Extracting him from the wreckage took a week and a day by his reckoning. While the paramedics administered oxygen and morphine and kept talking to him, fire officers with metal cutters worked at the bits that were trapping him. A horrific moment came when they decided to puncture the airbag that was restraining his head. Finding he could move a little, he looked to his right.
He was staring into the mask-like, dust-covered face of Aaron.
The paramedics had discovered Lew’s name. He didn’t remember telling them, maybe because his brain wasn’t functioning well. Or they’d got the information from the control room. They told him their first names, as matey as if they’d all just met at a drinks party. Needing to keep him conscious, they prattled away about things unrelated to the situation, favourite TV programmes, football and music. Some way into the process he managed to get his voice working-and he wasn’t wasting words on the rubbish they were going on about.
“My driver-I think he’s dead.”
“Afraid so. We got to him first but he was gone.”
“He was young, not long married.”
“Try and stay calm, Lew. We’ve got a job to do here.”
“He was driving okay. I don’t know what we hit.”
“Looks like you sheered off a wall of turf and turned right over. You may not feel like it right now, Lew, but you’re a lucky man.”
2
“So what happens now?” Paul Gilbert, the youngest member of the Bath CID team, asked. Everyone was talking about the fatal accident.
“It gets investigated,” DCI Keith Halliwell said from across the room. “A police car crashing is big time, a job for Professional Standards. It could go all the way to the IPCC. They’ll need to know all kinds of stuff, like what was their speed and were they using blues and twos.”
“They’ll have a job on their hands with the driver dead,” DI John Leaman said in his usual downbeat tone.
“The other guy survived-Lew Morgan,” Gilbert said. “He ought to know what happened.”
“Yeah-but how much does he remember? He was knocked out. It blanks out everything.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Are there cameras along Beckford Gardens?”
“Not when I was last there.”
“You can tell a lot from skid marks.”
“Were they on an emergency?”
“Only if you can call a naked man an emergency.”
“Bloody hell-is that what they were attending-some crazy streaker?” Leaman said. “Fancy being killed for that.”
“I wonder how the naked man will feel when he hears what happened,” Gilbert said.
“He won’t give a shit,” Leaman said.
True or not, that cynical declaration drew a line under the discussion.
At the same time, the head of CID, Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond, was in denial in the assistant chief constable’s office. He’d been called at home before breakfast and told to report as soon as possible. He didn’t object to that if there was serious investigative work to be done. The job he’d just been given wasn’t what he had in mind.
“Me?” he told Georgina Dallymore, his boss. “You can’t cast me as the professional standards man. Everyone in this place will fall about laughing.”
“No one here is laughing after the tragedy this morning.” Georgina knew how to turn the screw.
“I’m not cut out for this. You need someone who is blameless. My file looks like a jumbo crossword, there are so many black marks on it.”
“Nothing was said about your reputation, Peter. You’ll be the local investigator acting for the PSD at Portishead,” she said as if it was a done deal.
“PSD?” He hated abbreviations.
“Professional Standards Department.”
“There’s a department for it?”
“They asked for a senior officer who can punch his weight, who doesn’t shrink from asking questions.”
“What’s wrong with the collisions experts? They employ them just to investigate crashes.”
“The CIU? They’re involved, don’t worry. But their emphasis is mainly on the mechanical causes, if any. Yours will be on the people, the driver and the sergeant who was with him and whether they were negligent in any way.”
“I’m a detective. I come down hard on criminals, not my brother officers.”
“Peter, nobody volunteers for a job like this. Think of it as a moral obligation.”
“Moral? What’s moral about it?”
“And when all is said and done,” Georgina motored on, “it’s what you do better than anyone else-an investigation. Interviewing witnesses, evaluating evidence.”
“To stitch up someone I rub shoulders with every day?”
“Not necessarily. If you find they weren’t at fault, you say so. You give them a clean bill of health.”
“Just so it can be vetted by the PSD and passed to Police Complaints, who will pick it to pieces and say I conspired in a whitewash. This is a no-win job.”
“Now you’re being cynical.”
“Realistic.”
Georgina shifted to a more humane approach. “Put yourself in the shoes of the driver’s people. They’ll want to know how it could have happened and they’ll want one of our own to be in charge.”
“Did he have family?”
“A wife and a son of only eight months.”
Diamond’s obdurate face softened and creased. “That’s tragic… dreadful.”
Georgina leaned back in her chair with the look of a chess-player who has made the winning move.
He asked, “Is someone with them?”
“Of course. And there’s his co-driver, Sergeant Morgan, in hospital with multiple fractures and in danger of losing a leg. They’re entitled to the best enquiry we can give them. Do you know Lew Morgan?”
“If I do, it’s only by sight. In CID, we don’t spend much time with the uniformed lot. It’s not personal. Our work keeps us at a distance.”
“Which is why you’re so well placed to carry this out. You’re not too close to be swayed. I’m assigning you to this, Peter, and I don’t want any more objections.”
He’d been about to say he couldn’t be spared from the murder squad, but murders had been as rare as pay rises this last two months and Georgina knew. Saying there was a huge backlog of paperwork wouldn’t impress her; there was always a backlog. He was stuck with the accident investigation. Better make the best of it. “If I do this, I’m going to need assistance.”
“No argument about that,” she said, encouraged. “This will be too much for one man. I can deploy a sergeant from uniform to help you.”
“No use at all,” he said.
“Why on earth do you say that?”
“As you just remarked yourself, anyone from uniform can be swayed. I need neutrals like myself. CID people.”
She gave him a long look. “You’re a devious man.”
He waited.
She sighed. “Who are you thinking of-bearing in mind that we want CID to function efficiently while this is going on?”
“Keith Halliwell and Ingeborg Smith.”
“Two of your best officers?” She shifted her bottom as if he’d made her uncomfortable.
“John Leaman is perfectly capable of running things without us. He’ll jump at the chance.”
He’d asked for two, expecting her to limit him to Halliwell, but she surprised him by saying, “Very well. Take Halliwell and Smith.” Then she added, “Don’t lose any time. You’ll want to look at the scene. All the wreckage has to be cleared away before the day is out.”
With Keith and Ingeborg he drove out to Beckford Gardens. His two colleagues were every bit as uneasy as he had been about investigating a fatal traffic accident, and said so.
“The technical stuff is taken care of,” he told them. “We won’t be measuring tyre marks. The Collision Investigation Unit will take care of all that and supply us with the facts. Our job is to talk to the people involved and make sure they acted professionally.”