Dead People (19 page)

His nod was noncommittal as he read my card and looked at me curiously. ‘You with the team?’

‘Sort of. When did this happen?’

‘Late Saturday night.’

I asked the question I didn’t want to have to ask. ‘Anyone hurt.’

He pulled a grim face. ‘The poor kid’s in intensive care.’

Saturday night. I stacked it into the timeframe. On Saturday night I had only just heard about the yellow-haired boy. While I had been starting to mull over his existence, it looked like someone had decided to fuel-up and ignite the rocket that would take him out of this world.

I don’t like hospitals.

They remind me too much of my father dying. He was admitted to one as a healthy man to have a minor operation on his knee, and the place wrapped him in its embrace and killed him. Necrotizing fasciitis. They said that the bacteria must have already been present in his system, but even if it had been, why hadn’t they done what they were supposed to do and fucking cure him? They weren’t supposed to allow him to die.

I left my car where I had parked and walked. I wanted to use the time to think. In the interests of balance I even started out by giving some credence to the fact that it could have been a coincidental accident. Okay, I registered it as a possibility and then moved on to the real meat.

The perpetrator was taking a risk. If this could be proved to be something other than an accident, he was leaving himself wide open. People might start listening to me, and bring the investigation back home. But he must have figured that into the equation. Justin must have been deemed to be too dangerous. He couldn’t afford him talking to us.

So when had he put this into operation?

It was already in the history books when he had heard Justin’s father’s message on my answering machine. So that wasn’t the trigger. But hearing it had probably reinforced his sense that he had done the right thing after all.

So it was probably a result of realizing that his master plan had developed a glitch. Putting the frame on Bruno Gilbert had had the intended effect: the main focus of the investigation had moved to the safe waters of Newport. But I had been left behind as an irritant to worry at the loose ends in Evie Salmon’s short life.

And now Justin Revel was in the ICU. And Redshanks was where?

The fire-investigation officer I had talked to at the scene had not been forthcoming, but he had hinted that they were not looking beyond an accidental cause. Blinded by the light sparking off Occam’s fucking razor again. And there was nothing I could give them to change that opinion apart from a hunch, which was not a valid currency in their books.

I used my warrant card to pass through the system at the hospital to the ICU unit, where I hoped to get a report on Justin’s condition. I had a look in the waiting room. In one corner an elderly woman and what looked like her daughter were trying to stay as far removed as possible from the group of four or five youngsters in the opposite corner with the tribal markings of art students. Justin’s friends. I marked them down to talk to after I had found a doctor.

My phone rang.

Fuck! This was the ICU, I should have turned it off outside. Two nurses appeared out of nowhere to give me admonitory looks and frantic shut-down gestures. I imagined springs and cogs flying as expensive operating and monitoring machinery went haywire.

I checked the display. Fletcher. Perhaps he was ahead of me on the gas explosion and had news for me. I held up the phone in one hand and my warrant card in the other to the nurse who was approaching and mimed that the state of the nation was reliant on me being able to return this call.

She led me out onto a roof terrace.

‘Glyn, I’m just about to go into a meeting with DCS Galbraith. Where are we on Evie’s boyfriend?’

He was fishing again. Looking for something to take the credit for. ‘I haven’t had an opportunity to talk to him yet, boss, he’s been involved in a gas explosion at his flat.’

‘Sounds like bad timing.’

So Fletcher hadn’t heard, and didn’t care too much by the sounds of it. ‘He’s in the intensive-care unit,’ I added, trying to elicit some sympathy for Justin.

‘You often seem to have that effect on people.’ He chuckled. ‘If I’m not mistaken, you even managed to put me in there once. Remember that?’

‘No, boss,’ I retorted crisply, suppressing my anger. Because he was fucking mistaken. He’d twisted the slant. Yes, I had taken him to hospital, but only after the high-speed crash he had caused that had nearly killed us both. I had held him then, tightly, blood trickling out of his left ear and from the bridge of my nose, both of us covered with the shards of the broken windscreen and the stop-motion memory of the impact, while I had tried to absorb his convulsions.

I had brought him back from the edge then.

And now he was a detective chief fucking inspector with the ability to bend memory.

I managed to finish the call without venting my anger, knowing that the consequences of having my assignment taken away from me were not worth the short-term satisfaction of telling him that I was in total sympathy with his wife for leaving him. In the corridor I caught up with the nurse who had shown me to the roof terrace.

‘What’s the situation with Justin Revel?’ I asked.

She looked at me strangely. ‘This is the intensive-care unit.’

‘I know.’

She shook her head. ‘We don’t have anyone called Justin here.’

‘The gas-explosion victim?’

‘Mary Doyle?’

‘Mary Doyle?’ I repeated the name as a question, not understanding yet, but starting to see a chink opening up.

‘That’s right. The girl who was injured in the explosion.’

That was all the news I needed. I thanked her and headed back to the waiting room, trying, out of respect for poor Mary Doyle’s condition, not to be too joyful. I flashed on the art students. There had been no boy with yellow hair among them. But there had been one with a dyed-red thatch.

I opened one leaf of the double doors to the waiting room, but stayed back in the corridor.

‘Justin!’ I shouted.

I scored on two counts. The red-haired boy reacted with a jump, and gave a startled look in the direction my voice had come from. And the other kids had all looked at him.

I went into the room with my warrant card out, and what I hoped was my Good Cop façade in place.

‘Justin Revel?’ I asked, stopping in front of him.

He nodded, his expression a combination of confusion and embarrassment at being singled out. He looked to his friends for support, but they were caught up in the fascination of a new tale unfolding.

‘I need to ask you some questions about the accident.’

‘I’ve already talked to some policemen about it,’ Justin protested meekly.

‘Don’t say anything without a lawyer, dude,’ advised a gangly guy with a tuft of blond hair under his lower lip, and enough rings in his right ear to make it look like a machine.

‘Too much television,’ I told him, flashing him a poisoned look, before turning back to Justin. ‘I really need to talk to you,’ I said, trying to project strength and trust.

Justin got up reluctantly and followed me out into the corridor.

He was nervous. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. His hair was dyed emergency red and had been contrived to stick up and out, as if styled to freeze the moment of jabbing his fingers into an electrical socket. His complexion was pale, the skin fine and freckled, his features still marching towards adulthood. He was wearing a green-plaid heavy flannel shirt over a lemon-yellow T-shirt, both of which clashed with his hair and complexion, which was probably the desired effect.

‘Did Mary Doyle live in your house?’ I asked.

He looked at me uncomprehendingly.

‘How come she’s the one in intensive care?’

‘She borrowed my keys.’ He gestured back towards the crowd in the waiting room. ‘We were all out at a bar. We were going to move on to Steve’s place to . . .’ He cut himself off, deciding that that information was best edited out of the story. ‘We weren’t far from my place. Mary has a thing about going to the toilet in bars. So she went to mine. She’s done it before.’ He looked up at me for the first time. ‘I hadn’t smelled any gas,’ he said plaintively.

No, you wouldn’t, I thought, because there was nothing wrong with your system until someone deliberately fucked it up. ‘How long had you been out?’ I asked.

He thought about it. ‘Probably from about eleven o’clock that morning. It was getting on for about 1 a.m. when Mary went back to pee.’ He’d answered my next question before I’d asked it.

He hadn’t been in the flat for over twelve hours. Plenty of time for someone to establish and consolidate the mechanics of the operation.

‘Where are Mary’s parents?’ I asked, suddenly realizing the absence.

‘On their way back from Florida. They were on holiday.’ The poor guy was sick with worry and guilt.

Sadly, I wasn’t going to be able to reassure him.

‘It was meant for you.’

He nodded listlessly. ‘I know. I should feel lucky. But I just keep thinking about Mary.’

He hadn’t got it. ‘No, Justin–’ I accentuated the words very slowly, I needed him to climb on board now, to want to get in under my wing and let me take over the controls–‘it was deliberate. It really was for you.’

But first, he had to adjust to the craziness. That awful things like this really did happen in this world. Even in Hereford. His look went wild. He stared at me wide-eyed. Trying to take this in. He shook his head. ‘Who would . . .?’

‘That’s what I’m hoping you might be able to tell me.’

Panic and concern were combining to form fear in his face. For probably the first time ever his hairstyle matched his expression.

‘I think this has to do with Evie Salmon’s death.’

‘Evie?’

‘Yes, and by now, whoever did it knows he’s screwed up, that he got the wrong person.’ I touched him gently on the shoulder. It was important now to make physical contact, let him know he had a prop. ‘I need you to trust me. He probably knows you’re in here.’ I saw the jolt as this news hit him.

He looked instinctively back to where his friends were sitting in the waiting room.

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘The less anyone else knows the better.’

We used the ambulance bay at the rear, beyond the public glare, where the damaged ones went in, and the dead ones left. I instructed Justin to wait with a porter I had commandeered to show me the way, while I went back to fetch my car. I used a circuitous route as a precaution. But I reckoned if he was watching anything, it would be the main entrance to the hospital.

Unless there were two of them.

I bundled Justin into the rear seat-well and ordered him to stay down and not move from there until I gave him the all-clear. I had considered putting him in the boot for the additional security, but reckoned that there was a risk of him flipping. His emotional state was precarious. All this new information, followed by the grave-like darkness of the boot, and I could have ended up driving through Hereford with him screaming and kicking the shit out of my boot lid, which would not have made for an unobtrusive exit.

The porter watched me organize all this with a look of mystification.

‘I’ve been watching too much television,’ I explained as I drove off.

I took the Abergavenny road south-west out of Hereford. It was going to be a long detour, but if I had a tail I wanted them to settle in and get comfortable behind me before I slipped in the sneaky move.

The weather was holding. The sky was still blue, a sense of spring in the clarity of the light, a wonderful day to be out for a drive in the country. The traffic was light, the cars behind me were spread out and holding their positions, all bar one, who was coming up the line, overtaking at every opportunity. I let him come past me. A young guy in a hurry in an oldish Audi A3. If he was trying some fancy footwork and attempting to follow me from in front that was fine with me.

I came to the big roundabout at the end of the Abergavenny bypass, drove around it at speed, and doubled back on myself.

‘Remember these,’ I shouted back to Justin, and started listing the make and colour of the cars in the opposite stream of traffic. The cars that had been lined up behind me not so long ago. I carried on until I reached the entrance to the lane I had earmarked on the way down, and pulled into it. It was screened from the main road, and, when I turned the car around, I could watch the traffic going past.

I called out the description of the cars that went past for Justin to tell me if they were on the list I had asked him to memorize. I could remember them all myself, but I didn’t want to spoil his sense of involvement. I also wanted him to start to feel that we were working as a team. I waited for half an hour. None of the cars that had been behind me drove past us.

I took to the country roads after that, up the Golden Valley, sidling over towards Kington. I was pretty certain that we weren’t being followed, but as insurance I made Justin stay down.

I pulled into a lay-by on the top of the ridge near Arthur’s Seat, with a spectacular view over the Wye Valley and the Radnor hills to the north. I told Justin that it was now clear for him to get out.

I stayed in the car while he walked around outside, trying to stretch the kinks out of his muscles. I wanted him to have this time to himself to let him get the sense that he wasn’t a captive, and that I was a good guy. I also wanted to give him as much time as possible to clear the clog of panic and dread from his system. The sort of thing that we would have done in the old days with a quiet cigarette and manly chugs at the hip flask.

He came back over and started to open the rear door. I gestured for him to sit in the front.

‘Okay?’ I asked.

‘Sort of.’ He gave me a try-out smile.

‘There’s lots and lots of stuff you’re going to want to ask me,’ I warned him, ‘but I don’t have time to answer it all at the moment. Let’s just start by saying that I’m taking you to a place of safety, and then please let me ask the questions.’

‘Where are you taking me?’

‘A good friend’s.’ I held my hands up at him, palms out. ‘Now, remember the deal?’

‘You want to talk about Evie?’

‘About you and Evie.’ I looked at him for a moment. ‘What age are you?’

The question surprised him. ‘Twenty.’

I nodded, my hunch confirmed. ‘Evie was three years older than you. How come you came to be friends?’

‘My sister, Camilla. She was Evie’s friend at school. They let me hang around with them. When Camilla left home after sixth form, Evie and I sort of stuck together.’ He saw my next question forming. ‘Just as mates,’ he clarified with a small laugh.