The Hireling's Tale Page 10

  He spread his hands. ‘Mine. We found ourselves together in the bar, the party was too noisy for conversation, it was going to be a while before we met again - I asked if she fancied a bite of supper before we called it a night. I never thought—’

  ‘Of course you didn’t,’ nodded Liz. ‘Neither did she. But someone saw you going, or overheard you in the bar, and realized that Mrs Atwood’s room was going to be empty for an hour or so.’ Was it long enough? He obviously thought so. Long enough for sex with a prostitute; long enough to beat her; even long enough to take her on to the roof and throw her off. But not long enough to start phoning round for a suitable girl. So he had the girls lined up already, the only question was where he took them. He knew he’d find somewhere. Oh yes, he was certainly staying at the hotel. ‘Do you remember who was with you, or sitting around you, when you decided to go out to eat?’

  He couldn’t remember. ‘Just about everybody. No, some of them had already left, but everyone else had gathered in the bar.’

  ‘So - what? You made a public announcement?’

  Kendall flushed a little. ‘Of course not. We weren’t particularly looking for company. But we didn’t fix it up in a huddle behind the bicycle sheds either. Someone could have overheard. But I honestly can’t say who.’

  ‘All the same, maybe that’s it,’ said Liz. ‘If he was sitting beside you at that point, he may think it’s only a matter of time before you remember. And of course, if you remember you can tie him to the murder.’

  ‘One of my customers?’ Kendall said it as if the idea had only just occurred to him. ‘One of my customers is trying to kill me?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Liz, ‘with any luck, I’ll be able to tell you which one.’

  It was midnight before she got home. That in itself wasn’t unusual; but even as long days go, this had been a bad one.

  Brian had gone to bed, falling asleep over the book he was reading as he waited for her. The sound of her car woke him. He opened the front door in his pyjamas.

  ‘Any news about Frank?’

  Liz shook her head. ‘I’ll phone the hospital now.’

  But nothing had changed since she phoned before. They said he was stable and sleeping comfortably; which seemed a shade unlikely but Liz knew what they meant. If there was no news, at least there was no bad news.

  Brian was making some supper. ‘Get into bed and I’ll bring it up.’

  ‘Have I time for a shower?’

  ‘If you’re quick.’

  The water pounding down on her, pummelling her, just the cool side of comfortably warm, massaged the exhaustion from her bones and refreshed her skin and her mind. When Liz emerged, wrapped in a towel, to sardines on toast soldiers - Brian was the sort of vegetarian who considers fish an aubergine with fins - the worst of the day was swilling with the sweat and the grime down the plughole.

  There’s a kind of quiet strength in knowing that the worst has happened and still somehow you’ve survived. She’d never imagined a day as bad as this one - a hired killer on the loose, two bodies already in the morgue and Shapiro fighting for his life, a family to be protected from a threat with no face, no reason, and tomorrow she was going to have to hand over control to a head-office hero who thought criminal investigation was something you could do by the book.

  Liz had worked for superiors with a wide variety of styles, from the imperious to the downright casual, and she’d formulated a rule of thumb. Rank sat most effectively on those who exercised it as little as necessary. Frank Shapiro could go days without issuing a direct order, but only because everyone knew that his suggestions were to be acted upon with despatch. Nobody took liberties with him. He was so clearly on top of the job, so confident in the respect of his colleagues, that there was no need to keep proving it. Calm, thoughtful and dogged, he brought out the best in his officers. Men like Donovan, and to a lesser extent Dick Morgan, who would have been misfits almost anywhere else, had been able to do good and sometimes outstanding work under Superintendent Shapiro. That was his reward, not a quota of ‘sirs’ added to every conversation.

  ‘They seem to think he’s out of danger,’ she said through a mouthful of sardine. ‘They’re not committing themselves on how much damage has been done.’

  ‘You mean, he may not get back to work?’

  Liz shrugged. ‘The man’s fifty-six, he’s got to retire in four years anyway. Any injury which sidelines him for more than a few months is bound to be considered a reason for bringing that forward. Outside of Hollywood, you don’t find many policemen in wheelchairs.’

  Brian shook his head. ‘It’s funny but I never considered anything like this happening to Frank. Donovan, certainly - it’s a minor miracle every time he ends the week with all his bodily parts. And you. I’ve thought a hundred times I could lose you in something like this. But Frank? - it never seemed a possibility. He’s so - solid, so permanent. It’s like asking yourself if the Tower of London’s really as strong as it looks. I suppose the answer is, nothing is. Nothing’s so strong, so enduring, that it can’t be destroyed if the will is there.’

  ‘Most things can also be rebuilt if the will is there,’ Liz said.

  ‘God, I hope so.’ Brian Graham was a sensitive man, he didn’t just pity someone facing a life of disability, he felt for him - understood how it would feel from the inside. The despair. The way such a thing washed all the hope out of the future, all the colour, leaving only a burden. A split-second of being in the wrong place leading to a lifetime of sheer drudgery. Having to plan the simplest action like a military campaign. Because it isn’t the ability to run Marathons that the paraplegic misses. It’s the freedom to nip upstairs for a handkerchief at the first sign of a runny nose.

  ‘But even if he does recover, there’s no guarantee he’ll want to come back to work. You mustn’t underestimate the trauma, Liz – not just physical but mental. It’d take a tough man to put it behind him and go back to doing a job that got him hurt this badly.’

  ‘He is a tough man,’ insisted Liz. ‘Tougher than anyone ever gives him credit for. If he was thin and angular his name would be legendary as someone not to mess with. Since he looks like everybody’s favourite uncle people tend to think he’s soft and kind and easygoing to match. But he isn’t. Inside, where it matters, he’s hard, tough, resilient. He’s a survivor. People think Donovan’s tough - he looks the part - but they’re wrong about that too. He’s brittle, like glass; if that cracks he’s raw flesh all the way down. Frank’s like steel: he may bend but he’ll never, ever break. Chisel your way through the surface and all you’ll find is more steel underneath. Steel isn’t dead - warm it up and it can flow - but the toughness is intrinsic. He won’t give up. If he can live, he’ll live; if he can get back on his feet, he will; and if he’s fit enough to come back to work, he’ll do that too.’

  Brian hoped she wasn’t convincing herself it was possible just because she wanted it so much. ‘You know him better than anyone so I expect you’re right. But what if you’re wrong?’

  Liz cast hunted eyes at him. ‘Then we’ll get a replacement. We may even get lumbered with the guy they’re sending down tomorrow, in which case I’m very quickly going to run out of excuses to keep Donovan out of his way.’

  ‘Maybe your promotion’ll come through. Everyone says it’s overdue.’

  She squinted. ‘It doesn’t quite work like that.’ She thought about adding that part of the reason it was overdue was that she hadn’t pressed for it, but decided against. He’d want to know why. She didn’t mind telling him that working with Frank Shapiro, and even with Donovan and the others, was worth more to her than Superintendent on her door and an increment on her salary. She didn’t particularly want to tell him the other reason, which was that she wasn’t keen for her career to set his back yet again. ‘No, I don’t think anything now can save us from Detective Superintendent Hilton, Sir to his friends, at least in the short term. I’d better get practising my expressions. Respectful admiration should be a
bout right.’

  Brian nodded doubtfully. He’d seen her do Respectful Admiration before. It wasn’t as far as it might have been from Downright Incredulity.

  Chapter Four

  It was Wednesday, so King’s Lynn was less hectic than it had been the day before. The Tuesday market, much more than the Saturday one, was the commercial and indeed cultural heart of Lynn, and packed the old streets with locals and visitors alike.

  Donovan knew his way around Lynn. He’d even been to the Tuesday market before now, arriving the sneaky way - crossing the Great Ouse from the western bank on the passenger ferry that lands a stone’s throw from Tuesday Market Place. (Other markets might be a moveable feast, but changing the day of that in King’s Lynn would involve reprinting the street maps.) Of course, what he knew best was the river. Here in its last reach before dumping its silty contents into The Wash it was wide and brown, decorated by sailing boats and swans and oddly green mud.

  He parked Shapiro’s car, carefully, and walked down King Street looking for the Wherry Café. There was a wooden sign above the door like an old inn sign, showing a great barge with a single vast black sail. The heavy door with its bull’s-eye panes tinkled a little brass bell as he pushed it open.

  He wasn’t expecting to find Maddie Cotterick waiting for him. It had just turned nine o’clock, the café was still serving breakfasts. Donovan sat down and ordered everything on the menu. He hadn’t eaten since yesterday. He wasn’t a great breakfast man normally, though that was more to do with not wanting to cook than not wanting to eat. Like many naturally thin men, he could eat until the cows came home, and then he could eat the cows.

  As he ate he studied his fellow diners, paying particular attention to those who came in after him. He didn’t know what Maddie Cotterick looked like - it occurred to him only when he was halfway here that he should have returned to her house and hunted out a photograph - but a tom ugly enough to pass as one of the builders’ labourers and cattle-truck drivers who made up the bulk of the café clientele would have had difficulty making a living even in Castlemere. There were a handful of women in the café but none of them looked promising. One probably was a builder’s labourer; another was twenty years too old; a third might have been a milliner or a librarian with her chintzy dress and pale shoes. Every time the bell tinkled Donovan waited a moment and then glanced casually over, but he saw no one who seemed to be looking for him.

  When the bacon, the sausage, the fried egg, the fried bread and the mushrooms had all gone, and so had the pot of coffee, he checked his watch and found that most of the hour had gone too. She wasn’t going to come. He gave a frustrated scowl. But he’d done what she asked: there was nothing more he could do. He waited another five minutes, then got up, paid his bill and left. The little bell tinkled his departure.

  Twenty metres up King Street he was aware that he had company. He broke his stride, about to look round, but the woman’s voice hissed at him, ‘Keep walking. Where’s your car?’

  He’d been waiting for her so long that finally to be jumped like this, in the street, made him startle. Being startled made him ratty. ‘Jesus, Maddie, where do you think you are - Checkpoint Charlie?’

  ‘I think I’m in danger,’ she said tightly. ‘I’m your only witness to a murder, and the only one who can connect that with two other shootings. I think shutting me up must be quite high on somebody’s wish-list, and I think it’s in both our interests to take this seriously.’

  She’d succeeded in surprising him. He knew nothing about her, only what she did and where she lived, but still he had clear enough expectations to be taken aback when she confounded them. In his experience prostitutes were earthy, laconic women, often witty in an ironic, self-deprecating way. With their clothes on they were good company. But incisive, articulate, focused? - not for the most part. Even under stress, she talked like a woman who’d not only had an education but absorbed some of it. She wasn’t intimidated by him, wasn’t going to be grateful for whatever crumbs of aid he might condescend to throw her. She’d brought him here, and she was still calling the shots.

  He stopped in his tracks and looked at her, and that’s when he got his second shock. He recognized her. He’d been sitting a few metres away from her for the last half hour. She was the woman who, with her sprigged cotton dress, white loafers and mousy-fair hair pulled back in a pony-tail, he’d taken for a librarian.

  Then he remembered her house - not the room where she worked but the rest of it. Simple and sunny and optimistic: a house where a librarian would feel at home. He was beginning to understand that prostitution was something she did: it was neither who she was nor where she lived.

  She slipped a defiant arm through Donovan’s. ‘I suppose if we’re going to walk together we’d better try and look normal.’ She thought about that, suspected it was asking too much. ‘Who are you, anyway?’

  Donovan remembered what Liz had said. He still hadn’t realized it was a joke. ‘Darth Vader?’ he said doubtfully.

  Maddie Cotterick began to laugh. It had been a little while since she felt even like smiling, but trying to pass unnoticed in the company of a six-foot Irish detective calling himself Darth Vader did the trick. As a couple they were about as normal as Laurel and Hardy, as Fred Flintstone and Wilma, as Michael Jackson and Bubbles. It was too late to worry about it. She’d watched for an hour and seen no one following him. Besides, she needed a laugh. It released some of the tension that had been building inside her for the last three days. ‘No, really.’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Donovan, Castlemere CID. My car’s up here. And I am taking it seriously.’

  She wasn’t convinced. But she’d got what she asked for, an escort back to Castlemere, and she’d had practice at being grateful for small mercies. ‘I’m Maddie Cotterick. I imagine you guessed that. Don’t you want me to prove what I say?’

  Donovan shrugged. ‘Not my problem. All I have to do is get you back to Queen’s Street. My boss’ll figure out if you know anything useful.’

  ‘Was that her I talked to?’

  ‘DI Graham; yes.’

  ‘Have you talked to anyone else?’

  Donovan was getting a little irritated by this. He’d had a late night followed by an early start and a long drive, and he didn’t need a hooker with a keen sense of her own worth telling him how to do his job. ‘No, I haven’t. I haven’t talked to anyone, I haven’t been followed, and in the unlikely event that someone is looking for you he’s looking sixty miles away. No way could he have traced you here. Unless you were staying with your mother.’

  She shook her head, the pony-tail tossing scornfully. ‘An old school friend, from before I moved to Castlemere. No one could have known about her.’

  ‘There you are then. No one knows where to find you.’

  ‘You did. So did your boss.’

  In the same way they called Shapiro the Chief, Donovan called Liz the Boss. It was odd to hear someone else call her by the same name. He snorted, half a laugh, half a bark. ‘If you think we’re in league with a hired killer, maybe you’d best talk to the police here. Or could he have got at them too?’

  She knew she sounded neurotic. She believed she had every reason to be cautious. If Detective Sergeant Donovan wasn’t exactly Kevin Costner, he was still the best on offer. ‘That’s all right. I’ll trust you.’

  ‘Gee, thanks,’ growled Donovan.

  Liz intended to make an early start too, to have the office ready for Superintendent Hilton. There was important work to do; the sooner they were on the same wavelength the better. She didn’t want to spend the first day on the defensive, explaining that in an understaffed department in a crime wave they could go looking for a killer or get on top of the paperwork but not both. If she and Hilton were talking the same language before Donovan got back, he might be willing to believe her when she said that actually he was a seriously good detective.

  Her best intentions flew out the window, however, when she phoned Castle General before breakf
ast and the sister on ICU said Mr Shapiro was awake, making a certain amount of sense and anxious to see her. She made a bacon sandwich while Brian was still laying the table and ate it on the way out to her car.

  Taking the lift up to the Intensive Care Unit she tried to imagine what she’d find. Frank Shapiro much as always, just a little pale from the involuntary blood donation? A shrunken, cadaverous figure held motionless by ironwork? Donovan had warned her there was some paralysis. Would she find him in traction, in a wheelchair, or just propped up on an extra pillow with a bedpan within easy reach?

  He looked worse than she hoped, better than she feared. They had him wedged on his side and he looked uncomfortable and disorientated. If Donovan had woken up in ICU he’d have recognized his surroundings as soon as the mists cleared, but Shapiro was unaccustomed to waking in any bed other than his own. When he saw Liz crossing the ward relief softened the corrugations of his brow. ‘Over here,’ he croaked.

  He looked strained and grey, lumpen under the bedclothes, his diamond gaze muddied by confusion and fear, but already he didn’t look like a man in danger of dying. That crisis had passed: the next occupied him now. His eyes clung on to her like a child in a room full of strangers attaching itself to its mother’s leg.

  Liz pulled out a chair and sat down quickly, manoeuvring herself into his limited field of vision. ‘Frank. I’m so glad to see you. If it isn’t a silly question, how are you feeling?’

  It was a silly question, silly enough to get a little enervated chuckle out of him, but it was still the only one that concerned her. ‘Pretty rough,’ he admitted.

  ‘Do you know what happened?’

  He had a memory of having been told, but somehow it hadn’t quite sunk in. ‘Somebody said I was shot.’

  ‘At Philip Kendall’s house. He called in a muck sweat to say somebody was taking pot-shots at his back door, and you went round with Donovan. Apparently he was still there, just further away than anyone had thought to look. As you went to push Kendall inside he fired again.’