“Took a peek, did you? Some people have no respect for the departed.”
“I can save time getting him identified. His name is Tony Pinto. He’s an ex-con on parole. A violent sexual predator. I put him away years ago.”
“No great loss to the world, then.”
“How soon can you do the autopsy?”
“I’ll have to look at my diary.”
“Give it priority, please. He’s been dead for a week and you know how important the first few hours of an investigation are.”
“You’re sunk, then, and the crime scene is a quagmire. Call me later.”
A trip home for a change of clothes would have been nice, but a fast return to Concorde House came before anything else. He got a lift from Ingeborg and spent most of the trip sending a text to Bertram Sealy. That autopsy couldn’t be delayed.
The team were grouped around the kettle when he got there. They deserved their break, but it couldn’t last long. He told them to be in the briefing room on the hour, which was under fifteen minutes away.
A text came back from Sealy, which was quicker than he expected, but the offer of 3 p.m. on Tuesday was no good at all. He got through for a live call which was more of a blast than a conversation.
The muddy suit troubled him until the ever-resourceful Ingeborg visited the traffic section and charmed a police motorcyclist into lending her guv’nor a set of leathers. Getting into it was a challenge that he embraced. Zipped, sibilant with every movement and feeling more macho than Brando in The Wild One, he appeared before his squad as never before and got a reaction he didn’t expect or deserve. Middle-aged bikers are nothing unusual, he told himself, so what are the sly smiles for?
He told them to get over it.
He could have said the same to himself. He was still in shock from learning that the killer he’d been pursuing was in fact the victim. Until he got his own thoughts in order, he wasn’t ready to trade theories about how the death had occurred and why. The briefing would be all about action.
“I’ve twisted the pathologist’s arm and the autopsy takes place at six p.m. tonight, with Keith in attendance.”
This was the first Halliwell had heard of it. He’d known Diamond too long to complain. And in truth he wouldn’t have expected any different. No one could remember Diamond attending a postmortem.
“As well as that, you’re the admin officer dealing with duty rosters and the bloody budget. Keeping Georgina off my back, in other words.”
Halliwell nodded.
“We’ll use this as our incident room and, John, you’re the office manager. Get it up and running as soon as possible or quicker.”
Leaman, a borderline obsessive-compulsive, would have gone into a strop if anyone else had been named.
Diamond turned to Ingeborg. “I want a profile of Pinto from you. Every facet of his life. I’ll speak to the probation officer, who was quite sniffy about releasing information and can’t refuse now. We’ll get the prison record, the current address, next of kin, his employment details and anything of interest from their supervision. Your job is to get the gen on everyone else who came into contact with him and draw up a list of possible suspects. Ex-cons, anyone he worked with, everyone affected by his pursuit of women, including angry boyfriends, of course, and possibly other runners he knew.”
“Is that all?” she said with irony and immediately wished she hadn’t.
“No. There’s more. Get close up and personal with the Police National Computer and HOLMES. I’m relying on you to cover the field — and it could be a large one. Now, Paul.”
DC Gilbert flexed. “Guv?”
“You get several jobs rolled into one. Basically, you chase forensics for information until we get it. We’re off to a really slow start. It’s over a week since the day we think he was murdered. You’re the exhibits officer, the receiver and the indexer. Any problem with that lot?”
“I don’t think so, guv.”
“See Keith if you need backup.”
He went on to delegate more duties to other staff. Already he was certain the team needed to grow by at least ten more officers. He’d get reinforcements from downstairs and square it with Georgina when she found out.
“Get to it, people.” To show solidarity, he made an effort to get his own body on the move as well. The crutches undermined the macho look of the biking leathers.
From the quiet of his office he put through a call to Deirdre, his stonewalling contact in the probation service. When he announced himself, she said, “Before you say another word, Superintendent, I’m not allowed to say any more than I already have about Tony Pinto.”
“But you are,” he told her. “You’re liberated. In fact, it’s your duty. I’m conducting a homicide enquiry now.”
She needed time to take in what he’d said.
“He’s dead?”
“For over a week.”
“Are you sure?”
“His body was recovered from a mineshaft this afternoon. I saw him close-up. No question it was Tony.” He allowed her a few more seconds. “You were his probation officer, weren’t you?”
She’d refused to confirm this up to now. A whispered, “Yes.”
“You told me he failed to report for his weekly appointment.”
“I did.”
“Well, then.”
Untypically of the Deirdre he thought he knew, her voice was subdued, breathy with emotion. “This is dreadful. He was doing so well.”
He didn’t trust himself to comment on Pinto’s rehabilitation. “So where was he living? All I have is a box number.”
“Duke Street.”
“He was doing well.” Duke Street is one of the best addresses in Bath, a fine Georgian terrace close to the centre of town. “How the hell did an ex-con manage to get in there?”
“It was only a basement flat, I understand.”
“Better than you or I could afford, Deirdre. You’d need a small fortune to pay the rent. And flats don’t come on the market too often.”
“Well, yes. I gather it was a private arrangement through a friend.”
“Did you get some background on his situation? Did he have a job?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Or you didn’t ask?”
“Oh God.” She paused, apparently on the verge of tears. She tried to recover her official voice and didn’t quite succeed. “Tony could be charming and evasive at the same time. My main concern was that he was keeping out of trouble and he assured me that he was.”
“He would say that. Wasn’t he tagged?”
The scorn in his question helped her recover some of the old Deirdre. “I told you before, he was judged to be no risk. We don’t put everyone under surveillance. There were conditions attached to his parole and as far as I’m aware he kept to them. No nightclubbing, for instance. No unapproved travel. The first and only breach in his probation was the missed appointment.”
“He must have missed a second by now. And we know why. He was killed on the Sunday they ran the half marathon. He was still wearing the kit. Are you looking at a screen with his details on it?”
“I am.”
“I’ll have the number of the house, then, and the flat, if it has one, and everything else of assistance, including his prison record, however spotless it is.”
After ending the call, he levered himself to a standing position, stumped back to the incident room and asked Ingeborg if she’d boned up on Tony Pinto.
“It’s underway,” she said. “There isn’t much to go on.”
“Which is why you need to see inside his flat, which I just discovered is in Duke Street.”
“With you on board, guv?”
“Nothing gets past you, does it?”
John Wood the elder, the man whose vision transformed Bath from cramped, timber-framed medieval to the gracious, spacious, cream-coloured city of local stone it became in the eighteenth century, had Duke Street high in his thinking. His Essay Towards a Description of the city of Bath proposed “a grand place of assembly to be called the Royal Forum of Bath” which would occupy the Abbey Orchard, twenty-five low-lying acres reaching southwards from the Abbey precincts to the bank of the River Avon. Duke Street was to be one of two access routes to this spectacular site of assembly rooms and promenades softened by the backdrop of leafy Lyncombe Hill. Sadly, in Wood’s own lifetime the project fell victim to small-minded municipal officials and get-rich-quick developers, and in the next century Lord Manvers owned the land and did a deal with the Great Western Railway that blighted the area past redemption. All you see now is the mayhem of Manvers Street with its office blocks, a two-storey car park, pubs, shops, churches, student quarters and the railway station. The lone relic of Wood’s great plan is Duke Street. Elegant Georgian terraces stand either side of a flagged pavement, the widest in Bath and open only to pedestrians.