‘The little garden at the back? Did he grow anything?’
‘Forget-me-nots.’
There was a pause while Diamond and Ingeborg decided whether this annoying man was winding them up. It seemed he wasn’t.
‘Bloody things came up each spring. Like weeds, aren’t they? I take spade, get rid of fuckers.’
That figured, Diamond thought.
‘Then I grow potatoes.’
At this point Diamond decided he didn’t want to hear about the potatoes and it was unlikely anything else would emerge. The unwanted forget-me-nots had summed up the interview. ‘We’re leaving now,’ he told Ingeborg.
On the walk back to the car after they’d left Tank and Headmistress exercising the dog in Queen Square, Ingeborg said, ‘What did you make of all that, guv?’
‘Not much,’ Diamond said. ‘There wasn’t much.’
‘A wasted afternoon?’
‘You never know. Some of it could be helpful.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like the two women who lived in the house both walking out on their men. Didn’t that strike you as strange?’
‘Not in the least,’ she said. ‘A tin bath in the kitchen? I wouldn’t have stuck it for love nor money.’
He grinned. ‘A hundred years ago most of the population scrubbed up in front of the kitchen sink. Bath night was a luxury.’
‘This wasn’t a hundred years ago. It was in living memory. It’s primitive.’
‘One ended up in Posnan,’ Diamond said, still thinking about the two fugitive women. ‘I wonder what became of the other?’
‘Living with Harry?’
‘Or Bert.’
‘Are you thinking she’s dead?’
Some thoughts need time to mature. The tenants before Jerzy may well have been there during the crucial 1989 to 1995 slot and may have known the dead man. ‘Put it this way: I’d like to be reassured that she’s still alive.’
‘He couldn’t be sure about names so how would we find out?’
‘By digging.’
‘Digging in the backyard?’
‘I don’t mean literally.’
‘Why not?’ she said in all seriousness. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time an unfortunate woman has gone missing and been killed and buried by her so-called lover.’
He weighed the suggestion. Typical of Ingeborg to come up with the wronged-woman scenario. They’d only just heard of the existence of this lady and already she was cast as a murder victim. Yet Inge’s intuitions were never wholly unfounded. The house was already a murder location.
Stay within the bounds of reason, he told himself. The corpse found at the address hadn’t been buried. The fact that an unknown woman had lived there at one time and then left was a far cry from proving she was murdered and buried there. People walk out on their partners every day of the week. Stronger evidence would be needed to justify the man-hours expended on a dig. Headquarters wouldn’t wear it.
And yet...
‘It’s a building site now,’ he said.
‘A crime scene,’ Ingeborg said.
‘Technically, yes, but it’s been levelled. Loads of stuff has been taken away.’
‘The ground could still be holding evidence,’ she pointed out. ‘All we’ve done up to now is a fingertip search. If we leave it to the builders, they could be laying foundations any time, spreading concrete or driving in piles. We’d need to move fast.’
‘This is too speculative,’ he said.
‘Okay, forget about the woman if you want to,’ Ingeborg said. ‘Think about your crime scene. Isn’t that what you taught me to treat as hallowed ground? That small piece of garden is all we have left to explain a really bizarre case of murder.’
‘It was ruined before we knew we were dealing with murder. It’s flattened now.’
‘Under the surface. Who knows what may be buried there? Is it still cordoned off?’
A chill of guilt went through him. He couldn’t answer. He hadn’t been back. He stood still, lost for words.
Ingeborg wasn’t sparing him. ‘We don’t have any idea who the killer of the man in the loft was except he used the place to hide the body. Chances are he lived there as a tenant. You can’t live in a place without leaving evidence of yourself. Who knows what might turn up if we do a dig?’
‘You seriously think there’s a body there?’
‘Aren’t you listening, guv? I’m talking about stuff he may have discarded. An empty cigarette packet, a lottery ticket, a teaspoon, a glove, a hairclip, a foreign coin. It helps build a picture of who was living there. I don’t need to tell you this.’
She was right. His mindset was all wrong. He’d given so much mental energy to learning about Beau bloody Nash that basic procedures had been neglected.
‘I’ll clear it with Georgina.’
‘As soon as we get back?’
‘Soon as.’
But Georgina wasn’t in Concorde House. She was visiting some people in Charlcombe, Diamond was told by her personal assistant.
‘Is she expected back today?’
‘She didn’t say. She wasn’t in uniform.’
‘Unusual.’
‘Yes, she was looking really smart in the sort of blue the Queen sometimes wears. Heels, too. And she’d had her hair done again.’
‘I’m sorry I missed that.’
He asked to be informed if Georgina returned that day, but it sounded unlikely. In her absence he couldn’t authorise the dig, so he asked Ingeborg to drive out to Twerton and make sure the builders weren’t already corrupting the crime scene. ‘If it isn’t already sealed off, get it done. With luck, we’ll have a busload of bobbies out in the morning with spades and sieves.’
He called Halliwell and Leaman to his office. ‘Thanks to the Marks and Spencer lady we have a time frame. The Y-fronts first went on sale in 1989 and were replaced by another line in 1995. Allowing that some guys keep their underwear going for several years, we agreed that the outside limit is 2005.’
‘Too big,’ Leaman said with his customary plain speaking.
‘What do you mean — too big? The Y-fronts?’
‘The time frame. Sixteen years in a place where lodgers came and went like tube trains. Can’t we cut it down more?’
‘How do you propose to do that?’
‘A probability graph.’
‘A what?’
‘The early nineties, when pants like that were on sale everywhere, must be more likely than 2000 or after.’
‘Okay,’ he said, dazed by the reasoning.
‘As the time goes on, the probability declines. It’s a distribution curve and it falls away after 2000.’
‘I get it now, John.’
‘But can we agree on it?’ Leaman insisted. He could be so exacting.
‘No argument.’ Diamond said to shut him up. ‘You were looking at dates, Keith.’
‘Was I?’ From the frown on his face, Halliwell was trying to picture a distribution curve.
‘Come on. Dates when the city may have put on some kind of event involving Beau Nash.’
‘Right. 1974, three hundred years after he was born.’
‘Too far back. The pants weren’t in production then.’
‘The other likely dates were the millennium and the Queen’s jubilee.’
‘Unlikely,’ Leaman said.
‘What?’
‘We just agreed 2000 and 2002 are both towards the end of our time frame, so you can’t call them likely. To my recollection nobody dressed as Nash for either.’
The blood pressure was rising. ‘All right,’ Diamond said. ‘Here’s a better suggestion. The Beau Nash Society was meeting regularly right through those years and the president always dresses the part. He’s known as the Beau.’
‘You think our victim was one of their presidents? Wouldn’t they have noticed if he suddenly went missing?’
‘In the suit,’ Halliwell added.
‘It’s a line of enquiry,’ Diamond said, undermined by the reactions of his colleagues. ‘Don’t stamp on it before we even get it running. These people meet regularly and some of them are pretty high-powered. The current Beau is Sir Edward Paris, the property tycoon. You and I met him in the Archway café.’