A Taste For Burning Part 13

Liz forbore to comment. Privately she thought both men were losing their grip, and she had her doubts about G.o.d. 'Tell me again about the fire at the wharf. You were on the boat: were you asleep?'

'Yeah, it was late.'

'What woke you up? The flames, the noise?'

'David woke me. I suppose the noise woke him.'

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'What was he doing -staring out the window, climbing into his clothes?'

'I think he was already on deck. He shouted through the hatch, then he came below to make sure.' When he realized what it was she was asking his eyes sharpened and his voice dropped a note. 'He was dressed and he had his camera round his neck.'

They regarded one another in silence, fully aware of where this line of reasoning was taking them. They'd got Frank Shapiro against a wall and now they were proposing to put the boot in. Very quietly Liz said, 'Can you think of any reason David Shapiro couldn't have started the fire at Evanses?'

Donovan couldn't. 'But why would he? For kicks?'

'Kicks is the reason with any pyromaniac,' said Liz. 'Whoever did this it was for kicks. But actually David has another reason. His portfolio. He needs photographs like that to get the kind of job that'll involve taking more photographs like that. It's a self-rewarding strategy for him. If it comes off he may never have to start his own fires again.'

Donovan was catching up fast. 'The earlier fires -Rach id's and the warehouse. I don't know if David was in town on Friday last but he was certainly here on the Sat.u.r.day: that's when he went to see Payne only Payne got rid of him.'

'He could have come down the previous day.' They were kicking the idea between them like footballers warming up. They weren't committed to it yet, but the longer it stayed in play the likelier it started to look. 'Did you know David was suspected of starting a fire at Castle High? About six years ago, in his last term there. And that Frank was told about this?'

Donovan's eyes were doing sums. 'It must have been about then his marriage broke up. He and Mrs Shapiro separated, and David went with his mother.' He looked up at her. 'Another frigging coincidence?'

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'It could be,' insisted Liz. 'For G.o.d's sake let's keep a grip on this. It's a theory, that's all, just a bit of kite flying. All the same, you could read it that way, couldn't you? David did something Shapiro couldn't forgive. All right, he got away with it, but they knew at the school and Frank knew. He was a detective chief inspector, and his son was relieving his teenage angst by setting fire to public property. There was an almighty bust-up: maybe Frank threatened to nick him, maybe the boy threatened to run away. Either way Angela had had enough. She walked out, and David went with her.

'He finished school, then Angela packed him off to college in -Brighton, was it? -a decent distance from both his father and his school, hoping he could make a fresh start where n.o.body knew. And maybe he did. Maybe the change of scene, and doing something he enjoyed, and getting away from the friction at home, helped him settle down.

'Until he found himself back here, debating whether to go and see his father which he didn't want to do because he knew they'd only argue again. The closer he got to that confrontation, the more he teetered on the edge. Maybe he still reacts to stress by wanting to set fire to things. He'd know Frank would investigate. Maybe that made it more compelling. Not only was he relieving his feelings, not only was he going to get some terrific photographs, he was striking out at his father as well. He was saying, "I can make a fool of you when you don't even know I'm here. And if you did you couldn't do a thing about it without admitting that you knew I did it once before." You've talked to David: does that sound possible to you?'

Donovan thought about it, his head tipped back, his face twisted by the narrowing of one eye. 'I don't know,' he said at last. 'I wouldn't say it was impossible. He's a strange one, the same lad -I mean, I can see him voting Liberal Democrat and joining Amnesty International, but 164.

fire-raising? I don't know. Are we sure about the incident at the school?'

'It wasn't told to me as proven fact,' admitted Liz, 'but Ms McKenna thinks it's what happened. That's what she told Frank.'

'And he covered up for the boy.'

'That isn't fair. There wasn't any evidence it was David, only that it could have been. No one could have been charged on that basis. If Frank hadn't investigated the fire probably no names would have been mentioned: I think Ms McKenna was tipping off a parent rather than making an accusation.' But Donovan was still troubled. 'Why, what are you thinking?'

He gave an unhappy shrug. 'A week ago I'd have said I knew the Chief pretty well. Now suddenly all sorts of stuff's crawling out of the woodwork and I don't know what I think any more. Was it only a mistake over Foot, or did he send him down because he needed a result and there was no one else handy? Was David ent.i.tled to the benefit of the doubt, or did the Chief use his position as investigating officer to lose evidence on that too? And if he did that, and even if he didn't, shouldn't it have struck him as suspicious when he saw David at the warehouse on Tuesday morning?

'So why didn't he do something about it? Even if he didn't know for sure, even if it was only a suspicion at the back of his mind, why didn't he say something? Instead of letting us chase round the countryside in search of Pakistani conspirators and oil cans from Manchester. Can you honestly say it still doesn't smell to you like a coverup?'

'It's a completely different case,' Liz objected weakly.

'But it's the same man. The best reason for not believing Shapiro threw Foot to the wolves was that n.o.body'd ever known him do anything shady before. That's no longer the position.'

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Two suspicions don't add up to proof,' she insisted.

'My grandad had a saying, too,' Donovan said grimly. 'You know, the one worked with the racehorses? He used to say, The first time a horse kicks you it's his fault. The second time it's yours.'

Of the darts players, one was no longer known at his former address, one was working abroad, one had died in a road accident and two were working in London though they still had parents in Castlemere. Only one was still living at the address he'd given following the incident at BMT, so Donovan started with him.

Keith Baker would have appreciated the elder Donovan's advice: he was a vet. After graduating he spent three years with a large-animal practice near Newmarket. Then he returned to Castlemere as junior partner to a local man who was beginning to find wrestling with bullocks hard work and preferred things he could put on a table.

As well as being the handiest of the darts players, Baker had the greatest potential as a supergra.s.s. He was living and working in his home town, which made him more vulnerable to local opinion than someone living in the anonymous suburbs of a city. He was a professional man whose reputation was of fiscal as well as personal value to him. And he lived with his mother, a breeder of Welsh mountain ponies and a justice of the peace known to Castlemere's legal fraternity as Birch-the-b.a.s.t.a.r.ds Baker. Donovan could imagine young Keith resisting the full weight of the law for a principle he believed in but still crumbling in the face of maternal disfavour.

He arranged to meet Baker at the surgery. He had to wait: an equine colic took precedence. Then he had to wait a little longer while Baker cleaned and plastered two deep punctures in his forearm.

Donovan frowned. 'A horse did that?'

'Family dog,' Baker explained cheerfully. He was a 166.

bulky young man with straw-coloured hair and a touch of the wind in his complexion that would be a full-blown ruddiness by the time he was forty. 'You're not best placed to defend yourself when you've got the other arm shoved up a horse's b.u.m.' He grinned. 'I'll get my own back when it comes in for its vaccinations.'

Quite clearly the vet had no idea why a policeman wanted to see him, or even a vague anxiety about it. If he'd read about the Foot case being reopened he hadn't recognized its significance to him. It was a long time ago and he'd been a very young man, and he'd taken comfort from the fact that the man who died was defending premises that routinely tortured living creatures and the man who went to prison knew what he was risking when he volunteered. There's a shocking ruthlessness to youth. But Baker had grown up since then.

Donovan was in no mood for word-play, and he wasn't very good at it even when he was. He came straight to the point. 'Do you remember Trevor Foot?'

For a moment Baker didn't. Donovan saw him puzzling over the faint bell the name rang. When recollection came Baker's eyes flared for an instant before shutters dropped behind them. He said with infinite care, 'I never met him.'

'I know that,' growled Donovan. 'No one involved in that pantomime did.'

A lexicon of expressions was flitting across Keith Baker's open face as he wondered how much he dared say, what he dared ask. Still he opted for caution. 'I wouldn't know. I wasn't on the raid.'

'Yeah, that's right,' said Donovan, not troubling to keep the sneer out of his voice. 'You were just pa.s.sing. You heard nothing, saw nothing, know nothing, right?'

'That's right,' agreed Baker softly.

'Then this will only be of academic interest to you. But Trevor Foot, who also claimed that he wasn't there and didn't hear, see or know anything, was telling the truth. It didn't do him any good, n.o.body believed him and he's 167.

been in jail for the last eight years. But somebody knew he wasn't involved. The guy who set it up. Who organized the raid and laid on the diversion. He let Trevor Foot go to prison for eight years for something he knew he had no part in, and he never said a word. Not to us, not to the papers, not to anyone.'

There was a pause while Baker took it in, the burden of those eight years falling through his eyes. But he was a man who made important, even vital decisions on a daily basis and he wasn't going to be hustled into making a bad one for himself. He said slowly, 'How is it you think I can help you?'

Donovan took a deep breath. 'Mr Baker, I'll be straight with you. There was a time you'd have faced charges, if anyone had been able to prove you'd done what they thought you'd done. That time is past. We have a mess to clear up and we need help to do it.

'What do I want from you? A name. Not necessarily the man -or maybe it was a woman -who should have gone to gaol instead of Foot, though that would be best of all. Maybe the only name you know is the guy who organized the diversion, and maybe he wasn't much closer to the heart of events than you were. But somebody asked him to do that, and told him where to go and when, and that's who I want. He caused one man's death and ruined another man's life, and I don't know what kind of a Utopia you thought you were building that meant destroying people to make a point.'

Donovan had a certain crude skill as an orator, and if he tended to be stronger on pa.s.sion than logic that did not lessen the strength of his appeal. He could occasionally move people far beyond anywhere they wanted to go by the sheer power of convictions which, even when suspect, were always intense.

Keith Baker found himself swaying under the onslaught. If it was true that he now risked very little by speaking out, it was also the case that he had nothing to 168.

gain. The episode was ancient history, he hadn't thought of it for years. He was a different man: older, wiser, certainly more cautious. He'd entered into the conspiracy -because that was what it was, they'd all known what they were doing -in a spirit of righteous indignation levened by sheer devilry. They had been outraged by the television coverage of a man they considered a moral bankrupt: their response had seemed absolutely justified. The destruction of the BMT laboratory hadn't cost Baker a moment's sleep.

When they learned that the night.w.a.tchman was in hospital, and later that he'd died, a lot of the satisfaction went. They didn't feel responsible -they couldn't have known that he'd return to the burning building, let alone that he was an asthmatic -but nor did they do much celebrating after that. They didn't break ranks under the pressure of police questioning because they knew they could protect themselves and each other by staying silent. And they still believed that what they had done had needed doing.

It all looked a little different from where Baker stood now. If he could believe this policeman, the pressure was off as far as protecting himself and his friends was concerned. And he'd long ago come to terms with the fact of a man's death as a result of what they had done. It was something he regretted, deeply but not bitterly: he still felt that it was an accident in every way that mattered.

But the fate of Trevor Foot disturbed him. This was the first indication he'd had that Foot wasn't guilty as charged. Baker and his friends weren't involved in BEAST, its meetings and machinations, didn't know the names or faces of those who were. He had a.s.sumed that Foot was one of them, just a little less clever or less lucky than those who escaped scot-free. Baker had been sorry for him in the way he'd been sorry for the security man, in principle but without personal grief.

But if Foot was a scapegoat, everything was altered.

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Baker couldn't have known Foot was going down for something he had no part of, but every member of BEAST knew. And none of them had spoken out. Not anonymously, not through channels designed to protect their secrecy; not at all. Not in eight years. Keith Baker was a decent man, a caring man; he didn't like to think of anything suffering needlessly. The vivisection of Trevor Foot started a slow anger in him.

He said quietly, 'I didn't know he wasn't one of them.'

'I thought that.' Donovan went on waiting.

Baker reached a decision. 'I won't tell you who called me. He wouldn't have known who was and wasn't on that raid any more than I did. But we knew who ran BEAST. We didn't turn him in because we supported what he was doing. But not this. You're telling me he sacrificed an innocent man. I don't know if he was on the raid, but it was his idea and he planned it. He could have told you Foot wasn't there.'

'Who?'

'They called him Red Kenny. He was doing postgraduate research in zoology, he knew all the facilities that used animals, what they used them for and what they did to them. He was a c.o.c.ky b.a.s.t.a.r.d even then but we admired him for having the guts to tackle something many of us considered indefensible.'

He sighed. 'I mean, I'm a scientist. I'd find it hard to say that animals should never be used for experimentation of any kind. I'd have to set their misery against progress in human and veterinary medicine that wouldn't have happened any other way. An awful lot of dogs died in the study of diabetes, for instance, but a lot of people's kids died until it was done.' His lip curled then and his voice hardened. 'But I'm d.a.m.ned if I can see that it's worth blinding one rabbit to provide the world with waterproof mascara.'

Donovan let him finish. He didn't want to risk losing him now. Then he said, 'Red Kenny. Did you know his real name?'

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Baker blinked. 'Yes, of course. Sorry -there's no way you'd know. But you'll have seen him too, at least on TV. Keaton Payne, the naturalist. He lives in Castlemere -up behind the spinney, Hunter's Lane I think. Now he's got his own show and publishers righting for his latest book, and there are kids up and down the country wearing stickers showing Keaton Payne and a badger. Eight years ago he was Red Kenny, scourge of the vivisectors, leader of what was at least arguably a terrorist organization. And in my modest way I helped him.'

'Eight years ago,' growled Donovan, 'he let a pathetic little man go to prison for him. I bet if Trevor Foot ever joined the Keaton Payne Fan Club he'll let his membership lapse now.'

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In the endemic violence of the inner-city ghettos, where the shape of the day is dictated by such things as peak drug-dealing and optimum car-stealing times, dawn is about the only part of the twenty-four hours when most people will be where they're supposed to be. Some of them will not get home until three in the morning; some of them will be out wheeling and dealing before eight. But between five and six a.m. the only people who aren't in their own beds are in other people's. In the inner cities a dawn raid means exactly that.

In provincial towns like Castlemere even the criminals tend to keep office hours, and a dawn raid at seven o'clock is early enough for most purposes. But Keaton Payne was a naturalist specializing in nocturnal wildlife, and the cars sent to collect him and his guest missed them by a good half-hour.

Liz had no one but herself to blame. She knew what Payne did for a living, should have realized that like the animals he studied he would be at his most active in the twilight hours. 'd.a.m.n.'

'Do you want us to go look for them?' asked Donovan. 'If we can find the Range Rover they won't be far away.' He'd roused a neighbour to ask what Payne drove. There was no sign of the vehicle at the house but David's van was parked at the back. So they'd driven off together, still pursuing the ideal image for this celebration of one of the country's great and good. The environmentally friendly 172.

phoenix risen from the ashes of Red Kenny the BEAST.

Liz would have preferred to do this without a dragnet. The man she was here to arrest, whom she had reason to believe had committed a serious crime, would keep. There was no question of him either repeating the offence or skipping the country. Wrong metaphor, she thought parenthetically, with a little grin that none of those around her understood; a badger expert wishing to evade justice would undoubtedly go to ground.

But the man with him, against whom the evidence was highly circ.u.mstantial, and about whom she needed to talk to her superintendent since she couldn't expect an unbiased opinion from her chief inspector, could present a very real and immediate danger to a lot of people. If David Shapiro had done what she was afraid he'd done, he had to be taken out of circulation before Castle Mall opened with a bang this evening. Presumably he'd return for his van before then: she could mount a watch on Payne's house. But if she was wrong about David, arresting him wouldn't prevent an attack on the Mall. She needed time to discover whether he was responsible or not.

'Yes,' she decided. 'Find the car and bring them in. Keep it vague: let David think we want to talk to him about Payne. If at all possible I'd like still to be on speaking terms with Mr Shapiro when we've finished. One thing before you go. Open this van, will you?'

Anyone there could have done it with a simple toolkit and minimal damage. Donovan did it with the contents of his pockets and there was no sign it had been tampered with.

Inside was an incredible a.s.sortment of jumble. There were substances that could have been used to make a fire but nothing that couldn't be explained by the owner's profession. There was a faint smell of petrol: they tracked it down to a rag. There were no partly a.s.sembled incendiary devices or anything else conclusive. 'Gut feeling?' asked Liz.

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'My gut feeling,' said Donovan carefully, 'is that I'm glad it isn't my decision.'

'Thanks a bunch,' Liz said sourly. 'Go find yourself a Range Rover.'

By the time she arrived back at Queen's Street, Taylor and Shapiro were in their respective offices. There was a message at the desk to see Shapiro as soon as she came in. She knew why, of course: he wanted to know why his entire department was engaged on a dawn raid he knew nothing about. 'Sorry, Frank,' she murmured, heading for the Superintendent's office.

She outlined the case she had against Payne, and Taylor nodded with satisfaction. 'That'll take some of the heat out of the situation, if we can say we're about to charge someone in connection with the Foot affair. Can I say that? How sure are you?'

'Pretty sure,' said Liz. 'Baker had no reason to lie. He could have been wrong, I suppose, but he said they all knew. I think it'll stick.'

There was a genuine warmth in Taylor's eyes. 'Good. Good work. Frank'll be pleased.'

Liz bit her lip. 'Well, yes. But less so about the other suspect I want to question.' She told him all she knew about David Shapiro, enumerating meticulously the strengths and weaknesses of all the fragments she'd got together. 'I wish it was clearer. If I was sure it was David I could stop worrying about tonight. I'm not that sure, but there's too much to ignore. In view of the circ.u.mstances let's be honest, I mean because of who he is -I want your approval to question him.'

Taylor was staring at her as if she'd sought approval to take CID on a staff outing to the Isle of Wight. She refrained from prompting him. She'd spelled it out as clearly as she could, now she was awaiting instructions. It was one of those decisions he was paid to take.

He blinked the amazement out of his eyes and caught 174.

his breath. 'Oh, G.o.d, what a mess. Does Frank know about this?'

'Not yet, sir, no. He'll have to if we question the boy.' She went on waiting.

Taylor drummed square well-manicured fingertips in thoughtful arpeggios on the polished surface of his desk: literally playing for time. 'Children,' he said then, the word bursting from him in a soft explosion. 'They break your heart so many different ways. Just when you think you've made it, you've brought them up, and everything's settled and sorted out, they spring something like this on you.' He glanced at her quickly, gave a faintly desperate little snort of amus.e.m.e.nt. 'We're in the throes of a family wedding,' he explained. 'It makes one reflective.'

Liz offered a sympathetic smile but no comment.

'Very well,' he decided. 'I don't think we have any choice. That amount of circ.u.mstantial evidence against anyone else we'd have to take seriously: it can't alter anything that he's Frank's son. Maybe if he'd been at home, so Frank could vouch for his activities. But the fact is Frank has no more idea what the boy's been up to than we have. No, we can't soft-pedal on this. If you're wrong it'll be a matter of fulsome apologies all round, and if Frank wants to sulk he'll have to. But if there's any chance that we can prevent an incident at the Mall tonight by bringing him in, that's what we have to do. And as soon as possible. Bring them in, the pair of them, and let's see what they have to say for themselves.'

'What do we tell Mr Shapiro?'

Taylor's beard went lopsided as he sucked on the inside of his cheek. 'We'll have to warn him. Naturally he'll be shocked. I don't want him also to feel we did this behind his back.'

'Shall I talk to him or will you?'

The Superintendent regarded her shrewdly. 'Easier for you if I tell him; but perhaps easier for Frank if you do.'

Liz nodded ruefully. 'There was a message for me to 175.

see him when I came in. I'll go and break the glad tidings now.'

They found Payne's car in the little scenic park overlooking the watermeadows of the River Arrow. There were two figures on the river-bank half a kilometre away.