Within the privacy of a tent erected in Shapiro’s front garden, Dr Crowe slit the black bag open and carefully examined what it contained.
It’s meat, Shapiro told himself when he felt his gorge rising, just meat. Whoever it once was, whatever their story, that’s all it is now. If it was in the butcher’s window I wouldn’t give it a second look. Somehow that thought failed to appease his stomach.
When the forensic pathologist had finished piecing together the grisly jigsaw he straightened up, peeled off his rubber gloves and thrust his hands deep in his pockets. His plump face fell into thoughtful creases. ‘I suppose you want a description.’
Shapiro looked in quiet horror at the shapeless mound on his path. ‘Of that? You can tell me what that looked like?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Dr Crowe, grimly confident; ‘pretty much. But that wasn’t what I meant. I can give you a fair description of the killer too.’
Startled, the superintendent’s eyes flared at him. But though Dr Crowe was still a young man with a rather undergraduate sense of humour he didn’t joke about murder. ‘How?’
Crowe shrugged. ‘It’s my job. Do you want to make notes – for a Wanted poster?’
Impressed, Shapiro rooted for his notebook.
‘All right,’ said Crowe. ‘It’s a male you’re looking for, of course – not very big but very powerful. Huge neck and shoulder muscles, big deep chest. Weight, maybe about eighty pounds. Interesting dentition: undershot jaw, the lower teeth projecting beyond the upper ones. The canine teeth are particularly prominent. Temper, extremely unreliable. Members of the public should not approach; even your officers ought to be armed. I suggest one of those poles with a noose at the end…’
‘Hang on,’ growled Shapiro, doubt turning to suspicion, ‘hang on.’ He hadn’t written anything since the weight. He squinted at Crowe, who remained poker-faced; he looked at the remains on his path. ‘Eighty pounds: what, five and a half stone? Most victims weigh more than that. Before I go on News at Ten appealing for calm and information, do you want to tell me what that – thing – is?’
An amiable grin from the pathologist acknowledged that the game was up. ‘It was a pit-bull terrier.’
Understanding dawned. ‘So the murderer …?’
Crowe nodded. ‘Another pit-bull terrier, bigger or perhaps just meaner.’
Appalled, Shapiro stared at the carcase. ‘A dog did that?’
‘Oh, no,’ Crowe said quickly, ‘no. They fought to the death, the other dog ripped this one’s throat out. Then somebody skinned it. To make it harder to identify.’
‘And what was left he dumped on my path,’ mused Shapiro. ‘Not even at Queen’s Street, but my home. Why?’
‘That’s a bit outside the scope of forensics,’ admitted Crowe. ‘Have you been clamping down on dog-fighting recently?’
‘I wasn’t aware we had any to clamp down on.’ Shapiro’s expression was working through a range of possibilities, from shock to puzzlement to anger to resolution. ‘So now we know better.’
Crowe was packing his gear. The body-bag hadn’t been needed after all. ‘Maybe they’re warning you off.’
‘I imagine they are,’ said the superintendent bleakly. ‘However, Shapiro’s First Law of Getting Away With It advises against warning policemen off investigating things they didn’t know needed investigating until someone warned them off.’
‘The whole bloody town’s gone mad,’ Shapiro said with conviction. They’d gathered in his office at ten on Tuesday morning. He’d had no sleep, and judging from the shadows like bruises under Donovan’s eyes neither had the sergeant. Liz alone seemed unaffected. She hadn’t had as trying a night as the two men; even so, thought Shapiro irritably, she might have the grace to look tired. ‘Ram-raiders,’ he enumerated on thick fingers, ‘train robbers, a rapist and now a dog-fighting ring. Whatever happened to stealing car radios and mugging old ladies on pension day?’
Even at the end of the twentieth century, Castlemere remained a provincial town with essentially provincial criminals. It wasn’t the Vice Capital of anywhere, not even the fens. The local police had had their challenges but they usually came more widely spaced than this.
‘How’s Mrs Andrews?’ asked Liz. She learned of the attack when she came in an hour earlier, still on a high from the success at Mile End. Seeing one of the raiders shot dead in front of her, knowing that her actions would be subject to scrutiny, in no way diminished the satisfaction she felt. But this did: that while she was keeping Brian awake with a blow-by-blow account of how clever she’d been, how clever Donovan had been, how lucky Castlemere was to have them, a decent woman walking home through the centre of town had been dragged under a bush and raped.
Shapiro gave an unhappy shrug. ‘I don’t know. She wasn’t badly hurt; she said she’d be all right; I don’t know how she really felt. I was going to ask you to see her sometime but God knows how you’ll find the time now.’
Liz took his point. On sheer logistics they were going to be under pressure. ‘How do you want to do this?’
‘I don’t want to pass Mrs Andrews on, even to you – she’s had a tough enough time without being messed around now. Will you take the ram-raiders? And as dog-fighting’s the sort of milieu in which DS Donovan will pass virtually unnoticed he can have the pit-bulls. All right so far?’
Liz nodded; Donovan said nothing. Standing by the door he matched Shapiro’s bent-wood coat-stand for height, build and earnest attention to the proceedings. ‘Sergeant?’ the superintendent prompted gently.
Donovan blinked, came back from wherever his mind had wandered. ‘Oh – yeah. The dogs. I’ll get on to it. What about the train?’
‘What about it?’
‘Who’s dealing with that? We’ve two guys in the cells, another in the morgue, we’ve about thirty witness statements to collect – who’s doing all that?’
‘Me,’ Shapiro said glumly. ‘I’ve got Scobie taking statements, and unless the chaps in the cells change their minds they’re not going to waste my time on inconsequential chit-chat. Once we get the all-clear over the shooting we can wrap it up. Yesterday’s news, Donovan,’ he added briskly, ‘time to move on to fresh woods and pastures new.’
For a moment Donovan looked about to say something more; then he changed his mind. ‘Dogs. I’m on it.’
When the door closed behind him Shapiro said, ‘It’s shaken him up, hasn’t it?’
Liz raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re surprised? He was that close’ – her fingers, all but touching. ‘He did a good job there, Frank. I’d like to think those at Division who have him down as a loose cannon might recognize that last night he got a result nobody else here, including you and me, could have. How’s the driver?’
‘He’ll be all right,’ said Shapiro. ‘It was his heart but they got him to intensive care in time.’
‘Also thanks to Donovan.’
Shapiro smiled, the plump cheeks dimpling. ‘Yes, all right, Inspector, I’ve got the message. Now, what about the ram-raiders? Any thoughts on them?’
She considered a moment. ‘Well, they didn’t show up last night and this morning also passed without incident. The Son of God might sanction another hour or two’s surveillance if you ask nicely.’ The senior officer at Queen’s Street had always been known as God; the recent arrival of a much younger incumbent had somehow called for a new nickname.
Shapiro’s expression was rueful. ‘I tried already – got a very polite flea in my ear. In short, if I want any more stake-outs I can pay the overtime myself.’ He scowled. ‘I don’t get it. They should have gone again by now. What’s the problem, is it somebody’s birthday?’
Liz refrained from repeating her doubts. ‘What we really need is someone on the inside.’
Shapiro raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Do you fancy your chances undercover, Inspector?’
Liz chuckled. ‘If I knew where to find them I’d give it a shot. But I can’t get any word on them. Maybe you’re right, maybe it is the Tynesiders – that would explain the gossips in The Fen Tiger being as much in the dark as we are.’ The hostelry was Castlemere’s villains’pub long before the council gentrified the canal basin where it stood. Now weekend sailors brushed shoulders with the local Mafia and never understood the hush that fell when they used the pub phone to report the theft of their outboard motors.
‘What about Donovan? Some of his snouts keep their ears pretty close to the ground.’
‘Some of Donovan’s snouts keep their entire bodies pretty close to the ground! But nobody seems to know much about this. I don’t know what more we can do but wait for it to happen again and hope we can respond fast enough to catch them.’ Her gaze had dropped disconsolately to the desk-top, lost beneath a week’s worth of unfinished paperwork. Now it rose again; speculative. ‘Unless we can find the chap in the green fedora. Just for the record, Frank, if we did, how would you feel about an undercover operation? If we could set one up?’
Shapiro was tired, but not tired enough to agree without thinking it through. His eyes narrowed. ‘You?’
She shrugged. ‘Whoever. In principle, would you approve?’
While he wrestled with it he pulled faces. He looked at Liz. He looked out of the window. He scratched his chin, missing the comfort of a beard to tug enjoyed by millennia of Shapiro men. Finally he said, ‘I might. If we could do it cleanly so he wasn’t a marked man from day one.’
‘A marked man?’ Her voice rose delicately on the question mark.
Shapiro smiled wearily. ‘Definitely. A woman would stand out like a sore thumb in that sort of setup. I’m sure there’s nothing Donovan could do that you couldn’t, but he’s twice as likely to be accepted by the gang and four times as likely to be trusted with the sort of information we need. I’m sure you’d make a splendid ram-raider, Liz, but be realistic: your only way in would be as a gangster’s moll and nobody’d talk times and routes in front of you.’
‘You be realistic, Frank,’ she retorted, amused, ‘I’m fifteen years too old to be a gangster’s moll! I take your point; but I wouldn’t want Donovan doing it, not with last night still so fresh in his mind. You need a steady hand for undercover work: he needs time to get his nerve back. What about Scobie?’
Shapiro shook his head. ‘You also need two braincells to rub together. How about Morgan?’
‘Maybe. Oh, what’s the point discussing it?’ she said then impatiently. ‘We don’t know that the man in the green hat was their look-out, let alone where to find him or how to infiltrate a fifth columnist. Forget I asked; I just can’t think what else to do.’
‘If it was easy,’ Shapiro said gently, ‘they’d have got these people in Harrogate, Barnsley, Mansfield, Nottingham or Leamington. We may have to face the possibility that they’re too bloody clever for us too.’
Liz was a pragmatist: she knew you couldn’t win them all. She could live with that. What galled her was being unable to think up a plan of campaign. She looked away in irritation; when she looked back Shapiro had his eyes closed. ‘Frank, you look like death warmed up. Get a few hours’sleep. I’ll hold the fort.’
Shapiro opened his eyes and sniffed. ‘The reason that senior posts are reserved for older personnel, Inspector, is that having your own office makes it easier to sleep on the job. A couple of hours’catching up on my paperwork and I’ll be a new man.’
It was probably a joke, but anyway the chance didn’t arise. As Liz was leaving the results on the fingerprints came through. The older of the two men downstairs was Edward Parker, sometime of Leeds; the younger was Martin Ginley of Motherwell; the dead man was Harry Black from Sunderland. Black and Parker had both done time for armed robbery, Ginley had convictions for theft and what used to be called joy-riding until it was noticed how often it led to funerals.
Shapiro scowled. ‘Is there nothing left worth nicking in the north any more, that all their blaggers have to come down here?’
He thought that being confronted with their own records might encourage them to open up. But he learned nothing that Donovan hadn’t already told him: what happened, who gave the orders, who had the weapons. On the face of it that might have been all there was to tell. But Shapiro knew men, particularly criminals; he knew when he was being lied to, and he knew when he was being told less than the truth. These two were holding something back; and he couldn’t think what or why.
Until he was back in his own office, chewing his lip pensively, when Scobie knocked and came in with his arms full of papers and a puzzled expression gathered round his rugby-player’s nose. ‘Sir?’
‘Constable?’
‘The hostage, sir. The girl DS Donovan was worried about, who nearly got her throat cut.’
‘What about her?’
‘I can’t find her, sir.’
Shapiro regarded him with more resignation than surprise. ‘You mean you’ve lost her statement?’
‘No, sir. She doesn’t seem to have made a statement. I didn’t take it, nor did Wilson or Morgan. Everyone on the train saw her but nobody remembers seeing her after they left the train. We don’t even have a name and address for her.’ Scobie watched the superintendent warily, waiting for the explosion.
Instead, slowly, Shapiro began to smile. ‘The cunning so-and-sos! We all know that a well-prepared criminal is likely to be a successful criminal, but fancy being well enough prepared to bring your own hostage!’
DC Scobie was very good at running after escaping crooks, at bringing them down with a well-timed tackle and bringing tears to their eyes if they attempted to resist arrest. He wasn’t as quick on the uptake. ‘Sir?’
Shapiro spelled it out. ‘She was one of them, Scobie. There weren’t three of them, there were four. It was her job to be young, pretty and terrified, and not to struggle or try to escape the way a real hostage might. Black would need all his wits to handle a real hostage, but an accomplice would co-operate. She probably meant to go along when they left the train. But they couldn’t take her up the shaft, not realistically; anyway there was no need. As we evacuated the train she slipped away in the dark and we didn’t even miss her till now.’ He chuckled. ‘No wonder the lads downstairs didn’t want to talk!’
Unsure what the joke was, Scobie didn’t think he’d risk laughing too. ‘What do you want me to do, sir?’
‘Not a lot you can do, constable, is there? When Sergeant Donovan gets back you could get a full description from him. We’ll circulate it, we might get lucky, but it’s my guess we’ll have to put her down as the one that got away. I doubt we’ll see hide or hair of her again.’