Another One Goes Tonight

by Peter Lovesey

  But Halliwell wasn’t having any of that. “It’s too much to believe all these deaths are natural. Something very weird is going on, that’s for sure, and Pellegrini is the common factor. And now we can throw another killing into the mix. Do either of you seriously believe Jessie fell into the river by accident?”

  “There was no evidence of violence,” Ingeborg said, back-pedalling out of consideration for Diamond’s feelings.

  Halliwell wasn’t stopping now. “So she wasn’t shot or stabbed or knocked on the head, but she could have been pushed in or held under. Or drugged and dropped in the river unconscious. Or given so much drink she was incapable of saving herself. She knew what happened that night in the cottage and she had to die. And who was there with her? Pellegrini.”

  “A double murder?” Ingeborg said on a rising note, all tact abandoned. “You think he killed them both?”

  “Not the same night,” Halliwell said. “It was Jessie who reported Cyril’s death next morning. But she went missing soon after. He will have set a trap, lured her to Swineford on some pretext. He may have offered her hush money. It’s out in the country, quiet there most times. They meet somewhere—let’s say the Swan—and then do a bit of the Avon River Trail along the bank. He’ll have come prepared. He wouldn’t simply push her in and hope she’d drown. He could have used chloroform.”

  “Not easy to obtain,” Ingeborg said.

  “Unless you’re a scientist,” Halliwell said at once. “He was well capable of passing himself off as one. If it wasn’t chloroform it was some other knockout drug. He could have put something in her drink. We can work out the method later. His party trick is rendering people senseless and he used it on Jessie and dumped her in the river. With Jessie dead, he thought he was in the clear. No one could finger him for Cyril’s murder.”

  “Except Rex the taxi driver.”

  “He thought he’d covered that. He made sure Rex didn’t know his name or address. Have I made the case?”

  Halliwell looked for a response from each of the others. Diamond was subdued, playing the scenario over in his torn mind. Ingeborg too was pensive, fingering her blonde hair.

  Then she spoke. “There’s another way to look at it, isn’t there?”

  “What’s that?”

  “From Jessie’s point of view. She seemed to be coping well with Cyril, an old man with serious money worries. It was a job with a guaranteed wage because it was paid by the trust. A nice little earner—if she could stand being stuck in that cottage out in the country with just a ninety-year-old for company.”

  “Her choice,” Halliwell said. “Caring was her job.”

  “True. But when he dies suddenly she’s jobless. She has to think about her future. Seems to me she’ll look around urgently for a new employer.”

  “Pellegrini, you mean?”

  Ingeborg nodded. “She’ll have given him the once-over and decided he isn’t short of cash. His wife is dead and he’s getting on in years, so he might be glad of a live-in housekeeper. How will she approach him? Better do it fast. A meeting is set up.”

  “At Swineford?”

  “First she may have gone to the house and the next time—”

  “Before you go any further,” Diamond interrupted her, “Pellegrini didn’t need a housekeeper. He was organised with a cleaner, Mrs. Halliday. I met her and she was doing the job nicely. He had someone from the church bringing him meals on wheels. I can’t see him wanting anyone extra.”

  “That’s immaterial,” Ingeborg said. “I asked you to look at it from Jessie’s point of view. She’d make a pitch without knowing his arrangements.”

  Fair point. Diamond wished he hadn’t spoken. It was increasingly obvious he was on a different wavelength.

  “The upshot is the same,” Halliwell said. “She ends up dead in the river and there’s only one possible killer.”

  Diamond wasn’t willing to listen to any more. He’d told them his current thinking and it pained him to have it disbelieved. Their arguments were rational, his intuitive, and it wasn’t the way he liked to work. “I’m out of here.”

  “Are you okay, guv?” Ingeborg asked.

  “Perfectly.”

  “Something I said?” Halliwell asked.

  “Leave it,” Ingeborg told him.

  When the two were left alone, Ingeborg said, “Did you see his eyes?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Kind of troubled, tortured almost. I’ve never seen him like that. Is he losing it, do you think?”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” Halliwell said. “Overwork, do you think?”

  She shook her head. “It’s got personal for him, this investigation, and he’s not used to that. Something seismic happened at the hospital yesterday. We know Pellegrini may be starting to come out of the coma, but it’s more than that. It goes really deep and I’m not sure what it’s about.”

  “Holding his hand?”

  “Maybe. I wish I hadn’t mentioned his own wife when he was telling us about Trixie being the name that triggered the result. That was tactless of me.”

  “He doesn’t often talk about Steph,” Halliwell said, “but she’s in his thoughts still. They were very close.”

  “Too painful to share with anyone?”

  “Probably,” he said, tilting his head as if listening to some distant sound. “I’m forgetting this was before you joined CID. I was first at the scene that morning when we got the shout that a woman had been shot in Victoria Park. Neither of us had the slightest idea it would be Steph.”

  “The shock,” Ingeborg said, crinkling her eyes. “I can’t imagine.”

  “It was as bad as it gets. For fifteen, twenty minutes, maybe longer, he was on his knees beside her. It was obvious she was dead. I went to see if I could offer sympathy or support and he told me to back off. He wouldn’t let the police photographer near, the SOCOs. Anyone. All this time he was holding her hand, kind of cradling it.”

  Ingeborg dragged her fingers through her hair. “Oh my God. I didn’t mean to hurt him. I really have messed up.”

  Diamond walked steadily in the direction of the river—but not to throw himself in. Needing to get his thinking straight, he’d decided to visit the place where Jessie had been found. It was barely half a mile from the Keynsham police centre and the most direct route was up Pixash Lane over the London to Bristol railway and through an eighty-acre kids’ attraction known as the Avon Valley Adventure and Wildlife Park. From Brunel’s stone bridge he glanced down at the long stretch of track and gave a thought to Pellegrini. This might well have become a vantage point for a night visit after the HOPS moved on from Bath Spa station.

  He showed his warrant at the park entrance and got a wary look, but didn’t explain the purpose of his visit.

  Incongruously, on his way to a possible crime scene, he found himself among small, noisy people and their young mothers pushing strollers. Donkeys, goats, lambs and ducks were penned at either side and rides were offered on tractors and go-karts. Most of the kids, he suspected on this cool April day, were heading for the shelter of the play barn. One shrill voice said, “Let me go on the death slide, Mummy.”

  Diamond left all that behind and approached the tree-lined riverbank.

  He stood for a few minutes, imagining the scene. The water was flowing at a good rate. Although the body had been found along this stretch it didn’t follow she had got into the water here. About a mile upriver was Swineford weir and she may well have floated with the current from just below there and finally lodged against some obstruction. Behind him were moorings for narrow boats but the body had been found before reaching there. As so often happens, a person walking his dog had made the discovery. The immediate area would have been combed for her shoes, a bag or a suicide note, but by CID standards the search may not have lasted long.

  Might as well keep a lookout along
the bank in case some item had been missed by the search team.

  Too much to hope?

  On this bleak day, yes.

  He understood the mystification—to put it mildly—of his two colleagues when he’d changed his mind about Pellegrini. After days of insisting they were dealing with a serial killer, he’d let them down with a bump and made a poor job of trying to explain why. How do you explain a gut feeling?

  That Damascus Road moment in Critical Care was impossible to convey to anyone else, but from his new perspective he could see how flaky the whole case was. When suspicion alone is driving an investigation you’re on dangerous ground. You need evidence and it’s easy to kid yourself you’ve got it.

  Evidence?

  The urns had not been sinister after all. The night excursions on the trike were either to scatter ashes or visit the HOPS. The Internet forum was just that, an exchange of information on computer. The Fortuny gowns looked like stolen property, but may have been a gift. The visit to Little Langford could have been by invitation. Unless it could be proved that one or more of the unusually large number of deaths had been induced, there truly was no case to answer.

  There had only ever been one suspect. Cyril was almost certainly a thief but there was no suggestion he’d murdered anyone. Max’s death hadn’t benefited him. On the contrary, it had closed down his thieving possibilities.

  He kicked at a stone and watched it splash. Some ducks took flight.

  It had been an investigation like no other in his experience. The crimes may not have been crimes at all. The only suspect couldn’t be questioned. The witnesses were dead—all the principal ones, anyway. The scenes weren’t accessible without a warrant and he wouldn’t get that. The evidence was no more solid than a sandcastle.

  What had induced him to start on this?

  Suspicion.

  You sow a seed and it grows. Water it and it thrives. Throw on some feed and it spreads all over. But watch out for what you get. It may be a monstrous weed.

  Here he was, angry with himself and unable to face his own team. He’d never invested so much for such a poor return.

  Ahead he could see a beam bridge spanning the river, a solid-looking, dead-straight construction of metal and concrete supported at the centre by twin piers. Not the most beautiful of the bridges over the Avon, he reflected as he walked towards it, but sturdy enough to carry heavy traffic, conceivably even a train.

  Out here in the middle of nowhere? Unlikely. The main line to Bristol was half a mile south of here, running parallel to the Bath Road. This pointed in another direction, north-west along the valley.

  Yet it had the look of a railway bridge.

  Death and the railway: the two constants.

  Out of curiosity he climbed the embankment for a closer look and sure enough he found a single rail track heading north-west to only God knew where. A path for pedestrians and cyclists ran beside it.

  Memories were stirring. He’d heard of the privatised Avon Valley Railway without ever having had reason to visit. Volunteers had been working for years to restore some abandoned branch line near Keynsham and this was obviously it. The southern end couldn’t be far off or it would run straight through Swineford.

  Wouldn’t hurt to check, he thought. So he followed the track for a short distance. Presently the single rail became double, operated by a point, and a short way further on were twin platforms. A little station with its own name: Avon Riverside. Beyond were more points and a loop arrangement of the track to enable an engine to move from one end of the train to the other.

  All local railway enthusiasts must have known about this.

  Shaking his head, forced to accept another possible link between Pellegrini and Jessie’s death, Diamond returned to the bridge, leaned on the railing, peered over the edge and saw the reflection of his head and shoulders fragmenting in the shifting water. Summed up the way he’d felt all morning.

  He’d never considered suicide, even in his darkest moments, and he wasn’t planning it now, but he could feel an inexplicable pull from the swirling water below. Could Jessie have stood here and looked over?

  Or had she been brought here by her killer?

  21

  His bad day was about to get worse, but he didn’t know it when he first returned to the office.

  Alex the techie had left a voicemail message asking him to get in touch.

  “I thought I’d ask for you in person,” Alex said. “It’s about that file in ciphertext you asked me to work on.”

  “Did you crack it?” Diamond asked.

  “Sure. It wasn’t all that difficult. Pretty basic, really. A programme they were using ten years ago. I didn’t expect to come across it again in my lifetime.”

  “The person using it is quite elderly.”

  “That figures. Well, I have it in plaintext for you.”

  “Makes good sense, does it?”

  “Sense, sure. Good, I’m less sure.”

  Diamond didn’t pick up on that. He wanted to make up his own mind about the merits of the thing. It might be nothing to do with Pellegrini’s secret life, just some treatise on engineering. “Where can I pick it up?”

  “This is what I was about to ask. Emailing may not suit you. And I got the impression you didn’t want me calling at the police station.”

  “Understood. Where are you now? Can we meet?”

  “In the Internet café in Manvers Street. Do you know it?”

  “I know Manvers Street. I ought to, after working there almost twenty years.” Diamond had a troubling thought. “You didn’t print this out in a café?”

  “What do you take me for, Mr. D? I like the coffee here, that’s all.”

  “I can be with you in half an hour. As you say, a personal handover would be best.”

  Fully two hours later, one poleaxed policeman remained in the Internet café with his third cup of coffee. Alex had long since left, duly rewarded for his expert help. He’d handed across a printout of the decrypted computer file and it was devastating.

  Diamond had needed to read the thing in stages, forced to break off many times to get his head straight. Once through, he’d made himself start again. The shocks were just as jarring at the second reading. The pages shook in his hands. There was no way he could face his colleagues yet. Face them he must, but not in the blitzed state he was in after going through this material.

  No wonder the file had been encrypted.

  It was in the form of a journal. Not so much a diary as an outpouring of arrogance that left no doubt that the writer had committed a series of murders.

  To think that by this morning, Pellegrini had been absolved of all guilt—at least, in Diamond’s estimation. That heart-warming touch of fingers at the bedside, linking the two men in their grief as widowers, was now exposed as a cruel con.

  The big detective was close to tears. Tears of rage more than regret.

  Needing yet more time to collect himself, he finally left the café and moved like a sleepwalker up Manvers Street and across the square to Abbey Churchyard, the place where he’d found consolation before at critical moments of his life. He wasn’t drawn there by religion, but the need for some kind of therapy.

  On the west front of the Abbey were carved a number of figures attached to twin stone ladders. The founder from five hundred years ago, Bishop Oliver King, had dreamed of angels ascending to heaven and his vision had been immortalised this way. An assorted host by any criteria, the angels had been sculpted in different centuries, the lowest and most dilapidated in the sixteenth century, the next pair as recently as 1960 and the top ones from 1900. But the replacements were based on the originals. And as sometimes happened in medieval church architecture, a touch of humour had crept in. At odds with the iconography, certain of the angels were clearly descending the ladders head first.

  Diamond’s sympathies
were wholly with these misfits trying to come down against the flow. How they would pass the aspiring ones just below them was anyone’s guess. Maybe before they bumped heads they would be persuaded to turn and resume the climb. Or would they tell the high-flyers that heaven wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and the only way was down?

  The dilemma spoke to his troubled brain in times of personal crisis and never failed to lift his spirits.

  Sure, the latest twist in the investigation had wrong-footed him, but he was still clinging to the ladder. He’d find a way to move on. He always did.

  Back in the CID office, he didn’t immediately speak to Ingeborg and Keith. Bath’s criminal fraternity provided unending challenges. They stole cars and burgled and dealt drugs every day of the year. Enquiring into serious crimes ought not to be thought of as a displacement activity, but that was how it worked for him today. He had earnest discussions with John Leaman and Paul Gilbert about their caseloads. Another hour passed before he asked his two closest colleagues to step into his office.

  “I owe you both an apology,” he said after making sure the door was closed. “You said this morning there was only one possible killer and I disagreed. I doubted if murder had been done at all. How wrong I was.” He slapped down the sheets he’d collected from Alex. “Take a look. This is the decrypted version of the file you found on Pellegrini’s hard disk, Inge. It’s chilling.”

  Ingeborg picked up the first page.

  Another one goes tonight.

  This time I’m ahead of myself so this isn’t a to-do list. Everything is in place, as they say. But being methodical I want something on record to look at when it’s all over. You’re on your own in this game, so any debriefing is with myself.

  The only thing left is to make sure I get the timing right. I’m going for 2 a.m. when he’ll be sleeping soundly, guaranteed. Get gloved up, let myself in, do the necessary and get out without leaving any trace. The police have no idea and I’m not doing them any favours.