Another One Goes Tonight

6

Instead of homemade quiche, lunch was a beer and a sandwich in a seedy bar near the railway station.

“Talk about professional standards,” Keith Halliwell said, holding his glass to the light to look at the smears. “They could do with some here.”

“Brace up,” Ingeborg said. “We’ll survive.”

“Don’t count on it,” Halliwell said. “And don’t even think about using the toilet.”

This was an emergency meeting in every sense. The news had broken: bath man critically injured by police car screamed a headline board they’d seen along the street. After a spate of such incidents across the nation, some fatal, the collision in Beckford Gardens was a hot topic in all the papers. The media were giving it the treatment. Headquarters had been on to Keynsham demanding that report.

“We’re expected to deliver,” Diamond said, “today.”

“If not yesterday,” Ingeborg said.

“Bloody ridiculous,” Halliwell said.

Diamond didn’t argue. He was of the same mind. “Let’s lay out what we know for certain.”

“A reconstruction?”

“Starting with the 999 call at six in the morning from Cedric Bellerby-”

“It was never an emergency,” Halliwell said.

“He believed it was,” Ingeborg said.

“He’s a moron.”

“He made the call. Fact.”

“He’s just as responsible as our driver or the man on the trike.”

Diamond agreed with Ingeborg here. The caller wasn’t the issue. “A call about a naked man he’d seen through his binoculars swimming in the lido. The guy was making his way up the hillside towards the street.”

“Fully clothed by then,” Halliwell said.

“Towards the street,” Diamond said in a tone that brooked no more interruption, “where he could have been stopped by our lads and questioned. But while Bellerby was waiting by his front gate, Ivor Pellegrini came by on his trike, pedalling in the direction the patrol car would come from. His steering wasn’t the best but his lights were working. To quote Bellerby exactly-and this could be crucial to what happened-he was wandering across the road, too busy trying to control his trike to notice anyone else. What can we put that down to?”

“Drink?” Halliwell said.

“I have it on the authority of his cleaning lady that he doesn’t drink.”

“Old age? He shouldn’t have been on the road at all.”

“He was tired,” Ingeborg suggested. “He’d been up most of the night and gone further than a man of his age should have done.”

“Do we know his age?” Halliwell asked.

“He worked for Horstman’s,” Diamond said, “and they relocated to Bristol in 2000, when he started work for some of his local contacts, but he seems to be retired now. I reckon he’s seventy at least. This matters because if he was riding erratically he could have been the prime cause of the collision.”

“Could dementia be a factor?”

“Nothing wrong with his brain, according to Mrs. Halliday.”

“Is she any judge?”

“She sees him twice a week.”

“To clean his place, not to engage in intellectual debate.”

“I met her,” Diamond said. “Not much gets past her. If she says he’s still got his marbles, I believe her.”

“And yet we have the weird stuff Lew Morgan told you.”

“The rabbits?”

“And riding about at night with his wife’s ashes, which we know is untrue, because she wasn’t cremated.”

Diamond shook his head and sighed.

Ingeborg threw in a sharp one. “So who was the more confused-Pellegrini or Lew Morgan?”

“Not Lew,” Diamond said at once. “What he told me was coherent and most of it checks with the facts. He remembered they were on a call to Beckford Gardens, a shout about a naked man. He was able to give me Aaron’s name, and said correctly that he was married with a young kid. He’d obviously met Pellegrini because he remembered the deerstalker and the trike.”

“But when did this meeting take place?” Ingeborg asked.

“It wasn’t a meeting, it was a crash,” Halliwell said.

Nothing was said for a couple of seconds.

“No,” Diamond started up again. “That can’t be right. Lew wasn’t speaking about the crash. In fact, he became angry when I suggested trike man had anything to do with it. He accused me of trying to get inside his head and told me to piss off. Thinking back, he only brought up the topic of trike man to let me know the kind of night they’d endured. ‘Fucking nutcase,’ as he put it.” He paused and swirled the beer in his glass. “I’m thinking they came across Pellegrini at some point earlier in their turn.”

Ingeborg frowned. “There was nothing in the control room audio recordings. I’ve been through them three times and read the transcripts. I know most of it by heart.”

Halliwell was grinning. “Never worked in cars, have you, Inge?”

She cocked an eyebrow. “What’s that got to do with it?”

“Plenty of stuff goes on that never gets back to the control room.”

“Keith’s right,” Diamond told her. “If they make a road check that turns out to be negative, they won’t want it logged. I can see a situation where they ask trike man to pull over, only to discover he’s talking bollocks about migrating rabbits and taking his dead wife for an outing. If bullshit like that gets back to the nick, they’re a laughing stock.”

“So they don’t say a word and it doesn’t appear on the audio recording,” Halliwell said.

Ingeborg glanced away as if she’d lost interest. “Then we’ll never know for sure.”

“We’re not copping out,” Diamond said, resolved to achieve something from this session. “Where were they prior to the Beckford Gardens call-out?”

“Back in Keynsham,” Ingeborg said, “thinking their shift was over. And before that they were in Julian Road arresting the church-roofers.”

“So any meeting with Pellegrini has to precede that. Does the log tell us where they were in the early hours of their shift?”

“Widcombe Hill and the university. They were there some time, dealing with a complaint about rowdy students. Then they attended a break-in in Northwood Avenue.”

“All south of the river.”

“The river, the canal and the railway,” Diamond said.

“Is that significant?” Ingeborg asked.

“Some distance from where the collision took place,” Diamond said. “I’m thinking about Pellegrini on his trike. You’ve studied the audio-recordings, Inge. Was there any time of the night when nothing much seemed to be happening?”

She was silent for a short spell, remembering. “About one forty-five they drove out to Bathampton to check on a domestic-some man complaining his wife was threatening the kids. They sorted that and reported back at two-twenty and there wasn’t much communication for a time. The next the control room heard of them was two fifty-five.”

“Thirty-five minutes off air. Seems a likely slot. Where could they have met him at that time? Where were they at two fifty-five?”

“On the A4 heading back towards the city.”

“From Bathampton. That figures.”

“Where exactly was the domestic?” Halliwell asked.

“Meadow Lane, a turning off Bathampton Lane.”

“Which is really quiet at night,” Halliwell said, “and a good place to stop and search someone.”

“It makes sense,” Diamond said, encouraged that the team was functioning better. “He’s cycling unsteadily along Bathampton Lane and they stop him and maybe breathalyse him and have this ridiculous conversation about hopping rabbits which unsurprisingly doesn’t get reported to the control room. He’s allowed to continue.”

“Towards the A4?” Halliwell said. “I don’t think so.”

“Pellegrini won’t have gone that way. An old man on a trike wouldn’t last five minutes on a major road like that.”

Ingeborg agreed. “He’d stick to minor roads.” She took out her iPhone and started checking possible routes.

“Yet three hours later they get the call to Beckford Gardens and we can definitely place him there.”

“On his way home by the back route,” she said. “His night tour is over and he’s returning to base.”

“The back route from Bathampton?” Halliwell said. “Can’t say I know one.”

Ingeborg was about to enlighten him. “For a man on a trike, Bathampton is the only place where you can cross the railway and the A4 on a reasonably safe road.”

“With you there,” Halliwell said. “You mean Mill Lane.”

“Right. And a bit further on he’s over the toll bridge-which is free after ten p.m.-and across the river and he makes his way through Bailbrook and Larkhall on minor roads to Beckford Gardens, where Delta Three happens to be racing towards him on its emergency run. They meet head on.”

“There’s still something wrong,” Halliwell said.

“What?”

“What’s he doing there if he’s on his way home?” Halliwell said. “He lives in Henrietta Road. If he’s sticking to the minor roads you mention he wouldn’t need to go to Beckford Gardens.”

“It’s not far from his home,” Ingeborg said. She swiped the screen and satisfied herself.

“It may look all right on your phone-”

“So?”

“It’s out of his way. I’ve walked these roads.”

“We all have,” Diamond said. Halliwell was right, but he didn’t want the sniping to begin again. It was enough of a brain-fag accounting for Pellegrini’s movements. “I could be wrong in saying he was on his way home. Perhaps some special reason made him divert to Beckford Gardens.” He slapped the table. “Got it!”

A Eureka moment.

He raised a fist in triumph.

His companions simply stared.

“It’s the railway,” he said. “He was there for the railway. He’s an engineer and that’s his hobby. I’ve seen the pictures of trains in his home. If you go to the Hampton Row end of Beckford Gardens, you come to a footbridge. I walked up there and it seems to lead nowhere on the other side. But Pellegrini visited there. He must have parked his trike and climbed the bridge and looked over, along the track.”

Ingeborg was working her iPhone again. “It isn’t just a bridge, guv. It’s got a history. At one time there was a station there called Hampton Row Halt.”

Diamond gave her a disbelieving look. Hampton Row Halt-on the main line to London? It didn’t sound likely. Leg-pulling wasn’t unknown in Bath CID and he’d been caught a few times.

But she was serious. “They closed it in the First World War as an economy measure and it never reopened. Most of it is demolished.” She was quoting now. “‘Originally there were two platforms accessible from the iron footbridge that still exists.’”

Now he felt like hugging her. “Brilliant. It would be a place of pilgrimage for a railway buff,” Diamond said. “Can I see?”

She handed over the phone but he gave it straight back. “Bring up the map.”

“Hampton Row?”

“Bathampton Lane. This is all about the railway.”

And there it was on the small screen, just as he’d pictured it. “See how the track runs parallel to the road? That clinches it as far as I’m concerned. He spent his night following the railway line.”

There was pleasure in getting there. Solid detective work, deduction and fact-finding, the things they did best. They touched glasses, buoyed up by discovering why Pellegrini had been out on the roads at night.

But after a short interval, reality set in. The information wouldn’t greatly interest Headquarters or the IPCC.

“We now know he had a purpose,” Ingeborg said. “That’s something. He may be a nerd but he isn’t a total nutcase. It wasn’t about rabbits digging their holes.”

“Why mention them, then?” Halliwell said.

“As a distraction. He didn’t want the police knowing what he was really up to.”

“Why? It’s not illegal looking at railway tracks.”

“It is if you trespass on railway property.”

“Is that what he was doing?”

Diamond was getting another idea, a troubling scenario too way-out to share with the others in this exacting forum. “Thanks, both of you. This has been useful, very useful.”

“What will you tell Headquarters?” Ingeborg said.

“The truth.” And he left the intuitive thinking behind and relied on the right half of the brain to summarise their findings. “We’ve interviewed several witnesses and uncovered nothing to suggest a breach of professional standards. Our lads were on an emergency call and driving responsibly. They had their beacon flashing. Cars parked in the narrow road may have temporarily unsighted them. They appear to have met Pellegrini head on and the car projected him and his tricycle out of sight up the bank. There’s one witness account that his riding was unsteady shortly before the collision, but we gather he was a non-drinker so we don’t suspect alcohol was a factor. Old age and fatigue are more likely. The same witness informed us that the lights on the trike were working prior to the collision.”

“Pretty straightforward, then?”

“They’ll also have Dessie’s report packed with statistics and graphics.”

“All done and dusted,” Halliwell said.

“Unless one of the main players recovers enough to make a fuller statement.”

Now Halliwell was frowning. “Are you standing us down?”

A nod. “You can go back to normal duties.”

The order wasn’t expressed diplomatically, but diplomacy had never been Diamond’s strongest suit.

“Is that what you’ll be doing, guv-normal duties?” Ingeborg asked in a way that showed she already knew the answer.

He didn’t reply.

T rying not to look ahead. One thing leads to another: that’s the beauty of this-and the trap. I don’t see my life any more as a series of objectives. I’m content to go with the flow and see where it leads and only then make the arrangements. Up to now it has worked like a dream. But the danger is to get so confident that I make a mistake. I can’t see how it would happen but I need to be on my guard. So it’s a balancing act, being relaxed and vigilant at all times. The apparently aimless progress will confuse anyone with suspicions about me. They always think of murderers as single-minded, blinkered individuals. Psychopaths. I’m not like that at all, as anyone who has met me will tell you.

The academics who make a career out of studying serial murder, as it is crudely known, only get to analyse the failed practitioners. Those like me who are successful and leave no trace-and I can’t be the only one-never get into the textbooks. Who’d be a criminologist, making a science out of losers?