A Bleeding of Innocents (7 page)

Donovan shook his head. ‘Tulliver says not, reckons Page wouldn't do anything illegal. But suppose he overheard something – something that could put Carney behind bars? It's a two-hundred-mile flight, say three hours there and back. Maybe somebody got careless, forgot Page wasn't on the payroll.'

‘So Carney waited a week and then shot his wife?'

‘Even Jack Carney doesn't have a resident hit-man,' glowered Donovan. ‘He's got muscle. If this was a broken arm I'd want to know where Terry McMeekin was last night. But McMeekin isn't a killer. He'd like you to think so but he hasn't the guts. Carney'd bring someone in from outside. A week is about what it'd take to get hold of a pro, brief him, and get him in place. Only he made a mistake and shot Kerry instead.'

Liz turned it over in her mind. It was possible. It didn't stand out as a certainty but in this job not much did. You found something the rough shape of an answer and chipped away at the inconsistencies until a theory emerged. And the connection between David Page and the local gangster was surely more than a coincidence. At any event it warranted exploring.

‘All right, we'll talk to Page. You can talk to him if you like. But don't spring any surprises on me. I'll go along with you, Donovan, but I won't be led round by the nose.'

The flat was two rooms on the second landing. By the time they reached the door Donovan was limping. He rang the bell and when there was no reply rapped with his knuckles. His face twisted in bitter disappointment. ‘God-damn, he's gone out.'

‘Give him time,' she said softly.

The door opened. Page looked at the Sergeant blankly. Then he recognized Liz and something almost like hope kindled in his face. ‘Is there some news?' As if she might tell him there had been a mistake, that it wasn't his wife whose flayed head fell in his lap after all.

‘Not news exactly,' she said, ‘but something we wanted to ask you about. It might help.'

Page took them inside. It was a very small flat. The other thing that was immediately noticeable was that it was Kerry's place. The decorations, the furnishings, the taste were all hers. After two years of marriage he was still a guest there. The cottage was different, a joint endeavour, but this remained essentially a single girl's flat.

Home ground and time to pull himself together had left David Page both calmer and clearer. His face was tired and grey, he'd missed a night's sleep and would miss more before he started making it up, but Liz thought he was regaining control over himself. He was beginning to look like a man who routinely held other people's lives in his hands and not so much like a schoolboy accused of indecent acts behind the bicycle shed.

‘What is it? What have you found out?'

‘Last Saturday you flew some people to Cartmel,' Donovan said. ‘Tell us about them.'

Page was taken aback, couldn't imagine what this had to do with his wife's death. But he answered as best he could. ‘The booking was in the name of John Carney. The other man, McMeekin, was an employee of his.'

‘Did you know them before Saturday?'

‘No. He's chartered the Beechcraft – that's the eight-seater – a couple of times but it wasn't me who flew him.'

‘What did they talk about?'

Page blinked. ‘Racing. There was a horse Mr Carney had an interest in. He kept calling it his National prospect. He told McMeekin and me to put our shirts on it.'

Donovan gave a cheerless grin. ‘What else did they discuss? Business? It's a longish flight, they must have talked about something other than horses.'

‘I suppose so. I don't remember. Nothing interesting: they weren't exactly great conversationalists, you know?'

‘But you could hear what they were saying? Even when they were talking between themselves?'

‘I could hear. I wasn't listening. Why would I? I'm a bus driver, I get my passengers where they want to go, I try to be civil to them, I collect my pay, and I go home. I make small talk if they want to, I show them which is the altimeter and which is the clock, after that I do my job. I don't know what they were talking about last Saturday. I can't see it matters.'

Liz crossed her fingers out of sight in her pockets and hoped Donovan wouldn't tell him, but Donovan did.

‘It matters because Jack Carney is a thug, and if he thought he'd said something or Terry McMeekin had said something unwise in front of you he wouldn't hesitate to send someone to shut you up.'

The little blood that remained in it drained from David Page's face as if someone had cut his throat. He had trouble finding a voice. ‘You mean—?'

‘I mean, if you'd been driving last night maybe Jack Carney would sleep sounder in his bed for knowing that nothing you'd heard would go any further, even at the autopsy, even when the pathologist opened your head up to see what you'd got inside.'

Liz was outraged. This time she didn't wait to get Donovan in the car: as soon as Page's door was shut she turned on him. ‘That was unforgivable! That young man is mourning for a woman he loved who was murdered in front of him. Who gave you the right to grind his face in it?'

Cal Donovan was a tall, thin man with all the features of his black Irish heritage plain about him. The olive skin was drawn tight so that his narrow face hollowed under the high cheek-bones. His dark, deep-set eyes held a primordial spark. Expressions flitted across his face too quickly to leave a mark on the underlying structure, which was sharply brooding like a dyspeptic hawk. His hair was too long even when he'd just had it cut. He looked like the hired gun in a cowboy film.

So he was not well equipped to feign injured innocence. But he gave it his best shot. ‘Me? What did I do?'

‘You told him two things he didn't need to know. You told him that the atrocities committed on his wife didn't stop when she was dead. And you told him it was his fault. He's never going to forget that, Donovan. When he's come to terms with the rest of it, when he's ready to believe the people who tell him he couldn't have saved her, you saying she died because of him will live on like a worm in his brain.

‘He doesn't know you're no better than walking wounded yourself. He doesn't know your thinking has been affected by what happened under the viaduct. He doesn't know, and he wouldn't care if he did, that you feel responsible for that, that DI Clarke would be alive now if you hadn't put him on that street at that time. You feel guilty as hell and you want him to feel the same way.

‘I won't have it, Sergeant. If you can't handle your feelings you go home until you can. Survivor guilt is a natural phenomenon but you deal with it: you
don't
try and dump it on some poor boy who's got enough of his own to carry without picking up yours as well.'

Donovan had taken enough tongue-lashings in his time to become more or less inured, but this was different on two counts and momentarily he was speechless. In the first place she was a woman, had seemed the sort of nice middle-class woman who would shy away from making a scene in a public place, didn't look she had that kind of anger, that capacity for invective, in her. The way her eyes blazed into his from close range, her strong body blocking his escape down the stairs, startled him.

The other difference was that she was right. But he wasn't ready to admit that yet. ‘I didn't tell him anything he didn't already know or wouldn't find out.'

‘Yes, sure, if this comes to something we'd have had to tell him somehow.
I'd
have told him, and I'd have done it gently because he is not my enemy, he's a victim of this as much as she was. I would not have hit him in the face with it because striking out made me feel good and I couldn't get at the person I really wanted to hurt.'

Donovan swallowed and his eyes dropped. He did not know how much Shapiro had told her and how much she had worked out for herself but she'd made a good case against him. He wouldn't perjure himself by denying it. At the same time he was still too angry, with himself and with the world, to throw himself on the mercy of the court.

Liz saw his lips twitch as if the words had a bad taste. ‘I'm trying to do my job, that's all. Some bastard blew Kerry Page to kingdom come when she had every reason to expect another fifty years'health and happiness. Now I'm pretty sure we know who and I'm pretty sure we know why, and even if Page doesn't know it the answer's there in his head – something he heard or something he saw – and if I have to shake him a little to get it out I think that's a price worth paying to take this murderous bastard off the street.'

‘But it's not a trade-off you have any right to make,' Liz insisted. The temper was going from her eyes now but she wasn't ready yet to let him off the hook. ‘If you can't get the guilty without hurting the innocent then you wait for another chance. If you're doing your job well enough another chance will come.'

‘But maybe not before he blasts some other luckless sod who gets in his way,' Donovan retorted. ‘What about Page himself? If Carney took out a contract on him, he still wants it done. While we're being nice and polite about this maybe the bastard's on his way here with his shot-gun.'

Liz caught her breath. She should have thought of that. ‘That's a point. All right. You stay with Page, I'll go and see Carney. Where do I find him?'

Donovan's eyes flared. ‘You're not going alone.' It was a statement, not a question. ‘Look, the last babysitter Page wants is me. You're right, I was out of line with him. Ask the station to send someone round. I don't know, maybe they should draw firearms. Then you and me can go question Carney. He's a different kettle of fish, he won't be upset if I get heavy with him.'

‘You won't
get
heavy with him,' Liz said positively. ‘If anybody's going to get heavy it'll be me. You're there to watch my back, nothing else: is that clear?' Donovan nodded. ‘And another thing. The feminine form of sir is ma'am. Until I can trust you to remember I'm your superior officer, I think you'd better get in the way of using it.'

Because it was Sunday Liz assumed that the Castlemere Godfather would be at home. Though she knew nothing of Carney she had seen enough career criminals in her time to know that, whatever their origins, they didn't continue living in back streets after finding that crime does pay. So she was surprised when Donovan directed her into the black Victorian heart of Castlemere, the narrow streets under the shattered fortress it took its name from. But she drove where he said, dog-legging between the old buildings until an iron archway appeared ahead, the gates pushed back against the walls. It would have looked like any disused factory gate except that the iron had been recently painted and the lettering on the arch picked out in gold.

‘Mere Basin?' said Liz, wishing she'd had longer to get to know this town. ‘What's that?'

‘The canal,' said Donovan. She had made him leave his bike outside Page's house and ride with her. ‘All these buildings were warehouses in the last century. Castlemere was a canal junction; narrowboats travelled from here all over the country.' He paused then and she thought he was going to add some other nugget of information. But, staring ahead through the windscreen, he only added bleakly, ‘Ma'am.'

Liz looked at him curiously. ‘Are you some kind of a local historian, Sergeant?'

He did not return her gaze. ‘I'm a detective, ma'am. In Castlemere it's important to understand the canals as well as the road system. We've had thieves use getaway boats before now. You also feel a bit of a prat when someone you want to arrest waves at you across twenty feet of water and you don't know where the nearest bridge is.'

She didn't blame him for trying to level the score a little. ‘I'm going to have to do a bit of homework.' She drove under the arch. ‘So Mr Carney's a canal buff?'

Donovan spared her a disdainful glance. ‘Jack Carney? The only thing that interests Jack Carney is money. He's got an office down here. The council spent a fortune doing the place up. They wanted it to be like St Katharine's Dock in London, with boats and businesses and cafés and yuppie-hutches. Only when Carney moved in all the nice people moved out. So the cafés went up for sale and he bought them too; and the yuppies moved out and now half the flats are vacant. The boat-owners use it, of course, they've no choice. But the council could have saved its money. The place is more like Execution Dock than St Katharine's.'

Gold paint notwithstanding, Liz was already getting that impression. When the entry took a sudden steep dive it was like entering the underworld. ‘Still, it is Sunday. Will he be in his office?'

‘Fish don't stop swimming on Sundays,' Donovan replied grimly, ‘politicians don't stop lying, and crooks don't stop turning blood into money. He'll be here.'

‘Tell me about him,' said Liz. ‘How did he get started? How does he work? What's he into, and for how much?'

Momentarily Donovan seemed taken aback by the question, as if startled to meet someone who didn't know all about Jack Carney, his life and times and crimes. Liz understood that. She too had worked on target criminals, immersing herself in their affairs so deeply that she'd found it difficult to return to the world of ordinary people, ordinary problems. It became a kind of obsession, necessarily so; it was a job that couldn't be done on a nine to five basis, but part of the cost to be paid for success was that police officers had to get down in the dirt with them to fight people like Carney. Donovan had been there. She could see the marks on him.

After a moment he got his thoughts organized. ‘He started in the protection racket. No, before that he was in construction and somebody tried to put the frighteners on him. Boy, did they ever get it wrong! Carney not only didn't cave in, he took the firm over. They were only local lads trying to turn a dishonest penny, but by the time Carney had sorted them they were a major employer in these parts. All the usual victims – building firms, pubs and clubs, and just about any business run by immigrants. They're a soft touch: until they've been here a while they'd rather pay up than come to us. They don't like to make a fuss. Maybe they think it's part of the local culture,' he added disgustedly.