Changelings

by Jo Bannister

  Still Giles thought about it. But in the end he did the only thing he could: he agreed. ‘Ask Inspector Graham if her reclassification is up to date.’

  It was, but Liz wasn’t carrying a weapon and going back to Queen’s Street to check one out would take too long. ‘If he wants my name on the sheet,’ she said grimly, ‘he’ll have to send me something to fire.’

  ‘He wants it as by-the-book as he can make it,’ said Shapiro apologetically. ‘If Wingrave ends up dead, it looks better for an inspector to have done it than a constable.’

  ‘And better a woman than a man. If Jim Stark does it he’s a police thug rampaging out of control. If I do it I’m a plucky heroine protecting a tiny baby.’ Under the irony her voice was taut. She had no illusions about what lay ahead. This was not a man who would be deterred by threats. If he arrived at a scene where she was the authorized firearms officer, she would have to shoot him.

  She could do it. That was what all the hours of training, practice and reclassification were all about: so that in an emergency, to protect lives, she could drive enough hot metal into a man’s body to stop him. She’d done it once before. But it didn’t make it any easier. For some AFOs, once was enough.

  She sniffed. ‘Well. There’ll never be a better candidate, or a better cause.’

  The car paused in Brick Lane long enough to let Liz out, then proceeded on into The Jubilee. ‘If there’s nothing doing at the flat I’ll catch up with you at Sheila’s mum’s,’ she called after it, and Shapiro waved a hand in acknowledgement.

  Stark and WPC Flynn had been at the flat for half an hour but no one had come to bother them. Liz waited with them for perhaps ten minutes, but increasingly came to see it as futile. If Wingrave came here she’d know within thirty seconds anyway, and Stark would deal with the situation until she could return. Probably, though, he would go to the house. With Sheila in custody he’d expect the flat to be empty and Jason at his grandmother’s home.

  ‘OK,’ said Liz, ‘I’m going over to Coronation Row. If he turns up here I can be back in two minutes. Just – don’t take any chances with this man. I’d rather see him dead than either of you.’

  As she walked up Brick Lane someone fell into step beside her. He came from nowhere, suddenly he was at her side, and her first thought was that somehow it was Martin Wingrave and she still didn’t have her firearm.

  But it was Mitchell Tyler. He said, ‘Developments?’ in a tone heavy with implied criticism. As if she should have told him before haring off to Cambridge.

  She spared him an irritated glance. ‘Yes. We know who’s behind it. Hang around: he’s on his way here now.’

  ‘He?’ The left eyebrow arched. ‘So you were right – it wasn’t Sheila Crosbie.’

  Honesty piqued her. ‘Right and wrong. She was involved, but only under duress. He threatened her baby. He’s still threatening the baby.’ She condensed the story into a few brief sentences.

  Tyler heard her out in silence, a massive presence beside her. ‘And do we know yet what samples he took?’

  The hospital kept scrupulous records, they’d provided a full list within ten minutes. ‘Typhoid, legionnaire’s disease and hepatitis.’

  His expression didn’t flicker. But he’d understood well enough. ‘Are your shots up to date?’

  She managed a thin smile. ‘Not against that lot. So be warned: if you do want to be in at the arrest our health authorities may turn you into a pin-cushion for the privilege.’

  ‘Jeez!’ he swore feelingly. ‘I’ve only just got out of the last damned hospital!’ That reminded him. ‘How’s your husband doing?’

  It struck her with a pang like knives that, with everything that had happened in the last couple of hours, she hadn’t had the time to find out. She hadn’t even had the time to wonder. ‘He’ll be all right.’

  ‘That’s something, then.’

  They turned the corner into Jubilee Terrace. Tyler said, ‘At least the stupid girl got one thing right. She put the kid where he’ll be safe.’

  Liz nodded. ‘It was the one thing she always knew: that she had to keep the baby away from his father. Everything she did was geared to that.’ They continued half a dozen paces more, then she slowed and stopped, her face creased in a puzzled frown. ‘Mitchell – I didn’t tell you what we did with the baby.’

  He shook his head, unaware that it mattered. ‘The neighbour did.’

  ‘Neighbour?’

  ‘The flat next to Sheila’s. When I got no answer I raised the neighbour. A black woman, mid-fifties? She told me you’d arrested Sheila and taken the baby to the children’s home.’ He was watching her closely, his gaze like needles. ‘Why?’

  Liz let out a long breath and shut her eyes for half a second. ‘Because if you can know that, so can he. Wingrave. He wouldn’t even have to go there. If he knew the neighbour’s name he could phone her up and ask what was happening. If she’d tell you, a total stranger, she’d tell him.

  ‘He’s not going to the flat, and he’s not going to Coronation Row. He doesn’t have to. He knows where Jason is. He’s on his way to Dunstan House. He’s taking his bugs to a children’s home!’

  ‘Then we need to get there.’

  It was too far to run. ‘I have to tell Frank …’

  ‘I’ll drive, you call him.’

  ‘Drive what?’

  He strode back into Brick Lane. A white van was manoeuvring at the junction. It belonged to a rep who’d taken a wrong turn looking for the River Road. He was about to find out just how wrong.

  Tyler stepped in front of the van and it stopped. There wasn’t much choice: running him down would have been like driving into a brick privy. Nervously, the rep wound down an inch of window. ‘Yes?’

  Tyler smiled, not altogether reassuringly, and stepped round to his door. He yanked it open and hauled the rep outside. ‘You can get it back from the police in an hour. By then it should have saved some lives.’

  He got in behind the wheel; a moment later Liz swallowed her doubts and got in beside him. As they drove off she said reprovingly to the rep, ‘If you’d had your seat-belt on that wouldn’t have happened.’ Then they were gone.

  The Land Rover was being watched. Donovan’s heart sank. With it he wouldn’t have needed a head start: he could have gone through the villagers and any obstacle they were likely to throw in front of him. He’d have done it, too. These were people who’d conspired in one murder and were set upon another. They had too much to lose: they wouldn’t listen to reason. If they caught him they’d stamp him into the dust.

  Nor was it only his own life at hazard. Whatever Dr Chapel said, whatever these people would say if they were asked, Donovan knew that the next thing they felt threatened by would suffer the same fate. Fourteen years ago they had embarked on a road by which there was no returning. When they’d killed two men and still didn’t feel safe, in no time at all their gaze would turn towards the changeling child who could betray them.

  In the circumstances he’d have had no compunction about flattening anyone who stood between him and the road out of here. But there were three of them, and even on a good day, even with surprise on his side, dealing with three men would have been a problem. Today it was a joke. They could have overpowered him and made corn dollies with their other hands.

  No Land Rover then. He backed away cautiously, sliding out of sight round the corner. But he still needed transport. He couldn’t have walked out of here if nobody had been after them.

  Elphie could. Elphie could disappear into the fen and keep herself out of sight until she found help, and a search could pass within a metre of her and never find her if she wanted to stay hidden. But would she do it? She was eight years old; mentally she was less than that. These were people she’d known all her life. If they called to her that the game was over now, they were all going back for tea, she’d pop her head out of the sedges and join them. Frail as he was, Donovan still thought her best chance was with him.

  And maybe she cou
ld help him in return. He squatted down, face to face with her, his voice an urgent whisper. ‘Elphie – the quad bike. The thing your dad tows the trailer with. Where does he keep it?’

  One red sleeve rose as she pointed. Just in time he slapped a hand over her mouth. ‘Quietly!’

  She nodded obligingly enough. ‘The stable.’ He followed her finger to the range of outbuildings across the yard. The stable was the last one and backed on to the first of the bulb fields. God knows what he’d do to next year’s daffodils, but if he could get it out and started they could cover a lot of ground before a pursuit capable of following could be mustered.

  And they’d have to, because the sound of the little engine would be like rifle fire ricocheting between the stone buildings. Their ten minute head start would shrink to the time it takes a strong man to run fifty metres carrying an iron bar.

  Even footsteps could betray them now. They tiptoed across the yard and opened the stable door just enough to slip inside.

  Donovan didn’t do a lot of praying. But he prayed now, and it seemed to work. The key for the bike was on Payne’s ring along with the keys to the Land Rover. He made sure, half-turning it in the ignition; when there was no resistance he went to the back of the bike to disengage the trailer.

  It was heavier than he expected, or he was weaker: the tow bar dropped to the cobbles with a crash that made his heart leap. Surely someone had heard that? — the men at the Land Rover if not those in front of the house. Instinct told him to freeze and listen. Common sense told him to keep moving, that whether or not he’d been heard this was his one chance of escape and the sooner he took it the better.

  ‘Elphie,’ he whispered. ‘Open the stable door, then get up here in front of me.’

  They were ready. It was now or never: he turned the key and punched the starter. In the confines of the stable the engine roared like a B-52 taking off and the chunky machine shot out of the door like a cannonball.

  Elphie shrieked in what Donovan, gob-smacked, recognized as exhilaration. The noise was immaterial now – everyone in East Beckham must have heard the engine fire — but it drove home what he constantly needed to remember. This was a child, and not a normal child. However often he told her they were in danger, she would forget; however much he impressed on her the need for quiet, however well she seemed to understand, she couldn’t be relied on. If he was to save her it would be despite her best efforts.

  The bulb fields opened before them, newly ploughed, the dark brown corduroy as yet unmisted by green. He had only the vaguest idea which way he was pointing, and right now it didn’t seem to matter. All he cared about was putting distance between himself and East Beckham.

  He had to stay off the road. It would have made for easier riding than the humps and furrows of the field, but on tarmac the Land Rover and whatever other vehicles they had would overhaul the bike in minutes. With only one road in and out they couldn’t have missed him. He had to stick to ground too rough even for the Land Rover, or tracks too narrow for it.

  The towpath. It didn’t run, free and unbroken, all the way into Castlemere, but there were good stretches where the bike could maintain whatever its top speed was and others where he could drag it over, past or round assorted obstacles. They couldn’t do that with the Land Rover. If they didn’t catch up with him before the first spot where the path narrowed he’d be free and clear.

  Besides, by the canal he might find help. It was too late in a bad season to hope the water might be crowded with boating parties, but there was always the chance of meeting the odd fanatic like himself. A boat would be good. Failing that, someone on horseback would do. He knew people rode the towpath, and more in winter than in summer when they had to pick their way past old men fishing and boys on bicycles. Donovan couldn’t ride but he could heft the child up behind a rider and issue strict instructions to get as quickly as possible to the first house known to be safe. A horse could go places even the quad couldn’t. Across fields broken by banks and ditches it could also go faster.

  ‘The canal,’ he shouted in Elphie’s ear above the slipstream. ‘Which way?’

  The red sleeve pointed unhesitatingly. Unfortunately, it was pointing back the way they’d come.

  ‘Figures,’ growled Donovan. He wasn’t turning back, not for anything. He put the bike into a sweeping curve that would bring it down to the towpath over the next half-mile or so. He was heading away from Castlemere all the time, but that didn’t matter too much: if they reached the Sinkhole engine house they’d be safe enough. The main thing was to swap a geography which favoured his enemies for one which favoured him, and nobody knew the canal better than Donovan. If he was going to beat the odds and save both their lives, that was where.

  They came to the corner of the field and a gate. Elphie climbed down to open it; but she couldn’t manage alone, Donovan had to go and help. When he turned back, bitter disappointment jolted through him. He genuinely hadn’t thought of that. It hadn’t occurred to him that, if a quad bike was the ideal means of conveyance around the rough headlands and narrow tracks of the fen, The Flower Mill would have more than one.

  As he watched first two, then another one, then another breasted the swell of the field and started down the long incline.

  7

  The call went out as the borrowed van cornered hard – two wheels digging deep into the gravel, two spinning in air – into the drive of Dunstan House. Urgent: all available officers to Cambridge Road: intruder in the grounds of the children’s home: consider armed and dangerous. Without her radio Liz didn’t receive it; but then, it wasn’t telling Liz anything she didn’t already know.

  They didn’t have to hunt for Martin Wingrave: he was standing on the front steps, hammering at the glass door with a stone prised from the rockery. It was safety glass, designed to stop an over-excited ten-year-old running through it. It was never meant to withstand a determined attack by an adult with a brick.

  Liz couldn’t guess how long it would hold. It might delay him until the reinforcements arrived or the glass might shatter at any moment, admitting a man with no conscience and a burden of lethal bacteria into what should have been a place of safety.

  She couldn’t take the risk. She was out of the van a second before it stopped moving, racing across the lawn, wondering what the hell she could use to stop him. But this was a children’s home: anything that could be used as a weapon was locked away. Hence the stone from the rockery: Wingrave would have used a sledgehammer if one had been lying about.

  She shouted his name and he turned towards her, lowering the stone. For all that they had been at war for a week, this was their first actual meeting. Somehow, Liz was expecting more. A giant of a man, perhaps; or a man with evil branded indelibly on his face. But if evil men looked evil there’d be a limit to how much damage they could do. Martin Wingrave was a good-looking man, a little taller than most, a little broader, with the firm musculature of someone for whom physical fitness was not so much a hobby as a way of life. He was a carpenter, she remembered: his upper body strength would be considerable. If he wanted to punch a hole through that door, sooner or later he would.

  ‘I know who you are,’ said Martin Wingrave. At first she thought he was an incomer like herself. But it was a fenland accent until he’d worked at refining it. From early youth he’d had the innate conviction that he was better than those around him.

  A faint tremor in his voice indicated how much effort had gone into this incomprehensible act of revenge. Three days ago he was dramatically, violently ill; it had passed, as he’d known it would, but not without leaving its mark on him. He’d been ready for home, but nobody’d said anything about protracted physical exertion. When his task here was accomplished the dregs of energy would fail and he would quite possibly fall over. But Liz couldn’t wait for that.

  ‘I know who you are, too.’

  Wingrave raised one sandy eyebrow. In colouring he was on the foxy side of fair. Liz recognized an expensive haircut when she saw one
, though working with policemen she didn’t see one very often. ‘I’m here to visit my son.’

  ‘Most visitors ring the bell and wait for the staff to answer.’

  ‘I did that,’ said Wingrave, smiling slightly. ‘They seem to have been held up.’

  ‘You have no right of entry here, whatever your relationship to anyone inside. Also, you don’t look well. Why don’t you come with me while we get this sorted out?’

  Wingrave looked disappointed. Clucking with disapproval he shook his head. ‘Inspector Graham. Detective Inspector Elizabeth Graham, walking advertisement for the Equal Opportunities programme and all-round stupid cow. Even you can’t be so totally braindead as to think I’m going anywhere with you.’

  Liz was used to abuse. She’d had insults, and worse, thrown at her on a regular basis since she was twenty years old. She didn’t take it personally. Mostly it wasn’t even very alarming: people hurling obscenities were not usually hurling anything else. Violence tended to start when the verbal inventiveness ran out.

  This was different because the man doing it was different. He wasn’t drunk, or angry, or baiting her. Scorn dripped from his tongue like venom. With his back to the wall and a police officer blocking his exit, he still genuinely believed he was in control of the situation. He thought his natural superiority would enable him to succeed in whatever he attempted. He would never, under any circumstances, give up and come quietly.

  Mitchell Tyler had reached the same conclusion. He looked away and said dismissively, ‘Shoot the bastard.’

  Liz spared him a furious glance. ‘Mitchell, will you stay out of this!’

  He understood. ‘Oh yeah. This is Britain, isn’t it? – you believe in tackling violent psychopaths with stern words and an appeal to their better natures. You haven’t got a gun.’