Broken Lines

by Jo Bannister

  Thelma nodded and said nothing more. Liz left wondering if she’d doused a fire or poured petrol on it.

  Donovan put off visiting Desmond Jannery and his dosser friends until first thing Tuesday morning. Afternoons they were away begging; by evening they were mostly drunk.

  Trying to get a coherent picture of their movements the night Mikey came to grief was like juggling with mercury. Their accounts varied so wildly, from person to person and from one telling to the next, that if he hadn’t seen them there himself Donovan would have thought they were curled up in a Salvation Army hostel at the relevant time and were making the whole thing up.

  Desmond had the clearest recollection. He remembered seeing the dog, following it and finding the injured boy among the rubble of the broken walls. He remembered seeing Donovan there. He didn’t remember, as a woman called Sophie did, a giant silver snake slithering in from The Levels. He hadn’t noticed the UFO which landed near the abandoned railway carriages or the space-suited alien who’d travelled from a world beyond the orbit of Pluto for the purpose of appearing to a man called Wicksy.

  But though he thought about it again, he also hadn’t seen a car or a man wandering around Cornmarket with a baseball bat. He hadn’t even seen Mikey earlier on, when he was still vertical.

  The Scenes of Crime Officer had confirmed, from the blood spatter pattern on the brickwork, that the attack took place where Mikey was found so either he met his attacker there or they went there together. It seemed likely that some sort of conversation or argument passed between them before Mikey succumbed to the assault. But no one heard anything. Desmond and Sophie, and probably also Wicksy unless he was behind Venus at the critical moment, were dozing round their fire only a hundred metres away while somebody hammered a teenage boy into the dirt, and he couldn’t have had more privacy if he’d jumped Mikey in thick fog in the middle of The Levels. Even now they’d got over the excitement, and were neither too drunk nor too sober to make sense, the closest Donovan had to witnesses seemed to have heard and seen nothing at all.

  ‘I heard a car.’

  Donovan started at the voice close behind him. He’d thought there were just the four of them. He’d taken the black heap at the end of the settee for a bin bag. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Leslie.’

  Donovan didn’t think he’d forgotten but he checked his notes just in case. ‘You were here Friday night? You didn’t make a statement.’

  ‘I slept through it,’ said Leslie regretfully. ‘Finding him, the police cars, the ambulance – the lot.’

  ‘And the spaceship?’ asked Wicksy, appalled.

  ‘The lot,’ Leslie said.

  Donovan looked doubtful. ‘Then, when did you hear the car?’

  ‘Before I went to sleep,’ Leslie said contemptuously. ‘Of course.’

  Of course. ‘Which would have been about when?’

  ‘Five to twelve,’ said Leslie confidently. ‘I listen to the midnight news on my transistor, then I go to sleep. I heard the car just before the news came on.’

  ‘This was Friday night-Saturday morning?’

  ‘Every night,’ said Leslie firmly.

  ‘So, going up to twelve on Friday night you heard a car.’ Donovan wasn’t convinced but he was so desperate for someone to know something he’d have followed it up if Grandma Walsh had seen it in the tea-leaves. ‘Driving through or did it stop?’

  ‘It stopped. It came from that direction and stopped just about there.’ The little man was pointing confidently.

  Donovan let go of the breath he was holding in a weary sigh. ‘Yeah. Right, Leslie, I’ll bear that in mind.’ There was no car. There was no road for it to have come up. He was pointing at the canal.

  Demoralized, Donovan walked home along the towpath with Brian bounding ahead of him. He almost hoped someone would speak to him for the pleasure of snarling back; but he saw only a couple of kids fishing off the quay and someone messing about in a boat off the James Brindley’s stern. Donovan didn’t mind talking to people with boats, but as he looked to see who it was the outboard engine caught and it chugged away, towing a silver wake eastward up the canal.

  Brian had found a stick. Though he was definitely not a pit bull terrier, there wasn’t much Golden Retriever in him either. Mostly it was bloody-mindedness that made him fetch: however often Donovan could throw something away Brian could bring it back, and the crosser Donovan got the more the satisfaction the dog got out of it. Once, in exasperation, Donovan tried to end the game by lobbing it in the canal. He spent the rest of the evening in the close confines of Tara’s saloon with a stinking wet dog smirking at him over a slimy stick.

  The stick looked like something the kids might have been playing with but nobody seemed to want it back. Donovan didn’t want it either. He threw it away. Brian brought it back. He threw it away again; Brian brought it back. He went to throw it away again—

  An invisible mule kicked him hard under the heart, and his jaw dropped and he just stood holding the thing, his long fingers wrapped around a grip cobbled out of electrical tape, his eyes caught, as if on a nail, by the splintered and grimy end, bruised by fresh fang-marks, stained with something like tar.

  When he finally got a measure of control over himself, oblivious to the dog’s requests which were fast turning to threats, he whispered, ‘Oh shit.’

  Even the preliminary tests took a little while. But knowing what they would reveal eased the tension. Mikey Dickens’s blood at one end of the stave, Donovan’s fingerprints at the other.

  This time they talked in the interview room. It might have been a matter of form – Shapiro was determined to do nothing that smacked of favouritism, if he had to mill Donovan down to a fine grey powder to prove that all avenues had been explored he would do it – but then again, it might not. Nothing in the superintendent’s manner suggested this wasn’t for real.

  ‘You didn’t see it before the dog brought it to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you don’t know where he found it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Could he have brought it all the way from Cornmarket?’

  ‘No. I’d have seen if he had.’

  ‘So he picked it up on the towpath. When was the last time you noticed he didn’t have it?’

  Donovan gave a giant shrug. ‘Jesus, I don’t know! You don’t, do you – you don’t notice that somebody hasn’t got something. But we must have been pretty well back at the boat: if he’d found it much earlier he’d have wanted it throwing.’

  Shapiro nodded, expressionless. ‘So you’re telling me this weapon that was used to beat Mikey Dickens within an inch of his life was lying round in the immediate vicinity of your boat.’

  Donovan raked thin fingers through his hair. It needed cutting again. It always needed cutting. ‘I suppose it must have been. But if you want to know how it got there, I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Could it have been there since Friday night?’

  ‘How would I know? I suppose so. I suppose whoever hit Mikey came back up the towpath and threw it away there.’

  ‘You’ve had Brian out since then, though. Wouldn’t he have found it before if it was there?’

  ‘I expect so. Yes.’

  ‘So, having made his getaway, with the weapon either in his possession or secreted somewhere we couldn’t find it despite an extensive search, the assailant came back to move it to where it would be found. And not just by anyone: by the detective most closely involved in the case.’

  ‘Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?’ admitted Donovan. ‘But yes, that has to be what happened.’

  Shapiro waited for him to elaborate. When he didn’t the superintendent gave a little grimace. ‘What do you suppose it is? Apart from the thing that beat Mikey’s head in?’

  ‘A baseball bat?’

  ‘You thought it would be a baseball bat, didn’t you? Why – is there a lot of baseball played round here?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘Then why assu
me that’s what was used? Not a pickaxe handle, that you can buy in any hardware shop, or a bit of two-by-four, but a baseball bat?’

  ‘Because that’s what they use back home!’ exclaimed Donovan. ‘There’s only one baseball team in the Six Counties, but they sell hundreds of the bloody things every year. It’s the ideal tool for the job. After all, with one minor difference, it’s what a baseball bat was designed to do.’

  ‘What difference?’

  Donovan sniffed. ‘The ball’s a bit smaller than a man’s head.’

  Shapiro said nothing for a few moments. Donovan shuffled under his gaze.

  ‘If you were using it to play baseball, or beat a man’s head in, you’d hold it by the narrow end. Where the tape was,’ the superintendent said then. ‘If you were throwing it for a dog, though, it wouldn’t much matter how you held it. Odd, then, that your prints ended up in the same place.’

  Donovan was worried enough to start fighting back. ‘Yeah, isn’t that odd? The only part of a beat-up old bat that’s smooth enough to carry a print, and it ends up carrying mine. You’d almost think that was planned, wouldn’t you? You’d almost think someone deliberately wound some new electrical tape round this crappy old bat specifically so that whoever handled it next would leave their prints on it. That he then left the thing where the dog could hardly miss it in the sure expectation that I’d have it in my hands before it occurred to me what it was. As frames go it’s not exactly sophisticated, is it?’

  Shapiro cocked an eyebrow. ‘Sophisticated enough that you can’t prove that’s what happened.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be much point framing me if I could,’ grated Donovan.

  ‘All right.’ He tried to give even crooks a fair hearing, he wasn’t going to deny the same courtesy to his sergeant. ‘Why you? Just because you and Mikey were involved in a rather public battle of wits and the last thing you said to him, before witnesses, could have been a threat? But Mikey must have other enemies, any one of whom would be an easier target – any one of whom we’d have been happy to charge. So why you? Why any policeman? Why was he so determined it should be you that he held on to a weapon he should have got rid of and four days later returned to the scene of the crime in order to leave it where your dog would find it? Who hates you that much, Donovan?’

  Donovan glowered at him. ‘How long have you got?’

  Frank Shapiro was a man with a healthy respect for instinct. It was no substitute for evidence, but it had helped too often in the search for evidence for him to ignore a good gut feeling. His instinct said Donovan didn’t do this. He could have done. He was in the right area at the right time; he had a motive, he had a temper, and now the weapon had his prints on it. Shapiro couldn’t ignore all that. But he felt Donovan was telling the truth, that he was being set up for this. Why and by whom were questions to which, as yet, he had no answer.

  The alternative was to believe Donovan capable of premeditated and sustained brutality. If Mikey had stormed into Queen’s Street with a black eye Shapiro just might have believed it. There was a fury in Donovan, the fact that he kept it under strict control didn’t preclude the possibility that one day, with enough provocation, it could momentarily slip its leash. But this wasn’t a momentary loss of temper. This was deliberate, cold-blooded even. And after doing it he’d have had to do the rest – lie, lay this false trail and then feign bewilderment. None of it was impossible. But if he’d done all that then Donovan wasn’t the man Shapiro had taken him for.

  And that, in part, was the problem. Shapiro had a lot invested in Donovan’s innocence. Eight years of trust, of commitment, of mutual reliance. Eight years of standing up for him when it would have been easier to go along with the general view that Donovan was a grenade with the pin out. If he’d been wrong about that he’d been badly wrong and Mikey Dickens had paid the price.

  What concerned Shapiro now was the danger of wanting to believe in Donovan too much.

  He breathed steadily for a moment, formulating what he wanted to say. ‘All right, Sergeant, this is the situation. If you were anybody else and the best defence you could offer was that somebody was framing you, I’d be deeply sceptical but I wouldn’t be ready to arrest you. I’d ask you to remain available for further interviews, and I’d show you out.

  ‘There are two differences between you and everyone else. One is that we’ve known each other a long time and I don’t think this is your style. The other is that you’re a police officer. Anyone else would be entitled to the benefit of any doubt going, and to get on with his plumbing or road mending or door-to-door brush selling until I could make a case against him.

  ‘But a policeman under suspicion of a serious offence can’t go on as if nothing has happened. You know that, we all do. So I’m sending you home. Don’t take it personally: with luck well sort it out by the weekend, in which case it was just a few days’extra holiday, nothing more. No, don’t argue, Donovan,’ he said quickly, seeing the resentment rising in the younger man’s face, ‘there’s no alternative. I have to ask for your Warrant card.’

  ‘You believe it!’ exclaimed Donovan, and his eyes were angry and incredulous. ‘Somebody who can’t decide if he hates me or Mikey most tried to kill him and frame me, and you believe it.’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ snapped Shapiro, exasperated. ‘I most specifically did not say that.’

  ‘Well anyway, you think it’s possible.’

  ‘I didn’t even say that. I said it had to be investigated. I said you were relieved of duty until it was sorted. For you – as for me and for all of us – it isn’t enough just to say you’ve been framed. You have to prove it.

  ‘Go home, Donovan, do some thinking. If you’re being set up, who’s behind it? It has to be someone you know – take the dog for a walk and give it some thought. No,’ he added then, ‘don’t take the dog for a walk. The way your luck’s going he’d probably come back with your signed confession.’

  There were too many years and too many culture differences between them for a common sense of humour. Donovan had to be concentrating to know when Shapiro was making a joke and right now he was too upset. In his eyes there was no acknowledgement that there might be a wry side to this. They were bitter, and hurt, and afraid. His voice was low. ‘You didn’t have to say If. And you could have said We.’ He left the room so quickly it almost looked as if he was running away.

  Which meant that by the time Shapiro had worked out the meaning of that cryptic farewell it was too late to explain or apologize. He’d meant, If it was a set-up; and We have to prove it.

  His heart blazing sulphurously within him, ignoring everyone he met on the stairs and in the corridor, Donovan stalked out to the yard and punched life into his motorbike. He had no idea where he was going as he swung out through the gate, only that he was going to set a land speed record for getting there.

  Chapter Four

  Liz took an early lunch on Tuesday and went home in the hope that Brian would have done the same. Her heart lifted at the sight of his car in the drive.

  People who reckoned to know about men and women were puzzled by the success of their marriage. They had nothing in common. Liz was an energetic ambitous career-woman who’d already punched through many of the invisible barriers raised between her and where she wanted to be. A few remained, but having proved herself as a Detective Inspector she was now due promotion and a squad of her own. From there, given her ability and strength of purpose, the sky was the limit and no glass ceiling would stop her. Superintendent – ACC – maybe even Chief Constable, depending on how much she wanted it, how hard she worked, where the breaks came. She’d done well already, and would do better.

  Brian was head of Castle High’s art department mainly because he was now the oldest teacher working in it. He had no desire for his own school so saw no point scrambling for a deputy headship: he was happier doing what he did well than overstretching himself with something bigger and expected to stay at this level until he retired. Unless Liz’s job took them
away from Castlemere, in which case he might have to settle for less. That too he could face with equanimity. Equanimity was his middle name.

  He was forty-four now and his hair was going fast; but he was spared the anxiety that his good-looking wife might be drawn to a more attractive man by the knowledge that when they first got together twelve years ago he was already nudging middle-age, his hair was already looking impermanent and the kindest epithet applied to him was usually ‘homely’. If Liz had wanted a handsome, vital, exciting partner she’d never have married him. Brian Graham took considerable consolation from the fact that, unless he became an alcoholic or caught leprosy, time was unlikely to much diminish the Adonis factor in his case.

  They didn’t share the same interests. Liz spent her leisure time riding, kept her mare Polly in the backyard. Brian liked visiting museums and galleries. Liz enjoyed a good steak; Brian was a non-obnoxious vegetarian. Brian liked culture-vulture holidays in Greece; Liz rather fancied white-water rafting. It had to be love: there was nothing else keeping them together.

  ‘Will whatever you’re doing split in half?’ she called as she let herself in.

  ‘’Course it will,’ he replied nobly from the kitchen. ‘A jug of wine, half a spinach rissole and thou – what more could even Omar Khayyam ask?’

  They ate from trays in front of the living-room fire, enjoying the unexpected bonus of one another’s company. When there was a shit-fan interface at Queen’s Street they could go days without sharing a meal.

  ‘Pat Taylor was back at school this morning,’ said Brian, diplomatically ignoring the tomato sauce Liz was wielding so liberally. ‘She says she’s better, but she still looks a bit drawn.’

  ‘An accident knocks the stuffing out of you,’ said Liz. ‘Even when it doesn’t actually, a really close call leaves you feeling desperately mortal. Most of the time that’s something we know at the back of our minds without really acknowledging. I suppose by the time you’ve been bowled down the road by a van hitting you at sixty miles an hour you’re feeling about as mortal as you ever want to. Maybe someone who’s had to be cut out of her car is doing pretty well to be back at work nine days later and only a little drawn.’