“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.”