‘Welfare visit?’ Henry said with a forced smile.
Anger merely raised his thick eyebrows impatiently. ‘The consultant tells us you’re fit enough to talk to now.’
‘Yes, sure,’ Henry said brightly.
‘How’re you feeling?’ Roscoe asked.
The patient shrugged. ‘OK, I guess. Battered, bruised and a mushy-pea head, but otherwise not too bad.’
‘Good — can you tell us what happened then?’ Anger blurted sharply.
‘About what?’ Henry said blankly. His brain was hurting.
‘The accident.’
‘What accident?’ His mind was adrift again.
Anger sighed, seething, and opened his mouth to remonstrate. Jane Roscoe held up a calming hand to hold him back.
She spoke. ‘What do you remember?’ Her voice was gentle.
Henry shook his head slowly. ‘Erm. .’ he began pathetically, but could not follow it up.
‘Do you remember going to Manchester with the chief?’
‘The chief constable? Why would I be going to Manchester with FB?’ Henry said, rubbing his tired eyes, trying to concentrate. Then something came back to him. ‘Yeah, I did, didn’t I?’ He paused, forcing his grey matter to get hold. ‘I remember having a Big Mac with him, surrounded by a load of kids.’
‘What else?’ Roscoe probed.
‘Nothing, nothing there.’ He was getting frustrated with himself. He banged his fist on the bed tray, rattling the cutlery and crockery. ‘Shit!’
‘It’s OK, Henry,’ Roscoe said consolingly. ‘It’ll probably take time for it to all come back. Funny thing, memory.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said dreamily.
Dave Anger was less understanding and his dislike of Henry surfaced like a bubble coming up from the slime in the bottom of a cesspit and popping on the surface. ‘I think you’re taking the piss, Henry.’
‘Boss!’ Roscoe said sharply.
Henry stared distastefully at him.
Anger shot a warning look at Roscoe. ‘No,’ he said, getting to his feet. ‘This is all one big piss-take. Someone ducking and diving their responsibility, trying to wangle their way out of a messy situation.’
‘Boss!’ Roscoe said again.
‘No — he’s having this, the bloody bastard.’ Anger rose to his full height, like a bear about to attack. Then he bent over close to Henry and pointed a thick, stubby, accusatory finger at him. He growled through clenched teeth. ‘I want to know fucking everything, Henry. I want to know why there were two guns in the car and two knives and an Intel file, what’s been going on, who the third person was and I want you to stop playing this bloody amnesia game with us. It’s boring and very annoying.’
Henry felt himself draw back into his pillows and stare at Anger like a confused, frightened rabbit.
‘Mr Anger!’ Roscoe protested. She stood up, hands on hips, trying to reign him back. She looked pretty intimidating to Henry, but Anger was having none of it.
‘No! There’s questions that need answering and this bastard has those answers in that — allegedly — jumbled-up head of his.’ He towered over Henry. ‘You — start talking — Now!’ he ordered Henry.
Henry shook his head despairingly, on the verge of tears. ‘I can’t fucking remember!’ he insisted.
‘I don’t believe you. Look, you pathetic bastard, the chief constable’s lying through there in a bloody coma and there’s a dead guy lying stiff as a board in the mortuary who was in the back of your car. And we found guns, too — one was a Luger — and some ammo. You’d better start remembering, because there’s some very big questions need answering.’
They came at noon. Their faces were serious, grave even.
Sweetman and Mendoza were hunched bleary-eyed at the table in the dining room of Sweetman’s apartment, picking over the crumbs of a very late breakfast.
Mendoza’s prostitute had gone and they were alone.
Lopez and Grant came in. Their approach had been well rehearsed.
‘Cromer and Teddy Bear unearthed anything yet?’ Grant asked.
‘Not so far as I know,’ Sweetman said. They were the first words he had uttered that day. He swilled some fresh orange juice down his throat.
‘They won’t,’ Grant said firmly.
Sweetman raised his eyes. He did not ask the Why? question, no need to.
‘It’s not one of them,’ Grant said.
‘One of who?’
‘One of the people they’ve been sent to terrorize. It’s not one of them.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Had a whisper from a good source, a reliable source, who doesn’t want to be named.’
‘Who?’
‘Like I said. .’
‘OK, OK. So you’ve had a whisper. . what’s the whisper?’
‘I’ve been given a name.’
Mendoza and Sweetman sat upright.
‘Speak it,’ Mendoza said.
Grant paused for effect, keeping his eyes away from Lopez. He cleared his throat, then spoke.
Anger’s approach may not have been the most considered and appropriate (and he did get himself escorted from Henry’s room by the consultant and a nurse) but it did have some positive effect on Henry. Things, images, began to tumble along his battered dendrites. Now he could see the gun. Napoleon Solo. A Luger. Now he could visualize a journey along the motorway, adjusting his rear-view mirror, looking in his side mirrors, seeing headlights. But all these things did not merge into coherence. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle without the lid.
He had been driving a car which had crashed. That he knew because he had been told so, not because he remembered.
FB had been severely injured. Another man had died. What other man? Why had there been an accident? What had caused it? What had he done wrong? The lights in the mirrors were something to do with it.
Henry wracked his brain, banging his forehead with the balls of his hands.
It would not come.
Perhaps if he got up and went to see FB. That would be a good memory jogger.
He was no longer connected to anything. The blip-machines had been removed, the drips extracted from his veins. No longer tied down to any medical technology, he was a free man. He sat up, hung his legs over the side of the bed, aware that he was only wearing a rear-fastening hospital gown, loosely tied up the back — and that he was completely naked underneath.
His feet touched the cold floor. Gingerly he took his own weight, stood up and felt OK. The first time he had been up, all previous visits to the bathroom via bedpan alley. Two steps, then a wobble. Balance out of kilter slightly. One more step. . whoa! Not good. He grabbed the bed and eased himself back into a sitting position.
For the moment, Henry Christie was going nowhere.
Eighteen
Karl Donaldson opened his eyes. Warm, tawny sun filtered through the latticed shutters, spreading a glow across the room. He sat up slowly, rubbed his caked-up eyes and breathed deeply, blinking to try and focus. He looked at his own body, saw he was naked, saw how battered it was and knew he was fortunate to be alive.
Slowly he got to his feet, steadied himself and padded across the cold marble floor to the shuttered window, which he opened.
The view made his lips purse in wonderment. A beautiful valley, a river snaking through the floor of it and far away in the distance the shimmer of the sea in the heat haze. Rays of sunshine flooded in, caressing his body like a warm massage as he stood there gazing down the mountainside. Then a thought occurred to him. Maybe he was dead, maybe this was heaven.
There was a soft tap on the door.
Donaldson turned slowly, his aching joints not allowing quick action.
The door opened to reveal a beautiful girl standing on the threshold, long golden hair cascading across her shoulders, a dark Mediterranean shade to her glowing skin, wide brown eyes, dark eyelashes. A simple dress covered her, but also accentuated her full figure, her breasts pushing up against the fabric.