A Bleeding of Innocents (13 page)

‘Not a scratch.' He introduced himself.

Inside Perrin's flat he said, ‘You've heard about Mrs Board, I suppose.'

‘I
know
,' said Perrin, shocked as anyone might have been by an act of mayhem but not personally upset as he had been by Kerry's death. ‘Whatever's going on? Is it the same man, do you think?'

‘Hell of a coincidence if it's not,' said Donovan. ‘Didn't they work together, Kerry and Maggie Board?'

‘That's a long time ago,' said Perrin. ‘Kerry did theatre for about twelve months, and yes, she did work on Mrs Board's crew. But she packed it in about four years ago and moved to Rosedale.'

‘Why did she quit theatre? It's a good job for a nurse, isn't it?'

‘It's what she wanted to do since we started training. She loved it. It's the sharp end: things happen quickly in surgery, you have to be on your toes. There's a lot of pressure – if some guy's bleeding rivers surgeons don't have time for ‘please, Nurse'and ‘thank you, Nurse'. You have to be able to take the rough with the smooth and still do a professional job. The pay-off is when someone comes into theatre with his drawer in the morgue already booked and leaves it neatly zipped up and mumbling for his mother.' He grinned boyishly. ‘The credit goes to the surgeon, of course, which is all right because he carries the can when you lose one, but actually everyone in theatre is doing life and death work. The surgeon, the anaesthetist, the nurses: none of us can afford to have off days. It suits some people better than others.'

‘It suited Kerry for a year and then stopped suiting her?'

Perrin looked uncomfortable. The skin round his eyes creased and he looked at Donovan and then out of the window at the small, delicate garden. ‘There was a bit of unpleasantness. I don't know the details. One day they ran out of miracles and the relatives threatened to sue. It didn't come to anything but I think maybe it soured it for her.'

‘Was Kerry responsible?'

‘Oh, no. No one was to blame: they did their best and it wasn't enough. I don't even know if that's why but about that time she became – disenchanted. Maybe she'd just had enough. She transferred to geriatrics and I don't think she ever regretted it.'

‘She didn't keep in touch with people from the hospital.'

His eyes dropped. ‘No.'

‘How about Mrs Board? Would she have seen Kerry recently?'

‘I doubt it. Kerry didn't go to the hospital and I can't see Mrs Board taking the trouble to look her up. Don't misunderstand, Sergeant, she was a fine surgeon. But she didn't make personal friends of her staff. She expected the highest standards of professionalism. I think more people respected her than liked her.'

‘She seemed to get on with the girls at the nurses'home.'

Perrin smiled. ‘Most of them weren't working for her. Also, she was a guest in their house.'

‘Could she have been mistaken for a nurse?'

Perrin shook his head. ‘I really can't judge. I knew her, maybe that colours it. But I'd have said a man would have to be a long way off to think Maggie Board was an Indian rather than a Chief.'

Donovan was leaving, half-way down the outside steps, when Perrin threw after him – quite casually, without import – a snippet of information that hit him like another speeding car. ‘You know, of course, it was Mrs Board who operated on your colleague last week. The policeman who died.'

He had the walk back to the police station in Queen's Street to marshall his thinking. It was just as well. If he'd burst into Inspector Graham's office in a hot sweat and claimed he could pin this one on Jack Carney too she'd probably have fed him to the pencil-sharpener.

His first thought was that this connection between the two cases was hugely significant. As he walked, breathing the cool air, the significance seemed to diminish. By the time he turned into Queen's Street he didn't know if it was significant at all.

Liz looked up at the rap on her door, saw it was Donovan, prepared to go on working, then caught as a kind of visual echo his odd ambivalent expression and looked again. ‘What is it?'

His voice was improbably diffident. ‘You know when Kerry Page was killed, and I found a connection between her and Jack Carney, and it wasn't much of a connection but it might have meant something only it turned out it probably didn't?'

Liz's head reeled with his syntax but she knew what he meant. ‘Yes?'

‘What would you say if I told you there was a connection between Maggie Board and Carney, and it's even less of a connection but it still might mean something?'

If circumstances had allowed them to stick to the original plan this would have touched on Shapiro's case, so when Liz heard what Donovan had found out she took him to the Chief Inspector and had him say it again. By the time she'd heard it twice she was even less sure what it meant.

Shapiro hadn't got to be a DCI by being slow on the uptake. He said shrewdly, ‘It's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, isn't it?'

Twenty-four hours earlier Donovan would have slapped down his warrant card again. It was a sign of his returning equilibrium that he only wrinkled his lip and nodded. ‘Well, it is if I'm wrong about Carney. If I'm right about Carney then it's a hell of a coincidence.'

‘Why are you so sure that Carney had DI Clarke killed?' asked Liz. ‘I mean, suspicious, yes, we're all suspicious, I can see he's odds-on favourite. But you don't suspect him, do you, you think you know. Why?'

Donovan stood his ground. ‘I know the man. We were on his case for three months, for the last month we weren't on very much else. That's a lot of hours talking to people about one man. You learn how he works, how he thinks, what he's capable of. You begin to see what he'll do next, how he'll react in a given situation. What we were doing put him under pressure. He was always going to push back.'

He paused a moment, marshalling his thoughts. ‘This man is bad news, all right? It's not just that he's a villain. There are other villains in Castlemere, they don't give us too much grief. When we catch them at it we put them away, when we miss them we think: Never mind, we'll get them next time. I mean, it's a job, all right? – that's all it is. It's their job to steal and deal drugs and demand money with menaces, and it's our job to stop them. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, but we don't take it too personally either way.

‘Carney's different. He doesn't think he can get away with breaking the law, he thinks it doesn't apply to him. He runs his scams like a business empire, and he does it under our noses and dares us to do something about it. He probably has the biggest payroll in town and he thinks that entitles him to respect. Dear God, he even gets it in certain quarters. Half the council would tell you Jack Carney can't be the villain the police make out because of the annual party he runs for the local orphanage.

‘He sits in the middle of his web like a spider in a Savile Row suit, juggling money through a battery of accounts like some city tycoon, smiling his smug little smile and thinking he's fireproof. He's clever, and he's cautious, and he's powerful, and he thinks we can't touch him. We might pick off the odd foot-soldier from time to time but he thinks he's safe. He thinks he's too big for us.

‘So when Alan went after him – not his scams, not even his organization but him personally – he wasn't so much worried as outraged. He couldn't believe someone had the gall to do that. And when Alan started getting somewhere with the investigation Carney had to stop him. Not only to protect himself but to protect his authority. In this town you don't mess with Jack Carney, not even if you're a detective inspector. That was the message he had to put out, and what might have been a nasty accident but everybody would assume was an assassination was the ideal way. I don't believe in a drunk driver chancing to run down the one man in Castlemere Jack Carney had to see dead.'

He shook his head. ‘We should have been more careful. We knew what we were dealing with. I should have known there was something wrong with the message I got from Lucy. She always met me at chip vans so I could buy her a meal, why would she suddenly want to see me behind the gasworks?'

‘And there's been no sign of Lucy since?'

‘I think she's probably dead,' said Donovan evenly. ‘Maybe Carney settled for scaring the wits out of her and she'll turn up in time, but my guess is they killed her. Maybe she did have something for me and Carney found out. Or maybe McMeekin leaned on her to set us up. She specifically told me to bring my boss, so I'd guess she had Terry at her elbow all the time she was on the phone. We'll never know for sure. Old bag-ladies like Lucy, they're almost more spirit than substance anyhow. When they die and the spirit drifts away you could dump what's left on a rubbish tip and never know it was once a human being.'

Liz found herself staring and dropped her eyes quickly before he saw. She knew how Clarke's death had affected him but was frankly astonished to learn he was also mourning a tramp. In a blaze of understanding, suddenly she recognized him. She should have seen it sooner, he was practically a national emblem: the Irish warrior-poet, the minstrel gone to the wars. Now soldiering was a business of machines and critical-path analysis, and the only battles the Irish fought these days were against one another, policing was perhaps the last refuge for a man with the blood of Feagh MacHugh O'Byrne in him.

‘Still, it's a better reason for thinking it
could
have been Carney than for thinking it was.' Frank Shapiro was the latest in a long line of Jewish philosophers. It gave him a genetic advantage in sticking to the point. ‘And if Carney didn't have Alan killed, then the rest of it has to be coincidence.'

Donovan wasn't letting go. ‘But suppose it was Carney. We'd pushed him and pushed him until he had to start pushing back. Suppose he used Lucy to set us up and brought in a mechanic to take us out. OK, I can't prove it, but suppose. Only the mechanic botched the job and Alan was still alive when he reached hospital.

‘Suppose Carney knew Maggie Board. If he did, maybe it occurred to him he could still walk away from this with a smile on his face. Alan was all broke up, it wouldn't have taken much to make him let him go. She wouldn't have had to
do
anything, just not try too hard. Let him bleed a bit longer than necessary. He was on the edge already, she could push him over without anyone noticing. I don't know why she'd do such a thing. For love, maybe, or money. One way or the other Carney bought her. Only afterwards maybe he didn't like being that much in her debt. Maybe she wanted more than he wanted to pay; whatever, it was another loose end. He got the mechanic back.'

‘Do you see Mrs Board as a woman who'd risk everything for love?' asked Liz. ‘Or money, come to that. It's a hell of an allegation to make about a surgeon: that she'd let a patient die to get a friend off the hook. We don't even know if she knew him.'

‘People will do just about anything for love,' argued Donovan. ‘It doesn't have to make sense. I grant you, Maggie Board wasn't a woman to fall in love at the drop of a hat. All the more reason why, if she was in love with Carney – and it's not that unlikely, if you didn't know he was a thug you could think he was a charmer – she might do something that stupid, that out of character, to hold on to him.'

‘And where does Kerry Page fit in?' Shapiro asked softly.

‘Two possible ways. She really was shot by mistake because Carney thought David Page had overheard something. Or else Page killed her for the insurance, or someone else did for some other reason, and Carney's mechanic used the same MO to persuade us Board was another victim of a serial killer and keep us from looking for the real motive.'

After a long moment Shapiro gave a little grimace. ‘I don't know, lad, there's an awful lot of ifs and buts to it.'

‘Yes,' admitted Donovan, watching him.

‘But it's not impossible, is it? It could have happened. Mrs Board really didn't look much like a nurse, not from the range she was shot at. We'll have to find out somehow – find out, or rule it out.'

‘Where do we start?' asked Liz.

Shapiro ran the ball of his thumb pensively along his jaw, smoothing a beard he didn't have, a race memory of a beard. ‘We need to know if they knew one another. Carney's a married man, if he was seeing Board he wouldn't be doing it openly. And she wouldn't see him at either the hospital or the nurses'home. Show a picture of him to her neighbours in Cottage Row, see if they'd been seen together. And ask the people she worked with about the operation. If she was considering killing a patient she'd be disturbed, anxious. In a surgeon of her experience that should have been obvious.'

‘She might well be anxious,' said Liz. ‘If she refused to do as Carney asked he wouldn't want her round to talk about it. But doing it would give her a power over him that he couldn't tolerate. She was caught between a rock and a hard place.' She saw the flinch in Donovan's eyes and wished she'd put it some other way. ‘If this is more than just an imaginative hypothesis, of course.'

Donovan scowled at his shoes but said nothing.

Shapiro nodded slowly. ‘I have my doubts too. But if it's not a conspiracy then it's a striking coincidence, and I don't believe in those either. I think we have to follow it up, if only for my peace of mind.'

It was getting silly, the amount of time Donovan was spending in this hospital. He'd been here for three days after the episode in the viaduct, on Monday afternoon he'd been back to get his wrist plastered; now it was Tuesday and here he was again.

The chief administrator, with a courtesy that hardly hid his disapproval, allocated him a room where he could conduct his interviews and arranged to have the team who assisted at DI Clarke's surgery sent to him as they came out of theatre.