by Jo Bannister
Inspector Graham was out there somewhere. He’d told her about the lost child. Would she remember, guess what he’d do and be there to meet them when they emerged? Even if she didn’t, men clambering off a dangerous ladder were at a disadvantage in the face of a hostage developing an unexpected hero complex. If they knew he was a copper they might be prepared; but if they thought he was—
‘I work for Railtrack, maintenance section. There’s an airshaft half-way through the tunnel. As far as I know you can still climb up on to the hill. From there you’ve got six hours of darkness and forty square miles of wilderness to get lost in.’
For a moment he thought they weren’t going to buy it. Eyes hedged round by knitting raked him like claws. He felt their need for hope at war with their natural suspicion of anything that convenient.
Yet the shaft existed, he could show them. And whatever followed had to be better than being trapped in a tunnel. In the end, whether or not they trusted him, they’d go for it. It was probably the only chance they’d get.
They knew it. They also knew the risks. The muzzle of the gun under Donovan’s jaw forced his head back. ‘Jerk me around, flower, and you’re dead. You go first; then if anybody falls it’ll be you. First sign of trouble you’re going to get buggered by a bullet.’
He bundled Donovan to the door. Then he gripped the girl’s wrist.
Donovan took a deep breath. ‘She can’t come.’
The gun swung his way. ‘Don’t tell me what to do!’
‘She’s a wee girl, she couldn’t climb on top of the train let alone fifty metres up an old shaft. Even if she doesn’t fall she’ll slow you up. And if she does fall she’ll take everybody below her when she goes.’
He waited. He hoped he’d done enough to convince them. If he hadn’t he was prepared to fight for her, but he didn’t expect to win.
After a moment the man with the gun nodded. ‘OK.’ He pushed the girl to a seat. ‘OK, honey, you’ve done your bit. You stay here.’ Speaking to all of them he went on: ‘And let’s not have an undignified rush for the exit. Stay where you are and wait. I don’t know how long it’ll take us to get up the shaft, and if I don’t know you sure as hell don’t. Anybody shows his face before we’re gone, I’ll put a hole in it.’
They wouldn’t use the torch for fear of signalling their intentions. They dropped on to the track, the gunman pushing Donovan ahead of him, and walked back to the mid-point of the tunnel. ‘OK, where’s this shaft?’
Donovan found it by the down-draught of peaty air. There wasn’t enough space between the roof of the train and the vaulting of the tunnel to stand up: he was on his hands and knees on top of the carriage when he felt the movement of air and his groping hand vanished into the void. ‘Here.’
Perhaps two metres across, linking a black tunnel and a dark sky, the shaft received no natural light. Now the torch was essential. The last man wedged it in his top pocket so that it cast its beam up through the legs of those above. It gave a shaky fragmented light but enough to show where the rusty brackets were and, once, that the pinnings had gone on one side. Donovan stretched long limbs from the rung below to that above. For a moment he considered keeping quiet but wisdom prevailed. Probably the man with the gun would see it too and know Donovan had tried to kill him. If he didn’t see it, as the thing came away from the wall the gun could go off, and Donovan knew where it was pointing.
‘The next one’s loose,’ he said, and the man below said, ‘Thanks’ – as if he’d pointed out a dodgy paving-stone to a stranger in the street.
It was an arduous climb and, for them all in different ways, an anxious one. Even so, when Donovan reached for another rung and instead felt grass, for a moment he couldn’t think what to do next. ‘We’re at the top.’
‘Get out,’ panted the man with the gun. They were all out of breath. ‘Stay on your knees by the edge. Don’t think you can run faster than I can climb these last couple of rungs.’
Donovan told himself he’d never intended to run, had always meant to wait and see if he had back-up before making his next move. If DI Graham was in position with an armed response unit he needed the three men out of the shaft before they realized. And if she wasn’t, if no one had thought of the air-shaft, he had to be by the ladder as the man with the gun scrambled out.
It was an awkward manoeuvre with two free hands. If Donovan could catch him off balance and wrest the weapon from him, or send it spinning into the void, the thing would be over. They were two good reasons for behaving himself a little while longer. The effect of a bullet on the human body was a third.
After the oppressive darkness of the shaft the star-dusted sky over The Levels seemed vast. A couple of miles west the lights of Castlemere began; nearer, and also further out across the dark plain, were the scattered lights of farms. The curve of the hill hid from him the lights of the police down by the track and they would have no view of him. Unless the faint column of light from the torch was spotted …
‘Turn the torch off,’ said the man with the gun. ‘You: back off a bit.’
Donovan had knelt by the top of the ladder, ostensibly obeying instructions, actually thinking that from there he could act too quickly to be stopped. The man below him must have thought so too. Reluctantly Donovan shuffled a metre sideways.
He looked round but there was nothing to see. No ring of armed police. No DI Graham with her fair hair spread on the breeze like a recruiting poster. No Superintendent Shapiro, broad face beaded with sweat from the climb, taking control in that reassuring, avuncular voice with just a touch of adenoidal accent. Not even a probationary constable or a school crossing patrol lady. He was on his own up here.
OK. So the priorities were to neutralize the gun and raise the alarm. Wee buns. But damn that woman, he thought bitterly: how come she always knew what he was planning right up to the moment he wanted her to?
If he went for the gun too soon the man would merely duck back into the shaft and shoot him from there; and if he waited too long he’d be on his feet and back in control. He waited … he waited … and then he dived.
He got it wrong. The extra metre made all the difference: instead of bowling the armed man across the turf, Donovan barely reached him, found himself clawing for the gun at full stretch. The man dodged him easily, came to his feet with the gun levelled at Donovan’s face. ‘Bad move, flower.’ The hatred in his voice was so profound it vibrated.
Donovan had heard of people freezing with fear. He’d assumed it was a figure of speech. He’d been frightened enough often enough that he’d have known if it had ever actually happened. He thought it was probably an excuse offered by people who knew they’d proved unequal to a situation; a sop to cowardice.
Flat on his back, the breath knocked from him, face to face with oblivion, it happened to Donovan now. He froze rigid. His muscles locked round the long bones and would not obey him. He needed to be up, twisting out of the line of fire, jinking for cover. In this light every metre he put between him and that gun halved the chance of a shot finding him, quartered its chance of killing him. He didn’t have to get far, he didn’t have to get out of range or out of sight, he just had to get. Anything he did now would improve the odds.
But he couldn’t move. It was as if Lilliputians had swarmed over him with vines the moment he hit the ground. He felt his heart pound and his eyes round, and he couldn’t raise a hand to defend himself. A detached part of his brain that was watching curiously, that clearly hadn’t made the connection between his impending demise and its own, observed, If this was a novel the light would spring up now and DI Graham would leap into the ring shouting—
‘Armed police officers! Drop your gun. Now! Do it now. Do it!’
Yes, reflected that wry remote portion of Donovan’s brain watching him sprawl in the weeds moments from his own destruction, that’s what she’d say. By the book. Never mind blowing the bastard’s head off while there was still time to save his. Do it by the book, then you never have to worry about
justifying yourself. Only about breaking in a new detective sergeant.
For a second the man looked away. But the black eye of the gun remained fixed on Donovan’s face, pinning him down, undistracted by the flare of torches, the shapes sprung into focus between them, the distinctive crouching attitudes of people aiming weapons. The man saw them; but stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the cordon and the certainty of capture it represented he turned back to the man at his feet.
Donovan whispered, ‘Don’t—’
The big man smiled. At least the fleshy lips spread; nothing resembling a smile reached the eyes. The gun twitched fractionally as his fore-finger took up the slack.
The crash of the shot rolled round the top of the hill. A woman’s voice shouted, ‘No!’ into the echo. At last, and too late, Donovan tried to move, to throw himself those couple of metres that might make the difference between emergency surgery and the morgue. He managed to roll just once, then his long body slumped leadenly, face down this time, one arm about his head.
Before the smell of cordite cleared, two officers, one armed with a torch, the other with a gun, hurdled the broken wall and pin-pointed the two men still in the shaft. ‘Let’s be having you.’
Liz Graham bent over the fallen man, shook her head. It would take a doctor to make the death official but the fact of it was obvious. The bullet had entered above the left ear and taken the right ear with it. ‘Damn, damn, damn. I didn’t want that to happen.’
‘Sorry, ma’am.’ The man who fired was making his weapon safe. ‘There was no option. He was going to shoot Sergeant Donovan.’
‘Well, we couldn’t have that, could we?’ She sounded like someone putting a brave face on things. ‘I suppose.’ She looked round. ‘Donovan? Where’s he got to?’
He was on his knees beside the wall. It had taken him almost till then to realize it wasn’t him who’d been shot. Simultaneous with the hammer-blow of sound he had felt, or thought he had, the shock of impact; his body had spasmed and gone weak and he’d felt his senses fade.
But instead of fading out he found himself taking in the smell of damp earth and listening to the conversation. Only then did he understand that he’d miscalculated. His initial reaction, before relief, was embarrassment. ‘I’m here.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yeah.’
Liz smiled at the armed officer. ‘That’s Sergeant Donovan’s idea of a full report. All right, let’s see what we’ve got.’ She bent again, carefully picked the remains of the ski-mask away from the remains of the face. ‘I don’t recognize him. Donovan?’
By then the others were out of the shaft, pulling off their own masks. A boy of about nineteen, a man in his early thirties: she hadn’t seen either of them before. ‘You’re not from around here, are you?’ They made no reply.
Liz turned back to her sergeant, to acknowledge his success. The expression in his eyes stopped her. He was looking at the dead man on the grass. It wasn’t a pretty sight but they were neither of them virgins: they’d seen uglier things, and much more upsetting ones, than an armed thug shot dead before he could kill someone else.
But Donovan was looking at him with neither hatred, triumph nor even relief, but as if he was seeing a ghost. His eyes were appalled.
‘Donovan? Do you know him?’
‘No,’ he said hurriedly, accent thick as soda farls. ‘No, I don’t.’ And it was the truth. But it wasn’t the whole truth. He was looking at a man he’d never seen before; but the face he was seeing, white, half destroyed, the other half wry with the sheer unexpectedness of death, was his own.
Chapter Five
It was three-thirty on Tuesday morning before Shapiro gave up trying to interview the men in the cells. He’d sent Liz home an hour before, and Donovan an hour before that, as soon as he’d made a coherent report.
That took longer than it should have done. It was no wonder that a man who’d confronted his own mortality, who was alive now only because of a woman’s intuition and the skill of a police marksman, had been unsettled by the experience. But Shapiro was surprised that Donovan, who habitually pushed his luck until it started pushing back, seemed so subdued. Reaction usually made him surly. Shapiro hoped that if the sergeant got some sleep in what remained of the night, by morning he would be himself again.
There were people, both at Queen’s Street and Division, who would consider any change for the better. But Shapiro had known Donovan longer than most and recognized that his moods were the price to be paid for his commitment. He was difficult because he cared too much, because failure grieved him. A whole department of Donovans would have been impossible to command, but Shapiro had been glad of the one he’d got often enough to make allowances.
Unforthcomingness from Donovan he was accustomed to, but criminals under arrest were often oddly loquacious. When a man had been discovered half-way down a drainpipe with somebody else’s silver-ware it was too late to be coy. Talking about it, sometimes angrily, often with a kind of dry humour, seemed to ease the stress of watching the next five years go up in smoke.
So he didn’t understand why these two were set on silence. They had nothing to lose. They’d been taken in the act, there were dozens of witnesses, the third member of the gang died at the scene so there was no one to protect. Yet they refused to talk. They refused to give their names or addresses or accept the offer of legal representation. The older man spoke, when he spoke at all, with a Yorkshire accent, the younger was a Scot. They weren’t violent, abusive or hysterical. Though the boy was clearly shaken, even without the support of his steadier colleague he could not be tricked or persuaded to reveal anything useful. In the end Shapiro had to concede that he wasn’t going to make any progress unless their fingerprints were on record somewhere. He collected his coat to go home.
The woman was standing at the foot of the police station steps as he drove out of the yard. He almost didn’t pause, never afterwards knew what made him take a second look, then stop and take a third.
A woman calling at Queen’s Street at that hour of the morning was not so unusual in itself. As it was mostly men who got into trouble after the bars closed it was mostly women – wives, mothers, daughters – who got the job of collecting them when the paperwork was done. Also there was a small but dedicated band of female winos who, midway through the second bottle, remembered all the slights they’d suffered at the hands of the local constabulary and decided to have it out with them.
Somehow this woman, half-hidden in the shadows, matched neither template. She was hesitant, unsteady even, but he didn’t think she was drunk. She was too tidy, too well-dressed for someone who spent half of every night propping up a lamp-post singing ‘Nelly Dean’.
And women coming to collect errant male relatives were usually too angry to hover in Queen’s Street. Some of them were angry with the police, others with their menfolk, but they’d all had disturbed nights and wanted to get home.
She could be worried about a missing person, a son or daughter who hadn’t come home when they should have done. Shapiro put her at about forty, which was the right age to have children at the ‘it’s-my-life, I’ll-stay-out-till-dawn-if-I-want-to’stage. Parents always assumed the worst the first time – Shapiro remembered, Shapiro had been through it. Not with Rachael, who was born sensible, or with David, who worked on the principle that if no one knew when to expect him no one would worry if he was late, so much as with the middle one. Sally looked so fragile and was actually the toughest of the three. A couple of times Shapiro had been worried enough about her to phone Queen’s Street at three in the morning.
But that was the natural thing to do, wasn’t it? – to phone, not to call in. So it was something more than anxiety that had brought her out in the middle of the night. Something had happened. She’d done something, or had something done to her; she wanted to report it now, not wait till morning, and she couldn’t quite find the courage to climb those steps, walk up to the desk and make it official.
Sha
piro stopped his car on the yellow lines and got out. She whirled at his tread and her eyes were afraid. Shapiro stopped a few feet from her, before his bulky presence could crowd her, and kept his hands in the pockets of his coat. Solemnly he introduced himself. ‘Is there a problem? Can I help at all?’
She looked, wildly, from him to the lit door at the top of the steps. Framed by blonde hair in a shoulder-length bob she had a rather long, strong face whose lines suggested competence and a greater degree of self-confidence than she was currently exhibiting. She wore a camel coat over a cashmere sweater and tweed skirt. There were marks on the coat as if she’d been in an accident.
For a moment it seemed she was going to change her mind, hurry away with her story untold. She looked past him, saw the empty street beckoning, knew or guessed he had no power to detain her; the wrong word from him then and she would have taken to her heels. Her head rocked back, her face racked by indecision.
Shapiro said quietly, ‘I can help, you know.’
She laughed at that, a single bark of desperate laughter that was no sooner out than turning to a sob. She bit her lips to bring it under control. Then she looked Shapiro in the eye – a gesture whose courage he only appreciated when he’d heard what she had to say – and her voice was intelligent and, in the circumstances, remarkably restrained. ‘I do hope so, Superintendent, I could certainly use some help. You see, I’ve been raped.’
He spent the rest of the night with her. He offered to bring Liz in if she’d rather talk to another woman, but she declined.
Dr Greaves who examined her explained. ‘When a woman’s been abused by a man it can be enormously reassuring to be treated with respect by another one. In a way it’s too easy to retreat into the compassion of women. Unless she’s going to enter a nunnery she has to learn to deal with men again and the sooner she starts the easier it’ll be. If she can talk to you, Superintendent, that’s the best thing for her. She was fortunate it was you who saw her first.’