Broken Lines by Jo Bannister

difficulty believing that. ‘I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Never mind that. Roly Dickens knew about something that was only discussed in this office, and I want to know how.’
    Shapiro’s eyebrows rocketed. ‘Sergeant – are you accusing one of us of being in old Roly’s pocket?’
    That stopped him short. Donovan blinked and then knuckled his eyes. ‘’Course not. I just – I don’t know how it went wrong.’
    â€˜Maybe it didn’t,’ Liz said reasonably. ‘Maybe he just didn’t take the bait.’
    Donovan shook his head. ‘You didn’t see Mikey. It was like a big joke. Him and the old man had been wetting themselves for two hours, and when they thought I was getting pissed-off enough to go home Mikey came out to share it with me. They knew, the whole thing, and I don’t know how if they didn’t hear it from someone in Queen’s Street.’
    Shapiro caught his angry gaze and held it. No facial gymnastics now, just the steady eyes of a man wanting to be quite sure that what he said was understood, ‘Donovan, you’re suggesting that someone in this building is passing information on an inquiry to a known criminal. That’s almost the gravest allegation you can make against a policeman. Do you mean it?’
    For a moment the superintendent’s tone was enough to silence Donovan. But reflecting on the facts didn’t alter them and he nodded. ‘Yes. The evidence is there. OK, everything we do doesn’t go according to plan. I might have misread the situation. We might have been wrong about who had the gun, where it was, what he’d do if he thought we’d found it. We could have set the whole, thing up only to find he’d gone to the pictures. Or there might be something we don’t know about that would change drastically how he’d react.
    â€˜But it’s not just that he didn’t jump when we wanted him to. We said Jump and he blew us a raspberry. That’s not the thing going off half-cocked: it’s sabotage. Roly knew what we were expecting. He knew what we were doing and why. He knew that all he had to do was nothing, and then he was safe enough to let us in on the joke. He knew. Somebody told him.’
    â€˜All right,’ said Shapiro slowly. ‘Anyone in particular you want to point the finger at?’
    Donovan was uncomfortable but he wasn’t going to back down. ‘The three of us knew, and Dick Morgan; and the Son of God, and the Station Sergeant.’ He was not a religious man: he didn’t mean that, just as no sparrow falls unmarked by heaven, so no operation organized at Queen’s Street escaped the celestial eye. For reasons now disappearing in the mists of time Superintendent Giles was commonly referred to as the Son of God. ‘That’s too many to keep a secret. One of us must have said something to someone – in the canteen, in the corridor, in the bog. Anyone in the station could have known.’
    â€˜We’re not looking for someone who knew, though, are we?’ said Liz tersely. ‘We’re looking for someone who knew, and told Roly Dickens. For a favour or for money. So which of your colleagues do you reckon is in hock to the Dickenses?’
    â€˜You’re making it sound like it couldn’t happen,’ Donovan growled, ‘and we all know it does happen. There’s nothing special about us, it could happen here too. I don’t know who. There’s nobody I had any doubts about until now. But if we ignore what’s happened it’ll happen again.’
    â€˜So what do you want to do?’ asked Shapiro. His broad face remained expressionless. He’d helped Donovan with problems of every kind, professional and personal, in the eight years they’d worked together but he wasn’t going to help him with this. If Donovan thought one of his colleagues was an informer he