Broken Lines (19 page)

Following the divorce he'd moved into a terrace of old stone cottages behind the castle. They had mullioned windows and little porches, and narrow front gardens down to a gate in the picket fence.

She'd phoned ahead so he was waiting for her, wrapped in a tartan wool dressing-gown like one of Lucy Cole's illustrations. ‘I don't like the way this is shaping up.'

‘That's why I thought I'd better get you out of bed.'

It wasn't the most serious incident of public disorder either had ever dealt with. But more important than a few broken windows on a narrow boat were the implications.

‘They're blaming Donovan for what happened to Mikey.'

Liz shrugged. ‘Somebody's gone to a lot of trouble to make sure they do. They'd have to be pretty dim not to have put it together by now.'

‘Who was behind it? Vinnie Barker?'

‘No way. He probably went along with it – that's probably where he was when I went to his house, out with his mates gathering missiles and Dutch courage – but it wouldn't occur to him to organize something like that.'

‘Roly, then.'

‘According to his mum he's spending all his time at the hospital. More likely friends of his, out to show some solidarity.'

‘By heaving bricks through Donovan's windows.'

Liz grimaced. ‘That may not be what they went there for. I think we should be glad Donovan wasn't home tonight.'

‘He can't ride his bike round East Anglia forever. Tomorrow or the next day he'll be back, and he'll walk into a lot of bad feeling he's not expecting. Maybe I should put the number of the bike on the wire so anyone seeing him can warn him what's happened. He doesn't have to go home, particularly if he knows the dog's being cared for; he can go straight to Queen's Street.'

‘Do you really think they'd take a swing at him?'

Shapiro gave a tartan shrug. ‘They didn't find those bricks lying around on Broad Wharf, they armed themselves before they went. When they were still expecting to find him on board.'

‘Then they think he's guilty.'

‘It's a reasonable conclusion. On the evidence we have, the question is why
we
don't believe he's guilty.'

‘But we don't,' said Liz. ‘Do we?'

‘It's getting harder,' admitted Shapiro. ‘But even if you forget that this is a man we know, that we don't think would behave that way, you're left with two good arguments against. All the things that don't fit, and all the things that fit too well.'

‘What if we're wrong?' asked Liz softly.

‘If we're wrong, I will throw every book I possess at him, starting with Archbold and proceeding in diminishing order of size to
The Politician's Guide to Ethics
.'

Donovan rode through the dark and the intermittent flare of headlights until the gauge showed he was low on petrol. He found an all-night garage and then rode some more. The miles and the hours hummed past. At some point the traffic thinned to a hard core of long-distance lorries and the occasional utility vehicle; sometime after that he started seeing milkmen. He had only a vague idea where he was. The silent villages hardly impinged on his consciousness, and even small towns came and went in a handful of junctions where nothing challenged his right of way. He wouldn't have been amazed to see either Brighton Pavilion or Blackpool Tower twinkling at him out of the night.

It wasn't that he was going anywhere. It wasn't even that he needed time to think; in fact, riding his bike was an antidote to the unproductive merry-go-round thinking that swamped his head. At home, trying to read, trying to watch television, trying to catch up on the maintenance that was a constant factor in owning an elderly boat, so worried that nothing from outside the claustrophobic triangle of Broad Wharf, The Jubilee and Cornmarket could reach him, so full of resentment he wanted to fight with the very people – the only people – who could help, the hours would have dragged and each one brought him closer to an indiscretion that would finally nail the lid on his career. On the open road they flew by, and if he achieved nothing for all the miles he covered at least he wasn't making things worse.

By degrees, though, the darkness, the cold and the freedom from thought instilled the beginnings of calm in his mind, and calm was a foundation on which useful things could be constructed. He found himself considering, with a detachment he had not been capable of before, whether this flight into the dark – which had been necessary and therapeutic when he embarked on it – hadn't by now achieved all it was going to. He had never fled his enemies in the past and would not have people think he was running away now. On top of which, the only place any of this could be resolved was back in Castlemere. He had friends there as well as enemies; and even if he hadn't, he had work to do there.

The first time he saw a signpost to anywhere he recognized, he turned for home.

Early in the New Year six-thirty in the morning seems like the middle of the night. It's pitch black and the coldest part of the day. Even in built-up areas the streets are virtually empty; and the curtained windows of the houses are dark. At six-thirty this January morning in Castle Place it was as if the Martians had landed, and the only person who hadn't been told was Muriel Watkins.

Mrs Watkins owned the paper shop. Over the door it said ‘Paper Chase'but throughout Castlemere it was known as Muriel's. The only thing that had been there longer was the castle. Mrs Watkins was sixty-three now, and had bought the shop before she was thirty. She still opened seven days a week at seven o'clock, which meant arriving at six-thirty in order to take in the deliveries, sort the orders and organize the paper rounds.

As the first person up and about in Castle Place, Mrs Watkins had seen some things in her time. She had picked her way over snoring drunks in her doorway. She had crabbed in sideways to avoid noticing cars with the front seats reclined bouncing up and down beside the kerb. She had found unwanted dogs tied to her railings, and unwanted curries plastered across her glass.

She had never before found an armed robber waiting patiently for her to open up.

Her first thought was that he was a dosser who'd slept in her doorway, though with only an anorak and a woolly hat for protection the icy tiles should have stolen the life from him during the night. Then she thought he might be an early customer. ‘I don't really open for half an hour,' she said; then, relenting, ‘But if there's something particular you need—?'

There was, but it wasn't something she sold. As she unlocked the door he followed her inside, and when she turned to serve him she met the blank stare of a gun.

Mrs Watkins had never been held up before. Paper Chase wasn't the sort of high turnover business that attracted thieves; not ambitious ones, anyway. Perhaps it was the sort of business that novice robbers cut their teeth on. Taken aback as she was, Mrs Watkins could hardly fail to notice how the gun shook in the gloved hand.

‘Empty the till!' said the man, and his teeth chattered with cold and nerves.

Muriel Watkins eyed him in disbelief. ‘It's six-thirty in the morning. There's nothing in the till.'

‘What?' It simply hadn't occurred to him that robbing a shop first thing in the morning he was unlikely to get more than enough loose coins to change the first ten pound note. He had to think quickly. ‘Then open the safe.'

‘I don't have a safe.'

Kevin Tufnall, for it was he, felt sweat break out under the pulled-down brim of his woolly hat and wiped the back of a hand across his brow, coming within an ace of shooting himself in the eye. It was vital not to panic. All right, armed robbery was a new departure for him, but how difficult could it be? Luck had presented him with a weapon to use – as he understood it, you pointed it at people and they did as you said. They didn't, particularly if they were little old ladies with grey hair scraped into a bun, stand there looking you up and down as if you were something the cat dragged in.

He looked round desperately. Paper Chase was a tobacconist as well as a paper shop: his eye lit with relief on the shelves of cigarettes. There was a ready market for those, wasn't there? ‘All right. All right. I'll take the smokes; Put them in a bag.'

Mrs Watkins knew that no one with any sense argued with a man pointing a gun. So what if she lost a few hundred pounds worth of tobacco? – that was what insurance was for. No one would expect her to have a go at an armed robber. She was sixty-three and five-foot-one, and a stiff breeze made her tack across Castle Place like a sailing dinghy. She was the perfect muggee, except for one thing. The small spare frame of Muriel Watkins contained the heart of a lion, and a bad-tempered lion at that. Her very eyebrows bristled. ‘Certainly not. And you can stop waving that thing in my face as well!'

What happened next depended on who you asked. According to Kevin, she leapt on him like a fury, snatched the gun and flung it across the shop, then beat him about the head with her bony little fists. According to Muriel, she knocked the weapon aside and Kevin dropped it, and as he went to recover it he banged his forehead on the edge of the counter. Either way, the great paper shop robbery ended with the robber sitting on the floor nursing his head while the robbee phoned the police.

When Liz heard there'd been a stick-up in Castle Place and the perpetrator had been arrested, her first thought was that Mikey's accomplice was going solo. Her hopes soared. Armed robbery was not so common a crime in Castlemere that the odds were absurdly long. If he was also responsible for Mikey's present condition and she could charge him, she could get word to The Jubilee and Donovan could come home.

All that evaporated when she saw the name on the charge sheet. ‘Kevin Tufnall? He's doing armed robberies now?'

‘Not very well,' said the Custody Officer. ‘Muriel Watkins beat him up.'

The facts of the case were simple enough, and except for precisely how he was disarmed Kevin did not dispute them. Liz thought he was glad to be off the street and in a warm cell. What did concern her was the gun.

‘Where did you get it, Kevin? You've never carried a gun before.'

‘I found it.'

It wasn't a very original defence. What was novel about it was that, this time, it was probably true. Kevin hadn't the money to buy it or the nerve to steal it. ‘Found it where?'

Kevin gave her a hunted look. ‘Don't tell him.'

‘Tell who?' She wasn't trying to trap him, she was genuinely having trouble following this conversation.

‘I didn't steal it, I only borrowed it. I was going to put it back/ before he wanted it again. Only now—' There was no point in finishing the sentence. Clearly the gun would not be put back now.

‘Whose is it, Kevin? Where did you find it?'

Kevin heaved a vast lugubrious sigh. ‘That garage in Brick Lane. Where he keeps tools and stuff. Where he used to keep that dog. It was sleeting down, I was that bloody cold, and he hadn't locked up properly and I thought I'd get in out of the weather. I knew he didn't keep the dog there no more. There was some dust-sheets and things and I was going to sleep there. Then I thought' – the eyes came up, shiftily – ‘there might be something to eat, so I had a bit of a look round. And I found that.'

He hadn't been looking for something to eat, he'd been looking for something to sell. What he'd found was something that would help him steal something to sell.

Liz still didn't know what garage he was talking about, though she was plainly supposed to. Had the gun been secreted on a Dickens property after all? Had Roly double-thought them and put it where they'd assume he'd have more sense than to put it? ‘Which garage, Kevin? The lock-ups in Brick Lane? Which one – who rents it?'

Kevin couldn't decide if she was being dim or devious. His whipped-dog gaze took on a faintly irritated cast. ‘He shouldn't have had that, Mrs Graham. You're not supposed to have them, not unless they've been Issued. And even if it was, it shouldn't have been left lying around in a garage where anyone could find it.'

‘Anyone capable of breaking in, anyway,' amended Liz absent-mindedly. ‘Kevin – who exactly are we talking about? You're right, it shouldn't have been lying around in a garage, but whose garage in particular should it not have been lying around in?'

He was going to answer, he was just working up to it; but before he got there Liz knew what he was going to say. The garage – the tools – the dog that wasn't there any more – the gun that should have been Issued … He wasn't talking about Roly Dickens. He was talking about—

‘Donovan's?'

Half-way through conveying this latest bit of bad news Liz realized Shapiro wasn't reading the same things into it that she was. It was nothing he said, just the expression on his face at different points. He wasn't worried enough. At times he seemed grimly amused.

She frowned. ‘What? What have you spotted that I've missed?'

He had the grace to look faintly apologetic. ‘Sorry. But isn't it stretching probability a bit thin to blame Donovan for every crime in town?'

‘I'm not!' She blinked. ‘Am I? I'm not saying he held up Muriel's–I'm saying Kevin Tufnall did it, using the gun he found in Donovan's lock-up. And he's right, Donovan has no business keeping a gun there. Or anywhere else, come to that.'

‘What makes you think it's Donovan's?'

Her eyebrows lowered suspiciously. ‘What makes
you
think it isn't?'

‘You only think it might be because you also think he might have hit Mikey with a baseball bat. But if he had a gun we knew nothing about, why did he need the bat at all?'

‘You think Kevin's lying? Frank, I don't think Kevin Tufnall has the mental capacity to lie.'

‘On the contrary, I'm sure he found the gun where he said he did – rooting around in Donovan's garage. Which wasn't locked properly. Does that sound like Donovan?'