Diamond Dust (2 page)

3

B
y morning the scratches on his face had darkened and were more obvious. He checked them in the car mirror on the way to work, in a line of traffic on the Upper Bristol Road. No sense in kidding himself people wouldn't notice. Nobody at the nick would be bold enough to ask how they'd got there, but he was damned sure the place would hum with gossip. His team would have noticed he hadn't turned up at the pub, of course. 'I had to go to another scene,' he'd tell them without saying that the other scene was his home.

He had this bullish reputation that shielded him from comments on his appearance, but inwardly he was more self-conscious than anyone realised. So he entered the nick by the back door, went straight upstairs to his office and closed the door. No one came in.

Just after eleven he was summoned upstairs to Georgina's lair. Georgina Dallymore, the Assistant Chief Constable, gave the scratches a look and may even have winced a little, but made no reference to them when she gestured to him to sit down. 'So one of the Carpenters is off the streets now. Nice work, Peter.'

'Don't know how long for.'

'Yes, he's going to appeal. His solicitor said so on TV.'

'Did he? I didn't watch the box last night.'

'His friends outside the court made a lot of noise.'

'Rentamob, ma'am.'

Georgina picked up a pen and scrutinised it as if the writing on the side held some important message. 'They're a dangerous family, Peter. I wish we had something major on the other two.'

'Des and Danny? No chance,' Diamond said. 'They don't soil their hands.'

'It's all contracted out, you mean?'

He nodded. 'The only reason we got Jake was that he let this girl become a personal issue.'

'He's not the smartest of the brothers, then?'

'Smart enough to live in a swish pad in its own grounds in Clifton - until yesterday.'

She examined the pen again. 'What will they do now? Regroup?'

'I expect so. Vice, or Drugs, have better tabs on the empire than I do.' He sensed, as he spoke, that he was walking into something, and Georgina's eyes confirmed it.

'Right on,' she said. 'It's organised crime.' She leaned forward a little and her eyes had a missionary gleam. 'You'd be good at that - detecting it, I mean.'

He reminded her guardedly, 'I'm your murder man, ma'am.'

'And a very effective one. But there are times, like now, when all we have on the books are the tough cases from years back that nobody ever got near to solving.'

'Doesn't mean we give up on them.' He didn't like the drift of this one bit.

'I'm thinking your skills might be better employed elsewhere, particularly as you know a lot more about the Carpenter family now.'

Elsewhere? He looked away, out of the window, across the grey tiled roofs towards Lansdown. There was an awkward silence.

'You might need to work out of Bristol Central, but it's not like moving house. What is it - under an hour's drive from where you live?'

He waited a long time before saying, 'Is this an order, ma'am?'

'It's about being flexible.'

"Well, you're talking to the wrong man. I'm not flexible. Never have been. I'm focused.'

Georgina's voice took on a harder note. 'Focus on the Carpenters, then. Yes, it is an order - while nothing new comes up on the murder front. Liaise with Mike Solly and George Eldon. Get an oversight of the entire operation - drugs, prostitution, protection. Put a surveillance team together if you want. This is the time to strike, Peter. They've lost Jake, so they have to put their heads above ground.'

'Have you finished?'

'Careful what you say,' Georgina warned him.

'That's someone else's empire. Not mine.'

'I've issued an order.'

'You want me out of Bath - is that it?' The old demons raged in his head, savaging any good intentions that might have lingered there. He hadn't felt so angry since the day he'd faced another Assistant Chief Constable in this room and resigned from the Force.

'It's not personal. It's about effective management.'

'Effective?' He threw the word back at her.

'I think you'd better get out.'

'Piss off.'

'How dare you!'

'I'm just summing up what you said to me. You've got no use for me here, so you want me to piss off to Bristol.' He turned and walked.

Down in his own office, he stood shaking his head, getting a grip on his emotions. Organised crime had nothing to do with this, he believed. Georgina wanted him out. While he'd been tied up with the court case she'd been plotting his removal. Wrongly, she thought he couldn't take orders from a woman. She didn't understand that he didn't let
anybody
push him around. No doubt she planned to put some pussycat in his place. John Wigfull was out of hospital and supposed to be returning to work any time. Bloody Wigfull would fit in beautifully: the Open University graduate who did everything by the book, never raised his voice and kept his desk as tidy as a church altar. Yes, she'd love to upgrade Wigfull to head of the murder squad.

He spent the next hour with his door closed, looking at the paper mountain on his desk, the filing cabinets that wouldn't close and the stacks of paper on the floor. Was it admitting defeat to tidy up? Wasn't it better to leave everything as it was, just to demonstrate that he'd be back?

He didn't go to the canteen for his usual coffee. And they had the sense not to disturb him.

At lunchtime he got out of the place for a walk, not towards the Abbey Churchyard, where he sometimes went when life had dealt him a wicked hand, but round the back of the railway station, across Widcombe Bridge and along the bank of the Avon as far as Pulteney Bridge -as dull a stretch of river as any he knew. Whenever he told people where he lived, they said how lucky he was, but in truth he wasn't attracted to the postcard scenes of Bath. The stately buildings, the rich history, the setting among green hills didn't excite him. He would have been just as content to work in Bristol if he'd been posted there six years ago. But he hadn't. Stuffy old Bath was his patch. He was in tune with it now. That was why he resented Georgina's attempt to move him.

He picked up a 'ploughman's' baguette - a contradiction, in his opinion - and a can of beer and sat on a bench in Parade Gardens. By now his rebellious thoughts were being toned down. He was starting to accept the inevitability of obeying orders. Georgina hadn't proposed a permanent move to Bristol Central. The best tactic was to let everyone know this was a short-term investigation. He'd make a point of calling in most days at Manvers Street and keeping track of what was going on there.

Still far from satisfied, he ambled back to the nick without any urgency. After all, nobody could expect him to drop everything and beetle off to Bristol the same day.

There was a sense of important things going on when he walked through the door.

'Mr Diamond, there you are,' the desk sergeant called across the room.

'Something up?'

'A shooting in Victoria Park. A woman is dead.'

His spirits soared. Bad news for someone could be a lifeline for him. 'Suicide?'

'Apparently not'

'So who's dealing with it?'

'DI Halliwell.'

Keith Halliwell was his deputy, and well capable of sussing out the scene. 'Even so, I think I'll take a look,' he said as calmly as if a rainbow had appeared over the city. 'Which part of the park?'

'Crescent Gardens. Down at the bottom, back of the Charlotte Street Car Park.'

On his way through the building he thought about leaving a message for Georgina - just to rub in the fact that sudden deaths did occur in Bath - and then decided against it. First, he'd find out for himself what this shooting amounted to. It could be one of those incidents that get cleared up the same day.

Please God, no.

* * *

The Royal Victoria Park, on sloping ground to the west of the city, is in effect two parks, one rather gracious, with lawns descending to a wooded area providing the Royal Crescent with its leafy view; and the other, larger and containing the Botanic Gardens, a fishpond and a children's playground overlooking the gasworks. They are bisected by Marlborough Buildings and its long gardens. The shooting had happened in the gracious part, near the bandstand on the south fringe of the park below the Crescent.

They had sealed off the scene with police tape. The inevitable gawpers had gathered at the margin, but helpfully the trees screened the place from the car park.

The scene-of-crime lads - with at least one lass - in their white zipper overalls were already at work. Halliwell was standing with the constable guarding the access path. Spotting Diamond, he came over to meet him, rubbing his hands.

'We're back in business, guv.'

'What do we know?'

'Middle-aged woman, shot twice in the head at close range. No sign of the weapon.'

'Apart from two holes in her head.'

Halliwell grinned. 'Well, I guess that counts as a sign.'

'Let's have a look, then.'

Halliwell led the way to where the SOCOs were combing the ground for traces of the crime. The corpse was covered with a white plastic sheet.

'Who found her?' Diamond asked.

'A Mr Warburton, walking his dog. About ten-twenty this morning he heard the shots and came over.'

'Did he see the killer?'

'No. Too far away. He was up the hill, not far from the Crescent. When he got here, there was just the woman lying dead.'

'Other people must have heard it. Well into the morning. People are about. The car park would have been filling up.'

'Yes, but he was the only one who bothered to check.'

Diamond didn't question this. The common reaction to the sound of shooting isn't to go and investigate. Most people dismiss it as a car backfiring. If they know it's a gun they head in the opposite direction. He stood over the covered corpse. 'What am I waiting for - someone to introduce us?'

Halliwell stooped and lifted the sheet from the head.

Diamond ran an experienced glance over the blanched face, one blood-red hole almost exactly in the centre of the forehead and another in front of the left ear. Then he stared. His skin prickled and his muscles went rigid as if volts were passing through them.

From deep in his throat came a sound more like a vomit than distress. He sank to his knees and snatched back the plastic sheet and looked at the woman's clothes. No question: she was wearing the black Burberry raincoat she'd bought from Jolly's last summer and the blue silk square he'd given her on her last birthday. He fingered a strand of her hair and it felt like straw. 'It's Steph,' he said, gagging on the words. 'The bastards have shot my wife.'

4

H
alliwell was speaking into his mobile. 'We have a positive ID on the body in Crescent Gardens. Confirmed as Mrs Stephanie Diamond, wife of Detective Superintendent Diamond. I repeat. . .'

Diamond remained on his knees beside his dead wife, registering nothing of what was going on around him. This was not self-pity. The focus of his grief was entirely on Steph, and her life so abruptly ended. Dry-eyed and blank-faced, he was weeping inwardly for her, for her compassion, her wisdom, her sense of humour, her integrity, her serenity, her mental strength, her brilliant insights. It had been almost a psychic gift, that ability of hers to draw his attention to hidden truths. With uncanny timing, she had reminded him only the night before how he hated surprises. Here was the worst surprise ever. He hadn't remotely imagined it could happen. Had she? Without the faintest idea of why she had come to this place, he wasn't going to make sense of it now, or in the next hour, or the next day. He knew only that Steph had been the one love of his life and she had been shot through the head at point-blank range. Too dreadful.

Halliwell put a hand on his shoulder and suggested he sat in the car for a bit.

He said from the depths of his grief, 'Back off.'

Wisely, Halliwell did.

The SOCOs continued their fingertip search of the area, less talkative now. Professionals working at murder scenes often insulate themselves from the horror with black humour that might offend anyone unused to what goes on. Diamond was quite a joker himself.
No sign of
the weapon - apart from two holes in the head.
Trust him to make a crass remark like that. Since word had passed round that she was his own wife, the jesting had stopped.

The police photographers (a civilian couple) arrived and Halliwell explained the situation. 'Hang on a minute, and I think he'll move away.'

They waited five minutes.

'Can't you tell him we're here?' the woman said. 'He knows the routine as well as anyone.'

'He's not functioning as a cop at the moment.'

'Who's in charge, then? You?'

'Technically, Mr Diamond is, but . . .'

They looked across. Still the big man knelt, hunched beside his dead wife. 'How long has he been there?'

'Ten, fifteen minutes. It's one hell of a shock.'

'Was he the first officer on the scene, then?'

'No, I was.'

'Didn't you warn him?'

Halliwell reddened. 'I didn't recognise her. I should have, because I've met her a couple of times. I didn't look at her as you would a living person. Saw the injuries and shut myself off from the victim. Your mind is on what happened and what has to be done. Didn't dream it's someone I know.'

'He's got to move away if we're going to get our pictures.'

'All right, all right.'

Halliwell went back to his boss and explained about the photographers. Diamond didn't take in one word of it. He was holding his dead wife's hand, cradling it between both of his.

Halliwell tried again. 'They've got to get their pictures, guv.'

Nothing.

'The photos of the scene.'

He wasn't listening. The police and their procedures were part of another existence.

Halliwell turned away and went back to the photographers. 'I can't shift him.'

'Someone's going to have to.'

'You can wait, can't you?'

The woman made a performance of looking at her watch. 'We're self-employed, you know.'

'Bollocks.' Halliwell stepped away from them and took a call on his mobile.

It was Georgina, the ACC. 'Is this true - about Mr Diamond's wife?'

'I'm afraid so, ma'am. He's here at the scene.'

'Dear God. I'd better come and speak to him.'

'With respect, ma'am, I don't think he's fit to speak to anyone just now.'

'Where is he exactly?'

'Kneeling beside his wife.'

'Poor man ... I don't think he has any other family, does he?'

'None that I've heard of.'

'Close friends?'

'Outside the police? I wouldn't know.'

'It's up to us to help him through, then.'

Difficult. Halliwell doubted very much if Diamond wanted the ACC to help him through, but he'd told her already to stay away and he couldn't keep repeating it. He looked towards Diamond and saw him reach for the plastic covering and replace it over his wife's face. 'I'm going over to him now, ma'am. He may be ready to leave.'

Diamond stood up, paused for a moment more beside the body and then walked across to Halliwell. His eyes had the unfocused stare of the freshly bereaved, but he was able to find words now, and he made it clear that he wasn't thinking of leaving. 'What have we found, then?' he asked in a flat voice.

'Not much so far, sir. It looks professional.'

'You're searching for the bullets?'

'Of course.'

'And the cases? If they used an automatic . . .' He lost track of the sentence for a moment, his voice breaking up. Then he managed to control it. 'The weapon could still be around. Get some back-up. All this area has to be combed. Every yard of it.'

'Right, sir. Can the photographers get their pictures now?'

'I'm not stopping them.'

The hiatus was over. He was making a huge effort to show he was capable of carrying out the familiar routines. He checked that the police surgeon had been by to certify death, and Halliwell confirmed it.

'And the pathologist?'

'On his way, sir.'

'Middleton, I suppose?'

'Sir.' Halliwell found himself slipping in that 'sir' far more than usual. Normally he was more relaxed with his old boss. 'I'd just like to say—'

'No need,' Diamond cut him short. 'We understand each other. Take it as said.'

The cover was removed entirely from the body for the photographs and video record. More sightseers had gathered behind the police tapes to watch. A violent death in broad daylight was a rare event in Bath. Stephanie Diamond was fully clothed, yet it still seemed offensive that she should be an object of ghoulish interest. Her husband knew if he told them to move on, more would take their places.

So the painstaking process continued. The body was on the grass to the rear of the old bandstand, obscured from Royal Avenue, the road that crossed the lawns below the Crescent. The Victorian shrubbery nearby fringed the car park and trapped the litter that blew across the open lawns. The search for traces of the killer would be a long job.

The forensic team arrived in their vans. While they were putting on their sterile overalls, Halliwell hurried across to warn them who the victim was. Diamond didn't want sympathy from anyone, but he could be spared the backchat that went with the job.

The next twenty minutes passed slowly and mostly in silence, with the white-suited figures clustered around the body.

Someone must have tipped off that old motormouth, Jim Middleton, the forensic pathologist, before he arrived - a merciful act. He said nothing. Just put out a hand and rested it briefly on Diamond's shoulder in a gesture of support. Then took the taped route to the corpse and studied the scene. Diamond followed.

'Has anyone touched her?' Middleton asked.

'The police surgeon,' Diamond said. 'And forensics. And me. She hasn't been moved.'

Middleton crouched for a closer inspection. 'Bullet wound to the frontal, almost dead centre. Very close range. You shouldn't be here, you know. You're too involved.'

'I can handle it.'

'I don't doubt you, old friend, but that isn't the point.'

'This is the work of a hitman,' Diamond said, ignoring the criticism.

'Do you know something?'

'I'm talking about the bullet wounds.'

'Two, to be sure, you mean? I wouldn't read too much into that. They look very deliberate, measured almost, but that's speculation. Could equally be some crazy with a gun who happened to point the muzzle towards her and pull the trigger twice.' Middle ton crouched and peered closely at the powder burns around the neat hole the bullet had made in her forehead. 'Are you sure you want to be here?'

Diamond didn't answer, but remained where he was.

Middleton took a small tape recorder from his briefcase and started describing the wounds. He lifted each eyelid, the beginning of a slow, methodical examination. He inserted a thermometer into a nostril and noted the temperature. Felt the arms and tested for rigor by moving one. Looked at the hands and fingernails. Loosened the clothes around the neck and searched for other signs of injury. Turned the body and studied one of the blood-encrusted exit wounds at the back of the head.

'Have they picked up the bullets?'

'Not yet.'

'Buried in the ground, I dare say.'

'We can use a metal detector.'

The pathologist remained for over an hour before signalling to the waiting funeral director that he was ready to have the body removed to the hospital mortuary. Diamond stood back and watched his dead wife being lifted into a plastic zipper-case, and then into a plain fibreglass coffin, which was carried up the slope, through the crowd, loaded into a van and driven away.

With self-disgust he thought back to his first reaction to this, how he had been elated at the news of a shooting. And later joked about waiting to be introduced to the victim.

'Big shock,' Middleton said to Diamond. 'You want to go home now, take a Valium.'

'There's work to do. You know as well as I do - the first twenty-four hours are crucial.'

'Yes, but it shouldn't be you.'

He didn't dignify the suggestion with a response. Instead, he walked over to Halliwell. 'The bloke who found her - where is he?'

'Went off home, guv. He had the dog with him.'

'That's no reason to leave.'

'We took a short statement'

'A dog doesn't need to go home. Dog would stay in the park all day if it got the chance. Does he live nearby?'

'The Upper Bristol Road.'

'Which end?'

'This end, I think.'

'Get him here fast. I want to speak to him.'

He escorted Middleton to his car. 'Anything else you noticed?'

The pathologist said, 'What you don't find can be just as informative as what you do. Did you look at her hands?'

'I held them.'

'No damage. No sign that she put up a fight. When someone holds a gun to your head, you try and push it away. You fight for your life. This was quick, Peter. She didn't know much about it.' He opened the car door and got in. 'I wouldn't expect too much from the post mortem.'

Diamond watched him drive off.

Some time after, a constable approached him with a tall, thin man in tow. 'Sir, this is Mr Warburton, the gentleman who found the, em . . .' His voice trailed off.

Warburton, in his thirties, had a down-at-heel look, lank, dishevelled hair, his hands deep in the pockets of a black overcoat that was coming apart at the shoulder-seam. The shock of the morning's discovery may have left him looking troubled, or it may have been his stock expression. He swayed a little.

'You've been drinking?' Diamond said.

'A wee drop,' Warburton answered. 'It helps me sometimes. I got the shakes.'

'You found the body, I believe?'

'Heard the shots, didn't I?' He flapped his hand in the general direction of the Royal Crescent. 'I was right up there with my dog, causing no trouble, and I heard it go off and came down here.'

'What time?'

'Couldn't tell you.'

'We logged the call at ten-twenty, or thereabouts. See anything?'

'No.'

'Are you sure? How long after the shots did you get here?'

'Dunno.'

'Two minutes? Five? Ten?' As he said it, he knew he wouldn't get a precise estimate. The man was three-quarters slewed.

'Thought it was someone taking a pot at a rabbit.'

'Here?'

'I've seen them.'

'Why bother at all, then, if you thought it was someone after rabbits?'

'Followed my dog, didn't I?'

'Was nobody else about?'

'Not that I saw.'

'Had you been drinking?'

'Might have. Don't remember.' Pure bad luck that the only witness happened to be a wino.

'So what happened?'

'Like I said, I followed my dog. He found her first. He's a lurcher. Kind of stood over her waiting for me to get there. I thought it might be one of my mates, fallen asleep. Then I see the bullet holes.'

'What then?'

'Scared me, it did. I looked around for help and there wasn't none.'

'Did you hear anything? Movements in the bushes? The sound of anyone running off?'

Warburton shook his head. 'I belted down to the car park and there was a geezer just drove in. He had a mobile and I asked him to call the Old Bill.'

'Was anyone else in the car park? Anyone leaving?'

'Give us a break, mate. I was so shit-scared I wouldn't have noticed me own mother walk by.'

'And I suppose they told you to wait here and not touch anything.'

'If you know it all, why ask me?'

'And pretty soon the first police car drove up?'

'And found little old me holding the fort.'

'You didn't find anything near the body?'

'Like what?'

'Like money, for instance? A handbag?'

'Here, what do you take me for? That's a fucking insult considering I did my public duty.'

'If anyone did take anything from the scene, they're in trouble. It's a serious offence.'

'Don't look at me. I did nothing wrong.'

Diamond was inclined to believe him. 'Don't drink any more. That's an order. I may want to speak to you again.'

He found Keith Halliwell and told him to remain at the scene. 'I'm leaving you in charge. I want to check on certain pieces of lowlife and their movements earlier today.'

'Shall I do that?' Halliwell offered.

'You find the bloody bullets. And look for spent cartridges as well.'

* * *

He made the mistake of returning to Bath Police Station to begin his check on the Carpenters. Georgina walked into his office before he'd picked up a phone. She must have asked the desk to alert her the moment he returned.

'Peter, we're all devastated. I can't begin . . .'