The Hireling's Tale Read online

‘I’m worried,’ she said. ‘I think he may have done it again.’

  Donovan didn’t need her to draw him a diagram: he knew exactly what she meant. His attention sharpened like wind catching a sail. ‘What makes you think so?’

  She shrugged awkwardly. She’d more or less caught up with him now: in an empty street you couldn’t be close enough to talk to somebody and still look as if you were nothing to do with each other. ‘Somebody’s missing. One of the girls. I asked Dawn if we should report it, and she said we could get her in trouble. You know what it’s like in this business: you get a good offer, you can disappear for a few days and all it means is you had a profitable weekend. Only, with what happened at the Basin …’

  ‘My word any good to you?’ asked Donovan. ‘Because if it turns out to be a false alarm, I promise we won’t make life difficult for either of you. Tell me who she is and where she lives. If she is in trouble, the sooner we know about it the less chance we’ll find her with her skull smashed somewhere.’

  ‘And if she comes back with a john and finds you crawling all over her house?’

  ‘Then somebody smelled a leak and we’re from the Gas Board! Zara, we’re talking about somebody’s life here. You’ve heard of people dying from embarrassment? – well, this is how it happens. Tell me what you know.’

  She wouldn’t have stayed out watching for him if she hadn’t meant to do exactly that. Her mind was made up before the sun rose, it was only cold feet that made her hesitate now. ‘All right. Her name’s Maddie Cotterick. That’s her real name - her working name’s Shauna. She has a house in Viaduct Lane; I don’t know the number, it’s a yellow door. Since what happened yesterday we’ve been checking round - calling the register, if you like. Anyone who hadn’t been seen, somebody called on her. I called on Maddie, but she wasn’t there. But she hadn’t cancelled the milk.’

  It could mean nothing at all and they both knew it. But if it did mean something it probably meant something bad. ‘OK, Zara, I’ll get round there. She’s probably got an address book or something: I’ll call her friends, see if she’s with any of them.’

  ‘Jesus, Mr Donovan,’ exclaimed the girl, ‘you can’t work your way through her book like that! Nearly everyone in it’ll be … you know.’

  He did know. He gave a saturnine grin. ‘Credit me with a little tact. I wasn’t planning on starting the conversation with: “Hello, this is the police, do you know a tom called Shauna?” ’

  He took the dog home and fed it before heading to Viaduct Lane. Castlemere didn’t really have a Nob Hill, but it did have a scabrous underside and this was it. Even the viaduct was defunct: it used to carry the railway line from the shunting yard at Cornmarket, but that closed a generation ago. There was just a passenger halt now on the other side of town: nothing had rattled over the viaduct in the time Donovan had been in Castlemere.

  And except for the bright yellow door halfway along, nobody had painted any of the little houses here for at least that long. Castlemere’s only surviving length of cobblestones was in Viaduct Lane: not preserved, merely forgotten about. There was dirt in the gutters, weeds growing in the rain-damaged brickwork.

  He rang at the yellow door, but no one came and he heard no movement. He waited a moment, but he wasn’t about to walk away. ‘Goodness,’ he said aloud to himself, ‘is that gas I smell?’ With the aplomb of someone who’d done this before he put his elbow through the little glass pane in the front door and groped around for the latch.

  From the street this looked like the last stop on the highway to hell. No one who could beg, borrow or steal anything better lived in Viaduct Lane. People in The Jubilee looked down on Viaduct Lane. So Donovan was startled by what he found inside. It was a proper, even a nice little house. Tiny: two up and two down, and even then the rooms were smaller than he had aboard Tara. But nice. She kept it clean and decorated, with lots of primary colours and Walt Disney curtains. There were patchwork cushions and soft toys lying around. Maddie Cotterick might have to live in Viaduct Lane, but she didn’t let it past that yellow front door.

  There was no one here. The house felt too still even to have someone sleeping upstairs. Donovan checked the ground floor for signs of a struggle and found none; then he went upstairs. The house was too small to have a hall: the stairs were boxed into a little alcove off the living-room.

  There were two bedrooms, as different as chalk and cheese. His first thought was that two people lived here, and whoever decorated the rest of the house slept in the front bedroom. It was sunny and cheerful, with a toy clown hanging from a balloon as a lamp-shade and more of the soft toys lying around: a sheep, a lion, an Old English Sheepdog with a zip down its middle for pyjamas. The smaller back bedroom was decorated all in reds: scarlet and crimson and dark blood-red, with vivid slashes of cerise; the sort of colour-scheme that provoked migraines. Donovan nodded to himself, thinking he understood. This was Shauna’s room, all right. The other must belong to …

  And then he realized that he hadn’t understood at all; and though he was alone and his mistake a private one, still his lack of insight made him flush darkly. This was certainly Shauna’s room; and the rest of the house belonged to Maddie Cotterick. This was her place of business; the rest of the house was her home.

  As a policeman Donovan had known his fair share of prostitutes. On the whole he’d found them a tough, coarse, resilient, humorous bunch of women who had mostly fallen into the life as a result of some personal disaster but had a talent for making the best of a bad job. They had swum and not sunk. They talked about what they would do when they’d made enough money to retire, but Donovan got the impression that by the time they’d made the streets their own they were reluctant to abandon them in favour of a more genteel but less familiar way of life. He’d heard it said so often it was less a truism than a cliche: You can take the girl out of the business but you can’t take the business out of the girl …

  But he’d never considered the likelihood that, when they got home from work, they’d change out of their business clothes and catch up on a bit of reading or knitting, or painting the kitchen units. He hadn’t thought of them as having a life much beyond the realm of rubber and zips. He knew it was absurd: that’s why he blushed. He’d thought of them as a problem, he’d thought of them as an information resource, he’d thought of them as part of the street-furniture, but until now he’d never thought of them as people.

  As far as he knew he’d never met Maddie Cotterick, and now it might be too late. But she’d taught him something just by the way she decorated her house.

  There was no sign of trouble up here either, and no reason for anyone to have cleaned up as they did at the hotel. So probably she left willingly, just didn’t come back. That didn’t mean she was dead. Perhaps she was scared, thought now was a good time to take that holiday she’d been promising herself. He looked in the wardrobes - both wardrobes, in both rooms. The rail in the front room had a gap along its length, as if she’d grabbed a handful of clothes at random. So she’d left in a hurry. Oh yes, she was scared. The question was, had she any particular reason to be? Not uneasy, not on her guard, but scared.

  He found her address book, and checked that it contained personal friends as well as clients. Then he found a bit of sturdy board to nail over the hole he’d made in her door, and left, closing the little house up behind him.

  It was still early, so Donovan was surprised to be hailed as he rode his bike through Castle Place in the direction of Queen’s Street. Not a tom this time: he recognized the big green 4 x 4 as belonging to one of the local vets. He pulled up and took off his helmet, and his whole expression said Now what?

  Keith Baker backed his jeep and rolled down the window. He was a solidly built individual of about thirty with a thatch of straw-coloured hair and the ruddy outdoor complexion of a man who wrestles bullocks for a living. ‘Got a dead sheep in the back,’ he said by way of greeting.

  Donovan considered for a moment. ‘Well, keep your voice down or everybo
dy’ll want one.’

  Baker grinned. ‘I’m going to do an autopsy to confirm the cause of death. There’s a lot of things that kill sheep. Diseases that have no real equivalent in us or any other species. And dogs, and crows, and getting stuck on their backs, and falling off cliffs, and sometimes just having nothing better to do. You find them lying in the field with their legs stuck up in the air, and it can be a right bugger, sometimes, working out what killed them. But I’ve got a fair idea this time, right enough.’

  Donovan felt the day slowly passing. ‘Good. Fine. You must be sure and let me know.’ He went to put his helmet back on.

  Baker was still grinning. ‘You think this is nothing to do with you, don’t you? You think I’m just gossiping to pass the time. What if I told you that sheep was shot?’

  Donovan shrugged. ‘Maybe it was rabid.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ nodded Baker ironically. ‘And maybe it was flitting from tree to tree and got mistaken for a pheasant. I don’t mean the farmer shot it. I mean, he found it dying in the field and called me. He thought a dog must have had it. But you get more damage with dogs, to the fleece and to the carcass. The only thing I can think of would make three neat holes like that would be a gun. Not a shotgun, a rifle.’

  ‘Three holes? It was shot three times?’

  ‘Reckon so. If I’m right I’ll let you have the bullets. Bloody kids, I expect. Got hold of a gun, can’t wait to try it out on something, not good enough to hit rabbits so they look for something bigger and slower. Thought I’d better let you know. Anybody that stupid with guns, sooner or later it’s a person gets hurt.’

  Donovan nodded. ‘Whose sheep was it?’ Baker gave him a name and the address of a farm out on The Levels. ‘OK. If I get the chance I’ll take a run out there later, see if he can tell me any more. But we’re up to our eyes right now, it might be tomorrow.’ Or sometime next week, he added privately; or perhaps that quiet time we get in the middle of August. ‘Most useful thing you can do is put the word around. If it is kids, it could be farm kids - you know as well as I do what passes for security with most farm guns.’

  ‘Most farmers have shotguns,’ said the vet. ‘I don’t know how many would have a rifle.’

  Neither did Donovan: dead sheep weren’t really his field of expertise. ‘Leave it with me, I’ll see what I can find out.’ But he wasn’t planning on giving a shot ewe much priority at the present time.

  He wasn’t expecting that someone would have walked into Queen’s Street in the middle of the night and confessed to throwing a girl off the top of The Barbican Hotel, thus freeing him for other enquiries, and so it turned out. In fact, far from getting lighter, the workload had increased. There’d been an incident at Cornmarket.

  ‘Cornmarket? I’ve just come from there. Everything was quiet forty minutes ago.’

  ‘Well, it’s not quiet now,’ rumbled the Station Sergeant. ‘The chiefs on his way over, he said would you meet him there? He tried to phone you but you must have been on your way in.’

  ‘Chief’ was no longer an appropriate form of address for Shapiro, but he seemed to be stuck with it. It didn’t matter to Sergeant Bolsover, who’d known him since he arrived in Castlemere, that he’d been promoted from Detective Chief Inspector to Detective Superintendent, or even that he was still not the senior officer at the station. (That honour fell to Superintendent Giles, and his soubriquet was The Son of God.) By the time you’ve called a man Chief for ten years you can hardly start calling him something else.

  ‘What sort of incident?’ said Donovan.

  Sergeant Bolsover gave the sort of grim facial shrug his jowly fenland face had been designed for. ‘Messy,’ he said succinctly. ‘Is there another kind?’ It was an exaggeration, but though they dealt with an awful lot of stolen cars and break-ins and closing-time punch-ups for every murder that came along, some weeks it didn’t feel like that.

  Concerned for his springs, Shapiro had left his car at the end of Brick Lane and picked his way on foot across the urban wasteland that was Cornmarket. But this was Donovan’s backyard, he knew his way round in the dark. He rode surely across the broken ground towards the knot of people gathered in the far corner where the northern spur joined the main Castlemere Canal.

  Shapiro was one of them. He looked up at the sound of the bike. ‘Come over here and tell me who this is.’

  Donovan parked well away from the tapes, for fear of obscuring signs of an earlier vehicle. Immediately he was mobbed by the small community of homeless people who lived at Cornmarket and were among his nearest neighbours. Desmond Jannery was in a state of shock and couldn’t explain what was happening. Sophie was in tears. He gestured them to stay where they were and ducked under the tape.

  ‘That’s Wicksy.’ He must have had another name but Donovan had never known it. He was about thirty-five, bone-thin and slightly mad. In an earlier, uncivilized age he’d have been locked up in an institution and fed three times a day. But Wicksy had been lucky enough to qualify for Care in the Community, which meant that he got all the freedom he could use including the freedom to go hungry. He only owned one coat so he wore it winter and summer. Now he’d died in it. The hole drilled in the centre of his chest had spilled just a teaspoon of blood before his heart stopped pumping.

  ‘Somebody shot him?’ Donovan hadn’t supposed that Wicksy, or any of them, mattered enough to get shot. Being homeless was the next best thing to being invisible.

  ‘That,’ grunted Shapiro, ‘or he stood still long enough for someone to take a Black & Decker to him.’ It wasn’t disrespect: bad jokes are sometimes the best way for police officers to deal with tragedy.

  Donovan didn’t understand. ‘Why?’

  ‘We’ll find the man who did it and ask him,’ promised Shapiro. ‘Right now I’d settle for knowing where from.’

  Wicksy had taken the bullet high enough to pitch him on to his back, pretty much where he stood. He’d been standing on the edge of the canal because he’d been using it as a urinal. His friends had seen him fall and, imagining he’d been taken ill, had hurried over to help. He was dead by the time they reached him.

  So he’d been shot from across the canal. But this far out there were only fields. The nearest road, just visible as an embankment rising through the green corn, was quarter of a mile away.

  ‘Is there an easier way to get there?’

  Donovan shook his head. ‘The towpath’s on this side; the nearest bridge is at Mere Basin, but you can’t get here from there - you couldn’t get through the tunnel under The Barbican. Going out into The Levels, the next bridge is about two miles from here. No, the road’s your best bet.’

  ‘So somebody walked or drove out by River Road, stopped right about there, waded through quarter of a mile of growing corn – with a rifle held above his head like a Green Beret crossing a Vietnamese swamp - all in order to shoot Wicksy?’ More than perplexed, Shapiro sounded indignant. It defied logic, and above all he was a logical man.

  Donovan gave an apologetic shrug. ‘Looks a bit like it.’

  ‘Then why didn’t he leave a track through the corn?’ It was standing a foot high, it should have been perfectly obvious if it had been trampled, but neither man could see any indication of it.

  ‘Maybe he came by boat?’ hazarded Donovan. It wasn’t that wild a guess: it had happened before.

  ‘Same question,’ said Shapiro. ‘Why? You don’t have to kill people like Wicksy, you just have to wait for the next hard winter.’

  ‘Could he have seen something he wasn’t supposed to?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ agreed Shapiro, heavily ironic. ‘As I recall, Wicksy’s the one who sees spaceships. Damn sure you’d have to silence a witness as reliable as that!’

  ‘The man who shot him may not have known him that well,’ said Donovan reasonably. ‘He might not know that Wicksy spent most of his life on a different planet. If he saw something, and if it mattered enough, he was killed because whoever did it couldn’t count on us not believing him.’
r />   It was speculation but it made sense. ‘All right,’ said Shapiro. ‘What did he see?’

  Donovan’s eyes rounded. ‘I’m supposed to know that?’

  ‘Actually, yes. He was shot about twenty minutes ago. According to Desmond, you passed through about twenty minutes before that. So what did Wicksy see in those twenty minutes that got him killed? What did he see that you didn’t?’

  Donovan cast his mind back, but until Zara caught up with him on his way back along Brick Lane there had been nothing memorable about his walk. There had been nothing for Wicksy to see.

  He shook his head. ‘Beats me, chief.’

  ‘Call yourself a detective,’ grunted Shapiro.

  They were back at Queen’s Street, trying to organize two parallel murder inquiries, when - almost simultaneously - Shapiro received one phonecall and Donovan received another that cast a new and still more disturbing light on the death of the man known as Wicksy.

  Shapiro’s call was from Dr Crowe. The FME had begun a special post mortem; he’d broken off mid-scalpel, as it were, because he’d found something he believed the superintendent would want to know right away.

  ‘The bullet I took out of him. It’s a rifle bullet, right enough; well, we knew that. But it’s not common-or-garden rifle ammunition. I’m no expert, I’ve passed it on to Ballistics for a full assessment, but the last time I saw anything like that it came out of a South American diplomat who was assassinated on the steps of their London embassy.’

  ‘Assassinated?’ exclaimed Shapiro, startled. ‘You think Wicksy was killed by a hit man? A South American hit man?’

  ‘Well, that’s a fair bit of ground to cover in one stride,’ said Crowe. ‘But it was a professional job. That bullet, the sniper rifle that fired it, and the precise positioning of the wound make it highly professional. A job like that costs serious money.’

  Shapiro didn’t ask how an old-fashioned pathologist with a fancy new title came to know a thing like that. Conversations with Dr Crowe could always turn up surprises: the man was a sponge for arcane bits of information. ‘A sniper rifle?’