Down Among the Dead Men

by Peter Lovesey

  “Get to the point,” Georgina said.

  “Right. Well, my strike rate was suffering a bit on account of all the microchip stuff in modern cars. They have these smart keys and alarms. You need to be a computer nerd to nick one.”

  “We know all this. What happened?”

  “I took delivery of a box of tricks that would hack me into one of these new cars. Didn’t get much luck at first. Then one evening I’m sitting on the terrace of my local, the old Steam Packet at the top of River Road, when a BMW three series draws up outside. Perfect for me to half-inch with my brand-new jammer and key programmer. A young guy gets out and walks off across the bridge and I do the business. In under five minutes I’m driving it away to get some new plates fitted.”

  “Where?”

  “Chichester. Geezer I happened to know, who did up cars for people like me. I get well clear of LA and stop to give Stew a call, tell him I’m on the way like. That’s all fixed and before moving off I open the glove compartment and—would you believe?—a load of money falls out. Used banknotes all over the floor. My lucky day, I’m thinking. I fill my pockets and drive on and almost get to Chichester when I hear this police car coming up behind me. Next thing I’m out of the car and being searched. They told me the Bimmer was stolen, which I knew, but they had no business to know.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “The timing. It was far too quick, barely half an hour since I drove off. The kid who just parked it couldn’t have known it was gone. Anyway, these cops found the money on me, two grand, I heard later. I was bricking it by then and I told them a porky, said I’d sold a boat in Littlehampton and was on my way to Chichester for a night out. It wasn’t true, okay? I admit it. I had to think of something to tell them. And then comes the bombshell. They open the boot and there’s this body inside in a garden sack with a hole through his head. I swear I knew nothing about it. How could I, when I’d nicked the car half an hour before? Next thing I’m a murder suspect, handcuffed and bundled off to spend the night in a cell. I’ve been banged up ever since.”

  “Your story wasn’t believed,” Georgina said, more as a statement than a question.

  “It didn’t look good, me with all that money in my pockets. They said either I’d killed and robbed the dead man or I was paid the two grand to get rid of the body and was on my way to dump it somewhere when I was stopped. Nobody would listen. They found the tools I’d used, the jammer and the programmer, and said it was proof I’d nicked the car. Fair enough, but they were saying I’d nicked it the day before from a car park in Arundel. I swear I hadn’t been near Arundel.”

  “Couldn’t anyone give you an alibi? The staff at the Steam Packet?”

  “There was only the one barmaid on duty that night and she was Polish. By the time my lawyers got around to checking, she’d moved on and couldn’t be traced.”

  “Wasn’t anyone else drinking?”

  “None that I saw. I’ve had seven miserable years to think about this. The way I see it now, the car was already hot when I nicked it. That young guy was the killer. He was driving around with the stiff in the boot. He nicked the car in Arundel the day before. It was my bad luck to nick it from him.”

  “Why would he have left it outside the Steam Packet?”

  “The pub is right by the footbridge, isn’t it? He was going to wait till dark and then move the body onto the bridge and drop it in the river. It’s quiet there at nights. It is by day, come to that.”

  “He’d have to be strong.”

  “I told you he was young.”

  “Did you get a good look at him, then?”

  “It was how he was dressed, in one of them hoodie things the young tearaways wear.”

  “Did you see his face?”

  “Not really. When he drove up I was looking at the car. And when he got out he had his back to me.”

  “Why would he have got out?”

  “To size up the situation. Work out the best place on the bridge to tip the body over.”

  “You’re suggesting he killed the victim in Arundel and stole a car to dispose of the body?”

  “It makes sense. He wouldn’t want to use his own car and get it loused up with DNA and all that stuff.”

  “He chose to drive to Littlehampton and dump the body in the river?”

  “Where the current would take it out to sea. The Arun is one of the fastest flowing rivers in Britain. Six knots. Did you know that? I’ve done my research.”

  “We do now we’ve heard it from you,” Georgina said.

  “You don’t have to look at me like that. If I was the killer, I wouldn’t be driving to Chichester with the stiff, would I? I’d have tipped it in the river.”

  “We’ve only got your word you were driving there.”

  “No.” He frowned. “You’ve got the word of the cops who stopped me.”

  “It doesn’t mean you were planning to go to Chichester. You could have been on your way to some isolated place where a body could be disposed of.”

  “That’s what they said in court, but it’s not true. I was on my way to Stew to get the plates changed.”

  “And then what? Drive on to your chosen place of disposal?”

  “Fucking hell.” Danny Stapleton slapped his hand on the table between them. “I’m here to tell you what happened, not listen to your crap theories.”

  The prison officer grabbed Danny’s arms and forced him against the chair.

  “Okay, okay,” the prisoner said.

  “Do you want him cuffed, ma’am, or shall we end it there?”

  Georgina had lost the thread. It was a long time since she’d interviewed a hostile suspect, so Diamond took over, flapped his hand at the warder and said, “Let’s get back to the facts. You were arrested that night and taken to where—Chichester police station?”

  Released from the restraint, Danny picked up his story as if nothing had happened. “They questioned me for hours, wouldn’t believe what I was saying. Fair play, I’d made some of it up, about the money. It was in my pockets. My prints were all over it. I had to say something, didn’t I? I made up the stuff about the car and where I was headed that night. But after I’d had the night to think it over, I came clean. I told them exactly what I’ve been telling you.”

  “Which you can’t prove.”

  “Don’t I know it? They called me a killer and all sorts. I didn’t even know who the bloody victim was. That’s how innocent I was.”

  “You found out later.”

  “They’re not generous with their information, your lot.”

  “So who was he?”

  “For crying out loud, are you telling me you don’t know and you’re my best hope of getting out of here? I give up.”

  Georgina started speaking again, more to Diamond than Danny. “He was Joe Rigden, a self-employed gardener from near Slindon, one of the local villages. Shot through the head.”

  “I’ve never owned a gun,” Danny said at once. “Never heard of Rigden before they told me his name. Never met him.”

  Georgina added more details she must have got from her old college friend. “Rigden lived alone in an isolated cottage. He had a van and took jobs over quite a wide area, visiting people about twice a month. Because his garden visits were irregular, governed by the weather, it was a couple of weeks before he was reported missing.”

  “Living in a one-bedroom flat, I didn’t even have a window box, let alone a garden,” Danny said.

  “You weren’t charged with first degree murder,” Georgina said. “There wasn’t the evidence to convict you of that.”

  “No, but they kept on at me for days, telling me I was in the frame.”

  “Of course you were, and rightly so. You were the only suspect. You were found with the body. And you told the police a pack of lies.”

  “Only when I thou
ght I was being done for nicking the car. When it got serious next morning I told them everything I knew, but I wasn’t believed. They decided they’d got their man. Talk about the third degree. It was brainwashing. I was having nightmares, dreaming I did it. I still get them. I’m psychologically damaged. When I get out of here I’m going to sue you lot.”

  “Come on,” Georgina said. “There were strong grounds for believing you did it. You were convicted of being an accessory.”

  “A mandatory life stretch with a minimum of ten years before they even consider me for release. That’s not funny.”

  “The judge took the view that if you didn’t carry out the murder yourself, you must have known who did it and were guilty of obstructing justice as well.”

  “The judge was an arsehole.”

  “Statements like that won’t help your cause one bit. Do you know the identity of the murderer?”

  “How could I?”

  “Are you afraid of what might happen when you get out?”

  “Bollocks.”

  “I can easily terminate this, Mr. Stapleton. You don’t seem to realise you’re ruining your chances. I was told you’re well behaved, doing your best to get remission. It doesn’t sound like it.” Georgina, fully restored, in headmistress mode—and for once Peter Diamond wasn’t on the receiving end.

  “I’m stressed,” Danny said. “I shouldn’t be here. They never went after the young guy. He was the killer and he’s still at liberty.”

  “Yes, you’re under stress. Prison does that to people. Every inmate has a grievance. A lot of what you hear has no basis in reality.”

  He leaned forward, gripping the table. “There’s more, isn’t there? What’s all this interest all of a sudden? Something’s happened. Someone’s been talking. I was left to rot until a week ago. Now I’m getting pulled out of my cell every other day to talk to coppers.”

  “We’ll end it there,” Georgina said. “Your case is under review, Mr. Stapleton. Be grateful for that. If anything of importance emerges, you will certainly be informed. Meanwhile, if you think of any detail of the case that wasn’t aired in court, let the governor know, and we’ll get to hear of it.”

  8

  The car left the prison and headed along a deserted road towards the ferry. Georgina was still acting as if they were dealing in state secrets.

  “Are you going to fill me in?” Diamond said.

  “First, tell me what you made of him.”

  “Pathetic. No different from the thousand other small-time crooks I’ve come across.”

  “But convincing?”

  “He tells a good story. He’s had plenty of time to work on it.”

  “You didn’t believe him?”

  Staring out of the window at the bleak fields, he said, “I haven’t been told enough to form an opinion.”

  “You don’t have to sound so deprived, Peter. I’ll brief you fully in a moment. To be fair to Danny Stapleton, what he said to us is no different from what he was saying when he was first interviewed. He insists he’s a car thief and not a murderer. He seems to have made a living from it until the manufacturers went electronic with their security.”

  “The man Stew, the plates man—does he exist?”

  “Chichester police don’t have any record of him, but of course if he was any good they wouldn’t. The crooks in the stolen car business are very elusive.”

  “He was Stapleton’s best hope. Surely his lawyers would have pulled out all the stops to find him.”

  “I’m sure they did. And I’m sure Stew moved on and covered his tracks as soon as he heard about the arrest. He’d know it would be the end of his activities.” Georgina seemed willing to swallow everything they’d been told in the prison.

  “Wasn’t the call Stapleton made traceable from the phone?”

  “No phone was found.”

  He gave a soft laugh.

  She said, “I expect he got rid of it when he was arrested. It was dark, remember.”

  “They searched him.”

  “He got rid of it earlier, then, at the time he made the call.”

  “But after the arrest he needed to prove he was just a car thief and not a murderer. The phone was his best hope. If he’d slung it into a field he could have told his lawyers where to look for it. That’s if he really made this call and if Stew the plates man wasn’t invented just to enrich his story.”

  “You really are a sceptic, aren’t you?”

  “From the way you’re holding out on me, ma’am, I sense that the guy must have something going in his favour.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll give it to you just as I got it from Archie Hahn last night. It was too much to hope that Stapleton’s first-hand account might spark off a few original thoughts. You’re obviously not at your best.”

  He ignored the putdown. He’d had worse from Georgina.

  She was in full flow. “The murder of the gardener, Joe Rigden, was investigated by the local CID. As you heard, there was a couple of weeks’ delay in identifying the victim, and in the initial stage of the enquiry the focus was very much on Danny Stapleton as the potential killer. The BMW was quickly reported as missing from a public car park in Arundel. The owner was a man in his eighties, very absent-minded, who frankly shouldn’t have been in charge of a wheelchair, let alone a powerful executive car. He may well have forgotten to lock it. I suppose we can be grateful that he noticed the blessed thing was missing and reported it. The car was thoroughly examined for traces of the perpetrator, of course, and various items were collected, including fingerprints and hairs, most from the owner, but several from Stapleton as well and from the victim.”

  “Wasn’t the body at the bottom of a refuse bag?”

  “An open polypropylene bag of the kind gardeners and builders use. The policewoman who opened the boot got a few strands of Rigden’s hair on her sleeve. There were also a number of additional hairs found in the interior of the car. As you may know, hair as such doesn’t contain any nuclear DNA, but the hair follicles do and hair pulled from the head is okay for testing. There is also mitochondrial DNA in the cellular debris that forms a part of the growing hair shaft.”

  Georgina showing off. Diamond preferred to leave the details of forensic science to the white-coated brigade. He’d once been nominated for a course at one of the Home Office labs and had DNA written on his personal file: Did Not Attend.

  Georgina cruised on, “Three individuals were isolated and DNA profiles obtained. Potentially this was vital evidence. Two were from males and one female. They didn’t match anything in the national database and unfortunately the owner of the car was hopeless at remembering who had recently travelled with him. However, some good detective work identified one of the males as the mechanic who had last serviced the vehicle. On investigation he was eliminated from the enquiry and the other two profiles were kept on file. After that, the body was identified as Rigden and the whole enquiry shifted to his village and the various people who used his services as a gardener.”

  “Any with a motive?” Diamond asked.

  “Apparently not.”

  “What was he like, this gardener? Ever been in trouble?”

  “Far from it. I gather he had a spotless reputation locally. Always ready to help people out, shopping for the elderly, meals on wheels, looked after the graves in the churchyard for no reward.”

  “Except in the life to come.”

  Georgina shook her head. “He was an agnostic. Didn’t go to church. A total abstainer from alcohol. No philandering with either sex. Financial affairs all in order after he died. Sober, clean-living and honest sums him up.”

  “Sounds a prime candidate for a shot through the head.”

  “Now you’re being cynical.”

  “People like that don’t make themselves popular.”

  “Whatever the right
s and wrongs of it, no suspect was found, even though the fact that Rigden was murdered was undeniable.”

  “Did they discover where it happened?”

  “No.”

  “They must have searched his cottage for evidence of the shooting.”

  “It was all in perfect order.”

  “A perfect man living a perfect home life.”

  “Apparently so. The people whose gardens he tended all spoke highly of him.”

  “Not an easy case to crack.”

  “Stapleton was offered the prospect of a lighter sentence if he’d name the killer, but he continued to insist he had nothing to do with it. He was brought to court as an accessory and was found guilty by a majority verdict and given the mandatory life sentence. After several months, the enquiry was wound down.”

  “Until now, when someone wound it up again.”

  “Yes—and this is the unfortunate part. Recently an anonymous letter arrived at Sussex police headquarters claiming that a DNA sample obtained in 2011 from a drunk and disorderly suspect matched the profile of one of the two unknown people whose hair was found in the BMW. The senior investigating officer on the original case was informed, but no action was taken.”

  “Why not? It would have been simple enough.”

  “It wasn’t all that simple. The match was with the unknown woman.”

  “The woman?”

  “Yes, get your head around that, Peter. Two women get into a fight outside some night club in Portsmouth. They are arrested and held overnight. Their DNA is taken. One of them is the woman whose hair was found in the car used to transport Rigden’s corpse.”

  This required a rethink. Danny Stapleton had claimed he’d seen someone driving the BMW, and from everything he’d said he’d taken them to be male. Could he have been mistaken?

  “Wearing a hoodie,” Diamond said as much to himself as Georgina. “Danny didn’t get a proper look, he told us. Could have been female, I suppose. Yes, it’s easy to assume otherwise.”