Diamond didn’t need convincing of that. ‘They left no note?’
‘Nothing was ever found.’
‘Did they write wills?’
‘Yes, that was taken care of, but not as a last-minute thing. They’d drawn them up four years before they died. Everything went to charity except what the government took. I didn’t get a penny.’
‘Were they religious?’
‘John and Chrissie? The only thing they believed in was their bank account. They might have gone to the Christmas midnight service, but you do in a village. It’s a social thing.’
‘Is it possible that they wanted a child and couldn’t have one?’
‘Another misguided theory. She had a baby stopped a year after they married. They “slipped up”, John told me. No question they could have started a family if they’d wanted.’
‘So do you have a theory of your own?’
‘I can tell you why my brother took his life. He was heartbroken after Chrissie hanged herself. It’s obvious, isn’t it? But what her problem was, I haven’t the faintest. As I said, I always thought of her as sensible.’
‘She wasn’t in trouble at work?’
‘No. The coroner read out a statement from Marks and Spencer. They valued her contribution. She was going to be difficult to replace. Stuff like that.’
‘Did she have family — parents, siblings?’
‘She was Australian.’
‘Even Australians have parents.’
‘What I mean is that they were half the world away. Nothing was said about them troubling her.’
‘She hanged herself in Henrietta Park, I understand. That’s the one at the back of Great Pulteney Street. Why would she choose there?’
‘You mean why didn’t she go to another park? Don’t know. Because she knew of it, I suppose. She’d walk a lot in her lunch breaks, the only exercise she had time for. She was found hanging from a tree. They tried to inform John, but he’d gone missing. They got onto me, and I couldn’t tell them anything. We weren’t close. He was found up at Sham Castle two days later, as you probably know. My guess is that he knew what she’d done. Maybe she left him a note. He was so shocked that he simply walked around in a dazed state and finally decided he couldn’t face life without her.’
‘Was Sham Castle a place he knew well?’
‘No idea. You know what it is, literally a sham. You’re meant to see it from down in the city and think it’s a real castle when all it is is a facade. As an architect he may have been making some sort of point.’
‘What sort of point, Mr Twining?’
‘About his life being empty.’
‘Vacuous,’ Leaman said.
Twining frowned and said, ‘What did you say?’
‘Never mind,’ Diamond said with a glare at Leaman.
But Twining didn’t take offence. He’d launched into yet another theory. ‘Some time after it happened I heard the old story of why Sham Castle was put there.’
‘As a trompe l’oeil?’ Leaman said.
‘Come again,’ Diamond said. His sidekick might need a kick if he carried on like this.
‘An eye-catcher, anyway.’
‘That’s only part of the story,’ Harold Twining said. ‘Ralph Allen, the quarry owner who provided the stone for Regency Bath, had it built on the skyline so he could see it from his town house. Everyone knows that much. But local tradition has it that he had the thing built for another reason — this was in the seventeen-hundreds, remember — to conceal a dead highwayman hung in chains on a gibbet. By law the corpse was left dangling there as a warning. Ralph Allen thought it was gross, but he couldn’t change the law, so he did the next best thing and screened it off with his so-called castle.’
‘Is that well known?’ Diamond asked.
‘Not to me until I heard about it from some Job’s comforter.
My brother may have known the story.’
‘And decided to go up there out of some sense of history?’
‘Or affinity with the highwayman?’ Leaman said, and got another glare from his boss.
Twining shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
Diamond didn’t want to leave it there. ‘Most people who take their own lives do it in private. I get the impression from all you’ve said that your brother and his wife kept to themselves.’
‘True. If you want to be a success you don’t have much time for other people unless you’re making money out of them.’
‘They didn’t do drugs?’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Harold Twining then proceeded to answer his own question. ‘Oh, I see. You think they might have been out of their skulls when they did it? Well, it didn’t show up in their blood. Nothing was found in the post-mortem or we’d have heard about it at the inquest.’
‘Do you recall who the pathologist was?’
‘No, except he seemed to know the coroner. It’s an old-boy network, the coroner’s court. Pathologists, expert witnesses. They go through the motions while the family sits there listening in horror.’
‘How well did you know your sister-in-law?’
Harold Twining hesitated, as if playing the question over to himself. ‘Tolerably well.’
‘Then you’ll probably know if she had friends of her own, apart from her husband.’
‘I get you now,’ he said. ‘For a moment I thought you were suggesting I had a fling with her. You want to know if she got in with the wrong crowd. No, like I told you, Chrissie was a career woman. She didn’t have time to join a coven. I’m sure the old black magic is rampant in Bath, but that’s another false trail. We Twinings are a dull old lot.’
There wasn’t much more to be got from this obnoxious man. They didn’t stand him another drink. Before leaving, Leaman said, ‘By the way, you were telling a joke when we came in.’
‘What was that? I’ve forgotten.’
‘I think the punchline was, “Don’t laugh. You’re next.” But what was the joke?’
‘That one? It’s the one about the Irish guy whose wife discovers him holding a pistol to his head. Get it?’
19
‘F or simplicity’s sake, if a certain person should come in,’ Diamond said, ‘we’re discussing the ram raid. Understood?’
It was Friday morning and he had called his senior detectives — Halliwell and Leaman — to his office. They knew who the ‘certain person’ was. They also knew the topic he was refusing to abandon.
‘This double hanging.’
‘The Twinings,’ Halliwell said.
‘You’ve been keeping up, then?’
‘Can’t say I know a lot.’ But his tone said plenty. It told Diamond he was piqued at being sidelined on the ram raid while Leaman seemed to be taking over as number two on the team ‘There isn’t a lot. Married couple found in Bath two years ago.
Made no big impact at the time. Ingeborg picked it up.’
‘She’s a bright kid.’
‘I know, but I don’t want to talk about Ingeborg. I want your thoughts on what appears to be going on. There’s enough in common with the deaths of Williamson and Geaves to persuade me that the incidents are related.’
‘Seems a possibility,’ Halliwell said with a shrug.
‘I’d put it stronger than that. In each case, the woman dies first, the man goes missing for a day or so and then his body is found. Each of these hangings was in the open, in a place people were sure to notice. Public parks, the railway viaduct and Sham Castle. Most people choosing to hang themselves do it at home or at work, not in a public place. No suicide notes were left. The ages of the victims were similar.’
‘And it happened on our patch,’ Leaman said.
Diamond gave him a sharp look, suspicious that he was being sarcastic. ‘I thought that was self-evident.’
‘But statistically significant,’ Leaman said. ‘If the Twinings had been found in South Shields, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about them.’
‘True,’ he said without gratitude. ‘Let’s get to why we’re here. Do we agree that the post-mortem evidence on Delia Williamson points to murder?’