Trick of the Mind, Page 2

  Only O’Leary, however, knew the name that Carmichael repeated in surprise.

  “Bethancourt?” he said.

  The rented Volvo sped along the A1, past Saint-Denis, heading out into the night along the rain-slick pavement of the motorway. Bethancourt was normally an erratic driver, one more interested in what could be seen out of the car windows than in the road before him, but on this occasion he was fully concentrated on the highway and on putting as many miles behind him as quickly as possible. The traffic at this hour was not particularly heavy, even so close to Paris, and he was making excellent time, driving well past the limit allowed on the French motorways.

  He checked his watch for the fifth time since he had set out, not wanting to ring Carmichael back before the chief inspector could reach the hospital and get some news of Gibbons’s condition. Bethancourt had already allowed more than enough time for this, although he was not conscious of it. Deep down, he was dreading to hear his worst fears confirmed: that Gibbons had died.

  “He must be there by now,” he muttered to himself, and blindly reached for his mobile phone, lying on the passenger seat.

  “Carmichael.” The chief inspector answered at once, sounding distracted.

  “It’s Phillip Bethancourt, sir,” said Bethancourt. “Is there any news about Jack?”

  “Bethancourt?” Carmichael sounded surprised, as though he were trying to place the name. But in the next moment, a kinder tone came into his voice as he said, “He’s still alive, lad. There’s no real news yet—apparently they’re trying to stabilize him before they take him in for surgery.”

  Bethancourt let out a long sigh of relief. “Thank you, sir,” he said fervently. “I was rather afraid—well, never mind.”

  “We’ve all been worried,” said Carmichael sympathetically. “We’re just trying to sort out what happened here. You ring me a bit later and I may have more news.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Bethancourt. “Thank you very much. I’ll do that.”

  Carmichael rang off and Bethancourt tossed the phone back into the passenger seat, very glad of this respite from his worst fears, even if it was only temporary.

  He felt, he realized, guilty, as if he had let his friend down by being out of the country just when he was wanted. It was a wholly unreasonable feeling, but knowing that did not seem to improve his outlook.

  “Idiot,” he muttered to himself, and lit a cigarette, his fourth in the last hour. He had let his speed slacken a bit whilst he was speaking to Carmichael, but now he put his foot down again, cracking the window open to let out the smoke. The chill, damp air rushed in as the car sped up and the cigarette’s ember glowed red.

  Detective Sergeant O’Leary had retreated from the discussion of his superiors to resume his guard over the evidence bags. His position at the end of the row of chairs put him next to the double doors that separated the waiting room from the examination area, and so he was the first to see the two men in surgical scrubs emerge.

  “Ah, there you are, Sergeant,” said one, whom O’Leary recognized as the admitting doctor he had dealt with when he first arrived. “I’ve brought our surgeon, Mr. Wyber, out to explain the operation to you.”

  Wyber was a large man in his late forties with an abundance of dark gold hair, springing up from a hairline that was just beginning to recede. He smiled briefly, but O’Leary thought his eyes were cold.

  “That your guv?” he asked, nodding toward Carmichael.

  “Yes, sir,” answered O’Leary, beckoning as Carmichael turned at the sound of the surgeon’s voice. “How is Jack?”

  “Still critical,” replied the doctor. “But his blood pressure’s coming up a bit.”

  Led by Carmichael, the other detectives came up, and O’Leary performed the introductions cursorily.

  “The X rays are back,” announced Wyber. “They confirm your man was shot twice, both bullets still lodged in the intestines. The first one went in at an angle and didn’t do so very much damage all things considered, but the second penetrated deeply and the bowel will need to be resected in several places.”

  “But you think you can save him?” asked Carmichael.

  “He has a good chance,” replied Wyber. “If we can get him stabilized before surgery, he’ll have a very good chance. But he’s been badly wounded, Chief Inspector, there’s no getting round that, and I won’t know what kind of complications there may be until I open him up.”

  Carmichael nodded his understanding, but he was almost desperate for some kind of reassurance.

  “Tell me this,” he asked, “if everything goes as well as it possibly can, would he make a full recovery?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Wyber confidently. “In that case, a few months should see him put right. But we’re not there yet.”

  “No, of course not,” muttered Carmichael. “Is there any chance of speaking with him before the operation?”

  Both doctors looked bemused at this idea.

  “He’s unconscious,” said the doctor gently. “It would be unlikely that he should regain consciousness before his surgery.”

  “So he hasn’t said anything?” put in Hollings. “Nothing about what happened?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “He may not remember in any case,” said Wyber, and all the detectives turned to stare at him. “Trauma victims often don’t,” he explained. “But,” he added, forestalling their questions, “there’s no telling for sure. Individual cases vary greatly. I’ve known some people to forget whole days, while others remember the most horrific things in every detail.”

  “We’ll let you know when he’s taken into the operating theatre,” said the doctor, turning away. “I assure you, we’ll do the very best we can for him.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Carmichael automatically. “Thank you both.”

  They all looked at each other as the doctors left them.

  “Well, that changes things,” said Hollings, rubbing his chin. “If Gibbons can’t remember who shot him …”

  Carmichael was frowning. “There was always the possibility he hadn’t seen his attacker clearly. But there’s no denying I was hoping he would tell us who and why.”

  “If he’s one of those who forget whole days, he may not have any idea why he was shot,” put in Davies. “He may have forgotten the very thing he was shot for knowing.”

  Carmichael glared at him, and the inspector added hastily, “Not that he’ll be one of those. I only meant …”

  “We know what you meant, Grant,” said Hollings wearily. “It’s all right. And in any case, it was never sure Gibbons was shot for anything he’s presently involved in. It might have been a revenge attack by some recently released criminal he helped put in jail.”

  “That is the first thing that came to my mind,” admitted Davies. “I mean, considering what he’d been working on—there’s just no violence connected with the case.”

  “Until now,” muttered Carmichael under his breath, but in such a low voice no one but O’Leary, who was standing close beside him, heard.

  “Chief Inspector?” asked Hollings.

  “Never mind.” Carmichael waved his own comment away. “Whether he remembers or not, we’ll be able to track his movements better once forensics is done with his notebook. Meanwhile—”

  He broke off, swinging round as another young man came into the waiting room. He was slight of build and fresh-faced, which combined to give an impression of a boy of about sixteen, although in fact he had reached his early twenties, and he was remarkably self-possessed for either age.

  His eyes lit briefly on the policemen before traveling on to the bags containing Gibbons’s clothes, which O’Leary still stood protectively over.

  “Is that it then?” he asked, indicating the bags with his chin. “Mr. Hodges sent me,” he added, although all of the policemen had recognized him at once as Guy Delford, their forensics department’s latest genius and the apple of Ian Hodges’s eye.

  “That’s it,” affirmed Ca
rmichael. “Where is Hodges?”

  “Meeting me at the lab,” answered Delford, moving to collect the bags. “He wanted to be there when the evidence from the scene arrived. We’ll start work on it right away.”

  “Don’t you want to know how our man is?” asked O’Leary, a little exasperated by this apparent detachment in the face of crisis.

  “No!” For just a moment, Delford’s brown eyes blazed. “No,” he repeated more calmly. “I shouldn’t be able to work properly if I heard he was dead. I like Sergeant Gibbons, you see.”

  This left them all speechless as Delford was already renowned amongst Scotland Yard detectives as not merely forgetful of names, but of actually being unable to tell one detective from another. In the ensuing silence, Delford lifted the plastic bags and carried them out into the hall, dodging around Constable Lemmy, who was still hovering in the doorway.

  “The notebook,” muttered Carmichael. “O’Leary, just run after him and say I want Gibbons’s notebook back as soon as possible, will you?”

  O’Leary left with alacrity, and in a moment they heard his voice echoing back from the hall.

  Carmichael drew a deep sigh and turned to sit down at last, trying to think his way through this most difficult of investigations.

  The rain had picked up again, drumming on the roof of the car and splattering against the windscreen. Bethancourt peered past the wipers in search of the junction with the A26. He had been on the road now for close to two hours and figured he was almost halfway to Calais. He was still hoping to make the three o’clock ferry, though he had had to slacken his speed somewhat in deference to the rain.

  Apart from the steady sound of the downpour, it was quiet in the car, Bethancourt having long since lost patience with the vagaries of French radio and switched it off. In the silence, with the road ahead glittering wetly in the headlamps, he felt very much alone. He did not repent refusing Marla’s company for the trip, but found he did miss the company of his dog, Cerberus, who normally accompanied him on a drive of any length. Cerberus, currently residing in kennels just outside of London, was a very well-behaved borzoi who would in all likelihood have curled up and fallen asleep in the backseat by now. But somehow Bethancourt was acutely aware of the dog’s absence there. More than once, as his thoughts strayed, he found himself glancing into the back, only to find it empty.

  Ahead a sign loomed up, glimpsed between the regular beat of the wipers: Béthune, Boulogne, Calais, Dunkerque it proclaimed.

  “That’s it then,” murmured Bethancourt, shifting down to make the turn.

  The evidence bags having safely arrived at the lab, Carmichael had sent O’Leary off to liaise with DC Cummings, who was conducting the house-to-house in Walworth. Hollings had volunteered to go look up the local bobby on duty in the neighborhood at the time of the shooting, and was currently at the Lambeth police station. And Davies had left to knock up the insurance investigator who had been working the Haverford robbery, though Davies clearly thought this a waste of time.

  And he might be right at that, thought Carmichael glumly to himself. He suspected he had suggested it merely to leave no stone unturned rather than out of any real hope of a clue. Detective Inspector Davies, after all, had been with the Arts Theft Division for several years and presumably knew his own business. If he said there was no violence connected to the robbery of a fortune’s worth of antique jewels, he was most likely correct.

  That left Detective Constable Lemmy, who had stopped loitering in the doorway and taken a seat just inside it, in which he was now dozing. Sleeping, thought Carmichael wrathfully, was about the only thing Lemmy had shown any talent for since he had been visited on by the chief inspector.

  His mobile rang and Carmichael pounced on it, hoping for a report from O’Leary. But it was his wife.

  “How is Sergeant Gibbons, dear?” asked Dotty Carmichael, her voice without the faintest accusation despite the fact that Carmichael had promised to ring her with news and had completely forgotten.

  “He’s still alive,” said Carmichael. “I’m sorry I haven’t rung. I should have.”

  “I’m sure you’ve had a very busy night,” said Dotty. “Do you know anything yet? Is Gibbons going to be all right?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Carmichael. “They took him into surgery a half hour or so past, but I’ve not heard anything since. I suppose it’s going well enough.”

  “Are you still at the hospital?” she asked.

  “Yes. There didn’t seem to be much point in leaving—I’ve got everyone out trying to find out what happened, but so far there’s no one to interview, or even any suspects. And although the doctors said Gibbons wouldn’t wake up, well, you never can tell, can you?”

  “But surely someone else could have stayed,” suggested Dotty.

  “Well, yes,” admitted Carmichael. “In fact, I’ve got some armed uniforms here just to be safe. But Gibbons doesn’t know them.”

  “That’s a good thought,” she agreed. “He ought to have someone he knows there when he wakes up. Would you like me to come down and wait for him?”

  Carmichael was startled. “Down here? You mean the hospital?”

  “Well, yes, dear. That does seem most practical if one’s waiting for somebody to come out of surgery.”

  She was teasing him now, gently, but teasing nonetheless. Despite himself, Carmichael smiled.

  “Well, it’s likely to be a long wait,” he said.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “I can’t sleep anyway, not without knowing Sergeant Gibbons will be all right. And that way if you’re called away, he’ll still have someone who knows him there, won’t he?”

  “Yes,” said Carmichael. “Yes, he will. If you truly want to, Dotty, I won’t say no.”

  “Then I’ll come down,” she said firmly. “I should be there in forty-five minutes or so.”

  Bethancourt flicked his cigarette butt out the window, and took a drink from the bottle of Evian he had taken from the hotel. He badly wanted a coffee, but time was running on, and making the three o’clock ferry would be a close thing at this point.

  He checked the time yet again and found it was past 2:30 A.M. A half hour ago he had reluctantly decided that ringing Carmichael on an hourly basis for updates would probably be overly onerous to a busy and distressed policeman who had work to do, but it had, by his calculations, been more than ninety minutes now; surely in that amount of time there should be news. He picked up the phone.

  Unexpectedly, Carmichael sounded pleased to hear from him. “Bethancourt?” he said. “They’ve taken him into the operating theatre at last—not quite half an hour ago. I’ve left the hospital, but Mrs. Carmichael is there and will ring me the moment she hears any thing.”

  “That’s good news, sir,” said Bethancourt, hoping it was.

  “I wanted to ask you,” continued Carmichael, “what time it was when he rang you this evening?”

  “At six thirty-five,” answered Bethancourt, wondering why this should matter.

  “And when was the last time you spoke to him before that?”

  “The day before yesterday,” said Bethancourt. “I rang him to say I’d be back in London on Thursday.”

  “But he gave you no hint that anything was up?” asked Carmichael anxiously.

  “Not especially,” replied Bethancourt. “He told me about his transfer to Arts Theft and about how different it was from what he was used to, but nothing about any specific case. We talked about gambling.”

  “Gambling?” said Carmichael, sounding startled.

  “I was in Monte Carlo at the time.”

  “Ah,” said Carmichael, apparently dismissing this bit of information. “You said you’re on your way back now?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Bethancourt. “I’m on the road as we speak—just passing Béthune. I’m hoping to make the three o’clock ferry.”

  “Good, good,” said Carmichael. “Make sure you let me know once you’re here.”

  “Of course, s
ir,” said Bethancourt, wondering why Carmichael seemed so eager to speak with him, but forbearing to ask, given the chief inspector’s distracted tone.

  Carmichael rang off and Bethancourt tossed his phone back into the passenger seat thoughtfully. Carmichael often permitted Bethancourt to look in on Gibbons’s investigations, this having been mandated by the chief commissioner of Scotland Yard, who happened to be an old school fellow of Bethancourt’s father. But Bethancourt had always done his best to keep a low profile and certainly Carmichael had never sought out his thoughts before. Perhaps, thought Bethancourt, the chief inspector believed this shooting had to do with Gibbons’s private life rather than his professional one, although Bethancourt had difficulty believing this could be true.

  But it gave him something else to think about on the long drive north. Heretofore, his only thought had been to pray for his friend’s life; he had given no thought at all as to why or how he had been shot. He mulled this over now as he lit yet another cigarette and let the car gather speed.

  Hollings had at last managed to roust Constable Jacob Clarkson out of his no doubt well-deserved bed. Constable Clarkson was the local man in Lambeth who had been on duty that evening, and who, on hearing that a fellow officer had been shot, professed himself only too happy to return to the station to speak to Chief Inspector Carmichael about it. Clarkson was the salt of the earth, an experienced man who knew his patch like the back of his hand. He was also, however, one of those people who is not much good when awakened in the middle of the night, and although he did not actually fall asleep on the ride to the station, Hollings still thought it prudent to stop and procure the man a coffee before they arrived and had to face the chief inspector. Hollings had worked with Carmichael several times in the past and had generally found him to be an even-tempered man, but he could clearly see that was not the case tonight. Not that Hollings could blame him, but on the other hand, he didn’t see why Constable Clarkson should suffer for it.