No Birds Sing

by Jo Bannister

  ‘To the frigging driver!’ For the first time perspiration was beading the skin round the man’s eyes and there was alarm in his voice. ‘He sits at the front, yes?’

  Donovan did as he was told, led the way past notices threatening plague and mayhem on anyone disturbing the driver and tapped diffidently. ‘Excuse me, but—’

  A strong hand yanked him away. ‘Bugger that!’ The big man wrenched open the door and thrust the weapon inside.

  The train began to slow. Filling the doorway, the man with the knife looked back at Donovan. If a ski-mask can look puzzled, this one did. Not a word had been spoken.

  Donovan pushed past, looked into the cab. The driver was still in his seat, bent over his console, a finger hooked inside his tie. His face was white and running with sweat, his eyes stretched; choked sounds came from between clenched teeth.

  ‘God help us!’ With his hands under the driver’s arms Donovan eased him out of the cab, leaving it empty. He sat the man on the floor, loosened his tie and belt, took off his own jacket to cover him. ‘Try and breathe lightly. The worst’ll pass in a couple of minutes.’ One way or another, he thought parenthetically.

  Behind him the man with the knife was staring at the vacant cab. ‘Can you drive this thing?’

  Donovan eyed him sourly. ‘It doesn’t need anyone to drive it, it’ll stop itself. Have you never heard of a dead man’s handle? Well, this is what it’s for. Bursting in like that, you’ve given the poor sod a heart attack.’

  Chapter Three

  When the phone rang, the Grahams were busy. ‘Let it ring!’ gasped Liz. ‘Do that. God, yes! Do it some more.’

  But when it was still drilling its patient, insistent summons two minutes later she relented, pushed Brian off her and reached for it. By way of greeting she growled, ‘This had better be good.’

  ‘Oh, it is,’ Shapiro said with conviction. ‘Sorry to wake you’ – the Detective Superintendent was divorced and lived alone – ‘but you won’t want to miss this. We have a train robbery in progress.’

  ‘Good lord!’

  They’d been married ten years, Brian Graham knew that tone: it meant that something more interesting than him had come along. He sighed, reached for his book.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Coming in off The Levels,’ said Shapiro. ‘Somewhere about the Mile End Straight. I’m on my way there now.’

  ‘Doesn’t the driver know where he is?’

  ‘He’s not answering his radio.’

  Liz didn’t use the train much but it was an easy way to London so she’d done it the odd time. She ran a mental tape of the home straight. ‘Which side of the tunnel?’

  ‘All the signal box can say is that the train’s come to a stop somewhere about the Mile End tunnel and the driver isn’t answering his radio. We’re not going to know any more till we get there.’

  Liz frowned. ‘If they can’t talk to the driver, how do we know it’s a robbery?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Shapiro heavily. ‘You see the time? This is the last train we’re talking about. Remember who was catching the last train?’

  Premonition booted the air out of her. Trouble gravitated to Donovan like iron filings to a magnet. ‘He got a message through?’

  ‘Brief and garbled,’ said Shapiro, ‘but what’s new?’ Liz wasn’t fooled: he was worried, too. ‘Three men holding a girl at knife-point, relieving passengers of cash and valuables. At that point no one seemed to have been hurt but he rang off rather quickly.’

  ‘He won’t do anything rash,’ Liz said quietly. ‘He won’t go to war for the sake of some money.’

  Shapiro wasn’t persuaded. ‘Calling in was rash. If he was caught—’ He avoided finishing the thought. ‘He mustn’t draw attention to himself. He doesn’t want them knowing he’s a policeman.’

  ‘I don’t expect he’s planning to arrest them!’

  ‘It’s not what Donovan plans that you have to worry about,’ Shapiro said grimly, ‘it’s what he does on the spur of the moment. If he thinks he can get the knife he’ll go for it.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll get it. Maybe we’ll get there and it’ll all be over.’

  ‘And maybe they’ll kick his stupid head in.’

  The reason for calling it the Mile End Straight was lost in the mists of time. The line ran straight for seven miles across the Castlemere Levels; the Mile End tunnel itself was half a mile long and three miles short of Castlemere.

  The last train, braking steadily while its driver gasped and clutched his chest on the floor, made for the tunnel like a weary beast returning to its lair. There was something inevitable about it. Almost regardless of the emergency, a driver in control of his train would not have stopped in the tunnel. He would have stopped before if he could, continued through if he had to. Almost nothing that would go wrong on a train could get worse so fast that it made sense to try and deal with it inside a hill.

  But this train had no driver, was incapable of making value judgements. All it knew was to bring itself to a halt as quickly as was consistent with passenger safety.

  Before it was stationary the raiders had the door open. ‘We’re inside a frigging tunnel. Does it matter?’

  ‘Won’t have to,’ decided the man with the knife. ‘Go ahead, I’ll cover you – me and Little Miss Pretty here.’ She was still standing in the aisle, quaking and hugging herself, her face that was midway between child and woman streaked with tears. She let out a breathy little shriek as the man pushed her towards the door. ‘Careful how you jump down, you don’t want to hurt yourself.’

  Donovan was calculating percentages. She was a young girl and they were three violent men high on crime and adrenalin. If he let them take her she might be all right, but she might not. If they had a car near here, and if there was no one to stop them, they would disappear with her into The Levels where rape was about the best she could hope for.

  If he was going to intervene this was probably the only chance he’d get. When the girl jumped down, for a split second before the man followed she’d be out of range of the knife. If Donovan took him then she’d be safe. Even if they fought, even if he lost, there’d be time for her to hide in the darkness. The raider might have lost his knife by then, or be aware how much time was passing. If he grabbed a fresh hostage it could hardly be anyone more vulnerable.

  He was going to do it. He filled his lungs, banished from his mind the likely consequences of failure and moved on to the balls of his feet, ready to jump as the girl jumped.

  But the girl didn’t jump. Instead she backed uncertainly from the door and a second later one of the ski-masks reappeared. ‘There’s torches up ahead.’

  ‘So go the other way.’ Precisely on cue, as they turned to look the length of the train, lights glittered in the portal behind them. ‘Shit.’

  Donovan said, ‘Maybe you’d better give up the knife. Let the girl take it out: if they know you’re not armed it’ll take the heat out of the situation.’

  ‘The knife?’ The man looked at it as if he’d just noticed it. ‘Yes, I could do that.’ He held it out, left-handed, not to the girl but to Donovan. ‘Here.’

  Carefully Donovan reached for it. He was always careful around lethal weapons. But the man didn’t change his mind and when Donovan’s long fingers closed on the hilt he let it go. Donovan breathed out softly and looked up. ‘Good—’

  He was looking into the barrel of a small automatic pistol. ‘After all,’ said the man conversationally, ‘I’ve still got this.’

  It wasn’t the first time Donovan had found himself looking up the muzzle of a gun but the sight never lost its ability to shock. He felt the strength drain from his muscles, the blood from his face. He breathed, ‘You don’t want to do that.’

  ‘No,’ agreed the man, ‘but I will if I have to. I’m not going to jail for the sake of some costume jewellery and a mobile—’ He stopped abruptly, mid-sentence, staring at Donovan through the yellow knitted rings. When he spoke again his voice was down to the bare bones
of hatred. ‘You bastard! That’s how they got here so quickly – you called them. Now they’ve sealed the tunnel and they think we’re trapped. But they don’t know about this, do they?’ He stabbed the gun at Donovan’s eyes and Donovan recoiled. ‘They think all they have to worry about is a knife. They might rush a knife but they won’t rush this. All we have to do is find some way of letting them know we have it.’

  Donovan had been a policeman for ten years. He knew a threat when he heard one.

  The shot echoed round the tunnel like artillery. A thin blue line, marked by torches and rather spoiled by Shapiro’s old tweed coat a little right of centre, had advanced a dozen metres under the hill when it sent them diving for the black brick wall.

  ‘Anyone hurt?’ rapped Shapiro, hoping no one could hear the rasp in his voice. Even these days it wasn’t often that a Detective Superintendent got shot at. But no one had been hit and they fell back in disorder and relief.

  Shapiro called Liz on the radio. ‘I suppose you heard that.’

  ‘Any damage?’

  ‘No, thank God. Knives – Donovan said they had knives. He never said anything about guns!’

  ‘I don’t expect he knew,’ Liz said reasonably. ‘It’s a wonder he got a message out at all, you can’t blame him for not giving you chapter and verse.’

  ‘You don’t think—?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she answered firmly. ‘I think it was a warning. I think if they’d been going to kill him they’d have done it while they still had a chance of getting away. They must know by now they’re not going anywhere, that they’ll have to pay for anything they do. It may take time but in the end they’ll come quietly because they have no choice. Hurting their hostages will only make matters worse.’

  A less experienced officer might have believed her. But Shapiro knew not to expect too much sense from criminals with their backs to the wall. If Liz had been right, hostage dramas would always end peacefully, and they didn’t. She knew that as well, of course. She was trying to reassure him. She must have forgotten all the times he’d sworn that if he’d had a gun he’d have shot Donovan himself.

  ‘We’re going to need support,’ he said. ‘I’ll start the megaphone diplomacy, you get us some fire-power.’

  The sound of the gunshot filled the front of the train. It made the girl clap her hands to her ears with a shrill little scream; it made Miss Murchison, who hadn’t an hysterical bone in her body, grip the arms of her seat tightly; it penetrated the driver’s private world of fear and pain.

  Down the train came a series of softer bangs as the doors opened and hasty feet scrunched on cinders. One of the raiders flashed a torch down the tunnel. ‘They’re getting away!’ It was a young man’s voice, panic sharpening the native monotone of the lowland Scot.

  The big man was older and more pragmatic. ‘Let them go. We’ve got everybody we need right here.’ Seven hostages were enough to control with one gun. If it came to a shoot-out, seven targets would be hard to miss.

  Shapiro would be at one end of the tunnel, Donovan surmised, and Inspector Graham at the other. Neither would be pushed into doing something for the sake of being seen to. For one thing, they knew he was here, they’d be expecting him to do something clever. While they were waiting they’d try to open a dialogue. But however nasty this got they wouldn’t let the robbers go. They wouldn’t free men who’d do this to do it again.

  A fog-horn croak battled up the long tunnel. ‘My name’s Frank Shapiro, it’s my job to sort this out. You want to talk about how we do it?’

  ‘They’ve got us. They’ve got us.’ The boy was shaking his head like a caged bear.

  ‘They haven’t got us, and as long as I’ve got this they won’t.’ The big man hefted the gun; not extravagantly, just enough to make the point. That meant he was familiar with the weapon, knew what it could and couldn’t do. It could punch holes in anything it was aimed at. It couldn’t discriminate between intentional jerks on the trigger and accidental ones.

  Had there been no other considerations Donovan would have waited. The longer these men had to think about their situation the more resigned they would become. Only the fact that their blood was up kept them from seeing there was nowhere left for them to go.

  But the driver’s condition injected a degree of urgency. Donovan was no doctor, couldn’t distinguish between a heart spasm from which a man might recover without much help and a coronary attack in which every minute was vital. While he was softly softly catching monkeys a man could be dying. Reluctant as he was to draw attention to himself again, he said, ‘You could use the phone to negotiate.’

  The eyes burned in the holes of the ski-mask. ‘Negotiate? They won’t negotiate – they want us to put our hands up and I’m not going to do that. The only thing I have to say they know already: that I have hostages and a gun. That’s all they need to know.’

  In fact it wasn’t. Shapiro also needed to know about the driver, and that so far none of the passengers had been injured. How he would use the information when half of it suggested there was time to resolve this peacefully and the other half that patience could cost a life Donovan had no idea, only that he’d want to know. But he didn’t think he could say much more without giving himself away, and instinct warned that if these men knew he was a police officer his usefulness would come to an abrupt end.

  He wasn’t unafraid for his own safety – he’d been hurt too often to have any illusions about plugging the holes in his body with a hanky while he got on with the job – but there was more to it than that. In reasonable working order he was the best thing the hostages had going for them. He knew how sieges worked, what the dangers were, how to keep the shit from hitting the fan. Shot, knocked out or bound and gagged he could do nothing. So it wasn’t only self-regard that urged him to protect his identity. At least, he didn’t think it was.

  Hands spread he said soothingly, ‘I’m only trying to help.’ And in the moment of saying it, like a distant dawn breaking he got the first pale glimmer of how.

  Chapter Four

  When fishes flew and forests walked, Castlemere Levels was a marsh punctuated by islets. Even after the fens were drained the islets remained in the form of low hills with a distinct shrubby vegetation on top. Such was Mile End Hill. As late as the mid-nineteenth century the land was still so wet that it was easier to drive a tunnel through the hill than make a causeway strong enough to carry a train round it.

  Shapiro met Liz on top; but she had to wait for him because she jogged while Shapiro trudged. As she waited, gazing round she saw a clutter of stones like a tumbledown cairn half-hidden by willow-scrub. By the time Shapiro arrived her eyes were aglow. ‘I know what he’s going to do!’

  There was no judging how much time they had. Donovan would be trying to separate the raiders from their hostages but even once the means occurred to him the opportunity might prove elusive. He couldn’t force the situation, not against men with guns. But Liz remembered him telling her about the shaft, felt sure he’d find some way of using it. Donovan’s brain had the kind of boneless agility usually associated with ferrets in drainpipes.

  It was Shapiro’s decision but he respected Liz’s intuition. So often, coming at a problem from different angles, she and Donovan ended up in the same place. If she knew by the pricking of her thumbs what Donovan’s next move would be, Shapiro wasn’t going to say she was wrong. ‘Prepare a welcoming committee,’ he said. ‘I’ll get back on the loud-hailer, let them think we’re trying to talk them out.’

  ‘The old fool with the megaphone’s trying again,’ said the third man, easing the rucksack on his shoulders. ‘Can’t we shut him up?’

  The man with the gun shook his head. ‘I don’t want to waste bullets till I know how many we’re going to need.’ His eyes, restlessly scanning the carriage, lit on Donovan and his voice hardened. ‘What are you grinning at? I’ll tell you one thing – if it comes to a shoot-out, you’re the first. You brought them here; well, by God, you’re not walking awa
y.’

  Donovan hadn’t realized he was grinning; if he was, it was precipitate. He didn’t need the gun to remind him how many ways this could go wrong. These were deeply dangerous men: only the hope that he’d found a way to deal with them played on his face like a shadow of a smile.

  Cal Donovan was not a good-looking man. He went from wiry child to stringy teenager to stick-thin six-footer without passing through an attractive stage. The olive skin was drawn over the narrow bones of his face like a medieval icon while, sunk deep in bony pits, his dark eyes had an animal watchfulness that could flare to fevered intensity or sink to sullenness almost without warning. At thirty his self-command was better than it had been five years before but he still walked a tightrope between instinct and prudence, edgy as a cat with eight lives gone. Women, a few, glimpsed a certain tortured beauty; men reacted with the unease evoked by any powerful creature of unreliable temperament.

  He spread long-fingered hands defensively. ‘Don’t shoot me, I’m your last best chance of getting out of here.’

  The armed man leaned forward until Donovan was breathing gun-oil. ‘Say what?’

  By now Jody Perkins was a bright seventeen-year-old working on her Oxbridge entrance. But six years ago she was an active child with boundless curiosity and a Border Collie, and when she went missing on The Levels Donovan and a hundred other people turned out to search for her.

  Which is how he knew about the ventilation shaft. They found her twenty feet down the corroded iron rungs set into its wall. Intrigued, she’d climbed that far and then panicked, clutching the ladder while the dog barked hysterically overhead. Constable Donovan was lowered on a rope and brought her up without further incident.

  There were two things he didn’t know about the shaft: whether the rungs went all the way down, and whether they would carry a man’s weight. But this was a good time to find out. They couldn’t force a dozen hostages up the pipe ahead of them, would have to make do with him.