“I’d like to know who the disappointed client was,” Diamond said. “Won’t the all-powerful computer tell us?”
Leaman said, “I doubt it, if he chose to be anonymous.”
“The dealers would know. Can you get their phone number?”
He worked the keys again.
And again.
And again. “Looks like Matlock and Russell have gone out of business, guv. This is a directory of all the art dealers in the UK.”
“I wonder if the National Portrait Gallery know the name.”
“I can get a contact number for them.”
The speed of the computer gives the impression that information is always instantly on tap. Twenty minutes on the phone with various individuals at the gallery was a salutary corrective. Finally everyone was forced to conclude that anonymous meant anonymous and even if some trusted high-up had known the name at the time, no record or memory of it had survived.
“I’ll think of a way of winkling it out,” Diamond said.
“He probably will,” Leaman said to Poke. “That’s one of his strengths, winkling things out.”
Poke seemed unwilling to be impressed.
Before leaving the campus, Diamond wanted to winkle out something else. He called at the registrar’s office and asked if they kept records of students who were sent down. They referred him to the alumni office, who talked about data protection until he said who he was and that he was investigating the shooting of one of their own professors. They agreed to allow him access but said it would involve making a special search of files that hadn’t been computerised. The archives were stored in another part of the university known as the Old Red Building. He said he would make the check himself if someone would show him where the records were.
His persistence paid off. One of the staff was freed to help him make a physical search. They drove down to the Old Red Building, where he learned that no file existed of excluded students. The only way of finding the names was to compare the records of thousands of enrolled students with the lists—almost as many—of thousands who had gone on to complete their degrees. Anyone who didn’t feature in both lists could be assumed to have dropped out. However, the dropouts would include students who had left the university voluntarily, transferred to other universities, failed the first year exams, or became too ill to continue, or died.
“This could take days,” he said. “All I want is the name of one bad egg sent down by the dean for dealing in drugs.”
Leaman came to the rescue. “Can’t we narrow it down?”
“Good thinking. They were studying English and History.”
“In the session two-thousand to two-thousand and one,” Leaman added.
The task was still daunting, but more manageable. The helpful admin officer said she thought she could compile a list of all the dropouts by next day.
Diamond told her she was a star.
Outside the Old Red Building, Leaman said, picking his words with tact, “Are you thinking someone held a grievance all these years and hired professional hitmen to kill Gildersleeve? To me, it doesn’t seem likely.”
“Me neither,” Diamond said. “It’s a loose end I wanted tidied up.”
“Well. I hope that woman doesn’t lose much sleep over it.”
On the drive home through Reading at the rush hour, he kept making audible intakes of breath.
“You all right, guv?” Leaman asked.
“I wish you wouldn’t drive so close to the car in front, that’s all,” he said. “This isn’t the Defender, it’s a little old Honda with bodywork that buckles on impact.”
“It’s my car.”
“It’s my body you have in the passenger seat.”
“We’re crawling.”
“Try creeping.”
As they approached the motorway on the A33 everything came to a complete stop.
“What’s up now?” Diamond said.
“Someone up there heard your prayer.”
“That’s a first, then.”
“Do you feel more comfortable now?”
“Don’t get snarky with me.” He took out his phone.
“Are you going to check what’s happened?”
He nodded. But it wasn’t the traffic hold-up he was checking. He got through once more to Bristol and asked if there was news from the search in Leigh Woods. Nothing had been reported. Neither had there been a sighting of Nathan’s two limos.
“Are we checking the CCTV footage at the suspension bridge?” he said into the phone.
They were, and it was still going on.
“I want to be informed as soon as—”
The line went dead. He didn’t like to think they might have cut him off deliberately.
Leaman found the local radio station and learned that the westbound section between junctions 11 and 12 had been closed because of an accident and was unlikely to be opened again for two hours.
Ahead, cars were making U-turns. Leaman checked his mirror and started to do the same.
“Where are we heading now?” Diamond asked.
“Back through the town to find the back way to the next junction.”
To keep his mind off the driving, he tried to think of the positives from the funeral. Basically, he’d got what he came for, the interviews with Monica Gildersleeve and Archie Poke. And there was an intriguing new lead to pursue. Who was the anonymous seller of the Chaucer portrait who had missed out on a fortune when John Gildersleeve gave his expert opinion?
29
Ingeborg arrived early at Manvers Street next morning to find Diamond already there making waves, on the phone to Bristol, asking if the search of Leigh Woods had resumed, firing a series of questions at the hapless inspector on the line. How much of the woods had they covered? Were they still using the dog team? How many dogs? How many men? He went on to ask about the camera footage at Clifton suspension bridge. The check had been completed, a long, laborious process, and it emerged that one of Nathan’s limousines had definitely crossed the bridge in the Bristol direction at 5:50 A.M. on the day Nathan’s body was recovered from the river. The second limo had not been spotted.
“They split up, then,” he said, talking to the Bristol inspector as if he was up to speed on every detail of the case. “It makes sense. The car caught on camera must have been carrying the gun collection to some secret lock-up in the docks area. The other was used to dump the body somewhere in the woods. Then that second car crossed the river by another route, most likely using Brunel Way and Avon Bridge. Nathan will have known every patrol car in the county was looking for those limos. He will have got them off the road and out of sight as soon as they’d shed their loads. Then he’ll have told his men to disperse and lie low. He’ll not have told them he was about to make his way on foot to the bridge to commit suicide.”
There was a short pause in Diamond’s flow when the inspector got a few words in.
Then: “I don’t know if you’ve got the manpower, but somebody needs to search for the weapons and the cars. I’m strongly of the opinion that you’ll find them in the docks area. But the search for DC Gilbert has priority over everything. Do you understand me? Top priority.”
Then he put down the phone and sighted Ingeborg, calm and groomed again, with her blonde hair in the ponytail she usually wore and her lightly pencilled eyes giving no clue as to the tough time she’d been through.
“Rested now?”
“Rested and ready to go.”
“How did Lee Li take the news of Nathan’s death?”
“Like I expected. Shock. Some tears. She felt responsible, she said, and I soon knocked that on the head. She’s now come round to the view that she was lucky to escape when she did. He could easily have turned angry and she might have ended up dead in the river. Now she can get on with her life and her singing career without looking over her shoulder every minute.”
“Is she still at your flat?”
“Only until this afternoon. She’ll be staying with a frien
d.”
“You like her, don’t you?”
A shrug and a smile. “She’s sweet, but not empty-headed. She’ll have more success, I’m sure.”
“When she collects her Brit Award, you’ll get a mention in her acceptance speech: ‘And finally Ingeborg Smith who rescued me from the clutches of a major crime baron.’ ” He updated her on the Reading trip. “So you see, there’s a lot happening,” he concluded. “I’m off to Melksham presently to waylay Bernie Wefers.”
“Want me to come?” she offered.
He needed her instead to get on the trail of the mystery seller of the Chaucer drawing. “I have a strong hunch it’s worth finding out,” he said. “We know the dealers were Matlock and Russell, who seem to have gone out of business. But it was only ten years ago. Someone must know the inside story.”
“Were they London-based?”
“I’m not even sure of that. Would one of your contacts from the newspaper world be able to help?”
Before she could answer, another fresh morning face in the CID room set Diamond on a different tack. “Hello, here’s the myrmidon of the mortuary.”
“The what?” Keith Halliwell said.
“Never mind. What did you glean from yesterday’s autopsy?”
“That you’re unlikely to survive if you jump off the suspension bridge. You hit the water at thirty-three metres per second. Your thoracic cage is crushed and the ribs penetrate your vital organs. Lacerated lungs, ruptured liver and heart. Do you want me to go on?”
“Drowning didn’t come into it, then?”
“Didn’t need to.”
“I thought I once read about a woman who survived.”
“The famous case of the Victorian lady in a crinoline that acted as a parachute. Tragically, Nathan wasn’t wearing his crinoline on this occasion.”
As a reward for that mortuary duty, Halliwell found himself driving Diamond to Melksham, where Bernie Wefers was due to touch down in his helicopter. “What are we trying to achieve?” he asked Diamond.
“Some straight answers. When you and I met Bernie at Marlborough we didn’t explore his links with Nathan.”
“It didn’t come up,” Halliwell said. “Can’t say I blame him. If you’re being interviewed by the police you’re not going to throw in a mention of Bristol’s leading arms supplier.”
“Actually, it did come up.”
Halliwell frowned.
“But Nathan wasn’t mentioned,” Diamond went on. “If you cast your mind back, Bernie told us he went to Bristol to build an extension for a client, including a gym and a sound studio. We didn’t pick up the significance because at the time we hadn’t heard from Ingeborg about what she found at Nathan’s.”
“So he gave us the partial truth.”
“We wrung it out of him. We knew he’d been to Bristol.”
“Did we?”
Diamond shook his head. As a memory man, Halliwell wasn’t in John Leaman’s class. “The pilot told us about flying Nathan there and we checked the log and found it.”
“Percy Sinclair.”
“Come again.”
“The pilot.”
“You remember all the stuff it’s safe to forget. I sometimes wonder about your reports on the autopsies, whether you give me every blessed detail about the stomach contents and then forget to say that the head was sawed off.”
“If you doubt me, you could attend the autopsies yourself.”
“One of these days, I might,” Diamond said, a boast about as likely as his completing a triathlon. Then he moved on smoothly. “Bernie remains the prime suspect.”
“But he has an alibi for the day of the killing.”
“So does everyone else. He could still have hired some gunmen to hold up the auction. His motive is stronger than anyone’s. He threatened Gildersleeve outside the divorce court.”
“ ‘You’ll pay for this.”
“You’re doing better now. And going by his brutal revenge on Monica when he caught her out with Gildersleeve, he takes a strong line on retribution.”
“But he didn’t attack Dr. Poke when he caught her out with him.”
“I’m sure he meant to. Poke is a special case. There’s something about the squeaky voice and the wispy hair that disarms people. I noticed it myself. Are you an apologist for Bernie, or what?”
“Devil’s advocate,” Halliwell said. “I agree he’s got questions to answer.”
Melksham was only twenty minutes from Bath, even at the modest speed Diamond insisted on. A small working town that was also a traffic hub, it had few friends. “Of all the small towns of Wiltshire,” wrote Nikolaus Pevsner in The Buildings of England, “Melksham has least character and least enjoyable buildings.” Whichever way you approached the place, you saw a sewage farm or a caravan park or the twenty-eight acres of tyre manufacturing. So it was possible that Bernie Wefers was doing Melksham a favour with his new shopping centre.
A centre maybe, but central it was not.
They followed the Wefers Construction notices by way of several small roundabouts to a site on the eastern edge of the town surrounded by the rutted mud of months of building work.
THE PALACE PRECINCT, declared the ironwork arch over the entrance to a concrete barrack block. “Who would have thought it?” Diamond said.
“Some jerk with a degree in public relations,” Halliwell said.
“I don’t know. If you planted a few trees, you might make it easier on the eye—in about thirty years.”
“I expect they sawed down some fine trees here before they started.”
“That’s known as landscape architecture, Keith. Let’s get to those sandwiches. I’m ready for them.”
They were pleased to see Bernie’s helicopter standing in a corner of the field. They’d timed this trip to perfection. The speeches were over and about twenty guests were being treated to drinks around a non-functioning fountain in the echo chamber that was the new precinct. Not one of the twenty-four shops was yet in use or even spoken for, so the excitement was limited to the potential of the concept. A few helium-filled balloons anchored to the fountain advertised Wefers Construction and a scratchy sound system was playing Elgar.
“You’ve got to hand it to the Brits,” Diamond said to Leaman. “We know how to celebrate.”
They each took a drink from a tray (sparkling wine, not champagne) and helped themselves to eats (mixed nuts, not salmon and cucumber sandwiches). Then they honed in on Bernie, who had broken away from the mayor’s group and was looking at his watch.
“Not thinking of leaving already, were you?” Diamond asked him.
“You two again?” he said. “I’m starting to feel hounded.”
“We work just up the road. Couldn’t miss a chance to see your latest triumph and ask a couple of follow-up questions. When we last spoke, you didn’t mention your business link to Nathan Hazael.”
“Nobody asked me.”
“We know you built the major extension to his house at Leigh Woods. Did you also design the first-floor bathroom with the sliding shower cabinet?”
He frowned. “What’s it to you?”
“The hidden gunroom behind the shower.”
“That’s news to me. Goes in for field sports, does he? I never asked what he planned to do with it,” Bernie said in a virtuous tone, wide eyes mocking them.
“Come on, everyone knows how Nathan made his money. A collection of illegal weapons that featured in God knows how many recent crimes.”
“Fancy that.”
“You must have become a personal friend, doing so much work for him.”
“We got on,” Bernie said. “Didn’t talk guns at any point. Is that what you wanted to know?”
“Didn’t you inspect the collection, even to judge how it would fit into the room?”
He raised a warning finger. “Lay off, will you? I told you I didn’t know it was a bloody gunroom. He wanted a hidden room. That was the deal. For all I knew, it was for storing inflatable sex toys. You do
n’t ask questions of somebody like Nathan.”
“You must have spent plenty of time with him setting up all these projects.”
He shrugged. “Not ’specially. I have staff, you know, architects and surveyors.”
“All sworn to secrecy? He wouldn’t have wanted his gunroom known to all and sundry.”
Bernie grinned. “After they done the work, he took them out and shot them.”
Now it was Diamond who wagged a finger. “Let’s have some honesty here, Bernie. Did you personally design and build the sliding shower?”
A shake of the head. “His design. My execution.” And another grin. “Except I lived to tell the tale.”
“It’s an expert job, I’ll give you that. When did you build it? Before the gym and the recording studio?”
“They were done at the end of last year for some pop star he was shacking up with. The bathroom was an earlier job. I’d say four or five years ago.”
“While you were still married to Monica?”
“Must have been.”
“Did she ever meet Nathan?”
“Monica?” He thought about it and shook his head. “Not to my knowledge. ‘Work is work and wife is well out of it is my philosophy.’ Hers, too. Long as the money kept coming in, she was happy.”
Not the impression Diamond had got from Monica. She’d been far from happy when Bernie was off on his business trips. “Didn’t she know you were doing work for a notorious arms dealer?”
He reconsidered, as if wary of a trap. “You’ll have to ask her. Too far back for me to remember.”
“She didn’t take much interest in your work?”
“I just said.”
“Were you interested in hers?”
“You’re starting to sound like that bloody counsellor we had to see when we was getting divorced.”
“Fourteenth century English texts.”
“Give me strength. What would I know about that?”
“The poet Chaucer?”
“Are you enjoying this? Because I’m not.”
“But you know about building materials. Did Monica ever speak of a block of limestone that was said to come from Chaucer’s house in Somerset?”
The Stone Wife Page 30