by Jo Bannister
Every available officer had been drafted for a systematic combing of Cornmarket that lasted most of the weekend. It was no more successful than the search for Mikey’s gun. It was beginning to look as if the assailant had held on to it. But so much of the sprawling wasteland was littered with bits of discarded wood that it could have passed unrecognized with twice as many people searching. On top of which, the more nights that passed without finding it, the greater the chance that Desmond Jannery or one of his friends would gather it, all unknowing, and throw it on the fire.
‘We’re not having a lot of luck, are we?’ said Liz. ‘I gather your enquiries were just about as profitable.’
He sniffed morosely. ‘The three monkeys are a bunch of blabbermouths compared with this lot. Brick Lane I can understand, maybe Roly warned them off, but Cambridge Road? I don’t think his influence stretches much beyond the round of the armour-plated bread van.’
Liz gave an appreciative little chuckle. ‘It’s just the combination of the time and the place. Tea-time on a Sunday in the middle of winter there were never going to be many people about; and this side of Kumani’s the houses are bigger and further off the road so nobody would see much through the window. As for Brick Lane, I don’t know. Would Roly stop them talking to you? He’s got a better reason than anyone for finding out who did this.’
Donovan was so used to thinking of the Dickenses as enemies he needed reminding that this time they shared a common cause. ‘Maybe he thinks he knows,’ he grunted.
‘If he blames you he didn’t say anything to me about it. And why would he? – apart from Castlemere’s finest Roly Dickens knows you as well as anyone in town, if you’d been prone to thumping lippy kids he’d have heard about it before now. All the same, stay away from him. What Roly knows on a rational level and how he might react to finding you on his doorstep might be two different things. We don’t want an incident. Mikey’s head could be the least of it if tempers fray in The Jubilee.’
Donovan was confused. ‘Then we should concentrate on finding whoever attacked him. Nailing his crooked defence to a charge he’s never going to be fit to answer can wait.’
‘If I knew where to look for Mikey’s attacker I would,’ said Liz. ‘I don’t. So let’s press on with what we have a chance of tidying up, if only to clear the decks for if SOCO come up with something useful.’
‘You mean, when.’
‘Of course I do,’ she agreed.
Two sharp turns and Chevening roundabout came into view. Despite the cold of the day Donovan felt a sweat break out under his clothes. ‘Do you want me to talk to Mrs Taylor?’
Liz shook her head. ‘No, I’ll talk to her. I want you there mostly as a memory-jogger. Accidents do queer things to the mental processes. If you’re hurt enough, or scared enough, the mind can block it all out. If she still doesn’t remember, you may be able to talk her through it when nobody else could. Just seeing you will take her straight back there; with luck the details will follow.’
Donovan had no difficulty believing it. Being here was certainly bringing it back for him. The wreckage was gone now, even the burnt-out digger, but there was a big charred mark on the road that would serve as a reminder until Chevening reached the top of the road-works waiting list around the turn of the millenium. He could have died here, and that black mark have been his only memorial. There were those, he thought sourly, who’d consider a nasty stain in the road the most fitting one he could have.
Liz parked by the canal. ‘Stay here, I’ll give you a call if I need you. Seeing you might come as a bit of a shock, I don’t want to spring it on her without warning.’
‘You don’t need to explain,’ Donovan said mournfully, ‘I’ve heard it before. Mostly when I was of an age for meeting girlfriends’ mothers.’
Liz chuckled. ‘And now you’re all grown up you don’t get to meet their mothers?’
‘Now I’m all grown up,’ growled Donovan, ‘I don’t even meet the girls.’
Liz rang the bell, and when there was no reply rang again. Pat Taylor answered with her hair tied up in a scarf, a brush in her hand and a smear of distemper on her cheek. ‘Oh, Inspector Graham. Come in. You’ve caught me decorating. Can you wait five minutes while I finish and get clean?’
‘Of course.’ Rather than waiting in the sitting room she followed Mrs Taylor back upstairs.
‘My doctor suggested I take a few more days off work, but just sitting was driving me crazy. I’m going back tomorrow. As long as I don’t try to move too quickly I’m all right.’
‘How are the aches and pains?’
Mrs Taylor gave a taut smile. ‘Oh – settling down. Some of the bruises are pretty spectacular, but I can get out of my chair now without planning it like a military manoeuvre. When I’ve finished this I’m going to risk a good soak in the bath. So far I’ve got by on showers, but it’s not the same.’
Liz was a wallower too. ‘Leave your phone within reach so if you get stuck I can come and haul you out.’
She watched Pat Taylor finish the undercoat. It had been a child’s room, with some kind of a mural. It seemed a shame to cover it up, but Taylor junior had probably drawn the line at waking up in Noah’s Ark one more year. Since he could now be old enough to vote, perhaps he had a point.
‘There.’ Mrs Taylor left her head-scarf and coverall in the bedroom and firmly closed the door on them. ‘Now, what can I do for you?’
‘I wondered if you’d thought any more about the acci— About the crash.’
Mrs Taylor’s glance was sharp. ‘I’ve thought about nothing else.’
Liz nodded her understanding. ‘I know: the flashbacks are the worst part. But they do stop. Be patient, it’ll pass.’
It was in Pat Taylor’s eyes that she found the advice extraneous if not impertinent. Liz wondered if she’d been away that week last summer when the only topic of conversation in town was the rape of its senior policewoman. ‘I do know what I’m talking about,’ she could have said, ‘it isn’t just a quote from the Victim Support handbook.’ But she didn’t. Mrs Taylor might have found it helpful if she’d remembered but not if she had to be reminded. Besides, it smacked too much of competitive suffering: ‘You think you’ve had a rough time …?’ She let it go.
‘In that case,’ she said, ‘are you any clearer about who was in the van?’
Mrs Taylor was fiddling with the ornaments on the table. They didn’t need arranging: it was displacement activity. As was the decorating, Liz supposed. ‘I don’t understand why it matters,’ she said. ‘You can’t hold a passenger responsible for what happened.’
‘Not what happened to you, no,’ agreed Liz. ‘But we’ve got two different accounts of the earlier incident, the robbery at the garage, one from the driver and one from Detective Sergeant Donovan. Who’s right depends on whether there was a passenger in the van.’
‘You mean, the boy who hit me and your sergeant are telling different stories, and you don’t know who to believe?’
Put like that, Liz understood her puzzlement. ‘Anyone can make a mistake,’ she said lamely. ‘The problem is, Donovan’s so convinced he’s right he’s nailed his credibility to it. If we can get-independent confirmation it’ll spare him a lot of hassle and possibly some real trouble. So, can you help?’
The pause was almost long enough for Liz to say it again. Then Mrs Taylor turned to her. ‘Yes.’
Donovan was like a lemming, irresistibly drawn to water. When the front door of the cottage opened he was half-way down the stone steps to the canal and the two boats moored there. One was a small motorboat, the other an elegant old-fashioned rowing skiff.
He turned at the sound of the door and saw the women on the threshold. For a second his eyes met Pat Taylor’s before she backed into the house. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to talk to him. It’s – too soon.’
‘I understand,’ said Liz. ‘Thanks for your help.’ She walked back to the car.
Donovan met her there. His eyes were wary. ‘Well?’<
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‘Get in the car. We’re finished here.’
‘Don’t you want me to talk to her?’
‘She won’t talk to you. Says it’s still too painful.’
He frowned. ‘It’s my fault Mikey turned her car over?’
‘Of course not. But it brings it all back, and she’s not ready to deal with it yet.’
‘But if she doesn’t remember—?’
‘Ah.’ Liz got in behind the wheel and waited for him to get in too before she explained. ‘She does remember. She says she remembers quite clearly now. When she realized the crash was inevitable, there was nothing she could do to avoid it, she looked at the van and she didn’t look away until it hit her. She has no doubt what she saw.’
‘Which was?’
Liz took a deep breath. ‘You were wrong. She saw two faces behind the windscreen. She couldn’t identify either of them – she couldn’t even be sure they were both young men – but she’s adamant there were two.’
‘This is crazy!’ snarled Donovan. ‘Thugs don’t hijack other thugs! They hijack taxi drivers and clerks and women doing their shopping. Mikey Dickens getting hijacked is like two suicide bombers catching the same plane and blowing one another up!’
Liz shrugged. ‘I grant you it’s a long shot. But rank outsiders do sometimes win the Grand National, and even Mikey Dickens can be the random victim of violent crime.’
‘Twice?’ said Donovan incredulously.
‘OK, maybe not,’ said Liz, considering. ‘What if the hijacking was indeed random – Mikey just happened to stop the van in the wrong place at the wrong time. Suppose, though, he knew the man – they move in the same circles, it’s not unlikely. He knows Mikey’s going to be questioned, starts worrying that he might talk if the alternative is going down himself. So he waylays Mikey at Cornmarket for a pre-emptive strike. A hijacker who was known to him would have an even better motive than you for going after Mikey with a baseball bat.’
That shut Donovan up, at least for a moment. One of the two smartest people he knew had sent him looking for someone who saw Mikey alone in his van, the other thought it might be better if there was a hijacker. Donovan no longer knew what was best. He just knew what he believed, which was that the man who hit him was the same man he dragged out of the burning wreckage in Chevening a few minutes later. He couldn’t prove it. But he was there, he knew what happened.
He gritted his teeth. ‘It was Mikey in the garage. It was Mikey who hit me.’
It was like arguing with a child who thought the more times you repeated something the truer it became. All out of patience Liz snapped, ‘You can’t possibly know that. He was masked and muffled up from head to toe. Ash Kumani saw him for longer than you did, and knows him just about as well, and he wasn’t sure if it was Mikey or not. Even you can be wrong, Donovan. Even you.’
‘’Course I can,’ he shot back. ‘But I’ve no reason to lie, and Mikey has.’
‘And Mrs Taylor?’
‘If I can be wrong, I’m damn sure she can.’
‘Then who attacked Mikey? If there was no second man scared of being fingered?’
Donovan had his mouth open to answer but no answer came. ‘I don’t know. What was he doing that night? Maybe he was up to no good again. Maybe this time it misfired.’
Liz kept one eye on the road and regarded him askance with the other. ‘You mean, he tried to mug one of the Chicago White Sox?’
He had the grace to admit it was improbable. He even found himself wondering if she could be right, if he’d done Mikey an injustice. But not for long. ‘So why did Roly have everyone out before dawn on Monday if it wasn’t Mikey’s gun they were looking for? And how did he know where to look?’
That was a valid point. If Billy Dunne was telling the truth the gun had to be Mikey’s. ‘Then suppose there were two of them, but they were in it together. Mikey did the driving, his friend did the hold-up. When one got caught and the other got away they fell out and the friend shut him up. Does that work?’
‘No,’ said Donovan stubbornly. ‘If Mikey was only the driver, why wasn’t he in the van when I took the keys? He couldn’t have been that desperate for a leak.’
That was true too. It would also take a fairly optimistic armed robber to hold up a garage and then start looking for a getaway vehicle. ‘We haven’t got it right yet, have we?’ sighed Liz. ‘But there must be a connection between the robbery and the assault. Let’s try and work it backwards: if we knew what happened to Mikey at Cornmarket maybe we’d understand more about the robbery.’
‘Who do we ask?’
‘You could try Desmond and his mates again. They might remember some more detail by now. Specifically, they might remember hearing a car. It’s a fair step from town, so if he was on foot he probably is local.’
‘OK. And you?’
‘I’ll talk to Roly again, see if he’ll put me on to Mikey’s friends. He won’t be keen, but with Mikey on life support maybe he’ll force himself. If I can find out who Mikey was with that evening, maybe I can find out what he was doing, at Cornmarket. Was he taken there, did he go there to meet someone, is it where his mates hang out when there’s nothing better to do? But it was a cold night, they weren’t sitting on a wall passing reefers and dirty pictures. He must have had some reason to be there at midnight.’
Donovan kept a diplomatic silence. Even before he had the dog he often went out at night to wander through the silent dereliction along the canal. But Mikey had never struck him as the sort of man who needed solitude to still the turbulence of mind and breast stirred up by a hard day’s work.
It was after one. ‘Drop me off at home, will you,’ said Donovan, ‘I’ll take Brian for a run.’
As always, Liz did a mental double-take before the image of the dog that was definitely not a pit bull terrier supplanted that of her husband in her mind. ‘Er – why do you call him Brian?’
‘Brian Boru,’ said Donovan, ‘High King of Ireland.’
That explained it. Liz smiled. ‘I think mine’s named after the snail in The Magic Roundabout.’
Chapter Three
Liz returned to the house in George Street. Again it was Thelma who answered the door. She looked worn out. Two months ago she was in front of the Magistrates for handling stolen goods – ‘It’s me age, Your Worships, me eyes are going. When the constable told me it was a Cartier watch and the jewels were real, of course I knew then nobody got it with petrol coupons.’ The way she looked now, the least sentimental of Crown Prosecutors would be embarrassed about proceeding against her.
She was seventy-one – Liz knew from the charge sheets. Two months ago she was a spritely energetic seventy-one, the sort of old lady whose wrinkled skin and thinning hair hid a frame of iron and a heart like a steam hammer. As long as there was fuel for the fire – in her case a nice bit of cheque fraud or demanding with menaces – it would keep thumping long after nobler hearts had given up the ghost.
But the business with Mikey had taken all her reserves, left her grey, shrunken and frail. When she saw who was at the door she turned away, leaving it open, and returned to her chair and the sort of daytime television she’d always been too busy scheming to watch before.
‘Is there any news?’ asked Liz.
Without looking round Thelma shook her head. ‘No change. They say it’s still early days but I don’t know. He doesn’t look to me like there’s anyone at home.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Liz, and meant it. ‘How’s Roly bearing up?’
‘I haven’t seen much of him,’ said Thelma. ‘He just comes home to change his clothes. I don’t think he’s eaten properly since it happened.’ She glanced over her shoulder. ‘He’s at the hospital now, if you’re wanting him.’
‘I’ll tell you what I really want. I want the bastard who did this.’ It was a token of the respect she enjoyed in this least law-abiding of homes that Thelma accepted she meant that too. ‘I’m going to need some help with Mikey’s movements on Friday night.’
Thelma might be drained, sapped by worry and lack of sleep until she hardly knew what time of day it was, but while there was breath left in her she wasn’t going to miss the subtext to that. The eye was still shrew-sharp. ‘You want me to tell you who he was with? What they were doing?’
Liz took a chair and leaned close. ‘I’m investigating an attempted murder, I’m not interested in any little sidelines Mikey and his mates were pursuing. Even if I was, even if Mikey was up to no good, it could be a long time before I could charge him. That’s not what I’m after.’
At length Thelma looked up again from the television. ‘What do you want from me?’
Liz breathed softly. ‘I need to know who he was with that evening, where they went, what time they split up. I need names.’ She knew that, in The Jubilee, people would part with blood and even a minor extremity before they’d part with names.
For a moment it seemed she’d asked too much. ‘I’m not giving you names!’ exclaimed the old woman, horrified.
Disappointed, Liz straightened up. ‘Then—?’
‘But I’ll talk to his friends myself. If any of them was with him, and if they’re prepared to tell you about it, they’ll contact you.’
‘And if they aren’t prepared to talk about it?’
‘Well,’ said Thelma pensively, ‘I can’t be sure but I think probably Roly will want them to reconsider.’
So there were two ways Liz might discover who Mikey spent his last evening with: if they called her, or if they turned up in the same ward at Castle General.
‘Thanks, Thelma.’ She touched the older woman’s arm. It felt like a dry stick through her cardigan. ‘Tell Roly I’m doing my best.’
She almost made it out of the house without the thing she’d been waiting for coming up. But Thelma followed her into the hall. ‘I heard Mr Donovan was there when Mikey was found.’
Liz wasn’t going to lie, and she thought it would do more harm than good to hedge round it. ‘That’s right. He was out walking that dog of his. It was the dog that found him.’
