“Tell me about it.”
“Plus three others from the railway club, Seaton, Carnforth and Marshall-Tomkin,” she went on. “Okay, they passed away a year or so earlier, but it’s a frightening tally.”
Diamond tried to turn in the seat and speak to Halliwell. A stab of pain in his back made him yell so suddenly that Ingeborg’s steering wobbled. He apologised before saying, “Keith, you were going to find out how they died.”
There was a long silence from behind him.
Finally Halliwell said, “I don’t know if you want to hear this. Copies of the death certificates arrived this morning.”
“And?”
“If you remember, Carnforth was the one who died after a short illness, according to the paper. It was the flu.”
Another silence followed, this time of Diamond’s making. He’d just lost one of the potential serial-murder victims. He ought not to complain. “That’s certain?”
“It’s given as the cause of death.”
He gritted his teeth. “Can’t argue with that, then. How about the other two?”
“Edmund Seaton had bronchial pneumonia and Jeremy Marshall-Tomkin an aneurysm.”
“Is that peaceful?”
“It’s quick. Doctors certified these deaths and they sound like genuine medical conditions you wouldn’t confuse with murder.”
Two more gone.
“I don’t think we can blame Pellegrini,” Halliwell continued. “My reading of it is that none of those three was murdered. They agreed among themselves that they wanted their ashes scattered on the railway when their time came and whoever survived the others would perform this last duty for his fellow members. It had to be done secretly at night because Network Rail wouldn’t permit it.”
“Sounds right to me,” Ingeborg said. “He kept the urns as a kind of memorial.”
“We can all agree on that, then,” Diamond said with no pleasure at all. Poleaxed wasn’t enough to describe his state. “Instead of seven possible victims, we’re down to four, maximum. And I can’t honestly see why he would have wanted to murder Cyril.”
“Which brings the tally down to three,” Halliwell said. “Trixie, Olga and Max.”
“So whose ashes was he carrying on the night of the collision?” Ingeborg said.
“The urn was empty,” Halliwell said.
“When it was found, it was. By then he’d scattered them somewhere along the track. He was on his way back when the patrol car hit him.”
“Had to be Max,” Halliwell said. “He was the last of the railway club to die.”
“Last summer. Quite some time ago.”
“Yes, but you can keep ashes indefinitely. There’s no urgency.”
They were fast approaching the Bathampton Lane turn. Diamond was silent, still wrestling with the news that three of the deaths had not been caused by Pellegrini.
“How are we doing?” Halliwell asked.
“We’re good,” Ingeborg said. “The track is somewhere on our left. We’ll go on a bit and then do what Pellegrini is supposed to have done.”
“Except we don’t have any ashes to scatter,” Halliwell said.
“I’m talking about his cover story.”
“The rabbits?” Diamond said, making a huge effort to pay attention.
“The hops.”
“You’re calling it a cover story. Are you sure?”
“I am now. His real objective was dealing with the ashes.”
“And he had this other story ready in case anyone stopped him and asked what he was doing? He’d say he was studying wildlife?”
“He didn’t say that. This is where we got him wrong. He’s an engineer used to dealing in facts, not fantasy. He picked something real as his cover. Anyone could verify that it was true, as I will demonstrate shortly.”
“And it’s on his computer?”
“That’s how I know it happens each night while we’re sleeping.”
They bridged the canal, the railway, the A4 and the Avon at Bathampton and followed London Road East to link up with the A4.
“For an old guy he’s a strong cyclist if he came this far,” Halliwell said.
“Come on,” Ingeborg said. “The bike was motorised.”
“He didn’t need to,” Diamond said. He’d got the sense of what Ingeborg had said earlier. “This was only his cover story.”
“The railway is now on our right,” Ingeborg said.
“All the way to Box,” Halliwell said. “Are we going as far as that?”
“We may not need to. If I’ve got it right, they’ll be this side of the tunnel.”
Box Tunnel was dug through Box Hill at the start of the Victorian era to bring the railway to Bath and Bristol. Almost two miles in length, it was one of the great engineering projects undertaken by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
“We’ll stop in the next layby,” Ingeborg said. “Don’t want to drive straight past them without realising.”
“God, no. They’re good movers, not easy to catch,” Halliwell said in amusement. “They cover up to a mile a night.”
“We’re not trying to catch anything.”
Ingeborg pulled over at the top of the next rise, switched off the engine and got out. She told Diamond, “You don’t have to move yet, guv. I’m checking how close we are, that’s all.”
After midnight not much else was on the road. There were intervals between the sets of headlights. The light rain hadn’t gone away.
Still in the car, Diamond asked Halliwell, seated in the back. “Can you see anything?”
“I don’t know what we’re looking for any more.”
Ingeborg had walked a short distance from the car and was standing with arms folded, apparently alert to something.
“She can’t see a bloody thing,” Halliwell said. “She’s having us on.”
“I’ll have her guts for garters if she is.”
She returned. “We’re in luck,” she said as she got in. “They’re not far off.”
“Did you hear them digging their holes?” Halliwell said with sarcasm.
“Actually, I did, but you can’t see them from here.”
The silence from the back seat said it all.
They started up and turned right at a side road a short way on. Ingeborg explained that they would get a better view this way. Neither of her passengers commented.
“I’m stopping again,” she said presently. “A lot of this is guesswork now.”
Halliwell couldn’t resist saying, “Can’t you pick them up on your satnav?”
She opened her door and stepped out. “Listen. Open your window and listen.”
Diamond opened his door.
No argument: there was definitely a rhythmic sound coming from not far off, but it was more mechanical than natural.
“Is that them?”
“We can get closer,” she said. And they were off again.
After two more turns they had a view across the fields to the railway and an extraordinary floodlit spectacle, a stationary train made up of at least a dozen units in bright yellow.
A train?
Diamond was so confused that he got out of the car unaided and felt no pain. He stood with hands on hips taking it all in.
The sound they had heard was coming from a carriage that was, in effect, a piling rig driving a huge tubular pile into the ground attended by a team of workmen in hard hats and high-visibility jackets. Other rolling stock was made up of excavators, flat-bed wagons loaded with more of the piles, tanks that presumably held cement and water and a concrete mixer.
“It’s a bloody factory on wheels,” Halliwell said.
“Officially known as the High Output Plant System,” Ingeborg said, and waited a moment to deliver her punchline. “HOPS.”
A pause followed.
“HOPS, right,” Halliwell eventually said, grinning sheepishly. “Digging their holes. Pellegrini isn’t such a dumbo as we thought.”
Diamond was shaking his head. “Speaking of dumbos, I should have thought of this. The electrification of the Great Western main line. The booking clerk at the station talked to me about this and I didn’t cotton on that it was the thing Pellegrini was on about.”