A Bleeding of Innocents by Jo Bannister Page A

than him, was she? You said she filled the flat.’
    Tulliver considered, shrugged. ‘A shade taller, a bit broader. But you expect it the other way round, don’t you? What’s big for a girl is still small for a man.’
    â€˜So given the right circumstances – not much light, say, and them sitting down, and her sitting where you’d expect to see him – you could maybe mistake one for the other?’
    Tulliver’s eyes narrowed as he thought about it. ‘In the car? If whoever it was expected to see David driving? Well, maybe. If she had the collar of her coat up about her hair, say. She was fair too. Maybe in the dark you wouldn’t notice that her hair was curly and there was more of it. Maybe, if you were planning on shooting one of them, you wouldn’t be taking that long to weigh it up.’
    Donovan was almost literally chewing it over. He found himself gnawing on the inside of his cheek and stopped. ‘Do you know any reason someone would want to kill Page?’
    Tulliver didn’t answer immediately but when he did it was with conviction. ‘No. David hasn’t any enemies, he’s not that kind of boy. He’s inoffensive. He doesn’t get into trouble.’
    â€˜You’ve never caught him making – oh, I don’t know – unauthorized flights, landings he couldn’t explain?’
    Tulliver’s eye was stern. ‘I told you, laddie, I’ve no complaints about his work. I plan to make him a partner, all right? When he’s ready to buy in this business’ll be in both our names. You think I’d be doing that if I didn’t trust him? Besides which, you seem to be confusing us with British Airways. Yes, we do international flights – Longchamps for the racing, Frankfurt for the Book Fair, that sort of thing. But he doesn’t fly to the same places regularly enough to be of any interest to smugglers, say. I can’t see it, Sergeant. I can’t see David Page getting mixed up in anything crooked.’
    Thinking was making Donovan’s head ache. He knuckled his fist into his eye. ‘Then suppose it wasn’t something he did that made him a target but something he saw or heard. They’re pretty small, these planes, aren’t they? I mean, the passengers are right up there with the pilot?’ Tulliver nodded. ‘So anything they were talking about he’d hear. You keep records of who’s flown where, when, and for what purpose?’
    â€˜Of course.’ The big man reached for a heavy black-bound ledger with the entries made by hand. ‘How far back do you want to go?’
    Donovan shrugged. ‘Let’s start on Friday and work back.’
    He was expecting the job to take an hour and the results to be inconclusive at the end of it. He could hardly believe his luck when he found what he was looking for on the first page. And what he found filled him with a kind of unholy excitement that he had to keep the lid on until he could leave Tulliver’s office.
    He didn’t want to waste time so he telephoned before leaving. Inspector Graham was in Clarke’s office. ‘I’ve found something. It could be important and it could be urgent. We need to talk to Page. Where is he?’
    â€˜I sent him home,’ said Liz. ‘To the flat.’
    â€˜Can you meet me there?’
    â€˜Now? Why, what have you found?’
    Tulliver had taken himself out into the hangar so it wasn’t that Donovan couldn’t talk freely, more that he didn’t want to. ‘I can’t explain on the phone but it’s got to be significant. I can be there in fifteen minutes: will you meet me?’
    â€˜All right,’ said Liz, and before she could ask for more detail he’d rung off.
    She was parking her car in the avenue of slightly rundown Victorian houses, many of them converted into flats, a hundred yards from the nursing home, when a roar like a Harrier taking