A Bleeding of Innocents (10 page)

The motorbike which Liz had missed from Rosedale Avenue was propped outside the Fen Tiger in the centre of Castlemere. Propped in a dark corner between the door and the dartboard, Donovan, with his dark clothes and his dark eyes and his black helmet thumped down on the table in front of him, was a brooding presence that put the other customers off their beer. He looked as if he was drinking hard and might soon become violent. More than one of them, thinking he was under surveillance, finished his drink quickly and left. Among them were regulars who thought he was still a policeman.

After half an hour of this the barman quietly lifted the phone and called his boss.

Donovan wasn't watching anybody. He knew the regulars at the Fen Tiger as well as they knew him, could make a good guess at what nefarious activities each was involved in and why each left when he did. He didn't care. Donovan was a private citizen again. They could have sold drugs, compared knuckledusters, and pored over obscene photographs with complete impunity. Probably he wouldn't have noticed. Donovan wasn't watching, he was listening.

He was listening for a voice. He'd only heard it once and hadn't been firing on all cylinders then. But it had become of vital importance to him to find the owner of that voice, and he believed the way to do it was by haunting all the places where Jack Carney met people.

So he was drinking in Carney's pub – or rather Carney's wife's pub: Carney himself would have had problems convincing a magistrate of his suitability to hold the licence. He'd had a long coffee break – actually it was breakfast and lunch combined – at the Spotted Dick, Carney's canal-side café. He'd been to enquire about membership at the Castlemere Country Club (prop. John Carney), and he thought tomorrow he'd ask Carney Motors about spares for his bike.

Sooner or later one of three things would happen. He'd hear the voice of the man who got out of the car that killed Alan Clarke. Carney would get rattled enough by his hanging round – you couldn't call it harassment, pubs were for drinking in, cafés for eating in, and anyway it was hard to prove harassment by someone who was not now a policeman – to make a mistake: to threaten him, perhaps, or set McMeekin on him. Or another car would come speeding out of the night and leave Donovan's blood smeared along a wall and his body broken in a gutter, and Shapiro would have another crime to investigate. If he couldn't nail Carney for anything else, maybe he could nail him for that.

Liz took what Perrin had said back to her office and mulled it over. She found him a credible witness. He had no axe to grind. Another man might have hated Page for marrying the woman he loved but not Perrin. He was so clearly homosexual she'd hardly felt the need to ask; but when she did, for the record, he confirmed it without hesitation or rancour. He had loved Kerry without the desire for possession; he was content for her to be happy with Page. He had no reason to accuse the man of killing her.

Nor had he done so. Liz doubted if the possibility had occurred to him. But Perrin had supplied Page with a motive; they had always known he had an opportunity, and he might have had the means. It was time to talk to him again, at the police station this time.

When he found himself the only customer left in the Fen Tiger Donovan gave up. Nothing more was going to happen today. He'd come back tomorrow, at lunchtime, when the place was full of people talking and he could pass unnoticed for a while. He was somewhere, the man who'd killed DI Clarke and tried to kill him. He was somewhere, he probably took a drink and he wasn't a Trappist monk. Some day, somewhere – in this bar or another one or another of Jack Carney's little earners – Donovan would hear his voice again.

But not today. He was ready for home. It was only mid-afternoon but his bones ached. He'd made a start. Carney would know by now what he was doing. Today he would be puzzled, tomorrow amused, when it was still going on the next day he'd be getting irritated and some time after that he'd have to act. A man like Carney couldn't work in a spotlight. If Donovan watched every move he made, the people he needed to see would be either avoiding him or laughing at him, both fatal to his authority. Whether or not he wanted to, Carney would have to deal with Donovan sometime.

Outside McMeekin was waiting for him, his suited backside resting casually on the seat of the motorbike, his legs crossed elegantly at the ankle. He wore a mildly pained expression. ‘Sergeant Donovan, what are you doing here?'

Donovan eyed him for a moment longer, then looked up at the hostelry sign hanging out over the street. ‘Having a drink.'

‘You're frightening the customers away.'

‘I noticed that,' said Donovan. ‘Touchy, aren't they? Anyone'd think they had something to hide.'

McMeekin spoke carefully. ‘I think they're afraid of being pinned in a corner and told some rambling tale about crossbows and albatrosses.'

Donovan grinned at that. He quite saw himself as a character invented by a poet on opium. He thought it would explain a lot. ‘Who is he, McMeekin? You know, don't you?'

‘Who?'

‘The driver. The mechanic Carney hired to take out DI Clarke. And old Lucy. Did he kill Lucy as well? Why? What was it she knew, what was she going to show me? And how did you hear about it? Or – wait a minute.' His tone quickened with understanding. ‘She didn't know anything, did she? She was just the bait. You had your hit-man in place, all you needed was to get Alan and me to where he could get a clear run at us. Lucy was just the means. But you still killed her. Did they let you do her, Terry? Practice on an old bag-lady so maybe you could manage a man next time?'

McMeekin shook his head sadly. ‘You're raving, Donovan. That knock on the head. You want to go home, put your feet up, take some time off. You could end up back in hospital if you don't let it heal properly. You could end up dead.'

Donovan grinned wolfishly. ‘You threatening me, Terry?'

McMeekin was disdainful. ‘Be your age, Donovan. But we've all heard of it happening. You get a knock on the head, seem to make a good recovery, then a week later you run after a bus and your brain explodes. Very nasty.'

Donovan looked at the pub again. Since he'd left a couple of people had strayed back. ‘Well, don't count on it happening to me. I won't be running anywhere for a while. I'm going to be doing a lot of sitting round. Pubs, cafés, round the canal: places like that. It's time I caught up on the local gossip.'

It was meant as a threat and taken as one. The veneer of concern fell from McMeekin's eyes and his voice dropped a tone. ‘You've got nothing on us, Donovan. But try to stir up trouble and we'll return it with interest.'

‘What you going to use next time then – a steamroller?'

McMeekin came up off the bike with the easy fluid motion of well-trained musculature. He regarded Donovan with dislike. ‘If you think that Mr Carney had something to do with Inspector Clarke's accident, try to prove it. And if you can't, leave him alone.'

‘And if I can't do that either?'

‘Why then,' McMeekin said bleakly, ‘I suggest you watch your step, Sergeant.'

‘I intend to.' Donovan's lip curled in a vicious smile. ‘And yours. And Carney's. Every single one you take.' He threw a long leg over the machine, started up, and rode away satisfied with the exchange. The gauntlet was down now: Carney had no choice but to pick it up.

On his way home he found himself turning off the main road. He'd driven half a mile before he realized where he was heading.

The man with the pushchair was there again, tidying his wife's grave. He looked up as Donovan passed like a shadow on the gravel paths. But the young man with his darkly brooding face seemed to be in no mood for conversation so he only paused long enough to say something amiable and not requiring an answer to the dull-eyed child in the pushchair before resuming his work with fork and trowel.

Donovan had told Shapiro he had no use for formalities, in death as in life, and for the most part it was true. A dour Catholic upbringing in the north of Ireland had left him with an abiding mistrust of ritual. He believed devoutly that religion was humbug, that good and evil were artefacts of the human state needing no supernatural explanation, that the only afterlife a man could hope for was in his children and the memories of his friends. Alan Clarke's future was assured on both counts, but still Donovan wasn't here seeking communion with the dead man but because he used to work through his ideas with Clarke when he was alive and had nowhere else to take them now.

He stood for a long time, his hands in his pockets, his chin on his chest and his shoulders hunched round his ears, looking at the oblong of raw earth where the grass-seed had yet to sprout. But Marion must have been here because there were fresh flowers in the vase. The headstone was still being cut: for the moment a plain wooden cross carried the name and dates.

He didn't know what he was waiting for. He didn't know why he was here. Alan Clarke had been his superior, his mentor, and his friend, and Donovan's trust in his informant had cost him his life. Clarke couldn't absolve him of that, and Marion wouldn't, so all he could do was stumble on in the dark groping for something he needed but could not have described.

The graveyard was quiet on Mondays. Most people visited on Sundays, little family parties strolling flowers in hand along the neatly raked gravel between the stones. The flowers were on the graves now: because it was autumn mostly they were chrysanthemums, white and yellow and bronze. But there weren't a dozen people scattered across the whole forty acres and the only sounds were the occasional murmur of conversation, the crunch of a step on gravel, and the steady distant snipping as a groundsman trimmed away at a yew hedge.

So there was something immediately disturbing about the new sound that made both Donovan and the man with the pushchair look towards the stile in the wall where a couple of cars and Donovan's motorbike were parked. Four young men in motorcycle helmets were climbing over the wall. Since he'd have heard four motorbikes Donovan thought they must have come in the van that was turning round, so the helmets were not for protection or only in a way. The sound was the chime of chains as they vaulted the stile. As he watched they began to run towards him.

Tersely, out of the corner of his mouth, he said to the man with the pushchair, ‘Get out of here. Now!' Then he looked for a good big block of monumental masonry to put at his back.

Across the interview room table Liz regarded the young man with his choir-boy haircut and sky-blue eyes and tried to see him as the perpetrator of a clever and brutal murder. It was coming. It had seemed impossible the first time she talked to him. But Page was a professional pilot, trained to operate under stress. A man who could make the calculations necessary for an emergency landing with five different sorts of flame leaping from his engine could plan a murder, carry it out, even seem to be in shock afterwards. It didn't mean Page killed his wife. But it meant that he could have done.

‘Tell me about the insurance you had on Kerry.'

Under formal questioning she had watched the flesh fall from his face, his smooth cheeks hollow, his eyes recede into shadowy pits. Liz couldn't judge whether it was the reaction of an innocent man unjustly doubted or one who had thought till now that he'd got away with murder.

‘Insurance?' he stammered.

‘You had a policy on Kerry's life. Tell me about it.'

‘There are policies on each of us. I arranged them about a year ago. We had some surplus income, it seemed a sensible thing to do. If I'd died first the money would have made sure Kerry had no financial worries.'

‘That was a good reason to insure you. Why insure Kerry? You don't need her income to meet your obligations. I don't imagine you'll keep her flat, will you? Presumably you'll either move to the cottage or get somewhere nearer the airfield. Why did you need to insure Kerry?'

He was flustered, his eyes flickering across her face. ‘I told you, it seemed sensible. And – we did everything that way. Split down the middle. Not her money and my money but our money; not her future or mine but ours.'

‘Even when it made no sense?'

‘It
did
make sense. I didn't expect her to die now, for God's sake! She was twenty-nine years old, she should have lived another fifty years. The policies would have given us a pension!'

Liz's eyes flew wide with derision. ‘You're twenty-six, Mr Page! Nobody your age wonders how he'll get by when he's seventy!'

‘Well, we did,' he insisted. ‘For one thing, pilots don't always work to retirement age. You have to make your money while you're medically fit. For another, Kerry worked in an old people's home: she saw what time does to people, how things can go wrong, how they can think they've got enough to see them through but ill-health or bad luck or just a lot of years being old run through it till there's nothing left. Neither of us wanted to be worrying about money when we got old. It would have been crazy when we had more than we needed now.'

‘You've no current use for the money then?'

‘What?'

‘The insurance money. There's nothing you need it for, nothing you're wanting to buy.'

‘No.'

‘I see.' She lowered her eyes to the papers on the table before her, glancing through them. When she found what she was seeking she looked up again, holding him steady in her gaze. ‘Then Joe Tulliver hasn't offered you a partnership in Castle Air Services when you can get the capital together?'

Page's mouth opened and shut several times before anything intelligible came out. ‘No! Well, yes. I mean yes, but—' He was clutching the arms of his chair as if it was moving. For a moment he really looked ready to crack. Then he disengaged his eyes, dropping them into his lap, and breathed deeply until he had a grip on himself again. Then he looked up. ‘Inspector Graham, you don't believe I shot Kerry because I'd rather have a share of Joe Tulliver's firm. You can't believe that.'