Murder Club - Mark Pearson [74]
‘Because if she dropped the ball on Bible Steve, that could come back to bite the station. Particularly her.’
‘He seemed all right to me.’
‘And have you studied for seven years, and then worked in the field for years more, to make that kind of qualified judgement?’ Kate asked, but not unkindly.
‘Maybe not.’ The sergeant smiled ruefully. ‘But I’ve done over twenty years dealing with drunks.’
‘The point is that Bible Steve, or whatever his name is, had a fall before he came in, didn’t he?’
‘He collapsed outside the restaurant. Not sure how.’
‘As I understand it, he was found in a cruciform position?’
‘Come again.’
Kate demonstrated. ‘His feet together, his hands outstretched like this.’
‘Yes, like that.’
‘Which suggests to me that he toppled over backwards, his arms outstretched for balance. Rather than crumpling in on himself, to land in a kind of foetal position.’
‘I guess so.’
‘Which means that he could have slapped his head hard on the pavement when he fell. He could have suffered some kind of subdural haematoma.’
‘Which means?’
‘That we shouldn’t have released him unless we were very sure he hadn’t.’
‘Laura Chilvers did ask if we could keep him in overnight.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of the cold, she said.’
‘If she was worried that Bible Steve had suffered a serious head injury then she should have called an ambulance.’
‘Which she didn’t.’
‘No.’
‘But yet she wanted you to keep him in, even though in your opinion he was fit to be released?’
‘Yes, but you know what it is like on a Friday night here, Kate, at the best of times. Friday night a week before Christmas, it was like the biblical Bethlehem.’
‘No room at the inn?’
‘Exactly. And she knows that. I’m surprised she even asked. She knows we would have taken Bible to the homeless shelter anyway.’
‘Not that he stayed there.’
‘No.’
‘What if we released him when we shouldn’t, and he really did go out and murder someone?’
‘If he has, then we’re missing a corpse.’
‘Maybe we should have kept him in?’
‘If if and ans, as my granny used to say,’ said the desk sergeant, ‘were pots and pans, we could set up a bloody department store.’
Kate chewed at her thumbnail. ‘I don’t know. Laura did seem distracted. She got that call, do you remember? Seemed very snappy after it. Not herself.’
‘Like I say, Kate. It was a very busy night.’
‘Too busy, it seems.’
‘It’s not going to get any quieter this side of the silly season,’ said Matthews.
‘Never does,’ said Kate.
‘Never does,’ agreed the sergeant.
‘I wonder who it was that called Laura,’ said Kate, not really intending to voice the thought to the large man behind the desk, but he answered it for her anyway.
‘I guess only Dr Chilvers can tell you that.’
53.
DELANEY SAT IN his car with the engine running, an unlit cigarette between his lips as he looked out of the window.
The heavy precipitation promised by forecasters and amateur pundits all day was yet to materialise. Delaney watched the glistening snowflakes crystallising like pieces of coral fusing together on the ground. An ice carpet built up of millions and millions of flakes, no one of them alike, each unique and yet coming together.
Delaney wished he could manage that with the various elements of the cases he was working on. Fit the disparate particles together and make some sense.
Patricia Hunt had lied to him. He knew that much. Or if she had not lied exactly, had not told him the entire truth. A sin of omission rather than commission, as the brothers and sisters back at Ballydehob would have told him. The kind of brothers and sisters who don’t tease you on your birthday or give you home-made Christmas presents. The kind of brothers and sisters who would put the fear of God in you and made sure it stayed there.
Delaney didn’t read the Holy Book much any more. But what he did read, and could read very well, was people. Not just the old body-language trick of people looking up and to the left if they remembered something when asked a question, or up and to the right if they were making