The Hireling's Tale

by Jo Bannister

  Shapiro tried to reassure him. ‘He’ll have gone by now, Mr Kendall. The moment you slammed the back door he’d have been on his way.’

  ‘But I don’t understand!’ The man’s voice rose towards a wail; Mrs Kendall, by contrast, sat beside him on the sofa like a statue, rigid and silent, a handkerchief balled in one fist so tightly she’d probably never get the creases out. ‘Somebody shot at me. Somebody tried to kill me! Who? And why?’

  ‘I think, when we talk about it calmly, you’ll be able to tell us that,’ said Shapiro. ‘You must know something about somebody that would be damaging if it got out. You may not even realize its significance. Something someone said in an unguarded moment; something you saw in someone’s office. I presume you visit your clients’ offices?’ Kendall nodded, shakily. ‘Then it could be something that happened while you were abroad, that you haven’t yet recognized the importance of but which you would come to understand with time. Does that make any sense to you?’

  This time, shakily, Kendall shook his head.

  Shapiro sighed. ‘All right. Can you tell me who you’ve had dealings with that just might try to forestall a scandal this way? Governments with iffy human-rights records, say, and the more ruthless kind of private company.’

  In the end, the list of Kendall’s clients was not very different from the list of his conference delegates, and he found it hard to say which of them might indulge in this kind of cover-up without knowing what it was they were covering up.

  Shapiro hoped he might be thinking clearer by tomorrow, suggested they talk again then.

  Kendall looked alarmed. ‘But - if you don’t find him, I could be dead by tomorrow!’

  ‘We’ll try and prevent that,’ said Shapiro solemnly. It was about as far as he could honestly go. ‘I’ll leave officers here round the clock, at least until we figure out what’s going on. Alternatively, you might feel safer moving into an hotel.’

  ‘What - like The Barbican?’

  Shapiro understood his misgivings. ‘I’m not sure what more I can say, Mr Kendall. You need to be careful. We’ll do our best to sort this out, but I don’t want to mislead you, it won’t be overnight. In the short term I suggest you stay indoors as much as possible. Oh - except that it would be helpful if you could come outside and show me where you were standing when the shot was fired.’

  Even that was enough to make Kendall uneasy. ‘You’re sure he’s gone?’

  He was afraid for his life: Shapiro wasn’t going to mock him. ‘I’ll check with the ARU before we go out.’

  But they’d had time now to walk the back lane from end to end and there was no one there.

  They went into the garden. It was entirely ringed by high hedges: unless he brought a stepladder with him, the sniper must have made a hole to shoot through. The only problem with that was …

  Donovan was behind him as they headed back to the house. Shapiro turned to him and frowned. ‘It’s too close.’

  Like a chain reaction, like dominoes falling, what that meant tumbled through his brain and landed in his eyes. Donovan saw comprehension widen them; he saw them flick up, above the hedge to the gently rising ground beyond. Then Shapiro spun back towards Kendall, ahead of him on the steps, and his arms spread as he went to cover the man’s back.

  It was a year or two now since Frank Shapiro had felt justified in considering himself middle-aged. Many policemen of his age were retired, or had moved on to second careers. Since Shapiro had no wish to do anything else, and no wish to do nothing, he stayed where he was and did what he was good at. The increasing creakiness in his knees didn’t much affect his abilities as a detective: in his mid-twenties he realized he’d have to catch criminals with his brain because it was the only agile part of him. Since then his brain had got smarter and quicker, and his body had got bulkier and slower.

  But it’s amazing how fast even a slow, bulky, elderly detective superintendent can move if he has to. As Donovan watched in astonishment he launched himself up the steps like the demon king in a pantomime.

  He was still watching, startled speechless, when he saw the back of Shapiro’s coat open like a flower, a red flower blooming in a desert of herringbone tweed.

  Time slowed right down. Donovan felt himself rooted to the spot, trying to move and not succeeding. He heard a sort of surprised grunt from Shapiro and a thin cry from the man on the steps above him, slowly, slowly turning to see what had happened. He saw Shapiro falling towards the steps, and though there was all the time in the world he couldn’t get his arms forward to break his fall. He crashed face-down on the concrete, and time resumed normal speed.

  Donovan unglued his limbs and flung himself to cover Shapiro’s body with his own. But there were no more shots, and after a moment, still keeping between his chief and the lane, he pushed himself up on his knees and looked around.

  WPC Wilson was coming at a run. He waved her back with an urgent sweep of his arm. ‘Get on the radio,’ he roared. ‘Ambulance first, then the DI. You’ - he meant Kendall - ‘inside. Lock the door. Don’t worry about me,’ he added fiercely as the man went to argue, ‘it’s not me he’s shooting at!’ Then, and only then, did he dare look at Shapiro.

  And he thought Shapiro was dead; or if by sheer bloody-mindedness some spark of life persisted within him, it couldn’t possibly last long enough for the miracle-workers at Castle General to get their hands on him. There was a hole in the middle of his back Donovan could have sunk his fingers in, and enough blood had come out of it to baptize them both.

  Someone was cursing: not inventively, just the same obscenity endlessly repeated in a high thin whine of a voice laced through with shock and an agony of rage. Donovan looked up, wondering who it was. But there was only Shapiro - white-faced and deeply unconscious - and him, so he supposed it was him.

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Superintendent Giles wasn’t really a copper’s copper. He was a highly intelligent man, and a dedicated police officer. He was a graduate, and a Bramshill Flier, and the likelihood was that he would make Assistant Chief Constable. No one at Queen’s Street had a bad word to say about him. At the same time, he knew that if he stayed in Castlemere for the next ten years still no one here would feel about him the way they felt about Frank Shapiro. He commanded respect, he didn’t inspire affection. He was sorry about that, but doubted there was anything he could do about it. He wasn’t one to court popularity, and not only because he knew it didn’t work.

  In the sixteen months he’d been here he’d developed a regard for Queen’s Street that he hadn’t felt at every station where he’d served, and he would have liked to feel accepted as one of the team. But it was never going to happen. He was too young, too smart and too alien for most of them. He knew how the computers worked; he knew how to get the best out of Interpol. Men like Sergeant Bolsover, and Shapiro himself, who’d spent thirty years doing this job and knew it back to front and inside out could never wholly empathize with a man to whom crime statistics seemed important.

  He was the new generation, the new face of policing. The nearest thing he had to a contemporary was Liz Graham, who had also done her stint at Divisional HQ and never hit ‘Cancel’ on the keyboard when she meant to hit ‘Save’. But bizarrely enough, the one he felt to have most in common with was Donovan. They were both outsiders, for reasons that were beyond their powers to amend.

  What Superintendent Giles may not have known, and what somebody really should have told him, was that - on top of and apart from the considerable respect he enjoyed here - every so often he did something that genuinely touched the people working under him and made them wish they knew him better. He did something like that today. He didn’t go straight to the hospital when he heard about Shapiro. He went to the house in Cambridge Road where it had happened, to take over the inquiry so that Liz could go to the hospital instead.

  She found Donovan prowling the corridors like a caged tiger, oblivious of the blood on his shirt. A couple of months ago it wo
uldn’t have been so obvious, but in deference to the improving weather he’d switched his usual black for a stonewashed denim that now looked as if he’d salvaged it from an abattoir.

  Liz had spoken to Mary Wilson so she knew how he got so much of Shapiro’s blood on him. He’d used his own body to protect the injured man from further gunfire. It was what she would have expected; still, it was not a small thing. The shot that felled Shapiro could have been the first of many: it would have been hard to blame anyone whose natural human instinct led him to dive behind the nearest wall.

  ‘Any word yet?’ she asked.

  Donovan shook his head. The savagery of the movement told Liz all she needed to know about the turmoil raging in his breast.

  ‘No news is good news,’ she said tritely; and felt moved to justify that against the contempt in his eyes, flicking at her like a whip, by adding, ‘If he’d died they’d have come out and said so. While they’re too busy to talk there’s still a chance.’

  ‘He was shot in the back,’ snarled Donovan. ‘The bastard took out his spine. If he lives he’ll be in a wheelchair.’

  ‘You can’t know that!’ Liz flashed back angrily. ‘People who spend their whole lives dealing with back injuries can’t predict which ones are going to be devastating and which will mend. Millimetres count: a fraction one way and your spinal cord’s gone, a fraction the other and all you lose is a chip of bone. Don’t tell me he’s going to be a cripple when you don’t know that!’

  ‘You’re right, I don’t. He probably won’t live that long.’

  She wanted to slap his face. But a calmer voice inside her head reminded her that neither of them was wholly in command right now, neither should be held accountable for everything they said or did. She only had to look at Donovan to know he was in shock, and she didn’t expect she looked much better. She spread her hands, palms down, in a pacifying gesture. ‘All right,’ she said, a shade unsteadily; ‘all right. Don’t let’s bite one another’s heads off. Are you all right - you weren’t hurt?’

  Donovan shook his head again. ‘I was too far away. I couldn’t get to them …’ That bothered him. He wasn’t paid as a bodyguard any more than Shapiro was, but the deal had always been that Shapiro did the thinking, Donovan did the gymnastics. But when it mattered most he’d been too far away to help. A man he cared about more than any of the family that remained to him had dropped at his feet with a crater gouged out of his back because he’d thought quicker than Donovan could react.

  ‘He wasn’t in the lane. The bastard. The mechanic.’ He wasn’t an articulate man at the best of times. Under stress his Ulster accent thickened and the words came out disjointed, not in sentences but pushed out as they occurred to him. The Irish are a nation of poets, but that particular gene seemed to have passed Donovan by. ‘We checked the lane and the lane was clear, but he was never in the lane. He was where he’d been all along - quarter of a mile away across the fields. That’s what he was saying. The chief. He said, ‘It’s too close.’ Then he moved to get Kendall inside, and while I was still trying to work out what he meant the bastard shot him.’

  His head rocked back: if he’d been a dog he’d have howled. ‘If he’d thought of it sooner he could’ve hustled Kendall inside and nobody’d have been hurt. If he’d left it a bit longer, at least the man would’ve stopped his own bullet. As it is, he’s thrown away all of his life that’s worth the name, and for nothing. Kendall will still get his, as soon as the mechanic gets himself organized.’

  ‘God damn it, Donovan,’ snapped Liz, ‘don’t say that! The man has a killer on his tail, and you’re telling me there’s nothing we can do about it? What the hell’s he been paying his taxes for all these years?’

  Donovan shoved his hands deep in his pockets. ‘Be realistic. This guy’s a pro. World class. He’s killed a lot of people, a lot of them had people trying to protect them, and every time a police force somewhere has had catching him as its top priority. But he’s still free, and still making a living. We don’t know his name, we don’t know what he looks like, his age, nationality or colour. We don’t even know that he’s a man. I don’t think we can stop him.’

  ‘Well, fortunately for Mr Kendall,’ retorted Liz, ‘it doesn’t come down to what you think. However difficult the job, he’s entitled to our best efforts to protect him. And more, not less, because of what the chief’s already sacrificed. Don’t you dare tell me that the man who put Frank Shapiro in this hospital is beyond our ability to make him pay!’

  Dead on cue a door opened and a man in surgical greens came out. Liz caught his eye and saw weariness and the worst possible news there. But it wasn’t her he was looking for: he gave a little nod of acknowledgement before seeking out the people who were waiting for news of another patient. Liz let out a ragged sigh and looked for somewhere to sit down.

  She found herself puzzling over something Donovan had said earlier. ‘“It’s too close”? What did he mean?’

  ‘You don’t need a sniper rifle to shoot somebody over his own back hedge, and you sure as hell don’t have to tweak your sights by practising on live targets. Wicksy was shot at long distance - probably from River Road quarter of a mile away. If he was practising at quarter of a mile, quarter of a mile was his intended range. Not fifty metres from the lane at the back of the house.’

  Her eyes shut, Liz nodded slowly. ‘We should have known that. The information was there, if we’d only made use of it.’

  ‘There wasn’t much time for thinking.’ Talking about it was calming Donovan as nursing his rage had not. ‘We knew about the lane behind the houses, it seemed obvious that was where the gunman was. Even the chief only realized when he saw the layout, and by then it was too late.’

  ‘That depends on your point of view,’ Liz observed tiredly. ‘From where Kendall’s sitting it was just in time.’

  ‘Will you leave him in the house?’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s too open. If this man really can hit a moving target from quarter of a mile away, our only chance of protecting him is to send Kendall into hiding.’

  ‘Where can you put him that a good mechanic won’t find him?’

  She had no personal experience, but as she understood it there was nowhere that a good enough mechanic wouldn’t find his target eventually. That was the key word: eventually. ‘I can’t; but I can make him waste a lot of time looking. We can use that time to find out what the hell’s going on.’

  ‘Did Kendall come up with anything useful?’ Donovan had left the house with the ambulance, he’d had no time to talk to the man after the shooting. He was having to fight the notion that Kendall was to blame for what had happened. He knew it was unfair - he knew that a man who’d been shot at in his own back garden was entitled to ask for help - but at gut level, which was where he did a lot of his thinking, Donovan still held him responsible.

  Liz elevated an eyebrow. ‘Have you ever tried to conduct an interview in a broom cupboard? Maybe the Son of God’s had more luck. Or maybe he really doesn’t know who’s trying to kill him. Bullets coming over your back fence concentrate the mind wonderfully: if he still can’t say why, maybe he’s being targeted because of something he might have seen but actually didn’t.’

  ‘A mechanic as good as this guy’s been sent on the off chance?’

  ‘The best mechanic in the world could be hired for the small change in the back pockets of some of the people Philip Kendall deals with. And the more you’ve got, the more you have to lose, the more you’re prepared to do to protect it.’

  There was a long pause then. Donovan was clearly thinking about something and wondering whether to speak. When he caught Liz waiting with increasing impatience he shrugged. ‘I was just wondering when we can expect the visiting fireman.’

  Liz frowned. If there was one thing more impenetrable than Donovan keeping secrets, it was Donovan thinking aloud. ‘Visiting fireman?’

  ‘Serious Crime Squad,’ he said, as if the words tasted bad. ‘They’re not going to l
eave it to us, are they? With the chief out of action, the senior detective in Castlemere is now an inspector; and if you trip on a kerbstone it’ll be a sergeant. We get left to our own devices as much as we do because they’ve no one can hold a candle to the chief. Now it’s just us Indians, we’re going to get a visitation.’

  Liz hadn’t given it a thought. Now she realized he was right. For a second it knocked the wind out of her. They could use all the help they could get, but the idea of someone coming in over her head was disturbing. They were a small team at Queen’s Street, they worked well because they knew each other intimately, read each other’s minds and covered each other’s backs. Extra bodies and fresh ideas would be welcome, but they would also be disruptive. A peripatetic superintendent would have his own way of doing things, and though it mightn’t be too different from hers it would be diametrically opposed to Donovan’s. Just when they needed to be at their best, their strongest, they were going to find themselves on the defensive, sidetracked and marginalized. The king-pin of their success was fighting for his life, and if they wanted any part in the hunt for his assailant they were going to have to play by somebody else’s rules. It was hard to swallow. And if it was hard for her, it would be nigh impossible for Donovan.

  But it wouldn’t be today. If they could get a grip on this thing in the next twenty-four hours, perhaps whoever came would pick it up and run with it instead of trying to dazzle them with his superiority.

  ‘All right.’ She stood up. ‘Look, I can’t stay here, I’ve got to get things moving. Get Kendall somewhere safe. Then pick his head apart for whatever it is that’s in there that makes him worth assassinating.’

  ‘Do you need me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘but to be honest I’d sooner you stayed here. It’s stupid, but I just feel that while one of us is here the chiefs not going to slip out the back door. Call me as soon as there’s any news. If I have something for you to do, I’ll call you.’