“Really?”
“I told you I sent her DNA profile to Interpol. They got back to me this morning, or rather the Bulgarian police did. They matched it to a missing woman from Sofia by the name of Maria Mikhaylova, who left in 2010 and hasn’t been heard of since.”
Diamond tried to appear unmoved. Inside, his nerves juddered like one of Pellegrini’s express trains going over points.
“The physical details match pretty well,” Palmer was saying. “Height, build, colour. The age is close enough, thirty-seven compared to our estimate of between thirty and forty. I emailed her mortuary photo by return and they say it’s her.”
Run up a drain, Diamond thought. This can’t be right.
“They’re going to get back to me when they’ve spoken to the family.”
He took a long, deep breath to compose himself. “Bulgarian, you say? But we already have a match with the woman known as Jessie, who as far as I know is British.”
“Some of them speak excellent English,” Palmer said. “She could have been here five years.”
Why listen to this garbage?
“I’m not convinced. How is she supposed to have got here?”
“Can’t say for sure, but Bulgaria is high on the list for trafficking.”
“You mean for sex?”
“Sex or forced labour. Slavery, either way. It’s possible she escaped at some stage and decided to get a job and make her home here. She was getting on a bit to be a sex worker. They may even have let her go. She’s not going to live here under her Bulgarian name, is she? She calls herself Jessie and finds work as a carer.”
No doubt this bilge made sense to Palmer, but it was going over Diamond’s head. “You’ve had time to take this in. I haven’t.”
“You didn’t meet her yourself when she was alive?” Palmer asked.
“Well, no.”
“You want to find someone who did. Ask if there was any trace of a foreign accent.”
Not a bad suggestion. He thought of Hilary. She hadn’t said anything about Jessie sounding like a foreigner. He’d ask Keith Halliwell if he’d heard any such suggestion when he was knocking on doors in Little Langford.
Palmer was adamant. “It can’t be anyone else. DNA is a hundred percent accurate. There’s no other person in the world with the same profile.”
“An identical twin.”
“You’re splitting hairs now. If she has a twin, which is unlikely, the twin would also be Bulgarian, so you’re stuck with the same problem. Face it, Peter, your Jessie is Maria from Sofia. Try and look grateful.”
In his days as a smoker he’d have lit up. He badly needed some kind of therapy. He went to the nearest coffee machine and pressed the buttons for the blackest caffeine brew it would give.
He clutched the paper cup so hard that some slopped over the rim and hurt his hand. He was muttering to himself. He knew he had to adjust. You make assumptions and they get challenged by the facts. No future in arguing with the science.
After several swigs of coffee he began to accept the inevitable and tell himself that Jessie’s nationality wasn’t such a big deal after all. There was no reason why she couldn’t be Bulgarian. Nothing had been known about her life before she took her job as Cyril’s housekeeper, not even her surname. The rest of what Richard Palmer had been saying about the trafficking and the sex trade was guesswork, the spin he’d put on the few reliable facts he’d got from the Bulgarian police: that she was a missing woman in her late thirties whose appearance was similar to Jessie’s.
The one fact that mattered was that she was dead.
Dead and identified.
He binned the cup and went in search of Ingeborg.
She’d downloaded the data from Pellegrini’s laptop and was clicking through files at mind-boggling speed.
“How’s it coming?” he asked.
“These are his sent emails,” she said. “He’s methodical about accurate subject-lines and that helps. Loads of boring railway stuff. But I looked first at his document files and found he’d downloaded the Internet forum on murder methods-the material we know about because he printed it.”
“So he used the laptop for that?”
“Yes. And saved it.”
“Can you put a date on it?”
“Hang on a mo.” She worked the keyboard, found the file and checked the account details. “Created thirteenth June 2014. Not long after Max’s death.”
“After Max went? Interesting. I was thinking he must have researched all this before he started his killing.”
“It was before Cyril’s death. And Jessie’s. Maybe he was just brushing up on new ways of killing people.”
“What was the date again?”
“Thirteenth of June.”
“That was actually the day of the funeral. Max’s funeral. So Pellegrini was studying murder methods on the day he attended his friend’s last rites.”
Her eyes rolled upwards. “Some friend.”
“Has he saved anything else of interest?”
“Any amount of train-related stuff.”
“Of interest, I said. Nothing encrypted?”
“If there is, I haven’t found it yet. I was hoping the emails might contain something helpful, but they haven’t yet. He’s probably wise to the risks. Email was never designed with security in mind. Every message you send passes through various servers before it gets to the recipient. Any of them could intercept your personal correspondence.”
“To say nothing of hackers.”
“Or government agencies.”
“You’re not expecting to find much? Well, there’s new information today about one of the victims.” He told her what he’d just learned from Palmer about Jessie’s Bulgarian roots.
“Surprising,” she said, and showed straight away that she’d got the point. “DNA doesn’t lie. Does it make any difference to the case against Pellegrini if Jessie is from East Europe instead of somewhere in Britain? I don’t believe it does.”
“But we’ve learned that Jessie wasn’t her real name.”
“You’re thinking she was here illegally?”
“Palmer does. He put together a back story that made her a working girl who was trafficked and escaped and created this new identity for herself.”
“Does he have evidence for this?”
He shook his head. “Guesswork, but not all that far-fetched.”
Ingeborg had tensed. “Horribly persuasive.”
“And if there’s any truth in it,” he said, “we can’t rule out the possibility that she was killed by her former gangmaster and not Pellegrini. After all, the MO is different. His other victims weren’t chucked in the river. They were found dead in bed.”
She was silent, thinking. “But we don’t know she was in the sex trade. That’s Chief Inspector Palmer’s theory and I don’t know if we should buy it. He’s piling speculation on speculation.”
“Yes, and let’s not forget there was quite a debate in that forum about drowning and how difficult it is to prove at postmortem. Pellegrini was clued up on this.”
“It’s a departure from his usual MO.”
“True. But Jessie-I’m going to carry on calling her that-was younger than his other victims and less likely to die in bed. He had the problem of where she was going to be found.”
Ingeborg twisted a strand of hair around her forefinger. She wasn’t convinced yet. “Realistically, he’s elderly to lug a body about. It wouldn’t be easy for him to tip her in the river. How would he have got her out to Swineford? He doesn’t drive any more.”
“He’d arrange to meet her on some pretext.”
“Such as what?”
“I’m speculating myself now. He offers her a job, or money. Let’s remember she’s just lost her livelihood. He may have suggested she join him as his housekeeper. He invites her to meet for a drink at Swineford. He knows the place well because of the steam trains, the Avon Valley Railway. It’s a good location for what he has in mind, secluded and beside the river. They meet at the Swan some quiet evening and talk it over and he offers to show her the little station, which means a stroll along the riverbank. By then he’s added something to her drink. They don’t get far before she feels unsteady. All he has to do is push her in. He’s capable of that, especially if she’s losing her balance already.”