The Hireling's Tale

by Jo Bannister

  His expression didn’t flicker. ‘Well, there was something else I needed to ask you. Did you make any phonecalls last night?’

  Again the pregnant pause while Kendall worked out the implications. Oh yes, thought Hilton, this man is guilty as hell. But he’s clever as the devil. ‘Iris phoned her mother this morning.’

  ‘No one else?’

  Kendall shook his head. ‘No.’

  Hilton didn’t believe him, but when he glanced at DC Morgan and WPC Wilson for confirmation, neither was able to assist him. He went to the phone and pressed the last-number-redial. He got Kendall’s mother-in-law. Rather than talk he hung up.

  ‘So what happens now?’ asked Kendall, emboldened by his success. ‘Can we go home right away?’

  ‘I think so, sir, yes.’ He paused just long enough for Kendall to suppose he’d finished, then added, ‘Then it won’t be such a long haul next time I want to talk to you.’

  Donovan’s phone was switched off. To save the battery, thought Liz bitterly. What about your goddamned neck? Until she talked to him, found out where he was, she couldn’t send help. She put a message out to neighbouring forces to stop Shapiro’s car if it was spotted; that was all she could do until Donovan called in.

  By eleven-fifteen it was beginning to feel a long time since she’d heard from him. Probably it meant only that things were proceeding smoothly and he had nothing to report, but she was uneasy. The fact that Kendall could have sent someone after him didn’t mean he had. Probably she’d overreacted. Because it had been her mistake to talk that freely to him, she’d assumed the worst. It was only ever a possibility, and not a strong one.

  And the fact that Donovan was maintaining radio silence didn’t mean he had a problem. Among her sergeant’s many failings, a tendency to engage in inconsequential chit-chat was marked by its absence. If he had nothing to say he wouldn’t call. She kept dialling his number; he kept being unavailable.

  She called down to the switchboard. ‘You haven’t heard anything from DS Donovan, I suppose?’

  Sergeant Bolsover gave the set a slow, puzzled blink. ‘You mean, in the last twenty minutes?’

  Liz favoured him with an unseen scowl. ‘Twenty minutes? What are you talking about?’

  Patiently, Sergeant Bolsover explained. ‘He called in. Twenty minutes ago. Asked for you. I put him through - well, her, it was the woman. At least, I thought I put her through. You didn’t get her?’

  ‘No. We must have lost the connection.’ But Liz was reassured. As recently as twenty minutes ago they called in. Donovan was driving so Maddie used the phone. Maybe she hit the wrong button; or maybe the signal was lost. He’d try again in a little while. ‘That’s OK, Sergeant. At least we’ve heard from them.’

  She looked at her watch. They were still forty minutes away, and Hilton wouldn’t be back until after that. Nothing on her desk needed her immediate attention.

  ‘I’m nipping down to the hospital,’ she told Colwyn, ‘see how the chiefs getting on. If Donovan calls in, bring him up to date and tell him to stand by. Then call me. If I don’t hear from you I’ll be back in half an hour.’

  Colwyn made a note of her mobile number. ‘I’ll hold the fort.’

  Constable Dimmock, the Authorized Firearms Officer, was stood down when Shapiro was moved to a private room. WPC Flynn sat outside the door, reading a magazine. Liz suspected that if she’d been a professional killer, and had therefore not made a point of saying, ‘Good morning, Cathy’, as she went inside, Flynn might never have noticed her. Liz made a mental note to send DC Scobie to relieve her. He was no brighter than Cathy Flynn, but if errors were going to be made it was better to have the ward orderly in an armlock than an assassin let in merely because he’d picked up a white coat somewhere.

  Shapiro looked a great deal more comfortable than last time Liz saw him, lying on his back with a couple of pillows behind his head. At first glance she thought he was asleep. Then she realized that he wasn’t: instead he was staring at his feet through lowered lids and concentrating really hard.

  ‘Frank - what are you doing?’

  He looked up and beckoned her over urgently. ‘Come here. Sit there.’ He pulled the chair up beside the locker. ‘Now, watch.’

  She wasn’t at all sure what she was supposed to be watching for. And then she was. She felt an idiot smile spread over her face. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. ‘Frank, that’s terrific. How long—?’

  ‘Just this last half hour. I was asleep, and I dreamt I was running. Me! - never mind this, I haven’t run anywhere for years. And when I woke up I saw - that.’

  They looked together at the foot of the bed. Under the white sheet Frank Shapiro was wiggling his toes.

  He wanted to know how the investigation was progressing. Liz hardly knew how to answer. She told him about Maddie Cotterick, who might have something useful to contribute when Donovan brought her back but then again might not. And she told him about Donovan’s flash of inspiration.

  He heard her out in a silence so profound it was like another person in the room with them. Until he broke it she couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  ‘You mean, my brave and noble self-sacrifice was nothing of the kind?’

  Liz beamed sympathetically. ‘It was, Frank. You had no way of knowing the sod was shooting at you all along.’

  ‘All the same …’ He sounded hurt. This last half hour, since he’d woken up to find the first signs of life returning to his legs, he’d begun to feel just a little smug about what had happened. Not that getting shot in the back had much to recommend it. But for the thirty-odd years he’d been doing this job, he’d known and so had everyone around him that he did better work in his head than on his feet. It was nice to be seen as a man of action for a change. Who’d have thought it of the old desk-jockey? (they’d have said up at Division) - hurling himself in front of an assassin’s gun like that? Good old Frank Shapiro (they’d have said), slower than a speeding bullet. But it was different if the gunman was shooting at him anyway. ‘So what’s happening about Kendall?’

  ‘Mr Hilton’s gone to see him now. I don’t know if he’ll arrest him or not. The trouble is, there’s no evidence. It makes sense, and Maddie Cotterick may be able to confirm it, but if he insists he knows nothing about it I don’t know how we set about proving it.’

  ‘And Donovan’s fetching this girl now, is he?’ Shapiro’s eyes narrowed. Behind them he was thinking. Specifically, he was counting - the vehicles available, and the jobs that had to be done with them. And he came up one short.

  Liz had decided against worrying him with her remarks to Kendall. It was easier to tell him about his car. ‘Everything else was tied up, and it was just sitting in the yard so I told him to take the Jaguar. I hope that’s all right.’

  Shapiro sniffed; but it was too late and anyway a shade graceless to complain. He wouldn’t have thanked them for leaving it at Kendall’s house, and it would have been unreasonable to expect Donovan to drive it back to Queen’s Street and then take the bus to King’s Lynn. All the same …

  All the time his children had been small he’d driven a lumbering great estate big enough to take half a hockey team. And when they grew up there was the divorce to get through, and he’d limited himself to a mid-range saloon until he knew how big an impact the settlement was going to have on his finances. Only last year, with his promotion, had he decided the time had come to treat himself, and he’d spent months agonizing between the pros and even-more-pros of three or four seriously classy cars before opting for the Jaguar. He hadn’t been disappointed. Every time his backside settled into the upholstery he got a small thrill of pleasure.

  And now Donovan was driving it. Well, what if he was? He was a good enough driver; he didn’t race amber lights or tailgate people who overtook him. He had the mildly disconcerting habit of leaning into sharp corners, but perhaps that was something all bikers did.

  Shapiro sniffed. ‘As long as he doesn’t scratch it.’


  Chapter Nine

  It wasn’t a bazooka, it was an RPG launcher. When the rocket-propelled grenade hit the front of Shapiro’s Jaguar, instantly the question of scratches to the paintwork became academic. It blew the bonnet off. It blew the windscreen in and all the other windows out. It blew up the engine and then, just as the debris was beginning to rain down, it blew up the rest of the car. A gout of fire surged through the passenger compartment, filling it like molten steel filling a mould. Flames roared in the empty windows. When the heat reached the petrol tank, the explosion lifted what was left of the vehicle clean off the road and dropped it upside down in the ditch.

  Ditches in the fens aren’t primarily to provide hedgehogs with a hiding place until they see an approaching car. They’re to drain the surrounding land, and they’re usually full of water. Most of them are deep enough to drown in; some of them are wide enough to sail on. This one was almost big enough to swallow the blazing wreckage of Shapiro’s Jaguar: the water quenched the fire as far back as the front seats in a noisy chorus of hissing steam. Smoke and bits of charred debris continued roiling out of the back half where it lay inverted on the steep bank.

  The man in the middle of the road put his RPG down and drew a handgun. He wasn’t expecting to need it, but a man didn’t succeed in his profession by taking any chances at all. He didn’t see how anything could come out of that car except more steam and an oddly sweet smell like roast pork. But it wasn’t a decision he needed to take. If they were dead, they wouldn’t stop being dead because he had a gun in his hand; and if by any chance one of them had survived he was ready to rectify the situation. He waited a moment for the breeze to shred the pall of smoke and steam, then advanced towards the burning wreckage.

  But he knew before he got there, before he could see how much of the car was left, that his job wasn’t finished. He knew the smell of burning flesh, he’d encountered it before, and he missed it from the rich and acrid cocktail - burning petrol and burning electrics and hot metal and singed leather and melted rubber - rising from the ditch.

  ‘Damn,’ he said mildly. Then he stepped away from the car, crossed the road in a couple of deceptively swift strides and peered down the opposite ditch. ‘Ah—’

  He’d promised to protect her. He was paid to protect her. But in the face of an RPG there was nothing Donovan could do for Maddie Cotterick except scream, ‘Get out!’, and hope that while he was bowling out of the driver’s door she was doing the same on the other side. The Jaguar had come almost to a standstill but not quite. When he saw what was being aimed at them Donovan needed his brake foot back because he couldn’t leave without it.

  Nor did he jump a moment too soon. He acted on pure instinct, getting out of a situation that was plainly untenable. If he’d paused just a second to weigh up the alternatives, to wonder if he could get past the hatchback or shunt into reverse (and never mind his Superintendent’s gearbox) and roar back the way he’d come, he’d still have been in the car when it exploded. As it was he was somewhere between the seat and the open door, and his own impetus and the sudden expansion of the air behind him shot him out like the cork from an inexpertly opened bottle of champagne. The sound and force of the blast, and the searing flame riding upon it, swept over him before he hit the ground, shrouding him in choking chemical smog.

  He thought, insofar as he had the time or the mental capacity to think, that he was dying. He didn’t see how anyone could survive an explosion like that, and the reason it didn’t hurt more was that he was already past that stage. He’d seen people who’d been burned too badly to recover. They seemed to suffer less pain than someone with lesser burns. If there was enough tissue damage, the pain-sensitive nerves were largely destroyed.

  And Donovan thought that was probably the state he was in now: his clothes, his hair and his skin turned to ash, his raw flesh still too shocked to react. He thought, Any second now … any second now.

  Then the squall of air generated by the petrol tank detonating behind him tore a rent through the smoke, and for a moment he saw his hands. They were splayed out on the road, one either side of his face, and he could see them clearly. They looked fine. Not dissolved to ash. Not blackened and cracked. Not, so far as he could see, burned at all.

  Which raised the possibility that the rest of him was all right too; and that if he wanted to stay that way he’d better do something about getting out of here.

  The smoke disorientated him. He wasn’t sure where the gunman was, or even where the remains of the car were. But when he stretched out his right hand he felt the tarmac surface give way to dust and then to grass, and he rolled over his shoulder on to the bank and down into the drain. He had just enough time to think, quite calmly, If I’m wrong about this and I am burned, the shock of this’ll kill me; and then the water closed over him with a faint weedy slurp that no one any nearer the fire would have heard.

  Maddie Cotterick saw what Donovan saw at the moment Donovan saw it, and though she couldn’t identify it she certainly knew what it meant. She was evacuating the car even before Donovan yelled.

  She hit the ground hard because the Jaguar still had some forward momentum. All the breath left her in a rush, and she curled round her collapsed lungs gasping for air. For a couple of seconds none came; she thought she was going to die flapping on the tarmac like a landed fish. Then the car blew up.

  It might have been the shock wave hitting her that finally got her breathing again. Certainly she got the smell, and a wave of heat rolled over her like a breaker on a beach. But she was further away than Donovan and the flames missed her, and so did the great cushion of smoke that spread out, filling the lane from side to side. More by luck than design, it made a perfect smokescreen between her and the man hunting her.

  She got her knees under her, still bent low to the road, whooping the stinking air into her lungs, desperately watching the smoke and waiting for it to part around a striding figure. But it didn’t. Nor could she see Donovan. For all she knew he’d never got out of the car. She thought she was on her own. She knew she couldn’t outrun a bullet; in her current state she couldn’t have outrun the man either. Whatever chance she had, and she knew it wasn’t much of one, depended on finding cover. There was nothing back the way they’d come for much further than she could hope to escape pursuit. That left the ditches on either side of the road.

  She’d gone out the nearside door and landed closer to the nearside ditch. But even as she crouched there, gasping for breath, the Jaguar slewed into that left-hand ditch, adding white steam to the oily smoke pouring into the air. She had no idea if any more explosions were likely, but the possibility was enough to decide her. Hidden by the roiling cloud, she crawled on her hands and knees to the opposite verge and rolled down the bank out of sight.

  PC William Warren was on his way back to Peterborough when he saw the smoke. If he’d seen it on his way out of Peterborough he’d have thought that the Flixton family domestic that he was on his way to deal with had gone a bit further than usual and it was the demise of Flixton Farm he was seeing. But he’d left the parties fuming over their unresolved grievances at opposite ends of the eighteenth-century farmhouse, Mrs Flixton nursing a black eye and Mr Flixton treating his scratches with udder cream, and the sudden belch of smoke was ahead of him and a little way off the main road. At the first junction Warren turned towards it, and within a couple of hundred yards he came on the accident.

  At least, he supposed it was an accident. There was one car blazing merrily in the ditch, another parked across the road. A man was standing on the grass. He looked up at the sound of the police car and waved.

  His eyes wide, Warren hurried over to the burning car. ‘Is there anyone in there?’

  It was the right question, but actually the answer was immaterial. If there was it was already too late to help, for which PC Warren was heartily grateful. If he’d got here a minute earlier he might have had to try.

  The man shook his head and pointed north across The Levels. ‘They
went that way. A couple of young lads; I think they may have been joyriders.’

  ‘What happened?’

  The man gave a minimal shrug. He was a tall man of around fifty, well dressed and well groomed: a businessman, thought Warren, or perhaps a solicitor. ‘They came round the corner up there’ - he pointed - ‘at about seventy. I braked hard, which is why I ended up slewed across the road like this, but they couldn’t stop. The driver pulled on to the bank - I think he thought he could squeeze past me - but it was steeper than he was expecting. The car rolled, the boys got out, then it caught fire. They high-tailed it across the fields. The way they were laughing, it wasn’t their car.’

  The constable was looking at the wreckage. ‘I shouldn’t imagine it was. That was a Jaguar, that was.’

  ‘Pity,’ said the man.

  ‘I’m going to need some details from you’, said Warren.

  ‘Of course. But can I come into the police station and see you later? I’m a surgeon, I work at a private hospital near Godmanchester, I’m needed there in half an hour to scrub up for a hip replacement. I could come by on my way home this afternoon, after I finish.’

  PC Warren had no reason to quarrel with that. He took the witness’s name and address, and noted the number of his car, then he thanked Mr Dodgson for his cooperation. He wished him well with the hip replacement, and when the navy hatchback drove off he stayed with the smouldering wreckage and waited for the assistance he’d summoned to arrive.

  By noon Liz was seriously worried. Donovan should have been back at Queen’s Street by now. Of course, anything could have happened to delay him, including a flat tyre, but if he’d been held up he’d have called in a revised ETA. He should have called in anyway, particularly after his earlier attempt failed, if only to say he was all right. Liz tried three more times to raise him, with the same results as before. Every word of her exchange with Kendall hammered in her head like a drum.