible they’ll prove to a couple of Hallelujahs and a Praise the Lord.

  ‘Well,’ he said when they were outside and walking back to the car, ‘what did you make of Brady?’

  ‘He didn’t seem too bothered by our questions, did he? I suppose Donovan’s right? He doesn’t strike me as the terrorist type. Generally, whoever they are, whatever the cause, the one thing they have in common is a total lack of humour. They have no sense of proportion. Brady – Bailie – isn’t like that.’

  ‘I doubt Donovan made it up,’ grunted Shapiro, looking at her sidelong. ‘Of course he was only a kid and kids are
impressionable. Maybe Brady never was the major terrorist he seemed to a bunch of thirteen-year-olds. But it would be unsafe to assume that because he can lay on the charm when it suits him he must be a decent chap underneath. I’ve known some thoroughly charming murderers in my time.’

  Liz accepted the rebuke but not altogether gracefully. ‘Well, he didn’t murder Charisma. Unless Dr Crowe’s wrong about when she died, none of them did. They were in Belgium at the time. That’s too easily checked to be a lie.’

  ‘True,’ agreed Shapiro. ‘All the same, Brady knows something.’

  She stopped and looked at him, her eyes widening. There was a note almost of indignation in her voice. ‘I was watching him all the time. His expression never flickered. What did you see that I missed?’

  Shapiro allowed himself a small self-satisfied smile. It was one of the compensations for advancing age, that he could still show bright young detective inspectors a thing or two. ‘I didn’t see anything. Maybe you were too busy watching to hear what he said. We pulled her out of the canal, everyone else assumed she drowned. But Brady said the riggers weren’t the sort of men to go round knifing prostitutes.’

  ‘No, I didn’t pick that up,’ she admitted. ‘It could have been a coincidence – the first thing that came into his head?’

  ‘It could have been. But why would it come into his head when he knew she was found in the canal?’

  ‘God damn!’ Liz was all for going back and having it out with him, but Shapiro kept her walking towards the car.

  ‘He’ll keep. Like you say, we know he didn’t kill her.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I know: withholding evidence isn’t the behaviour of an innocent man. But I’d like to know what he might be guilty of before I haul him in. Let’s find out what Special Branch have to say, yes?’ He gave a low chuckle, amused by her indignation. ‘Shapiro’s First Law of Criminal Investigation: never ask a question until you’ve a good idea what the answer’s going to be.’