The Hireling's Tale

by Jo Bannister

  She wasn’t arguing. It wasn’t an argument: they were mulling it over, in the way that she usually did with Shapiro; and if Hilton’s methods and vocabulary were different, abrasive where Shapiro’s were pensive, they were not necessarily the worse for it. It was the feedback that was important, tossing ideas between them until the patterns they formed became less random and more significant.

  Liz said, ‘Maddie says they’re connected - the girl’s death and Frank getting shot. How?’

  ‘Philip Kendall is the connection.’

  ‘Kendall’s house is where the shooting took place. But perhaps the mechanic merely followed Frank there. He needed him out in the open, this was his chance. Maybe he took the pot-shot at Kendall’s back door just to bring him out.’

  ‘So Kendall was never more than a red herring?’

  Liz shrugged. ‘I don’t know. We’ll have to ask Maddie that too.’

  ‘You could have asked when you were talking to her,’ Hilton said pointedly.

  Liz gave a rueful shrug. ‘I did try. I think she was afraid that when we knew as much as she did we’d leave her to cope alone.’

  ‘Is her life really in danger?’

  ‘I don’t know that either,’ admitted Liz. ‘I didn’t feel it was safe to dismiss the idea. And I wanted to hear what she had to say.’

  Hilton nodded. ‘So it wasn’t just a matter of getting Detective Sergeant Donovan out of my way for a few hours.’

  Liz cast him a startled look; but immediately she realized it was a shrewd little joke. She was beginning to see how DI Colwyn could enjoy working with the man. She fought to keep her face straight. ‘Of course not, sir. He’s looking forward to seeing you again.’

  ‘Of course he is,’ agreed Detective Superintendent Hilton with a thin smile. ‘True as I’m strangling this ferret.’

  There were thirty-five miles of good road between King’s Lynn and Peterborough; Donovan expected to cover them in fifty minutes. (In a car: on his bike he’d have aimed at half an hour.) Another twenty-five miles, say forty minutes, would see him coming into Castlemere. They’d been on their way for half an hour when he saw something he hadn’t expected to see again. The navy-blue hatchback.

  Only the fact that he was looking out for trouble made it seem at all sinister. It had passed him before when he pulled on to the hard shoulder. Since then he’d been told to get a move on: probably he’d increased his speed just enough to catch it. These weren’t local roads, they were long-distance routes: every second car would be going to Peterborough or beyond. If he slowed down he’d probably meet the white saloon again; if he accelerated enough he might even catch the Porsche. It was the nature of good roads in open country.

  And yet … and yet. The woman beside him believed her life was in danger: that someone was hunting her and would try to kill her. Even if it turned out she was wrong, Donovan thought the belief was absolutely genuine. He hadn’t worried much till now because he thought the man who shot Shapiro was still in Castlemere, trying to find out where Philip Kendall had got to. But if Kendall was never the target he wouldn’t be wasting time looking for him. He might be intending to finish his business with Shapiro; or he might have Maddie in his sights.

  He could no longer afford the luxury of strict adherence to protocol. Their lives just might depend on things only Maddie knew.

  He kept his eyes on the traffic ahead, watching the hatchback for any change in its speed, but he spoke to Maddie. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  The conference trade was something of a speciality and Maddie had never got involved before. She wasn’t planning on working at all that weekend. She had a friend to stay, intended to spend the time with her, catching up on one another’s news.

  But it’s the same in all businesses: it’s hard to refuse a favour to a regular customer.

  She covered the phone with a hand. ‘I’ll tell him no. Damn it, I expect more notice than this even when I haven’t got other plans. I’ll tell him I’m already booked.’

  Linda shook her golden head and grinned. She was Maddie’s age but she’d cornered a slightly different market. At twenty-six she still looked about twenty. In the right gear she looked an incredibly promiscuous fourteen. ‘Say we’ll both go. It’ll be fun.’

  Maddie frowned. They’d been going to go to a film, she’d been looking forward to it. But Jane Austen was more her sort of thing than Linda’s, she suspected her friend was glad of an excuse to get out of it. Linda wasn’t a natural spectator. She was keener on participation. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course. Bit of fun, bit of grass, bit of cash - my idea of the perfect night.’

  It was Maddie’s experience that, while a lot of prostitutes talked like this in company, not many really and honestly felt that way. They looked on it more like a job in an abattoir: a messy old business but somebody has to do it. They were often uneducated women with limited options for making serious money. But Linda loved the game. She’d have gone on doing it if she’d won the lottery. She enjoyed the excitement, the risk, the rush it gave her; the sensation of power. Maddie recognized that it was an illusion of power and acted accordingly; but Linda was too swept up in her own myth of woman rampant to see that the weaker can only exploit the stronger as long as the stronger consent. Somehow, in the seven years she’d been doing this, she’d never had to deal with a genuine sadist: a man who obtained sexual release from physically abusing his partner.

  In all the commotion of a big conference winding up they had no difficulty passing the desk of The Barbican Hotel unnoticed. The man met them at the lifts. It wasn’t Maddie’s regular but his friend, the visitor for whom he wanted to lay on a treat. She wasn’t worried when the man who’d phoned her didn’t join them. He was a civilized punter who always paid up without demur; any friend of his was acceptable to her.

  She weighed the client up covertly as the lift rose. He was a few years older than her but still a young man, strongly made, with the elegant, tensile power of a cat. A man of expensive tastes and extravagant good manners. He was a foreigner, but Maddie had no problems with that. The only drawback might be if he tried to pay by American Express.

  Thus far Donovan had seen no need to interrupt her. He concentrated on his driving, and on the car up ahead, and let the story she was telling pour into his mind unfiltered by much in the way of analysis. But there was something he wanted to know now. ‘Did he give you his name?’

  Maddie shook her head. ‘He said to call him Sir.’ Donovan had a bizarre picture flit through his head then; but no. Even if he could fake a foreign accent, nobody’d have described Superintendent Hilton as having extravagant good manners. ‘Go on.’

  It came as no great surprise to Maddie when the man produced some cocaine. Crack, for smoking. He passed it round, along with the means of taking it, and started dragging it in. Linda followed suit enthusiastically, Maddie with circumspection. It was a basic precaution in her business always to be in full command of one’s senses. But Linda didn’t believe in taking precautions. She thought the free availability of mind-altering substances was a bonus.

  ‘How much detail do you want?’ asked Maddie.

  Donovan shrugged. ‘Whatever it takes. Don’t worry, you won’t shock me.’ But she did, a little.

  Perhaps because she seemed younger, perhaps because she was keener, the client concentrated his attention on the bubbly blonde, excited by the combination of a cheeky schoolgirl face, a pneumatic woman’s body, and the total lack of inhibition of an enthusiastic whore. The crack drove both of them to mounting excesses: Maddie found herself propped in a corner with a half-smoked spoon, watching with bored tolerance that grew slowly to unease.

  She realized sooner than Linda, who’d been freer with the crack, that the girl was beginning to take some punishment. Not just a little rough and tumble, that was par for the course. But this man was starting to use force on her. Cocaine is an anaesthetic: if she hadn’t been high she’d have known she was getting hurt. When the drugs slowed her
reactions he shoved and shook her into compliance. He slapped her face, and Linda was spaced out enough that when he laughed at her objections she laughed too.

  ‘I knew it was getting out of hand,’ said Maddie in a small voice. ‘I knew he was getting vicious, and he was going to hurt her. He was pulling her about like a rag doll, and she was so high she’d no idea she was in danger.’

  ‘But you weren’t? - high?’

  She shook her head. ‘A drag or two, to get in the mood. He kept pushing more at me. I pretended to use it to keep him happy.’ She forced a smile. ‘If there’s one thing a prostitute’s good at it’s faking.’

  A knot of lorries slowed the traffic in front. Donovan pulled the Jaguar into the outside lane and powered past. The road ahead was clear.

  It might have been, Maddie admitted, that she too had taken more crack than she thought. But her recollection was that the tone of events really did change between one breath and the next. One moment she was sitting in the corner, in a litter of discarded clothes, pretending to smoke and watching two consenting adults play a game of rough love that at least one of them would regret when she came to her senses; and the next the game had changed to a deadly reality. The man was hitting the cheeky schoolgirl face as he might have hit another man: with his fists, with his weight behind them. He split her lip and she mewed a kittenish protest. Maddie thought the blood on his hands excited him. He hit her in the face again, this time under the eye. The skin over her cheekbone parted. The man laughed again. This time he laughed alone.

  Maddie Cotterick was haunted by her failure: not just that she couldn’t save her friend, but that she made almost no effort to. By the time she realized how critical matters had become she was paralysed with fear. So it was important to her that the man beside her knew she had tried. Only once, and without success, but she had at least tried.

  ‘I got up then. Linda didn’t: I think it was more the crack than what he’d done to her. If she’d been able to stand up for herself, maybe … But she couldn’t, and he knew he could knock either of us alone into the middle of next week. I said I was leaving, I was going to get help. But he’d locked the door. I yelled but no one heard - everyone was at the party downstairs, and they were making too much noise to hear anything.

  ‘I thought for a second I’d brought him to his senses. He left Linda and stood up. He gave a little smile - almost like an apology. He said, “I get carried away sometimes.” He came over to the door. I thought he had the key: I stood back for him to unlock it.’

  She remembered then, with the prospect of escape so close, that she’d hardly a stitch on. She looked round to see where her clothes had got to.

  He hit her so hard, with the back of his fist across her ear, that she literally flew, crashing into the wall, her limbs sprawling among the legs of the furniture, her wits fluttering around the cornice like a flock of startled birds. The violence of it, abrupt and extreme, left her stunned. Her eyes remained open, she saw everything that happened thereafter, but dizziness, shock and terror prevented her from making any further intervention.

  He returned his attentions to Linda. Kneeling on the bed now, she’d found a tissue and was dabbing ineffectually at her face. ‘You shit,’ she mumbled plaintively through broken lips. ‘You shit.’

  He hit her. He hit her and hit her and hit her. In the face. In the belly. About the ribs. She fell off the bed, curled foetally around the hurt, and he picked her up and hit her some more. Before he finished her face was raw meat. Blood from her nose and mouth sprayed the walls as he pounded her head from side to side.

  Surreally, it all happened in near silence. After it started the girl never had enough air in her lungs to fuel a cry. Even when she fell off the bed her body was already too limp with abuse to make much of a thud. She spilled bonelessly along the rug. Maddie heard a little broken moan as the man picked her up, and that was all.

  She couldn’t be sure if Linda was still conscious when it ended or not. In any event her involvement was not required. At a certain point the man was ready. He stopped hitting her, pulled her roughly spread-eagle on the bed, inserted himself and hunched to a rapid climax. It was over in seconds. All that build-up to so little satisfaction. It wasn’t about sex. Sex was the excuse. It was about pain.

  Slowly then he seemed to come to his senses. He looked around and saw what he’d done, the mess he’d have to clear up. Maddie closed her eyes before his gaze reached her, let him think she was unconscious. Even better, let him think she was dead. Anything that would keep him from turning his attentions on her.

  She stayed where she was, motionless, half under the furniture, listening to him move around the room. Once he lifted her chin with his foot, and she was surprised to discover that he’d put his shoes back on. She made no visible reaction, didn’t open her eyes, and he moved away.

  The next thing she heard was the door opening and when she dared a look they were both gone, Linda and the man. So was the bloody sheet off the bed. But there was still a jumble of clothes littering the floor, so she grabbed anything that looked familiar, got into just enough of them to pass a casual glance, and ran. She met no one in the corridor. She found the back stairs and left that way.

  ‘I didn’t know until later that he’d killed her,’ she whispered. ‘But I did really. After I got home I called the hospital but she wasn’t there. All the damage he’d done to her, I knew that if she wasn’t in hospital she was dead.

  ‘I thought he’d come after me then. I didn’t know his name but I’d seen his face, I knew what he’d done. If he’d killed her he had to kill me too. The other one knew where to find me, I couldn’t think of anything but getting away. I should have come to you but I was too scared. I thought he’d buy his way out of trouble somehow. I thought it would be my word against his, until he stopped me from talking altogether. I thought if I just got out, went where nobody could find me … I suppose that sounds stupid.’

  ‘It sounds like you were scared out of your mind and probably concussed as well,’ said Donovan. ‘Nobody’s responsible for what they do in circumstances like that.’

  ‘But I left her!’ cried Maddie. ‘I left her to die. I let him kill her.’

  ‘He bounced your head off the wall,’ said Donovan tartly. ‘He thought he’d knocked you out or he wouldn’t have left you in the room alone. The wonder is not that you couldn’t help your friend but that you managed to save yourself.’

  ‘You think so?’ Her voice was a tiny plea; she was desperately looking for some kind of redemption.

  ‘Maddie, you’re talking to a policeman! I’ve been beaten up too. I know what it’s like to have the strength and the wits knocked out of you. All the faculties you have left concentrate on one thing: survival. Any way, at any cost. You just don’t have enough reserves left to worry about anyone else.’

  ‘She was my friend …’

  ‘It wouldn’t have made a difference if she’d been your mother.’

  She was crying again. But it was different; softer. Telling her story had robbed it of much of the pain, the self-recrimination. She was crying with relief.

  But she hadn’t finished the story. She hadn’t reached the part Donovan was waiting for. He left a decent interval before prompting her. ‘What happened at Kendall’s house? Who shot the chief? And did he mean to, or were we right the first time and he was aiming at Kendall?’

  Maddie wiped away her tears and blew her nose. Her voice was calmer, the edge gone out of it. ‘I’m not sure. When it happened, when I saw it on the news, I thought Kendall was the target. That’s what scared me. I thought, if he was on the hit list, damn sure I was. I don’t know who did the shooting. A pro, I suppose: someone else he hired to do a messy little job for him.’ The little wan smile flickered again. ‘Another hireling. The man who killed Linda sent him, to silence me and to silence Kendall.

  ‘Or maybe to stop Mr Shapiro, because he was getting too close. There are places in the world where it doesn’t matter what you do as l
ong as you can afford a cover-up. That’s the kind of place he’s from. Back home he’d have used his influence and the local chief of detectives would have looked the other way. Here he needed to stop him with a bullet.’

  Donovan didn’t understand. ‘What do you mean, getting too close? We hadn’t a single idea who was responsible. Our list of suspects was the same as Kendall’s guest-list, and we weren’t even sure he was on that. He’d nothing to gain by shooting either of them, Kendall or the chief. Neither of them could put the finger …’

  His voice died away. Like an echo, something she’d said before came back to him. His brows knit. ‘You said there were two men. You said it was the other one who called you. He was a regular. So - he’s a local man?’

  Maddie rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. ‘I’m sorry, I’m really not telling this very well. Yes, of course. I don’t think he meant us to get hurt, but afterwards he helped his friend get away, and he must have warned him that the police had his name. Maybe you had forty others as well, but as a local man he knew that if anyone could whittle that list down to one it was Mr Shapiro. I was wrong, wasn’t I? - the little shit was never in any danger. He wasn’t the target, he was the bait. The bullets were for me and Mr Shapiro.’

  Another echo; another little bell ringing in the background. She’d called somebody that before, though she wasn’t a woman from whom expletives flowed naturally. That little shit—

  ‘Kendall?’ exclaimed Donovan, ripping his eyes off the road to stare at her. ‘Kendall set him up?’

  ‘Philip Kendall. Yes.’