A Bleeding of Innocents (12 page)

This time he waited until she indicated she was ready to hear him. ‘You're right, I was out of line.' He spoke in a low voice. ‘It won't happen again. I don't want to go on leave. Tell me what to do: I'll help out any way I can.'

She'd been ready for more of a fight. By backing down he left her with nothing more to say. ‘Right. Good.' As a parting shot she added tersely, ‘But next time you slap your warrant card on my desk I'll feed it to the pencil-sharpener.'

After she'd given it back to him she said, ‘You've been to the hospital? What's the damage?'

‘A cracked bone in my wrist, cuts and bruises. That's all.'

‘Four of them, you say – with chains?'

He nodded. ‘Chains.'

‘You fought them off?'

He smiled at that, a rueful smile that was much less fierce than his grin. ‘Jesus, no. I was on the ground behind a gravestone with my hands over my head, I couldn't have fought my way out of a wet paper bag.'

Liz smiled back. Something – it may have been the beating – seemed to have done him good because he was calmer now than at any time since she'd met him. ‘Then how come you aren't in a teaching ward in Castle General with medical students walking round you then sitting their finals?'

Donovan thought for a moment. ‘You know Superman?'

She stared. ‘Pardon?'

‘Well, he isn't a reporter with glasses after all. He's an antiques dealer with a kid in a pushchair and a First World War pistol in his glove-compartment.'

It was a pistol in appearance only, incapable of being fired: a legitimate antique. George Swann kept it in his car because he regularly carried valuables and wanted something to scare thieves off that couldn't be snatched and used against him. The Luger looked deadly serious but was actually no more lethal than anything else with which one man could hit another.

His first instinct when thugs with helmets and chains came storming over the wall was to get his son to safety. He pushed the buggy at a dead run up the gravel path to the main gate where his car was parked. The stile was no use to a man with a pushchair.

But when Danny was in the car and he looked back to where the four men had cornered the other against a Victorian marble angel he knew he was the only one close enough to help. If he went looking for a phone they'd be finished before the police could get there. So he grabbed the seventy-five-year-old pistol and ran back as fast as he could. He was not a young man any more, and he was afraid, but he made himself run.

When he was within thirty yards – close enough for them to see what he was holding, far enough that they wouldn't jump him before weighing up the risks – he shouted a challenge. The four of them were in a knot at the feet of the angel, arms flailing, boots swinging, but they looked up at his shout, the helmets turning like the heads of giant insects. The scene froze.

If they'd called his bluff he could have done nothing to save himself. But one of them yelled in a thick local accent, ‘Holy God, he's got a gun!' They were running towards the stile and the waiting van while Swann was still wondering what to do if they came at him.

He felt his outstretched arm begin to shake and put the gun in his pocket before he should drop it. Then he stepped round the angel to see how much damage they'd done.

Donovan was having trouble getting his face off the ground without using his left arm. Every inch of him hurt. He'd taken a thorough beating and if it had gone on five minutes longer he'd have been pounded to a bloody pulp.

Swann had helped him to his car and taken him to the hospital. When he'd asked timidly what it was all about and Donovan said he was a policeman, the Castlemere Superman had turned the wrong way up a one-way street.

Donovan's return put new life into Liz. Partly it was an extra pair of hands – well, hand – at a time when it was most needed. Partly it was knowing that, exhausted as she felt, she couldn't possibly look as bad as he did. And partly it was because he represented a small success, the only problem she had resolved satisfactorily since coming here. Three days ago she was a bright confident detective inspector from Headquarters sent to hold the fort while DCI Shapiro discovered what happened behind the gasworks. Now they had not one body but three, at least two killers on the loose – one possibly a drunk driver, the other a psychopath with a nurse fetish – and Liz felt she'd gone five rounds with Frank Bruno. But she'd got Donovan back on the rails, at least for now.

Returning from the hospital and seeing the distinctive figure stooped over a phone, Shapiro did a double-take. He stuck his head round Liz's door to see if she knew. ‘Er—?'

‘Oh yes,' she said, almost breezily, ‘all sorted out. He made the coffee.'

‘Oh – good,' said Shapiro doubtfully. ‘That's all right then. Um – why is his arm in plaster?'

‘He was mugged.'

‘Was he?'

‘In the cemetery,' Liz added.

‘R-i-g-h-t,' said Shapiro, understanding less with every word. ‘So now he's back at work?'

‘It seems to have knocked a bit of sense into him.'

‘And he's – er – he
is
fit to work, I suppose?'

‘I wouldn't think so,' said Liz candidly. ‘He looks like death warmed up, but we can't afford to be picky. I thought he could work here, then if he flakes out it won't be so obvious.'

Shapiro nodded. ‘I always said we should encourage women in the police force. The compassionate face of criminal investigation, I called it.'

‘You never told me to be compassionate,' she remembered. ‘You told me I'd have to be as hard as nails.'

‘Could have saved my breath, couldn't I?'

As he left her office for his own Donovan came in. He'd been gathering vital statistics about the dead woman. ‘She was forty-five, divorced for eleven years, no children, no contact with the ex-husband as far as anyone knows. She'd been at Castle General since then; she trained in London but wanted a change of scene when the marriage broke up. She lived in one of the alms houses in Cottage Row, backing on to the canal.' He glanced up from his notebook. ‘Sorry, you wouldn't know. Midway between the castle and the basin, off Milne Road. She had a damp problem, the workmen have been in for a fortnight. There were some vacant rooms at the nurses'home so she rented one of those till she could get back in the house. She was older than the rest of them but she was on good terms with the nurses – they'd go for a drink together, sometimes go jogging in the park. Unless you knew her there was nothing much to mark her out from the others. Someone looking for a nurse could have easily picked on her.

‘One thing, probably not significant but you never know. She and Kerry Page – Kerry Carson she was then – worked together before Kerry went to the nursing home.'

Liz shrugged. ‘I suppose any nurse and any doctor are likely to have worked together in the local general hospital at some time.'

‘No, it was a bit more than that. Kerry was Staff Nurse in theatre for about a year. Then she switched to geriatrics and left the hospital soon after.'

‘So they haven't worked together for—?'

‘About four years,' said Donovan.

‘Any suggestion that they've seen one another since?'

‘Apparently not.'

‘Four years.' Her face went in thoughtful wrinkles. ‘It can't be significant now, can it?'

‘I wouldn't think so,' said Donovan. ‘It might be worth asking Page, and this friend of hers next door – Perrin?'

‘When I get the time,' agreed Liz. ‘Right now I'm up to my eyes with Mrs Board.'

‘And Page's jacket has turned up.'

‘Has it?' That was more interesting – at least, it would have been earlier today when he was still a suspect. ‘Any blood on it?'

‘None.'

‘Where did they find it?'

‘In the water-meadows beside the river, half a mile from the car park.'

‘How did it get there?' asked Liz, exasperated. But still it was mostly a rhetorical question.

Donovan chose not to interpret it as such. ‘Maybe I should go ask him,' he said, watching her from under hooded lids. ‘I can call on Perrin too, see if either of them knows if Kerry had seen Board recently.'

Liz frowned. ‘You can't drive like that. And I can't spare anyone to take you.'

‘I'm not a cripple,' he exclaimed, ‘I can walk that far!'

She eyed him with amusement. ‘Now there's a word I thought had disappeared from the detective's lexicon. Lord, that takes me back!'

‘What?' His dark face was suspicious.

‘I remember when policemen used to walk. And ride bicycles. I bet you didn't think I was that old, did you?' He preserved a careful silence. She chuckled. ‘Yes, all right, have a word with them. If Kerry and Mrs Board had kept in touch perhaps we should know.'

He wasn't sure what kind of a welcome Page would give him. Their last meeting had been less than amicable. But Page had more on his mind than remembering which police officer had said which beastly thing to him. He greeted Donovan without enthusiasm but without anger either. Like all of them he seemed more tired than anything else.

‘We found your jacket,' Donovan said. ‘I'll have someone drop it back to you.'

‘Thanks,' Page said automatically. ‘Where was it?'

‘Down on the riverbank.'

Page frowned. ‘How—?' Then he stopped abruptly. ‘Oh.'

Donovan waited for a moment, then prompted. ‘So how did it get there?'

‘I told you. I told someone. We walked by the river, then we went back to the car and sat for a while.'

‘And you took your jacket off and dropped it in the grass?'

Page looked at him. The blue eyes were luminous, caught between tears and laughter. ‘Sergeant, it was a beautiful night. The moon was up, there wasn't a soul for miles. We walked for a while, then I spread my coat on the ground, and we lay down and made love. OK? I made love to my wife, and afterwards I forgot to pick my coat up. That surprises you?'

Donovan shook his head. ‘Not even slightly.'

‘You're right.' Page accepted the compliment with a faint smile. ‘She could make you forget anything – where you were, who you were, that the sun would rise come morning …' His voice was turning bitter. ‘With her, like that, I was ten feet tall. I'd have gone through fire for her. And half an hour later some mad bastard who knew nothing about my wife except that she was a nurse pointed a shot-gun at her, and I never even yelled at him to stop. I didn't raise a hand to save her. She might as well have been alone for all the use I was.'

Donovan recognized the mood. He'd been living it for three days longer than Page. He shook his head. ‘He had a shot-gun. You couldn't have saved her, you could only have died with her.'

‘Even that would have been something!'

‘No,' said Donovan. ‘No, it wouldn't. You saw this man. You heard his voice. Sooner or later we'll get him and you'll identify him. You couldn't have saved her, but you can do that for her.'

Then they talked about Maggie Board. Page had heard about her before he left the police station, had been listening to the local radio since. But he didn't know until Donovan told him that his wife once worked with the dead surgeon.

‘They hadn't stayed friends, then.'

‘She had almost no friends from the hospital,' said Page. ‘Julian next door, but only because it mattered so much to him. She wouldn't have cared if Castle General had turned into a steamboat and sailed for Africa.'

‘Why was that? OK, she'd moved on, but why make the break that complete? Could there have been something she wanted to get away from?'

‘Maybe.' Page's voice quiet, almost too calm. ‘I don't know what, she never talked about it. But geriatrics wasn't her first choice. It was a—' He stopped, lacking the word.

Donovan pressed him. ‘What?'

‘A refuge, I think. She said once, it's the only branch of medicine where the relatives send thank-you letters instead of writs when a patient dies.'

Donovan frowned. ‘She got upset at losing patients? Then why specialize in the one department where all the patients die sooner or later?'

Page shrugged helplessly. ‘I don't know. It didn't make sense to me either but like I said, she wouldn't discuss it. I wondered once—'

Again he stopped. Again Donovan had to prompt. ‘Wondered what?'

‘If she'd had a fright in theatre. If she'd made a mistake sometime. I mean, if I made a mistake that could have killed people I'm not sure I'd want to go on flying. However much I'd miss it, I wouldn't want to take the risk again.'

‘She did choose to move into geriatrics, I suppose? She wasn't sacked from the theatre, anything like that?'

‘Oh no, she chose to leave. She moved first on to the hospital's geriatric wards, then when the job at Rosedale came up she went there.'

‘So if she made a mistake it couldn't have been a big one.' He meant, not big enough to die for four years later.

‘I don't think so. The people at Rosedale pay enough to be choosy, they wouldn't have hired Kerry if there'd been a black mark on her record. Maybe somewhere less prestigious or in another town, but not so close to Castle General. If there'd been a problem they'd have heard.'

But if the people at Rosedale hadn't perhaps Julian Perrin had. Donovan tried his flat, found it empty, was walking back up Rosedale Avenue when he saw the man DI Graham had described parking a banana-coloured Citroen Deux-Chevaux. ‘Mr Perrin?'

The nurse glanced at Donovan's plaster and his battered face and said politely, ‘I'm sorry, we don't do house-calls.'

Donovan grinned. ‘You should have seen the other guy.'

‘Not a mark on him?' asked Perrin sympathetically, and Donovan shook his head.