“He was fooling you. He had his supper two hours ago. He’ll get overweight.”
“Look who’s talking.” She zipped up her jacket.
“Aren’t you staying the night?” he asked.
“With a back patient? You’re joking.”
T oday I’m rather pleased with myself. A situation has arisen giving me the chance to insure my secrets against discovery. It’s the conjuror’s trick of misdirection, simple, but effective. The nice thing is that I am uniquely placed to pull this off. I’ve baited the trap and we’ll see if it works. No worry if it doesn’t.
18
Eight-fifteen next morning found Diamond at the Guildhall in Bath High Street attending something he wouldn’t normally have dreamed of going near, a gathering of geeks called the Techie Brekkie. He was on the trail of Alex, the one-time IT problem-solver for Bath Police. Early morning enquiries through a website called BathSpark had suggested this was where Alex was likely to be.
It was a good thing Ingeborg had come too. Mingling with this lot would be next to impossible for him. Aside from the fact that he was the only man in a suit and their average age was about twenty-five, he wasn’t likely to hold up well in conversation. Plenty was going on, serious networking. This was a quarterly opportunity for computer slaves to emerge from behind their screens for a brief respite with fellow sufferers-the chance to meet real people. They had embraced it in numbers.
“Fancy a bacon butty?” Ingeborg said.
“Better not. I’ll need to shake hands with Alex when I spot him.”
“They won’t do handshakes,” she said. “High fives, more like.”
“Not with a bacon butty.”
“What does he look like?” she asked.
“Average height. Dark, shoulder-length hair in those days. This lot seem to shave their heads.”
“The name badges might help.” Everyone including themselves had a blue ID on a cord. Diamond’s just said Pete. They’d asked if he belonged to an organisation and he thought Bath Police might be off-putting.
“We’d better move in and start looking,” Ingeborg said. “They start their discussion soon.”
“Jesus Christ, I want to be out before then.”
Alex was one of the last to arrive and he spotted Diamond first. He’d changed his image, clipped the hair from the sides of his head and grown a mohawk on top. He was wearing shades. “I had to look twice,” he said.
He had to look twice?
“No disrespect, Mr. Diamond, but I wouldn’t have placed you here in a million years.”
All three slipped away from the brekkie through a door marked the never bored room. There wasn’t much time for catching up on the last ten years or however long it had been. Alex soon understood why they’d come looking for him. He agreed straight away to see if he could help. He gave them a card with his contact details and Ingeborg passed him the “box of tricks,” as Diamond had called it: a USB flash drive containing the encrypted file.
“We can’t pay you anything up front,” Diamond said.
Alex flashed his teeth. “So what’s new?”
The aroma of bacon in the Techie Brekkie had got Diamond’s juices going.
“A lot has happened since yesterday morning,” he told Ingeborg. “We need to touch base.”
The nearest base was Café Retro, on the corner of York Street. He ordered the Big Bath special, she the granola and yoghurt.
“Don’t stand on ceremony,” he said when hers arrived first. “Get stuck in.”
There was plenty to tell. She hadn’t even heard about Pellegrini’s taxi ride to Little Langford on the evening of Cyril’s death.
“That’s the clincher, guv,” she said. “Got to be.”
She understood right away why it was so vital to speak to Jessie the housekeeper. “When she walked in he must have had the shock of his life. Do you think he murdered her as well?”
“No,” he said. “She was there next morning. She found Cyril dead in bed and called the doctor.”
“She’s the only witness, then.”
“Right. And she won’t even know he was murdered.”
“Can we be certain he was?”
“Why else did Pellegrini go there? It’s like the other cases. An old man dies in his own bed and it gets put down as natural. My best guess is that they had a drink and he popped something in Cyril’s glass.”
“Poison?”
“Sleeping tablets of some sort.”
“Would that be enough?”
“Mix them with alcohol and they can be lethal. Cyril would have gone to bed feeling drowsy and never woken up.”
“But Jessie coming back early wasn’t in the script.” Ingeborg’s hand went to her mouth. “Guv, I have a horrible feeling about this. How long ago was it? Six weeks?”
“More like seven now.”
“Time enough for him to have caught up with her and killed her. Don’t we have any idea where she went after Cyril’s death?”
“Keith spent most of yesterday trying to trace her through the care agencies. Difficult, without a surname. We got nowhere.”
“Maybe she got the job independently.”
“Possibly. We haven’t given up. He’s at Little Langford knocking on doors as we speak.” He paused as the Big Bath special was put in front of him. “This is what I call a breakfast.”
“She’ll have left the village, won’t she?” Ingeborg said.
“I’m sure of that, but someone may be able to tell us more. Her surname or what she was planning to do next.”
“Did she have a phone?”
“I expect so. But she took it with her.”
“I’m thinking Cyril must have stored her number on his own phone.”
“If he did, his niece Hilary slung it out with all the other junk. She was doing a house clearance, a wholesale clearance. Hilary is a force of nature, a whirlwind. The place was bare except for the heaviest furniture when I got there. The only personal item left was a plastic hairbrush we found under Jessie’s bed. And I know what you’re about to ask me.”
“DNA?”
“There were a few blonde hairs caught in the bristles. I already sent the brush to be analysed. It must have been under that bed at least six weeks. I don’t know how long DNA survives.”
Ingeborg was better informed. “The best results come if the follicle is still attached. That’s where the living cells are found. There’s still a chance of getting mitochondrial DNA from the shaft of a hair.”
“Dyed hair?”
“No difference.”
“Anyway, the result isn’t back yet.”
“Let’s be positive,” she said.
“I’d rather have a name to work with. A DNA profile is bugger all use unless we can compare it with another.”
“She could be on the national database.”
“We’re talking about a carer here, Inge. If Jessie had a criminal record she wouldn’t be in the job.”
“Got to be checked, though. It’s vital that we trace her.”
“No argument about that.”
When Ingeborg drove back to Keynsham to catch up on her CID duties, Diamond remained in Bath. “If Georgina asks for me, tell her I’m having another look at the accident site,” he’d told her.
“Is that what you’re really up to?”
“It’s what you tell Georgina, okay?”
Left alone, he made his way on foot to Green Park Station, a place no longer of interest to railway buffs except for its ironwork architecture. The last train was seen there half a century ago. The Beeching cuts brought quietus and for years the site was a soot-stained, decaying embarrassment. Regeneration came in 1982-4, courtesy of Sainsbury’s, who built their supermarket, cleaned the entire Victorian terminus and installed shops, a car park and a farmers’ market where the locomotives had once steamed in.
Diamond wasn’t there for the railway history but to look up one of Bath’s characters: the watercress man. Garth Ogle sold nothing but watercress and watercress products from a market stall. The cress came fresh in bunches or processed and packaged in a variety of forms, as soup, pesto, oil, sausages, ice-cream, a range of cosmetics and even gin infused with the stuff. Some of the sausages were being cooked on a Primus and smelt good, but even a man of Diamond’s capacity couldn’t face one after the Big Bath special.