Charisma

by Jo Bannister

  ‘I’m glad we have your confidence, sir.’ Liz smiled and tried to leave. But one of Davey’s powerful hands captured her wrist. Startled, she looked back at him, by which time he’d already released her. His head was on one side, like a supplicant schoolboy’s.

  ‘It’s half-past twelve, Inspector. I was going to have a bit of lunch in the bar. Will you join me?’ She hesitated and he hurried on. ‘It’s never much fun eating alone in a public place. Eating alone in a public place in a wheelchair is next best thing to exhibiting yourself at a freak-show.’

  ‘Won’t Miss Mills be joining you?’

  He shook his head. ‘She’s down at the wharf, getting the tent in order. I’m not allowed to help: I’m supposed to rest until teatime. Come on – you need a break or you’ll be arresting the wrong people all afternoon.’

  Liz grinned. ‘All right. Just a sandwich – I really don’t have time for anything more.’

  ‘Just a sandwich.’

  6

  Donovan spent the day on the phone. By late afternoon a pattern was emerging: not the one he’d hoped for, a trail of teenage girls with their throats cut at times and places where Michael Davey was thundering forth on the Old Testament virtues, but a pattern none the less. He squinted at his notes from different angles as if seeking a hidden message. Then he went to consult Inspector Graham. She wasn’t in her office so he tried Chief Inspector Shapiro.

  Shapiro looked up, glowering, at his unheralded appearance. ‘Does it ever occur to you, Sergeant, that you could march in here one day and find me making mad passionate love to Miss Tunstall on top of the desk?’

  This thought had not occurred to Donovan. Partly because Superintendent Taylor’s secretary, like Shapiro himself, had reached an age that militated against cavorting on office furniture, and partly because he knew his chiefs private vice and it was not middle-aged ladies in lisle stockings but forty winks when business was slow.

  ‘Sorry, sir.’ He gestured with his hands, one full of papers, the other wrapped in cling-film. ‘Nothing to knock with.’ His face brightened. ‘I could kick.’

  Shapiro sighed. ‘Just clear your throat and give Miss Tunstall time to cover her confusion. What do you want?’

  ‘I’ve been phoning round the places this travelling circus pitched its tent before coming here, and I’ve turned up something a bit odd.’

  Shapiro waited but Donovan didn’t go on. ‘Yes?’ he said at last, irritably.

  ‘This improvement Jennifer Mills claimed in crime figures following their visits is open to debate. You might get something if you massaged the figures enough, but the kindest interpretation is that Miss Mills has a touching faith in her employer. Mostly the statistics fluctuate about how you’d expect, with one exception. Several divisions noticed an increase in drug offences after Davey left town. Not while he was there, after he left. They didn’t think much of it, only mentioned it as a curiosity. But about the third time I heard it I started taking notice. Small towns they are, mostly, that never had much of a drug problem before. I asked across the Channel too, but so far as I can find out there’s been nothing similar following the European tours.’

  Shapiro stared at him, appalled. ‘Dear God, Donovan, what are you saying? – that Cardiff’s answer to Billy Graham is a drug-runner?’

  The prospect cost Donovan no grief. ‘Why not? It’s a good cover. Who’s going to strip-search a peripatetic preacher in a wheelchair?’

  The gears were grinding almost perceptibly behind Shapiro’s eyes. ‘How often does he cross the Channel?’

  ‘Twice a year in each direction. They do winter and summer in England, spring and autumn on the Continent.’

  ‘That’s just two trips a year when they could bring stuff into England. It isn’t much. If Davey’s set up a drug-running operation you’d think he’d want to milk it for more than that.’

  ‘How it pays depends on how much he carries, not how often he makes the trip. Look, most drugs entering Britain now come from Europe. Some of it comes sewn into tourist souvenirs but the profitable way is to shift it by the ton. Customs know that: they search ships, open cargoes, strip the odd juggernaut to the wheel-bearings. But unless they have precise information they still miss a hell of a lot.

  ‘So suppose you’re a well-known evangelist with your own tent, three big vehicles, two cars and a good reason to cross from Europe to England twice a year. You’re not going to invent excuses to make extra trips. You’re going to stick to your schedule, pack your trucks with as much stuff as you can hide from a routine inspection and sell it in small lots as you travel. After a few months you go back for more.’

  ‘I suppose you could hide quite a cache in a lorry before it became too obvious,’ Shapiro ruminated.

  Donovan consulted his notes. ‘A ton of cannabis is worth about £2.5 million. A ton of cocaine would make £150 million. With what you could hide in a lorry you wouldn’t need extra trips.’

  Shapiro went on looking at him for a long time. ‘Am I going to get a rocket over the size of our phone bill?’

  Donovan chuckled darkly. ‘You want me to do a thorough job, don’t you?’

  ‘What does Inspector Graham think of this?’

  Donovan looked away. ‘I don’t know where she is.’

  ‘Polio,’ said Michael Davey. He gave a rueful grin that knocked ten years off his face. ‘Pity, really. It would’ve been worth more to me, professionally speaking, if I’d been mugged.’

  Liz smiled too. ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Nine. I’ve had time to get used to it. There are compensations. I’m never stuck for a seat.’

  ‘Have you’ – Liz encompassed his life-style with a gesture – ‘been doing this long? What do you call it, a campaign?’

  The grin deepened with just a hint of mischief. ‘I call it a mission. You’d use another expression. Don’t deny it: you might be more tactful than Mr Shapiro but I doubt you’ve any more time for it than he has. I’ve yet to meet a police officer who thinks I’m worth the space I take up. It’s funny, really, because so far as I can see we’re on the same side. I could understand it if I was encouraging people to nail one another to barn doors. But all I’m doing is trying to make them better people. What’s so anti-social about that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Liz agreed. ‘The problem is that when people feel strongly about something – moral revival, gay rights, animal welfare, whatever – they see everything in black and white. If I’d been there last night I might have agreed with everything you said. But I’d also have foreseen what you didn’t: that if you bring together a lot of angry, frightened people who don’t know which way to turn and give them a blood-and-thunder speech about rooting out the evil in their midst, they aren’t all going to break up quietly and go home when you’ve finished.’

  Davey nodded a wry acceptance. ‘I should have anticipated it. Truth is, it never occurred to me. I’m a preacher, see. One of the ironies of the job is that it’s not evil people but good ones who come to listen. I’m always preaching to the converted. And you don’t expect decent law-abiding, God-fearing, go-to-meeting folk to turn into a lynch mob.’

  ‘Perhaps preachers don’t. Policemen do.’

  His voice was husky. ‘I wish you had been there last night.’

  Liz thought she was changing the subject. ‘Have you and Miss Mills been together long?’

  A shield dropped in front of his eyes, distancing. A cool crept into his voice. ‘What do you mean, together?’

  She blinked. ‘I understood she was your business manager. Perhaps I’ve got it wrong.’

  Davey seemed relieved. ‘No, that’s right enough. It’s just, people jump to conclusions. A man and a woman travelling together …’ His voice warmed. ‘Jenny’s my strong right arm. More than that, she’s all the bits I’m not best favoured with. She’s my legs, my wits, my patience. She organizes me. Give me a crowd and I can move them: give me a map and a diary and I’m lost. Before Jenny came along I used to run round in circles, the
same half-dozen towns all the time. You can’t call that Outreach, can you?’

  ‘She must be a great help.’

  ‘It’s Jenny makes it all possible. I have’ – he made a self-deprecating gesture with one hand – ‘a certain reputation for doing faith transfusions. When we go back to places after a year or so people thank me for what I’ve done for them. Nobody ever thanks Jenny, but without her I’d be helpless. She came from a good family, had real prospects. She gave up everything to come with me. I’ll always be grateful.’

  Liz smiled. ‘I’m sure she knows how much you think of her.’

  ‘Oh, Jenny knows. There’s nobody in the world I respect more than Jenny. We have a very nice, satisfying working relationship.’

  But Liz had talked to Jennifer Mills and knew something which apparently Michael Davey did not: that his business manager would have liked more than respect and a satisfactory working relationship.

  Donovan was tired, his hand was sore and he’d given up waiting. He was heading for the door when Liz came in. ‘Oh, Donovan. I was hoping I’d catch you.’

  ‘The chiefs been looking for you,’ he replied obliquely.

  She nodded without comment. ‘Did you get anywhere with the phone calls?’

  ‘Maybe.’ He told her what he’d told Shapiro. At some point during the telling, almost unnoticed, she steered him away from the door and back upstairs.

  When he’d finished she sniffed dubiously. ‘It sounds you’re trying to pin half the crime in Europe on this man.’

  Donovan stiffened. ‘I’m not trying to pin anything on him. I’m reporting what I’ve been told: that in several of the places he’s visited there’s been an upsurge in drug-related crime.’

  ‘There’s been an upsurge in drug-related crime most places in the last few years,’ Liz said reasonably. ‘Anyway, you can’t both be right: Mr Shapiro suspecting him of murder, you suspecting him of drug-running.’

  ‘Why not?’ A hint of belligerence was creeping into his manner.

  ‘Because it makes no sense. If he’s got narcotics worth millions hidden in his lorries he’s going to be on his best behaviour, not out hunting young girls to kill. Besides, I know for a fact that he didn’t kill Alice Elton: he was in the dining-room of the Castle Hotel at the time. So he didn’t kill Charisma either. I’m not even going to wonder if there are two homicidal maniacs using the same MO.’

  ‘All right, so he’s not the killer. What about the drug figures? You reckon that’s a coincidence?’

  ‘Could be,’ she said lightly. ‘Tell you what: get on to Drugs Squad, let them know what you’ve found, see if it makes any sense to them. Tell them about Brady too, that rumours of his death have been exaggerated and if he is up to something this could be it. They’re the experts, they’ll have a good idea if your statistics mean anything.’

  Apropos of nothing, except that he didn’t make small talk and there was meaning in everything he said even if no one else understood it, Donovan asked sourly, ‘Have a nice lunch?’

  Liz felt herself flushing. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You’ve been talking to Davey. What did he tell you? – that he’s just your ordinary everyday prophet, his hobbies are saving the world and macrame, he wouldn’t dream of whipping up interest by killing young girls, and it never occurred to him to raise a mob and send them after a scapegoat.’

  She was about to deny it but changed her mind. ‘Yes,’ she said calmly, ‘that’s about what he said. Not the same degree of rhetoric but that figures: people who have something to say say it, people who haven’t just make a lot of noise. You’re good on ideas, Donovan, I’ll give you that. What you’re not good at is recognizing the difference between the improbable and the downright bloody ludicrous.’

  On a better day Donovan would have agreed with her. He knew his strengths and weaknesses as a police officer: they were the same as his strengths and weaknesses as a man. He was energetic, resourceful and single-minded in the interests of his friends and his job. He hated to think he could be wrong about either. He wasn’t often wrong about friends: he didn’t make them easily, by the time he was ready to consider them friends he knew them well. Enemies he made more readily so he was more likely to misjudge them.

  But he thought that Inspector Graham was letting personal feelings colour her judgement. He believed that what he’d discovered warranted proper consideration, not brushing under the carpet because it didn’t accord with what she thought she’d learned about the man over a ploughman’s lunch.

  He came to his feet abruptly, uncoiling like an angry snake. The blood glowed darkly in his face and his eyes were hot. ‘Coincidence? You think it’s coincidence that everywhere this guy goes he leaves a wake of crime behind him? Drugs, murder? You probably think what happened to Ray Carver was a coincidence too. Just one of those things that happen now and then: people go to a gospel meeting, sing a few hymns, then they run riot and set someone on fire.’

  Liz breathed heavily at him. ‘I didn’t say that. If it’s any comfort to you, Donovan, what happened to Carver is going to give Michael Davey nightmares for a long time. But it wasn’t deliberate and it wasn’t malicious. If there’d been a case against him, don’t you think the chief would have charged him? He wanted to. But there wasn’t so he couldn’t. Whether you like it or not, legal responsibility for the attack on Carver begins and ends with the man downstairs.’

  Donovan was too angry to leave it at that. Words poured from him in a bitter torrent, the accent as always thickening in direct proportion to his fury. ‘So Mr Davey’s having trouble sleeping, is he? So he bloody well should. So am I; and I doubt Ray Carver’s getting much either. He’s no skin left between his knees and his navel, and I watched him barbecued. But I see now Mr Davey’s the one we should be sorry for. People thought unkind things about him, didn’t they?’

  ‘Donovan,’ she began, her voice rising as her own temper frayed.

  ‘Do you know what burning human flesh smells like?’ he shouted in her face.

  Her cheeks hot with outrage she stared at him, her breast surging with contradictory urges: compassion because it had been a deeply disturbing experience, anger – at him for refusing to accept her judgement, at herself for not managing his outburst better – even an odd little impulse of protectiveness towards Davey. She teetered on the brink of saying too much, of meeting Donovan’s aggression with aggression of her own.

  But she conquered it. Without taking her eyes off him she got up from her chair, picked up her bag and walked to the door in masterly silence. Donovan was left alone in her office, awkward and confused, aware he’d gone too far again, wondering if she’d be back or if she was finished, considering the strong possibility that he was.

  7

  Only when he was sure Liz wasn’t coming back did Donovan leave the office. But he didn’t go straight home. He was looking for two things: Liam Brady and a fight.

  At the tent the crew were preparing for the evening meeting. The tall woman was supervising from the modest eminence of the dais, a clipboard in her hand, a cigarette held lightly between her lips. She wanted the seats arranged with mathematical precision and an Order of Service – fresh from the local copy-shop, it was only Wednesday but what had seemed an adequate supply had already run out – on each. She gave her orders confidently and didn’t have to repeat herself too often. Donovan stood in the flap of the tent taking a malicious pleasure in the sight of the mad dog of the Provisional IRA lining up chairs and laying out prayer-sheets at the behest of a woman with an eagle eye and a clipboard.

  Jennifer Mills saw him too. She let him watch for a minute while she arranged things to her satisfaction. Then she said, ‘I’m afraid you’re too early for the meeting.’

  Being on duty prevented him from replying as he would have liked. ‘I’m looking for someone.’

  ‘We’re rather busy just now. Could you come back later?’ The well-bred voice remained friendly but it really wasn’t a question.


  Of course he could have come back later. His boat was a hundred metres away: he could have gone home, made himself a meal, come back when Brady had finished work. But Donovan was in no mood to co-operate. ‘No.’ He put his hand inside his jacket, reaching for his warrant card.

  The Geordie, who was nearest, reacted as if Donovan had produced a hand-grenade. He glanced up casually to see who was arguing with his boss, then in a split second his whole manner changed and he launched himself at the man in the entrance. One big fist locked on Donovan’s wrist and the other on his throat. The impetus of the attack carried both of them out of the tent and they crashed into the generator throbbing industriously outside. The machine caught Donovan in the small of the back, knocking the wind out of him, but the collision did nothing to loosen Kelso’s grip. He kept coming, bearing down on the younger man, bending him backwards over the machinery with all his weight and strength. His eyes glaring into Donovan’s were filled with cold resolve. For a fleeting moment Donovan thought the man meant to break his back.

  Then it was all over. Brady came sprinting out of the tent behind them, and gripped Kelso’s arm. ‘For God’s sake don’t throttle him, he’s another frigging peeler!’

  From a range of centimetres Donovan watched the man’s eyes come back to life. The heavy brows stapled down in a puzzled frown. He released his grip on Donovan’s throat and let him straighten up. ‘Then why’s the bugger pulling a piece?’

  ‘I wasn’t.’ Even to himself Donovan’s voice sounded rusty, creaking through his bruised larynx. He produced the card.