Another twitch confirmed it.
Communication at last.
A small but sensational triumph.
Nothing else happened. Pellegrini didn’t open his eyes and say, “You’ve got me bang to rights, officer, I’m ready to confess.” Something may have registered in the vital signs but Diamond missed it, too surprised to look up at the monitor.
He was thrilled beyond description.
Impossible to overestimate his sense of relief. The raw emotions of that morning on the embankment came flooding back: fear that he would get the compressions wrong and destroy a life he could have saved, revulsion at the mouth-to-mouth, exasperation with the discipline of counting, but above all the will to succeed-and all brought to a halt by the anti-climax of the paramedics taking over. From that moment until now, any hope had been put on hold.
The immediate effect on Diamond was dramatic.
The drip, drip of suspicion accumulated over the past week drained away. None of it had any part in this moment. He felt only the closeness of a shared experience, an irresistible warmth towards the helpless man who had freed him from uncertainty with no more than a touch.
He had to tell someone and he’d taken Paloma for an evening meal at one of their regular haunts, the White Hart at the bottom of Widcombe Hill. Church pew seats, but cushioned, white walls and wood floors. Real ale, too.
“It was uncanny,” he said, after a long first gulp. “I almost gave up, and then this. He may be a thief and a murderer. God knows I’ve found enough evidence to arrest him, but when I felt that tiny movement of his finger and knew he’d understood me, I melted. We were sharing in something intensely personal. If there hadn’t been so many tubes and wires I’d have hugged him. It’s unprofessional. It’s all about some primitive drive to connect.”
“That’s understandable,” Paloma said. “You saved his life. You have a stake in his future.”
“It goes deeper than that. I’m doing something a cop should never do-taking sides. In the face of all the evidence I’m now trying to think of reasons why he might be innocent.”
“He has a right to be understood, whatever he’s done.”
“My heart is ruling my head.”
“It’s allowed,” she said.
“Not in my job.”
“Perhaps he is innocent. You said all the deaths were signed off by doctors as natural. The doctors may be right.”
“How I wish!”
“Well, you haven’t explained to me how the doctors could be mistaken.”
“Actually, there’s a long history of doctors getting it wrong. They’re not trained to spot the signs of criminality. Some killers are so confident they call in their GP to examine the corpse and certify death.”
“Confident of fooling them?”
“The stuff he downloaded from the Internet was nothing else but clever ways of killing people.”
“Doesn’t mean he put it into practice.”
“That’s my hope.”
She sat back and took a sip of wine. “You’ll know before long, so why agonise over it? He’ll get his head straight and you’ll be able to question him.”
“That’s if he makes a full recovery. It’s not guaranteed. Parts of his brain may have been permanently damaged. He reacted to his wife’s name, and that’s a positive sign.”
Paloma smiled. “A lot more positive than reacting to a steam train. There’s hope for him, whatever he’s guilty of. If I were you I’d soft-pedal until he’s well enough to give his own account.”
Good advice, he decided.
“How’s your back now?” she asked.
“Much improved. Another massage might see it right.”
She gave him a wide-eyed look that didn’t commit to anything.
“Your place or mine?” he asked.
“Well, I don’t think they’d welcome it here.”
T he best-laid plans… I made my preparations and knew what ought to work, but the current one behaved out of character. People, being people, have minds of their own. I mustn’t let it get to me. I can’t bail out this time, because this one knows far too much and he has to go. Knows I’m coming? Possibly. It’s a new challenge for me. I simply have to be equal to it.
Cool is the rule.
20
The soft-pedalling came to a stop as soon as the next morning when Diamond arrived at Keynsham. A note was on his desk asking him to call someone called Frankie on a Bristol number.
Frankie turned out to be female and a forensics officer.
He reached for pencil and paper. The science would go over his head if he didn’t jot down the salient points.
“You recently sent us a pink plastic brush with some hair samples for testing.” Frankie spoke in a tone of disapproval, as if it had been a letter bomb.
Jessie the housekeeper’s dyed hair ought not to have upset them. “The day before yesterday. Did you get anything from it?”
Frankie wasn’t ready to say. She had questions of her own. “You found the brush at an address in Wiltshire, according to the information you supplied. Is that right?”
“A cottage in Little Langford, not far from Salisbury.”
“Was that you personally?”
“Yes, it was.”
“And is there an unbroken chain of custody?”
This was something Forensics were hot on. You had to keep a written record of the whereabouts of every piece of evidence to show it wasn’t corrupted, but it was a bit insulting to be asked. “I wasn’t born yesterday. Did you manage to get some DNA off it?”
“We did, both nuclear, from the follicle cells, and mitochondrial, from a hair shaft, which is more difficult to extract. So we have a result. But you didn’t provide the name of the individual whose hair it is. Was there a reason for that?”
He was writing and speaking at the same time. “We don’t have a surname. She’s known as Jessie.”
“And you’re absolutely sure the brush belongs to her?”
“I found it under her bed.”
“The hair is definitely female and originally brown in colour, tinted blonde,” Frankie said.
“That all ties in,” he said. “Jessie has blonde streaks.”
“Fortunately the chemicals used in tinting hair don’t degrade the DNA. We checked the national database. Currently it stands at six million DNA profiles.”
“Don’t tell me you found a match,” he said, more in hope than expectation.
“We did.”
“Frankie, you’re a star.”
She gave a grunt like a boxer taking a punch. Accepting a compliment was clearly difficult for her.
“So what’s her surname?” He was ready with the pencil.
“I can’t tell you.”
The pencil broke. “What?”
“The match is with an unknown woman.”
“Unknown? How can that be? If it’s a database it has names.”
“Not in her case. This individual was found dead in the River Avon two weeks ago.”
He needed a moment to take it in. “That’s awful. Did she drown?”
“The postmortem was inconclusive. Any pathologist will tell you drowning is difficult to be sure about.”
Thoughts flapped around his head like trapped birds. Jessie dead? He’d counted on her as his key witness. She’d been at Max’s funeral. She’d been in the cottage when Cyril died. She’d spoken to Rex, the taxi driver. She must have had words with Pellegrini that night. Soon after that, she’d gone missing, but the possibility that she’d died hadn’t seriously crossed his mind.
“Could there be a mistake?”
Stupid bloody question.
Frankie said after a couple of beats to register disapproval, “No two people have ever been found to have shared the same DNA, other than identical twins. I wouldn’t be speaking to you if there was any doubt.”
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “A woman’s body was found in the river. Where exactly?”
“A few miles west of Bath, near Swineford.”
“That’s a long way from Little Langford.”
“It’s not my job to explain how she got there,” Frankie said. “You asked for the location and that’s it. Your own police authority must have dealt with it.”