A Bleeding of Innocents (3 page)

Liz blossomed under his tutelage but there were inevitable disappointments and she could not always swallow them cheerfully. ‘It's hard,' she'd complained wearily to him one day.

‘You think being a woman detective is hard?' Shapiro had said. ‘You try being a Jewish detective.'

Now the Jewish detective was a chief inspector and the woman detective was an inspector, and but for the precise circumstances they would have been delighted to be working together again. As it was they settled for a warm handshake as Shapiro showed her to his office.

She was sensitive to the fact that the world had moved on since they'd last worked together: she waited for an invitation before sitting down. Then she said, ‘I'm sorry about Alan Clarke. He was a good man, he'll be missed. Do you know yet what happened?'

Shapiro gave a distracted little shrug. He'd thought of nothing else for four days and three nights. There were blue rings under his eyes and tiredness was grained into his skin. Today for the first time Liz got a glimpse of how he would look when he was old.

He said, ‘He was, yes. And no, I've no more idea why he died than I had on Wednesday morning. I still can't say whether it was an accident or murder.'

Shapiro's secretary brought them some coffee.

‘Wasn't there a witness?' Liz asked.

‘Yes and no,' sighed Shapiro. ‘Alan's sergeant was with him, it was his snout they were meeting. But the lad was hit too – head injury, he was unconscious six hours. He's told me what he thinks he remembers but it's hard to know how accurate his memory is and also whether there's more stuff locked up in it than he can get at. There may be: he came up with something yesterday that he hadn't remembered before. If it was how he thinks—' He shrugged, spooned sugar into his coffee.

‘What?'

‘Donovan thinks it was deliberate – murder. That may be colouring his recollection. But he thinks the man who hit them stopped the car, walked back to check them, and when he saw that Donovan wasn't badly hurt returned to his car to have another go at him. It was only the lights of an oncoming vehicle that made him change his mind. If it did happen anything like that we're not dealing with an ordinary hit-and-run.'

‘Donovan,' said Liz, thoughtfully. ‘Haven't I heard of him?'

‘Probably. Oh, there's not a lot wrong with Donovan. Normally, I mean. He's a bit keen sometimes, and sometimes he's a bit unconventional, but he's a better copper than most people give him credit for.' Shapiro scowled then, wrinkling his nose as if he'd bitten into a lemon. ‘Actually, Liz, there's something you can do for me. As soon as he's half-way fit Donovan's going to come in here wanting to be in on the investigation. I can't use him but I'd rather not have to fight him off. Can you keep him busy? I want to run this enquiry but you'll have Alan's caseload to cope with plus anything new that comes up. Even if we get a quiet week or two you'll still be short-handed. I mean to get to the bottom of what happened under the viaduct, and I'll need most of the department to do it. Donovan could be useful to you. If—'

‘If?'

‘If you can get him to concentrate on his job instead of trying to do mine.'

He was at the end of his strength and still he was running. He couldn't feel the road under his feet. All he could feel was the great wet patch on the front of his shirt that was cold against his skin with the chill of the autumn night. He no longer knew where he was running, only what he was running from.

It was a clear, almost frosty night brilliant with moonshine so that although the road was not lit he could see where he was going. Further back, stumbling among the trees, he had fallen again and again: there was leaf-mould in his hair and sticking to his shirt. Remotely, in some portion of his brain where he could still think coolly, he supposed that was why no one would stop for him. Lurching along the road in his shirt-sleeves, with a great patch of wet blood on his chest, he must have looked like an axe murderer.

The water-meadows were a local beauty spot; this road was busy on sunny Sundays in summer. At two in the morning in mid-October it was all but deserted. He must have run a mile from where they parked the car but only two vehicles had passed him, one in each direction. Too much time was passing. He needed help.

He was about ready to drop when more headlights slashed round a bend at him. Not a car; higher, further apart, maybe a lorry. Little old ladies out driving alone could be forgiven for taking one look at him and pumping the accelerator but lorry drivers should be made of sterner stuff. This could be his last chance: any time now exhaustion would sweep the legs from under him and roll him in the gutter and it would be morning before anyone found him.

It was a lorry and it wasn't wasting time: he could hear the big diesel bearing down on him. Desperation made him reckless. Shielding his eyes against the light with one hand he stumbled into its path, flagging it down. A long hollow siren of a horn warned him off and the lights moved into the far lane to pass him.

The driver must have cracked muscles to make it swerve like that, like a fast snake coiling across the road. The black bulk of the load swayed against the diamond-dusted sky as the wheels went one way and the weight the other. He watched it swerve and sway, and knew it could not stop before it reached him.

The front mudguard missed him by inches but the slipstream hit him a blow like a sledgehammer, pitched him off his feet and threw him down hard on the shoulder of the road. He rolled twice then hit the verge and lay still, face down, his limbs splayed like those of a rag doll.

Ray Bonnet the lorry driver had had a bastard of a day and it didn't look like getting better even now it was tomorrow. He'd had a breakdown, he was in trouble with his hours, now he'd run down some lunatic clog-dancing his way home from the local pub. It wasn't his fault. All he'd seen was the white shirt lurching across the dark road in front of him, spinning into the gutter behind. But it was scant comfort. He thought he'd killed someone.

As soon as he could he stopped the lorry and turned on the hazard lights. Snatching his torch he dropped to the ground and ran heavily back to where the flash of white had gone spinning in his mirror.

When he found the body spread-eagled by the side of the road, Bonnet looked for some moments and did not touch it. He was only a youngster: in his mid-twenties perhaps, his face still a boy's face, smooth and unweathered. There was a graze and a smear of road dirt on his cheek. As Bonnet leaned over him he opened his eye. The pupil shrank in the light of the torch, leaving a great blank blind-looking blue-grey iris. His lips moved.

Bonnet leaned closer. ‘What's that, son?'

The young man seemed more stunned than injured. He got his hands under him, levering his face off the ground, and Bonnet gently eased him on to his side. As he twisted the great gory splash on the front of his shirt came into view.

The young man blinked his eyes into focus and fixed them on Bonnet's face. His voice was quiet and frail, breathy with effort but absolutely distinct, as if all his energies were directed into making it so, as if conveying this message was now the most important thing in his world and easily worth risking his life for. ‘You have to help me. My name is David Page, and somebody's shot my wife.'

Liz's first reaction was to wonder why Page had run for help, up a deserted road miles from anywhere in the middle of the night, leaving a perfectly good car parked among the trees overlooking the water-meadows. When she saw inside she understood.

The bloody ruin that had been Kerry Page was in the driving seat. Her husband could have moved the body, and if there'd been any chance of saving her presumably he'd have done so and too bad if it complicated matters for the police. But Kerry had been hit at close range by a shot-gun and the blast had taken her full in the face. All that was left of her above the waist was bloody garbage: he got her blood down his front when it toppled sideways against him. Moving her from the driving seat would have taken a strong stomach.

When Liz walked towards the blue and silver car one of the young constables who was having trouble holding on to his supper moved to intercept her. But Shapiro put a weary hand on his shoulder. ‘It's all right, son, she's one of us.'

His face was grim, his greeting apologetic. ‘Talk about being thrown in at the deep end! It's not always like this, you know. People in Castlemere do occasionally find something to do of an evening besides killing one another.'

Partly it was the shock talking. He had seen more and messier bodies than most men but the sight had never lost its power to appall him. Facetiousness was a defence.

Liz twitched a little smile and nodded. There were lights set up round the car. She tilted her head towards it. ‘Let's see what we've got.'

A thinness in Shapiro's voice warned her what to expect. ‘It's a bit of a shocker. We've designated that bush over there as a throw-up zone.'

In fact she did not find devastation on this scale as horrific as lesser injuries to living flesh. There was no question of Kerry Page having survived, even momentarily, the blast that took her face away. There was no need to wonder how much she had known, how bad the pain had been and how long it had lasted. One moment she was alive and well, the next dead meat. She was beyond reach of their help, beyond need of their sympathy. All she asked of them now was to find her killer.

The forensic pathologist was already on the scene, immediately identifiable by his composure amid the shambles. The police worked in the same surroundings, and many of them had seen things which would have been kept decently out of sight at a family butcher's, but they lacked this easy familiarity with the biological basics. To a policeman, a person was a person until another person tore the back off the watch to reveal the surprising mechanism. To a pathologist, a person was a cardiovascular system governed by a nervous system hung on a skeleton for mobility, and the surprise was that this intricate mechanism thought of itself as a unique individual.

The pathologist was a tall, rather plump man with ginger hair. He had been in bed when the police called: Liz glimpsed pyjama stripes in the neck of his thick sweater. Soon he would be going back to bed because he was almost finished here. Jars and envelopes, carefully labelled, ranged across the bonnet of the car. The pathologist straightened up with a sigh, absently wiping blood off his tweezers with his handkerchief.

Shapiro introduced them. The pathologist's name was Crowe.

Liz said, ‘Both barrels?'

‘No,' said Dr Crowe, ‘just one. It was enough. He must have aimed at her face: the pellets thin out as you move down the body and some went over the top of her head, lodging in the lining of the roof. Some of her hair's up there too.'

‘She died quickly?'

‘Oh, yes.'

Most of the windscreen was gone but a crescent of crazed glass clung together on the passenger's side. ‘He must have been close.'

The pathologist nodded. ‘Yes, the spread's pretty dense. Just as well for the husband – a metre further back and the same shot would have taken his arm off.'

‘The husband was in the passenger seat?'

‘Apparently,' said Shapiro.

‘And he wasn't hurt?'

‘Not in the shooting. He collected some cuts and bruises going for help.'

The first officers on the scene had cordoned off the area in front of the car where the killer had stood. Liz walked round behind the car in order to peer in at the passenger seat.

Shapiro said, with just a trace of smugness, ‘I already looked. No pellet holes.'

Liz smiled. ‘So we can't say he wasn't in the seat.'

‘And we can't say that he was.'

Dr Crowe sniffed. ‘You're a suspicious lot, you policemen. Police persons,' he amended with a coy smile. ‘It's not fair. I spend hours bent over a microscope trying to get my witnesses to give their evidence. Yours come straight out and tell you what happened, and half the time you won't believe them.'

‘Half the time they're lying,' said Liz.

‘You think he did it then – this boy, the husband?'

‘Oh, come on,' complained Shapiro, ‘it's a bit early for that. For one thing, I shall want your report on his clothing first. But you know as well as I do that most murders are family affairs, committed by someone close to the victim; and the other recurring theme is that people who report crimes are often the ones who committed them.'

Dr Crowe stood sucking his teeth. ‘Well,' he said finally, ‘if he staged it he made a good job. There are no splashes of blood on the passenger seat – if the husband wasn't sitting in it he must have covered it up first. Then there's this business of the body collapsing on to him.'

‘What about it?'

‘I haven't seen his shirt yet, I can't guess what it'll tell us. But the thing is this. If he was sitting beside her when she was shot he'd be spattered with her blood. The pattern's practically diagnostic. But if she immediately slumped on to him and covered him with the stuff then the splashes would vanish into the greater – um—' He couldn't think of a word and so left the sentence hanging. ‘So the evidence that he was where he says he was is destroyed. By the same token, we can't point to a lack of spattering and say he must be lying.'

Liz's blood ran momentarily chill in her veins. She nodded at the corpse. ‘You mean, he may have pulled – that – on to him to erase an inconsistent blood-spot pattern?'

Dr Crowe gave an undergraduate shrug. ‘Couldn't say, Inspector. All I can say is that if he did it would have had that effect.' The sudden amiable grin was engaging. ‘My business is facts. Suppositions are your field.'

After the body was removed the mood lightened perceptibly. By now the first eastern palings of the false dawn were dimming the stars: in an hour it would be light enough to start a search of the woods around the car park. Liz organized a torchlight sweep of the immediate area and radioed in for more help as it became available.