He was the same Dr. Higgins who had used the cherry picker to declare the skeleton dead. ‘What are you doing here?’ the sarcastic little man asked Diamond. ‘Hoping to make the front page of the Sun again?’
Too shocked to trade insults with this jobsworth, Diamond turned to Ingeborg and said loudly, ‘Did you call a real pathologist? We need an expert here.’
She confirmed that Jim Middleton was expected, an assurance that did nothing for Diamond’s state of mind. Fifteen years before, his beloved wife Steph had been gunned down only a short distance from here, on the lowest stretch of the sloping lawn below the crescent, and Middleton had attended the murder scene and afterwards carried out the autopsy. No reason to blame Inge or the pathologist. His own raw emotion made the memory painful.
The scene of crime team arrived in two vans. Their first task would be to fix some temporary lighting.
Asked when anyone had first noticed Perry was missing, a short man in a tracksuit, one of the event organisers, said there had been some confusion after the Chinese display. Perry had been expected to step forward and inform the huge audience that while the judges were coming to a decision the city of Bath would present a show of its own, but he hadn’t appeared, so Bath’s set-piece figures had been activated without any announcement. And after the five-minute show was over and Beau Nash and Jane Austen had fizzled out, Perry still couldn’t be found, so one of the judges had been forced to take over and declare the result. The Chinese chef de mission had been handed the trophy and the crowd was unaware that anything unplanned had happened. It was only after people were starting to disperse that one of the riggers had stumbled on the body on the turf.
‘Did anyone touch him?’
‘Several of us — to see if he needed help. But it was obvious he’d been shot and was dead, poor guy. We told the nearest policeman.’
He spoke to Ingeborg, ‘Take the names of that rigger and everyone who handled the body.’ Then he asked the tracksuited man, ‘How could he have been shot without anyone noticing?’ The question came out like an accusation of negligence. Diamond wasn’t in a mood to spare people’s feelings.
‘No one had any reason to go round the back of the figures.’
‘Why not?’
‘We don’t go near for safety reasons,’ the man said. ‘The things are ignited remotely using infrared signals.’
‘There were plenty of people involved in setting off the fireworks. Someone must have seen what was going on.’
‘Don’t count on it. The guys up here all had their own jobs to do and there weren’t many of us.’
‘Yes, but someone fired a gun.’
‘If you’d been here—’
‘I was.’
‘Then you must have heard the mortars the Chinese were firing. Even with ear muffs on, they were deafening. Rapid, too. And of course everyone looks to the sky to see the effect.’
He’d done the same. He wouldn’t have witnessed the shooting even if he’d been at the front.
A sudden flash of light transformed the scene. A police photographer was taking shots of the corpse.
Another thought occurred. ‘Some of the flashes from the fireworks lit up everything brighter than daylight.’
‘I can only speak for myself and I wasn’t looking for a gunman.’
Diamond gazed up at the huge mass of the crescent. Now that midnight had come and gone, most of the lights were out. ‘People in there would have had the best view of the firing area. Some of them must have been watching from the windows.’
‘Yes, but, like I say, would they have noticed what was going on down here?’
He had to concede that the man had a point. Most of Bath had watched the free show, but finding even one witness to the shooting would be a challenge.
He stepped over to where the Chinese team were uprooting hundreds of racks and tubes used to fire the mortar shells that had made such an impression. ‘Anyone speak English?’
Apparently not. This was the worst start to an investigation he could remember.
More of them were loading a truck. By repeating the same question several times over he found someone who appeared to understand what he asked.
‘Good. Did any of your guys see the man get shot?’
A shrug.
‘Would you ask them?’
Another shrug, but the man did at least say something to his colleagues. No one appeared interested. The speaker of English shook his head and said, ‘See nothing.’
The French, when Diamond tried them, were more animated. He got a ‘Zut alors!’ and much gesticulating, but nobody admitted to witnessing the murder.
‘So who was the rigger who found the body?’ he asked Ingeborg.
‘He’s local. His name is Dave Bateson. I’ll call him over.’
Dave Bateson was one of the Bath team and he looked like a coal miner coming off shift. It seemed his responsibility had been to make sure the two figures stayed fully ignited and in motion for as long as possible.
‘I thought it was all remote,’ Diamond said.
‘Yes, but once they were alight, things could go wrong. We were confident Beau Nash would keep bowing, but Jane Austen was more complicated and could easily have gone belly up.’
Jane Austen belly up would not have enhanced her reputation or the city’s.
‘How do they work?’ Diamond asked. ‘Like the moving signs in Piccadilly Circus?’
‘Not really. It’s all down to the lancework.’
‘What’s that when it’s at home?’
‘Set-piece pictures like you saw — they’re powered by multiple firework fountains known as lances mounted on a wood or metal frame and connected by a fuse. The manufacturers are perfecting new systems all the time. These things were automatons. It’s very high-tech.’
‘Oh yes? So high-tech that you had to be ready with a box of matches if they failed?’
Bateson gave a nervous laugh. ‘It’s not like that.’
‘When did you actually find the body?’ Diamond asked.
‘Only after the show was over. I must have been close to him when the figures were set off. I was keeping behind the frames so as not to be obvious. I wouldn’t have noticed anything on the ground while I was on duty. That’s pressure, that is. Imagine if I failed.’
‘Jane Austen fizzing out?’
‘Or the other one.’
The whole concept of Jane Austen and Beau Nash appearing together was fatuous anyway. They were born a hundred years apart. The Beau had been dead nearly forty years when Jane arrived in Bath.
‘So can we be confident the body was lying there all the time?’
‘I suppose. Horrible shock I had, almost falling over it like that. Soon as I did, I called my mates over and we made sure it wasn’t some drunk. When we saw the blood we called your lot.’
‘My lot?’
‘The police.’
‘Right.’ Diamond’s mind was on other things. ‘The layout for the show must have been planned some time ahead. Did you have anything to do with it?’
‘No, each team planned its own.’
‘I’m talking about the areas the teams were given to set up their displays.’
‘Got you. That was fixed a few weeks ahead, but it was obvious, really. You had to give the finalists separate stations and it made sense to keep them apart with our bit standing between.’
‘It’s becoming clearer to me now,’ Diamond said. ‘If the shooting was pre-planned, the killer must have known his best opportunity was to do it behind all the action while the show was in progress.’
‘I can’t argue with that.’
‘He could be reasonably confident Perry the Pyro would be standing behind your figures. Where else would he go when he wasn’t out front giving his pitch to the audience? He wouldn’t want to spoil their view so he’d go round the back.’