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  ‘Yes,’ Forsyth agreed, ‘I do.’

  ‘But how could you know? How could you possibly know?’

  ‘Oh, that’s a very easy question to answer,’ Forsyth said mildly. ‘I know because I’m extremely good at my job.’

  FIVE

  Ward Sister Diana Sowerbury studied the two men and one woman who were striding rapidly down the corridor towards the nurses’ desk in the ICU.

  One of the males was in his mid-thirties. He moved like a man who took the admiration of women as a right, but unlike many men who fancied themselves in that way, there were some grounds for his confidence. True, he was not exactly handsome, but his features were pleasant enough. And his body more than compensated for any facial failings. It wasn’t just that it was firm and well proportioned, it exuded a kind of hardness that some women – mentioning no names! – find irresistible, Sister Sowerbury concluded – and almost giggled.

  The other man was a little taller, much slimmer, and ten or twelve years younger. He was almost certainly a lover, rather than a fighter, and if Diana had been a fanciful woman – which she most emphatically was not – she might say that he looked like a poet.

  But it was the woman who was the most interesting member of the trio. If all three of them were police officers – and Diana Sowerbury was almost certain that they were – then this woman would only just reach the minimum height requirement. Nor did she have the sort of body which might compensate for this lack of stature. No broad shoulders here – instead she looked as delicate as a china doll.

  If she was one of my nurses, the ward sister thought, I’d be spending half my time protecting her from the others, because while all nurses were unquestionably angels in disguise, some of them could be vicious little bitches as well.

  Up until this point, her face had been a blank (never put your nurses at an advantage by letting them guess what you’re thinking!) but when the three visitors came to a halt, three feet away from her, she adopted a sympathetic expression, and said, ‘I’m sorry, but visiting hours are between six and eight.’

  ‘The ward sister usually lets us come and visit any time we’re free,’ said the hard man.

  She might well have done, Diana Sowerbury thought, but you don’t establish your own reputation by letting things carry on just like they always have.

  ‘I’m sorry, Chief Inspector,’ she said, with some regret. She paused. ‘It is Chief Inspector, isn’t it?’

  Beresford avoided looking at Meadows, who he was pretty certain would be mouthing the words ‘acting chief inspector’, and said. ‘Yes, that’s right. My name’s Colin Beresford.’

  ‘Colin Beresford,’ Diana Sowerbury said – rolling his name around her mouth as if it were a luscious exotic fruit she were about to crunch, and at the same time resolving to look him up in the telephone directory. ‘Well, Chief Inspector Beresford, whatever things used to be like here, I’m the ward sister now, and I’m afraid I’ve had to make a few changes in the interest of my patients’ welfare. And one of those changes is that we adhere strictly to the stated visiting hours.’

  ‘Why?’ asked the china doll.

  Why? Diana Sowerbury repeated to herself.

  Why?

  Nobody ever asked her that.

  You didn’t question a ward sister – especially this ward sister.

  It simply wasn’t done!

  ‘Well, is there a reason?’ the china doll persisted.

  ‘As I’ve already intimated, we have to consider the other patients, detective constable,’ the ward sister said. ‘We don’t want to disturb them.’

  ‘It’s detective sergeant, not detective constable,’ the china doll told her firmly. ‘Detective Sergeant Kate Meadows – if you’d like to look me up in the phone book.’

  And as she spoke, she looked first at Diana Sowerbury, and then at Colin Beresford.

  It was almost as if there was a bit of mind reading going on here, the ward sister thought, uncomfortably.

  ‘As I said,’ she ploughed on, ‘the last thing we want to do is disturb the other patients and—’

  ‘Isn’t the boss in a private room?’ Meadows interrupted her.

  ‘Well, yes,’ Diana Sowerbury confessed.

  ‘Then we won’t be disturbing any of the other patients, will we?’ Meadows asked.

  It occurred to the ward sister that logically she hadn’t got a leg to stand on, and that to invoke the rules simply as rules would make her look both petty and insignificant. But she was buggered if she’d give too much ground to Detective Sergeant China Doll.

  ‘I can allow two of you in at a time – but no more,’ she said, glossing over the fact that, until a minute earlier, she was allowing none at a time. ‘So perhaps you, sergeant, might like to go down to the cafeteria, while the other two—’

  ‘Why only two of us at a time?’ Meadows demanded.

  The ward sister sighed, as if to show exasperation at the laywoman’s ignorance of medical matters.

  ‘We don’t want to tire our patient out, now do we?’ she asked, saying the words slowly and distinctly, so that even a complete moron like Meadows would understand.

  ‘Our patient is in a coma,’ Meadows pointed out. ‘It wouldn’t matter to her if the GUS (Footwear) world famous brass band was marching around her room, playing a selection of tunes from the works of Rogers and Hammerstein.’

  ‘Some coma patients are well aware of what is going on around them, and she might be one of those,’ the ward sister responded.

  ‘In that case, we’ll save unnecessary expense by ringing Kettering and cancelling the GUS band,’ Meadows said. ‘That’ll mean it will be down to the three of us.’

  Diana Sowerbury was suddenly aware that all activity in the unit had stopped. She’d spent the morning making her mark – by which she meant whipping up her nurses into a state of terror, so that they had begun walking on eggshells for fear of causing her even the mildest displeasure. Yet these same nurses were not now gliding hither and thither, proving what good workers they could be – these same nurses were frozen to the spot, and watching her like hawks.

  She shouldn’t back down.

  She couldn’t back down now.

  And yet—

  And yet, though she didn’t want to admit it, the china doll – the little waif who she had so recently imagined would need protection – unquestionably scared the hell out of her.

  ‘I—’ she began.

  ‘I’m spitting feathers, and if I don’t get a cup of industrial strength tea down my throat soon, I swear I’ll turn to powder where I’m standing,’ Colin Beresford said, out of the blue. ‘My best plan is to head for the cafeteria. Would you care to join me, sister?’

  Diana Sowerbury hesitated for a second, and then said, ‘Yes, that’s a good idea. You can brief me on how your work is likely to impact on my work here in the ICU.’

  I wouldn’t have thought she was his type, Meadows reflected, but that’s only because I’d forgotten that every type is his type.

  ‘Come on, Jack,’ she said. ‘Let’s see how the boss is getting on.’

  ‘How are you, boss?’ Meadows asked awkwardly. ‘It’s me, Kate, and I’ve brought Jack with me.’

  She looked down at the figure lying in the bed. Paniatowski had always been quite pale (which was hardly surprising given that she lived in Lancashire, where the only sure-fire way to get colour in your cheeks was to expose yourself to the harsh winds blowing off the moors!) but the chalky pallor she had acquired since the attack was enough to send shivers of apprehension running down anybody’s spine.

  And the tubes – the bloody tubes running in and out of her as if she were some mad scientist’s experiment, rather than a person.

  ‘Colin would have been here, but there was this sexy ward sister standing in the way – and you know what he’s like when he runs into that kind of obstruction,’ Meadows ploughed on.

  She was no bloody good at this kind of thing, she told herself.

  She could scare b
ullies shitless, without even breaking into a sweat.

  She was a positive genius in the bedroom, provided your tastes veered towards unusual sources of pain.

  But she couldn’t do girly talk and she couldn’t do sympathy, and even though she admired the woman in the bed – and maybe even loved her – she knew she could never express any of that convincingly.

  ‘We’ve been keeping in touch with Louisa, and she’s fine,’ Meadows continued. ‘And you mustn’t worry about her finding it too much of a strain to look after the twins as well as doing her training, because your housekeeper is a bloody marvel, and when she needs a break, one of us will take over for a while.’ She realized she was speaking nineteen to the dozen, and paused for breath. ‘Jack is brilliant at telling the kids stories, and due to the experiences I’ve had with my particular hobby, I’m a dab hand at changing nappies.’

  Why was she doing this? she wondered.

  What was making her witter on like a demented mocking bird high on tequila sunrises?

  If Monika was capable of registering what was being said to her, she’d know all this already. And if she couldn’t register it, why waste the time telling her?

  She studied Paniatowski’s face, hoping to find evidence that even if Monika couldn’t understand the words, she at least knew she was being addressed.

  Nothing! It was like gazing down at a death mask.

  I’ve been happier working on this team than I’ve been at any other point in my life, Meadows thought – and if the boss dies, it’s all gone.

  Don’t you die on me – don’t you dare die on me! she thought.

  And then she realized – with mounting horror – that she had actually said the words aloud.

  ‘Why don’t you tell the boss what Louisa’s been up to today?’ Jack Crane suggested.

  ‘Good idea,’ Meadows said, shooting him a grateful look. ‘Well, boss, it seems that our young cadet has found her first body. Was it no more than a coincidence, you ask yourself. Or does she, like her mother, have a natural gift for sniffing out stiffs?’

  The hospital porter noticed the two men sitting in the front of the VW Beetle when he stepped out into the car park for a smoke.

  He was supposed to report suspicious people to security, but there was absolutely nothing suspicious about these two. They had probably brought some female relative to visit a patient who was also a relative.

  And as she’d been getting out of the car, she’d no doubt tried to persuade them to go with her.

  ‘Come on,’ she would have cajoled, ‘our Edna will be chuffed to bits that you’ve come to see her.’

  And one of the men would have said, ‘It’s you she wants to see, love. I’ll only get in the way.’

  But what he would really have meant would have been, ‘You’ll feel right at home in there. Any woman does. But I’m a man! I don’t like hospitals. They turn my insides to water.’

  And the woman would finally have given up, and left the men in peace, listening to the cricket on the radio.

  The hospital canteen was a little too antiseptic for this to be a truly romantic first date, but it was what there was, and it would have to do.

  Ward Sister Sowerbury was certainly a quarry worth a little hunting, Beresford thought, looking at her over his coffee. She was tall for a woman, and a little too broad for many men’s taste, but she was muscled without being over-muscular, and though he had not stroked it yet, he could tell her skin would feel wonderfully soft.

  ‘How long have you been nursing?’ he asked her.

  Diana Sowerbury smiled knowingly at him. ‘It’s thirteen years since I qualified,’ she said, ‘and in case you’re counting, that makes me thirty-four.’

  ‘I wasn’t counting,’ Beresford said.

  Diana’s smile broadened. ‘I feel I can trust you,’ she said.

  ‘You can trust me,’ he assured her.

  ‘And would you like to know why I feel I can trust you?’

  ‘Is it because I’ve got an honest face?’ Beresford asked hopefully.

  ‘No, it’s because I can tell when you’re lying. You were counting the years, weren’t you?’

  ‘Maybe a little bit,’ Beresford admitted sheepishly. ‘So, have you always worked in Lancashire?’

  ‘Changing the subject?’ Diana Sowerbury asked.

  ‘Definitely,’ Beresford agreed.

  ‘I used to work in Yorkshire, and before that I was in Singapore and Gibraltar,’ Diana said, and when she saw Beresford raise a quizzical eyebrow, she said, ‘I was in the army. That’s where I did my training.’

  ‘So what brought you to Lancashire?’ Beresford wondered.

  ‘I’m surprised you even need ask that question,’ Diana said.

  ‘Really? And why’s that?’

  ‘Because I thought that as far as you Lancastrians were concerned, there are only two kinds of people in the world – those who live in Lancashire, and those who (whether they admit it or not) want to live in Lancashire.’

  ‘Fair point,’ Beresford said, complacently.

  The story the smoking porter had concocted for himself was not quite a hundred percent off the mark, in that the men in the VW were, in fact, listening to the radio – though it was certainly not the cricket which was holding their attention.

  ‘There are a number of questions I think we should be asking ourselves,’ Meadows was saying through the speaker. ‘For a start, why did the killer choose the allotments as a place to get rid of the body? It certainly isn’t the first place I’d think of. Was the victim local – or was he not? If he wasn’t local, why did the killer go to so much trouble to disguise him?’

  ‘And if he was local, did anyone report him missing?’ asked a second – male – voice.

  ‘Exactly, Jack,’ Meadows said. ‘The chances are that if he was a local man he was reported missing, since there are very few people around who absolutely nobody would miss. But we haven’t got the time, or the resources, to go through the records of every man who’s disappeared in central Lancashire in the last twenty years. So what we desperately need is for Doc Shastri to tell us how long he’s been dead.’

  ‘It’s time to go,’ a third voice announced. ‘Say your goodbyes.’

  ‘Would you like to …’

  ‘No, I’ll wait in the corridor.’

  There were a few seconds of silence, then Meadows said, ‘We’re all finding this hard to take, but it’s hardest of all for Colin, because he’s been your friend for a long time.’ Another pause. ‘There’s not one of us that doesn’t believe you can come out of this, boss. Not one of us!’

  There was the sound of footsteps, and a door closing.

  ‘How touching Lady Katherine can be when she puts her mind to it,’ Forsyth said.

  ‘Why do you call her that?’ Downes asked – and the moment the words were out of his mouth he knew he’d fallen into one of those little pits full of sharpened bamboo poles that Forsyth seemed to take such delight in setting in his path.

  ‘I call her that because that is what she is,’ Forsyth said. ‘Didn’t you know? Haven’t you read the files?’

  ‘It isn’t in the files,’ Downes said.

  ‘That’s right, it isn’t,’ Forsyth said, as if he had forgotten that detail. ‘Several years ago, when she was still just about one of us, she used her influence to have that removed.’

  ‘One of us?’ Downes asked, hating himself. ‘Was she in the service?’

  ‘Not that us! I’m talking about the establishment – the people who matter,’ Forsyth said airily. ‘She hasn’t got the same influence now. Oh dear me, no. Once you’ve chosen to step outside the charmed circle, there’s no going back – you simply have to learn to live in the outer darkness.’

  ‘With people like me,’ Downes said, as if challenging him to be rude enough to confirm it.

  ‘Yes, with people like you,’ Forsyth said easily. ‘Look, here comes three-quarters of the finest crime-fighting team in Lancashire.’

  T
he two men watched as the team progressed across the car park.

  ‘I meant what I just said, you know,’ Forsyth told Downes. ‘A lot of people might judge Colin Beresford to be plodding, but he would prefer to describe himself as dogged, and so would I. Lady K; she’s fearless and recognizes no boundaries – physical or mental – which is why she is often able to find out things that completely elude others. Jack Crane is very bright and has a sweeping imagination. Put all that together with Monika Paniatowski’s over-arching leadership and vision, and what have you got?’

  ‘DCI Paniatowski is in a coma,’ Downes reminded him.

  ‘What you’ve got,’ said Forsyth, ignoring the comment, ‘is a team to be worried about. And I am.’ He paused for a moment. ‘I think we’d better pay Monika a visit ourselves.’

  Ward Sister Diana Sowerbury studied the two men walking down the corridor towards the ICU. The younger one had clearly dressed in a way which he imagined would make him look smart and classy, she thought, and he probably just about succeeded. On the other hand, the other man – the one with the hair like spun silver – didn’t really have to try, because there was something about him which ensured he would be classy if he were dressed in a dustbin bag.

  The two came to a halt at Sister Sowerbury’s desk.

  ‘I do hate to disturb you, Sister,’ Forsyth said in a voice quite unlike his ordinary one, ‘but I’m only in this lovely town for a few hours, and while I’m here, I would so like to take the opportunity to see my niece.’

  ‘What’s her name?’ Diana asked.

  ‘Minnie Mouse.’

  The sister frowned. ‘As you are no doubt aware, we have no one of that name here, and if this is your idea of a joke …’

  ‘Oh, good heavens!’ Forsyth said, holding up his hands in mock horror. ‘Did I say Minnie Mouse?’

  ‘You know you did.’

  ‘I must have been having a senior moment there. You see, I’ve known her since she was a child, which is why I still call her Minnie Mouse, and she still calls me Uncle Goofy. Everyone else knows her as Monika Paniatowski.’