“In the conversation you had, did he mention the railway at any stage?”
“Never a fucking word. Why?”
“We think he was following the main line. It runs close to Bathampton Lane and Beckford Gardens. He’s one of these railway enthusiasts.”
Lew frowned. “Yeah?” He looked as if this new suggestion was more than he wanted to know.
Diamond spared him a description of Pellegrini’s model train set. “Thanks, Lew. You’ve helped a lot.”
“And I bet this isn’t the end of it. I’ll get plenty more like you giving me a hard time. Headquarters and the IPCC, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“You know the drill, then.”
“I can handle it as long as they jack me up with whatever it is I’m on right now. What did you say you are at the nick-accident investigator?”
“That’ll do,” Diamond said.
Ivor Pellegrini was fast becoming more villain than victim. He had an unhealthy interest in murder. He was a danger on the roads who had probably caused the death of one police officer and the loss of another’s limb. He certainly wasn’t senile. He’d refused to be intimidated by a police car stopping him. He’d run rings around Lew Morgan and he’d manifestly lied about the purpose of the cremation urn. The valuable Fortuny gowns hidden in his workshop needed explaining.
All this was painful to think about. There was no logic decreeing that the man whose life you saved had to be worthy of survival. But each offence was wounding.
Just to be certain there was no change in the patient’s condition, Diamond visited the Critical Care unit before leaving the hospital. The redoubtable sister he’d seen before was on duty.
“What is it this time-a get-well card?” she said.
“Would he appreciate one?”
“Not yet.”
“He’s still out cold, then?”
“That’s not a term we use, but yes.”
“No improvement at all?”
“Nothing anyone has noted. What’s happened to Hornby?”
He took a moment to remember who Hornby was. “He’s doing fine now.”
“Who’s looking after him?”
“Er, family.”
“We were told there isn’t any family.” Nothing got past this sister. Anyone in need of intensive care would be fortunate to have her in charge.
“My family.”
“You took him in? That’s nice.”
I took you in as well, sister, Diamond thought, and I’m starting to get a conscience about it. “Cats are easy to board. It’s just for a short time, I hope.”
“That’s what we do at this stage, hope,” she said. “It’s better than despair.” Evidently impressed that Diamond was a caring man, she said, “I can let you see him if you wish.”
“Please.”
“You’ll need kitting out first.”
In the protective apron and mask he was escorted to the side room where the patient lay tubed, wired and ventilated and showing no signs of life that were not medically induced. He seemed diminished by all the equipment. With most of his features hidden under the mask inflating the lungs, he was hard to recognise as the man Diamond had attempted to revive a few days before. Grey hair, wrinkles, large ears, arthritic hands with one finger attached to a pulse oximeter.
“Is this what they call a vegetative state?”
“Keep your voice down, superintendent.”
He said in a whisper, “Or is it a persistent vegetative state?”
“It’s only termed persistent after four weeks.”
“How long do you reckon to keep them going?”
“Not my decision, I’m glad to say. Have you seen enough?”
He drove to work with the image difficult to shift from his brain. Strange to think if he hadn’t chosen to explore the uncultivated side of Beckford Gardens at the time he did but an hour later, the old man would certainly have been dead and none of the elaborate medical effort would have come into play. For the health professionals there was no dilemma. Life was a universal entitlement and their job was to bend every effort to preserve it. Diamond’s own view was less clear. Already he was questioning whether it would have been better for everyone concerned, including the patient, if he hadn’t performed CPR. He could recall from his schooldays a couple of lines from a poem by Arthur Hugh Clough he’d been made to learn:
Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive
Officiously to keep alive.
When he got to work, his first action was to make a transcript of everything Lew Morgan had told him. He prided himself on his power of recall, but inevitably some of it would go if he didn’t commit it to paper, so it all got into record as near to exactness as he could manage.
That done, he stepped into the CID room and asked Ingeborg to make an online search for obituary notices for Mrs. Olga Filiput, a former resident of Cavendish Crescent, who had died about 2013, aged over ninety, and her husband, first name unknown, who had outlived Olga by about six months.
“Is there something I should know about these people, guv?” she asked.
He was so used to getting Inge’s help accessing the Internet that he’d asked without thinking. Officially she was back on routine CID duties. His orders. The mystery surrounding Ivor Pellegrini was no longer her concern, or shouldn’t be. She didn’t need to be involved in suspicions that were Diamond’s alone. If Georgina learned he was using his staff to pursue what was little more than a private hunch, he’d be in trouble.
But he’d set this ball rolling and he couldn’t stop it now without giving offence. He told Inge what he had learned from Paloma and her Fashion Museum contact, Denise.
“You’re really into this, aren’t you?” she said. “What do you hope to get from it?”
That word again. His take on hope wasn’t the same as the sister’s in Critical Care. “In this job, you don’t hope for anything if you’ve got any sense,” he said, trying to keep some distance from Ingeborg and sounding lofty and ungrateful in the process. “You make your enquiries and see what emerges.”
This is not good, he told himself. If you can’t be frank with your closest colleagues you shouldn’t be in the job.
The Bath Chronicle was online and the death notices easy to access. Ingeborg found the announcement of Olga Filiput’s death before Diamond had made his first coffee of the morning.
“It’s only brief,” she said when he came, mug in hand, to look at her screen, “but it tells us the husband’s name among other things. He was Massimo.”
“Good work. What does it mean?”
“The name? Like maximum, I think. The greatest.”
“I wonder how anyone lives up to that.”
She highlighted the notice for him, one among many:
FILIPUT, Olga, beloved wife of Massimo, passed away peacefully on 2 November, aged 92. Funeral service and cremation at Haycombe, Bath, 2:45 p.m. on 17 November.
“Okay,” he said. “Now find Massimo’s death notice for me.”
“I can’t,” she said. “Not here, anyway. His name would have popped up in the search, but it didn’t.”
“He went about six months after Olga. That’s May, 2014.”
“You told me already, guv.”
“And you haven’t been able to find it?”
“It’s not there.”
“Massimo-the greatest-and he doesn’t even get a death notice in the local rag? Try again.”
She sighed. “It doesn’t work like that. I made the search under Filiput and Olga was the only one that came up. If I repeat the search I’ll get the same result.”
“Why didn’t the old man get a mention in the paper if she did? They weren’t short of the pennies.”
“You’d have to ask his family-if there is one.”
“Find them, Inge. They’ll be a younger generation, so check the social media. It’s an unusual surname.”
He left her to start the search and it was a longer process. He had time to check with DI John Leaman on what else had been happening in CID. The church-roof lads had appeared in court and been remanded in custody. A spate of burglaries had shocked the affluent residents of St. James’s Square. Nothing Leaman and the rest of the team couldn’t deal with.