by Jo Bannister
‘So let’s say he met her on Friday night – it had to be Friday if she was going to lie more than a few hours where she died, none of this would take place by daylight. Maybe they talked, maybe went somewhere to make love, then he killed her. Then he hid her and waited. It was too risky to move her at once. There may have been people about: it was Friday night, maybe not long after closing time. So either he left her where she was, temporarily, always meaning to dispose of her properly when it was safe. Or he panicked, bundled her out of sight and took to his heels, but later he got worrying that he should have made a better job of it.’
‘But did he? Make a better job, I mean.’ Liz had lost interest in needling Donovan when Shapiro began to talk. She wasn’t unduly modest about her professional ability but she recognized that while he had taught her most of what she knew he hadn’t taught her all he knew. Any time Frank Shapiro cared to talk she was ready to listen.
But not uncritically. ‘What I mean is, when he put her out of sight immediately after the crime she wasn’t found. When he put her in the canal she was.’
‘Hiding her bought him time to get organized. To get himself an alibi, perhaps. Once he’d done that he wanted her off his hands.’
‘It was a hell of a risk. You’re saying he killed her on Friday night, hid her and so far nobody knew anything about it. Then last night he took her from her hiding-place and put her in the canal. Why? It doubled his chances of being caught. He’d need an absolutely compelling reason to go back to her. He mustn’t have had any choice.
‘What if he killed her at his own house? She was a teenage prostitute living with her dad: they went to the man’s place for privacy. That means he probably lives alone. That’s where he killed her, and that’s why he had to move her, whatever the risk.’
‘You don’t think she was killed here then?’ said Donovan, expressionless as the dead girl.
Shapiro looked at him, his eyes clearing. ‘I doubt it. If she was he’d have put her in the canal right away. On the other hand, maybe she wasn’t killed that far away. This was her beat, and …’ He looked up the towpath towards the distant shunting yard, down the canal to the crowded buildings of the town centre. ‘It’s the sort of place where people do get their throats cut,’ he finished lamely.
‘This may look like nowhere to you,’ Donovan said forcibly, ‘but there are people around, even after dark. Half a dozen of these boats are lived on. Somebody’d have seen something. If they didn’t see him do it they’d have seen him walk away with blood all over him. Cut somebody’s throat like that and the stuff goes everywhere.’
Dr Crowe put in his ten-penn’orth. ‘Can’t say for sure, but the easiest way to inflict a wound that deep and that wide would be from behind.’ He demonstrated, slashing one of the big soft hands across Liz’s throat. ‘In which case the blood would have gone everywhere except over the killer.’
Donovan was unconvinced. ‘He still had to move her. All the front of her would be covered in blood, there’d be a pool of it on the ground.’ One eyebrow climbed interrogatively.
‘The lads are looking,’ said Shapiro, who’d reached the scene first and so organized the search. ‘Nothing yet.’
‘If she was killed here there’d be blood on the ground and blood on whatever he covered her with. He must have covered her or she’d have been found. She wasn’t killed here. She was killed somewhere else and brought here after dark. If he drove out to Cornmarket he’d be far enough from the moorings that nobody’d hear anything, not the car and not the splash.’
Shapiro looked up and down the wharf, assessing the distances. They were a hundred metres from the nearest houseboat, half a mile from Doggett’s Lock where the northern spur branched off. ‘You mean she didn’t necessarily go in where she came out?’
Donovan’s face held a waterman’s scorn. ‘She’d move about a bit in twelve hours. It’s not like a river where everything goes downstream but things don’t stay put either. There’s a lot of traffic through here, pleasure boats and the like, especially Sunday mornings. It all moves the water round, and anything in it. She could have gone in anywhere along here. But if I wanted rid of a body I’d be looking for privacy, and the quietest bit of Cornmarket is out by the junction.’
‘All right,’ agreed Shapiro, ‘go and look. See if there are any fresh tyre marks or signs of something being dragged.’ When Donovan had loped off he said to Liz, ‘I suppose you know why he wants her to have been killed somewhere else.’
Liz shook her head.
Shapiro nodded at the houseboats. ‘The green one is Donovan’s. If she was killed here, he was probably within earshot at the time.’
They talked to the man who found the body but learned nothing more. By then Donovan had returned, looking discouraged.
‘Nothing. It doesn’t look anybody’s been there for days. No signs of a car; no signs of something being pushed over the edge.’
The pathologist and the photographer having finished, the crew of the waiting ambulance wrapped the body carefully and took it away. It occurred to Liz that it could have been a long time since men treated that young girl’s body with respect.
‘Right,’ said Shapiro, briskly, when she’d gone. Like all of them he found it easier to breathe when the reason for his presence no longer physically dominated the scene. ‘Donovan, try the other way, see if you can spot anything. Uniform have already looked but you’re familiar with the place, you might see something they’ve missed. If we can find where she went in it’ll be a start. Before you go, which was her house in Jubilee Terrace?’
‘The second from this end. You can’t miss it, it’s the one with no paint.’
‘I suppose,’ said Liz resignedly when Shapiro said nothing more, ‘that the happy task of telling a drunkard that his teenage prostitute daughter’s had her throat cut falls to me.’
3
The house was one laggard step ahead of a public nuisance order. Bits fell off it in high winds. The chimney canted charmlessly and could have burned the house down had anyone been rash enough to light a fire in the grate. You could smell the rot in the windowsills; broken glass in the door had been patched with a bit of cardboard box advertising a defunct brand of dog-food.
Castlemere Borough Council had a file on Philip Pierce thick enough to obstruct a main drain and heavy enough, if dropped from sufficient height, to crush the life out of a good sized rat. (Computerization came late to the Borough Council and was substantially pre-dated by its difficulties with Pierce.) The house had been his grandfather’s, his uncle’s and an older cousin’s before it passed to him, there being no other members of the family it could devolve upon. The settlement of the cousin’s estate was the last time rates were paid on it. From time to time Pierce went to prison, quite amiably, considering it a reasonable alternative. He spent a little longer inside for not paying his council tax, a fact he put down to inflation.
He had long ago had everything which could be cut off (in a civilized country) cut off: the gas, electricity and telephone. He hardly missed them. A gas cylinder supplied a bare minimum of heat and cooking, candles enough light for a man who didn’t read on principle, and since there wasn’t a bookie left in Castlemere who would take his bets except for cash the phone was only an irritation. He lived simply and alcoholicly on what was left of his Social Security after a begrudged portion had been extracted to pay official debts. On a list of nominees for a Citizen of the Year Award he’d have figured rather lower than Nero and Sweeney Todd.
All of which, somehow, made it more difficult to tell him what had happened.
Most people are essentially the same in all the ways that matter: no amount of money protects them from the pain of a lost child, no depth of poverty steels them against it. But Liz had no idea what to expect from a man so beyond the pale of ordinary human decency that he preferred prison to paying bills and let his teenage daughter go street-walking rather than work himselt.
The doorbell didn’t work either. There was a knoc
ker hanging by one rusty screw: she tried that then, dissatisfied with the result, rapped on the door with her knuckles. When nothing happened she rapped on the window. At length she heard shuffling in the hall and the door opened.
Philip Pierce emerged blinking, like a bear leaving its den in the spring. In his hand there was a carving-knife. Down the front of his old grey sweat-shirt were rusty-red stains.
For ten seconds they eyed one another in silence. Liz’s mind split like a sunbeam meeting a prism: one half raced, the other froze. Finally she found a voice. ‘There’s no need for the knife, Mr Pierce.’
He looked at it. He looked at her. His face creased in a slow frown. ‘How do you cut a loaf then, missus – with a spoon?’
Behind her Shapiro gave a little gruff chuckle. He nodded at the rusty stain on Pierce’s front. ‘Baked beans?’
‘You try opening them with a chisel. They go everywhere.’ The man gave a sudden raucous laugh and tossed the pelt of black hair – the same curly black hair as the dead girl’s – out of his eyes. ‘What the hell, if they was less trouble you wouldn’t enjoy them as much.’ He looked at Liz again and leered. The smell of stale cider hit her in the face. ‘What’s the matter, missus? Did you think I’d killed the cat?’
Shapiro took over. ‘We’d like to talk to you inside, Mr Pierce. We’re police officers. I’m afraid we have some bad news for you.’
Inside, surrounded by incredible squalor, they told him. Shapiro talked and Liz watched Pierce’s reactions. He didn’t see it coming the way most people do. He sat on the broken couch hardly seeming to listen, inaccessible behind an expression compounded of boredom and insolence. He thought he knew what they were going to say. He thought they’d picked the girl up for soliciting. That would be bad news right enough; but if there was a fine she could pay it without recourse to him.
Shapiro said, quite clearly and gently, ‘She’s dead, Mr Pierce. Charisma – that’s your daughter, isn’t it? She’s dead. Friday night we think. She was found in the canal this morning.’
Something terrible was happening to Pierce’s face behind its veil of sullen indifference. It was breaking up, slowly crumbling, like jelly left too long in a hot kitchen or a sand-castle before the rising tide. The eyes had rounded to a shocked vastness, yawning black holes that all his immediate universe was collapsing into. The sardonic twist of the full lips had softened to a tremble; a tiny gap between them formed a kind of question mark.
Sitting alone in the middle of the couch, fists bunched loosely either side of him with the fingers turned up like something that had died, he began to cry. Without reserve or dignity, great racking sobs that twisted his mouth into ugly shapes came out of his throat and tears spilled on to his unshaven cheeks.
Taken aback, Liz watched him through a veil woven of pity and distaste, helplessly. She didn’t understand his reaction or know how to respond to it. This was a man who let, even sent, his young daughter out to sell her body. Whose efforts to make a home for her wouldn’t have convinced the RSPCA he was a fit person to keep a rabbit. Every time Charisma had closed the front door he must have known there was a good chance he wouldn’t see her again. Her profession was not only the oldest in the book, it was also the most dangerous. She was a young girl and she went with men she didn’t know in the dark corners of the Castlemere waterfront. Pierce couldn’t be surprised at what had happened to her. If he cared, why hadn’t he cared enough to prevent it?
Shapiro claimed no special insight into the human condition but he’d been in this business longer than Liz and had seen more of both its villains and its victims. He had learned to be less judgemental: however appallingly Pierce had behaved, right now he was a bereaved father. He asked Liz to find some tea.
There was none, or anything else she could make a comforting hot drink of. Finally she poured Pierce a glass of water and took him that. She had to wash the glass first.
By then Pierce had got some kind of a grip on himself, enough to start answering questions as long as they were simple and repeated as necessary.
Charisma was his daughter. Her real name was Charlene: she thought the amended version was better for business. She was sixteen years old. He last remembered seeing her on Friday afternoon before she went out. She left him a fiver to buy beer and chips. He hadn’t left the house since.
His eyes, red-rimmed, crept up Shapiro’s waistcoat slowly, as if afraid what they might find. His voice wasn’t much more than a whisper. ‘Did she fall in the canal?’
Shapiro shook his head sombrely. ‘No. She was murdered.’
Pierce drew a deep, ragged, shuddering breath. ‘Someone pushed her in? Why? Why?’
Shapiro didn’t, at least for the moment, go into the manner of her death. ‘We’ll find out.’ The tone was reassuring but it was not an idle promise. He was not a hard man. His career had been an uphill struggle against people who thought him too soft to be a detective. But what he lacked in machismo he made up in sheer professional ability.
Liz had known policemen who considered the death of a prostitute an occupational hazard. Shapiro took a different view. A girl had been killed, murdered, in his town and that offended him. What the girl was mattered less than what the man was: a murderer at liberty in Castlemere. Shapiro wanted him as much as he would have wanted any other murderer. He meant it: if it was humanly possible he would find out why Charlene Pierce died.
She suspected Brian might have to finish unpacking the china when he arrived with the furniture tomorrow.
The tow-path was to Donovan what the street in front of his semi is to the average householder. He drove along it twice a day, parked his bike on it every night. When he couldn’t sleep he walked for miles along it, watching the moon in the canal, smelling the sweet ripeness of the water. If he went westward he passed through Broad Wharf where the evangelist’s tent was pitched and under an arch of warehousing into Mere Basin, geographical and spiritual heart of Castlemere. If he walked east the tow-path followed the edge of Cornmarket until it turned north. To continue eastward into the quiet countryside of the Castlemere Levels he crossed the spur at Doggett’s Lock, walking across the lock gate, a feat most ramblers considered dangerous even in daylight since the Castlemere Canal Restoration Society took away the handrail in order to get a new one cast.
But familiar as he was with it – with its kerbstones worn smooth by generations of mooring ropes, with its cobbled surface designed for boat-horses rather than motorbikes, with its iron furniture of rings and bollards that here were the decent shades between black and rust and in Mere Basin had been painted by the council in primary colours like garden gnomes – he had never looked at it this closely, this intently. He’d never noticed the dates cut into some of the stones that made Castlemere Canal among the earliest in the country. He’d never noticed the perfect fit of the masonry. If they did it now, he supposed, they’d use concrete and all the water would leak away in ten years.
Moving this slowly, scanning every inch, he was easy prey for the man with the Jack Russell. Herbert Pendle fell into step with him as he walked, and as he walked he complained. ‘You told me it were a circus. You told me they had a performing bear.’
‘I lied,’ said Donovan.
Herbert sniffed. ‘I suppose you think that’s funny – telling lies to old men. We had some respect when I were your age. If I were ten years younger I’d teach you a bit of respect.’
Donovan broke his scrutiny of the ground long enough to look at him: not in anger, perhaps with exasperation. He said nothing. But Herbert, who had already framed his next remark about the war and the various things he didn’t fight it for, among them the employment by the British police of Irish hooligans unable to keep a civil tongue in their heads, suddenly saw the bleakness in the young man’s eyes and changed his mind, and said to the dog instead: ‘Come on, Mary, it’s time we was home.’
Donovan watched him go, his dark face creased in a frown. He got no pleasure from upsetting old men. Still less did he want to s
care them – for he’d seen that look before in the eyes of people who’d started to say something to him and then changed their minds. He didn’t know why. He didn’t mean to intimidate people. He wasn’t a violent man. He was a public servant. It troubled him that ordinary decent people sometimes looked at him and were afraid. He wondered what it was that they saw.
For a moment he thought of calling an apology after the old man. Then the urge, which was uncharacteristic, passed and he returned instead to his inspection of the wharf.
Finally he found what he was looking for: a place where the slick of grime had been smeared at the edge as if something heavy had been put down there and then pushed into the water. There was no obvious explanation: no rungs down to the water that could have been used by someone getting into a boat, no bollard where a shaggy mooring rope could have rubbed the spot. Not even the sort of little boy who played round the Castlemere wharves would have sat in the dirt and the damp dangling his feet over the edge.
Donovan straightened and looked around him. He was midway between a day-boat and a little cabin cruiser, neither of them occupied by night, and the quiet splash of a body being let into the water by an arm or leg wouldn’t have travelled much further than that. Not as far as fifty metres, say, to the first of the narrowboats which was permanently occupied.
Donovan didn’t call them houseboats: that suggested the fat families of Birmingham shopkeepers sunning themselves on deck-chairs while firmly attached to the bank. All the narrowboats in the small residential community along the tow-path occasionally disconnected their power supply, took in their ropes and set off for a cruise round the inland waterways.
Including the one tied up beyond the cabin cruiser, her steady green and black reflection in the water a tribute to Shapiro’s first instinct which was to stop all movement on the canal until he was sure there was no more evidence to disturb. Not that Tara would have been going anywhere today. Her owner was working.