‘Are you thinking of the old Soviet bloc? He looks European.’
‘Could be, and I wouldn’t discount the Middle East. Some of those people could easily pass for Europeans.’
‘I’ll give it a whirl. What are you doing next?’
‘I’ve got a funeral to attend.’
But the funeral wasn’t until 3 P.M. Diamond had other lines of enquiry he wasn’t revealing to Gull at this juncture.
‘Guv.’
The quiet, yet insistent, call from across the room was timely. A chance to leave Gull to wrestle with the linguistic problem.
Diamond shimmied between the desks to where Ingeborg was sitting back, adjusting her blonde ponytail, eyes on the computer screen.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘You asked me to check private colleges in and around Bradford on Avon. There’s one here known as the West Wiltshire Higher Education Institute. It was under investigation last summer and closed down.’
‘What for?’
‘Enrolling more foreign students than they could possibly cater for. It was an immigration scam. They got accepted for courses, obtained student visas and then disappeared into the underground economy. The government has been trying to crack down. Across the country ninety thousand were taken on last year by educational establishments that don’t have the “highly trusted” status the Ministry of Education is trying to insist on.’
‘When you say “foreign”, you mean from outside the European Union?’
‘Yes. Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Algeria. Shall I go on?’
‘Tell me about this college they shut down. Where was it?’
‘Off the Bath Road at the top of the town. Just a large house as far as I can make out.’
‘You mean Bradford on Avon?’
She nodded. ‘They had capacity for fifty and they enrolled five times that number over the course of a year. They were crafty. They had what they called an induction course that lasted a couple of weeks and then off-site work experience to acquire better language skills. Many of the students couldn’t speak any English when they arrived.’
‘And I suppose the work experience was low-paid casual labour?’
‘You bet. In theory they were supposed to return to study full time when they’d got enough language skills, but they wouldn’t learn much English picking fruit and digging potatoes. You can see why the college lost track of most of them. It was a huge turnover.’
Diamond didn’t need much more persuading. ‘But they’d learn about the local terrain. This is just what I was looking for, Inge, and the best explanation yet for how the sniper might have got to know Becky Addy Wood and Avoncliff. His student visa has no currency any more and he doesn’t have the language skills to integrate into the system. His world has collapsed. He knows it’s only a matter of time before he’s arrested and banged up in one of those removal centres. He’s living rough, stealing stuff to get by, but he has the bike and he has the gun. He’s angry, vulnerable, terrified. He resolves to take the fight to the opposition, take revenge on the police. The rest we know.’
‘Want me to do more checking?’ Ingeborg asked.
‘It would be nice if there’s a record of the students they took on.’
‘I doubt if they kept one. Or if they did, they would have destroyed the evidence.’
‘There must have been some evidence of malpractice if the college was closed down. Wiltshire Police may know something. It’s worth trying.’
‘I’ll get onto them.’
‘Before you do,’ Diamond said, ‘we were talking the other day about the blog you found.’
She turned to face him, all attentiveness. Clearly she thought he’d dismissed the blog as yet another piece of computer nonsense. ‘I can’t claim credit for that. The barmaid at the Porter found it and told me.’
‘Still worth a look?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Could you bring it up on the computer in my office?’
‘Not a problem. You’ll have at least four postings to read, but they won’t take long.’
In front of his screen, working the keyboard, Ingeborg said, ‘This is interesting. There’s a fifth.’
29
So much has happened since my last blog that I hardly know where to begin. You remember I risked my job by turning snoop and looking at the order book for the client I recognized as Heathrow man. I was on the point of pulling out of the whole shebang until it became clear how crucially Vicky needed the distraction. Against my better judgment I passed John Smith’s name on to my two friends. Vicky was at breaking point, poor lamb. Her husband Tim has been behaving more oddly than city break man and Heathrow man together. My guess is that his problem stems from the Iraq War. Post-traumatic stress, they call it, don’t they? On top of that came the bad luck of losing his taxi business in such cruel circumstances. Sometimes people just need time and space to get over their troubles and I hope this is the case with Tim. I don’t like to think what he gets up to when he leaves the house at nights. Well, to be honest I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Maybe he just walks the streets to clear his head of depression. I hope that’s all it is, for Vicky’s sake. She’s so certain he isn’t visiting some other woman that I have to believe her. What else can he be doing? When he left the army, did he smuggle out anything as a souvenir? Don’t go there, I keep saying to myself. Don’t go there.
Now we know where Heathrow man lives we’re better placed to find out more about him. I was willing to do some local research, but this time Vicky volunteered, saying she hadn’t contributed much up to now. Fine, I thought. The more she gets involved the better for her peace of mind. Compared to her difficulties at home this is child’s play. So Anita and I left her to it.
She delivered.
We met in the department store the next afternoon and Vicky looked a million times better than when I’d last seen her. For one thing she’d dressed in brighter, trendier clothes with a beautiful blue floaty scarf over a lemon-coloured top that she insisted she’d found in Help the Aged. A tight black skirt and suede boots completed the outfit. With her gorgeous looks and that amazing black hair she was radiant. And eager to tell us what she’d discovered.
‘After we spoke yesterday, I went to the house, just to see for myself, thinking John Smith is still away in Amsterdam so it ought to be safe to look round. While I was standing on the opposite side of the street, I had a piece of good luck. A woman drove up in a Volvo and got out with some shopping and went inside number 48, leaving the car on the drive. I don’t think she noticed me.’
I couldn’t stop myself interrupting. ‘What was she like — dark, shoulder-length hair, grey suit?’
‘Yes.’
‘Could so easily be the woman city break man met in the pub. I wonder if they’re married.’
Vicky nodded. ‘I’ve never seen her before, so I can’t say, but from your description it’s well possible. At the time I was more interested in the car, thinking maybe it belonged to him and his wife was using it while he was away. I crossed the road and took a closer look and found I was right. There was a parking permit next to the tax disc on the windscreen. It said J. Smith.’
‘Nice detective work,’ Anita went. ‘A permit for where?’
‘The city museum.’
Anita blinked and pulled a face. ‘He’s a pointy-head? And I thought he looked quite dishy.’
I gave a shrug. ‘He could be both. Why not?’
Vicky picked up her story. She was dead keen to tell it. ‘I decided to go up there in the morning and see what else I could find out. I took the whole day off work. I’ve never been in the museum before.’
‘I have,’ Anita went. ‘School trip, years ago. Full of bones and fossils. No refreshments. Not my thing at all.’ She was definitely a little jealous of Vicky finding out things.