Diamond Dust

by Peter Lovesey

  Officers in helmets and black body armour and carrying Heckler & Koch MP5s were already checking the beach huts with dogs when Diamond and Stormy Weather drove up. There was an air of confidence about the search. Apparently a local shopkeeper had been shown a picture of Dixon-Bligh and was certain he had bought food a number of times in the past two weeks.

  Stormy looked at Diamond as if he was Nostradamus.

  The wooden huts, about a hundred and fifty on a turf promenade above the beach, were a testimony to people’s individuality. They had obviously been there long enough for some to have been replaced and others given a facelift, so the doors and walls were decorated in a host of different styles and colours. Shuttered windows, verandahs and payed fronts were desirable extras. The majority were padlocked. A few of the oldest had conventional mortice locks built into the doors. It would be one of these Dixon-Bligh had illicitly used.

  Diamond eyed the line of pitched roofs stretching almost to the sand dunes on the skyline at East Head, and asked the senior man how long the search would take.

  ‘Not long, sir. The dogs will know if he’s inside.’

  This confident prediction was followed shortly by a result. The two springer spaniels started yelping and scratching at the door of one shabby hut towards the near end of the row. Their handlers had to haul them away.

  ‘Game on,’ the man in charge said.

  Everyone took up strategic positions. Officers with submachine-guns crouched and took aim in the shingle below the level of the huts, watched from behind a stout wooden groyne by the others, including Diamond and Weather.

  Diamond told a senior man they didn’t want the suspect killed and was informed they were using soft-point rounds.

  Through a loudhailer the occupant of the hut was told that armed police were outside. He was instructed to come out, hands on head.

  There was no response.

  Two more warnings were given. Then the order came to force an entry. A distraction device, some kind of thunderflash, was lobbed behind the hut and went off with a terrific report.

  Instantly four men armed with submachine-guns dashed to the hut from either side. The only way in was through the front and it wouldn’t take much. The wooden door was half-rotten through years of exposure to salt spray. A burst of gunfire shot away the hinges.

  The door fell outwards and hit the paving stones. It had not been locked.

  But no one was inside.

  The anticlimax silenced everyone. There was that feeling of sheepishness – not unknown to Diamond – when the long arm of the law has reached out and missed.

  Finally the man in charge said, ‘Stupid bloody dogs.’

  ‘Back to it, lads,’ some other officer said. ‘There’s a million more fucking huts.’

  The man at Diamond’s side said, ‘Which genius gave us this tip-off?’

  Diamond said nothing, and Stormy stayed silent as well.

  Interestingly the dogs were still straining at their leashes to return to the empty hut. The handlers had a problem getting them back to work.

  ‘I know it’s obvious no one is in there,’ Diamond told Stormy, ‘but I want a closer look.’

  They stepped up to the hut and over the bits of timber that had been the door. There were definite signs of recent occupation. Just inside the doorway was a folded sleeping bag. Also a torch, a cut loaf and a carton containing canned food and beer. An A to Zof West Sussex and a copy of the Sunday Express – last week’s edition. He picked up the torch and switched it on. ‘What do you make of that, Dave?’

  Stormy bent closer to the area of flooring caught in the beam of light.

  Diamond told him, ‘That’s what excited the dogs.’

  ‘Stormy wetted his finger and touched the dark patch. ‘You’re right. It’s blood.’

  After the forensic team and SOCOs arrived there was the usual hiatus. Clearly someone or some animal had shed blood in the beach hut, but it was a mystery where they had gone. The sniffer dogs took no interest in any of the other huts, or the changing rooms, toilets or cafe higher up the beach. With nothing else to detain them, the armed response team packed up and drove away.

  ‘Looks like the Arabs got to him first,’ Stormy said.

  ‘Killed him, you mean? For blabbing?’

  He nodded. ‘Those guys don’t take prisoners. Did you ever see Lawrence of Arabia?’

  ‘If he’s dead, I don’t know where they left him.’

  ‘Buried him on the beach, I expect. It wouldn’t take long.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be long before he was found, either. Plenty of people come along here walking their dogs, even at this time of year, and when a dog gets a whiff of blood… And how would the Arabs have found him here?’

  ‘They’re smart operators, Peter. They escaped from the Dorchester under the noses of one of these hotshot teams of ninjas, so it’s not beyond them to track Dixon-Bligh to his hideout.’

  ‘Unless.’

  ‘Unless what?’

  ‘Unless this is a totally unrelated incident. Remember it was a hunch that brought us here.’

  ‘Let’s say a brainwave.’

  Diamond sniffed. ‘We can hope so.’

  They sat on a wooden beam facing the band of grey sea and the misty outline of the Isle of Wight. Nearer to them, gulls and sandpipers in their hundreds had colonised the wet sand.

  ‘I hope this smackhead isn’t dead,’ Stormy said. ‘I want him put on trial.’

  ‘Be better off dead when I catch up with him,’ Diamond muttered.

  ‘You don’t want to foul up your career for a scumbag like that.’

  ‘Watch me.’

  ‘That’s precisely why you and I are sidelined.’

  From behind them a uniformed PC called Diamond over to where the incident tapes kept any onlookers out of the sterile area. ‘Gentleman here wants a word, sir. He appears to know something.’

  The informant was a tall, elderly man with a white moustache. He was wearing a windcheater and brown corduroys tucked into green Wellingtons. His red setter started forward and licked the back of Diamond’s hand.

  ‘Something to tell me, sir?’

  ‘Seeing all the activity here I wondered if it’s anything to do with that fellow they found on the beach yesterday.’

  ‘What fellow?’

  ‘Couldn’t tell you who he was. I was walking the dog as usual and saw what happened. Some windsurfers spotted him half in, half out of the water at damned near high tide. Blood all over his shirt, but no wound that I could see. He was obviously in a bad way. Out to the world. They took him off in an ambulance.’

  ‘Where would they have taken him?’

  ‘Casualty, I expect. Chichester has the nearest A & E Department.’

  ‘If my client were to make a voluntary statement about his movements on the day in question,‘Joe Florida’s solicitor said, ‘and if he proved to your satisfaction that he had no part in the matter under investigation, would you be willing to set aside any possible prosecution on matters of a lower tariff?’

  ‘No deals,’ McGarvie told him.

  ‘In that case, he has nothing else to say.’

  Keith Halliwell leaned towards his SIO and whispered something.

  McGarvie gave a petulant click of the tongue and sat back in his chair, raking both hands through his hair. Finally he said, ‘If you were talking about something that happened outside our jurisdiction – we’re from another force, Avon and Somerset, you understand – my colleague and I wouldn’t’ – he sighed, hating this – ‘wouldn’t necessarily be under an obligation to investigate.’

  ‘He needs a stronger assurance than that.’

  ‘Are you saying that after all this he remembers what he was doing on February the twenty-third?’

  Joe Florida pointed to the tape recorder mounted on the wall. ‘Turn that fucker off, and I’ll tell you.’

  ‘Typical breakdown in communications,’ Diamond grumbled on the drive to Chichester. ‘If someone is brought into h
ospital with blood all over him and no explanation, it’s a police matter. The local CID must have been out at that beach looking for evidence. Why didn’t we hear about it?’

  ‘Because we were with Gina’s lot,’ Stormy pointed out. ‘They’re not exactly the local plod.’

  Thanks to Stormy’s driving they reached St Richard’s Hospital inside half an hour. The doctor in Accident &Emergency took them into an office at once. A stethoscope hung from his neck and he fingered the sound-receiver as he spoke. ‘Yes, I was on duty yesterday when the man was brought in from West Wittering. From the contents of his pocket he was called Edward Dixon-Bligh, but he hasn’t been formally identified yet’

  ‘So he’s dead?’

  ‘On arrival.’

  ‘Do you know the cause?’

  ‘Loss of blood.’

  ‘But where from?’

  ‘His mouth. This is hard to believe, but someone cut out his tongue.’

  32

  The next afternoon Diamond, back in Bath, was summoned to the top-floor suite known as the Eagle’s Nest. Curtis McGarvie was there already, seated in the armchair closest to Georgina’s desk. He had a half-empty mug of coffee in his fist, revealing he’d been there some time. And he was sitting at an uncomfortable angle with his knees pointing at Diamond, presumably to line himself up with the inquisition.

  Georgina cleared her throat. ‘Thank you for coming, Peter.’ The greeting had a faintiy pejorative edge, and the follow-up confirmed it. ‘If you were expecting a pat on the back, think again. Just because the Yard are treating you like some footballer who scored the winning goal, it doesn’t excuse your conduct here. You defied my explicit instruction to stay out of the investigation into your wife’s death.’

  ‘I did stay out, ma’am.’

  “What?’

  ‘Ask DCI McGarvie. I haven’t troubled him at all. When did we last speak?’

  McGarvie glared and said, ‘That isn’t the point.’

  ‘You ran what amounted to a parallel investigation,’ Georgina steamed on. ‘You visited the crime scenes and interviewed witnesses. What’s that, if it isn’t interference?’

  ‘Am I prohibited from visiting the place where my wife was murdered? No one made that clear to me.’

  McGarvie said, ‘You also turned up at the scene of the Patricia Weather murder – even before I did.’

  ‘Nobody barred me from other cases.’

  ‘Come off it, Peter. We all know it was a carbon copy of your wife’s shooting.’

  ‘We didn’t know at the time. Stormy Weather is an old colleague. I was with him at Fulham. I’m allowed to have some sympathy for an old mate who goes through a similar experience, aren’t I?’

  Georgina said, ‘This is evasion. You teamed up with DCI Weather and drove all over the south of England like…’ She turned to McGarvie for help, and got none. ‘… like a re-run of Starsky and Hutch.’

  ‘If you knew my driving, ma’am, you wouldn’t make that comparison.’

  ‘Don’t mess with me. You go off on your own without any consultation, riding roughshod over sensitive lines of enquiry, blundering into this safe house where the witness was being kept.’

  ‘That was to enquire about Ted Dixon-Bligh, ma’am.’

  ‘And you’re going to justify it on the grounds that he was the killer.’

  ‘No, ma’am. He was family.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘My wife’s ex-husband. I wanted to see him on a family matter.’

  Georgina made a puffing sound of irritation.

  Diamond explained, unfazed, ‘DCI McGarvie told me he was holed up somewhere, and the Met couldn’t find him. You’ll confirm those were your words, Curtis?’

  McGarvie wasn’t willing to confirm anything. He stared straight ahead.

  ‘You don’t seem to remember. You’d lost all interest in Dixon-Bligh, or so it appeared to me at the time. You were getting very interested in Joe Florida. What happened about Florida?’

  ‘Released without charge,’ McGarvie said after a pained pause. ‘After eleven hours, he finally decided to tell us he had an alibi.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘He was having his car tyres replaced at a garage in Hammersmith.’

  ‘True?’

  ‘Confirmed, yes.’

  ‘It took eleven hours to get that out of him?’

  ‘The old tyres left a set of prints outside a betting shop that was torched the previous evening.’

  ‘Back on the protection game?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  Diamond gave a sigh that was almost sympathetic. ‘We can’t win ‘em all, can we? I helped trace Dixon-Bligh, as you know, but it was too late.’

  Now McGarvie waded in. ‘You knew he was wanted for questioning. If you’d informed me about this beach hut at West Wittering, I would have collared him.’

  ‘I honestly didn’t think about the beach hut until I was at the safe house.’

  ‘You’re trickier than a cage of monkeys.’

  Georgina continued with the tongue-lashing. ‘The whole point is that your actions would have undermined a prosecution against this man. It’s lucky for you he’s dead.’

  This time he was silent. He’d made all the points he wanted.

  Georgina banged on for a few minutes more, saying she’d considered formally disciplining him and it was only because of the tragedy of Steph’s murder that she chose to be compassionate.

  He didn’t thank her.

  He was on the point of leaving when she seemed to relent a little, maybe deciding she’d taken too strong a line. ‘It’s brought closure, anyway, Peter.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The man is dead.’

  ‘That’s closure?’ he said in a flat voice.

  ‘In the sense that we can draw a line under the investigation. I realise it doesn’t put an end to your personal grief.’

  He was silent.

  Georgina asked, ‘Did you have any suspicion Dixon-Bligh was involved with this Arab group?’

  ‘Not till I was told, ma’am.’

  ‘The manner of his death – removing his tongue -seems particularly brutal. I’m told it’s considered a just punishment for an informer. In their society a thief has his hand cut off.’

  ‘I’ve heard.’

  ‘There’s no question that it was an act of revenge by the diamond robbers?’

  ‘That’s the strong assumption.’

  ‘They’ll be out of the country by now.’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘Difficult, bringing international criminals to justice. Still, it’s the Yard’s problem, not ours. We’re left with some tidying up of our own. It’s time for some cooperation between you two. Curtis will need chapter and verse from you, every bit of evidence that seals Dixon-Bligh’s guilt. It has to be written up before we can close the file. I rely on you, Peter, to pass on your findings. It will be hard for you, I appreciate, but a necessary duty.’

  ‘Bit of a turnaround,’ he commented.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You warn me off, tell me not to show my face in the incident room, and now you want me to tell him how it was done. Cool.’

  Not merely cool. In that atmosphere you could have preserved a mammoth for a million years.

  ‘Well, I’ve got good news for you, Curtis,’ Diamond filled the silence. ‘You won’t have to put up with those findings of mine, because they don’t exist.’

  ‘Just what do you mean by that?’ Georgina asked.

  ‘Dixon-Bligh didn’t murder my wife.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Peter.’

  ‘Will you hear me out?’

  She sighed and leaned back in her chair.

  Diamond said, ‘I almost convinced myself he was the killer when I heard he was a junkie. It provided the selfish, blinkered, crazed motive I was looking for. But something didn’t fit. I also learned yesterday that he was a chef at the Dorchester.’

  Georgina took a deep, audi
ble breath. ‘We know about that.’

  He nodded. ‘But you didn’t follow it up.’

  ‘What do you mean – “follow it up”?’

  ‘I did. This morning I phoned the Dorchester and asked if they happened to know if he reported for duty on February the twenty-third, the morning Steph was murdered. Yes, they said, he was in the kitchen, cooking.’

  ‘This I refuse to believe,’ McGarvie said to Georgina as if Diamond had finally flipped. ‘How would anyone remember one day in February?’

  ‘Because it was Shrove Tuesday – Pancake Day.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘People in the catering business remember Pancake Day. The Dorchester put on a big charity lunch hosted by the Variety Club of Great Britain. All the catering staff were there from early in the morning. It was one of the biggest lunches of the year.’

  ‘Is this certain?’

  ‘Dixon-Bligh was in the kitchen at the Dorchester cooking three hundred pancakes.’

  ‘So he was definitely innocent?’

  ‘Of murdering Steph? Yes. And almost certainly of murdering Patsy Weather. But there’s no question he was involved in the diamond heist that went wrong. His fatal mistake was blabbing to his girlfriend.’

  For some minutes after Diamond left Georgina’s office, nothing was said. McGarvie sat in the armchair shaking his head at intervals.

  Eventually, Georgina said, ‘He’s a loose cannon with a habit of hitting the target. A good detective. The best. I only said the things I did because I thought he’d cracked this, gone off and cracked it, and hung you out to dry.’

  ‘I know, ma’am.’

  ‘But he failed. We all failed. This was one of those wretched cases that beat everyone.’

  33

  On the first day of November, Curtis McGarvie’s overtime budget was cancelled by Headquarters. Inevitably, the Stephanie Diamond inquiry was scaled down drastically, and the decision came almost as a relief to the team. They’d run through their options. Nothing new had come up. McGarvie remained in charge, with Halliwell as his deputy, assisted by three CID officers and two civilian computer operators. These days they rarely stepped outside the incident room.

  Peter Diamond observed this with detachment. He’d long since lost any confidence in the murder team. He, too, was becalmed, but he promised himself it was temporary. He would never give up. He still lay awake for long stretches of the night wrestling with the big questions: why had Steph never mentioned her appointment in the park? Who was ‘T’? What was the link – if any – with the shooting of Patsy Weather?