Diamond’s hopes soared. “Today, you mean?”
“No, mate. One morning last week, between six and seven, when I was coming home from work.”
“Which day was that?”
“I couldn’t tell you. I remember, because he wasn’t all that easy to spot. He had one of those LED flashers. He was coming towards me, so he can’t have come far.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The top of this street is a dead end. It goes a long way and gets a change of name-Hampton Row-but you can’t drive any further. It ends in a footbridge across the railway, and that’s it.”
“Could he have brought the tricycle across the footbridge?”
“Unlikely. Too many steps.”
“So it looks as if he starts in Hampton Row. What’s it like up there-just an extension of this, with houses one side and rough ground the other?”
“Pretty similar, except they’re small terraced houses all the way along.” It was said in a superior tone. Beckford Gardens was the smart end.
“No garages, then, where you could store a trike? Thanks. This is useful,” Diamond said, thinking it shouldn’t be too difficult to trace the tricyclist’s home if he lived in one of the terraced houses. He needed to know more about this man who had apparently been the cause of the crash. That was a given. And at a deeper, emotional level, he was tied to the life he still hoped he had helped to save.
“One other question. The police car was on its way here to check on a report of a naked man. Can you think of anyone locally who gets up to stuff like that?”
“Round here? Unlikely. Who reported it?”
“At this stage I’m not sure. Our control centre ought to know the source of the call but I haven’t been able to check yet.”
“What a weirdo.”
“It takes all sorts.”
Diamond returned outside to see if Ingeborg or Keith Halliwell had discovered anything more. He’d visited the three houses he’d picked for himself. Halliwell had got through his three and learned nothing of use and Ingeborg was still not back.
“Probably getting coffee and cake,” Halliwell said.
“If she is, she’d better have something to report.” He called the control room and asked if there was news from the hospital of Lew Morgan’s condition. The injured sergeant was under sedation. He wouldn’t be fit to interview for at least the next twelve hours. “How about the man on the trike?” Diamond asked.
“They’re trying to resuscitate him,” the operator said.
“I know that. Do we know his name? Was he carrying any form of ID?”
“Apparently not.”
He was stung by their lack of urgency. “Someone at your end should have identified him by now. It’s not rocket science. How many blokes in Bath own motor-powered tricycles? Was he registered to ride the thing?”
“One moment, sir.”
He told Halliwell the operator was checking. “Idle bastards. This should save us no end of time and hassle.”
The operator got back to him. “An electric bike is an EAPC.”
“What’s that when it’s at home?”
“I’m not quite sure, sir. The thing is, it doesn’t have to be registered, taxed or insured.”
“Great.” He ended the call and told Halliwell.
“Not to worry, guv. As soon as it’s on the local news, someone will know who he was. You can’t ride a thing like that around Bath without people asking who the hell you are and why you do it.”
“Good point.” He checked his watch. “Which house did Ingeborg go into?”
“The one with the tiled porch.”
“D’you think she’s okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s been in there the best part of half an hour. The naked man could be in one of these houses.”
“She’d kick him where it hurts most, guv.”
Halliwell was right. Ingeborg could look after herself. She hated being treated as the helpless female. More than once, Diamond had made the mistake of fretting over her as if she was a daughter. He hardened his heart and watched the lifting gear being attached to the wrecked car, ready to hoist it on to the flat-bed truck. At least one life had been lost, but for the professionals it was just another traffic accident.
There was a movement under the tiled porch.
“Here she comes,” Halliwell said, “looking none the worse.”
“I hope you’ve got something for us,” Diamond told her when she joined them.
“Afraid not,” she said. “It was an old lady in a panic because the carer hadn’t arrived. She had no idea what was going on outside.”
“So you did some caring?” Halliwell said in a mocking tone, still smarting from being called a fascist.
“I couldn’t just walk out. She was in a wheelchair.”
Diamond stopped himself from making an approving comment about Ingeborg’s feminine side.
“I did ask her the questions,” she added, “just in case.”
“And the other people you spoke to?”
“No help at all. Just like her, they had questions for me.”
He decided to cast the net wider. He wanted to explore the top end of this road, where the man on the trike had come from, leaving Ingeborg and Halliwell to knock on doors at the other end. When he stepped over the do not pass tape, edged through the gawpers and headed up the street, it was a relief to leave the mayhem behind.
If the truth were told, he needed a chance to collect his thoughts. Accident investigation was new in his experience. At a murder scene, he’d be making the decisions. He’d decide the scale of the investigation, how many CID people to employ. A procedure was observed. As SIO he’d seal the immediate area and control the access and the screening of the body. He’d liaise with the scene-of-crime people, a police photographer, the divisional surgeon and usually a forensic pathologist, and there was no question who conducted the operation.
Here, he’d been one of many response people from the different emergency services. They respected each other, for sure, only they all had jobs to get on with. Nobody wilfully contaminated the scene, but it was a dog’s breakfast compared with the painstaking process he was used to. And the noise level had been a pain. In these conditions it was easy to act and hard to think.
He asked himself what he could usefully do before the doctors allowed him to interview the key witness, Lew Morgan. In the next twenty-four hours or so there would be a postmortem on the dead driver. He’d long ago learned that a postmortem was a false dawn. It happened soon after death and you hoped for swift information, but then samples of blood and body fluids were sent for testing and the testers wouldn’t be hurried. In this case the cause of death was obvious. All he wanted to know for sure was that the late PC Aaron Green had no trace of alcohol or drugs in his system.
As Halliwell had rightly commented, identifying the civilian victim shouldn’t be a problem once the incident had some publicity. Not many people rode the streets of Bath on tricycles. Somebody would be able to put a name to him.
Towards the end of Beckford Gardens he found he’d been misinformed. The street didn’t just become a dead end in Hampton Row as the man in combat trousers had claimed. Beckford Gardens ended at a left turn called Rockliffe Road. The man on the trike could easily have come from there.
You need to check every damned thing yourself.
He moved on, muttering. After the Rockliffe Road turn, Beckford Gardens had a change of identity as Cleveland Row and finally Hampton Row. At least the description as a terrace of small dwellings had been accurate. By the look of them, they were two hundred years old or more, some shabby, some nicely renovated. At the far end, where the road went no further, was the bridge over the railway, and he couldn’t imagine anyone struggling to hoist a tricycle over that. He climbed the steps and watched a First Great Western express from Paddington shoot beneath him on its way to Bath Spa station. The small boy in him thrilled to the power of the train making the bridge vibrate.