Down Among the Dead Men

by Peter Lovesey

  He moved smoothly on. “So you didn’t mind me picking up the baton? I hope I didn’t say anything you weren’t about to say.”

  “I was coming round to asking questions about the Rigden murder just as you did, but her offensive outburst put me off my stroke.” She looked away, across the street. “All in all, you covered for me rather well.”

  “Thanks. I’m concerned about the niece.”

  “Avoiding arrest, you mean?”

  “It could be worse.”

  “In what way?”

  “I didn’t say anything to DI Mallin when she was talking about the glut of missing persons almost certainly murdered. Joss is missing.”

  13

  Peter Diamond phoned Hen Mallin from his room in the hotel while Georgina was taking an afternoon nap.

  “Me again.”

  “Peter, are you alone?”

  “She’s on a siesta.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “She’s totally stressed out.”

  “She is?”

  “A rare admission of frailty. She tells me the minimum. I wish there’d been some way of tipping you off about the visit.”

  “Did I look as if I’d seen a ghost? I was reeling and rocking.”

  “You were fine.”

  “Until I let rip. What a dumbo.”

  “You aren’t. She got what was coming. She’s like that about rank. It comes from insecurity.”

  “And she’s your assistant chief constable?”

  “Almost as long as I remember. You didn’t meet her ten years ago when we worked together on that body on the beach case. She was away on a cruise.”

  “A cruise? Siestas and cruises. Not a bad life.”

  “It means I get a break sometimes.”

  “How the hell do you cope?”

  “We understand each other. I’m not easy to get on with either. Georgina has a good side I see occasionally.”

  “She thinks I let down the whole of womankind. I saw it in her eyes.”

  “Failing to investigate your niece? Women are allowed to show compassion.”

  “Don’t tell me. Tell your boss. Oh, forget it. She’s right. I screwed up. What do they call it, favouring your family?”

  “Nepotism.”

  “Right on. I admit it. Nepotist of the year. I don’t deserve to stay in the job. Didn’t I say it loud and clear to Dallymore?”

  “You did—but something was missing.”

  “What was that?”

  “A little ‘ma’am’ at the end.”

  They both laughed.

  Hen’s voice improved. She wasn’t back to her boisterous best, and might never be, but she made a try. “Peter, my old cock sparrow, I don’t know how you worked it, but I’m chuffed to have you on board.”

  He let the “old cock sparrow” wash over him. “You can credit Georgina, not me. I tried to wriggle out of it—but then I didn’t know you were the officer under suspension. Do you know who fingered you?”

  “No.”

  “Could it have been Montacute, who is now doing your job?”

  “Too obvious.”

  “Why—don’t you get on with him?”

  “He’s a moaner, but he doesn’t want me out of it. He might be forced to make decisions of his own.”

  “Got to be someone with an agenda. Are the others loyal?”

  “Does it matter? I’ve admitted to all and sundry I fouled up. I don’t lose any sleep trying to guess who the whistleblower was.”

  “But you are losing sleep. I saw it in your face.”

  “Is it as obvious as that? Joss was only eighteen when Rigden was murdered. What was she doing to get her DNA in that bloody car, Peter? And where has she bunked off to, now the heat is on?”

  “That’s for us to work out.”

  “You and Dallymore?”

  “With any help we can get from you. Someone has to untangle this mess. We’ll manage.”

  “Find Joss. I don’t care what happens to me.”

  “You made that obvious. But I have a sense that your part in all this is going to seem small beer when everything is understood.”

  “Commander Hahn may disagree. He’d like to see me roast in hell.”

  “Hahn? He’s got bigger things to worry about than you. He spooked in case Danny Stapleton sues for wrongful conviction.”

  “And he blames me.”

  “Get this straight, Hen. You did your job with the investigation. Stapleton was caught with a murdered body in a car he’d stolen. His defence was paper thin. A judge and jury heard the case and convicted him.”

  In the pause that followed he could almost hear her brain ticking over. Finally she said, “You’re music to my ears, darling. I was feeling lower than a snake’s belly this morning. If Dallymore picked you for this mission she can’t be all bad. I don’t mind calling her ma’am. I’ll call her your royal highness if she doesn’t send you home.”

  He hadn’t made this call just to restore Hen’s spirits, or his own. “There was something you said this morning about recent cases you were working on.”

  “You’ll have to remind me. My head was in a whirl.”

  “Missing persons. What’s that about? Every police authority has missing persons.”

  “Sure, and most of them turn up, one way or another, dead or alive. This is serious stuff, Peter, and it’s been going on some time. Far too many stay missing. They vanish. No one hears from them again.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Petty criminals mostly. The sort who mess with the local crime barons. In former times their bodies would be found riddled with bullets in a local quarry or some abandoned house. You expect it with rival gangs. Over recent years it’s become more efficient. Plenty of victims still get taken out. We hear the same distress calls from their nearest and dearest. But the bodies aren’t found. Death and disposal on an industrial scale.”

  “And you were onto it? How far did you get?”

  “Nowhere. Well, almost nowhere. I made a start. The first stage as always was to learn as much as we could from informants. The only message coming back is that someone has a foolproof method.”

  “Of disposal?”

  “A business operation.”

  “Murder Inc—in Chichester?”

  “Not just Chichester. All along this stretch of the south coast, from Brighton to Portsmouth. Forty miles, give or take.”

  “So other forces are onto this?”

  “I spoke to my CID oppos in all the main towns. Bloody hard convincing some of them anything is wrong.”

  “These were informal contacts?”

  “You bet. The top brass are going to take a lot of convincing. When the government judges us by the crime figures and the murder rates are falling, who in his right mind wants to know about killings that have gone unreported? I had to hammer the point home. When we put our information together it was bloody obvious this was too serious to ignore. So who do you think was volunteered to carry the thing forward?”

  “You’re a glutton for punishment. When did you start?”

  “Two weeks before I was suspended.”

  “And you say you got almost nowhere?”

  “We’d barely started.”

  “You must have some theories.”

  “The obvious one—being so close to the coast—is that they take the bodies out to sea and dump them overboard. If so, they do it well. I can’t find a single instance in the last two years of a murdered corpse being washed up or found floating.”

  “Isn’t the sea always supposed to give up its dead?”

  “That’s horseshit. No offence, my love, but it’s one of those Biblical sayings that gets misquoted all the time. On the day of reckoning all the people who were ever drowned will come to life—that’s what
the good book says.”

  “Didn’t know you were a Bible-basher.”

  “I’m not. So many people quoted it at me that I looked it up.”

  “But there’s an element of truth. Bodies don’t stay under water indefinitely.”

  “Okay, a submerged body inflates with internal gases after a while and will rise to the surface, but if the disposal man is the professional we think he is he’ll surely weigh the things down.”

  “Have you talked to pathologists?”

  “No help at all. If I could find them a body to slice up they’d give me all sorts of information. The whole point of this brain-teaser is that there ain’t no evidence.”

  “You’ve obviously thought of other methods?”

  “There’s no shortage of ideas. Everyone has a favourite theory, from acid baths to car crushers.”

  “Old mineshafts?”

  “Not in these parts. Mind, it wouldn’t be much trouble to drive the bodies to Wales or Cornwall. Why are you so interested in this?”

  “I was thinking if you were getting warm in your enquiries and the people behind this racket got to know, they would have wanted you suspended.”

  “But they’d need a line into our investigation and it hasn’t even reached the stage of being an investigation.”

  He said nothing.

  “Peter, that’s appalling. Can’t I trust my own colleagues? Who would leak it? I work every day with my team. They’re solidly behind me.”

  “All of them? You said Montacute moans about you.”

  “Heat of the moment. We have a mutual disrespect. You know yourself CID isn’t a love-in. But if there isn’t loyalty, there’s nothing.”

  “Civilian staff?”

  “They’re okay. They don’t get involved in office politics.”

  “The only one I’ve met so far is Pat Gomez.”

  “Pat who?”

  “Gomez. She showed us upstairs and made the tea.”

  “I know who you mean. She’s only been in the job six months. She knows nothing about my faux pas of three years ago.”

  “You were in consultation with other stations. Can you trust all of them?”

  “They’re senior detectives.”

  “So?”

  A gasp came down the line. But there was amusement in her tone when she said, “Peter Diamond, you’re a rabid old cynic.”

  “Tell me about it. Will Montacute have taken over from you as convenor of this unofficial group?”

  “Nobody tells me anything. They seem to be under instructions to treat me as the enemy now.”

  “Has it occurred to you that the villains could have won and your missing persons project might be kicked into the long grass? You were the prime mover. Is anyone else as keen as you to push on with this?”

  She didn’t seem to have an answer.

  “Every chief constable wants falling crime figures,” he went on. “Meet our targets, let the public think they’re safer now than they ever were. You were threatening to spoil all that, uncovering lots of extra murders. Am I such a cynic?”

  Hen gave a little murmur of impatience. “Listen, matey, I appreciate your interest in my missing persons crusade, but right now I’d prefer you to concentrate on the case in hand—my runaway niece.”

  “You want me to prove Joss had nothing to do with the body in that car?”

  “That would be the perfect outcome.”

  “I can’t promise anything, Hen.”

  After the call ended, he thought about what had been said and it didn’t hang together. Hen preferred to think there was no connection between what she called her crusade and her suspension. But three years had gone by since she had chosen to ignore the DNA evidence that Joss was involved. She’d insisted she’d confided in nobody when Joss’s name came up. Why had her dereliction of duty been raised at this particular time if it didn’t have something to do with the stirring she was doing? She trusted her close colleagues in Chichester and couldn’t face the realisation that one of them had betrayed her.

  Trust is the mother of deceit.

  Georgina knocked on the door and said she was ready to go again.

  “Did you get some shut-eye?”

  She glared. “I wasn’t sleeping. I was deciding what to do next.”

  “Did you reach a conclusion?”

  “I did. First, I want to get your impressions of DI Mallin.”

  Difficult. This sounded like a trap. Georgina was no fool. She’d noticed him calling Hen by her first name. She could have used some of her siesta time to put a call through to headquarters and check whether their careers had overlapped. He didn’t want to be stood down. “My impressions? Mostly favourable,” he said. “At least she admits she was in the wrong.”

  “She couldn’t do much else.”

  “She could have spun some story and fudged the issue. Pressure of work. Unfamiliarity with the Rigden case. She held her hand up and I can’t fault her for that. It simplifies our task.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “Do you want me to go on analysing her motives?”

  “That’s what I asked.”

  “She’s obviously under strain. The outburst towards the end.”

  “More than an outburst. A personal attack,” Georgina said. “I’m not used to being spoken to like that. I was temporarily lost for words.”

  “Yes, I hope you didn’t mind me taking over.”

  “You called her ‘Hen.’ What was that about?” She wouldn’t let it go.

  This time he was ready with his explanation. “I heard it from you. Down by the canal yesterday, when you told me who we’re investigating, you spoke her full name—Henrietta.”

  “Did I? It seems a long time ago.”

  “I once knew a Henrietta and called her Hen. The name sprang to my lips at the moment I needed to get this lady’s attention. It seemed to do the trick.”

  She said without much gratitude, “Yes, you brought her to her senses. She made some sort of apology, I think. It’s all a blur now.”

  The blur was good news. Georgina wasn’t often vague in her recollections. “If she’d spoken to me in that way,” he said, “it wouldn’t have been just a blur. It would have been a red mist. You were gracious.”

  “Was I?” she said in an interested tone, keen to hear more.

  “I was proud of you. Can’t recall exactly what you said, but I was grateful. Gave me the chance to move on and ask her some questions about the problems with the Rigden murder investigation.”

  “I do have a memory of that.”

  Better get back to the script then, he thought. “And after that I asked about her missing niece.”

  “Yes, and the family background. The mother who died young and the domineering father.”

  “Brother Barry.”

  “He sounds unpleasant. Do you think DI Mallin is in awe of him?”

  “Hard to say.” He couldn’t imagine Hen being in awe of anyone, but it wouldn’t have been wise to say so.

  Georgina wasn’t the sort to be in awe either. “We’d better go to Midhurst and meet this ogre.”

  Their police chauffeur took them over the South Downs along a winding route through farmland and forest. Georgina had spoken on the phone to Barry’s second wife, who had wanted to know if there was news of Joss and sounded genuinely distressed that there was none. She’d suggested they came at once. Barry would be there soon.

  “Was he at work, then?” Diamond asked in the car.

  “She didn’t say. I’ve no idea what work he does.”

  He looked out of the window, “Management, I should think, if he can afford to live here.”

  Midhurst is an affluent market town with a rich history and a low crime rate. Diamond assumed this branch of the Mallin family had come up in the world, so it came as a su
rprise when the car pulled up at the edge of a field on the northern outskirts. There was a gate with a rutted approach that a tractor might have used.

  “Are we there?”

  “This is where the sat nav brought us,” their driver told them.

  “Those things aren’t infallible.”

  “I can see something white through the hedge,” Georgina said. “Take a look, Peter.”

  He was wary. As a townie, he mistrusted fields. You never knew what they contained. Something white could be one of those enormous Charolais bulls. He thought about delegating the job to the driver who had brought them to this unlikely spot, but perhaps it wasn’t enough to make an issue about. He stepped out and looked over the gate.

  The white was a static caravan alone in the field. Grey breeze blocks had been used to stabilize it. A wooden set of steps was in place in front of the door.

  The Mallin residence?

  He opened the gate and went over.

  A woman answered his knock. About fifty, blonde, overweight, anxious-looking. “You’ll be from the police? Come right in.”

  “Hang on. I’ll fetch my boss.”

  In this compact home they didn’t need to be detectives to tell no one else was in. “Barry won’t be long. I called him,” Cherry Mallin told them after they’d made themselves known and perched on stools in the kitchen area. “When you called I was hoping you might have news of Joss, but you say she still hasn’t been found. We’re at our wits’ end.”

  “Does she have a mobile?” Georgina asked.

  “Turned off.”

  “How long has she been gone?”

  “More than five weeks.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Here with us. I thought you knew.”

  “We’re not from the local lot,” Diamond said. “Does she have her own room?”

  She pointed to a door. “It’s poky, but we manage.”

  “May we look?”

  “Go on. The ones in uniform already went through it and took some stuff away, like the laptop. Nothing left, really.”

  She was right. It was a minimal, impersonal space with a bed and hanging canvas storage space with six shelves which housed the rest of Joss’s possessions, make-up, clothes, shoes, a few paperbacks. Diamond could imagine how Hen would feel if she saw this pathetic little collection.