The Hireling's Tale

by Jo Bannister

  ‘Really? Were you scared?’

  He thought a second, opted for the truth. ‘Shitless. But I’ve never left anyone in the lurch yet, and I won’t start with you.’

  ‘Even if it means getting hurt?’

  ‘If it comes to a direct choice, then yes. But …’ He was about to add that it wouldn’t come to that, it almost never did, the point of a police escort was not to stop the first bullet but to ensure that the target stayed away from people with guns. But Maddie forestalled him by bursting into tears.

  ‘I know. I believe you. God damn it, I know you would - your Superintendent did it, damn near lost his life doing it, and for that little shit Kendall! That’s what makes it so awful. I don’t think I can bear it.’ Clenched so tight the knuckles had turned white, her fists were hammering on her knees almost hard enough to do some damage.

  Donovan had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. There was nowhere safe for him to stop, and anyway it was wiser to keep moving. But he snatched repeated glances at her, bent crying over her punitive fists. The sight disturbed him, more than he would have guessed. Perhaps because she wasn’t the sort of girl to cry over nothing. ‘Maddie, what is it?’

  At first she only shook her head bitterly at him. But when the sobs abated and her hands lay exhausted in her lap she tried to explain. ‘Linda was my best friend, had been since we were six years old. We’d lived together, looked out for one another. And I took her there - it wasn’t her job, it was mine. But I let her die so I could escape.

  ‘I’m nothing to you, but you’d risk your life for me. I loved Linda, but I let a mad bastard beat up on her, and then take her out and kill her, and all I could think about was getting away myself. Even when I was safe I hadn’t the guts to call you people and tell you what had happened. Ironic, isn’t it? - I wouldn’t be in this mess if I had.’

  Donovan could be a savage taskmaster, but his highest expectations were always of himself. It wasn’t condescension, he genuinely saw no irony in the fact that she needed more from him than she had been able to offer her friend. It wasn’t even that, as a man, he was stronger than her: it was what she said before, the money. For centuries Irish soldiers had toiled, suffered and died in the service of England’s army for no better reason than that they had taken the King’s Shilling. It was no criticism to say that their loyalty had been bought. They did the job they were paid to do or died in the attempt. In every sense, Cal Donovan was their heir. Another hireling.

  Maddie Cotterick was a hireling too, but dying was no part of her contract. He didn’t blame her for being so scared at the prospect that the only thing that mattered, the only thought her brain could encompass, was her own safety.

  He didn’t know what to say to her. He still knew precious little of what had happened; perhaps his sympathy for her pain was misplaced. But the pain was real enough, and you don’t need to know what has made a child cry to want to hold it until it stops. He mumbled, ‘You don’t have to do this. Flay yourself like this. You didn’t kill her. Probably you couldn’t have saved her.’

  ‘But I’ll never know that, will I?’ she wailed. ‘Because I didn’t even try.’

  Donovan was fighting two urges, one less familiar than the other. He had no brief to question her, but procedure wouldn’t have stopped him hearing her story if he thought she needed to tell it. He was used to ignoring procedure when it suited him.

  He was less accustomed to feeling like this: as if he wanted to comfort her. Most of the people he dealt with were upset, but he didn’t often feel moved to do anything about it beyond taking their statements and trying to nail the culprit. Conventional wisdom did not see him as a sympathetic man; though people who knew him well enough knew that when his compassion was stirred he felt more deeply and reacted more strongly than many a more obviously sensitive soul.

  But there was something about Maddie Cotterick that troubled him, and he wasn’t sure what it was or even which girl it was: the independent, unconventional straight-talker who made her living on her back because it pleased her to do so, or the girl in the sprigged dress and white loafers, her strong regular features pleasing rather than pretty, the sort of girl you could have known for years before it finally struck you what good company she was. Or maybe trying to separate them like that was itself an artifice, a way of being comfortable with who she actually was. Because actually she was both.

  ‘Listen,’ he said at last, ‘if it’ll help, tell me what happened. It isn’t an interview, I won’t ask you any questions, but if you need to get it off your chest we’ve got an hour’s drive ahead of us, it’ll feel a long way with you bottled up like a pressure cooker. If you talk about it, maybe you’ll start to understand it better. Maybe you’d see there was nothing else you could have—’

  His voice, low with an uncertain gentleness, stopped as if guillotined. He was looking in the mirror.

  Shapiro had been sleeping. Partly it was the drugs, partly the trauma, but he found he was likely to drift off any time he wasn’t actually being prodded or poked or talked to reassuringly. He didn’t fight it. It passed the time, and in his current state there was little else he could do to fill it. Except worry, and when the medical staff thought he was worrying they came and talked reassuringly to him some more.

  It wasn’t that he was ungrateful. But he’d got the message by now: they didn’t know any more than he did. Only time would tell to what extent he would recover the use of his legs. That being so, passing time in the easiest way possible seemed sensible.

  This time as he woke he was aware of someone beside his bed. He had the feeling whoever it was had been there for some time. He cranked round his gaze until he found the figure sitting in the utilitarian hospital chair, so familiar and so unexpected that for a moment it stole his breath away.

  Angela had been watching him for half an hour, waiting for him to stir. She had seen his lax, heavy body, undignified in its awkward position, slowly firm and organize itself as his floating persona returned to animate it. Or at least, most of it. There was still no movement under the sheet that covered his legs; but there was something different from when she was here yesterday. Even the still bits looked as if they belonged to him now. When she first saw him, barely conscious, the bottom half of him had seemed dead; or not even that, more like a rough prosthesis. As if someone had stuffed a pair of pyjama trousers and bundled them under the sheet to approximate an appearance of normality.

  ‘Hello, you,’ she said softly.

  For a moment he just breathed, taking her in. He hadn’t seen her for two years. He had her address in Bedford but he’d never seen her house. She looked a little older. She looked tired. He was so glad to see her the tears sprang to his eyes and he had to sniff them away in an unconvincing simulacrum of a yawn.

  ‘Have you been there long?’

  ‘Not long. I didn’t want to wake you - I thought the sleep would do you good.’

  ‘Did I make the news, then?’

  ‘You did, but I already knew. Mr Giles called me. I came straight over, but you were too groggy yesterday to notice. I stayed at your house last night. I hope you don’t mind.’

  They’d shared everything for over twenty years: how could he mind her being in his house? ‘Do you like it?’ He’d had no use for a family home after his family scattered, had moved into the stone cottage five years ago.

  ‘It’s charming. It’s what you need.’

  Shapiro snorted. ‘It’s what I used to need. Now I need a bungalow.’

  But she knew him too well to tolerate his self-pity. ‘You could always get a stair-lift put in.’

  He stared at her, fully intending to feel hurt. But her magical blend of affection and pragmatism was exactly what he needed. He found himself smiling. ‘I’m glad you’re here. I’ve missed you.’

  Her own smile had a dimple in it. ‘I noticed. You never could see the point of vacuuming under things, could you?’

  He considered that dirty pool. ‘I have a woman—’
>
  One fair, perfectly arched eyebrow climbed.

  ‘I have a cleaner,’ he elaborated sternly. ‘She’ll be offended if she finds you inspecting under the furniture.’

  ‘That’s the idea,’ said Angela. ‘She’ll be offended; and then she’ll get out the extension hose.’

  ‘Can you stay?’ he said. ‘For a while.’

  ‘As long as you need me.’

  Shapiro tried to make a joke of that too, but before he could get it out his face started to crumple. ‘Oh God, Angela. How am I going to manage?’

  Her long hand grasped his and held it tight. ‘The way you’ve managed all the other difficult things you’ve had to do,’ she said fiercely. ‘With courage. With strength. With intelligence and good humour, and the sort of personal reserves that get deeper the more you draw on them. You’re a brave man, Frank Shapiro, and you’ll get through this. Maybe in a wheelchair. Maybe on a stick. Maybe on your own two feet, with just an interesting limp to remind people what kind of a man you are. That isn’t actually the important thing. If there is a permanent disability it may take you months, even longer, to get its measure and come to terms with it, but that still isn’t the important part. The thing to remember is that you will.

  ‘Whatever you’re stuck with, however unfair, you will come to terms with it. You’ll get past it to where the rest of your life is waiting. It may not be quite as you’d imagined it, but then, whose ever is? You’re the same man you always were, you’ll make a life worth having. Even in a wheelchair. I don’t mean to minimize the enormity of that, I can imagine how it must seem to you. Like a mountain in your way. But don’t underestimate yourself. You’re an impressive bloody man, Frank, I don’t think you always realize how much. How much people admire you. Well, now you’re going to give them something new to admire. Either how quickly you get back on your feet again, or how well you cope without.’

  His thick fingers inside her long ones were trembling. His voice broke up. ‘I don’t feel impressive,’ he whispered. ‘I feel frightened.’

  ‘I know,’ said Angela, holding him. ‘But that’s what courage is. It’s not about not being afraid. It’s about overcoming fear. And you will. I know you, Frank, I know you will.

  ‘But you don’t have to do it yet, and you don’t have to do it in front of me. I don’t need impressing. I know what you’re made of.’

  Inside the compass of her arms, his body shook with the relief of tears.

  ‘It’s probably nothing,’ said Donovan. ‘But there’s a dark blue hatchback two cars back that’s been there or thereabouts since we got on this road. I’ve passed stuff and stuffs passed me, but that hatchback is just about the same distance behind us it’s been all along. Like I say, it probably doesn’t mean a thing. But maybe we ought to make sure.’

  There was nowhere to turn off. He indicated and pulled up on to the hard shoulder, taking out his mobile phone as a kind of explanation. The grey van that was immediately behind him sailed past without hesitation, and so did the navy hatchback. With the facility of long practice Donovan noted its number. There was nothing to note about its driver, except that he was alone. The car continued up the road and disappeared in the following traffic.

  ‘False alarm,’ said Donovan wryly. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ said Maddie Cotterick. ‘I don’t want reassuring, I want looking after.’

  He put the phone away unused, waited for a gap in the traffic and got back on the road. He waited, too, for her to pick up where they’d left off. But the mood seemed to have been broken, and it wasn’t for him to try to re-establish it. There was time and road enough ahead: if she wanted to talk she would. If not she could talk to DI Graham at Queen’s Street.

  He concentrated on his driving. But Fenland roads are flat and straight, the Jaguar might have gone on for miles if he’d fallen asleep at the wheel. It left a lot of mental capacity for other purposes. He found himself thinking about what had happened. More than thinking: reliving it. Standing flat-footed and uncomprehending in Philip Kendall’s back garden while Shapiro flung himself in slow motion at the man on the steps. The rifle was far enough away for the sound of the shot to pass unnoticed; but Donovan saw it hit, and the way cloth and flesh dissolved and the blood fountained under the penetrating assault was more shocking, at a more fundamental level, than he could have imagined. It was like having your own mortality thrust in your face. Because your body worked pretty well most of the time, and so did everybody else’s, you tended to forget how easily it could be made to come apart. Seeing someone shot at close quarters was the ultimate object lesson.

  He found himself thinking about the mechanic. People hired this man to go round killing other people, and he was so serious about the job, so perfectionist, that after he set up his equipment he practised on live targets at the optimum range. Dedication to duty is always impressive; such dedication to such a duty was also deeply chilling. That one act told more about the man they were looking for than could have been crammed into a three-page biography. He was a professional. He was the ultimate professional. If he was sent to kill Kendall, for whatever reason, he wouldn’t stop until he succeeded. Which meant, almost certainly, that Maddie Cotterick could have caught a bus back to Castlemere in perfect safety.

  The Jaguar was slowing down. Puzzled, Maddie looked at her driver, about to ask why. The expression frozen on his dark face alarmed her. She jogged his elbow. ‘Sergeant?’

  Donovan blinked, and understanding rushed into his eyes like a cataract. His foot slammed down on the accelerator and the Jaguar took off like a greyhound leaving a trap. He steered one-handed, groping with the other inside his jacket.

  When he had the mobile phone he pushed it into Maddie’s hands and told her what to dial. His urgency frightened her. ‘I don’t understand. What’s happened? What—?’

  But like many people in receipt of a revelation he didn’t make a very good job of explaining it. His eyes blazed. ‘If the bastard’s as good as all that,’ he exclaimed, with an impatience that was more for his own stupidity than hers, ‘how come he bloody missed?’

  Chapter Seven

  If you looked for two people with nothing in common but a job, you could hardly do better than Liz Graham and Cal Donovan. In every sense, they came from different places: different lands, different cultures, different backgrounds; different experiences leading to different ways of seeing the world. The odd thing was that, starting from diametrically different viewpoints, they had a knack of arriving at the same destination at pretty much the same time. They had been doing this since the earliest days of their association, a time when they could agree on almost nothing else. Donovan thought Liz an interloper, Liz thought Donovan a loose cannon, but they still had an uncanny ability to echo one another’s thought processes.

  So while, objectively, Donovan wasn’t making a great deal of sense at his end of the line, at hers Liz was able somehow to reach past the hurried jumble of words and lift the notion he was trying to convey clean out of his mind. Her eyes saucered. ‘You mean - he meant to shoot Frank? Frank was his target all along? Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Donovan. ‘But boss, if a man like that wants him dead he’s not safe in the public ward of a general hospital. You’d better get him out of there - or if he can’t be moved, at least get him some protection.’

  He was right, but that didn’t make it any easier. ‘Where from? There’s nobody left!’

  ‘Send Kendall home and let the chief have his minders. If Kendall wasn’t the target he’s never been in any danger.’

  ‘Lord Almighty!’ She was trying to follow it through, work out what it meant. But there wasn’t time. It was more important to get the arrangements made: she could work out the implications later. ‘I can’t do that. What if you’re wrong? But I’ll sort something - get the chief out of sight for starters. And we’ll rake up someone to stay with him. What about you? Have you got the girl?’

  ‘Yeah, we’re on our way back. We’ll be ba
ck by noon.’

  ‘Be careful,’ said Liz. ‘If we’ve read this wrong and he’s not looking for Kendall, it may be he’s looking for Maddie after all. Have you had any problems?’

  ‘I don’t think so. There was somebody keeping pace with us a few minutes back, but I slowed up and he disappeared. I haven’t seen him since.’

  ‘Did you get a number?’

  He passed it on. ‘But like I say, I don’t think he’d any interest in us. I’m just being a bit neurotic.’

  ‘Stay neurotic,’ said Liz severely. ‘We obviously don’t know what the hell’s going on, until we do we all need to be neurotic. Get back here as quickly as you can.’

  ‘Count on it,’ said Donovan.

  Superintendent Hilton heard her out without interruption. As soon as she finished he called in DI Colwyn. ‘Get down to the hospital right away. Take a firearms officer. Detective Superintendent Shapiro is to be put in a private room as soon as it’s safe to move him. Wherever he is, that ward is closed to visitors and other than named staff unless they’ve been personally vetted by DI Graham. Clear?’

  ‘Sir.’

  When he’d gone Hilton propped his elbows on the desk and rested his chin on his folded hands. His eyes were troubled. ‘What does it mean? If Superintendent Shapiro was the intended victim?’

  ‘That he knew something?’ hazarded Liz. ‘That he’d worked out who killed the girl and had to be silenced.’

  Hilton raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘He knew who committed a murder and failed to mention it to you? Oh no, Inspector; oh dear me no. We don’t keep secrets of that kind. We’ve all seen too many midweek movies, we know exactly what happens to detectives who say they’ve just one more thing to check, they’ll reveal all in the morning … No, if Mr Shapiro had even suspected something important enough to kill him for he’d have shared it with you.’

  He heard the echo of that and gave a thin smile. ‘You know what I mean. After all, there was plenty of time. If there was time to bring in a professional hit man, and for him to carry out his meticulous preparations, whoever employed him must have known for at least twenty-four hours that Mr Shapiro would need dealing with. It isn’t credible that he knew something vitally relevant to his case but neglected to mention it for something over a day.’