Charisma

by Jo Bannister

  Betrayed utterly by his moment of panic, now his only real choice lay between co-operating with her and making matters worse. He knew he was facing prison. But if he could preserve that distance between himself and Bailie he could still hope to avoid a life sentence. He slumped back against the wall with his hands apart and let the breath run out of him in a sibilant paeon of defeat. He said, ‘It wasn’t my idea. Topping him. That wasn’t my idea.’

  Liz had no idea what he was talking about but her blood ran chill. ‘Who?’

  ‘The mick detective. I just wanted him out of the way till we made some arrangements. It was Joe Bailie wanted him dead. And Scoutari. Not me.’ It wasn’t true but he thought it might serve. It was important on these occasions to get one’s own version in first.

  Liz made herself breathe, searched for a voice. ‘Are you telling me Detective Sergeant Donovan is dead? When – where?’

  Kelso waved an arm towards Cornmarket. ‘The shunting yard. Or maybe the canal – Bailie was going to drown him. I don’t know, I came away. I don’t need any part of killing a copper.’

  Liz stared at him. ‘What – just now?’ Kelso nodded. Hope sent a surge of adrenalin through her veins. Anger throbbed in her breast. ‘You stupid bloody man! He may not be dead yet. There may be time to stop it.’ She took off at a run, as fast as she could and faster than was safe on the dark tow-path.

  For just a second Liam Brady thought there was a choice. But of course there wasn’t and he knew it soon enough. Quietly, without obvious rancour, he promised Scoutari, ‘I’ll find you. Wherever you go I’ll find you.’ Then he dropped over the edge into the canal.

  It was deeper than he expected, chest-high cold black water stinking of rot. He stumbled for a footing. There was no current, only the spreading ripples of his own entry, but the bottom was foul with mud and rubbish – broken prams, bicycle wheels, the skeletons of drowned dogs. When he lost his balance and went in over his head the water tasted of stagnation, a century of it, thick and sour and overly biological.

  When he clawed the weed from his eyes there was someone above him, a woman on the tow-path who bent and offered her hand. He shook his head, rank water shaking off him. ‘Help me. There’s someone in here.’

  ‘Donovan?’ Recognizing her voice Brady blessed the fates that had sent him a professional. ‘Dead? Alive?’

  ‘He was alive when he went in. That’s got to be a minute now. Help me find him.’

  She threw off her jacket, then she was down in the water with him. Its cold grip on her chest drove a startled gasp from her, the stench she breathed in made her gag. ‘Where is he?’

  Brady circled his hands above the surface. ‘About here. He’s tied, he won’t be able to get up. And I can’t find him.’

  They quartered the canal bed, searching with their feet. Even in daylight they couldn’t have seen through more than a metre of stagnant water and a veil of green scum. The seconds ticked resolutely by, measuring off the time a man could live without air.

  Liz tried to work faster, cover more ground; but she knew that if she moved too quickly she could pass him by and never know it. If that happened he’d die. There simply wasn’t time to cover the same ground twice.

  Something snagged her foot so that she almost fell. Cursing she kicked free. But as she moved on there was a soft hurried popping as a string of bubbles exploded under her nose, glinting briefly silver as the moon caught their dying. ‘Donovan?’ Feeling her stumble over him he’d gambled the rest of his breath to gain her attention. If she’d already turned away, if she’d fallen or otherwise disturbed the water’s surface, he’d have died at her feet and the best she could hope was that she’d never know how close she’d come to saving him.

  ‘Over here!’ She didn’t wait for Brady but snatched a breath and plunged, groping for where her toes had been. Her feet came off the bottom but it didn’t matter, she already had contact with his clothes, billowed out by the water, nudging the backs of her hands like soft blind fish. She found the line of his arm and hooked her hand through it, got her feet back under her and heaved.

  For a moment, breaking the surface herself, she thought she had him. His body shifted against her legs, seemed to be lifting. Then the movement stopped and however hard she tugged she couldn’t get his head above water. She pulled till her feet slid from under her again.

  Brady reached them as she went under. But there was no more time. No time to explain the problem – that Donovan was entangled with something immovable on the canal bottom. No time to find out what and free him. He was an engine that had been running on the smell of petrol for two minutes and now even the smell was used up. The engine was going to stop.

  But perhaps she could buy him some extra time – a couple of minutes, something. The idea was forming in her mind even as she was falling and she sucked in as much breath as she could hold before letting his tethered weight drag her under.

  She made no effort to extricate him. Instead she groped along his body until she felt his hair – too long as always, but if he survived for Shapiro to complain again he could say with absolute truth that he owed his life to his dislike of barbers – stroking the backs of her fingers. Fisting her hand in his collar, letting her legs float away because she didn’t need them now, she found his face and his mouth. She kissed him.

  Whatever he’d been expecting it wasn’t that. His body convulsed with shock and his head jerked back so that most of the air was lost in a silent explosion between them. Damning him roundly she turned for the surface.

  Brady was waiting. While she took on air she gasped an explanation. ‘He’s down here, at my feet. He’s caught somehow, I can’t get him free. But I can breathe for him while you get him free.’

  She went down again. It took her a moment to find Donovan, another to find his face. This time he knew what she was doing. He let her fit her mouth over his and took greedily the air she fed him. When her lungs were empty she left him.

  Brady surfaced a second later. ‘There’s something big down there, a fridge or a cooker or something, the rope’s fast in it. Do you have a knife? If I could cut it I could pull him out.’

  Liz shook her head. Detectives, least of all women detectives, are not encouraged to carry concealed weapons. Brady started to say something else but she couldn’t wait to hear it. ‘I have to get back to him. Find something.’ She dived, carrying Donovan’s life in her lungs.

  When next she surfaced there was no sign of Brady, nor did he appear in the time it took her to catch her breath. ‘You bastard!’ She thought he’d despaired of success and quit while he could, leaving her alone to decide when she was too exhausted to keep her sergeant alive any longer. That time would come: she couldn’t breathe for both of them ad infinitum.

  But it hadn’t come yet. Stoking the fury that helped blot out her fear, she went down again.

  Looking for Brady she’d lost her bearings, wasted seconds finding Donovan again. By then he was desperate, thrusting his head at her face. She gave him what she had left, returned for more. By now her chest was going like a bellows, cramps sliding knifelike under her ribs.

  Brady landed with a splash beside her, glass glinting in his hand. ‘If you can cut a man’s throat with a broken bottle you can sure as hell cut a bit of flex.’

  It took longer than cutting a man’s throat. The glass edge sliced through the plastic sleeve but he had to break the wire filaments almost one by one. He tried to finish the job on one breath and couldn’t, had to go up again for fresh air, wasted more time finding where on the flex he’d been working. Soon he needed to breathe again.

  To start with he could feel Donovan moving under him, twisting as he offered his face to Liz, his hands to Brady. But as the seconds ticked by first he felt the tension in the long body mount, its movements becoming spastic with urgency, then seep away till there seemed to be no movement at all.

  He thought, It’s taken too long. We gave it our best shot but it took too damn long. But though he thought he
was attending to a dead man his fingers kept working at the same frantic rate, his brain too numb with disappointment to tell them to stop. His fingertips stung as the effort opened little cuts to the putrid water.

  When at last the flex parted Brady hooked his arm through Donovan’s, planted one foot against the thing anchoring him and hauled with all his strength, and the flex pulled free. Brady shot to the surface, Donovan shot to the surface and Liz surfaced immediately behind them.

  ‘Help me get him out,’ gasped Brady.

  ‘No time.’ Liz tipped Donovan’s head back until only his face, fishbelly white, was above the water. ‘Support his back.’ She tore his shirt open, put her ear to his chest. Then she hit him with the heel of her hand. Brady held him while Liz continued compressing his chest, counting as she did. Then she bent her face over his and blew two long breaths into him. His chest rose under her hand. Then she did it again; and again.

  A hand touched her wrist gently. Angrily she shook it off. ‘Not yet. It’s too soon to say he’s dead. As long as there’s air in his lungs and I can keep his heart going he has a chance. Continue till exhaustion: that’s what the book says, that’s what I’m going to do.’

  The hand found her again, rising from the water. It was very cold and its grip was weak. But she still thought it was Brady’s until Donovan turned his head aside, choking up bitter water, gasping down foul air.

  11

  The following morning they gathered in Shapiro’s office: Shapiro, Liz, Donovan and Liam Brady.

  Donovan left hospital after a night under observation, a reflection less of his powers of recovery than of the fact that he was a stupendously bad patient, ill-tempered and grudging of care. Castle General put up with him until they were sure he was out of danger, then they threw him out.

  Shapiro spent the night shuttling between his office, Superintendent Taylor’s office and the interview room where Michael Davey was making his statement. He sat down at five o’clock to catch his breath and woke at eight with a stiff neck and creases in his suit.

  Liz spent the first half of the night at the hospital being inoculated against water-borne diseases, and the second half explaining to Brian how she came to be French-kissing her sergeant in the murky depths of Doggett’s Canal.

  Brady collected the same cocktail of vaccines, reported to his controller, then retired to Donovan’s boat for a good night’s sleep.

  Now they were trading accounts. Donovan had heard most of it from Brady, and Shapiro from Brady’s controller, but Liz had missed much of the detail. She came straight to the point which concerned her. ‘Your decision not to inform us that you were operating in Castlemere. Had that anything to do with my association with Michael Davey?’

  Brady looked blank. ‘Association? It’s news to me. Anyway, nothing Davey got up to was of any interest to us. I’d been with the crew seven months, I joined up when they came back from France last October. I knew who was behind the drugs operation, who was involved on the edges and who had no idea what was going on. Davey wasn’t involved.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you tell us what you were doing?’

  ‘Because secrecy is what keeps you alive in this business, Inspector. If we’d tipped you off, the minute that girl turned up dead in the canal you’d have assumed it was something to do with us. Either you’d have turned us upside down, or for fear of compromising my activities you’d have left us strictly alone. Either would have made Kelso suspicious. The guy’s cleverer than he looks, he’d never have made this work for so long if he wasn’t.

  ‘So we did what we always do: said nothing while it was going down. My chief would’ve been in touch once we’d moved on. You’d have got the arrests here,’ he added generously. ‘It suits us for people to think their local force got lucky, it stops them looking any further. But we didn’t want Kelso touching until the summer tour was over. You can clean up a lot of towns in three months.’

  ‘So you’d been with them seven months,’ Shapiro said thoughtfully. ‘Long enough to know what Davey was and wasn’t involved in. What about Mills? Had you any suspicions about her?’

  ‘Neither of them was involved with the drugs,’ said Brady. ‘I was sure of that.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. According to Davey, Jennifer Mills killed five young girls, three of them – our two and the one in Le Havre – in the time you were with the mission. Had you no idea that was going on?’

  There was the briefest pause, then Brady shook his head. ‘I wasn’t watching her. Once I knew the drugs were Kelso’s province I stuck with him. That was my job, Chief Inspector. I didn’t need another one.’

  Shapiro had a habit of nodding gently, sympathetically, all the time he was listening to someone answer questions; right up to the moment that the answer was finished and the interviewee sat back, modestly satisfied with his performance, when he went for the jugular. ‘So why did you put Charlene Pierce in the canal?’

  It was hard to know who was the most startled. Liz had heard nothing of this from Shapiro, Donovan had heard nothing from Brady.

  Brady was startled too: it was the last thing he expected. He waited too long to deny it. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I didn’t, for sure,’ admitted Shapiro. ‘Till now.’

  ‘No one saw me and I told no one. I don’t understand.’

  Shapiro didn’t smile. ‘The timing, mostly. She died in the early hours, she should have been found when people started moving on the wharf. Since she wasn’t she must have been out of sight before then. Mills didn’t hide her, she couldn’t serve her purpose until she was found. So she was covered up by whoever discovered the body, before anyone else was about. Around the time you people arrived.’

  ‘That’s some lucky guess!’ exclaimed Brady.

  ‘Not really. Whoever hid her returned that night to put her in the canal. You’d had a long day, you had supper in the caravan then went to bed. The only one with the opportunity to move the body was the man who went to the chip shop. The same man who knew she’d been knifed.’

  Brady didn’t know Shapiro very well. Slowly he smiled and held his wrists out. ‘OK, governor, it’s a fair cop.’

  Remembering the hours they’d puzzled over that sequence of events, trying to make sense of it, Liz gritted her teeth to avoid saying what she thought. ‘In God’s name, why?’

  ‘To protect my cover.’ He seemed surprised it needed saying. ‘The girl had been dead for hours, she was way past any help I could give her. But she could still help me: she could get herself found someplace else. I couldn’t call you – people like Joe Bailie don’t call the police even when they’ve done nothing. And if someone else had found her you’d have been all over us and ruined everything.

  ‘Whoever killed her was long gone – and remember, I didn’t know who it was, had no idea it was anything to do with me. I thought it was more important to protect an operation that was steadily netting suppliers on the Continent and dealers in England, and would go on doing as long as it continued. So I covered her up – I’d have been seen dragging her over to the canal – and when the day passed without her being found I went back and put her in the water. I hoped she’d float far enough that you’d never know where she’d come from.’

  Liz stared at him in astonishment and outrage. ‘She was a sixteen-year-old girl and she was murdered! And you hoped no one would notice because it was inconvenient?’

  Brady was swift in his own defence. ‘Inspector, she wasn’t my job. My job is infiltrating drug networks. To do it I risk my life on a daily basis for months at a time. I can’t take on any more responsibilities. I’m sorry about the girl, but I still don’t see her death as any reason to trash an important operation.

  ‘I don’t have to tell you all the different ways people die from drugs. They die of addiction. They die of accidents while under the influence of drugs. They die in fights over drugs. They kill to get money to buy drugs. They die of overdoses, of bad stuff and of failure to pay their supplier. It’s a plagu
e in every sense of the word.

  ‘What are you saying? – that if I’d called you first thing on Saturday you’d have looked at the body then arrested the Iron Maiden? I don’t think so. It was detective work, not forensic pathology, that found her and that was always going to take time. You’d have gained nothing if I’d called, and I’d have wasted seven months’ work. OK, it wasn’t an ideal solution, but let’s keep a sense of proportion. Charisma was a tom, and she’d been dead for hours by the time I found her, and all you can do for the dead is bury them.’

  ‘And Alice Elton?’ Shapiro asked softly.

  ‘The kid on the pony?’ Brady frowned, failing to make the connection. ‘What about her?’

  Shapiro spelled it out. ‘Alice Elton died because of the time it took us to discover who killed Charlene Pierce. If we’d started thirty hours earlier, and had the information the body could then have yielded, and hadn’t been misled into thinking the killer hid her for twenty-four hours before putting her in the canal, we might have got to Jennifer Mills while Alice Elton was still alive.’

  Brady tried to shrug that off but the words lacked conviction. ‘Cal, who does your governor think he is? – Inspector Morse? No one was going to unravel that mess in three days, however fresh the body.’

  Appealed to directly, Donovan made his first contribution to the debate. He said quietly, ‘I think maybe you should shut up now.’

  Genuinely confused by criticism he had not anticipated, Brady rounded on him. ‘Watch your mouth, boy. I’ll justify myself to your chief if I have to, but I won’t be judged by a man who’d be dead meat but for me. I risked my life for you, Cal Donovan, I’ll ask you to remember that.’