‘Yes, and I’ve got a whole lot more to lose than you have. I’m the branch manager. You’re only a van-driver, sunshine.’ With her Egyptian look she was like Cleopatra dealing with a Nubian slave.
‘It’s still my job and there’s trust involved in it.’ I dredged up a smile in spite of all the mean stuff being said. ‘I don’t want to stop being friends or meeting you. I’m pulling out of the sleuthing, that’s all.’
‘Quite a turnaround after we all agreed it gives us a cause to take on together. What do you say, Vicky?’
Vicky shrugged. ‘It’s up to Ishtar, I guess.’
Anita wasn’t letting her off with a wishy-washy answer like that. ‘Don’t you cop out as well. We’re all involved. From what I understood, it’s given you a new lease of life. When you get a bit low — as we all do from time to time — this is a whole different project to get stuck into.’
‘That’s true,’ Vicky went. ‘I need something outside myself.’
‘Nicely put.’ Anita was pleased to have won a point.
‘But it doesn’t affect my job. I can understand where Ishy is coming from.’ Poor Vicky, she was trying so hard to keep the peace.
‘Why should it affect her job?’ Anita went. ‘She doesn’t work with the guy. She only delivers a bloody buttonhole once in a while. That’s no big deal.’
‘Excuse me,’ I put in. ‘I’ll be the judge of that. Loyalty matters to me.’
‘What about loyalty to Vicky and me, your sleuthing sisters? Doesn’t that count for anything?’
I could see this ending in a catfight and I didn’t want that. ‘It was a bit of fun. It’s come to an end for me. That’s all.’
Anita refused to let go. ‘Let me tell you something about this bit of fun, as you call it. This bit of fun is making a difference to someone’s life, someone not a million miles from here. Vicky, why don’t you tell Ishtar what you told me?’
Vicky swayed back as if she’d been hit.
‘Go on,’ Anita commanded her. ‘She’s your friend. She’s not going to broadcast it all over town.’
Vicky swallowed hard and suddenly it was like a tap had been turned on. ‘Things are not going well with Tim,’ she went in a low voice, looking down, avoiding eye contact. ‘It’s been difficult for some time. I try and talk to him and he ignores me. He can look straight through me. I don’t know if anyone close to you has ever done that. It’s chilling, like you’ve become a ghost. Over the last three months there’s been a massive change in him. He never smiles and jokes like he used to. We sleep in separate rooms. Well, we have for some time. Originally it was because he was working late and wanted to sleep on in the mornings and we were disturbing each other. We both needed our seven or eight hours of sleep so we came to this arrangement. But he doesn’t have a job any more and he still sleeps alone. He uses his room like a bed-sit. He’s got a computer in there and a portable TV. He’ll go in there of an evening and I don’t see him at all. He’s put a lock on the door and I have to knock if I want to speak to him and sometimes he doesn’t bother to open it. He’ll talk to me through the closed door. It makes life very hard.’
‘I’m sure,’ I told her, my heart going out to her. ‘What about meals?’
‘He doesn’t want me to cook for him. He lives out of tins mostly and eats in his room.’
‘It sounds as if he needs help.’
‘Not from his own wife,’ she went and was close to tears.
‘How do you manage for money?’
‘He pays the rent and the main bills. Well, you pay them, in a way, as taxpayers. He’s unemployed now, on the social. I buy the food and my clothes. It works out about right.’
‘You buy his tins?’
‘I know what he eats and drinks.’
‘Speaking of drink …’
‘He’s not alcoholic. He doesn’t touch it at all, or drugs. And there isn’t another woman, I feel sure of that. He’s never been one for playing around.’ She paused and glanced away. ‘Actually he has quite a low sex drive.’
I remembered her wish to have children. Will she ever have any now?
‘Could it be gambling behind this? You can do that alone on the computer.’
‘It crossed my mind, but he pays the bills on time. We don’t get the red ones. There’s something else,’ she added. ‘Sometimes he’ll go out at night. I hear him creep out and lock his bedroom after him. He’s back before dawn. I don’t know what he’s doing.’
‘Have you asked him?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t like to.’
‘Forgive me, Vicky, but are you totally sure there isn’t another woman?’
‘I can’t be a hundred per cent certain, but I think I’d get an inkling and I don’t. All I can feel is the unhappiness coming from him. Bitterness. Not towards me. He ignores me.’
Anita folded her arms and turned to me. ‘You see now why she needs something else to take her out of herself? The sleuthing sisters does it nicely.’
I wasn’t really listening. I knew she wanted to press home how inconsiderate I am, and how Vicky’s situation was heaps worse than my own. That’s Anita’s steam-rollering style, and I don’t blame her for it. No, I was still coming to terms with what I’d been hearing, this sad, dysfunctional marriage and what could lie at the root of such misery.
I probed gently. ‘What was his job?’
Vicky didn’t seem to mind talking now. ‘Originally he was in the army. Ten or eleven years. He got to be a sergeant.’
‘You were an army wife?’
‘Yes, and it worked quite well until he got posted to Iraq. I stayed home, of course. The war changed his feelings about the army. Instead of signing on again, he resigned. With his savings he bought a second-hand car and started up as a taxi-driver in (she mentions another city twenty miles from here), but he lost his licence.’
‘Why? Why did he lose his licence?’
She sighed. ‘It was such a shame. He was doing really well with the taxi business. Working hard and making good money. Then one night he got a call to pick up a group of teenagers from a party at a house somewhere out in the country. When he got there and saw the state of them, he refused. They’d obviously been drinking heavily and were rowdy and abusive and two of them were vomiting. A driver isn’t forced to take people. Tim took a pride in his car and always kept it spotless. He drove off and left them. But something dreadful happened. The sick ones got worse and the others called an ambulance and they were taken to hospital, but one of them died.’
‘Died? How ghastly.’
‘It turned out that the two who were sick had eaten some seafood that caused acute food poisoning. Tim had to give evidence at the inquest and a doctor said they could have saved the girl if she’d been taken to the hospital earlier.’
Anita went, ‘Meaning if Tim had picked them up as planned?’
And I was like, ‘He wasn’t to know that. He wasn’t supposed to be taking them to the hospital.’
‘That’s right,’ Vicky went, ‘but the way it was reported in the press, he was the villain in all this, not the people who served up toxic food or the friends who behaved so unpleasantly. Tim was the scapegoat, the cabdriver who refused to pick up a critically ill young girl. It was written up in the local paper three weeks running on some pretext or another. There was a lot of bad feeling in the city. You see, the girl who died was a policeman’s daughter, only fifteen.’
You’d think the policeman would have picked her up.’
‘He was on duty. Anyway, soon after the inquest was in the papers, Tim started getting stopped by the police for things they never usually check, tyres, emissions, a dodgy brake light, mud covering the number-plate, so-called speeding when he was just on the limit. It became obvious it was a campaign to get his licence taken away. And that’s what happened in quite a short time. We can’t say for certain that some of the things that went wrong — like low tyre pressures — were caused deliberately, but we’re very suspicious. He got in trouble seve
ral times over and in the end he lost his licence to drive a taxi.’
‘That’s so unfair. Him an ex-soldier, too.’
‘And people treated us like shit — neighbours, shopkeepers. They’d all read the papers. The only ones who were sympathetic were other cabdrivers. They know it could easily have been them. But they couldn’t do anything to help. We decided to leave. That’s why we moved here.’
‘And he’s been unemployed since?’
‘He had to sell the car, so he can’t do taxi work. He rides a motorbike now.’
Anita gave me a Mother Superior look. ‘Hearing what Vicky goes through puts our little enterprise into perspective.’ She turned back to Vicky. ‘It’s light relief, isn’t it, my pet?’
There was no response from Vicky. I could see it had been a huge effort for her to talk about her problem.
The tension between us was unbearable. I felt it was up to me to end it and I knew how. ‘All right, I’ll tell you the name of Heathrow man. It’s John Smith. And now you know as much as I do.’
Anita began to laugh. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘I checked the invoice book this morning.’
Vicky blinked several times, as if snapping out of a trance. ‘John Smith? That’s amazing. So what are we going to do about him?’
24
In the morning Peter Diamond put in a later appearance than usual. The word had spread in CID that he’d personally arrested the Somerset Sniper overnight, but it hadn’t been the triumph it might have been. At the scene, the capture had been messy. Back at the nick, he owed the team an apology. Almost every line of enquiry he’d initiated had been shown as mistaken. No one was going to forget that his focus had been closer to home. They hadn’t missed the irony that he, of all people, had nicked a man who by all accounts wasn’t a serving officer, an ex-officer or even a civilian employed by the police.
So it wasn’t going to be a case of round to the pub, lads, we nailed this together. No one knew what the big man’s mood would be.
He looked none the worse for his wrestling match on the riverbank — except for what he was wearing: a houndstooth sports jacket with leather elbow patches, grey flannel trousers and crepe-soled canvas shoes. God only knew where he stored such relics. There was a distinct smell of mothballs. His movement was ponderous, as if every muscle was stiff, yet he wasn’t carrying the stick and the limp had gone as he passed through the CID room on the way to his office.
Actually he sounded energized. ‘Morning, people. Ingeborg and Paul, I need to hear from you about last night.’ He left the door open.
Looks were exchanged. It seemed to be business as usual, regardless that the main suspect was under arrest in the cells downstairs.
‘What did you come up with?’
In his office, Ingeborg played along, assisted by Paul Gilbert, with a short account of their walkthrough of Harry Tasker’s beat, how they’d got the tip that Anderson Jakes might have information and where they’d tracked him down and what he had to tell them about Harry’s possible dealings with Soldier Nuttall’s son, Royston.
‘It’s all academic now,’ she added. ‘In view of the arrest last night, we don’t need to pursue this.’
‘Why not?’ Diamond said.
‘It’s dirty linen, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t talk to me about dirty linen. Both my suits are at the cleaner’s.’
‘Guv, no one wants bad stuff like this to come out, even if it’s true. Harry’s funeral is on Thursday.’
‘I thought I made myself clear at the meeting the other day. If Harry was up to no good, it has to come out. Nothing is off limits.’
‘But we’ve got a man in custody.’
‘Has he confessed, then?’
‘Not yet. I don’t think they’ve got much out of him.’
Paul Gilbert added, ‘He seems to be claiming the right to silence. But they’ve sent his shoes to forensics and taken his prints and we’ll soon know if he’s the killer.’
‘Shows how much you know about forensics,’ Diamond said. ‘Don’t hold your breath.’
Gilbert gave a queasy smile.
‘He’s within his rights not to say anything.’ Diamond’s mouth curved in a way that wasn’t charitable. ‘He’s Jack Gull’s catch. Well, more or less. Jack always believed the guy in the woods is the killer and that’s who we nicked and now he can go to town on him. We’re pursuing our own line of enquiry. This Royston sounds like someone we should speak to. Where does he hang out?’
Suppressing a sharp, intolerant sigh, Ingeborg said, ‘Claverton Down. He lives with his father.’
‘Soldier Nuttall?’
‘Right.’ The triple nod she gave said it all about Nuttall’s reputation.
‘Is the kid employed?’
‘It seems not. He’s a young man of independent means, thanks to his father. A bit of a wheeler-dealer, according to Anderson. What he deals in wasn’t made clear, except it’s a cut above what most of the others handle.’
‘Sounds like hard drugs. And he’s a night bird, obviously. This morning might be a good time to find him at home.’
A little of the colour drained from Ingeborg’s cheeks. ‘You want us to go to the house?’
‘It’s a lot easier than trailing around the streets at night. I’d better come with you.’
‘I can handle it,’ she said quickly.
‘Put it another way. I need to come with you. When there’s a suspicion a police officer was corrupt, I have a duty to get involved.’
She eyed him warily, suspicious that he was being over-protective. ‘What about Paul?’
‘It won’t take three of us.’ He turned to Gilbert. ‘Have a quiet word with the PCSOs who share that city beat with Harry Tasker. If he was on the take as we now suspect, they’ll surely have heard a whisper.’
Before leaving the office, he eyed the overflowing in-tray. The morning’s mail had been heaped on top of yesterday’s. With care, so as not to spill everything on the floor, he extracted those sheets listing the personnel at Wells, Radstock and Bath. He held them over the waste-paper bin. And then some inner prompting made him hesitate. He stuffed them into his top drawer. On the way out, he turned to Keith Halliwell and casually asked him to deal with the mail. Opening letters was all too boring for a man of action.
Down at Avoncliff, three of Avon and Somerset’s underwater search unit were following up Diamond’s report of a loud splash in the river. A rigid inflatable boat was secured with lines from the bank and the first diver and his attendant were aboard and ready to start.
‘What exactly are we looking for here?’ the constable in the scuba diving suit asked before taking the plunge.
‘Mr. Diamond said it was heavier than a bird and lighter than a body,’ the sergeant in charge said from the riverbank. ‘Think of it as a lucky dip,’
‘If it was a branch off a tree it would have floated away.’
‘And we wouldn’t want to find it, would we? He thinks it was an object slung in the water by the guy they arrested last night.’
‘The sniper? Maybe it’s his gun.’
‘That would be the top result. I suggest you stop going on about it and go down and have a look.’
The diver nodded, adjusted his mask and tipped off the side of the dinghy.
He wasn’t down for long.
He bobbed to the surface and gave a thumb-down sign.
‘What’s wrong?’ the sergeant asked.
The diver pushed up his visor. ‘Visibility almost nil. Do we have the sonar equipment?’
Their grey USU van was nearby. The operation was halted for a while.
Even with sonar, and after several dives, nothing seemed to be down there.
The sergeant studied his map and said to the diver’s assistant, ‘I hope this is the right stretch of river. They could have left a cone here to help us.’
‘They like to test us out.’
The diver submerged again. He took much longer.
‘Not
a bad spot,’ the sergeant said, looking at the wooded hills surrounding them. ‘There’s a good pub a short walk from here. Do you know the Inn at Freshford? Nice old place with a packhorse bridge. If he doesn’t surface soon, I’ll be off there for a pint.’
Then the water churned and the diver’s head and shoulders came to the surface.
‘Got something?’ the sergeant said.
He poured the water from his find and held it up: a motorcycle helmet, black and shiny. ‘Hasn’t been down there long,’ he said. ‘It’s in good nick. Why would anyone want to chuck this away?’
Diamond continued to function as if he were high on caffeine. ‘Jack’s done us a bloody good turn,’ he said to Ingeborg as she drove out of the police station in her shiny Ford Ka. ‘All the media interest is going to be on the man he’s holding. We can come and go as we like.’
‘Isn’t he the sniper, then?’
‘I honestly don’t know. All I can tell you for sure is he tried damned hard to get away.’
‘Wasn’t he armed?’
‘They looked in the rucksack and all he was carrying were a few apples and a cut loaf.’
‘Money?’
‘A few quid in his trouser pocket.’
‘What was he doing by the river?’
‘Same as me, I expect. Trying to avoid being picked off by one of Jack’s sharpshooters.’
‘So you think he knew the stakeout was in place?’
‘Most likely. If he is the sniper, he’s been smart avoiding arrest all these weeks. He’s not going to blow it by being too obvious.’
‘And if it isn’t him?’ Ingeborg said as she steered left and they crossed the Avon at Churchill Bridge and approached one of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s oddest indulgences, his railway viaduct disguised as a castle wall.
‘It will have been some ne’er-do-well out late. Didn’t stop him spotting one or other of the firearms team and steering a wide berth. Do you know where Soldier Nuttall lives?’
‘I must have passed the gate a hundred times,’ she said, not wanting to be patronised. She moved out to overtake a farm vehicle. ‘There’s something else I ought to tell you, guv. Last night when we were doing the rounds and questioning people, someone told me about a blog she’d been looking at. Sounds as if it’s posted by some woman who reckons a friend’s partner has been acting suspiciously.’
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