Read Online Broken Lines by Jo Bannister - Free Book Online Page A

off their Christmas list. Billy replied with a tragic little sigh.
    Donovan chuckled. ‘Don’t sound so worried, I’m not going to get you in trouble. I just wondered what you’d heard about this gun of Mikey Dickens’s.’
    Those were the magic words that freed Billy’s tongue. The muscles of his jaw, that would have clamped tight at the word Walsh, immediately relaxed. He thought he was off the hook. He thought he could get Donovan off his back without calling the fires of hell down on him.
    All the same, life had taught Billy Dunne to be cautious. ‘Gun, Mr Donovan?’
    Donovan’s lupine smile was rather wasted in the dark, though Billy shivered anyway, from habit. ‘Gun, Billy. The gun he held up Ash Kumani with. The gun he threw away shortly before I caught up with him. The gun his entire bloody family turned out to look for. That gun.’
    Billy tried to sound as if he had just this second understood what Donovan was driving at. ‘Oh – that’s what they were doing, is it? I knew there was something going on, I didn’t know just what.’
    Donovan fought the unreasonable, and unhygienic, urge to kiss him. ‘Yeah, that’s what it was. They wanted to find Mikey’s gun before we did. They did, too. They must have been at it for hours.’
    â€˜They were, Mr Donovan. I heard them all setting off about five o’clock yesterday morning – there must have been a dozen cars, maybe more. Then around eight they were back, all laughing and inviting one another in for a drink. Old Roly’ – Roland Dickens, Thelma’s eldest and Mikey’s father – ‘was acting the dog.’
    â€˜The dog?’ This was one piece of Jubilee argot Donovan hadn’t heard before. ‘What dog?’
    Billy smiled slowly. ‘You know, Mr Donovan. The dog that got the cat that got the cream.’
    Donovan let him continue on his way. There probably wasn’t much he could add, and if Donovan thought of something more to ask he knew where to find him.
    So Roly organized the great gun hunt, after he got back from seeing Mikey in the hospital. That figured. If any of the clan had been in a hole it would have been Roly digging them out. The man was an icon to those who mourned the passing of Victorian values, a paterfamilias who had bred copiously and raised his children to follow in his footsteps. Even now they were grown and some were raising children of their own he continued to keep a close eye on all their doings, the rock to which they clung if danger threatened. Admittedly, what they mostly needed his help with was avoiding being locked up on charges ranging from shoplifting to armed robbery. But nothing was too much trouble for this acme of family men: father, grandfather and Godfather.
    But knowing who had the gun and finding it were two different things. On what he knew now Donovan could get a search warrant, and strip Roly’s house in George Street down to the bricks. And he would find nothing. He might, just, get the warrant extended to cover other properties owned by the Dickens family, and he would find nothing there too.
    The gun might already have gone – into the canal or a landfill site somewhere, or off the stern of a cross-channel ferry on an away day to Calais. If you wanted rid of something as small as a gun, that was easy enough, and if Mikey Dickens had killed someone with the weapon that would surely have been its fate. But he hadn’t. The resources of a murder hunt wouldn’t be devoted to finding it, and a gun has an intrinsic value in criminal circles: not even the cost of a new one so much as the risks involved in acquiring it. Dealers in unlicensed weapons hazard their freedom and their lives every day, and it makes them paranoid. If they have any doubts about your bona fides they don’t just run, they shoot you and then run. Donovan had arrested people buying unlicensed arms who’d been