Another One Goes Tonight Page 10

  Bluebeard:

  Are you really a lady? I wouldn’t want to fall out with you.

  Lady Macbeth:

  Haha.

  Bluebeard:

  You’re on to something, pushing them over the side. Nothing confuses the police and forensic people better than water. They find a floater, as they call them, and unless there are obvious injury marks it’s hard to be certain about the cause of death. Drowning is difficult to prove at the best of times and just about impossible when the victim has been dead in the water some time.

  Lady Macbeth:

  I thought it was simple to tell from the water filling up the lungs.

  Bluebeard was sounding increasingly like a pathologist.

  Not necessarily. Some people die from cardiac arrest, basically from the shock of submersion through cold water rushing into the mouth and nose. The water might not even get into the lungs. The nervous reflex triggers a heart attack. This happens quite commonly with drunks who fall in.

  Lady Macbeth:

  I don’t call that drowning.

  Bluebeard:

  It’s still a body found in water. I think it’s known as dry drowning. A lot of people die in their own baths. Electrocution is a possibility from using a hair dryer or even an electric fire. Most bathrooms don’t have power points but there’s always some idiot who decides to use an extension lead. You could murder someone by dropping the electrical device in the water.

  Lady Macbeth:

  I saw that in a TV play.

  Bluebeard:

  Another water death that comes to mind is a famous case called the Brides in the Bath that happened about a hundred years ago but could still work. This man would marry and take out life insurance on his bride. While she was taking a bath he’d come in and grab her legs, forcing her to slide under the water and die. Then he’d call the doctor and say she must have had a heart attack. It worked so well that he got over-confident and did it too many times. Someone read in the paper about it and he was caught. If he hadn’t been so greedy he would have got away with one or two.

  Lady Macbeth:

  Nasty. You’ve really studied this.

  Bluebeard:

  In fact there are so many complicating factors in drowning that the experts use what they call a diagnosis of exclusion. If the body is found in water and there’s no other reason for the death, it’s assumed to be drowning. As for deciding if a drowning is accidental or deliberate, your average pathologist is at a loss. Useful information for a would-be killer.

  Lady Macbeth:

  Not for me. It’s all too proactive. I’d prefer some method that doesn’t require so much effort on my part.

  Bluebeard summed up and ended the discussion:

  Whatever. Like I said, it just goes to show there must be hundreds of murderers we could easily rub shoulders with. Next time you’re in a queue at the supermarket take a look at who’s in front of you or more important behind you. I always do.

  Diamond flipped through the sheets, his brain buzzing with this discovery. He knew weird things were debated on the Internet but finding them here, printed out as if they needed to be kept and read again, was disturbing.

  Another thread was debating ingenious methods used in fiction:

  One of the best was in a short story by Roald Dahl called Lamb to the Slaughter but you have to read it yourself. I don’t do spoilers. —Calamity Jane

  Everyone has heard of that one. What about a colourless, odourless poison like ricin? That’s getting into spy stories quite often since it was shown to have been used by some secret service agent. —Jonesy

  A sharpened icicle driven into the heart and after it melts. No evidence, see? —Calamity Jane

  Cool. —Clare de Lune

  One of the cleverest ideas was in Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train. I guess most people have read it or seen the movie. She sets up a situation where the killer has no obvious connection with the victim. I won’t spoil it by saying any more. —Highsmith fan

  My number one film. —Tom Ripley

  Injecting an air bubble into the bloodstream. Writers have been thinking up this stuff for more than a century. —Crime Reader

  The writer you mean (let’s spare her blushes) injected an artery with a hypodermic instead of a vein, but it was still neat, I thought. Like I said I favour poison. There’s so much of it about, in the garden, the garage, the medicine cabinet. A good method I once read about was adding the poison to a tube of toothpaste. A drop of pure nicotine killed the victim. You only have to do some background reading to make sure it works quickly and without anyone noticing. —Jonesy

  Are you favouring poison or recommending it? This is too creepy for me. —Normal Norm

  Diamond folded the papers and pocketed them. Chilling. He’d seen enough to cause him to stand up and look again at that row of plastic pots.

  Sinister or innocent?

  Each was about nine inches high, in the shape of a classic Grecian urn with a neck and topped with a lid. They could be used for any kind of storage. And since everything in this workshop had a reason for being here, why not these?

  Better check.

  He moved the chair across the room, stepped up and took a closer look, and he now saw that the train designs were stickers someone had cut out and attached to the plastic.

  But there was something more. Something disturbing. Printed labels had been fixed to the lids of all three urns.

  Each had a man’s name, a lifespan in years and a location.

  The first was Edmund Seaton 1949–2013 Gloucester Castle.

  A rapid rethink was necessary. He’d been right the first time. These, after all, had to be cremation urns.

  Diamond reached for Edmund Seaton’s pot and felt its weight, mainly to judge whether the ashes were still inside. It lifted so easily that he knew at once that they were not. Just to be certain, he checked Roger Matthew Carnforth 1943–2014 Oxburgh Hall. Roger’s remains were elsewhere.

  And so were the ashes of Jeremy Marshall-Tomkin 1937–2014 Forthampton Grange.

  Reassuring, really. It would have been macabre to have stored three sets of human ashes in a workshop, however cheerfully the urns were decorated.

  He was about to get down when, as an afterthought, he felt for the lid of the first urn and lifted it off.

  The pot wasn’t empty after all.

  Something was inside, but not ashes. A piece of fine, cream-coloured silk was coiled to fit into the space. He lifted it out and stepped down from the chair. The lightweight silk unfurled into a finely pleated, exquisitely tailored, full-length gown. In spite of the way the garment had been stored, there was scarcely a crease to be seen.

  At this point, logic abandoned him.

  What in the name of sanity was a woman’s evening dress doing in a cremation pot in an engineer’s workshop?

  And whose dress was it? Some unknown woman’s? The late Edward Seaton’s? Or Ivor Pellegrini’s?

  Having started this, he had to go on. He climbed on the chair again and checked the other urns. Each contained a coiled silk dress. The one in Roger Matthew Carnforth’s urn was pink, Jeremy Marshall-Tomkin’s blue. At a loss for an explanation, he replaced all the lids and stepped down, his brain reeling from the discovery.

  He hadn’t found the answer to Pellegrini’s secret life. He’d found a question, a much bigger question.

  “Wow—it’s stunning,” Ingeborg said, holding the creamy silk dress at arm’s length. “Gorgeous. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  “I have,” Diamond said. “I’ve seen two more.”

  He’d left everything else in place in the workshop and returned the keys to the sister at the RUH with the good news that Hornby had been rescued in time and was now in a good home and on a special diet.

  His solo investigation was already
compromised. He’d needed a woman’s help. And he couldn’t get Ingeborg’s opinion without upsetting Halliwell. So they were both with him in the privacy of his office.

  For the moment, he was getting little else from Ingeborg than “oohs” and “ahs.” Keith Halliwell was lost for words as well, but for a different reason, which anyone might take to be that dresses weren’t his thing at all.

  “I’ve had longer to think about it than you two,” Diamond said, “and I’m still stumped.”

  “You want our opinion?” Halliwell said finally.

  Diamond heard the reserve in the tone. “That’s why I called you in.”

  “I thought Inge and I had been returned to normal duties.”

  So that was it: hurt feelings.

  “The Professional Standards job is done. Finito. This is over and above the call of duty. I’m sounding you out, okay?”

  “No,” Halliwell said. “It’s not okay. I’m pissed off, if you want to know the truth. Either you want us on board or you don’t. Which is it?”

  He could feel the degree of hurt. He’d known Halliwell for most of their working lives and now he’d treated him like a rookie. He’d treated both colleagues shabbily.

  “Can we rerun this? I’m sorry if it seemed I was excluding you. That wasn’t the intention.”

  “You couldn’t have made it more clear,” Halliwell said. “‘You can go back to normal duties.’”

  He remembered saying the words. “I should have expressed it better. It’s not a one-man show. In fact, I’m in real difficulty with it. This guy Pellegrini has got under my skin since I gave him CPR. I want to take a step back, see him for what he is, good or bad, and there’s no chance I can do it without you, but it has to be extra to our other work.”

  “Okay,” Halliwell said, with slightly less pique in the voice. “What do we know about Mrs. Pellegrini? I’m assuming the gowns belonged to her.”

  “Trixie? I wouldn’t bet on it,” Diamond said. “The neighbour, Mrs. Roberts, gave a dull picture of her, always in a hat, flat shoes and twinsets.”

  Halliwell managed a grin. “If that’s all she wore, I wouldn’t call it dull.”

  “Oh come on.” He grinned back. The remark wasn’t all that witty but he appreciated it as a peace offering. “She was shy, wore no make-up, used a shopping trolley. None of it goes with glamorous silk dresses.”

  “Not exactly day wear, are they?” Halliwell was trying to draw Ingeborg into the debate but all her attention was wholly on the dress, smoothing her fingertips along the fine seams.

  “They were hidden,” Diamond said. “Rolled up and kept out of sight on a high shelf in the workshop where no one went except Pellegrini himself.”

  “Are you thinking he was a transvestite, guv?”

  He blinked at the suggestion. “Hadn’t crossed my mind. It’s not impossible. He liked dressing up.”

  Now Ingeborg spoke. “Oh, I hope not. This is made for someone with a figure. Were the others like this, pleated silk?”

  “I got the impression they were. One was pink, the other blue.”

  “If they weren’t his, and they weren’t his wife’s, they belonged to his dead friends,” Halliwell said. “It was a secret club for cross-dressers.”

  “Get away,” Ingeborg said. “These were old guys.”

  “Does that make a difference?”

  “It’s grotesque.”

  All this speculation wasn’t leading anywhere. “It may not be a bad idea to check the names and find if they really lived in those places,” Diamond said. “Gloucester Castle for a start. That was Edmund Seaton’s humble pad.”

  “Doesn’t exist,” Ingeborg said at once. “I know Gloucester and there was a castle at one time but it’s long since gone.”

  “I wonder if Edmund Seaton ever existed.”

  “Shall we see if he’s listed on the Internet? May I use your computer, guv?”

  “Be my guest.” He got up.

  She draped the dress over her chair-back and sat in front of Diamond’s computer. “What were Seaton’s dates?”

  He had a note of them. “1949 to 2013.”

  Before using his keyboard she made a point of flicking dust from it with a Kleenex and wiping the screen. Nothing was said.

  “Well, it’s not obvious,” she said after working the keys for some seconds.

  “Nothing doing?” Halliwell said.

  “What’s the local paper in Gloucester?” Diamond asked Ingeborg.

  “The Citizen.”

  “Is it online?”

  She checked. “Good call, guv.” But after a few minutes she said, “Nothing here about an Edmund Seaton.”

  “A funeral in 2013?”

  She shook her head. “I tried that first. We could be making a wrong assumption here. Gloucester Castle is no more but it could be the name of a pub and it wouldn’t have to be in Gloucester.”

  “Or a boat,” Halliwell said. “It wouldn’t be a bad name for a boat.”

  “Thanks for that,” she said with a twitch of the lips. “We’d never trace a boat.”

  “The others had fancy addresses, too,” Diamond said. “Oxburgh Hall—does that exist?”

  Ingeborg tried again, and this time she said, “Bingo—it’s a National Trust property in Norfolk.”

  “Good. Our man was Roger Matthew Carnforth, died 2014. Do these places have a live-in curator?”

  Ingeborg had already found the website. “What a stunning place.”

  They looked over her shoulder at a slideshow of a large building with features of a castle—a moat and battlemented tower and arched entrance—and the solid structure of a large country house.

  “Generations of a single family have lived there since it was built in the fifteenth century,” she read aloud from the screen.

  “The Carnforths?” Diamond said.

  “The Bedingfields.”

  “I’m starting to feel spooked.”

  Ingeborg wasn’t giving up. “Our man could have worked there as a guide. I could phone the place and see if they’ve heard of him.”

  Diamond nodded. “Do it.”

  “What shall I say it’s about?”

  “Part of an ongoing inquiry.”

  But no one at Oxburgh Hall had heard of Roger Matthew Carnforth. The National Trust employee was adamant that nobody of that name had been employed there in her time, which stretched back twenty-three years.

  “Another dead end,” Halliwell said.

  “What was the last man’s address?” Ingeborg asked.

  “Forthampton Grange,” Diamond said with resignation. “Tell me it’s a brand name for chocolate biscuits and I’ll trouble you no more. I’ve had enough of this game.”

  She Googled the name, sat back and gazed at the screen as if she’d lost control. “You’re not going to like this,” she said. “All I’m getting is websites connected to the Great Western Railway.”

  “Which was wound up seventy years ago when the railways were nationalised,” Halliwell said.

  But Diamond was galvanized. “Bring up one of the websites. What does it say?”

  “Something about a Grange class and some numbers: 4-6-0.”

  “We’ve cracked it, then.”

  “Have we?”

  “These aren’t the places where these guys lived. They’re steam trains.”

  The other two eyed him as if he’d finally flipped.

  “It’s all connected to Pellegrini’s obsession with the railway,” he went on. “Each locomotive was given a name and the names were grouped in classes. Gloucester Castle was one of the Castle class, Oxburgh Hall was one of the Halls and Forthampton was in the Grange class. We can check and I guarantee that’s what we’ll find.”

  “How do you know?” Ingeborg asked.

  “Must be my age.
When I was a kid I was given an electric train set and the engine was called Albert Hall.” He smiled at a long-buried memory that surfaced. “I grew up thinking it was a person’s name. Albert Hall, right? It was only when Pink Floyd held a gig there and got banned for firing a cannon and nailing the bass drum to the floor that I found out it was a concert hall.”

  “You liked Pink Floyd?” Ingeborg said, eyes wide.

  “Still does,” Halliwell said. “Haven’t you seen the CDs in his car?”

  “That’s immaterial,” Diamond said. “Check the trains and see if I’m right.”

  Ingeborg managed to contain herself and obey orders. Presently she said, “Gloucester Castle, yes, a 4073 class locomotive built in May, 1949.”

  “Good. Now Oxburgh Hall.”

  She located it almost at once. “The 4900 or Hall class, built 1943.”

  “And Forthampton Grange?”

  She didn’t keep them in suspense for long. “Found it. The Grange engines were a smaller-wheeled version of the Hall class. This one dates from 1937.”

  “The year Jeremy Marshall-Tomkin was born,” Diamond said. “Do you see? Each of them is linked to a locomotive built the year he was born. Seaton, 1949, Carnforth 1943 and Marshall-Tomkin 1937.” He snapped his fingers. “And I’ve just remembered. There was a bloody great GWR name-plate fixed to the workshop wall. County of Somerset. No need to look it up. It will date from Pellegrini’s year of birth.”

  “Neat,” Halliwell said. “Very neat. But where does it lead us?”

  Ingeborg said, “My guess is that we’re talking arrested development here, eternal schoolboys who like playing trains and belong to some sort of club. Sad but less harmful than holding up banks.”

  “And each of them chose a train as some kind of identity tie-in,” Halliwell said. “You could be right, Inge.”

  “She is,” Diamond said. “She must be.”