Charisma

by Jo Bannister

  So Donovan didn’t wait to see but smashed the glass in the next door along, scrabbled for the catch and fell into the hall with an image of movement – rolling movement like a breaking sea – on the edge of his vision.

  His groping hands found the phone. He dragged off a glove with his teeth and dialled 999. While the dial returned unhurriedly to neutral he had time to think that countries which used 111 as their emergency code had the right idea. Then the line connected and someone asked him which service he required.

  Then the wave of bodies that had wheeled into the street behind him surged through the open door, bowled him away from the phone and fell on him like breakers falling on rocks. Fists and boots rained on him. The arms he raised to shield his face were wrenched apart and someone hit him across the eyes.

  Then the tide receded, taking its flotsam with it. When the house was empty the little tinny voice of the emergency operator was plainly audible asking with increasing agitation what was happening, whether anyone was still there, and which of the three services the caller was in most urgent need of.

  Half conscious and unresisting, Donovan was dragged into the street and dropped in the gutter. His head collided with the kerbstone: new constellations rose before his eyes. Men leaned over him. Someone shone a torch in his face.

  He could make more sense of the voices than of what he could see. They were saying Carver’s name and, with taut satisfaction, ‘We’ve got him.’ Someone said, ‘The stinking beast.’

  Someone else said, ‘That isn’t Carver.’

  A murmur and then a silence ran through the press. A voice raised in thin anger demanded, ‘Then why’d he run? Of course it’s Carver.’

  ‘I’m telling you,’ said the first man, ‘I know Ray Carver and that’s not him.’

  ‘Then who is he?’

  They bent over him; hands fastened in his jacket hauled him to his feet. The torch blinded him. He mumbled through broken lips, ‘I’m a frigging policeman.’

  In the hush that fell the sound of the motorbike was clear, strong and close. Someone yelled, ‘That’s Carver!’

  If he’d been the man they thought, Carver would have got through the depleted gathering in Jubilee Terrace, broken bodies spinning from the wheels of the big machine, and might well have escaped. But he wasn’t. He was an ordinary man; within certain limitations a decent man; a man who could have avoided trouble by either compromising his lady-friend or lying about what he’d seen but who had refused to do either. Whatever he might have promised Donovan, Ray Carver was never going to mow through a press of human bodies. He didn’t have it in him. At the last possible moment, when he had either to brake or drive into them, he braked.

  Road-dirt spat from under the tyres and the machine slewed wildly. People scattered before it. When the wheels went from under him Carver hit the ground hard, the bike toppling on to him, pinning him down.

  For a long moment no one seemed to know what to do. The man they’d come seeking was helpless at their feet. They gathered round to look. A couple of the older men ventured forward to lift the bike off him and help him up.

  A furious bellow stopped them. The young men who had led the charge up into the enclave were back, thrusting through the crowd. One of them bent over the man on the ground and pulled the helmet off. ‘That him?’ Voices agreed that it was.

  The man straightened up, breathing heavily. He was stocky and well muscled but more accustomed to heavy labour than to running. Sometimes he was a catch-hand bricklayer, sometimes he was a bouncer at the ‘Samarkand’ nightclub. He didn’t live in The Jubilee but he was known there. His name was Jackson, he was in his mid-thirties, and he was the father of two daughters both under ten.

  He’d put a suit on for the gospel meeting but it wasn’t a new suit to start with and it had aged a lot in the last ten minutes. His tie was pulled down and his collar open; sweat glinted on his face in the wink of the street-lamps. He said, ‘So that’s what human filth looks like.’

  Carver struggled with the machine lying on his leg but couldn’t shift it. His mouth moved but nothing came out. Fear shone in his eyes.

  Jackson bent over him again to take the key out of the ignition. For a moment Donovan thought he’d done it to prevent Carver leaping up and riding away. Then with a shock of premonition he realized what was intended. He roared, ‘No!’ and heard his voice crack.

  Hands held him. Someone hit him in the small of the back and he went down on his knees. The rest of what happened he watched through a forest of legs.

  Jackson didn’t glance at him. He unlocked the petrol filler cap. The fuel ran over Carver’s leg and up to his groin. Fumes rose acrid as incense.

  The sometime bouncer took out a cigarette. ‘Damned if I know what we should do with it,’ he said with a heavy and vicious humour. ‘Anybody want a smoke while we think about it?’

  So far as Donovan could see nobody took him up on the offer. But he lit his own cigarette, and held the match until it burned down to his fingertips. For the same space his eyes held Carver’s eyes as they rounded with terror, terrible mewling little cries spilling out of his lips while his head shook from side to side and his hands thrust ineffectually at the machine.

  When the flame burned his fingers the stocky man said mildly, ‘Ow,’ and let it drop.

  ‘I want him for this, Liz.’ Shapiro was speaking through clenched teeth which meant he was very angry. When he was ordinarily displeased, for instance with her, he favoured a kind of gruff sarcasm. Occasionally she had heard him angry enough, usually with Donovan, to raise his voice. But in the ten years, on and off, that she’d known him she could only remember three or four occasions when he’d been angry enough to whisper. ‘Not just the bastard in the cells who did it. I want the bastard in the tent who put him up to it.’

  ‘If we can get him.’ Liz was more cautious. ‘Incitement’s a tricky one, Frank. You can know perfectly well what somebody meant but if the words are in any way ambiguous you’re not going to make it stick.’

  ‘That gang went straight from his tabernacle to The Jubilee. Ten minutes after he’d finished with them they were beating the crap out of my sergeant. Then they watched while one madder-than-average bastard doused a helpless man with petrol and put a match to him. You don’t think that’s cause and effect?’

  ‘I’m sure Davey was responsible for what happened,’ Liz said deliberately. ‘I don’t know yet if he’s committed any offence. I’ve got them waiting downstairs now. I may know more when I’ve interviewed them.’

  ‘Can’t Donovan nail him?’

  ‘Not specifically, no.’ Liz had talked to him in the hospital while he was getting his own hurts dealt with. They weren’t serious: cuts and bruises, burns to one hand where he’d tried to smother the flames, forgetting that he’d left a glove in the house with the phone. He’d seemed dazed, mostly with shock. Seeing a trapped man deliberately set on fire, hearing the shrieks hammer at his brain and trying to effect a rescue while thirty men looked on and did nothing had been the most harrowing experience of his life. The flames were reflected in his eyes as he talked. Liz knew he was seeing anything but her. ‘Nobody said “Reverend Mike sent us.” ’

  ‘What about Jackson? Will he say it was Davey’s idea?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Liz gave a grim smile. ‘He’s still claiming it was an accident, that he wanted a smoke and didn’t think of the consequences.’

  ‘God help us all!’ exclaimed Shapiro despairingly. ‘When he’d unscrewed the petrol cap? When he had to take the key out of the ignition to do it? What does he think? – somebody looked under a cabbage leaf and there we were?’ Belatedly he caught an echo of what Liz had said. ‘Interviewed them? What them?’

  ‘He has an assistant. Jennifer Mills. She makes the business arrangements, he does the talking.’

  ‘She was there last night?’

  ‘She’s there every night, apparently. Reverend Mike’s cheerleader.’

  Shapiro sniffed. ‘Which do you want to ta
lk to?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’ They were alone so she could be candid. ‘But if you take him, Frank, don’t lose your temper. I know how you feel about zealots, but whether we like it or not people selling religion enjoy more latitude than people selling fish-and-chips. It doesn’t make him fire-proof. It does mean that if you want to prosecute you’ll have to be careful.’

  Shapiro wasn’t so angry that he’d lost all sense of proportion. He tugged an imaginary forelock. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  She grinned at him with real affection. He wasn’t one of the giants of detective mythology, one of the men to whom the conversation inevitably turned at police gatherings. But she thought he was probably as good a policeman, and at least as good a man, as those that were.

  Being a Jew may have held him back. Being of no great height and inclined to stoutness would not have helped. There were no stereotypes of stardom that fitted him. At the same time she had never met anyone, police or civilian, who’d known Frank Shapiro however casually without learning to respect him. She hoped he knew that.

  She said, ‘Just don’t tell him about the agnostic dyslexic insomniac.’

  ‘The one who lies awake nights wondering if there is a dog?’ He sighed and shook his head, making for the door. ‘It’s getting time to retire when everyone you work with knows all your jokes.’ In the doorway he paused. ‘Have somebody buzz me when Donovan comes in.’

  Liz stared at him. ‘Donovan won’t be in today.’

  Shapiro just smiled as he went out.

  4

  Jennifer Mills was Liz’s age or a little older, a tall, slim woman with intelligent eyes in a high-boned face under a short cap of red-blonde hair. She had a low, faintly husky voice on which an upper-middle-class accent sat lightly, a mere interesting inflection. She wore tailored casuals and good shoes. A slouch hat lay on the table before her, and beside it a packet of cigarettes and a gold lighter. She had seen no need to ask permission to smoke.

  A glance confirmed what Liz had been told, that Davey was the heart and soul of the crusade but Mills was its brains. It was Davey people came to hear but Mills who put him where he was needed. In the other interview room Davey might be filling the air with gestures and rhetoric but Liz suspected Shapiro had the easier task. This intelligent, self-contained woman wasn’t going to get carried away by the sound of her own voice and accidentally say what she meant instead of what was politic.

  Liz introduced herself and began the interview. Almost immediately Mills interrupted: there was no hostility in her manner, but – deliberately or instinctively – she hijacked the proceedings, effectively setting both the agenda and the pace.

  ‘I want to say at the outset that Reverend Davey and I are appalled at what happened last night. Neither of us anticipated such a thing. We want to co-operate with your inquiry and hope we can help you bring those responsible to justice. We’ve no wish to protect anyone capable of that kind of atrocity. The climate of fear created in this town by recent events is no defence.’

  If Liz was taken aback by this manifesto she tried not to show it. ‘It must have occurred to you, Miss Mills, that since those involved came to Broad Wharf seeking the consolation of religion and left as a mob looking for blood, Mr Davey’s contribution must be open to criticism.’

  Jennifer Mills took from her handbag the flat plastic box of a tape cassette. ‘You might find it helpful to listen to this. I tape all Reverend Davey’s addresses. He doesn’t use a prepared text so if he comes up with something that hits the spot it’s useful to have a record. I also offer them to the local radio when we arrive somewhere new.’ She smiled thinly. ‘Sometimes they have a little fun at our expense but it’s all publicity. This is the tape from last night. I can’t prove when it was made but he refers to the murder of the child earlier in the day, and you can hear the crowd there, so it really couldn’t have been made anywhere else.’

  Liz put it into the machine and they listened to the musical voice, the Welsh accent emphasized by the electronics, that began low and sombre and worked its way up by degrees to first a strident intensity and then a soaring celebration of the power of the word that seemed to Liz to have less to do with religion than with the sheer grand opera of oratory.

  Shapiro didn’t like opera. He mistrusted oratory – it was too easy to be swayed by the power of the speaker and fail to analyse the content of the speech – and was unconvinced of the efficacy of religion, his own or anybody else’s. For every genuinely religious person he’d met he reckoned there were ten who used dogma as an easy alternative to thinking and faith as a substitute for personal responsibility. He suspected the words ‘The will of God’ had been responsible for more deaths than cholera.

  So it was never on the cards that Frank Shapiro and Michael Davey would like one another and by no means sure that they would manage respect. But they were two middle-aged men in responsible professions with a wealth of experience behind them, and they ought to have been able to avoid insults.

  Davey had been badly shaken by the events that followed his meeting, and the summons to the police station seemed to infer that they were in some measure his fault. He hadn’t intended to raise a mob against anyone, least of all an innocent man. He’d listened to the tape – his memory being less reliable – and he didn’t think he had instigated what happened. The Old Testament prophets he preferred didn’t mince their words, tended to preach in blood and thunder, but he didn’t think quoting them amounted to incitement to violence. But he was aware the police might take another view. Anxiety made him come out fighting.

  ‘What the hell kind of a town is this?’ he demanded, leaning over the table and thrusting his broad face at Shapiro’s. ‘You people got no self-control? Between young girls selling themselves on the streets, and people cutting throats twice a week, and people setting fire to other people because of some rumour, it’s like Sodom and Gomorrah. I’ve been some rough places in my time but I don’t remember anywhere they hold life as cheap as here.’

  Shapiro gritted his teeth but couldn’t stop his nostrils flaring. ‘I’m glad you want to talk about the attempted murder of Raymond Carver, Mr Davey. That’s why you’re here.’

  Diamond eyes glinted in the flushed face. ‘Oh, I know why I’m here, Chief Inspector. I’m here because it’s easier to sit moaning in the dark than try and get a fire going.’ It was the wrong metaphor for the occasion. Flustered, he hurried on. ‘When people ask what you’re doing about the appalling lawlessness in Castlemere you’ll be able to point at me and say, We’re arresting the people who complain about it.’

  ‘I see,’ Shapiro said slowly. ‘You said the police weren’t doing enough to catch Alice Elton’s killer, and your audience dashed off and set fire to the man we’d had in for questioning.’

  ‘No!’ Then he thought again. ‘Well yes, I suppose so. But it wasn’t my doing. You’re blaming me for something I could neither anticipate nor prevent. On the same basis I could blame you for the murder of that little girl in the park. It’s the job of the police to protect people but, boy, did you ever let her down!’

  ‘And you think your way’s better, do you?’ asked Shapiro, tight-lipped. ‘Rabble-rousing, mob rule, and go straight to the punishment to avoid the tedium of a trial. That’s the New Jerusalem you have to offer us, is it, Mr Davey?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Davey shot across the table at him, ‘if I have anything to offer. But at least I am not afraid to confront the need. I’m not so scared of failing that I’d sooner pretend there’s no problem. I don’t sit in a snug little office two floors above the street, with my back to the window so I can pretend not to see the filth mounting up out there. I get down into it, with the smell in my nostrils and the grime under my fingernails, and I try to clean it up. I don’t always succeed. Even when I do succeed, a little, there’s still so much more to do than one man can ever hope to tackle. But by God, Mr Shapiro, at least I try. I do my Christian duty and try.’

  Someone deliberately trying to annoy Sh
apiro could not have bettered that sanctimonious stridency of tone, that astringent blend of militancy and piousness. Anyone who knew him would have seen how angry he was becoming. Even a stranger such as Davey must have seen how the muscles of his face tensed and the skin round his eyes and over his jowls went white. But he still didn’t raise his voice. He lowered it so that the words came out, one at a time, like the base line in a piece of martial music reserved for state funerals.

  ‘There’s a young man in Castle General because of your Christian duty. He’s got third-degree burns from his waist to his knees. I’m told his life is now out of danger. I’m also told he has months or years of painful skin grafts ahead of him. Now, I don’t know yet if you’re legally responsible for what happened to him. But if you don’t feel a moral responsibility then it seems to me that what you call your Christian duty is of less use to humanity than the bit we throw away after circumcision.’

  Outrage leaves many people momentarily breathless. If it had had that effect on Davey he probably wouldn’t have spat out, ‘And what can a Jew know of Christian duty?’

  ‘Jews,’ said Shapiro deliberately, ‘know all about Christian duty. They’ve carried the burden of it for two thousand years.’

  Into this edifying scene came Liz Graham. She saw the anger in the two men’s faces, red in Davey’s, white in Shapiro’s, and sighed. ‘May I have a word with you outside, sir?’

  ‘Now, Inspector?’

  ‘Now, sir.’

  When he’d heard the tape Shapiro had to agree that, unwise as it might have been in the circumstances, Davey’s address of the previous night did not constitute an offence. ‘Damnation,’ he said with quiet feeling. ‘I wanted the pleasure of charging the daft bastard.’