Born in a Burial Gown (27 page)

Fluke and Vaughn arrived at Durranhill within minutes of each other, and an hour later, they were sitting opposite Nathaniel Diamond. The custody sergeant told Fluke that, despite nearly twenty-four hours in a police cell, Diamond still looked calm. His only reaction had been when his solicitor was served the notice granting an additional twelve hours’ questioning time. Apparently, he’d looked at the camera and raised an eyebrow.

The previous day, Diamond had been in control. Fluke had detected deception when shown the picture of the victim but other than that he’d remained calm.

This time Fluke wasn’t leaving until he had something he could use.

Vaughn had asked if he should bring Diamond up from the cells, and Fluke was about to tell him ‘yes’ until he realised it would just be a continuation of the previous day. He needed something more, some sort of leverage. It was going to be a battle of intellectual heavyweights, and Fluke needed to land the knockout blow. Instead, he turned to Vaughn, ‘No, Al, I want to review yesterday’s interview first.’

For an hour, Fluke pored over the footage. He watched it with the sound and then without. Vaughn, a brilliant detective in his own right, looked over his shoulder but said nothing.

Fluke watched himself reveal the photo of Samantha to Diamond. There’d definitely been recognition. He watched from the beginning again. He saw himself enter. He saw himself open his folder.

And he saw what he’d missed the first five times.***

Fluke stared at Nathaniel Diamond across the scuffed table and studied him. Really studied him. On the face of it, he was what he looked like. A thug. An intelligent thug yes, but a thug all the same. Yet, as Fluke looked closer things cleared. The tattoos were a little too well done. No prison ink there. Expensive black tribal sleeves on both arms. His tracksuit, before it had been removed, was also expensive, according to the young officer who had bagged it. They’d also taken an Omega watch from him and that wasn’t cheap. It also wasn’t garish like some of the more expensive watches could be.

After what Fluke had just witnessed in the footage, he no longer thought of Diamond as an intelligent thug. He thought of him as having a once-in-a-generation mind.

Fluke now suspected his image was completely cultivated. It suited him at that moment and, like a chameleon shedding its skin, he would swap it for another when the time was right. The more Fluke thought about it, the more he came to view Diamond as the head of a large business – an illegal business, but a business all the same. No business survived for long without a business plan and without a CEO. And the CEO had to look the part. On Wall Street, the bankers, moneymen and oil analysts wore their pinstriped suits. In Carlisle, the crime families wore tattoos, tracksuits and heavy jewellery. Occasionally, a dangerous dog was thrown in for good measure. It was still an image, however. Two extremes, but the principle was the same.

Brains wouldn’t have been enough in Diamond’s business, however. He would’ve had to spend some time establishing himself among some pretty rough competition, competition that would undoubtedly have included his own family. The fact that he was the younger brother but the head of the family, spoke volumes. Violence was just another business tool, to be used when needed but only then. As well as being highly intelligent, Nathaniel would be a genuinely frightening man to get on the wrong side of.

Fluke had met hard men all his working life. The Royal Marines recruited almost exclusively from that gene pool. Some were bullies, some weren’t. A few were psychopaths, and some were the nicest people you could ever wish to meet. During his time as a police officer, Fluke had met men who were arguably harder. Men who were psychotic. Men for whom violence was a daily occurrence.

What they all had in common, however, was that there was always someone harder round the corner. Someone younger and quicker coming up through the ranks. Someone just a little bit more mental. Just a little bit more fearless.

So violence would have got Nathaniel to the top, and his brains would have kept him there, but not indefinitely. The X-factor would be ruthlessness. That would be the trait that would keep him in charge and make the Diamonds a viable option for outside investment from the drug gangs of Liverpool, the type of gangs that were hunted by the National Crime Agency rather than CID.

A ruthless man could organise a murder if his business were threatened.

The previous day Diamond had been in control.

Today, it would be Fluke’s turn. At first, he’d thought he was imagining it. Part of him still didn’t think what he’d seen was possible. He’d had to watch it over and over again until he was sure.

Diamond held his eye as Fluke stared at him but it wasn’t a battle of wills. Just as Fluke was weighing him up, he got the sense Diamond was doing exactly the same to him.

Fluke broke the silence. ‘Just how clever are you, Nathaniel?’

Diamond said nothing.

‘You see, I think you’re a very clever man indeed. Far more intelligent than my colleagues in Carlisle have ever given you credit for. Far more than I’d given you credit for.’

Diamond stared at Fluke. There was something going on that Fluke was still unaware of, some context to the investigation that he was yet to see. Diamond could see it, Fluke was sure of that. Would he share it, though?

Time to take a risk.

‘When did you learn about the airline’s interview technique, Nathaniel?’

Still nothing. But Fluke sensed there was movement behind his eyes, as if the neurones in his brain had suddenly had to change direction.

‘You see very few people know about that technique, Nathaniel. It’s still being piloted. It’s still a university project for now. I’m the only person who uses it in Cumbria. I may be the only police officer in the country that uses it. But you knew what I was doing all along. So I have two options. You either knew about the technique or you were able to work it out as I was doing it. I think you worked it out, Nathaniel. You want to know how I know?’

Diamond raised his eyebrows slightly. He was curious. Fluke had grabbed his interest.

‘It’s because I fucked it up, that’s why,’ he said. ‘You knew what I was doing. You knew I was asking control questions. You reacted to every question as I’d expected. As you had wanted to. You never lost control. Even the little burst of anger at your solicitor here was part of it.’

Diamond said nothing but Fluke knew he was right.

‘I had my control questions. Now I had to ask the question. The one question that it had all been for. But I fucked it up, didn’t I, Nathaniel?’

Diamond continued to stare. Just as Fluke was about to continue, he nodded slightly.

‘You were playing along. You were expecting the question, weren’t you? You were expecting the surprise, if you’ll forgive my oxymoron. You were watching me as carefully as I was watching you. I showed you the picture of my victim. That was my surprise. But it was no surprise was it, Nathaniel?’

‘No, Inspector, it wasn’t.’ The first words he’d said since the interview had started.

‘No, Nathaniel. Because when I went through the interview footage again, I noticed that when I took my papers out at the start of the interview, I had mistakenly left the photo of the victim in view for nearly two seconds.’

Fluke took the photo back out of the file and placed it on the table in front of him.

‘This one in fact. But you noticed. The footage shows you noticing. You hid your surprise well. I watched it five times before I spotted it, and I had to watch it another five times just to be sure.’

Fluke picked up the photo and studied it. It was the question that was going to break the case. Sometimes it wasn’t just about asking the right question, it was about asking the right question at the right time.

‘So my question, Nathaniel, is this. I have you on tape fully in control of your micro-expressions. I have you on tape letting me see what I was expecting to see on my control questions. I know you’d seen the photo before I showed it to you. I know you weren’t surprised by it and that you were expecting it. You could easily have cast suspicion away from your family.’ Fluke stared at him. Crunch time. ‘But you didn’t, Nathaniel. You feigned surprise. Subtle yes, but enough so I wouldn’t miss it. You made sure I’d know your family’s involved somehow. Nothing that will stand up in court but enough to keep me interested.’

Diamond was watching him carefully. There was a game being played here but only one of them knew the rules.

‘I want to know why, Nathaniel? I want to know why you want me investigating your family for murder?’

The room was silent apart from the sound of something dripping. There were no taps, radiators or pipes in interview rooms so Fluke assumed it was coming from some internal plumbing in either the walls or the ceiling. He counted the drips and got to thirty before Diamond spoke.

‘Are you investigating my father for rape, Mr Fluke?’

Of all the responses he’d anticipated, that wasn’t in the top hundred. He had to be careful. ‘Why do you say that, Nathaniel?’

‘I hear things,’ Diamond said.

‘And what do you hear?’

‘I hear you have a dead girl. I hear she was raped. I hear you think whoever raped her, killed her…’ he said quietly, staring directly at Fluke. ‘Or arranged to have her killed, which is the same thing really.’

Fluke thought for a moment. ‘I hear that too.’ If they were being open with each other, he’d play along. For now. He paused for a moment. He had the feeling Diamond was trying to tell him something, something he wanted Fluke to work out. Something he wasn’t prepared to say on tape.

Fluke wondered if he wanted to snitch but immediately dismissed it. Being a snitch would end his business. None of the bigger gangs would deal with him. No, that wasn’t it.

Diamond was staring at him. He wanted Fluke to get the message. Needed him to understand the subtext. Fluke stared back but it wasn’t a pissing contest, just two people trying to communicate without speaking. Vaughn and the solicitor were in the room as well but Fluke knew that they were the only two that mattered.

‘You’re going to need to give me something, Nathaniel.’ Fluke felt rather than saw Vaughn turn to look at Fluke, not understanding what was happening but knowing not to interrupt. The solicitor didn’t understand either but was too scared to speak.

Fluke saw Diamond look down and think, saw him deciding what he could tell Fluke and what he couldn’t. He knew that the investigation was either going to stall completely or progress fast in the next few seconds.

Diamond looked up. ‘The girl. You need to look at her again.’

For the second time in five minutes, Fluke was surprised by Diamond’s response. There was no bone being thrown here. No suspect was going to be thrown his way. No vehement denial of involvement. Just another riddle to add to the plethora of riddles the case was attracting.

This was different though. Diamond wanted him to go in a direction he’d wanted to go anyway. Until now, a direction he’d not dared to. To do so would have been unthinkable.

Fluke understood.

Nathaniel didn’t want his family investigated. He wanted Samantha investigated.

Find out how the victim lived and you’ll find out how they died.

‘Why do I need to do that, Nathaniel? What do you know that I don’t?’

‘I can’t make it easy for you, Mr Fluke. If I tell you what I know, you’ll stop looking. You’ll take what I give you, and the investigation will end right here, right now. And the outcome would be, shall we say, unacceptable to me. I can’t have that.’

Fluke believed him. ‘We’ve looked at her pretty hard, Nathaniel. What am I missing?’

Diamond’s expression remained the same but there was an urgent tone to what he said next, ‘Look harder, Mr Fluke. Look harder.’

Fluke had lied to Diamond. They hadn’t looked at Samantha that hard. They’d looked at her as a murder victim. They’d looked at her as a rape victim. They’d looked at her as someone on the run. But they hadn’t touched the surface of
why
she’d been murdered,
why
she’d been raped and
why
she was on the run.

Diamond knew something but for some reason he couldn’t tell Fluke. It would stop the investigation, he’d told him.

He needed to focus on Samantha.

He already had suspicions, unshaped and unshared.

Fluke had put two local detectives on finding out her real name but he knew that he hadn’t prioritised it. If he had, he’d have led on it himself.

He drove back to FMIT instead of going to see Leah. He had a new line of enquiry.

He gathered everyone together. Luckily, the first stage of the hunt for Kenneth Diamond would be done by uniform and CID, so most of the team were there.

‘Listen up!’ he called out. ‘I’m changing the focus of the investigation. The hunt for Kenneth Diamond goes on but our number one priority is now the girl. I want to know everything about her. Nathaniel Diamond knows something we don’t. Something he can’t tell us for some reason. I want to know what that is.’

Towler walked over to the whiteboard, ready to start tasking when Fluke called them out.

‘We know she was hiding from someone. I am now convinced it wasn’t a Diamond. So we need to know more than we do now. Where’s Kay?’ Fluke had kept Kay Edwards on secondment to FMIT and intended to use her.

‘Here, sir,’ said a voice from the back.

‘I want you to go through the rape again. Take Jo through it all. Get everything down. Nothing’s irrelevant. Go back to the SARC at Preston and retrace everything.’

Towler wrote down the task on the board with the initials of the two officers.

‘I’ll go back to the hospital and see if they have a cosmetic surgeon for me to speak to yet. I’ll do that on my own, Matt. Longy, I need you to look for her online. Anything. Use the name she gave. Use her DNA, fingerprint, surgery scars, anything you can think of. And don’t limit yourself to UK databases. I want Interpol tapped up. The States. See if you can speak to the FBI. Start the process to check with their border security, if she’s been there she’ll have been fingerprinted on arrival.’