Charisma

by Jo Bannister

  Brian’s chin was on top of her head: she could feel him chuckle. ‘If it’s personal perhaps I shouldn’t ask.’

  ‘Actually,’ she said, squirming round so she could see his face, ‘you should. It’s personal to me, not to Frank. He’s afraid I’m being swept off my feet by an evangelist in a white suit and a wheelchair.’

  She told him what had happened: all that had happened and all that anyone thought might have happened. She was watching his eyes all the time. He knew it wasn’t as light a matter as she made out; but he seemed to know too that there was nothing she wasn’t telling him. He said soberly, ‘It must be difficult working under a magnifying glass like that.’

  She shrugged. ‘It is a bit. But we’re used to it, all of us. We always have one eye on how our actions might look to an outsider. It just hadn’t occurred to me that as a woman I was especially vulnerable. Perhaps it should have done.’ Her head tilting, she looked at him from the tail of one eye. ‘In the same way that male teachers have to guard against the fertile imaginations of teenage girls, I suppose.’

  Brian’s expression was scathing. ‘Oh, sure. They queue up after Home Economics to make passes at me. Listen, all the way through the Permissive Society everyone was talking about free love and the death of morality, and I was wondering when I was going to get my share.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Still waiting,’ he said lugubriously.

  Liz thought the subject dropped, but after a pensive silence he came back to it. ‘What’s he like, this preacher?’

  She took a moment to arrange her thoughts. ‘Larger than life, but somehow it’s all real. Your first impression is that it’s an act. But as you talk to him, listen to him rather, you realize that’s how he is: that isn’t a line he’s spinning you, it’s what he believes.

  ‘He’s a very big man physically, and that spills over into everything he does. He shoves himself around with these big powerful hands, and when he can’t express himself in words alone he stops wheeling for a moment to make some grand gesture. But it isn’t rhetoric: he’s absolutely sincere. The words rush out of him as if his brain’s boiling them up too fast to catch them, but even in full flow he’s totally coherent. You have the feeling of a huge agile intellect caged inside that vast crippled body.’

  ‘Do you like him?’

  Again she took a moment to think. ‘I don’t know. I find him – fascinating, I suppose. The sheer chained power of him. It’s like standing on a volcano and feeling the rumble. He’s an intensely passionate man. You start off thinking it’s rather immature to feel that strongly about things, but next thing you know he’s grabbed you by the mind and shaken your ideas to the roots. When you listen to him you begin to understand how Hitler could turn a sophisticated modern nation into a barbarian tribe essentially by oratory alone.’

  ‘Charisma,’ suggested Brian.

  For a moment Liz thought of the little tom with her slashed throat and didn’t understand. ‘Oh – yes. Yes, certainly. A dangerous thing, charisma.’

  A little later still Brian said quietly, ‘Frank was right about one thing, wasn’t he? You are just a little in love with this man.’

  Liz twisted like an eel in his arms and stared up at his face, and couldn’t for the life of her be sure if he was joking.

  It was a night for confidences. After the gospel meeting broke up Davey and Jennifer Mills left the crew to finish and set off for their hotel. Because Davey’s car, unlike a motorcycle, couldn’t slot between the bollards on the walkway they headed up the towpath to Cornmarket and back by Brick Lane. Given the roughness of the ground, it took them longer to drive from the wharf to the Castle Hotel than it would have taken a fit man to walk.

  It wasn’t wasted time. It gave them space to talk.

  ‘It was a good night,’ Mills began, blandly enough, lighting a cigarette.

  Davey smiled bleakly into the blackness ahead. ‘There’s nothing like the fear of God to get hands into pockets.’

  Mills didn’t glance at the cash-box on the back seat. ‘Yes, it was a good collection. I’ll count it later. But that isn’t what I meant. I meant, you were good tonight.’

  He refused to be mollified. Some internal irritation was gnawing away at him. ‘According to you I’m always good.’

  She turned her head, smiling at the side of his face lit by the instruments. ‘Are you picking a quarrel, Michael?’

  He shook his head wearily. ‘Don’t mind me. I’m – a bit out of sorts, that’s all.’

  For a moment she said nothing more. Then, her voice flat, stripped of the humour that lubricated the occasional friction between them, she said, ‘Do you want—?’

  ‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘That’s not it.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’ The least edge on her words suggested however that this was not wholly truthful. ‘If it’ll help.’

  Davey shook his head again. ‘No.’

  She peered at him, trying to read his expression in the dimness of the car. ‘What is it, Michael? What’s troubling you? Is it that man who got hurt?’

  ‘No, not really. I mean yes, I am bothered by it, I still think I should have seen it coming, done something to prevent it. I mean, I got those people there: I must bear some responsibility for what they did.’

  Mills turned her slim body towards him, demanding his attention although the rough road required his eyes. ‘No, Michael. With all due respect to you, they came because of what’s been happening in this town. If they hadn’t come here they’d have gone somewhere else: a bar, a street-corner, somewhere. Instead of singing hymns they’d have got drunk. They’d still have got angry, the boy would still have been hurt. You’re not responsible. Blame whoever killed those girls; blame the police if you like, for stumbling round blindly when they should have the killer behind bars; but don’t reproach yourself. You do nothing but good wherever you go.’

  He put out one bear’s paw to touch hers. ‘Dear Jenny. What would I do without you picking me up when I fall, kissing the sore bits better?’

  ‘I can’t imagine,’ she said briskly. ‘Now tell me: what’s really bothering you?’

  He gave up trying to keep it from her, tried to make light of it instead. But the shake in his laugh betrayed him. ‘I think I’m in love.’

  Jennifer Mills froze from the inside out. Ice-water bathed her spine; premonition stole her breath away. ‘Michael. Who? How?’

  ‘I – I can’t,’ he stumbled, a gleam of tragedy in his eye. ‘It’s not possible.’

  She governed all his days. Whatever he needed, as a preacher and as a man, she obtained for him. She didn’t believe he could have been seeing a woman without her knowledge, so it was not so much intuition as deduction that led her to the improbable truth. She still hadn’t breath enough to do more than whisper, but the pitch of her whisper soared. ‘The policewoman?’

  As if he’d slapped her she turned her face from him, her body quivering with fury. She anticipated difficulties all the time. It was her job, to anticipate and forestall them. But she had not anticipated this, and she was shaken to the core.

  When she got her brain back in gear it was the practical implications she turned to first. ‘How far has it gone?’

  He darted her a glance at that, desperate and haunted. ‘It hasn’t. How could it? She’s conducting a murder investigation and I’m in a wheelchair: we can’t exactly slip away and book into a motel as Mr and Mrs Smith.’

  ‘But you’d like to?’

  ‘Oh, Jenny,’ he said, and the unhappiness in his voice stabbed her to the heart. ‘It’s like – having half of something all your life. And you get used to having half, and tell yourself half is enough, and maybe the other half doesn’t even exist. And then by sheer chance one day you find that other half. Only it belongs to someone else and you’ve no right to it. But you feel like you have a right, you know? – as if having the half of it all this time entitles you to the rest.’ He glanced at her uneasily, unable to fathom her expression in the near darkness.
‘Am I making any sense?’

  She understood him well enough. She’d have liked to tell him to stop feeling sorry for himself, that it was nothing but spring fever and the best thing he could do was get on with his work, but she couldn’t. She knew it went deeper than that, that hopeless as the wanting was it was anchored in his soul by roots so strong that ripping it out would leave a great bloody crater. She sat as rigid and white as a woman carved in marble, and inside she was raging with a passion that would have startled those who knew her at the monstrous unfairness of it. She knew what it was to want something you couldn’t have.

  But she didn’t answer him until she had the turmoil under control and could open her mouth without giving vent to it. ‘You hardly know her.’

  ‘I know that. Jenny, I know how absurd this is.’

  ‘Have you said anything to her? Does she know how you feel?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t,’ he said scornfully. ‘What would I say? “Here’s my alibi, Inspector, here are my fingerprints, and by the way will you leave your husband and run away with me?” ’ Then his tone softened. ‘All the same, I think maybe she does know. People do, you know, when other people are attracted to them.’

  Her eyes gaped at him but he seemed oblivious of their meaning. She said tightly, ‘You don’t say.’

  He stopped the car with a lurch, careless for once of how skilfully he manipulated the controls. There was entreaty in the gruffness of his voice. ‘Jenny, help me here. I don’t know what to do. I know what I ought to do but …’ He tailed off, unable to think of a reason to do what he wanted instead of what he should.

  By degrees Mills regained her composure. If she was shocked it was not her place to show it. She was his fixer: of course he told her that he’d embarked on a relationship that could jeopardize everything they’d achieved. She took a deep breath.

  ‘Michael, what do you want me to say? It’s all right, go for it? The world owes you a bit of happiness? That may be true but it really isn’t relevant. She’s a married woman. Other men can go lusting after married women but you can’t.’

  He slapped his useless legs furiously. ‘Why not? Because of these?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she snapped, ‘that’s only a physical problem, I never saw one of those defeat you yet. You can’t get involved with Mrs Graham because of the man you are and the job you do. How can you tell other people how to behave if you’re embroiled in adultery? Oh, I know it’s been done before. But not by you. Whatever you are, Michael, you’re not a hypocrite. If you can’t speak from a platform of absolute honesty you won’t speak at all. You couldn’t lie to save your life.’

  ‘So maybe it’s time to think of doing something else,’ he countered. ‘Maybe I’ve already done all the good I’m going to. Maybe now it’s time I looked for something else to do, let someone better equipped carry the torch.’

  Mills shook her head. ‘You don’t mean that. This isn’t just a job to you, it isn’t even just a way of life. It is your life, your reason for living. Your reason for getting into that chair and hauling yourself round the country when it would be so much easier to settle down quietly somewhere and live on welfare. It wasn’t much of a hand your God dealt you but I’ll say this for you, Michael, you never looked like throwing it in before.’

  ‘I’m not talking about throwing it in,’ he retorted angrily, ‘I’m talking about retiring. I’m fifty-two years old. I’m due a bit of happiness. If not now, when?’

  She sighed. ‘God help me, Michael, if I thought it would make you happy I’d give you my blessing. But you’ve never taken anything you didn’t earn: how are you going to live with taking another man’s wife? You’d be wretched. And it’d be the end of this love affair between you and God. He might forgive you but you never would. He’s your best friend and you’d never be able to look Him in the face again.

  ‘Michael, your whole life’s been one of sacrifice. It’s what you are, where your authority comes from. I can’t see you getting anything but despair out of sacrificing your mission for your own desires.’

  ‘What if it’s what she wants too?’

  ‘Her soul’s in her own keeping,’ Mills said coldly.

  ‘And mine is in yours?’ His voice was bitter.

  ‘You wouldn’t be talking to me if you were comfortable with this. You’d talk to her and tell me what you’d decided. You know there’s no future in it. Yes, you could give up everything for her and tell yourself that turned it from a spot of adultery into a great romance. But you’d regret it for the rest of your life. Believe me, Michael, I know. You know. We both know what’s important to you, and whatever this fire in your blood is telling you right now, it isn’t the satisfaction of the flesh.’

  She wasn’t saying what he wanted to hear. Hurt and under siege he responded with a cheap jibe. ‘That’s easy for you to say.’

  She was his friend. They’d been together five years. She’d given up everything for him: her friends, her prospects, any life outside the mission. Faithful and uncomplaining, she’d put his needs ahead of hers in every particular; she’d done things for him that only close friends would do. She deserved better than that. Icily she turned away. ‘Act your age, Michael. Stay away from her.’

  He was bitterly ashamed of himself. That didn’t make his burden easier to bear. A stubborn anguish ran through his voice. ‘I don’t know, Jenny. I don’t know if I can.’

  2

  The gospel meetings began shortly after eight and lasted a couple of hours, the last enthusiasts straggling away about ten-thirty. Sunset was around half-past eight.

  Donovan reckoned there were two prime times for something to happen: about nine when the meeting would be in full swing and the wharf dark so that a careful man could move around unseen, and about ten-fifteen when the faithful would throng out of the tent and a man could pass unnoticed among them. On the whole he favoured the earlier time: the more people who were around, the harder it would be to find privacy. But when he slipped off Tara under cover of dusk and took up his watch from the alley where he found Charisma it was with the bleak knowledge that he might be standing here for ninety minutes before anything happened, or three hours before he could assume nothing was going to happen.

  What he was hoping for – though with the mission here for a fortnight there was no reason for it to be tonight – was that someone from the camp would slip away for a meeting with a leading light of the local drugs trade. Eight months ago it would have been Jack Carney or someone acting for him. But where he was now there were men in peaked caps to discourage nocturnal excursions, and if any of Castlemere’s lesser gangsters had taken over where Carney left off word had not reached CID.

  That made it harder to crack down on but, if anything, more important. If the mission was smuggling drugs the quantity on offer could be enough to confirm Scoutari, or whichever of the pretenders made the deal, as top dog. Stopping him now would prevent a lot of misery. Donovan hadn’t much sympathy for people who took drugs but on a purely practical basis supposed that, as with tetanus, prevention was better than cure.

  If he was right about this, and he knew there was room for doubt, what they stood to gain was worth more than his time alone. He hadn’t asked for help because of the risk that he was wrong. If there were no drugs it would be hard enough to apologize to Shapiro for wasting his own time without having to account for someone else’s. Also, if Drugs Squad were involved the danger of giving the game away increased with every extra body employed.

  The first indication that it mightn’t be a wasted vigil came soon after he’d settled himself in the dark passage. The door of the caravan opened and the bearded Breton emerged. The glow of the tent showed him stretching, wandering about aimlessly, then taking a seat on a mooring bollard with a clear view of Tara. Donovan had left a light burning in his bedroom to suggest occupation.

  After a minute the caravan door opened again. Donovan heard footsteps and two figures passed between him and the water. One, from the shape of it,
was Kelso. The other could have been Brady. The Breton stayed where he was, watching the wharf and the boats.

  In daylight Donovan could not have followed without being seen. But the darkness was undiscriminating: it covered their secret activities and it covered his. He let the two men get forty metres ahead – any closer and they might have heard him, any further and he could have lost them – then slunk out of the alley and along the wall. He watched the look-out, silhouetted against the glimmer of the water, but there was no sign that he’d been seen. Of course, the man was looking the wrong way. Hugging the buildings on his left, and when they ceased to be buildings the shadow of the broken walls, Donovan followed the two men to Cornmarket.

  There was a bad moment when he heard the sound of running feet on the tow-path behind him. He shrank into a bricked-up doorway and the man trotted past without knowing he was there. A moment later the murmur of voices told that the running man had caught up with the others, clearly believing that their departure had gone unnoticed and he could now do more good closer to the men he was there to protect. In that he was right. It certainly made Donovan’s job harder.

  They followed the tow-path – the two men first, the Breton ten metres behind, Donovan forty metres behind him – to the lock, then turned for the shunting yard. Where the diminishing cover of the derelict buildings petered out and the wasteland of Cornmarket began Donovan dropped further back. The only other thing he could do to avoid being seen was abandon his pursuit and he wasn’t prepared to do that.

  The shunting yard came down to the tow-path, victims of the same march of progress. Inside were only the carcasses of dead rolling-stock. It was a good place for a quiet meeting: one man on the path could stop anyone creeping up unnoticed. When the other men entered the yard the Breton stayed behind.

  Donovan was half expecting that, had already decided what to do: cross the spur at Doggett’s Lock, run like hell up the far side and cross back at the stone bridge half a mile further on, coming down on the shunting yard from the unwatched side. At least, he assumed it would be unwatched. There was only open country beyond, and nobody in his right mind would cross the lock in the dark.