China Roses

by Jo Bannister

  ‘So whoever took the Land Rover was acting alone?’

  ‘One set of footprints would generally equate to one person,’ said Sergeant Wilson, smiling into the woolly scarf he had tied inside his forensic hood. ‘But the person who attacked your friend isn’t the one who left the Land Rover here. I think that was Sperrin himself.’

  Hazel was staring at him. ‘That isn’t possible.’

  SOCO raised an eyebrow at her. ‘On the contrary, it’s the only logical explanation. We know from the farmer that the vehicle was left here at least seventeen hours before Sperrin turned up in Norbold. What do you suppose? – that whoever mugged him took him away in their own car, drove him round for half a day or so, and then chucked him out in Siding Street? Unless of course,’ he added with a twinkle, ‘they mugged him in Norbold first thing yesterday morning, then drove out here to abandon his jeep the previous afternoon. That would work, if it was a time machine as well as a Land Rover.’

  The rumble of a train passing somewhere in the middle distance interrupted his flow of wit. After the sound had diminished and died it took him a moment to pick up again where he’d left off.

  ‘We know that Sperrin got out of the Land Rover meaning to come straight back – he left his parka on the seat, and it’s too cold to go far without a coat. If anyone else had brought it here, they’d probably have emptied his pockets and certainly chucked the parka in the back, out of their way – they wouldn’t have driven here sitting on it. And the single set of footprints don’t go back up the lane and thence to the county road and ultimately civilisation, they head off towards that.’ He pointed.

  ‘The standing stone?’

  ‘He’s an archaeologist, isn’t he? Who else would wade across a muddy field in November to look at a bit of granite?’

  ‘Police officers looking for clues?’ Hazel guessed grimly. They splashed their way to the stone.

  ‘Yes, there’s his boots again,’ said Sergeant Wilson, pointing to a slightly flattened bit of mud. ‘He walked round the stone, stopped, walked on again. And then …’

  Now he stopped, in an attitude as close to that of a springer spaniel as a man of his age and bulk could assume. Hazel followed his focus across the field to the boundary hedge. ‘And then he set off again,’ said Sergeant Wilson, ‘and this time he was running.’

  ‘Someone was chasing him?’

  SOCO looked around, shook his head. ‘No. So either someone was threatening him from a distance – waving a gun, maybe – or he wasn’t running away from anything. Maybe he was running towards something.’

  They followed the line Sperrin – assuming it was him – had taken. Beyond the hedge was a tarmac lane. There was a gate, secured by a chain and a padlock long rusted up. Hazel scaled the gate with ease, helped Sergeant Wilson over the corroded top bar. He began casting round, again like a spaniel, then gave a grunt of satisfaction. ‘Something stopped here. Not a tractor – maybe a van. Bigger than a car, anyway. People got out – can’t say how many, but more than one. One of them was a woman – see, that small print there?’

  Hazel looked where he was pointing but didn’t see what he was seeing. Sergeant Wilson went on. ‘There was some milling around. Then, presumably, they all got back inside and drove away.’

  ‘And David was with them?’

  ‘I’m a scenes of crime officer,’ Wilson reminded her, ‘not a clairvoyant. I can’t see any sign that he walked away, but then there wouldn’t be anything to see on the tarmac. But if he got to Norbold fifty miles away, it seems likely he went in the van.’

  Hazel’s fair brows knitted as she tried to visualise the events. ‘So David came to look at the standing stone. He didn’t mean to be long or he’d have put his coat on, but while he was there something happened that made him run – not back to his car but away from it. Maybe, like you say, someone pointing a gun at him. It had to be a fairly serious threat: he’s not the sort of guy to be easily intimidated.

  ‘Something happened that he didn’t want to wait and argue about, or go back for his phone, and he ran. He probably went over the gate the same way we did—’

  ‘Maybe a little quicker,’ conceded Wilson.

  ‘Well, maybe just a little quicker,’ smiled Hazel. ‘And he flagged down a passing van and hitched a lift.’

  ‘Why did the people in the van get out? If your friend was alarmed enough to run, why didn’t he tell them to stay in the van and drive off ASAP?’ He watched her curiously, interested in her reply.

  ‘Maybe … maybe he was already hurt, and they got out to help him.’

  Sergeant Wilson shook his head. ‘When he was running he wasn’t hurt. He was just in a devil of a hurry.’

  ‘Then …’ Hazel thought some more. ‘Suppose there were more than one of them. That David ran from the man with the gun, and flagged down the van only to find it belonged to the gunman’s mates. They jumped out to grab him, threw him in the van and drove off to … well, God knows where, except that they ended up in Norbold. Where, having beaten the living daylights out of him, they dumped him in Siding Street.’ She looked at the legendary Sergeant Wilson almost shyly. ‘Would that work?’

  ‘It might,’ he agreed kindly. ‘And in this job, knowing what could have happened is the first step to knowing what did happen.’

  Ash waited at the main entrance of Norbold Infirmary until he saw the tall narrow figure of Pete Byrfield hurrying up from the car park. ‘Hazel was called away. She asked me to meet you.’

  It was in Byrfield’s eyes that he thought there was bad news. ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘Not to David, no,’ Ash assured him hastily. ‘He’s awake, he’s had something to eat, he’s a bit drowsy and disorientated but his doctor’s well satisfied with his progress.’

  ‘You spoke to the doctor?’ They were heading up the stairs towards the wards.

  ‘I’m not family, they wouldn’t talk to me,’ said Ash. ‘Hazel got an update before she headed out.’

  Byrfield reached the top and turned to face him. ‘So David really is on the mend?’

  ‘It sounds like it.’

  ‘Then why did Hazel want you to come here and hold my hand?’

  Ash smiled. ‘Because she worries about her friends. She knew I meant to visit David as soon as he was feeling better, so she suggested I meet you here. I don’t think she had any more of an ulterior motive than that.’

  ‘No.’ Byrfield sounded relieved, but also as if he wouldn’t relax totally until he’d seen his brother.

  This was the first visit Ash had paid to Norbold Infirmary since learning that Sperrin was here. Not because he was unconcerned, but because he didn’t think his presence would be of any consequence to Sperrin, asleep or awake, and he didn’t want to be in the way.

  So he was more shocked than Byrfield, who’d been here yesterday, at how ill Sperrin looked. He was clearly awake now – he had a magazine open on his knees, though his eyes made no effort to focus on it – but for a moment Ash found it hard to associate the small motionless figure under the sheets with the pugnacious, dynamic man he had known. Sperrin hadn’t been a big man then, either, but somehow the amount of personality he managed to cram into his compact frame usually prevented people from noticing. Ash didn’t think he’d ever seen him completely still before.

  But Byrfield was grinning broadly, his relief now unconstrained. ‘David. You’re looking better.’

  Sperrin’s gaze came round slowly, settled on his brother’s face. ‘Am I? Than when?’

  ‘Than when I was here yesterday, and you were away with the fairies. I was worried about you.’

  Sperrin seemed to give that some thought, failed to draw any conclusions. ‘Do you know what happened? Nobody here will tell me anything.’

  ‘I don’t think anybody knows anything. We’ve all been hoping that you’d tell us what happened.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ retorted Sperrin testily. ‘Concussion – yes?’

  ‘What do you remember?’ asked A
sh.

  Sperrin thought. ‘I remember Hazel. She wasn’t making any sense. She said I’m in hospital in some place I’ve never heard of.’

  ‘That was yesterday evening. You’d only just woken up. The town’s called Norbold. It’s not far from Coventry, and it’s where she works and both she and I live.’

  ‘So what am I doing here?’

  ‘We really don’t know,’ said Ash helplessly. ‘You were found unconscious in a back street early yesterday morning. Your injuries are consistent with a fairly enthusiastic assault. Do you know who attacked you?’

  Sperrin looked indignant. ‘Somebody did this to me? Who? Why?’ He thought for a moment longer, then his voice hardened. ‘And why the blue blinding blazes am I asking you? Why don’t I remember what happened?’

  Byrfield didn’t want him worrying about it, at least until he was stronger. ‘David, it’s too soon. You were out cold for hours – of course there are gaps in your memory. Perhaps you shouldn’t try too hard to remember just yet. Perhaps it’ll all come back over the next day or so if you just rest and concentrate on getting better.’

  But David Sperrin had never been good at waiting. ‘I can’t have amnesia. I remember who you are, both of you. I remember who I am. Why can’t I remember what happened?’

  That was the moment at which the detective sergeant from Meadowvale CID arrived to ask the questions Hazel had wanted to. As luck would have it, the sole occupant of the office when DCI Gorman went to dispatch someone was DS Presley.

  Tom Presley was a sound, reliable, hard-working police officer, but he would never have won an open scholarship to charm school. When the Continuous Training people had wanted to update Meadowvale on interview techniques in cases of sexual and domestic violence, they had used Presley as an example of how not to do it. Presley still recounted this with pride.

  He entered the side ward with a desultory flick of his warrant card, nodded distantly at Ash, took the chair that Byrfield had been about to sit on and introduced himself. He pushed Sperrin’s plaster out of the way so he could put his notebook down on the bed, peered at the injured man as if he’d already caught him lying, and said with a kind of bored cynicism: ‘OK then, so who beat the shit out of you?’

  As the people from Continuous Training pointed out, there were interviewees who could be traumatised all over again by such an approach. David Sperrin was not one of them. The day had yet to dawn when, even well below his best, he could be upset by the likes of Tom Presley. His native contentiousness rose in his veins like wine.

  ‘Gee, Sergeant Parsley,’ he said, fixing the detective with a hawkish gaze, ‘I don’t know. And I’m not the one who’s paid to find out.’

  Tom Presley rolled his eyes. ‘This will be a lot easier, sir, if you try to co-operate. And the name’s Presley.’

  ‘I am trying to co-operate. I’m trying not to mislead you by telling you things which are not true. I don’t know who attacked me.’

  Presley wrote something in his notebook. ‘All right. What are you doing in Norbold?’

  ‘Where?’ said Sperrin.

  ‘Norbold,’ said Presley. ‘As in Norbold Infirmary. What brought you here?’

  ‘No, I don’t know the answer to that one either,’ said Sperrin frankly. ‘Being hit round the head does that sometimes, I’m told.’

  The sergeant looked at him in open disbelief. ‘You’re saying you’ve lost your memory? Isn’t that a bit convenient?’

  Sperrin bristled. ‘Not particularly. I’d quite like to know who to thank for all this. Never mind, I’m sure you’ll get to the bottom of it soon. Won’t you, Sergeant Weasley?’

  Presley was beginning to breathe a little hard. ‘If you don’t remember the attack, what do you remember?’

  Sperrin made an expansive gesture that usually requires two hands. ‘Lots of things. E equals MC squared. The square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. Mares eat oats and does eat oats, but little lambs’ – he leaned forward slightly, insisting on the point – ‘eat ivy. There is in fact almost no end to the things I can remember. The only thing I can’t remember is what I’m doing here, in a town named after a lavatory cleaner, and I think I know why that is.’

  He beckoned with the forefinger of his good hand. Tom Presley leaned closer.

  ‘It’s because I have concussion, Sergeant Grisly.’

  Presley straightened as abruptly as if someone had goosed him. He glared at the unrepentant Sperrin. ‘That’s Presley, Mr Sperrin. Detective Sergeant Presley.’

  ‘Presley,’ Sperrin told Ash confidentially. ‘I think I may have got that wrong. He’s Defective Sergeant Presley.’

  Byrfield thought he should step between them, at least metaphorically, before the policeman exploded. ‘I’m sorry my brother isn’t being more helpful, Sergeant. He’s right: it is partly the concussion. It’s also pretty much who he is. Can I suggest you try again later, when whatever medication he’s been given has had time to work its way through his system?’

  DS Presley, who had never backed down from a criminal in his career, was happy to leave this victim to his own devices. He clearly wasn’t going to learn anything useful, and Hazel would soon be back to take over.

  After he’d gone Byrfield said wearily, ‘Why do you do that, David?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Go out of your way to make people dislike you.’

  Sperrin sniffed. Deprived of his sport, he’d sunk back on his pillows, tired and ill. ‘It saves time.’

  Ash found himself grinning. ‘But it doesn’t always work.’ The urge to take some petty revenge on DS Presley had stirred his own soul from time to time. If he hadn’t responded to it, that was because he was a nicer person than David Sperrin. He added as a puzzled afterthought: ‘Mares eat oats and does eat oats …?’

  Finally Sperrin had the grace to look a little ashamed. ‘Some stupid little song my mother used to sing, when I was a child.’

  Ash remembered the difficult relationship Sperrin had with his mother. He remembered the reason for it. ‘I can’t picture Diana singing to you.’

  ‘Well – not to me, exactly,’ admitted Sperrin. ‘To my brother James.’

  FIVE

  By the time Hazel had returned from the wilds of Bedfordshire, changed her shoes, reported to DCI Gorman and heard an abridged but still enjoyable version of DS Presley’s vicissitudes, it was early evening. She decided to pay Sperrin another visit on her way home.

  ‘Well, you’re looking better,’ she said brightly.

  ‘People keep telling me that,’ grunted Sperrin. ‘It’s not a lot of comfort.’

  ‘You’d rather be told you’re looking worse?’

  ‘I’d rather be told what the hell’s going on.’

  Hazel sat down beside him. ‘We all want to know that, David. We thought you were our best chance of finding out.’

  ‘Hazel,’ he growled, ‘I’ve already had this conversation once today. With one of your colleagues – a long streak of piss with ferret eyes?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Presley,’ she said, deadpan. She might not have coined the description but she recognised it.

  ‘Him, yes. I couldn’t tell him what happened to me, and I can’t tell you. I don’t know. The first thing I knew was waking up here – last night, was it? – and you wittering on about … something.’

  ‘All right,’ said Hazel calmly, ‘then what’s the last thing you remember? Before that.’

  David Sperrin had spent much of the day, when he wasn’t either dozing or baiting DS Presley, wondering the same thing. He hadn’t come up with many answers. ‘I was driving. Yesterday morning?’

  Hazel shook her head. ‘By eight o’clock yesterday morning you were worshipping the kerbstones in Siding Street, here in Norbold. Whatever happened, happened long before that.’

  ‘So maybe it was the morning before. Which would be …?’

  ‘Monday,’ supplied Hazel.

  ‘OK, Monday. I was drivin
g … somewhere.’

  ‘Where?’

  His brow was furrowed. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t going anywhere in particular. I know I wasn’t working. Maybe I just fancied a run-out, and set off to see where the map would take me.’

  ‘Could it have taken you to a standing stone in the middle of a field between Royston and Biggleswade?’

  A certain intelligence crept into Sperrin’s frown. ‘The Myrton menhir? It’s possible. Why?’

  ‘That’s where we found your car. But it had been there longer than you’ve been in Norbold, so it wasn’t dumped there by whoever thumped you here. Is it possible you left it at Myrton and got to Norbold some other way?’

  Sperrin’s face twisted as he wrung his brain like a wet cloth. Nothing useful dripped out. ‘I don’t remember. I don’t remember being there, let alone how I left.’

  ‘Well, maybe that’s not what happened,’ Hazel said soothingly. ‘Only, with it being an archaeological site, it seems more likely that you wanted to go there than that someone’ – she nearly said normal – ‘who stole your car did.’

  ‘The Neolithic isn’t my period,’ said Sperrin pensively. ‘If it’d been a hill fort, it would have made more sense. But if I saw a signpost then yes, I might have gone for a look. You say the Land Rover was there?’

  Hazel nodded. ‘And your coat, your wallet and your phone. At least you weren’t robbed.’

  ‘Lucky old me,’ said Sperrin, unenthusiastically. He was still trying to force the memories. ‘So what do you think happened? I saw the sign, followed it, parked the car … Then what?’

  Hazel shook her head. ‘I don’t think we should speculate. I don’t want to risk your poor battered head making a false memory – confusing a hypothesis with reality.’

  ‘Get me a map,’ he said. ‘Maybe that’ll help jog my memory.’

  ‘Well, all right,’ Hazel said doubtfully. ‘I’ll bring one in tomorrow.’

  ‘Got a date tonight, have you?’ he asked nastily.

  ‘That’s right,’ she replied, hanging onto her patience. ‘With my bed. So have you. A good night’s sleep will do you more good than staring at a road map.’