Another One Goes Tonight

by Peter Lovesey

“It’s all above board. I’ve been doing for him and his late wife for the best part of ten years. What’s happened to the poor man, then? How bad was this accident?”

  “Let me in and I’ll tell you.”

  She was Mrs. Tessa Halliday, from Fairfield Park on the northern outskirts, he learned when she had shown him through a carpeted entrance hall into a kitchen almost as big as the new CID room at the police centre. Old-fashioned in style, with a built-in dresser and walk-in pantry, it even had a servant bell box. But the Aga was modern and so were the double-door fridge, dishwasher, hob and hood.

  He told her about the accident but without saying a police car had been involved or that Pellegrini had lain unconscious and unnoticed for three hours. Even so, he left her in no doubt that her employer was critically ill and unable to receive visitors.

  In turn, she told Diamond that the Pellegrinis—she called them Ivor and Trixie—had lived in Bath most of their married life. They were a devoted couple, regular churchgoers and wholly upright citizens. Ivor had held a senior position with Horstman’s, one of Bath’s main employers, at their Newbridge works, before the factory closed and was moved to Bristol. Then he’d taken on consultancy work for a number of local firms.

  “I know where Horstman’s used to be,” Diamond said. “Just up the road from where I live in Lower Weston. Good firm, good reputation. Is engineering what he does in the workshop?”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” she said.

  “You don’t go in there to clean?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not even sure Trixie was allowed in there. It’s his holy of holies.”

  “He doesn’t go in there to say his prayers, by all accounts. I heard he made her a shopping trolley and we think the tricycle was homemade as well.”

  “He’s clever with his hands. Is that what you call engineering, then?”

  “I would say so.”

  “I thought it was just engines and that.”

  “This is a sensitive question but I’d like you to try and answer it. Have you noticed anything different about Mr. Pellegrini’s behaviour since his wife died?”

  “What do you mean? Of course he’s different and so would you be.”

  That raw nerve twitched. He didn’t inform her how right she was, that he, too, was a widower, deeply scarred by his loss. “He was out on the roads on his tricycle in the small hours of the night. Is he mentally okay?”

  She looked surprised. “In the night? Why would he do that?”

  “My question, exactly. Eccentric, is he?”

  She frowned and thought before answering. “I suppose you might get that impression because of the clothes he wears, but people wear all sorts these days, don’t they? There isn’t anything wrong with his brain, if that’s what you’re asking. If he went out at night there must have been a good reason.”

  “Do you know if he likes a drink or two?”

  “Nothing alcoholic, that’s for sure. They both had strict views about that.”

  “Does he have family—anyone we should notify?”

  “I can’t think of anyone. I went to Trixie’s funeral and there weren’t any family there, just a few of us from Bath who knew her, some people from the church and some neighbours from long ago. It’s sad, but they were a close couple and didn’t mix much.”

  “One last thing,” he said. “Is there a photo of Ivor anywhere about the house? I’d like to make absolutely sure he’s the man who had the accident.”

  There was a nice one in the library, she said, and led him upstairs to an even larger room where the two longest walls were lined with books and each had one of those rolling ladders attached to a track for reaching the top shelves. He couldn’t resist moving one along a short way.

  “Runs well.”

  “All his own work,” she said. “Is that engineering as well?”

  “Definitely.”

  The end walls were used to display pictures, mostly of steam trains. He’d already noticed several shelves of books about railways. “He’s a train enthusiast, then?”

  Her mouth twitched into a slow smile. “He’s a man.”

  “I expect it’s more than collecting numbers in his case,” Diamond said. “He’ll know how they work.”

  “The only thing that interests me is will they go on time,” Mrs. Halliday said. “The photo is up the other end.”

  He was prepared for this but he still felt his flesh prickle. It was of Ivor at the wheel of an open-top sports car in his younger days, darker and with more hair, but definitely trike man. All doubt was removed: this was the accident victim.

  He gave her the bad news.

  “That’s awful,” she said. “What will happen now?”

  He shrugged.

  “Is he going to die?”

  “They’ll do all they can to keep him alive.” He looked at the picture again. “Does he do any driving these days, or does he only use the trike?”

  “He gave up some time back. He has an account with a taxi firm for longer trips.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Who’s that?” Mrs. Halliday said.

  She’d asked a question Diamond himself wanted answered. “Let’s see.”

  He was down those stairs quicker than hell would scorch a feather.

  He opened the front door to a smiling woman holding a plate with something on it covered in tinfoil. But the smile changed to drop-jaw surprise. “I was expecting Ivor. Who on earth are you?”

  He told her and said, “I’m afraid he’s in hospital.”

  “Really?” Her face creased in concern. “What’s wrong? I’m Elspeth Blake from the church. We do a bit of baking for him since his wife died.”

  “A road accident. He was knocked off his bike.”

  Mrs. Halliday piped up in support from somewhere behind him. “They didn’t know who he is. I was able to show the officer his picture. What have you cooked for him, Elspeth?”

  “A quiche Lorraine,” Elspeth Blake said. “Perhaps I should take it to the hospital.”

  Diamond explained that Pellegrini was too unwell to enjoy a quiche. “Is it still warm? Smells good.”

  Mrs. Halliday said, “The best thing we can do is let it cool and put it in the freezer for when he comes home.”

  “I don’t think so,” Elspeth Blake said, friendly but firm. “I can easily make him something fresh when he’s better again.”

  Unlikely, going by the look of him this morning, Diamond thought. Pity to let a good quiche go unappreciated. “A not-so-old person might appreciate it while it’s still warm—or three not-so-old people. It’s my lunchtime. Is it yours, ladies?” He watched for a positive reaction.

  Never tangle with a lady on a mission of goodwill. She laughed—and there was real amusement in the laugh—yet she backed away a step. “I hope you’re joking. They’ll be happy to take it at Julian House.”

  Impossible to go into competition with Bath’s shelter for the homeless. “If you like I can deliver it for you,” he offered without any ulterior motive. “I’m going that way shortly.”

  She gave a smile and a knowing look that said nice try but no chance. She was an attractive redhead in her forties with eyes that glittered behind tinted green-rimmed glasses and anyone would think he’d suggested something far more lewd. “Thanks, but that won’t be necessary. I’m going that way myself. Where is Ivor, in the Royal United?”

  The question seemed to suggest Diamond might have been making it up about poor Ivor’s plight. His try for the quiche had turned him into a con artist in her eyes. “Critical care. It isn’t possible to visit.”

  “We’ll pray for him then.”

  “Good plan.”

  Elspeth and the appetising quiche left the scene.

  He closed the door. “I didn’t handle that very well, did I?” he said to Mrs. Halliday. “I
thought we were in for a tasty lunch.”

  “She had other ideas.”

  “More’s the pity. Smelt really good to me. Would you have had a slice if it was offered?”

  She didn’t admit to it right away. Finally, without a smile, she said, “Possibly.”

  Not the conspiratorial pact he was trying for. Undeterred, he asked the question he’d been leading up to. “Is there a key to the workshop? I’d like to see inside.”

  “He keeps it to himself,” she said. “I wouldn’t know where to look. I must get on. There’s a lot more to do.”

  “I’ll take a chair to stand on and see if I can look through the windows.”

  She gave him a suspicious look. “What do you want to do that for? You know who he is.”

  “Yes, but I don’t know why he was out in the small hours of the night.” He returned to the kitchen and found a high stool that was probably used to reach the top shelves. After missing out on the quiche he wasn’t going to be denied again. He took the stool outside and positioned it under one of the workshop windows.

  He wasn’t prepared for what he saw. On a shelf directly under the window were three terracotta-coloured plastic containers that he recognised as cremation urns.

  6

  Instead of homemade quiche, lunch was a beer and a sandwich in a seedy bar near the railway station.

  “Talk about professional standards,” Keith Halliwell said, holding his glass to the light to look at the smears. “They could do with some here.”

  “Brace up,” Ingeborg said. “We’ll survive.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Halliwell said. “And don’t even think about using the toilet.”

  This was an emergency meeting in every sense. The news had broken: bath man critically injured by police car screamed a headline board they’d seen along the street. After a spate of such incidents across the nation, some fatal, the collision in Beckford Gardens was a hot topic in all the papers. The media were giving it the treatment. Headquarters had been on to Keynsham demanding that report.

  “We’re expected to deliver,” Diamond said, “today.”

  “If not yesterday,” Ingeborg said.

  “Bloody ridiculous,” Halliwell said.

  Diamond didn’t argue. He was of the same mind. “Let’s lay out what we know for certain.”

  “A reconstruction?”

  “Starting with the 999 call at six in the morning from Cedric Bellerby—”

  “It was never an emergency,” Halliwell said.

  “He believed it was,” Ingeborg said.

  “He’s a moron.”

  “He made the call. Fact.”

  “He’s just as responsible as our driver or the man on the trike.”

  Diamond agreed with Ingeborg here. The caller wasn’t the issue. “A call about a naked man he’d seen through his binoculars swimming in the lido. The guy was making his way up the hillside towards the street.”

  “Fully clothed by then,” Halliwell said.

  “Towards the street,” Diamond said in a tone that brooked no more interruption, “where he could have been stopped by our lads and questioned. But while Bellerby was waiting by his front gate, Ivor Pellegrini came by on his trike, pedalling in the direction the patrol car would come from. His steering wasn’t the best but his lights were working. To quote Bellerby exactly—and this could be crucial to what happened—he was wandering across the road, too busy trying to control his trike to notice anyone else. What can we put that down to?”

  “Drink?” Halliwell said.

  “I have it on the authority of his cleaning lady that he doesn’t drink.”

  “Old age? He shouldn’t have been on the road at all.”

  “He was tired,” Ingeborg suggested. “He’d been up most of the night and gone further than a man of his age should have done.”

  “Do we know his age?” Halliwell asked.

  “He worked for Horstman’s,” Diamond said, “and they relocated to Bristol in 2000, when he started work for some of his local contacts, but he seems to be retired now. I reckon he’s seventy at least. This matters because if he was riding erratically he could have been the prime cause of the collision.”

  “Could dementia be a factor?”

  “Nothing wrong with his brain, according to Mrs. Halliday.”

  “Is she any judge?”

  “She sees him twice a week.”

  “To clean his place, not to engage in intellectual debate.”

  “I met her,” Diamond said. “Not much gets past her. If she says he’s still got his marbles, I believe her.”

  “And yet we have the weird stuff Lew Morgan told you.”

  “The rabbits?”

  “And riding about at night with his wife’s ashes, which we know is untrue, because she wasn’t cremated.”

  Diamond shook his head and sighed.

  Ingeborg threw in a sharp one. “So who was the more confused—Pellegrini or Lew Morgan?”

  “Not Lew,” Diamond said at once. “What he told me was coherent and most of it checks with the facts. He remembered they were on a call to Beckford Gardens, a shout about a naked man. He was able to give me Aaron’s name, and said correctly that he was married with a young kid. He’d obviously met Pellegrini because he remembered the deerstalker and the trike.”

  “But when did this meeting take place?” Ingeborg asked.

  “It wasn’t a meeting, it was a crash,” Halliwell said.

  Nothing was said for a couple of seconds.

  “No,” Diamond started up again. “That can’t be right. Lew wasn’t speaking about the crash. In fact, he became angry when I suggested trike man had anything to do with it. He accused me of trying to get inside his head and told me to piss off. Thinking back, he only brought up the topic of trike man to let me know the kind of night they’d endured. ‘Fucking nutcase,’ as he put it.” He paused and swirled the beer in his glass. “I’m thinking they came across Pellegrini at some point earlier in their turn.”

  Ingeborg frowned. “There was nothing in the control room audio recordings. I’ve been through them three times and read the transcripts. I know most of it by heart.”

  Halliwell was grinning. “Never worked in cars, have you, Inge?”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Plenty of stuff goes on that never gets back to the control room.”

  “Keith’s right,” Diamond told her. “If they make a road check that turns out to be negative, they won’t want it logged. I can see a situation where they ask trike man to pull over, only to discover he’s talking bollocks about migrating rabbits and taking his dead wife for an outing. If bullshit like that gets back to the nick, they’re a laughing stock.”

  “So they don’t say a word and it doesn’t appear on the audio recording,” Halliwell said.

  Ingeborg glanced away as if she’d lost interest. “Then we’ll never know for sure.”

  “We’re not copping out,” Diamond said, resolved to achieve something from this session. “Where were they prior to the Beckford Gardens call-out?”

  “Back in Keynsham,” Ingeborg said, “thinking their shift was over. And before that they were in Julian Road arresting the church-roofers.”

  “So any meeting with Pellegrini has to precede that. Does the log tell us where they were in the early hours of their shift?”

  “Widcombe Hill and the university. They were there some time, dealing with a complaint about rowdy students. Then they attended a break-in in Northwood Avenue.”

  “All south of the river.”

  “The river, the canal and the railway,” Diamond said.

  “Is that significant?” Ingeborg asked.

  “Some distance from where the collision took place,” Diamond said. “I’m thinking about Pellegrini on his tri
ke. You’ve studied the audio-recordings, Inge. Was there any time of the night when nothing much seemed to be happening?”

  She was silent for a short spell, remembering. “About one forty-five they drove out to Bathampton to check on a domestic—some man complaining his wife was threatening the kids. They sorted that and reported back at two-twenty and there wasn’t much communication for a time. The next the control room heard of them was two fifty-five.”

  “Thirty-five minutes off air. Seems a likely slot. Where could they have met him at that time? Where were they at two fifty-five?”

  “On the A4 heading back towards the city.”

  “From Bathampton. That figures.”

  “Where exactly was the domestic?” Halliwell asked.

  “Meadow Lane, a turning off Bathampton Lane.”

  “Which is really quiet at night,” Halliwell said, “and a good place to stop and search someone.”

  “It makes sense,” Diamond said, encouraged that the team was functioning better. “He’s cycling unsteadily along Bathampton Lane and they stop him and maybe breathalyse him and have this ridiculous conversation about hopping rabbits which unsurprisingly doesn’t get reported to the control room. He’s allowed to continue.”

  “Towards the A4?” Halliwell said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Pellegrini won’t have gone that way. An old man on a trike wouldn’t last five minutes on a major road like that.”

  Ingeborg agreed. “He’d stick to minor roads.” She took out her iPhone and started checking possible routes.

  “Yet three hours later they get the call to Beckford Gardens and we can definitely place him there.”

  “On his way home by the back route,” she said. “His night tour is over and he’s returning to base.”

  “The back route from Bathampton?” Halliwell said. “Can’t say I know one.”

  Ingeborg was about to enlighten him. “For a man on a trike, Bathampton is the only place where you can cross the railway and the A4 on a reasonably safe road.”

  “With you there,” Halliwell said. “You mean Mill Lane.”

  “Right. And a bit further on he’s over the toll bridge—which is free after ten p.m.—and across the river and he makes his way through Bailbrook and Larkhall on minor roads to Beckford Gardens, where Delta Three happens to be racing towards him on its emergency run. They meet head on.”