Broken Lines

by Jo Bannister

  Shapiro wouldn’t lie to her. ‘We wondered. We looked into it. Mrs Dickens, I can’t tell you yet who attacked Mikey but I don’t believe it was Detective Sergeant Donovan. There are too many things that don’t fit. He said someone was framing him, and that’s what it looks like. Plus, this isn’t his style.

  ‘What I can tell you is that we now have the gun used in the garage robbery. It makes a nonsense of Mikey’s defence. We can prove that Mikey was no innocent bystander but in fact carried out that robbery. I hope one day he’ll be fit to stand trial for it.’

  ‘From your mouth to God’s ear,’ murmured Thelma; which rather surprised Shapiro, who hadn’t heard that since he was last in Golders Green.

  ‘I also hope, very much, that Roly isn’t going to be in the court next door on charges arising out of today’s events. Or that if he is, we’re talking unlawful imprisonment not murder. There’s not much either of us can do to improve Mikey’s chances, but together we may be able to help both your son and my sergeant. What do you think?’

  She didn’t have to think. ‘If I knew where they were I’d tell you. I don’t; and I don’t know anything else that might help you find them.’

  Shapiro believed her. ‘All right. Then, if Roly gets in touch will you let me know?’

  That she did give a moment’s thought; then she nodded. ‘If you’ll promise me – promise, mind, Mr Shapiro – that whatever he’s done you’ll look after him. You won’t let anyone hurt him.’

  Could he promise that, Shapiro wondered. Whatever he’s done? If he’s laving his grief right now in Donovan’s blood? This was a man Shapiro had known for eight years, who’d driven him mad for eight years but who had also earned his gratitude and respect. He thought, What if we find him how we found Mikey? If we find him dead? If Roly’s killed him? – tortured and killed him? What price then my promise to Thelma?

  Actually, it would alter nothing. Once Roly was in custody it was Shapiro’s job to protect him, and he would have no qualms about doing it. ‘I promise. Once he’s under arrest he’s safe: my word on it. But first we have to find him. Can you think of anywhere he’d go if he needed not to be disturbed?’

  ‘I’m a bit out of date with these things,’ admitted Thelma. ‘But he wouldn’t come back to The Jubilee. You can’t do anything here without being seen, and not everybody turns a blind eye. Walshes wouldn’t – Walshes’d let you know, if only to do Roly a bad turn. Even some of our people’ll think he’s gone too far this time.’ She gave a dry chuckle, a little desperate sound. ‘If his own mother’s prepared to grass him up—!’

  ‘It isn’t like that,’ Shapiro said quietly. ‘The state he’s in, he needs help as much as Donovan does. If he was himself he’d know this was a bad mistake. He needs you to do his thinking for him.’

  She didn’t really need convincing, but she appreciated it just the same. ‘Maybe he wouldn’t go anywhere in particular. I mean, he doesn’t need to. He’s got the Transit with him, you could entertain half Queen’s Street in there. Maybe all he needs to do is drive out into The Levels and park off the road somewhere. It could be days before someone stumbles across them.’

  Shapiro knew the big black van she was talking about. She was right: it was as near a Black Maria as you could get on the open market. Maybe better: they moved even top security prisoners by hire coach these days. It wouldn’t be soundproof, but then he wouldn’t be parking it in Castle Place. Deep in the woods, or out on The Levels, they could make all the noise it took and no one would hear. A Transit van was good enough for his purpose, for as long as whatever Roly had in mind would take.

  ‘I’ll start looking for it,’ he said.

  ‘Tell your people,’ said Thelma, the thin old voice insistent. ‘Tell them what you told me. That you’ll look after him. That he isn’t to be hurt. Whatever he’s done.’

  ‘I’ll tell them.’

  The same place he found the scalpel Roly had acquired a family-sized reel of surgical strapping. He’d bound Donovan’s wrists behind his back with it, and strapped his ankles together. Lengths of it blinded and gagged him. He lay on his side, the only movement he was capable of a sort of maggot wriggle. Not that it got him anywhere. There wasn’t much room in here, he bumped into things almost immediately. Mostly he did it to check if Roly was still there, because he kicked him if he was.

  Sometimes he was there, sometimes he wasn’t. The only sense Donovan had left was his hearing, and he listened for the door as Roly came and went. But sometimes he got it wrong – Roly opened the door without going out, perhaps to check if there was anyone around – and then Donovan got a dig in the ribs to stop him fidgeting. He bore it stoically. It wasn’t much of a dig, and the wriggling wasn’t getting him anywhere anyway.

  Worse than a bruised rib was not knowing what was coming. He hadn’t seen Roly’s face since this began: at first the blade under his jaw kept him from looking, then the tape over his eyes did. The man must have skipped a gear, which wasn’t altogether surprising, but Donovan needed to know if it was only a temporary aberration. If an opportunity had presented itself and for just a moment he’d been crazy enough to take it; since when he’d been sitting with his head in his hands wondering how to get himself out of this mess. Or if the madness went deeper and he really meant to avenge himself on the man he blamed for his son’s condition. If the eyes watching him were bestial with hate; if Roly had no thought for the consequences and the only reason he hadn’t yet waded in was that he was brooding on what to do, how much and how quickly. Whether there was more satisfaction to be had from hurting him slow or fast.

  Even without his eyes, Donovan could have made a fair guess if Roly had talked to him. Or shouted at him, or called him names. But he didn’t. Instructions murmured in his ear until they were past the risk of discovery, and after that the only communication was between Donovan’s ribs and the toe of Roly’s boot. He might have provoked a response had he not been restrained by the sort of bondage usually associated with Tory MPs. He might hum, or sneeze, if he had a mind to but those were about the only freedoms left to him.

  At some point, presumably, Roly would strip the tape from his mouth so he could answer questions. You couldn’t beat a confession out of someone rendered mute. He would, of course, deny laying a finger on Mikey; Roly, of course, would not believe him. He’d set about making it easier to admit it than to hold out. It was important that Donovan didn’t yield to the temptation. If this was about revenge, what Roly would do to a man who denied maiming his son was nothing to what he’d do to one who admitted it.

  Donovan could take a beating. He had before, he could again. He could keep his mouth shut and take the punishment, and hope to wake up in Castle General with only some interesting new scars to show for it. But if he made the mistake of thinking a free and frank confession would end this, he wouldn’t wake up at all. If the situation deteriorated that far, denial to his last conscious breath was his only hope.

  Shapiro would be looking for him. He wouldn’t know where to look, so he’d pull in every favour he’d ever earned to amass enough manpower to look everywhere. If Roly purposed his death, he clearly didn’t purpose it right now or he’d have made a start. Time was on Donovan’s side. It might not always feel like it, particularly once Roly started hurting him, but time was his friend.

  The door opened and closed again. Donovan waited, feeling his nerve endings sharpen and twitch.

  Roly’s big hands fastened in his clothes and propped him upright. Thick strong fingers fastened in his jaw; He could feel Roly’s breath on his face. When Roly ripped the tape off his mouth it took with it two days’growth of beard.

  The man’s voice was low and measured, oddly precise, as if Roly was choosing his words with uncommon care. ‘Now, Mr Donovan, let’s see if we can get to the bottom of this.’

  Chapter Three

  ‘First we need to set the ground rules,’ said Mikey Dickens’father. ‘The ground rules are, you answer my questions or I thump you. You lie to m
e and I thump you. You tell me the truth and—’ He paused a moment, considering. ‘Well, I might still thump you,’ he admitted, ‘depending on what the truth is, but at least you’ve got a chance that I won’t. Clear?’

  Donovan’s mouth was dry. He’d lost track of how long he’d been lying here, gagged, blindfolded and trussed like a chicken, but it felt like hours. He croaked, ‘Makes the Marquis of Queensberry look like Mother Teresa.’

  That rumble low in Roly’s jowels was a chuckle. But Donovan didn’t read any more into it than that. The man hadn’t come so far with this only to give up at the first smart remark. Besides, he might have earned a chuckle this time; next time he said something smart he’d probably get thumped.

  ‘You know why?’ said Roly. ‘The Marquis of Queensberry was a sporting man. I’m not. He was looking for a fair fight; I’m not. He wanted to be entertained; I don’t. I want to know who beat Mikey. I want to know if it was you, and if it was—’ He stopped. This was a man who ran his business on the basis of casual threats, following up just enough of them to keep people in line, and he was reluctant to say what he would do to the man who beat his child. That told Donovan more than any threat.

  He said, ‘It wasn’t.’

  Blinded by the tape, he got no warning. Roly hit him across the mouth with enough force to snap his head over. The unexpectedness of it was shocking. He felt blood trickle down his chin.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Roly calmly, ‘forgot one. You bullshit me, and I thump you.’

  He knew what he was risking but it seemed important to Donovan to set some rules of his own. When his breathing steadied he said thickly, ‘It still wasn’t me beat up on Mikey.’

  He waited for Roly’s fist, his nerves screwed tight, but nothing happened. ‘Well,’ said the big man thoughtfully, ‘we’ll come to that. Let’s start with an easy one. What were you doing in the hospital?’

  ‘Visiting,’ said Donovan after a moment. ‘It’s what you do when people are sick.’ As always, fear made him querulous.

  ‘Mikey’s been sick for five days. You haven’t been near him before.’

  ‘I’ve been busy.’ Did Roly also forget to mention that offensive answers, however accurate, would get him thumped? Donovan waited; but apparently not.

  ‘So what changed?’

  ‘What changed is—’ He realized just in time what this was going to sound like and stopped, wondering what to do. While he was still wondering Roly’s fist arrived, a knot of bone like a cow’s knuckle spilling him across the floor.

  The big man’s voice was still ominously, unnaturally calm, prompting him. ‘What changed is—?’

  With his hands and feet bound Donovan couldn’t sit up unaided. Whatever it cost, he was damned if he was answering questions in this position. ‘Pick me up.’

  ‘What?’ It may have been the accent, which always thickened under stress, or it may have been the blood in his mouth, but Roly genuinely didn’t understand.

  ‘I said pick me up, God damn it!’ Donovan raged in breathless, impotent fury. ‘I’ll tell you what I know, but not with my face on the floor.’

  After a long second the big hands seized Donovan by the shoulders and propped him upright again. Roly picked up where he left off. ‘And the question was, what changed?’

  ‘I’ve been suspended.’

  He heard Roly catch his breath. ‘You mean, even Mr Shapiro thinks you did it?’

  ‘I don’t know what he thinks.’ An edge of desperation snagged in Donovan’s voice. ‘But somebody’s set me up well enough that he couldn’t keep me on the job any longer.’

  ‘You’ve been framed?’

  As a defence, it usually provoked the same hooting derision from Donovan. His broken lips sketched a bleak grin. ‘Pathetic, isn’t it? You’d think a guy could come up with a better excuse than that.’

  ‘What have they got on you?’

  The man was asking him to hang himself. He could refuse to answer. He’d get thumped, but he still thought he could deal with that. More serious, more of a threat to his long-term health, was that Roly would take his silence as proof of guilt. Why not? – in similar circumstances Donovan had. The facts were damaging; letting Roly see he was afraid of them could be fatal.

  He took a deep breath. ‘Plenty. I’d think I’d done it if I didn’t know better.’

  He didn’t begin at the beginning: Roly knew what Mikey had done to him, he was more interested in what had been done to Mikey. He began with that sleepless night on Tara when he decided to take the dog for a walk.

  Liz glanced at her watch as she turned into the school campus. The start of the lunch hour was a good time to catch a teacher: she wouldn’t have to arrange cover for her class before she could talk.

  She parked her car and headed for the staffroom. Mrs Taylor was going the same way: they met in the corridor. ‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’ said Liz.

  ‘Now?’ The other woman frowned. ‘I was just going for lunch.’

  ‘Skip the soup,’ said Liz shortly. There was an empty classroom immediately beside them: she opened the door and waited till Pat Taylor joined her inside.

  ‘There’s a flap on,’ said Liz, ‘so I’d like to make this quick. I’d also like to clear it up once and for all. How many people were in the van that hit you?’

  Annoyance flickered in Mrs Taylor’s gaze. ‘This is what I’m missing the minestrone for? Two. I told you: two.’

  ‘So you did. The trouble is, that’s starting to conflict with the evidence. The only other person who said there were two is a proven liar.’

  Her eyes flared. ‘And who says there was one? Your sergeant. The one who, if he hadn’t been a policeman, would have been charged with attempted murder by now.’

  That startled Liz so much that for a moment she didn’t know what to say. She was surprised that Donovan’s situation was a matter of public gossip, at least outside The Jubilee, more than surprised that Mrs Taylor would throw it in her face like that. So she’d had an upsetting experience; but even coming on top of a bad time for her, that didn’t justify her hatred for Donovan. And plainly it was hatred, not unhappy memories, that made her shun him before and speak this way now. Why? – because he left her hanging in her seat-belt for a few minutes while he rescued a man from a fire?

  ‘Is that what you want?’ she asked quietly. ‘To ruin Donovan? Why?’

  Expressions kaleidoscoped across Pat Taylor’s face. Liz glimpsed hate, sure enough; and loss and pain. There was a mass of anger, and behind that there was grief. She wouldn’t meet Liz’s gaze. At last, and it was an effort to get it out, she said, ‘He should have helped me.’

  ‘He would have helped you, if he could. Mrs Taylor, we’ve been through this – he had two people in trouble, one was frightened, the other was in immediate mortal peril. He’d rather have helped you than the boy – it would have been safer and more rewarding – but he didn’t have any choice. He did what was required of him. It’s most unfair that, with all the trouble he has right now, you’re still trying to make him pay for that.’

  ‘Unfair? You call that unfair?’

  Which was the wrong answer from someone who was telling the truth. But Liz wasn’t content to prove her a liar: there had to be a reason. She said quietly, ‘Will you at least admit that you may have been mistaken about the passenger?’

  It was like drawing teeth. Mrs Taylor clutched her grievance to her and held her tongue. Liz said nothing more: nothing that would help her out, nothing that would help her change the subject. She just waited, her eyes on Pat Taylor’s face.

  Finally, as if the very silence was a goad whose urging could not be resisted forever, Mrs Taylor stumbled out, ‘I – suppose.’

  Liz vented her breath in a sigh. She may have seemed certain, obdurate and enduring, but inside she’d been ready to give up. ‘I see. All right. Well, it can go on file as Anyone-can-make-a-mistake. But I’d like to understand. I don’t know why you ‘d treat a decent man that way.’

  And the
n she did. Perhaps the answer passed intuitively from one woman’s mind into the other; or perhaps deep in the synapses of her brain Liz was working on the puzzle unknown even to herself. However it was, connections were made that completed the chain of motive and action, of cause and effect. Some of it she knew already; the rest she guessed.

  Shaken, she sat down abruptly on a desk. ‘Oh Pat. Pat, why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell somebody?’

  Pat Taylor’s voice was a whisper. ‘How did you guess?’

  Liz shook her head with shock and compassion. ‘There had to be something – something like that, something big. You’re not an irrational woman, there had to be some reason for you to hate him that much. And then, when I called at your house, you had a hospital appointment but you didn’t want a lift into town. You weren’t going to Castle General, were you? You were going to the Feyd Clinic. Had it already happened?’

  Mrs Taylor gave a fractional shake of the head. ‘I thought I’d got away with it. I told the hospital I was two months pregnant, and they checked me over and said everything seemed all right. They said to come back if I had any symptoms, and to see my own doctor in the next few days. That’s where I was going when you called. The clinic knew my history, they’d finally succeeded in getting me pregnant – if anyone could save the baby they could.’

  She sat down on the next desk. ‘I was there when the bleeding started. They said not to worry, there wasn’t much, it would probably stop in a little while. They put me to bed and gave me an injection.

  ‘But it didn’t stop. Then late in the afternoon…’ Her voice tailed away. Liz stole a glance at her face and was stunned by the pain there. She didn’t dare speak, could only wait until Mrs Taylor was able to continue.