A Taste For Burning Part 14

Donovan waded down to them through knee-high corn ripe for the harvest.

When he was close enough to see their faces he thought it odd that David, who knew him, should look surprised and Payne, who did not, should look at him with first a question, then understanding, finally acceptance in his eyes. He waited by the river until Donovan reached them but he didn't make the policeman explain his presence. 'All right, officer, I'm coming now. We're finished here.'

David looked between the two men in sharp-eyed bewilderment. 'What the h.e.l.l's going on? Donovan?'

Payne turned to him slowly, like a man finding his coattails tugged by a child. 'I'm afraid that's as much as we can do. I expect it'll be enough.' He managed a wan smile. 'Though you may find an unexpectedly heavy demand.'

'What are you talking about?'

'I'm sorry, David, I have to go. Would you take the car back to my house and put the keys through the letterbox before you leave?'

'No, sorry,' Donovan said quickly, 'I need you at the station too. Inspector Graham'll explain. I'll have someone take your car home, Mr Payne.'

Payne accepted that too with a gracious shrug. In fact the situation was now out of his hands and he had no say in what happened next. But it was Donovan's experience that the higher standing a man enjoyed in society, the harder he found it to accept that. The genuine criminal cla.s.ses, who really did on occasion say, 'It's a fair cop, guv,' were much easier to arrest.

Donovan had two cars at the scene. He sent David back in one, travelled with Payne in the other. It would 176.

seem natural enough to David that the detective sergeant would ride with the suspect rather than the witness. Actually it was a way to avoid questions he didn't want to answer.

Frank Shapiro's face was tight with anger and his eyes were hollow with shock. 'I don't believe this,' he said, more than once. 'It's not possible, I don't believe it.'

'It is possible,' said Liz carefully, speaking as clearly as if to a child, 'but that's all it is. If I've got this wrong, Frank, n.o.body'll be happier than me.'

'I don't understand,' he said, also not for the first time. 'How can you think David's capable of such a thing? Of killing someone, for G.o.d's sake -a man died in one of those fires. Whatever makes you think my son is capable of that? He's not an easy boy, G.o.d knows, he always had more -resolve -than he knew what to do with, but still, Liz, murder?'

Before she could answer Donovan put his head round the door to say they'd arrived. 'Who do you want to interview first?'

Liz said, 'David,' and Shapiro said, 'Yes, all right, we can dispose of this nonsense in five minutes and get on with something serious.'

She looked at him with compa.s.sion but no yielding. 'Frank, I'm sorry to be blunt but you have no part in this. It's my case, David's my suspect, and I don't want you there when I question him. You've been kept informed as a matter of professional courtesy, but that's it: from here on your son will be treated the same as any other interviewee. I'll tell David his rights before we start: if he wants a solicitor present that's something you can do for him. But he's too old to need or even want his father present during questioning.'

She was right, but there was no mistaking the hurt she caused him. He dropped his eyes quickly and she heard him take a deep breath. Then he reached for the phone.

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'I'll call my solicitor. At least wait till he gets here.'

But David didn't want a solicitor present, perhaps least of all his father's solicitor, so she couldn't even grant him that. She began the interview at two fifteen, with five hours in hand before Castle Mall opened. A fact of no significance if David Shapiro were the man she sought but of pressing urgency if he were not.

For ten minutes Shapiro sat alone in his office, his chin sunk on his chest and his eyes veiled as if he were dozing. But behind the mask of stillness his mind was racing. He was trying to remember how they ever got here: from the proudest night of his life, when he'd held up the red and squawling thing fresh from its mother's belly, to sitting in a silent room waiting to learn if that same child had taken its rejection of everything he stood for so far as to repeatedly risk and finally take a human life.

He ached for the certainty in his own heart that it wasn't possible, that Liz had made a silly mistake and would be back any moment to apologize for it. But he couldn't be that sure. It wasn't that he didn't know his son any more; he'd never known him, never understood him, never known what he was capable of.

After ten minutes he suddenly lurched to his feet, rammed his fists into his pockets and stalked downstairs.

Taylor looked up at his unheralded arrival with a guilty start Shapiro didn't understand until he saw what the Superintendent was doing. He was looking at the photographs of his children on his desk.

'Wait till we know there's something to sympathize about before you say There But For the Grace of G.o.d,' he grunted.

Taylor pushed the picture-frames away quickly. 'Yes, of course.'

'Inspector Graham's talking to him,' said Shapiro. 'Meanwhile Payne's twiddling his thumbs in the other interview room. Is there any objection to me questioning him?'

178.

Taylor had to think about that, but in fact there wasn't. There was no longer a shadow hanging over Shapiro's conduct of the case. He jailed the wrong man, but that was something that could happen to any of them and particularly to anyone who didn't have all the evidence. 'If you're sure you want to. I'd understand if you were too upset by ... this other business ... to handle it.'

'Of course I'm upset,' snapped Shapiro. 'But it's David's problem, there's nothing I can do about it. But BMT was my case: I may not have distinguished myself over it, but I'd rather wrap it up myself than have someone else do it.'

'Yes, all right,' agreed Taylor. 'But be careful, Frank. Complaints'll be going over the thing with a fine-tooth comb: I don't want them to find any more irregularities. Question Payne by all means, take a statement if you can. But by the book, all right? I know how you must feel about him, but keep a lid on it. I don't want anything else to go wrong.'

As Shapiro headed for the door Taylor called after him, 'Get Donovan to give you a hand.'

Shapiro turned slowly and his eyes were molten. 'I thought he was helping Inspector Graham.'

'Not at the moment. Have him sit in with you: it might be hard to remember sometimes but he is a sergeant; if there are any queries afterwards he'll be a useful witness.'

'Witness.' Shapiro pondered. 'You mean, he'll be able to corroborate my account of the suspect suddenly headb.u.t.ting the recording equipment.'

Superintendent Taylor was not gifted with a great sense of humour. Many of Shapiro's little witticisms pa.s.sed him by. But he smiled at that one. Perhaps he thought it safest.

Shapiro sighed. 'All right.' He turned towards the interview rooms, and Donovan was at his heel when he got there.

179.

Keaton Payne the naturalist and Frank Shapiro the detective had never met. Shapiro knew Payne's face from the television and newspapers. Payne knew Shapiro's from his bad dreams.

'I knew eight years ago that it was you I had to worry about.' The smile was rueful but without bitterness or any sense of enmity. Payne seemed to think this could be done as politely as one general accepting another's sword. 'I had you in mind when I was planning it. There wasn't much time, I had to strike while indignation was running high. Going on television was a bad move for BMT, there was quite a backlash and while it lasted I could count on widespread public sympathy. But I had to be careful. I knew better than to expect sympathy from you.'

'I'll take that as a compliment, shall I?' said Shapiro, expressionless.

'Oh do,' said Payne, 'it's most sincerely meant.' 'To what extent were the darts players involved?' Payne shook the leonine head. 'Merely as a diversion. I knew you'd be expecting a reaction to the broadcast and have the laboratory under surveillance. I needed fifteen minutes to get in, free the animals, torch the place and get out. But whoever drew your fire had to be able to stand up to questioning. It didn't matter what you suspected as long as you could prove nothing against them. 'When I found a darts team with a forthcoming fixture in Castlemere I had them bring it forward. They told the 180.

pub team they couldn't make the agreed date, offered to buy the drinks if it could be done at short notice. The Castlemere team were all local men, a few phone calls was all it took.'

'Did the darts players know what you intended?'

'No,' Payne said firmly. 'They thought that our sole purpose in entering the laboratory was to free the animals. Only my squad knew I meant to burn the place.'

'Your squad?' murmured Shapiro.

Payne gave a lofty smile. 'Be your age, Chief Inspector. I'll tell you what happened but I won't give you names. You've got me: don't be greedy.'

'So the darts team hared off in their van with the police car in pursuit, and you broke into the laboratory, removed the animals and set incendiaries. Did you know there was a security guard?'

'Of course,' Payne said readily. 'Research was my speciality. There were usually two men on duty but one of them had 'flu and with the police about he wasn't replaced. That left one man in the porter's lodge inside the main entrance.'

'How did you know he'd be in the office, not walking the corridors?'

'It didn't matter where he was: we rang the front-door bell and he let us in. I had on a dark coat and a chequered cap, he thought I was one of your men. By the time he realized his mistake it was too late. Two of our lads stayed with him while we got the job done. When we were ready to leave we shut him in an outbuilding. He'd have been all right if he'd stayed there.'

'He was paid to protect the premises. He broke out of the shed and returned to his office to raise the alarm. But you'd cut the phone line, hadn't you? So he went to see about the animals. He knew you'd opened the cages, he wasn't sure they'd find their way outside.'

Payne nodded sombrely. 'I read that in the paper. I felt badly about it. But I told him they were safe. He should 181.

have known we wouldn't leave them to burn.'

Shapiro said levelly, 'Well, as long as you felt badly about it.'

If he'd been caught at the time of the raid, Red Kenny the scourge of the vivisectors would have been mentally prepared for anything the police might throw at him, up to and including the furniture. But eight years of highly public success had changed his expectations. He was used to being listened to with respect and admiration, had come to take it as his right. He had not so much fallen as dived headlong with a flourish into the pitfall specially designed for television celebrities, that of believing in his own myth. He'd heard so often what a splendid fellow he was that he thought it must be so. He resented being spoken to in a manner suggesting that in some quarters these truths were somewhat less than self- evident.

He frowned. 'I know you can't approve of what I did, Chief Inspector, but try to remember why we were there. It wasn't for the good of our health. There was no money in it. We were there because BioMedical Technology routinely performed painful, distressing and lethal experiments on animals, and they did it for profit. Not in pursuit of a cure for cancer, but so that women who were born white might look a little browner when brown is in fashion, and women who were born brown might straighten their hair when it isn't.

'Do you know what an LD50 test is? You take a statistically significant sample of animals and subject them to increasing levels of a substance until fifty per cent of them are alive and fifty per cent dead. The amount of scientifically useful information that gives you wouldn't displace a single angel from the proverbial pin-head. It's useful to know what overdose of a substance is potentially fatal, but you know that when you've got your first corpse. There is no value in knowing how much of a substance will kill half your mice: all of them after the first one die 182.

for nothing. OK, they're only mice. But they have the same capacity to feel pain that we have, and their lives are all they've got. They shouldn't be used and thrown away for nothing. It's immoral.'

'So is killing people.'

'I never intended to hurt anyone except financially,' Payne said frostily. 'I'm sorry about the security guard, but I'm not responsible for either his asthma or the fact that he returned to a burning building.'

'What about Trevor Foot? Do you feel any responsibility for what happened to him?'

Payne met his gaze squarely. 'No. Do you?'

'Since you ask,' said Shapiro, his lip curling, 'yes. I should never have believed a little toe-rag like that was behind something this slick. It had to be someone like you. If I'd kept looking I'd have found you.'

That was more the sort of comment a television scientist expected. 'Can I take that as a compliment?'

'Actually,' said Shapiro, 'no. Go on with the story.'

Payne gave a cool shrug. 'There's nothing more to tell. That was BEAST's last action. I finished my research, left Cambridge, and what I've done since is a matter of record. I don't regret BEAST but I suppose I grew beyond it. I make my voice heard in other ways now, without risking my safety and my freedom.'"

Suddenly he laughed. 'Which is why, of course, I found myself playing the reluctant host to your son. You could have knocked me down with a feather when he introduced himself. The magazine said they'd be sending a photographer but they didn't say who. When I realized who he was I couldn't think what to do. I'm afraid I rather panicked. I made up some feeble excuse and sent him away.'

'He thought you didn't want a Jew in your house.'

Payne's eyes widened. 'What kind of man does he take me for?' He said it without any trace of irony. 'I didn't know how close you'd got to BEAST before, didn't want 183.

to remind you I was still about. At that point, of course, I didn't know that you two hardly speak.'

Shapiro's jaw hardened but he didn't comment. 'Why did you change your mind?'

'I realized I was behaving as if I had something to hide. It was a coincidence, nothing more -if you had finally tracked me down you wouldn't have sent your son. Then when it was in the paper that the Foot case was being reopened I thought I could learn something useful from him, so I called him back.

'I have to say, young David was a bit of a disappointment. He wouldn't talk about you however much I prompted. Apart from telling me how to stand and when to blink, the only time he opened up was when he talked about his ambitions. He'll do well, you know. If you want something as much as he wants that, you don't let anything stand in your way.'

'Can we leave my son's ambitions out of this?' Shapiro asked coldly. 'I'd like to hear why you let Trevor Foot go to prison for what you did.'

'Isn't it obvious? I didn't want to go myself.'

Shapiro shook his head in disbelief. But he shouldn't have been surprised: he'd dealt with professional criminals and he'd dealt with fanatics, and for ruthlessness fanatics had the edge every time. 'It really is that simple? You'd sacrifice anyone to get what you want?'

'No, not anyone. But you said it yourself: Foot's a toe-rag. Lazy, dishonest, a bore and a bigot. What would he have done with his freedom? He'd still be a painter and decorator, unless he'd got the sack by now. He'd still be joining every lunatic fringe group in town. And he'd still be trooping in to your front desk at intervals to claim the Crime of the Month. He's been a public nuisance all his life: the only positive thing he ever did was to keep me out of prison.'

Such arrogance would have been staggering in any circ.u.mstances. What made it devastating was the man's clear belief that it was a fair trade: eight years of an innocent 184.

boring man's time for eight years of an important guilty one's. He thought that because he was a cleverer man than Foot, and had been acting in a cause and had gone on to become a public figure who appeared on television and opened church ftes, his freedom weighed more on the cosmic scale than Foot's. Even now he failed to appreciate the enormity of what he'd done.

'Hang on,' said Shapiro, suddenly aware that there was an implication here that he was missing. That description was too accurate to have been gleaned from newspaper reports. 'Are you telling me you knew Trevor Foot?'

'Oh yes,' said Payne. He grinned boyishly. 'Better than he knew us. Don't misunderstand, Chief Inspector, he was never a member of BEAST. But it wasn't for want of trying. A few of us lived around here so some of our activities were in this area; of course, you're aware of that. It seemed to make us fair game. He kept trying to contact us: he'd dog anyone who spoke up for animal rights or against blood sports, anything like that. In the end he was reduced to spying on vegetarians.

'We strung him along. For light relief, you know? Look, we were playing a game that could have finished all our careers and put half of us in prison. We needed to let off steam sometimes. Foot was a standing joke. When we'd nothing better to do we'd slip him messages -he worked around the town, it was easy to leave a note in his pocket while his coat hung on a fencepost or put it on the front seat of his van -inviting him to the next meeting. It was always somewhere inaccessible and whenever possible on a wet night. We warned him that if the authorities got wind of us we'd vanish into the night so he should never wait more than a couple of hours.'

He chuckled at Shapiro's expression. 'I know what you're thinking: we should have had more important things to do than torment the village idiot. But he brought it on himself. We were all so exasperated it was a choice between that and breaking his legs.'

'Broken legs wouldn't have taken eight years to mend.'

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But Shapiro's mind was on something else. He was thinking, in some despair: everything Foot said was true. The girl. The trip to London. Even the messages he received. I a.s.sumed he'd made it up. There was no proof he was lying, I just a.s.sumed it -because of who he was, because I knew him and the things he got involved with.

I could have got to the bottom of it if I'd kept looking -not got to this man, no, there were too many people ready to shield him, but the evidence was there that Foot wasn't involved. If I'd looked I'd have found it. If I hadn't fallen into the trap I warn every new DC against: presuming we know more about a case than the facts warrant. I didn't frame Trevor Foot but I might as well have done. I c.o.c.ked up, and he went to prison because of it.

'Doesn't it worry you?' he asked. 'That for being a pain in the neck you let a man rot for eight years? Seeing animals behind bars incensed you enough to risk your own liberty: doesn't it trouble you that you locked an innocent man away?'

'I didn't send him to prison,' Payne said indignantly. 'I didn't accuse him, convict him or sentence him. I used him, yes; in fact, we both did. I used him to protect me from a law that values property above humanity. You used him to tidy up your crime figures. That may damage my chances of an Albert Schweitzer Award, but it doesn't leave you smelling of roses either.'

'You're telling me something I don't know already?' snapped Shapiro. 'I know what a mess I made of this, not only by locking him up but by leaving you free. Well, I can do something about the latter, but all I can do about the former is regret it. I don't suppose that'll be much consolation to Trevor Foot. But stupid as I was, I bore him no malice. If I had to admit that I ruined his life out of spite, I think I'd die of shame.'

He stood up. 'Don't tell me, I know how much my opinion's worth to you. Well now, could you use a cup of tea? Afterwards we'll get it all down as a statement.'

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He left the interview room and Donovan followed him out. Because he was angry with himself Shapiro looked for someone to take it out on. 'You were a lot of use in there. I thought you'd died and it was sheer force of habit keeping you leaning against the wall. There's only the introduction on the tape to show you were in the room.'

Donovan shrugged. 'You didn't seem to need any help.'

'Appearances can be deceptive,' the Chief Inspector muttered grimly, heading down the corridor.

187.

In a world which equates power with sound -the roar of a jet engine, the tumult of raised voices, the quake of marching feet -it's easy to forget the strength there may be in silence. David Shapiro discovered that strength early in life and learned to use it to maximum effect. With it he reduced a good, kind, intelligent man to impotent despair.

Liz Graham was also good, intelligent and reasonably kind, but she had two ma.s.sive advantages over Shapiro in handling his son. She was not a man, and she was not his parent. Nature tells females how to deal with unruly young things, because if it didn't few of them would grow to be old things. Also, to her David was just another suspect. She was sorry for Shapiro, but not enough to give his son an easy ride.

She knew she could breach his defences with not much more than time, patience and a smattering of good humour. But there was no time. It was imperative to establish whether they were still looking for an arsonist or not. David's refusal to communicate posed a real threat: people could die because of it. In these precise circ.u.mstances he was more dangerous innocent than guilty.