by Jo Bannister
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
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Contents
Jo Bannister
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Part Two
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Part Three
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Jo Bannister
No Birds Sing
Jo Bannister
Jo Bannister lives in Northern Ireland, where she worked as a journalist and editor on local newspapers. Since giving up the day job, her books have been shortlisted for a number of awards. Most of her spare time is spent with her horse and dog, or clambering over archaeological sites. She is currently working on a new series of psychological crime/thrillers.
Epigraph
O what can ail thee, Knight-at-arms
Alone and palely loitering;
The sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.
‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’
John Keats, 1795–1821
Part One
Chapter One
Strolling through Castlemere with Thomas Stirling on a Sunday morning made Mrs Cunningham feel like a young woman again.
Coming to town with Mr Cunningham was like taking part in military manoeuvres. So long for the drive in: mark. So long to find a parking space: mark. (They had a Ford Fiesta but Mr Cunningham drove as if it were a Chieftain tank.) So long to shop: ‘Quickly, quickly, you’orrible little woman, a Peruvian grandmother with gout could get round Tesco’s faster than this,’ or ‘Look, we’re three minutes behind schedule already! Better do Safeway’s at the double.’
How different, then, walking these same streets with Thomas. He never hurried her, considered his time well spent if he had no more to show for it than the memory of her smile. They wandered, they chatted – mostly Marion Cunningham chatted, Thomas paying solemn attention to all her opinions. They paused to admire the sights – the castle crumbling on its hill above the diamond, the Georgian frontages below, the sparkle of canal water glimpsed through the Brick Lane entries, the boats in Mere Basin bright as bath-time toys.
Sometimes she reached out and touched him, almost as if to prove that he was real. For reply his cornflower gaze adored her. When she was with Thomas she never gave Mr Cunningham a thought.
It didn’t matter that the shops, except for the newsagent on the corner, were closed. They window-shopped. Mr Cunningham never window-shopped; but Thomas allowed himself to be steered from one display to the next and never cared what he was being invited to admire as long as it was pretty.
Today they stopped at the jeweller’s. When Marion was a girl old Mr Reubenstein sold costume jewellery and alarm-clocks from a shop the size of a goat-house in one of the entries. His son Mr Reubenstein expanded into a proper shop in Castle Place selling better jewellery, silverware and a nice class of crystal, and his son Mr Reubenstein expanded into the shops on either side to create Rubens, a glittering array of jewellery, presentation-ware and objets d’art. It was all here: the precious, the semi-precious and the merely pleasing. Mr Reubenstein the latest was no snob when it came to selling. He agreed with Thomas: he’d put anything in his window if it was pretty and turned a profit.
Mrs Cunningham was looking at the rings. Some were new, others antique; several were a shade ostentatious for good taste but Mrs Cunningham didn’t mind. She loved their fire, their sheer joie de vivre. ‘Oh look, Thomas,’ she said, pointing to a cluster of amethysts around a single diamond, ‘that’s a hundred years old. It was first worn by a lady when my grandma was in her pram.’
Thomas Stirling said, ‘Ruggle,’ and set about chewing the ear off his teddy; which Mrs Cunningham took to mean much the same as tempus fugit.
Thus preoccupied – Mrs Cunningham with the ring, her grandson with his bear – they did not for a moment notice that they had been joined at the glittering window by a third party; and indeed, to take the non-speciesist view, a fourth.
‘Lovely, aren’t they?’
Mrs Cunningham looked up, enthusiastic agreement on her lips; but she was so taken aback that all she could manage was a sort of non-committal moo.
Politely, the man showed no signs of having noticed. ‘Every inch a gentleman,’ thought Mrs Cunningham in mounting hysteria. But what did he expect? – standing there in his green felt fedora, his tartan muffler and his calf-length burgundy corduroy coat, like a man thrown out of a Doctor Who audition for being too peculiar.
It may have been the smear of lipstick that finally did for her, it may have been the puff of blusher; it may have been the brassy curls permed within an inch of their life peeping out from under the hat. Or it may have been the dog – if it was a dog and not a skinned rabbit – squatting on its naked rump at his feet. It wore a blue collar studded with rhinestones, and that was all. Its freckled fawn body was devoid of hair. There were tufts on its feet, a plume on its tail, an explosion of hair like a punk’s Mohawk on its head, but its cat-sized torso was nude. It gave Mrs Cunningham a bored yawn revealing an absence of teeth.
She backed so hurriedly she almost fell off the kerb. ‘Whoops,’ said the strange man mildly. Flustered and embarrassed, Mrs Cunningham flashed him her most brilliant smile, wheeled the pram and set off across Castle Place like a galleon in full sail, her raincoat flapping round her. Her cheeks flamed.
She realized her behaviour was provincial but she’d been startled. Her willingness to live and let live was as well developed, she hoped, as in any middle-class woman of her generation – beside Mr Cunningham she seemed a dangerous libertarian – but her subconscious was honed by small-town mores fifty years before when an apparition in lipstick and a green fedora would have had insults, and worse, hurled at him in the street.
By the time she reached Dorinda Day’s on the far side of the diamond she had regained enough self-possession to slow down and, under the guise of studying the latest thing in cruise wear, steal a backward glance at what the strange man was doing now. But in the time it took her to cross Castle Place he had disappeared, possibly into one of the shops, possibly up the steps to the castle. She gave a sigh that was mostly relief but just a little disappointed.
But she had little time to ponder who he’d been, where he’d come from and where he’d gone. In an instant the open space that all week was packed with parked cars and traffic and now held only a handful of strol
lers like herself, enjoying the April sunshine or fetching the Sunday papers, was filled with sound: an anarchic roar that drummed the ears and made Thomas Stirling drop his bear and howl in protest.
It came from the direction of Cambridge Road and filled Castle Place like water filling a bucket. Mrs Cunningham just had time to recognize the bellow of a high-powered car before it shot into sight, a big black 4x4 with bull-bars; and not enough time to complete the indignant thought, ‘They’ll cause an accident going at that speed!’ before the behemoth slewed across the square where thirty seconds earlier she’d been pushing the pram. Then it mounted the pavement where, a few seconds before that, she and Thomas had been window-shopping. Mrs Cunningham gripped the handle of the pram until her knuckles turned white. In the instant that she realized what the vehicle was going to do, it did it.
There was toughened glass in the window of Rubens, and a grille designed to stop an opportunist brick without denying potential buyers a view of the goods. It might have been cellophane for all the resistance it offered. Safe in its cage the big dark bonnet smashed through glass and grille, spraying them and the wares they guarded in a rainbow arc of spinning, glittering, prism-scattered light.
By the time the air had cleared of stars Mrs Cunningham could see the monster entirely inside the shop, all five doors open, small dark figures – four of them, and perhaps they only seemed small beside the over-sized car – tossing in everything they could reach in a minute and a half. There was no time for discrimination, they took it all: gemstones and rhinestones and Christening mugs and charm-bracelets and watches.
At the end of ninety seconds they piled back in the car, the engine gunned – the sound drowning out the wail of the alarm – and the 4x4 lurched back through the wreckage of the window, spun on a rear tyre and shot off down Bedford Road at the foot of the diamond. First it disappeared from sight, Mrs Cunningham and half a dozen other stunned observers staring after it, then the fighter-plane roar of the engine faded into the distance.
For perhaps another minute only the shrill of the alarm, the broken glass tinselling the pavement and the gaping hole in Rubens’ window display testified to what had happened. No one ran for the police. No one chased after the big dark car. The sheer speed of the episode, from a normal sleepy Sunday morning in Castle Place back to the same thing with burglar alarms, had paralysed them. Mrs Cunningham had one hand to her mouth: she couldn’t have said why, but nor could she have moved it.
Then a new siren joined the first and a police car shot out of Market Lane, slewing to a halt in front of the ravished jeweller’s. Two officers leapt out. The man dashed through the breach into the shop, the WPC – seeing Mrs Cunningham clinging to the pram – hurried over to check that she was all right. ‘Did you see what happened?’
Mrs Cunningham nodded.
‘You were standing here?’
Mrs Cunningham shook her head. ‘Only a moment.’ Her voice shook, too. ‘Just before it happened we were over there. Right there. Right – there.’
WPC Wilson looked across the square and back to Mrs Cunningham, and frowned. It was a long way for a middle-aged woman to push a pram in a few seconds. ‘Thank God you moved. Why did you – was there some kind of warning?’
‘My guardian angel,’ said Mrs Cunningham. She began to laugh. ‘My guardian angel, constable, wears a green felt hat and make-up, and has a boiled rabbit on a lead.’ Then the laughter turned to tears, and she lifted Thomas Stirling out of his pram and hugged him as if she meant never to let him go.
‘Coincidence?’ Detective Inspector Liz Graham pitched it precisely midway between a statement and a question. It didn’t mean she had no opinion, rather that she wanted to hear Shapiro’s first.
Detective Superintendent Frank Shapiro gave a morose shrug. ‘What’s the alternative? A ram-raider with a social conscience?’ He glared at the papers littering his desk. It was the same desk he had had as Detective Chief Inspector. Most of the papers were the same too. It was Sunday afternoon.
‘Could be. It’s not in their interests to turn this into a murder inquiry.’ She stood at the window gazing down at the canal, a tall woman who wore the CID uniform of tweed jacket, trousers and brogues with rather more style than most of her male colleagues. Long fair hair with an exuberent natural curl was tamed into a pleat for work, and her green eyes sparkled with intelligent good humour.
A persistent girlishness had somehow survived the bludgeoning effort of turning a job she had a talent for into a career until now, at forty, she had the rank she’d earned with a senior officer she liked and respected. People who’d known her through the struggle for acceptance reckoned she’d finally cracked the secret of dropping a year with each birthday. At last summer’s Castlemere Horse Show she won a red rosette in the Pairs Jumping (Any Age) partnered by a seriously competitive seven-year-old on an Exmoor pony.
‘So they sent a sweeper up ahead to clear the path?’ Shapiro was unconvinced. ‘Why not put out cones, or ask for a police escort?’
Liz grinned. She knew him well enough to recognize that gentle irony as the smoke-screen behind which he did his thinking. He was always open to rational argument, possibly because rational argument mostly proved him right. Yet coincidence tended to be the last thing they considered, when nothing else made sense. ‘He was the look-out. It was his job to take a last look at the shop before they hit it, to make sure the area car hadn’t just stopped for ice-creams at Cully’s.’
Shapiro pictured the incident in his mind’s eye. He was of an older generation than Liz, a thirty-year-man who wasn’t the height of fashion when he started. He scraped through recruitment with question-marks against his height (modest), his bulk (immodest, even as a young man) and his manner (diffident going on vague). Only a note pointing out the wisdom of encouraging minorities got him a probationary posting. But the rest of the way to Detective Superintendent he made on merit, and the sheer ability that lay behind the broad amiable face and slightly disorganized manner had been a matter of public knowledge for so long now there was almost no one left who remembered what unpromising material he was once considered.
He nodded slowly. ‘All right. They’re not committed, they can change their minds right up to the moment they hit the window. There’s a look-out on the street in case anything goes wrong at the last moment. If the area car had been doing the ice-cream run they’d have just kept driving.’
It was Liz’s turn to look doubtful. ‘Most look-outs try to blend into the background. They don’t dress up like something from an end-of-the-pier show.’
‘Agreed,’ said Shapiro. ‘But that car was doing sixty when it hit Castle Place: the driver had just a few seconds to decide whether the raid was on or off. He hadn’t time to hunt for the one chap who knew if it was safe to proceed. The look-out needs to be obvious from a speeding car a hundred yards away.’
They weren’t arguing. They were trying to work it out, and that made sense. Liz thought it possible to push the hypothesis a little further. ‘The woman with the pram said he vanished before the car arrived. So the plan is, if he’s still there when they reach the target they keep going; if he isn’t they do the job. That works. If the coast’s clear and they do the raid the look-out’s already offside so there’s nothing to connect him to it. If he’s still there, there’s no raid.’
Shapiro was leafing through his papers. ‘There’s no mention of a Quentin Crisp look-alike at any of the earlier incidents.’
‘I’m not convinced this is the Tynesiders at all.’
The Detective Superintendent elevated a shaggy eyebrow. ‘Really?’ He could invest a single word with enough polite disbelief to send most junior officers back-pedalling for their lives. But Liz mostly considered her opinions before expressing them, which made her harder to shift. Shapiro was forced to run to a second word. ‘Why?’
She thought for a moment. ‘Every police force in the country is watching out for a gang of ram-raiders who first struck in Middlesbrough five months ago and
have reappeared at three- or four-week intervals in Harrogate, Barnsley, Mansfield, Nottingham and Leamington Spa. We’re calling them the Tynesiders, though they could be from the Isle of Wight for all we know, because that’s where they made their debut.’ A strong forefinger tracked their progress down the map on the wall.
Usually Shapiro had a map of Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire pinned up but today it was a larger map of England. It was not a new map. Either it was a very old map, that had had a lot of pins stuck in it tracing the course of a lot of criminal enterprises over the years, or it was the one that hung beside the dart-board in the canteen. To avoid perforating it further, Shapiro had tacked on stickers to represent the ramraiders’activities. They described a wobbly but essentially vertical line down the centre of England.
‘Logically,’ said Liz, ‘their next port of call is somewhere round Oxford and it shouldn’t be for another week or more. They’re fifty miles off course, and though I don’t know why they follow that particular routine I can’t see them changing it when it works so well.’
Shapiro shrugged. ‘Perhaps they think it’s time to throw in a wild card. Make it harder for us to second-guess them.’
Liz stared. ‘Has anybody come close to second-guessing them?’
‘Not that you’d notice,’ admitted Shapiro.
Liz nodded. ‘Then there’s the look-out. Nobody’s reported that before.’
‘Nobody’d have reported it this time if Mrs Cunningham hadn’t got talking to the Queen of the May. Anyway, it’s obviously a disguise – even Quentin Crisp doesn’t look that much like Quentin Crisp! As long as he’s easily identifiable he doesn’t have to stand out like a lighthouse. Maybe last time he was the one pushing the pram; or he was a jogger in a fluorescent shell-suit, or a blind man selling flags on the corner. Anything that the driver would spot in the couple of seconds he has to make his decision.’ He picked up a couple of faxes, discarded them again. ‘There’s not enough detail in these. Get Scobie to phone round, see if that rings a bell with anyone.’