Down Among the Dead Men

by Peter Lovesey

  “So you came in to report a missing person?” the bearded one, Montacute, said.

  “Not really,” Mel said. “You already know she’s missing. She’s been on the list since July.”

  DI Montacute looked at a piece of paper the constable had brought in. “This is Constance Gibbon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Art teacher at Priory Park?”

  “Not any more,” Mel said.

  “Right. She resigned at the end of last term. Have you got a new teacher now?”

  She nodded. No reason to talk about Tom. This was about Miss Gibbon.

  “I don’t understand, then,” DI Montacute said. “If she left, why are you bothered about her?”

  Before Mel could answer, the other officer, DS Diamond, said, “Let’s cut to the chase, Melanie. What do you want to tell us?”

  She hesitated. In truth, she had nothing to tell. She was there to gather information, not give it. “I saw she’s missing, but, like, nobody seems to care.”

  “Nobody in school, you mean?”

  “She means us,” DI Montacute said.

  “Both. Well, I can’t expect you to care. She’s just a name to you.”

  “Doesn’t mean we’re not concerned,” Diamond said. “You like Miss Gibbon?”

  “Not especially. Her lessons were pretty boring, to be honest. But I don’t know why she left so suddenly.”

  “Have you spoken to your teachers?”

  “No one is saying. They clam up when I ask.”

  “As if they know something you don’t?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did Miss Gibbon ever say anything about her life outside the school?”

  Mel shook her head. “Never. She was, like, stone-faced if anyone asked.”

  DI Montacute took up the questioning again. “Reading the file, it seems enquiries were made at your school after Miss Gibbon was reported missing by her sister and they weren’t able to help.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “The school couldn’t get in touch. Letters weren’t being delivered.”

  She shrugged as if this was all outside her knowledge.

  “You said she could be boring. Was there any open hostility to her?”

  “I wouldn’t say open, but after she’d gone, everyone cheered when we heard she’d left.”

  “And you obviously feel different now.”

  She spoke from the heart. “It’s like this. I don’t particularly want her back teaching us, but I have, like, this really bad feeling something terrible has happened and I can’t just ignore it.”

  DS Diamond nodded. “You’ve done well to come and talk to us.”

  “I was thinking of getting it out on Facebook and the social media.”

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t yet.”

  DI Montacute said, “Christ, no. That’s not the way to go. Leave it to us to make more enquiries.”

  “What will you do?” Mel asked, far from convinced.

  “Depends. We might speak to her sister, get more of a picture of her life. It may be that she lost her job and went away on some foreign trip without telling anyone and will surface again and wonder what the fuss was about. That happens.”

  “I’ve remembered something. She did go on cultural cruises.”

  “There you are, then. Could be as simple as that. But we’re investigating, be assured of that.”

  * * *

  “You see the stuff we have to deal with?” Montacute said after the girl had left. “If Hen’s missing persons scare ever goes public we’ll be snowed under. Runaway teenagers, confused old people.”

  “I thought the focus was on known criminals.”

  “Yeah, but we’d have to vet them all.”

  “Miss Gibbon doesn’t sound to me like a gang member. Will you speak to her sister?” Diamond answered his own question. “I didn’t think so.”

  Montacute crossed to the door.

  “Before you go,” Diamond said, “I must pick up the printing.”

  “You’ll need a handcart.”

  They returned to the CID section together. “I’ll also need the printout on the missing persons,” Diamond said.

  “No problem. It’ll be in the tray with the other stuff,” Montacute said.

  “When I spoke to Hen this morning, she said there were eight cases that interested her. Eight in four years.”

  “So?”

  “Was that a deliberate choice, the four years?”

  “Her decision, not mine.”

  “Did it take long to check?”

  “Hell of a time.”

  “It was a practical decision, then? She might just as well have gone back eight years, or twelve?”

  “She’d have had a bloody strike on her hands if she had.”

  Diamond had the information he wanted. A scenario was taking shape in his brain.

  “I notice you’ve started calling her Hen,” Montacute said.

  “Same as you do.”

  “Yeah, but you only met her this morning. You’re investigating her. Shouldn’t you keep it formal?”

  “I need no lessons from you,” Diamond said. He scooped up the hefty printout and carried it out. Fortunately for his dignity he didn’t drop the lot.

  16

  “The deceased had been placed in a foetal position in a large cylindrical polypropylene bag of the heavy duty type used for garden refuse, with stitched seams and webbing carry handles. He had been shot with a near discharge almost certainly from a rifle leaving a circular entrance wound 3cm above the left ear with smoke soiling, burning of the skin and some singeing of the hair. The cranium was severely disrupted, with some ejection of brain tissue.”

  Do I really need to read on? Diamond asked himself. He’d already skipped several sheets of photographs. He turned the page and found a list of the clothes worn by the victim, clearly working garments.

  Then he took a deep breath and decided he’d better go back to the description of the corpse.

  This was the moment Georgina chose to knock on the door.

  “Homework?” she said, parking herself in the only armchair.

  “The Rigden shooting.”

  “A lot of reading.”

  “Yes, I’ve made a start.”

  “Anything of note?”

  “One thing I hadn’t appreciated was that the bag the body was found in was a garden refuse bag.”

  “Is that important?”

  “Could be.”

  “Plastic?”

  “No, that heavy duty synthetic material stitched at the seams. In other words, the sort of bag used by garden professionals, one of his own, I suppose.”

  “That’s grim, his own bag.”

  “Not so grim as the pictures.”

  “Had it been used before?”

  “As a body bag?”

  “I meant for garden refuse, grass cuttings and weeds.”

  “Doesn’t say so.” He picked up the report again. “No, sounds like a fresh bag—at least until the body was dumped in it.”

  “May I see?”

  He handed over the sheets with those graphic images of the head wound printed in colour.

  Georgina winced at each one and then tried to appear indifferent. “Wasn’t any DNA recovered?”

  “Only Rigden’s. Quite a lot of brain and gore.”

  She turned the pages face down. “I was about to ask if you’ve eaten yet, but I’m not sure I can face food now.”

  Diamond wasn’t sure he could face Georgina. He’d escaped shared meals so far. “There’s a mass of paperwork here to look through. I was thinking of seeing if room service would do a burger or some such.”

  A burger wasn’t the suggestion Georgina needed at this moment. She turned ashen. Her
eyes bulged and her cheeks puffed out. She made a beeline for the bathroom.

  It became obvious Diamond would be dining alone.

  Left to himself, he made a call, but not to room service.

  “Yes?” In that one word Hen conveyed the misery she was going through.

  “Chin up,” he said. “It isn’t the bank about your overdraft.”

  “Peter? What’s up now?”

  “Is this a bad time?”

  “Bad time, good time. To be honest, I’m feeling pretty low, so a call from you is a welcome distraction.”

  “More problems?”

  “It’s finally sunk in that I can’t re-run my big mistake. Like you, I sound off at regular intervals about the bloody job, but when it’s taken away and you’re hit with what you’re missing, the future is bleak. I’m already thinking it was a mistake to fess up.”

  “You were honest, Hen. That took courage.”

  “Yeah, but my instinct is to fight my corner. I didn’t.”

  “Never been in trouble like this before, have you?”

  “Christ, no. Once is enough.”

  He understood and sympathised. His usual way of dealing with other people’s troubles was to respect their fragile feelings by saying the minimum. This called for something different. He would share a confidence with Hen. “Years ago, before we met, something similar happened to me. I messed up badly and quit the police.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I was out in the cold for the best part of two years, doing a series of temporary jobs to make ends meet, barman, security guard, Sainsbury’s trolleyman, school assistant, even ho-ho-hoing it as Father Christmas. The hardship was self-inflicted, I may say. I’m hot-tempered now and I was worse in those days. Definitely not cut out to be Santa. Actually there were times when I felt like topping myself. But I got my CID job back eventually. I hadn’t appreciated that a time would come when they needed me back to re-investigate a case I’d once been involved with. I won’t bore you with it. I’m saying don’t write yourself off. You have a wealth of experience and they’d be idiots to ignore it.”

  “Peter, I appreciate what you’re saying, but no one is indispensable.”

  “You haven’t been sacked, Hen. You’re suspended. There’s a difference.”

  “Suspended pending an inquiry. But there’s nothing to inquire about. I’m guilty as charged. Even you can’t ignore the fact that I held up my hand to misconduct in public office.”

  “I’m not ignoring anything. It’s up to Georgina and me to look at all the circumstances.”

  “That woman took an instant dislike to me. She has no sympathy.”

  “She’s not the dragon she appears. And she’s only half the team.”

  “If Danny Stapleton’s trial turns out to have been a miscarriage of justice, nobody can help me.”

  “We’ve been over that. There’s no way you could have known about Joss’s DNA at the time of the trial. I know it’s difficult, but think about the positives.”

  “Positives? What are they when they’re at home?”

  “You’re going to be needed. You set up this inquiry into known crooks becoming missing persons when it’s likely they were murdered, right?”

  “That’s putting it strongly. I wouldn’t say I set up an inquiry. I was making enquiries, basically fact-finding.”

  “Okay, it was at an early stage, but you were in consultation with other CIDs.”

  “Whatever gloss you put on it, the whole thing is a side issue, a red herring, matey. It has no bearing on the mess I’m in.”

  “You may be wrong about that. It could have a big part to play. You asked the other CIDs to check their records of missing persons for the past four years, is that correct?”

  A prolonged, “Mmmmm,” came down the phone. She was plainly losing patience.

  “Why four? Why not five, or ten? You don’t know how long this may have been going on.”

  “Listen, chuck. There’s a limit to how much digging other CIDs are willing to do. Four years was stretching it.”

  “You were being practical, so you said four?”

  “I don’t know where you’re heading with this.”

  “Let’s suppose it’s been going on longer, quite a lot longer, and no one picked up on it.”

  “Peter, my old pal, you didn’t used to be like this. You’re starting to bore me.”

  “What if the disappearances went all the way back to 2007, when Rigden was murdered?”

  The line went silent while she took it in. Then: “I don’t know what you’re on about. In the first place, Joe Rigden was no crook. He was Snow White’s twin brother. Secondly, he didn’t disappear. There was a body and it was his, no argument.”

  “Found in a garden refuse bag in the boot of a stolen car. But who is to say that all the other victims weren’t transported in bags in stolen cars to some place where they were disposed of? This one only came to your attention because it was stopped by two sharp cops on patrol.”

  “That last bit is correct. The rest is horsefeathers.”

  “Why?”

  “Like I said, Rigden didn’t swim with pondlife. He was Mr. Nice Guy.”

  “He was shot through the head and driven away in a stolen car. That’s how it’s done in the criminal world. The guy driving the car was a known crook. You’ve got to face the possibility that Mr. Nice Guy got into trouble with someone in the mob who decided to have him taken out.”

  “Unlikely.”

  “Try this, then. Rigden happens to witness a crime. He’s so public-spirited that he decides he has a duty to report it. He makes no secret of it. He’d be a key witness, a marked man, wouldn’t he?”

  “But he wasn’t. He was unknown to us as a witness or anything else. I appreciate what you’re trying to say, but this is clutching at straws.”

  “Did you come up with a motive for the murder?”

  “No.”

  “You tried, I’m sure.”

  “Everything we could think of.”

  “You spoke to all the people who employed him?”

  “Every one. It’s all on file somewhere in the system.”

  “I have a printout here in front of me, all the statements, a large stack of paper.”

  “Then don’t waste time on the garden owners. They all said the same thing: what a lovely man Joe was.”

  “It’s possible he was up to something none of them knew about.”

  “You reckon? Peter, I explored every corner of his life. Money, friends, family, his entire employment history, reading materials, phone calls, travel. A recruit for the secret service doesn’t get a going over like that.”

  “Growing cannabis? He was a gardener.”

  “You’re joking, I hope.”

  He wasn’t giving up. “Getting back to Danny Stapleton, who was a villain with a record, we know there was organised crime involved in this. What was the prosecution case? Didn’t they allege that Danny was taking the body to some place where it would be disposed of?”

  “That was basically it.”

  “And you, Hen? Did you form an opinion whether he was doing the dirty work himself, or delivering the corpse to someone else?”

  “I’m of two minds now. In court, they portrayed him as the driver and the disposal man. He had all that money, too much for a delivery job and nothing else.”

  “And of course his defence was to deny all knowledge of the body, so they were free to cast him as the evil bastard on his way to tip it into a reservoir, or down a hole, or whatever?”

  “Right,” Hen said. “We couldn’t pin the actual killing on him, so he was tried and convicted as an accessory after the fact.”

  “And he still denies it all. He has his own version of what happened. He had the bad luck to nick a car containing a body.”


  “And even worse luck to get caught.”

  “So he would have us believe,” Diamond said. “I’m tempted to have another go at him, see if we can break that story, but it won’t be enough. Do you think Danny did the killing himself?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I. He was a bit player. He may know who the disposal man is, but he won’t say. It would destroy his story.”

  “So you’re stuffed.”

  He ignored that. “Rigden the gardener is the key to this. He may have led the life of a saint, but for some reason he got into dire trouble with one of the big boys. I’ve got to go over some of the ground you did seven years ago.”

  “Waste of time.”

  “Help me, Hen. There must have been someone close to him—closer than the rest, anyhow.”

  “Seven years have gone by. No one’s going to tell you anything new.”

  “Give me a name.”

  “Some are dead. Others have moved away. Actually, the one who seemed to know him best was the Reverend Conybeare.”

  “A reverend? Wouldn’t you know it?”

  17

  Just to be certain, she Googled full moon for the fifth time that day and confirmed what she already knew. It was definitely tonight. If Ella had looked out of the taxi window she’d have seen the real thing emerging from behind a cloud, sharp, silver-white and symmetrical. This had to be the right night for Tom’s latest party.

  Her mum and dad were under the impression she was part of a sleepover at Jem’s, a gathering of all the art group. They hadn’t batted an eyelid when she’d appeared in her best goth outfit, the waistclincher corset and crushed velvet miniskirt with lace trim her dad had disapproved of last time she’d worn it, saying it barely covered her backside—as if minis hadn’t existed when he and Mum were teenage lovers. They had known each other since school and there were some seriously embarrassing photos in an album Mum kept, embarrassing because of the fashions and the fact that Dad in those days had longer hair than Mum’s. But they hardly ever spoke about what Mum called their courting days and in all truth Ella didn’t want to hear about such things. The notion of her parents making love was as distasteful as her own sex life would have been to them, not that it amounted to much. The really hot stuff was in her imagination.