“I didn’t notice anything different. He was ready for his Irish stew when he got in, hungry as always.”
“What was he wearing? His motorcycle gear?”
“Black leathers.”
“He took them off, I expect.”
“Slung them over the back of the chair like he always does.”
“Does he have a spare set?”
“Of leathers? Do you have any idea what they cost? You don’t get much change out of a grand.”
“The answer is no, I take it. He’ll be wearing the same jacket and trousers today at the shoot at Jacob’s Ladder.”
“Is that where he is?” she said. “You know more than I do.”
They didn’t get anything else from Candida. The nasty cop approach might have brought out new details, but the value of them was far from apparent.
Everyone had left the jetty by the time they emerged from Deck the Halls. The forensic tent was gone and so were the divers and their equipment. All that remained, like a rebuke, was the suitcase containing the dead snake.
“She knew all along what was in the case,” Diamond said. “She could have told the divers straight away.”
“You can bet she phoned Fergus,” Ingeborg said. “I expect he told her to play dumb. She has to live with him. She wouldn’t defy him. I’ve always had the feeling he’s a bully, if not an out-and-out wife-beater.”
“He certainly played it cool himself, staying well away.”
“What’s going to happen to the snake?” she asked.
“Don’t know. Doesn’t belong to me.”
“We can’t let Fergus throw it back in the marina.”
“We’ll notify the council. They know what to do. Somerset gets more roadkill than anywhere else in Britain.”
“I don’t suppose they get many pythons.”
On the drive back to their base at Concorde House, Ingeborg said, “Candida has been devious in the past, feeding the jinx story to the paper, but I felt she was telling the truth this time. Her personal story rather moved me, actually.”
“I was touched by it as well,” Diamond admitted. “Almost stopped me in my tracks.”
“If she was being truthful, she wasn’t at Combe Hay herself and she provided an alibi for Fergus. She said he got home before ten the night Greg was stabbed. I can’t think of any way he could have done the killing and got back to Saltford. The dash cam showed nine twenty. He’d have needed to hide the body somewhere, clean up, change into his leathers and ride back from Combe Hay in under forty minutes. Theoretically possible for someone like Houdini, but... Fergus?” She blew a soft raspberry.
“Like you, I believed her,” Diamond said. “There was the moment I asked what time he got home and it was clear she had to cast her mind back. She hadn’t prepared for the question or she wouldn’t have hesitated. I’ve interviewed enough witnesses in my time to know when an answer is spontaneous and genuine.”
“Two in one day,” Ingeborg said.
“You mean Natalie and Candida?”
“Two honest women.”
“Both can’t be. Who do you prefer to believe?”
She drove on for a while without answering. The next comment came from Diamond, complaining about farmers who didn’t trim their hedges: an indirect way of suggesting she drove more slowly through the narrow lanes.
When Ingeborg spoke again, it was to say, “I can think of only one of our suspects who ticks all the boxes: motive, means and opportunity. He’s already acting as if he is Greg’s replacement, he carries a knife and he was just a short walk from the scene. The killer has to be Will Legat.”
25
The king of the incident room, John Leaman, came straight over as soon as Diamond and Ingeborg returned. He was rubbing his hands, a rare display of emotion. “A batch of test results have come in, guv. The lab beat all records.”
“Thanks to Wolfgang cracking the whip,” Diamond said. “What have we got?”
“The victim was definitely Greg Deans. The bloody handprint on the car was his and so was the blood on the ground, so much, they say, that he couldn’t have lived.”
“We know that. What else?”
“They found no traces of anyone else’s blood or DNA.”
“Really? That surprises me.”
“The perpetrator was wearing gloves.”
“Shoeprints?”
“Nothing conclusive. The ground was too squelchy.”
“Squelchy? Is that the term they used?”
“No, it’s me summing up. Do you want me to read you the exact words?”
“No need. I can read them myself.”
“They did get a tyre print where the ground wasn’t quite so muddy, a good one, and made a cast of it.”
Diamond nodded. “I saw Wolfgang collecting it.”
“It’s a clear tread pattern and the interesting thing is that it’s not from a car.”
“A motorbike?”
“Yes — the tyre was a Michelin Pilot. They give a range of probable serial numbers and there’s enough wear to identify the bike if we can find it.”
“Could be helpful, very helpful. Go on.”
“That’s about it. The fingertip search of the field produced a few items like cigarette butts, but no reason to connect them to the killer.”
“Where were they found? Anywhere near the gate?”
“I didn’t ask. I was thinking some farm worker dropped them. The killer wouldn’t stand around smoking after the stabbing.”
“Before, John, before. He spent some nervous time waiting for the Range Rover to come up the lane. That’s when he would have needed a fag.”
Leaman’s embarrassed features displayed most of the colours of a Turner sunset. “I didn’t think of that.”
“It’s okay. I don’t expect you to cover every angle.”
“I’ll call the lab and find out.”
“Before you do, run the dash cam footage for me one more time on the large screen, would you, just the sequence in the field? There’s a moment when the car is turning and the camera catches a glimpse of something metallic under the hedge.”
“There isn’t much to see. Just a gleam of silver.”
He shouldn’t have been irritated by Leaman’s remark. After all, the man’s pathological attention to detail was often of value. But he was feeling the strain himself. “You’re not telling me anything new, John. I’ve studied it many times over. I want to see it on a bigger scale, understood?”
An injured look settled on Leaman’s features. “Got you.”
Realising he’d caused unintended hurt, Diamond softened the remark by placing some blame elsewhere. “I asked our IT people to check it frame by frame and enhance it if they can, but we’ve heard nothing back yet. I’m thinking it may have been this motorbike.”
Ingeborg tried to assist. “I can guess where you’re going with this, guv. Fergus is a biker. He rides to Combe Hay and parks the bike out of sight in the field, ready to ambush Greg. Candida will have driven there in a van and parked in the field opposite. She was the one who stood in the lane and directed Greg off the road and into the field like a lamb to the slaughter. Am I right?”
“Substantially, yes, but that’s only a scenario. Let’s not get carried away.”
“Like the corpse?” Halliwell said, making his own attempt to lighten the mood.
“What?”
“Carried away in the van.”
“Haha. Are you ready, John?”
Leaman seemed to have got over his angst. “Do you want the blinds down?”
“Good idea. Gather round, people. The more eyes we have on this, the better.”
They watched the sequence from the moment Greg’s headlights picked out the figure in the hi-vis jacket signalling to him to turn off the lane and into the field. The lights were dipped as the car approached the figure and only switched on again to make the turn. The picture gave the illusion of the field moving left as Greg drove in and turned in a tight circle to bring the car to a position facing the lane. It was difficult to see anything clearly because of the bumping over the rutted surface, creating secondary movement up and down as well as sideways.