The Last Detective pd-1

by Peter Lovesey

  For this petulant outburst, Diamond was given a lecture on the time-scale necessary for the processing of histological tissues, which required at least a week, and on the pressures the Home Office Forensic Laboratory was under. 'Currently they're so pressed that it could be weeks before they deliver.'

  'Weeks? Have you told them it's a suspicious death? Don't they understand the urgency?' Diamond had picked up a pencil and put it between his teeth. He bit into the wood. 'You're still not willing to say if she drowned?'

  'All I will say is that as yet the cause of death is not apparent.' Merlin was retreating behind the form of words he used in giving evidence.

  'Jack, my old friend,' Diamond coaxed him. 'Can't you speak off the record to me? Can you help me with an estimate of the date of death?'

  'Sorry.'

  'Terrific!' The pencil snapped into two pieces.

  There was a longish silence. Then: 'I am doing the best I can in the circumstances, Superintendent. I won't be steam-rollered. You must appreciate that the service is undermanned.'

  'Jack, spare me the charity appeal, will you? Just call me the minute you reach an opinion.'

  'I always intended to.'

  Diamond dropped the phone and left it dangling below the worktop. The telephonist retrieved it without complaining and removed the pieces of pencil. Diamond ambled across the floor again to see what had come in as a result of his television appeal, knocking the carousel out of alignment as he went.

  John Wigfull, his second-in-command, summed up. 'We've heard from seven callers convinced that the victim is Candice Milner.'

  After a pause to decide whether the question should be taken seriously, Wigfull said, 'The Milners – that soap on the BBC. Candice was written out of the story a couple of years ago, at least.'

  'Give me strength! What else?'

  'Two deserted husbands called in. In one case the wife left a note saying she was going away for a week to unwind. The home is in Chilcompton. That was six months ago.'

  'Six months. She ought to be in missing persons.'

  'She is. The photo doesn't bear much resemblance. We passed it over.'

  'I'll take another look at it. You'd better send someone to talk to the bloke tomorrow. What else?'

  'Slightly more promising, this. A farmer by the name of Troop from Chewton Mendip had a row with his wife three weeks ago and she hitched a lift with the lorry-driver who collects the milk-churns. Husband hasn't seen her since.'

  'Didn't he report it?'

  'He was giving her time

  'He was giving her time to come to her senses. There's a history of fights and walk-outs.'

  'And he reckons the picture looks like his wife?'

  'He's not saying, sir. His sister-in-law thinks so. She was the one who phoned us.'

  Diamond's eyes widened a fraction. 'Anything on file? Complaints of violence?'

  Wigfull nodded. 'Just the one, on 27 December, 1988. Farmer Troop seems to have kicked his wife out of the house, literally, and refused to let her in again. The sister reported it. A PC from Bath was sent out and saw the bruises. The woman refused to proceed. She said it was Christmas.'

  'Goodwill to all men.' Diamond took a deep, disapproving breath and let it out slowly. 'What can you do? You and I had better follow this one up ourselves, John. Chewton Mendip can't be more than five miles from the lake. I'll see the sister-in-law in the morning – and you'd better find out the name of the gallant knight of the churns.'

  Wigfull grinned appreciatively. Any sign of good humour in the superintendent had to be encouraged. They weren't exactly bosom pals. Wigfull had been named as Diamond's assistant in the worst of circumstances, when the Missendale scandal had first made banner headlines. In the few preceding months, Diamond had made an impressive debut with Avon and Somerset and cleared up two murders, assisted by an inspector he had got along well with, called Billy Murray. But within hours of Diamond's involvement in the Missendale case becoming known, instructions had come from County Headquarters that Murray was to be transferred to Taunton, where a vacancy had arisen. John Wigfull, from CID (Administration), was his replacement. Rightly or not, Diamond was convinced that Wigfull was a plant, the Headquarters man under instructions to report any excesses. Unlike Billy Murray, Wigfull did everything by the book. He'd gone to a lot of trouble to ingratiate himself with the squad. He hadn't succeeded yet with his superior.

  'Anything else?' asked Diamond.

  'A fair number of sightings.'

  'But of what?'

  'Horizontal jogging, mostly.'

  'No reports of violence?'

  'Nothing yet.'

  'Not much, is it? I may go on the box again towards the end of the week. Let's see if Chewton Mendip amounts to anything. Is that where the sister lives as well?'

  She was Mrs Muriel Pietri, and her husband Joe owned a motor repair business beside the A39 that had a sign that promised, 'Low Cost High Class Repairs. We Get You Back On The Road.' The police often visited the place to follow up hit and run accidents. Diamond himself called there early next morning. Someone lower in rank could have handled the interview, but the prospect of question and answer was so much more appealing than another morning in the caravan.

  The sickly-sweet vapour of cellulose paint hung in the air as he manoeuvred his bulk unskilfully through a narrow passage between damaged vehicles, collecting rust on his grey check suit. He had brought a sergeant with him to take the statement.

  Mrs Pietri stood at the open door in a floral print frock that she probably wore for visitors. She was made up for the occasion – the works: foundation, lipstick, mascara and some sort of cheap scent that made the paint quite fragrant in retrospect. A slim, dark-haired, slow-speaking woman, burning with the enormity of what she believed had happened. 'I do fear the worst this time,' she said in the broad accent of Somerset as she led them into her scrupulously tidy front room. 'Carl's behaviour is a proper disgrace. He do clout my sister summat wicked. Terrible. I can show you photographs my husband took with one of they Instamatics last time poor Elly came here. Black and blue, she were. I hope you'll be giving the bugger a dose of his own medicine when you visit him. He do deserve no blimmin mercy, none at all. Won't 'ee sit down?'

  'You saw the artist's impression of the woman we found?' said Diamond.

  'On Points West last night. That be Elly, without a blimmin doubt.'

  'Sergeant Boon has a copy of the picture. Take another look at it, would you? It's only an artist's sketch, you understand.'

  She handed it back almost at once. 'I swear to it.'

  'What colour is your sister's hair, Mrs Pietri?'

  'Red – a gorgeous, flaming red. It were her best feature, and it were natural, too. Women spend fortunes being tinted at the hairdressers for hair that colour and it never looks half so good as Elly's did.'

  Her use of the past tense reinforced her conviction that the dead woman was her sister. Diamond made it just as clear that he was keeping an open mind. 'Flaming red, you say. Is that what you mean – pure red?'

  'Natural, I did say, didn't I? Nobody's hair is pure red, except for they punks and pop stars.'

  'I need to know.'

  She pointed to a rosewood ornamental box that stood on the sideboard. 'That colour, near enough.'

  'Her eyes – what colour are they?'

  'Some folk called they hazel. They always looked green to I.'

  'What height is she?'

  'The same as I – five-seven.'

  'Age?'

  'Wait a mo – Elly were born two years after I. St George's Day. She must have been thirty-four.'

  'You said that your husband took photographs of her.'

  'Not of her face, my dear. The backs of her legs, where she were marked. It were in case she wanted evidence for a divorce. I don't believe I got a picture of her face, not since her and I were kids at school, anyways. We were never a family for taking pictures.'

  'But you said your husband has a camera.'

&nbs
p; 'For his business. He do photograph the damage in case the insurance people get funny.'

  'I see.'

  'It were his idea to take they pictures of Elly's legs.'

  'Photographing the damage.'

  'I can find they if you want.'

  'Not now. Tell me how you heard that your sister is missing.'

  'Well, being that she lived so near, she used to call in here regular for a bit o' gossip Tuesday morning. She didn't come last Tuesday, or the Tuesday afore that, so I got on the blower and asked that bugger of a brother-in-law what happened to my sister.'

  'And?'

  'The blighter tells I this bit o' hogwash about Elly taking off with Mr Middleton who collects the milk. Your sister is a shameless woman, he did tell I, no better than the whores of Babylon. He called her other things, too, that you wouldn't find in the scriptures. Riled I proper, I can tell 'ee.'

  'When is this supposed to have happened?'

  'Last Monday fortnight, he did say. I didn't believe a word of it, and I were right. She must have been dead already, lying naked in Chew Valley Lake, poor lamb. Do you want I to come with 'ee to identify her proper?'

  'That may not be necessary.'

  'Will you be going over to arrest the bugger?'

  'I want you to sign a statement, Mrs Pietri. The sergeant will assist you.' Diamond got up and walked out.

  Over the radio he made contact with Inspector Wigfull. 'Any news?'

  'Yes,' Wigfull answered. 'I just called at the milkman's cottage.'

  'Middleton?'

  'Yes.'

  'And?'

  'Elly Troop opened the door.'

  Chapter Five

  IN THE MODERN POLICE, AS any detective will tell you, a murder mystery is rarely, if ever, solved by scintillating deductions from clues that baffle inferior minds. Unless the killer's identity is so obvious that the case is cleared up in the first hours, the investigative process is likely to be laborious, involving hundreds of man-hours by police officers, forensic scientists and clerical staff. If any credit attaches ultimately to a conviction, it is diffused among numerous individuals, and has to be qualified by administrative delays, false assumptions and sometimes fatal errors. These days criminal investigation is not a sport for glory hunters.

  After the unproductive interview with Mrs Pietri, Diamond returned to the mobile incident room and pounded the floor again. He demanded another look at the missing persons files for Avon and Somerset and the adjacent counties and vented his anger on a filing clerk when he found that the list hadn't been updated since he had last seen it. The atmosphere in the caravan was sulphurous as he reduced the girl to tears, blaming her for other shortcomings in the list that were apparently not her responsibility.

  Inspector Wigfull's return should have defused the tension. Wigfull, the sunbeam of the squad, as Diamond unkindly dubbed him, always had a word of encouragement for everyone, including the civilian clerks, each of whom he knew by their first names. His was the shoulder to cry on. He smiled a lot, and when he wasn't smiling he still appeared to be, because of the tendency of his exuberant moustache to curl upwards at the ends. This time the mere sight of him coming up the steps – playing a catching game with his car keys – triggered Diamond into another tirade.

  'You took your bloody time.'

  'Sorry, sir. Mrs Troop was in a bit of a state. She needed advice.'

  'John, if you want to join the bloody Marriage Guidance people and hold hands with weeping wives, why don't you go ahead? I happen to be working on a murder inquiry, and if that isn't your particular bent, I suggest you tell me right now so that I can ask for someone I can rely on.'

  'She'd been assaulted by her husband, sir. I was telling her to lodge a complaint this time.'

  'Social work,' said Diamond as if he were speaking of some disease brought on by lack of hygiene. 'You're supposed to be a detective. Meanwhile I'm stuck here like a lupin waiting for a bee.'

  'Has there been a development?'

  Diamond flung out his hand and knocked over a box of paper clips. 'Of course there bloody hasn't. How can there be when you're listening to sob stories over coffee in Chewton Mendip? Three days, and all I've got for it is a sunburnt scalp. We're literally up the creek until we can put a name to this corpse.'

  'Should we have another look at missing persons?' the hapless inspector suggested.

  There was a tensing of shoulders right around the room, unnecessarily as it turned out. Diamond, deciding that he had raised his blood pressure to dangerous levels, said in the mild register that he knew was more effective than a bellow, 'That is what I have been trying to do.'

  'But in this area alone?'

  'And Wiltshire.' He snatched up a sheaf of flimsy papers and flapped it. 'A bloody long list, growing by seventy-plus every week.'

  Wigfull cleared his throat and said, 'Surely the PNC can helpus.'

  Diamond had to think a moment. His mind didn't work in abbreviations, and people who knew him better were more tactful than to press the cause of the Police National Computer. 'Yes,' he said with contempt, -by giving us twenty thousand names.'

  'You limit it by keying in the data you have,' Wigfull tried to explain. 'In this case, females under thirty with red hair.'

  In reality, Diamond had a reasonable grasp of the PNC's functions; otherwise he couldn't have survived in the CID. What he deplored was the general belief that it was the cure-all. 'For the present, we'll work with the county lists,' he said. 'I want updates on each of the names I've marked. Call the local stations. Get descriptions, real descriptions, not sodding data, as you insist on calling it. I want to know what they're like as people. By 3.30 this afternoon. I'm calling a conference.'

  'Very good, Mr Diamond.'

  'That remains to be seen. You may have sensed that I'm feeling somewhat frayed at the edges, Mr Wigfull. Somewhere out there is a murderer. We're making precious little progress towards arresting him. Jesus Christ, we don't even know how it was done.'

  'Looks as if we'll need the PNC,' said Wigfull.

  Diamond turned away, muttering, to check more responses to the local appeal for information. Copies of the artist's impression had appeared in Monday's Bath Evening Chronicle and the Bristol Evening Post. 'Two more for Candice Milner,' he presendy called across to Wigfull. 'It says a lot about contemporary values when people can't discriminate between real life and a flaming television serial.' It would take a breakthrough of cosmic proportions to shake him out of this embittered mood.

  Wanting to get away from the constant bleep of the phones, he chose to hold his case conference in the minibus parked beside the incident room. So at 3.30, the four senior officers in the squad sat with him in the rear of the vehicle in uncomfortable proximity and in turn reported their findings.

  Wigfull's work on the phone had yielded results of a sort: he had fuller details of three missing women whose descriptions broadly tallied with the woman found in the lake. 'Janet Hepple is divorced, thirty-three, a part-time artists' model in Coventry. Red hair, five foot seven. She left her flat seven weeks ago, leaving rent unpaid, and hasn't been seen since. Evidently this was out of character. Everyone spoke of her as honest and reliable.'

  Diamond was unimpressed. 'And the second?'

  'Sally Shepton-Howe, from Manchester, missing since 21 May, when she had a row with her husband and ran off. She sells cosmetics in a department store in the city. Hair described as auburn, green eyes, thirty-two, good-looking. A woman of her description was seen that night at Knutsford Services on the M6 trying to hitch a lift south.'

  'Asking for it. Who else?'

  'This is an odd one. An author, from west London, Hounslow. Writes romance. What are those books women buy everywhere?'

  'Bodice-rippers?' someone suggested.

  'No, the name of the publisher.'

  'Don't ask me. I only read science fiction.'

  'Anyway, she writes them. She's called Meg Zoomer.'

  'Zoomer. Is that a pen name?'

&n
bsp; 'It's real, apparently, the name of her third husband.'

  'Third?' said Diamond. 'What age is this woman?'

  'Thirty-four. She appears to carry on as if she's one of the characters in her books. Hungry for romance. She wears a dark green cloak and grows her hair long. It's chestnut red. Anyway, she drives about in an MG sports car looking for experiences to use in her books.'

  'Someone's having you on, John,' said Keith Halliwell, the inspector supervising the house-to-house inquiries.

  'They'd better not be,' Diamond said gravely, 'This is a murder hunt, not a night out at the pub. Let's have the rest. When was Mrs Zoomer last seen?'

  'The nineteenth of May, at a party in Richmond. She left soon after midnight with a man who seems to have been a gatecrasher. Everyone assumed he came with somebody else. Tall, dark-haired, aged about thirty, powerfully built, a trace of a French accent.'

  'Straight out of one of the books,' commented Halliwell. 'What did he drive – a Porsche, or a four-in-hand?'

  'Wrap up, will you?' Diamond snapped. He regarded Halliwell as a pain, which was why he was on house-to-house. 'Who was the informant?'

  'The woman who lives next door, sir. She took in the milk each day until there was no room left in her fridge.'

  'Has anyone shown her the picture yet?'

  That's being done. And Scotland Yard are trying to locate Mrs Zoomer's dental records.'

  'A model, a shopgirl and a writer,' Diamond summed it up, and sniffed. 'That's all?'

  'Those are the missing redheads more or less fitting our description, sir.'

  'I thought you would come up with more than that.'

  Wigfull countered this by saying, 'With respect, sir, the PNC would have given us more.'

  After an uneasy silence, Diamond said tamely, 'All right. See to it.'

  Wigfull tilted an eyebrow in Halliwell's direction and it was his undoing.

  'As we're going to cast the net more widely,' continued Diamond in a reasonable tone, 'maybe we should broaden our data-base.'

  The jargon from the lips of the Last Detective ambushed everyone. 'In what way, exactly, Mr Diamond?' Wigfull innocently asked.