by Jo Bannister
Now it was over, and unless a theatrical agent was waiting with a contract at the stage door it was back to Castlemere’s generally less picturesque crime scene tomorrow morning. For Ali Baba’s mother read Mikey Dickens’s grandma Thelma; for the Wazir’s treasure read a nice little earner in second-hand car stereos with the serial numbers unaccountably missing.
She liked Brian’s colleagues. She’d met most of them at one time or another, but dressing up in false beards and discarded curtains showed them in a whole new light. Who’d have thought that the best education in Castlemere was being purveyed by people whose idea of entertainment was I-say-I-say-I-say jokes and sand dancing?
Brian spotted someone he wanted to talk to and left her to the tender mercies of Slasher Siddons, head of Religious Studies. The Reverend Simon Siddons was a fencer in his youth: thirty years later the nickname still gave him so much pleasure he made sure no one forgot it. He’d played the part of Mrs Baba, in drag.
He looked over the heads of the assembly – he was the tallest person present as well as, at least temporarily, the best endowed bosom-wise – and saw Brian talking to a mousy woman in the last dirndl skirt in England. ‘Marion Cully,’ he said, for Liz’s benefit. ‘She’s Mrs Taylor’s deputy in the English department, she went round with some flowers this afternoon to see how she was. After the accident.’
‘Accident?’ Liz hadn’t been at Queen’s Street today or she’d have known.
‘She was run off the road by some young tearaway last night. She wasn’t hurt, apparently, just very shaken. But it must have been a close thing. One of the cars caught fire.’
‘The accident in Chevening? I heard something about it on the radio. They said three people were taken to hospital but that none of the injuries was serious. Do you know who the others were?’
She wondered why Mr Siddons was regarding her oddly, as if he thought she might be fibbing and couldn’t work out why. ‘One of them was the boy involved – one of the Dickenses, I think. The other was your sergeant. The Irish one.’
Liz had a sort of reflex action for when people mentioned Donovan: her heart sank and her chin rose, ready to defend him. In the three years he’d worked for her she’d called him every name under the sun, but never in front of third parties. In front of third parties, which included all the general public except Brian and all the police except Shapiro, she backed him to the hilt because she knew he did the same for her.
‘Donovan was in one of the cars?’
‘I think he came on the scene right after the crash. He pulled young Dickens clear in the nick of time.’
Liz nodded slowly. That sounded like Donovan. If the man went into a florist’s he’d walk in on the world’s first Great Chrysanthemum Robbery.
Later, driving home, she asked Brian how Miss Cully had found the head of the English department.
‘Well, she’s at home. The hospital didn’t keep her, just checked her over and discharged her. Marion said she was still pretty tearful. Shock, I suppose. I mean, that’s about as close as you ever want to come.’
‘Did you know Donovan was involved?’
‘Donovan?’ Brian stared at her so long Liz thought there was going to be another accident. Then the cork whiskers spread in a wry grin. ‘Typical. No, I didn’t know it was him. Somebody said there was a policeman on the scene, but I thought they meant afterwards. Was he hurt?’
‘I’ll get the gory details tomorrow. Slasher reckons he pulled the kid responsible out of the wreckage just before it blew up.’
This time Brian nodded without taking his eye off the road. ‘More guts than sense; but then, so have lemmings.’
Liz chuckled. ‘True, but not kind.’
Brian glanced at her from the corner of his eye. ‘It wasn’t me said it. It was you.’
She wanted him to leave the whiskers on – ‘I’ve never slept with a Wazir before’ – but Brian thought of the mess they’d make of the sheets. So he washed off the whiskers but kept the smoking cap on.
He also kept the Wazir’s voice, though with a salacious undertone that would have frightened the younger members of the evening’s audience and made the older ones seriously uneasy. ‘Now you are my odalisque, my pretty, with your white skin and your golden hair and your green, green eyes, and I shall have my wicked way with you.’
‘Oh but sir,’ protested Liz, ‘whatever will my husband think?’
‘Him? He’s only an art teacher, and I am the Wazir of Old Baghdad!’
She thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘Fair enough.’
Later, as they drifted becalmed off the shores of sleep, she wove her arm through his and said, ‘Brian – do you ever wish we’d had children?’
He rolled on his side and in the darkness looked at where she was. Neither of them turned the light on. ‘What’s brought this on?’
Liz squirmed the curves of her body into his. ‘Just, seeing you with the kids made me wonder. You’re so good with them, I wondered if you were sorry you’d none of your own.’
It was an honest enquiry and he tried to answer honestly. ‘Most of the time I never give it a thought. Sometimes I’m very glad that children are my work and I can leave them behind when I come home. But yes, just occasionally I think it would have been nice if it had happened. Christ!’ He sat bolt upright. ‘Liz – you aren’t trying to tell me something?’
She shook her head. Unseen, the long fair hair stroked his skin. ‘No, I rather think we’ve left it too late. My fault, I suppose. I wanted to get my career on track without any distractions, and by then the biology was fighting an uphill battle. I’m sorry if it matters to you, even a little bit.’
His long arm was around her bare shoulders. They couldn’t have been closer if he’d been inside her. ‘But it’s not the little bits that count, it’s the whole package. Sure I could have had children. But not with you – not with you as you are. If you’d made different choices you’d have been a different woman, and it wasn’t anyone else I wanted. Yes, sometimes I wish I had children. Sometimes I wish I had a Porsche, a yacht and a villa in the Algarve. Then I wonder what I’ve got that I’d be willing to give up for them, and the answer is nothing.
‘I’ve got the top three items on my list: you, you and you. Anything more than that’s icing on the cake. Sure it looks nice, it tastes sweet, but it’s the cake that counts.’ He gave a lugubrious sniff. ‘Besides, any time I’m feeling broody I can always take 3b for extra art. It’s a complete cure. An afternoon with 3b and you realize Darwin got it wrong. The apes isn’t where we came from – it’s where we’re heading.’
Chapter Four
To reach her office the next morning Liz had to cross a battlefield centred on the station sergeant’s desk. The protagonists were a middle-aged man and a woman in her twenties, though a small child was watching with a wide-eyed innocence that suggested it had played a prominent role in the dispute.
Sergeant Bolsover too had become embroiled, rising from his paperwork to interpose his bulk between the warring parties. Kevin Tufnall already had one black eye, it went against the spirit of the Police and Criminal Evidence legislation to let him get another within the confines of the police station.
Because it was Kevin who was in danger, even though the woman came barely up to his shoulder. Her face was red with fury and her fists knotted, and if the Station sergeant had stepped aside she would undoubtedly have knocked the stuffing out of Castlemere’s least gifted professional criminal.
It wasn’t just the arthritis in his hands, though in recent times that had put dipping and even basic shimming-a-lock-with-22-’loid beyond his capabilities. He was also handicapped in his chosen career by fallen arches, which meant that little old ladies collecting their pensions could outrun him, and by adenoids which made his voice so distinctive blind men could pick him out of identity parades. Buck teeth made him immediately recognizable from almost any angle.
Magistrates had commented on his unfitness for a life of crime and wondered if invalid
ity benefit might prove a cost-effective means of keeping him out of court. But Kevin Tufnall was a proud man. He wouldn’t take charity when he could still take most other things that weren’t nailed down.
Liz greeted him like an old friend. She’d been arresting him at regular intervals for the last three years. ‘Hello, Kevin, how’s tricks?’
He gave her a hurt spaniel look. He had a touch of conjunctivitis. ‘I’ve been misunderstood, Mrs Graham. Again.’
She bit her lip. ‘What happened this time?’
Bella Willis had been through one of the worst half-minutes a mother can when she glanced up from the cheese counter in Tesco’s to see a shabbily dressed man reaching into the pram where young Dean Willis was attempting to swallow one foot.
There wasn’t much of Bella. Girls who were at school with her would have said she was a shy little thing who preferred to watch anything more robust than flower-arranging from a safe distance. But now her child was at risk. She let out a howl of rage that transfixed everyone between Ready Meals and Best Cambridge King Edwards, and flew at him.
Liz could have told her, had she been there, that a ten-month-old baby was the last thing Kevin Tufnall needed or wanted. But Bella thought her child was being abducted, and nothing Kevin could have done that left her standing would have protected him from her fury. Her hard little fists blackened his eye and split his lip. When he tried to turn away she tore out a handful of his hair. If people hadn’t restrained her, shy little Bella Willis would have ripped him limb from limb.
Liz sighed. ‘All right, Kevin, what were you after? Not the baby, I know that – too hard to fence. Did you have some earlier shopping in the pram, Mrs Willis? Had you tucked your purse under the covers?’
By now Bella had realized that this man, though he was plainly known to the police, was not known for abducting infants. She’d misread the situation. It hardly mattered. A man she didn’t know had trespassed on her most precious property. Huge, primitive emotions burgeoned within her. She could have done anything – she could have killed him. Even now the rage shielded her from embarrassment. She would have scurried away apologizing from someone who jostled her on a bus; she would have been too mortified to complain if someone hijacked her drier at the laundrette. But this man had made her think her baby was in danger, and it was impossible to overreact to that. She had trouble speaking civilly even to Liz. ‘Of course not.’
‘There must have been something,’ said Liz reasonably. ‘He steals – that’s what he does, nothing else. Do you want to tell us, Kevin? If you don’t admit attempted theft it’s going in the book as a suspected abduction.’
Kevin thought a bit longer, but a man who goes to prison every few months wants nothing on his record that smacks of child abuse. Being that mis-understood could get him killed. Finally he nodded, and mumbled something out of the corner of his mouth like a spy giving a password in a public place.
It wasn’t a deliberate ploy to embarrass him further, Liz genuinely didn’t hear. ‘Sorry – what?’
With a martyred expression Kevin repeated it louder. ‘I said, I was hungry. I haven’t eaten since yesterday morning. There was a packet of rusks on top of the pram.’
It was too pathetic to be other than true. Liz rolled her eyes. ‘You mean, you really are reduced to stealing from babies? Kevin, that’s the pits. You have got to get your act together, before we find you dead in Cornmarket with a tin of cat-food clutched in your cold little hand and no can-opener.’
Her first instinct was to go and tell Frank Shapiro about her latest contribution to the clear-up rate. But actually it wasn’t as funny as it was tragic. Kevin Tufnall might be an extreme case, but he was more typical of the criminal underworld than clever men with organizations behind them. Most of the people the police dealt with were more stupid, lazy and weak than they were evil. They lacked the commitment, the application, to make a success even of crime.
But she wanted to see Shapiro anyway. ‘What’s all this about Donovan and a car crash?’
Donovan was already there, lurking behind the door. ‘Go on,’ he growled, ‘talk about me behind my back.’
Liz bestowed on him her sweetest smile. ‘Now Sergeant, you know we wouldn’t do that. You sit down right here in the middle of the room and we’ll talk about you in front of you. So Frank, what’s this about Sergeant Donovan here and a car crash?’
Shapiro chuckled into his double chin. That was one of his more successful gambles. It shouldn’t have worked, they were too different: the taciturn sergeant from a gritty little mid-Ulster town and the cheerful, intelligent, capable woman for whom a spell as DI in Castlemere could only be a step on the way to something better. It should have been – in fact it was – antipathy at first sight. Donovan saw Liz as a Regional HQ bimbo riding a wave of positive discrimination, whose first bloody nose would see her back behind a desk except for inspirational TV appearances. Liz thought Donovan was a loose cannon, a simmering brew of grudges barely contained within a vessel as brittle as glass.
Making them work together could have been a bad mistake. If he’d had longer to think about it, and enough manpower to have a choice, probably Shapiro would have thought better of it. But there was no alternative, and in the pressure cooker of difficult and sometimes dangerous inquiries the partnership had blossomed and become fruitful.
Once she confounded his prejudices, Liz Graham was the best thing that could have happened to Donovan. She wasn’t afraid of him. She could tolerate his moods, his impatience, his war of attrition with authority, for the sake of his strengths – his absolute commitment to the job and his willingness to do whatever was necessary to get it done. She also recognized that behind the romantic unpredictability of the wild Celt Detective Sergeant Donovan suffered from punishingly high expectations of himself. He didn’t need driving. He needed steering.
With a little prompting he told the story again, starting with the robbery at the garage and ending with the van in flames outside Chevening Parish Church. Anti-climax had set in, leaving him flat and intolerant of all the fuss.
When Liz realized she was sitting there with her mouth open she shut it and tried to think of something intelligent to say. ‘Er – has the gun been recovered?’
Shapiro was impressed. The first time he heard this story, an awareness of how closely Donovan had shaved disaster left him incapable of coherent thought for several minutes. ‘SOCO have been over the van with a fine-tooth comb but they didn’t find anything that might once have been a handgun.’
‘Then he dumped it,’ said Donovan, shortly, as if someone had accused him of something. ‘Somewhere on the road between Kumani’s and Chevening. It was dark, he could have dropped the window and slung it out anywhere – I wouldn’t have seen, there were whole stretches where he was just a couple of tail-lights in the distance. Some of the time I couldn’t see him at all, I was following by guess and by God.’
Shapiro nodded. ‘Well, if that’s what he did we should find it.’
Head down, Donovan growled something sotto voce. This was a tactical manoeuvre: if a senior officer asked him to repeat himself it was hard then to complain that he was speaking out of turn.
Shapiro knew the rules of this little game well enough. It was one of the small liberties he allowed to Donovan in order to save his energy for stamping on the larger ones. He vented a weary sigh. ‘Sorry, Sergeant, what was that?’
Donovan looked up, his lips tight. ‘I said, we better had. I don’t want there to be any doubt about this. It was an armed robbery. Not a toy, not a replica – that was a real gun. He wouldn’t have knocked me out with a toy; and Ash Kumani would have kicked him down Cambridge Road if there’d been any question in his mind what Mikey was pointing at him. It was an armed robbery, he decked me to get away, and he could have killed the woman in the car. I want that gun found. I don’t want anyone saying, Well, maybe it was real and maybe it wasn’t and anyway we can’t prove it so how about we charge him with assault and driving without due car
e and attention?’
Shapiro understood his anger. It was one of the most offensive things that could happen to a police officer, to know – not to suspect, not to believe, but to know – that a crime had been committed and to be denied a successful prosecution by a break in the line of evidence.
It didn’t depend on what you knew but on what you could prove. The Crown Prosecution Service hated losing cases, if they weren’t confident of a conviction they wouldn’t proceed. Placid middle-aged policemen with grandchildren and a liking for country walks could be reduced to impotent fury by the sight of some cocky young thug back on the street because a break in the evidence allowed another interpretation of the facts, if viewed from the right angle and with a following wind. It was desperately frustrating. You told yourself you’d get them next time, but it didn’t make it any easier to see them swagger away. It was one of those occasions when the fact that police arms had to be authorized and issued, not just pulled from a holster, saved a lot of not very worthy lives and some rather more valuable careers.
‘I’ve got a dozen people out looking,’ said Shapiro. ‘They know it’s important, they’ll find it if they can. At least we know where it has to be – if he threw it from the car it went out the driver’s window and ended up south of the road. It’s just over three miles from Kumani’s to Chevening, so the search area is a twenty foot strip three miles long. I’ve known smaller needles found in bigger haystacks. As long as nobody’s pocketed it already, they’ll find it.’
Donovan was frowning. ‘They’re only looking now?’
Shapiro regarded him levelly. ‘Yesterday I was still waiting for SOCO to tell me if it was in the car.’
Donovan knew he was being unreasonable. ‘Yeah – sorry. I just—’
