Authors: Peter Lovesey
Ada was blocking his route to the bar door.
She remained where she was. However, she said with more tact, ‘If you took the trouble to drive her to hospital, you must have been concerned.’
He said, ‘Will you stand out of my way?’
‘Please. We’re not blaming you for anything,’ said Rose. ‘I just want to know what happened to me that night. You’re the best chance I have - the only chance.’
‘No, he isn’t,’ said Ada. ‘There’s his wife.’
Dunkley-Brown said through clenched teeth, ‘You are not speaking to my wife.’
‘She offered to come outside,’ said Ada.
‘There’s no reason. She can’t tell you a damned thing.’
‘Then you have nothing to fear.’
‘I’ve nothing to fear anyway. My conscience is perfectly clear.’
Ada turned to Rose. ‘Why don’t I stay out here with Mr Dunkley-Brown while you go and ask his good lady to join us?’
‘This is outrageous,’ said Dunkley-Brown. ‘You can’t detain me against my will. I’ll complain to the police.’
Ada beamed at him. ‘I bet you won’t, buster. I bet my next dinner you won’t.’
Rose went back inside and found that the bonhomie had been fully restored at the table. There was some ribald comment when they saw who had come from outside.
‘Hullo, what’s happened to Ned?’ one of them said. ‘Still at it?’
The other man said, ‘With the big one.’
‘Showing her his Bentley,’ shrieked one of the women.
Ignoring them, Rose walked around the chairs and up to Mrs Dunkley-Brown. ‘If you don’t mind, we’d like you to help us after all.’
‘Watch out, Pippa,’ said the woman to her right. ‘They might want you for a threesome.’
Pippa Dunkley-Brown glared at Rose. ‘My husband said he could handle it. What do you want me for?’
‘To support what he’s saying.’
‘He doesn’t need me. He’s well used to speaking for himself and being believed.’
‘You were there. We want to know what happened.’
‘Where? What
is
this about?’
‘The Hinton Clinic last Monday night.’
After a pause, she said, ‘I don’t know a damned thing about the Hinton Clinic. I’ve never set foot inside the place.’
In her exasperation, Rose found herself pouring out words. ‘Oh, come on, I don’t mean inside. Just in the grounds. The car park, where I was found. I need your help. I’m not accusing you of anything. You probably saved my life, you and your husband. If you want to keep quiet about what you did, that’s up to you, but please have some understanding for my position.’
The man across the table, the most vocal of the group, said, ‘What’s this about saving her life, Pippa? Have you and Ned been performing acts of heroism and keeping it from your old chums?’
She said tight-lipped, ‘She’s confused.’
‘Yes, I am confused,’ Rose said. ‘I admit it. That’s why I’m appealing to you for help.’
Pippa Dunkley-Brown drew herself up. ‘Young woman, I’m becoming more than a little angry.’
The man opposite, well soused, seized the chance to goad her. ‘Come clean, Pippa. What were you and Ned up to in this hospital car park that you don’t want us to know about? Naughties in the back of the Bentley?’
She snapped, ‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous.’
‘Well, if it wasn’t you with Ned,’ he said with a grin at the other women, ‘who was it?”
Pippa reddened.
One of the women, probably the man’s wife, said, ‘Knock it off, Keith, you stupid jerk.’
The rebuke had the effect of stinging Pippa rather than Keith, for it showed that these friends of hers were taking the suggestion seriously. The idea that her ageing husband might dally with another woman was more damaging than any threat represented by Rose and Ada. She couldn’t allow it to pass unchallenged. she said in a low, measured voice, ‘What are you on about, Keith?’
‘Ignore him. You know what he’s like,’ said Keith’s wife.
‘No, I’m not having Ned smeared. If you’ve got something to tell us, Keith, you’d better say it, or apologise.’
Keith was grinning to cover his unease. ‘Calm down, love,’ he said. ‘I was only pulling your leg.’
The other man tried clumsily to assist. ‘Let’s face it. Old Ned’s a bit of a lad.’
‘That’s what you think, is it?’ said Pippa, at the limit of her self-control. ‘Right.’ She made a fist with her right hand and thumped the table. ‘I’m going to tell you all exactly what happened. I was with Ned all of last Monday, all of it. We were coming back from Bristol early in the evening, about six-thirty. We’d been to a garden centre to look at some ornaments and left a bit late to miss the worst of the traffic. We were on the motorway, the M4, as far as that junction that leads down into Bath.’
‘Eighteen,’ said the other man at the table to ease the tension. ‘She means Junction Eighteen.’
‘I suggested we got something from a Chinese takeaway. That’s why we headed for Bath. We drove along there for about a mile.’
‘The A46,’ said the same man. ‘You were on the A46.’
‘Shut up, Frank,’ said his wife.
Pippa continued, ‘It was that difficult light between day and evening. Ned was driving. It’s that stretch before you come to Dyrham Park. Just open country. I was thinking about other things. Suddenly Ned had the brakes on and I was jerked forward against the safety belt. What had happened was that this stupid woman - you.’ She pointed at Rose. ‘You had wandered into the road, right in front of us. Thank God Ned saw you a bit ahead, because you would have been dead meat now if he hadn’t. He jammed on the brakes, as I said, and when we hit you we’d slowed right down. Good thing there wasn’t anything close behind us. You still fell across the bonnet and you must have landed awkwardly because you were right out. It was terrifying. We got you off the front of the car and made sure you were still breathing and tried to revive you at the side of the road. Ned was in a state of shock, poor man. He knew he was in deep, deep trouble.’ She looked across the room towards the door. ‘He isn’t coming, is he?’
Rose said, ‘He won’t get past Ada. Go on, please.’
‘He’s been caught before for being over the limit,’ said Pippa. ‘You all know that. One more would do for him. He’d had a couple of drinks in Bristol. It doesn’t affect his driving, not that amount. I tell you, this wasn’t his fault, but it would have been no good arguing. They’d have breathalysed him and taken his licence away, and if it was known he’d hit someone, he’d get sent down for a term. That’s why we couldn’t report it. I knew the hospital wasn’t far away. There’s a road sign along there.’
‘I know it,’ said Frank.
She looked up at Rose. ‘We did what we could for you. We lifted you into the back seat. Cars and lorries were going by, but no one stopped, thank God. Then we drove to the Hinton Clinic, with Ned at the wheel and me beside you in the back seat.’
‘What a nightmare,’ said Keith’s wife.
‘Then we had this problem. We couldn’t take you in as a casualty, or questions would have been asked. To have given false names would have made it worse. So I suggested we put you down in the car park where someone was sure to discover you and get you inside. That’s what we did. We picked a spot under a lamp-post. Then we got the hell out of there.’
‘That’s all?’ said Rose.
‘Well, I called the hospital a couple of days or so later.’
‘That was you. I see.’ Now that the story was told - and told with enough detail to make it credible - Rose was gripped by overwhelming disappointment. She had learned some more about what happened that night, but the overriding question remained unanswered. ‘When you first saw me, I was wandering in the road?’
‘Yes.’
‘In open country?’
‘You came out of nowhere,’ said Pippa. ‘Look, Ned’s going to go through the roof when he finds out I’ve told you all this. We were going to say nothing to anybody. I was just so incensed when Keith started hinting that Ned—’
‘Pippa, darling, what are friends for, if we can’t stand by you at a time like this?’ put in Keith’s wife. ‘It could have happened to any of us.’
Rose turned away. She hadn’t listened to the last exchange.
She wasn’t interested in how Pippa made peace with her husband. The painstaking process of reconstruction, from Mrs Thornton to Percy the car-dealer, to the Dunkley-Browns, had crashed with that devastating phrase: ‘You came out of nowhere.’
On Westbury station, Ada found the chocolate-bar machine and subjected it to a series of expert thumps.
When seated with the resulting heap of Cadbury’s bars in her lap, she remarked to Rose, ‘I wouldn’t want to be Pippa when he gets her home.’
Rose hadn’t given a thought to Pippa. Her mind was occupied trying once more to find a way out of her predicament.
Ada chuckled a little and said, ‘While her old man was refusing to admit to anything, she was singing like the three tenors.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ said Rose, snapping out of her thoughts and turning to face her.
‘Get away. Have some choc.’
‘She didn’t set out to tell me anything. It was only because her friends started winding her up, hinting that her husband was having an affair.’
‘Which he very likely is,’ said Ada. ‘And she very likely knows it.’
‘How do you work that out?’
Ada answered with conviction, ‘They must have got horribly close to the truth. Much more of it, and she would have cracked, and all her friends would know she couldn’t hang on to her decrepit old goat of a husband. Bloody humiliating for a woman as pretty as Pippa.’
‘Maybe. But instead she told them how he knocked me down and failed to report an accident. That’s worse than humiliation. That’s a crime, Ada.’
‘That crowd are boozers themselves, petal. They won’t shop him.’
All of this rang true, but none of it helped Rose. ‘I’m not much further on, am I? We now discover that I wandered onto a main road and was lucky not to be killed. What was I doing there?’
Ada ripped open another bar of chocolate. ‘Buggered if I know. If that’s the stretch I’m thinking of, it’s desolate up there.’
‘Really?’
‘No trees, no houses, nothing.’
‘Ada, I’m going to have to go there and see the place for myself.’
‘What use is that?’
‘I want to find out what I was doing there.’
Ada’s flesh rippled with amusement. ‘A date with a little green man?’
‘Get serious, will you?’ said Rose. ‘It could spark off a memory.’
‘Shut up and eat some chocolate.’
‘I’ve really got to go there.’
‘Tomorrow, petal. Tonight you move into your new place on Wellsway. Remember?’
First, they returned to Harmer House to collect Rose’s few possessions, automatically quickening their steps on approaching the line of parked cars outside. This time they reached the front door without incident. ‘You don’t have to help me with the move,’ Rose said as they started up the creaking stairs. ‘You’ve given up so much of your time already, and I’m really grateful, but I can do this by myself.’
‘Try and keep me away,’ said Ada.
Rose thanked her.
Ada said, ‘Don’t get ideas. I want to see if it’s a better drum than this.’
Rose knew it wasn’t in Ada’s nature to admit to being helpful. ‘I’ve really enjoyed your company. I don’t know how you feel about keeping in touch. I’d like to stay friends if you would.’
They went up four or five more stairs before Ada reacted.
‘Give me a five.’
‘What?’ said Rose.
‘Your hand.’
‘Oh.’ She held out her palm and Ada slapped hers against it in agreement.
‘Whatever, wherever.’
‘Whatever, wherever,’ repeated Rose.
Ada stopped suddenly and lowered her voice. ‘Can you hear anything? I think there’s someone in our room.’
Rose listened. Without question there were voices coming from the bedroom. ‘It sounds like Imogen.’
‘At this time?’
They crept to the top. The door had been left ajar. Rose was right. Imogen’s well-bred drawl was coming through clearly. The other voice was female also.
Rose looked at Ada, who shrugged.
They pushed the door wide and stepped in.
‘Goodness, you surprised us,’ said Imogen.
Ada, close behind Rose, said, ‘Can’t think why. Believe it or not, this is our room, ducky.’
‘Yes, it’s an intrusion. I’m sorry, but there was nowhere else to wait,’ said Imogen. ‘And something very special…’
… was interrupted by something very unexpected. The other woman opened her arms wide, said, ‘Darling, where have you been?’ and stepped forward to embrace Rose in a hug that squeezed a high note out of her like a Scottish piper starting up.
Ada cried out, ‘Watch it - she’s busted her ribs.’
The woman released Rose. ‘Oh, my God, I had no idea.’
Actually the discomfort was mild, for the pressure had been cushioned by a substantial bosom. The woman was sturdy, though sylphlike compared to Ada. She was about Rose’s age or younger, with fine brown hair, worn in a ponytail. Her get-up was strangely chosen for visiting a hostel for the homeless. She looked as if she had spent the last hour having a make-over in a department store. She was in a white silk blouse that hung loose over black leggings. An expensive-looking coat was draped over a chair-back.
Imogen said, ‘This is your sister Doreen. Don’t you recognise her?’
Rose felt as if lightning had struck. ‘My
Sister?’
‘Stepsister, to be accurate,’ said the woman. ‘Roz, it’s me.’ She took one of Rose’s hands and clasped it between both of hers. ‘It’s all over, love. I’ve come to take you home.’
Pulses buzzed in Rose’s head and none of them made any helpful connections. She took a step away, releasing her hand.
Imogen said, ‘When Miss Jenkins called the office, I just had to bring her here. I know it’s late and obviously we’ve taken you by surprise.’
Rose said flatly, ‘I don’t know her.’
‘You don’t
recognise
her,’ Imogen corrected her. ‘You don’t recognise her because you still haven’t got your memory back.’
‘But if she’s my own sister…’
‘It doesn’t mean that your memory will suddenly switch on.’ She turned to the woman. ‘You’ll have to make allowances, I’m afraid. It’s like a shutter in her brain. She can’t see anything behind it.’