“I said he didn’t murder her and I’ll tell you why.” He shared with them yesterday’s experience in the hospital and the first thrilling sign of life from Pellegrini, the response to Trixie’s name. “He loved her. When his finger pressed into my hand like that, I don’t mind telling you I was moved. By then I’d gone through what I thought was a list of buzzwords and names, but it was Trixie who was the spark. It’s hard to explain. No one’s more hard-bitten and cynical than I am. This time there was communication, like some form of telepathy. He was telling me she was more important to him than all the railway stuff I’d been going through, all his friends and carers. He was coming alive for Trixie and her alone.”
The silence that followed told Diamond he hadn’t done a good job of explaining the extraordinary revelation Pellegrini’s touch had been for him.
The team looked embarrassed.
It was Ingeborg who finally spoke. “This is difficult to say, guv. Is it possible you were influenced by personal experience?”
“I don’t know what you’re on about.”
“Him responding when his dead wife’s name was spoken.”
“You mean…?” He couldn’t complete the sentence, couldn’t even say Steph’s name without getting a lump in his throat. “I don’t think so, don’t think so at all.” He forced himself to get a grip. “It’s not obvious to me, anyway.” But inside, he knew Inge could be right.
She now made an effort to cover the raw wound she’d exposed. “It doesn’t affect the point you’re making. You’re saying we may have misjudged him?”
But Halliwell wasn’t having any of that. “It’s too much to believe all these deaths are natural. Something very weird is going on, that’s for sure, and Pellegrini is the common factor. And now we can throw another killing into the mix. Do either of you seriously believe Jessie fell into the river by accident?”
“There was no evidence of violence,” Ingeborg said, back-pedalling out of consideration for Diamond’s feelings.
Halliwell wasn’t stopping now. “So she wasn’t shot or stabbed or knocked on the head, but she could have been pushed in or held under. Or drugged and dropped in the river unconscious. Or given so much drink she was incapable of saving herself. She knew what happened that night in the cottage and she had to die. And who was there with her? Pellegrini.”
“A double murder?” Ingeborg said on a rising note, all tact abandoned. “You think he killed them both?”
“Not the same night,” Halliwell said. “It was Jessie who reported Cyril’s death next morning. But she went missing soon after. He will have set a trap, lured her to Swineford on some pretext. He may have offered her hush money. It’s out in the country, quiet there most times. They meet somewhere-let’s say the Swan-and then do a bit of the Avon River Trail along the bank. He’ll have come prepared. He wouldn’t simply push her in and hope she’d drown. He could have used chloroform.”
“Not easy to obtain,” Ingeborg said.
“Unless you’re a scientist,” Halliwell said at once. “He was well capable of passing himself off as one. If it wasn’t chloroform it was some other knockout drug. He could have put something in her drink. We can work out the method later. His party trick is rendering people senseless and he used it on Jessie and dumped her in the river. With Jessie dead, he thought he was in the clear. No one could finger him for Cyril’s murder.”
“Except Rex the taxi driver.”
“He thought he’d covered that. He made sure Rex didn’t know his name or address. Have I made the case?”
Halliwell looked for a response from each of the others. Diamond was subdued, playing the scenario over in his torn mind. Ingeborg too was pensive, fingering her blonde hair.
Then she spoke. “There’s another way to look at it, isn’t there?”
“What’s that?”
“From Jessie’s point of view. She seemed to be coping well with Cyril, an old man with serious money worries. It was a job with a guaranteed wage because it was paid by the trust. A nice little earner-if she could stand being stuck in that cottage out in the country with just a ninety-year-old for company.”
“Her choice,” Halliwell said. “Caring was her job.”
“True. But when he dies suddenly she’s jobless. She has to think about her future. Seems to me she’ll look around urgently for a new employer.”
“Pellegrini, you mean?”
Ingeborg nodded. “She’ll have given him the once-over and decided he isn’t short of cash. His wife is dead and he’s getting on in years, so he might be glad of a live-in housekeeper. How will she approach him? Better do it fast. A meeting is set up.”
“At Swineford?”
“First she may have gone to the house and the next time-”
“Before you go any further,” Diamond interrupted her, “Pellegrini didn’t need a housekeeper. He was organised with a cleaner, Mrs. Halliday. I met her and she was doing the job nicely. He had someone from the church bringing him meals on wheels. I can’t see him wanting anyone extra.”
“That’s immaterial,” Ingeborg said. “I asked you to look at it from Jessie’s point of view. She’d make a pitch without knowing his arrangements.”
Fair point. Diamond wished he hadn’t spoken. It was increasingly obvious he was on a different wavelength.
“The upshot is the same,” Halliwell said. “She ends up dead in the river and there’s only one possible killer.”
Diamond wasn’t willing to listen to any more. He’d told them his current thinking and it pained him to have it disbelieved. Their arguments were rational, his intuitive, and it wasn’t the way he liked to work. “I’m out of here.”
“Are you okay, guv?” Ingeborg asked.
“Perfectly.”
“Something I said?” Halliwell asked.
“Leave it,” Ingeborg told him.
When the two were left alone, Ingeborg said, “Did you see his eyes?”
“What do you mean?”
“Kind of troubled, tortured almost. I’ve never seen him like that. Is he losing it, do you think?”
“I hadn’t noticed,” Halliwell said. “Overwork, do you think?”
She shook her head. “It’s got personal for him, this investigation, and he’s not used to that. Something seismic happened at the hospital yesterday. We know Pellegrini may be starting to come out of the coma, but it’s more than that. It goes really deep and I’m not sure what it’s about.”
“Holding his hand?”
“Maybe. I wish I hadn’t mentioned his own wife when he was telling us about Trixie being the name that triggered the result. That was tactless of me.”
“He doesn’t often talk about Steph,” Halliwell said, “but she’s in his thoughts still. They were very close.”
“Too painful to share with anyone?”
“Probably,” he said, tilting his head as if listening to some distant sound. “I’m forgetting this was before you joined CID. I was first at the scene that morning when we got the shout that a woman had been shot in Victoria Park. Neither of us had the slightest idea it would be Steph.”
“The shock,” Ingeborg said, crinkling her eyes. “I can’t imagine.”
“It was as bad as it gets. For fifteen, twenty minutes, maybe longer, he was on his knees beside her. It was obvious she was dead. I went to see if I could offer sympathy or support and he told me to back off. He wouldn’t let the police photographer near, the SOCOs. Anyone. All this time he was holding her hand, kind of cradling it.”
Ingeborg dragged her fingers through her hair. “Oh my God. I didn’t mean to hurt him. I really have messed up.”
Diamond walked steadily in the direction of the river-but not to throw himself in. Needing to get his thinking straight, he’d decided to visit the place where Jessie had been found. It was barely half a mile from the Keynsham police centre and the most direct route was up Pixash Lane over the London to Bristol railway and through an eighty-acre kids’ attraction known as the Avon Valley Adventure and Wildlife Park. From Brunel’s stone bridge he glanced down at the long stretch of track and gave a thought to Pellegrini. This might well have become a vantage point for a night visit after the HOPS moved on from Bath Spa station.