“When did the incident occur?”
“Four months ago. The night of February the twelfth, to be precise.”
“In Devon?”
Peel nodded.
“And the officer who wasn’t allowed to bring charges?”
“Detective Inspector Timothy Peel.”
“I assume it wasn’t a political protest.”
“An automobile accident. Her third, as it turned out. She wrapped her Aston Martin roadster around a tree about a mile from Wickham House.”
“I spent last evening reading everything I could find online about Alice Winter, and there was nothing about a serious road accident.”
“That’s because no record of the accident exists.”
“How is that possible?”
“I’m getting to that, Mr. Allon.”
The accident, Peel continued, occurred at approximately two fifteen in the morning, but it would be nearly an hour before another motorist happened upon the scene. Alice, semiconscious and disoriented, was taken by ambulance to the A&E ward at Devon and Exeter Hospital and treated for a concussion, a scalp laceration, and two fractured ribs. Peel had been working a late-night stakeout in Perceval Road—a major drug case involving four of Exeter’s finest—and headed over to the hospital to take charge of the inquiry. He arrived to find a dazed and bruised Alice Winter resting comfortably in a private room, accompanied by her husband and his barrister. She was in no condition to answer questions, so Peel posed them to her husband instead. They were polite in tone, nothing confrontational or accusatory. Namely he wanted to know what a wealthy socialitelike Alice Winter was doing behind the wheel of an automobile at two o’clock in the morning.
“And the answer?”
“She was on her way back to London, or so Edward Knight claimed.”
Peel then attempted to ascertain why that was the case. At which point Knight’s barrister declared that his client would be answering no further questions.
“Sounds to me as though the barrister and his client were hiding something.”
“Nothing gets by you, does it?”
“What could it have been?”
“Why does any woman leave her twelve-bedroom manor house in the middle of the night?”
“They must have been quarreling.”
“That was my distinct impression. The question is, what were they quarreling about?”
Peel decided not to press the matter—Knight, after all, had not been in the vehicle at the time of the accident—so he went to have a quiet word with the physician who had treated Alice, a courtly chap called Dr. Rajiv Singh.
“And what do you suppose the good doctor told me?”
“That Alice had been under the influence at the time of the accident.”
Peel nodded. “That was his suspicion.”
Over the strenuous objections of Edward Knight and his lawyer, a uniformed PC administered a field breathalyzer test at half past six that morning, some four hours after the accident. It indicated that Alice was slightly below the legal drink-drive limit of thirty-five micrograms of alcohol per one hundred micrograms of breath.
“Which meant she was probablyoverthe limit at the time of the accident,” said Gabriel.
“One would think,” agreed Peel. “But higher authority instructed me not to pursue the matter further.”
“What happened to the records?”
