Charisma

by Jo Bannister

  5

  Over the phone Brian Graham’s voice was quiet and icily calm. ‘What do you mean, you have to work tomorrow?’

  Liz stood on one leg, twisting the wire like a discomfited schoolgirl, wincing at the fury latent in his self-control. She wasn’t surprised he was furious. He was entitled to be furious. ‘I know what I said. I said I’d keep Monday free to finish the move. I said, come what may, I’d be here. Brian, I’m sorry. I didn’t expect a murder over the weekend.’

  ‘Murder?’ She detected the least imaginable lightening in his tone, as if this at least were something he could understand. ‘A woman, was it?’

  Liz blinked. ‘Yes, as a matter of fact it was. Well, a girl.’

  A sniff came down the wire. ‘Find the husband. Ask if she’d recently left him to move house on his own.’

  First thing Monday morning she found Donovan waiting in her office, looking as disgruntled as Brian sounded. ‘Special Branch.’ He spat the words out as if they tasted bad. ‘They couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery.’

  ‘Don’t they have anything on Brady?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. They say he’s dead. They say he died in the States, in a car crash, and the file is closed.’ His voice was heavy with sarcasm. Liz guessed he’d given Special Branch as hard a time as they’d given him.

  ‘A car crash. What – deliberate? A hit?’

  ‘They say not. They say he was on his way to address a meeting, he’d been drinking and he tried to beat an articulated lorry through a red light.’

  Mingled feelings of relief and anti-climax left Liz momentarily nonplussed. She’d been gearing herself up mentally for the worst, for the prospect that poor Charisma’s death was no more than a prelude to the campaign of terror to come; and now it seemed Donovan had made a mistake. An easy mistake, it had been thirteen years … A shade light-headed, she chuckled. ‘So Joseph Bailie isn’t Liam Brady at all – never was any more than a carnival roustabout—’

  Donovan breathed heavily. ‘Boss, did I ever tell you about Glencurran? It was a one-horse town until the horse died. It’s got three churches, three pubs and a betting shop, a sub post office, a general store and an agricultural supplier. It’s got a two-room primary school and one bus-stop. Total population, including the outlying farms, about four hundred. I knew them all, at least to see. I’d know Petey Conway’s bedbound grandmother if she got a hip replacement and turned up here as an exotic dancer. You think I can’t recognize the guy every five-year-old in Glencurran knew to tiptoe round? The one guy who never got “Wash me” scrawled in the dirt on his car?’

  Liz didn’t ask the first question which occurred to her, which was how he had brought himself to leave such a throbbing metropolis. Instead she said patiently, ‘But, Donovan, he’s dead. The FBI told Special Branch and Special Branch told you: Liam Brady is no more. Bailie looks like him, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m telling you,’ he said stubbornly. ‘I know the man. That’s him.’

  Liz favoured him with a look on the incredulous side of sceptical. ‘Then how do you explain it?’

  ‘Cock-up?’

  ‘Did you try Customs?’

  ‘They’ve nothing either. They checked the crew through Dover about five o’clock Saturday morning. They weren’t looking for anything in particular and they didn’t find anything.’ His lip curled. ‘They pointed out that the duty on religious pamphlets and holy water aren’t enough to tempt the average smuggler away from cocaine.’ He sniffed dourly. ‘Smug bastards.’

  Liz smiled. By his own account Donovan went through life like the fox, every man’s hand against him. Of course it wasn’t true. He met with approximately the same trials and tribulations as other people; he just resented them more. At first she’d found his grim humour tiresome. Now it positively cheered her up. Her whole day seemed bright with promise when compared with the war of attrition that was Donovan’s.

  Her father made a formal identification of Charlene Pierce, aged sixteen, known along the wharf as Charisma. Then he passed out on the mortuary floor. When he was feeling better Shapiro had a squad car take him home; but he heard later that Pierce got out at some traffic lights and disappeared into a handy pub.

  At midday – about the time her furniture and her husband were expected – Liz called Castle General and asked for Dr Crowe. She was told he couldn’t come to the phone immediately – ‘Up to his eyes at the moment,’ said his assistant, leaving Liz to wonder if she meant it literally – but he called back in fifteen minutes with an interim report on the Pierce autopsy.

  ‘Cause of death was the obvious – sudden massive blood loss from a throat wound that severed both carotid arteries and the trachea. She’d have lost consciousness almost immediately with death following soon after. Unless she did it before she wouldn’t have screamed. Then she lay for several hours on her side on a hard surface, and only after that was she put into the water.’

  ‘Time of death?’

  She heard him sucking his teeth. ‘That’s a good one. It’s a complicated scenario, you know? Body temperature’s no guide after a few hours in cold water; the decomposition process would be affected too. I can’t really expand on what I said yesterday.’

  Liz knew how reluctant pathologists were to pin themselves down to times of death, even with ‘give or take half an hour’ as a gesture to human fallibility. But even by the usual standard, even allowing for the undoubted complications, Crowe seemed to be being unhelpful. ‘If I promise not to quote you, when would you say she died?’

  He chuckled good-naturedly. ‘Then I’d say she was killed around midnight on Friday, and that she lay for about twenty-four hours before she was put in the canal. But those are only guidelines, and if anyone asks about this conversation I shall deny it ever took place.’

  Liz liked Crowe, liked most of the pathologists she met, found them on the whole more approachable than GPs, and thought it a pity that their patients were in no state to appreciate them. ‘The secret of your competence is safe with me,’ she assured him solemnly.

  ‘And I was right about her killer standing behind her, I think. It’d be an awkward movement to make a wound like that from in front. From the angle the blade was held at, he was several inches taller than her.’

  ‘Good,’ said Liz, thinking this was a bonus. ‘How tall?’

  Crowe sounded apologetic. ‘Well, it’s not going to be that much help. She was only five-foot-one. You could say he was probably five six or more, but most men are.’

  ‘At least we can rule out midgets,’ Liz said philosophically. ‘All right. Apart from the neck wound, was she injured in any other way? Was she raped?’

  The pathologist was slow to answer. ‘She hadn’t been raped violently.’

  Liz’s eyebrows climbed. ‘There’s a gentle way?’

  Reproof came down the phone at her. ‘That’s not what I meant. Look, this was a girl who spent her working life with her legs apart. She had sex the way you use a typewriter, battering away at it whenever the need and opportunity arise. Of course she was bruised. Of course there were abrasions. And yes, she had sex on the day of her death. But it could have been earlier and not with the man who killed her. It may have had nothing to do with her death.’

  ‘So what’s he saying?’ scowled Shapiro when Liz brought him up to date. ‘That she was a prostitute but she wasn’t killed for sex?’

  Liz shrugged. ‘If a girl’s a prostitute, you don’t have to kill her for it. You pay her for it.’

  ‘Then why did he kill her?’

  ‘For pleasure? We should consider the possibility, Frank. There are men who get a kick out of killing women: the ultimate domination. Prostitutes are more accessible than most women, they’re more likely to meet such men. Then there’s the fact that they won’t be missed as quickly and the feeling that less effort may be put into finding their killers.’

  ‘The hell for that!’ Shapiro’s eyes were fierce. ‘Round here, nobody’s life is that cheap.’

  ‘We�
��ll tell him that when we find him,’ Liz promised.

  For a time Shapiro said nothing more. But the air around him remained charged with his thinking so Liz stayed where she was. At length he said, ‘Twenty-four hours?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Isn’t that what Crowe said – that she’d been dead twenty-four hours when she went into the water?’

  ‘It was a guess, but yes, something like that.’

  ‘She lay under that tarpaulin all Saturday and nobody found her. I know the tow-path isn’t Piccadilly but it’s not Outer Mongolia either. Particularly at weekends there are boats passing up and down, people walking dogs, kids out for a bit of fun. And nobody found her. Nobody thought it worth examining a girl-sized hump under a tarpaulin? Somebody’s dog must have smelled her and wanted to investigate. What did they do – pull it away, complain it was making them late for dinner? What kind of a town is this?’

  ‘An ordinary town,’ Liz said quietly, ‘full of ordinary people who don’t expect to be confronted with dead bodies on public paths. If your dog barks at a bit of tarpaulin you think there’s a rat in it and hurry away. Hindsight’s a fine thing, Frank. But there was nothing unusual about a roll of old tarpaulin left out with the timberyard’s rubbish. Why would anyone investigate? You can’t blame people for walking past, any more than you can blame Donovan for not hearing anything. It would have been nice if we’d picked up on it sooner but nobody turned their back on her deliberately. It was bad luck, that’s all.’

  Shapiro nodded dispiritedly. ‘I just wonder sometimes if we’re the only ones who give a damn about law, order, the sanctity of human life, all that stuff. If the tax-payers of Castlemere wouldn’t be just as happy with an effective public cleansing department that tidied up the mess so they didn’t have to look at it. Go into town. Have lunch in a nice restaurant, have a drink in a wine bar, have a look round a couple of the better shops, and listen to what’s being said. You think the place is going to be up in arms over this? Somebody cut a young girl’s throat: that’s public knowledge now. But what’s Castlemere going to be talking about? Going down three-nil to Hull Kingston Rovers. Delays on the motorway due to the contra-flow system. How long it takes to get an appointment at Hair traffic Control. They don’t care, Liz. The only reference you’ll hear, if you hear anything, is What do these girls expect? and Why don’t the police do something about prostitutes?’

  ‘You’re not being fair, Frank. We worry about it because it’s our job to. They pay us to worry about it. They try not to worry about it, not to think about it, because there’s nothing they can do. None of them, and probably none of us either, could have saved Charisma from that end or one very like it. Donovan tried, I imagine others have too, and she didn’t want to know. We could have locked her up. Then the man who killed her would have killed someone else – a young girl on her way home from a disco or out walking the family dog, a young mother whose car broke down so she had to walk the last mile home. I’m not saying that would necessarily have been worse. But would it have been any better?’

  ‘It would at least have reminded our local worthies that violent death isn’t the prerogative of the poor,’ Shapiro said savagely. At once he relented with a wry smile. ‘You’re right, I’m being unfair. It’s just, I get so tired of policing two nations when one of them thinks there’s a special lane on the ring road for BMWs and the other thinks we’re part of a conspiracy against them.’

  Before she left Liz said, ‘What, if anything, do you want me to do about Bailie? Now it seems he isn’t Donovan’s friendly neighbourhood terrorist after all?’

  Shapiro’s lived-in face wrinkled. ‘What’s to do? He’s in the clear as far as the crime we’re investigating – they all are, they didn’t enter the country until after she was dead. And if he didn’t kill her, why would he be moving her body about? Surely to God that was the killer. His slip about the knife must have been a coincidence.’

  ‘Donovan’s still convinced he’s Liam Brady.’

  ‘Donovan’s always convinced he’s right, right up to the moment that he’s proved wrong. Brady’s dead. Special Branch wouldn’t have closed the file without being sure.’

  As she went down the corridor towards her own office she met Donovan coming up it. ‘Is the chief in?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And no.’

  He frowned. ‘I wanted to ask him—’

  ‘No,’ she said again.

  He didn’t understand. ‘I wondered what he thought, if it’s a good idea—’

  ‘No, Donovan,’ she said a third time. ‘No, you may not go and see Bailie. No, you may not accuse him of being a dead terrorist. No, you may not search his belongings for Semtex. I asked Mr Shapiro and he told me, and now I’m telling you. No. We leave the man alone.’

  The van was leaving as Liz got home. The front door was open and there were packing cases in the hall and also at the top of the stairs. So far as she could tell from a quick glance through the windows the furniture had been decanted into more or less the right rooms.

  She found Brian in the living-room, sprawled on the couch with his head tipped back and his eyes shut. She thought for a moment he was asleep. He looked exhausted, his shirt darkly patched with sweat.

  But he wasn’t asleep. He stirred at her entry and cranked his eyes open. ‘Good day at the office, dear?’

  She bent to kiss his forehead, which was about as high as foreheads go before people start talking openly about baldness. ‘Not great. But probably better than yours.’

  ‘The cooker’s working. Do you want to eat now or later?’

  ‘Stay where you are,’ she said, ‘I’ll put something together. I’ll just turn Polly into the paddock first.’

  ‘Polly—!’ From the tone of Brian Graham’s voice he thought there were more important things to do.

  ‘Be fair: today’s shambles wasn’t her fault, there’s no reason to punish her for it.’

  ‘Oh, see to the bloody horse,’ he growled, closing his eyes again.

  6

  ‘Sin,’ rumbled the Reverend Michael Davey. ‘Sin and corruption.’ His eyes, sharp as a diamond drill guaranteed accurate to a thousandth of an inch, scoured his congregation as if expecting to catch some of them out in pride, avarice or lust at that very moment.

  ‘Sins of the heart. Sins of the soul. Sins of the flesh. Wherever I go, wherever I travel, always the same. People without values. Without faith. Without love: the love of God, of their fellow man, of their families, of themselves even. Because people who liked and respected themselves couldn’t do half the things that happen in our society. Old men tortured for their pension money. Old women raped at knife-point. Children snatched from the streets, young girls violated by those who should be looking after them.’

  Reverend Michael Davey wore a white suit, as anyone who had seen the posters would have expected, and sat in the centre of a dais raised some three feet above ground level – sat because he had no option, he was a man in a wheelchair. On his feet he would have been a hugely commanding figure, tall and broad, with a strong fleshy face crowned with a shock of springy hair somewhere between blond and white. That was the age he was, somewhere between young and old, and that was all you could know without reading his well-publicized autobiography. In fact he was fifty-two.

  But the impression he gave, in spite of the wheelchair, was of a man in the prime of life and vigour. The eyes were only part of a vast natural arsenal of command. The voice was another weapon: deep, rough, with power burgeoning up through it as if it came from a fathomless reservoir of passion and it was as much as he could do to keep it from running amok and tearing the tent down.

  The white suit, the commanding figure, even the electric hair and diamond eyes, were taken straight from the chapter on American evangelists in the Book of Stereotypes. But the voice, resonant with its full vowels and rolling consonants, came from the mining valleys of Wales. It was a fierce, angry, Trade Union type of Welshness in which the words rushed from him like a vio
lent little torrent coming off Snowdon.

  ‘So what’s gone wrong, that suddenly we have such monsters among us?’ he asked. ‘There are people, you know, who blame God. It wouldn’t happen if He really cared for us. What, rape and torture God’s will? If I believed that I’d throw stones at the Archbishop of Canterbury and spit in the communion wine. I would not serve a God who treated His people that way. These things are artifacts not of God but of the Devil, and we have to confront the Devil’s work, and the Devil’s people, wherever we find them.

  ‘Know thine enemy, saith the Lord. And there’s a damn good reason for that: if we don’t know him, if we don’t recognize him when we see him, he’s free to work his ravages among us. We must understand the forces of evil, recognize them and join battle with them. In the dark streets and the gutters. In the high-rises and the sewers. In the places where people live, where they work, where they drink and have their entertainment, even – God help us – in the schools. There are no refuges from the tide of filth and sin that washes around us. Either we fight against it or we go under.’

  That was not quite the end. There was some more of the same, followed by a rousing hymn in which the preacher’s voice could be heard soaring majestically. A yellow plastic bucket went round in lieu of a collection plate. Then the congregation climbed creakily to its feet and filed out. It didn’t take long. There might have been twenty of them, mostly old ladies. Row upon row of folding seats had collected only dust.

  There was a plywood ramp from the dais down to the ground sheet. With the confidence of long practice Davey rolled off the top, gathering enough speed to take him half-way up the aisle before he had to wheel. He arrived at the flap of the tent in time to bid goodnight to the rearguard.

  ‘Thanks for coming. Come again tomorrow – same time, same place. We haven’t finished here; we’ve hardly begun.’

  When they were gone he turned to the woman standing beside him. All the fierce power went out of his eyes and his muscular shoulders slumped. His voice was soft, a low rumbled plaint. ‘Oh, Jenny, what am I doing here? These people aren’t interested in anything I have to say. They only came out of politeness: they’d have sat on the same seats if I’d been selling hair tonic or vegetarianism or a new political party for black lesbian pacifists.’