‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I guess so.’
Then Tara Jones was in front of us in a white T-shirt with those tight trousers with the hoops around her bare feet. She pushed back her hair and she didn’t smile and she didn’t ask us to come inside.
‘Tomorrow we’re bringing in Paul Warboys and Barry Wilder for further interviews,’ I said.
‘On the weekend?’ she said.
‘The law doesn’t stop for the weekend,’ I said.
‘And you want to know if they’re lying,’ said Tara Jones.
17
The summer had a different rhythm to the rest of the year and I did not drive home after we said goodnight to Tara. I didn’t need to go home.
Now Scout was at school, our lives revolved totally around term dates, pick-up times and all the everyday details of school life. But it was different in the long summer holiday.
Many of Scout’s friends had gone off on holiday, but there were always plenty more still in town, and my daughter was a popular child –and not just with her classmates. Parents loved her too because she was polite, sweet-natured and – just shy of her sixth birthday – already a veteran of the sleepover. Scout wasn’t one of these children who had been pushed into the sleepover too soon and then wakes up in tears at 3 a.m., demanding an Addison Lee cab to take her home. Parents, kids – everyone loved her.
Tonight Scout was away at her number one sleepover destination – with her best friend Mia in Pimlico – and as I watched Edie walk off to join the revellers on Upper Street where she was meeting her married boyfriend in some funky new bar, I realised I had no reason to hurry home.
So instead of heading south to Smithfield, I turned the BMW X5 north and drove to the far end of the Holloway Road, to the Whittington Hospital, where Darren Donovan’s elderly victim slept in the darkness that is somewhere between life and death.
Bert Page lay in a room full of flowers.
There were flowers on every available surface of his small room at the Whittington, flowers in every state from brown decay to full bloom, many still wrapped in their cellophane. I checked a few of them for the cards of well-wishers, but there was nothing.
I sat down beside the old man, my eyes stinging with helpless fury at the state of him.
Bert Page was a tiny man, almost child-size, and his frame did not seem strong enough to cope with the vast array of machines attached to his frail body.
He had tubes snaking up his nose and mouth and down into his windpipe from the ventilator giving him his next breath. An intravenous drip pumped two soft bags of fluids into one of his stick-like arms. Monitors traced lines of green, yellow and red for his heart rate and blood pressure.
I leaned closer to see some sign of life. Beyond the tubes that covered much of his face, he did not appear to be sleeping. He was not in anything recognisable as sleep. It was in a state far deeper than sleep. I had never seen anyone look so far from life with their heart still beating.
Frayed striped pyjamas hung loosely on the tiny old man’s emaciated frame and I could see the white hair on the papery skin, and the rough tattoo just above his heart, smudged with the passing of the years.
6 - 6 - 44
The sixth of June 1944. D-Day. I tried to imagine Bert as the teenage soldier he had been, landing on that Normandy beach, but it felt like it was another lifetime. I took his hand, the one that didn’t have the tubes keeping him alive, and it was like holding a small bird, just delicate bones held by a thin layer of skin.
‘Oh, Bert,’ I said out loud. ‘What did that bastard do to you?’
The door opened and a nurse let in a young doctor. The nurse disappeared and the doctor came in, consulting his notes. He looked Greek or Turkish. Very young, very tired.
‘I’m Dr Safik.’
Turkish then, I thought. I stood up and shook hands, telling him my name as I showed him my warrant card. He really looked at it and I realised that he had already seen a few warrant cards in his short career.
‘Detective Constable Wolfe?’ He gave me back my warrant card. ‘By your rank, I’m assuming you’re not the Senior Investigating Officer?’
‘Acting.’
‘How can I help you? Presumably you’re not investigating the assault on Mr Page?’
‘I’m investigating the murder of Darren Donovan, the man who assaulted Mr Page.’ I looked at the old man in the hospital bed. I did not like saying Donovan’s name in this room. ‘What can you tell me about his visitors?’
Dr Safik’s mouth twitched with distaste.
‘He doesn’t have any, as far as I am aware. That’s not unusual these days. But it’s unusual for a man that attracted so much widespread sympathy as Mr Page.’ The young doctor almost smiled. ‘It didn’t appear to do him much good, did it? All that attention from the media.’
‘Does Mr Page have any chance of recovery?’
‘He’s in what we call a state of unrousable unconsciousness. Do you know what the Glasgow scoring system is, Detective?’
I shook my head.
‘It’s a numerical system used to assess the extent of a head injury. It’s based on motor response, eye opening and so on. A score of seven indicates a full coma.’ He glanced at the old man. ‘And Mr Page is a seven. Recovery at his age? It’s unlikely.’
‘And he has no visitors at all?’
‘Not as far as I am aware. You should talk to the nurses’ station. I know there were some members of the press sneaked in when the attack first happened.’ I suddenly remembered a horrific photograph of Bert Page in an Intensive Care Unit shortly after he was robbed by Darren Donovan, the old man’s face so swollen and discoloured that it barely looked human. ‘There’s a daughter in Australia who can’t quite manage to get over to see her father before he dies. But, no – Mr Page does not get visitors.’
I inhaled the sweetness of Bert Page’s hospital room.
‘Then who sends him flowers?’ I said.
Saturday night was slipping into Sunday morning when I finally arrived home. Stan roused himself and padded across the loft to meet me, his strawberry blonde tail wagging with welcome.
Jackson was sitting at my laptop, wearing some of my old clothes – a black T-shirt that said LONSDALE LONDON in white letters, faded Levi 501s – that I did not recognise at first because he had washed and ironed them so well.
‘You should have seen Scout when Mrs Murphy packed her off with little Mia and her mum,’ he said. ‘She was so excited.’
I felt the pang of the parent who is absent too often.
‘Is it OK to use the laptop?’ he said. ‘I was just checking the news.’
‘Anytime.’
He closed the laptop.
‘You should try to get away with her yourself,’ Jackson said. ‘They give you holidays in the Met, don’t they?’
I nodded. ‘We get twenty-five to thirty days, depending on length of service.’
I tended to use my days off walking Stan on the Heath. Were Scout and I really going to go on holidays like normal families? Two weeks in the sun? I couldn’t quite imagine it. And what would we do with Stan? He didn’t have a passport. And he was part of our little family, too.
‘Remember that holiday home my folks had when we were kids?’
The family that adopted Jackson had a cottage on the coast of Kent. I remembered a pebble beach, bunk beds and the salt tang of the English Channel. The sea was freezing even in the height of summer. When I was eleven years old, it had seemed like heaven.
‘Sand Pebbles,’ I said.
‘Sand Pebbles!’ Jackson laughed.
‘It’s still there?’ I said. ‘Sand Pebbles is still there?’
‘They never sold it,’ he said. ‘They rented it out before they died, but now it doesn’t even get rented out. I spent a couple nights there before I came up to London. It’s not in great nick, but you and Scout can use it anytime.’