Another One Goes Tonight

by Peter Lovesey

  A few sheets printed out from the Internet debating methods of murder don’t make anyone a killer.

  The truth probably lies elsewhere.

  How frustrating that the man himself is alive yet unable to speak. No use relying on an improvement in his condition. Even if he does recover, there’s no certainty he’ll speak sense. He talked bollocks about rabbits. Lew Morgan, an experienced cop well used to dealing with tall stories, decided the man was a nutcase.

  But was all the crazy talk just a front, an attempt to distract from a more likely reason for his night ride: the illegal scattering of ashes along the railway? Illegal, but not unworthy. He definitely lied when he said the cremation urn contained his late wife’s ashes. The talk of bringing her on the ride must have been his cover story. Maybe the rabbits are no more than an extra touch of idiocy to convince the two policemen he was gaga, and basically harmless.

  Or could there be a germ of truth in the story?

  Lew Morgan ought to be able to throw more light. He was the last to speak to Pellegrini. That weird conversation in the small hours of the morning could be the key to understanding whether the man was criminal, crazy or misunderstood. The version Lew gave was spoken in snatches when he was still in shock and under sedation.

  He had to be given his chance to talk some sense.

  The monitoring equipment took up so much room that when Diamond arrived at the ward next morning he had to slot a chair into a space between bags of fluid hanging from drip stands. This time he hadn’t been required to dress in the sterile clothes. Lew Morgan was out of intensive care and in a private room, fully conscious and propped up on the adjustable bed. No restrictions had been placed on the visit, even though it was little over a day since the patient’s left leg had been amputated above the knee.

  He started to introduce himself again as “Peter Diamond from the nick”—without mention of rank—hoping Lew would open up and fill in some of that crucial extra detail. After everything the poor guy had been through, he was unlikely to have any memory of the previous visit and its abrupt, abusive end.

  But Lew interrupted him. “I know who you are. You were here a couple of days ago asking questions.”

  “You were heavily sedated.”

  “So what’s new?”

  “You sound brighter.”

  “High as a fucking kite. Haven’t the faintest idea what they’re pumping into me except blood and I need plenty of that. Is this still about Aaron’s driving? He did nothing wrong, poor sod.”

  “Glad to hear it. There was nothing at the crash site to suggest any different.”

  “So what’s your problem? I can speak up for Aaron.”

  “But you told me you didn’t see the crash because your eyes were closed.”

  “That’s a fact. When I opened them we were out of control and turning over. He screamed out ‘Jeez’ and now I know why: that old git on the trike.”

  “You remember him, then?”

  Lew’s hands gripped the bedding as he spoke of the still-vivid experience. “He comes out of nowhere. Aaron swings the wheel and takes us up the bank and we swerve across the street on two wheels and hit the wall.” He added through gritted teeth, “They tell me the old fuck is on life support. Let me anywhere near and I’ll switch him off even if I have to hop there on my one leg.”

  “It can’t have been deliberate,” Diamond said.

  “How do you bloody know? You weren’t there.”

  “I’ve been to the scene. There were stationary vehicles. Aaron was unsighted, and so was the tricyclist probably.”

  “He was an accident waiting to happen. Unsteady.”

  “How do you know that if your eyes were closed?”

  Lew hesitated and screwed up his face in thought. “We stopped him earlier. Fucking demented. He shouldn’t have been out.”

  “I want to ask you about that, Lew. We touched on it when I saw you last but you weren’t able to say much. Where was he when you first pulled him over?”

  “Out Bathampton way. This was early in the shift, around two-thirty. Bathampton Lane, in fact. He was the only thing on the road but he didn’t have a crash helmet, so we stopped to have a word. Well, I did. Aaron stayed in the car.”

  “What exactly was said?”

  “Straight off I could tell he was going to give me lip. The posh voice, calling me officer.”

  “Patronising?”

  “That’s the word. I tell him he shouldn’t be driving a motorised vehicle without a helmet and he says, cool as you like, he’s legal on account of it being an EAPC.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Electrically assisted pedal cycle.”

  “And was he right?”

  Lew nodded. “Smug bastard.”

  “So at that stage he was talking sense?”

  “Every fucking thing he said sounded sense the way he spoke it, like I was a peasant, if you know what I mean. He said he had the government guidance about EAPCs on a piece of paper and I reckon he did, but I didn’t give him the chance to show me because it was getting to be a battle of wills.”

  “I can understand.”

  “I asked about the contents of his saddlebag and he listed every fucking thing as calm as if he was reading the football results. Mostly it was stuff you’d use to look at wildlife, like binoculars, camera and so on. And his food. Banana, slice of cake, flask of tea. Nothing alcoholic. And Trixie.”

  “His wife.”

  Lew’s eyes widened. “You know about this? Did I tell you before? It was when it became obvious he was nuts. He was talking about Trixie’s ashes. He’d brought the urn with him in the saddlebag, so she could join him on the trip.”

  “Weird.”

  “I was already wishing I hadn’t started with him. Next I asked where he was going and he said he wouldn’t know until he got there because they were always on the move.”

  A warning light flashed in Diamond’s brain. He wasn’t sure if it was wise to go down the crazy route again. “Who were?”

  “He didn’t actually say but I took it to be rabbits because he said they covered about a mile each night, using hops. That’s got to be rabbits or hares, hasn’t it?” Lew seemed to want to discuss this rationally.

  “Frogs? Fleas?”

  “You’re joking, I hope. He wouldn’t want binoculars to look at fucking fleas.”

  “A mile a night? Do rabbits go that far?”

  “Hares might. They get up speed, don’t they? Hares, rabbits, kangaroos, take your pick. It’s all horseshit, anyway. He said they were heading for Bath.”

  “I find that impossible to believe,” Diamond said.

  “You’re not the only one. And when I asked how he knew where to look for them, he said, as straight-faced as I’m speaking to you now, he could hear them digging their holes. That was when I decided enough was enough. Either he was taking the piss or he was round the twist.”

  “So you returned to the car?”

  “After telling him to keep off the main roads. He said he always did and I told him other traffic might not see him coming. He said a full moon helped. I remember thinking you can say that again, you fucking loony. We watched him start up and ride away and I thought that was the end of it. Shows how wrong you can be, doesn’t it?”

  “You didn’t breathalyse him?”

  “No point. As far as the law was concerned he was riding a pushbike. Anyway I’d have spotted the signs if he was over the limit. I’m not new in the job.”

  “Unsteady, you said.”

  “I meant his riding, kind of wobbly, due to age, not alcohol. If I’d thought a charge would stick, I’d have done him.”

  “In the conversation you had, did he mention the railway at any stage?”

  “Never a fucking word. Why?”

  “We think he was following the main line.
It runs close to Bathampton Lane and Beckford Gardens. He’s one of these railway enthusiasts.”

  Lew frowned. “Yeah?” He looked as if this new suggestion was more than he wanted to know.

  Diamond spared him a description of Pellegrini’s model train set. “Thanks, Lew. You’ve helped a lot.”

  “And I bet this isn’t the end of it. I’ll get plenty more like you giving me a hard time. Headquarters and the IPCC, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “You know the drill, then.”

  “I can handle it as long as they jack me up with whatever it is I’m on right now. What did you say you are at the nick—accident investigator?”

  “That’ll do,” Diamond said.

  Ivor Pellegrini was fast becoming more villain than victim. He had an unhealthy interest in murder. He was a danger on the roads who had probably caused the death of one police officer and the loss of another’s limb. He certainly wasn’t senile. He’d refused to be intimidated by a police car stopping him. He’d run rings around Lew Morgan and he’d manifestly lied about the purpose of the cremation urn. The valuable Fortuny gowns hidden in his workshop needed explaining.

  All this was painful to think about. There was no logic decreeing that the man whose life you saved had to be worthy of survival. But each offence was wounding.

  Just to be certain there was no change in the patient’s condition, Diamond visited the Critical Care unit before leaving the hospital. The redoubtable sister he’d seen before was on duty.

  “What is it this time—a get-well card?” she said.

  “Would he appreciate one?”

  “Not yet.”

  “He’s still out cold, then?”

  “That’s not a term we use, but yes.”

  “No improvement at all?”

  “Nothing anyone has noted. What’s happened to Hornby?”

  He took a moment to remember who Hornby was. “He’s doing fine now.”

  “Who’s looking after him?”

  “Er, family.”

  “We were told there isn’t any family.” Nothing got past this sister. Anyone in need of intensive care would be fortunate to have her in charge.

  “My family.”

  “You took him in? That’s nice.”

  I took you in as well, sister, Diamond thought, and I’m starting to get a conscience about it. “Cats are easy to board. It’s just for a short time, I hope.”

  “That’s what we do at this stage, hope,” she said. “It’s better than despair.” Evidently impressed that Diamond was a caring man, she said, “I can let you see him if you wish.”

  “Please.”

  “You’ll need kitting out first.”

  In the protective apron and mask he was escorted to the side room where the patient lay tubed, wired and ventilated and showing no signs of life that were not medically induced. He seemed diminished by all the equipment. With most of his features hidden under the mask inflating the lungs, he was hard to recognise as the man Diamond had attempted to revive a few days before. Grey hair, wrinkles, large ears, arthritic hands with one finger attached to a pulse oximeter.

  “Is this what they call a vegetative state?”

  “Keep your voice down, superintendent.”

  He said in a whisper, “Or is it a persistent vegetative state?”

  “It’s only termed persistent after four weeks.”

  “How long do you reckon to keep them going?”

  “Not my decision, I’m glad to say. Have you seen enough?”

  He drove to work with the image difficult to shift from his brain. Strange to think if he hadn’t chosen to explore the uncultivated side of Beckford Gardens at the time he did but an hour later, the old man would certainly have been dead and none of the elaborate medical effort would have come into play. For the health professionals there was no dilemma. Life was a universal entitlement and their job was to bend every effort to preserve it. Diamond’s own view was less clear. Already he was questioning whether it would have been better for everyone concerned, including the patient, if he hadn’t performed CPR. He could recall from his schooldays a couple of lines from a poem by Arthur Hugh Clough he’d been made to learn:

  Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive

  Officiously to keep alive.

  When he got to work, his first action was to make a transcript of everything Lew Morgan had told him. He prided himself on his power of recall, but inevitably some of it would go if he didn’t commit it to paper, so it all got into record as near to exactness as he could manage.

  That done, he stepped into the CID room and asked Ingeborg to make an online search for obituary notices for Mrs. Olga Filiput, a former resident of Cavendish Crescent, who had died about 2013, aged over ninety, and her husband, first name unknown, who had outlived Olga by about six months.

  “Is there something I should know about these people, guv?” she asked.

  He was so used to getting Inge’s help accessing the Internet that he’d asked without thinking. Officially she was back on routine CID duties. His orders. The mystery surrounding Ivor Pellegrini was no longer her concern, or shouldn’t be. She didn’t need to be involved in suspicions that were Diamond’s alone. If Georgina learned he was using his staff to pursue what was little more than a private hunch, he’d be in trouble.

  But he’d set this ball rolling and he couldn’t stop it now without giving offence. He told Inge what he had learned from Paloma and her Fashion Museum contact, Denise.

  “You’re really into this, aren’t you?” she said. “What do you hope to get from it?”

  That word again. His take on hope wasn’t the same as the sister’s in Critical Care. “In this job, you don’t hope for anything if you’ve got any sense,” he said, trying to keep some distance from Ingeborg and sounding lofty and ungrateful in the process. “You make your enquiries and see what emerges.”

  This is not good, he told himself. If you can’t be frank with your closest colleagues you shouldn’t be in the job.

  The Bath Chronicle was online and the death notices easy to access. Ingeborg found the announcement of Olga Filiput’s death before Diamond had made his first coffee of the morning.

  “It’s only brief,” she said when he came, mug in hand, to look at her screen, “but it tells us the husband’s name among other things. He was Massimo.”

  “Good work. What does it mean?”

  “The name? Like maximum, I think. The greatest.”

  “I wonder how anyone lives up to that.”

  She highlighted the notice for him, one among many:

  FILIPUT, Olga, beloved wife of Massimo, passed away peacefully on 2 November, aged 92. Funeral service and cremation at Haycombe, Bath, 2:45 p.m. on 17 November.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now find Massimo’s death notice for me.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “Not here, anyway. His name would have popped up in the search, but it didn’t.”

  “He went about six months after Olga. That’s May, 2014.”

  “You told me already, guv.”

  “And you haven’t been able to find it?”

  “It’s not there.”

  “Massimo—the greatest—and he doesn’t even get a death notice in the local rag? Try again.”

  She sighed. “It doesn’t work like that. I made the search under Filiput and Olga was the only one that came up. If I repeat the search I’ll get the same result.”

  “Why didn’t the old man get a mention in the paper if she did? They weren’t short of the pennies.”

  “You’d have to ask his family—if there is one.”

  “Find them, Inge. They’ll be a younger generation, so check the social media. It’s an unusual surname.”

  He left her to start the search and it was a longer process. He had time to check with DI John Leaman on what el
se had been happening in CID. The church-roof lads had appeared in court and been remanded in custody. A spate of burglaries had shocked the affluent residents of St. James’s Square. Nothing Leaman and the rest of the team couldn’t deal with.

  “Massimo seems to have been the last of the Filiputs in Bath,” Ingeborg told Diamond when he checked with her again. “I drew a blank. I suppose there was no one left to arrange for a death notice.”

  “The Internet failed us?” he said.

  “On the other hand he may have left instructions that he didn’t want his funeral announced. Some house-breaker could have seen the notice and raided the home in Cavendish Crescent on the day of the funeral. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened.”

  Tempted to have another dig at Ingeborg about the limitations of the Internet, he spared her and moved on. “Find one of those websites that lists properties that were sold in the last two or three years.”

  Easy.

  Most of the crescent was divided into four-bedroom flats that sold for anything up to £750,000. The only sale of a complete house that fitted the time-slot was at £2.3 million. Ingeborg found the agent who had handled the sale, called them and learned that the Filiput property had been sold by Fathom and Peake, a firm of solicitors.

  “We’re motoring now,” Diamond said. “I mean, I’m motoring now, back to Bath.”

  The lawyers’ office was in Henry Street, close to the former home of CID. The receptionist asked what the enquiry was and Diamond flashed his ID and said he needed to see the solicitor who had dealt with the late Massimo Filiput’s affairs.

  “I’m not permitted to disclose client information,” she said.

  “Ma’am, I’m not asking you to disclose anything. Just press the right buzzer and I’ll turn my back if you want.”

  “It’s not as straightforward as that.”

  “It never is in these places,” he said. “Okay, let’s try another approach. Who’s the most senior person in the building?”

  “That would be Miss Hill.”

  “Not Mr. Peake? I was hoping to go right to the top.”