“And maybe Mary didn’t want it known she had a love child. Racism could have played its part as well, remembering the attitudes of thirty years ago.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“But she couldn’t have been all that ashamed. She gave her a theatrical name. Isn’t Candida the title of a play?”
“By George Bernard Shaw.”
“You have done your homework. I’m seeing this differently now.” He paused to take it in more fully. “Surely Candida wouldn’t have plotted to kill her own mother.”
“It’s not unknown,” Sharp said with a detachment Diamond hadn’t seen before. “We don’t know what bad blood there was between them. And we only have Candida’s account of what happened the night Mary died.”
“You’re ahead of me.”
“I’ve had longer to get my head around it.”
Diamond was spurred into speaking his thoughts aloud. “She claimed she didn’t go into Mary’s house after driving her home, but we can’t rely on anything she told us. If she did go in and added pure ethanol to the vodka her mother was drinking, it would have been enough to kill her. It makes your blood run cold.”
He could see he wasn’t telling Jean Sharp anything she hadn’t been through in her mind already. She was able to speak rationally about the probability that they were dealing with matricide, among other crimes. “Until she’s arrested and questioned, we won’t know what happened to make her like that.”
He nodded. “And the fact that everyone else seemed to regard Mary as angelic would only have ramped up Candida’s bitterness.” He heaved a large sigh, confronting the chasm of malice that had just opened up. “You’re right. More will come out, I’m sure. We could go on speculating indefinitely. We’ll pull them both in and get the truth of it. This is a huge help, Jean. You’ve given us enough to crack the case.”
She almost fled from the table, she was so relieved to have got the story off her chest.
Through the window, Diamond saw more vehicles arrive in the car park. Dr. Bertram Sealy got out and started pulling on his pale blue forensic suit. The photographer Diamond remembered from the crime scene in the field at Combe Hay had also driven in.
“Drink up, everyone. We’re going outside.”
He asked Ingeborg to call Paul Gilbert and find out whether Fergus was still at the shoot on Jacob’s Ladder.
“He would have told us, guv.”
“Do it.” The tension was getting to him. “And keep watch on the narrowboat in case Candida appears.”
On the way to the jetty, Ingeborg offered Diamond her phone. “It’s Paul. Do you want to speak to him yourself?”
“Has he got Fergus in sight? That’s all I need to know.”
She nodded.
“Tell him to stick with the jerk whatever happens.”
Wolfgang had already erected a forensic tent not much bigger than the sort boy scouts use. “It’s the width of the jetty,” he explained. “You can’t anchor the sides to air.”
“We won’t squeeze three people in there as well as the suitcase,” Diamond said.
“Take it down if you like,” Wolfgang said, “but if you do, you’ll be all over the papers tomorrow.” He jerked his head in the direction of a cluster of press photographers who had set up their tripods on the opposite bank.
“They get everywhere,” Diamond said.
Wolfgang handed Diamond a forensic suit. He put it on without complaining. He wouldn’t tell anyone he was more excited than a kid on Christmas morning.
Sealy adjusted his face mask, dipped his head and went inside the tent, followed by the forensic photographer. Diamond had to observe from outside with his head between the tent flaps — an undignified pose destined to be picked by several picture editors for next morning’s editions.
The small space already smelt musty.
“So how long has it been out of the water?” Dr. Sealy asked, starting to loosen the straps.
“Three to four hours,” Diamond said.
“Prepare for an interesting fragrance, then.”
“Is it locked?”
“That won’t stop me. Suitcases are easy to force. I always padlock mine when I go on holiday. No, it isn’t locked. Hold your noses.”
Sealy unzipped the case. The clicks of the camera shutter provided a kind of incidental music.
He lifted the lid and the foul smell of rotting flesh filled the tent.
Sealy said, “Ha.”
The lid was masking Diamond’s view. “I can’t see from here.”
Sealy said, “You won’t want to.”
“Why?”
“It’s not what you led me to expect. It’s organic, I’ll give you that. It appears to be dead. But you don’t need me. You want a zoologist. What you’ve got here is a large reptile. I’m no expert, but I would say this is a reticulated python.”
24
Humiliation crushed Peter Diamond. The weight of it was overwhelming. At this low point of his career all the experience of a lifetime’s service, the cases he had solved, the killers he had brought to justice over the years, counted for nothing. He’d come here confident of a triumph and was hopelessly, ridiculously wrong.
Dr. Sealy had a grin wider than a body bag. The forensic photographer had turned his back and was shaking with mirth. Diamond, in his undignified position, his bonneted head inside the tent and the rest of him outside, bent over as if inviting someone to kick him, was at a loss.
Sealy said, “Are you going to tell them or shall I?”
He was right. They all had to be told they had been brought here on a fool’s errand — Earnshaw, the divers, Wolfgang, Halliwell, Leaman, Ingeborg and Sharp. There was no ducking who had cocked up.
Still in a state of shock, Diamond removed his head from the tent.
A cloud had covered the sun and a cool breeze blew across the marina, creating ripples he could hear lapping the sides of the moored boats.
“Sorry, people,” he said in his stricken voice. “It’s not what I expected. It’s a dead snake.”
Earnshaw said, “Speak up.”
Wolfgang said, “You can take off the mask now.”
He dragged it below his chin. “A snake.”
“What sort of snake?”
“A python, we think.”
They had to see for themselves. Diamond was practically pushed off the jetty. Only one person hadn’t moved. Keith Halliwell waited on the deck of the Daisy Belle, the boat berthed next to Deck the Halls. “You’d better look in here, guv,” Keith said. “I got a bit ahead of myself and opened up.”
Diamond had prepared himself to think of the second narrowboat as a charnel house, a murderer’s store where bodies were locked away prior to disposal in the water. He crossed the walkway and stepped on deck. The padlock was still in place. Halliwell had forced the hasp away from the wood.
He pushed the door open and went in.
The interior was so dimly lit that he had to wait a second or two for his eyes to adjust. He could hear a faint mechanical humming he took to be a fridge motor.
That much was correct. He could now make out a large cabinet freezer with the fridge beside it and shelving opposite. Above him was a double tube of strip lighting.
“There’s got to be a switch,” he said.
“Found it,” Halliwell said and flicked it on.
The entire length of the boat was revealed, taken up with huge glass tanks two metres high and twice as long, reinforced with steel. Their slatted covers appeared to work on a roller-glide system. Two stood each side of a narrow aisle. Inside each tank was a jungle in miniature, forked logs and branches projecting upwards from a ground cover of stones, ferns and broad-leaved plants.
“I think it’s called a vivarium,” Halliwell said. “He keeps snakes.”