Broken Lines

by Jo Bannister

  ‘Nothing the Dickenses do surprises me,’ spat Donovan. ‘But I talked to you as a friend. OK, that was stupid. But you didn’t have to sell me to the highest bidder.’

  ‘Don’t be so melodramatic,’ she said dismissively. ‘You made a mistake. You were indiscreet, and you paid for it. Perhaps I should have told you who I was when we first met. Perhaps you should have asked. But you didn’t, and by the time it mattered I had good reason not to. Yes, I betrayed your trust. If I hadn’t I’d have betrayed that of a client. I’m sorry, Donovan, but the bottom line is, if the information was sensitive you should have kept it to yourself.’

  She took another step towards him. This time he backed away. He said in his teeth, ‘I never was a great judge of character.’

  Jade ignored that. ‘This doesn’t have to change things between us. You won’t make the same mistake again.’

  He actually panted in astonishment. The thought of resuming intimacy with a woman who’d auctioned his integrity was inconceivable to him.

  Nominally a Catholic, in fact Donovan didn’t have what it took to be a Christian at all. He never forgave and forgot. Occasionally he forgave; eventually he forgot; but his instinct was to carry a grudge until it could be redeemed. It was why he couldn’t accept that this time Mikey Dickens might get off scot-free.

  In the same way he couldn’t imagine putting aside his grievance against Jade Holloway, either for affection or carnal need. Inside her body he’d lost himself. The sheer power of the experience had stripped away his defences. He wasn’t a man who made friends or took lovers easily. There was nothing casual about him: to Donovan a personal relationship meant commitment, and by the time he was ready for that he was open to being hurt. He mightn’t have called it love but he’d felt something fierce and extraordinary, and he’d thought she had too. Knowing she’d laughed about him with his enemies struck him to the soul.

  ‘Damn right I won’t! Christ Almighty, that is absolutely one mistake I won’t make again. Not change things? You used me. You came to my bed, we made—’ He couldn’t have said it before, he certainly couldn’t say it now. ‘Then you waited for me to roll over and stabbed me in the back.

  ‘You know it can’t end here? I have to tell my chief. I’ve been accusing half Queen’s Street of bubbling: I can’t keep quiet now I know it was me. I guess my chief will want a word with yours.’

  ‘Tell Shapiro by all means,’ she said off-handedly. ‘If he wants to talk to Mr Carfax he can do. I have no doubt Mr Carfax will back me. Who I sleep with is none of their concern. The only issue is what I did with information gained in a personal conversation, and I have no doubt that what I did was right. The one who behaved inappropriately was you. You talked about things you had no business mentioning outside these walls.

  ‘You want to tell Shapiro that you’re so smitten by the sight of a naked woman that you’ll tell her anything? Go ahead, it’s probably something he needs to know. You think I betrayed you, and maybe I did. But first you betrayed him.’

  Donovan rocked as if she’d slapped his face. It was true: that was the hard thing. She’d used him, but the real and original act of treachery was his. And he’d been so involved he hadn’t even realized what he was doing.

  It was the one thing with which he’d always consoled himself. He made mistakes, he got things wrong, but he clung to the thought that everyone knew that, when the chips were down, Donovan could be counted on. Now it turned out even that was an illusion. He was like a stray dog: show him a bit of kindness and he’d do anything for you.

  His lip curled, but his contempt now was entirely for himself. ‘You hear about it, don’t you? – men with good jobs, men with families, losing everything for a woman. And you think, By God, that must have been some woman, that he gave up all he had for her. But it’s not like that, is it? It isn’t passion, just stupidity – not seeing soon enough where it’s leading. A man who leaves himself that vulnerable deserves to lose everything. Not for being wicked: for being that stupid. For not knowing there are two kinds of whores, and the honest ones only want money.’

  If they’d been alone she’d have hit him for that. But they were on the front steps of a police station, they were already attracting curious glances, if this went on much longer explanations would be required. Her slim hands fisted at her sides, her lips tight, Jade stalked past the hurt and bitter man at the foot of the steps, pausing just long enough to deliver a parting shot.

  ‘It’s time you grew up, Donovan. The real world doesn’t abide by playground rules. Success is what you’re measured by: if you want a piece of that you’ll have to shake off this idea that other people would rather lose than take advantage of your naivety.’

  Donovan stood immobile at the bottom of the steps, one hand on the brass rail, his eyes hollow, wondering where on earth to find the courage to go upstairs and make the confession he knew he had to make.

  Liz was passing through the front office when her attention was drawn to the scene by WPC Wilson. ‘Do you think he needs help?’

  Liz watched for a moment on the monitor, chewing her lip. It looked personal. On the other hand, a stand-up fight on the steps of a police station between a Detective Sergeant and the legal representative of a man accused of assaulting him could hardly be considered a private matter. She was opening the door when Ms Holloway made it easier by walking away. When Donovan still didn’t move Liz went down to him.

  The first he knew that she was there was her scent. He could never be sure if it was a perfume she used or just the lingering aroma of horse feed. With a watercolour label and a name like ‘Summer Meadow’it would cost £20 a bottle; as horse and pony nuts it would sell for £6 a sack.

  He looked up quickly, defensively. Her eyes were concerned. ‘Donovan? What’s wrong?’

  He drew a ragged breath. ‘Can we go upstairs? I’ve got something to tell you. You’re not going to believe how stupid I’ve been.’

  Chapter Ten

  Shapiro listened with more composure than Donovan spoke. In thirty years on the job he’d seen it all before. He’d seen good coppers leave the rails for love, for money, for the hell of it. He’d known them go to bed with defendants’wives, daughters, mistresses, and on one memorable occasion the defendant himself. A defence solicitor might have been a new departure but it was only a variation on the theme.

  ‘And you didn’t know who she was until just now?’

  ‘No. She was riding a motorbike when I met her.’ He seemed to think that explained everything.

  ‘And she didn’t quiz you about the case?’

  Without looking up Donovan shook his head. ‘She didn’t have to. I couldn’t have said any more if she’d laced my cocoa with truth serum. I didn’t think I was compromising the investigation, but together with what she already knew of course I was. I knew somebody’d got a big mouth: it never occurred to me it was me.’ He filled his lungs and raised his eyes. ‘There’s no need to start disciplinary proceedings, unless you want to. You can have my resignation.’

  Shapiro raised an eyebrow. ‘Is that what you want?’

  Donovan’s eyes flared. ‘You’re joking! I just – don’t see any alternative.’

  Shapiro sighed. ‘Don’t be so theatrical, Sergeant. Yes, you’ve made an idiot of yourself. Yes, you’ve wasted everybody’s time. And yes, you’ll take a bit of stick over it in the canteen – for a week, or however long it takes for the next poor soul to cock up. It isn’t a resigning matter. It isn’t even a disciplinary matter. You’ve set the record straight, we know what went wrong, we know it won’t happen again – that’s it. Go, and sin no more.’

  ‘But—’ Donovan couldn’t believe it was over. ‘Mikey Dickens is going to get away with armed robbery because of me!’

  ‘Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t,’ said Shapiro calmly. ‘It’s too soon to say. You can take the blame if it makes you feel any better, but since we don’t hand out medals every time we get a conviction I don’t see why you should do public penance for
this. You made a mistake; all right, you made a stupid mistake. I can cope with honest mistakes, even stupid ones, as long as I know about them. If you’d taken money from her, or if talking was the price of getting her into bed, you’d have been an ex-policeman by now. But with all your failings, Sergeant, I’ve never had cause to doubt your honesty and that’s worth a lot. You’re forgiven, Donovan.

  ‘But if you want to pay them back, go find someone who saw Mikey driving up Cambridge Road alone on Sunday evening. It’s quite true: success is the best revenge.’

  Donovan had walked in here thinking he’d trashed his career, and he was going to leave with hardly a stain on his character. He looked as if a puff of wind would knock him off his feet. He mumbled thickly, ‘I won’t let you down again. And I will get Mikey Dickens. Maybe not for this, but somewhere and sometime, and the smartest London lawyer money can buy won’t do him any good.’

  Shapiro nodded tolerantly and let him go; only murmuring after him, ‘It’s not the smart ones you have to watch for, it’s the pretty ones.’

  Liz shook her head knowingly. ‘It’s the ones on motorcycles.’

  When they were alone Shapiro laced his fingers over his chest and regarded her speculatively. ‘Was I right? Or should I have given him a hard time?’

  She shook her head again. She had her hair down today and it danced on her shoulder in a mass of fair curls. ‘I don’t think anything you could say would hammer the lesson home any harder. That’s one mistake he’s never going to make again. My guess is the next woman he wants to sleep with will have to fill in a questionnaire.’ Her face split in a grin. ‘It’s a pity, really. I find it

  enormously cheering that even Donovan can make a fool of himself

  over a girl.’

  Beyond Broad Wharf the towpath ran east for half a mile before turning up the northern spur of the canal, now derelict. Before the railway came the area between the waterways was a centre of the forage trade: hay and grain grown on the water-meadows of the River Arrow went by barge to feed carriage horses and dray horses all across the south-east. It was still called Cornmarket, though it had been wasteland for a generation.

  Sergeant Bolsover, who was born in Castlemere, remembered when this was the town’s industrial estate, home to numerous factories and extensive railway yards. Shapiro remembered the yards closing in favour of a passenger halt across town, and the factories either closing or moving out to the new ring road. By the time Donovan came it was just a thousand acres of rubble, emptier and more desolate the further east you went. Youngsters held mountain bike trials there; people walked their dogs there, as long as they could be home by nightfall; people abandoned their clapped-out cars and defunct settees there.

  People who’d spotted the name on a map were devastated by the reality and couldn’t imagine why it hadn’t been redeveloped. But Castlemere had shrunk, in size and in population, since Commarket was the beating heart of its commercial success a hundred years ago. It wasn’t redeveloped because it wasn’t needed.

  A small community of tramps and dossers lived there, in homes made by stretching plastic or tarpaulin between the remaining bits of masonry. Their social focus was a great bonfire that burned for most of the year in a ring of discarded furniture. Keeping it fed was the main reason Cornmarket hadn’t disappeared under a sea of detritus long ago, because the town’s refuse collectors would only come here under protest and armed guard.

  Fenland winters are bitterly cold: anyone with anywhere else to go had gone months back. Those who still had some family may have spent the long summer evenings abusing them from the comfort of an overstuffed settee in front of the bonfire; but by the middle of October the memory of their sins was fading and as the frosts deepened vacancies appeared on the settees. Others, who had no families or whose families wouldn’t have them back, headed for the milder climate of the big city and took a cardboard box behind King’s Cross station till spring. Only those with no alternative remained at Cornmarket throughout the iron-hard winter, huddled together like puppies in a crate to share the meagre warmth of their wasted and rancid bodies.

  Such a one was Desmond Jannery, age thirty-two going on fifty, one time actor, one time chicken shed mucker-out, long time nothing at all; hobbies – cider, cheap wine and methylated spirits. Desmond had family, he even had family not far from here, but they’d long given up on him – and no one who wasn’t there while they were still trying has any right to criticize. He tried wintering in London once but found the pace hectic and decided, like George V, that he didn’t much care for abroad. He had no ambitions left, not even rock-bottom ones like getting through the next night. Each dawn he woke with a sense of disappointment.

  Once or twice he’d summoned the strength of purpose to make an end, saved up enough cider to drink himself into a stupor and lain down unprotected on the bare ground to let the cold leach away his life unnoticed while he slept. But each time another derelict had seen, and solicitously tucked a blanket around him, and he had woken to another chill dawn and a day without promise. He’d given up on suicide now. It seemed to be something else he was no good at.

  It was the dog that woke him. Desmond liked dogs, even this one with its mantrap jaws and unforgiving eyes. Its name appeared to be Brian You Bastard. It came by here most nights, and often paused in the pool of warmth around the fire, the red glow revealing the hard framework of muscle and sinew so that for a moment it appeared not a real dog but some epic statue, an heroic dog of bronze. Then it lifted its leg against the settee and broke the spell.

  Tonight, though, the dog had other things on its mind. It stood silhouetted by the fire and stared at him, so intently that Desmond was willing to believe the stare alone had woken him. He looked round but saw no one else astir. The fire was burning low: he threw some wood on to it. His feet were numb with cold and he got up to stomp the life back into them. He didn’t know what time it was but clearly it was late, probably after midnight. The dog bounded past him into the encircling dark. On an impulse, taking a brand from the fire he followed.

  Even with his alfresco torch he almost didn’t see the figure on the ground. It was clad in black and lying motionless, face down on the frozen ground, just a darker shadow in the shadow of a broken wall.

  Desmond’s first thought was that it was a fellow sojourner – somehow they never quite thought of one another as friends – who’d had too successful a day’s begging for his own good; or maybe, as Desmond had himself before now, saved up enough strong cider to see him on his way. When it happened to him Desmond had thought it no kindness to drag him back. Now he found he could not just turn and walk away. He bent down, holding the brand close, and shook the figure by a thin shoulder. ‘Hello there?’

  There was no reply; and then he saw why not, and that there was unlikely to be however hard he shook. The torch he held cast only a dim red light but it was enough to pick up the gleam of blood in the tangled hair.

  No one committed suicide by hitting himself over the head. A broken skull meant violence and that, even in the fringe society to which Desmond Jannery belonged, meant calling the police. It would be a difficult time for all of them but there was no alternative. The man might not be dead. Desmond couldn’t go back to the fire and let someone else discover him in the morning if there was even a slim chance that he was still alive.

  He took a deep breath, meaning to rouse the camp. But as he turned he almost collided with a man standing behind him: a tall string-thin figure as dark as the one on the ground. Desmond raised his brand, more for protection than illumination, but there was enough light at such close quarters for him to see and, after a moment, recognize the man’s face.

  Startled as he was he leaned forward, peering. ‘Is that you, Mr Donovan?’

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  At one in the morning The Jubilee was as dark and eerily quiet as a disused stage-set. No lights showed in the front parlours; even the upstairs windows were black. They kept regular hours in the
six streets: those whose trade required the cover of darkness were away pursuing it while the day-shift were tucked up in their beds. Even the local cats were staying home tonight.

  Liz parked in front of the house in George Street and looked up at its narrow frontage, three windows and a door, wondering how three generations of Dickenses managed to live in such close proximity. Perhaps it was bigger than it appeared; also, the three generations were now represented by just three people. Thelma was a widow, Roly’s wife left him years ago and only his youngest child remained at home. Fifteen years ago he must have been putting them to bed with a shoe-horn.

  It was tempting to linger in the frosty peace of the street, but there was a difficult job to do and it was better to get on with it. There were no bells in the Victorian front doors – when she rapped the iron knocker it was like cannon-fire ricocheting between the brick frontages.

  She expected Roly to come down, but when the hall light came on and the door opened it was his mother standing there in her dressing-gown, her thin grey hair plaited into a cord, a peevish expression on her sleep-wrinkled face. She may have recognized Liz’s car from her bedroom window. She’d certainly seen it often enough.

  But her expression changed as she took in Liz’s. She may not have known why the Inspector was here but she knew it wasn’t to arrest anyone. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I’m sorry to get you up, Thelma. It’s Mikey. Is Roly at home?’

  ‘He’s asleep. Shall I get him? What’s Mikey done?’

  ‘I think you should wake him,’ said Liz. ‘There’s been – an accident. Mikey’s in the hospital.’

  When Thelma woke him with the news Roly Dickens threw on whatever clothes were nearest and hurried down. The effect was of a badly wrapped parcel. He was a big man, in every direction, and the combination of a sweatshirt that barely made it down to his middle with a pair of those special builder’s trousers that barely made it over his hips was not entirely becoming.