Another One Goes Tonight

by Peter Lovesey

  “This is a matter of life and death.”

  “What is?”

  “You’ll need your files on the estates of Olga and Massimo Filiput. Do you have them nearby?”

  At the other end of the line there was some conversation he didn’t pick up. This was encouraging, because it probably meant she had some personal assistant with her. There was the pleasing rasp of a filing cabinet being opened.

  “What now?” Miss Hill asked.

  “Do you also have a scanner in your office?”

  After a gasp of horror, she said, “I’m not copying confidential material for you, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

  “I wouldn’t think of asking you,” he said, “but you and I know that wills become public documents after the testators die, so it isn’t confidential at all. I could get copies from the probate registry, but I need them urgently, and you know what bureaucracy is. For you, I’ll make it easy. All I need is the inventory of Olga’s assets, the antiques and jewellery. And for comparison, I want the corresponding document for Massimo.”

  “We went through this before, in my office.”

  “I know, Miss Hill. It’s a pain, but this is a fresh enquiry. Something else came up. I’ll give you my email address and you can send them through directly.”

  “You said it was a life and death matter.”

  “Isn’t that the definition of a will?”

  His own filing system was more individual than Miss Hill’s. For days he’d been walking about with some sheets of paper stuffed in his jacket pocket: the Internet discussion forum about murder methods. He took them out and unfolded them.

  He should have been treating them with more respect, he realised. Normally printouts were insignificant, easily replaceable. But these, it had become clear, weren’t saved as files in Pellegrini’s computer. They were the only record of the man’s interest in ingenious ways of killing. They ought to be kept in an evidence bag.

  Some of the so-called methods were pretty absurd. The icicle through the heart. The poisoned toothpaste. The air bubble in the bloodstream. They might impress in an old-fashioned detective story, but putting them into practice in reality would be so difficult and risky that no intelligent killer would bother with them.

  And yet Diamond knew of real crimes that were scarcely less ingenious. Who would have thought of an umbrella as a murder weapon? In 1978 a Bulgarian defector called Georgi Markov was queuing for a bus on Waterloo Bridge when he felt a sharp pain in his thigh and turned to see a man picking up an umbrella. Three days later Markov died, poisoned by a small platinum pellet containing the deadly poison ricin, apparently fired from the umbrella. Of course, this theory relied on Markov’s memory of the shooting. It might have been dismissed as fanciful were it not for the discovery of the pellet when the muscle tissue was forensically examined. It then emerged that only ten days earlier another Bulgarian called Kostov waiting at a station in the Paris Metro had been shot with a pellet fired from a shopping bag.

  Pellegrini, an inventive man, an engineer, was not incapable of devising a method all his own. He’d researched other original murders, as he would, being methodical. But he aspired to perfection, the undetectable crime.

  Poison?

  The victims had died at home, in bed, apparently of natural causes. Had he found some substance that acted efficiently and left no trace? Poisoners had long looked for the colourless, odourless deadly dose. Even if he’d found such a thing, how was it administered? He was known to go out at night. Had he visited the old men and made sure they took their toxic nightcaps? It didn’t seem likely. The risks were too high.

  And Pellegrini was an engineer, not a chemist. Poisons unknown to science weren’t his stock-in-trade.

  The answer had to be different, clever and foolproof.

  Well, Diamond told himself, I’m no fool.

  Even so, he tucked the printouts into an evidence bag.

  Keith Halliwell had been on the phone some time, trying to find whether Pellegrini had an account with a local taxi company.

  “Any joy?” Diamond asked.

  Joy wasn’t in the look he got back. “Got it straight away. He’s used Abbey Taxis for years.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “They’ve never taken him to Little Langford. Even as I was speaking to them I was thinking how bloody silly it was,” Halliwell said. “An intelligent killer wouldn’t do this. He’d go to a different firm.”

  “You tried them all?”

  “All the ones in Yellow Pages. And I thought of something else.” Halliwell was frayed at the edges this morning, proving he, too, was tired from last night.

  “Tell me, then.”

  “He wouldn’t use his own name.”

  “Ah, but he’d still have to give them the address.”

  “Come on, guv, get real. He could ask them to pick him up outside the nearest pub if he wanted. Anywhere, really.”

  Diamond was forced to agree. His long-term deputy was ahead of him over this task. “Should have thought of it before I asked you.”

  And now Halliwell looked down and rearranged the pens on his desk as if he was uncomfortable about what he was going to say. “You’re just as confident as ever, are you?”

  “Confident of what? His guilt?”

  “Not that exactly. Don’t get me wrong, guv. You’ve got my full support. The thing is . . . can we be certain these deaths are suspicious?”

  Diamond could have erupted, but he didn’t. He summoned a smile. “Of course they’re suspicious or we wouldn’t be beating ourselves up to get at the truth. All the suspicion is on our side—or mine, if you like. So, yes, they’re suspicious deaths as long as we have our doubts about them. The question you meant to ask is can we be certain these deaths are murders, and of course we can’t. They were certified as natural and the bodies were cremated.”

  Halliwell eased a finger around his collar. After this admission, he really had to press the big man harder. “We wouldn’t be questioning them at all if it wasn’t for what we know about Pellegrini.”

  “True. He almost got away with it.”

  “We’re pinning everything on him?”

  “Is there anyone else?”

  “But there’s nothing definite.”

  “This is normal, Keith. We’re not going to find a smoking gun. We do the groundwork and build up a case. It’s why Inge has been slogging over the computer and you’re phoning taxi firms.”

  “I understand that.” He cleared his throat. “I was awake most of the night asking myself how it was we came to cast him as a killer in the first place.”

  “That’s down to what I found in his workshop.”

  “The Internet material?”

  “And the stolen gowns.” Some irritation crept into his voice. He, too, was well down on sleep. “I thought you were up to speed on all this. Max Filiput was suspicious that valuable items like the gowns were disappearing from the house. He talked to Dr. Mukherjee about it.”

  “It makes Pellegrini a thief, but does it make him a killer?”

  “It gives him a motive for murder, covering up the crime. The timing is significant, too. Filiput dies pretty soon after. You still don’t look happy with this. Have I missed something?”

  Halliwell rubbed the side of his face, deeply ill at ease. “Until yesterday we were thinking those old men in the railway club were earlier murder victims, but we changed our minds because of the death certificates. They didn’t die mysteriously in their sleep. They were ill, seriously ill. Flu, bronchial pneumonia, an aneurysm. The reason Pellegrini had their cremation urns was to scatter the ashes secretly along the railway as they’d requested.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Murder was in our minds,” Halliwell went on in the same dissenting tone but almost apologetic. “Serial murder. But now we have to rein back.”
r />   “Okay,” Diamond said, testy from fatigue. “Three names come off the victim list.”

  “Who’s left? What about the wives? We thought he may have killed Trixie and Olga but that’s far from certain.”

  “We know he was present when they died, both of them,” Diamond said. “Up to now we concentrated on the others. We’ve yet to investigate what really happened. There’s only so much three of us can do.”

  “The women are long shots if we’re honest, guv. Olga falling down the stairs doesn’t square with any of the other deaths.”

  “So what are you telling me? None of it happened?”

  “It’s not the case it was shaping up to be. We’re down to Max and possibly Cyril, and they were signed off by their doctors as dying naturally.”

  “Naturally—but suddenly.”

  “They were both old men over ninety. What I’m trying to say is are we clinging to the idea of murder on not much evidence?”

  Diamond put a good face on it but he was shaken. He understood the effort it had taken for Halliwell to voice his concerns. The team was losing confidence, and it had to be addressed. “Personally, I don’t share your doubts, but maybe that’s because I’m closer to the man than you are. I’ve spoken to some of the people who knew him and I’ve seen inside his house and his workshop and sat beside his bed in hospital. I gave him the kiss of life, for Christ’s sake. I’m not going to say I have a hunch about him. I don’t work on the basis of hunches, as you know. But I’m not giving up on him. It’s your choice whether you go along with me. It’s not part of your job description, right?”

  “I’m not quitting, guv. It needed to be said, that’s all.”

  He tried to make light of it. “In case we’re up shit creek and I haven’t noticed? Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  Halliwell grinned back. “I’ll have another crack at the taxis.”

  “What does Inge think?”

  “Don’t know. Haven’t seen her all morning.”

  “I hope she’s still on board. Shit creek isn’t the ideal place to jump ship.”

  Back in his office he stood in thought.

  There’s always a low point.

  He stared through the glass at everyone busy on official duties.

  Get on with it, you great lummock, he told himself. You can only go upwards from here. Stepped round his desk, rolled out the chair, lowered himself into it and screamed like a seagull at the spasm of pain that hit him. Yesterday’s injury hadn’t gone away. He’d forgotten the low point in his own spine.

  When the agony had subsided to mere soreness he checked his inbox and found one from Miss Hill with two attachments: the documents he’d asked for.

  Olga’s collection of jewellery wouldn’t have disgraced a queen. The inventory ran to six pages: necklaces, bracelets, bangles, rings, brooches, lockets, earrings and even two tiaras. Almost all were listed as antique and many were Austro-Hungarian or Russian. Some of the valuations in the right-hand column made him blink and look twice.

  The serpent’s head necklace of 18 carat gold with five inset diamonds and blue enamel was listed on page 3 and valued at £2,600.

  The real thing in its velvet bag was tucked away in the bottom drawer of his desk. Normally he would have handed it to the exhibits officer who stored every item of evidence, but this wasn’t an official investigation.

  He’d lock the drawer in future.

  He turned to Max’s assets and found what he expected: some notable omissions.

  No mention of the serpent’s head necklace.

  He spent the next hour checking one list against the other, item by item, and several other pieces hadn’t made it to Max’s inventory: a gold bangle with appliquéd decoration, a gold and enamel brooch set with a star sapphire, a gold and carnelian signet ring, an art deco sapphire and diamond pendant on a gold chain, a diamond and amethyst necklace. Altogether, they were valued at more than twenty thousand pounds. Of course, you’d get a fraction of that if you fenced them, yet it was still a sizeable haul.

  They’d been cherry-picked, by the look of it.

  There was a crime here for sure. Max wouldn’t have sold them himself. He hadn’t needed the money.

  Max was doddery but he’d sensed that things were disappearing.

  Look no further for a motive.

  Diamond called Miss Hill again. She was shocked to hear of the missing items and swift to make clear it wasn’t her job to compare one list of assets with another. He asked whether photos had been taken at valuation. She said it was standard practice. He told her he would immediately email a list of the missing items and she agreed to reply with jpegs of each of them. He could rely on her discretion, she said. Nothing of this would be revealed to her colleagues or anyone else. He believed her.

  15

  It was obvious Halliwell had got a result at last.

  “This time, instead of asking about Pellegrini, I phoned around to see if any driver had made a trip to Little Langford in the past six months. Small place, large fare, so they’d remember, see?”

  “One of them did?”

  “None of the big companies had any record of it, but I struck lucky with a small firm called Rex Cabs.”

  “No surprise it’s small with a name like that.”

  “Yeah?” Halliwell looked vacant.

  “Come on,” Diamond said. “Wrecks cabs. Geddit?”

  “Oh yeah. Well, I spoke to Rex himself and he definitely drove someone there on a Monday evening six weeks ago.”

  “About the time Cyril died.” Diamond cut the jokey stuff. “We must talk to Rex. Where is he?”

  “Right now? In the rank at the station, waiting to meet the next London train.”

  “Call him and ask him to drive out here. No, better not. On second thoughts, we’ll meet him at Verona.”

  “Verona?”

  “The coffee shop. Get with it.”

  Rex looked about eighteen, bucktoothed and chewing. He wore a red jacket with an emblem of a robin perched on a football. Either the robin or the football was out of proportion. His baseball cap had the same design. Tufts of bleached-blond hair stuck out under the sides and back.

  Diamond offered coffee.

  Rex said he’d prefer a Coke.

  “Good of you to come,” Diamond said. “We’ll reimburse the fare right away. Will twenty cover it?”

  “No problem,” Rex said and pocketed the note.

  “You heard what interests us—the fare you took to Little Langford some six weeks ago.”

  “No problem,” Rex said again.

  “Do you remember who it was and where you picked him up?”

  Two questions together seemed to be more than Rex could handle. He chewed hard and looked up at the ceiling.

  “The fare. Was it a man?”

  Rex nodded.

  This was hard work.

  “About what age?”

  He shrugged. “Dunno.”

  “Try. It’s important.”

  “An old guy.”

  “That’s better.”

  “No problem.”

  The two words were marginally preferable to “no comment,” but they didn’t make for a connected conversation. If it hadn’t mattered so much, this would have been a parlour game, trying to steer Rex away from his favourite catchphrase. Diamond tried again. “Where did you pick him up?”

  “City centre.”

  “Where exactly?”

  “Orange Grove.”

  “Right. The rank at Orange Grove. We’re getting somewhere.”

  “No problem.”

  “Can you tell me how he was dressed? I’m trying to work out whether we’re talking about the same guy.”

  This, it seemed, was a problem. Rex chewed some more and said nothing.

  Fortunately Diamond had bro
ught the group photo of the Bath Railway Society. He unfolded it. “Is he one of these?”

  A nicotine-stained finger went straight to the likeness of Pellegrini.

  Every pulse in Diamond’s body zinged.

  “You’re a star,” he said. “An absolute star.” And before Rex opened his mouth, he added, “So this old gentleman asked you to drive him to Little Langford?”

  A nod.

  “Tell me, Rex, did he have anything to say on the journey?”

  This got a frown and a moment’s thought, followed by a shrug.

  “You don’t remember? Did he know the way? Did he tell you when the turn for the Langfords came up?”

  Rex chewed some more and said, “Satnav.”

  “Right.”

  “No problem.”

  “When you dropped him off did he ask you to wait?”

  But the young man lapsed into silence again. It was a straightforward question he didn’t seem capable of answering.

  “It’s a simple question,” Diamond said. “What’s the problem?”

  No answer.

  Keith Halliwell had said nothing yet, sipping his coffee while Diamond was trying all he knew to prise out information. Now, out of nowhere, Keith put in a comment of his own. “That was a goal on Saturday, wasn’t it?”

  Rex’s face lit up like a breaking cloud. “Did you see the replay? It’s obvious it crossed the line. The ref was nowhere near. It was criminal. He’s done it to us before, that ref. Was you there then?”

  “I caught it on Points West,” Halliwell said. “I can’t always get to the games. They should be using goal-line technology, in my opinion.”

  “Dead right, mate. It’s a no-brainer,” Rex said.

  “So you don’t work when there’s a home game at Ashton Gate?”

  “I’m self-employed, aren’t I? I put in the hours all week, so why shouldn’t I watch football?”

  Halliwell smiled. “I wish it worked like that for me. Mr. Diamond here is a rugby fan. He doesn’t know what we’re talking about. He gets to most of the Bath games and I have to stand in for him at work.” Without pause, he said, “Is there anything else you can tell us about the fare you took to Little Langford?”