“It’s a departure from his usual MO.”
“True. But Jessie—I’m going to carry on calling her that—was younger than his other victims and less likely to die in bed. He had the problem of where she was going to be found.”
Ingeborg twisted a strand of hair around her forefinger. She wasn’t convinced yet. “Realistically, he’s elderly to lug a body about. It wouldn’t be easy for him to tip her in the river. How would he have got her out to Swineford? He doesn’t drive any more.”
“He’d arrange to meet her on some pretext.”
“Such as what?”
“I’m speculating myself now. He offers her a job, or money. Let’s remember she’s just lost her livelihood. He may have suggested she join him as his housekeeper. He invites her to meet for a drink at Swineford. He knows the place well because of the steam trains, the Avon Valley Railway. It’s a good location for what he has in mind, secluded and beside the river. They meet at the Swan some quiet evening and talk it over and he offers to show her the little station, which means a stroll along the riverbank. By then he’s added something to her drink. They don’t get far before she feels unsteady. All he has to do is push her in. He’s capable of that, especially if she’s losing her balance already.”
“Hmm.”
She didn’t sound impressed.
“One possible scenario,” he said. “I’m not saying it’s foolproof.”
“How does he get there in the first place?”
“Taxi. That’s his mode of transport. And when he’s ready to leave, he calls for another.”
“And Jessie? How does she get there?”
“She drives. She has her own car. We know that because she used to drive Cyril to Bath.”
“Yes, but where does she leave it? In the pub car park?”
She’d seen the flaw.
And so had he. “Her car is still going to be there. That is a problem. It would have been reported before now.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Well, there may be an answer. After pushing her in, he picks up her handbag and removes the key to her car and returns to the car park and drives away. We know he could drive at one time.”
“No disrespect, guv,” she said, “but on balance I’d rather keep an open mind about how Jessie got into the river.”
“Are you thinking a gangmaster did it?”
“Or a client. Or she jumped. We don’t know enough.”
He let her get back to the computer.
This day kept throwing up new problems and time was racing by. He needed to get a grip on the fundamentals of the case before confronting Pellegrini. He was strongly tempted to treat Jessie as a side-issue, unconnected with Pellegrini, and concentrate on the deaths of Max and Cyril.
And yet Jessie had been a main player. She’d visited Max’s house regularly with Cyril. She may well have known Cyril was stealing items of jewellery to fund his gambling debts. It wasn’t impossible she had been aiding and abetting him in the thefts. While the two old men played Scrabble she had the opportunity to root around the house for things to steal.
And she’d met Pellegrini at Max’s funeral. That meeting may have made her death inevitable. Pellegrini, too, had been stealing Max’s property. The Fortuny gowns were evidence of that. Was the funeral reception the occasion when Pellegrini discovered he wasn’t the only thief?
That afternoon in the house in Cavendish Crescent there had been some sort of incident involving Jessie. Diamond had heard about it from Mrs. Stratford, the actress who cleaned for the Filiputs—and from Jake, the gay railway enthusiast who lived in the signal box. In the unseemly scramble for railway souvenirs Pellegrini had upset coffee over Jessie’s skirt and she’d left the room and changed into something else. She hadn’t returned.
Why?
Surely because she was gifted with a last chance to roam the house looking for more things to steal while the party was in full swing downstairs.
What if she’d been caught red-handed by Pellegrini? He, too, must have realised this was his final visit to the house, an eleventh-hour opportunity of theft.
Or was it the reverse? Had Jessie discovered Pellegrini in the act of stealing?
Either outcome was fraught with danger. Exposure would be devastating for each of them. They had so much to lose if the police were called.
So there had been no hue and cry. It had been resolved another way.
Jessie couldn’t have known she was dealing with a killer.
All of this had to be set against the practical difficulties Ingeborg had raised. The MO was different. The victim was female and younger than the others. Pellegrini, at seventy, was taking on someone who could match him physically.
But the idea of murder was rooted in Diamond’s thinking. His way forward was clear. Get to the truth of Jessie’s death.
He went back to Richard Palmer’s office.
The chief inspector eyed him with amusement. “Found the identical twin yet?”
Diamond wasn’t in a jesting mood. “I’d like to see the postmortem report.”
“You still have doubts?”
Palmer accessed the report on screen and moved out to allow Diamond to use his chair.
His preferred reading didn’t include material such as this, but he worked steadily through the forensic pathologist’s findings. In effect, there were two reports: an interim one dictated at the time of the autopsy or shortly after, before the test results were obtained, and a second, with fuller information and a summing up, including discussion of the possible causes of death.
The description of the body was basically similar to the missing person appeal on the police website, but there were additional details. Some superficial injuries had been noted consistent with her having fallen into the river, travelled downstream and met obstructions. Nothing external or internal indicated she had been assaulted prior to entering the water, but the involvement of someone else couldn’t be ruled out.
As to the cause of death, it was impossible to be certain. The pathologist had looked for the classic signs of drowning. There was water in the stomach and oesophagus, but you would expect some from passive percolation regardless of whether the person had been dead or alive. The water within the body didn’t contain debris such as weeds and algae. No stones or weeds had been gripped in the hands, which would have indicated cadaveric spasm, and therefore drowning. The characteristic froth that forms in the air passages wasn’t present, but still didn’t make for a conclusive diagnosis.
The samples tested in the laboratory had yielded no findings of importance. A diatom test, for the microscopic algae present in water, had proved nothing either way. Nothing in the body fluids had suggested she was already dead prior to immersion.
“Drowning cannot be ruled out in this case,” the pathologist summed up, “but neither can it be ruled in. The circumstances in which the body was found make it probable. However, there is insufficient evidence to be certain.”
“You thought she’d got drunk and fallen in,” Diamond said after rising from Palmer’s chair. “There’s nothing here about alcohol.”
Palmer clung to his theory. “I told you before, it metabolizes quickly. We can’t be sure how long she was in the water. Twenty-four hours would do it unless she drank the pub dry.”
“Have you heard any more from Bulgaria?”
“About her past?” Now the chief inspector jutted his chin like a politician who is asked the question he was waiting for. “I was spot on.”
“They got back to you?” Diamond said with a grunt of annoyance. “Why didn’t you let me know straight away?”
“I was getting it on file while it was fresh in my head.”
“She really was in the sex trade?”
Palmer stood with arms folded, the embodiment of smugness. “They confirmed it, the familiar story, depressing, but all too common. She came from an o
rphanage somewhere out in the sticks, got into petty crime as a juvenile and made her way to the capital, where she was soon taken over by traffickers, promised a better life and driven with other girls across the border into Turkey. Forced into prostitution, escaped and was taken over by some other minder who was worse than the first lot. He shipped her out of the country and she found herself in Milan and then Rome, still selling her body. There the trail goes cold.”
“This was when?”
“About 2010, they reckon.”
“You got all this from the Bulgarian police?”
“About an hour ago.”
Diamond glared at his self-righteous colleague and felt too bruised to protest any more about poor communication. “The Bulgarians know all this and we know shit about her life in Britain?”
“It’s not for want of trying.”
“Oh, come on. She could have been on the game here as long as five years.”
“It’s not illegal, Peter.”
“But pimping is. Someone was controlling her.”
“You tell me.”
“All right, I will. She ends up in Britain, probably after a nightmarish journey in a container and presumably without papers. And some gorilla puts her to work, right?”
“Something like that.”
“But at some stage she gives up the sex trade and finds work as a housekeeper.”
“Housekeeper so-called,” Palmer said with a sneer.
Diamond wasn’t having that. “She really was a carer by the end of her life. The old guy was ninety. It was a proper job with a regular wage paid for out of his late wife’s estate.” He dragged a hand over the dome of his head. “I need more about her time in Britain and how she got to be in the West Country. If she was here any time at all, she must have had some run-ins with the police.”
“Probably under another name.”
“There was a time when every force had its vice squad and you’d know who to ask. These days the only vice squad left in Britain is a punk band.”
Palmer grinned.
“Avon and Somerset must have someone with responsibility for policing the sex industry in our manor.”
“Here in Bath it’s me,” Palmer said.
“You? Why didn’t you say so?”
“I don’t crow about it.”
“Who are the major pimps, then?”
Palmer blew a soft raspberry. “It all changed when Bob Sabin died.”
“Everyone’s heard of Sabin.”
“He had an empire that stretched way beyond Bath, did Bob. After he died, the bulk of it was taken over by his sidekick, Eddie Woodburn.”
“Woodburn. The name is familiar.”
“You can forget it now. Eddie took a bullet to the head shortly after and there was mayhem. We thought we were in for a gang war, but it was settled. I won’t say peacefully because I don’t believe for a moment it was peaceful. Charles Gaskin divided the spoils with Gerry Onslow.”
Diamond knew both names and thought of them as pond life, but hadn’t needed to meet them. Organised crime was a constant menace dealt with on a regional basis by a unit known as Zephyr. Palmer would be reporting to them. “How long have Onslow and Gaskin been running the show?”
“Woodburn was shot at the end of last year, so it’s three or four months. Not long.”
“Long enough. Which of them should I speak to?”
“You’re not serious, Peter?”
“Got to find out if they regarded Jessie as unfinished business and put out a contract on her. If they didn’t, it’s odds on that my man Pellegrini is her killer.”
“Wouldn’t it be simpler to ask him when he comes out of the coma? It would be safer, for sure.”
“No. I need to know the score before I speak to him. Who shall I try, Onslow or Gaskin?”
“I don’t know about Gaskin, but Onslow is local.”
“That settles it, then. Where does Onslow hang out?”
23
Bath has many amusing ironies. The best is the fact that thousands of tourists arrive because of the Jane Austen connection while the author herself could hardly wait to quit the place with “happy feelings of escape.” Another is that for three decades no one could bathe in Bath—because the spa water was deemed dangerous.
This was remedied in 2006 when the New Royal Bath opened. The massive glass cube a few steps across the street from the Pump Room has a clean bill of health, is stunningly modern and houses five floors of pools and treatment rooms using the warm spring water that fell as rain ten thousand years ago, is heated more than a mile below ground level, and is the source of the city’s existence.
Mind, the project had a series of embarrassing false starts. Part-funded by a millennium grant, the building was envisaged as a spectacular way of marking the year 2000, and six years later it still wasn’t open. Delays and spiralling costs made it into a battleground between the designers and the contractors while horrified ratepayers looked on. The farcical high point was the visit of the Three Tenors in 2003. Perfect timing, it was thought, for a grand opening. Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras were duly filmed beside the rooftop pool (but not in it) holding glasses of the spa water, but the champagne had to be put on ice because the wrong paint had been used and a legal injunction meant new contractors had to be brought in to do the work. Fully three more years passed before the doors were opened to the public.
Gerry Onslow, the most feared man in the West Country, wasn’t bothered about the forty-five million the building was said to have cost. He reckoned he was paying off the overspend himself. He had exclusive use of the place several evenings a week after the public had left and the doors were officially closed. How much this cost him was a secret known only to the management and Gerry, but it must have been substantial.
He always came with a team of heavies who made sure he was not interrupted. They guarded the main entrance, the changing rooms and the pool area. No one was so foolish as to enquire if they were armed.
This evening Gerry was in the Minerva pool on the lower ground floor. Although the visually exciting rooftop pool has the best views and the water temperature is the same as downstairs, the Minerva has more appeal on a chilly April evening. Another factor in Gerry’s thinking was that any evil-minded person with a long-range rifle could take a shot from the roof of the Abbey tower.
He wasn’t there to swim. This was all about easing away the stresses of a complicated week of trafficking, laundering money, making offers people couldn’t refuse and watching his own back.
He floated.
In the buoyant water, he could have been lying in bed, he was so relaxed. He filled his lungs with the warm air and treated the water like a mattress. He wasn’t built like an athlete, but fat is less dense than muscle and more helpful for floating. Gerry didn’t think of himself as fat and didn’t want anyone else to think it either, so let’s say discreetly that here in the water the laws of physics were in his favour.
Out in the middle, he felt safe. The massive trumpet-shaped white pillars rising from the turquoise pool and bearing the weight of the entire building gave a feeling of stability. He liked staring up at them and thinking about the business he supported.
So he was totally unaware of the manatee-like shape gliding underwater towards him. The first he knew of it was when something brushed against his foot.
Startled, he drew his legs up to his chest and tipped like a barrel, glimpsing the creature’s shadow below him. But he couldn’t stop himself from swallowing a pint of water before he got control of his body and managed to stand upright, with his feet on the bottom. The pool’s depth was the same throughout, only four feet six.
A smooth, oval head broke the surface within touching distance and water cascaded from it.
The manatee spoke.
“Easy, Gerry.”
“What the fuck .
. . ?”
The creature was human, but not reassuringly human. To Gerry’s eye it was uglier than any sea monster.
Yet there was just a chance this might be someone who had been allowed in by mistake.
“You shouldn’t be here. The bath is closed.”
“Not to me.”
Spoken with menace. No mistake.
A manatee would be preferable to this.
Gerry looked round for his minders. Nowhere in sight. They’d cocked up, the toerags. They would be burnt toast in the morning.
Forced to humour the invader, he said, “Who the fuck are you?”
“Peter Diamond, Bath CID.”
“Police?” Gerry shrilled. Panic set in. They must have found out about Charlie Gaskin, his so-called “oppo,” who had taken a bullet to the head last month and was now part of the foundations of a new high-rise building in East Twerton.
Peter Diamond said, “I’d have brought my warrant if it was waterproof.”
“Get outta here.”
“No thanks. I went to some trouble to get in.”
“How the hell . . . ?”
“Hiding in a towel room for over an hour. I need a quiet chat with you and this is the ideal situation.”
“What d’you mean—‘ideal’?”
“I know you’re clean, don’t I?”
“Ha bloody ha.”
“And if your minders take a pot-shot with their handguns, they’re as likely to hit you as me, so they won’t try.”
“Who told you I was here?”
“Common knowledge. Take my advice, Gerry, and vary your routine. Shall we do this in the whirlpool?”
A feature of the Minerva was a bowl-shaped structure in the middle of the pool.
“Why should I fucking talk to you?” Gerry asked. His teeth were chattering, but not from cold.
“Because I know enough to put you away for a long time—but that isn’t in the plan if you cooperate. I want answers to questions, off the record. I have no hidden tape recorders, no wires, see?”
The policeman spread his palms and it was true. All he was wearing was a pair of baggy blue swim shorts.
Another One Goes Tonight Page 31