“Did Cyril inherit the fortune his wife earned?”
A smile and a shake of the head. “She was smart. When she wrote her will, she put all her money in trust. He was allowed an annuity of fifty thousand but he couldn’t get his hands on the rest, except a salary was set aside for a housekeeper—because she knew he wasn’t capable of managing on his own. He’s had a string of housekeepers, has Uncle Cyril. He’s not easy to manage. The house in a posh part of London went to him, but he sold it to get more cash to gamble with. I think he bought a smaller place and then sold that, and so on, until he ended up in this dump. Prop them against the wall and you can unscrew the other bed,” she said. She was definitely the foreman of this team.
“If Aunt Winnie was as wealthy as you say, some of her fortune must be left over.”
“I won’t see a brass penny of it. It’s all going to War on Want.”
“Rather that than the bookmakers.”
“True.”
The second room had been the housekeeper’s. Nothing personal remained but it had a fresher look to it than Cyril’s room and the bed was a divan with a padded headboard. He succeeded in shifting the mattress without damaging anything—except one of his lower vertebrae.
He’d never been kicked by a shire horse but he now had some idea how it felt.
He roared.
“What’s up?” Hilary asked.
He slumped on to the sprung bedstead. “Give me a moment.”
“Your back, is it?”
He rubbed it, trying not to swear.
“You know what they say,” she said. “No good deed ever goes unpunished.”
“Do they?”
He was in too much agony to trade smart talk.
“There’s a medicine cabinet in the bathroom where he kept his sleeping tablets,” she said. “There must be painkillers of some sort.”
“I don’t want his stuff.”
“I can see if there’s anything you can rub on it. I don’t mind doing it for you.”
“No thanks.” She might not mind but he did. He braced himself and succeeded in standing up. “Let’s see if we can unscrew the legs from this thing.”
“You’re tougher than you look,” Hilary told him.
“I played rugby when I was younger,” he said. “The idea is to get straight back into the game.”
Presently he’d recovered enough to slide the mattress out to the landing on its side and let it shoot downstairs. They dealt with the other one the same way. Then without actually needing to lift them, they manoeuvred them into the van.
She offered to leave the bedsteads for another day, but he insisted he would be all right and they returned upstairs to finish the job. He really believed there was some benefit in soldiering on rather than collapsing and letting the injury stiffen up.
When they shifted the second bed he saw something gleaming on the floor that turned out to be a cheap plastic hairbrush. Pink, with white nylon bristles.
“Jessie’s,” Hilary said, picking it up. “She didn’t leave anything else behind.”
“She won’t be coming back for it,” he said. “Can I see?”
“Keep it if you want.”
“I will.” No detective worthy of the name turns down an offer like that. He wrapped the brush in the folded papers in his jacket pocket. A few blonde hairs were enmeshed between the bristles.
Hilary offered black coffee—there was no milk in the small kitchen—and he drank it standing up.
“All you got for helping me was a sore back and an old hairbrush,” Hilary said. “This hasn’t helped your friend in hospital.”
In his present state of discomfort, he had to think who his friend in hospital was. Pellegrini and friendship went together like fire and water.
A lot has happened since I last put anything in the diary. How events move on. Memo to myself: must do better in keeping the record updated. If I leave it too late, there’s no point really.
What can I say about the last one? He was an overdue train that needed taking into the terminus (he’d appreciate that). After his wife went, he found life increasingly difficult. He had vague suspicions certain people were taking advantage, but he was in no condition to stop them. I did him a service, ending his journey.
13
The drive back was a blur. He made a short stop at work to bag up the hairbrush for forensics and then went straight home, needing to get horizontal. The pain in his lower back wasn’t going to go away quickly. He let himself in, swallowed some painkillers and dropped like wet washing on the sofa in the front room.
He hardly stirred until he felt something soft nudging his face.
Raffles, wanting to be fed.
He checked the time. Four hours had gone by.
Four hours?
Without thinking why he was there he swung his legs off the sofa and was sharply reminded by his lumbar region. He swore so loudly that Raffles shot upstairs.
After more groaning, mainly at his own folly as he recalled what had happened, Diamond eased himself up, shuffled to the kitchen and opened a tin of cat food. Raffles reappeared as quickly as he had gone.
In CID they would be wondering where the boss was. Better let them know.
He called Halliwell.
“Keith, it’s me.”
“Okay.”
The slightly bored response wasn’t the fanfare of relief he’d been expecting. “What do you mean—okay? I’ve been out of the office since midday. Didn’t anyone notice?”
“You were going to the Langfords. We didn’t expect you back in a hurry.”
“Nearly seven hours?”
“Was it as long as that?”
“Forget it. What’s been happening?”
“Some progress. A bit of a breakthrough, in fact. Hold on. I’ll pass the phone to Inge.”
“Guv,” Ingeborg’s voice took over. “Did you meet Cyril?”
“No. He died.”
There was a sharp intake of breath. “Another one?”
“My reaction, too, but I can’t see how his death could have been caused by you-know-who. He went peacefully at home in his own bed.”
“So did the others. The men, at any rate. And was he rich, like Filiput?”
“He may have been at one time. By the end he was up to his ears in debt. I met his niece who is the sole heir and she’s come into nothing except a load of trouble.”
“So was it recent, his death?”
“Six weeks.” He told her about Cyril’s gambling addiction and the special provisions of his wife Winnie’s will. “She made sure her life’s savings didn’t all go to the loan sharks and bookies.”
“I’m warming to this woman,” Ingeborg said. “She must have cared about him to arrange the annuity.”
“He still managed to get through a lot, including the profit from selling their house in London. The cottage is just a two-up, two-down place unlikely to cover the debts. Even the Scrabble sessions at Cavendish Crescent seem to have been for money.”
“How do you play Scrabble for money?”
“Like any other game. There’s a winner, isn’t there? Or it could be a pound a point. Two people playing will score more than five hundred points between them, easily.”
“Are you a player, guv?”
“I used to have the occasional game with Steph, but not for money.” He went silent for a moment, remembering. Then he snapped out of it and told her about the necklace he’d found.
“What was he doing with a gold necklace?” she said.
“An antique gold necklace. I’m wondering if it belonged originally to Olga Filiput. She had some valuable things, I was told by Dr. Mukherjee, antiques and jewellery as well as those Fortuny gowns. Max inherited them and got worried because he couldn’t keep track of them all. He suspected some went missing—and we
know where the gowns ended up.”
“Cyril nicked the necklace?”
“There was quite a free-for-all at the funeral.”
“I thought that was about Filiput’s railway collection.”
“Right, but railway items didn’t interest Cyril. He was the Scrabble partner, nothing to do with the GWR lot. He was under pressure from people he’d borrowed from. I’m wondering if he took his chance to look for something really worth taking while the others were fighting over the photographs and posters.”
“Wow. It’s possible.”
“What’s your news?” he asked her. “Keith said something about a breakthrough.”
She laughed. “That’s putting it strongly. I may have solved a small mystery. How would you like a midnight adventure with Keith and me?”
“Tonight?”
“That’s what we have in mind.”
“Doing what?”
“What Ivor Pellegrini does—a jaunt in the country to see if we can find them digging their holes.”
“The rabbits? Oh, for Christ’s sake, Inge.”
She laughed again. “I can pick you up from your house about eleven-thirty if you’re game.”
He was game but he wasn’t sure if his back was. “Are you sure this won’t be a waste of time?”
“Trust me. I’ve done my research. It’s going to be a revelation. Come on, guv. You’ll miss a few hours’ sleep but so what?”
Loss of sleep wasn’t the problem. He’d just had four hours. “All right. I’m on board.” He ended the call and went off to look for more painkillers.
He’d had a bath by the time they arrived but he couldn’t pretend he was fit.
Before they even got to the car, Halliwell asked, “What happened, boss? You look terrible.”
“It’ll pass.”
“You’re not walking right.”
“If you really want to know, I was helping a lady with a bed.”
Ingeborg was quick to warn Halliwell, “Don’t go there.” She opened the car door. “Are you able to get in, guv?”
“In, yes. I might need help to get out.”
The roads were almost empty but Ingeborg still observed the limit, mindful that at this hour any vehicle would be obvious to a police patrol. “We’ll go past Pellegrini’s house and follow the route he took the night of the crash,” she said.
“Do we know it?” Diamond asked.
“We do now.”
“How did you work this out?”
“What he was really up to? From his computer data. I spent hours searching for the download of the stuff he’d printed out—those murder notes—until steam was coming out of my ears. Then I had the idea of making a different search trying some of the crazy stuff he said when he was stopped by our guys. I used the search function, working with the most recent documents, which all seemed to be just boring railway stuff, and suddenly there it was staring back at me from the screen.”
“The crazy talk?”
“The meaning of it all.”
“Get away.”
“I’m serious.”
“Which word did it—rabbits?”
“No. If you look at the notes you made after your second visit to Lew Morgan, he was careful to point out to you that Pellegrini didn’t actually mention rabbits. That was Lew, trying to make sense of it.”
“As anyone would. As we did, in fact.”
“Pellegrini said he heard them digging their holes, right?”
“Supposedly. And heading for Bath.”
“Using hops.”
“Are we dealing with some other creatures, then?”
“You’ll see. It was the word ‘hops’ that cracked it for me.” She left that to sink in. “Henrietta Road is coming up shortly. Ideally we should be switching to tricycles to reconstruct his journey properly. We’ll have to imagine him packing his supplies in the saddlebag and pedalling off on his nightly jaunt.”
“A right bunch of idiots we’d look on trikes,” Halliwell said.
“There’s Pellegrini’s workshop, anyway,” Diamond said, looking left at the white building in front of the large house. “From now on we’re following in his tyre tracks.” He didn’t trouble Ingeborg any more for explanations. She’d made it plain that the whole purpose of the trip was to show, not tell.
They turned right at Henrietta Road and, shortly after, crossed the canal by way of Sydney Road.
“I’m going to cheat a bit now,” Ingeborg said. “He used the back roads but it’s simpler for us to nip along the A36. We’ll rejoin him at Bathampton.”
“Is that rain I see on the windscreen?” Diamond said.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Are they just as active in the wet, then?”
“It won’t stop them.” She steered the conversation away from the rabbits—or whatever she was saving for later. “With Cyril dead, that makes two men and two women in a year and a half: Olga and Max Filiput, Trixie Pellegrini and Cyril. Pellegrini is dangerous to know.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Plus three others from the railway club, Seaton, Carnforth and Marshall-Tomkin,” she went on. “Okay, they passed away a year or so earlier, but it’s a frightening tally.”
Diamond tried to turn in the seat and speak to Halliwell. A stab of pain in his back made him yell so suddenly that Ingeborg’s steering wobbled. He apologised before saying, “Keith, you were going to find out how they died.”
There was a long silence from behind him.
Finally Halliwell said, “I don’t know if you want to hear this. Copies of the death certificates arrived this morning.”
“And?”
“If you remember, Carnforth was the one who died after a short illness, according to the paper. It was the flu.”
Another silence followed, this time of Diamond’s making. He’d just lost one of the potential serial-murder victims. He ought not to complain. “That’s certain?”
“It’s given as the cause of death.”
He gritted his teeth. “Can’t argue with that, then. How about the other two?”
“Edmund Seaton had bronchial pneumonia and Jeremy Marshall-Tomkin an aneurysm.”
“Is that peaceful?”
“It’s quick. Doctors certified these deaths and they sound like genuine medical conditions you wouldn’t confuse with murder.”
Two more gone.
“I don’t think we can blame Pellegrini,” Halliwell continued. “My reading of it is that none of those three was murdered. They agreed among themselves that they wanted their ashes scattered on the railway when their time came and whoever survived the others would perform this last duty for his fellow members. It had to be done secretly at night because Network Rail wouldn’t permit it.”
“Sounds right to me,” Ingeborg said. “He kept the urns as a kind of memorial.”
“We can all agree on that, then,” Diamond said with no pleasure at all. Poleaxed wasn’t enough to describe his state. “Instead of seven possible victims, we’re down to four, maximum. And I can’t honestly see why he would have wanted to murder Cyril.”
“Which brings the tally down to three,” Halliwell said. “Trixie, Olga and Max.”
“So whose ashes was he carrying on the night of the collision?” Ingeborg said.
“The urn was empty,” Halliwell said.
“When it was found, it was. By then he’d scattered them somewhere along the track. He was on his way back when the patrol car hit him.”
“Had to be Max,” Halliwell said. “He was the last of the railway club to die.”
“Last summer. Quite some time ago.”
“Yes, but you can keep ashes indefinitely. There’s no urgency.”
They were fast approaching the Bathampton Lane turn. Diamond was silent, still wrestling with
the news that three of the deaths had not been caused by Pellegrini.
“How are we doing?” Halliwell asked.
“We’re good,” Ingeborg said. “The track is somewhere on our left. We’ll go on a bit and then do what Pellegrini is supposed to have done.”
“Except we don’t have any ashes to scatter,” Halliwell said.
“I’m talking about his cover story.”
“The rabbits?” Diamond said, making a huge effort to pay attention.
“The hops.”
“You’re calling it a cover story. Are you sure?”
“I am now. His real objective was dealing with the ashes.”
“And he had this other story ready in case anyone stopped him and asked what he was doing? He’d say he was studying wildlife?”
“He didn’t say that. This is where we got him wrong. He’s an engineer used to dealing in facts, not fantasy. He picked something real as his cover. Anyone could verify that it was true, as I will demonstrate shortly.”
“And it’s on his computer?”
“That’s how I know it happens each night while we’re sleeping.”
They bridged the canal, the railway, the A4 and the Avon at Bathampton and followed London Road East to link up with the A4.
“For an old guy he’s a strong cyclist if he came this far,” Halliwell said.
“Come on,” Ingeborg said. “The bike was motorised.”
“He didn’t need to,” Diamond said. He’d got the sense of what Ingeborg had said earlier. “This was only his cover story.”
“The railway is now on our right,” Ingeborg said.
“All the way to Box,” Halliwell said. “Are we going as far as that?”
“We may not need to. If I’ve got it right, they’ll be this side of the tunnel.”
Box Tunnel was dug through Box Hill at the start of the Victorian era to bring the railway to Bath and Bristol. Almost two miles in length, it was one of the great engineering projects undertaken by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
“We’ll stop in the next layby,” Ingeborg said. “Don’t want to drive straight past them without realising.”
“God, no. They’re good movers, not easy to catch,” Halliwell said in amusement. “They cover up to a mile a night.”
Another One Goes Tonight Page 19
