“I can understand that,” she said with a smile. “You distress me on a regular basis. Do we know any more about this poor man?”
He had to rack his brain to remind himself how much she had been told. “Retired engineer, widower, lives alone in Henrietta Road.”
“I know that much,” she said. “What was he doing out on the road at such an early hour?”
He could safely tell her about the HOPS, and did so without once leading her on.
She listened and was satisfied. “That clears up the mystery, then.”
“Er, yes.” If Georgina believed there was no more to uncover, who was he to disabuse her?
“You can get back to what you do best.”
He waited for another sarcastic dig, but she spared him.
“Investigating crime,” she said.
“Business as usual, ma’am.”
Within the hour he was at Pellegrini’s house with Ingeborg and Mrs. Halliday. The helpful help—as Diamond thought of her—had been collected in a patrol car from her flat in Fairfield Park.
“Believe me, we appreciate this,” he told her.
“I’m pleased to do it,” she said. “I enjoyed the ride. I usually cycle over. Anything I can do to help Ivor get his memory back has got to be good.”
Ingeborg gave her boss a sharp look. She would never entirely fathom his deviousness.
Mrs. Halliday produced her house key and let them in. “I can’t let you into his workshop. That’s where he spends most of his time, but it’s private, like.”
“I remember. You called it his holy of holies.”
“I’ve never so much as flicked a duster in there.”
“We don’t need to go in,” he said in all honesty.
“Where shall we start, then? I showed you the library, didn’t I?”
“With the rolling ladders. Yes. Where does he go when he isn’t in there or the workshop?”
“His bedroom. He’s got an enormous telly in there and a phone.”
“We’ll start there. We may find some object that will trigger his memory when I take it to the hospital.”
She led them upstairs, talking as she went. “Even when Trixie was alive they had their own bedrooms. He suffers from insomnia, you see. He likes to get up in the night and turn on the TV.”
“Does he have any favourite programmes?” Ingeborg asked.
“Anything to do with trains, I expect. Sometimes they show old films at night, don’t they?”
“Murder on the Orient Express?”
“That would appeal to him, yes.”
“Brief Encounter?” Diamond said. His preference was always for the older films.
“Beautiful,” Mrs. Halliday said. “I weep buckets each time I watch it.”
“The Lady Vanishes?”
“We shouldn’t have started him on old films,” Ingeborg said. “He’ll go on forever.”
He didn’t because they’d reached Pellegrini’s room. “I gave it a good clean the other day,” Mrs. Halliday said. “Not that he’s untidy. He’s one of the tidiest gentlemen I’ve worked for.”
This was borne out by the absence of any clutter. It could have been a hotel room ready for a guest. Double bed, chest of drawers, built-in wardrobe, plasma TV, a poster of the Cornish Riviera Express.
“Not much here we can take to the hospital,” Diamond said.
Ingeborg picked up a small framed photo from the bedside table. “This must be Trixie.”
A slight woman in her sixties, with permed white hair and rimless glasses. She was in a twinset and tweed skirt. She looked as if she wouldn’t know what to do with a Fortuny gown.
“Can’t show him that,” Diamond said. “It might distress him. Isn’t there anything else?” He opened the wardrobe and spotted some neckties neatly arranged on a special hanger. “One of these might do.” He picked off one that was light brown in colour with rows of small yellow circles with the letters GWR inscribed in grey. Not a thing of beauty.
“He ought to recognise that,” Mrs. Halliday said.
“Good suggestion.” Diamond folded the tie and put it in his pocket. “We can hang it on the railing above his bed.” He looked at the old-fashioned rotary-dial phone on the bedside table. No stored numbers. “Did he use a mobile?”
“I never saw him with one. If he did, it would be in his little office in the spare room.”
Another office.
Diamond’s gaze flicked to Ingeborg.
“Where’s that?”
Mrs. Halliday led them along the corridor and opened a door. The first thing Diamond noticed on the desk was precisely what they’d hoped to find: a laptop.
A disappointing day had suddenly redeemed itself. “This will do it,” he said, flipping open the lid. “What’s the screensaver? I wouldn’t mind betting it’s a bloody train,” he muttered to himself.
How right he was: front view with a fine head of steam polluting the countryside.
“This is ideal.”
“I can’t allow you to take that away,” Mrs. Halliday said. “It might have personal stuff on it.”
“Don’t you worry about that, my dear,” he said, sounding awfully like a conman. “My colleague Ingeborg has a clever little gadget that will copy this and any other memorable images he’s stored. She’s a wiz at technical stuff.”
Ingeborg may have cringed at such deceit, but she’d come prepared with the hard drive.
“Won’t take more than a few minutes,” Diamond went on. “I wonder if there’s anything else here.” He needed to find a distraction while Ingeborg transferred all the data.
“This.” Mrs. Halliday reached up to a shelf above the desk and picked off a soft toy, a huge, hideous pink squirrel in a railway guard’s uniform with cap and waistcoat and a plastic whistle sewn between the front paws. “I found him in a car boot sale and gave him to Ivor for his birthday. Isn’t he the cuddliest little armful you ever saw?”
It was more armful than cuddly, and not little, about the size of a St. Bernard.
He managed to say, “Very fetching.”
“I made the uniform myself,” she said. “It’s all authentic. The cap took me a long time. When I got him he had a large nut between his paws—a padded felt nut about the size of an orange—and I had the idea of giving him the whistle instead for reality’s sake. Ivor was really taken with him. He calls him Nutty. He made the shelf specially. He says Nutty can sit up there where I can see him each time I clean the room.”
“How thoughtful.” Nutty had been thrust into Diamond’s arms. He could understand Ivor’s difficulty on being presented with this misguided labour of loyalty. And why it was kept above eye level on the shelf. He thought about replacing it there, but Mrs. Halliday had other ideas.
“Take him with you to the hospital and stand him near the bed where Ivor can see him.”
“The nurses might trip over him.”
“On the bed, then.”
“I doubt if they allow things like that in intensive care,” he said. “They have rules about hygiene. They won’t even let you take flowers in.”
“There’s nothing unhygienic about Nutty. I spruced him up before I gave him to Ivor. He’s been through one of those big commercial washing machines,” she said. “He was too large to get into mine. He’s germ-free. You can smell the detergent on him. Have a sniff.”
Nutty’s state of hygiene wasn’t worth fighting over.
It was easier to give in. “I can only ask.” He held on to the thing.
“Not by his ears,” Mrs. Halliday said. “Tuck him under your arm.”
Ingeborg must have heard this going on, but she kept a straight face and concentrated on copying the entire contents of the laptop.
“Is he able to eat?” Mrs. Halliday asked—and for one surreal moment Diamond thought she was sp
eaking about Nutty.
“The last I heard they were feeding him through a tube.”
“As soon as he’s on solids we can get Elspeth Blake to send in one of her quiche Lorraines. He’d enjoy that.”
“I expect they regulate what patients eat.” He turned to Ingeborg. “Have you finished?”
She nodded and disconnected the lead.
“What else can I show you?” Mrs. Halliday asked.
“We’ve got more than enough now.”
“Is it safe to talk, do you think?” Diamond asked as Ingeborg powered her Ka southwards on Henrietta Road towards the city.
“Why, what’s the problem?” she asked.
“Him in the back.”
She laughed. Nutty had taken over most of the back seat. “He could be a whistle-blower, couldn’t he? He’s got the whistle. All he needs is some puff. What are you going to do with him?”
“I’m not taking him to the hospital.” He paused for thought. “Actually he looks comfortable where he is.”
She crashed the gears. “He’s not staying in my car.”
“We can’t have him in CID,” Diamond said. “Georgina will want to know where he comes from.”
“We know where he comes from: a charity shop. They’ll take him.”
“Can’t do that. He doesn’t belong to us.”
For harmony’s sake he agreed to transfer Nutty to his own car when they reached the staff car park.
“How long will it take you to go through the disk?” he asked.
“Depends, doesn’t it? Could be really quick, but if any of the files are encrypted we could be looking at a couple of days.”
He hoped not. This was crunch time. If Pellegrini used the laptop for his emails and the Internet, his guilt would surely be exposed. Even a technophobe like Diamond knew modern computers list your search history. That’s how paedophiles are caught. And if the Internet didn’t nail him, his emails surely would. It was vital to know all the dirt before Pellegrini emerged fully from the coma.
Eager as Diamond was to find the smoking gun in this case, a part of him remained uneasy. The sense of touch has a remarkable ability to stimulate our emotions. That pressure of Pellegrini’s fingers when Trixie’s name was spoken had been profoundly moving at the time and wouldn’t fade from his memory, however obvious it had become that the man was a killer several times over.
“Make a start straight away,” he told Ingeborg, “and let me know the minute you find anything.”
Attached to his own computer screen he found a Post-it note asking him to contact Richard Palmer, the chief inspector he’d consulted about the body in the Avon.
“Some juicy news about the drowned woman,” Palmer said when Diamond looked into his office.
Diamond corrected him. “The woman in the river. We don’t know for sure if she drowned.”
“Okay, Peter, be like that. Call her the woman in the morgue if you like. Anyhow, she’s not just ‘the woman’ any more. I know who she is.”
“Really?”
“I told you I sent her DNA profile to Interpol. They got back to me this morning, or rather the Bulgarian police did. They matched it to a missing woman from Sofia by the name of Maria Mikhaylova, who left in 2010 and hasn’t been heard of since.”
Diamond tried to appear unmoved. Inside, his nerves juddered like one of Pellegrini’s express trains going over points.
“The physical details match pretty well,” Palmer was saying. “Height, build, colour. The age is close enough, thirty-seven compared to our estimate of between thirty and forty. I emailed her mortuary photo by return and they say it’s her.”
Run up a drain, Diamond thought. This can’t be right.
“They’re going to get back to me when they’ve spoken to the family.”
He took a long, deep breath to compose himself. “Bulgarian, you say? But we already have a match with the woman known as Jessie, who as far as I know is British.”
“Some of them speak excellent English,” Palmer said. “She could have been here five years.”
Why listen to this garbage?
“I’m not convinced. How is she supposed to have got here?”
“Can’t say for sure, but Bulgaria is high on the list for trafficking.”
“You mean for sex?”
“Sex or forced labour. Slavery, either way. It’s possible she escaped at some stage and decided to get a job and make her home here. She was getting on a bit to be a sex worker. They may even have let her go. She’s not going to live here under her Bulgarian name, is she? She calls herself Jessie and finds work as a carer.”
No doubt this bilge made sense to Palmer, but it was going over Diamond’s head. “You’ve had time to take this in. I haven’t.”
“You didn’t meet her yourself when she was alive?” Palmer asked.
“Well, no.”
“You want to find someone who did. Ask if there was any trace of a foreign accent.”
Not a bad suggestion. He thought of Hilary. She hadn’t said anything about Jessie sounding like a foreigner. He’d ask Keith Halliwell if he’d heard any such suggestion when he was knocking on doors in Little Langford.
Palmer was adamant. “It can’t be anyone else. DNA is a hundred percent accurate. There’s no other person in the world with the same profile.”
“An identical twin.”
“You’re splitting hairs now. If she has a twin, which is unlikely, the twin would also be Bulgarian, so you’re stuck with the same problem. Face it, Peter, your Jessie is Maria from Sofia. Try and look grateful.”
In his days as a smoker he’d have lit up. He badly needed some kind of therapy. He went to the nearest coffee machine and pressed the buttons for the blackest caffeine brew it would give.
He clutched the paper cup so hard that some slopped over the rim and hurt his hand. He was muttering to himself. He knew he had to adjust. You make assumptions and they get challenged by the facts. No future in arguing with the science.
After several swigs of coffee he began to accept the inevitable and tell himself that Jessie’s nationality wasn’t such a big deal after all. There was no reason why she couldn’t be Bulgarian. Nothing had been known about her life before she took her job as Cyril’s housekeeper, not even her surname. The rest of what Richard Palmer had been saying about the trafficking and the sex trade was guesswork, the spin he’d put on the few reliable facts he’d got from the Bulgarian police: that she was a missing woman in her late thirties whose appearance was similar to Jessie’s.
The one fact that mattered was that she was dead.
Dead and identified.
He binned the cup and went in search of Ingeborg.
She’d downloaded the data from Pellegrini’s laptop and was clicking through files at mind-boggling speed.
“How’s it coming?” he asked.
“These are his sent emails,” she said. “He’s methodical about accurate subject-lines and that helps. Loads of boring railway stuff. But I looked first at his document files and found he’d downloaded the Internet forum on murder methods—the material we know about because he printed it.”
“So he used the laptop for that?”
“Yes. And saved it.”
“Can you put a date on it?”
“Hang on a mo.” She worked the keyboard, found the file and checked the account details. “Created thirteenth June 2014. Not long after Max’s death.”
“After Max went? Interesting. I was thinking he must have researched all this before he started his killing.”
“It was before Cyril’s death. And Jessie’s. Maybe he was just brushing up on new ways of killing people.”
“What was the date again?”
“Thirteenth of June.”
“That was actually the day of the funeral. Max’s funeral. So Pellegri
ni was studying murder methods on the day he attended his friend’s last rites.”
Her eyes rolled upwards. “Some friend.”
“Has he saved anything else of interest?”
“Any amount of train-related stuff.”
“Of interest, I said. Nothing encrypted?”
“If there is, I haven’t found it yet. I was hoping the emails might contain something helpful, but they haven’t yet. He’s probably wise to the risks. Email was never designed with security in mind. Every message you send passes through various servers before it gets to the recipient. Any of them could intercept your personal correspondence.”
“To say nothing of hackers.”
“Or government agencies.”
“You’re not expecting to find much? Well, there’s new information today about one of the victims.” He told her what he’d just learned from Palmer about Jessie’s Bulgarian roots.
“Surprising,” she said, and showed straight away that she’d got the point. “DNA doesn’t lie. Does it make any difference to the case against Pellegrini if Jessie is from East Europe instead of somewhere in Britain? I don’t believe it does.”
“But we’ve learned that Jessie wasn’t her real name.”
“You’re thinking she was here illegally?”
“Palmer does. He put together a back story that made her a working girl who was trafficked and escaped and created this new identity for herself.”
“Does he have evidence for this?”
He shook his head. “Guesswork, but not all that far-fetched.”
Ingeborg had tensed. “Horribly persuasive.”
“And if there’s any truth in it,” he said, “we can’t rule out the possibility that she was killed by her former gangmaster and not Pellegrini. After all, the MO is different. His other victims weren’t chucked in the river. They were found dead in bed.”
She was silent, thinking. “But we don’t know she was in the sex trade. That’s Chief Inspector Palmer’s theory and I don’t know if we should buy it. He’s piling speculation on speculation.”
“Yes, and let’s not forget there was quite a debate in that forum about drowning and how difficult it is to prove at postmortem. Pellegrini was clued up on this.”
Another One Goes Tonight Page 30