by Jo Bannister
Donovan supposed it was a dour Yorkshire joke. ‘You’ve had no problems with his work, then.’
Tulliver regarded him levelly. ‘If I’d had problems with his work, lad, he wouldn’t still be here. There’s a word for unreliable pilots. It’s Unemployed.’
‘Funny,’ murmured Donovan, ‘my boss thinks that’s the word for policemen who don’t file reports.’
Tulliver gave a broad grin. ‘I think I’d like your boss.’
Donovan wished he hadn’t said it. ‘Yeah, we all did, and it didn’t do him a pick of good because now he’s dead. But that isn’t my case. The Pages: did you ever see them together?’
Joe Tulliver was a bluff man, unpolished, a man with little in the way of refinement. But he had not built a good business without learning something about people. He heard the grief still sharp in Donovan’s voice and realized this was something that had happened recently; and noting the healing wound on the man’s temple and the stiff way he moved he supposed this was the sergeant who survived and his boss the inspector who died in the incident behind Castlemere gasworks the previous week. The other thing he heard in Donovan’s voice was that he didn’t want to talk about it.
So he answered the question. ‘All the time. She used to go with him sometimes if she wasn’t working. She was a nice girl, and David’s been like one of the family for ten years. Most weeks they’d drop by our house at least once.’
‘This weekend?’
‘No, not this weekend. They were at the cottage, weren’t they? Mostly it was during the week they came to us. We didn’t go there: you couldn’t swing a cat in that flat of theirs. There’s not a lot of David but she was a big girl, she damn near filled it on her own.’
‘Why didn’t they move somewhere bigger?’
‘I think it suited them well enough. It was Kerry’s flat before they were married, just round the corner from where she worked. It meant she didn’t need a car, and she could get home for a couple of hours if she was on a split shift. But any time they had a day off they went to the cottage. That was where they were at home. The flat was just for convenience.’
‘They liked the solitude, then.’
Tulliver raised one bushy eyebrow. ‘They were only married two years. Of course they liked the solitude.’
Donovan twitched a saturnine grin. ‘They were OK, then, were they? It was working out?’
Tulliver knew what he was asking. ‘They were more than OK. They were very happy. David thought the sun shone out of her navel, and I reckon she loved him too. All their off-duty time they spent together: he’d go to the flat to be with her, she’d come out here to be with him. They weren’t just in love, Sergeant, they liked one another. If you’ve got it at the back of your mind that maybe David Page blew his wife’s head off with a shotgun, forget it.’
Donovan was still thinking about something Tulliver had said earlier. ‘The car’s his then. Did Kerry drive it much?’
The big man thought. ‘Not really. I mean, she could drive. But David needed it to get to work so it was always here with him. No, David did most of the driving.’
‘Only she was in the driving seat when she was shot.’
Tulliver shrugged. ‘I suppose she liked to keep her hand in. If they ever gave up the flat she’d need a car of her own.’
‘Yeah, maybe that’s it.’ Donovan was trying to picture them together. ‘She was taller than him, was she? You said she filled the flat.’
Tulliver considered, shrugged. ‘A shade taller, a bit broader. But you expect it the other way round, don’t you? What’s big for a girl is still small for a man.’
‘So given the right circumstances – not much light, say, and them sitting down, and her sitting where you’d expect to see him – you could maybe mistake one for the other?’
Tulliver’s eyes narrowed as he thought about it. ‘In the car? If whoever it was expected to see David driving? Well, maybe. If she had the collar of her coat up about her hair, say. She was fair too. Maybe in the dark you wouldn’t notice that her hair was curly and there was more of it. Maybe, if you were planning on shooting one of them, you wouldn’t be taking that long to weigh it up.’
Donovan was almost literally chewing it over. He found himself gnawing on the inside of his cheek and stopped. ‘Do you know any reason someone would want to kill Page?’
Tulliver didn’t answer immediately but when he did it was with conviction. ‘No. David hasn’t any enemies, he’s not that kind of boy. He’s inoffensive. He doesn’t get into trouble.’
‘You’ve never caught him making – oh, I don’t know – unauthorized flights, landings he couldn’t explain?’
Tulliver’s eye was stern. ‘I told you, laddie, I’ve no complaints about his work. I plan to make him a partner, all right? When he’s ready to buy in this business’ll be in both our names. You think I’d be doing that if I didn’t trust him? Besides which, you seem to be confusing us with British Airways. Yes, we do international flights – Longchamps for the racing, Frankfurt for the Book Fair, that sort of thing. But he doesn’t fly to the same places regularly enough to be of any interest to smugglers, say. I can’t see it, Sergeant. I can’t see David Page getting mixed up in anything crooked.’
Thinking was making Donovan’s head ache. He knuckled his fist into his eye. ‘Then suppose it wasn’t something he did that made him a target but something he saw or heard. They’re pretty small, these planes, aren’t they? I mean, the passengers are right up there with the pilot?’ Tulliver nodded. ‘So anything they were talking about he’d hear. You keep records of who’s flown where, when, and for what purpose?’
‘Of course.’ The big man reached for a heavy black-bound ledger with the entries made by hand. ‘How far back do you want to go?’
Donovan shrugged. ‘Let’s start on Friday and work back.’
He was expecting the job to take an hour and the results to be inconclusive at the end of it. He could hardly believe his luck when he found what he was looking for on the first page. And what he found filled him with a kind of unholy excitement that he had to keep the lid on until he could leave Tulliver’s office.
He didn’t want to waste time so he telephoned before leaving. Inspector Graham was in Clarke’s office. ‘I’ve found something. It could be important and it could be urgent. We need to talk to Page. Where is he?’
‘I sent him home,’ said Liz. ‘To the flat.’
‘Can you meet me there?’
‘Now? Why, what have you found?’
Tulliver had taken himself out into the hangar so it wasn’t that Donovan couldn’t talk freely, more that he didn’t want to. ‘I can’t explain on the phone but it’s got to be significant. I can be there in fifteen minutes: will you meet me?’
‘All right,’ said Liz, and before she could ask for more detail he’d rung off.
She was parking her car in the avenue of slightly rundown Victorian houses, many of them converted into flats, a hundred yards from the nursing home, when a roar like a Harrier taking off preceded Donovan’s motorbike round the corner. It slewed to a halt, spitting grit. Liz waited in the open door of her car while he took his helmet off. Then she said, ‘What’s all this about? What have you found out?’
His urgent stride carried him up the steps to the front door. ‘Come on, I’ll tell you inside.’
She didn’t move. ‘Sergeant.’ When he looked back she tapped her finger on the roof. ‘In the car.’
He frowned, puzzled and irritated. ‘But—’
‘The car.’
When he had folded his long legs inside, and shut the door because she made it clear she was waiting for him to do so, she said – quietly, without rancour, but also firmly: ‘A few ground rules, Sergeant. You don’t bounce me around. I’m happy for you to use your initiative but this is my case and I want to know what you’re doing and also what you’re thinking. When I know why you want to, I will decide if we talk to Page again, and what we say. But we’re going nowhere until I know wha
t you suspect and why.’
For a moment Donovan looked like a sparrowhawk who’s been mugged by a sparrow. Then he blinked resentfully and explained. ‘What if Kerry wasn’t the intended victim? What if it was Page? Anyone who knew them would be expecting him to be behind the wheel. His boss says you could make that mistake – particularly if it was dark and she was wrapped up warm.’
Liz had considered the possibility without reaching any conclusion. ‘Did Tulliver know someone who might want Page dead?’
‘No. But I might.’ Liz heard the electric thread running through his voice and wondered if it should be warning her of something. Clarke would have known, and probably Shapiro, but she didn’t know him well enough. ‘I looked at his flight log. Last Saturday week he flew a party up to Cartmel for the races.’
Liz knew the pause was for dramatic effect but did not mind humouring him a little. ‘Who?’
‘Jack Carney.’ He said it with a kind of tight-lipped triumph. ‘Maybe the name doesn’t mean much at Headquarters but he’s the closest thing we’ve got to the Godfather. What trouble we have with organized crime is down to Carney. It’s always someone else does the time but Carney pulls the strings. He’s an evil sod, and he’d buy a hit if he thought it’d keep him out of jail.’
Liz’s eyes were searching his narrow face. She had not realized how ravaged he looked. ‘So what are you thinking? That Page was running errands for this man, that he tried to cheat him – something like that?’
Donovan shook his head. ‘Tulliver says not, reckons Page wouldn’t do anything illegal. But suppose he overheard something – something that could put Carney behind bars? It’s a two-hundred-mile flight, say three hours there and back. Maybe somebody got careless, forgot Page wasn’t on the payroll.’
‘So Carney waited a week and then shot his wife?’
‘Even Jack Carney doesn’t have a resident hit-man,’ glowered Donovan. ‘He’s got muscle. If this was a broken arm I’d want to know where Terry McMeekin was last night. But McMeekin isn’t a killer. He’d like you to think so but he hasn’t the guts. Carney’d bring someone in from outside. A week is about what it’d take to get hold of a pro, brief him, and get him in place. Only he made a mistake and shot Kerry instead.’
Liz turned it over in her mind. It was possible. It didn’t stand out as a certainty but in this job not much did. You found something the rough shape of an answer and chipped away at the inconsistencies until a theory emerged. And the connection between David Page and the local gangster was surely more than a coincidence. At any event it warranted exploring.
‘All right, we’ll talk to Page. You can talk to him if you like. But don’t spring any surprises on me. I’ll go along with you, Donovan, but I won’t be led round by the nose.’
The flat was two rooms on the second landing. By the time they reached the door Donovan was limping. He rang the bell and when there was no reply rapped with his knuckles. His face twisted in bitter disappointment. ‘God-damn, he’s gone out.’
‘Give him time,’ she said softly.
The door opened. Page looked at the Sergeant blankly. Then he recognized Liz and something almost like hope kindled in his face. ‘Is there some news?’ As if she might tell him there had been a mistake, that it wasn’t his wife whose flayed head fell in his lap after all.
‘Not news exactly,’ she said, ‘but something we wanted to ask you about. It might help.’
Page took them inside. It was a very small flat. The other thing that was immediately noticeable was that it was Kerry’s place. The decorations, the furnishings, the taste were all hers. After two years of marriage he was still a guest there. The cottage was different, a joint endeavour, but this remained essentially a single girl’s flat.
Home ground and time to pull himself together had left David Page both calmer and clearer. His face was tired and grey, he’d missed a night’s sleep and would miss more before he started making it up, but Liz thought he was regaining control over himself. He was beginning to look like a man who routinely held other people’s lives in his hands and not so much like a schoolboy accused of indecent acts behind the bicycle shed.
‘What is it? What have you found out?’
‘Last Saturday you flew some people to Cartmel,’ Donovan said. ‘Tell us about them.’
Page was taken aback, couldn’t imagine what this had to do with his wife’s death. But he answered as best he could. ‘The booking was in the name of John Carney. The other man, McMeekin, was an employee of his.’
‘Did you know them before Saturday?’
‘No. He’s chartered the Beechcraft – that’s the eight-seater – a couple of times but it wasn’t me who flew him.’
‘What did they talk about?’
Page blinked. ‘Racing. There was a horse Mr Carney had an interest in. He kept calling it his National prospect. He told McMeekin and me to put our shirts on it.’
Donovan gave a cheerless grin. ‘What else did they discuss? Business? It’s a longish flight, they must have talked about something other than horses.’
‘I suppose so. I don’t remember. Nothing interesting: they weren’t exactly great conversationalists, you know?’
‘But you could hear what they were saying? Even when they were talking between themselves?’
‘I could hear. I wasn’t listening. Why would I? I’m a bus driver, I get my passengers where they want to go, I try to be civil to them, I collect my pay, and I go home. I make small talk if they want to, I show them which is the altimeter and which is the clock, after that I do my job. I don’t know what they were talking about last Saturday. I can’t see it matters.’
Liz crossed her fingers out of sight in her pockets and hoped Donovan wouldn’t tell him, but Donovan did.
‘It matters because Jack Carney is a thug, and if he thought he’d said something or Terry McMeekin had said something unwise in front of you he wouldn’t hesitate to send someone to shut you up.’
The little blood that remained in it drained from David Page’s face as if someone had cut his throat. He had trouble finding a voice. ‘You mean—?’
‘I mean, if you’d been driving last night maybe Jack Carney would sleep sounder in his bed for knowing that nothing you’d heard would go any further, even at the autopsy, even when the pathologist opened your head up to see what you’d got inside.’
Chapter Six
Liz was outraged. This time she didn’t wait to get Donovan in the car: as soon as Page’s door was shut she turned on him. ‘That was unforgivable! That young man is mourning for a woman he loved who was murdered in front of him. Who gave you the right to grind his face in it?’
Cal Donovan was a tall, thin man with all the features of his black Irish heritage plain about him. The olive skin was drawn tight so that his narrow face hollowed under the high cheek-bones. His dark, deep-set eyes held a primordial spark. Expressions flitted across his face too quickly to leave a mark on the underlying structure, which was sharply brooding like a dyspeptic hawk. His hair was too long even when he’d just had it cut. He looked like the hired gun in a cowboy film.
So he was not well equipped to feign injured innocence. But he gave it his best shot. ‘Me? What did I do?’
‘You told him two things he didn’t need to know. You told him that the atrocities committed on his wife didn’t stop when she was dead. And you told him it was his fault. He’s never going to forget that, Donovan. When he’s come to terms with the rest of it, when he’s ready to believe the people who tell him he couldn’t have saved her, you saying she died because of him will live on like a worm in his brain.
‘He doesn’t know you’re no better than walking wounded yourself. He doesn’t know your thinking has been affected by what happened under the viaduct. He doesn’t know, and he wouldn’t care if he did, that you feel responsible for that, that DI Clarke would be alive now if you hadn’t put him on that street at that time. You feel guilty as hell and you want him to feel the same way.
�
��I won’t have it, Sergeant. If you can’t handle your feelings you go home until you can. Survivor guilt is a natural phenomenon but you deal with it: you don’t try and dump it on some poor boy who’s got enough of his own to carry without picking up yours as well.’
Donovan had taken enough tongue-lashings in his time to become more or less inured, but this was different on two counts and momentarily he was speechless. In the first place she was a woman, had seemed the sort of nice middle-class woman who would shy away from making a scene in a public place, didn’t look she had that kind of anger, that capacity for invective, in her. The way her eyes blazed into his from close range, her strong body blocking his escape down the stairs, startled him.
The other difference was that she was right. But he wasn’t ready to admit that yet. ‘I didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know or wouldn’t find out.’
‘Yes, sure, if this comes to something we’d have had to tell him somehow. I’d have told him, and I’d have done it gently because he is not my enemy, he’s a victim of this as much as she was. I would not have hit him in the face with it because striking out made me feel good and I couldn’t get at the person I really wanted to hurt.’
Donovan swallowed and his eyes dropped. He did not know how much Shapiro had told her and how much she had worked out for herself but she’d made a good case against him. He wouldn’t perjure himself by denying it. At the same time he was still too angry, with himself and with the world, to throw himself on the mercy of the court.
Liz saw his lips twitch as if the words had a bad taste. ‘I’m trying to do my job, that’s all. Some bastard blew Kerry Page to kingdom come when she had every reason to expect another fifty years’health and happiness. Now I’m pretty sure we know who and I’m pretty sure we know why, and even if Page doesn’t know it the answer’s there in his head – something he heard or something he saw – and if I have to shake him a little to get it out I think that’s a price worth paying to take this murderous bastard off the street.’