You couldn’t argue with that either, thought the DCI.
‘All right, Mr Hardcastle. You look a bit shaky, so I’m going to ask the paramedics to have a look at you, and then you can go. But we’ll need to interview you fully later on, all right?’
The man nodded.
Clarke walked away, turning to Vogel, who was still at her side. She thought he was probably keeping close in the hope of learning something. Vogel was neither a man to give up nor one who took kindly to being kept in the dark. She decided he needed something to do, a task that would take his mind off matters that she wasn’t in a position to share with him.
‘Vogel, get a search team down here, would you,’ she ordered. ‘Oh, and check where the fuck CSI are.’
Clarke shook her head wryly. The familiar SOCOs, Scenes Of Crime Officers, had a year or two previously been ‘rebranded’ by most police forces as Crime Scene Investigators. They weren’t even police officers nowadays, but civilian staff who wore dark-blue uniforms bearing the CSI logo. Clarke thought it had given them an exaggerated sense of their own importance. That and the American TV series some of them seemed to think they were part of.
‘The paramedics are trampling all over the scene,’ she observed. ‘Let’s hope it’s worth it and they can keep Tanner alive.’
Vogel nodded, took his phone from his pocket, and started to move away from his senior officer. He hadn’t spoken a word to her since their arrival at the car park, except when she had directly addressed him.
‘Oh, and Vogel, stop fucking sulking,’ she called after him.
‘Don’t know what you mean, boss,’ replied Vogel, deadpan.
‘All right, I give in — we’ll have a chat at the end of the day,’ Clarke promised, rather against her better judgement.
Vogel smiled. Almost. It was more a stretching exercise with his lips, thought Clarke.
Sixteen
Henry Tanner showed signs of beginning to recover consciousness as he was being loaded into the ambulance which would take him to Southmead, the newly renovated and extended hospital complex that housed Bristol’s premier accident and emergency department.
His eyes flickered open then shut again. He raised one hand a few inches then let it drop. He moaned two or three times, and even seemed to be attempting to speak.
But Henry had received a nasty bang on the head and been shot. He was not a young man. None of those gathered in Traders’ Court, not even the paramedics, were in a position to speculate on Henry’s chances of recovery, even though the signs were encouraging.
DCI Clarke climbed into the ambulance alongside the injured man. Vogel made a move to follow.
‘No,’ commanded Nobby Clarke. ‘This won’t take the two of us. You go tell the family what’s happened. I’ll see what our Henry has to say when he’s a bit more lucid.’
I’ll bet you will, thought Vogel. And you don’t want me to know what that might be, either, I’m pretty damned sure of that.
‘I’d rather come with you, boss,’ he protested. ‘I feel I need to know more...’
‘Just get on with it, Vogel,’ instructed the DCI. ‘I want this area properly checked out — have someone pull up all the CCTV in the vicinity. And ANPR too — let’s get the registration of every vehicle arriving and leaving the area around the time of the incident. You never know...’
You certainly didn’t, thought Vogel. The Avon and Somerset Constabulary, in common with other police forces, was not even privy to where ANPR cameras were positioned. There was, however, a specialist team of civilian investigators trained to study and evaluate CCTV and ANPR footage.
‘Yes, boss,’ he muttered resignedly.
Clarke gestured for the paramedic nearest the open ambulance doors to shut them in the DI’s face.
Vogel stood back and watched as the ambulance trundled off. He doubted he was going to learn much more from Nobby Clarke. Not for the time being anyway. Even if she did fulfil her promise to brief him later, he had a feeling she might still be economical with the truth.
Clarke had always been open with information in the past. Whatever lay behind this curious business, it had to be something at government level; that was the world Nobby Clarke moved in nowadays. Vogel was beginning to suspect a cover-up, the sort of thing that allowed criminals to get away with their crimes. He had no time for that sort of thing. He was a copper, not some latter-day George Smiley.
But despite his reservations he did what he always did and got on with his job. As Nobby Clarke had told him to.
When he’d finished coordinating the search and forensic teams who would investigate the shooting, Vogel asked PC Bolton to drive him to Tarrant Park. He didn’t know for certain that the family would be there, but he deemed it unlikely they would leave The Firs empty whilst young Fred Mildmay was still missing. On the way he called PC Saslow to tell her he was en route. She told him the family had not wanted her to stay the night, even though she had offered to do so, but that she was heading back there now.
‘I’m only about five minutes away, boss,’ she said. ‘Do you have some news.’
‘Not about the boy,’ Vogel replied. He told her about the shooting.
‘Shit,’ said Saslow.
‘Exactly,’ said Vogel.
He asked her not to say anything about the incident to Joyce Mildmay or anybody else until he got there.
It was midday by the time he arrived at Tarrant Park. Vogel had had only limited experience of missing persons cases, but he knew that no matter how remote the possibility, families continued to cling to the hope that their loved one might walk in unharmed at any second.
He was not to be disappointed. Joyce Mildmay’s first words when she opened the door were: ‘Have you got news of Fred?’
Vogel thought that was normal enough behaviour for a woman in her situation. Even though it quickly became apparent that she already knew her father had been shot.
Once she had ascertained that the DI’s visit was not directly linked to Fred’s disappearance, she told Vogel that her elder son and her mother had gone to the scene of the shooting, arriving soon after the ambulance conveying Henry Tanner to A & E had left, and presumably not long after Vogel had departed.
‘Mum called a few minutes ago,’ Joyce explained. ‘They’ve gone on to the hospital.’
She went on to say that her mother had been told by one of the police constables on duty at the scene that Henry had been unconscious but had appeared to be coming round when he was being loaded into the ambulance. Vogel made a mental note to find out which officer and give him a bollocking. It wasn’t a policeman’s place to give medical reports.
Joyce then led Vogel into the sitting room instead of the kitchen, where he assumed Molly and PC Saslow were.
‘I’d like to speak to you alone first, Mr Vogel,’ she said, closing the door firmly behind them.
He nodded, waiting for her to continue.
‘When Dad comes to, I bloody well want him to tell us why all this has happened. Because one thing’s certain, Mr Vogeclass="underline" my father knows the answer. He has the answer to everything that happens in this bloody family.’
Joyce spat the words out. She seemed more angry than anything else. Vogel didn’t blame her. He too was angry at being kept in the dark; as deputy SIO he felt he had a right to know what was going on. And like Joyce, he suspected that Henry Tanner knew what had triggered the sequence of events culminating in his shooting.
Before he could compose a response to Joyce’s outburst, she spoke again.
‘They decided I should be the one to wait here, just in case there was news of Fred. But I must admit I’m beginning to question everything now. Maybe the real reason they don’t want me to go to the hospital is because they don’t want me near my father.’