A Bleeding of Innocents

by Jo Bannister

  Liz took what Perrin had said back to her office and mulled it over. She found him a credible witness. He had no axe to grind. Another man might have hated Page for marrying the woman he loved but not Perrin. He was so clearly homosexual she’d hardly felt the need to ask; but when she did, for the record, he confirmed it without hesitation or rancour. He had loved Kerry without the desire for possession; he was content for her to be happy with Page. He had no reason to accuse the man of killing her.

  Nor had he done so. Liz doubted if the possibility had occurred to him. But Perrin had supplied Page with a motive; they had always known he had an opportunity, and he might have had the means. It was time to talk to him again, at the police station this time.

  When he found himself the only customer left in the Fen Tiger Donovan gave up. Nothing more was going to happen today. He’d come back tomorrow, at lunchtime, when the place was full of people talking and he could pass unnoticed for a while. He was somewhere, the man who’d killed DI Clarke and tried to kill him. He was somewhere, he probably took a drink and he wasn’t a Trappist monk. Some day, somewhere – in this bar or another one or another of Jack Carney’s little earners – Donovan would hear his voice again.

  But not today. He was ready for home. It was only mid-afternoon but his bones ached. He’d made a start. Carney would know by now what he was doing. Today he would be puzzled, tomorrow amused, when it was still going on the next day he’d be getting irritated and some time after that he’d have to act. A man like Carney couldn’t work in a spotlight. If Donovan watched every move he made, the people he needed to see would be either avoiding him or laughing at him, both fatal to his authority. Whether or not he wanted to, Carney would have to deal with Donovan sometime.

  Outside McMeekin was waiting for him, his suited backside resting casually on the seat of the motorbike, his legs crossed elegantly at the ankle. He wore a mildly pained expression. ‘Sergeant Donovan, what are you doing here?’

  Donovan eyed him for a moment longer, then looked up at the hostelry sign hanging out over the street. ‘Having a drink.’

  ‘You’re frightening the customers away.’

  ‘I noticed that,’ said Donovan. ‘Touchy, aren’t they? Anyone’d think they had something to hide.’

  McMeekin spoke carefully. ‘I think they’re afraid of being pinned in a corner and told some rambling tale about crossbows and albatrosses.’

  Donovan grinned at that. He quite saw himself as a character invented by a poet on opium. He thought it would explain a lot. ‘Who is he, McMeekin? You know, don’t you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The driver. The mechanic Carney hired to take out DI Clarke. And old Lucy. Did he kill Lucy as well? Why? What was it she knew, what was she going to show me? And how did you hear about it? Or – wait a minute.’ His tone quickened with understanding. ‘She didn’t know anything, did she? She was just the bait. You had your hit-man in place, all you needed was to get Alan and me to where he could get a clear run at us. Lucy was just the means. But you still killed her. Did they let you do her, Terry? Practice on an old bag-lady so maybe you could manage a man next time?’

  McMeekin shook his head sadly. ‘You’re raving, Donovan. That knock on the head. You want to go home, put your feet up, take some time off. You could end up back in hospital if you don’t let it heal properly. You could end up dead.’

  Donovan grinned wolfishly. ‘You threatening me, Terry?’

  McMeekin was disdainful. ‘Be your age, Donovan. But we’ve all heard of it happening. You get a knock on the head, seem to make a good recovery, then a week later you run after a bus and your brain explodes. Very nasty.’

  Donovan looked at the pub again. Since he’d left a couple of people had strayed back. ‘Well, don’t count on it happening to me. I won’t be running anywhere for a while. I’m going to be doing a lot of sitting round. Pubs, cafés, round the canal: places like that. It’s time I caught up on the local gossip.’

  It was meant as a threat and taken as one. The veneer of concern fell from McMeekin’s eyes and his voice dropped a tone. ‘You’ve got nothing on us, Donovan. But try to stir up trouble and we’ll return it with interest.’

  ‘What you going to use next time then – a steamroller?’

  McMeekin came up off the bike with the easy fluid motion of well-trained musculature. He regarded Donovan with dislike. ‘If you think that Mr Carney had something to do with Inspector Clarke’s accident, try to prove it. And if you can’t, leave him alone.’

  ‘And if I can’t do that either?’

  ‘Why then,’ McMeekin said bleakly, ‘I suggest you watch your step, Sergeant.’

  ‘I intend to.’ Donovan’s lip curled in a vicious smile. ‘And yours. And Carney’s. Every single one you take.’ He threw a long leg over the machine, started up, and rode away satisfied with the exchange. The gauntlet was down now: Carney had no choice but to pick it up.

  On his way home he found himself turning off the main road. He’d driven half a mile before he realized where he was heading.

  The man with the pushchair was there again, tidying his wife’s grave. He looked up as Donovan passed like a shadow on the gravel paths. But the young man with his darkly brooding face seemed to be in no mood for conversation so he only paused long enough to say something amiable and not requiring an answer to the dull-eyed child in the pushchair before resuming his work with fork and trowel.

  Donovan had told Shapiro he had no use for formalities, in death as in life, and for the most part it was true. A dour Catholic upbringing in the north of Ireland had left him with an abiding mistrust of ritual. He believed devoutly that religion was humbug, that good and evil were artefacts of the human state needing no supernatural explanation, that the only afterlife a man could hope for was in his children and the memories of his friends. Alan Clarke’s future was assured on both counts, but still Donovan wasn’t here seeking communion with the dead man but because he used to work through his ideas with Clarke when he was alive and had nowhere else to take them now.

  He stood for a long time, his hands in his pockets, his chin on his chest and his shoulders hunched round his ears, looking at the oblong of raw earth where the grass-seed had yet to sprout. But Marion must have been here because there were fresh flowers in the vase. The headstone was still being cut: for the moment a plain wooden cross carried the name and dates.

  He didn’t know what he was waiting for. He didn’t know why he was here. Alan Clarke had been his superior, his mentor, and his friend, and Donovan’s trust in his informant had cost him his life. Clarke couldn’t absolve him of that, and Marion wouldn’t, so all he could do was stumble on in the dark groping for something he needed but could not have described.

  The graveyard was quiet on Mondays. Most people visited on Sundays, little family parties strolling flowers in hand along the neatly raked gravel between the stones. The flowers were on the graves now: because it was autumn mostly they were chrysanthemums, white and yellow and bronze. But there weren’t a dozen people scattered across the whole forty acres and the only sounds were the occasional murmur of conversation, the crunch of a step on gravel, and the steady distant snipping as a groundsman trimmed away at a yew hedge.

  So there was something immediately disturbing about the new sound that made both Donovan and the man with the pushchair look towards the stile in the wall where a couple of cars and Donovan’s motorbike were parked. Four young men in motorcycle helmets were climbing over the wall. Since he’d have heard four motorbikes Donovan thought they must have come in the van that was turning round, so the helmets were not for protection or only in a way. The sound was the chime of chains as they vaulted the stile. As he watched they began to run towards him.

  Tersely, out of the corner of his mouth, he said to the man with the pushchair, ‘Get out of here. Now!’ Then he looked for a good big block of monumental masonry to put at his back.

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Across the i
nterview room table Liz regarded the young man with his choir-boy haircut and sky-blue eyes and tried to see him as the perpetrator of a clever and brutal murder. It was coming. It had seemed impossible the first time she talked to him. But Page was a professional pilot, trained to operate under stress. A man who could make the calculations necessary for an emergency landing with five different sorts of flame leaping from his engine could plan a murder, carry it out, even seem to be in shock afterwards. It didn’t mean Page killed his wife. But it meant that he could have done.

  ‘Tell me about the insurance you had on Kerry.’

  Under formal questioning she had watched the flesh fall from his face, his smooth cheeks hollow, his eyes recede into shadowy pits. Liz couldn’t judge whether it was the reaction of an innocent man unjustly doubted or one who had thought till now that he’d got away with murder.

  ‘Insurance?’ he stammered.

  ‘You had a policy on Kerry’s life. Tell me about it.’

  ‘There are policies on each of us. I arranged them about a year ago. We had some surplus income, it seemed a sensible thing to do. If I’d died first the money would have made sure Kerry had no financial worries.’

  ‘That was a good reason to insure you. Why insure Kerry? You don’t need her income to meet your obligations. I don’t imagine you’ll keep her flat, will you? Presumably you’ll either move to the cottage or get somewhere nearer the airfield. Why did you need to insure Kerry?’

  He was flustered, his eyes flickering across her face. ‘I told you, it seemed sensible. And – we did everything that way. Split down the middle. Not her money and my money but our money; not her future or mine but ours.’

  ‘Even when it made no sense?’

  ‘It did make sense. I didn’t expect her to die now, for God’s sake! She was twenty-nine years old, she should have lived another fifty years. The policies would have given us a pension!’

  Liz’s eyes flew wide with derision. ‘You’re twenty-six, Mr Page! Nobody your age wonders how he’ll get by when he’s seventy!’

  ‘Well, we did,’ he insisted. ‘For one thing, pilots don’t always work to retirement age. You have to make your money while you’re medically fit. For another, Kerry worked in an old people’s home: she saw what time does to people, how things can go wrong, how they can think they’ve got enough to see them through but ill-health or bad luck or just a lot of years being old run through it till there’s nothing left. Neither of us wanted to be worrying about money when we got old. It would have been crazy when we had more than we needed now.’

  ‘You’ve no current use for the money then?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The insurance money. There’s nothing you need it for, nothing you’re wanting to buy.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I see.’ She lowered her eyes to the papers on the table before her, glancing through them. When she found what she was seeking she looked up again, holding him steady in her gaze. ‘Then Joe Tulliver hasn’t offered you a partnership in Castle Air Services when you can get the capital together?’

  Page’s mouth opened and shut several times before anything intelligible came out. ‘No! Well, yes. I mean yes, but—’ He was clutching the arms of his chair as if it was moving. For a moment he really looked ready to crack. Then he disengaged his eyes, dropping them into his lap, and breathed deeply until he had a grip on himself again. Then he looked up. ‘Inspector Graham, you don’t believe I shot Kerry because I’d rather have a share of Joe Tulliver’s firm. You can’t believe that.’

  Liz declined to answer. ‘But he did make the offer.’

  ‘A couple of months ago. It wasn’t a take it or leave it thing. Joe said if ever I fancied working for myself we could work something out. He didn’t expect an answer there and then. We didn’t even talk about money. I said I’d give it some thought, talk to Kerry about it, and he said no rush but when the time came for him to retire he’d like to leave the business in good hands. That was all. There was no question of having to lay my hands on big money at short notice.’

  ‘Did you talk to Kerry about it?’

  ‘I never got round to it. I didn’t want to disappoint her if it didn’t come to anything. I wanted to be sure Joe meant it. I wanted to be sure it was what I wanted, that I wasn’t making a commitment I’d regret later. And I wanted to be sure we could—’ He stopped, leaving the sentence unfinished.

  Liz finished it for him. ‘That you could afford it. What about all this surplus money that was going into insurance policies you didn’t need?’

  A spark of temper kindled in his eye. ‘Fifty quid a month is one thing. Twenty thousand pounds down is something else. It was a big step. I had to be sure it was what I wanted.’

  ‘Have you decided yet?’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ he snarled. ‘All at once it doesn’t seem very important.’

  Liz nodded mechanically, giving nothing away, wondering if it was time to hit him with the other thing. The prospect gave her no pleasure but the results might be revealing. She said, ‘Did you know your wife was seeing another man?’

  She thought he might leap to his feet, hurling denials and abuse. She was ready to defend herself if he hurled more than words. She knew she had stripped away so many of his skins that he must be close to losing control. Whether he was a cornered killer or a young man driven to the edge of reason by the events that had overtaken him, she had to be ready for violence.

  Instead he began to cry. His shoulders slumped, his slim hands slipped from the arms of the chair into his lap and great tears began to roll down his cheeks. His lips trembled like a child’s. ‘That isn’t true. It isn’t true.’

  ‘It is true,’ said Liz. ‘She went to a restaurant with him only a month ago. Before that he’d called at the flat.’

  ‘No. No.’

  ‘When you weren’t there,’ she added unnecessarily. Perhaps all of this was unnecessary. If he was guilty he was a hell of an actor; if he was innocent she was putting his heart through the wringer.

  ‘Who?’ His voice was a mere breathy ghost.

  ‘A doctor.’

  ‘She was seeing a doctor?’ A note of hope elevated the last word. ‘Someone she knew, someone she worked with. A friend, that’s all.’

  ‘Wouldn’t she have told you?’

  His face fell again. ‘Yes,’ he admitted softly.

  The time was coming, Liz was aware, that she was going to have to come down off the fence and decide – innocent or guilty. Did she believe him? The evidence against him was circumstantial but couldn’t be ignored. He had insured Kerry’s life. He’d been offered a partnership in a business he loved when he had the money to buy in. If he learned that Kerry was having an affair, in a fury of cold rage because he’d loved her and she’d betrayed him, could he have decided to realize his investment in her and put it into something more reliable – the planes he’d hungered after since he was eleven years old?

  He might look like a broken child but he was a grown man with a man’s passions. If Kerry hurt him enough he was capable of exacting revenge. But would he have done? Everyone who knew them said they were in love. If he’d found her with her doctor friend he might have brained her with the iron. But was he a man who’d resort to careful, clever, cold-blooded murder? She hoped she wasn’t being swayed by his tears, but Liz was about ready to wager that he was not.

  She began to say, ‘Mr Page, you must see how it looks—’ Then there was a sharp rap at the door of the interview room and Shapiro’s head appeared briefly, beckoning her with a terse nod. She announced her departure to the recording equipment and went outside with him.

  ‘What is it?’

  Shapiro indicated the door. ‘How long’s he been here?’

  Liz checked her watch. ‘Something over an hour. I can get you the exact time.’

  He shook his head. ‘An hour’s more than enough. There’s been another murder. Another nurse, another shot-gun. David Page didn’t kill his wife and it doesn’t look as if Ja
ck Carney did it either. It’s just turned into a serial killing. That means we’re looking for someone with no motive outside his own mind.’

  The killing took place outside the nurses’home adjacent to Castle General, in broad daylight, with passers-by twenty yards away and probably thirty people close enough to have seen something. And none of them had seen anything.

  Or rather, they had all seen the same thing: a woman in a lime-green track-suit jog across the park then ease back to a walk as she reached the pavement. She traded a word with two young men who were just entering the park. Someone else saw her look at her watch and shove an unruly mass of dark red hair back into the knot it was escaping from. Then it seemed everyone lost interest in her and got on with their own pursuits – playing with dogs, exercising children, feeding ducks, sailing model yachts – until the sound of the gunshot brought them snapping round like soldiers called to attention.

  If Maggie Board had been less profoundly injured she might have survived. Not only because the hospital was just a hundred yards from where she was shot but because a good half of those enjoying the autumn sunshine in the park that Monday lunchtime were doctors or nurses. They didn’t freeze at the sight of blood. They ran to her, crouched over her, hunted for vital signs, hunted for bleeding points in the welter of chewed-up flesh. One of the joggers sprinted for the casualty entrance.

  But in the event nothing they could do would have saved her. The blast from the shot-gun hit her in the chest and throat and if she wasn’t dead when she hit the pavement she was already beyond saving. It would have been better if fewer of the on-lookers had been experts and more had been helpless bystanders. For while everyone in the immediate area was trying to render medical assistance no one was looking to see who left the scene in a hurry with a whisp of smoke curling from under his raincoat.

  Liz had spoken to a dozen people before somebody mentioned the yellow car, and he wasn’t sure if it had anything to do with the shooting. But it was parked close to where Mrs Board was shot, and it seemed odd that it should drive away while people were on their hands and knees round the woman on the ground, trying to drag her back from the abyss although in reality she had already fallen.