Broken Lines (7 page)

It wasn't altogether that looks were misleading, more that he knew he could afford no such self-indulgence. Sergeant Bolsover might cuff a lippy youth and everyone would nod and say, That's how it used to be done in the old days, and a lot less trouble we had then too! But Donovan wasn't a fat grandfather with a dozen ancestors in the parish churchyard, and it made a difference. Also, he knew that if he ever started down that route, one day he'd beat the living daylights out of someone. Donovan's temper was like another man's drinking: it was no problem as long as he didn't think he could stop at just one thump.

He looked hurt, but that too was part of the game. ‘I mean, in casual conversation. Nice day, how's the pigeons, and by the way who's got Mikey Dickens'stick-up kit?'

‘Is anyone in The Jubilee likely to tell you?'

Donovan gave a slow smile. ‘There's a couple of people owe me a favour, yeah.'

‘And I'd be wiser not asking how?' Shapiro shook his head wearily. ‘All right, Sergeant, if you think it's worth a shot go ahead. Try not to start a riot. The reality of life in The Jubilee is that, however close the nearest policeman, there's always a Dickens closer. No one who wants to go on living there can afford to take your side against Mikey.'

‘There's also the matter of tribal rivalries,' said Donovan. ‘The Dickenses may be top dogs now but there's others snapping at their heels. There's people in The Jubilee would be happy to see one less Dickens around the place. All I have to do is find one, and a nice dark corner to talk to him in.'

The Jubilee did not entirely deserve its reputation as a hot-bed of crime. Certainly the Dickenses lived there, three generations of them in half a dozen houses scattered among the six streets, and so did their rivals the Walshes. But a lot of decent people without connections to either family lived there too. They minded their own business, stayed off the street if trouble was brewing, and as long as they exercised a little discretion in who they talked to about what nobody bothered them. There were advantages. One was that The Jubilee was virtually a crime-free area, since those responsible for most of the crime elsewhere in Castlemere preferred not to bring work home.

There were six streets but only one way in. Jubilee Terrace was the last turning off Brick Lane before it ran into the dereliction of Cornmarket. Wags in The Ginger Pig reckoned that if you waited till the racing was on the telly and then walled up the junction you'd solve most of Castlemere's problems at a stroke. There was just enough truth in that to make it funny.

The second last turning off Brick Lane, on the other side, was the walkway through to Broad Wharf and Donovan's narrowboat
Tara.
Apart from Martin and Lucy Cole on the
James Brindley
, the denizens of The Jubilee were his nearest neighbours.

He thought about putting Brian Boru on the chain that served as his lead and taking the dog with him. In Brian's company he could walk with impunity into The Jubilee, downtown Beirut or the jaws of hell itself. On the other hand, it was hard to engage people in casual conversation when they kept counting their fingers. He took Brian for a run round Cornmarket, half a mile down the towpath, then left him in
Tara's
chain locker while he headed for The Jubilee alone.

What he was looking for was a fringe member of the Walsh clan. No one connected with the Dickenses would give him the time of day; neither would anyone without affiliations, for fear of attracting attention. Those associated with the Walsh family would be happy enough to see Mikey get his just deserts and would probably be happy enough to help, but might want to get approval from head office before saying anything. Gang wars had started with less provocation.

So Donovan wasn't looking for an official Walsh spokesman so much as a hanger-on who might talk faster than he thought, who might hear all the gossip mainly because nobody noticed him, and pass it on in the touchingly simple belief that anything that was bad for Dickenses had to be good for Walshes.

Such a man was Billy Dunne, and when Donovan saw the bent little figure shuffling down Coronation Row his heart rose. He faded back into the shadows at the corner of Jubilee Terrace, where a broken light had been awaiting replacement for three years to his knowledge, and waited for the characteristic tap-drag of Billy's progress to reach him.

Billy Dunne may have had his collar felt more times than any man living, even Kevin Tufnall, but never before as he walked round a dark street corner a hundred yards from home. He let out a squawk they could have heard in The Fen Tiger, which was undoubtedly where he was heading now.

It wasn't the most auspicious beginning to a discreet chat. ‘Jesus, Billy,' exclaimed Donovan disgustedly, ‘have you got a guilty conscience or what?'

‘Mr Donovan?' Equal quantities of relief and alarm warred in Billy's creaky voice as he peered into the darkness. He thought at first that he'd been jumped by something nasty, then that it was a policeman, then and finally that being jumped by that particular policeman
was
pretty nasty. He tried frantically to remember if he'd been up to anything Donovan could have found out about.

Donovan had thought he'd keep Billy company as far as The Fen Tiger, where Castlemere's four canals met in a near-subterranean basin near the centre of town. But if Billy Dunne had to talk to a policeman, and he didn't seem to have much option, he preferred to do it in the shadows. He stood his ground nervously. ‘Was you looking for me, Mr Donovan?'

‘I was,' said Donovan. ‘Matter of fact, Billy, I thought you could help me with something.'

The words confirmed Billy's worst fears. When the police asked for your help, without arresting you first, it was the kiss of death to a man in Billy's position. If you couldn't or wouldn't help they never forgot it; if you could and did, everybody you knew crossed you off their Christmas list. Billy replied with a tragic little sigh.

Donovan chuckled. ‘Don't sound so worried, I'm not going to get you in trouble. I just wondered what you'd heard about this gun of Mikey Dickens's.'

Those were the magic words that freed Billy's tongue. The muscles of his jaw, that would have clamped tight at the word Walsh, immediately relaxed. He thought he was off the hook. He thought he could get Donovan off his back without calling the fires of hell down on him.

All the same, life had taught Billy Dunne to be cautious. ‘Gun, Mr Donovan?'

Donovan's lupine smile was rather wasted in the dark, though Billy shivered anyway, from habit. ‘Gun, Billy. The gun he held up Ash Kumani with. The gun he threw away shortly before I caught up with him. The gun his entire bloody family turned out to look for. That gun.'

Billy tried to sound as if he had just this second understood what Donovan was driving at. ‘Oh –
that's
what they were doing, is it? I knew there was something going on, I didn't know just what.'

Donovan fought the unreasonable, and unhygienic, urge to kiss him. ‘Yeah, that's what it was. They wanted to find Mikey's gun before we did. They did, too. They must have been at it for hours.'

‘They were, Mr Donovan. I heard them all setting off about five o'clock yesterday morning – there must have been a dozen cars, maybe more. Then around eight they were back, all laughing and inviting one another in for a drink. Old Roly' – Roland Dickens, Thelma's eldest and Mikey's father – ‘was acting the dog.'

‘The dog?' This was one piece of Jubilee argot Donovan hadn't heard before. ‘What dog?'

Billy smiled slowly. ‘You know, Mr Donovan. The dog that got the cat that got the cream.'

Donovan let him continue on his way. There probably wasn't much he could add, and if Donovan thought of something more to ask he knew where to find him.

So Roly organized the great gun hunt, after he got back from seeing Mikey in the hospital. That figured. If any of the clan had been in a hole it would have been Roly digging them out. The man was an icon to those who mourned the passing of Victorian values, a paterfamilias who had bred copiously and raised his children to follow in his footsteps. Even now they were grown and some were raising children of their own he continued to keep a close eye on all their doings, the rock to which they clung if danger threatened. Admittedly, what they mostly needed his help with was avoiding being locked up on charges ranging from shoplifting to armed robbery. But nothing was too much trouble for this acme of family men: father, grandfather and Godfather.

But knowing who had the gun and finding it were two different things. On what he knew now Donovan could get a search warrant, and strip Roly's house in George Street down to the bricks. And he would find nothing. He might, just, get the warrant extended to cover other properties owned by the Dickens family, and he would find nothing there too.

The gun might already have gone – into the canal or a landfill site somewhere, or off the stern of a cross-channel ferry on an away day to Calais. If you wanted rid of something as small as a gun, that was easy enough, and if Mikey Dickens had killed someone with the weapon that would surely have been its fate. But he hadn't. The resources of a murder hunt wouldn't be devoted to finding it, and a gun has an intrinsic value in criminal circles: not even the cost of a new one so much as the risks involved in acquiring it. Dealers in unlicensed weapons hazard their freedom and their lives every day, and it makes them paranoid. If they have any doubts about your bona fides they don't just run, they shoot you and then run. Donovan had arrested people buying unlicensed arms who'd been positively relieved to find he was a policeman and not another trigger-happy dealer.

So if the gun could be kept safe until it was wanted again, that's what Roly would do. Send it to ground; and not with another Dickens or a known Dickens associate. It could be anywhere. He could have gone out with a trowel and a plastic bag and buried it in a corner of someone's allotment. Unless Roly could be persuaded to say where, it would never be found.

Donovan was about to leave when he heard the motorbike. There was an extraordinary
déjà vu
moment in which he thought it was his bike and therefore him riding down through The Jubilee; though common sense intervened quickly it didn't quite wipe out the absurd chill of that. Shaking his head to dislodge the sensation – he was an imaginative man, born of an imaginative race; a certain amount of creativity was valuable in a detective but not so much that he found himself wondering if he had his own permission to be riding his own motorbike – he turned to see where the sound was coming from.

The machine emerged from George Street into the upper part of Jubilee Terrace. There were enough surviving street lights up there to send a constellation of glints and gleams bouncing off the black and chrome of a Kawasaki 400 in show-room condition.

A bike like that didn't belong in The Jubilee. Not because none of the inhabitants could afford it – rob enough garages and you can afford most things – but because if it had belonged there Donovan would have known. If that bike lived anywhere in Castlemere Donovan would have known. He went to the office window at the sound of a bike engine the way other people respond to the sound of a band in the street.

And if it didn't live here, the chances were – this being The Jubilee – it had been stolen. In London, maybe, and brought here in the belief that no one would know. Donovan might not have noticed if someone had come out of George Street wearing the Crown Jewels, but he always noticed bikes.

The rider was dressed like most bikers, in black leathers with a full-face helmet. He wasn't a big man: if Mikey Dickens hadn't been
hors de combat
Donovan might have thought it was him. Except that he rode that bike with a finesse which was not the first quality you associated with Mikey or any of his family. Respect, thought Donovan – for the machine, for what it could do.

All the same, the mere fact of its being here raised enough reasonable suspicion for a conscientious policeman to stop it and seek an explanation. And maybe talk grommits and big ends for a while. As the bike crossed Coronation Row and slowed to turn into Brick Lane Donovan stepped out of the shadows into the middle of the road, one hand up in the prescribed fashion.

The Kawasaki was too well-bred for its brakes to squeal but it kicked a couple of little fish-tails as it came to a halt. Muffled by the tinted perspex, the tirade of abuse from inside the helmet may have lost some of its highlights but Donovan still got ‘cretin'and ‘bonehead'and (probably) ‘sucker'.

‘All right, sonny,' he growled, ‘you want to tell me about the friend of a friend who didn't at all mind you borrowing his wheels while he was in Benidorm?'

‘And another thing,' snarled the rider, unintimidated, throwing off the helmet so that a river of red-gold hair flowed down one black leather shoulder: – ‘don't call me sonny!'

Donovan didn't believe in love at first sight. If asked he would have said he didn't believe in love; though this was nonsense, all Irishmen are romantics, it's why they write such wonderful songs about all the battles they've lost. But either way, a beautiful girl on a Kawasaki 400 was a dream come true. Donovan felt his jaw drop and closed it. He felt his eyes smart and blinked. Finally he remembered he was still standing in the middle of the road with one hand up and he let it fall. ‘Er – hi,' he said inanely.

‘I
said
,' repeated the girl, her voice steely with exasperation, ‘what do you want that's worth risking both our lives for?'

‘I think I was going to make a big mistake,' admitted Donovan. ‘I was going to ask if you'd any right to be riding that bike.'

Even outside the shadow there wasn't a lot of light, but what there was gathered in the pale oval of her face. Enough to show the flash of indignation in her eyes tum first to an appreciation of the compliment and then to amusement. ‘That would have been a mistake,' she nodded. Unmuffled by the helmet, her voice had the clear carrying quality of struck crystal. ‘Anyway, what business is it of yours?'