Peter Diamond - 09 - The Secret Hangman Page 10

  ‘That would be great. It’s run like a library, but they lose a fair number. It’s properly managed, though, from a depot on some trading estate. Now what about you?’ she said. ‘Are you happy in your work?’

  ‘Me, I’m stuck in a rut.’

  ‘But you like being in the police, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s what I do. I try and make a fist of it. Yours is the ideal job, turning your hobby into a thriving business.’

  She looked pleased. ‘Want to see where it happens?’

  ‘I’d love to.’

  She led him across the hall and up a wide staircase. The wall to their right was lined with photos of Edwardian beauties in fine clothes, but he was watching the swing of Paloma’s hips as she ascended. Maybe she took lessons from her son, because she moved well and had a good figure.

  At the top was a room that must have been two large bedrooms knocked into one and they were lined with shelves. Books, filing boxes and bound magazines filled the space from floor to ceiling with an impression that everything had its place. Many were old, yet there was no smell, no sign of dust. At one end facing a window was a huge antique desk, its surface clear.

  ‘That’s what I use when I’m opening books, looking for items,’ she said. ‘The office bit is through here.’ She opened a door between the shelves and showed him a room set up with computer, printer and scanner, photocopier, filing cabinets and phone.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked, looking at a square screen with some kind of winding gear at its base.

  ‘My microfilm viewer. I have a run of the Illustrated London News up to 1940 and various journals too big to store next door. About a thousand reels.’

  ‘I’m reeling, too.’

  ‘There’s another room with scrapbooks, but I’m not taking you in there. I’m ashamed of it. They come in all sizes and they’re the devil to keep tidy.’

  ‘You obviously like order,’ he said thinking of the tip that was his own work space at home.

  ‘Without it, I’d disappear under a million newspaper cuttings.’

  ‘So this is where you tracked down the Müller cut-down. It didn’t take you long.’

  ‘It was in one of my fashion encyclopedias. It’s funny. Top hats were supposed to be the mark of a well-dressed man, yet they have quite a sinister reputation.’

  ‘As worn by undertakers?’

  ‘True, but I’m talking about what happened to the people who made them. They treated the felt with salts of mercury, so they were breathing in poisonous fumes. They’d get the shakes and twitch. That’s how the phrase ‘mad as a hatter’ is supposed to have originated.’

  ‘I thought that was Alice in Wonderland.’

  ‘No it goes back a good thirty years before Lewis Carroll.’

  ‘I’ve learned something new, then.’

  ‘Shall we go downstairs? I’ve got a quiche warming up. I thought it might go nicely with the beer.’

  The living quarters were on a scale he’d not often seen. The kitchen was like a Zanussi showroom, big enough for a double-door fridge to slot in among fitted units and not be noticed until Paloma took out a bowl of salad. Two trays were ready on the work surface in the centre.

  ‘As it’s a nice evening I thought we’d eat on the terrace.’

  ‘Seems a good idea,’ he said, as if he was well used to eating on terraces.

  ‘As I warned you in Strada the other night, I don’t have much time for cooking.’

  ‘Heating up the quiche is more than I do,’ he said.

  ‘You warm up those baked beans you told me about, don’t you?’

  ‘The beans, yes,’

  ‘So don’t undersell yourself, Peter Diamond. I have no doubt you have talents you keep well hidden.’

  They took the trays through a sitting room bigger than some hotel foyers and set them outside on a wrought-iron table under a green and white striped canopy. The garden, all trimmed lawns and well-stocked borders, stretched away to a grove of beech trees. No other house was in sight.

  She took champagne from an icebox and asked him to open it.

  ‘Funny kind of beer.’

  ‘You don’t have to drink it.’ She produced a can of Miller Lite from the same box.

  ‘I can’t let a lady drink champagne alone.’ He popped the cork and poured two glasses and handed her one. He lifted his own. ‘To my gracious hostess.’

  She said, ‘You have a nice way with a woman.’

  He laughed. ‘Then I must have learned something in more than fifty years.’

  ‘Did you go to a co-ed school?’

  ‘Actually, no. I grew up with a sister. That makes a difference. And I was married twelve years. Steph took me on and I won’t say she turned the frog into Prince Charming, but I’m not the yob I once was. What else? My boss is a woman of a totally different sort. I treat her as a challenge. And the best detective I ever had in my team was called Julie.’

  ‘No stranger to the fair sex, then. Must be useful in your work.’

  ‘You mean understanding the criminal mind?’

  She smiled. ‘Not all women are baddies, are they?’

  ‘No, but I have to be on my guard.’

  ‘Against feminine wiles?’

  ‘I try not to get sidetracked.’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re speaking of your work in the police?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And when you’ve left the job behind, as you put it to Jerry, are you just as cautious?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be here if I was.’

  ‘That’s true.’ She lifted her glass again. ‘Here’s to leaving the job behind.’

  ‘As often as possible.’ He lifted his and touched hers. When they’d drunk some he topped up her glass.

  ‘Give yourself some.’

  He smiled. ‘What’s left is yours. I brought the car with me.’

  ‘And it wouldn’t do for a policeman to get over the limit. So you don’t actually leave the job behind.’

  ‘Anyone in charge of a car should watch his intake.’

  ‘Now you’re talking like a policeman. No, that’s unfair.’ She gave a light slap to the back of her hand. ‘I’d do precisely the same, except if I’m going for a few drinks with someone I travel by taxi.’

  After they’d finished the quiche, she brought a selection of sorbets. ‘You mentioned your wife again,’ she said when she’d served them, ‘but you haven’t said much about her.’

  ‘Steph died three years ago,’ he said without elaborating.

  ‘And you told me you have no children? By choice?’

  ‘She miscarried several times.’

  She looked at him for a moment in silence. ‘That must have been dreadful for you both.’

  ‘More so for Steph,’ he said, remembering, and he started to speak more freely. ‘Each time she went for four or five months and then at one routine appointment the medical professionals listened for the heartbeat or did a scan and the heart wasn’t beating.’

  This time she didn’t speak at all. Her hand went to her mouth.

  He hadn’t talked of these painful memories with anyone before. Here in this peaceful garden with this calm, interested woman, it was all right. It was more than that. It was a help to him. ‘They gave her a tablet to induce labour and sent her home to wait. That’s the worst time, the two days before we went back to hospital and our dead baby was born.’

  ‘Were they kind to her?’

  ‘Immensely. And after the delivery they make sure you’re kept busy with all the arrangements, the form-filling about the postmortem and funeral. Good psychology, I suppose.’

  ‘But the grief catches up with you?’

  ‘Mm.’ He exhaled quite sharply. ‘Sorry, I don’t know how I got started on this.’

  ‘It was me,’ she said. ‘I asked.’ She looked across the lawn without focusing on anything. ‘My experiences couldn’t be more different. Jerry was born precisely nine months after I married Gordon, the man I told you about, who dumped me
later. I was a failure as a mother. Some women have this powerful maternal instinct. I’d hoped when I had the baby that the mothering, nurturing thing would magically take me over, but it didn’t. I was uncomfortable even holding the child. I didn’t want another.’ She sighed.

  Blackbirds in the garden were outdoing each other in joyous song that was a counterpoint to the confidences being exchanged.

  Paloma went on, ‘But then we slipped up, as they say. I opted for a termination. When you hear something like that – after your experiences – it must make you angry.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We all have to cope with what life throws at us.’

  She turned to face him and her blue eyes held his for a moment. ‘In the choice versus life debate, I’d have thought you’d be pro-life.’

  He shrugged. ‘In my job you see so much that’s gone wrong in families, unwanted, abused kids, that you can’t take such a firm line. I can think of situations when my values tell me abortion is morally right. But as a routine procedure, I’m not so comfortable with it.’

  ‘I can understand why.’

  Later, when the sun and the champagne had almost sunk from view, he asked how she managed the house and garden and she said she had a treasure called Rita who was in every morning and Carl the gardener came in twice a week. Diamond praised the state of the lawns and said he thought of his own as a wild flower meadow. She took him seriously and asked if he was an environmentalist and he laughed and said he was sorry to disillusion her, but no. He’d have a show garden himself, but he lacked one vital element. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

  ‘Carl the gardener.’

  She smiled. ‘Before it gets properly dark I want to show you the secret garden. Do you know about night-scented stocks? It’s full of them. Gorgeous. Come on, Pete.’ She took him by the hand. It was a while since anyone had called him Pete or held his hand. ‘Look, the fairy lights are coming on,’ she said. ‘They show us the way.’

  She didn’t let go of his hand as she led him across the lawn towards the solar-powered lamps marking the path round one of the borders. The clouds were inky-black tinged with the last suggestions of red and this wasn’t the best light for looking at a secret garden, but he sensed this wasn’t the real object. Paloma had finished the champagne without help from him and was happy, if not merry, if not plastered. Soon it would be make-up-your-mind time. He started mentally rehearsing what to say.

  As it turned out, the secret garden had a door set into a brick wall, and the door was locked, so Diamond didn’t get to see inside. What followed was down to his heightened anticipation and her inebriation and would embarrass them both for days to come.

  Paloma rattled the door and said, ‘Oh, fuck.’

  Diamond made the little speech he’d been struggling to put into words: ‘I really like you, Paloma. It’s just a bit sudden for me.’

  She said, ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  He said, ‘Nor me.’

  Appalled with himself, not knowing how to follow that, and with his dignity in free fall, he leaned towards her and kissed her, but the kiss was clumsy and desperate and didn’t improve matters one bit.

  In under ten minutes he was driving home, going over what he’d said and should have said, like a schoolkid who has messed up his first date.

  14

  Over the next week he plunged himself into his work. He and Halliwell tried to put together enough evidence to show beyond doubt that Danny Geaves had murdered Delia and then hanged himself. The one indisputable fact – that both the principals in the case were dead – made it an unappealing exercise, but it had to be gone through. The forensic reports had come in, and added little to what was already known. Nothing so helpful as a DNA sample had been found to link Geaves to the crime scene in the park.

  ‘If we knew where he spent the last week of his life we might find something,’ Diamond said.

  ‘A suicide note that tells all?’ Halliwell said. ‘You’re an optimist, guv.’

  ‘I was thinking of some trace of Delia. She was away from home on the Tuesday night and found dead on Thursday. If we could show she spent those two nights with Geaves, we’d be home and dry.’

  ‘Are you thinking they got together? Deep down, guv, I believe you’re a romantic.’

  His thoughts strayed back to the secret garden. ‘Some chance.’

  ‘I thought they’d parted for good.’

  ‘People change. She wasn’t getting much attention from Ashley Corcoran. Maybe she heard from Danny and decided to see if there was still a spark in their relationship.’ He sketched the scenario. ‘She agrees to meet Danny thinking it might work out, but the magic isn’t there. On their second evening together she tells him she isn’t going back with him. He loses it and strangles her.’

  ‘I can believe that.’

  ‘Then there’s the unromantic theory,’ Diamond said. ‘He was planning to kill her from the start. Old wounds. He’d never forgiven her for leaving him the first time.’

  ‘What – and he has sex with her before he strangles her? That’s sick.’

  ‘He was sick. He was suicidal.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Halliwell said from the depth of his experience, ‘it’s no bad thing to admit you’re not one hundred per cent sure.’

  Diamond wasn’t having such defeatist talk. ‘Sometimes you have to make more of an effort. There’s going to be an inquest and the coroner will expect more than guesswork. We need to find Danny’s bolt hole. We appealed for help in tracking Delia’s movements. What have we done about Danny? Asked around in Freshford. That’s not enough. What if he was seen in Trowbridge, or Westbury, or Bath, even?’

  ‘Are you thinking of going on TV again?’

  He shook his head. ‘We wouldn’t get air-time. Everyone else thinks the case is done and dusted.’

  ‘Especially the boss.’

  ‘Especially her, yes. You and I are supposed to paper over the cracks and tiptoe away.’

  Halliwell gave him a speculative look. ‘And we’re not happy with that . . . are we?’

  ‘You know me, Keith. I have to find out what really happened, even if it turns out exactly as Georgina thinks.’

  ‘So what’s the next step?’

  ‘We make an appeal in the local papers: did anyone see Danny Geaves in the week leading up to his death?’

  ‘Smart move. Have we got a picture? I mean of when he was alive?’

  ‘I was given one by Amanda. We issue a press release saying we’re keen to trace his movements in the week before his death.’

  ‘I’ll see to it.’

  ‘No. We have a tame journalist in our ranks.’

  ‘Ingeborg?’

  ‘She knows how to make the front page.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing her on page three,’ Halliwell said.

  ‘I’d keep that to myself if I were you.’

  The Bath Chronicle ran the piece next day on an inside page. The Danny Geaves story couldn’t compete with a sighting of Jane Austen’s ghost promenading along the Gravel Walk. But there was still a result. Two Chronicle readers called the police, positive they had spotted Danny in the village of Bathford in the days before his death.

  The first was a woman who had seen a man of Danny’s description loitering, as she put it, near the school. She’d taken note of him because she was a parent and felt it was up to parents to be vigilant. The man hadn’t approached any children or she would have reported him, but he looked in need of a shave (a sure sign of decadence in Bathford), and was ‘unkempt’, apparently unlike any of the parents meeting their children. Her description of the man’s clothes matched those found on the body at the viaduct.

  The second sighting was more promising still. Two days running a postman had noticed someone looking like Danny walking along Farleigh Rise, the road to Monkton Farleigh. Postmen are usually reliable witnesses. They know the locals. Anyone else stands out. This postman described the man as looking ‘up to no good’. When the post van stopped acros
s the road the stranger had gone behind some bushes as if trying to avoid being spoken to. There was nothing there except scrub and trees, the postman said. It looked suspicious, but people sometimes go behind bushes for calls of nature, so he hadn’t followed. He’d decided simply to take note. When he’d seen the picture in the Chronicle he’d recognised the man for certain.

  Armed with a stack of copies of the picture of Danny Geaves, Diamond drove out with Halliwell and a minibus loaded with uniformed officers. Bathford is built on a rise bounded by the confluence of Box Brook and the Avon to the north and Bathford Hill to the south. They parked above the village at the top end of Farleigh Rise and began a search on both sides for evidence of someone living rough. Flattened vegetation and the remains of a bonfire would be a good indicator.

  Inside the first half-hour one of the search party found the ashes of a bonfire close to a hut.

  ‘We may have got lucky,’ Diamond said.

  ‘I don’t think so, guv,’ Halliwell said when they reached the place. ‘The burnt area is too big. This is a forester’s fire, used to burn unwanted timber.’

  ‘So how long were you in the boy scouts?’

  ‘There’d be signs of food in the embers.’ Untroubled by the sarcasm, Halliwell spread the ashes with his foot. Then he tested the padlock on the door of the hut. ‘It hasn’t been tampered with.’ He looked through the window at the side. ‘I can see a crosscut saw.’

  ‘All right. You made your point.’

  The searchers fanned out again and moved on. After another hour Diamond left the party and returned to the minibus. He asked the driver if the tea was brewing.

  ‘What tea, sir?’

  ‘Are you telling me you don’t carry an urn? I’ve got sixteen men and women gasping for a cuppa.’

  ‘It wasn’t mentioned, sir. I’m the driver, not—’

  Diamond held up a menacing finger. ‘What are you about to say? You’re not the teaboy? I’m sorry, sunshine, but I just promoted you. You’d better motor back to Bath and get something organised. I wouldn’t say no to some cheese and pickle sandwiches while you’re at it.’