by Frank Lean
Was it my fault? Was my desire to dig for information too insultingly transparent? Vanity said not.
These and other self-pitying, self-doubting thoughts plagued me until Nature supplied a little distraction. Rain was still lashing down. There was no sign of dawn. The mundane task of keeping the Mondeo moving began to occupy more and more of my attention as I left the suburbs of London behind. I was desperately uncomfortable in my sodden clothes, and that helped to keep me awake and alert. Water thumping against the wheel arches as I drove through deep pools and the incessant squeaking of the windscreen wiper both became more pressing than questions about my love life.
Let’s face it, I told myself, you’re a selfish bastard who takes what he can out of life.
As I drove northwards on the almost deserted motorway, listening to radio reports of flooding with one ear and the ceaseless drumming of the rain with the other, it was hard to sustain any emotion. The thoughts that did seep through my self-reproaches were that I was a fool, a man who couldn’t keep his emotions and his business interests in separate boxes, and that Marti had been lying through her teeth for at least half the time I’d been with her.
The crash came with devastating suddenness.
I was straining my eyes to bore through the billowing clouds of rain ahead when a rear impact almost jerked my head off my shoulders. There was no accompanying noise that I was conscious of but I knew I’d been rammed. My Mondeo spun off to the left across the hard shoulder and in a splintered second I caught a glimpse of a white van racing past before the world turned upside down. Now there was tremendous noise; so much noise, so loud and so varied that it seemed to press all the fear out of me. My airbag inflated and thumped me in the face and my head shot into the headrest as if a heavyweight boxer had landed a punch. I was still conscious and aware that the roof was about to be ripped off when the car flipped over again and I was cartwheeling towards a massive concrete bridge support. I just had time for one thought – who would care if I died, not with a whimper but with a bang? Then all the lights went off.
‘Come on, Mr Cunane! David! David Cunane! Mr Cunane,’ the words went on and on, over and over and over. Consciousness slowly returned and the first thing that came to me was that I was warm and dry and that it wasn’t raining. I struggled to concentrate. I was flat on my back, there was a dim light filtering through but something was wrong with my eyes.
Then, like a record running down on an old-fashioned wind-up player, my consciousness slowly faded.
When I came back to the world the voice was still there: ‘David, David, come on, Davie boy.’ It droned on and on. I tried to concentrate on that voice. It belonged to a woman, one of those deep, phlegmatic Scots voices. ‘David, David,’ she crooned. I tried to move but nothing stirred, not a single muscle flickered. It was as if I was snuggling down at the bottom of a very deep hole with a mass of cotton wool pressing on me, restraining me. I struggled to move my lips but they wouldn’t obey.
I stopped trying and concentrated on the voice again. There was comfort in it but not sufficient to distract me from my fears. I thought about my eyes. Was I blind? There was light but no vision. I seemed to overhear a whispered conversation to my left. It was maddening and the temptation to wallow in the self-pity that had almost overcome me in the car was overwhelming. I wanted to scream and howl. I felt as if I was slipping away from the world.
‘Dave!’ This time it was a male voice and it was right in my ear. It was as if a switch had been thrown. I moved my hand.
‘There! What did I tell you?’ the Scots voice said triumphantly. ‘He’s not in a coma. You Mancunians have thick skulls. Just a spot of mild concussion, that’s all.’
Light flooded in. Whatever had been covering my eyes was removed. I still couldn’t see. My eyes seemed to stay shut however hard I tried to open them.
‘Dave, you’ve been in an accident,’ the man said. I recognised the voice. It was DCI Brendan Cullen. I stopped trying to struggle up to full awareness. Cullen! What could he be doing at my bedside?
‘Come on, mate! Wakey, wakey!’ he said cheerfully.
‘Bren,’ I mumbled. My mouth felt as if it was full of battery acid. I tried to lick my lips but my throat was dry.
‘Here, take this,’ he said, putting the spout of a hospital water beaker to my lips. I sucked gratefully.
‘Are you two all right for a minute?’ the Scots nurse asked. ‘He’ll be OK. You’re sure he’s a friend of yours, Inspector? I’ll be back to have a look in five minutes.’
Her departure distressed me. My emotions were fragile. I had to struggle to stop myself crying. The Scots nurse sounded immensely competent and capable. I didn’t want her to go.
‘Come on, Dave. No brain damage. That’s what they say, but they don’t know you like I do. Your brain was damaged to start with.’
‘Thanks,’ I croaked. To my ears the word seemed to come from a long way off.
‘Do you want a fright?’ he asked brutally.
‘Oh, God! Haven’t I had enough frights?’
‘No, you need this one. Perhaps you might stop meddling in things that don’t concern you if you see the state you’re in.’ Cullen held a mirror in front of me. It took me a moment to realise that the mass of blue and purple I was staring at was my face. My eyes were swollen like two fat, double eggs. I felt like crying again but there was something in Cullen’s voice that prevented that.
‘He must have had perfect timing.’
‘Who?’
‘The guy in the van that copped you. It shot past us and gave you a deliberate nudge just as you were coming up to a nice solid concrete bridge and then away off the motorway at the next interchange before anyone could say boo. Whoever arranged it, I have to hand it to them. It was choreographed to perfection, balletic almost. Michael Schumacher couldn’t have done it better.’
‘You were following me?’
‘Yep, and your fog lights were on, visible for miles. You were driving carefully on the inside lane, a steady sixty to seventy. I’m telling you, mate, that was no accident. If you’d been doing another ten miles an hour you’d be in the mortuary now.’
In my dazed state it seemed to take ages for my brain to work. I struggled to understand what Cullen was saying . . . the accident wasn’t an accident. What did he mean? Then the thought that someone had been trying to murder me gradually took hold. It penetrated the miasma of self-pity that had been gathering round me even before the car went off the road. Anger began to give an edge to my thoughts.
‘Why were you following me?’
‘Operation Calverley. I told you. You’re our principal lead. The only reason that you’re not also our principal suspect is because I know the way you operate.’
‘God!’ I groaned. With vision, pain was returning too. Every part of my body had its own separate ache. I tried to move my arm and discovered that it was strapped across my chest.
‘Displaced collar bone, concussion, suspected skull fracture, extensive bruising. Bloody lucky if you ask me. You should be a coffin job by rights.’
‘Thanks,’ I muttered and then lapsed into silence. The bed felt very comfortable and I could have slept. Even without a near fatal road crash, I’d been on the go continuously for the last two days.
‘Come on, Dave,’ Cullen urged. ‘I need to know what’s been going on.’
‘When you find out, tell me,’ I groaned.
‘Listen, we can do it here or at the nearest police station. This isn’t an old pals’ reunion. We were following you and you led us to Marti King, but now she’s disappeared again. Where is she?’
‘How do I know?’ I asked.
‘Oh, come on, Dave. She’s been pulling your chain for weeks.’
‘She’s a client.’
‘Like hell, she is. Do you spend the night with all your female clients?’
‘That just happened.’
‘Dave, baby, you’re forgetting I can read you like a book. A pretty face and you’d believe a
nything she said. I can’t afford to do that. I’ve got to check her out for the Olley and the Levy murders.’
‘Marti didn’t kill Olley!’ I croaked.
‘How do you know? I’ve seen that video a hundred times and I’ll swear it was a woman.’
‘It couldn’t have been Marti.’
‘How do you know? Are you just thinking with your balls or have you proof?’
‘She’s not like that.’
‘Isn’t she? Did you know that she had a passionate affair with the late Mr Lou Olley shortly before his demise?’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Yes, and she was seen scrapping with him in a Manchester night club – Steptoes. We’ve got it on video. Lou wasn’t a gentleman, not like you, Dave. He didn’t give a shit about a lady’s honour. She tried to slap him and he belted her in the eye.’
‘Oh,’ I muttered.
‘Remembering something?’ Cullen asked hopefully.
I shook my head. That was a mistake. The slightest movement reactivated all my aches and pains.
The Scots nurse returned.
‘How are we getting on?’ she enquired. ‘Not tiring my patient, are you, Inspector?’ While she was speaking she busied herself examining various intimate parts of my body. I realised that my many bruises were packed with ice. Florence McNightingale briskly adjusted everything. A tingling sensation told me that parts of my body that I’d given up as permanently lost were still functioning.
‘No, sister,’ Cullen said genially. ‘Dave and I are old friends. We go back a long way, don’t we, Dave?’
I didn’t say anything but the sister was canny enough to ask: ‘Is that right, Mr Cunane? My goodness, if you knew some of the tricks these policemen get up to . . .’
‘Yeah, Mr Cullen’s the least of my problems,’ I managed to growl.
‘Well, don’t wear him out, Inspector,’ she warned before bustling on to her next port of call. ‘Concussion’s a funny business, even for you thick-headed Mancunians.’
At that moment Cullen’s mobile chirruped.
‘Switch that off!’ the sister ordered.
‘Just my pager,’ Cullen lied and then stepped out of the side ward.
His absence gave me time to think. My thoughts towards Marti King were not charitable, but she was a sort of client, and if I was going to emerge with any sort of dignity or reputation from this mess that was the story I had to stick to.
‘I’ve got to go, Dave,’ Cullen said cheerfully when he returned, ‘but I’ll be back. Let me just leave you with this one thought. We lifted several sets of prints from Sam Levy’s house in Bowdon. Yours, Angelina’s, the hairdresser’s – and guess who else’s?’
‘Spare me the games, Bren.’
‘Marti King’s, that’s whose. So just you think about that till I get back.’
38
AFTER CLIMBING WALLS attached to a huge suitcase and surviving a pile-up on the motorway, getting out of that hospital should have been child’s play.
It wasn’t.
I wasn’t attached to any drips or monitors, so getting onto my feet was mainly a matter of suppressing the curses, groans and shrieks of pain that naturally arose when I moved my bruised and battered body. I swung my legs free of the bed and tried standing up. I did it, just. A wave of nausea swept over me but the thought of what Cullen and Operation Calverley had in store kept me tottering on my feet. Incredibly no bones appeared to be broken. I decided to write a letter of congratulation to the head of Ford UK if I survived the rest of the day.
I thought my luck was in when I spotted a blue plastic bag containing my clothes. I grabbed the bag and vainly tried to rip it open. The material seemed to be incredibly tough and it was sealed with swathes of tape. I struggled silently for the best part of five minutes without success.
In the end I managed to gnaw the bag open with my teeth and then extract the garments and lay them on the bed. My heart sank. They’d cut me out of my clothes. The only serviceable items were my shoes and belt. The trousers, jacket and shirt were there but all neatly filleted. I could have cried in frustration. I think I did cry. Then, when I was at the lowest point, I had a stroke of luck. Cullen had carelessly left his ‘Man at C&A’ mac slung over the chair next to the bed.
There was nothing in the pockets, not a nice handy warrant card or a spare £20 note, but it was long and it was about my size. That just left my legs. With my ugly face I could hardly pretend to be a female or even a stray hairy-legged Scot in a kilt. I had to do something. Cullen might be back at any moment. In every film I’ve ever seen about hospitals there’s always a storeroom with a handy change of clothes. But this was real life and there was nothing.
I looked at my trousers slung forlornly on the bed. I draped them round my legs like two long skirts. In a way having open-plan trousers was an advantage because I was working one-handed. I still had a neck brace on and my left arm was lashed across my chest. Moving very slowly I managed to strip several long pieces of tape from the plastic bag and used them to fasten up the ends of my trousers. It didn’t look too convincing, but then how many people were going to look at my legs with my face in such a mess? Getting the shoes on was a struggle. My feet appeared to have swollen by at least two sizes. Wallet, watch and broken mobile phone were in the bedside cupboard.
I don’t know why no one stopped me. The first hundred feet were the worst. The side room I was in was on a corner and I managed to dodge into a main corridor with a minimum of fuss. Still, a man with a face like a bruised melon with trousers flapping round his legs . . . you’d have thought someone would have said something, but everyone who caught my eye hastily looked at something else. I was Mr Invisible. Probably it was because there was a large psychiatric hospital next door, but I walked along the corridor following the arrows for Exit, rolling from side to side like a drunken sailor, and no one said a word to stop me. The thought of Cullen’s anger lent me strength.
When I got into the open air the rain had stopped. I painfully clumped along the hospital service road to a major road. I had no plan apart from putting distance between myself and the place where DCI Cullen expected me to be. It was hard taking in my surroundings. I could only swivel my head with the utmost difficulty. I was hoping that the hospital was in a big city, Birmingham or Coventry or somewhere, but it wasn’t. There were green fields and trees in all directions. I scanned the road expecting to see a police car at any moment.
All that I did see were little knots of people waiting at bus stops on either side. I went to the nearest group and stationed myself among them. Of those waiting I was probably the most convincingly dressed. The trend to dress as if expecting tropical conditions and then pretending that the weather was fine was being taken to absurd lengths by some, as they shivered in T-shirts and jeans. Ten anxiety-filled minutes later, a Stagecoach bus rolled up and I got my first clue as to where I was. The sign on the front said ‘Rugby’ and in my condition I felt that was totally appropriate.
‘Rugby,’ I said, handing the driver a ten pound note.
‘Do you want the weekly saver?’ he asked without even raising his eyes towards me.
I grunted a response which he took as affirmative because he put two pound coins and a weekly ticket into my hand. I considered struggling upstairs before deciding to haul my weary carcass to the rear seat. Again, the eyes of my few fellow passengers were carefully averted. Cullen’s mac and the neck brace must have helped, but I presented a freakish appearance. Perhaps they were used to seeing twitchy vagrants emerging from the hospital.
Public transport has its advantages for the fugitive. The bus route was so winding and the journey so slow that if Cullen had discovered my disappearance by now, as he surely must have, he’d never have found me trundling towards Rugby on the slowest bus in the Midlands. As the bus jerked and slid its way along the country lanes I fell into a kind of twilight zone, halfway between pain and sleep. It was only when all the other passengers disembarked that I realised that I
’d arrived in Rugby, a red brick town of small shops and narrow streets. I took a taxi to the station and then became probably the only person in the country to bless the name of Virgin Rail. There was a train to Manchester and it was due in twenty minutes.
It was almost six and already dark when I got out of a taxi at Thornleigh Court.
39
‘DAVE, ARE YOU insane?’ was the question Janine understandably asked when I told her that we were starting the holiday in Blackpool right away.
‘You’re right, I am insane,’ I said, ‘but humour me. We can book into a hotel tonight and then look for somewhere else in the morning. My treat.’
‘Oh, great,’ Janine muttered. ‘You turn up out of the blue looking like . . .’ She paused and took a glance at the anxious faces of her children. Unlike the public, which had averted its collective gaze, they were studying my battered dial with the greatest interest’ . . . like, I don’t know what, and expect us to dash off into the night.’
‘It’s not so bad. We’ll book in somewhere and then we can see the illuminations. The kids’ll love it.’
‘Oh let’s go, Mum!’ the children enthused in chorus.
‘Stay here a minute!’ Janine ordered Lloyd and Jenny. Then she linked my arm and marched me to the corridor.
‘Who’s after you?’ she demanded in an urgent whisper. ‘If you’ve put my children in danger this is the finish for us.’
‘It’s Cullen. He wants to question me about one of my clients and I’ve nothing to say to him.’
‘It’s that damned Marti King, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I admitted.
‘Love, can’t you see that she’s going to get you killed? My crime editor friend reckons that Marti’s a serious player in Carlyle’s more nefarious enterprises.’
‘He may be right,’ I muttered between swollen lips. Janine kissed me. I winced, which she misunderstood.
‘Why did you have to see her?’