Broken Lines (20 page)

He kept the motorbike in there, and the national collection of sprockets. ‘Not really,' admitted Liz. ‘But then, nor do some of the other things he may have done recently.'

‘Fair enough. So let's think about it. If the gun
isn't
Donovan's, who do you think it might belong to?'

Her eyes widened. ‘Mikey?'

‘And who might have put it there?'

‘Roly?'

‘And why?'

‘Because it's the last place in town we'd think of looking for it!'

Shapiro smiled. ‘That's my girl. And that's why Kevin was able to get into the garage: Roly forced the lock first. This gun – I imagine it was pretty well hidden? – he wouldn't want Donovan spotting it while he was doing an oil change or something.'

Liz nodded cautiously. ‘It was in a biscuit tin at the back of a cupboard behind a stack of old biking magazines. Kevin only got it out because he thought it might still have some biscuits in it.'

‘We'll have to see what Forensics come up with. But if, as I hope, it still has Donovan's blood on the muzzle end, it's the one used in the robbery. Now, I suppose it's just about possible that Donovan picked himself off Kumani's floor, hurried out to his bike and caught up with the van in time to see Mikey, or his mate if he had one, sling it out of the window. Then he stopped and hunted for it – and it was dark, remember, and it probably ended up in the long grass or the ditch – and after he found it he got back on his bike and caught up with the van
again
in time to see the immediate aftermath of the crash in Chevening. But if I went to the Crown Prosecutor with a story like that he'd laugh in my face. It isn't enough that it could just about have happened, with a following wind and a great dollop of luck. If it isn't what
would
happen then it isn't what
did
happen.'

Liz was still trying to work out what having Mikey's gun meant. They'd looked so hard for it, then resigned themselves to not finding it, now she couldn't quite remember what they wanted it for. Oh yes: tying Mikey to the robbery. It seemed a bit academic now. ‘Maybe they'll turn up some fingerprints. If Mikey's are on it he was at least a willing partner.'

‘Maybe we'll get lucky and find someone else's too. Roly's, perhaps, though I don't hold out much hope – I can't see an old pro like him handling it without gloves. We may have a better chance of getting something from Mikey's partner.'

‘If he had one.'

‘If he had one,' agreed Shapiro. ‘But think about it: they're two young men, or just possibly a young man and a girl, planning their first armed robbery. This may be the first gun of their own that they've had: it's the most natural thing in the world that they'd be passing it between them, admiring it, getting the feel of it; pretending to shoot one another, for pity's sake. It would get their prints all over it. All right, so they'd wipe it down afterwards. But there are a lot of surfaces to a gun, if we're lucky they put on a couple more prints than they got off.' He sucked in a deep breath. ‘And if we're unlucky—' He stopped.

Liz raised an interrogative eyebrow. ‘If we're unlucky?'

‘If we're unlucky, we'll find one of Donovan's.'

It was a little after eight when Donovan came off the motorway at the Castlemere exit. Apart from an hour at an all-night transport café, where he'd fallen asleep over a pot of coffee and nobody'd fancied being the one to to wake him, he'd been riding all night. Despite his leathers he was chilled to the bone. He needed a hot breakfast and a hot bath.

But the other thing he needed, which was a sense of perspective on what was happening to him, seemed somehow to have crept up on him unnoticed during the dark hours. He no longer resented Shapiro's decision to suspend him, saw that he had little choice. He hadn't the heart to go on hating Mikey either: whatever he'd done he'd paid for. And if he wasn't ready to extend the same indulgence to Mikey's solicitor, still felt both used and abused over that, he was within striking distance of seeing the funny side of it. He'd been made a fool of by a clever, unscrupulous woman: that wasn't high tragedy so much as farce. He'd get over it.

He'd get over all of this. Perhaps right now he couldn't see the way through, but there had to be an explanation and Shapiro would find it. None of this was random. Someone wanted to destroy him, wanted it enough to sacrifice another man in the process. That wasn't a casual dislike: it was deep and personal, and it came from somewhere. Somewhere there was some record of how he'd occasioned that much anger, and Shapiro would find it. Donovan believed that absolutely. He had to.

He found himself thinking about Mikey. Mikey wasn't worried about what was going on. Mikey was unlikely to worry about anything ever again. Presumably, whoever did this could have done it the other way round, could have split Donovan's skull and framed Mikey for it. In a very real sense, therefore, it was a privilege to be the one doing the worrying. Almost, Donovan felt a sense of obligation to Mikey Dickens.

Which must have been why he turned on to the ring road instead of heading into town, and two minutes later was parking the bike in the Staff Only part of the Castle General car-park.

He knew his way round this hospital better than some of the staff. The Intensive Care Unit was at the back of the building, on the first floor. No one challenged him: they recognized him, assumed he had business here. His disgrace was not yet a matter of public knowledge.

They had Mikey in the corner. He knew it was Mikey only because of the name on the graph. His head and most of his face were swathed in bandages; there were pads over both eyes. One arm and both hands were in plaster, and there was a cage under the sheet covering his legs. Between the dressings, where Mikey himself was visible, great splotches of multi-coloured bruising spread like a sunset across his arms, shoulders and ribs. He lay on his back in the middle of the high hospital bed as if he hadn't so much as twitched since they put him there. A forest of metal had grown up about his head, stands carrying drips and monitors and ventilating apparatus. He was dwarfed by it all. There wasn't a lot of Mikey Dickens at the best of times: now he looked like a battered child.

There was a chair by the bed. Donovan hooked it out with a foot, dropped on to it half sideways – as if he didn't want to look he was staying long. As if he didn't want to be mistaken for a relative or a friend, or anyone to whom Mikey's condition was of particular moment. But apart from the ward sister who nodded at him, no one was taking any notice. Nobody cared what Donovan was feeling.

Freed of the need to feign disinterest, Donovan finally looked at the injured youth not with a policeman's eyes, gauging the degrees of damage, toying with the unworthy thought that he'd brought this on himself, but with ordinary common humanity. This was a nineteen-year-old boy, and someone had taken away all of his life that was worthy of the name. All right, Mikey Dickens was never going to be a great violinist, a creator of beautiful or important things, even a decent hard-working husband and father. But he'd been vital, quick and sharp-witted, and now there was only the slow pulse of the bulb in the ventilator to say he belonged up here rather than down in the morgue. The only valuable thing about Mikey – the uniqueness of his personality – was gone, stolen, squandered, and the enormity of that crime struck Donovan as if for the first time. A breath of a sigh escaped him and he gave a weary, incredulous shake of the head.

The ward sister was at his elbow. ‘You're not hoping to question him today, are you?'

Donovan twitched her a sombre smile. ‘You reckon I'd be better coming back tomorrow?'

‘I doubt it. Or next week either.'

‘He's not going to make it, is he?'

With relatives she was more circumspect. Policemen counted almost as honorary staff – except when it came to parking spaces – and she could afford to be honest. But the regret was genuine. ‘I don't think so. Not the way you mean. The equipment may keep him ticking over but I don't think it's going to bring him back.'

‘How long do you wait?' asked Donovan. ‘Before turning it off?'

‘That's something the doctors will decide in consultation with the relatives. His father's been here almost since he was brought in, I think he knows what the position is. The only real question is whether they wait a week or two, a month or two, or longer.'

‘Roly's a realist,' said Donovan. His tone of voice rather surprised him: it sounded like respect. ‘He won't want the kid lying around like this once there's no hope left.'

‘No,' she agreed. ‘Well, we're not quite there yet. Miracles do happen – actually, more than you might think. Maybe young Mikey's got one coming.' She found a bit of bare skin on his arm and gave it an encouraging pat.

After she had gone about her business Donovan continued looking at the wreckage of Mikey Dickens with a compassion that had nothing to do with self-interest. If Mikey woke up, and brought with him some recollection of the events of that night – why he went to Cornmarket, who he met there – he could very much simplify the task facing Castlemere CID. If he could only remember bits of it he would still be the best witness they had. But that wasn't what Donovan was thinking. He was sorry. He was sorry for the mess Mikey had made of his life when he had it, and sorry he'd never now get the chance to do better.

A little while later the sister came back, and for a surreal moment thought the policeman was bent over the bed praying. She was surprised but rather touched. Of course, he was Irish and perhaps that made a difference. But moving closer she realized her mistake. He wasn't praying: he'd folded his arms on the edge of Mikey's bed, lowered his head on to them and fallen asleep.

The gun came back from Forensics with as good a report as Shapiro could have wished. There was tissue and O-rhesus-negative blood residues on the left-hand rim of the muzzle; as if a right-hander had used it as a club. Mikey Dickens was right-handed; Detective Sergeant Donovan had O-negative blood.

Apart from those microscopic traces the gun had been wiped clean. There were no prints on the grip or the barrel. But Sergeant Tripp wasn't born yesterday. Some jobs are awkward with gloves on, and loading a revolver is one. He'd dusted the caps of the unused bullets. He'd got several partial thumbprints, two of them good enough to use in evidence. They matched those filed under the name of Michael Dickens.

‘So Mikey loaded the gun,' said Liz. ‘So he wasn't hijacked. He was at least an equal partner.'

‘Or Donovan was right all along and he was on his own.'

‘Not according to Mrs Taylor.'

‘I know. But look. It was Mikey's gun, he loaded it. He drove his van to Kumani's garage, and when Donovan walked in there was someone small enough to be Mikey wielding the gun and nobody in the van. Pat Taylor is the only one who says someone else was involved.'

‘You're saying she was mistaken?'

‘It's possible. After all, she didn't remember this passenger until you spoke to her on Monday. When you asked her last Tuesday she didn't know.'

Liz shrugged. ‘Some time passed. She calmed down, was able to think more clearly.'

‘All right,' nodded Shapiro slowly, ‘so there was a passenger. Probably. But not a hijacker: now we can prove Mikey was in on the robbery.'

Liz squinted at him. ‘But that isn't the issue, is it? – it never was and it isn't now. We always knew Mikey was lying, all that's changed is that now we can prove it. But it's a big jump from him having a partner to him having a partner who beat his head in and set Donovan up to take the blame!'

‘But unless Donovan really is responsible, somebody did exactly that. If Donovan was a total stranger instead of someone we reckon to know, I still wouldn't believe he'd done everything he'd have had to for this to work. Not because he couldn't, but because there was no need for half of it. The baseball bat: he could have left it at the scene or he could have disposed of it. But why on earth would he pretend to find it four days later?'

She had no answer to that. ‘What do we know for sure? – what do we have actual evidence for? We know Mikey was in on the robbery. We know he was driving the van when it crashed. We know that the gun had already been ditched, and that somebody found it and put it in Donovan's lock-up.

‘We know that, five days later, Mikey went to Cornmarket in the middle of the night and somebody beat his head in with a baseball bat. We know Donovan was on the scene shortly afterwards, and four days later it was him who found the weapon. We know someone with small hands had put insulating tape around the handle.'

‘I can't imagine any circumstances in which Donovan would have asked someone else to do that.'

Neither could Liz. ‘He'd have done it himself if he thought it necessary. He couldn't afford for anyone else to know what he was up to.'

‘Unless it was purely to mislead us,' Shapiro said reluctantly. ‘You could get a mystery print inside your sticky tape if you wanted it there. The girl next door – Lucy Cole? If he said he'd managed to stick the end of his roll down and could she get a fingernail under it, she'd have obliged and never given it another thought. Her prints won't be on record anywhere, but they'd be just enough to cast doubt on Donovan as a suspect. I'm not saying he did that,' he added hastily, ‘only that he could have done.'

‘Could have, might have, would have, wouldn't,' grumbled Liz. ‘It's like trying to eat spaghetti with a spoon. What about the gun? Mikey loaded it, Donovan was hit with it, it wasn't found at the scene of the crash but it turned up in his lock-up. Could Donovan have put it there?'

‘No,' decided Shapiro. ‘He went straight from Chevening to the hospital, even if he'd acquired it somehow he couldn't have held on to it. Besides, we're pretty sure Roly's search party found it. That's what Billy Dunne said, and Mikey wouldn't have been so cock-sure if it hadn't been safe.'