Broken Lines (29 page)

For a minute longer he just lay where he was, absorbing that. Then he sucked in a deep breath and struggled to sit up. Liz helped him. ‘I know who did it. I know who beat Mikey.'

She could have lied, but he'd have found out soon enough. She chuckled sympathetically. ‘Sorry, Donovan – so do we. The Taylors. We picked them up this morning.'

Donovan would have been angrier if he'd been stronger. He stretched his forearms across his knees and rested his head on them. ‘Oh, bugger,' he muttered wearily.

Dealing with Roly Dickens took priority. Shapiro spared little thought for the Taylors until he had the big man tucked up comfortably in a cell.

Roly gave no further trouble. He didn't want his solicitor, he didn't ask for bail, he made no attempt to put a gloss on what he'd done. He was sorry for what he'd done to Donovan, but mostly he regretted being in a police cell when he should have been at his son's bedside.

‘I promise you, Roly,' Shapiro said, ‘if there's any change you and I will go back to the hospital. I let them know you'd be here, they'll call me if there's anything to report.'

‘'Preciate that, Mr Shapiro,' rumbled Roly.

Shapiro regarded the old battler with compassion. ‘I do understand, you know. I can't ignore what's happened, but I understand where it came from. You had your strings pulled at a time when you were desperately vulnerable. I'm not saying anyone would have reacted the same way, but in all the circumstances things could have been worse. We'll sort it out, Roly. Nobody wants your head on a platter.'

‘Mr Donovan might.'

‘I doubt it. Or if he does now, he won't for long. Leave it with me, once he's feeling better I'll talk to him.'

‘I could have done it, you know.' A little peak of wonder rose through the dull monotone of Roly's voice. Already the thing was beginning to seem unreal, like a nightmare he'd woken from, but he remembered with a kind of horror how he'd felt. ‘I shouldn't be saying this, should I, but it's true. I wanted to kill him when I thought he'd beaten Mikey. Even when I knew he hadn't – I saw it come together in his face, nobody's that good an actor, I saw him work out who did it and then realize he couldn't tell me – I was ready to hurt him to get the name. I threatened to blind him, Mr Shapiro. I could have done it. I was this close.' The finger and thumb he held just barely apart were as thick as sausages.

‘Roly,' said Shapiro firmly, ‘neither of us knows for sure what you could have done. We only know what you did. I know what you threatened to do, but whether you'd have done it is something else. The facts are that for five hours you held a man you believed responsible for your son's condition, and all you actually did was thump him. All right, several times and quite hard, but people get worse injuries in boxing matches.

‘Forget what might have happened. Yes, you could have killed him, or blinded him, but if you hadn't got round to it in five hours it's my guess you never would have. Talk's easy, but it takes a particular type of man to brutalize someone who can't defend himself. Whatever our differences, Roly, I don't think you're that kind of man.'

‘Mr Shapiro,' said Roly with a slow smile, ‘did you ever think of going into criminal defence work?'

Shapiro gave a little snort of laughter and left him alone.

The Taylors were still where he'd left them. Sergeant Tomlinson was the Custody Officer: Shapiro checked that no problems had arisen during his absence.

‘No, sir. But Mr Taylor made a phonecall about an hour ago.'

Shapiro wasn't surprised. ‘His solicitor?' ‘No, sir, his doctor.'

That did surprise him. ‘He's ill? Why didn't you call Dr Greaves?'

‘He wasn't ill,' said the sergeant stoically. ‘And Dr Greaves may be an excellent police surgeon but I doubt he's a fertility expert.'

Shapiro enjoyed being enigmatic; he wasn't keen when other people got enigmatic back. He squinted over his shoulder at Sergeant Tomlinson as he headed up the corridor.

Clifford Taylor looked up quickly as Shapiro came in. There was a cup on the table in front of him: he'd drunk about half of it. Not too anxious to drink at all, nor so relieved at being left alone he could have managed a square meal. In his gut Shapiro didn't believe this man had done anything as dreadful as bludgeoning a nineteen-year-old boy.

‘Did you find your sergeant?'

Though he was a bit taken aback, Shapiro knew how difficult it was to keep secrets in a police station. He saw no reason not to answer. ‘Yes. He's all right – a bit of concussion, some pretty spectacular bruises; I left him at the hospital but I'll get him back in a day or two.'

‘The boy's father had him?'

‘He thought Donovan put his son in ICU. Which is what he was supposed to think.'

‘Somebody' – the accountant gave an awkward shrug, too embarrassed to use slang he'd only ever heard on television –‘made it look that way?'

Shapiro breathed heavily. ‘Mr Taylor, you
know
somebody made it look that way. You also know who. If it wasn't you and your wife together it was your wife alone.'

Taylor's gaze flicked up briefly and then returned to the table-top. ‘I made a phonecall. While you were out.'

‘I know,' nodded Shapiro. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?'

‘I called the clinic. The Feyd Clinic, where we were having fertility treatment.'

‘Oh yes?' Shapiro was puzzled. Guilty or innocent, he'd have thought the man would have other things on his mind.

‘Pat didn't have a miscarriage.'

The superintendent stared at him. ‘You mean, she's still pregnant?'

‘I mean, she never was pregnant.'

All Shapiro's experience told him that women didn't lie about something like that. ‘What makes you think so?'

‘The consultant. I asked him if she miscarried, and he said no.'

But it made no sense. What Pat Taylor had done, the lengths she'd gone to – the extreme lengths, if her husband hadn't helped – were beyond belief if all she was mourning was her battered car.

The possibility remained, of course, that what Taylor was trying to do was wriggle off the hook, and that he'd say anything about anyone to do it.

‘I'm surprised the consultant was willing to discuss it with you.'

‘I'm not,' said Taylor tersely, ‘I bought him his Rolls Royce. As far as he's concerned, I'm still a patient. Pat and I went there as a couple, she never told them we'd split up. I think she was afraid they wouldn't treat her alone.'

‘In that case your consultant should be prepared to speak to me, with your consent. Will you give it?'

‘Oh yes,' said Taylor. ‘Superintendent, don't misunderstand me. I'm not trying to persuade you of my innocence by convincing you of Pat's guilt. But I think she needs help – not medical, psychiatric – and until the facts are known she's not going to get it.'

That seemed reasonable. Taylor didn't need to throw suspicion, on his wife, and he wouldn't succeed in averting it. ‘And the consultant was quite sure there was no pregnancy?'

Taylor ground his knuckles into his eyes. ‘She went to the clinic after the accident. She told them what had happened, and what she was afraid of – that she was carrying a child and it had been harmed. They ran the tests and found what they expected. There was no evidence of pregnancy.

‘When the consultant told her she became hysterical. They put her to bed for a couple of hours until she was feeling better, then they sent her home. I asked if she could have got confused, if she could have miscarried at home either before or after visiting the clinic, but he was adamant there was nothing to miscarry.'

Shapiro was still trying to get his head round it. ‘Then what on earth was it all about? Why have we got one man dying in the hospital, one sitting in the cells here, and one who could have been in the next room to either of them if things had gone just a little differently? If she wasn't avenging a lost baby, what
was
she doing?'

‘I asked that too.' Taylor swallowed. This wasn't easy for him. He was talking about a woman he'd loved for half his life. In spite of everything, what he felt for her was still closer to love than anything else. ‘I told him she was behaving irrationally and blaming it on the loss of a pregnancy. The consultant reckoned that by now she'd convinced, herself it was true. That his tests were wrong, that she really was pregnant and she lost it because of the accident. He said what she was really mourning was her fertility, her ability to have a child. When she finally realized it was never going to happen, she felt bereaved.

‘She needed to grieve, and she did it by thinking of it as a child she'd lost. The rest followed from that. If there was a child and she lost it because of the crash, that was the fault of the boy who ran her down and the policeman who could have rescued her before the baby was damaged. She believed that between them they'd killed her child.'

And she wanted revenge in the same fierce, regardless-of-the-consequences way that she'd spent ten years trying for a baby. Liz had been worried she'd have been too weak from the miscarriage to do all she'd have had to, but that wasn't a problem if there never was a pregnancy.

‘Let me get this straight,' said Shapiro. ‘From start to finish she was acting alone? You didn't help her with any of it, not even inadvertently?'

Clifford Taylor shook his head. His eyes were hollow. ‘Incredible, isn't it? For twenty years people have been leaving their children with Pat in the absolute belief that she could be trusted to look after them. As far as I know she's never so much as smacked one round the head with a ruler. And then, almost out of nowhere, she took a stave to a nineteen-year-old boy and hit him until she thought he was dead. And not in the heat of the moment – she had to plan it like a military manoeuvre, and then to plan some more how she was going to lay the blame on your sergeant. God in heaven, Superintendent – is it even possible?'

It was possible. In thirty years Shapiro had seen all manner of people do all manner of things that others had thought beyond them. Bella Willis defending her baby from Kevin Tufnall. Other mothers and fathers walking through fire to rescue their children. Other men and women, equally ordinary to the casual eye, conceiving and carrying out difficult and complicated schemes to get what they wanted – money, somebody else's spouse, their own freedom.

And these were the cases that Shapiro knew about, the ones where something went wrong and it all came out. As a realist he knew there must be others who'd been clever enough to get away with it. With just a little less ambition Pat Taylor could have been one of them. If she'd settled for punishing Mikey she would never have been suspected. Unless he recovered enough to point the finger, which was looking less and less likely, the attack on him would have remained unsolved. Greed was her undoing. She wanted them both, but her efforts to implicate Donovan started her careful construct unravelling.

Shapiro nodded wearily. ‘Oh yes. More than that: one step at a time it wasn't even very difficult.' Murderers were often surprised at how easy it was to end a human life. Beforehand they worried they mightn't have the strength or the stomach to complete the task. But when the time came they had no trouble inflicting enough damage to kill the victim three times over.

‘The hardest part would be working it all out, and that was an intellectual exercise she was well equipped for. She made a phonecall, and a couple of boat-trips, and beat the living daylights out of a boy she blamed for the loss of her baby. None of that was beyond her once she'd decided on the sort of revenge the courts are no help with, that you have to take for yourself.'

For all the mayhem she'd caused, Shapiro couldn't help feeling sorry for Pat Taylor. She'd acted on emotions as powerful at a genetic level as self-preservation. If she'd been made to kill at gunpoint they'd have been talking inculpable homicide. Perhaps Mrs Taylor had had no more chance of resisting the demands on her than if she'd had a gun in her back.

In a way, whatever they decided, what happened to her now was academic. Her life was wrecked as much as Mikey's. If she continued to believe that she'd lost a child, the refusal of the rest of the world to acknowledge that loss would be an enduring torment And if at some point she came to understand that there never was a child, that she'd destroyed one man and come within an ace of destroying another for a figment of her imagination, how would she feel then? They were all victims: Mikey, Roly, both the Taylors … In the end, and by the skin of his teeth, Donovan with his black eyes and his bloody nose had got off lightest of all.

He also had a certain amount of pleasurable satisfaction coming, in that his superintendent owed him an apology.

There was still Pat Taylor to see. Now Shapiro had all the material facts he hoped she would answer whatever questions remained. Both the objects of her hatred were beyond her ability to harm them further so she had nothing left to lose. Shapiro thought she would tell him now what she did and how she did it. He didn't think he'd ask her why.

The cup in front of her had been drained to the dregs. Whatever hags had ridden and continued to ride Pat Taylor, anxiety for her own future was not one. She knew she hadn't got one.

Her gaze was hard and fierce, a combination of fire and ice. Tiger eyes. She didn't care what happened to her now; she only cared what Shapiro might be able to tell her. She barked at him, ‘Well?'

It wasn't the time and anyway he felt no inclination to gloat. He stood with his back to the door and his hands in his pockets. ‘Detective Sergeant Donovan's being kept in hospital for a check-over but he doesn't seem to have come to much harm. Roly Dickens has been charged with assault.'