Read Online The Hireling's Tale by Jo Bannister - Free Book Online

age he’d have been locked up in an institution and fed three times a day. But Wicksy had been lucky enough to qualify for Care in the Community, which meant that he got all the freedom he could use including the freedom to go hungry. He only owned one coat so he wore it winter and summer. Now he’d died in it. The hole drilled in the centre of his chest had spilled just a teaspoon of blood before his heart stopped pumping.
    ‘Somebody shot him?’ Donovan hadn’t supposed that Wicksy, or any of them, mattered enough to get shot. Being homeless was the next best thing to being invisible.
    ‘That,’ grunted Shapiro, ‘or he stood still long enough for someone to take a Black & Decker to him.’ It wasn’t disrespect: bad jokes are sometimes the best way for police officers to deal with tragedy.
    Donovan didn’t understand. ‘ Why? ’
    ‘We’ll find the man who did it and ask him,’ promised Shapiro. ‘Right now I’d settle for knowing where from.’
    Wicksy had taken the bullet high enough to pitch him on to his back, pretty much where he stood. He’d been standing on the edge of the canal because he’d been using it as a urinal. His friends had seen him fall and, imagining he’d been taken ill, had hurried over to help. He was dead by the time they reached him.
    So he’d been shot from across the canal. But this
far out there were only fields. The nearest road, just visible as an embankment rising through the green corn, was quarter of a mile away.
    ‘Is there an easier way to get there?’
    Donovan shook his head. ‘The towpath’s on this side; the nearest bridge is at Mere Basin, but you can’t get here from there - you couldn’t get through the tunnel under The Barbican. Going out into The Levels, the next bridge is about two miles from here. No, the road’s your best bet.’
    ‘So somebody walked or drove out by River Road, stopped right about there, waded through quarter of a mile of growing corn – with a rifle held above his head like a Green Beret crossing a Vietnamese swamp - all in order to shoot Wicksy?’ More than perplexed, Shapiro sounded indignant. It defied logic, and above all he was a logical man.
    Donovan gave an apologetic shrug. ‘Looks a bit like it.’
    ‘Then why didn’t he leave a track through the corn?’ It was standing a foot high, it should have been perfectly obvious if it had been trampled, but neither man could see any indication of it.
    ‘Maybe he came by boat?’ hazarded Donovan. It wasn’t that wild a guess: it had happened before.
    ‘Same question,’ said Shapiro. ‘Why? You don’t have to kill people like Wicksy, you just have to wait for the next hard winter.’
    ‘Could he have seen something he wasn’t supposed to?’
    ‘Oh yes,’ agreed Shapiro, heavily ironic. ‘As I recall, Wicksy’s the one who sees spaceships. Damn
sure you’d have to silence a witness as reliable as that!’
    ‘The man who shot him may not have known him that well,’ said Donovan reasonably. ‘He might not know that Wicksy spent most of his life on a different planet. If he saw something, and if it mattered enough, he was killed because whoever did it couldn’t count on us not believing him.’
    It was speculation but it made sense. ‘All right,’ said Shapiro. ‘What did he see?’
    Donovan’s eyes rounded. ‘I’m supposed to know that?’
    ‘Actually, yes. He was shot about twenty minutes ago. According to Desmond, you passed through about twenty minutes before that. So what did Wicksy see in those twenty minutes that got him killed? What did he see that you didn’t?’
    Donovan cast his mind back, but until Zara caught up with him on his way back along Brick Lane there had been nothing memorable about his walk. There had been nothing for Wicksy to see.
    He shook his head. ‘Beats me, chief.’
    ‘Call yourself a detective,’ grunted Shapiro.
    They were back at Queen’s Street, trying to organize two parallel murder inquiries, when - almost