Diamond Dust Read online

  ‘Eleven-thirty.’

  He closed his eyes and was silent for a moment. ‘Who’s going to be there?’

  McGarvie steered the conversation away. ‘You said she had no enemies, so let’s talk about yours.’

  ‘Waste of time.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Come on. This has the Carpenters written all over it’ ‘In my shoes, you wouldn’t say that. You know the danger of going for the obvious. No disrespect, Peter, but you’ve roughed up more villains than just the Carpenters.’

  ‘Ancient history.’

  McGarvie drew a long breath to contain his patience. ‘Don’t you think you owe it to her to help me?’

  The tactic worked. Diamond dropped his opposition. ‘Villains with old scores to settle? Here, you mean? In Bath?’

  ‘Let’s start here, any road. I remember the case that made your name here, the body in Chew Valley Lake, but that wasn’t your first.’

  He nodded. ‘There were five before that, three domestic, the others drugs-related. Far as I know, all of the killers are banged up.’

  ‘The kid who murdered Mrs Jackman?’

  ‘Bore me no grudge.’

  ‘The con who escaped from Albany?’

  ‘Back inside.’

  McGarvie displayed a more than superficial knowledge of Diamond’s career as he went through the principal investigations of recent years. He must have studied the files overnight. You couldn’t fault the man’s thoroughness. But as Diamond had warned at the outset, nothing useful came out of it. The killers he’d put away had been mainly loners, not one of them connected with organised crime in the way the Carpenters were.

  ‘What about your private life?’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘People you know outside the job.’

  ‘You’re thinking I pick fights with the neighbours? I haven’t got the energy. I pay my bills on time – well, Steph does. Call at the pub for a quiet pint once in a while, and I mean quiet. They don’t know who I am. Come home, feed the cat, mow the lawn – the daily grind.’

  On cue, Raffles came around the door, sized up the visitors, decided DC James was the softer touch and began pressing his side against the young man’s shins. James tried to ignore it.

  ‘Forgive me – I have to ask this,’ McGarvie said. ‘Your marriage. Was it going well?’

  Diamond said with a slight break in his voice, ‘It was all right.’

  ‘No possibility that she-‘

  ‘None.’

  For a while the only sound was the cat’s purring as it continued to lean against James’s trousers.

  Finally McGarvie said, ‘I have this major problem with the Carpenter theory. If it’s a contract killing, as we suppose, why did they target your wife? You should have been the mark. You, or some witness, or the lawyers, or the judge. Not your wife. You and I know what these scum are like. If they take revenge it’s not at one remove.’

  Diamond shrugged. He couldn’t understand it either, and he had nothing to contribute.

  ‘Can I feed him?’ DC James asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The cat. He’s hungry.’

  Diamond hadn’t even noticed. ‘If you like. The tins are in the kitchen. Shelf over the cupboard.’

  When the two older men were alone, McGarvie once again raised the possibility that Steph had a secret life Diamond had not been aware of. ‘We work long hours, get home tired. It’s not surprising if our women don’t always tell us everything that happened.’ Seeing Diamond’s expression he spread his hand and held it up. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting she had a relationship. Just the possibility that she got into something she didn’t want you to know about, something slightly dodgy that got out of control.’

  Diamond glared. ‘Such as?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m guessing. What do middle-aged women get up to? Gambling?’

  ‘Not Steph.’

  ‘She didn’t owe money to anyone?’

  ‘Forget it. She wouldn’t borrow a penny.’

  ‘I suppose she didn’t do drugs?’

  ‘This is bloody offensive.’

  ‘Would you mind if we searched her bedroom?’

  ‘Christ – what for?’

  ‘Peter, I haven’t the faintest idea what might turn up, but it needs to be done.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘It’s as good a time as any.’

  He stared out of the window. ‘I’d tell you if there was anything.’

  ‘But have you been through her things?’

  Of course he hadn’t. That would be a breach of trust. They’d always respected each other’s privacy. He was damned sure Steph had nothing to hide from him.

  Being brutally honest with himself, if he were investigating some other woman’s murder, he’d insist on a proper search, just as McGarvie was doing. You don’t rely on the husband to tell you everything.

  ‘Come on, then.’

  He led McGarvie upstairs.

  Their bedroom was ready for inspection, the bed made, clothes put away, though that hadn’t been his purpose when he tidied up the day before.

  McGarvie started with the dressing table, removing the two drawers entirely and placing them on the bed. Steph’s make-up, combs and brushes were in one, her bits of jewellery in the other. Apart from her wedding ring, which was on her finger when she died, she hadn’t the desire to deck herself in what she called spangles and fandangles. Much of the stuff never saw the daylight and had been inherited from aunts and grandmothers. McGarvie opened every one of the little boxes and looked into the velvet bag containing the single string of pearls Diamond had bought her on their wedding day.

  He asked which of the two chests was Steph’s, and Diamond pointed to it. With the same thoroughness he pulled the top drawer completely out and felt among her underclothes, watched sullenly by Diamond. At the back of the second drawer was a shoebox full of letters. ‘Do you know what these are?’

  Diamond went over to look. When he saw his own handwriting on one of the envelopes he grabbed the box with both hands. ‘You won’t want this.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘They’re from me, ages ago.’

  McGarvie held out his hands. ‘Sorry, but there may be other letters, more recent ones. I’ve got to go through the box.’

  ‘It’s too bloody personal.’ He didn’t hand it back.

  Wisely McGarvie chose to let him mull over that, and continued with the search. That second drawer had evidently been Steph’s storage place for photos, invoices, vouchers, visiting cards and newspaper cuttings. It would take a team of detectives to follow up every lead. ‘I’ll have to take all this away… as well,’ McGarvie said.

  Diamond didn’t commit himself. He doubted if there was a clue to the killer in there, but he didn’t want to impede the investigation. ‘Why don’t you look in the wardrobe?’

  McGarvie was thorough. Every pocket of each coat, each pair of slacks, was searched, but he found no more than a few pence and some tissues. He looked on top of the wardrobe and beneath it and pulled the bed across the floor to see if anything was underneath.

  ‘Bathroom?’

  The search moved on. Mike James joined in and they went through each of the rooms.

  On the landing, McGarvie glanced upwards. ‘What do you keep in the loft?’

  ‘She never goes up there. Can’t stand spiders.’

  They took his word for it, which was something. He had some police property up there, including a gun and ammunition. In his present state he didn’t care a toss about being compromised. He just didn’t want anything to deflect from the hunt for Steph’s killer.

  They took the search downstairs and still found nothing of interest. McGarvie looked at his watch. He didn’t need to say he was thinking about getting to the post mortem. ‘Did she keep an address book?’

  ‘Yes, but you can’t take that away. I’m phoning people all the time.’

  ‘I’ll have it photocopied. You’ll get it
back inside two hours, I guarantee.’

  Her whole life laid out, as if for inspection. With a sigh, he picked the book off the table by the phone.

  McGarvie handed it to Mike James. ‘That’s your job. Get it copied and back to Mr Diamond directly.’ To Diamond, he said, ‘Is it okay if I take that drawer from the bedroom?’

  With reluctance, he gave in.

  ‘And the box of letters? Trust me. I’ll examine everything myself. Nothing will be passed around.’

  It was the best offer he would get. He knew the way things were done.

  7

  He descended into limbo – or grief – drifting through the days without any sense of what else was happening in the world. He kept strange hours, often sleeping in snatches through the day and sitting up most of the night. Nothing seemed to matter. When friends called he told them he was all right and didn’t want help. He rarely answered the phone and didn’t open letters or look at the newspaper or listen to music or the radio.

  It was a call from the coroner’s office that ended this hiatus. All the forensic tests had been completed and the coroner was ready to release Steph’s body for disposal. They needed to know which undertaker was in charge of the funeral arrangements.

  Shocked out of his zombie state, he remembered his conversation with Julie Hargreaves, about putting his energy into giving Steph the sort of send-off she would have wanted.

  ‘What day is it?’

  ‘Wednesday.’

  ‘The date, I mean.’

  ‘March the tenth.’

  ‘March? More than two weeks had drifted by and he’d done nothing about it.

  ‘I’ll get back to you shortly.’

  He snatched up the Yellow Pages and looked under Funeral Directors. The process took over. The same afternoon, clean-shaven and showered, wearing a suit, he went into Bath, from the undertaker’s to the Abbey to the Francis Hotel, making decisions about black Daimlers and brass handles and orders of service and bridge rolls and chicken wings. He was functioning again.

  8

  Awkward and totally out of his element he followed the coffin into Bath Abbey and up the main aisle. An early plan to use one of the apsidal chapels had been abandoned when it became clear how many wished to attend the service. Three to four hundred were seated in the main Abbey Church. The story of the shooting had featured for days in the national press and on television and people who had known Steph from years back had made the journey. The police alone numbered over sixty, among them the Chief Constable and three of ACC rank, as well as most of Bath CID and about twenty old colleagues from his years in the Met. The biggest contingent was of friends Steph had made through her work in the charity shops, customers as well as staff. There was her ‘family’ of Brownies grown into adult women. Then there were former neighbours from the series of places he and Steph had occupied in London and Bath.

  The small family group of Steph’s sister Angela with her husband Mervyn and Peter Diamond’s own sister Jean and her eccentric partner Reggie looked and felt humbled by the scale of the affection represented here. None of them had known of Steph’s gift for making lasting friends of almost everyone she met. Diamond knew of it, but even he hadn’t expected them to come in such numbers.

  One of the few who hadn’t bothered to respond was Edward Dixon-Bligh, Steph’s first husband. If he was in the congregation, Diamond wouldn’t know. He’d seen photos, but never met the man. In view of the unhappiness of that first marriage, his absence would trouble nobody.

  Julie’s advice to make a fitting occasion of this had been spot on, though in his heart of hearts Diamond wanted it over. He’d taken leave of Steph already, in those wrenching minutes kneeling beside her damaged body in the park. The service in the Abbey was for her, because she had been a believer, and for everyone else who loved her and had faith that she was going to a better place.

  At odds with his agnostic leanings, he joined in the hymns as well as he could and heard the address, the readings and the prayers and wished peace and rest for her. And then followed the coffin out again and was driven to the crematorium at Haycombe for what the undertakers had termed the committal.

  There, not for the first time in recent days, he had the strange sensation that he was detached from what was going on, with the power to switch off as if it were a TV programme. Some roguish part of his brain was telling him it was all a nightmare and he would go home and find her there. He had to make an effort to concentrate.

  All the illusions came to a stop when the curtains slid across.

  Back to the Francis for the ‘light refreshments’. The pitying looks and well-meant words of consolation from her friends – and his – rammed home the certainty that she had gone and his life had altered immeasurably.

  A few went so far as to ask what was happening about catching the person responsible. He answered that he didn’t know. The case was out of his hands.

  In truth, he did know. Things were happening, for sure. There was an incident room. Appeals to the public. Over a hundred officers at work. They knew what time the murder had taken place and where, what calibre of gun had been used, what bullets. McGarvie’s first reaction had been correct. The murder weapon was a revolver, a.38. But as for the killer, they were still at a loss.

  ‘Are you back to work yet?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Best thing, old man.’

  Next morning everyone at the nick went out of their way to be sympathetic. He had to run the gaundet of goodwill before he could close his office door. He didn’t count the number of times he was told it was nice to have him back. On his desk were bundles of letters that could only be messages of condolence. He shoved them to one side and leafed through the internal memos instead.

  About ten-thirty came a call from McGarvie, who had the sense to treat him like a fellow professional. ‘If you can spare a few minutes, I need your help.’

  ‘On the case?’ He couldn’t disguise his eagerness.

  ‘Yes – but don’t get me wrong. This doesn’t put you on the team. I want your services as a witness, to take a look at a suspect.’

  ‘A line-up?’

  ‘No. We’ve brought in a woman we think may be the one who scratched your face outside the law courts. You can look at her on camera, tell us if we’re right.’

  ‘You think she could be the killer?’

  ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘You said she was a suspect’

  ‘For the assault on you.’

  ‘That? I don’t want anyone done for that,’ Diamond said at once. ‘I haven’t laid a complaint.’

  ‘Hold on, hold on. It gave me a reason to pull her in,’ McGarvie explained. ‘I’ve no plan to press a charge.’

  ‘Ah.’ His brain wasn’t sharp at all.

  ‘We’ll see what else comes out. If she’s so passionate about the Carpenter verdict, she might say something helpful.’

  ‘I’m with you now.’

  ‘Say twenty minutes?’

  His confidence in McGarvie was growing, in spite of the lack of any obvious progress. He fetched a coffee from the machine at the cost of another ‘nice to see you back’ from one of the civilian staff, and took it to the observation room, where you could monitor interviews.

  The woman was being questioned by McGarvie and a female detective in Interview Room C. Diamond had to watch the screen for a while before making up his mind. The last time he’d seen this woman she was practically foaming at the mouth. Now there was no discernible aggression. She was in control of herself, if not entirely at ease.

  But definitely his attacker.

  McGarvie was saying to her, ‘You don’t deny you were in court?’

  ‘That’s no crime.’

  ‘What was your interest in the case?’

  No response.

  ‘You’re a friend of Jake Carpenter’s – is that right?’

  ‘If you know it all, buster,’ she said with a flat nasal twang more London than Bristol, ‘I don’t know
why you bother to ask me.’

  ‘I’m giving you the chance to explain what happened.’

  ‘Oh, sure.’

  ‘You were also seen outside the court demonstrating – if that’s the word – about the verdict.’

  ‘It’s a free country.’

  ‘So you don’t deny you were one of the people shouting?’

  She showed more interest. McGarvie was making headway, even if she insisted on ducking the last question. She flicked some blond hair from her face, and tilted her chin to a more challenging angle. Defiant, but sexy. Meticulously groomed and fashionably dressed in a black suit and wine-red polo-neck. It was easy to see why Jake Carpenter had been attracted.

  ‘Did you follow all of the trial?’ McGarvie asked. ‘Did you hear all the evidence?’

  ‘Evidence? I call it a stitch-up.’

  ‘So I’m told. Were you there right through?’

  ‘Not every day. I couldn’t stomach it, watching a fine man brought down.’

  In the observation room, Diamond said, ‘I feel like throwing up.’

  McGarvie pressed on. ‘What’s the truth of it, then, in your opinion? The poor woman was violently murdered. Her face was raw meat when they took her out of the river. You wouldn’t argue with that?’

  ‘Jake ain’t a violent man. He may have his faults, but he don’t treat women like that.’

  ‘The blood in his car matched hers.’

  ‘Piss-easy to arrange, innit?’

  ‘Watch it, Janie.’

  ‘Some nutter killed her,’ she said. ‘She was on the game. It’s a risk they take.’

  ‘Jake was her pimp,’ McGarvie told her. ‘She flew the coop and paid the price with her life.’

  ‘Your lot were out to get him, and this gave you the excuse.’

  ‘Her blood was on his shoe as well.’

  ‘Of course it was. A few spots in his car wouldn’t do the trick. It stands out a mile what you did. You wrap it up as science and the stupid jury swallows it.’

  They could have gone on like this indefinitely. McGarvie had the sense to change the script.

  ‘How long have you known the Carpenters?’

  ‘Seven months.’

  ‘You’re not local, are you, Janie? Where are you from?’