The Hireling's Tale by Jo Bannister Page B

both outsiders, for reasons that were beyond their powers to amend.
    What Superintendent Giles may not have known, and what somebody really should have told him, was that - on top of and apart from the considerable respect he enjoyed here - every so often he did something that genuinely touched the people working under him and made them wish they knew him better. He did something like that today. He didn’t go straight to the hospital when he heard about Shapiro. He went to the house in Cambridge Road where it had happened, to take over the inquiry so that Liz could go to the hospital instead.
    She found Donovan prowling the corridors like a caged tiger, oblivious of the blood on his shirt. A couple of months ago it wouldn’t have been so obvious, but in deference to the improving weather he’d switched his usual black for a stonewashed denim that now looked as if he’d salvaged it from an abattoir.
    Liz had spoken to Mary Wilson so she knew how he got so much of Shapiro’s blood on him. He’d used his own body to protect the injured man from further gunfire. It was what she would have
expected; still, it was not a small thing. The shot that felled Shapiro could have been the first of many: it would have been hard to blame anyone whose natural human instinct led him to dive behind the nearest wall.
    ‘Any word yet?’ she asked.
    Donovan shook his head. The savagery of the movement told Liz all she needed to know about the turmoil raging in his breast.
    ‘No news is good news,’ she said tritely; and felt moved to justify that against the contempt in his eyes, flicking at her like a whip, by adding, ‘If he’d died they’d have come out and said so. While they’re too busy to talk there’s still a chance.’
    ‘He was shot in the back,’ snarled Donovan. ‘The bastard took out his spine. If he lives he’ll be in a wheelchair.’
    ‘You can’t know that!’ Liz flashed back angrily. ‘People who spend their whole lives dealing with back injuries can’t predict which ones are going to be devastating and which will mend. Millimetres count: a fraction one way and your spinal cord’s gone, a fraction the other and all you lose is a chip of bone. Don’t tell me he’s going to be a cripple when you don’t know that!’
    ‘You’re right, I don’t. He probably won’t live that long.’
    She wanted to slap his face. But a calmer voice inside her head reminded her that neither of them was wholly in command right now, neither should be held accountable for everything they said or did. She only had to look at Donovan to know he was in
shock, and she didn’t expect she looked much better. She spread her hands, palms down, in a pacifying gesture. ‘All right,’ she said, a shade unsteadily; ‘all right. Don’t let’s bite one another’s heads off. Are you all right - you weren’t hurt?’
    Donovan shook his head again. ‘I was too far away. I couldn’t get to them …’ That bothered him. He wasn’t paid as a bodyguard any more than Shapiro was, but the deal had always been that Shapiro did the thinking, Donovan did the gymnastics. But when it mattered most he’d been too far away to help. A man he cared about more than any of the family that remained to him had dropped at his feet with a crater gouged out of his back because he’d thought quicker than Donovan could react.
    ‘He wasn’t in the lane. The bastard. The mechanic.’ He wasn’t an articulate man at the best of times. Under stress his Ulster accent thickened and the words came out disjointed, not in sentences but pushed out as they occurred to him. The Irish are a nation of poets, but that particular gene seemed to have passed Donovan by. ‘We checked the lane and the lane was clear, but he was never in the lane. He was where he’d been all along - quarter of a mile away across the fields. That’s what he was saying. The chief. He said, ‘It’s too close.’ Then he moved to get Kendall inside, and while I was still trying to