Light dawned.

'My God! I get it now!' said Sowden triumphantly.

'Get what, Doctor?'

'Why all the fuss and keep it quiet! It's a nice little cover-up.'

'Cover-up?' echoed Dalziel softly. 'Of what? By who?'

'Of drunken driving causing death,' said Sowden challengingly. 'And by the police of the police.'

It was a dramatic little confrontation beginning to attract some distant notice from nurses and other personnel.

The cigar-smoking man intervened.

'No one's asked me who I am.'

'All right. Let's have your name and rank too,' said Sowden.

'No rank. Plain Mr Charlesworth. Arnold Charlesworth,' said the man. 'I'm not a policeman. I'm a bookmaker. And I'm more than happy to be breathalysed. Again.'

Sowden ignored the last word and said, 'Why should anyone want to breathalyse you, Mr Charlesworth?'

'It's the law, Doctor,' said Charlesworth in a friendly tone. 'You see, it was me that was driving the car that killed that poor sod back there. The Superintendent here was just my passenger. And my breath test was negative.'

He puffed a wreath of cigar smoke about Sowden's head.

'So stuff that in your stethoscope and diagnose it,' he said.

Chapter 4

'Either this wallpaper goes or I do.'

Mrs Tracey Spillings was in her forties, all the way down. She had a boldly handsome, no-nonsense kind of face, but her brusque manner did not mean she was entirely bereft of empathy, for, seeing the anguish on Pascoe's face (Pascoe's because it took more than mere noise to limn any detectable emotion on Wield's features), she gestured towards what looked like an empty armchair and said, or rather shouted, 'She means no disrespect, it's her only pleasure, switch it off and God knows what she'd be up to, ain't that right, Mam?'