Another One Goes Tonight

26

“Turn it round.”

Ingeborg, taken by surprise, said, “What?”

“The car. Do a U-turn. We’re going back.”

“We’re almost there, guv.”

“I know. There’s nothing for us at this place. Do as I tell you.”

Ingeborg allowed two motorbikes to hurtle past in the other direction and then did as instructed with a screech of tyres. “Where are we heading?”

“The RUH.” He had his phone out again. “Put your foot down.”

This had to be serious. Diamond urging any driver to put their foot down was as likely as him taking to the stage at Covent Garden in the pas de deux from Le Corsaire.

His direct line to the sister didn’t work. She wasn’t answering.

Called to some new emergency?

Please no.

Back to the main hospital number. “This is the police. Can you put me through to the Critical Care unit? I can’t get the sister in charge.”

A wait while they tried.

“Try the ward adjacent to it… I’m trying to remember the name… It’s where you’re put when you’re starting to recover… Bradford, that’s it.”

He kept the phone jammed to his ear and said to the others, “It’s a general ward and he’s in a private room.” He was speaking into the phone again. “Who is this? The sister?… Who’s in charge, then? Let me speak to the senior person, whoever that is.”

His two colleagues waited to be enlightened. Clearly whatever was going on at the hospital had priority over everything. Ingeborg was forced to give her attention to the driving. Her car wasn’t fitted with blues and twos, so other drivers weren’t aware she’d be ignoring speed limits and rules of overtaking. The A36 through the Wylye valley isn’t as twisting as the river it runs beside, but it comes a close second.

Diamond had got through to someone more senior on Bradford Ward. “You have a patient called Pellegrini, right? Until a couple of days ago he was in Critical Care. Can you see him from where you are? Is anyone with him? Okay, now listen to me. This is the police. Close the ward and stop all visitors from entering. Yes, everyone. An extreme emergency. I’m sending officers to seal off the ward. It’s mandatory that you take this action now.”

He prodded the keys again and got Keynsham and made himself known. “I need to seal Bradford Ward at the RUH until I can get there. I’m currently on the A36, a good twenty minutes away. Treat this as a high emergency. Get some armed officers there as soon as possible… Yes, the hospital has been informed. Do it now.”

“Can you do that?” Halliwell asked him after he’d taken the phone from his ear.

“Do what?”

“Close a hospital ward.”

“I’ve just done it, haven’t I?”

“But on what authority, guv? You know what hospitals are like. They have their own protocols.”

“You heard my end of the call,” Diamond said. “Didn’t I make myself clear?”

“I wonder if they’ll act on it.”

“Of course they will. ‘An extreme emergency’ I said. The lives of the patients come above everything else.”

“They’ll want to confirm it with Keynsham. I doubt if they’ll act on one call to a staff nurse-or whoever you spoke to.”

There was sense in what Halliwell was saying.

Troubling sense.

“I couldn’t get hold of the sister I know,” Diamond said. “She’d take me seriously. I’ll try her again.” He keyed in the direct number.

Still no answer.

“What I’m getting at,” Halliwell said, “is that if some hospital manager was to check with the station, nobody knows what the hell is going on. The ACC isn’t in on this, is she?”

“Christ no. Georgina doesn’t know.”

“So it’s not like an ongoing operation everyone is up to speed with.”

He was right. Now it had been pointed out, Diamond could see his emergency unravelling as the hospital hierarchy tangled with the management tier in the police. “I’d better fess up with Georgina. God, where do I start?”

When he tried Georgina’s direct number, she was engaged, very likely in conversation with the hospital.

A nightmare of failed calls.

“Where are we now?” he asked Ingeborg.

“Beckington, guv. We’re closing in.”

“Ten miles?”

“About that.”

“When we get there, it’s gate one, the main entrance. Pull up there and when we get inside, Critical Care is straight ahead, not far up the corridor, and Bradford Ward is next to it. I’m not sure what to expect. If they haven’t sealed the ward it could be too late. The sister said he’s expecting two lots of visitors, two railway buddies, who I took to be Jake and Simon, and a woman friend, who is almost certainly Jessie.”

“Jessie is alive?” Ingeborg said.

“Alive and set on killing Pellegrini.”

“Jessie?”

Ideally, he would not have sledgehammered them like this. Under the pressure of what awaited at the RUH there was no way of letting them in gradually. Only God knew the shock Diamond had felt when he’d finally grasped the truth, but at least he’d worked it out for himself. His two colleagues were forced to take it on trust.

He kept the facts terse and to the point. “She’s our serial killer. She did for all the others, wrote the journal, planted the bogus DNA, and almost got away with it by leading us to think she was dead. She’s been waiting to see if Pellegrini recovers because he knows far too much about her. She can’t allow him to live and this is the first chance she’s had to get to him since he came out of the coma.” He took a breath. “Now do you see why I want to close the bloody ward?”

Neither spoke. There’s a limit to how many revelations anyone-even a trained detective-can take in at a time.

“Take it from me, all this is true,” Diamond went on. “Everything checks. There isn’t time to take you through it, but I will. Right now, we must stop her from committing another murder, if we’re not too late.”

Profound shock takes people in different ways. In the back seat, Halliwell reacted like a troubled infant by chewing something soft and fleecy that turned out to be one of Nutty’s ears. At the front, Ingeborg did well to avoid running into the back of a post office van.

They were making the ascent that is Claverton Down, swerving past slower vehicles at every opportunity. The innate terrors Diamond suffered from high speeds were as nothing to his concern for Pellegrini’s survival. He tried using the phone again and was thwarted. He felt like tossing the wretched thing out of the window.

In silence, they careered down Bathwick Hill and the city opened up in front of them. They’d made brilliant time, but every minute that passed could be the minute murder was being done. Pity the hospital was located on the other side, out at Weston. At the bottom of Bathwick they passed St. Mary’s church hall, where the railway society held its meetings and Captain Jarrow presided. The meeting with that old soldier seemed a lifetime ago to Diamond.

Ingeborg took her own route through the centre. There were a dozen ways she could have chosen and only volume of traffic made the difference at this stage. Her judgement worked for them: along a northern arc, using Weston Lane, avoiding the afternoon congestion on the Upper Bristol Road.

Sharp left at Combe Park and they’d made it to the hospital. Through gate one.

She halted at the drop-off point outside the main entrance. They all quit the car and sprinted past wide-eyed visitors and staff through the atrium, round the side of the café and up the corridor to Critical Care.

Bradford Ward was on the left.

No one was guarding the entrance. They got straight in.

Diamond grabbed a male nurse by the shoulder. The trolley he was pushing swung off course and almost hit a visitor on her way out.

“Patient Pellegrini. Which way?”

“Who?”

“Just admitted from Critical Care.”

“Oh.” The nurse pointed. “Second left. Who are you?”

He didn’t get an answer. Diamond followed Ingeborg into the private room.

Unoccupied.

Or so it appeared. On the bedside cabinet two white mugs and an empty plate with a few crumbs suggested someone had been there.

Ingeborg grabbed the pillow and tossed it aside. Underneath was the deathly pale, slack-jawed face of an old man Diamond recognised as Ivor Pellegrini. He must have been smothered.

“Get help.”

Halliwell dashed out while Diamond placed his index and middle fingers against the hollow between Pellegrini’s windpipe and the main neck muscle.

With nothing to do but watch and hope for a faint beat of life, Ingeborg stood back. After the rush to the room, her own heart was pounding. So strong was her concentration on the figure in the bed that she barely noticed a slight sound behind her.

“Who’s that?”

Diamond must have heard her, but he was too intent on what he was doing to look round.

She turned her head fully and glimpsed a female figure in dark clothes, with red hair, quitting the room.

In their beeline to the bed, they’d failed to notice someone else against the far wall. They must have interrupted the killer at work.

Ingeborg moved so fast in pursuit that Diamond didn’t know she’d gone. He turned to say, “I can’t find a pulse.”

Instead of Ingeborg, Halliwell had returned with a nurse.

The medics took over.

Ingeborg retained a fleeting impression of the woman she was pursuing, above all the shoulder-length red hair. White-skinned, average in height, black suit, flat shoes-or so she thought. She hadn’t seen anything of the face. Didn’t match the description of Jessie, who had short, brown hair with blonde highlights. But this person had to be stopped. She had definitely been in that room with Pellegrini.

Why hadn’t the ward been sealed, as Diamond had ordered? Could have saved the old man’s life.

Concentrate, she told herself. Somewhere up ahead is that woman.

Anyone who had just smothered a man wasn’t going to hang about. Better look for a redhead in a hurry, striding out fast, if not actually running. Probably heading through the atrium to the main entrance.

Ingeborg ran, dodging people who hadn’t seen her coming. She hoped she wouldn’t collide with some luckless outpatient on crutches.

For a moment she saw the woman framed in the spring sunlight at the entrance, the red hair swinging as she turned left and out of sight. In that direction she’d be heading for one of the car parks. Made sense.

No more than fifty yards to make up. But the first car park wasn’t far off.

Outside the building, a cluster of security people had surrounded the Ka, which was improperly parked, of course, the doors still hanging open. The explanation could wait. Ingeborg needed to use it. She felt in her pocket, brandished her ID and yelled.

“Police, stand back!”

Dodged past two uniforms, slammed one door shut, jerked another fully open, got in, started up and powered away.

She’d sacrificed some precious distance to the suspect, but she had a plan, outrageous, dangerous, and the best she could do in the situation. She would stop all movement of traffic.

A short distance along the narrow two-way road leading to the car parks, she glanced in her mirror, decided it had to be now, jerked the steering wheel right, slammed the brakes and swung the Ka across the centre of the road and squared up broadside on, blocking all progress either way.

Immediately, brakes screeched, horns were sounded, windows wound down and no doubt the air was blue with curses at the crazy woman who was in the act of abandoning her vehicle in the worst possible place. Ingeborg couldn’t hear for the din of the horns.

She waved-a gesture that might mean anything-but seemed to be saying all was fine and dandy, whatever the inconvenience. Then she marched up the centre of the road along the line of cars backing up and stared into each vehicle, oblivious of what they were shouting at her.

She was fired up, concentrating on the task of finding the redheaded driver, who should by now have moved out of the car park and been caught in the tailback, unable to move.

Unfortunately, the trap was full of innocent victims: wide-eyed old ladies, bald-headed men, a couple of turbans, two eyes peering from a burka, a mother with three screaming kids in the back, middle-aged blondes, distracted brunettes, a nun, a doctor in an emergency car, a good cross-section of the population. Any minute someone was going to jump out and grab her.

She reached a point that she calculated was too far along the line. The redhead ought to be in the thick of the hold-up if she hadn’t found some other way out, or was still in the car park, boxing clever.

Frustrated, Ingeborg turned and retraced her steps along the verge on the other side of the cars. She’d take a close look at everyone in the front passenger seats. She thought she’d checked them all.

Ten or twelve cars along the line, she got lucky. She happened to look down at an empty seat in a Fiat just as the driver’s hand snaked across and snatched something away.

A flash of copper that shimmered with the movement.

A red wig.

Ingeborg reached for the door handle just as the driver exited on the other side and made her escape bid.

Definitely the woman in the black trouser suit and flat shoes, but now without glasses and with her own hair exposed as short and brown with blonde streaks. She was bolting across a patch of lawn towards the hospital building.

Ingeborg started after her and knew at once she had the speed to catch her.

Maybe thirty yards on, she launched herself into the tackle that ended the chase. The woman buckled at the waist. They both hit the grass and Ingeborg made sure she was on top, cushioned from the fall. She grabbed a wrist and secured an arm-lock.

“You’re nicked, Jessie-or is it Elspeth Blake?”

In the private room in Bradford Ward, a team of doctors were trying to resuscitate Pellegrini using a defibrillator, watched by Peter Diamond and Keith Halliwell.

The only positive thing anyone could have said was that he was in the right place. The medics knew what to do, they had the record of his natural heart rhythm and they understood how fragile he was.

To Diamond’s eye, this was a scene out of numberless TV hospital dramas. Any moment the senior doctor would remove the paddles, turn to his colleagues and shake his head.

It would be a terrible anti-climax, a cruel outcome for all the doctors and nurses who had spent days helping their patient out of the coma.

But it wasn’t played that way. Presently there was nodding between the team. They’d detected a response.

“Let’s get out of their way,” Diamond said to Halliwell. “They’ll want to move him back into Critical Care.”