The Hireling's Tale

by Jo Bannister

  Donovan was speaking again. ‘His wife’s here.’

  ‘Mr Giles called her. I’m afraid I didn’t think of it.’

  ‘I thought I’d take her over to the chiefs house. He had his keys on him, so I can let her in. Then I’ll go home and get cleaned up. I’ll see you in about an hour.’

  Donovan got a taxi to take them back into town. He didn’t have it wait: from Shapiro’s little stone house in Castle Mews it was only a ten-minute walk to Mere Basin and up Broad Wharf to where Tara was moored.

  He found the key on Shapiro’s ring and opened the door. Angela Shapiro stood in the hall, looking round her as if she’d never been there before. Donovan said awkwardly, ‘I think there’s a spare bedroom on the left, at the top of the stairs.’

  She smiled at him. At fifty she was still a notably attractive woman. Too damned attractive, people had said, to be snared by the man she married: a wry twenty-six-year-old Detective Sergeant built like a brick privy, with a crumpled face and an odd way of looking at things. It was by no means certain then that this last feature would help him to a good career in CID. It might equally well have led to his being labelled a maverick, someone who didn’t do things the establishment way. Someone who got results his own way often enough that the job he had was safe but it was as high as he’d ever go. Someone like Donovan, in fact. Angela became Mrs Frank Shapiro knowing he might be a DS to the end of his career.

  And left him when he was a Chief Inspector. Where was the sense in that? Only that they’d been in love when they were younger and somehow, between the work and the hours, that love had shrunk first to a simple fondness, then to indifference, finally to irritation. They had different priorities. Angela grew tired of the things that mattered to her, that mattered to the family, always having to play second fiddle to the victims and criminals who seemed to matter to him more.

  ‘Can I make you some tea?’ she asked. ‘Or at least find you a clean shirt?’

  Donovan shook his head abruptly, startled out of a kind of reverie of contemplation. Of course, he was tired. ‘I’m only a step from home. I’ll get over there and get cleaned up. Is there anything you need?’

  ‘I don’t expect so. If there is I can pop down to the shops. I lived in this town for three years, you know, I still remember my way round.’

  He left his number anyway. ‘We’ll be at Queen’s Street till late, but call me anytime if there’s any problems.’ It wasn’t grammatical but it was kindly meant.

  There was a way in which this dour, awkward man reminded her of her son. It wasn’t physical. They were both dark, but where David was small and compact, Donovan was long and thin as string. So it went deeper than that. It was something in the eyes, in the way they looked at the world - wary, intense, committed, like explorers in an alien environment. She’d long suspected that David was a changeling, a fairy child left to be raised by humans and somehow - change of policy or a new filing system at Fairy HQ – never collected. Perhaps the same administrative cock-up had abandoned DS Donovan in a world for which his genes, his racial memory, did not prepare him.

  ‘I’ll phone the hospital later. When Frank’s awake I’ll go in and see him. I’ll let you know how he is.’

  Donovan nodded and left. Attracting strange looks as he crossed Castle Place, he remembered he was still wearing his shirt inside out.

  *

  ‘You were right about the visiting fireman,’ said Liz when he got in about four o’clock. ‘The Son of God knows him; I’ve met him a time or two. Detective Superintendent Hilton. He’ll be here tomorrow morning.’

  Donovan’s eyes widened in recognition. ‘Hilton? I had him when I was a DC in Kilburn. He hates me!’

  ‘It’s not just you he hates,’ said Liz comfortingly. ‘General consensus is, he hates the whole human race.’ She gave it a little more thought. ‘Still, knowing him, and knowing you, it is possible he hates you more than most. What can I say? - keep out of his way as much as you can.’

  ‘How am I supposed to do that?’ demanded Donovan indignantly. ‘I think he’ll notice if I hide in the bog every time he calls a briefing.’

  They turned on the television for the six o’clock news. As expected, the shooting of a Detective Superintendent while protecting a Castlemere businessman headed the run-list. The item had Shapiro’s photograph and another of Kendall’s house. Liz had agonized with Superintendent Giles over how much detail they should give out with the press release, but they needn’t have bothered. The reporters had got hold of everything they left out anyway. It didn’t matter. The mechanic obviously knew who his target was so there was no point making a great secret of it. As long as nobody knew where he was, and so far even the BBC had failed to discover that.

  ‘I wonder if Frank was watching,’ said Liz pensively. ‘He’d have liked that bit about “brave and self-sacrificing”.’

  ‘He’d have liked the bit about “swift and agile” even better,’ said Donovan with a grin.

  The girl in the boat got a one-line mention, mostly because of the curiosity of another serious crime in the same small town in the same brief space of time. Wicksy didn’t get even that.

  A little after eight WPC Flynn rang up from the switchboard. ‘I’ve got a caller wanting to talk to someone about Mr Shapiro. She won’t give her name. She sounds drunk to me. I think it’s probably a crank, but I thought you’d want to talk to her anyway.’

  ‘Yes, Cathy, thanks. I better had.’

  Cathy Flynn was a good enough officer, but she wasn’t in Mary Wilson’s class. Wilson wouldn’t have thought the woman on the phone was drunk. She’d have known she was hysterical with fear.

  ‘Try and calm down,’ said Liz. ‘I can’t understand what you’re telling me until you calm down. Now, can you give me your name?’

  ‘Later,’ said the woman jerkily. ‘Maybe. If it’s safe. If you can help me.’

  ‘Help you with what? What’s happened?’

  But she slid away at a tangent without answering. ‘I don’t know who I can trust. You think you know what’s going on, but you’re wrong. You don’t understand. Where it started. Who’s involved.’

  Liz was making nothing of this. ‘I’m sorry, I’m probably being very dim, but I’m not following what you’re saying. You know something about the shooting of Detective Superintendent Shapiro? - or have I got that wrong too?’

  ‘No,’ said the woman, ‘that’s right. At least, I think so. The girl in the boat - I know who she was. I know who killed her.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Liz, her brows bent, ‘let me get this straight. Are you saying there’s a connection? Between the girl who was killed and the attempt on Mr Kendall’s life that put Mr Shapiro in the hospital?’

  That drew Donovan back. He was only next door in his own office: with both doors open he could hear what she said. He came and stood in her doorway, his eyes puzzled and suspicious. His thin lips made a kind of silent question mark.

  ‘Yes!’ exclaimed the woman. ‘That’s what I’m telling you. I know who she was and I know who killed her. He killed her so she couldn’t identify him, and then he tried to kill Kendall so he couldn’t identify him. And now he’s going to kill me so I can’t identify him, and I want protection or I’m putting this phone down and you’ll never know who I am and what I know.’

  But Liz had been doing this job for a while now, and she’d got quite good at it. She beckoned to Donovan, and said softly into the phone, ‘It’s Maddie Cotterick, isn’t it?’

  Chapter Three

  There was a gasp at the other end of the line, and after that a silence so long that Liz began to think the other woman had dropped the phone and gone. ‘Maddie? Are you there? Talk to me, tell me what you want me to do.’

  At length she heard Maddie Cotterick suck in an unsteady breath and knew she was still there. So she wanted to talk, to sort something out. She’d just been startled speechless by how little her anonymity had protected her. She didn’t know what it meant. Were the police loo
king for her? Did they already have the information she’d hoped to buy her safety with?

  Finally she managed, ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘We’ve been worried about you,’ said Liz. ‘One of your friends reported you missing. Someone went to your house and it looked like you’d left in a hurry. We were afraid something had happened to you.’

  ‘Something happened to me, all right,’ blurted the woman; it sounded as if she was choking off a sob. ‘I watched a man use my best friend’s face as a punchbag. Even when I knew he was going to kill her I was too scared to help. I pretended I was out cold. I just lay in a corner with my eyes shut, and when he took her outside I grabbed my clothes and ran.’

  She was crying now, shame and grief distorting her voice as they were undoubtedly distorting her face. ‘I could have saved her. Even then: if I’d gone for help, maybe there was time to stop him. At least I could have made him pay. But I was afraid, so I ran. And now my friend’s dead, and the man who killed her is going to kill me too.’

  That was, had to be, the important point. What Liz wanted to hear was how all this fitted in with the shootings, but what she had to sort out first was where Maddie Cotterick was and how she could be protected. Except to dismiss it, they hadn’t even considered a connection between the two episodes. But Maddie said there was one. It was her bargaining point, the thing she was offering in return for help.

  Liz didn’t need a bribe. If the girl was in danger she’d help even if she didn’t know next week from Wednesday. But if she could cast light on the attempts on Philip Kendall’s life that had put Frank Shapiro in the hospital and perhaps ended his career, that was a huge bonus. ‘Maddie,’ she said, trying to instil calm with her voice. ‘Does he know where you are now? The man who killed your friend?’

  ‘I - don’t think so. I don’t see how. But - you don’t know these people, you don’t know what they’re like. They buy what they want. He’ll have people looking for me. I don’t know if there’s anywhere I can be safe!’

  ‘You can be safe here,’ said Liz firmly. ‘No, listen to me. He wants to kill you because of what you know. Share that information with me and you’re safe. Tell me what happened, who was involved. Tell me now. Then tell me where you are and I’ll send someone for you. No one’ll harm you in the police station, and by the time you leave there’ll be no point in trying to. Do you understand?’

  She understood, she just didn’t believe. ‘Not a chance. I’ll talk to you, I’ll tell you everything, but not now - not while I’m out here on my own. What’s to stop you leaving me here? While I have information you need, you have to keep me safe. Once you have that information, some of the urgency goes. I don’t want anybody thinking time doesn’t matter when my life’s on the line!’

  Liz saw no point in arguing. The woman was frightened, beyond being convinced. Nor were her fears absurd. Police work is full of prioritizing: she couldn’t guarantee, particularly when tomorrow the decision would be someone else’s, that collecting Maddie Cotterick from whatever sanctuary she had fled to would still be a priority when they knew what she had to say.

  But from what she’d said so far there seemed a good chance that Maddie held the key to understanding and then cracking a difficult, dangerous case. Liz had got it wrong once already: she’d thought these were two separate events. But Maddie said she could connect them. Unless she’d sought sanctuary in Nova Scotia, it was worth parting with someone for long enough to bring her in.

  And particularly since there was someone she wanted to keep away from Queen’s Street until Superintendent Hilton was firmly in the saddle and had taken up the reins.

  ‘All right, Maddie. Tell me where you are. I’ll send my sergeant to fetch you.’

  Even that didn’t reassure the woman. ‘I’m not telling you where I’m staying. Inspector, it’s not that I don’t trust you. But these are powerful people. They can get things done. The man who wants me dead, he isn’t wandering round East Anglia with a sawn-off shotgun. He picked up the phone and made a cash transfer, and now someone who’s made a career of finding and killing people who’ve seen things they shouldn’t have is looking for me. I’m not saying you’ll sell me out. I’m saying if you know where I am you could let slip the least fragment of information that’s all someone like him needs. I don’t want your sergeant getting here and finding only a nasty stain on the carpet!’

  ‘What do you suggest?’

  The woman had clearly thought this out before ringing. ‘I’m in King’s Lynn, in a call box. That’s all I’m telling you. I’ll meet him in the town centre. There’s a café in King Street, near the market place. The Wherry Café. Tell him to go inside and wait. I’ll join him when I’m sure he hasn’t been followed. When can he be there?’

  Liz thought. ‘Are you safe where you are tonight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was a sixty-mile drive, it would take maybe ninety minutes each way. The earliest she could be here was approaching midnight, and Castlemere wasn’t the kind of party town where you could drive around at midnight without been conspicuous. If someone was looking for her, it would be safer to wait until the roads were busier. ‘Then first thing tomorrow morning. He could be there by – what? – eight-thirty if you’re ready then.’

  ‘Say nine o’clock, then the traffic’ll be thinning out.’ Liz was impressed. The woman had thought this through. If a marksman was on her trail, she didn’t want to be in the only car on the road but she also didn’t want to be sitting in a traffic jam like a duck at a rifle range. ‘Tell him to be in the Wherry Café by nine, and I’ll join him some time after that. What does he look like, how do I recognize him?’

  With Donovan standing there Liz hesitated to answer. Donovan frowned at her, not understanding the little smile playing over her lips. She could have said, ‘Tall, thin, thirty; dark hair, dark eyes, dark clothes; face like a vulture whose last gazelle disagreed with him.’ Instead she said, ‘Darth Vader on a diet.’

  Maddie got the idea. ‘All right, I’ll know him when I see him. Tell him to wait. I won’t show myself until I know it’s safe.’

  Privately, Liz thought the woman had been watching too many movies, but if that was what it took to keep her happy it could be coped with. ‘All right. He’ll wait for an hour. If you can’t get there in that time, call me again and we’ll fix a new rendezvous.’

  When it was settled and Maddie Cotterick had gone back to her secret sanctuary, Liz realized Donovan was still looking at her suspiciously. ‘Darth Vader?’

  She thought quickly. ‘We had to agree a password. When she approaches you, you introduce yourself as Darth Vader.’ She told him where and when they were to meet.

  ‘And how am I supposed to get there?’

  ‘Ah.’ His bike was not the ideal transport for collecting a valuable witness, and a squad car would probably send the woman back into hiding. Reluctant to commit a CID car for most of the morning, she was about to offer him her own when a better thought occurred. ‘Take the chiefs. It’s in the yard - I had it brought from Cambridge Road.’

  Donovan raised an eyebrow. ‘Won’t he mind?’

  ‘That you’re using his car to fetch a woman who says she knows who shot him? Would you?’

  ‘He never lets me drive it normally.’

  ‘He isn’t normally lying in a hospital bed with a bullet hole in his back! Needs must when the devil drives, Sergeant.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s the devil’s driving he’s worried about,’ muttered Donovan.

  Liz passed him the bunch of keys. ‘Just don’t scratch it, that’s all.’

  It had been a long day, she was tired; she’d need an early start in the morning - as early as Donovan’s - if she wasn’t going to be caught on the hop by the arrival of Superintendent Hilton; still there was one thing more she needed to do tonight. She got in her own car and drove the thirty-five miles to Northampton.

  It was ten-thirty before she got there; the Kendalls were in bed. It had been a long day f
or them too. Philip Kendall put on his dressing-gown to come down and talk to her.

  ‘We’ve been contacted by someone who says she knows what happened in the hotel,’ said Liz. ‘She thinks the shootings at your house are part of the same thing. Can we go over it again in the light of that and see if we can work out who’s behind it?’

  She didn’t go into more detail than she needed to. ‘Somebody brought in a couple of call-girls, and used Mrs Atwood’s room to entertain them while’ - the possibility that they were being overheard occurred to her just in time – ‘she was having supper. He gave one of them cocaine. Then he beat her so badly he thought she’d report him. So he killed her.

  ‘When the man took her friend to the roof, the other girl took her chance and got away. She grabbed some clothes from her house and got out of town. Now she’s telling me that the murder of her friend and the attempts on your life are connected. She wouldn’t explain how - my sergeant’s fetching her in the morning, I’m hoping to get a clearer tale then.

  ‘In the meantime, perhaps you can help me make sense of it. If the man who killed the girl also wants you dead, it’s because you two can identify him. This isn’t because of something you saw on a visit to Outer Mongolia - it’s because of what happened in The Barbican Hotel on Sunday night. Whether or not you’re aware of it, you know who murdered that girl. He knows you know, and he wants to silence you.’

  Philip Kendall was trying desperately to think. She could see the cogs whirring away behind his eyes. His forehead creased in an agony of self-catechism; a couple of times his lips pursed on an answer, but either it was the wrong answer or it danced away before he could grasp it. Finally he shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said helplessly. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘All right,’ said Liz, ‘try this. The man we’re looking for knew where to find an empty room that he could use. He knew Mrs Atwood wouldn’t come in and surprise him. So he knew she’d gone out for the evening – and further than the hotel bar or she could have come back at any moment. Whose idea was supper - yours or hers?’