Down Among the Dead Men

by Peter Lovesey

  A fact he couldn’t deny. No point now in trading blows, reminding her that she had made the major decisions of the day, to visit Danny Stapleton in the prison and then drive out to Littlehampton.

  “I’ve encouraged you to give your opinion and we’ve had some useful exchanges,” she said. “I wouldn’t call that ‘tagging along.’ My impression of Dr. Watson is that he spent much of his time being awestruck by his companion’s intellect. I haven’t noticed much of that going on.”

  He stared ahead, not trusting himself to speak.

  “Have you had your say, because I’d like to raise a couple of matters myself?”

  “Go ahead.” He was losing this battle of wills.

  And now Georgina chose to play the card that always defeated him: the helpless woman. “It isn’t easy for me, dealing with someone of your force of personality. If I appear to pull rank sometimes, it’s for my own survival. You can be a tidal wave at times. I’ve seen it often and stood back. Fortunately you aren’t as destructive as a tidal wave, but you’re very alarming, more so than you realise. I’d like to reach an understanding in the days to come. I didn’t rise to assistant chief constable by sitting behind a desk fretting over the crime figures, as you mainly see me. I do have a human side. I want this investigation to be a partnership.”

  “So do I, ma’am.”

  “If you’re serious about that, you can stop calling me ‘ma’am’—at least while we’re alone. I won’t insist you use my Christian name, but you may if you wish. In my family, I’m known as Georgie.”

  His stomach clenched.

  “I want to be comfortable with you, Peter.”

  “Suits me.” He couldn’t yet bring himself to call her Georgina, let alone Georgie.

  This had become a heart-to-heart now. “In the car yesterday, when I called you my secret weapon, I could tell it embarrassed you.”

  “Surprised me, anyway.”

  “I was more than a little on edge myself, trying to cut through the formality. The talk about sharing a room didn’t come out as I intended. I wouldn’t want you to think of me as a predatory female.”

  “I wouldn’t want it either.”

  “The fact that you spoke just now about our relationship isn’t going to throw me off kilter. We both know what you meant.”

  “Of course.”

  “We can work together without that kind of nonsense.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Doesn’t mean we aren’t normal human beings, of course.”

  “Goes without saying.” He walked a little faster. They were both walking noticeably faster. They’d reached the footbridge and were more than halfway across. They’d soon be back at the car with their driver, who Diamond was beginning to think of as his chaperone.

  “So let’s both make an effort, shall we?”

  “Right. Where do you suggest we go next?” He was tempted to add, “Your place or mine?” but he couldn’t risk the joke.

  10

  They returned to Chichester to read the file on the Joe Rigden murder. It couldn’t be shirked. Georgina’s knowledge was second-hand—from her college friend, Archie Hahn, in that moonlit stroll along West Wittering beach—and Diamond’s was third-hand. He hated being under-informed. The original witness statements would give them both a better grasp. Georgina saw the sense in it. And there was another factor neither of them mentioned: they were at screaming point from being together so long.

  In the circumstances, they didn’t expect a warm welcome at the police station and it wasn’t given.

  “We were warned to expect you,” the desk sergeant said as if they were the flu virus. “I’ll tell them in CID.”

  They were kept waiting ten minutes. “This isn’t good enough,” Georgina said loudly enough to be heard.

  A young woman in plain clothes finally appeared and asked to see their IDs.

  “We already produced them,” Georgina said. “Who are you?”

  “Pat Gomez.”

  “Pat Gomez, ma’am. And we don’t need to know your given name. Rank?”

  “I’m on the civilian staff, ma’am.”

  Pat Gomez showed them upstairs into a CID office not unlike their own in Bath except that the faces looking up from computer screens might just have sucked lemons.

  “Who’s in charge here?”

  Pat Gomez pointed to an open door.

  They crossed the room and stepped inside. The bearded man on the phone behind the large desk continued talking into it and didn’t even make eye contact.

  “This is too much,” Georgina told Diamond.

  “I wouldn’t make an issue of it, ma’am.” Hearing a click from her tongue, he remembered too late that for him, at least, “ma’am” was no longer protocol. Instead of calming her down, he’d added to her annoyance.

  Georgina looked to be on the point of snatching that phone and jumping on it.

  The call came to an end. “We’re short-staffed and busy,” the bearded man said. “I take it you’re the Bath contingent.”

  “And what are you?” Georgina asked as if he was the lowest level of pond life.

  “DI Montacute, currently running this department as a stopgap.”

  “Standing in for the DCI?”

  “Regrettably, yes.”

  Georgina made a performance of introducing herself and Diamond. All it lacked was a twenty-one gun salute. “So in future when you speak to me, I expect to be addressed as ma’am. We’ll begin by examining the file on the Rigden murder from 2007.”

  “I’ll see if it’s available . . . ma’am.”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “It’s been in Malling House for some weeks.”

  “Where on earth is that?”

  “Lewes. Sussex police headquarters. They took the decisions over this. Actually we must have made a photocopy before sending it off.” He spoke into an intercom, then nodded. “No problem. The original is back.”

  Georgina said they would need the spare copy as well. They were offered the use of a stationery store as their base. She was outraged.

  “Haven’t you got anything better than that?”

  Montacute shook his head. “Like I said, ma’am, we’re fully stretched. The briefing room is doubling up as an incident room for a murder enquiry and the interview rooms are constantly in use. It’s been non-stop for weeks.”

  They were shown the storeroom. Chairs could be brought in, they were told, and more space created by restacking boxes of envelopes. Georgina wasn’t having it. “There isn’t even a window,” she said to Diamond. “It’s a glorified cupboard, that’s all it is. We’re being treated as pariahs because of what we’re here for. I don’t accept all this talk of being run off their feet. Have a look round and find us somewhere more suitable.”

  He didn’t fancy touring the corridors opening doors, so he had a quiet word with a uniformed sergeant he saw coming up the stairs. There really was pressure on rooms, he learned. A spate of serious crimes in recent weeks meant that resources were stretched to the limit.

  “Leave it to me,” Georgina said, when told. She was in no mood to cave in.

  She marched into Montacute’s office. “Are you overseeing the murder investigation as well?”

  “I’m not the SIO, ma’am, but I see it as my responsibility to keep up with it, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “As well as these other serious crimes I’m hearing about?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Multitasking?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “In that case, you can’t be sitting behind a desk all day. That’s no way to keep up.”

  “Oh, I’m on my feet a lot, ma’am. Anyone here will vouch for that.”

  “As I thought. You’re peripatetic. This office is under-used. We’ll move a couple of extra desks
in and make this our base.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Of course we can’t. I wasn’t speaking literally. Get a couple of your team to shift the furniture. If you’ve got a problem with it, speak to Commander Hahn at headquarters. He’ll want us treated right. We’re doing you people a favour, coming here and taking on your little local difficulty. We’d like tea and biscuits as well.”

  Georgina at her unstoppable best. Diamond almost felt proud.

  They didn’t take long to get installed. DI Montacute cleared his desk without another word and migrated somewhere else. Tactfully they avoided asking if it was the stationery store.

  The desk beside the window with the view of the canal basin was claimed by Georgina. Diamond would be facing a wall on the far side of the room, but he didn’t mind.

  The case file and its duplicate were wheeled in on a trolley by Pat Gomez while they were finishing their tea. CID work had still been largely supported by paper records back in 2007. Diamond was given the bulkier of the two—three box-files of material—and it turned out to be the original. Enough reading to take care of the rest of this day and the next. Fortunately, whoever had dealt with all the documents had done an excellent job of arranging them by date and indexing them. Occurrence reports, witness statements, diagrams, photos, everything was so methodically sorted that you could be forgiven for thinking the case was solved and the killer sent down.

  He supposed he should have started with the earliest stuff and worked through, but he couldn’t resist looking at the most recent. Right on top was a handwritten note that caught his attention because it was headed ACC Dallymore, Avon & Somerset. It was on Sussex police headquarters notepaper.

  A note for Georgina?

  No, it was about Georgina.

  Unlike everything else, it wasn’t referenced or indexed. Someone must have received this private note and carelessly left it in the box. The paper looked and felt fresh, as if it had been written recently.

  He glanced over his shoulder at Georgina. She had her glasses on and was already reading.

  If the note had been written at headquarters in the last few days, it wouldn’t be among the papers in front of her—which was just as well.

  My recommendation is Dallymore. Many moons ago I went through Bramshill with her and she ended up in Bath as ACC crime management. Did all the right things, learned the drill, kept her buttons and shoes clean and never rocked the boat. Politically sound. Doesn’t have a subversive thought in her head. If—heaven forbid—anything more damaging should emerge, we can rely on her to miss it altogether, or, at worst, bury it. What’s more we can argue that being a woman she’s the ideal choice for this one.

  It was initialled in ink, AH. With friends like Archie Hahn, who needs enemies?

  Diamond folded the note and put it in his pocket. He hadn’t often felt sympathy for Georgina, but he did over this. She must never see it.

  He couldn’t fault the character sketch, but, as written down by her supposed old chum, it was a betrayal. If anything more damaging did emerge, he would make damn sure it wasn’t missed or buried. The one point that intrigued him was the last. Why was a woman the ideal choice? Pure prejudice? The idea that women were put on this earth to rock the cradle and never to rock the boat?

  Grinding his teeth, he turned to the earliest material, the statements by the officers who had stopped the stolen BMW that September evening in 2007 and found the body in the boot. Their accounts chimed in with what he had learned from Georgina and Danny Stapleton himself.

  At 9:43 p.m., along the A259 approaching the Bognor Road roundabout, we spotted a car reported as stolen in Arundel the previous day. It was being driven by a male who identified himself as Daniel Stapleton. We searched him and found a large amount of money in banknotes stuffed into his pockets and socks. His explanation was that he’d sold a boat in Littlehampton and was on his way to Chichester for a night out. We then lifted the lid of the boot and discovered a dead body contained in a garden sack.

  One of the statements added: The suspect appeared to panic and insisted he had not looked inside the boot and had no knowledge of the contents and was unable to explain how the body got in there. He was cautioned and arrested and after we had radioed for assistance he was taken to Chichester police station.

  A signed statement from Danny the next day struck a different note, starting with the admission that he had lied to the arresting officers. He now claimed that half an hour before his arrest he had stolen the car from River Road in Littlehampton using an electronic jammer and a key programmer.

  The BMW was parked opposite the Steam Packet by a youth wearing a hooded garment, who then proceeded across the footbridge. I was unable get a close look at him. He was slight in build and appeared to have the movement of a young person.

  The wording was unmistakable police-speak, but there was nothing sinister in that if the facts were essentially true and Danny had checked them and signed the thing. Faced with a statement form, many witnesses suffer from writer’s block and need prompting.

  Usefully, the next page was a transcript of the taped interview and Danny’s authentic voice came through:

  Q. Why did you lie about the money?

  A. I was bricking it, wasn’t I?

  Q. Scared? Scared of what would happen when the boot was opened?

  A. No, mate. I didn’t know about that.

  Q. You’re lying again, aren’t you? You knew the body was in there because you put it there. You were in deep trouble. That’s what scared you.

  A. Honest, I was as shocked as they was.

  Q. You were shocked at being caught red-handed. You’d already shot the man through the head and robbed him. Then you had to get rid of the body, so you stole the BMW in Arundel—

  A. Arundel? Did you say Arundel? No, you’re wrong there. It was LA.

  Q. Danny, this isn’t funny. A man has been murdered.

  Q. LA—Littlehampton.

  Q. The murder took place in Littlehampton? Is that what you’re telling us?

  A. No, that’s where I nicked the car.

  Q. Untrue. You’ve got to do better than this. It was definitely taken from the Mill Road car park in Arundel, opposite the castle.

  A. Wrong. I know where I was.

  Q. The car was reported stolen from Arundel. It’s a fact. It’s on record. That’s why you were stopped.

  A. Now you’re confusing me.

  Q. If you tell lies, you’re going to get caught out. Let’s have the truth of it.

  A. I’m giving it to you. I don’t understand what you’re on about.

  Q. Murder, that’s what we’re on about. When you were stopped you were on your way to dump the body somewhere. Where were you taking it—the reservoir at Westhampnett? You were heading that way.

  A. I wouldn’t do that.

  Q. You had other plans? Were you just going to leave it somewhere in the stolen car and hope it wouldn’t be traced to you?

  A. Jesus Christ, I’m saying I never killed this geezer. You got to believe me. I never touched him.

  Q. You touched his money. Your prints are all over it. And you might as well know your prints are on the sack the body was wrapped in.

  A. Oh, shit. (Long pause) That’s because the cops in the car told me to drag the sack to the front of the boot so they could see who it was.

  Q. They didn’t say anything about that in their statements. You’re at it again, aren’t you—making it up as you go along? It’s not clever, Danny. You keep tripping yourself up. Much better to front up and tell us what really happened.

  A. I already told you.

  Q. All that Littlehampton crap? You cooked a story up overnight to try and confuse us, but it hasn’t worked. The car was stolen from Arundel. That’s where the owner left it. All our patrols were notified the day before yesterday. You should have chan
ged the plates.

  A. I tried. I was too late.

  Q. Well, that sounds like an honest admission at last.

  A. I mean I was on my way to a plates man in Chichester when I was stopped. I told you about him.

  Q. And we checked and there’s no one called Stew on the trading estate.

  A. He’s not going to have a board with his name, is he? He’s in a dodgy trade.

  Q. He isn’t there. He doesn’t exist. Just imagine trying to get this story of yours past a prosecution lawyer. He’d eat you up.

  Diamond flicked through more pages and found photos of the BMW and the body in the boot. Easy to understand the horrified reactions of the officers. You stop a stolen car and routinely open the boot and are faced with a sight like this. The wound to the head looked hideous: a bullet hole in front of the left ear and an exit wound that had blown a gaping hole the other side big enough for most of the brain to have been shot away. Yet the face was unblemished. As sometimes occurs after a shooting, the victim appeared serene, eyes closed, mouth slightly open and without strain.

  A set of pictures from the autopsy were included, but Diamond had seen as much as he could take.

  There were also mugshots of Danny looking bewildered, mouth in a tiny o and eyebrows arching. He had a God-given talent for appearing wide-eyed and misunderstood. In the same document sleeve were some more youthful photos projecting even more innocence. They must have been taken years earlier when he was caught stealing cars. Same expression, except he’d put on weight since then.

  Various forensic reports stacked up more evidence implicating Danny. The tools of his trade, the jammer and the programmer, had been found in a carrier under the passenger seat well marked with his fingerprints and DNA. He had definitely handled the banknotes and the sack the body had been contained in.

  The autopsy report confirmed the obvious—that the victim had died from a gunshot close to the head. No other injuries were found.

  Diamond’s grasp of events was being helped by the methodical filing by date. A full two weeks had passed before the dead man was identified. Meanwhile Danny had been in custody, charged with stealing the car. The more serious charge had waited while more evidence had been gathered.