“The Lady Vanishes?”
“We shouldn’t have started him on old films,” Ingeborg said. “He’ll go on forever.”
He didn’t because they’d reached Pellegrini’s room. “I gave it a good clean the other day,” Mrs. Halliday said. “Not that he’s untidy. He’s one of the tidiest gentlemen I’ve worked for.”
This was borne out by the absence of any clutter. It could have been a hotel room ready for a guest. Double bed, chest of drawers, built-in wardrobe, plasma TV, a poster of the Cornish Riviera Express.
“Not much here we can take to the hospital,” Diamond said.
Ingeborg picked up a small framed photo from the bedside table. “This must be Trixie.”
A slight woman in her sixties, with permed white hair and rimless glasses. She was in a twinset and tweed skirt. She looked as if she wouldn’t know what to do with a Fortuny gown.
“Can’t show him that,” Diamond said. “It might distress him. Isn’t there anything else?” He opened the wardrobe and spotted some neckties neatly arranged on a special hanger. “One of these might do.” He picked off one that was light brown in colour with rows of small yellow circles with the letters GWR inscribed in grey. Not a thing of beauty.
“He ought to recognise that,” Mrs. Halliday said.
“Good suggestion.” Diamond folded the tie and put it in his pocket. “We can hang it on the railing above his bed.” He looked at the old-fashioned rotary-dial phone on the bedside table. No stored numbers. “Did he use a mobile?”
“I never saw him with one. If he did, it would be in his little office in the spare room.”
Another office.
Diamond’s gaze flicked to Ingeborg.
“Where’s that?”
Mrs. Halliday led them along the corridor and opened a door. The first thing Diamond noticed on the desk was precisely what they’d hoped to find: a laptop.
A disappointing day had suddenly redeemed itself. “This will do it,” he said, flipping open the lid. “What’s the screensaver? I wouldn’t mind betting it’s a bloody train,” he muttered to himself.
How right he was: front view with a fine head of steam polluting the countryside.
“This is ideal.”
“I can’t allow you to take that away,” Mrs. Halliday said. “It might have personal stuff on it.”
“Don’t you worry about that, my dear,” he said, sounding awfully like a conman. “My colleague Ingeborg has a clever little gadget that will copy this and any other memorable images he’s stored. She’s a wiz at technical stuff.”
Ingeborg may have cringed at such deceit, but she’d come prepared with the hard drive.
“Won’t take more than a few minutes,” Diamond went on. “I wonder if there’s anything else here.” He needed to find a distraction while Ingeborg transferred all the data.
“This.” Mrs. Halliday reached up to a shelf above the desk and picked off a soft toy, a huge, hideous pink squirrel in a railway guard’s uniform with cap and waistcoat and a plastic whistle sewn between the front paws. “I found him in a car boot sale and gave him to Ivor for his birthday. Isn’t he the cuddliest little armful you ever saw?”
It was more armful than cuddly, and not little, about the size of a St. Bernard.
He managed to say, “Very fetching.”
“I made the uniform myself,” she said. “It’s all authentic. The cap took me a long time. When I got him he had a large nut between his paws-a padded felt nut about the size of an orange-and I had the idea of giving him the whistle instead for reality’s sake. Ivor was really taken with him. He calls him Nutty. He made the shelf specially. He says Nutty can sit up there where I can see him each time I clean the room.”
“How thoughtful.” Nutty had been thrust into Diamond’s arms. He could understand Ivor’s difficulty on being presented with this misguided labour of loyalty. And why it was kept above eye level on the shelf. He thought about replacing it there, but Mrs. Halliday had other ideas.
“Take him with you to the hospital and stand him near the bed where Ivor can see him.”
“The nurses might trip over him.”
“On the bed, then.”
“I doubt if they allow things like that in intensive care,” he said. “They have rules about hygiene. They won’t even let you take flowers in.”
“There’s nothing unhygienic about Nutty. I spruced him up before I gave him to Ivor. He’s been through one of those big commercial washing machines,” she said. “He was too large to get into mine. He’s germ-free. You can smell the detergent on him. Have a sniff.”
Nutty’s state of hygiene wasn’t worth fighting over.
It was easier to give in. “I can only ask.” He held on to the thing.
“Not by his ears,” Mrs. Halliday said. “Tuck him under your arm.”
Ingeborg must have heard this going on, but she kept a straight face and concentrated on copying the entire contents of the laptop.
“Is he able to eat?” Mrs. Halliday asked-and for one surreal moment Diamond thought she was speaking about Nutty.
“The last I heard they were feeding him through a tube.”
“As soon as he’s on solids we can get Elspeth Blake to send in one of her quiche Lorraines. He’d enjoy that.”
“I expect they regulate what patients eat.” He turned to Ingeborg. “Have you finished?”
She nodded and disconnected the lead.
“What else can I show you?” Mrs. Halliday asked.
“We’ve got more than enough now.”
“Is it safe to talk, do you think?” Diamond asked as Ingeborg powered her Ka southwards on Henrietta Road towards the city.
“Why, what’s the problem?” she asked.
“Him in the back.”
She laughed. Nutty had taken over most of the back seat. “He could be a whistle-blower, couldn’t he? He’s got the whistle. All he needs is some puff. What are you going to do with him?”
“I’m not taking him to the hospital.” He paused for thought. “Actually he looks comfortable where he is.”
She crashed the gears. “He’s not staying in my car.”
“We can’t have him in CID,” Diamond said. “Georgina will want to know where he comes from.”
“We know where he comes from: a charity shop. They’ll take him.”
“Can’t do that. He doesn’t belong to us.”
For harmony’s sake he agreed to transfer Nutty to his own car when they reached the staff car park.
“How long will it take you to go through the disk?” he asked.
“Depends, doesn’t it? Could be really quick, but if any of the files are encrypted we could be looking at a couple of days.”
He hoped not. This was crunch time. If Pellegrini used the laptop for his emails and the Internet, his guilt would surely be exposed. Even a technophobe like Diamond knew modern computers list your search history. That’s how paedophiles are caught. And if the Internet didn’t nail him, his emails surely would. It was vital to know all the dirt before Pellegrini emerged fully from the coma.
Eager as Diamond was to find the smoking gun in this case, a part of him remained uneasy. The sense of touch has a remarkable ability to stimulate our emotions. That pressure of Pellegrini’s fingers when Trixie’s name was spoken had been profoundly moving at the time and wouldn’t fade from his memory, however obvious it had become that the man was a killer several times over.
“Make a start straight away,” he told Ingeborg, “and let me know the minute you find anything.”
Attached to his own computer screen he found a Post-it note asking him to contact Richard Palmer, the chief inspector he’d consulted about the body in the Avon.
“Some juicy news about the drowned woman,” Palmer said when Diamond looked into his office.
Diamond corrected him. “The woman in the river. We don’t know for sure if she drowned.”
“Okay, Peter, be like that. Call her the woman in the morgue if you like. Anyhow, she’s not just ‘the woman’ any more. I know who she is.”