Broken Lines

by Jo Bannister

  And these were the cases that Shapiro knew about, the ones where something went wrong and it all came out. As a realist he knew there must be others who’d been clever enough to get away with it. With just a little less ambition Pat Taylor could have been one of them. If she’d settled for punishing Mikey she would never have been suspected. Unless he recovered enough to point the finger, which was looking less and less likely, the attack on him would have remained unsolved. Greed was her undoing. She wanted them both, but her efforts to implicate Donovan started her careful construct unravelling.

  Shapiro nodded wearily. ‘Oh yes. More than that: one step at a time it wasn’t even very difficult.’ Murderers were often surprised at how easy it was to end a human life. Beforehand they worried they mightn’t have the strength or the stomach to complete the task. But when the time came they had no trouble inflicting enough damage to kill the victim three times over.

  ‘The hardest part would be working it all out, and that was an intellectual exercise she was well equipped for. She made a phonecall, and a couple of boat-trips, and beat the living daylights out of a boy she blamed for the loss of her baby. None of that was beyond her once she’d decided on the sort of revenge the courts are no help with, that you have to take for yourself.’

  For all the mayhem she’d caused, Shapiro couldn’t help feeling sorry for Pat Taylor. She’d acted on emotions as powerful at a genetic level as self-preservation. If she’d been made to kill at gunpoint they’d have been talking inculpable homicide. Perhaps Mrs Taylor had had no more chance of resisting the demands on her than if she’d had a gun in her back.

  In a way, whatever they decided, what happened to her now was academic. Her life was wrecked as much as Mikey’s. If she continued to believe that she’d lost a child, the refusal of the rest of the world to acknowledge that loss would be an enduring torment And if at some point she came to understand that there never was a child, that she’d destroyed one man and come within an ace of destroying another for a figment of her imagination, how would she feel then? They were all victims: Mikey, Roly, both the Taylors … In the end, and by the skin of his teeth, Donovan with his black eyes and his bloody nose had got off lightest of all.

  He also had a certain amount of pleasurable satisfaction coming, in that his superintendent owed him an apology.

  There was still Pat Taylor to see. Now Shapiro had all the material facts he hoped she would answer whatever questions remained. Both the objects of her hatred were beyond her ability to harm them further so she had nothing left to lose. Shapiro thought she would tell him now what she did and how she did it. He didn’t think he’d ask her why.

  The cup in front of her had been drained to the dregs. Whatever hags had ridden and continued to ride Pat Taylor, anxiety for her own future was not one. She knew she hadn’t got one.

  Her gaze was hard and fierce, a combination of fire and ice. Tiger eyes. She didn’t care what happened to her now; she only cared what Shapiro might be able to tell her. She barked at him, ‘Well?’

  It wasn’t the time and anyway he felt no inclination to gloat. He stood with his back to the door and his hands in his pockets. ‘Detective Sergeant Donovan’s being kept in hospital for a check-over but he doesn’t seem to have come to much harm. Roly Dickens has been charged with assault.’

  ‘Assault?’ She spat the word at him as if she’d bitten into a strawberry and found half a worm. ‘I wanted …’ She stopped, the fanatic eyes disappointed.

  ‘I know,’ murmured Shapiro. ‘But most people draw the line somewhere, even the head of crime in The Jubilee. Roly had a pile of grief and rage to deal with, but in the end he managed to cope with the loss of his son without destroying someone else’s.’

  Her chin came up. People who’d known Pat Taylor for years, people who’d studied the subtleties of Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray with her, would not have recognized her now. ‘You think that makes him stronger than me? How strange; I think it makes him weaker.’

  Shapiro could think of nothing more pointless than arguing morality with her. ‘I know what you did; I know pretty much how you did it. You could clarify a couple of matters.’

  She no longer cared who knew what. She had more than half succeeded in what she’d set out to do. If that was something less than a triumph it was just enough to satisfy her need for vengeance. ‘Such as?’

  She had phoned Mikey at home, pretended to be Liz Graham – whom she knew just well enough to convince someone who knew her no better – and arranged to meet him at Cornmarket at midnight. She already had a weapon, it had been lying in the boot of her car since the last time she covered for a missing sports teacher.

  ‘A baseball bat?’ said Shapiro.

  Mrs Taylor shook her head once, crisply. ‘Rounders.’

  She put it in the boat at her landing. The clothes she needed for a cold night on the water were a perfect disguise, and the blood washed off easily. It took her twenty minutes to motor to Cornmarket. She saw no one except the derelicts by the fire.

  Mikey arrived late. Pat Taylor was waiting inside the ruins of the Inland Navigation offices. They didn’t exchange so much as a word. She let Mikey pass her, then felled him with a knock that would have won her a home run in the World Series.

  ‘And after that?’ prompted Shapiro gently.

  ‘After that I hit him some more. I kept on hitting him till I couldn’t lift the bat any more.’ By then she believed Mikey Dickens was dead. Giving the fire a wide berth she walked back to her boat, taking the weapon with her, and went home.

  Phase two, she admitted, involved a little homework. There were things she needed to know about Donovan before she could make him a convincing scapegoat. Fortunately, she worked with a man whose wife knew him well.

  ‘You must tell Brian Graham how helpful he was. He was always telling some new anecdote about his wife and her sergeant. I knew a lot about him already, it was easy enough to find out more. Where he lived, for instance.’ That icy smile again. ‘I was lucky there. I’d have managed somehow if he’d lived at the top of a tower block, but it was so much easier that he lived on the canal too.’

  She prepared the weapon, returned to Broad Wharf at a likely time and waited for Donovan to take his dog for a walk. The animal wouldn’t ignore something as intriguing as the scent of a man’s blood on a stick left by its own front door. The first time she waited in the motorboat but they didn’t show up and she had to go home. The second time it worked like a charm.

  She hadn’t anticipated Roly Dickens finishing the job for her. She meant to wreck Donovan’s career, maybe send him to prison. When she learned that Roly too had pieced the clues together and come to the desired conclusion, the idea that he might do to Donovan what she’d done to his precious son seemed like a miracle. It was so perfect it had to happen.

  Her lip curled. ‘Now you tell me you’ve charged him with assault. I hoped he’d kill the bastard.’

  ‘If it’s any comfort,’ murmured Shapiro, ‘it’s not your fault he didn’t. He believed what you wanted him to; only in the end it wasn’t enough for him to do what you wanted him to. He meant to, at least at the start. Fortunately, it’s one thing committing murder in the white-heat of blind fury, quite another to stay angry enough for five hours. If Roly had really wanted Donovan dead he should have cut his throat when he found him asleep on Mikey’s bed. It was always going to be harder after they’d talked.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have found it harder,’ said Mrs Taylor.

  ‘No?’ Shapiro shrugged. ‘But you didn’t risk finding out, did you? You weren’t prepared to talk to him.’

  ‘I didn’t think I could hide how I felt. And I had to, if I was going to do anything about it.’

  ‘Maybe you were worried about giving yourself away,’ allowed Shapiro. ‘Or maybe you were worried that if you talked to him you’d realize he didn’t deserve your enmity. He was just an ordinary man doing a difficult job the best way he knew. He never meant you any harm, as far as h
e knew he hadn’t done you any. You couldn’t talk to him because you couldn’t afford to see him as another human being with hopes, fears and problems of his own. To do what you intended you had to demonize him, and real human beings don’t make good demons.’

  Pat Taylor lurched to her feet behind the table so abruptly that WPC Flynn took a step forward, ready to intervene. But she wasn’t going anywhere. Her face was crimson with a rage that nothing she’d done, nothing that had happened, had in any way diminished. Pure atavistic savagery shone from her eyes. ‘They stole my baby,’ she shouted, spit flying out with the words. ‘They stole my baby!’ Shapiro had no doubt that if either of the men she blamed had been there she’d have tried to finish the job, with her teeth if no other weapon presented itself.

  Shapiro shook his head, but there was no point trying to convince her. Taylor was right, she needed professional help; though how much good it would do remained to be seen. He sighed. ‘We’ll need to get a statement at some point, but perhaps you’d like to rest now?’

  She shrugged, returned to her chair. ‘I’m not tired.’

  But Shapiro was. He needed some fresh air. Mostly, he needed to be out of that room.

  He was doing Donovan’s thing, strolling by the canal behind Queen’s Street, when Sergeant Bolsover hailed him from a back window. ‘Phone, sir. It’s the hospital.’

  Roly Dickens had an appointment with the Magistrates that afternoon. Shapiro cancelled it. He helped the big man into his coat, waiting patiently while he went through the ritual of checking he had a handkerchief, his gloves and a scarf. It was displacement activity: if he did what he always did when he was going out, perhaps everything would be all right when he got back. Perhaps he wasn’t really going to sit by a hospital bed and watch his youngest son struggle through his last few breaths.

  ‘Ready?’ asked Shapiro.

  ‘Ready,’ said Roly. Then he began to cry.

  After a moment Shapiro stretched an arm around the broad, bowed shoulders and just stood with him as The Jubilee’s answer to the Godfather sobbed brokenly into his spread hands.

  Shapiro didn’t want to rush him but there was a certain amount of urgency. As the great racking sobs abated, pity knotting up his stomach he patted Roly’s arm. ‘Come on. Let’s go and give Mikey a proper send-off. See him safely on his way.’

  They went down to Shapiro’s car together, and as they passed the busy building fell silent around them.

  Copyright

  First published in 1998 by Macmillan

  This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  ISBN 978-1-4472-3619-1 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-3618-4 POD

  Copyright © Jo Bannister, 1998

  The right of Jo Bannister to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted in accordance

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