Impossible to go into competition with Bath’s shelter for the homeless. “If you like I can deliver it for you,” he offered without any ulterior motive. “I’m going that way shortly.”
She gave a smile and a knowing look that said nice try but no chance. She was an attractive redhead in her forties with eyes that glittered behind tinted green-rimmed glasses and anyone would think he’d suggested something far more lewd. “Thanks, but that won’t be necessary. I’m going that way myself. Where is Ivor, in the Royal United?”
The question seemed to suggest Diamond might have been making it up about poor Ivor’s plight. His try for the quiche had turned him into a con artist in her eyes. “Critical care. It isn’t possible to visit.”
“We’ll pray for him then.”
“Good plan.”
Elspeth and the appetising quiche left the scene.
He closed the door. “I didn’t handle that very well, did I?” he said to Mrs. Halliday. “I thought we were in for a tasty lunch.”
“She had other ideas.”
“More’s the pity. Smelt really good to me. Would you have had a slice if it was offered?”
She didn’t admit to it right away. Finally, without a smile, she said, “Possibly.”
Not the conspiratorial pact he was trying for. Undeterred, he asked the question he’d been leading up to. “Is there a key to the workshop? I’d like to see inside.”
“He keeps it to himself,” she said. “I wouldn’t know where to look. I must get on. There’s a lot more to do.”
“I’ll take a chair to stand on and see if I can look through the windows.”
She gave him a suspicious look. “What do you want to do that for? You know who he is.”
“Yes, but I don’t know why he was out in the small hours of the night.” He returned to the kitchen and found a high stool that was probably used to reach the top shelves. After missing out on the quiche he wasn’t going to be denied again. He took the stool outside and positioned it under one of the workshop windows.
He wasn’t prepared for what he saw. On a shelf directly under the window were three terracotta-coloured plastic containers that he recognised as cremation urns.
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?”