The Hanging Garden (17 page)

The Farmer put down the receiver. ‘Bill’s still on it,’ he said. ‘Felt if he worked straight through we might get a quicker result.’

‘That’s good of him.’

‘Look, we’ll let you know the minute we get something, but meantime you’ll probably want to go home …’

‘No, sir.’

‘Or to the hospital.’

Rebus nodded slowly. Yes, the hospital. But not right this minute. He had to talk to Bill Pryde first.

‘And meantime, I’ll reassign your cases.’ The Farmer started writing. ‘There’s this War Crimes thing, and your liaison on Telford. Are you working on anything else?’

‘Sir, I’d prefer it if you … I mean, I want to keep working.’

The Farmer looked at him, then leaned back in his chair, pen balanced between his fingers.

‘Why?’

Rebus shrugged. ‘I want to keep busy.’ Yes, there was that. And he didn’t want anyone else taking his work. It was
his
. He owned it; it owned him.

‘Look, John, you’re going to want some time off, right?’

‘I can handle things, sir.’ His gaze met the Farmer’s. ‘Please.’

Across the hall in the CID room he nodded as everyone came up to say how sorry they were. One person stayed at their desk – Bill Pryde knew Rebus was coming to see him.

‘Morning, Bill.’

Pryde nodded. They’d met in the wee small hours at the Infirmary. Ned Farlowe had been napping in a chair, so they’d stepped into the corridor to talk. Pryde looked tireder now. He had loosened the top button of his dark green shirt. His brown suit looked lived-in.

‘Thanks for sticking with it,’ Rebus said, drawing over a chair. Thinking:
I’d rather have had someone else, someone sharper
…

‘No problem.’

‘Any news?’

‘A couple of good eyewitnesses. They were waiting to cross at the lights.’

‘What’s their story?’

Pryde considered his reply. He knew he was dealing with a father as well as a cop. ‘She was crossing the road. Looked like she was heading down Minto Street, maybe making for the bus stop.’

Rebus shook his head. ‘She was walking, Bill. Going to a friend’s in Gilmour Road.’

She’d said as much over the pizza, apologising that she couldn’t stay longer. Just one more coffee at the end of the meal … one more coffee and she wouldn’t have been there at that moment. Or if she’d accepted his offer of a lift … When you thought about life, you thought of it as chunks of time, but really all it was was a series of connected moments, any one of which could change you completely.

‘The car was heading south out of town,’ Pryde went on. ‘Looks like he ran a red light. Motorist sitting behind him seemed to think so.’

‘Reckon he was drunk?’

Pryde nodded. ‘Way he was driving. I mean, could be he just lost control, but in that case why didn’t he stop?’

‘Description?’

Pryde shook his head. ‘We’ve got a dark car, a bit sporty. Nobody caught the licence plate.’

‘It’s a busy enough street, must’ve been other cars around.’

‘A couple of people have called in.’ Pryde flicked through his notes. ‘Nothing helpful, but I’m going to interview them, see if I can jog a memory or two.’

‘Could the car have been nicked? Maybe that’s why he was in a hurry.’

‘I can check.’

‘I’ll help you.’

Pryde considered this. ‘You sure?’

‘Try and stop me, Bill.’

‘No skid marks,’ Pryde said, ‘no sign that he tried braking, either before or after.’

They were standing at the junction of Minto Street and Newington Road. The cross-streets were Salisbury Place and Salisbury Road. Cars, vans and buses queued at the traffic lights as pedestrians crossed the road.

It could have been any one of you, Rebus thought. Any one of them could have taken Sammy’s place …

‘She was about here,’ Pryde went on, pointing to a spot where, just past the lights, a bus lane started. The carriageway was wide, a four-lane road. She hadn’t crossed at the lights. She’d been lazy, carrying on down Minto Street a few strides, then crossing in a diagonal. When she’d been a child, they’d taught her about crossing the road. Green Cross Code, all of that. Drummed it into her. Rebus looked around. At the top of Minto Street were some private houses and Bed & Breakfasts. On one corner stood a bank, on another a branch of Remnant Kings, with a takeaway next door.

‘The takeaway would have been open,’ Rebus said, pointing. On the third corner stood a Spar. ‘That place, too. Where did you say she was?’

‘The bus lane.’ She’d crossed three lanes, been only a yard or two from safety. ‘Witnesses say she was nearly at the kerb when he hit her. I think he was drunk, lost it for a second.’ Pryde nodded towards the bank. There were two phone boxes in front of it. ‘Witness called from there.’ The wall behind the phone boxes had a poster glued to it. Grinning maniac behind a steering-wheel, and some writing: ‘So many pedestrians, so little time’. A computer game …

‘It would have been so easy to avoid her,’ Rebus said quietly.

‘Sure you’re okay? There’s a café up the road.’

‘I’m fine, Bill.’ He looked around, took a deep breath. ‘Looks like offices behind the Spar, doubtful anyone would have been there. But there are flats above Remnant Kings and the bank.’

‘Want to talk to them?’

‘And the Spar and the kebab shop. You take the B&Bs and the houses, meet back here in half an hour.’

Rebus talked to everyone he could find. In the Spar, there was a new shift on, but he got home phone numbers from the manager and called up the workers from the previous night. They hadn’t seen or heard anything. First they’d known had been the flashing lights of the ambulance. The kebab shop was closed, but when Rebus banged on the door a woman came through from the back, wiping her hands on a tea-towel. He pressed his warrant card to the glass door, and she let him in. The shop had been busy last night. She didn’t see the accident – she called it that, ‘the accident’. And that’s what it was: the word really hadn’t sunk in until she said it. Elvis Costello: ‘Accidents Will Happen’. Was the next line really ‘It’s only hit and run’?

‘No,’ the woman said, ‘the first thing that caught my attention was the crowd. I mean, only three or four people, but I could see they were standing around something. And then the ambulance came. Will she be all right?’

The look in her eyes was one Rebus had encountered before. It almost wanted the victim dead, because then there was a story to be told.

‘She’s in hospital,’ he said, unable to look at the woman any longer.

‘Yes, but the paper said she’s in a coma.’

‘What paper?’

She brought him the first edition of the day’s
Evening News
. There was a paragraph on one of the inside pages – ‘Hit and Run Coma Victim’.

It wasn’t a coma. She was unconscious, that was all. But Rebus was thankful for the story. Maybe someone would read it and come forward. Maybe guilt would begin to press down on the driver. Maybe there’d been a passenger … It was hard to keep secrets, usually you told
some
one.

He tried Remnant Kings, but of course they had been closed last night, so he climbed to the flats above. There was no one home at the first flat. He wrote a brief message on the back of a business card and pushed it through the letterbox, then jotted down the surname on the door. If they didn’t call him, he’d call them. A young man answered the second door. He was just out of his teens and pushed a thick lock of black hair away from his eyes. He wore Buddy Holly glasses and had acne scars around his mouth. Rebus introduced himself. The hand went to the hair again, a backward glance into the flat.

‘Do you live here?’ Rebus asked.

‘Mm, yeah. Like, I’m not the owner. We rent it.’

There were no names on the door. ‘Anyone else in at the moment?’

‘Nope.’

‘Are you all students?’

The young man nodded. Rebus asked his name.

‘Rob. Robert Renton. What’s this about?’

‘There was an accident last night, Rob. A hit and run.’ So many times he’d been in this situation, passing on the bland news of another changed life. It was a whole hour since he’d telephoned the hospital. In the end, they’d taken his mobile number, said it might be easier if they phoned him whenever there was news. They meant easier for them, not him.

‘Oh, yes,’ Renton was saying, ‘I saw it.’

Rebus blinked. ‘You saw it?’

Renton was nodding, hair bobbing in front of his eyes. ‘From the window. I was up changing a CD, and –’

‘Is it okay if I come in for a minute? I want to see what kind of view you had.’

Renton puffed out his cheeks, exhaled. ‘Well, I suppose …’

And Rebus was in.

The living-room was fairly tidy. Renton went ahead of him, crossed to where a hi-fi rack sat between two windows. ‘I was putting on a new CD, and I looked out of the window. You can see the bus stop, and I wondered if I might catch Jane coming off a bus.’ He paused. ‘Jane’s Eric’s girlfriend.’

The words washed over Rebus. He was looking down on the street, where Sammy had been walking. ‘Tell me what you saw.’

‘This girl was crossing the road. She was nice-looking … I thought so anyway. Then this car came through the lights, swerved and sent her flying.’

Rebus closed his eyes for a second.

‘She must have gone ten feet in the air, hit that hedge, bounced back on to the pavement. She didn’t move after that.’

Rebus opened his eyes. He was at the window, Renton standing just behind his left shoulder. Down on the street, people were crossing the road, walking over the spot where Sammy had been hit, the spot where she’d landed. Flicking ash on to the pavement where she’d lain.

‘I don’t suppose you saw the driver?’

‘Not from this angle.’

‘Any passengers?’

‘Couldn’t tell.’

He wears glasses, Rebus thought. How reliable is he?

‘When you saw it happen, you didn’t go down?’

‘I’m not a medical student or anything.’ He nodded towards an easel in the corner, and Rebus noticed a shelf of
paints and brushes. ‘Someone ran to the phone box, so I knew help was coming.’

Rebus nodded. ‘Anyone else see it?’

‘They were in the kitchen.’ Renton paused. ‘I know what you’re thinking.’ Rebus doubted it. ‘You’re thinking I wear specs, so maybe I didn’t see it right. But he definitely swerved. You know … deliberately. I mean, like he was aiming for her.’ He nodded to himself.

‘
Aiming
for her?’

Renton made a movement with his hand, imitating a car gliding off one course and on to another. ‘He steered straight for her.’

‘The car didn’t lose control?’

‘That would have been jerkier, wouldn’t it?’

‘What colour was the car?’

‘Dark green.’

‘And the make?’

Renton shrugged. ‘I’m hopeless with cars. Tell you what though …’

‘What?’

Renton took off his glasses, started polishing them. ‘Why don’t I try sketching it for you?’

He moved the easel over to the window and got to work. Rebus went into the hall and called the hospital. The person he got through to didn’t sound too surprised.

‘No change, I’m afraid. She’s got a couple of visitors with her.’

Mickey and Rhona. Rebus terminated the call, made another to Pryde’s mobile.

‘I’m in one of the flats over Remnant Kings. I’ve got an eyewitness.’

‘Yes?’

‘He saw the whole thing. And he’s an art student.’

‘Yes?’

‘Come on, Bill. Do you want me to draw it for you?’

There was silence for a moment, then Pryde said ‘Ah’.

Rebus held the mobile to his ear as he walked through the hospital.

‘Joe Herdman’s put together a list,’ Bill Pryde was saying. ‘Rover 600 series, the newer Ford Mondeos, Toyota Celica, plus a couple of Nissans. Rank outsider is the BMW 5-series.’

‘It narrows things down a bit, I suppose.’

‘Joe says the Rover, Mondeo and Celica are favourites. He’s given me a few more details – chrome around the number-plates, stuff like that. I’m going to call our artist friend, see if anything clicks.’

A nurse was glaring at Rebus as he walked towards her.

‘Let me know what he says. Talk to you later, Bill.’ Rebus slipped the phone back into his pocket.

‘You’re not supposed to use those things in here,’ the nurse snapped.

‘Look, I’m in a bit of a hurry …’

‘They can interfere with the machines.’

Rebus pulled up, colour leaving his face. ‘I forgot,’ he said. He put a shaking hand to his forehead.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine, fine. Look, I won’t do it again, okay?’ He started to move off. ‘You can rely on that.’

Rebus took a photocopy of Renton’s drawing from his pocket. Joe Herdman was a desk sergeant who knew everything about cars. He’d been useful before, turning a vague description into something more concrete. Rebus
looked at the drawing as he walked. All the details were there: buildings in the background, the hedge, the onlookers. And Sammy, caught at the point of impact. She’d half-turned, was stretching out her hands as if she could push the car to a stop. But Renton had drawn fine lines issuing from the back of the car, representing the air being pushed, representing speed. Where there should have been a face, he had left a blank oval. The back half of the car was very clearly defined, the front a blur of disappearing perspective. Renton said he’d left out anything he couldn’t be sure of. He promised he hadn’t let his imagination fill in the blanks.

It was the face, or the lack of it … it disturbed Rebus more than anything else in the picture. He drew himself into the scene, wondered what he’d have done. Would he have concentrated on the car, caught its licence plate? Or would his attention have been focused on Sammy? Which would have prevailed: cop instincts or fatherhood? Someone at the station had said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get him.’ Not, ‘Don’t worry, she’ll be all right.’ Which brought it all down to two things: him – meaning the driver – and retribution, rather than her – the victim – and recovery.

‘I’d just have been another witness,’ Rebus said quietly. Then he folded the drawing and put it away.

Sammy had a room to herself, all tubes and machinery, the way he’d seen it in films and on TV. Only here the room was dingier, paint flaking from the walls and around the window-frames. The chairs had metal legs and rubber feet and moulded plastic seats. A woman rose as he came in. They embraced. He kissed the side of her forehead.