Broken Lines (30 page)

‘Assault?'
She spat the word at him as if she'd bitten into a strawberry and found half a worm. ‘I wanted …' She stopped, the fanatic eyes disappointed.

‘I know,' murmured Shapiro. ‘But most people draw the line somewhere, even the head of crime in The Jubilee. Roly had a pile of grief and rage to deal with, but in the end he managed to cope with the loss of his son without destroying someone else's.'

Her chin came up. People who'd known Pat Taylor for years, people who'd studied the subtleties of Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray with her, would not have recognized her now. ‘You think that makes him stronger than me? How strange;
I
think it makes him weaker.'

Shapiro could think of nothing more pointless than arguing morality with her. ‘I know what you did; I know pretty much how you did it. You could clarify a couple of matters.'

She no longer cared who knew what. She had more than half succeeded in what she'd set out to do. If that was something less than a triumph it was just enough to satisfy her need for vengeance. ‘Such as?'

She had phoned Mikey at home, pretended to be Liz Graham – whom she knew just well enough to convince someone who knew her no better – and arranged to meet him at Cornmarket at midnight. She already had a weapon, it had been lying in the boot of her car since the last time she covered for a missing sports teacher.

‘A baseball bat?' said Shapiro.

Mrs Taylor shook her head once, crisply. ‘Rounders.'

She put it in the boat at her landing. The clothes she needed for a cold night on the water were a perfect disguise, and the blood washed off easily. It took her twenty minutes to motor to Cornmarket. She saw no one except the derelicts by the fire.

Mikey arrived late. Pat Taylor was waiting inside the ruins of the Inland Navigation offices. They didn't exchange so much as a word. She let Mikey pass her, then felled him with a knock that would have won her a home run in the World Series.

‘And after that?' prompted Shapiro gently.

‘After that I hit him some more. I kept on hitting him till I couldn't lift the bat any more.' By then she believed Mikey Dickens was dead. Giving the fire a wide berth she walked back to her boat, taking the weapon with her, and went home.

Phase two, she admitted, involved a little homework. There were things she needed to know about Donovan before she could make him a convincing scapegoat. Fortunately, she worked with a man whose wife knew him well.

‘You must tell Brian Graham how helpful he was. He was always telling some new anecdote about his wife and her sergeant. I knew a lot about him already, it was easy enough to find out more. Where he lived, for instance.' That icy smile again. ‘I was lucky there. I'd have managed somehow if he'd lived at the top of a tower block, but it was so much easier that he lived on the canal too.'

She prepared the weapon, returned to Broad Wharf at a likely time and waited for Donovan to take his dog for a walk. The animal wouldn't ignore something as intriguing as the scent of a man's blood on a stick left by its own front door. The first time she waited in the motorboat but they didn't show up and she had to go home. The second time it worked like a charm.

She hadn't anticipated Roly Dickens finishing the job for her. She meant to wreck Donovan's career, maybe send him to prison. When she learned that Roly too had pieced the clues together and come to the desired conclusion, the idea that he might do to Donovan what she'd done to his precious son seemed like a miracle. It was so perfect it
had
to happen.

Her lip curled. ‘Now you tell me you've charged him with assault. I hoped he'd kill the bastard.'

‘If it's any comfort,' murmured Shapiro, ‘it's not your fault he didn't. He believed what you wanted him to; only in the end it wasn't enough for him to
do
what you wanted him to. He meant to, at least at the start. Fortunately, it's one thing committing murder in the white-heat of blind fury, quite another to stay angry enough for five hours. If Roly had really wanted Donovan dead he should have cut his throat when he found him asleep on Mikey's bed. It was always going to be harder after they'd talked.'

‘I wouldn't have found it harder,' said Mrs Taylor.

‘No?' Shapiro shrugged. ‘But you didn't risk finding out, did you? You weren't prepared to talk to him.'

‘I didn't think I could hide how I felt. And I had to, if I was going to do anything about it.'

‘Maybe you were worried about giving yourself away,' allowed Shapiro. ‘Or maybe you were worried that if you talked to him you'd realize he didn't deserve your enmity. He was just an ordinary man doing a difficult job the best way he knew. He never meant you any harm, as far as he knew he hadn't done you any. You couldn't talk to him because you couldn't afford to see him as another human being with hopes, fears and problems of his own. To do what you intended you had to demonize him, and real human beings don't make good demons.'

Pat Taylor lurched to her feet behind the table so abruptly that WPC Flynn took a step forward, ready to intervene. But she wasn't going anywhere. Her face was crimson with a rage that nothing she'd done, nothing that had happened, had in any way diminished. Pure atavistic savagery shone from her eyes. ‘They stole my baby,' she shouted, spit flying out with the words. ‘They stole my baby!' Shapiro had no doubt that if either of the men she blamed had been there she'd have tried to finish the job, with her teeth if no other weapon presented itself.

Shapiro shook his head, but there was no point trying to convince her. Taylor was right, she needed professional help; though how much good it would do remained to be seen. He sighed. ‘We'll need to get a statement at some point, but perhaps you'd like to rest now?'

She shrugged, returned to her chair. ‘I'm not tired.'

But Shapiro was. He needed some fresh air. Mostly, he needed to be out of that room.

He was doing Donovan's thing, strolling by the canal behind Queen's Street, when Sergeant Bolsover hailed him from a back window. ‘Phone, sir. It's the hospital.'

Roly Dickens had an appointment with the Magistrates that afternoon. Shapiro cancelled it. He helped the big man into his coat, waiting patiently while he went through the ritual of checking he had a handkerchief, his gloves and a scarf. It was displacement activity: if he did what he always did when he was going out, perhaps everything would be all right when he got back. Perhaps he wasn't really going to sit by a hospital bed and watch his youngest son struggle through his last few breaths.

‘Ready?' asked Shapiro.

‘Ready,' said Roly. Then he began to cry.

After a moment Shapiro stretched an arm around the broad, bowed shoulders and just stood with him as The Jubilee's answer to the Godfather sobbed brokenly into his spread hands.

Shapiro didn't want to rush him but there was a certain amount of urgency. As the great racking sobs abated, pity knotting up his stomach he patted Roly's arm. ‘Come on. Let's go and give Mikey a proper send-off. See him safely on his way.'

They went down to Shapiro's car together, and as they passed the busy building fell silent around them.

First published in 1998 by Macmillan

This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

ISBN 978-1-4472-3619-1 EPUB
ISBN 978-1-4472-3618-4 POD

Copyright © Jo Bannister, 1998

The right of Jo Bannister to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make restitution at the earliest opportunity.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The Macmillan Group has no responsibility for the information provided by any author websites whose address you obtain from this book (‘author websites').

The inclusion of author website addresses in this book does not constitute an endorsement by or association with us of such sites or the content, products, advertising or other materials presented on such sites.

This book remains true to the original in every way. Some aspects may appear out-of-date to modern-day readers. Bello makes no apology for this, as to retrospectively change any content would be anachronistic and undermine the authenticity of the original.

Bello has no responsibility for the content of the material in this book. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not constitute an endorsement by, or association with, us of the characterization and content.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Visit
www.panmacmillan.com
to read more about all our books
and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and
news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters

so that you're always first to hear about our new releases.