‘It had better not be a request for time off.’
‘You asked me to check on Francis Melmot.’
‘Well? Do we have anything on him?’
‘Nothing on record. It never got to court, but there was a complaint of assault that was later withdrawn. It was in connection with his father’s death in 1999.’
Diamond gave a nod. ‘I know the old man shot himself, supposedly while cleaning his gun.’
‘Well, not long after that, a reporter turned up at Melmot Hall and made some remarks Francis didn’t appreciate.’
‘About the shooting?’
‘No, about his father’s private life. The old boy was quite a goer. He’d been screwing a barmaid and Mrs Melmot had got to hear of it. The reporter seemed to be suggesting the old lady told her husband to do the decent thing and shoot himself and wanted to see if he could get a quote from Francis. Instead he got his nose broken.’
‘He’s a big guy to tangle with, is Francis. I suppose the mistress offered her story to the paper.’
‘Whatever, it never got into print.’
‘This tells us he’s capable of violence, but I have some sympathy, especially as it was a poxy pressman. Where did you dig this out?’
‘From an old-stager at Frome nick. He remembered taking the statement.’
‘Nice work, Paul. Get a note of it on the case file.’
Around noon, Ingeborg came in. ‘Is your phone dead, guv?’
‘Could be. I asked the switchboard to give me a break.’
‘Keith was trying to reach you from the mortuary.’
He sat forward. ‘He was? Is it over?’
‘Depends what you mean. You could say it’s just beginning. They’re saying Clarion was suffocated.’
18
‘Convince me,’ Diamond said. Halliwell gave his humour-the-boss grin. He was back from the mortuary and looking drained, not from attendance at the autopsy, but the prospect of explaining the result to his crotchety superior. ‘Dr Sealy wasn’t in any doubt.’
‘I’m no pathologist,’ Diamond said, ‘but even I know they turn purple if they suffocate. I saw the body. She was as pale as your shirt. What is more, they get those little blood marks in the eyes and the skin.’
‘Petechial haemorrhages,’ Halliwell said from his long experience of listening to pathologists.
‘Well, there weren’t any.’
‘He said the so-called classic signs were absent.’
‘Great. So how does he know she was suffocated?’
‘He found pressure marks at the base of her neck.’
‘She was strangled? I saw no marks.’
‘Will you let me explain, guv? This wasn’t a strangling. These marks were here.’ He tapped his own shoulders where the collar of his T-shirt met his neck. ‘About here, on each side, where the killer pressed into the flesh with thumbs and knuckles. You wouldn’t have seen because of that hooded jacket she was wearing. The pressure was through her clothes.’
‘To obstruct the arteries?’
Halliwell shook his head. ‘You’re getting ahead of me again. Dr Sealy said in his opinion she was suffocated with a plastic bag pulled down over her head and held there until she stopped struggling, which happened rapidly.’
There was an interval of silence while the method registered with Diamond. ‘An ordinary plastic bag?’
‘Except most carrier bags have little holes punched into them.’
‘Right. This one was airtight?’
‘She was already seated,’ Halliwell went on, ‘so the killer would have entered the box from behind and slipped the bag over her head.’
‘Simple as that?’
‘Not quite. You and I might think she died from lack of oxygen, but sometimes a neurochemical reaction kicks in and the death is from cardiac arrest. He said in cases like that, the skin turns pale rather than congested and there aren’t any of the signs you’d normally expect in asphyxia.’
‘As I noted at the scene,’ Diamond said with more than a hint of self-congratulation.
‘It was a quick death, apparently, and the panic in the victim very likely contributed to the speed of it.’
Diamond exhaled sharply. ‘Nasty.’
‘And it didn’t require much strength.’
‘Surely she’d have grabbed at the bag and tried to pull it off.’
‘Very likely, but the force downwards is stronger than her trying to get a grip and push it up. By grabbing the bag she was tightening the pressure against her nose and mouth. And she wouldn’t have been heard. She was out of sight of the audience, anyway.’
‘She may have scratched her attacker.’
‘I wouldn’t mind betting he – or she – wore gloves.’
Halliwell had sketched the scene vividly enough for Diamond to visualise how the killing may have worked, and it was gruesome in its efficiency. ‘And there’s no other way to read these marks?’
‘He said not. The bruising on the shoulders was definitely man-made, recent and prior to death.’
‘We didn’t find a bag at the scene.’
‘Well, the killer wouldn’t have left it there.’
He had to agree. ‘You’re right, Keith. This wasn’t the work of someone careless.’
‘Will you tell the press?’
A difficult question. It had crossed Diamond’s mind already, without any prompting from Halliwell. The police are trained to be selective with information. Sometimes details known only to the killer are held back for tactical reasons. The news that Clarion Calhoun was dead would get banner headlines. To reveal that she’d been murdered in this manner would put the media machine into overdrive and make his task that much harder to perform. Yet if they weren’t told, they’d ferret out the truth in a matter of hours. He could see no advantage in playing the long game. ‘I’ll lay out all the main facts.’
It was agreed that Halliwell would brief the CID team shortly before Diamond broke the news to the press. ‘Tell them to put their private lives on hold. It’s overtime for everyone.’
He kept the press conference down to under twenty minutes. His stark opening statement made the strong impact he intended and gave the hacks their juicy quotes. The questions that followed were mostly reactive to the crime rather than targeted to the investigation. He dealt with them in short answers and came out feeling less battered than sometimes.
In the CID room he braced himself for a more searching examination. Everyone was there, buoyed up by Halliwell’s briefing. Even Georgina had come downstairs to listen.
‘It’s the most public murder enquiry we’ve ever had in this city,’ Diamond told them. ‘We must be razor sharp. Speaking of which, where’s John Leaman?’
A hand went up at the back of the room.
‘You’re in charge of the search of the theatre. The box where she was killed has been gone through by the crime scene people, but the rest of the building hasn’t. Comb the place for the murder weapon, the plastic bag. The killer may have dumped it in some bin thinking it wouldn’t be noticed. Take as many coppers with you as uniform can spare. If you see anyone acting suspiciously, report it to me. Inge?’
‘Guv?’
‘Go through all the statements we took in the theatre last night. Look at everyone’s movements, especially during the interval. We have three obvious suspects, Shearman, Melmot and Binns. Each of them knew ahead of time that she was coming to the play. See if what they said checks out.’
‘Right, guv.’
‘Then there’s a second tier of suspects, the actors. They had a view of the box.’
‘Not a good view,’ Leaman said.
‘Did I use the word good? They could tell it was occupied if they happened to look and, as I understand it, that box isn’t used much.’
‘The Schneider woman admitted she saw someone,’ Halliwell said.
‘A ghost,’ Paul Gilbert said.
‘Saw something, then. And at the start of the interval she was busy telling everybody about it, enough to alert anyone with half a brain that someone had been sitting there.’