Broken Lines (6 page)

‘He
hasn't
still got it,' insisted Donovan, because he doesn't exist! There was only ever Mikey. I know, I never saw his face. But if you smell pig, and something pig-shaped runs you down and leaves trotter-prints up your cardigan, you don't need to see the face to know it was a pig.

‘It was Mikey's size and Mikey's shape, it was wearing Mikey's coat and doing what Mikey does in the characteristically vicious way that Mikey does it. Then it burnt rubber in Mikey's van, and when it crashed – away to buggery! – there was Mikey behind the wheel. It was
all
Mikey, there
was
no one else. He dumped the gun because he didn't want to be caught with it on him. The rest of it, this other man, he made it up. If there'd been a gun in his ribs that's the first thing he'd have said when I pulled him out the van. You would, wouldn't you? – It wasn't my fault, guv, it was the other feller made me do it. If there'd been another man, Mikey'd have said so.'

‘Maybe he would,' said Shapiro grimly. ‘Except—'

It wasn't often that Donovan failed to follow where his chief was leading. But he lost the trail this time. ‘Except what?'

Shapiro glowered at him. ‘Except that he was never properly cautioned about the consequences of not doing so.'

The Taylors had a cottage on the Castlemere Canal a mile or so from Chevening village. Even with the directions she'd been given Liz had trouble finding it. She passed the farm lane twice before realizing it was the turning she needed and not just the way to some barn or byre. Leaving the road she drove through the eerie flatness of The Levels with not a house, not a car, not even a tractor in sight.

Then suddenly she was there, a little stand of willows screening the cottage until the glint of water at the end of the lane had already brought her to a halt.

There was no car in front of the house, which might have meant there was no one at home or just that the Taylors hadn't yet replaced the white saloon. Liz rang the bell and waited, and was at length rewarded by footsteps in the hall.

‘Mrs Taylor? I don't expect you remember me – I'm Brian Graham's wife, we've met at the school.'

Patricia Taylor nodded, politely enough but without warmth: either she wasn't sure who her visitor was or she didn't care.

Liz pressed on. ‘Actually, I'm here in my official capacity, as a Detective Inspector.' She produced her warrant card, mostly from habit. ‘About the crash.'

‘I made a statement.'

‘Yes. I hoped we could talk a bit more about it now the dust's had time to settle.'

Mrs Taylor showed her to a chintzy sitting room that enjoyed the winter sun and a view across the canal to the endless vista of The Levels beyond – a sort of Dutch landscape that made the ordeal of bouncing up a farm track eminently worthwhile. She took a chair and gestured Liz to the sofa. ‘I don't know if I can add anything to what I've already said.'

She was a year or two younger than Liz, her nose up against the great watershed of forty. She was dark and erect, with a reserved manner that earlier generations would have considered properly school-marmish. In today's educational climate it set her apart from those of her colleagues who taught in sweatshirts and trainers.

‘How are you feeling now?'

Pat Taylor's dark eyes widened as if she considered the inquiry slightly impertinent. Then she seemed to realize it was just part of the process. ‘All right, I suppose. Bruised – I've got the marks of the seat-belt printed right across me. Shaken, of course. The hospital said there was no damage done so I suppose I should be grateful. I could be dead. I could be a vegetable!' She heard her voice climbing and fell abruptly silent.

Liz nodded gently. ‘I know. It makes you feel so vulnerable, doesn't it? It makes you think you'll never be safe outside your own front door again.' Liz wasn't talking about a car crash but she was talking from personal experience. ‘But it does pass. First it fades a little, so it's somehow less intrusive, less disabling. Then you notice that you've gone a whole afternoon without thinking about it, then a whole day. And then it takes its place in history. You don't forget, but you get past it and move on. Thank God it was only the car you lost, not a member of your family.'

Mrs Taylor managed a wan smile. ‘I'm sorry. You must think I'm behaving very badly.'

‘Don't be silly. You had a brush with death, of course you're shocked. It'll take time to find your feet again. But you must have driven an awful lot of miles when nobody trashed your car, and it's most unlikely anything like it will ever happen to you again.'

‘Who was he?' She didn't say who she meant; she didn't have to.

‘I don't expect you'd know him. He's only a young lad, but he's got quite a track record. There was a robbery at the garage on Cambridge Road, he may have been involved in that. My sergeant gave chase, and he seems to have been more interested in getting away than winning awards for his driving. You were just very unlucky.'

‘Your sergeant,' echoed Mrs Taylor. ‘The tall man, who came over to me after the crash?'

‘Yes, that's Donovan.'

‘He said he couldn't get me out. He said I had to wait.'

‘It was the safest thing to do.'

‘He got that little thug out of his van!'

‘With the van on fire the risk of compounding an injury was irrelevant. If he'd waited for the experts there'd have been only a body to recover.'

‘I wish—' She heard herself saying it and stopped. ‘No. Sorry. Was he all right?'

‘They're both all right, give or take a few cuts and bruises. Now we're trying to establish exactly what happened – just who was responsible for just what.'

Mrs Taylor's eyes flared. ‘I hope nobody's saying any of this was my fault! I was already half-way round the roundabout. I heard him coming, I knew he was going too fast, but I thought he'd stop at the broken line. He couldn't have missed seeing me. There was nothing
I
could do – if I'd braked he'd still have hit me.'

‘Mrs Taylor, nobody's suggesting you could have done anything more,' Liz said quickly. ‘Like you say, he should have stopped at the line. Once he came over it, at that speed, the accident was inevitable. It's just a miracle nobody died.'

‘Then I don't understand. What else do you need to ask me?'

Liz went carefully. She didn't want to be accused of putting answers in a witness's mouth, particularly when she was the only witness they had. ‘When you saw the van coming at you, did you get a proper look at it?'

‘Where else would I be looking?' Mrs Taylor frowned. ‘If he's saying it was someone else who hit me, he can think again. It happened quickly, but not so fast that I couldn't see what it was running me down. It was a small red van and it hit me amidships. There was no one else in sight.'

‘That's right, Donovan was still coming through the S-bend – the crash had happened by the time he got there. Certainly it was the van that hit you, that isn't disputed.'

‘Then what is?'

Liz didn't answer directly. ‘It was a two-seater van. Did you see if there was a passenger?'

Her lips made little puzzled shapes as Mrs Taylor considered. ‘There was someone else in the van? Someone who didn't get out?'

Again Liz reassured her. ‘The van was empty when it blew up. Our Scenes Of Crime Officer would have known if anyone had been left behind – it doesn't matter how fierce the fire, you can always recognize a body. No, the suggestion's been made that someone may have been inside earlier, and we're trying to establish when he left, before the accident or afterwards.'

‘Don't call it that,' said Mrs Taylor.

‘What?'

‘An accident. It wasn't an accident. An accident is something that cannot be predicted or prevented. What happened was the inevitable consequence of deliberate actions. An accident is an accident regardless of the outcome, but if he'd killed me that boy would have been guilty of manslaughter.'

All right, she taught English, the precise usage of words probably held greater significance for her than for the population at large. It was still odd to insist on something so trivial.

But then, less than forty-eight hours ago this woman was hanging in the straps of her seat-belt as her car rolled down the road like a nine-pin in a bowling alley. She was traumatized, her reactions would be unpredictable for a while. She'd faced death close enough to smell it and nothing would be quite the same again. There were things she would have to relearn, and one was that basically the world was a pretty safe place, there was no need to be afraid all the time; and another was which things mattered and which didn't.

In just a second or two her existence had been turned, quite literally, upside down and all the old certainties had been shaken. There would be times when shaving death in a car crash seemed almost banal; and in the next breath she would burst into tears because there were no chocolate digestives left in the biscuit-tin. In time she would pick up the rhythm of her life once more, but a bad accident is a little like a minor stroke, it creates little gaps in the record, little question marks where none were before.

‘So – did you see who was in the van?' prompted Liz gently.

‘I saw the driver. I'm not sure I could identify him. His mouth was open and his eyes were staring, but I suppose I looked pretty much the same to him. He had a dark coat on, and a dark woolly hat – his face looked very white between them.' She forced a chuckle. ‘I imagine mine did too.'

‘What about the passenger? Was there one?'

Mrs Taylor had to think longer about that. ‘I'm not sure. I can't picture a second face, not the way I can the driver's, but I couldn't swear there wasn't one. Oh God,' she sighed then, ‘it's such a jumble. You'd think it would be the clearest thing in the world, wouldn't you, we were only a few feet apart and I knew he was going to hit me. But I couldn't pick the driver out of a line-up, and I can't even say if he was alone in the van. I'm sorry, Mrs Graham, I'm not being much help, am I?'

Liz smiled. ‘I need to know what you remember, not what might have been but then again might not. There are no right answers, only accurate ones. If you say you don't remember, or you're not sure, then I can look for the answers elsewhere. People trying so hard to be helpful that they end up misleading us are the real problem.'

‘Didn't your sergeant see who was in the van?' ‘Not in the period we're talking about. Never mind, we may find someone else who did – someone crossing the road or driving in the opposite direction. We'll make enquiries.' As she went to leave she added, ‘It's just possible that in another day or two you'll have a clearer image of events than you have now. If that happens, if at some point you're pretty sure either that there was someone else in the van or there wasn't, would you give me a call?'

‘Yes, of course.' Pat Taylor glanced at her watch. ‘I'm sorry but I must go now – I've got a hospital appointment.'

‘I'm going back to town, can I give you a lift?' ‘Thank you, but no. The taxi's on its way.'

The search party combed every inch of roadside between Kumani's garage and the Chevening roundabout, and found nothing. At first they concentrated on the verge which would have been on Mikey's right as he drove. Unsuccessful there, they extended the search to include the left hand verge and as far to the right as a good shot-putter could have lobbed a handgun. Still they found nothing.

Shapiro called them off at midday. Superintendent Giles wanted his uniforms back for other duties, DC Scobie was needed in court and, estimable as he was in many ways, DC Morgan could not conduct a finger-tip search of three miles of hedgerow on his own.

Donovan ambushed him as he came in. ‘Nothing?'

‘Sorry, Serg. Did our best.' It sounded like real dismay, but actually Dick Morgan always talked as if someone had spilt ketchup on his cornflakes. It was his Fenland genes, lugubrious and pessimistic: soon it will be autumn and how shall we live through the winter?

‘I know. What do you reckon – any point me pushing for another go?'

Morgan thought for a moment then shook his head. ‘Somebody beat us to it.'

That was what Donovan thought too. ‘No prizes for guessing who.
We
might have trouble mustering enough people to search for a missing gun but I bet half The Jubilee's been walking up and down that road.' Glencurran, where Donovan came from, was four hundred miles north-west of the Fens but the local character shared the same peaty bleakness. Donovan might have been a square peg in a round hole in Castlemere, but he'd have found no hole at all anywhere else.

He gave a perfunctory tap on Shapiro's door as he went in. ‘Bugger-all, then?'

Shapiro eyed him with disfavour. ‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Sorry, sir. Um – the search of Cambridge Road and Chevening Moss Road appears to have met with no great success, sir. Specifically, the weapon being sought has not proved amenable to discovery. Sir.'

Shapiro sighed. ‘Sergeant, one of the few things more alarming than you in a bad mood is you attempting to be funny. Is that the sort of thing that passes for humour in Glencurran?'

‘Wouldn't know, sir,' Donovan said woodenly. ‘The last man who made a joke there got his head blown off.'

Frank Shapiro, who hailed from the close-knit Jewish community of north London, always thought his people had an odd sense of humour. But if Donovan was at all typical they couldn't hold a candle to an Ulster Catholic.

‘I was thinking I might go for a nosy round The Jubilee. If Mikey's dad did organize a Hunt-the-Luger party somebody might let it slip in casual conversation.'

‘You mean, with your finger up his nostril?' Shapiro was joking now. Despite appearances – and Donovan could put the fear of God into someone who'd only come to Queen's Street to hand in lost property – he had no history of violence, towards suspects or anyone else.