“There isn’t much policing in it,” Paloma said. “Swift is a glamorous villain who comes out on top every time. Rides a Harley-Davidson, plays the field with men friends, breaks into big houses and never gets caught.”
“Like I say, it’s divorced from reality.”
“That isn’t the point, Pete. What matters isn’t the storyline. It’s what’s going on behind the scenes in real life. Don’t you think there’s something fishy, all these incidents? I know Ellie Pitcairn, who dresses the show, and she says a lot of people are worried.” Paloma’s company was the go-to source of images used by costume designers in the theatre, TV and film.
“Actors are a superstitious lot,” Diamond said. “What’s the Shakespeare they won’t mention by name?”
“The Scottish play?”
He grinned. “There you go.”
“These aren’t superstitions, matey. People have died.”
“Yes, but they’re saying it’s down to a jinx. That’s my point. They’ve had more than average bad luck and that’s all it is.”
A moment of silence followed, before Paloma said, “I agree with you in principle.”
“But?”
“What if some evil-minded person is behind this?”
He picked up the newspaper again. “Old lady discovers burglar in her house and has heart attack. Understandable. Producer dies unexpectedly. Okay, that’s unfortunate, but sudden deaths do happen. What else? A small fire, a stunt that went wrong, the climber stupid enough to be up a mountain in January and a guy who went AWOL. Most of these are outside anyone else’s control. Over how long — five or six years? The paper must be stuck for news.”
“But would you join their show?”
“No thanks. I get all the drama I want at work — and that’s from my team.”
“That’s dealt with that, then,” Paloma said. “I should have known you’d shoot the story to bits. The producer should ask you along to restore everyone’s confidence.”
“Reality check by Peter Diamond. For a fat fee and my name on the credits at the end? You’re on.”
“On second thoughts, no. You should stay well clear. I know what these luvvies are like. They’d give you merry hell.”
Even so, six weeks later there was a reality check for Diamond when he arrived for work in the crime investigation office at Concorde House, near Bristol, on a Monday morning.
“What’s new?” he asked when he walked in.
“You know that TV series, Swift,” DCI Keith Halliwell, his long-serving deputy, started to say.
“Before you start on that tired old story, Keith, it’s bullshit. There’s no jinx. I saw the piece in the paper and it doesn’t stand up.”
“One of the crew is missing.”
“Old news. If I remember, he was Dave somebody, the assistant producer.”
“Not him. Someone new. This only just happened. And on our patch.”
“Here?” His indifference took a nudge, no more.
“They’re filming in Bath. A guy called Jacob Nicol, a rigger, didn’t turn up for work and hasn’t been in touch since.”
Diamond was back on song. “Am I supposed to be worried? They’re paranoid. They saw the piece in the paper and they’re panicking because someone takes a couple of days off work. What’s a rigger? It doesn’t sound like a key role.”
“They put up scaffolding and lay tracks for the camera. Lighting, hoists, that kind of stuff.”
“Manual work. They can replace him.”
“There’s more to the job than that. They need experience.”
“I refuse to get excited about this, Keith. When we find his body riddled with bullets I’ll sit up and take notice.”
“Hold on, guv. There’s more. One of the crew called at the house and all his property has gone. There are stains that might be blood.”
“This was when?”
“Yesterday.”
“How did we get to hear about this — a 101 call?”
“It came through on the local number. The guy on the switchboard wasn’t very experienced. He got the main details, the address and so forth, but didn’t ask who the informant was.”
“For pity’s sake. Did any of our lot take a look?”
“Paul.”
“Does Paul know the difference between blood and tea stains?”
“I told him to get forensics out there.”
“We’ll find out, then.” Shaking his head at the triviality of it all, the big man headed for his office.
The chest-high stack of paper on his desk had grown markedly since he had last looked at it. He wasn’t troubled. A show of paperwork was his strategy for keeping his boss, Assistant Chief Constable Georgina Dallymore, off his back. If he’d read the stuff online he could have spent countless hours with nothing to show for it. So he made sure everything was printed and stacked where it could be seen.
The old CID — as he still thought of it — worked under the umbrella of a polango (his word for a police quango) called MCIT, the Major Crime Investigation Team, that generated much of the paper in front of him, the combined output of three police authorities. In theory it made for more efficient detective work. In Diamond’s experience, bad things were done in the name of efficiency. Police numbers had shrunk. Salaries hadn’t improved. Worst of all, the old Manvers Street police station in the centre of Bath had been closed and sold and the men and women who worked there dispersed across the county. His own team had been put out to grass fourteen miles away at Emersons Green. He’d told the powers-that-be — Georgina, to be precise — that closing the old nick was an own goal. The only police presence remaining in the city centre, the hole in the wall at the One-Stop shop, was a joke. Not many Bathonians knew it existed and visitors hadn’t a hope in hell of finding it.
Twenty minutes passed.
There was a knock on the door from someone who still held him in awe. Anyone else wouldn’t wait to be invited. He shouted, “Come,” and they did and it was DC Paul Gilbert, the junior of the team, but only junior in the sense that he was the youngest of an ageing bunch of detectives.
“News from the lab, guv. You know I went to the missing rigger’s place last night? The stains are definitely blood.”
“Right.” He chewed on that for a moment. “I heard there wasn’t much.”
“Four spots.”
“Like from a nosebleed?”
“Possibly.”
“Any disturbance?”
“A rug a bit rucked up, that’s all. But they took away a pillowcase that they say has traces of snot and saliva.”
“How does that help?”
Gilbert blinked twice and said with an air of disbelief, “It’s a source of DNA. The rigger slept in the bed, so they can see if there’s a match with the DNA in the blood splatter.”
Diamond had the glazed expression of a sleuth who had never fully embraced forensic science. “While the plodding policeman patiently continue their enquiries. Did you ask the landlord if he heard anything?”
“He doesn’t live there. It’s a maisonette divided into two flats. The student upstairs heard him come in really late the night before he went missing, like one thirty in the morning. That’s the last thing anyone knows.”
“Where is this?”
“Fairfield Park.” Maisonette territory, high on the northern slopes where developers made a mint from cheap housing sixty years ago.
“Signs of a break-in? Doors, windows?”
“Nothing. Apart from the rug, it looked normal inside. Well, normal except that none of his stuff was there. All the cupboards and drawers were empty.”
“He’d done a flit.”
“It seems so. The place wasn’t much lived in, as far as I could tell, probably rented only for as long as they’re here filming.”