by Jo Bannister
The man covered his face, gestured peremptorily, and Donovan remembered his manners and dropped the beam. ‘Sorry.’
‘’S all right,’ the man said, amiably enough. ‘Only, people get a bit twitchy, you know?’
‘Not as twitchy as me,’ growled Donovan. ‘I keep expecting the frigging Dog Police to leap out of the trees.’
The man chuckled. ‘You haven’t been here before, have you?’
Donovan shook his head. ‘The poor sod’s been living in a lock-up. Somebody told me I could bring him here without being bothered.’
‘Right enough. But that’s no kind of exercise, dragging him round on a rope. Let him run, that’s what I do. They can’t do much damage out here.’
Looking again, Donovan realized the brute beside him had neither a lead nor a muzzle. He shivered. ‘You don’t know Brian. He’s a desperate dog for a fight. He’ll fight his own shadow if there’s nothing else going. I like the dog, you know, but I wouldn’t trust him an inch.’
‘Brian?’ The man laughed. ‘That’s not much of a name for a fighting dog.’
‘Brian Boru,’ said Donovan indignantly. ‘How’s your Irish history?’
‘Bit of a sporting gent, was he?’
‘There was nothing sporting about it. He killed Vikings, as many as he could, any way he could. Nowadays they’d call him the Butcher of Clontarf and take up a collection for disabled Norsemen. But when it’s a matter of kill or be killed you have to admire the guy who does it best. It’s like the dogs: you can’t blame a dog for fighting when it’s in his nature.’
‘Right enough.’ The man fell into step beside Donovan, his dog pacing silently at his heel. Donovan kept Brian’s leash short. ‘Dogs like these, a good scrap’s the best exercise they can have. Did you ever think…?’
They walked back to the car-park. The van was gone; the other man put his dog into the trailer. ‘Do you have a name?’
‘Duggan,’ said Donovan. ‘Hugh Duggan.’
‘First names are enough. ‘I’m Mick.’ He patted the trailer. ‘And he’s Thor. Listen. If I hear anything, should I let you know?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Donovan with conviction.
Chapter Eight
‘Two rapes with a week between,’ said Liz, stirring her coffee vengefully. ‘That isn’t a habit, it’s a compulsion. It won’t be long before he tries again.’
‘I said that about the ram-raiders.’ Shapiro sniffed. ‘I’m still hiding round corners to avoid the Son of God.’
Superintendent Giles was not merely twelve years younger than his predecessor, he was a different kind of policeman. He had two degrees. He was computer literate. It was he who found the funding to stake out nine different premises when Shapiro was sure the ram-raiders would strike on Monday evening, and again when he revised that to Tuesday morning. Every time Shapiro met his cool blue gaze he saw pound signs clocking up.
Liz didn’t feel like smiling. She wasn’t angry with Shapiro: she was still angry with Gail Fisher and her friend, and even that was a kind of referred anger because she didn’t know the man she was really angry with. She didn’t subscribe to the Victorian view that it was a fate worse than death, but she had better reasons than sisterly solidarity for considering rape a peculiarly vicious offence.
It was a crime perpetrated exclusively by stronger people on weaker ones, as distasteful as a grown man beating a child or a strong one a cripple. Additionally, it tainted a special gift of joy. Like the Bad Fairy, the rapist waved a wand over something meant to be an abiding pleasure and turned it to gall. It wasn’t like stealing a woman’s purse. It was like stealing her purse, and coming back to steal it again every time she tried to open it for maybe the rest of her life. When it came to rape, Liz had no sense of humour.
‘We have to find him,’ she said flatly. ‘Whatever it costs, we have to stop him.’
‘I agree. But is money the answer? With unlimited funding, how would you have saved Mrs Andrews from being raped? You could turn Castlemere into a police state and still not be able to guarantee women’s safety from molestation. Even a curfew wouldn’t have saved the woman in the office block. It’s easy to say that prevention’s better than cure but mostly it can’t be done. Usually the best we can do is catch those responsible for crimes and hope to restrict their opportunities to reoffend. There’ll never be an entirely safe society; and what’s more, there never was.’
Liz banged down her empty cup. ‘No? Well, consider this. If there was anything out there as dangerous to men as men are to women, the army would be brought in to wipe it out.’
He understood her anger but Shapiro was concerned that it was clouding her judgement. He said quietly, ‘And you think of this. The groups at greatest risk of violence in our society aren’t women at all. Small children suffer the greatest number of attacks in the home, and young men the greatest number in the street. If you had a son of twenty and a daughter of twenty-one walking home late at night, the girl isn’t the one you’d need to worry about.’
For a moment Liz went on eyeing him hotly; then she looked away. The annoying thing was, she knew he was right. ‘You think I’m over-reacting.’
‘No,’ he said honestly. ‘How can you over-react to something like this! But we need to focus on the right problem. It’s nothing to do with sex. It’s about dominance. Rapists are men attacking women because that’s how the biology works. But the problem isn’t that men can rape women, it’s that a few men want to: that the urge to violence occasionally expresses itself that way. Rape isn’t an excess of love but a burgeoning of hatred. Rapists don’t want what they take, that’s only an excuse; if there were no women to rape they’d victimize someone else. What they want is to hurt – physically, mentally, emotionally. All they really want from you is your pain.’
When she first worked for Shapiro, when he was a detective inspector and she a sergeant, Liz was always being made aware of how much he knew that she didn’t. It happened less now, partly because she’d made a point of listening then, but still often enough to remind her that though she had her own strengths she didn’t have his profound understanding of human nature. She still listened when Shapiro talked because there was still a lot he could teach her.
‘All right,’ she conceded with a flicker of grace, ‘I’ll try not to besmirch half the human race with the sins of a minority if you’ll think of some way to catch the sod.’
‘We’re waiting for the results of the DNA test. That may come up trumps.’
Liz eyed him askance. ‘If he’s done it before, and been caught. But if he’s done it before it was somewhere else, and if he’s a local man he’s only just started and won’t be on file. DNA’s a long shot.’
Shapiro felt the burden of her expectation. ‘Without a description it’s still probably the best we have. Unless…’ On second thoughts he decided not to say it.
Liz finished for him, her lips tight. ‘Unless he does it again, and this time he drops his driving licence. Frank, we could go through an awful lot of victims before he does something that stupid. We need to force the pace, push him into making a mistake. What about a decoy?’
Shapiro recoiled as if she’d offered him a bag of pork scratchings. ‘To catch a rapist? You’re on dangerous ground there, girl. This is a hit-and-run expert, remember. If there’s anyone close enough to protect the decoy he won’t strike. And if you move the cover back to where he isn’t aware of them, he’ll be in and out before they can reach her.’ He winced. ‘If you’ll pardon the expression.’
‘She’ll have two massive advantages over the previous victims,’ Liz pressed. ‘She’ll be ready for it, watching and listening for his first move. And she’ll be a policewoman. We’re better at self-defence than the average building society manageress.’
The pause meant Shapiro was considering it. He didn’t like it but there weren’t many options. Doing nothing but hoping for the best was one; this was the other. Finally he said, ‘Even in a blonde wig, Wilson’s too young and too
small to fit the profile. Cathy Flynn would look the part but I don’t know how she’d react if he took the bait. Besides, I don’t think she’d volunteer, and I’m not ordering anyone to do that. Who’s left? We’re not exactly knee deep in good-looking blonde Whoopsies aged about forty who can handle themselves in a scrap.’ Women Police Constables labour under a variety of nicknames up and down the country. ‘Whoopsies’ is one of the less pejorative.
‘Who says it has to be a Whoopsie?’
‘Donovan in a blonde wig?’ The idea was enough to freeze the conversation in its tracks.
Liz recovered first, shaking the image out of her eyes like soapy water. ‘Me, Frank. I haven’t met your Mrs Andrews but from your description, and Fisher’s description of her friend, I’m the obvious choice. I’m the same age, build and colouring – if he went for them he’ll go for me.’
But he wouldn’t agree there and then. He wanted to think about it. Even if he were persuaded he’d need to get approval: Giles held the purse-strings. After the earlier fiascos, clutched might be a better word.
She got home a little after seven. Her husband was in the kitchen washing sugar-beet and flaked maize off his hands. Every morning Liz prepared three buckets of feed for her mare, and if she wasn’t there at the appropriate times Brian would deliver them to the stable behind the house. It was the limit of his involvement with the horse, and it took Liz three years to persuade him to do that much.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like animals. He had a definite fondness for cats. But horses, with their unfathomable thought processes and instantaneous reactions, their iron feet and their sheer size, frightened him. It was in vain for Liz to point out that Polly was a middle-aged lady of sedate good manners, and that the appearance of a bucket was in any event a guarantee of good behaviour. Instead she bought a manger that hooked over the door and could be filled from outside the stable.
She put her arms round his middle and laid her cheek against his back, feeling his bones through his shirt. ‘Good day at the chalk-face?’
‘3b,’ he said wearily, ‘have just discovered nipples.’ He taught art. Though his pupils ranged from eleven-year-olds to A-level students of nineteen it was always 3b that gave him trouble. Nipples, fig-leaves and those bits of voile, unexplained by the context, that floated in front of classical nudes at strategic moments. As 2b they were too shy to comment; as 4b they were too cool. But every year 3b stumbled on nipples with the thrill of Marilyn Monroe discovering updraughts. ‘You?’
‘Not very.’ She turned him in the compass of her arms so that she could see his face. There was nothing remarkable about it. It was intelligent, kind and sensitive, and boasted a forehead that went most of the way back to his collar. Men who wouldn’t have stood a chance if a freak nuclear accident in Market Harborough wiped out most of the male population couldn’t see what a good-looking woman like Liz Graham saw in a balding art teacher; and wouldn’t have believed that the answer was as simple as love if she’d told them. ‘We need to talk about it. There’s something I want to do, and I think maybe you have a right to be consulted.’
When he realized what she was proposing his first instinct was to stop her somehow. Not to forbid her, he knew he couldn’t do that, he knew by trying he risked more than she was planning to, but by asking her, begging if he had to. His blood ran cold at the very idea.
But he’d been married to her for ten years, knew how important this was to her. She hadn’t made detective inspector by pulling flashy stunts, she’d done it by hard work and professionalism. She hadn’t dreamed this up on the drive home, she’d thought it through and believed it was the best way to trap a dangerous man who would otherwise remain free. That didn’t put Graham’s mind at rest, but it told him two things. That if she did it she’d do it properly, with all the support she needed. And that if she didn’t do it, because of him, she’d think less of him.
He didn’t dare ask how risky it could be. ‘How safe can you make it?’
Proud of him, her smile was warm. ‘Safer than points duty on market day; safer than clearing a pitch invasion after a four-one drubbing by Rochdale; about the same risk factor as going through Donovan’s desk without wearing rubber gloves.’
But he didn’t want humour, he wanted the truth. ‘Seriously.’
Liz nodded, chastened. She owed him honesty. ‘Pretty safe. I’ll have a radio so I can have back-up within twenty seconds. If I can hold on to him for twenty seconds the thing’s finished, he’s behind bars, he can’t harm anyone else.’
‘What makes you think he’ll go for it? I mean, why you? There must be dozens of attractive forty-year-old blondes in Castlemere. How do you catch his eye?’
‘We look at what he’s done already. Both times he chose a semi-public place – if either woman had made enough noise she’d have been heard. So maybe the risk of being caught is part of the thrill. Also, he wants a certain type of victim, not just any woman who crosses his path. We can use that. I thought we’d start at Mere Basin. We don’t know just where the first attack took place, but he was in one of the office blocks after normal hours so maybe he works there. If so he may notice another forty-year-old blonde coming and going late at night.’
‘And if he takes the bait?’
‘I yell, and Donovan and Scobie and Morgan dash up and sit on him.’
‘You make it sound you couldn’t possibly get hurt.’ She was holding his hand, her fingers woven with his. ‘You can always get roughed up in this job, you know that. Mostly it’s black eyes, occasionally a broken nose.’ That took him back: she’d had a plaster over her nose the night he asked her to marry him. He hadn’t meant to propose, not quite then, but that plaster brought out his nurturing instincts. ‘It’s pretty rare for anything to go further awry than that.’
‘But it could happen.’
‘With three large policemen watching my every move? No. We won’t let it get that far out of hand.’
Brian Graham didn’t like it any more than Shapiro had done, for some of the same reasons. He didn’t give a damn about the overtime budget but he didn’t want his wife putting herself in danger. Even a carefully controlled danger; even in a good cause.
On the other hand, every policeman’s wife in the country saw him off to work feeling the same way, and Brian doubted if many of them were invited to say how many risks of what nature they should take in the course of their work. He appreciated being asked – she didn’t have to do that, she could have said nothing until it was over.
‘Donovan. And Scobie’s the one with the nose?’ His shudder was real enough. ‘I don’t know what effect they’ll have on the enemy, but by God they frighten me.’
Quoting the Duke of Wellington was about the closest Brian came to machismo. His courage took quieter forms; like saying yes to something that filled him with dread when he could have said no. Liz’s gaze on his face was fond. ‘Brian Graham, you’re a star.’
A few minutes later the phone went. When she came back anticipation was warring in her eyes with a little anxiety, and winning. ‘That was Frank. We’re on.’
Chapter Nine
That night, and again the following night, as the clock in Castle Place struck twelve, she drove under the iron archway and down the steep ramp into Mere Basin. Four canals met in the heart of Castlemere and a six-storey warehouse had been built over each of them on black brick vaults high enough to accommodate a narrowboat chimney and not much more. In recent years the Victorian warehouses had been redeveloped as shops, offices and apartments, and very pleasant it was when sunshine poured through the great square well of the buildings on to the peaty water and gaily-painted boats.
At midnight, however, the shops were shut and the offices were dark and all that could be seen of the two hundred people who lived there were cars parked in the basement garages and the glow of a few lights behind drawn curtains high up in the buildings. It wasn’t quite enough to send shivers up the spine, but nor was it the obvious spot for a woman on her own to walk a d
og.
In fact Liz was not on her own. Secreted about the Basin were DS Donovan and DCs Scobie and Morgan. Donovan was (of course) on a boat, Scobie was in a car and Morgan was in a little striped tent where the gas company had had the pipes up. To a casual eye the place was deserted.
Except for the tall fair woman with the little white dog who parked her car under The Barbican and walked unhurriedly beneath the building and out towards Broad Wharf. There were lights on the tow-path, but Broad Wharf was where they ended. Under the last of them she leaned against a bollard for a few minutes; then she turned round and wandered back. She did this on Tuesday night, and again on Wednesday night, by which time she was heartily sick of the little white dog she’d borrowed; and she didn’t attract so much as a wolf-whistle.
On Thursday morning she found a summons from Superintendent Giles on her desk. She knew what he was going to say but she still didn’t have an answer.
He was about her age, tall and slender and fair; like a recruiting sergeant for the Hitler Youth, someone remarked nastily when he first arrived. He greeted Liz politely and waited for her to take a seat before asking, ‘Any luck at the Basin last night?’
There was only one reply possible. ‘No, sir, not so far.’
His smile had a distant quality; not because he was an unkind man, more because the bias of his skills was administrational rather than personal. He liked the words ‘organization’and ‘method’: it was impossible to swap a casual remark with him on the stairs without one or other coming into it. ‘The thing is, Mrs Graham, we need results to justify the expenditure. I can’t keep four detectives tied up for an hour every night when the only benefit is that Miss Tunstall gets her dog walked.’ Miss Tunstall was his secretary.
‘It’s like any other kind of fishing,’ Liz said apologetically. ‘All you can do is bait the hook. You can’t make the fish jump.’