He was supposed to break into his own flat?
Shit! Shit! Shit! Where had his mind gone? Not thinking like a copper any more. Not even like a human being. And he’d actually believed he was putting it on, for Riggs. Shit, he was half vegetable. Couldn’t work out really, really simple things. He looked wildly around him. No money, no keys. Nowhere to go, now. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to sleep.
The street swayed. His left leg had gone dead. He wanted to smash his head into the lamp-post. Again and again and again. His useless, damaged head.
He gave the post a final kick. Its light began to flicker on; he backed away in alarm. Then saw that lights were coming on all down the street.
Because it was dusk.
He started to laugh, pushing away the memory of a woman under a sputtering lamp in Old Church Street only seconds before … and walked on towards a row of mostly darkened shops, resting his right shoulder against the windows as he passed from doorway to doorway. Only one shop was lit. Or, half lit, drably, around a window-display.
H. W. Worthy: monumental mason.
Mottled, grey, marble gravestone, with a glistening black flowerpot, empty, and a dark green, tangly wreath. No bright, beckoning lights, no flowers, no fountains. Worthy had it right. The dark and true nature of death.
Bobby Maiden rested his forehead against the cool of the plate-glass window, staring death in the face.
And the face of death stared back, from the drab wreath. The dark leaves framed it, a face made of compost and fibre, broken twigs clenched in its earth-blackened teeth, its deep-set eyes darkly glowing, its hair and beard writhing with voracious organic life.
The face of death grinned at Maiden; his stomach pulsed, an acrid bile rose into his throat. He was only vaguely aware of a grey car gliding to the kerb, the passenger door swinging open before it slid to a stop.
‘You look lost, Bobby,’ Suzanne said.
‘We have a problem,’ Jonathan said on the phone to Andy. ‘Your friend has checked out of Lower Severn without leaving a forwarding address.’
‘Bobby Maiden? What’s he doing on Lower Severn?’
‘Dr Connelly had him moved. Couldn’t see why he was still in Accident and Emergency. Now he’s gone.’
‘Brian Connelly wouldnae see his own-He’s gone?’
‘Taken his clothes and left.’
‘You mean you let him just walk oot? ‘
‘It was before I came in, Sister Andy. He had visitors, apparently. His father and the Superintendent. Nobody liked to disturb them. Then they had a death on the ward and tea was delayed, and when they brought Mr Maiden’s, he was gone. And his clothes from the locker. The man in the next bed says he simply got up and strolled out.’
‘Staggered, more like. You checked around the building?’
‘Virtually everywhere except the ventilation tunnels. We assume he became disoriented. Wandered off. Sister Fox has informed the police. I thought you’d want to know.’
‘Taken his clothes? Aw hell. The boy’s no fit to be out.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘Like I havenae enough problems,’ Andy said.
The half-packed suitcase lay on the bed. If she didn’t leave soon she wouldn’t make St Mary’s before Mrs Willis was asleep.
‘Just let me know, OK?’
She sat in the back with him. Thigh to thigh. Just like before.
‘This is nice, Inspector.’ She was luminous in the dimness of the car. Wearing an orangey sweatsuit, her hair down. A lot was different about her. ‘This is really nice. In fact, when we spotted you I really couldn’t believe it. We thought you’d be in hospital for a long, long time.’
He said nothing. Same driver too. Victor Clutton, father of the late Dean. No mistaking him this time.
The old Sierra rattling off into the twilit town centre. Suzanne gazing at him, looking genuinely, spontaneously happy. A glow about her that shone through the ubiquitous grey, kindling something half forgotten in the late Bobby Maiden.
Don’t get fooled again.
‘This the very same car, isn’t it? Bit of a risk.’
‘Not a dent on it, Bobby. You went whizzing over the bonnet, banged your head on the kerb. Jesus, I really can’t believe this. In the papers, it was touch and go. Touch and gone, in fact. Inspector Lazarus, you might say. Pretty scary all round, Bobby. Especially as Vic was trying so hard to avoid you. As it was, in fact, all your own fault.’
‘That’s the story you’ve agreed, is it?’
‘That’s the truth.’
‘Just like Tony’s your uncle?’
‘Well, yeah, that was a lie. I also know a Van Gogh from an Atkinson Grimshaw. And a Wordsworth from a Larkin. I was just having fun, Bobby. You know that. Hey, I’m not kidding.’
Suzanne crooked her head to peer directly into his eyes.
‘Whether you remember or not, it was a genuine bloody accident. We just couldn’t believe you didn’t get out of the way.’
Vic Clutton said, ‘Ask him why he was walking down the middle of the road, sorter thing. Ask him what he thought I was supposed to fucking do.’
‘You did look awfully strange, Bobby. Like you’d been dropped out of a UFO.’
‘I was walking towards you. You were under a street-lamp. You were waiting.’
‘I was in the car, Bobby. I went straight back to the car. Vic’d been parked round the corner the whole time, hadn’t you?’
‘You were under the bloody-’ The faulty streetlamp, coming on, going off, lighting the figure of the woman. Had he imagined her?
‘Waste of bleedin’ breath.’ Clutton hit the accelerator to overshoot the junction with Old Church Street. ‘Like I said. He’ll either finger us or he won’t.’
Suzanne said, ‘Just do the driving, Vic.’
‘He thinks we fitted up his son, isn’t that right, Mr Clutton?’
‘Don’t be naive, Bobby. Vic knows Dean was dealing, freelance. He was a very silly boy, was Dean, God rest his poor, corrupt little soul. Had to prove he was smarter than his old man, didn’t he, Vic?’
Vic said nothing, drove down towards the suburbs, the sun low over a horizon spiked with pylons.
‘They were never close,’ Suzanne said. ‘But we won’t open that particular can of worms.’
‘OK.’ Maiden leaned his head back until it was almost on the parcel shelf. ‘If it was an accident, why, not long before this … accident happened, did you advise me to go back in the flat and lock the door?’
Suzanne was silent for a long time.
‘Oh yeah?’ Vic said, suspicious. ‘That’s what you said to him, was it?’
‘Look, there’s a kids’ playing field back there,’ Suzanne said. ‘I fancy a bit of a swing. You up to pushing me, Bobby?’
The playground was deserted in the dusk. Maiden wedged himself into a metal roundabout; Suzanne sat on the lip of a rusting slide. Maiden felt calmer than he could remember.
‘What gets me, Bobby, is not so much why a halfway decent artist like you became a copper, as how you got so good at it. Putting two and two together and making seventeen.’
‘I was pissed. Out of interest, though … purely out of interest … was seventeen the right answer?’
‘You know it bloody was.’
Vic Clutton was leaning on his Sierra, parked fifty yards away. He was having a smoke, feigning unconcern.
‘Look, I’m not saying Tony’s a good man,’ Suzanne said. ‘He’s a businessman. In the free market. First and foremost, a businessman is what he is. He can be, like, awkward, if anybody threatens his regular income, but he’s never — and he wouldn’t lie about this, not to me — he’s never done anything terminal.’
‘Terminal.’ Maiden sighed. ‘You’re really into this vintage gangland vernacular, aren’t you, Suzanne?’
‘Look, Inspector, no bullshit … it would’ve upset him quite a bit if somebody’d suggested to him that the only way of removing a particular obstacle was that he might actually do something, like … I mean, cold …’