The Hireling's Tale (13 page)

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Authors: Jo Bannister

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BOOK: The Hireling's Tale
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Inside the compass of her arms, his body shook with the relief of tears.
 
 
‘It’s probably nothing,’ said Donovan. ‘But there’s a dark blue hatchback two cars back that’s been there or thereabouts since we got on this road. I’ve passed stuff and stuffs passed me, but that hatchback is just about the same distance behind us it’s been all along. Like I say, it probably doesn’t mean a thing. But maybe we ought to make sure.’
There was nowhere to turn off. He indicated and pulled up on to the hard shoulder, taking out his mobile phone as a kind of explanation. The grey van that was immediately behind him sailed past without hesitation, and so did the navy hatchback. With the facility of long practice Donovan noted its number. There was nothing to note about its driver, except that he was alone. The car continued up the road and disappeared in the following traffic.
‘False alarm,’ said Donovan wryly. ‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be,’ said Maddie Cotterick. ‘I don’t want reassuring, I want looking after.’
He put the phone away unused, waited for a gap in the traffic and got back on the road. He waited, too, for her to pick up where they’d left off. But the mood seemed to have been broken, and it wasn’t for him to try to re-establish it. There was time and road enough ahead: if she wanted to talk she would. If not she could talk to DI Graham at Queen’s Street.
He concentrated on his driving. But Fenland roads are flat and straight, the Jaguar might have gone on for miles if he’d fallen asleep at the wheel. It left a lot of mental capacity for other purposes. He found himself thinking about what had happened. More than thinking: reliving it. Standing flat-footed and uncomprehending in Philip Kendall’s back garden while Shapiro flung himself in slow motion at the man on the steps. The rifle was far enough away for the sound of the shot to pass unnoticed; but Donovan saw it hit, and the way cloth and flesh dissolved and the blood fountained under the penetrating assault was more shocking, at a more fundamental level, than he could have imagined. It was like having your own mortality thrust in your face. Because your body worked pretty well most of the time, and so did everybody else’s, you tended to forget how easily it could be made to come apart. Seeing someone shot at close quarters was the ultimate object lesson.
He found himself thinking about the mechanic. People hired this man to go round killing other
people, and he was so serious about the job, so perfectionist, that after he set up his equipment he practised on live targets at the optimum range. Dedication to duty is always impressive; such dedication to such a duty was also deeply chilling. That one act told more about the man they were looking for than could have been crammed into a three-page biography. He was a professional. He was the ultimate professional. If he was sent to kill Kendall, for whatever reason, he wouldn’t stop until he succeeded. Which meant, almost certainly, that Maddie Cotterick could have caught a bus back to Castlemere in perfect safety.
The Jaguar was slowing down. Puzzled, Maddie looked at her driver, about to ask why. The expression frozen on his dark face alarmed her. She jogged his elbow. ‘Sergeant?’
Donovan blinked, and understanding rushed into his eyes like a cataract. His foot slammed down on the accelerator and the Jaguar took off like a greyhound leaving a trap. He steered one-handed, groping with the other inside his jacket.
When he had the mobile phone he pushed it into Maddie’s hands and told her what to dial. His urgency frightened her. ‘I don’t understand. What’s happened? What—?’
But like many people in receipt of a revelation he didn’t make a very good job of explaining it. His eyes blazed. ‘If the bastard’s as good as all that,’ he exclaimed, with an impatience that was more for his own stupidity than hers, ‘how come he bloody missed?’
If you looked for two people with nothing in common but a job, you could hardly do better than Liz Graham and Cal Donovan. In every sense, they came from different places: different lands, different cultures, different backgrounds; different experiences leading to different ways of seeing the world. The odd thing was that, starting from diametrically different viewpoints, they had a knack of arriving at the same destination at pretty much the same time. They had been doing this since the earliest days of their association, a time when they could agree on almost nothing else. Donovan thought Liz an interloper, Liz thought Donovan a loose cannon, but they still had an uncanny ability to echo one another’s thought processes.
So while, objectively, Donovan wasn’t making a great deal of sense at his end of the line, at hers Liz was able somehow to reach past the hurried jumble of words and lift the notion he was trying to convey clean out of his mind. Her eyes saucered. ‘You mean - he
meant
to shoot Frank? Frank was his target all along?
Why?
’
‘I don’t know,’ said Donovan. ‘But boss, if a man
like that wants him dead he’s not safe in the public ward of a general hospital. You’d better get him out of there - or if he can’t be moved, at least get him some protection.’
He was right, but that didn’t make it any easier. ‘Where from? There’s nobody left!’
‘Send Kendall home and let the chief have his minders. If Kendall wasn’t the target he’s never been in any danger.’
‘Lord Almighty!’ She was trying to follow it through, work out what it meant. But there wasn’t time. It was more important to get the arrangements made: she could work out the implications later. ‘I can’t do that. What if you’re wrong? But I’ll sort something - get the chief out of sight for starters. And we’ll rake up someone to stay with him. What about you? Have you got the girl?’
‘Yeah, we’re on our way back. We’ll be back by noon.’
‘Be careful,’ said Liz. ‘If we’ve read this wrong and he’s not looking for Kendall, it may be he’s looking for Maddie after all. Have you had any problems?’
‘I don’t think so. There was somebody keeping pace with us a few minutes back, but I slowed up and he disappeared. I haven’t seen him since.’
‘Did you get a number?’
He passed it on. ‘But like I say, I don’t think he’d any interest in us. I’m just being a bit neurotic.’
‘Stay neurotic,’ said Liz severely. ‘We obviously don’t know what the hell’s going on, until we do we
all need to be neurotic. Get back here as quickly as you can.’
‘Count on it,’ said Donovan.
 
 
Superintendent Hilton heard her out without interruption. As soon as she finished he called in DI Colwyn. ‘Get down to the hospital right away. Take a firearms officer. Detective Superintendent Shapiro is to be put in a private room as soon as it’s safe to move him. Wherever he is, that ward is closed to visitors and other than named staff unless they’ve been personally vetted by DI Graham. Clear?’
‘Sir.’
When he’d gone Hilton propped his elbows on the desk and rested his chin on his folded hands. His eyes were troubled. ‘What does it mean? If Superintendent Shapiro was the intended victim?’
‘That he knew something?’ hazarded Liz. ‘That he’d worked out who killed the girl and had to be silenced.’
Hilton raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘He knew who committed a murder and failed to mention it to you? Oh no, Inspector; oh dear me no. We don’t keep secrets of that kind. We’ve all seen too many midweek movies, we know exactly what happens to detectives who say they’ve just one more thing to check, they’ll reveal all in the morning … No, if Mr Shapiro had even suspected something important enough to kill him for he’d have shared it with you.’
He heard the echo of that and gave a thin smile. ‘You know what I mean. After all, there was plenty of
time. If there was time to bring in a professional hit man, and for him to carry out his meticulous preparations, whoever employed him must have known for at least twenty-four hours that Mr Shapiro would need dealing with. It isn’t credible that he knew something vitally relevant to his case but neglected to mention it for something over a day.’
She wasn’t arguing. It wasn’t an argument: they were mulling it over, in the way that she usually did with Shapiro; and if Hilton’s methods and vocabulary were different, abrasive where Shapiro’s were pensive, they were not necessarily the worse for it. It was the feedback that was important, tossing ideas between them until the patterns they formed became less random and more significant.
Liz said, ‘Maddie says they’re connected - the girl’s death and Frank getting shot. How?’
‘Philip Kendall is the connection.’
‘Kendall’s house is where the shooting took place. But perhaps the mechanic merely followed Frank there. He needed him out in the open, this was his chance. Maybe he took the pot-shot at Kendall’s back door just to bring him out.’
‘So Kendall was never more than a red herring?’
Liz shrugged. ‘I don’t know. We’ll have to ask Maddie that too.’
‘You could have asked when you were talking to her,’ Hilton said pointedly.
Liz gave a rueful shrug. ‘I did try. I think she was afraid that when we knew as much as she did we’d leave her to cope alone.’
‘Is her life really in danger?’
‘I don’t know that either,’ admitted Liz. ‘I didn’t feel it was safe to dismiss the idea. And I wanted to hear what she had to say.’
Hilton nodded. ‘So it wasn’t just a matter of getting Detective Sergeant Donovan out of my way for a few hours.’
Liz cast him a startled look; but immediately she realized it was a shrewd little joke. She was beginning to see how DI Colwyn could enjoy working with the man. She fought to keep her face straight. ‘Of course not, sir. He’s looking forward to seeing you again.’
‘Of course he is,’ agreed Detective Superintendent Hilton with a thin smile. ‘True as I’m strangling this ferret.’
 
 
There were thirty-five miles of good road between King’s Lynn and Peterborough; Donovan expected to cover them in fifty minutes. (In a car: on his bike he’d have aimed at half an hour.) Another twenty-five miles, say forty minutes, would see him coming into Castlemere. They’d been on their way for half an hour when he saw something he hadn’t expected to see again. The navy-blue hatchback.
Only the fact that he was looking out for trouble made it seem at all sinister. It had passed him before when he pulled on to the hard shoulder. Since then he’d been told to get a move on: probably he’d increased his speed just enough to catch it. These weren’t local roads, they were long-distance routes: every second car would be going to Peterborough or
beyond. If he slowed down he’d probably meet the white saloon again; if he accelerated enough he might even catch the Porsche. It was the nature of good roads in open country.
And yet … and yet. The woman beside him believed her life was in danger: that someone was hunting her and would try to kill her. Even if it turned out she was wrong, Donovan thought the belief was absolutely genuine. He hadn’t worried much till now because he thought the man who shot Shapiro was still in Castlemere, trying to find out where Philip Kendall had got to. But if Kendall was never the target he wouldn’t be wasting time looking for him. He might be intending to finish his business with Shapiro; or he might have Maddie in his sights.
He could no longer afford the luxury of strict adherence to protocol. Their lives just might depend on things only Maddie knew.
He kept his eyes on the traffic ahead, watching the hatchback for any change in its speed, but he spoke to Maddie. ‘Tell me what happened.’
 
 
The conference trade was something of a speciality and Maddie had never got involved before. She wasn’t planning on working at all that weekend. She had a friend to stay, intended to spend the time with her, catching up on one another’s news.
But it’s the same in all businesses: it’s hard to refuse a favour to a regular customer.
She covered the phone with a hand. ‘I’ll tell him no. Damn it, I expect more notice than this even
when I haven’t got other plans. I’ll tell him I’m already booked.’
Linda shook her golden head and grinned. She was Maddie’s age but she’d cornered a slightly different market. At twenty-six she still looked about twenty. In the right gear she looked an incredibly promiscuous fourteen. ‘Say we’ll both go. It’ll be fun.’
Maddie frowned. They’d been going to go to a film, she’d been looking forward to it. But Jane Austen was more her sort of thing than Linda’s, she suspected her friend was glad of an excuse to get out of it. Linda wasn’t a natural spectator. She was keener on participation. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course. Bit of fun, bit of grass, bit of cash - my idea of the perfect night.’
It was Maddie’s experience that, while a lot of prostitutes talked like this in company, not many really and honestly felt that way. They looked on it more like a job in an abattoir: a messy old business but somebody has to do it. They were often uneducated women with limited options for making serious money. But Linda loved the game. She’d have gone on doing it if she’d won the lottery. She enjoyed the excitement, the risk, the rush it gave her; the sensation of power. Maddie recognized that it was an illusion of power and acted accordingly; but Linda was too swept up in her own myth of woman rampant to see that the weaker can only exploit the stronger as long as the stronger consent. Somehow, in the seven years she’d been doing this, she’d never had to deal with a genuine sadist: a man who
obtained sexual release from physically abusing his partner.
In all the commotion of a big conference winding up they had no difficulty passing the desk of The Barbican Hotel unnoticed. The man met them at the lifts. It wasn’t Maddie’s regular but his friend, the visitor for whom he wanted to lay on a treat. She wasn’t worried when the man who’d phoned her didn’t join them. He was a civilized punter who always paid up without demur; any friend of his was acceptable to her.
She weighed the client up covertly as the lift rose. He was a few years older than her but still a young man, strongly made, with the elegant, tensile power of a cat. A man of expensive tastes and extravagant good manners. He was a foreigner, but Maddie had no problems with that. The only drawback might be if he tried to pay by American Express.
Thus far Donovan had seen no need to interrupt her. He concentrated on his driving, and on the car up ahead, and let the story she was telling pour into his mind unfiltered by much in the way of analysis. But there was something he wanted to know now. ‘Did he give you his name?’
Maddie shook her head. ‘He said to call him Sir.’ Donovan had a bizarre picture flit through his head then; but no. Even if he could fake a foreign accent, nobody’d have described Superintendent Hilton as having extravagant good manners. ‘Go on.’
It came as no great surprise to Maddie when the man produced some cocaine. Crack, for smoking. He passed it round, along with the means of taking it,
and started dragging it in. Linda followed suit enthusiastically, Maddie with circumspection. It was a basic precaution in her business always to be in full command of one’s senses. But Linda didn’t believe in taking precautions. She thought the free availability of mind-altering substances was a bonus.
‘How much detail do you want?’ asked Maddie.
Donovan shrugged. ‘Whatever it takes. Don’t worry, you won’t shock me.’ But she did, a little.
Perhaps because she seemed younger, perhaps because she was keener, the client concentrated his attention on the bubbly blonde, excited by the combination of a cheeky schoolgirl face, a pneumatic woman’s body, and the total lack of inhibition of an enthusiastic whore. The crack drove both of them to mounting excesses: Maddie found herself propped in a corner with a half-smoked spoon, watching with bored tolerance that grew slowly to unease.
She realized sooner than Linda, who’d been freer with the crack, that the girl was beginning to take some punishment. Not just a little rough and tumble, that was par for the course. But this man was starting to use force on her. Cocaine is an anaesthetic: if she hadn’t been high she’d have known she was getting hurt. When the drugs slowed her reactions he shoved and shook her into compliance. He slapped her face, and Linda was spaced out enough that when he laughed at her objections she laughed too.
‘I knew it was getting out of hand,’ said Maddie in a small voice. ‘I knew he was getting vicious, and he was going to hurt her. He was pulling her about like a
rag doll, and she was so high she’d no idea she was in danger.’
‘But you weren’t? - high?’
She shook her head. ‘A drag or two, to get in the mood. He kept pushing more at me. I pretended to use it to keep him happy.’ She forced a smile. ‘If there’s one thing a prostitute’s good at it’s faking.’
A knot of lorries slowed the traffic in front. Donovan pulled the Jaguar into the outside lane and powered past. The road ahead was clear.
It might have been, Maddie admitted, that she too had taken more crack than she thought. But her recollection was that the tone of events really did change between one breath and the next. One moment she was sitting in the corner, in a litter of discarded clothes, pretending to smoke and watching two consenting adults play a game of rough love that at least one of them would regret when she came to her senses; and the next the game had changed to a deadly reality. The man was hitting the cheeky schoolgirl face as he might have hit another man: with his fists, with his weight behind them. He split her lip and she mewed a kittenish protest. Maddie thought the blood on his hands excited him. He hit her in the face again, this time under the eye. The skin over her cheekbone parted. The man laughed again. This time he laughed alone.

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