A Bleeding of Innocents

by Jo Bannister

  ‘What sort of a car was it?’

  The witness was an elderly man who had been walking his elderly dog as far as the duck-pond. Neither of them was up to running when the shot was fired so they watched while others acted. The man didn’t have his glasses on: all he could say of the car was that it was yellow, and he didn’t see the driver. If the dog saw anything more it wasn’t talking.

  The other thing which they learned, which served to confuse the issue more than it illuminated it, was that Maggie Board wasn’t a nurse. She had a room in the nurses’ home, she worked in the hospital, but she wasn’t a nurse. She was a surgeon.

  ‘What do you make of that?’ asked Shapiro.

  The neat division of effort which Liz’s arrival had made possible, which had come under stress almost immediately with the murder of Kerry Page, had now collapsed entirely. The only way Castlemere police could get through at all was for everyone – CID, uniform, Traffic Branch, and dog handlers – to turn their hands to whatever needed doing most urgently. Liz had not needed to tell Shapiro this: he had gone with her to the scene of the latest outrage as soon as she’d sent David Page home.

  The only one missing was Donovan. Liz thought privately they’d manage well enough without him but Shapiro was disappointed. ‘I thought he’d have been here. He knows the state we’re in. He could have offered to help.’

  ‘Make of what?’ Her head was spinning. She knew from experience that when there had been time to reduce the information they had into a series of reports she would be able to pick up the threads and get a cohesive picture of events and chronology. But just now it was like swimming in a kaleidoscope, words and images exploding at her from all directions. She was sure she should know what Shapiro was talking about but she didn’t.

  ‘Maggie Board wasn’t a nurse,’ he explained patiently. ‘She lived in the nurses’home – she’d taken a spare room while contractors were dealing with damp at her house, apparently. And off duty she looked rather like a nurse – you don’t see many women of her age out jogging in fluorescent track-suits. She could easily have been taken for a nurse, particularly if you weren’t talking to her. But she wasn’t. She was a surgeon.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Liz. ‘Er – so?’

  ‘So,’ he went on, still patiently, ‘did the killer think she was a nurse or did he know who she was? Did he make a mistake or does he hate all medical personnel equally?’

  Liz was sure that it mattered but just for the moment she couldn’t quite see how.

  Shapiro peered into her face with puzzlement turning to concern. ‘Good grief, girl, you’re wrecked! Did you get any sleep last night?’

  She sighed. ‘Not much, no. I’m sorry, Frank, I’ll try and get my act together.’

  He sniffed mournfully. ‘I wish I could afford to send you home. But I can’t. Even the walking dead are indispensable just now. But listen, get back to the station, wash your face, get some coffee, and put your feet up for ten minutes. Then you might be some use to me.’

  She raised a hand helplessly. ‘I can’t leave—’

  ‘Do as you’re told,’ he said firmly. ‘We’re just about finished here anyway. I’ll talk to a couple of people at the hospital, then I’ll be back there myself. You can run a murder enquiry from a pavement for just so long.’

  She accepted the wisdom of what he was saying, still felt she was letting him down. ‘Yes, all right. The coffee: I think maybe I’ll buy a fresh jar on my way in. A big jar.’

  The police station was almost empty. The desk sergeant, the RT operator, a couple of constables to deal with anyone who couldn’t resist having an accident while their colleagues were interviewing people who had seen nothing outside the nurses’home, that was about it. When Liz went upstairs to the CID offices it was like being on the Flying Dutchman.

  She put the kettle on – Shapiro’s secretary was helping to man the switchboard – kicked her shoes off, dropped her forehead on her arms on the desk and shut her eyes for a moment.

  Five minutes later she woke with a start, roused not by a sound but by a smell – the aroma of strong coffee. She blinked round her, looking for an explanation. When she found it she didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Donovan had his back to her and for a moment he didn’t answer. He was pouring boiling water carefully into a mug. Then he put the kettle down and picked up the mug with the same hand. When he passed it to her she saw why. His other hand was in plaster from the knuckles to half-way up his arm. His face looked as if he’d lost an argument with a lamppost.

  His voice was low and his eyes avoided hers. ‘I heard about the incident at the hospital, wondered if I could help.’

  ‘You, Sergeant?’ Liz asked testily. ‘I thought you’d resigned.’

  His head jerked but he didn’t look up. ‘That was – stupid. Petty. I wouldn’t have done it to Alan Clarke and I’d no business doing it to you.’ He gave a little lop-sided shrug. ‘It’s up to you. I gave you my card, keep it if you want.’ His eyes travelled slowly up to meet hers. He looked as weary as she felt. ‘But if you want to get the work out of me before I go, maybe I can be some use. I can man the phones. I can take statements, there’s nothing wrong with my right hand …’ He ran out of things to say and fell silent.

  He handed her the coffee a little as if it were an olive branch. She sipped it speculatively. ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘I got mugged.’ He risked a fractional grin. ‘In a graveyard.’ He told her how he’d spent his day.

  ‘Carney’s doing?’

  ‘Probably McMeekin’s.’

  ‘What do you want to do about it?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing. I asked for it and I got it. His time’ll come. There’s more important things to do first.’

  Liz thought a moment longer before answering. ‘Donovan, get yourself a coffee, sit down, and listen to what I have to say. And listen good because I won’t say it again. I’m tired of you behaving like Tintin the bloody Boy Detective. God knows I need all the help I can get on this investigation, but if I have to wonder whether you’re assisting in the same enquiry or pursuing some vendetta of your own I’d just as soon you stayed at home.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I—’

  ‘I haven’t finished yet,’ Liz interrupted fiercely. ‘It’s this simple, Sergeant. I need to be able to rely on my officers. I expect their loyalty. You took advantage of the fact that I’m new here and don’t know all the background, and you used me to have a go at Carney even though you knew we were putting an important investigation at risk. I won’t tolerate that kind of irresponsibility. I’ve no room on my team for a prima donna.

  ‘Maybe Alan Clarke allowed you a certain leeway. I know Mr Shapiro thinks you’re a good copper. But, Sergeant, your problem is that Alan is dead and you answer to me, not Mr Shapiro. I can use your help, but if you’re going to work for me you have to work with me. I’m not going to let you get on with it and rubber-stamp the results, however sure you are that you’re in the right. I don’t work that way. Unless you’re prepared to fit in with me you’d better take a long leave, starting now.’

  This time he waited until she indicated she was ready to hear him. ‘You’re right, I was out of line.’ He spoke in a low voice. ‘It won’t happen again. I don’t want to go on leave. Tell me what to do: I’ll help out any way I can.’

  She’d been ready for more of a fight. By backing down he left her with nothing more to say. ‘Right. Good.’ As a parting shot she added tersely, ‘But next time you slap your warrant card on my desk I’ll feed it to the pencil-sharpener.’

  After she’d given it back to him she said, ‘You’ve been to the hospital? What’s the damage?’

  ‘A cracked bone in my wrist, cuts and bruises. That’s all.’

  ‘Four of them, you say – with chains?’

  He nodded. ‘Chains.’

  ‘You fought them off?’

  He smiled at that, a rueful smile that w
as much less fierce than his grin. ‘Jesus, no. I was on the ground behind a gravestone with my hands over my head, I couldn’t have fought my way out of a wet paper bag.’

  Liz smiled back. Something – it may have been the beating – seemed to have done him good because he was calmer now than at any time since she’d met him. ‘Then how come you aren’t in a teaching ward in Castle General with medical students walking round you then sitting their finals?’

  Donovan thought for a moment. ‘You know Superman?’

  She stared. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Well, he isn’t a reporter with glasses after all. He’s an antiques dealer with a kid in a pushchair and a First World War pistol in his glove-compartment.’

  It was a pistol in appearance only, incapable of being fired: a legitimate antique. George Swann kept it in his car because he regularly carried valuables and wanted something to scare thieves off that couldn’t be snatched and used against him. The Luger looked deadly serious but was actually no more lethal than anything else with which one man could hit another.

  His first instinct when thugs with helmets and chains came storming over the wall was to get his son to safety. He pushed the buggy at a dead run up the gravel path to the main gate where his car was parked. The stile was no use to a man with a pushchair.

  But when Danny was in the car and he looked back to where the four men had cornered the other against a Victorian marble angel he knew he was the only one close enough to help. If he went looking for a phone they’d be finished before the police could get there. So he grabbed the seventy-five-year-old pistol and ran back as fast as he could. He was not a young man any more, and he was afraid, but he made himself run.

  When he was within thirty yards – close enough for them to see what he was holding, far enough that they wouldn’t jump him before weighing up the risks – he shouted a challenge. The four of them were in a knot at the feet of the angel, arms flailing, boots swinging, but they looked up at his shout, the helmets turning like the heads of giant insects. The scene froze.

  If they’d called his bluff he could have done nothing to save himself. But one of them yelled in a thick local accent, ‘Holy God, he’s got a gun!’ They were running towards the stile and the waiting van while Swann was still wondering what to do if they came at him.

  He felt his outstretched arm begin to shake and put the gun in his pocket before he should drop it. Then he stepped round the angel to see how much damage they’d done.

  Donovan was having trouble getting his face off the ground without using his left arm. Every inch of him hurt. He’d taken a thorough beating and if it had gone on five minutes longer he’d have been pounded to a bloody pulp.

  Swann had helped him to his car and taken him to the hospital. When he’d asked timidly what it was all about and Donovan said he was a policeman, the Castlemere Superman had turned the wrong way up a one-way street.

  Chapter Two

  Donovan’s return put new life into Liz. Partly it was an extra pair of hands – well, hand – at a time when it was most needed. Partly it was knowing that, exhausted as she felt, she couldn’t possibly look as bad as he did. And partly it was because he represented a small success, the only problem she had resolved satisfactorily since coming here. Three days ago she was a bright confident detective inspector from Headquarters sent to hold the fort while DCI Shapiro discovered what happened behind the gasworks. Now they had not one body but three, at least two killers on the loose – one possibly a drunk driver, the other a psychopath with a nurse fetish – and Liz felt she’d gone five rounds with Frank Bruno. But she’d got Donovan back on the rails, at least for now.

  Returning from the hospital and seeing the distinctive figure stooped over a phone, Shapiro did a double-take. He stuck his head round Liz’s door to see if she knew. ‘Er—?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, almost breezily, ‘all sorted out. He made the coffee.’

  ‘Oh – good,’ said Shapiro doubtfully. ‘That’s all right then. Um – why is his arm in plaster?’

  ‘He was mugged.’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘In the cemetery,’ Liz added.

  ‘R-i-g-h-t,’ said Shapiro, understanding less with every word. ‘So now he’s back at work?’

  ‘It seems to have knocked a bit of sense into him.’

  ‘And he’s – er – he is fit to work, I suppose?’

  ‘I wouldn’t think so,’ said Liz candidly. ‘He looks like death warmed up, but we can’t afford to be picky. I thought he could work here, then if he flakes out it won’t be so obvious.’

  Shapiro nodded. ‘I always said we should encourage women in the police force. The compassionate face of criminal investigation, I called it.’

  ‘You never told me to be compassionate,’ she remembered. ‘You told me I’d have to be as hard as nails.’

  ‘Could have saved my breath, couldn’t I?’

  As he left her office for his own Donovan came in. He’d been gathering vital statistics about the dead woman. ‘She was forty-five, divorced for eleven years, no children, no contact with the ex-husband as far as anyone knows. She’d been at Castle General since then; she trained in London but wanted a change of scene when the marriage broke up. She lived in one of the alms houses in Cottage Row, backing on to the canal.’ He glanced up from his notebook. ‘Sorry, you wouldn’t know. Midway between the castle and the basin, off Milne Road. She had a damp problem, the workmen have been in for a fortnight. There were some vacant rooms at the nurses’home so she rented one of those till she could get back in the house. She was older than the rest of them but she was on good terms with the nurses – they’d go for a drink together, sometimes go jogging in the park. Unless you knew her there was nothing much to mark her out from the others. Someone looking for a nurse could have easily picked on her.

  ‘One thing, probably not significant but you never know. She and Kerry Page – Kerry Carson she was then – worked together before Kerry went to the nursing home.’

  Liz shrugged. ‘I suppose any nurse and any doctor are likely to have worked together in the local general hospital at some time.’

  ‘No, it was a bit more than that. Kerry was Staff Nurse in theatre for about a year. Then she switched to geriatrics and left the hospital soon after.’

  ‘So they haven’t worked together for—?’

  ‘About four years,’ said Donovan.

  ‘Any suggestion that they’ve seen one another since?’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘Four years.’ Her face went in thoughtful wrinkles. ‘It can’t be significant now, can it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t think so,’ said Donovan. ‘It might be worth asking Page, and this friend of hers next door – Perrin?’

  ‘When I get the time,’ agreed Liz. ‘Right now I’m up to my eyes with Mrs Board.’

  ‘And Page’s jacket has turned up.’

  ‘Has it?’ That was more interesting – at least, it would have been earlier today when he was still a suspect. ‘Any blood on it?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Where did they find it?’

  ‘In the water-meadows beside the river, half a mile from the car park.’

  ‘How did it get there?’ asked Liz, exasperated. But still it was mostly a rhetorical question.

  Donovan chose not to interpret it as such. ‘Maybe I should go ask him,’ he said, watching her from under hooded lids. ‘I can call on Perrin too, see if either of them knows if Kerry had seen Board recently.’

  Liz frowned. ‘You can’t drive like that. And I can’t spare anyone to take you.’

  ‘I’m not a cripple,’ he exclaimed, ‘I can walk that far!’

  She eyed him with amusement. ‘Now there’s a word I thought had disappeared from the detective’s lexicon. Lord, that takes me back!’

  ‘What?’ His dark face was suspicious.

  ‘I remember when policemen used to walk. And ride bicycles. I bet you didn’t think I was that old, did you?’ He preserved a caref
ul silence. She chuckled. ‘Yes, all right, have a word with them. If Kerry and Mrs Board had kept in touch perhaps we should know.’

  He wasn’t sure what kind of a welcome Page would give him. Their last meeting had been less than amicable. But Page had more on his mind than remembering which police officer had said which beastly thing to him. He greeted Donovan without enthusiasm but without anger either. Like all of them he seemed more tired than anything else.

  ‘We found your jacket,’ Donovan said. ‘I’ll have someone drop it back to you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Page said automatically. ‘Where was it?’

  ‘Down on the riverbank.’

  Page frowned. ‘How—?’ Then he stopped abruptly. ‘Oh.’

  Donovan waited for a moment, then prompted. ‘So how did it get there?’

  ‘I told you. I told someone. We walked by the river, then we went back to the car and sat for a while.’

  ‘And you took your jacket off and dropped it in the grass?’

  Page looked at him. The blue eyes were luminous, caught between tears and laughter. ‘Sergeant, it was a beautiful night. The moon was up, there wasn’t a soul for miles. We walked for a while, then I spread my coat on the ground, and we lay down and made love. OK? I made love to my wife, and afterwards I forgot to pick my coat up. That surprises you?’

  Donovan shook his head. ‘Not even slightly.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Page accepted the compliment with a faint smile. ‘She could make you forget anything – where you were, who you were, that the sun would rise come morning …’ His voice was turning bitter. ‘With her, like that, I was ten feet tall. I’d have gone through fire for her. And half an hour later some mad bastard who knew nothing about my wife except that she was a nurse pointed a shot-gun at her, and I never even yelled at him to stop. I didn’t raise a hand to save her. She might as well have been alone for all the use I was.’