Broken Lines

by Jo Bannister

  ‘After everything that had happened, it wasn’t such a surprise. I was where I needed to be, people who knew what this meant were looking after me. But oh! the wrench of it. It wasn’t a pregnancy, it was a baby. It was my baby, the only baby I ever conceived, the only chance of a baby I’d ever have, and my body was pushing it out as if it didn’t want it. I’d spent ten years fighting for that baby, and now my womb was throwing it away. I wanted to stab myself. I thought, maybe if I stabbed myself it would give my body something else to worry about and it would leave my baby alone. If I’d had something to do it with I would have.

  ‘And then it was too late. It was all over. I felt – empty. As if my insides had been ripped out. They tidied me up, gave me a sedative. They said, All right, we’d been unlucky, but it was a good sign that I’d been able to conceive, maybe next time …’ She barked a silent, mirthless laugh. ‘Next time? This one took ten years. Now I’m thirty-eight, I don’t have a husband any more, and even if they’d give me AID I couldn’t afford it on my own. This was my one chance, my last chance. And it was gone because some little thug ran me off the road, and some stupid ignorant policeman thought his trashy life was worth more than my baby’s!’

  Liz had nothing to say to her. She’d known there had to be an explanation, something she was missing, something to explain that excess of anger, and this was it. God knew it was enough.

  At last she stood up and touched Pat Taylor’s hand. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I do understand. It wasn’t Donovan’s fault, but I understand why you felt it was. I’ll leave now. Call me if there’s anything I can do; otherwise I won’t bother you again.’

  ‘And’ – Mrs Taylor forced a thin smile – ‘bearing false witness against a police officer?’

  Liz shrugged. ‘He’s got more than that to worry about right now. Forget it, it’s history. You were under a terrible strain and you made a mistake. It’s cleared up now.’

  Heading back into town she found a phrase rattling round in her head. ‘His line was broken…’ Shakespeare, the Bible? – most expressions you’d heard and couldn’t place were one or the other. Until now it hadn’t meant anything to her: she’d understood the meaning, given no thought to the import. Now the enormity of it bore in on her. The line of Clifford and Patricia Taylor was broken. A thousand generations had gone into making each of them; but their line ended here, their last chance stolen along with Ash Kumani’s weekend takings.

  The thief’s line had ended too. The line of Roly Dickens would go on, he had more than enough children and grandchildren to ensure it, but the unique combination of DNA that was Mikey Dickens would not now contribute to the next generation. His line was broken.

  As, for that matter, were the lines of Brian and Elizabeth Graham. To be sure, they’d had more choice in the matter than either Pat Taylor or Mikey Dickens, but the magnitude of the choice momentarily troubled her. There were no Graham children, and no Ward children either: Brian had had a sister who died of leukaemia in adolescence, Liz was an only child. Four lines – those of her parents and those of his – had combined in the hope of succession and had been disappointed.

  Common sense kicked in. There was nothing so extraordinary about any one of them that their genes should have passed down undiluted. And there were plenty of children in the world, and the way sex worked there could be no shortage of those sporting ancestral Ward and Graham genes. They had heirs, and as much stake in the future as anyone else. They’d chosen – she’d chosen – to eat the cake, she couldn’t now complain that the cupboard was bare.

  But she could still find it in her to envy Frank Shapiro his three. In them his immortality was secure; through them he was made someone of historical account, and would have been if he’d achieved nothing more. He would live in them, and in their children, long after the small accomplishments of DI Graham were forgotten.

  She was getting maudlin. There was another saying: Take what you want, says God, and pay for it. Nothing was for nothing; at least, nothing worth having. She still considered what she’d chosen was worth what she’d given up.

  Shapiro was back in his office. She knew by his face that there was no news. She told him where she’d been. ‘There was no passenger in the van. Pat Taylor made that up, to avenge herself on Donovan.’ She told him why. ‘Oh, and Jade Holloway’s volunteered to give her fingerprints. Which means, of course, it wasn’t her that handled the baseball bat. Frank, I think we’re right back where we started. What do we do next?’

  ‘I don’t know what to do.’ Liz wasn’t sure but it might have been the first time she’d heard him admit defeat. ‘We’ve searched the hospital, we’ve got people looking for Roly’s van, I even got his mum to say she’d call if she hears anything. I don’t know what else we can do.’ He looked old; old and tired.

  And for the first time Liz felt that maybe she could do something he couldn’t. She sat down, taking determination deep into her lungs. ‘If we can get at who did what Roly Dickens is blaming Donovan fot, maybe we won’t have to find them – maybe Roly’ll give it up. He’ll have no reason to hurt Donovan once he knows.’

  Shapiro’s eyes were dull. ‘If we can get at it. If it isn’t already too late.’

  ‘Don’t think like that,’ Liz said fiercely. ‘As far as we know there’s still everything to play for. Start thinking it’s a lost cause and we’ll get careless, we’ll miss things. I can’t guarantee we’ll find him if we keep looking, but I’m damn sure we won’t if we don’t. Don’t you dare give up on Donovan! He wouldn’t give up on you.’

  One of the few drawbacks to being a Detective Superintendent was that people didn’t often speak to you like that. Only someone who’d known Frank Shapiro as well and as long as Liz would have done so now; but it was what he needed. He shook himself like a Labrador emerging from a pond. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry, I just – lost it for a moment. All right. Nobody’s giving up on anybody. Maybe we need to split our resources. You concentrate on who attacked Mikey. Take who you need and what you need to do it. I’ll stay with the search; I can use uniforms for that. We need a break – desperately, and soon, but we only need one. Don’t tell me we haven’t earned that much.’

  Liz knew it didn’t work like that but she wasn’t going to say so. ‘Damn right we have.’

  ‘Then let’s get out there and collect’

  Back in her own office, though, she let the optimism slip. Concentrate on who beat Mikey? She’d been doing that since it happened! She had no new ideas to explore, no leads to pursue. Between them, she and Donovan had interviewed everyone they could think of who might know something about the episode. All their questions had been answered, and if the answers were less than helpful that was because they weren’t asking the right questions of the right people. Somebody knew what happened to Mikey, but Liz had no idea who; and if Donovan had had a suspect he wouldn’t have kept it a secret while the evidence against him mounted until even his colleagues doubted him.

  She couldn’t think of anyone else she could talk to, or any new questions she could put to those they’d already seen. Sitting at her desk, with the statements they’d taken and various notes and jottings she’d made ranged in front of her, the bustle of the building coming to her as a rumour through the shut door, the awareness grew upon her that that might mean something. Beyond the perennial, frightening possibility that she was missing something and someone was going to get hurt because of it.

  What it might mean was that all the pieces were already on the table. If she’d searched under the rug and round the back of the cushions and found nothing, maybe that meant all the bits of the jigsaw were there in front of her – she just wasn’t recognizing their significance.

  The facts were all here. There was something in one of the statements that they were misinterpreting. Something Vinnie had said; something Desmond Jannery had said; perhaps something Mikey himself had said. He told Vinnie he was going to meet Donovan. Either he was lying, or telling the truth, or had himself been m
isled.

  No. Actually, he didn’t say he was going to meet Donovan. If Liz remembered correctly – she flicked through her notes to confirm it – he said he was going to meet The Filth, and he hoped it would be as entertaining as last time. What else could that mean? Another policeman?

  A policewoman?

  She felt a little quiver of recognition, like a blip on a Geiger counter. They hadn’t understood why Mikey would risk meeting Donovan. But maybe he went to meet someone who was less likely to lose her temper and would do less damage if she did. They knew a woman was involved: what if she’d set up this meeting not in Donovan’s name but in Liz’s? Mikey would have met DI Graham at Cornmarket at midnight without a thought for his safety. She wasn’t going to beat him up, and she wasn’t going to arrest him, not that way. All she could have in mind was to ask him to give Donovan a break. He’d have met her just for the pleasure of saying No.

  ‘All right,’ Liz whispered to herself.

  She fanned the papers out again, went over the statements they’d taken. The answer was in here somewhere, if only she could recognize it.

  Or just maybe it wasn’t. Some of the statements were missing. The dossers Donovan had talked to immediately before the baseball bat turned up: there was no record of what they’d said. Of course, right about then the excrement met the air-conditioning. He’d gone back to Queen’s Street, Shapiro had taken him to the interview room and he’d left there on suspension. Even if there’d been time, committing the thoughts of a bunch of winos to paper would not have been a high priority when Donovan was trying to explain his fingerprints on a weapon of murderous attack.

  So the only place a record of those interviews currently existed, apart from Donovan’s head, wherever and in whatever condition that might be, was his pocket-book. If he’d taken it with him its contents were no more accessible. But he might not have done. Strictly speaking, Shapiro should have asked for it before sending him home.

  Liz tapped his door. ‘Frank, when you sent Donovan home, did you keep his pocket-book?’

  ‘Mm.’ Shapiro had felt badly about that but it was good procedure, it was on the list of things he wasn’t going to do differently for Donovan. He’d dropped it into his desk drawer and not looked at it since. ‘Here.’

  Liz studied it, trying to read the scrawl. Alongside what he’d written was a sketch of Cornmarket tagged with the positions of the various parties. Mikey, Desmond, someone called Leslie back at the fire, someone called Wicksy and a woman called Sophie. Also a car located in the middle of the canal, a snake, and a circular feature he’d labelled UFO. Liz could make nothing of it. ‘I think he’s lost his marbles.’

  ‘Let me see.’ Shapiro concentrated on the spiky, angular writing. He found Sophie’s snake, and Wicksy’s UFO, and the car which Leslie insisted had driven in from The Levels despite the inconvenient absence of a road. He gave a disappointed sniff. ‘It’s nonsense. Of course it’s nonsense: they’re winos, they’re describing their bad dreams.’

  But Liz still thought there was something important here. She reread the notes, looked again at the scribbled diagram. And very slowly she began to see a grain of sense in it.

  ‘Something happened,’ she said. ‘Something unusual. They heard and saw something that isn’t a regular feature of the Cornmarket night-life. One of them thought it was a car, one of them thought it was a spaceship and one of them thought it was a snake. But they all put it in the same place at more or less the same time – by the canal round about midnight.’

  His interest captured, Shapiro came round the desk and peered over her shoulder. ‘By the canal? Or on it?’

  Liz didn’t understand. ‘On it?’

  Shapiro was nodding. There was a light in his eye that said he’d got ahead of her. ‘What sounds like a car, looks like a snake, contains men from outer space and travels on water?’

  ‘A boat?’ At least it met some of the criteria.

  ‘Of course a boat,’ said Shapiro. ‘It had to be. He didn’t come up Brick Lane or by the towpath, by car or on foot. He came by the canal. Donovan didn’t see him because he never passed Tara: he came in from The Levels. If he’d come up from town Donovan would have heard the engine, whether he was at home or already on the towpath. It wasn’t a car Leslie heard, it was a motorboat.’

  ‘And the spaceship? The snake?’

  ‘It was dark, yes? Just a bit of moonlight? A motorboat leaves a wake.’

  Finally Liz caught up. ‘And the wake reflected the moonlight, and followed the boat down the canal like a silver snake!’

  ‘About the UFO, I’m not sure,’ admitted Shapiro.

  Liz imagined the scene. ‘This is someone who owns his own boat. You couldn’t hire one at midnight in the middle of winter, and anyone you tried to borrow it from would ask too many questions. So he’s a canal buff. He also owns the rest of the gear – waterproofs, a life-vest, maybe a sou’wester. If you bumped into somebody shaped like the Michelin man wearing oilskins in the middle of the night at Cornmarket, particularly if you’d been knocking back the meths, you’d think the Martians had landed!’

  Shapiro was remembering something. ‘There was a motorboat on the canal when Donovan found the bat. He said that’s why he didn’t immediately spot what the dog was playing with – he was watching the boat instead.’

  Liz let out a silent whistle. ‘He said he was being framed. I didn’t really believe it. But he was right, wasn’t he? It was no accident he found the bat when he did – whoever used it on Mikey brought it back a few days later, put it where Donovan would find it and stayed around until he did.’

  Shapiro was shaking his head in wonder. ‘I never considered the canal as a way of getting about. But that’s what the damn thing was built for! You can still get almost anywhere in the country by inland waterway.’

  ‘Like where?’ said Liz. There was an odd tone in her voice. ‘Like where exactly?’

  They unpinned the map from his wall, spread it on his desk. The Castle Canal was a blue line trailing away eastward through The Levels towards the greater expanse of Cambridgeshire and the fens.

  Long before that, though, it looped round by Chevening.

  Chapter Four

  Donovan felt himself weakening. He’d been hit harder, and hurt more, by men who manipulated pain as if it were an art form; but none of them had had as much reason to hate him as Roly Dickens, and none had had the same patience. The sheer repetition of that ham-bone fist arriving out of the dark was taking its toll. He felt his brain slowing and growing woolly. He was getting punch-drunk. If he couldn’t talk his way out of this with all his wits about him, he hadn’t much chance with them dripping out of his ear.

  Roly mightn’t like his answers but at least they were still coherent: Donovan wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take before he started rambling on about beach holidays in Ballycastle and the price of fish. You could bounce a man’s brain off the inside of his skull only so many times before the damage became permanent. Maybe that was what Roly intended. Maybe that was the only fitting revenge: to put the man he blamed for his son’s coma into an adjacent bed in ICU, plugged into the same machines, kept alive by the same tubes.

  He found he’d been thinking about that while Roly was waiting for an answer. But Roly didn’t hit him again; instead he shook his shoulder. His voice came through the darkness and the fog with an incongruous note of concern. ‘Mr Donovan, are you all right?’

  Donovan gave a frail, breathless laugh. ‘Since you ask, Roly, no. Somebody’s using my head as a punchbag.’

  Roly peered closely at the policeman’s face. There wasn’t much light in here, he’d blindfolded Donovan more for psychological effect than because there was anything he wanted to keep secret. But from close up he could see the damage he’d done, and he was surprised because he didn’t remember hitting Donovan that many times. He sat back, breathing heavily – with exasperation, and because he didn’t often take this much exercise. ‘If you’d just tell me the truth
—!’ he complained.

  ‘I am, Roly,’ Donovan groaned. ‘You’re just not hearing it.’

  ‘But you’re making no sense!’

  ‘That’s my fault?’ He thought for a moment. ‘Listen, Roly. Go to the library if you want to read about crimes that make perfect sense. The motive’s convincing, the timing’s spot on, and when the criminal’s nailed in the last chapter you knew it was him all along. But Roly – and I’m surprised at having to tell you this – the real thing isn’t like that. People get knifed over a packet of crisps. If you’re looking for sense you’re going to be disappointed. Settle for the facts. And try to recognize them when you hear them.’

  There was a pensive silence. Donovan didn’t know if Roly was thinking or lining up another swing at the punchbag.

  ‘You want me to believe that you were angry at Mikey, you threatened him, you were there when he was found and your prints were on the weapon he was beaten with, but it wasn’t you beat him up?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Donovan heavily. ‘That’s exactly what I want you to believe.’

  ‘But you can’t prove it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you’re being framed, but you don’t know who by?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And even Mr Shapiro isn’t prepared to take your word for it?’

  Donovan would have given anything to be able to say that, however bad it looked, his superintendent continued to have faith in him. A ragged breath rasped in his teeth. ‘No.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Donovan,’ Roly said severely, ‘but Cushy Carnahan would convict you on evidence like that.’

  Donovan chuckled, stopped when it started getting away from him. The controls were beginning to slip. Partly it was exhaustion and partly it was fear, but some of it was concussion and that was only going to get worse. At least in the short term; maybe in the long term too.

  He was worrying about the long term? When any minute Roly would decide that the reason Donovan’s story made no sense was that he was lying in his teeth? ‘I dare say he would,’ he slurred. ‘But I don’t think he’d tie me up and beat me to death because of it.’