“Now?”
“Later. We must test it for residues, like everything else.” He backed out and straightened up. “Don’t build up your hopes. It may not have been activated.”
“Dash cams are powered by the ignition, aren’t they?”
“Usually. Even if it was working — which isn’t certain — it won’t have carried on recording after he switched off. The modern cameras have a motion detector that operates even when the vehicle is parked, but this is very basic. And of course you won’t see anything outside the camera’s range.”
“Let’s not get carried away,” Diamond said, riled by so much downbeat comment.
“What do you mean by that?”
“It could still give us vital evidence.”
Wolfgang remained unmoved. “Have you finished your inspection?”
“I’d like to know if there’s anything on the back seat.”
“Couldn’t you see from the front?”
Diamond leaned in again, careful not to touch anything. “The head restraints are in the way.”
“Don’t touch them.”
“I don’t intend to. Can you see anything through the back window?”
“Not without wiping it clean,” Wolfgang said. “It’s far too dirty.”
“We could open the rear door and have a look.”
The suggestion was met with a sound like the dregs of a drink sucked through a straw. “Nothing must be touched. Photography next and then we’ll go over the exterior.”
No short cuts, then. Wolfgang went by the rules and another twenty minutes passed before he allowed one of the rear doors to be opened.
Diamond approached the car again.
A carrier bag was on the back seat.
“Is it too much to hope we can see what’s inside?” Diamond asked.
Wolfgang eyed him with scorn. “Haven’t you ever done the explosive devices course?”
Leaving Halliwell at the scene, Diamond and Ingeborg removed their forensic suits and drove the short distance to the pottery to break the bad news to Natalie. With them came one of the SOCOs on a different mission: to collect DNA samples from Deans’s room. She was still in the full protective whites and holding a handful of evidence bags.
“Better not show yourself at the start,” Diamond said, thinking of the shock she would give dressed like that. “Sit in the car for a few minutes and we’ll come out and get you.”
The no-nonsense nurse came to the door and told them Natalie was in bed and sleeping. “She stopped struggling against the sedation and now she can rest.”
“She’ll be out to the world for some time, then?”
“Until tomorrow, for sure.”
“Best thing,” he said, thinking more of himself than Natalie, if truth were told. Giving bad news was a duty every police officer dreaded. It could wait until the morning. “Are you staying the night?”
“Yes. I’ll be here when she wakes up.”
“Excellent. I’ll be back tomorrow myself to speak to Natalie after she’s rested.” He’d decided not to say anything to the nurse about what had been found in the field. Natalie needed to hear it first-hand from him. “But as we’re here, we’ll take a look around the outbuildings. And a colleague of ours will need access to Mr. Deans’s room.”
The scale of the pottery business was an eye-opener when they visited the buildings grouped around the yard. One barn was stacked with finished mugs, ready for sale, flatpacks of cardboard boxes and rolls of bubble wrap. Another, where a huge kiln was housed, had more filled racks against the wall. The mugs here had been given the bisque firing and awaited the glaze. And in another, they found the potter’s wheel adapted for use by a disabled person. A tray on a bench beside it was filled with freshly made mugs.
“Sad sight.” Diamond spoke his thoughts aloud. “I doubt whether any of this will get finished. She really depended on Deans.”
When they returned to the field, Wolfgang had decided to close down for the day. His team had completed their immediate work and would be back at nine next morning. Two hapless constables would stand by the entrance all night, as Wolfgang put it, “to safeguard the integrity of the site.”
“What was in the Sainsbury’s bag on the back seat?” Diamond asked.
“More Sainsbury’s bags,” Wolfgang told him.
“That was all?”
“We found reddish hairs inside the car and on the grass quite close to the large bloodstain. They could be informative.”
“His own, by the sound of it.” Diamond said.
“I will personally deliver all the samples tonight. We use a lab not far from where I live in Midsomer Norton. I believe in keeping the chain of evidence as short as possible.”
“Your colleague found some hairs on a brush and comb in Greg Deans’s room.”
“Excellent. They will serve as the control samples.”
“This may be an impossible question, Wolfgang, but how soon can we expect some results?”
“I will ask the head scientist to treat them as a priority. They know me there. They don’t usually keep me waiting.”
“I can believe it.”
“One more thing. We removed the memory card from the dash cam. I’ll send the footage later today to your computer — if any of it is worth sending.”
“You’re a star. Do you want my contact details?”
Wolfgang smiled at the naivety of the question. “I have you on my phone already. Look for an email at ten this evening, that is if you work outside normal hours.”
On the way back, he listened to Bristol Radio. There was nothing yet about Greg Deans on the regional news. “We’re ahead of the pack this time,” he said. “I thought someone was sure to have tipped them off.”
“Isn’t that your job?” Paloma said.
He smiled. “All in good time. We may issue a statement tomorrow if we have anything definite for them. Right now I’m not looking for more publicity. Fingers crossed, I’ll learn something from the dash cam footage.”
As you would expect from the punctilious Wolfgang, the video arrived in Diamond’s inbox shortly before ten the same evening. The covering email was typically chastening. “This will be meat and drink to you people, no doubt. The limitations of the camera are obvious, as you will discover. The best dash cams have night vision. However, I’m sending the footage for what it’s worth.”
Paloma offered the use of her all-singing, all-dancing computer to get a generous-sized image. “Ready?” she said and clicked on the download.
Up came a driver’s view of a main road in daylight with other vehicles ahead.
“Early in the day on his way to work, by the look of it,” Diamond said. “Can we fast-forward?” He was leaving Paloma to manage the technology.
“Should be able to,” she said. Figures along the bottom of the screen displayed the time and date as well as the car’s speed. “What time of day are we looking for?”
“He phoned home at eight twenty and said he was leaving Trowbridge, so if we can pick it up round about then, we’ll get to the action, I hope.”
The images after dark were more grainy than the earlier ones, but once the car’s headlights had been switched on, the picture quality wasn’t bad.
“It’s a weird experience watching this,” Paloma said. “Like I’m in the car and driving it.”
“I know. I feel the same. Have to keep reminding myself it’s Greg at the wheel.”
“That’s even more spooky, being driven by a dead man. Shall I let it run now? Shout if you want to rewind.”
“Will do. Those are the gates of Milroy Court coming up. He’s turning left and he’s on his way home. The street lighting helps.”