Another One Goes Tonight

by Peter Lovesey

  “Able to speak now.”

  “Really?” Some of the disapproval vanished from her face. “Is he making sense?”

  “On and off. He’s well dosed with morphine, or whatever they give them.”

  “Was he able to tell you his name?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  With a rasping catch of breath she was back on the attack. “That’s the first thing to find out.”

  “I knew it already.”

  “How is that?”

  He frowned. “Have we got our wires crossed, ma’am? I’m speaking about Lew Morgan.”

  “Morgan?” she said as if the injured sergeant was an alien creature. “For pity’s sake, I thought you’d been talking to the civilian you discovered. He’s our priority now. It’s not just a police car overturning. It involves a member of the public, and that’s the worst possible development.”

  From the looks she was giving him, she blamed Diamond for finding the man. Would her life have been easier if the poor old coot had been left up there to rot? She probably thought so.

  She was still on at him. “I thought you were telling me there was an improvement in his condition. Did you see him?”

  “He’s critical. That’s the worst you can be, short of dead. They’d like to do a scan but they don’t want to unplug him.”

  And now she had more worry lines than a Shar-Pei in a dog pound. “This could be catastrophic.”

  “But we keep calm and carry on.”

  She glared back. “Don’t try me, Peter. This investigation can be taken out of your hands.”

  If only, he thought.

  She shot him another reproachful look. “I’ll have to speak to Professional Standards.”

  “I thought I was Professional Standards.”

  “You’re their instrument. Did you say Ingeborg is with the press officer?”

  “I did.” Being called an instrument was another first for Diamond and he didn’t much like it.

  “Doing what?” Georgina asked.

  “Issuing a statement about the man on the trike. As you were just saying, we urgently need to know who he is.”

  Now her eyes bulged as if she’d swallowed her tongue. “You’re not making the information public?”

  “We have to, ma’am, or we’ll never find out who he is. If he rides a trike around Bath, he must be well-known.”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. The last thing we want is publicity. Don’t you ever read the newspapers? They love to run headlines about innocent people knocked down by speeding police cars.”

  “We can’t pretend it didn’t happen. It’s going to get known anyway, so we might as well make it official.”

  “Show me the statement you’re proposing to issue. I want to vet it first.”

  “Too late for that, ma’am. It’s done and dusted. I asked Ingeborg to draft the piece and get it out as soon as possible. That was more than an hour ago. By now it’s public knowledge. The media can’t resist breaking news.”

  “I’m speechless. You didn’t vet the statement before it went out?”

  “I trust my team, ma’am. She’s an ex-journalist, as you know. There won’t be any grammatical errors.”

  “That’s not the point, and you well know it. I wouldn’t have sanctioned this.” Georgina got up, walked to the door and looked out. “If it’s done and dusted, to use your phrase, why isn’t she back at her desk?”

  “She’ll be with the press officer getting the first responses. Fingers crossed we’ll get his name shortly.”

  “But at what cost? Headlines in the gutter press. I can see it already: pensioner critical after police car crash. All my efforts promoting our good name undone at a stroke. Attending countless civic functions being nice to people. I might as well give up trying.” Unable to think of a better exit-line, Georgina stomped through the CID room and out.

  Events didn’t pan out as speedily as Diamond had predicted. He was told by John Wigfull, the ex-cop who had returned as their press and PR man, that Ingeborg had gone out for a coffee.

  “Did she hand you the press release? Has it gone out?”

  “It’s on my to-do list,” Wigfull said. “My in-tray is heaving.” Like Diamond, he never allowed anyone to think he was underemployed.

  Theoretically, then, there was still a chance for Georgina to put a stop to the process.

  “I didn’t hear that, John.”

  “What?”

  “‘On my to-do list.’ Get it on the done list before the ACC puts you in her out-tray.”

  He wasn’t a detective for nothing. He found Ingeborg where he knew she would be: at Verona Coffee, their new place of escape from the police centre. He ordered a cappuccino for himself, tipped in more sugar than was good for him, asked for a triple chocolate muffin as well, and carried them to the table where his usually alert sergeant was so engrossed in the Guardian that she hadn’t seen him coming.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said. “Murders are down and crimes against women are up. So what’s new?”

  “Hi, guv.” She pushed the paper aside. “How was the hospital?”

  “You mean, how were the patients? As expected. Lew Morgan is talking some sense and some nonsense. He’s going to lose a leg, poor guy, but I don’t think anyone has told him yet.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Yes, and I’m not sure if trike man is brain dead. They don’t want me to see him.”

  “Maybe it’s a coma. People can go for years like that.”

  “What a comfort you are.”

  “I was looking on the bright side.”

  “If that’s the bright side, next time I go for coffee I’ll join John Leaman.”

  “You said Lew spoke some sense. Is there anything I should hear about?”

  “Not a lot. He can recall the events leading up to the crash.”

  “That’s all we need to know, isn’t it?”

  “Except he had his eyes closed and didn’t see how they lost control. It had been a long night turn, he said. He heard the driver say ‘Jeez!’ and opened his eyes and they were already on two wheels.”

  “Imagine.”

  “I can, all too easily.” Diamond’s unease in fast cars was almost a phobia. “But he was also talking about trike man, called him Sherlock fucking Holmes.”

  “You just said he didn’t see anything.”

  “This is where it gets confusing. He must have got a sight of the old guy in the deerstalker.”

  “In that instant he opened his eyes, obviously.”

  “Then he started rambling about hops.”

  “Hops they make beer from?”

  “I didn’t think so. I assumed he was thinking of rabbits. He said you could hear them digging their holes.”

  “Rabbits? Never.”

  “You’d have to be up close to hear that going on. But let’s not forget we already decided the old guy could be a wildlife enthusiast. He was carrying field glasses and a camera. Lew mentioned something else: they were heading towards Bath at a mile a night.”

  “What, the rabbits?” She laughed. “Beware the bunny invasion. Where did all this come from?”

  “Hallucinating, I reckon.”

  “But he knew about the man on the bike.”

  “Evidently. When I asked if he’d seen him in Beckford Gardens, he denied it and turned angry and accused me of trying to get inside his head. He called the sister and she saw he was upset and asked me to leave.”

  “His head will be clearer next time.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it, with major surgery to come.”

  “Well, then”—she sat forward in her chair and made a steeple of both hands—“he must have seen trike man being catapulted in the air by the crash and his brain is suppressing it. That’s why he got angry with you, because
you tried forcing him to confront the ugly reality. If Aaron Green was at fault in his driving, going too fast or not concentrating, Lew wouldn’t want it known.”

  “He did say something about nutcases.”

  “And we know where he wants to point the blame.”

  “I welcome your ideas on this, Inge, but let’s not make up our minds before all the evidence is in. We haven’t got Dessie’s report and we don’t know much about trike man—whether he was fit to be out on the roads at night.”

  “I gave the press release to John Wigfull. We’ll get some take-up shortly.”

  “Let’s hope so. And by the way, Georgina Dallymore isn’t too thrilled that we went public. She thinks Bath Police will be hung out to dry by the press for injuring a harmless old man.”

  “She’s right about that, only it’s better to go public now than wait for it to leak out.”

  “My feelings exactly, but I just hope we get some information back. I’m in the dog house already. I know where I’ll end up if this doesn’t succeed and it won’t be fragrant.”

  Keith Halliwell was back from the postmortem when they returned to the police centre. He was able to report that Aaron Green had died from compression of the heart between his sternum and his vertebral column.

  “Basically,” Halliwell said, “his upper body hit the steering wheel with such force that he died at once.”

  “And I bet he wasn’t wearing the seatbelt,” Ingeborg said.

  “It’s not compulsory for police drivers.”

  “I know that.”

  “I can see the reason if you’ve made an arrest and got a suspect in the car,” Diamond said, “but it’s stupid not to use one if you’re on an emergency call.”

  “They think it’s macho to go without,” Ingeborg said. “The younger guys in particular.”

  “Macho? Lew Morgan was wearing his and it saved his life. He’d have been flung through the windscreen.”

  “He’s still going to lose a leg,” Ingeborg said.

  Halliwell shook his head. “That’s bad. I didn’t know.”

  Diamond said, “I was at the hospital this morning.”

  “Me, too,” Halliwell said. “I could have given you a lift.”

  Diamond could tell it wasn’t meant as a dig. Halliwell came out with things like that from genuine willingness to be helpful. There was an understanding in CID that he stood in for Diamond at all postmortems. The big man was uncomfortable with dissections. But he was also self-conscious about it.

  Diamond updated Halliwell on his somewhat surreal conversation with Lew Morgan. Halliwell was unable to throw any light on the matter. Rabbits, he said in his forthright way, were outside his experience. He’d seen them in the lanes around Bath but never travelling with any purpose.

  “Me neither,” Diamond said. “Maybe we should put it down to the painkillers he was on.”

  Before lunch, calls started coming in. The first appeal for information had been on BBC Radio Bristol and a number of Bathonians had phoned in to say that the tricyclist in the deerstalker was a well-known local character. This was a beginning, even though no one seemed to know his name or address.

  “It’s only a matter of time,” Ingeborg said. “Someone will know.”

  Diamond hoped so. He needed the result before the police were hammered by the headlines in next day’s papers.

  So there was great relief all round when, about two-fifteen, a Mrs. Roberts from Henrietta Road called the radio station to say that the man was almost certainly one of her neighbours. Her contact details were passed to the police.

  “He’s called Ivor,” she told Diamond when he phoned her. “An elderly gentleman all on his own. Lives in a big house up the road from us. All we’ve got is a two-bedroom flat. Ivor’s place is easy to spot because there’s a large workshop at the side with a corrugated-iron roof. How he got planning permission is beyond me. It doesn’t do anything for the beauty of the street. But I feel sure he must be the person they spoke about on Radio Bristol because of the deerstalker hat and the tricycle. You don’t see that too often, do you? His wife died some time towards the end of last year. And as if that isn’t enough to bear, poor man, now this happens. Will he pull through?”

  “We hope so. Do you know his name?”

  “I told you: Ivor.”

  “The surname.”

  “I can’t help you there. We don’t say Mr. this and Mrs. that. We’re friendly along here, even though some live in million-pound mansions and others more modestly, like my husband and me. He always gives us a wave as he goes by, but being on his tricycle he doesn’t stop for a chat. I heard he was an engineer before he retired.”

  This checked with Dessie’s evidence that the bike was homemade and expertly welded. “How long has he lived there?”

  “Quite a long time. We arrived sixteen years ago and they were here then. His wife Trixie was a dignified lady who I never once saw without a hat, rather shy, I always thought. Flat shoes and twin-sets. No make-up. But they were very close. She had an unusual shopping trolley with large wheels that I think she once said he made her. She had a beautiful funeral. Lots of flowers and a white coffin. They buried her up on Lansdown in the cemetery there.”

  “Buried her? Are you sure she wasn’t cremated?”

  “Absolutely. You can visit the grave. It’s very peaceful up there and she’s got a lovely headstone.”

  So much for Lew Morgan’s information about Trixie’s ashes. And Ingeborg’s theory about the scattering of them.

  Mrs. Roberts talked on, through his distracted thoughts. “But I was telling you Ivor was the only mourner who went from the house and only a handful came back after. Sad, really. I don’t know if they had family.”

  “Have you seen him riding out early in the morning? The accident happened about six.”

  “Lord help us, I’m never up as early as that. What would he be doing out at that hour?”

  “We don’t know. That’s why I asked. Does he drive a car?”

  “Years ago he had a beauty, one of those expensive German makes. White, it was, and he kept it beautifully clean, but I haven’t seen it for ages. He must have given up the driving when he got older. He gets about on the tricycle these days.”

  Mrs. Roberts had been a useful source but she’d told him as much as he needed, so he thanked her and ended the call. Ingeborg had already found the house on Google Earth and got the number. The electoral roll gave the name of the occupier: Ivor Pellegrini. His wife Beatrix was still listed.

  “Distinctive name,” Diamond said. “Stay online and see what else you can find. It would be good to get a picture, to be certain this is the right man.”

  “I doubt if he’s on Facebook, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Me?”

  She smiled. The boss didn’t do his networking electronically.

  “But check it, by all means,” he said.

  “Can we speak to the people next door? They might know more than I can get from the Internet.”

  And now he grinned. “That’s a big admission, coming from you. Okay, we’ll try both. You get surfing or tweeting or whatever and I’ll visit Henrietta Road and do some old-fashioned door-stepping.”

  The buildings in Henrietta Road lined one side only because one of Bath’s prized green areas was opposite. Henrietta Park, originally part of the Bathwick Estate, had been gifted to the city in 1897 by one Captain Forester to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. The Pleasure Ground Committee had arranged for the ground to be turfed and given paths and a drinking fountain. When the park opened, the villas along the west side of the triangular plot were already in place and their situation was much enhanced by the new amenity. Most had since succumbed to economic constraints and been divided into flats. As properties they were not the grandest in Bath but, as Mrs. Roberts had accurately stated, y
ou would still need more than a million to buy a single villa outright.

  She had also been right about the iron-roofed workshop. The advantage to Diamond was that no other villa had such an eyesore in front, so Ivor Pellegrini’s home was easy to spot, a handsome three-storey stone building with large sash windows and a corniced entrance with a front door painted yellow.

  He left his car outside and took a closer look, starting with the workshop. Clearly the retired engineer liked to keep his hand in with some mechanical projects, but whatever was inside couldn’t be inspected. The windows were too high to see into, the door was sturdy and fitted with a lock that looked as if it would do for Lubyanka prison. A metal plaque said the building was protected by a response alarm. He spotted the bell under the overlap of the roof.

  Switching his attention to the main building, he saw at once that it was fitted with CCTV—and the cameras were not dummies. Nothing remarkable in that. If you had a nice house you might well discourage intruders. He took a stroll round the side.

  Unexpectedly, an upstairs window was drawn upwards and a woman looked out and said, “What are you up to?”

  “Nothing to worry about, ma’am,” Diamond said. “Police officer, making enquiries about the owner of the house.”

  “Oh yes?” She sounded sceptical.

  “I’m right that Mr. Ivor Pellegrini lives here, am I?”

  “What of it?”

  “We’ve reason to believe he had an accident yesterday.”

  “Oh my God. What happened?”

  “Are you related to him?”

  “Me?” Her voice shrilled in denial. “I’m only the cleaner. I come in twice a week. Nobody told me he was hurt. Is it bad?”

  “Before I answer that I’d like to be sure we’re talking about the same man. Does Mr. Pellegrini ride a tricycle and wear a deerstalker hat?”

  “He does.”

  “And is there anything to show he’s been home in the last twenty-four hours?”

  “He hasn’t,” she said. “The bed hasn’t been slept in and I found two days’ letters and papers on the doormat when I let myself in.”

  “You have a front door key?”