Broken Lines (10 page)

Donovan needed to be visible, but not so visible that Roly would suspect. He returned to the corner of Jubilee Terrace: apparently half the Walled City knew he considered it a discreet place to watch them from. A younger, thinner man than Roly might leap over the wall dividing the back yards of Coronation Row from those of Brick Lane; but age and girth were not Roly's only reasons for coming this way. He couldn't lose Donovan until he'd picked him up.

Liz was sitting in her car at the town end of Brick Lane with a Bichon Frise in the passenger seat. She and Bubbles were old friends, they'd done stakeouts before. He belonged to Superintendent Giles's secretary Miss Tunstall and was the perfect excuse for loitering in the street late at night. A man alone might seem suspicious, a woman alone might attract attention, but someone walking a dog was just someone walking a dog. If Roly was on foot she and Bubbles would, well, dog him and he'd think nothing of it. If he was driving they'd follow in the car. Bubbles enjoyed a good car chase.

She didn't know how quickly Roly would respond to the item on the news: somewhere between fifteen minutes and an hour was her best guess but it might take longer, particularly if Mikey wasn't at home. At intervals she checked with Donovan on the radio but The Jubilee was quiet. After an hour Bubbles really did need to go for a walk.

After two hours Liz was pretty sure this wasn't going to work. She called DC Morgan, who was waiting at the school, but he'd seen no one. Even the glue-sniffers seemed to be having the night off. ‘We'll give it another hour,' Liz decided, ‘but I don't think he's coming.'

Donovan had reached the same conclusion, and was wondering if he should suggest calling it a night or wait for Liz to do so, when he heard footsteps. He'd melted back into the shadows before remembering he wasn't meant to be invisible.

But those weren't Roly's footsteps. The big man was fifty years old and seventeen stone, and he'd never had a light quick step like this. Also, he didn't limp. Donovan waited, listening, and the footsteps reached the corner and stopped.

‘Don't mean to disturb you, Mr Donovan.' It was Mikey. Already he'd acquired another of those long, amorphous coats that made him look like a small banshee. ‘But my dad says it's a cold old night, and if you're going to be here much longer can we bring you a Thermos?'

‘They knew. Everything.' It was Friday morning now, but Donovan was still so angry he spat the words. ‘Not just that I was watching them: they knew it didn't matter if I was or not. Roly wasn't going anywhere. He didn't have to: he knew Mikey's gun was where he left it. How?'

Liz shrugged. She was tired and dispirited too, but she'd been unsuccessful often enough in the past that she no longer took it personally. ‘Maybe we were wrong about the school. Maybe he has it at home. Or maybe he got rid of it permanently.'

‘Then what were the men in the kitchen talking about?'

‘I don't know,' Liz said irritably. ‘Maybe they weren't talking about the gun at all.' She frowned. ‘You never did explain how you came to overhear that.'

That was all he'd said – that he'd overheard it. He didn't want to bring Jade into this: partly because of the sense he had that their relationship was valuable and delicate, and just a little bit because he was shy of admitting he had a girlfriend.

The man and woman in this office were the people who knew him best in the world. It wasn't exactly friendship but a professional relationship close enough to mimic it in all the essentials. They knew each other's strengths and frailties. They counted on one another, for their lives if need be. And Donovan knew that if he admitted he was seeing a girl who rode a motorcycle, the Dickens case would go on the back burner while the best detecting minds in Castlemere concentrated on his sex life.

Fortunately he was a fluent liar. Or rather, he was a successful liar because also he looked shifty when he had nothing to hide. ‘I was skulking,' he said defensively. Neither of them would have difficulty believing that. ‘I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Never mind that. Roly Dickens knew about something that was only discussed in this office, and I want to know how.'

Shapiro's eyebrows rocketed. ‘Sergeant – are you accusing one of
us
of being in old Roly's pocket?'

That stopped him short. Donovan blinked and then knuckled his eyes. ‘'Course not. I just – I don't know how it went wrong.'

‘Maybe it didn't,' Liz said reasonably. ‘Maybe he just didn't take the bait.'

Donovan shook his head. ‘You didn't see Mikey. It was like a big joke. Him and the old man had been wetting themselves for two hours, and when they thought I was getting pissed-off enough to go home Mikey came out to share it with me. They knew, the whole thing, and I don't know how if they didn't hear it from someone in Queen's Street.'

Shapiro caught his angry gaze and held it. No facial gymnastics now, just the steady eyes of a man wanting to be quite sure that what he said was understood, ‘Donovan, you're suggesting that someone in this building is passing information on an inquiry to a known criminal. That's almost the gravest allegation you can make against a policeman. Do you mean it?'

For a moment the superintendent's tone was enough to silence Donovan. But reflecting on the facts didn't alter them and he nodded. ‘Yes. The evidence is there. OK, everything we do doesn't go according to plan. I might have misread the situation. We might have been wrong about who had the gun, where it was, what he'd do if he thought we'd found it. We could have set the whole, thing up only to find he'd gone to the pictures. Or there might be something we don't know about that would change drastically how he'd react.

‘But it's not just that he didn't jump when we wanted him to. We said Jump and he blew us a raspberry. That's not the thing going off half-cocked: it's sabotage. Roly knew what we were expecting. He knew what we were doing and why. He knew that all he had to do was nothing, and then he was safe enough to let us in on the joke. He
knew.
Somebody told him.'

‘All right,' said Shapiro slowly. ‘Anyone in particular you want to point the finger at?'

Donovan was uncomfortable but he wasn't going to back down. ‘The three of us knew, and Dick Morgan; and the Son of God, and the Station Sergeant.' He was not a religious man: he didn't mean that, just as no sparrow falls unmarked by heaven, so no operation organized at Queen's Street escaped the celestial eye. For reasons now disappearing in the mists of time Superintendent Giles was commonly referred to as the Son of God. ‘That's too many to keep a secret. One of us must have said something to someone – in the canteen, in the corridor, in the bog. Anyone in the station could have known.'

‘We're not looking for someone who knew, though, are we?' said Liz tersely. ‘We're looking for someone who knew, and told Roly Dickens. For a favour or for money. So which of your colleagues do you reckon is in hock to the Dickenses?'

‘You're making it sound like it couldn't happen,' Donovan growled, ‘and we all know it does happen. There's nothing special about us, it could happen here too. I don't know who. There's nobody I had any doubts about until now. But if we ignore what's happened it'll happen again.'

‘So what do you want to do?' asked Shapiro. His broad face remained expressionless. He'd helped Donovan with problems of every kind, professional and personal, in the eight years they'd worked together but he wasn't going to help him with this. If Donovan thought one of his colleagues was an informer he was going to have to prove it. Until then he was on his own.

Out on his own was a place Donovan knew, but that didn't necessarily mean he liked it. People assumed he behaved like this from choice, deliberately taking positions where he could expect no support. He didn't. He didn't enjoy fighting all his battles single-handed, gaining ground a bloody inch at a time and always staring defeat in the face. But that puritan streak insisted that if a cause was right it remained so however few people espoused it, and right was worth fighting for however uphill the struggle. He often wished he could be more flexible, compromise without it feeling like drawing teeth. But he was a prisoner of his own myth, and by now he was so used to being the dissenting minority that he mistrusted anything that seemed too easy.

‘God damn it,
I
don't know!' But he wasn't angry with Shapiro, or even himself, so much as a third party he had no way of identifying. ‘Roly Dickens is the only one who knows, and he's not going to tell me even if I take a shovel to him.' At the back of his mind he was aware that it might not have been a deliberate treachery so much as somebody saying something to his wife who then said something to her mother who was discussing it with her sister in the queue at Woolworth's … That sort of thing happened more than bribery and corruption, and it was unstoppable because nobody ever realized they were the weak spot where the dam started to leak.

‘Which you wouldn't dream of doing,' Shapiro said pointedly; and after a moment, reluctantly, Donovan nodded.

‘'Course not, sir. Figure of speech.'

‘Besides which,' murmured Liz, ‘you take a shovel to Roly Dickens and he'll wrap it round your neck.'

‘OK,' admitted Donovan, ‘I can't prove it. But it's happened, and it's cost us time and effort and a couple of good convictions. Worse than that, it's let Roly Dickens get up on his hind legs and crow about putting one over on us. About how his family are fireproof. We can't let the idea get around that there are people in this town that the law doesn't apply to.'

‘I know that, Sergeant,' said Shapiro stiffly. ‘I may have said as much to you. I may also have mentioned that elephants aren't the only ones with long memories. We'll get them. We'll get Mikey for the garage robbery, and we'll get Roly for concealing the gun. I can't promise it'll be this week or next week, but it doesn't have to be. We'll be here for a while. And this investigation doesn't founder because we haven't got the gun. We'll find someone who saw Mikey alone in the van. Mrs Taylor may be able to help when her head's a bit straighter.'

Liz nodded. ‘I'll go and see her again after the weekend. She was still pretty upset when I talked to her before. She'll have calmed down by now, she may have a clearer picture of what she saw.'

‘And if she hasn't?' asked Donovan, edgily.

‘Then we'll look for someone else,' said Shapiro. ‘It was early Sunday evening, there must have been other people on Cambridge Road. If we ask for eyewitnesses there'll be someone who saw Mikey drive off alone. Or maybe I can poke a hole in his story. He's waiting downstairs now.'

Donovan was taken aback. ‘You're going to charge him?'

‘Certainly not. The obliging little chap's here voluntarily to help catch the wicked criminal who hijacked his van.'

They didn't have irony in Glencurran; even after so long Donovan could miss it if he was preoccupied. ‘But – he made that up.'

Liz grinned and Shapiro closed his eyes for a second in despair. ‘Sergeant – go find some detecting to do. I'll talk to Mikey. If I can make confetti of his alibi, you'll be the first to know.'

Donovan sniffed. ‘If I'm right about the leak, Roly Dickens'll be the first to know.'

After he'd gone Liz said, ‘Is he right, do you think – is someone here on more than a nodding acquaintance with the Dickenses?'

Shapiro didn't answer directly. One side of his lived-in face wrinkled up as if he'd sucked a lemon. ‘I think he's right about last night – I think they knew what we were up to. Roly knew he had nothing to worry about. That might be because the gun was where it couldn't be found, but we can't discount the possibility that he heard it from someone here. I'd sooner think it was carelessness than corruption, but either way we need to be aware of it. Next move we make stays in this room till it's too late to matter.'

He pushed his chair away from the desk and got up. ‘Well, young Dickens and his solicitor are waiting in Interview Room One, and since he's here out of the simple goodness of his heart it would be discourteous of me to keep them any longer.'

His brush with death had made a better man of Mikey Dickens. Almost, Shapiro thought sourly, he seemed to be soliciting for some kind of Good Citizen award. Every question he asked, every time he sought a fuller explanation, Mikey's brows knit in concentration and he answered as comprehensively as he could.

Normally that would have pleased the detective: the more complex the lie, the sooner it breaks down. But Shapiro soon realized that although Mikey was saying a lot he was just repeating the same words, and Shapiro had heard them before. Mikey's bladder, the man in the grey coat, the gun: it all sounded terribly familiar. Afraid for his life, Mikey had done what he was told. None of what happened was his fault. He never knew who his passenger was, wouldn't recognize him if they met again.

It wasn't true. Shapiro knew it wasn't true, but that wasn't the point. It
could
be true, and without proof to the contrary Mikey was entitled to the benefit of the doubt. His solicitor was there to remind the superintendent should he chance to forget.

Ms Holloway seemed surprised that Shapiro was still handling this personally. No one was dead, no one was badly injured: she'd expected that by now the matter would have been delegated to an inspector.

‘I like to keep my hand in, Miss Holloway,' Shapiro explained affably – carefully pronouncing the vowel in her title for no better reason than that it seemed to annoy her. ‘New Year's a good chance: it takes a couple of weeks for business to pick up again after the holiday.'

She smiled thinly. ‘I suppose even criminals like to spend Christmas with the family.' She said Christmas to annoy him in return: with a name like his he wasn't likely to have been at Midnight Mass.