Part 16 (1/2)

'Caroline,' I called out loudly.

'Shhh,' said the nurse. 'You'll wake everyone up.'

'I'm here,' said Caroline, coming and crouching down to my level.

'The brakes on my car failed,' I whispered.

'I know,' she said. 'A policeman told the doctors they thought it was the brakes failing that caused the accident.'

'It wasn't an accident,' I said.

'What do you mean?'

'I think someone tried to kill me.'

'You're really serious, aren't you?' Caroline said.

'Never more so,' I said.

I had told her all about my car not being locked at Cambridge station and about my concerns that the brakes or the steering might not have been all right on Tuesday night.

'But you don't know for sure that someone had tampered with the brakes,' she said. 'You said that they seemed OK when you drove home.'

'True,' I said. 'But there's no escaping the fact that they did fail on Wednesday morning.'

'It might have been a coincidence,' she said.

I looked at her and raised my eyebrows.

'OK, OK,' she said. 'But coincidences do happen, you know.' She held my hand. I liked that. 'So what are we going to do about it?'

'I wonder if the police have someone who would look at the brakes on my car to see if they have been interfered with?'

'Don't they have accident investigators?' Caroline asked. She yawned. 'Sorry.'

'You need to go to sleep,' I said.

'I'm fine,' she said, yawning again.

I wanted to ask her to get into the bed and sleep next to me, but I thought the nurse wouldn't like it.

'You can't stay here all night,' I said.

'Nowhere else to go.'

'Go to my cottage,' I said. 'The key must be somewhere.'

She looked through my things, which someone had thoughtfully placed in a white plastic bag in the bedside locker. There was no key.

'I remember now,' I said. 'It's on the same ring as the car keys.' Probably still with the car, I thought.

'I don't want to go to your cottage on my own anyway,' said Caroline. 'Especially not if someone really is trying to kill you. I'll stay here, thanks.'

In the end, she slept in the chair next to my bed. It was one of those chairs that reclined so that bedridden patients could be lifted into it to have a change of posture. Caroline reclined in it, covered herself with a blanket from the bed, and was asleep in seconds.

I looked at her for a while thinking that it had been a strange recipe for romance: first poison your intended, next irritate with fatuous telephone calls, then stir thoroughly at dinner before frightening badly with a life-threatening car crash, finally serve with a conspiracy theory of intended murder.

It seemed to have worked a treat.

They let me go home the following day. Caroline had convinced the doctors that I would be fine at home if she was looking after me. And who was I to object to that?

A black and yellow New Tax taxi delivered us to my cottage about one o'clock. I had called my occasional cleaner to arrange for her to meet us with her key so we could get in. Lunch presented us with another problem. I rarely had much food in the house other than stuff for breakfast since I usually ate lunch and dinner at the restaurant. Caroline briefly inspected my premises and then she searched the kitchen for food.

'I'm starving,' she said. 'At least they gave you some breakfast in the hospital, I've had nothing since yesterday morning.'

She found some sugar-coated cornflakes in the cupboard and some milk in the fridge so we sat at my tiny kitchen table and had bowls of cereal for lunch.

Carl had phoned the hospital first thing to find out how I was and, as I expected, he had given the appearance of being mildly disappointed to find that I was not only alive but my brains were unscrambled and functioning properly. The hospital operator had put him through to my bedside telephone.

'So, you're still with us, then?' he had said with a slightly frustrated tone.

'Yeah, sorry about that,' I'd said. 'How are things at the Hay Net?'

'Doing well without you,' he had said. 'As always,' he had added rather unnecessarily, I thought. Cheeky b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

For all his seemingly bad grace about my wellbeing, I couldn't really imagine that Carl would have had anything to do with a conspiracy to kill me. Surely it was just his warped sense of humour. Tiresome as they could be at times, I didn't think there was anything truly sinister behind his little irritating comments.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed that anyone would seriously want me dead. Perhaps the brake failure had been coincidence after all. Anyway, tampering with brakes didn't seem to me to be a particularly good way of trying to kill someone, not unless they were driving down a steep mountain road full of hairpin bends, and steep mountain roads were somewhat conspicuous by their absence in Newmarket.

After our cereal lunch, I lay on my sofa and called the restaurant, while Caroline explored upstairs.

'Had a relapse?' Carl asked hopefully when I said I wasn't coming in.

'No,' I said. 'I've been told by the doctors to take it easy for a few days. I'll see how I get on.'

'Don't hurry back,' said Carl in a dismissive manner.

'Look,' I said, 'what's eating you at the moment? Why are you being so d.a.m.n unpleasant?'

There was a longish pause at the other end.

'It's just my way,' he said. 'I'm sorry.' There was another pause. 'I will be delighted when you get back, I promise.'

'Now, don't go too far the other way,' I said with a laugh. 'I won't know if I'm coming or going.'

'Sorry,' he said again.

'Apology accepted,' I said. 'How was lunch?'

'So so,' he said. 'But we had a good one last night. About 80 per cent full.'