‘Fine, fine, so the nurses say. He fell into the van more than anything, and it had already almost pulled up to unload. They are keeping him in for a day or two.’ The young man nodded toward the building. ‘He’s very sedated. They’re taking the chance to give him a wash.’ Each man privately shuddering at the prospect. No one knew how old he was, or even if Baxter was his real name. The man himself, wrapped up in his own world of insights and outbusts, would have had no more idea of the disproportionate amounts of time and effort dispensed in his care.
‘A life without walls,’ Grey mused.
‘Sorry Sir?’
‘Nothing, ignore me. So, the Aubreys?’ There was no need to rush now, the quarry having fled.
‘They were here when we got here. He’d already been seen. In fact they were pretty much ready to leave; just waiting to be issued some tablets at the dispensary.’
‘How did he look?’
‘Well he had a plaster over his eye and bandage around his left arm. His shirt still had blood all over it.’
‘And in himself?’
‘A bit panicked, to be honest sir, his wife worse than him. He just seemed keen to get back to work, “too many meetings!” he was saying. Anyway, I called in to the station as soon as I had a chance. It wasn’t easy though — Baxter had his second wind by then, and he was taking a bit of holding down for the nurses to look at him.’
‘That’s okay. So you didn’t get a chance to speak to Alex Aubrey?’
‘No Sir, but I spoke after to one of the nurses who had seen him…’
‘Cartwright, what have I told you about tapping up nurses?’
‘…who told me he had needed a couple of stitches above his eye, and his hand was pretty cut up too. He’d told them he’d had a fall, but the nurse told me if those injuries were from a fall then he must have fallen into a greenhouse! They would have preferred to keep him in for observation — head injury, you know — but the pair were desperate to get away.’
‘Thank you,’ said Grey as he went to get out of the car, ‘but hang around won’t you — I’ll need you again.’
‘No problem, Sir,’ Grey heard as he went thought the double doors, and asked at the reception to speak to the doctor on watch.
‘Dr Okanu will be with you soon,’ the receptionist said with a smile after a whispered call on her headset, the Inspector glad to hear the name; and sure enough a minute later a besmocked medical profession appeared, greeting Grey on first name terms, and ushering him through into her office.
‘Coffee?’ she asked.
‘No, thank you. I can’t stop. Next time, I promise. But for now I was hoping you could spare a couple of minutes?’
‘Of course. How can I help?’
‘Well, I was hoping to ask you about Alex Aubrey?’
‘Well, you know I can’t tell you very much, what with patient confidentiality.’
‘He was here just though wasn’t he, cuts to his face and hand, claimed to have had a fall?’
‘Well, you seem to know almost as much as I do, Inspector!’
‘The Constable saw his injuries,’ continued Grey, ‘so you won’t be giving anything away.’
‘But you think there might be more to it that a fall? He and Mrs Aubrey did seem worried,’ the Doctor reflected. ‘They aren’t in trouble, are they?’
‘I don’t know. But it would help if I had a clearer idea of what had happened to him?’
The Doctor pondered on the question, stretching back in her chair before she answered, ‘They feel the need to make an excuse, those who come here with suspicious injuries. They know and we know that they didn’t walk into something, or trip up and fall over. But it eases the situation, to have this white lie believed.
‘He told the nurses he had fallen while carrying a drinks tumbler. Now, he had cuts to both hand and face. As they cleaned him up a grain of glass was found in the facial wound, it close enough to the eye to require my supervision in removing it. All this from one drinking glass? Now, there are some very random injuries to be had out there, Inspector; but a tale like that only comes from someone who hasn’t had time or opportunity to think up one better.’
‘So what might be more likely, do you think?’
‘Flying glass is my best guess, a broken window maybe? A larger piece could have broke off in the wound, leaving the tip.’
‘That’s nasty.’
‘And pure speculation, mind. Now let me put it another way: I have served enough Saturday nights in Casualty to recognise when someone’s been hit with a drinking glass and hit hard. These were straight cuts, not curved.
‘What’s he involved in, Inspector?’ asked the Doctor, suddenly realising what she was describing.
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘Well,’ she jumped up to her feet, confirming the circle of confidence was broken enough for today, ‘I trust at least I’ll never hear another word of this conversation spoken of anywhere.’
But she knew him better than that, as shaking hands, he thanked her, and wished her well until the next time they met. As he left Grey wondered if it hadn’t been a terrific stroke of luck, old Baxter’s injuries notwithstanding, to have had an officer here just in time to catch the Aubreys’ visit.
Unlike the Longs with their hour-long bus route (for he had caught that part of Mrs L’s interview) he and the waiting Constable were now heading at pace along broad roads and out into open country. He knew the address that Mrs Long had given the Desk Sergeant to be in an area not without its charms but very rural, with its metal barns, chicken farms, and roots in agriculture. This was not at all like the acres from which the Aubreys hailed, and which they were themselves now entering. For the Aubreys, though also living outside of the town, were in a quite different part of the countryside; an area of moderate to large houses, golf greens, and ornamental lakes — Southney’s answer to the stockbroker belt.
Grey noted the two areas were reached by quite different roads, which, when triangulated in his mind, struck him as taking at least as long to get to from each other as from town. He wasn’t sure yet if this would be important. He also speculated as they drove as to whether Thomas Long’s disappearance and whatever had just occurred at the Aubrey house were linked? But it was too early for that kind of thinking.
‘Just pull up here,’ Grey instructed the Constable, he deciding it better to approach in something like a civilian manner rather than in a squad car. For if the Aubreys hadn’t wanted to report a crime at the hospital, he thought, then they might not appreciate the police’s involvement now. But that was fine, for he could be subtle when required. The key was going to be convincing the couple that he was only here to ask about Thomas Long.
However, Grey’s consideration proved unnecessary; for as he walked along the broad curving drive that met the glassy front porch of the large and unusually designed house, it was obvious that no one was at home — no lights on, no windows opened; only uncollected letters poking from their slot, which if their postie came about the same time as his, supposed the Inspector, then the couple had been gone since before ten or eleven that morning.
He rang the bell anyway, but hardly waited for an answer before moving on. It was only as he turned from the porch that he noticed one of the panels of the lounge window beside it was not glass but rather white plastic, filled in expertly, and much more subtly than the tradition chipboard panel, and leaving a reflective impression not unlike the glass remaining around it. They had filled that in quickly, he thought.
Around the side of the house, between the double garage and the wall ran a path connecting the front and back gardens. And it was on this path that Grey saw dark spots dotted along the slabs, and brown splashes by them on the house’s whitewashed wall. They could as easily have been the slops of a tin of creosote as the trail of a bleeding man struggling to his car.
Treading carefully, Grey continued on to the golf fairway of a rear garden, the lawn of which seemed to move and undulate as he walked along its edge, the whole space enclosed by centuries-old trees. The kitchen window had a pane missing also, the damage more recent though, a last shard still clinging to the frame; and as he moved to peer through the hole he saw further shattered pieces strewn across the kitchen table amid the remnants of breakfast; bacon gone crinkly, shrivelled up eggs, plates that might need a few spins in the dishwasher. And here the parts of the drama of that morning came together in his mind, Grey envisioning Alex Aubrey sat there eating,
