Broken Lines

by Jo Bannister

  It had been a calculated gamble. If the hospital had been crawling with police officers opening doors and checking under beds, Roly would have seen them before they saw him. If he meant to kill Donovan he would have all the opportunity he needed. But she was right. If he wasn’t going to come, too much time was going to waste.

  ‘All right,’ decided Shapiro, ‘Plan B. We search the building from top to bottom. Well, bottom to top – we’ll start in the basement, drive him upwards. Less chance of him slipping out through a side door.’

  ‘Do you want me to come down?’

  ‘No, stay where you are. You might get lucky before we do.’

  Shapiro surveyed his team. Four of them wasn’t enough to search a large, complex building but getting more would mean waiting and suddenly he felt they’d waited too long already. ‘Be careful. I don’t want to overstate the case, but Roly Dickens in his current state is a deeply dangerous man. Nobody tackles him alone. You find him, you even think you’ve found him, you pull back – quietly – and call me. Clear?’ There was a muttered chorus of assent. ‘All right, let’s do it.’

  Nothing she could have been doing, even snatching open doors that might conceal a homicidal maniac, would have been as hard on Liz’s nerves as doing nothing. She looked to DC Morgan for signs of a similar frustration, but Fenmen like Morgan could give lessons in patience to a stone.

  Finally she got to her feet. ‘It’s no good, I can’t—’ The radio on the table beside her burped as Wilson tapped hers with her pen.

  Hope flared in Liz’s eyes. ‘She’s spotted him!’ She picked up the radio. ‘I’ll let Mr Shapiro know.’

  ‘All right,’ exclaimed Shapiro. He raised his voice, no longer afraid of being overheard. ‘Roly’s upstairs. So let’s get Donovan found while there’s no risk of meeting him. Liz, you’ll let me know as soon as he leaves?’

  ‘Of course. We’ll be right behind him.’

  They hadn’t expected Roly to stay in ICU, just stick his head in to see if anything had changed before returning to where he’d been for the last several hours. But it seemed the big man was no longer concerned with concealment. He trudged across the ward, cumbrous and tired, pulled out the chair beside Mikey’s bed and sat down heavily. He looked as if he was there for the duration.

  Unable to make sense of it, Liz radioed downstairs again. But Shapiro didn’t understand either. Unless, and he wasn’t going to say this aloud, it meant there was nothing for Roly to go back to. ‘I’m on my way. We’ll have to ask him what he’s done with Donovan.’

  Just then, though, Roly looked up from the bed, looked around and heaved himself to his feet. The big body rolling slightly, he walked over to the sister’s desk.

  ‘If Mr Shapiro’s anywhere handy, tell him I’d like a word.’

  Liz was with them in a few quick strides. ‘He’s in the basement, Roly. Shall I get him up here?’

  Roly shook his head. ‘We’ll meet him down there.’

  Shapiro had thought he’d need guns to make a safe arrest, but two women and a middle-aged man without a Swiss Army penknife between them proved a wholly adequate escort. Roly wasn’t going anywhere. Whatever had happened, it was over now.

  Liz fought the urge to question him. She’d know about Donovan soon enough, but while Roly was trudging docilely beside her and help was two floors below she wasn’t going to open a line of inquiry that would make both of them angry.

  Shapiro met them at the foot of the lift-shaft, nodded a wary greeting. ‘Roly. I believe you’ve got something we’re looking for.’

  There was no reading Roly Dickens’s expression. His eyes were as blank as ball-bearings: the adrenalin storm had passed, leaving him drained. He led them past the emergency generators and the laundry and into a side corridor.

  Liz kept her voice flat. ‘Are we going to need a doctor?’

  The big man considered, then nodded. Mary Wilson took off back the way they’d come.

  Roly stopped at a shut door. Shapiro couldn’t imagine how he could tell it from a dozen others. ‘He’s in there. Before you go in, I’d better warn you. I had to hurt him.’

  Liz pushed past him, fear and a helpless fury beating a turmoil in her breast, and flung open the door.

  It was a small concrete box of a room with one small, high window. Dusty crates and boxes suggested it had no particular function except as a repository, for things that were broken or finished with.

  At the back of the room, under the window, a body spilled across the dirty floor. That long and thin, and dressed for a tanners’ funeral, it could only be Donovan. He was on his side with his back to her and his wrists taped behind him. He lay quite still. There was blood on the floor.

  She hesitated, his name thin on her lips. Then she steeled herself and bent over him.

  His face was battered almost past recognition. Blood trickled from his mouth and his nose, and his eyes were swollen shut. A painful whisper of breath rasped between broken lips. He was unconscious, but not so deeply unconscious that the hurt couldn’t reach him. It wouldn’t be long before he was back.

  On a crate beside him lay the scalpel Roly had taken from ICU. It was clean. Except to cut lengths of tape, he hadn’t used it.

  Shapiro vented his breath in a ragged sigh. ‘All right. Liz, stay with him till the doctor gets here. Roly, time for you and me to talk back at Queen’s Street.’

  The superintendent went to lead him away; but Roly stood his ground for a moment, half turned in the doorway, looking back over his shoulder. His voice was gruff. ‘I’m sorry about this, Mrs Graham. I had to lay him out. If I hadn’t I’d have done something we’d have both regretted.’

  Liz looked up at him, caught between tears and a smile. Donovan’s face was a bloody mess, but he’d heal. It could have been so much worse. ‘I think he’ll be all right.’

  ‘He’d better be,’ grunted Roly. ‘He knows who beat up on Mikey.’

  ‘He does?’ Shapiro couldn’t have looked more startled if someone had hit him with a kipper. ‘How?’

  Roly shrugged. ‘I dunno. Something to do with a boat, I think.’

  Liz gave a shaky chuckle. ‘Figures.’ She looked at Shapiro. ‘Can I tell him? It won’t make any difference now.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  She stood up. ‘We’re not sure of the detail yet, but we have two people helping with our enquiries right now. As Mikey’s father, I think you’re entitled to know that.’

  ‘Someone I know?’

  Liz shook her head. ‘Even Mikey didn’t know them. The woman was in the car he turned over the night of the robbery. She miscarried a baby she’d been trying for for ten years. I think it drove her a little mad.’

  ‘A woman?’ Roly sounded astonished. He thought about it. ‘A woman. And that’s why…’ He nodded at Donovan, still senseless on the floor.

  Liz’s lip curled. ‘You played right into her hands. She blamed them both: Mikey for the crash, Donovan for saving him instead of helping her. This was her revenge. She wanted you to kill him.’

  Roly wasn’t accustomed to being used. The thought of what this woman he’d never met had nearly made him do made him feel ill. His voice was thick. ‘Yeah? Well, tell her something. Tell her he took that for her. Tell her he was ready to take more.’

  Liz was glad when they went. She didn’t want Donovan waking up as the main attraction in a three-ring circus.

  In fact they were alone when he surfaced. He didn’t open his eyes: they were too bruised. He mumbled, ‘Roly?’

  ‘No, it’s me – Liz Graham.’

  She’d freed his hands. They were numb after five hours lashed behind his back. He moved one towards his face, but he had neither the co-ordination nor the feeling in his fingers to be sure. ‘My eyes?’

  Understanding rocked her. So that was what Roly meant. She guided Donovan’s hand and touched his fingers to his eyes. ‘They’re fine. A bit puffy, you look like the morning after the night before, but you’re OK. There’s no damage done.�
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  For a minute longer he just lay where he was, absorbing that. Then he sucked in a deep breath and struggled to sit up. Liz helped him. ‘I know who did it. I know who beat Mikey.’

  She could have lied, but he’d have found out soon enough. She chuckled sympathetically. ‘Sorry, Donovan – so do we. The Taylors. We picked them up this morning.’

  Donovan would have been angrier if he’d been stronger. He stretched his forearms across his knees and rested his head on them. ‘Oh, bugger,’ he muttered wearily.

  Chapter Seven

  Dealing with Roly Dickens took priority. Shapiro spared little thought for the Taylors until he had the big man tucked up comfortably in a cell.

  Roly gave no further trouble. He didn’t want his solicitor, he didn’t ask for bail, he made no attempt to put a gloss on what he’d done. He was sorry for what he’d done to Donovan, but mostly he regretted being in a police cell when he should have been at his son’s bedside.

  ‘I promise you, Roly,’ Shapiro said, ‘if there’s any change you and I will go back to the hospital. I let them know you’d be here, they’ll call me if there’s anything to report.’

  ‘’Preciate that, Mr Shapiro,’ rumbled Roly.

  Shapiro regarded the old battler with compassion. ‘I do understand, you know. I can’t ignore what’s happened, but I understand where it came from. You had your strings pulled at a time when you were desperately vulnerable. I’m not saying anyone would have reacted the same way, but in all the circumstances things could have been worse. We’ll sort it out, Roly. Nobody wants your head on a platter.’

  ‘Mr Donovan might.’

  ‘I doubt it. Or if he does now, he won’t for long. Leave it with me, once he’s feeling better I’ll talk to him.’

  ‘I could have done it, you know.’ A little peak of wonder rose through the dull monotone of Roly’s voice. Already the thing was beginning to seem unreal, like a nightmare he’d woken from, but he remembered with a kind of horror how he’d felt. ‘I shouldn’t be saying this, should I, but it’s true. I wanted to kill him when I thought he’d beaten Mikey. Even when I knew he hadn’t – I saw it come together in his face, nobody’s that good an actor, I saw him work out who did it and then realize he couldn’t tell me – I was ready to hurt him to get the name. I threatened to blind him, Mr Shapiro. I could have done it. I was this close.’ The finger and thumb he held just barely apart were as thick as sausages.

  ‘Roly,’ said Shapiro firmly, ‘neither of us knows for sure what you could have done. We only know what you did. I know what you threatened to do, but whether you’d have done it is something else. The facts are that for five hours you held a man you believed responsible for your son’s condition, and all you actually did was thump him. All right, several times and quite hard, but people get worse injuries in boxing matches.

  ‘Forget what might have happened. Yes, you could have killed him, or blinded him, but if you hadn’t got round to it in five hours it’s my guess you never would have. Talk’s easy, but it takes a particular type of man to brutalize someone who can’t defend himself. Whatever our differences, Roly, I don’t think you’re that kind of man.’

  ‘Mr Shapiro,’ said Roly with a slow smile, ‘did you ever think of going into criminal defence work?’

  Shapiro gave a little snort of laughter and left him alone.

  The Taylors were still where he’d left them. Sergeant Tomlinson was the Custody Officer: Shapiro checked that no problems had arisen during his absence.

  ‘No, sir. But Mr Taylor made a phonecall about an hour ago.’

  Shapiro wasn’t surprised. ‘His solicitor?’ ‘No, sir, his doctor.’

  That did surprise him. ‘He’s ill? Why didn’t you call Dr Greaves?’

  ‘He wasn’t ill,’ said the sergeant stoically. ‘And Dr Greaves may be an excellent police surgeon but I doubt he’s a fertility expert.’

  Shapiro enjoyed being enigmatic; he wasn’t keen when other people got enigmatic back. He squinted over his shoulder at Sergeant Tomlinson as he headed up the corridor.

  Clifford Taylor looked up quickly as Shapiro came in. There was a cup on the table in front of him: he’d drunk about half of it. Not too anxious to drink at all, nor so relieved at being left alone he could have managed a square meal. In his gut Shapiro didn’t believe this man had done anything as dreadful as bludgeoning a nineteen-year-old boy.

  ‘Did you find your sergeant?’

  Though he was a bit taken aback, Shapiro knew how difficult it was to keep secrets in a police station. He saw no reason not to answer. ‘Yes. He’s all right – a bit of concussion, some pretty spectacular bruises; I left him at the hospital but I’ll get him back in a day or two.’

  ‘The boy’s father had him?’

  ‘He thought Donovan put his son in ICU. Which is what he was supposed to think.’

  ‘Somebody’ – the accountant gave an awkward shrug, too embarrassed to use slang he’d only ever heard on television –‘made it look that way?’

  Shapiro breathed heavily. ‘Mr Taylor, you know somebody made it look that way. You also know who. If it wasn’t you and your wife together it was your wife alone.’

  Taylor’s gaze flicked up briefly and then returned to the table-top. ‘I made a phonecall. While you were out.’

  ‘I know,’ nodded Shapiro. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

  ‘I called the clinic. The Feyd Clinic, where we were having fertility treatment.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Shapiro was puzzled. Guilty or innocent, he’d have thought the man would have other things on his mind.

  ‘Pat didn’t have a miscarriage.’

  The superintendent stared at him. ‘You mean, she’s still pregnant?’

  ‘I mean, she never was pregnant.’

  All Shapiro’s experience told him that women didn’t lie about something like that. ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘The consultant. I asked him if she miscarried, and he said no.’

  But it made no sense. What Pat Taylor had done, the lengths she’d gone to – the extreme lengths, if her husband hadn’t helped – were beyond belief if all she was mourning was her battered car.

  The possibility remained, of course, that what Taylor was trying to do was wriggle off the hook, and that he’d say anything about anyone to do it.

  ‘I’m surprised the consultant was willing to discuss it with you.’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Taylor tersely, ‘I bought him his Rolls Royce. As far as he’s concerned, I’m still a patient. Pat and I went there as a couple, she never told them we’d split up. I think she was afraid they wouldn’t treat her alone.’

  ‘In that case your consultant should be prepared to speak to me, with your consent. Will you give it?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Taylor. ‘Superintendent, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not trying to persuade you of my innocence by convincing you of Pat’s guilt. But I think she needs help – not medical, psychiatric – and until the facts are known she’s not going to get it.’

  That seemed reasonable. Taylor didn’t need to throw suspicion, on his wife, and he wouldn’t succeed in averting it. ‘And the consultant was quite sure there was no pregnancy?’

  Taylor ground his knuckles into his eyes. ‘She went to the clinic after the accident. She told them what had happened, and what she was afraid of – that she was carrying a child and it had been harmed. They ran the tests and found what they expected. There was no evidence of pregnancy.

  ‘When the consultant told her she became hysterical. They put her to bed for a couple of hours until she was feeling better, then they sent her home. I asked if she could have got confused, if she could have miscarried at home either before or after visiting the clinic, but he was adamant there was nothing to miscarry.’

  Shapiro was still trying to get his head round it. ‘Then what on earth was it all about? Why have we got one man dying in the hospital, one sitting in the cells here, and one who could have been in the next room to eith
er of them if things had gone just a little differently? If she wasn’t avenging a lost baby, what was she doing?’

  ‘I asked that too.’ Taylor swallowed. This wasn’t easy for him. He was talking about a woman he’d loved for half his life. In spite of everything, what he felt for her was still closer to love than anything else. ‘I told him she was behaving irrationally and blaming it on the loss of a pregnancy. The consultant reckoned that by now she’d convinced, herself it was true. That his tests were wrong, that she really was pregnant and she lost it because of the accident. He said what she was really mourning was her fertility, her ability to have a child. When she finally realized it was never going to happen, she felt bereaved.

  ‘She needed to grieve, and she did it by thinking of it as a child she’d lost. The rest followed from that. If there was a child and she lost it because of the crash, that was the fault of the boy who ran her down and the policeman who could have rescued her before the baby was damaged. She believed that between them they’d killed her child.’

  And she wanted revenge in the same fierce, regardless-of-the-consequences way that she’d spent ten years trying for a baby. Liz had been worried she’d have been too weak from the miscarriage to do all she’d have had to, but that wasn’t a problem if there never was a pregnancy.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ said Shapiro. ‘From start to finish she was acting alone? You didn’t help her with any of it, not even inadvertently?’

  Clifford Taylor shook his head. His eyes were hollow. ‘Incredible, isn’t it? For twenty years people have been leaving their children with Pat in the absolute belief that she could be trusted to look after them. As far as I know she’s never so much as smacked one round the head with a ruler. And then, almost out of nowhere, she took a stave to a nineteen-year-old boy and hit him until she thought he was dead. And not in the heat of the moment – she had to plan it like a military manoeuvre, and then to plan some more how she was going to lay the blame on your sergeant. God in heaven, Superintendent – is it even possible?’

  It was possible. In thirty years Shapiro had seen all manner of people do all manner of things that others had thought beyond them. Bella Willis defending her baby from Kevin Tufnall. Other mothers and fathers walking through fire to rescue their children. Other men and women, equally ordinary to the casual eye, conceiving and carrying out difficult and complicated schemes to get what they wanted – money, somebody else’s spouse, their own freedom.