Killing Me Softly (21 page)

It had been a long and exhausting day and Abigail dropped into bed like a log. She fell into a heavy sleep, punctuated by confused and vaguely frightening dreams, as soon as her head touched the pillow, and then woke suddenly and fearfully with her head ringing, or was it her head?

No, it was the telephone. She stretched her hand out for it, answering blearily. For a moment, what she was hearing didn't make sense, and then it did, horribly.

The desk sergeant gave her the details with a question in his voice that she answered with one of her own. ‘Why me?'

‘He mentioned your name.'

‘All right, I'll be there. Quick as I can.'

It was two twenty-five by her bedside clock as she switched off the bedroom light.

His body was wired up to frightening-looking machines, tubes and plastic bags, blood plasma, a saline drip. Electronic bleeps sounded and an oscilloscope traced a jagged line on a monitor screen. His arms and shoulders were bare and his head was swathed in bandages that completely covered his hair and part of his jaw. He was unrecognisable as Nick, almost unrecognisable as a human being.

‘You can sit there if you want,' offered a staff nurse called Storey, by the name badge on her chest, indicating a chair by the bed, ‘but there's no point, really. He won't come round for ages yet.'

‘He is going to come round?'

The dark-blue uniformed nurse gave her a guarded look.

‘I'm the police,' Abigail said, bringing out her warrant card. ‘Inspector Moon.'

‘Oh.' She looked confused. ‘He asked for Abigail, before he passed out, and they said –'

‘I'm a friend as well. He used to be a policeman.'

The eyes assessed her professionally. ‘I'm sorry. He's very ill. Ruptured spleen, kidneys badly damaged, his jaw and his skull fractured, plus several broken ribs, and knife wounds. The depressed fracture of the skull is the worst –'

‘They really meant it, didn't they?' Abigail's mouth twisted.

‘I'd say so.' A bleeper went in the nurse's pocket. ‘Sorry, I have to go. There's one of your lot here already, gone to find some coffee I think, he'll be able to give you details when he gets back.'

She whisked out and Abigail followed her into the corridor and sat on one of the uncomfortable moulded plastic chairs to wait, cold to her core despite the overheated hospital temperature. It was a young uniformed constable named Spellman who arrived a few minutes later, armed with a plastic beaker of coffee and a cellophane-wrapped pack of sandwiches. His ears red, he put them down on the window sill. The DI! He'd be for it, leaving his post for nosh while on duty. He should've let one of the orderlies bring him something later, but he was young, perpetually hungry.

‘Go ahead, don't let your drink get cold, eat your sandwiches.'

He looked relieved. ‘Can I get you something, ma'am? There's only cheese and onion, though.'

‘No thanks, not at the moment. Where did they find him, Andy?'

Gratified that she'd remembered his name, the young PC took a sip of coffee and began to tear at the cellophane while he told her that Nick had been picked up by the river. ‘Outside one of these old warehouses, about midnight. A couple had been celebrating their anniversary at that new place, the Holly Tree. They were walking back to their car when they nearly fell over him. Lucky they did. Doctor says he'd have been a goner if it had been any later.'

His eyes were speculative as he gave her the information. He obviously knew that Nick had asked for her, and was wondering why, but he was a very new recruit and would know nothing of Nick having once worked at Milford Road, or of their affair. Few did. They'd been very discreet. Even so, someone there had known that she was the ‘Abigail' Nick had asked for. It would soon be all around the station. She didn't enlighten Spellman.

‘I'd like to be told immediately he comes round. It seems it's going to be some time yet, so I'm going back to the station. Get back to his bedside as soon as they'll let you.'

Cheese and onion fumes mingled with the antiseptic hospital smells and followed her as she walked down the corridor.

She drove straight back to the station and carried a drink from the dispenser in the CID room back to her office. She drank it piping hot and though she couldn't have told anyone whether it was tea, coffee, chocolate or hot water, she felt slightly warmer after it.

She thought about the disaster her decision to ask Nick for help had turned out to be. That her request was a direct cause of what had happened to him, she couldn't have much doubt. By asking around about Wishart's anonymous visitor, he'd put himself in the front line for a horrendous and vicious attack. No mere opportunist mugging, but done with deliberate intent, which lent even more weight to the theory that there were connections between Wishart's mystery visitor and his death. It was A1 priority to talk to Nick as soon as he was able. She would get someone more experienced than Spellman to sit by his bedside, ready for when he came round.

The grave face of Staff Nurse Storey flashed before her mind's eye, and her heart gave a nasty downward plunge. His attackers hadn't intended him coming out of this situation alive, and even though he had, it seemed doubtful if he'd stay alive much longer.

Mayo was told as soon as he arrived at the station. He asked her to come up to his office and then sat in silence for a while after he'd listened to what she had to tell him, thinking about it.

‘I'm taking you off the case, Abigail.'

‘No! You can't.'

His eyebrows shot up.

‘I have to stay with it!'

‘You know as well as I do that personal involvement is the last thing we want on any case, never mind one like this is turning out to be.'

‘I'm not personally involved, not in the way you mean. But it
was
my fault that Nick was roped in and I want to see it through. No,' she said levelly, pre-empting any attempt to interrupt, determined not to weaken her case by showing emotion, ‘I knew what I asked him to do might be risky, but I'm not breast-beating. He's had enough experience to know what's what. After all, he could have said no.'

His expression stayed impassive and the necessity to try and make him see got the better of caution. She spoke heatedly. ‘But I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel responsible – I am, and it's damn stupid for me not to follow it through – you absolutely
must
let me stay with it!'

‘Abigail, don't shout at me.'

She bit her lips when she saw the warning flash in his eyes. ‘I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that.' He wasn't one to insist on protocol but he wouldn't stand for anyone stepping over the mark, whoever they were. She was way out of line with this, and his frosty silence told her so, but at least he hadn't called her ‘Inspector'.

She sat contemplating the carpet. The lights were on in his office. Curtains of fine rain swept across the windows. A patrol car with its siren going left the car-park outside. At last Mayo spoke.

‘I'm not at all sure that I'm doing the right thing, but all right, you can stay on the case. On one proviso – that you go home and get yourself a couple of hours' sleep before you do anything else. You look done in. No, no argument, it's not an option, it's a bloody order! And think yourself lucky I'm such a soft touch.'

By nine thirty Carmody and Jenny Platt were half-way to Nottingham. It was three hours since Carmody's breakfast, and his stomach was growling. ‘Want a coffee?' he asked Jenny.

‘I wouldn't say no.'

He peeled off down the slip road at the next services. They took their drinks to a seat by the window and watched the three lanes of traffic shooting past without pause, like a shoal of rainbow fish.

News of the attack on Nick Spalding had run through the station like a hot knife through butter, and the fact that Abigail had been to his bedside had raised more than a few eyebrows.

‘He was before my time,' Carmody said. ‘Before I was transferred here, but you'd remember him, wouldn't you, Jen?'

‘Mm. I'd just made CID. But he left soon after.' She drank some of her coffee. ‘Wouldn't say I knew him, though. I don't think anybody did, really.' She looked as though she wanted to say something else, but evidently thought better of it.

Nobody except DI Moon, thought Carmody, supplying to himself what Jenny hadn't said, knowing why she hadn't. Solidarity, that was it. Abigail was the only other woman in CID. Besides, she was their boss. Carmody knew all this well enough and, since he'd been teamed up with Abigail long enough to have his own loyalties, he didn't press the point. ‘His condition sounds serious, from what I've heard,' he said.

‘Yeah. And the funny thing is, his wife's disappeared.'

‘Whose wife?'

‘Spalding's, of course.'

‘Buggered off, you mean?'

‘The DI didn't seem to think so, but she sent me to do a bit of poking around. No joy, though.'

Was there reason, Jenny wondered, to believe all this was the cause of Abigail's present mood? She wasn't normally a moody person – what you saw, with Abigail, was what you got, and that was a good-humoured, friendly relationship with those working with her, though anyone who dubbed her as a pushover would be seriously underestimating her, to say the least. Jenny, for one, certainly wouldn't. She'd be hard put to it to say just what was wrong with Abigail these last few days, but she certainly wasn't herself. The way she'd snubbed Farrar, for instance, the other morning at Clacks Mill when for once he hadn't really deserved it, and she'd been pretty sharp with Jenny herself once or twice. Jenny shrugged off the feeling of something out of synch. Put it down to PMT she wouldn't. That was the usual male assumption, an attitude she despised.

‘When you say funny,' Carmody was saying, ‘you mean you think this mugging had something to do with his wife disappearing?'

‘I didn't say that. More likely Nick poking his nose in where it wasn't appreciated. You know he's going to set up a PI business in Hurstfield?'

‘Not for some time, he isn't. If at all now, poor sod. Finished? Come on then, on our way. I feel better after that,' Carmody said, having despatched the couple of large sticky buns that had accompanied his coffee, and wondering what Jenny knew that she was keeping to herself.

An order, Abigail repeated, as she closed her front door behind her. One you didn't disobey if you valued your job. But reluctant as she was to admit it, the way she felt, Mayo could be right, and maybe she
would
feel better if she went to bed and made up on the sleep shortfall. You could learn to do without sleep but it was tough, if you were the sort who needed your eight hours to function properly. And even before last night, when she'd caught three hours' sleep at most, she'd been losing out, and was beginning to wonder if it was Sunday, Monday or Christmas Day when her alarm woke her. But she didn't give much for her chances of sleeping now, with her brain leaping around like a salmon caught on the line.

She did an unprecedented thing in the middle of the day, and poured herself a slug of whisky, albeit a cautious one. Might just help her to relax, but there was no point in overdoing it.

She slumped into a chair and tried to think sleep, but that was easier said than done. The picture of Nick plugged into the life-support machine wouldn't leave her mind. She'd listened to the local radio on the way home and heard a news flash to the effect that a man, identified as ex-Detective Constable Nicholas Spalding, had been discovered late last night near Cat Lane, having been viciously attacked, almost certainly by more than one person. The police were appealing to anyone who might have witnessed the attack, or seen anything suspicious, to come forward. It was routine procedure, just going through the motions. The only witnesses who were going to come forward had already done so – the couple who'd found him – at Abigail's guess, only minutes before he would have ended up in the river.

The whisky had been a rotten idea. Rather than being anaesthetized, she felt more alert than ever. Maybe if she lay down properly, it would work and she'd zonk out for a few hours. She had her foot on the bottom stair when there was a knock on the door. What now? Hardly anyone came out here to the cottage. She dithered for a moment, then gave in and opened it. Two females, one very tall, one short and round. Jehovah's Witnesses, anxious to share their knowledge of the Bible with her.

‘Sorry, but you'll have to go and share it with someone else,' she snapped, and shut the door firmly on their determined, smiling faces.

She felt immediately better for it, then ashamed. She was tempted to call them back and offer them explanations, plus tea and a slice of her mother's date, cinnamon and walnut cake that she'd been heroically saving for Ben, who wouldn't be needing it now. But common sense reasserted itself when they turned back to smile and wave at her from the gate,
knowing
she'd be watching them, chirpy as crickets, forgiving, smug, self-righteous. They'd probably smelt the whisky on her breath.

Which had had the very opposite effect of what she'd intended. Sleep? Forget it.

With a sigh, she tipped what was left of the scotch down the sink, made herself a triple-strength coffee, threw her coat on again, and drove back to the hospital. This could be counted as personal, not professional, involvement.

Nick hadn't yet come round, Andy Spellman told her. The PC was sitting in the corridor, reading a paperback western. ‘They've shunted me out here,' he said, breathing onion fumes over her as he added, ‘there's someone else in with him, now.'

‘Doctors?'

‘No, ma'am, I think it's his wife.'

The address they were looking for was the one Barbie had given when applying for the job.

They reached Nottingham and drove through some fairly solidly affluent suburbs until they came to a maze of small streets. The house they wanted was in a small brick-built terrace called Florence Street. The next was Edith, and the one next to that Violet, no doubt a tribute from the Edwardian builder to his female relations.