Broken Lines Read Online Free Page B

cheese straws in the staffroom. They were still in costume. Brian Graham, who was the Wazir, was wearing burnt-cork whiskers, a long brocade waistcoat and something that might have been a Victorian smoking cap. Liz thought he looked more like Mr Mole than the Wazir of Baghdad. But then, she didn’t look much like a chief of detectives either.
    The part does not figure prominently in the original story. It was created specially for her when she saw a rehearsal a couple of weeks ago and laughed herself silly. It was the funniest thing she’d seen since Donovan took her to a pub where folk music was perpetrated. She only came to admire the scenery – as head of the art department Brian had a dual contribution to make to the festivities. But by the time she’d hooted her way through a couple of scenes – comedy, love interest, the death of Ali Baba’s mother, the lot – it was generally agreed that she’d better be given a part to play since the alternative was probably having her in the audience.
    Now it was over, and unless a theatrical agent was waiting with a contract at the stage door it was back to Castlemere’s generally less picturesque crime scene tomorrow morning. For Ali Baba’s mother read Mikey Dickens’s grandma Thelma; for the Wazir’s treasure read a nice little earner in second-hand car stereos with the serial numbers unaccountably missing.
    She liked Brian’s colleagues. She’d met most of them at one time or another, but dressing up in false beards and discarded curtains showed them in a whole new light. Who’d have thought that the best education in Castlemere was being purveyed by people whose idea of entertainment was I-say-I-say-I-say jokes and sand dancing?
    Brian spotted someone he wanted to talk to and left her to the tender mercies of Slasher Siddons, head of Religious Studies. The Reverend Simon Siddons was a fencer in his youth: thirty years later the nickname still gave him so much pleasure he made sure no one forgot it. He’d played the part of Mrs Baba, in drag.
    He looked over the heads of the assembly – he was the tallest person present as well as, at least temporarily, the best endowed bosom-wise – and saw Brian talking to a mousy woman in the last dirndl skirt in England. ‘Marion Cully,’ he said, for Liz’s benefit. ‘She’s Mrs Taylor’s deputy in the English department, she went round with some flowers this afternoon to see how she was. After the accident.’
    â€˜Accident?’ Liz hadn’t been at Queen’s Street today or she’d have known.
    â€˜She was run off the road by some young tearaway last night. She wasn’t hurt, apparently, just very shaken. But it must have been a close thing. One of the cars caught fire.’
    â€˜The accident in Chevening? I heard something about it on the radio. They said three people were taken to hospital but that none of the injuries was serious. Do you know who the others were?’
    She wondered why Mr Siddons was regarding her oddly, as if he thought she might be fibbing and couldn’t work out why. ‘One of them was the boy involved – one of the Dickenses, I think. The other was your sergeant. The Irish one.’
    Liz had a sort of reflex action for when people mentioned Donovan: her heart sank and her chin rose, ready to defend him. In the three years he’d worked for her she’d called him every name under the sun, but never in front of third parties. In front of third parties, which included all the general public except Brian and all the police except Shapiro, she backed him to the hilt because she knew he did the same for her.
    â€˜Donovan was in one of the cars?’
    â€˜I think he came on the scene right after the crash. He pulled young Dickens clear in the nick of time.’
    Liz nodded slowly. That sounded like Donovan. If the man went into a florist’s he’d walk in on the world’s