Another One Goes Tonight

4

Diamond slept fitfully, troubled by recurring images of the old man’s grey, lifeless face.

In the morning, he drove-with even more care than usual-to the Royal United Hospital instead of straight to work. After much badgering of the ward sister responsible for Lew Morgan’s care, he was told he might be allowed a short visit after the consultant had seen the patient.

It wasn’t so simple.

Extra treatment-whatever that meant-was prescribed, meaning a wait of at least an hour. Instead of sitting outside and staring at a wall he had the good idea of checking on the progress, if any, of the tricyclist. He located the Critical Care unit quickly, not far from the room where Lew Morgan was being treated. Understandably, he wasn’t allowed inside, even with his police ID.

“What are his chances?” he asked the one nurse willing to be questioned.

She held her hand palm downwards and made a quivering movement.

“Not the best, then?”

“He’s old. He must be over seventy, quite well nourished, but the trauma he’s been through would test someone half his age. Apparently-don’t ask me why-he was lying unconscious for some hours before he was brought in. There are other injuries from the fall and we haven’t concluded how serious they are.”

“He’s still with us. That’s something.”

She didn’t comment, just widened her eyes a fraction.

He took this to mean the patient was clinically alive thanks to the treatment he was getting. Whether he showed vital signs of his own was less certain.

Of course it would aid the investigation if the old boy pulled through, but at this minute Diamond wasn’t thinking about the investigation. He passionately wanted the man to survive.

“Did you discover his name?” he asked the nurse. “I was wondering if you found a wallet or a card-case in his pockets.”

“There wasn’t anything like that,” she said. “Some money and a set of keys that Sister has put in the safe. No, he’s our mystery patient until somebody misses him and comes looking.”

He went outside and called CID. Ingeborg was in.

“I’ve been given a statement from the control room, guv,” she said. “It’s a log of all their exchanges with Delta Three on the night of the crash.”

“Good. I asked for that. Anything of special interest?”

“Not really but it gives a picture of the areas they visited. They arrested two men from Swindon stealing lead from a church roof in Julian Road and brought them in to the custody suite. They were still here when the call came in about the naked man. It was almost the end of their turn.”

She also had a list from Dessie of the items found in the handlebar bag: binoculars, digital camera, a few tools for the trike, an Ordnance Survey map of Bath, a vacuum flask containing the dregs of some tea and a plastic sandwich box but with only some cake crumbs and a banana skin inside. And a plastic vase.

“A what?”

“A vase about a foot high, with a lid. Dessie thought it might have contained ashes.”

“Oh?”

“He said it was typical of the temporary containers provided by crematoria but there was nothing inside.”

“Like an urn? How weird.”

“Very.”

“You mentioned a camera. Have they checked it?”

“Damaged, I’m sorry to say.”

“How damaged? It would be good to know if he took any pictures.”

“The vacuum flask split and everything was soaked in tea. They’re sending the memory card to a data recovery expert but they don’t hold out much hope.”

“What’s a data recovery expert for if he can’t recover data?”

“Am I supposed to answer that, guv?” Ingeborg said.

“No need. I was having my usual rant. We’ve got a few clues now.”

“Have we?”

“Come on, Inge. Is this the result of all the hours I’ve devoted to teaching you the art of detection?”

He heard a nervous laugh. “Sorry, guv, I must have missed something.”

“First, there’s the obvious clue of the banana.”

“But there isn’t a banana.”

“That’s the obvious clue.” She’d walked into that like a latter-day Dr. Watson. “He’d eaten it.”

“He’d eaten the cake as well.”

“Better. What do you deduce from that?”

“He’d got hungry at some point.”

“More importantly, he hadn’t just started out. He must have been out some time already.”

“Okay, that’s worth knowing, I agree.”

“Now let’s turn to the clue of the binoculars,” he said.

“You’re doing my head in, guv. Does it mean he was another voyeur, like Mr. Bellerby?”

“Spying on people? I doubt it. He wouldn’t need an Ordnance Survey map for that. It suggests to me he’d been out most of the night in the country-maybe at a nature reserve, looking at wildlife. Foxes, deer and badgers all like to move about after dark. He had the deerstalker hat and gaiters, so he dressed the part. The camera was in case he got a chance of a picture. My hunch is that this was a keen nature-lover.”

“Will that help us identify him?” Ingeborg said without sounding wholly convinced.

“Well, it doesn’t give us his name and address,” he said, slightly piqued. “I’m a detective, not a clairvoyant.”

She hesitated. “Isn’t there something else-the clue of the empty cremation urn?”

“For the present, I haven’t got that down as a clue.”

“Could he have been on his way back from scattering someone’s ashes?”

A depressing thought that couldn’t be discounted. “I suppose.” His thoughts moved on. He was back in the CID groove. “Was anything on TV this morning about the crash?”

“I don’t look at TV in the morning.”

“Issue a press statement appealing for information, then. I’m serious now, Inge. I want this done right away. Full description of our tricyclist, the eccentric get-up. We can say he was injured early yesterday in a car accident in Beckford Gardens and is now in intensive care. Someone must be missing him by now.”

His own last comment stayed with him after he’d pocketed the phone and was returning to Lew Morgan’s ward. Was there anyone who would miss the old nature-lover? The cake might suggest there was someone who cared about him. But going out at night-and staying out-could be the mark of a loner.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” the sister said when Diamond reached the room where Lew Morgan was being treated. “He’s unlikely to remember anything about the crash.”

“So I’m wasting my time?”

“It’s not surprising. He’s being treated with strong painkillers.”

“They said he might lose his leg.”

“He will, almost certainly.” A statement of fact. There’s no room for sentiment in the treatment of accident victims.

“Does he remember much?”

She looked at him over her glasses. “It’s not our job to question him. We try to stay positive. Are you a close friend?”

“Can’t say I am.”

“But you’re here officially?”

“Between you and me, I’d rather be anywhere else.”

“You can try getting him to speak. He knows who he is and where he lives.”

“That’s a start.”

“Be patient, then, get his confidence and let him talk if he wants to. Don’t make him anxious. No pressure, please. First, you must put this on.” She took a pack from a shelf and handed it to him.

A surgical mask and gown in a sterile bag. He was going to feel odd dressed like that but he didn’t question the instruction.

“If you need me,” the sister added, “there’s a call switch in front of him.”

Dressed like someone out of ER, he went in. He could just about recognise the patient as the uniformed sergeant he’d seen from time to time at Manvers Street police station. Lew Morgan’s eyes were closed and sensor pads were attached to his chest. A console of screens monitoring vital functions was at the head of the bed. An intravenous drip on a stand was connected to his right arm. But his face was clear, apart from bruising and small cuts.

“Lew?”

The eyes opened and looked as if they wanted to close again. Wouldn’t anybody’s, faced with one more hooded figure with a sterile mask?

“Peter Diamond, from the nick. You may have seen me around.”

No answer.

Be patient and get his confidence, she’d advised, so he made the attempt. “Plenty of people send you their best, too many to mention by name. You’ll be inundated with get-well cards. I get to be the first to see you because I was given the job of finding out what happened. I’ll need all the help you can give me.”

No response, except that the eyes remained open.

Diamond had never been good at small talk-and this was a muffled monologue, not a conversation. He would quickly run out of topics that would not upset the patient. “Of course, if there’s anyone you’d like to visit you, just say their names and I can arrange it.”

Lew didn’t seem interested in naming his police buddies. But then his cracked lips moved and at a second try he found his voice. “Did we…”

“Yes? I hear you.”

“… get to Beckford Gardens?”

Did we get to Beckford Gardens?

A pause for Diamond to catch up. “You did.” Encouraged to have elicited anything at all, he was about to add, “That’s where you crashed,” and managed to stop himself. Instead, he said, “You definitely got there. Oh yes, there’s no argument about that. Mission accomplished.”

The mouth curved into something like a smile.

“So you haven’t lost your memory.” Diamond started mining this promising seam. “You can recall where you were heading. You’d been on the night turn when the call came from the control room soon after six a.m.”

Lew’s lips twitched, trying, it seemed, to speak again. It took an effort but the words finally came. “Some bollock-naked idiot.”

This eased the tension wonderfully. Diamond grinned. “I couldn’t put it better myself. Report of a naked man in Beckford Gardens.” Instead of being the hospital visitor with the sick patient, he could relate to the guy as one cop to another.

“Aaron at the wheel,” Lew volunteered. “PC Aaron Green.”

Watch it, Diamond told himself. This was heading into an area the sister would class as upsetting. Fortunately she was on her duties way out of earshot.

“Married,” Lew said. “Young kid.”

“I know.”

“Nothing wrong with his driving.”

“I’m sure.”

“Tired. Very tired.” The eyes closed.

Frustrating. On the brink of saying something helpful he seemed to be drifting off again. Then it became obvious that Lew wasn’t speaking of his present condition. Those eyes were squeezed tight in an effort to remember.

They opened again. “Knackered. Both of us,” Lew said. He’d been trying to convey the state he and Aaron had been in before the crash.

Anyone who had worked the night turn would understand. Seven a.m. can never come too soon.

“One of those nights,” Lew said. “Fucking nutcase.”

“Nuisance calls?”

“Old guy on a trike.”

Suddenly Diamond was all ears.

“… dressed as Sherlock fucking Holmes.”

“I’m with you, Lew. This is really helpful. Keep going.”

“Crazy. Told me he had his wife with him.”

Who was the crazy one here? Lew himself had a few of his pages stuck together if he thought he’d had a conversation with the accident victim.

“It was her ashes.”

The empty urn Dessie had recovered from the scene. Surreal and impossible as it was, Lew was making some kind of sense. “He spoke to you? Is that right-you and he talked? Did he tell you anything else?”

“Rabbits.”

“Yes?” Thrown by the word, Diamond tried to respond as if he understood. It was vital to keep this going. “Like furry creatures with large ears?”

“A mile a night, hopping to Bath,” Lew said. Maddeningly, he’d lost the thread just after he’d made the first significant statement.

“Yes?”

“Hear them digging their holes.”

Too bad Lew had lost it and was talking rubbish. He needed to be brought back to the scene of the collision. “You were telling me you and Aaron were dog tired. Do you remember what happened when you got to Beckford Gardens?”

“Bushed, yeah.”

The troubled brain was working hard.

“Shut my eyes.”

“No. Stay with me if you can.” Diamond didn’t want this ending now. “We’re almost through, Lew.”

“I’m telling you,” Lew said with more force. “My fucking eyes were shut.”

“Got you now. Sorry.”

“Next thing Aaron yells something and we’re fucking turning over. That was it.”

“What did he yell?”

“‘Jeez!’ Something like that. Ask him.”

Chilling. He thought Aaron was still alive.

He’d been trapped in the car beside a corpse. Surely he remembered? But the brain has its own way of dealing with shock. He must have suppressed the ghastly memory he couldn’t deal with yet.

Diamond changed tack. “The old guy on the trike. Did he cause the accident?”

“Him? What do you mean?”

“He was there, Lew.”

“Wasn’t.”

The only witness to the crash was self-deluding about everything he couldn’t cope with. This critically important interview was imploding. “Believe me, he was.”

“No.”

“I’m telling you.”

“Stay out of my head, will you?”

A sharp rebuke. Worse, Lew reached for the call switch and pressed it. The session was about to end.

“I’m on your side, Lew.”

But now the eyes registered only mistrust.

Diamond was thinking if the medics had decided an amputation was necessary there might not be another chance in days of getting to the truth. “We’re all aware of what you’re going through. You know what the police are like. They have to know every detail of what happened.”

“Piss off.” Lew pressed the button again.

The sister came in, heard what was said and summed up the situation. “I had my doubts it would work. It’s too soon. I’m afraid I must ask you to leave.”

Diamond didn’t argue. “Thanks, anyway.” He removed the sterile clothes and gave her a card. “If he changes his mind, these are my contact details.”

She glanced at the card and smiled faintly. “I don’t suppose he knew he was talking to a superintendent.”

“I’ve heard worse,” he said.

On his way back to the car he was seething with frustration. He’d succeeded only in upsetting a critically injured man. The fragmented account of the collision had added little of use to what he already knew. He’d not asked for this bloody job and he was getting nowhere with it.

There was a voice message on his mobile asking him to call Desmond De Lisle. Who the hell was that?

Dessie.

He called the number.

“How’s it progressing, squire?” Dessie asked.

“Squire” was slightly less objectionable than “man,” but it still rankled. “It isn’t. One of the survivors is too far gone to speak and the other isn’t making sense. But you were trying to reach me.”

“Don’t get your hopes up. Nothing to make your day. The smashed car is being worked on as we speak, checking mechanical faults, brakes and what have you. It’s not a job you can do in a day or even a week. What I’m calling about is we also have the bits of the trike to play with.”

“Does it matter?”

“May do. Something interesting has come up. The trike wasn’t factory built. None of the parts are standard manufacture except the tyres. He was riding a homemade machine.”

“Strange.”

“I think so. And it’s expertly done. The welding, the gears, the electrics, are as well built as any commercial bike. Kept in nice condition, too. From all I can tell, looking at the brakes and the mechanics, it was roadworthy.”

“Could he have made it himself?”

“Can’t answer that, squire, but whoever put it together was hot stuff at metalwork.”

“Thanks for letting me know. Have you learned anything else?”

“Not a lot. The tread marks confirm what I showed you at the scene. The patrol car moves out to pass the parked vehicles and immediately brakes hard, gets into a skid, hits the trike, rises up the bank, turns over-”

“Hold on, Dessie. You’ve added something. You didn’t mention the trike when we walked it through.”

“Obviously. Because you hadn’t found it at that stage. For him to be flung up there, with all that force, he must get hit broadside on.”

“Okay. The big question is why PC Green slammed on the brakes.”

“Haven’t you worked that out?”

“The trike?”

“Got to be. He was unsighted by the parked cars and didn’t see the winking LED lights until the last moment.”

“Right. And it’s possible the old man was wandering all over the road. I heard from a witness that he wasn’t too straight with his steering. Does that fit your reading of it?”

“Tell you later, when we get round to the computer simulation.” Dessie paused. “You say there was a witness?”

“Someone saw him ride past higher up the street. They didn’t witness the crash.”

“Was he breathalysed?”

“The old man? No chance,” Diamond said. “I’m not even sure he was breathing when I found him.”

“Shouldn’t we ask the hospital for a blood sample?”

Slipped up there, Diamond thought with a stab of guilt. Being so new to crash investigation, he’d missed a basic procedure. “Quite right. I’m seeing to it.”

“And the driver?”

“What about the driver?”

“You’ll need to know if he was legal.”

“They’re doing a postmortem this morning. The usual body fluids and tissue samples will be sent for testing. I’ve no reason to think he’d been drinking.”

“The shunt was entirely down to the civilian, then,” Dessie said with irony. “The police are squeaky-clean.”

“That’s my strong impression.”

“Just bad luck they met a speeding tricyclist.”

When he ended the call, Diamond was feeling a long way out of his depth, wondering how “just bad luck” would be received by Professional Standards and the IPCC. He would need all of Dessie’s graphics and stats to back up a conclusion as artless as that.

He started the car and drove into work. Please God a really juicy murder had been committed overnight and this whole wretched inquiry could be passed to someone else.

T his isn’t a compulsion. I’m not psychotic. I can stop at any time. And when I do, the world won’t be any the wiser, which will be a personal success. I keep this record of my ordered state of mind at every stage so I can look back at each episode and recall exactly why it was necessary to put an end to a life and how I dealt with it. Of course there are glitches sometimes. I think back to the first and cringe at how naïve I was. Fortunately no one noticed except me.

Right now I’m thinking another one may be beckoning, but not in the near future, not before I’ve taken time to make all the arrangements. Good preparation is the key.