A Bleeding of Innocents (19 page)

His first thought was that he couldn't imagine her doing anything as glamorous, frivolous, and unproductive as riding a horse. His second thought was that he could imagine her riding but not doing all the less glamorous bits like falling off and mucking out and hauling bales of hay. Finally he decided he was wrong, that she'd be in her element in gumboots and armed with a shovel, that as an antidote to a week in CID keeping a horse might be nearly as good as running a motorbike. Harder to park, of course. ‘Do you have a horse?'

‘Yes,' she nodded. ‘At home. My husband's looking after her till I get back. He won't be enjoying it. He's an art teacher. He likes the look of horses more than the reality.'

‘My grandfather,' Donovan offered unexpectedly, ‘was travelling head lad at one of the top racing stables in Ireland.'

‘Really? Is he still alive?'

‘Nah,' drawled Donovan. ‘One of the bastards kicked his head in after a bad day at Fairyhouse.'

They travelled the rest of the way in silence.

The list of operations performed by Board, Saunders, and Carson in their last month together was longer than Liz had expected. If the surgical team had been doing heart transplants it would have been easy. But they had been working through a backlog of minor corrective procedures that took thirty or forty minutes each: there were several names on each day's list and seventeen days in the month when the team was working together. The print-out ran to four sheets densely packed with names and addresses, a digest of the problem in each case, the treatment, the outcome, and dates of admission and discharge.

Liz had also obtained a copy of the register of deaths in the Castlemere area in the last month, a record of admissions to residential homes, and even – a long shot, this – prison discharges in the same period. She hoped to find a name from the operating list recurring in one of the others. She was looking for someone with an abiding hatred for the surgical team, who could do nothing about it for four years, then suddenly could. It meant scanning through a lot of information with no guarantee they'd recognize the match when they found it.

Even if they were now working along essentially the right lines the family might have left the area in the last four years so that the name would appear in the hospital list but be registered as a death in another district. If the patient was still alive, he or she might have been admitted to a specialist unit in another part of the country. Or the killer might have taken time to mourn his loss, in which case the name would figure in none of the current records. If they could find no match they would have to contact the four pages of families one by one.

There was no effective way of splitting the work between them. Liz read from the lists of dead and institutionalized, and Donovan hunted up and down the theatre list for a match. They had an interesting half-hour sorting out the various members of the Smith clan but when they had it was clear that the dead ones hadn't been operated on and the hospitalized ones hadn't died.

There were other names that recurred. When they first turned up two Edwardses they thought they'd hit pay-dirt. But the Edwards on the theatre list was a middle-aged man with a hernia and the dead Edwards a teenage girl. The Swann in hospital was a baby and the dead one a woman. The sick Taylor and the dead one were both young men and looked promising until they realized that the first died of his injuries in Intensive Care. He was a motorcyclist brought in as an emergency midway through the morning's operating list.

‘Possible?' asked Donovan.

‘Not impossible,' allowed Liz. ‘But we're back to wondering why, if he's been dead four years, someone should start avenging him now. We'll check it out but I bet it's someone else.' She moved on to the next name.

After a moment it struck her that Donovan was no longer with her. Physically he was still sitting on the far side of the desk, hunched on a chair that seemed too low for him, his long legs bent like a stick insect's, his plastered forearm resting across his knees. But a gap had opened between them. The forefinger of his good hand was no longer tracing down the hospital list in response to the names she read out; his body had grown still and his face had gone distant, out of focus. She stopped reading and waited. After a minute she said quietly, ‘Sergeant? What is it?'

He started and his gaze jerked round to her. His eyes were flayed. ‘Nothing. Sorry, I – I just went AWOL for a minute. Where did we get to?'

She put the papers down. ‘Never mind that for a moment. Are you still blaming yourself for what happened to Saunders?'

‘No. No, of course not.' But there was no conviction in the way he said it.

Liz sighed. ‘Donovan, listen. We're not responsible for the things we can't prevent. The man who killed him is responsible for Emil Saunders'death. Maybe Saunders gave him a reason. But all you're guilty of is trying to fit a thirty-hour day into twenty-four hours. Yes, it would be nice if we could sit on people's doorsteps until they were ready to talk to us. Once in a blue moon it would make a difference. But most of the time we'd have to neglect other duties, other people's problems, in order to do it. Your decision not to wait for Saunders was a proper one. I'm sorry it worked out badly but that was the luck of the draw. You've nothing to reproach yourself for.'

She didn't understand his fierce look. Words rushed from him in brief, savage torrent. ‘Have you any idea the number of times I've been told that?'

She blinked, surprised by his vehemence. ‘DI Clarke, you mean?'

‘Alan. Lucy. Colleagues, acquaintances, friends, family – dear God, so many I've trouble remembering them all!' He spun off the chair with an abrupt, fluid movement as if he might leave the hurt behind, and fetched up by the window looking down at the car park. His voice was bitter. ‘You must have heard of Donovan's Luck. Even at Headquarters they've heard of Donovan's Luck.'

She didn't know whether honesty would appease or disappoint him. ‘No. Sorry.' She could have left it at that. But after a moment she added, ‘What do you mean?'

He looked round with a twisted parody of a smile. ‘It's a bit like Hobson's Choice – it's no luck at all. I get people hurt. Sometimes I get them killed. It's never my fault. Only people who work with me, and people who know me, and in the dim and distant past people I dared care about, drop like flies round me. It's like carrying the plague, you know? I don't get it myself – OK, a bit of a side-swipe from the car that killed Alan – but mostly I'm left standing in a sea of bodies. These days I use a loose-leaf address book: it's easier to up-date.'

She didn't know what to say. It was tempting to dismiss it as hysteria, but though he was clearly depressed she didn't see him as either hysterical or self-indulgent. So maybe he did have bad luck. No, that wasn't what he was saying – that he
was
bad luck. To people around him. People like her.

She dismissed that with a quick shrug, as if it were an insect that had settled on her, cleared her throat, and picked up the print-out again. ‘Where were we – Taylor? No, we did him. What about Gregory – Miss Marjorie Gregory, Hampton Cottages? Did anyone feel strongly enough about an eighty-seven-year-old maiden lady living in sheltered accommodation to murder three people over a botched operation four years ago?'

Donovan left the window and slouched back to his chair. He looked awkward, avoiding her gaze as if regretting his outburst. His index finger, strong, narrow, and slightly crooked like a raptor's talon, scored down the page in search of Miss Gregory. Not finding her on the first sheet he flipped to the second, then to the third. Then the moving finger stopped and tapped once, and Donovan said, ‘Hold on,' in a puzzled, pensive tone that made Liz look up.

‘You've got Miss Gregory too?'

‘No,' he said. ‘Sorry. Er – go back a bit. What have you got on Swann again?'

She read it out. ‘But it's a different Swann. The hernia op was a baby. The death was a middle-aged woman.'

‘Yeah. But I think it's the same family.'

Liz studied the relevant entries. There were no obvious connections. Certainly the address was different.

‘What makes you think so?' It was possible the family had moved in the last four years, more likely that there were two Swann families in Castlemere.

‘I've met them,' said Donovan. ‘Well, more than that actually. It was George Swann stepped in when I was having the crap beaten out of me down at the cemetery. His wife's grave's near Alan's, she's not been there much longer. Swann was planting some flowers. He had his kid beside him in one of them buggy things.'

Liz thought about it, dismissed it. ‘Coincidence. He wouldn't have a five-year-old in a pushchair.'

Donovan shook his head. ‘He called the kid Danny. The baby's down on the theatre list as Daniel Swann. At the time I didn't register it but there was something wrong with the child. It kind of looks through you. Maybe it can't walk.'

‘And this Mary was his wife?'

‘That I can't swear to. But she died a fortnight ago and this grave's a few days older than Alan's so yes, I guess that's Mary Swann.'

They sat back, looking at each other, unsure what it meant. ‘How could he blame Saunders for the death of his wife?'

Donovan shrugged. ‘Search me. How could he think he's free to act if he has a retarded five-year-old to look after?'

‘It doesn't hang together, does it? Do you know what he does for a living?'

‘He's an antiques dealer. Shop in Castle Place, you've probably seen it – that's the address given for Mary Swann. They must have sold their house.'

‘Antiques,' mused Liz. ‘Not really Mac the Knife territory, is it?'

‘You think not? There's big money in antiques, and it's harder to prove who owns them than a car or a video. No serial numbers. There are villains enough in the antiques trade. I just wouldn't have said George Swann was one of them.'

‘What's he like?'

‘Oh – pretty average. Mid-forties maybe. Decent kind of individual. Gentle, you know?' He grinned suddenly. ‘You appreciate gentleness when you've just had three feet of chain wrapped round your head.' His eyes changed then, grew sharp. ‘So average, in fact, he could be every third man in Castlemere.'

Liz understood. ‘And he had a gun?'

‘Well, yes and no. It was a gun – a pistol, not a shotgun, First World War job I think – but it wasn't capable of being fired. I checked while he was driving me to the hospital. It was in a trunk of stuff he bought once, he said, he hung on to it for fear of being held up sometime. I told you antiques wasn't that genteel a trade.'

‘I suppose, though,' Liz said slowly, ‘a man who could come by one gun in the way of business might come by another. What kind of car does he have?'

Something like a shock-wave swamped Donovan's expression. His head rocked back and he groaned. When he surfaced his face was rigid and there was a breathless quality to his voice. ‘Oh dear God … Detective, is it? I get paid for being a detective? I
knew
what that porter said meant something to me, I just couldn't get hold of it. I don't know what kind of a car it was. I was a bit groggy, OK? But the thing you couldn't miss if you'd half an eye in your head was, it was yellow.'

The first thing new staff at Castle General learned about Desmond Hawley was that the chief administrator was three different men. With the consultants he was punctilious, with junior doctors and nurses superior, with domestic staff so overweening as to leave scant change out of rude. So none of his fellow employees would have been surprised to know that, just as he treated Inspector Graham in a different manner to Sergeant Donovan, so he treated Chief Inspector Shapiro in a different manner to Inspector Graham.

His manner was not all that had changed. His perception of how this might turn out had moved on too. He no longer believed it was possible to avoid scandal. His priority now was to establish that what happened was the fault of individual members of staff, not of the hospital.

Ushering Shapiro to a chair in his office he launched a pre-emptive strike. ‘I was about to call you, Chief Inspector. I've just heard about Dr Saunders. I think I know what this is all about.' He told the story of George Swann who believed his child was a victim of medical negligence.

Shapiro stopped him to make a phone call, then asked him to continue.

‘I had no idea,' insisted Hawley, ‘that the poor man had become demented. I knew he blamed us for his son's condition but that's not uncommon. People don't realize that surgery is not an exact science. Every year something that works fine for ninety-nine patients makes the hundredth worse. But people think we're only doing our job when it comes out right and must have been negligent when it comes out wrong.'

‘Swann accused Dr Saunders of negligence?'

The administrator sniffed. ‘He accused everyone of negligence. At first he was upset, which was understandable. Later he became obsessive. He waylaid members of staff and tried to bully confessions out of them. We received letters on his behalf from half the solicitors in Castlemere. Of course I put it in the hands of our lawyers and let them deal with him. I'm a busy man, Chief Inspector: I sympathized, I assured him that what happened to his baby was nobody's fault, but I really wasn't prepared to listen to his tirades month after month.

‘I said if he thought he had a case against us he must pursue it. I didn't expect him to get anywhere and he didn't. But it took him four years to accept that. At least, I thought he'd accepted it. We got a letter from his solicitor – his last solicitor – a month ago saying he was taking no further action.'

It was a text-book description of a bureaucrat stonewalling. Shapiro could imagine the effect it had on the bereaved man. ‘Did you ask the surgical team about the case?'