Another One Goes Tonight

by Peter Lovesey

  “Are you in pain?”

  One for yes.

  “We’ll give you something in a second. Are you bleeding?”

  Am I bleeding? Bleeding terrified.

  He didn’t know, so he didn’t answer.

  “Can you feel your legs?”

  And how! He confirmed it.

  “That’s good. Tell me where the pain is. Upper body?”

  Two grunts.

  “Okay, you’re making sense. You have pain below the waist, right? Can you move your leg at all?”

  Two more.

  “But you can feel it, and that’s good. We’ll get you out of here as soon as we can. In the meantime I’ll give you something for the pain.”

  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.”

  “Person,” Ingeborg said.

  “What?”

  “You said people. My understanding is that there’s only one survivor and we won’t be talking to him for a while. He’s in intensive care.”

  “Sergeant Morgan,” Halliwell added. “Lew Morgan.”

  “You know him?”

  “Been at Bath as long as I have.”

  They pulled up in Beckford Gardens some way short of the taped-off area. A patrol car parked sideways with beacon lights flashing was blocking the road. Beyond were more police vehicles and lifting gear. “We’ll get a sense of the scene as we always do,” Diamond said, trying to sound upbeat before they left the car. “Let’s treat it as we would a crime scene.”

  “Except that the body will have been removed,” Ingeborg said, making clear she was every bit as unhappy about this assignment as he was. “It’s not the same at all, guv. We won’t be looking for a murder weapon. Or suspects.”

  “Or motives,” Halliwell chimed in.

  “It was a traffic accident,” Ingeborg said. “Shocking, but no mystery.”

  “Hang on, there are things to investigate,” Diamond told them. “And there are victims.”

  “Casualties.” Ingeborg was unconvinced.

  “One fatal, one critically injured,” Diamond said. “As I understand it, they were called out to a so-called emergency about a naked man. In my book, they were victims.”

  “Who made the call?”

  “That’s one of the mysteries we have to unravel.”

  “Whodunit,” Halliwell said, and triggered one of those moments when there was imminent danger of Diamond combusting.

  This time he just rolled his eyes.

  They stepped into the taped-off area.

  The stretch where the crash had happened was about halfway along Beckford Gardens, a long narrow road in the north-eastern section of the city known as Bathwick. Houses and bungalows along one side faced bushes and trees on the other. You couldn’t see the railway and the canal on the undeveloped side but they weren’t far off.

  The mangled wreckage of the Ford Focus police car was across the pavement. It had demolished someone’s garden wall and come to rest on its side with the front end in their rose-bed. Bits of the bodywork in the familiar blue and yellow Battenburg livery were lying where they had been dropped by the rescue team.

  Diamond’s hope of treating this as a crime scene had to be swiftly revised. Massive tyres had crisscrossed the surfaces where he would have hoped to find tracks of the original crash. Heavy machinery, a truck-mounted crane and a flatbed lorry stood close to the centre of things, as well as a fire tender. The car roof had been removed with hydraulic cutters to get at the casualties inside. Fire and rescue officers, police and highways officials couldn’t avoid splashing through pools of oil and water as they went about their business removing equipment.

  He went over to one of the police and identified himself. He was taken to meet the collision investigator, who looked about seventeen and said his name was Dessie. He was in a high-visibility jacket and hard hat with the word CHIEF across it. Two young women, similarly dressed, except that their hard hats had nothing written on them, were close by, using a laser rangefinder.

  “Who do you represent?” Dessie asked. “I’m the specialist here.”

  “Professional Standards. We won’t tread on your toes. Can you run through what happened?”

  “Man, you’re joking. The only guy who can answer that is in intensive care.” Dessie might have been young but he wasn’t subdued by rank.

  Diamond didn’t particularly like being addressed as “man,” but equally Dessie probably didn’t appreciate people who called themselves Professional Standards muscling in on his territory. “You must have formed an opinion. A police car doesn’t smash into a wall for no reason.”

  “Take your pick,” Dessie said, spreading his hands. “Driver fell asleep at the wheel, had a stroke, an epileptic fit, an attack of cramp, a visual problem, a call on his mobile. His brakes failed, his steering went. A stone shattered the windscreen. A deer ran across the road. Or a cat, or a dog, or a runaway ostrich.”

  “A naked man?” Halliwell said before Diamond could turn ballistic.

  “Don’t come clever with me,” Dessie said, regardless that he was being clever with them.

  “That’s what the call was about—a naked man.”

  “Sure, and they were expecting him. He wouldn’t have caused the crash.”

  “If he stepped out from behind one of those parked cars, he would,” Halliwell said. “Anyone, clothed or not, would have made them hit the brakes and very likely go out of control.”

  “That’s one more scenario. I’m trained to keep an open mind.”

  “Perhaps you should tell us what you’ve learned so far,” Diamond said through gritted teeth.

  “Now you’re talking, man. I’ve noted three points of interest. I can walk you through if you want.”

  “It would help.” He resisted the urge to add “sonny.”

  Dessie was already on his way to a place some thirty metres from the wrecked police car, zigzagging between groups of fire and rescue officers. He was a fast mover.

  He stopped where a white Toyota and a silver Renault were parked close to the kerb. Presumably they belonged to people from the adjacent houses. “There’s bugger all left to see because of all the vehicles that have come through since,” Dessie said when Diamond and the others joined him, “but everything was photographed and measured—skid marks this side of the Toyota indicating that something braked hard here and narrowly avoided hitting the thing. Delta Three—our patrol car—was travelling north along here, on the lookout for the naked man. You can see for yourselves how narrow it is. There isn’t much space for overtaking.”

  With that settled, he marched briskly to the steep grass verge that fringed the road opposite the houses and rose to about five feet above the level of the road surface. Tyre tracks were clearly visible, showing something had mounted the slope and veered back to the road several metres on. “Second point of interest. The tracks show where the front offside wheel mounted the soft shoulder. The indentation is deepest at the high point. When you look at the wheels in a moment you’ll see mud and grass adhering to the tyre wall. It’s pretty obvious they struck this bank and lost control. The speed they were going and the angle were enough to tip the car over.” He headed across the road to the wreck of Delta Three, embedded in what remained of the garden wall.

  “It’s a miracle anyone got out alive,” Ingeborg said when they caught up.

  “What you’re looking at now is my third and final piece of evidence, the shell of the thing after they were cut out,” Dessie told her. “Take note of the mud on the wheels.”

  The young man was justified in treating them as beginners in accident investigation, Diamond had to remind himself, but he couldn’t take much more of it. “When did
you get here?”

  “While they were extracting the dead driver. The survivor was already in the ambulance on his way to the Royal United.”

  “So you didn’t see the car in its original state after it hit the wall?”

  “Others were here. It was photographed. I won’t be short of evidence.”

  “We won’t be short of evidence,” Diamond told him. “We’ll need copies of everything you have. Has anyone from the houses come forward?”

  “A few I spoke to,” Dessie said. “None of them saw the crash. Several heard it.”

  “We’d better do some doorstepping.”

  “Hold on,” Dessie said. “That’s my call.”

  “Have you made it?”

  “Not yet. I’ve been far too busy with other stuff.”

  “And you don’t have much help by the look of it. But you’re in luck, because we’ll knock on doors and share information with you.”

  The young man blinked.

  “Better get on, then,” Diamond said. “Can’t keep you from your duties any longer.”

  He waited for Dessie to get out of earshot. “Something’s not right here,” he told his companions. “An experienced driver doesn’t lose control, even on a 999 job.”

  “Mechanical failure?” Ingeborg said.

  “How often does that happen? Police cars are well maintained.”

  “We can’t rule it out.”

  “Can’t rule out all the other possible causes he was rabbiting on about. We simply have to stop guessing and get some evidence. Now that we’ve done the tour with Dessie, I want to walk through his points of bloody interest myself. You two had better talk with the gawpers. A few have collected by the tapes. See if they can offer anything helpful.”

  He crossed the road again to point of interest number two, the place where they’d been shown the tyre tracks. The bank Dessie had called the soft shoulder was much more than that, more than head-high in places. At the top was a long strip of scrubland with well-established trees planted to screen the stark grey walls of the railway embankment beyond. A London-bound train had just thundered past at the level of the rooftops.

  He didn’t need to study the grooves in the mud. He could understand how the car had been thrown off course and turned over. He was more interested in what had happened immediately prior to that. A higher viewpoint might help. He reached for an overhanging branch, hauled himself up the bank and found he could see much more. The work of hosing away foam and oil continued around the wreck of Delta Three. A flatbed truck was being backed towards it. Difficult to picture the scene before the accident.