He tried to make light of it. “In case we’re up shit creek and I haven’t noticed? Wouldn’t be the first time.”
Halliwell grinned back. “I’ll have another crack at the taxis.”
“What does Inge think?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t seen her all morning.”
“I hope she’s still on board. Shit creek isn’t the ideal place to jump ship.”
Back in his office he stood in thought.
There’s always a low point.
He stared through the glass at everyone busy on official duties.
Get on with it, you great lummock, he told himself. You can only go upwards from here. Stepped round his desk, rolled out the chair, lowered himself into it and screamed like a seagull at the spasm of pain that hit him. Yesterday’s injury hadn’t gone away. He’d forgotten the low point in his own spine.
When the agony had subsided to mere soreness he checked his inbox and found one from Miss Hill with two attachments: the documents he’d asked for.
Olga’s collection of jewellery wouldn’t have disgraced a queen. The inventory ran to six pages: necklaces, bracelets, bangles, rings, brooches, lockets, earrings and even two tiaras. Almost all were listed as antique and many were Austro-Hungarian or Russian. Some of the valuations in the right-hand column made him blink and look twice.
The serpent’s head necklace of 18 carat gold with five inset diamonds and blue enamel was listed on page 3 and valued at £2,600.
The real thing in its velvet bag was tucked away in the bottom drawer of his desk. Normally he would have handed it to the exhibits officer who stored every item of evidence, but this wasn’t an official investigation.
He’d lock the drawer in future.
He turned to Max’s assets and found what he expected: some notable omissions.
No mention of the serpent’s head necklace.
He spent the next hour checking one list against the other, item by item, and several other pieces hadn’t made it to Max’s inventory: a gold bangle with appliquéd decoration, a gold and enamel brooch set with a star sapphire, a gold and carnelian signet ring, an art deco sapphire and diamond pendant on a gold chain, a diamond and amethyst necklace. Altogether, they were valued at more than twenty thousand pounds. Of course, you’d get a fraction of that if you fenced them, yet it was still a sizeable haul.
They’d been cherry-picked, by the look of it.
There was a crime here for sure. Max wouldn’t have sold them himself. He hadn’t needed the money.
Max was doddery but he’d sensed that things were disappearing.
Look no further for a motive.
Diamond called Miss Hill again. She was shocked to hear of the missing items and swift to make clear it wasn’t her job to compare one list of assets with another. He asked whether photos had been taken at valuation. She said it was standard practice. He told her he would immediately email a list of the missing items and she agreed to reply with jpegs of each of them. He could rely on her discretion, she said. Nothing of this would be revealed to her colleagues or anyone else. He believed her.
15
It was obvious Halliwell had got a result at last.
“This time, instead of asking about Pellegrini, I phoned around to see if any driver had made a trip to Little Langford in the past six months. Small place, large fare, so they’d remember, see?”
“One of them did?”
“None of the big companies had any record of it, but I struck lucky with a small firm called Rex Cabs.”
“No surprise it’s small with a name like that.”
“Yeah?” Halliwell looked vacant.
“Come on,” Diamond said. “Wrecks cabs. Geddit?”
“Oh yeah. Well, I spoke to Rex himself and he definitely drove someone there on a Monday evening six weeks ago.”
“About the time Cyril died.” Diamond cut the jokey stuff. “We must talk to Rex. Where is he?”
“Right now? In the rank at the station, waiting to meet the next London train.”
“Call him and ask him to drive out here. No, better not. On second thoughts, we’ll meet him at Verona.”
“Verona?”
“The coffee shop. Get with it.”
Rex looked about eighteen, bucktoothed and chewing. He wore a red jacket with an emblem of a robin perched on a football. Either the robin or the football was out of proportion. His baseball cap had the same design. Tufts of bleached-blond hair stuck out under the sides and back.
Diamond offered coffee.
Rex said he’d prefer a Coke.
“Good of you to come,” Diamond said. “We’ll reimburse the fare right away. Will twenty cover it?”
“No problem,” Rex said and pocketed the note.
“You heard what interests us-the fare you took to Little Langford some six weeks ago.”
“No problem,” Rex said again.
“Do you remember who it was and where you picked him up?”
Two questions together seemed to be more than Rex could handle. He chewed hard and looked up at the ceiling.
“The fare. Was it a man?”
Rex nodded.
This was hard work.
“About what age?”
He shrugged. “Dunno.”
“Try. It’s important.”
“An old guy.”
“That’s better.”
“No problem.”
The two words were marginally preferable to “no comment,” but they didn’t make for a connected conversation. If it hadn’t mattered so much, this would have been a parlour game, trying to steer Rex away from his favourite catchphrase. Diamond tried again. “Where did you pick him up?”
“City centre.”
“Where exactly?”
“Orange Grove.”
“Right. The rank at Orange Grove. We’re getting somewhere.”
“No problem.”
“Can you tell me how he was dressed? I’m trying to work out whether we’re talking about the same guy.”
This, it seemed, was a problem. Rex chewed some more and said nothing.
Fortunately Diamond had brought the group photo of the Bath Railway Society. He unfolded it. “Is he one of these?”
A nicotine-stained finger went straight to the likeness of Pellegrini.
Every pulse in Diamond’s body zinged.
“You’re a star,” he said. “An absolute star.” And before Rex opened his mouth, he added, “So this old gentleman asked you to drive him to Little Langford?”
A nod.
“Tell me, Rex, did he have anything to say on the journey?”
This got a frown and a moment’s thought, followed by a shrug.
“You don’t remember? Did he know the way? Did he tell you when the turn for the Langfords came up?”
Rex chewed some more and said, “Satnav.”
“Right.”
“No problem.”
“When you dropped him off did he ask you to wait?”
But the young man lapsed into silence again. It was a straightforward question he didn’t seem capable of answering.
“It’s a simple question,” Diamond said. “What’s the problem?”
No answer.
Keith Halliwell had said nothing yet, sipping his coffee while Diamond was trying all he knew to prise out information. Now, out of nowhere, Keith put in a comment of his own. “That was a goal on Saturday, wasn’t it?”
Rex’s face lit up like a breaking cloud. “Did you see the replay? It’s obvious it crossed the line. The ref was nowhere near. It was criminal. He’s done it to us before, that ref. Was you there then?”
“I caught it on Points West,” Halliwell said. “I can’t always get to the games. They should be using goal-line technology, in my opinion.”
“Dead right, mate. It’s a no-brainer,” Rex said.
“So you don’t work when there’s a home game at Ashton Gate?”
“I’m self-employed, aren’t I? I put in the hours all week, so why shouldn’t I watch football?”
Halliwell smiled. “I wish it worked like that for me. Mr. Diamond here is a rugby fan. He doesn’t know what we’re talking about. He gets to most of the Bath games and I have to stand in for him at work.” Without pause, he said, “Is there anything else you can tell us about the fare you took to Little Langford?”