A Bleeding of Innocents

by Jo Bannister

  Liz said, ‘Both barrels?’

  ‘No,’ said Dr Crowe, ‘just one. It was enough. He must have aimed at her face: the pellets thin out as you move down the body and some went over the top of her head, lodging in the lining of the roof. Some of her hair’s up there too.’

  ‘She died quickly?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  Most of the windscreen was gone but a crescent of crazed glass clung together on the passenger’s side. ‘He must have been close.’

  The pathologist nodded. ‘Yes, the spread’s pretty dense. Just as well for the husband – a metre further back and the same shot would have taken his arm off.’

  ‘The husband was in the passenger seat?’

  ‘Apparently,’ said Shapiro.

  ‘And he wasn’t hurt?’

  ‘Not in the shooting. He collected some cuts and bruises going for help.’

  The first officers on the scene had cordoned off the area in front of the car where the killer had stood. Liz walked round behind the car in order to peer in at the passenger seat.

  Shapiro said, with just a trace of smugness, ‘I already looked. No pellet holes.’

  Liz smiled. ‘So we can’t say he wasn’t in the seat.’

  ‘And we can’t say that he was.’

  Dr Crowe sniffed. ‘You’re a suspicious lot, you policemen. Police persons,’ he amended with a coy smile. ‘It’s not fair. I spend hours bent over a microscope trying to get my witnesses to give their evidence. Yours come straight out and tell you what happened, and half the time you won’t believe them.’

  ‘Half the time they’re lying,’ said Liz.

  ‘You think he did it then – this boy, the husband?’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ complained Shapiro, ‘it’s a bit early for that. For one thing, I shall want your report on his clothing first. But you know as well as I do that most murders are family affairs, committed by someone close to the victim; and the other recurring theme is that people who report crimes are often the ones who committed them.’

  Dr Crowe stood sucking his teeth. ‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘if he staged it he made a good job. There are no splashes of blood on the passenger seat – if the husband wasn’t sitting in it he must have covered it up first. Then there’s this business of the body collapsing on to him.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I haven’t seen his shirt yet, I can’t guess what it’ll tell us. But the thing is this. If he was sitting beside her when she was shot he’d be spattered with her blood. The pattern’s practically diagnostic. But if she immediately slumped on to him and covered him with the stuff then the splashes would vanish into the greater – um—’ He couldn’t think of a word and so left the sentence hanging. ‘So the evidence that he was where he says he was is destroyed. By the same token, we can’t point to a lack of spattering and say he must be lying.’

  Liz’s blood ran momentarily chill in her veins. She nodded at the corpse. ‘You mean, he may have pulled – that – on to him to erase an inconsistent blood-spot pattern?’

  Dr Crowe gave an undergraduate shrug. ‘Couldn’t say, Inspector. All I can say is that if he did it would have had that effect.’ The sudden amiable grin was engaging. ‘My business is facts. Suppositions are your field.’

  After the body was removed the mood lightened perceptibly. By now the first eastern palings of the false dawn were dimming the stars: in an hour it would be light enough to start a search of the woods around the car park. Liz organized a torchlight sweep of the immediate area and radioed in for more help as it became available.

  It was not that she expected to find the shot-gun in the long grass. Whatever had happened here that wasn’t likely. If Page murdered his wife he had thought it out, planned it in detail, and executed it with care, and he wasn’t likely to blow it by throwing the gun away afterwards. He could have taken as long as he needed to dispose of it, only leaving the scene to flag down a vehicle when he was confident it could not be found. On the other hand, if someone else murdered Kerry Page then he – conceivably she – left the scene while Page was running for help and there would have been time enough for an orderly withdrawal.

  But if a search was unlikely to find the murder weapon it might provide information about the murderer. How he had reached the little scenic car park set in its copse of trees between the secondary road and the water-meadows of the River Arrow; if he had left the same way; if he’d had a vehicle, what kind of vehicle it was. There might be signs of more than one person. The murderer might have smoked while he was waiting for his victim. When he saw what he had done perhaps he staggered away to be sick among the trees. None of these possibilities was a likelihood but they had to look, they had to look thoroughly, and they had to do it at the earliest opportunity.

  ‘And we’ll need divers to drag the river,’ said Shapiro, mentally ticking off a check-list. ‘I’ll get that moving. Why don’t you go and talk to the boy?’

  ‘The husband? All right.’ But Liz was surprised. David Page was the only suspect they had so far, she’d expected Chief Inspector Shapiro would want to conduct that interview himself.

  There was a sly quality to his grin. ‘He’s just a kid. Talk to him kindly and he might tell you things he’d only tell his mother.’

  Liz remembered that he was her superior and resisted the urge to blacken his eye. She said sweetly, ‘Rather than his grandfather, you mean, sir?’

  Officially, David Page was bereaved next-of-kin. A woman constable was sitting with him in the interview room, supplying him at intervals with cups of hot sweet tea. He had his hands round one when Liz introduced herself, his elbows braced on the table-top to stop him shaking and spilling it. He clutched it as if the warmth in his cupped palms was the only bit of comfort he could find. He did not appear to be drinking much. Two other cups, their contents gone cold and scummy, stood almost untouched on the table.

  ‘She was so – kind,’ he said, the words jerking out of him.

  She had heard worse epitaphs but it struck Liz as an odd thing for a man to say about his murdered wife. Beautiful, perhaps, or sweet: ‘She was so lovely, why would anyone want to kill her?’ Alternatively, she was so alive, how could she be gone? Or she was so headstrong, so wilful, it was only a matter of time before something happened to her. But kind?

  But perhaps that was why he’d married her. He was younger than her – not much, three years, though it may have seemed more. Page was twenty-six but Liz saw now why Shapiro described him as a kid. Knowing he did a responsible job she had expected someone mature and self-confident. Instead he seemed little more than a boy, a blue-eyed, fair-haired boy. He was a pretty thing, even with his face grazed and tracked with tears. Perhaps that was why Kerry, who was a nurse and may have been drawn to helplessness, had married him. It could have been a marriage made in heaven, one of those improbable pairings that succeed beyond all expectation because they give both parties what they need most.

  The other possibility was that the partnership had failed so utterly that one of the parties to it had disposed of the other with a shot-gun.

  A possibility was all it was. Page did not look like a violent man, but if her years in CID had taught her nothing else they had warned her not to judge by appearances. Mild-mannered little men did occasionally murder their wives, and big hectoring bullies were capable at times of astonishing tenderness. Liz hoped she was a fair judge of human nature but knew it was more important to be a punctilious collator of evidence. So she asked him what happened.

  His sky-blue eyes flickered. ‘I – already—’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she said, her voice reassuring. ‘But it’s helpful for me to hear it first-hand. There’s no rush, take your time. Tell me what you did from, say, tea-time onwards.’

  David made their meal. He enjoyed cooking. When they were in town, between his flights and Kerry’s shifts they had trouble making their off-duty hours match and tended to snatch food as and when they could. But at the cottage David assumed responsibili
ty for their evening meal, immersing himself in recipes and ingredients.

  This Saturday evening he made chicken paprika. When it was done they left the washing-up in the sink and sprawled, gently burping, in front of the log fire. They had no television at the cottage. At the end of an hour David suggested a little healthy exercise but Kerry thought they should go for a walk first. They drove to the local beauty spot, an elevated viewpoint in a bend of the River Arrow, and walked down to the water-meadows. It was dark but the night was clear, the moon painting the lush grass silver. They strolled for a time, then returned to the car and just sat, looking out over the river, watching the moon take a slow dive into the trees on the opposite bluff. Kerry had seemed half asleep, leaning against him with her head on his shoulder.

  He did not know how long they sat there. Twice he suggested heading for home but Kerry was comfortable, enjoying the quiet and the moon-silvered view. So they went on sitting, hardly speaking, close and comfortable and happy.

  Then, in a second or two, everything changed for ever. A man walked in front of the car and the waning moonlight gleamed on something long and slim cradled in his arms. He looked at them through the windscreen. Kerry sat up. The man raised the gun and shot her in the face, and she toppled slowly sideways, resting on her husband’s shoulder in death as she had in life.

  He did not believe Kerry made a sound. He himself cried out in horror, and pushed his wife’s bloody head aside as if it were something vile and alien, not someone he loved.

  Beyond the crazed glass he saw the black eyes of the gun pan slowly across the car until he was staring into them. He knew nothing about guns except that shot-guns commonly fired two cartridges. He was very afraid. He whimpered.

  The gunman regarded him levelly, without speaking, for perhaps half a minute: thirty seconds, each of them spun out impossibly long and thin, in which David Page did not breathe, dared not move, felt the presence of death beat in his face like the wings of a bird, felt a scream building within him.

  Then the man – it was a man’s voice – said, quite quietly, almost gently, ‘No, not you.’ Then he walked away.

  For minutes longer David sat paralysed in his car, behind his broken windscreen, beside his butchered wife. Then a little life began creeping back into his mind and, with it, awareness of having to do something. He edged carefully out of the car. The night air struck his chest where his shirt was wet. He looked round fearfully but there was nothing to suggest that anyone else was there. Nor, on the wrong side of midnight, was there much chance of anyone coming. What help he needed he would have to find.

  Before she sent him home – to the flat in town, he would be handier there and the cottage would be knee-deep in police for a while yet – there were a few questions Liz wanted answering. Before they were finished there would be more questions, but a few would suffice for now.

  ‘Kerry was driving the car. Why was that?’

  Page shrugged numbly. ‘No reason.’

  ‘You drive it sometimes?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But this evening Kerry drove. Did she keep the keys?’

  ‘They were in the car. She got there first, she got in behind the wheel. We were only going a few miles.’

  ‘So you’d have driven if you’d been going further.’

  ‘Maybe. Sometimes. Does it matter?’ Page’s voice climbed, fluting and querulous.

  Liz changed the subject. ‘Was it a warm evening?’

  Page stared. ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘You didn’t have a coat on.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  Liz’s eyebrows arched. ‘Not when you picked a fight with Mr Bonnet’s lorry – all he saw of you was your shirt. When did you take it off?’

  Page shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Before Kerry was shot or after?’

  ‘I don’t remember. For God’s sake, my wife was in pieces beside me – you think I noticed the cold?’

  ‘Could you have put it over the back of your seat?’

  His sky-blue eyes were mystified. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘This man. How close to the car was he when he fired?’

  ‘Very close.’ A tremor caught up the edge of his voice. ‘He was at the bumper. The barrel of the gun was almost as long as the bonnet. The muzzle couldn’t have been’ – he held up two fingers, both visibly shaking – ‘from the glass.’

  ‘Would you recognize him again?’

  ‘The voice maybe. Not the face.’

  ‘Why not? It was a bright night – bright enough to go walking by the river. He was only a metre from you.’

  ‘He had the moon at his back. I never saw his face.’

  ‘Could you see what he was wearing?’

  ‘A hat of some kind, a coat. I think there was a scarf over his face.’

  ‘So he didn’t think it was a warm evening.’

  Anger kindled in Page’s eyes. ‘You don’t think maybe he put all that on so no one would recognize him? You don’t think that maybe, since he was going out to shoot someone, he thought that might be a good idea?’

  Liz nodded calmly. ‘Yes, that’s probably the reason. Was there anything familiar about him – the voice, the way he moved? Could you have met him before?’

  As fast as it had surged Page’s temper subsided, leaving him frail and exhausted. ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Someone Kerry introduced you to, for instance.’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ Tears welled in his eyes. ‘She had a lot of friends. She had no enemies.’

  ‘She had one,’ Liz said gently. But at the back of her mind another possibility was taking shape. She said nothing aloud but to herself she observed: Or else you did.

  Chapter Four

  Liz went to the cottage but learned nothing except that Page had told the truth about the washing-up. It was still waiting piled in the sink for the couple to return from their drive. She was not sure when it would be done now.

  At the police station there was a message for her to see Shapiro.

  His office was like the man: lived-in almost but not quite to the point of shabby; not scruffy but with a predisposition to appear untidy; comfortable and without pretension. A pot-plant which had seen better days and a framed snap-shot of him with his ex-wife and their daughters at David’s Tower in Jerusalem shared the windowsill. The desk was oak, more worthy than prestigious, and there were more papers stacked on top than was seemly for a Detective Chief Inspector. It was an office for working in rather than impressing people.

  Shapiro waved her to a seat. The broken night on top of his other worries had taken its toll of him: he looked older every time Liz saw him. There was a greyness to his skin that suggested that if he pushed his health much harder it would start pushing back. DI Clarke’s death had hit him personally as well as professionally. He’d lost a friend and a colleague; it was his job to find out why; now while the division was still in shock he had an extraordinarily brutal murder to contend with. In all the circumstances there was no chance of him taking time to get his breath back, but that didn’t mean he didn’t need to.

  ‘You let the boy go, then?’ he said.

  ‘For the moment. He’s not going anywhere. If he meant to skip the country he’d have done it instead of reporting the murder.’

  ‘So sending him home doesn’t necessarily mean he didn’t do it.’

  Liz smiled. ‘Me thinking he didn’t do it doesn’t necessarily mean that either. But I wouldn’t say I’ve formed an opinion yet. Have you?’

  Shapiro spread a defensive hand. ‘You’re the investigating officer – I’ve got enough on my plate without this.’ He glanced sidelong at her. ‘But since you ask, no, I don’t really see him as the type. It was a particularly bloody act. Someone stood close enough to that girl to see the whites of her eyes, then blew her face off with a shot-gun. Most people couldn’t do that. I doubt if he could. He’s not what you’d call a hard man.’

  Liz demurred. ‘Maybe it didn
’t take hardness so much as anger. If he was furious with her, if he wanted not merely to kill her but to destroy her, to expunge her, he could have done it that way, and planned the rest to protect himself. He may look like a schoolboy but actually he’s an intelligent man. He does a job that requires meticulous attention to detail. If he decided to kill her he’d have considered the consequences.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as the blood spattering. His coat’s missing. What if he put it over the passenger seat when he got out of the car? That would have kept her blood off where he was supposed to be sitting. Then he removed the coat, got back in the car, and pulled her on to him. Then he disposed of the coat and there’s nothing to contradict his account.’

  Shapiro stared at her. ‘You’re talking as if he did it. Is that what you think?’

  ‘Not particularly, no. But he could have done. We need to find that coat. If it got mislaid in the general mayhem the search’ll turn it up. If it stays lost he’ll have to be a bit more specific about where it got to.’

  Shapiro regarded her with a new respect. He’d had a keen regard for her when she worked for him before, had tried to teach her all he knew. But he was beginning to suspect that it wasn’t all she knew. ‘So where did he have the gun?’

  ‘Under the seat? It would be accessible without being on view. When they’d been sitting in the car for a while and Kerry was nice and drowsy he could have said he’d got cramp, he was going to walk about for a minute. He could have shrugged his coat over the seat, and got out and pulled the gun from underneath without her even noticing. Even if she saw, even if she guessed what he intended, sitting behind the wheel she’d have been slower to move than him. All he had to do was step in front of the car and shoot. Then he moved the coat, took his seat, pulled Kerry against him. Then he disposed of the gun and the coat – he may have had a hiding place ready, this was only four miles from their cottage, remember. Then he made his way up to the road and waited for someone to come along.’

  ‘My God, you do believe he did it!’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she insisted. ‘I believe he could have, and that’s how. If I can find the coat or the gun, or pin a lie on him, or come up with some kind of a motive, then maybe I’ll begin to think it was him. But so far it could have happened just as he said. The only fingerprints we have are his and Kerry’s, but he never said the man touched the car and even if he did he was probably wearing gloves. The grass in front of the car shows someone was there but there’s no clear impression, it could have been either Page or this mystery gunman. I’m sorry, Frank, we’re going to be walking both sides of the street for a while yet.’