by Jo Bannister
That coaxed a fractional grin from him but it didn’t last. ‘Jesus, boss, I don’t know. I think maybe this is the end. I don’t think I can do it any more.’
Liz settled her arms about him firmly, holding him not like a lover, perhaps like a friend. ‘What’re you talking about? You’ll be in plaster a couple of months, after that you’ll just need to build up the strength. Footballers who break their legs are playing again before the end of the season.’
He shook his head weakly, insistently. His voice was breathy as if his senses were slipping again, the words slurring. ‘That’s not what I mean. The leg’ll mend. It’s the rest of it. I don’t think I can face – this – again.’
‘This?’ Her voice soared incredulously. ‘You’ll never have to face this again. This was one for the record books.’
‘You’re not listening,’ Donovan whined fractiously, twisting against her, the pain of his broken ankle a hiss in his teeth. ‘I’m scared, God damn it! I was never so scared in all my life. I was so bloody scared I didn’t know what to do. I lost it. And I don’t know how to get it back. I don’t even know if I want it back.’
The breath caught in Liz’s throat. Shocked as he was, clinging to reality by his fingernails, she knew what it cost him to say that. He was absolutely serious: for the first time in the two years she’d known him he seemed beaten. The ordeal of the last hours had been too much, psychologically and emotionally, and it had broken him.
Instinct warned that what she said now mattered.
By the time the professionals got hold of him the die would be cast: if he believed he couldn’t function as a police officer any more they’d never convince him differently. But in the next few minutes, before the cavalry arrived with a stretcher and a bottle of nitrous oxide, she could do something for him. Not make things as they were: that was beyond her. And maybe not get him back to work. If he’d really had enough, she wouldn’t even try.
What she could do was stop him sliding into a bad decision through being too exhausted to make a good one. She could get him back on the horse that threw him. After that, if he wanted to shoot the damn thing, stuff it and put it on castors, that was his choice. He had a right not to be a detective any more. But there were people who cared about him enough to want what was right for him, and it was his good fortune that one of them was here.
She said fervently, ‘Donovan, of course you were scared! Do you think you shouldn’t have been? Of course you freaked out! Do you think I’d have done any better? That the chief would? You can’t win a situation like that, all you can do is get through somehow. It doesn’t matter how. All that matters is surviving.
‘And now you feel – flayed. Vivisected. It’s not just the hurt, it’s the helplessness. Something was done to you, something demeaning, that you were powerless to stop, and the humiliation is eating like acid into the bones of what you thought you were. A week ago you were a man with an important job, a good income, the respect of colleagues, the love of friends. Now that seems a world away. You’re in a kind of limbo – alone and palely loitering in a place where no birds sing. Because something evil can crawl out of a nightmare and sink its claws in you, and use you in ways that make ashes of everything you’ve built.
‘You know what that is, Donovan? That’s rape, in every way that matters. It’s not the physical assault that hurts, it’s the loss of free will. We’re not used to that, we thought we left it behind with childhood. Oh, we do lots of things we’d sooner not, but for adults there’s always a choice. You can quit the job, end the relationship, whatever. Only the very young, maybe the very old and people in prison have no freedom and even they have rights. We assume that, between the extremes of dependency and providing we stay out of jail, we’re in charge of our own lives.
‘That’s what the rapist destroys: the sense of autonomy. If anyone who’s strong enough can dump all that about intrinsic human value and inalienable rights and use you any way he wants, the fabric between the nightmare and the real world has stretched so thin it seems it’ll split wide any second and let the chaos in.’
He’d gone very still in the compass of her arms but Liz knew he was listening. Stark had gracefully withdrawn a little way, but she thought he was listening too. Only the dog, motionless at Donovan’s side, holding her in its basilisk stare, was obviously listening and it couldn’t understand a word.
She wanted to finish before they were interrupted. Her voice took it up again, soft but threaded through with a certainty that surprised even her. Crystallizing her thoughts for Donovan’s benefit was sharpening her own understanding. ‘What happened to us – both of us – was outside our control. We’re not responsible, any more than if we’d been hit by a runaway truck. There was nothing to do except what we did: we endured.
‘But now we have a choice. We can’t pretend it never happened but we don’t have to carry it through life like some great emotional burden. It happened, it’s over; you got your ankle bust, I got away pretty lightly too. The scars will heal in time. It’s what scars do – all they can do.’ She took a deep breath that came out as a sigh. There was a kind of release in putting it into words. Her only regret was that she could talk like this to Donovan but hadn’t managed to explain it to her husband.
‘What I’m trying to say is that I’m not cut out to be a victim and I don’t think you are either. After an air disaster, the victims are the ones who go to the funeral in boxes. The ones there on sticks are survivors.’
She was done. There was nothing she could usefully add; perhaps she’d said too much already. Among the dark trees wove the fireflies of distant torches.
Even though he’d been told the dog was Donovan’s, the sight of it crouched over him made Shapiro’s heart lurch. Constable Sutton edged towards it with a catching pole from the kennels. Brian Boru sat impassively to be lassoed, making them all feel rather foolish.
When it was done Shapiro hurried forward, anxiously taking in the white, strained face and shut eyes of the man on the ground. ‘How is he?’
Liz looked up with a tired smile, made no effort to rise. ‘He’ll be all right. His ankle’s broken, he’s a bit battered – nothing more.’
‘Does he know about—?’ He gestured back towards the cottage.
Donovan raised one eyelid and squinted at him. ‘Oh yeah.’
‘You saw it happen?’
‘I was a captive audience.’ He flinched as the paramedics examined his leg.
‘We’ve got all the people involved,’ said Shapiro. ‘How many of these killer dogs are we still looking for?’
Donovan had watched those dogs in action. He knew Andy would be alive now but for Brian’s attack. But he’d be dead, and when he’d been defenceless with his back against this tree it had been Brian again who stood between him and carnage, snapping and snarling until Gates’s dogs lost interest arid moved off.
For a moment he appeared to consider Shapiro’s question. Then he said, very firmly, ‘Both of them.’
Chapter Twenty-three
It was the middle of the night before they finished. Though she had a backlog of work waiting, Liz thought she’d earned a lie-in: with no one but herself to consider – that’s a joke, she thought bitterly, who else do I ever consider? – she threw Polly an extra slice of hay and set the alarm for an hour later than usual.
In the event she slept for perhaps an extra thirty minutes before wakening to the smell of coffee.
Before she was aware of knowing what it meant she was flying downstairs, dressed only in an oversized t-shirt bearing the legend ‘Teachers do it AGAIN and AGAIN until they GET IT RIGHT!’ and with her tangled hair streaming in a sunshine train behind her. Brian Graham just had time to put the tray down before she flung herself on him.
‘You bastard!’ she sobbed, clinging to him like a vine. ‘How could you do that to me?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured, holding her, feeling the rich warmth of her body through the thin cotton, breathing in the fresh-from-sleep smell.
‘I – thought it was what you wanted.’
‘Jesus, Brian,’ she hissed down the neck of his shirt, ‘How could I want that? I love you: don’t you know that? I love you and I need you. There’s other stuff that I want, but the only thing I need is you. How could you think I wanted you to go?’
‘Just because you said so,’ said Brian mildly, shaking his head. ‘Silly me.’
She pulled back and looked at him suspiciously; and yes, she was right, he was laughing at her. Or at them. And why not? They’d behaved like idiots, got hung up on words at a time when anyone could have told them the only reliable guide was instinct. ‘Oh – come upstairs.’
‘Shall I bring the tray?’
She stared at him. ‘Are you mad?’
Afterwards he said pensively, ‘We should have done that before.’
‘I wanted to.’
‘I wish you’d said. I thought it was the last thing you’d want. I thought maybe you’d never want it ever again.’
She put her head on one side. ‘It?’
‘It. This.’ Brian gave a rueful grin. ‘All right, sex. You know I had a sheltered upbringing: I was fifteen before I stopped saying “toilet”.’
Laced by his arms she giggled. Then her brow knit in the search for words that said exactly what she meant. ‘The point is, Brian, this wasn’t sex, this was making love. And what happened out there’ – she nodded towards the yard – ‘wasn’t even sex. Not to me, probably not even to him. It was a mugging. Love is in the commitment and sex is in the joy; without either it’s just a violation. They stick something up you when you go for a smear test, too, but nobody thinks of it as sex. It was a violent assault, neither more nor less. A forcible intrusion. Breaking and entering.’
Brian shook his head disbelievingly. ‘Can it really mean so little to you? But what does that say—?’ He heard himself reopening the argument, stopped abruptly. Nothing mattered to him as much as having her here.
But Liz wanted all the doubts resolved. ‘About what?’ Her eyes saucered with understanding. ‘My God, Brian – what does it say about us? About us in bed? You think that because I’m not prepared to fall apart over this it means I put no value on what we do? That’s it, isn’t it? – that’s what you think!’
Her astonished stare made him uncomfortable. He could have denied it, but they’d come close to the abyss by failing to make their feelings clear, lying was no way back. ‘I suppose. Yes, that’s what I was afraid of. Does that sound stupid?’
She rolled eel-like in his arms, came to rest on top of him, staring into his eyes from a range of inches. They were the blue of well-washed denim, and the hearts of them were warm but tacked in the corners she saw worry and fear. She’d done this to him. Not the man who raped her – Liz herself. He’d worried himself sick about a phantasm, something with no reality, a bad dream with no power to hurt them, and she hadn’t seen it happening and stopped it. Perhaps he had been stupid, but she’d been cruel.
‘Yes,’ she said honestly, ‘to me it does. But then, I know it isn’t true. I can shrug this off – maybe not as easily as I make out, but I can put it out with the trash – because I know how pathetically ersatz a thing it was. And I know that because I have the real thing to compare it with. It doesn’t touch us, Brian – it doesn’t come anywhere near us.
‘It’s – like getting home and finding you’ve had burglars. It’s a horrible feeling: somebody’s been in your home, helping himself to things that belong to you, trespassing in a place where you’d always felt safe. Ask anyone who’s been burgled: it’s not what you lose that matters, it’s the invasion. People spend weeks spring-cleaning to get rid of the feeling that the place where they live has been sullied.
‘They say being burgled is a bit like being raped. It’s not trivializing what happened to me to say that’s how it felt. Vicious, dirty and offensive, and not like sex because sex is better than that. I’m hurt and angry, and when I’m angry I don’t always hit the right targets – I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed that? – but I swear to you, Brian, nothing that can be done in five minutes to a woman who had to be knocked out first can possibly affect a relationship she’d die for.’
When they’d had breakfast Brian said, ‘Are you going into work now?’ Liz nodded. ‘Me too. Leave your car at home today.’
She frowned, puzzled. ‘Why?’
He smiled. ‘Because I want to drive my wife to work.’
So he was there to witness perhaps the strangest sight ever seen at Queen’s Street, not excluding a Jewish Santa Claus at the Christmas party. Later Liz quizzed him closely, sure he must have known, but he hadn’t. He’d just wanted people to see them together.
The police station was full of flowers. Bouquets wrapped in cellophane, bunches tied with wool, hyacinths in pots, a dozen long-stemmed red roses in a crystal vase, a clump of what looked like ragwort – it couldn’t have been, it was too early in the year, perhaps it was a rare Japanese dahlia – and two boxed orchids. Additionally there were great mismatched armfuls of flowers that had arrived one at a time and been hurriedly introduced by a desk sergeant who was more concerned with clearing a corner of his work-space than running a match-making service for horticultural lonely hearts.
Liz stared at them open-mouthed from the back door. ‘Somebody’s birthday?’
WPC Wilson appeared from behind a small camellia. ‘They’re for you, ma’am.’
‘Me?’ Liz was genuinely staggered. ‘Why should anyone send me flowers? Let alone’ – she indicated the riot of colour with a stunned wave – ‘Kew Gardens.’
‘I take it you didn’t hear the radio last night,’ said Wilson diplomatically.
‘Radio? Oh – that thing of Gail Fisher’s? No, I was busy.’ Her eyebrows, which had reached her hairline, fell suspiciously. ‘Whatever did she say?’
Wilson shook her head blithely. ‘Nothing special. Only what everyone here’s been thinking for four days: that this town’s lucky to have you, and instead of making cheap jokes it should send you flowers and then give you all the help and support it can. I think people took the flowers part more literally than she expected.’
‘But—’ Liz couldn’t get her mind round it. She’d seen nothing similar in twenty years on the force. ‘Who are they all from?’
‘Some have cards attached, some haven’t. A lot of the single flowers were kids dropping them in on their way to school. Mostly the others were women.’
They’d hurried in red-faced, embarrassed by what they were doing, anxious to deliver their gift and get away; but aware at the same time of being part of something important, standing up to be counted on an issue that mattered. As the flowers mounted Wilson loved watching the women’s faces change as they came in from the street, from the troubled certainty that they were making fools of themselves to delight at joining a groundswell of female solidarity, a regiment levied by a ten-minute radio slot rushing to the barricades armed with flowers.
Wilson indicated a bunch of parrot tulips. ‘Those are from us. From Queen’s Street.’
Sergeant Tulliver cleared his throat. ‘There’s a couple of empty cells, we could put them in there.’
Liz shook herself, got her brain back in gear. ‘No, find me a van. Some I want to keep, and I think we should leave some on view here, and I’ll take the others to the hospital. There’s enough here to decorate the whole damn place.’ She shook her head in wonder. The threat of tears pricked behind her eyes. ‘Is Mr Shapiro in?’
Sergeant Tulliver nodded. ‘Went up a few minutes ago.’
‘At least, it was probably Mr Shapiro,’ added Wilson with a grin. ‘It could have been some carnations wearing his hat.’
He’d brought in a couple of vases as well. She found him in her office arranging the flowers with deep concentration and no skill. ‘Did everybody hear this broadcast except me?’
His eyes avoided her. ‘Somebody made a tape, I listened to it after you’d gone home. I thought—’ He made a shy gesture towards the carnati
ons. ‘I didn’t expect everyone in town to have the same idea.’ He drew her attention to a pot on the windowsill. ‘Donovan sent that.’
She was past wondering how he’d heard the broadcast or managed to send her a plant from his hospital bed. She peered at it. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s a Mother-in-law’s Tongue,’ said Shapiro. ‘I told him it was a funny choice but he insisted.’
Liz thought it was funny too. After what had passed between them last night it was so funny they could hear her laughing all over the building.
When the phone rang it took her a moment to find it. It was Gail Fisher.
Liz said severely. ‘I suppose I’ve you to thank for the fact that this police station looks like the Chelsea Flower Show.’
She could hear Fisher’s delight. ‘Really? I hoped somebody might take it up, but – well, I sent some narcissi just in case. They’re not alone then?’
‘Not exactly. If you can spare ten minutes, have a look before I take some of them to the hospital. It’s enough to renew your faith in your fellow man. Or fellow woman, mostly.’
‘Funny you should mention that,’ said Fisher, her tone changing. ‘I do want to see you, though not about the flowers. And not at Queen’s Street. I have a friend who wants to talk to you. Could you meet me at her house?’
Liz sat up sharply, the flowers receding into a soft multi-coloured haze. ‘Is this the same friend we were talking about before?’
‘Yes. She – I think she feels she let the side down. She wants to help you find this man.’
The house was in Rosedale Avenue, a pleasant piece of stockbroker Tudor with a long front lawn running down to a stone bird-bath. You could tell you were in the nice part of town. In less salubrious areas people put their bird-baths in the back gardens; and there were places where they took them in at night, like washing.
Liz wasn’t aware of having met Amanda Urquhart before but she seemed familiar after a moment, queasily, she realized it was because they were as much alike as sisters. She was aged about forty, fair, well-built, tall, and a professional woman – an architect.