Charisma

by Jo Bannister

  Liz stayed with the house-to-house until there seemed to be no more mileage left in it, then she sent the team back to Queen’s Street. She didn’t follow at once. She needed a new line of thought on this, and she’d already had everything Shapiro had to offer. She was no distance from Tara; a walk along the tow-path was a good way to clear her head; and if Donovan, watching for suspicious activities, happened to see her and ask her aboard, or join her in her stroll, she was not too proud to pick his fertile mind.

  In the event she did not see Donovan, though he probably saw her. Indeed, he wasn’t keeping much of a watch if he did not. For as soon as she emerged on to Broad Wharf a deep musical voice hailed her and Michael Davey came towards her, propelling himself with purposeful thrusts of his powerful arms.

  The white suit was for business. Off duty he dressed like any other middle-aged man with a lawn to mow or a car to wash, in jeans and a rugby shirt in the Welsh colours. On his feet he wore trainers. Because they hardly touched the ground they stayed cleaner than most people’s trainers. However, the wheels of his chair were filthy and a bearing needed oiling.

  ‘Mrs Graham. Were you looking for me?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not this time.’

  Unconsciously or by design his face fell. ‘Oh. Dammo.’

  Liz smiled. ‘Nothing personal. I just felt like a walk. We don’t have any parks in the middle of town, just the canals.’

  ‘Funny things, canals. We think of them as the next best thing to nature, a piece of countryside sneaking into town. But actually they’re industrial engineering on a grand scale. Every cubic foot of water in them represents a foot of earth taken out by a man with a spade and a barrow.’

  ‘You should talk to my sergeant, he’s a canal buff.’ She stopped just short of telling him, or reminding him if he already knew, that Donovan lived on the wharf. Careful, girl, she thought: you liking the man doesn’t mean Donovan’s wrong.

  Davey laughed. Two young men fishing turned their heads at the echoing sound. Michael Davey had spent too many years projecting his voice and personality into the furthest reaches of a tent to hold discreet conversations now. ‘I’ve spent more hours by canals than the average bargee. Don’t know why but as soon as a local authority sees an application to erect a marquee they ask themselves where the nearest canal is. They must think the water’ll come in handy for baptisms.’

  Liz chuckled. ‘You don’t go in for total immersion then.’

  ‘Only if I misjudge the edge of the tow-path.’ He made a sudden lunge for the rim: Liz was startled enough to grab his chair. He spun to face her, his eyes merry. ‘It’s a dangerous place, the towpath. Nobody should walk here alone.’

  ‘Not just now, anyway,’ Liz agreed grimly.

  It was all the invitation he needed. He swung the chair into line with her, measuring his pace to her stride. ‘You don’t mind?’ he asked belatedly. ‘I mean, if you came here to think—’

  She glanced at him, intrigued. ‘How did you know that?’

  He shrugged like a mountain shrugging. ‘You’re a police officer in the middle of a murder investigation: I doubt you’re here for relaxation.’

  She nodded. ‘It’s hard to think in the office when there’s this much going on. You need to clear your head from time to time. There’s a level at which useful things are going on but you can’t access it for all the rubbish that gets piled on top. You have to clear the decks sometimes, see what’s there.’

  Davey was silent for a moment. Liz glanced at him and glimpsed a battle going on behind his eyes. Then he looked up and said, frankly though with obvious reluctance, ‘Shall I go away? Can you think better alone?’

  She laughed and shook her head. ‘No. Talking helps too. That’s part of the problem: we’re constantly talking to each other, recycling the same ideas. It helps to talk to normal people – people who aren’t intimately involved.’

  ‘Normal?’ he echoed on a rising note. ‘Bless you for that. Most people reckon I’m about as normal as a three-pound note.’

  Liz smiled again but didn’t contradict him.

  They walked – or she walked and he accompanied her – east towards Cornmarket. They left the houseboats behind, and on their left the warehouses along Brick Lane became more and more derelict until they ended in the wasteland that stretched all the way to the shunting yard.

  ‘Could have been worse,’ Liz said casually, looking round. ‘The council could have put you here instead of Broad Wharf.’

  He said morosely, ‘We got a redundant abattoir once.’

  ‘What got you started in this line of work?’

  He looked at her in surprise. ‘You heard the tape.’

  She was taken aback, momentarily wrong-footed. ‘Yes, of course. But—’

  He stopped his chair, forcing her to turn towards him. His voice hardened, became resonant. ‘But what? You thought I made it up? You think it’s a performance I put on? – like pretending to do magic, you can’t see how it’s done but nobody really thinks you’ve sawn a lady in half. I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mrs Graham, but I don’t have any tricks. I can’t do anything clever. The only gimmick I have is the white suit and that was Jenny’s idea: looks good on the posters, see. Apart from that, what you see is what you get. I tell people how to better their lives. You could say that’s presumptuous. And I don’t always achieve what I set out to. But by God, I believe what I’m saying. It isn’t an act. If I wanted to act for a living, even in this chair I could make better money a damn sight easier.’

  Without thinking Liz touched his shoulder contritely. ‘I didn’t mean that. I know this is important to you. I just wondered if you’d always been a preacher.’

  He seemed aware that he’d over-reacted. He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Sorry. Yes, I was a lay preacher back in Wales. I was an assistant librarian in the week, and every Sunday I set off for some obscure little meeting-house in one unpronounceable valley after another. I did it for twenty years. Then I took a long hard look at it all and asked myself if I wanted to do it for another twenty years. And I didn’t. So I found a theological college that would take on a forty-year-old cripple.

  ‘I never saw the crusade as my life’s work. I thought it was something I could usefully do for a few years after graduating and before I had the experience to run my own congregation. If I’m honest, I suppose I thought it would show those people who’d wondered if I was fit enough to do the job. Only I got hooked. I made an awful hash of it to start with, but I still knew it was something I wanted to do well. I was helping people in a way that I hadn’t even in the meeting-house days, reaching people who had no other minister, no other church. It was me or nothing. I sweated blood for them.’

  He smiled fondly. ‘Then Jenny came along and got me properly organized. You wouldn’t believe the difference she made. In two years I was preaching all over Europe, we had our own tent, we had the trucks and the road-crew – it’s like being a pop-star, all I have to do is turn up and do my stuff. Everything else Jenny and the boys take care of. They make it all possible. Dammo. Now I really am sounding like an actor.’

  Liz chuckled. ‘I imagine there’s a bit of the actor in every preacher. Just as there’s a cynic in every police officer. It goes with the territory.’

  Davey’s broad face was sombre again, compassionate even. ‘That’s self-defence, isn’t it? I may be talking about vile and violent matters but I’m talking to decent people. You have to deal with terrible people. Somehow you have to protect yourself against their vitriol wearing you away. Anyone might be a cynic in the same circumstances.’

  They’d reached the end of Cornmarket where Doggett’s Canal joined the main system. Davey looked into the yawning pit of the empty lock, the exposed timbers black with age and rank with weed, a noisome stew of mud and rubbish and a little water in the very bottom. ‘Where do we go from here?’

  ‘Back, I’m afraid. They’re supposed to be putting a bridge here so that you can walk out to the Levels. It’s a
toss-up whether anyone now living will see it. The local Restoration Society want to get the lock working first, to open up the route north. They beaver away down there every summer, apparently, but all they’ve achieved so far is to saw off the handrail.’ Rusty spikes on top of the lock gate showed where it had been.

  Davey stared. ‘You mean people used to walk across there?’

  ‘So I’m told. It took a steady hand and a head for heights but you could do it. Now you have to walk half a mile up the spur to the next bridge.’ She grinned. ‘Unless you’re my sergeant, of course, in which case you stroll across with your hands in your pockets and glare at anyone who won’t follow. I told you about him, didn’t I?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Davey said glumly. ‘You told me about him.’

  They turned back. Liz picked up the conversation where they’d left it. ‘There are terrible people but probably not as many as you think. Most crime isn’t violent, it’s against property. But it’s the Moors Murderers and Yorkshire Rippers, and this man we’ve got in Castlemere right now, who fill the newspapers; naturally, they’re shocking crimes and it’s the papers’ job to report them. And we remember them long after we’ve forgotten last week’s burglary. But statistically they’re very rare. You’re more likely to be kicked to death by a donkey than murdered by a psychopath.’

  Davey was frowning. ‘I know that’s the official line. But I can only speak as I see, and what I see – wherever I go almost – are insane crimes whose only possible motive is to inflict pain and anguish. It isn’t my imagination, Mrs Graham. You’ve had two young girls murdered in the past week and your town is up in arms. But every time we put the tent up the local papers are full of something just as bad. In Le Havre it was a girl too, butchered on the street. In Portsmouth it was a Gosport man who’d smashed his baby’s head against the wall of a public car-park, and in Bristol an old woman burned to death in her flat when kids put firelighters through her letterbox. How can you say these are rare events?’

  Liz shrugged helplessly. ‘Because I know what the figures are. Perhaps, travelling round as you do, you see places at their worst. And I don’t suppose it’s the quiet backwaters where you can have a reign of terror with a feathered whoopee-whistle that you visit.’

  For that he flashed her a quick grin. ‘Well, that’s true. We go where we think we can do some good. But still,’ he insisted unhappily, ‘I look around me and I don’t see your green and pleasant land. I see dangerous people and scared people. I see communities on the edge of chaos.’

  Liz shrugged that off. ‘You’ve been unlucky. Come back in three months. Once we’ve got this man the hottest story in the Castlemere Courier will be silage run-off killing fish in the canals. It’s like I say: you’re seeing us at our worst.’

  ‘Will you catch him?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Liz said with conviction. ‘We have to.’

  9

  Frank Shapiro’s maternal grandfather lived his whole life in the Warsaw ghetto. He wore a long black gaberdine coat and a round hat trimmed with fur. From early manhood to the day he died he had a full beard, and when he was thinking he used to stroke it as if it were a cat asleep on his chest.

  Shapiro’s father was born in England. Not knowing what lay ahead for European Jewry, as a young man he was scornful of ghetto ways and confident that the way for a modern Jew to prosper and earn respect was not segregation but integration. He became a solicitor’s clerk, dressed like other solicitor’s clerks, and though he kept a kosher home, at midday he ate with the other clerks. He considered his religion a personal matter, not secret but private, and was philosophical when work kept him from getting home for the start of the sabbath on Friday afternoon. He wouldn’t have been seen dead in a black gaberdine and fur-trimmed hat. But he still wore a beard, a neatly pointed one which he fingered pensively when faced with a complex piece of law.

  The rather solid child who was destined to become Detective Chief Inspector Shapiro of Castlemere CID grew up during the war and post-war years so had no illusions about being as English as the next man. It was not religion that set him apart, for if he’d had any less he’d have had none at all. He didn’t keep kosher, he didn’t hurry home on Fridays, and when he remembered the major festivals it was with the faintly embarrassed air of a man pretending to be Father Christmas for his children.

  What set Frank Shapiro apart was four thousand years of history locked in his genes, and about that he could do nothing at all. Unless he changed his name he was never going to pass for Anglo-Saxon, and anyway he didn’t want to. With all its contradictions, what he was suited him. He suspected he’d have been an outsider even if there’d been no overt reason for it: the last boy in his class to be picked for teams, the last man on his relief to be told they were going for a drink after work. He wasn’t an aggressive loner like Donovan but he had no talent for joining in. He didn’t join clubs, was content to watch the world through a window.

  Frank Shapiro didn’t grow a beard at all. That didn’t stop him stroking it when he was deep in thought. He was thinking now, frowning at the telephone he’d put down minutes ago and fingering his chin. Finally he picked the phone up again and dialled.

  Donovan had spent an unprofitable afternoon watching for signs of drug-dealing at the mission. But none of the crew had left the wharf, and of the few people who ventured there, with dogs or to check moored boats, none seemed to have business at the encampment. The only person he saw approach or be approached by anyone from the mission was his own inspector, and even at his most jaundiced he’d never suspected her of dealing in proscribed substances.

  That didn’t mean he was glad to see her. His first thought was that she was coming to Tara, which was like putting up a sign reminding the people he was watching of his presence. But then Davey intercepted her and they strolled off up the tow-path, and he didn’t see where they went after that.

  Now Shapiro wanted to see him. He could hardly refuse. He was officially working, though sitting in his own living-room with his feet up, a pot of coffee beside him and the stereo playing so quietly it might have been humming to itself, wasn’t everyone’s idea of work. And nothing that had happened so far suggested he would miss much by leaving the wharf for half an hour, particularly since the mission was entering the busiest period of its day. If Brady or Davey or any of the others had someone to meet, the best time would be morning, with no one around, or later when the wharf would be awash with urgent seekers after truth and a man seeking something else could pass unnoticed.

  ‘Fen Tiger, ten minutes?’ he suggested.

  ‘My office,’ countered Shapiro, ‘in fifteen?’

  But they settled for the pub because it overlooked Mere Basin. Tall black buildings that had once been warehouses and were now apartments and offices arched over each of the four canals that met there and stopped the eye travelling as far as Broad Wharf, but the same tow-path passed under the window. Anyone leaving the camp for a meeting, or anyone going there for one, would probably come this way. The alternatives, Cornmarket and Brick Lane, were each a longer walk to the town centre.

  Donovan was there when Shapiro arrived, hunched in a corner by the window. Without taking his eyes off the tow-path he took a fierce draught from the glass in front of him. Partly it was the grim way he did it, with more dedication than enjoyment, and partly that the accent conveyed a certain stereotype, but Donovan had a modest local reputation as a drinker. Only close friends and barmen knew that what he was drinking mostly wasn’t alcohol, and most of the time he spent in pubs he was listening.

  When he saw his chief Donovan pointed at his glass and raised an eyebrow, but Shapiro shook his head. Evening it might be but his day was far from over. He squeezed in behind the table, envying Donovan his young man’s narrow hips.

  ‘I had a call from Drugs Squad,’ he said by way of greeting. ‘I don’t know what to make of it.’

  Donovan’s gaze flickered between Shapiro and the window. ‘About—?’ The tilt of his head semaphored the mi
ssion.

  Shapiro was non-committal. ‘It wasn’t the chap you phoned, it was his governor looking for your governor. Nice chap, we had a pleasant little talk. But what he was saying was, “Butt out”.’ For Shapiro this was outrageous slang.

  Donovan’s eyebrows climbed. ‘Just that? No explanation?’

  ‘Not even when I asked for one. All he’d say was that we had no need to be concerned.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said I needed to know what the situation was. I said that if he was running an operation on our manor I’d make sure we stayed out of his way.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He refused to answer.’

  Less and less of Donovan’s attention was on the tow-path. He stared at Shapiro with coals in his eyes, like a dog scenting game. ‘Then he is. I knew it; I knew there was something going on. But they should have told us before this. Do they not trust us? Do they think we’re going to go round there blabbing—?’

  He finished so abruptly, so obviously in the middle of a sentence, that Shapiro peered into his face. ‘Sergeant?’

  Casual acquaintances always saw the same side of Donovan: a Celtic dourness both relieved and underlined by a strain of humour so black they never knew whether it was safe to laugh. People who knew him better had glimpsed other things: a fierce loyalty, a volcanic temper, a childishly stubborn tenacity, even the rare smile that transformed his narrow face with unexpected gentleness.

  But even Shapiro, who had known him longer than most, had never seen him nonplussed. His eyes dropped and flicked away, flitting between nearby objects as if seeking a safe place to land. Above them his brows drew together and his lips formed a question-mark. He looked at Shapiro and the question was in his eyes as well. But he didn’t voice it, and when he saw curiosity sharpening his chiefs gaze he looked quickly away. Incredibly, he blushed.

  ‘For crying out loud, Donovan, what is it?’ A sudden stab of the intuition that had got Shapiro where he was told him. The muscles of his face went slack and his voice breathy. ‘You’re not serious. You think someone at Queen’s Street is passing information? And Drugs Squad know this, and that’s why they’re leaving us out in the cold?’