Broken Lines (15 page)

That was a valid point. If Billy Dunne was telling the truth the gun had to be Mikey's. ‘Then suppose there
were
two of them, but they were in it together. Mikey did the driving, his friend did the hold-up. When one got caught and the other got away they fell out and the friend shut him up. Does that work?'

‘No,' said Donovan stubbornly. ‘If Mikey was only the driver, why wasn't he in the van when I took the keys? He couldn't have been
that
desperate for a leak.'

That was true too. It would also take a fairly optimistic armed robber to hold up a garage and
then
start looking for a getaway vehicle. ‘We haven't got it right yet, have we?' sighed Liz. ‘But there must be a connection between the robbery and the assault. Let's try and work it backwards: if we knew what happened to Mikey at Cornmarket maybe we'd understand more about the robbery.'

‘Who do we ask?'

‘You could try Desmond and his mates again. They might remember some more detail by now. Specifically, they might remember hearing a car. It's a fair step from town, so if he was on foot he probably is local.'

‘OK. And you?'

‘I'll talk to Roly again, see if he'll put me on to Mikey's friends. He won't be keen, but with Mikey on life support maybe he'll force himself. If I can find out who Mikey was with that evening, maybe I can find out what he was doing, at Cornmarket. Was he taken there, did he go there to meet someone, is it where his mates hang out when there's nothing better to do? But it was a cold night, they weren't sitting on a wall passing reefers and dirty pictures. He must have had some reason to be there at midnight.'

Donovan kept a diplomatic silence. Even before he had the dog he often went out at night to wander through the silent dereliction along the canal. But Mikey had never struck him as the sort of man who needed solitude to still the turbulence of mind and breast stirred up by a hard day's work.

It was after one. ‘Drop me off at home, will you,' said Donovan, ‘I'll take Brian for a run.'

As always, Liz did a mental double-take before the image of the dog that was definitely not a pit bull terrier supplanted that of her husband in her mind. ‘Er – why
do
you call him Brian?'

‘Brian Boru,' said Donovan, ‘High King of Ireland.'

That explained it. Liz smiled. ‘I think mine's named after the snail in
The Magic Roundabout
.'

Liz returned to the house in George Street. Again it was Thelma who answered the door. She looked worn out. Two months ago she was in front of the Magistrates for handling stolen goods – ‘It's me age, Your Worships, me eyes are going. When the constable told me it was a Cartier watch and the jewels were real, of course I knew
then
nobody got it with petrol coupons.' The way she looked now, the least sentimental of Crown Prosecutors would be embarrassed about proceeding against her.

She was seventy-one – Liz knew from the charge sheets. Two months ago she was a spritely energetic seventy-one, the sort of old lady whose wrinkled skin and thinning hair hid a frame of iron and a heart like a steam hammer. As long as there was fuel for the fire – in her case a nice bit of cheque fraud or demanding with menaces – it would keep thumping long after nobler hearts had given up the ghost.

But the business with Mikey had taken all her reserves, left her grey, shrunken and frail. When she saw who was at the door she turned away, leaving it open, and returned to her chair and the sort of daytime television she'd always been too busy scheming to watch before.

‘Is there any news?' asked Liz.

Without looking round Thelma shook her head. ‘No change. They say it's still early days but I don't know. He doesn't look to me like there's anyone at home.'

‘I'm so sorry,' said Liz, and meant it. ‘How's Roly bearing up?'

‘I haven't seen much of him,' said Thelma. ‘He just comes home to change his clothes. I don't think he's eaten properly since it happened.' She glanced over her shoulder. ‘He's at the hospital now, if you're wanting him.'

‘I'll tell you what I really want. I want the bastard who did this.' It was a token of the respect she enjoyed in this least law-abiding of homes that Thelma accepted she meant that too. ‘I'm going to need some help with Mikey's movements on Friday night.'

Thelma might be drained, sapped by worry and lack of sleep until she hardly knew what time of day it was, but while there was breath left in her she wasn't going to miss the subtext to that. The eye was still shrew-sharp. ‘You want me to tell you who he was with? What they were doing?'

Liz took a chair and leaned close. ‘I'm investigating an attempted murder, I'm not interested in any little sidelines Mikey and his mates were pursuing. Even if I was, even if Mikey was up to no good, it could be a long time before I could charge him. That's not what I'm after.'

At length Thelma looked up again from the television. ‘What do you want from me?'

Liz breathed softly. ‘I need to know who he was with that evening, where they went, what time they split up. I need names.' She knew that, in The Jubilee, people would part with blood and even a minor extremity before they'd part with names.

For a moment it seemed she'd asked too much. ‘I'm not giving you names!' exclaimed the old woman, horrified.

Disappointed, Liz straightened up. ‘Then—?'

‘But I'll talk to his friends myself. If any of them was with him, and if they're prepared to tell you about it, they'll contact you.'

‘And if they aren't prepared to talk about it?'

‘Well,' said Thelma pensively, ‘I can't be sure but I think probably Roly will want them to reconsider.'

So there were two ways Liz might discover who Mikey spent his last evening with: if they called her, or if they turned up in the same ward at Castle General.

‘Thanks, Thelma.' She touched the older woman's arm. It felt like a dry stick through her cardigan. ‘Tell Roly I'm doing my best.'

She almost made it out of the house without the thing she'd been waiting for coming up. But Thelma followed her into the hall. ‘I heard Mr Donovan was there when Mikey was found.'

Liz wasn't going to lie, and she thought it would do more harm than good to hedge round it. ‘That's right. He was out walking that dog of his. It was the dog that found him.'

Thelma nodded and said nothing more. Liz left wondering if she'd doused a fire or poured petrol on it.

Donovan put off visiting Desmond Jannery and his dosser friends until first thing Tuesday morning. Afternoons they were away begging; by evening they were mostly drunk.

Trying to get a coherent picture of their movements the night Mikey came to grief was like juggling with mercury. Their accounts varied so wildly, from person to person and from one telling to the next, that if he hadn't seen them there himself Donovan would have thought they were curled up in a Salvation Army hostel at the relevant time and were making the whole thing up.

Desmond had the clearest recollection. He remembered seeing the dog, following it and finding the injured boy among the rubble of the broken walls. He remembered seeing Donovan there. He didn't remember, as a woman called Sophie did, a giant silver snake slithering in from The Levels. He hadn't noticed the UFO which landed near the abandoned railway carriages or the space-suited alien who'd travelled from a world beyond the orbit of Pluto for the purpose of appearing to a man called Wicksy.

But though he thought about it again, he also hadn't seen a car or a man wandering around Cornmarket with a baseball bat. He hadn't even seen Mikey earlier on, when he was still vertical.

The Scenes of Crime Officer had confirmed, from the blood spatter pattern on the brickwork, that the attack took place where Mikey was found so either he met his attacker there or they went there together. It seemed likely that some sort of conversation or argument passed between them before Mikey succumbed to the assault. But no one heard anything. Desmond and Sophie, and probably also Wicksy unless he was behind Venus at the critical moment, were dozing round their fire only a hundred metres away while somebody hammered a teenage boy into the dirt, and he couldn't have had more privacy if he'd jumped Mikey in thick fog in the middle of The Levels. Even now they'd got over the excitement, and were neither too drunk nor too sober to make sense, the closest Donovan had to witnesses seemed to have heard and seen nothing at all.

‘I heard a car.'

Donovan started at the voice close behind him. He'd thought there were just the four of them. He'd taken the black heap at the end of the settee for a bin bag. ‘Who are you?'

‘I'm Leslie.'

Donovan didn't think he'd forgotten but he checked his notes just in case. ‘You were here Friday night? You didn't make a statement.'

‘I slept through it,' said Leslie regretfully. ‘Finding him, the police cars, the ambulance – the lot.'

‘And the spaceship?' asked Wicksy, appalled.

‘The lot,' Leslie said.

Donovan looked doubtful. ‘Then, when did you hear the car?'

‘
Before
I went to sleep,' Leslie said contemptuously. ‘Of course.'

Of course. ‘Which would have been about when?'

‘Five to twelve,' said Leslie confidently. ‘I listen to the midnight news on my transistor, then I go to sleep. I heard the car just before the news came on.'

‘This was Friday night-Saturday morning?'

‘Every night,' said Leslie firmly.

‘So, going up to twelve on Friday night you heard a car.' Donovan wasn't convinced but he was so desperate for someone to know something he'd have followed it up if Grandma Walsh had seen it in the tea-leaves. ‘Driving through or did it stop?'

‘It stopped. It came from that direction and stopped just about there.' The little man was pointing confidently.

Donovan let go of the breath he was holding in a weary sigh. ‘Yeah. Right, Leslie, I'll bear that in mind.' There was no car. There was no road for it to have come up. He was pointing at the canal.

Demoralized, Donovan walked home along the towpath with Brian bounding ahead of him. He almost hoped someone would speak to him for the pleasure of snarling back; but he saw only a couple of kids fishing off the quay and someone messing about in a boat off the
James Brindley
's stern. Donovan didn't mind talking to people with boats, but as he looked to see who it was the outboard engine caught and it chugged away, towing a silver wake eastward up the canal.

Brian had found a stick. Though he was definitely not a pit bull terrier, there wasn't much Golden Retriever in him either. Mostly it was bloody-mindedness that made him fetch: however often Donovan could throw something away Brian could bring it back, and the crosser Donovan got the more the satisfaction the dog got out of it. Once, in exasperation, Donovan tried to end the game by lobbing it in the canal. He spent the rest of the evening in the close confines of
Tara
's saloon with a stinking wet dog smirking at him over a slimy stick.

The stick looked like something the kids might have been playing with but nobody seemed to want it back. Donovan didn't want it either. He threw it away. Brian brought it back. He threw it away again; Brian brought it back. He went to throw it away again—

An invisible mule kicked him hard under the heart, and his jaw dropped and he just stood holding the thing, his long fingers wrapped around a grip cobbled out of electrical tape, his eyes caught, as if on a nail, by the splintered and grimy end, bruised by fresh fang-marks, stained with something like tar.

When he finally got a measure of control over himself, oblivious to the dog's requests which were fast turning to threats, he whispered, ‘Oh shit.'

Even the preliminary tests took a little while. But knowing what they would reveal eased the tension. Mikey Dickens's blood at one end of the stave, Donovan's fingerprints at the other.

This time they talked in the interview room. It might have been a matter of form – Shapiro was determined to do nothing that smacked of favouritism, if he had to mill Donovan down to a fine grey powder to prove that all avenues had been explored he would do it – but then again, it might not. Nothing in the superintendent's manner suggested this wasn't for real.

‘You didn't see it before the dog brought it to you?'

‘No.'

‘So you don't know where he found it.'

‘No.'

‘Could he have brought it all the way from Cornmarket?'

‘No. I'd have seen if he had.'

‘So he picked it up on the towpath. When was the last time you noticed he didn't have it?'

Donovan gave a giant shrug. ‘Jesus,
I
don't know! You don't, do you – you don't notice that somebody
hasn't
got something. But we must have been pretty well back at the boat: if he'd found it much earlier he'd have wanted it throwing.'

Shapiro nodded, expressionless. ‘So you're telling me this weapon that was used to beat Mikey Dickens within an inch of his life was lying round in the immediate vicinity of your boat.'

Donovan raked thin fingers through his hair. It needed cutting again. It always needed cutting. ‘I suppose it must have been. But if you want to know how it got there, I've no idea.'

‘Could it have been there since Friday night?'

‘How would I know? I suppose so. I suppose whoever hit Mikey came back up the towpath and threw it away there.'

‘You've had Brian out since then, though. Wouldn't he have found it before if it was there?'

‘I expect so. Yes.'

‘So, having made his getaway, with the weapon either in his possession or secreted somewhere we couldn't find it despite an extensive search, the assailant came back to move it to where it would be found. And not just by anyone: by the detective most closely involved in the case.'