Frank Lyle slept sitting up, the sleeping position of the dying man in a hospital bed, a transparent oxygen mask over his nose and mouth, his face dark with stubble. I had only ever seen him with his face clean-shaven, I realised. But everything was changed in here.
There was a plastic sheet surrounding his bed like an oversized shower curtain, separating him from the other men in the ward. Some of them slept deeply, the bottomless sleep of opiates, while some twisted and moaned in the night, somewhere between sleep and waking.
The old cop stirred, writhing with a sudden spasm of pain, and then he was staring at me, as if unsure whether I was only in his imagination.
‘Christ Almighty,’ he said, peering closer at the raw scuff mark high on one cheekbone. ‘You look worse than me.’
We both smiled at that.
‘And when someone in a cancer ward tells you that you look rough …’ he said. Then he winced with a sudden stab of pain.
‘Frank,’ I said. ‘We know who took Jessica.’
He waited, and I could hear his laboured breathing.
‘Two of Flowers’ men,’ I said. ‘Ruben Shavers and Derek Bumpus. We assume they were freelancing for a third party.’
‘Are they in custody?’
‘Not yet. They ran. But we’ll find them.’
He thought about it, his eyes shining with helpless tears in the twilight of the hospital ward. Then he shook his head.
‘So – what? They were bought by some business rival?’ he said. ‘Or an old face from long ago who has waited a lifetime for payback?’
‘Looks like it,’ I said.
He held back the tears but he could not stop his voice from cracking with emotion.
‘There are only two real possibilities,’ he said, as if we were working this case together. And I guess that in a way we were. ‘They took her and killed her immediately. Or they took her …’
He waited for the breath to come, and when it finally came there was still not quite enough of it.
‘And then they raped her,’ he said. ‘And then they killed her. Anything else you can think of?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But if we don’t have a body then she could still be alive. Somewhere, somehow.’
I resisted the urge to touch his arm.
He was not the kind of man who had much use for a reassuring pat.
‘We’ll keep looking,’ I said. ‘For Bumpus and Shavers. For Jessica.’
Look in the graveyard, Big Del had boasted, just before he kicked me in the head.
Was Jessica Lyle really buried in a graveyard? But what graveyard? And how the hell was I ever going to find it?
‘My only child,’ Lyle said.
Was his mind wandering? Perhaps it was the painkillers. The medication would be heavy duty by now.
‘But you have a son,’ I gently reminded him. ‘You have Tommy, don’t you?’
He laughed bitterly, remembering.
‘Oh yes. My son.’ His eyes flashed with irritation in the twilight of the hospital ward. ‘I meant – my only daughter. That’s what I meant.’
His back arched with a sudden slash of excruciating pain.
There was a scarred metal box on his bed for calling for help.
‘Frank,’ I said. ‘Do you need some more morphine?’
But he shook his head, his face still twisted by the pain.
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘I’m rationing the hard stuff. Or it will only be much worse later.’ He stared at me, panting for breath like an overheated dog on a summer’s day. ‘You’ve been in a place like this before, haven’t you?’
I nodded. ‘My parents,’ I said. ‘Both of them. And my grandmother. My nan.’
I didn’t like to say the word. Even now, half a lifetime on from losing my family, I hesitated to name the thing that had killed them.
So Frank Lyle said it for me.
‘Cancer,’ he said. ‘Some of the men in here, some of them are younger than you, I bet. And somewhere else – in some other hospital – there are children with cancer. So what do I have to moan about? I tell myself that I have had a life. Some of them in this ward, like him in the next bed, their life hasn’t even started. I try to count my blessings. But it is the hardest thing in the world, trying to understand the good luck you have had. What happened with your folks?’
‘They died within twelve months of each other when I was a kid,’ I said. ‘Lung cancer. Smoking-related, although they had both stopped for years. Same thing with my nan. She looked after me when my mum and dad were gone. I reckon there comes a point where it’s not worth giving up. My old man didn’t tell anyone he was dying, like it had slipped his mind.’
‘Maybe he was trying to protect you and your mother,’ he said, harder now, a touch of the tough old cop returning. ‘That ever occur to you?’
‘Later,’ I said. ‘That’s what I thought maybe happened a lot later. And he was like you. A hard man.’
Frank Lyle snorted in his hospital bed.
‘Maybe he just wanted to deal with it alone,’ he said. ‘But I think, more than anything, your father, he just couldn’t find the words. I don’t know how you find those words to tell people you love you’re not going to be around. That’s what is hard.’
‘It was all different with my mum,’ I said, ‘because we knew from the start. But in some ways, it was just the same, at the end.’
‘That must have been tough,’ he said, softening. ‘Losing them so close together.’
‘You ever meet people who lost both of their parents in the same car crash?’
‘A few,’ he said, then thinking about it. ‘A lot.’
‘Me too. Because married couples travel in cars together. They do it all the time. And so – some of them – they die together. It was a bit like that with my parents. I was like one of those kids who lose their folks in a car crash. You are living one kind of life and then suddenly you are living another kind of life.’
I watched him stop thinking, overwhelmed by the pain now, the pain of the tumour that was growing inside him and killing him.
I indicated the metal box. ‘Morphine,’ I said. ‘It will help you sleep.’
‘I don’t care for the stuff,’ he said, as if he was talking about Marmite. ‘It puts a fog in my head. It turns you into somebody you’re not.’
‘It will take the edge off the pain,’ I said, although I knew he was right about the morphine fog. ‘Until you get a bit better.’
‘They don’t put you in here to get a bit better,’ he said. ‘They put you in here to die.’
But the agony was all-consuming and he reached for the metal box on his bed and called for a nurse. I stood up when she whipped back the curtains and began to administer to him, as jovial as a nursery school teacher.
I got up to go.
‘What happened to you?’ he said. ‘After your parents were gone?’
‘I was lucky,’ I said. ‘Because I had my grandmother. You only really need one person who loves you.’
We were silent.
‘Like my grandson,’ he said. ‘Like Michael.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Like Michael. He’s lucky too.’
Whitestone was standing outside the main doors of the hospital.
A skeletal patient in a dressing gown sucked hungrily on a cigarette with one hand and steadied his oxygen tank with the other. Whitestone sipped from a vending machine cup of coffee that was too boiling hot to drink and she did not really want. But she sipped it anyway.
‘How’s the security guard doing?’ I said. ‘How’s Modric?’
‘Modric will live, I reckon,’ she said, not making it sound like that was necessarily a good thing. ‘He’s in a medically induced coma. They’re trying to protect his brain. He has a cerebral haemorrhage from where his head hit the car or the deck. Tubes coming out of every bit of him. I saw his wife outside the ICU. They’ve got two little kids. She can’t stop crying.’
I looked back at the hospital.
‘Maybe I should talk to his wife,’ I said. ‘Tell her how well he did.’
‘She knows,’ Whitestone said flatly. ‘And with that and two quid, she can buy a cup of coffee.’ She nodded at me. ‘Tell me what happened again,’ she said.
She had done the hot debriefing while they were patching me up in Accident and Emergency, but they always liked you to keep telling the story. Just in case it was different.
‘I saw Ruben Shavers in the Pergola and as I was arresting him I was struck from behind by Derek Bumpus,’ I said. ‘And as Bumpus was attempting to strangle me, they argued and Shavers said to him, Do you want to top another one?’
‘Another one after killing Jessica Lyle.’
‘And maybe also Lawrence, the fiancé that got knocked off his bike. Pat, I am really struggling to believe that was just another accident statistic.’
‘Shavers and Bumpus have worked for Flowers for years. They could have bodies buried all over this town. What else?’
She watched me hesitate and knew that there was something I had censored in the hot debriefing. But I told her now.
‘Bumpus talked about Scout,’ I said.
‘How does he know about Scout?’
‘He saw her the first time Flowers came to see me after Jessica was taken. And the first thing he said to me was – How old is your kid? And he talked more when he had his hand around my throat. He said he was going to pay her a visit. He said he knows where we live.’
Her face was impassive in the glow of the vending machine.
‘He asked me about Scout’s bedroom, Pat.’
‘He’s taunting you. He’s getting under your skin.’
‘Yes, all that,’ I said. ‘But I think he means it, too. I think he means every word. There are men like that in the world. We have busted enough of them. Men who want to do things to children. And Derek Bumpus is one of them. And he has this thing, Pat, this obsession with Scout.’
She was silent. And then she nodded.
‘Then what happened?’
‘Bumpus wanted to kill me but the sirens were coming and he ran out of time. But he could not stop himself from taunting me. Wanting to show me – I don’t know – that he thought he had somehow won. Look for her in the graveyard, he told me. And then they fled.’
Whitestone thought about it. She sipped at the scalding brown liquid pretending to be coffee and then, with a grimace of disgust, poured it into the vending machine’s little silver drain.
‘How many graveyards are there in this city?’ she said.
‘We can’t dig up all of them.’
‘Then it’s a false lead. He wants us chasing our tails instead of him.’
I wasn’t convinced.
‘But if you want to bury a body that will never be found,’ I said, ‘then where better than a graveyard?’