by Jo Bannister
‘I know you’re upset,’ he chided her gently, ‘but do try not to be crass. No, I’m not going on Police Six with it. What I might do is give Gail Fisher an interview confirming the basic facts and asking that anyone else who’s been attacked and hasn’t reported should come forward now. I could add that our officer who was attacked has taken some leave and gone away for a week. That should take the pressure off.’
Liz shook her head in bitter disbelief. ‘Frank, I don’t know why we’re even discussing this. I’m fit to work, I want to work, I’m being paid to work – and you want to send me to the seaside because Cathy Flynn was upset by a pair of bloomers? Send her to Bognor, she needs it more than I do.’
Shapiro was inclined to agree. He felt himself starting to grin. ‘Oh, Liz, why can’t you be a lazy timeserving git like other coppers and take a free holiday when it’s offered?’
But she wasn’t smiling. ‘You know why, Frank. Because after a week on the beach I’d need another. And after two I’d never get back.’
‘So I should tell the Son of God you wouldn’t welcome any such suggestion?’
She nodded incisively. ‘Tell him I’d fight it tooth and nail.’
When Shapiro had gone she looked round the room, hung with clothes like ungainly Christmas decorations, in a kind of wonder and with the fragile beginnings of amusement. Whatever had she been thinking of? She put them away, keeping out only what she’d need for the morning.
Brian said, ‘You’re still going in, then?’
Again she nodded. ‘I have to.’
‘No,’ he said carefully, ‘you want to.’
She turned to him, held his gaze. His kind eyes were the best feature of an otherwise unremarkable face. She looked there for some understanding of how these events were affecting her, their implications for the medium and long-term future. Shapiro understood. He might not like how she wanted to handle it but he understood that her needs took priority over her inclinations. That she had to work backwards from where she wanted to be and make choices that would help her get there. She looked for some appreciation of that in Brian’s eyes, and could not find it.
‘I want,’ she said fiercely, ‘the same as you do – that this never happened. But that’s not an option. As second choice, I want to have the damage repaired so that things are as good as they were before – between you and me, between me and my colleagues, between Queen’s Street and the town. That is possible but it’ll take hard work and it has to start with me. And I have to start tomorrow, before the cracks widen too far.’
The pain in his eyes was like another assault on her. ‘Oh, Liz,’ he said softly. ‘I wish you’d tell me how you really feel.’
Despair flared in her like temper. ‘I have told you!’ she cried. ‘You just don’t listen.’
His sensitive hands reached for her shoulders but she shook him off impatiently. ‘You see?’ he murmured. His misery was like his soul, gentler than hers, not less passionate but less demonstrative. His heart would break with barely a crack. ‘You’re pushing me away. It’s not him doing that, it’s you. You seem to think I’m a detail you can sketch in when you’ve sorted out the important things with Frank Shapiro. But I’m important, Liz. I’m half of our marriage, you can’t push me aside while you decide what to do. You owe me better than that. You owe us better.’
‘And don’t you owe me something?’ she snapped back faster than thought. ‘Support, maybe? Time and space? You must know how difficult this is for me. Why are we talking about your feelings when it’s me that’s been raped?’
She should have slapped his face: it would have been less hurtful. He recoiled, in fact, as if she had. He backed away. He knew he couldn’t win a head-to-head with her when her hackles were up. He thought if he let it drop now, came back when she was calmer and they talked about it rationally, they might make some progress.
He was turning to leave the room when he suddenly saw himself through her eyes. That wasn’t discretion, it was cowardice. If he let that be her last word it would never be erased; Damoclean, it would hang over them forever. He wheeled back, surprising her.
‘How dare you accuse me of not supporting you?’ he demanded in quiet fury. ‘I have always backed you to the hilt. I’ve watched you do things, take risks, that knotted me up inside – things no man should have to watch his wife doing – rather than be accused of standing in your way. My career has always played second fiddle to yours. And you have the nerve to ask for my support!
‘Can’t you see I’m not a by-stander in this? I’m a victim too. Our marriage is the most important thing in my life, and what that animal did struck at its very heart. Of course I have feelings about it, and they matter, and if you’re as blasé about all this as you pretend why can’t you spare just a little interest and concern for them?’
‘Blasé?’ she shouted in outraged astonishment. ‘Because I won’t dissolve in tears on your manly bosom and let you decide what’s best for me? Get a life, Brian! I’m running up a down escalator here, I don’t know that I can reach the top, but I’m damn sure that if I don’t give it all I’ve got I’ll get dumped on the floor.
‘I’m sorry if I haven’t treated your feelings with due deference. I thought that since mine were having to get by on a lick and a promise yours could, too. But then I only had some man I don’t know from Adam humping me. You had an animal strike at the very heart of the most important thing in your life. Hell, Brian, I’m really sorry I wasted all this time wondering what was right for me!’
They didn’t go in for slanging matches. Disagreements between them were usually settled amicably. They had exchanged the odd cross word over the breakfast table, but nothing that needed forgiveness later. They had never had a real stand-up, drag-out fight before; perhaps, without something of this magnitude to prompt them, they never would have. They were two reasonable people, they didn’t fight about things that could be settled sensibly.
But there were no reasonable answers this time, and neither was entirely rational. Nerves strung to top C, they hadn’t enough composure for one, let alone to share.
‘How can you even think you’re fit to work?’ Brian snorted derisively. ‘If you can’t exercise self-control in your own living-room, how the hell are you going to cope with a bunch of people who’re full of their own woes and don’t give a damn about yours?’
‘With the support of my colleagues,’ Liz shot back. ‘Them I can count on.’
He sucked in a sharp breath at that, as if the barb were a physical one she’d struck into his flesh. ‘I can’t cope with this,’ he admitted then, his voice trembling. ‘I can’t cope with you like this.’
‘Then perhaps you’d better have a week at Bognor,’ snarled Liz. ‘Send me a postcard, let me know how your feelings are getting on.’
He had nothing more to say, nothing left to fight her with. He did what, in retrospect, he might have been wiser to do before – left the room, went upstairs.
Liz watched him go with a maelstrom of emotions in her breast. She felt anger, bitterness and a horrid kind of triumph because she’d stood her ground and he hadn’t. But she also felt let down. She felt she’d let him down. She thought he’d said stupid, insensitive things; she thought she’d said some pretty unforgivable things too. She thought she should probably go after him. But she didn’t.
Chapter Fifteen
There was nothing wrong with the 4x4. Donovan tinkered anyway, mainly for the pleasure of feeling oiled components slide under his fingers. He was a sensual man.
It was the oil that saved him.
When Donovan painted his boat he got so much paint on him that days later people would say, ‘Green again this year? And yellow window frames?’ When he changed a type-writer ribbon he looked like an extra on the Black and White Minstrel Show. And when he danced cheek-to-cheek with an engine he got oil all over his face.
Behind the cottage there was just room between the rusted outbuildings for the 4x4, Donovan’s van and Gates’s run-about. Wash
ing against the back fence like a dark tide was a belt of woodland. There was no telling from here how deep it was or how far it went; it had a neglected look, surplus to requirements and forgotten. It was like a piece of primeval forest that had somehow escaped axe and plough, and would probably continue to do so having neither practical nor aesthetic value.
Donovan heard movement in the undergrowth and momentarily his heart quickened; but nothing in there was likely to give him a problem. The others might feel threatened by sounds of surreptitious movement in the bushes, but Donovan was fairly sure it wasn’t a police dragnet closing in. Perhaps it was badgers – the woods round here were full of them.
It was neither policemen nor badgers. The green hem of the wood twitched as something pushed through and Donovan found a girl watching him over the remains of the fence. ‘Who’re you?’ she demanded warily.
She’d stood close to him for long enough that she should have known. He recognized her, though the woolly jacket was torn and dirty now and the frizzy hair was tied back with a bandana. She looked older, not so squeaky-clean, not so likely to scream and shed terrified tears at the sight of a knife, but she was unmistakably the girl from the train.
But remembering faces is something policemen are trained for. Thieves tend not to look that closely at the people they’re robbing. Also, Donovan had been clean then and wearing a collar and tie while Hugh Duggan’s jeans, sweatshirt and person were all liberally anointed with oil.
The voice would be the hurdle. Donovan’s accent, unremarkable in itself, was rare around Castlemere. Was it too late, he wondered, to assume a speech impediment? Probably, he’d talked to Gates for too long without. Maybe the best he could do was say as little as possible in front of the girl. ‘Duggan,’ he granted. ‘You?’
‘Patsy,’ she said. She waited for a reaction; when he didn’t oblige she lost interest in him, her eyes sliding away across the yard. ‘Tudor around?’
Donovan indicated the cottage.
The girl skipped over the fence, agile as a forest animal, passed him without a look. Preoccupied, she’d filed him in her mind as someone tall, taciturn and oily and left it at that. With luck, next time they met she’d remember him as the man from the yard, and after that as Hugh Duggan and nothing else. Donovan breathed a little easier.
He leaned on the bull-bars and eyed the wood. If this started getting nasty, that was the way he’d go. Five metres beyond the fence he’d be in deep gloom. In two minutes he could lose himself so completely it would take an army to find him.
But he didn’t want to quit this close to success. The worst was over: she’d have remembered him by now if she was going to. Later she might get the nagging feeling of having seen him somewhere, not know where and decide he reminded her of someone on TV. Even if she did place him, all was not lost. So far as Patsy ever knew he was a railway engineer who knew about the air-shaft.
And in consequence led her companions into a police ambush, following which he swapped his job for one of the vacancies thus created. These people didn’t stay free by believing in coincidence. They were cautious, suspicious. If the girl remembered him she’d tell Gates, and Gates would—
What? Beat the truth out of him? Not Gates; even if he’d been big enough it wasn’t his style. Charlie was big enough but didn’t seem the violent type either. No, if Patsy chanced to remember, and as a cautious man he felt the risk was too great, Gates would quit Castlemere as soon as he could pack. Donovan had the registration numbers of his cars but they were certainly false and would be changed at the first opportunity. To ensure a head start he’d probably shut Donovan in one of the outbuildings. It could take him hours to free himself, but he didn’t think he risked anything worse.
So after a little while he stopped looking at the wood and went back to his engine. A while after that he went inside and cleaned up. But he didn’t clean up too thoroughly.
Charlie was still puzzling over his crossword and didn’t look up. ‘Patsy’s back.’
‘I saw her outside.’
‘Coach is pointing out the error of her ways. Best not to say anything.’
Donovan shrugged. ‘None of my business.’
When he saw her next her face was rebellious, streaked with tears, and patched with hand-sized splashes of red that would darken into bruises. She threw herself into the chair beside Charlie’s. ‘Look what he’s done to my face,’ she said sulkily.
Charlie spared her no sympathy. ‘Harry’s dead and the boys are in jail, and you want me to worry about you getting your face smacked? Grow up, Patsy.’
‘Don’t blame me for what happened,’ she said indignantly, ‘it wasn’t my idea.’
‘No, it was Harry’s. The flash ideas were always Harry’s,’ the big man said wearily. ‘But he was a driver, ideas weren’t his thing. If no one had gone along with his flash ideas he’d be alive now.’
The girl turned her back on him. The only other person in the room was Donovan. She regarded him critically for a while – too long, he felt his skin beginning to crawl. ‘You any good then?’ It sounded as if, whatever he said, she’d argue.
It was hard to equate this spiteful little witch with the terrified schoolgirl on the train. He’d risked his life to protect her; now he couldn’t imagine how he’d been fooled. He shrugged. ‘Ask the coach.’
‘Ask the coach, tell the coach, kiss the coach’s arse,’ she mimicked bitterly. ‘Does nobody round here have a thought in his head except what Tudor puts there?’
Finally Charlie looked at her. ‘Yeah,’ he said heavily. ‘Harry did.’
The stairs creaked and Gates was watching them from halfway up, the light eyes astute, the small V-shaped smile speculative. When he had their full attention he said quietly, ‘What about the 4x4, Hugh? Are you happy with it?’
‘It’ll do,’ grunted Donovan, still rationing his words in front of Patsy.
Gates smiled. ‘It had better – we need it first thing tomorrow. We hit the shop at seven. There’ll be enough traffic about by then that we won’t stand out, not enough to get in the way.’
Donovan felt a chill like a cool breath move up his spine. Twelve hours and this would be done. As long as she didn’t remember for the next twelve hours it wouldn’t matter what Patsy remembered after that.
Gates spelled out the plan in detail. Even so there wasn’t a lot to remember. Andy in the run-about would drop him in Bridgewater Street at ten-to-seven. Eminently visible in white overalls with a paint brush in his pocket, Gates would linger outside Owens, ostensibly waiting for someone, actually checking for problems. At seven Donovan would arrive. If all was well Gates would be out of sight by then, back in his car parked round the first corner, and he’d wait till the raid was complete. If the job went wrong, anyone who got there ahead of the police would get a lift; anyone else would be on his own. If it went well they’d meet back at the cottage.
‘Whatever else you do, Hugh, don’t bring the police. If you think you’re being followed, lose them; if you can’t lose them, lose the car and get away on foot. But if you are picked up, keep your mouth shut. You’re on your own – I shan’t be able to help you – but I’ll keep your money for when you’re able to spend it.’
He chuckled at Donovan’s expression. ‘I’m only saying if the worst comes to the worst. It won’t, it never has yet, but I want you to understand what the priorities are. Not getting caught is first, together with keeping quiet if you’re unlucky. The haul comes a poor third – what we miss one day we can make up another as long as we’re all OK. But God help anyone who brings trouble to my door. I am not the price of your freedom. Betray me and somehow, some day, I’ll make you pay.’
It wasn’t the most lurid threat Donovan had ever heard but it may have been the most sincere. He gave a disdainful sniff. ‘I don’t grass.’
‘Good. Because I don’t make hollow threats.’
It was a long evening, with nothing for Donovan to do but avoid talking to Patsy, and a longer night in which the co
ntours of the chair he sprawled in became ever more deeply impressed on his bones. He got no sleep until exhaustion finally claimed him about half an hour before Gates shook him awake. ‘Time to move.’
He really was a very cautious man. Before he left the cottage he wanted to see everyone ready to go, dressed in their ram-raiding outfits and in the 4x4 with the back seat down and the engine on. ‘I’m not going to twiddle my thumbs in town while you wrestle with the starter!’ But the engine caught first time. ‘Then let’s do it. Good luck, everyone.’ He waved a white arm from the window as Andy drove him away.
For ten minutes they sat in the front of the 4x4, listening to the throaty purr of the engine and growling at one another. All had cause to be on edge. Two of them were worried in case the police showed up, the third in case they didn’t.
At six-fifty Donovan slammed the 4x4 into gear.
When they reached the by-pass, under the guise of washing fly-specks off the windscreen he turned on the lights. There were no police cars in sight but any of these drivers could be a policeman. Maybe the 4x4 had been spotted already; maybe he’d drive into an ambush. If not he’d have to kill a little time till help arrived. There was a telegraph pole set in the pavement not far from Owens, he didn’t think Shapiro would mind him side-swiping that to jam the passenger door shut. He reckoned he could stop Charlie and the girl climbing out over him while Shapiro saw to Gates and the boy.
If Shapiro showed up. If somebody noticed these damn great headlights blazing away in the spring sunshine.
Even if they didn’t, Queen’s Street would quickly learn of a giant 4x4 wrapped round a telegraph pole in Bridgewater Street.
If they missed Gates at the scene they’d pick him up at the cottage or fleeing the area. One way or another, Donovan thought it would work out.
Right up to the moment that he turned into Bridgewater Street and there was a knot of people on the pavement between the telegraph pole and Owens Electricals.