Bloodhounds

by Peter Lovesey

  "You're talking about the locked room mystery? You think you've cracked it?" said Wigfull on a shrill note of disbelief.

  Diamond had cracked it all right. He was certain now, after thinking it through, going over it many times in his mind since getting the flash of inspiration the evening before. As he'd told Julie at the time, the breakthrough had come with her question: "What was the murderer doing there?"

  Between them, on a table, labeled and bagged, were the contents of the dead man's pockets. Diamond pointed to the polythene bag containing the padlock. "Take a look. Is it, or is it not, indistinguishable from the padlock on the narrowboat?"

  Wigfull turned it over several times. "It's the same make, certainly. But we've been through this before, my theory about a substitute padlock. You know we have. I thought I had the answer until you showed it was impossible. This padlock can't have been used. Milo's was on the door when we opened it that night, and he had only the one key. You proved that yourself when your divers found his old bunch of keys in the canal and the damned thing fitted. This doesn't prove anything unless the keys happen to be identical, and we were told by the locksmith that such a thing couldn't happen."

  "Just in case, let's put that to the test," said Diamond. He went to a drawer and took out Milo's padlock and the key that fitted it. "Pass me the other bag, would you—the one containing Rupert's keys?"

  "Do you think you ought to be handling them?" said Wigfull.

  "The keys, please."

  Wigfull shook the bag and dropped the key ring on the table top. He wasn't going to risk leaving his prints on them.

  All work was suspended in the incident room. Everyone in there—detectives, filing clerks, computer operators—gathered around the two senior men. Julie Hargreaves was there, and Keith Halliwell, on tenterhooks to hear the explanation.

  There were four keys on the ring: one of the Yale type that looked like a front-door key; a plastic-topped one that was probably for a car; and two small narrow ones, identical in shape. Diamond slotted one of the latter into Milo's padlock and tried unsuccessfully to turn it. To leave no one in any doubt, he tried the other, still with no result.

  Wigfull said smugly, "You see. It doesn't match. Let's compare it with Milo's key. I'm willing to bet the whole shape is different."

  He was right. When placed together, the two keys were clearly cut for different locks.

  Diamond was not discouraged. Far from it. "Right. This is the way it was done. It's going to make you groan, it's so simple. This is Milo's padlock, right? And this is the key that fits it, the one key available at the time. Milo had possession of the key, so Milo was the only person who could open the padlock at any time. Everyone agreed?"

  There were some cautious murmurs. Nobody really wanted to be shown up as gullible.

  "Now imagine Milo going to his locked boat anytime you like. He uses his key to open the padlock. Now what does he do?"

  Halliwell said, "Removes the key and replaces it in his pocket."

  Diamond wagged a stubby finger in confirmation. "Right. The keys go back into his pocket. What about the padlock?"

  "He doesn't put that in his pocket," said one of the computer operators. "It's too bulky."

  "So what does he do?"

  "Leaves it hanging on the staple."

  "Correct. Locked or unlocked?"

  A moment's hesitation. Then, from Wigfull: "Unlocked, presumably. No point in locking it while he's at home. If he wants privacy, he can use the fingerbolts on the inside of the door."

  Diamond gave a nod and referred the matter to everyone else by spreading his hands. "Reasonable? Now, let's take this on a bit. Milo is aboard his boat, sitting in the cabin watching TV or cooking. The door is bolted from the inside. The padlock is hanging from the staple outside the door with the shackle—this arched bit at the top—unfastened. Anyone could lift the padlock off. Are you with me still?"

  There were nods and murmurs all around.

  "Now along comes our villain with a similar padlock— different key, of course—unhooks Milo's padlock and substitutes his own. Done in a moment without Milo being aware of it. He goes away and waits for his opportunity."

  There were definite sounds of understanding.

  "You're onto it, aren't you?" said Diamond. "Milo decides to go out. And what does he do to lock his door? Simply closes it, lifts off the padlock—the new padlock, believing it to be his own—and slots the hasp over the staple. Puts the padlock in position and presses it home. He doesn't need to use his key. They lock automatically, as anyone who has used a padlock knows."

  They were not only up with his explanation now; they were ahead. The murmurs were of appreciation.

  "But of course," Diamond said, "the padlock he's just attached to his boat belongs to the villain, who can now unlock it at will. So the villain lets himself in, does his dirty work, and leaves. And when he leaves, he fixes Milo's padlock on the door and presses it closed. Milo comes back later, unlocks as usual, and can't fathom how someone could have got inside his cabin."

  Julie said, "Nor could anyone else until this moment."

  Halliwell said, "You've cracked it."

  Even Wigfull was nodding.

  A couple of people applauded, and almost everyone joined in.

  Diamond flushed with embarrassment and reminded them that there was work to be done. His stock had never been higher at the Bath nick.

  Later, at the bridge in Sydney Gardens, he examined the scene of the hanging. The approaches were still cordoned off. The Scenes of Crime officers had come and gone. Part of the rope was still attached to the iron parapet.

  "If you wanted to end it all," Diamond said to Julie, who was with him, "there are worse ways than this. You sit on the railing here with one end around your neck and the other attached to the bridge and jump down. Mercifully quick."

  "Is that what happened?" Julie said. Something in his tone had suggested otherwise.

  "He certainly broke his neck."

  She nodded. "Only I notice you haven't used the word suicide once."

  "Because I'm not sure," he said.

  "Murder by hanging would be pretty unusual, wouldn't it?"

  "Very."

  "Have you ever come across one?"

  "Never. The victim is going to struggle, isn't he? I reckon you'd need a couple of people to carry it out. It's not as if his arms and legs were pinioned, as they are in a judicial hanging. Unless he were very feeble for some reason, or so pissed out of his mind that he didn't know what was happening—"

  "That might be true in this case," she said.

  "He was out early last evening," Diamond confirmed. "I did establish that he had a quick pint in the Saracen's Head about seven and went off to meet someone else."

  "Did he say who?"

  "No. But it was at some other pub, which was why he didn't have the dog with him. He told them in the Saracen's that you couldn't count on every pub accepting animals."

  "So it was a boozy evening," said Julie. "Do we know what time he died?"

  He shrugged. "They can never tell you with any precision. Between midnight—when Wigfull came through here— and six thirty in the morning."

  Julie tried to picture the scene. "If he was drunk by then—I mean so helpless that someone could hang him—this would be a long way to bring him. Can you get a car along these paths?"

  Diamond's immediate response showed that he'd given the problem some thought already. "Yes, you can drive straight in from Sydney Place. There's no gate."

  "Difficult to prove," Julie remarked.

  "Impossible."

  "I meant the possibility of murder."

  "You never know what the postmortem may show up," he said. "I've asked Jack Merlin to do it."

  Merlin was the top forensic pathologist in the west of England. He would have to drive seventy miles, from Reading. He and Diamond knew each other of old, but he would have needed some convincing that a routine suicide by hanging was worth the journey.

&n
bsp; "You do believe there's something suspicious," Julie probed.

  He made some indeterminate sound and pulled a face. "Nothing very solid."

  To draw him out, she said, "There wasn't any suicide note. If he did this from a sense of guilt, you'd think he would want to confess."

  Again, he gave a shrug. "It's early days to worry about a note. Could be at his house, or in the post. The thing that makes me pause for thought is the padlock being found in his pocket. If you were going on a bender with a friend, would you carry a damned great padlock with you? What would be the point? It's not as if he was going to try the locked room trick on Milo's boat again. No point in that, surely? The only reason I can think of is to link him with the killing of Sid Towers. That may have been Rupert's way of telling us he was guilty. But as you just pointed out, he could have done that better in a written confession."

  "And if we're talking murder," said Julie, "the padlock in his pocket is a lot easier to plant than a fake confession. It still frames him."

  Diamond turned and looked along the strip of blue-green water toward the second iron bridge. "Another murder on the canal? I wonder, Julie. I wonder."

  The first task after entering the house in Hay Hill that afternoon was to open a tin of dog food and pour some water into a bowl. Marlowe was ravenous.

  Julie saw to it. "Poor thing—he's been alone here since seven last night. I'm going to take him for a walk. You don't mind?"

  "If it doesn't take long."

  He opened some windows.

  The second task was to find the suicide note, if one existed. He looked in the obvious places, over the fireplace and by the bed. On the kitchen table. Beside the ancient typewriter in the back room.

  No joy.

  He found some cash, about thirty pounds, in an old box file, along with an out-of-date passport, letters from the local Job Center and the Social Security office, unfilled tax declaration forms, doctors' certificates, and beer mats with some names and addresses scribbled on them that meant nothing to Diamond. Nothing so helpful as a diary. A testament to a chaotic existence. He was learning nothing new about Rupert.

  While his thoughts were still full of the dead man, he felt a sudden pressure against his leg. "Jesus!"

  Marlowe was back from his walk and wanting more food.

  Julie followed the dog in. "He's a super old thing really," she said. "Just wants some training. I'm sure he'd pick it up."

  "You'd better open another tin before he has my leg," said Diamond, less enchanted.

  "Found anything useful?" she asked.

  He shook his head.

  "So we wait for the postmortem?"

  "Well, I did ask the1 police surgeon to take a blood sample. There may be some news on the alcohol content. We'd better be getting back to the nick, anyway."

  "What about the dog?"

  Diamond's mind was on other things.

  Julie said, "We can't leave him here and forget about him. What's going to happen to him?"

  He yawned and said as if such details were beneath him, "The Dogs' and Cats' Home at Claverton, I reckon."

  Julie's blue eyes moistened at the thought. "We can't just stick him in a home."

  "My cat, Raffles, came from there."

  "He's not a young dog, you can see that. No one would want to take him on."

  "There's no alternative."

  "There is. He can come home with me. I'll have him."

  His eyes widened. "You've got two dogs already, haven't you?"

  "So I'm used to it."

  He felt compelled to ask, "What's your husband going to say?"

  "Charlie? I'll talk him into it."

  "But if you've got the dog with you already . . ."

  She smiled. "Exactly. When he sees Marlowe, he won't turn him away."

  He didn't pursue it. Julie's domestic arrangements were her own business. They drove back to Manvers Street with Marlowe seated contentedly on the backseat, spreading gusts of his doggy breath around the car.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Back at Manvers Street, there was a message waiting from the police surgeon; Rupert's blood alcohol level had been high, at lOOmg/ 100ml, but not excessively high. Diamond screwed it up and tossed it into the bin. "I'd have expected double that figure if he was legless."

  Julie pointed out that lOOmg was above the legal limit for a driver, and Diamond said offhandedly that this wasn't about pinching a dead man for drunk driving.

  She was treading on eggs, but she wasn't going to let him get away with a cheap jibe. "It's worth remembering when the blood sample was taken, about eight this morning. We don't know when he had his last drink, but the alcohol must have been metabolizing for some time. It would have been a higher reading if we'd got the blood earlier."

  He rolled his eyes at her use of the word metabolizing and said, "Too bad we didn't, then. You must be right, I suppose. I'm a dead loss at science. You've got to make allowances, Julie."

  She surprised him by saying, "You, too, Mr. Diamond."

  "What?"

  "You've got to make allowances."

  "What for?"

  "For the metabolic factor."

  "Ah." He grinned faintly.

  Still unhappy with the result, however, he arranged for a driver to collect the sample and take it at once to the Home Office forensic laboratory at Chepstow. They would check for other substances; it was not inconceivable that one of Rupert's drinks had been spiked. But of course a test for drugs would take time. He hated delays.

  His mood didn't improve when he looked into the incident room. The impetus seemed to have gone out of the inquiry, as if everyone there was just cruising now. The general idea was that Rupert's hanging had confirmed him as the murderer, even though no confession had yet come to light. Diamond, they felt, was just being bloody-minded now, and he added more fuel by ordering an immediate search for witnesses and yet another check of all the suspects and the people they lived with, this time to establish their movements since seven the previous evening—an exercise guaranteed to create more resentment and hostility.

  He said he would take his share of the flak by checking on Jessica Shaw and the men in her life. Halliwell and a detective constable were sent to the Paragon to interview Miss Chilmark. Julie went off to the Badgerline offices to find where Shirley-Ann Miller was this morning, and after that to the Sports and Leisure Center to check on Bert. DS Hughes and DC Twigg were dispatched to Claverton to call on Polly Wycherley. And, just for the record, as Diamond put it, DS Mitchell went out to the boatyard to talk to Milo Motion.

  Instead of going directly to the Walsingham Gallery, Diamond started at the Locksbrook Trading Estate, west of the city, where Jessica's husband rented a unit for his ceramics business. It was high time to meet that patron of the arts, Mr. Barnaby Shaw.

  Asked to wait in the showroom, he felt like Gulliver in Lilliput, surrounded by what must have been the entire range of miniature buildings in Barnaby's stock: houses by the hundred, stately homes, churches, pubs, and castles. Finely made as they were, to a man as incorrigibly clumsy as Diamond, such exquisite little pieces represented a thousand potential hazards. He stood uneasily in the only space of any size that he could find, trying to stay clear of the slowly revolving display stands. It was a mercy when Barnaby's assistant called him into the managerial suite.

  Having negotiated the showroom without mishap, the big man tripped on an Afghan rug and lurched forward, grabbing Barnaby's welcoming hand and practically dragging him to the floor. Bits of china around the room rattled, but nothing was broken.

  "Never look where I'm going," he admitted. "When I was a kid, my knees were permanently covered in scabs."

  The p.a. escorted him to an armchair.

  Barnaby looked more shaken than his guest. Trim in a gray suit, with a maroon shirt and toning tie and pocket handkerchief, he wasn't dressed for wrestling. Diamond watched the way he scooted back around his desk; he looked used to staying out of trouble.

  They discu
ssed the miniatures politely. Barnaby had started making matchstick models thirty years ago and progressed by stages to ceramics. He sometimes did commissions for people who wanted their homes immortalized, but it came rather expensive. Diamond said honestly that he considered it a waste of money, adding tactfully that he was always breaking things.

  Barnaby submitted easily to the questioning.

  "Yes, I was here until late yesterday evening catching up on the orders. It gets very busy in the run-up to Christmas."

  "Christmas already?" Diamond said in mock horror. "Anyone with you?"

  "Last night, you mean?"

  "Yes."

  "Not after six, when the staff left."

  "So what time did you get home, Mr. Shaw?"

  "Must have been well after midnight. About one thirty, I'd say." He was fluent in his replies, unaware (presumably) of Rupert's death, giving the impression of a small businessman pressed to the limit, but cheerful. But he obviously found time to dress well, even if the three-piece suit seemed a little wasted on the trading estate.

  "Did you speak to anyone at all in that time?"

  "Certainly—on the phone."

  "But you weren't seen by anyone?"

  "No."

  "When you got in, was your wife in bed?"

  "I presume she was."

  "You don't know?"

  "We sleep in separate rooms."

  That fitted, Diamond thought. He was hard pressed to think what Jessica Shaw found attractive in this dull, over-worked man, unless it was the money he made from his titchy houses. No, to be fair, he was dapper. And he took the trouble to tint his hair.

  "Do you happen to know how Mrs. Shaw spent the evening?"

  "You'll have to ask her. I haven't seen her since early yesterday. She was still asleep when I left this morning." He put his hand to his mouth as a thought struck him. "Look, nothing's happened to Jess, has it?"

  "Not to my knowledge."

  "Someone else? A.J.?"

  "I was going to ask you about him, Mr. Shaw. A close friend of the family, obviously."

  "Well. . . yes," said Barnaby, as if he needed to ponder the matter before confirming it. "He's extremely helpful."