Dead Heat

10

I was being wheeled on a hospital gurney along a gray corridor. I could see the lights in the ceiling. But they weren’t the usual bright rectangular panels; they were different. They were round glass globes. And there were windows, lots of bright, sunlit windows. And voices too, lots of voices, both male and female.

“I think he’s come round again,” said one male voice above me.

“Hello,” called a female voice on my left. “Mr. Moreton, can you hear me?”

A face came into view. The face smiled at me.

“Mr. Moreton,” said the face again. “You’ve had a bit of an accident, but you are going to be just fine.”

That was a relief, I thought.

Nothing seemed to hurt much, but my body, strangely, didn’t feel attached to my head. I felt like I was looking down on somebody else’s corpse. Oh no, I thought, surely I haven’t broken my back?

I began to panic and I tried to sit up.

“Just lie back and rest,” said the female voice, a restraining hand placed firmly on my shoulder. She looked into my face. “You’ve had a nasty bang on the head.”

Oh God, I must have broken my neck.

I tried to wiggle my toes and was rewarded with the sight of the blanket moving. Waves of relief flowed over me. I lifted my hand to my face and wiped the cold sweat from my forehead. All was well, I thought, even if the sensations were a bit unusual.

“You’re probably concussed,” she said. “You’re on your way now to have a brain scan.”

I hoped they’d find one.

I wondered where I was. I knew that I was in the hospital, but where? And why was I in the hospital? The questions were too difficult for my befuddled brain, so I decided to take the easy option and do as I was told. I laid my head back on the pillow and closed my eyes again.

FOR THE NEXT few hours, I was dimly aware of being lifted and poked, of being talked about but not talked to. I just let the world get on without me.

I couldn’t remember why I was here. Rather worryingly, I couldn’t remember very much at all. Who am I? I wondered, and was comforted by at least knowing that it mattered. I decided that I probably wasn’t crazy. Surely, I thought, if I was crazy I wouldn’t know to ask myself the question in the first place. But what was the answer?

Thoughts drifted in and out of my consciousness without any threads of connection. Come on, I said to myself, sort it out. There were clearly some priorities to set. Who am I? Why am I here? And where is here?

“Mr. Moreton? Mr. Moreton?” a woman called from my left, and someone stroked my arm. Was Mr. Moreton me? I suppose it must be. Did I really want to come back into the land of the living just yet? I supposed I should.

I opened my eyes.

“He’s back again,” said the woman. “Hello, Mr. Moreton, how are you feeling?”

I tried to say that I was fine, but it came out as a croak. The woman obviously thought it was a good sign that I had reacted at all. She leaned over me and smiled into my face. “Well done,” she said. “You are going to be all right.”

Why did I think that she was trying to convince herself as much as she was trying to convince me?

I tried again to speak. “Where am I?” I croaked.

“Addenbrooke’s hospital,” she said. “In Cambridge.”

I knew I knew something about Addenbrooke’s hospital, I thought. What was it? Memory circuits in my head flipped and flopped and came up with an answer: Addenbrooke’s hospital was where the food-poisoning victims went.

Why did I think that? Who were the poison victims? Would they be OK? I decided not to worry about them. They would be all right, I said to myself. The woman had said so, and I believed her. I closed my eyes again. I wasn’t yet ready to participate in the world any further.

WHEN I WOKE next, it was dark. There was a window to my right and it was black, with the exception of a couple of yellow streetlights visible in the distance. I lay there, looking out. I remembered I was in the hospital. Addenbrooke’s hospital, in Cambridge. But I couldn’t remember why. Then I wondered what was happening at the restaurant.

“Hello, Max,” said a voice on my left.

I rolled my head over. It was Caroline. I smiled at her.

“Hello, Caroline,” I said. “How lovely.”

“You know who I am, then,” she said.

“Of course I do,” I said. “I may be in the hospital, but I’m not stupid.”

“The doctor warned me that you might not remember who I was. He said that earlier you appeared not to remember who you were either. Seems you have been drifting in and out all day. How do you feel?”

“Better, for seeing you,” I said. “But why am I here?”

“You had an accident,” she said. “You were hit by a bus and you banged your head. They think it must have been on the side window of your car. They say that you are just a bit concussed, but you should be fine in a few days.”

I couldn’t remember an accident or a bus. “How did you know I was here?” I asked her.

“I called your cell to tell you the time of the train I was coming on and a nurse answered it. She told me you were in the hospital, so I came straightaway.” Caroline smiled.

That’s nice, I thought.

“What time is it?” I said.

“About two o’clock,” she said.

“In the morning?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry about dinner,” I said. “Where are you staying?”

“Right here,” she said. That was nice too. “It took a bit of persuasion, but, in the end, they let me stay.”

“But you must have somewhere to sleep,” I said.

“I’m happy right here.” She smiled at me. I was so glad. “I’ll find somewhere to sleep in the morning.”

Wow, I thought.

“Are you still suing me?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” she said, and she laughed. Her laughter turned to tears that streamed down her face. She was laughing and crying at the same time. “Oh God, I’m so relieved you are all right. Don’t you ever do that to me again.”

“Do what?” I said.

“Don’t you ever frighten me like that again. When I called your phone, they told me you were having a brain scan to check for any pressure buildup. They told me that they didn’t yet know of the extent of any permanent brain damage.” She was crying from the memory. “I don’t want to lose you, not when I’ve only just found you.”

“I thought it was me who found you.”

“Yes,” she said, choking back the sobs. “So it was. How was that, exactly? Perhaps it’s better I don’t know.” She leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead. Then she kissed me gently on the lips. I could get used to that, I thought.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s not a convenient time, but I really need to go to the bathroom.”

“I’ll get a nurse,” she said, and disappeared. She came back with a large, middle-aged woman wearing a blue nurse’s tunic.

“Ah, you’re back with us again, Mr. Moreton,” said the nurse. “How are you feeling now?”

“Not too bad,” I said. “I’ve got a bit of a headache, and I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Bottle or bedpan?” she said. It took me quite a few seconds to understand what she meant.

“Oh,” I said. “Bedpan. But can’t I go to the bathroom?”

“I’ll see if I can find a wheelchair,” she said. “I don’t want you walking yet after such a bang. You have a concussion, and your balance may be affected.”

She returned with the wheelchair and helped me out of bed and into it. I was wearing what could only be described as a nightshirt with an opening down the back. It did nothing for my modesty, since my rear end was exposed for all to see as the nurse lowered me gently into the chair. My balance indeed wasn’t very good, and the maneuver could hardly be described as elegant. I hoped very much that Caroline hadn’t been watching.

The nurse pushed me down the corridor to the bathroom. I was getting rather urgent and I started to get myself out of the chair and onto the toilet.

“Just a minute,” said the nurse. “Let me put the brakes on first.”

The brakes? Wasn’t there something else about brakes? I tried to remember what it was.

As if wearing a gap-backed nightshirt wasn’t bad enough, the nurse insisted on standing next to me and holding my shoulders throughout the procedure in case I toppled off the toilet and onto the floor. Being in the hospital, I concluded, did nothing for one’s dignity.

Feeling much better but still embarrassed by the process, I was wheeled back to my bed by the nurse. She applied the brakes of the wheelchair. I sat there. Why was it that I hoped the brakes wouldn’t fail again?

“Caroline?” I called out loudly.

“Shhh,” said the nurse. “You’ll wake everyone up.”

“I’m here,” said Caroline, coming and crouching down to my level.

“The brakes on my car failed,” I whispered.

“I know,” she said. “A policeman told the doctors they thought it was the brakes failing that caused the accident.”

“It wasn’t an accident,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I think someone tried to kill me.”

“YOU’RE REALLY SERIOUS, aren’t you?” Caroline said.

“Never more so,” I said.

I had told her all about my car not being locked at Cambridge station, and about my concerns that the brakes or the steering may not have been all right on Tuesday night.

“But you don’t know for sure that someone had tampered with the brakes,” she said. “You said that they seemed OK when you drove home.”

“True,” I said. “But there’s no escaping the fact that they did fail on Wednesday morning.”

“It might have been a coincidence,” she said.

I looked at her and raised my eyebrows.

“OK, OK,” she said. “But coincidences do happen, you know.” She held my hand. I liked that. “So what are we going to do about it?”

“I wonder if the police have someone who would look at the brakes on my car to see if they have been interfered with?”

“Don’t they have accident investigators?” Caroline asked. She yawned. “Sorry.”

“You need to go to sleep,” I said.

“I’m fine,” she said, yawning again.

I wanted to ask her to get into the bed and sleep next to me, but I thought the nurse wouldn’t like it.

“You can’t stay here all night,” I said.

“Nowhere else to go.”

“Go to my cottage,” I said. “The key must be somewhere.”

She looked through my things, which someone had thoughtfully placed in a white plastic bag in the bedside locker. There was no key.

“I remember now,” I said. “It’s on the same ring as the car keys.” Probably still with the car, I thought.

“I don’t want to go to your cottage on my own anyway,” said Caroline. “Especially not if someone really is trying to kill you. I’ll stay here, thanks.”

In the end, she slept in the chair next to my bed. It was one of those chairs that reclined, so that bedridden patients could be lifted into it to have a change of posture. Caroline reclined in it, covered herself with a blanket from the bed and was asleep in seconds.

I looked at her for a while, thinking that it had been a strange recipe for romance: first poison your intended, next irritate her with fatuous telephone calls, then stir thoroughly at dinner before frightening badly with a life-threatening car crash, finally serve up a conspiracy theory of intended murder.

It seemed to have worked like a charm.

THEY LET ME go home the following day. Caroline had convinced the doctors that I would be fine at home if she was looking after me. And who was I to object to that.

A black-and-yellow NewTax taxi delivered us to my cottage about one o’clock. I had called my occasional housecleaner to arrange for her to meet us with her key so we could get in. Lunch presented us with another problem. I rarely had much food in the house, other than for breakfast, since I usually ate lunch and dinner at the restaurant. Caroline briefly inspected the premises, and then she searched the kitchen for food.

“I’m starving,” she said. “At least they gave you some breakfast at the hospital, I’ve had nothing since yesterday morning.”

She found some sugarcoated cornflakes in the cupboard and some milk in the fridge, so we sat at my tiny kitchen table and had bowls of cereal for lunch.

Carl had phoned the hospital first thing to find out how I was, and, as I expected, he had given the appearance of being mildly disappointed to find that I was not only alive but my brains were unscrambled and functioning properly. The hospital operator had put him through to my bedside telephone.

“So, you’re still with us, then?” he had said with a slightly frustrated tone.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” I’d said. “How are things at the Hay Net?”

“Doing well without you,” he had said. “As always,” he had added rather unnecessarily, I thought. Cheeky bastard.

For all his seemingly bad grace about my well-being, I couldn’t really imagine that Carl would have had anything to do with a conspiracy to kill me. Surely it was just his warped sense of humor. Tiresome as his little irritating comments could be at times, I didn’t think there was anything truly sinister behind them.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed that anyone would seriously want me dead. Perhaps the brake failure had been coincidence after all. Anyway, tampering with brakes didn’t seem to me to be a particularly good way of trying to kill someone, not unless they were driving down a steep mountain road full of hairpin bends, and steep mountain roads were somewhat conspicuous by their absence in Newmarket.

After our cereal lunch, I lay on my sofa and called the restaurant, while Caroline explored upstairs.

“Had a relapse?” Carl asked hopefully when I said I wasn’t coming in.

“No,” I said. “I’ve been told by the doctors to take it easy for a few days. I’ll see how I get on.”

“Don’t hurry back,” said Carl in a dismissive manner.

“Look,” I said, “what’s eating you at the moment? Why are you being so damn unpleasant?”

There was a longish pause at the other end.

“It’s just my way,” he said. “I’m sorry.” There was another pause. “I will be delighted when you get back, I promise.”

“Now, don’t go too far the other way,” I said with a laugh. “I won’t know if I’m coming or going.”

“Sorry,” he said again.

“Apology accepted,” I said. “How was lunch?”

“So-so,” he said. “But we had a good one last night. About eighty percent full.”

“Great.”

“Everyone asked where you were. Richard told them all about your accident, which was then the talk of the place,” he said. “Lots of people sent their best wishes. And the staff are concerned about you too.”

“Thanks.” I wasn’t sure that the overfriendly Carl wasn’t more annoying than the surly one, but I decided not to raise the subject again. “Tell everyone I’m fine and I’ll be back at work as soon as I can, probably by the middle of next week.”

“OK,” said Carl. “I’ve booked a temporary chef from that agency in Norwich to help over the weekend. I hope that’s OK.”

“Good,” I said. “Well done, Carl.” All this mutual admiration was too much. “Now, sod off and get back to work.” I could hear him laughing as I hung up. Carl was one of the good guys, I was sure of it. Or was I?

Next I telephoned the Suffolk police to discover what had happened to my car.

“It was towed by Brady Rescue and Recovery of Kentford,” they said. “They’ll have it there.”

“Has anyone inspected it?” I asked.

“The attending officer at the accident would have briefly inspected the vehicle before it was removed.”

“Apparently,” I said, “someone from the police told a doctor at the hospital that the accident was due to brake failure.”

“I don’t know anything about that, sir.”

“Is there any way I could speak to the policeman who attended the accident?” I asked.

“Can you hold, please?” I didn’t have a chance to say either yes or no, before I found myself listening to a recorded message telling me of the services offered by Suffolk Constabulary. I listened to the whole thing through at least three times before a live voice came back on the line.

“I’m sorry, sir,” it said. “The officer is not available to speak to you.”

“When will he be available?” I asked. “Can I leave a message for him to call me?” I gave my cell number, but I didn’t hold out much hope that the message would get through. They were very busy, they said, but they would see what they could do.

I called the towing company. Yes, they said, they had my Golf. But it was not in great shape. Could I come and visit? I asked. Yes, they said, anytime.

Caroline returned to the sitting room after her investigation of my property.

“Nice place,” she said. “Better than my hovel in Fulham.”

“Do you want to move in?” I asked.

“Don’t push your luck, Mr. Moreton,” she said, smiling. “I’ve been looking for where I would be sleeping tonight.”

“But you are staying?” I said, perhaps a touch too eagerly for her liking.

“Yes,” she said, “but not in your bedroom. If that’s not OK by you, then I will go back to London now.”

“It’s OK,” I said. Not brilliant, I thought, but OK.

I took some painkillers for my throbbing head, and then Caroline and I went by taxi to Kentford to see my car.

As the man from the towing company had said on the telephone, it wasn’t in great shape. In fact, I had to be told which one of the wrecks was mine since I didn’t recognize it. The roof was missing completely, for a start.

“What on earth happened to it?” I asked one of their men. My pride and joy for so long was now just a mangled heap.

“The fire brigade cut the roof off to get the occupant out,” he said. “The car was on its side when I got there with my truck and the roof was already gone. Maybe it’s still in the ditch, next to where the car was.”

It didn’t matter. Even to my eyes, the car was a complete write-off. Not only had the roof disappeared, the front fender was completely ripped away and the wheel beneath was sitting at a strange angle. That must have happened, I thought, when I hit the bus.

“Has anyone been to inspect it?” I asked him.

“Not that I’m aware of. But it’s been sitting here since yesterday morning, and I don’t exactly keep guard.”

“Here” was down the side of the workshop, behind a pair of tow trucks.

“I was the driver,” I said to him.

“Blimey, you were lucky, then. I thought it was a fatal when I first arrived.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Fire brigade and ambulance spent ages getting you out. That’s never a good sign. Had you in one of those neck-brace things. You didn’t look too good, I can tell you. Not moving, like. I thought you were probably dead.”

“Thanks,” I said sarcastically.

“No,” he said. “I’m glad you’re not, like. Easier for me too.”

“Why?” I said.

“If it had been a fatal,” he said, “I would have to keep this pile of garbage here for the police inspectors, and they take bloody ages to do their stuff. Since you’re OK, I can get rid of it, off the premises, just as soon as your insurance bloke looks at it. Also,” he added with a smile, “since you’re alive I now can send you a bill for recovering it from the roadside.”

I made a mental note to phone the insurance company, not that they would give me much. I suspected that car was worth little more than the policy’s deductible, but it just might pay the wretched man’s bill for getting rid of the wreck.

“I think the accident occurred because my brakes failed,” I said. “Is there any way of checking that by looking?”

“Help yourself, it’s your car.” He turned away. “I’ve got work to do.”

“No,” I said quickly. “I wouldn’t know what to look for. Could you have a look for me?”

“It’ll cost you,” he said.

“All right,” I said. “How much?”

“Usual labor rates,” he replied.

“Can you look at it now?” I said. “While I’m here?”

“Suppose so,” he said.

“OK,” I said. “Usual rates.”

He spent about twenty minutes examining what was left of my car, but the results were inconclusive.

“Could have been the brakes, I suppose,” he said finally. “Difficult to tell.”

I assured him that it definitely was the brakes that had failed and caused the accident.

“If you were bloody certain it was the brakes, what did you want me to check it for?”

“I want to know if the brakes had been tampered with,” I said.

“What, on purpose?” He stared at me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s what I want you to tell me.”

“Blimey,” he said again. He leaned back over the car.

“Look here,” he said. I joined him in leaning over what had been the front bumper. He pointed at a jumbled mass of metal pipes and levers. “The brake system on this old Golf was a simple hydraulic, non-power-assisted system.” I nodded. I knew that. “What happens when you push the brake pedal is you force a piston along this cylinder.” He pointed at what looked like a metal pipe about an inch in diameter and about an inch and a half long. “The piston inside pushes brake fluid through the pipes to the wheels, and the pressure causes the brake pads to squeeze the brake discs. That’s what slows the car down.”

“Like a bicycle brake?” I asked.

“Well, not exactly. On a bike, there is a cable going from the brake lever to the brake pads. In a car, the pressure is transmitted through the fluid-filled pipes.”

“I see,” I said. But I wasn’t sure I did completely. “So what caused the brakes to fail?”

“Brakes will fail if air gets into the pipes instead of the brake fluid. Then, when you push the pedal, all you do is compress the air and the brakes don’t work.” He spotted my quizzical look. “You see, the brake fluid won’t compress, but air will.” I nodded. I knew that from my school chemistry.

“So all someone needed to do,” I said, “was to put some air into the pipes and the brakes wouldn’t work.”

“Yes,” he said. “But it’s not that easy. For a start, there are two brake systems on this car, so if one failed the other should still work.”

“There were no brakes at all when I pushed the pedal,” I said.

“Air must have got into the master cylinder,” he said. “That’s very unusual, but I have come across it once before. That time was due to the pipe from the reservoir to the master cylinder coming loose.” He had lost me.

“But can you tell if it was done on purpose?” I asked him.

“Difficult to tell,” he said again. “Might have been. The joins are still tight, so someone would have had to split the metal pipe.” He pointed. “It could have been done by flexing it up and down a few times until it cracked open due to fatigue. You know, like bending a wire coat hanger until it snaps.”

“But wouldn’t that make the brakes fail immediately?” I asked him.

“Not necessarily,” he said. “It might take a while for the air to seep from the cracked pipe into the master cylinder.”

“Can you tell if that is what happened here?” I asked.

He looked again at the jumble of broken pipes. “The accident seems to have smashed it all. It would be impossible to tell what had been done beforehand.”

“Would the police accident investigators have any better idea?” I asked him.

He seemed a bit offended that I had questioned his ability. “No one could tell from that mess what it was like before the accident,” he said with some indignation.

I wasn’t sure that I totally agreed with him, but I didn’t think it was time to say so. Instead, I paid him half an hour’s labor cost in cash and used my cell phone to call a taxi.

“Do you have the keys of the car?” I asked the man.

“No, mate,” he said. “Never seen them. Thought they were still in it.”

They weren’t. I’d looked. “Never mind,” I said. “They wouldn’t be much use now anyway.” But they had been on a silver key fob. A twenty-first-birthday present from my mother.

“Can I send it off to the scrap, then?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “Wait until the insurance man has seen it.”

“Will do,” he said. “But don’t forget, you’re the one paying for the storage.”

What a surprise.

“WELL, THAT WASN’T very conclusive,” said Caroline as we sat in the taxi taking us back to Newmarket. “What do you want to do now?”

“Go home,” I said. “I’m feeling lousy.”

We did go home, but via the supermarket in Newmarket. I sat outside in the taxi as Caroline went to buy something to eat for supper, as well as a bottle of red wine. I was pretty sure that the painkillers I was taking didn’t mix too well with alcohol, but who cared.

I lay on the sofa and rested my aching head while Caroline fussed around in the kitchen. Once or twice, she came and sat down next to me, but soon she was up and about again.

“Relax,” I said to her. “I won’t eat you alive.”

She sighed. “It’s not that. I’m restless because I haven’t got my viola here to play. I usually practice for at least two hours every day, even if I’m performing in the evening. I haven’t played a note since the day before yesterday and I’m suffering from withdrawal symptoms. I need my fix.”

“Like me and my cooking,” I said. “Sometimes, I just get the urge to cook even if there is no one to eat it. The freezers at the restaurant are full of stuff I intend getting round to eating one day.”

“Shame there’s none of it here,” she said.

“I could call and ask one of my staff to bring some over.”

“No,” she said, smiling. “I’ll take my chances and cook for the cook. It also might be better not to mention anything about this to your staff.”

“Why not?” I said.

“They might get the wrong idea.”

“And what, exactly, is the ‘wrong idea’ they might get?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “If they knew I was staying here, they might jump to the wrong conclusions.”

I wasn’t sure I liked the way the conversation was going. Too much analysis of any situation was apt to make it appear somewhat stupid, whereas uninhibited and thought-free actions were more often an accurate reflection of true feelings. The raw and honest emotion of last night in the hospital was in danger of being consumed by too much good sense and the weighing up of consequences.

“What do you play when you practice?” I asked, changing the subject. “And don’t say ‘the viola.’”

“Finger exercises mostly,” she said. “Very boring.”

“Like scales?” I had been forced to do hours of scales on the piano when I was a child. I had hated it.

“Exactly,” she said. “But I also play pieces as well. Scales alone would drive anyone crazy, even a pro musician.”

“What is your favorite piece to play?” I asked.

“Bach’s Violin Concerto in E Major,” she said. “But, of course, I play it on the viola.”

“Doesn’t it sound all wrong?”

She laughed. “No, of course not. It sounds fine. Take the song ‘Yesterday.’ You know the one, by the Beatles. It can be played on the piano, the guitar, the violin or anything else. It still sounds like ‘Yesterday,’ doesn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” I said. I would take her word for it.

I looked at my watch. It was six o’clock. The sun, if not exactly over the yardarm, was well into its descent from the zenith, so I opened the wine, and we sat and drank it, content in each other’s company.

Caroline fixed fresh salmon with a parsley sauce, new potatoes and salad, and it was delicious. We sat together on the sofa and ate it on our laps while watching a satirical news program on the television. Real domesticity.

As she had planned, Caroline didn’t sleep in my bedroom.

But, then again, neither did I.