He made a sound deep in his throat not unlike a growl. ‘I knew that dog was trouble from the moment it slobbered over my trousers.’
‘You can’t blame the dog for burying a bone,’ Ingeborg chided him. ‘If anyone is to blame, it’s me. I was pushing the idea of the woman being murdered.’
‘My decision to dig up the garden. How is John Leaman taking it?’
‘He doesn’t know yet.’ Her face creased into a pained look. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to phone him.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He drove out to Twerton early to check on the crime scene people.’
‘Christ, are they still there?’
‘John made sure they were. He was cracking the whip all of yesterday expecting more finds. All they dug up were fragments of bone.’ She sighed. ‘Poor old John. He’s so excited to be in charge, like a dog with a—’ She stopped in mid-sentence, angry with herself. ‘You know what I mean.’
Her sympathy had to be deep-felt for the rivalries within the team to be set aside. Diamond, too, ached for his earnest colleague. ‘I’ll go directly and see him. Is there anything else I should be told?’
‘It can wait.’
Leaman was in conversation with the senior crime scene specialist when Diamond ducked under the tape and picked a path through the heaps of excavated earth.
The man was cheerful, untypically, alarmingly, distressingly cheerful. ‘You should be in boots, guv. That’s another pair of shoes you’ll have to clean.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘We’ve almost cracked it now.’
‘Have we?’
‘The house-to-house has brought a result. The lads found a retired newsagent living over one of the shops and he remembers Harry coming in sometimes for the Daily Mail. Our suspect was definitely called Harry, by the way, and the woman he was living with was Sarah.’
‘Okay,’ Diamond said wondering how on earth he could let the man down without too much hurt.
‘Harry and Sarah, guv. The names are confirmed.’
‘Right.’
Leaman gave him a puzzled look before resuming. ‘They didn’t have much to say, either of them. The guy — Harry, I mean — was in his thirties, white, with dark hair, average height, always paid in cash rather than card, and didn’t have much to say for himself. The woman was friendlier, quite a bit younger, nice-looking, with long reddish-brown hair, but she suddenly wasn’t seen again and no one knew why. I didn’t tell him we have our suspicions. This was in 1997, the year Labour were elected. Harry carried on living alone in the place for at least two more years before Jerzy the Pole took over the tenancy.’
‘Good. That could be helpful.’
‘I’ve asked for another check of the soil. If we can find some hair of the right colour, that will clinch it.’
‘Mm.’
‘You don’t sound all that pleased. Is something up?’
‘I wanted a few words, John.’
The effect of the few words was pitiful to witness. Leaman turned deathly pale. He shook his head. His mouth shaped to say something and no words came.
It was left to the crime scene man to utter the obscenity the bombshell demanded.
‘I look at it this way,’ Diamond tried to say in mitigation. ‘It’s a violent death we all believed must have happened, but didn’t. That’s good news. Harry’s woman isn’t buried here. She must have left him of her own free will.’
The crime scene man said in support, ‘It isn’t the first time I’ve been called out to deal with an animal bone. Generally you can tell with a quick look. A complete femur from a sheep is going to be shorter, but of course this was just the end piece.’
Diamond was moved to put his arm round Leaman’s drooping shoulders. ‘My mistake, not yours. Don’t take it personally.’
Leaman stared ahead, still lost for words.
Diamond tried to bolster him. ‘I need you back at the office. We may have identified the skeleton.’
His words made no impact at all.
‘You’re more likely than anyone to discover what the hell went on here.’
The crime scene man said bitterly, ‘We re-dug every inch of the fucking garden.’
‘And it had to be done,’ Diamond said without sympathy. Right now he couldn’t deal with a second malcontent. ‘This is still the most likely crime scene, but the focus has shifted now.’
Some of his earlier words had finally penetrated the avalanche of blighted hopes that had crushed his wretched colleague. ‘Have you put a name to the skeleton?’
‘Kind of. We’re not there yet.’ He was casting around for something to alleviate the pain and by some miracle he thought of it. ‘Which is why you’re urgently needed. Shall we go?’
The task of locating a picture of the conman Sidney Harrod was high priority and well suited to Leaman’s skills. A complete run of Bath City Life had been located in the Central Library. After Diamond had briefed him about Harrod’s likely theft of the eighteenth-century costume owned by Lord Deganwy, Leaman drove to the library with a recovering sense of purpose to search every issue between 1990 and 2000. He would look for photos of Beau Nash Society events and scan them into his computer. With the stimulus of a new assignment, the hurt of losing his status as Senior Investigating Officer would ease a little. Once the file was complete he would return to Concorde House and produce an electronic rogues’ gallery of likely candidates.
The result would be shown to Algy, the key witness.
That was the plan.
Meanwhile Diamond briefed the team.
‘This man who called himself Sidney Harrod is by far the most likely individual yet to be our skeleton. He was a conman and his mark was an elderly man, Lord Deganwy, who seems to have been suffering from dementia. Harrod befriended the old man and allegedly took away a number of bits of antique furniture and we don’t know what else apart from the genuine eighteenth-century suit and wig that we believe our skeleton was dressed in.’
‘How do we know it wasn’t sold on?’ Paul Gilbert asked. ‘The skeleton could be someone else.’
‘We don’t until we can prove Harrod is our man. The age is about right, the height is similar and he may well have worn dentures.’
‘Is there a definite link to Twerton?’
There wasn’t and everyone knew it. ‘That’s something yet to be established. We need everything we can get on Harrod. It won’t be easy. Algy has told me all he remembers. I’ll be asking him to look at some old photos of the annual ball and see if he can pick Harrod out. John Leaman is assembling a file at this minute.’
‘Isn’t there anyone else who may have known him?’ Keith Halliwell asked.
‘In the Beau Nash Society? No.’
‘His landlord?’
‘From twenty years ago?’ Ingeborg said. ‘Where do you start?’
‘We definitely need a picture of the guy,’ Halliwell said. ‘Get it into the media for the public to see.’
‘If one exists,’ Diamond said. ‘A clever conman won’t have stepped forward and said cheese when a photographer came by.’
‘And if there isn’t a photo?’
‘He was living in the city for the best part of two years and using the name of Sidney Harrod. There must be some trace of him.’
‘He won’t have registered as an elector,’ Gilbert said.
‘But he was sociable. He may have been known in clubs and pubs. You’re going to groan, but we ask around. Another possibility is the public library.’
‘The library?’ Halliwell said as if it was the townswomen’s guild.
‘This was a con artist aiming to crash the Beau Nash Society. Where would he have gone for his information?’
‘The Internet?’