Another One Goes Tonight

20

The soft-pedalling came to a stop as soon as the next morning when Diamond arrived at Keynsham. A note was on his desk asking him to call someone called Frankie on a Bristol number.

Frankie turned out to be female and a forensics officer.

He reached for pencil and paper. The science would go over his head if he didn’t jot down the salient points.

“You recently sent us a pink plastic brush with some hair samples for testing.” Frankie spoke in a tone of disapproval, as if it had been a letter bomb.

Jessie the housekeeper’s dyed hair ought not to have upset them. “The day before yesterday. Did you get anything from it?”

Frankie wasn’t ready to say. She had questions of her own. “You found the brush at an address in Wiltshire, according to the information you supplied. Is that right?”

“A cottage in Little Langford, not far from Salisbury.”

“Was that you personally?”

“Yes, it was.”

“And is there an unbroken chain of custody?”

This was something Forensics were hot on. You had to keep a written record of the whereabouts of every piece of evidence to show it wasn’t corrupted, but it was a bit insulting to be asked. “I wasn’t born yesterday. Did you manage to get some DNA off it?”

“We did, both nuclear, from the follicle cells, and mitochondrial, from a hair shaft, which is more difficult to extract. So we have a result. But you didn’t provide the name of the individual whose hair it is. Was there a reason for that?”

He was writing and speaking at the same time. “We don’t have a surname. She’s known as Jessie.”

“And you’re absolutely sure the brush belongs to her?”

“I found it under her bed.”

“The hair is definitely female and originally brown in colour, tinted blonde,” Frankie said.

“That all ties in,” he said. “Jessie has blonde streaks.”

“Fortunately the chemicals used in tinting hair don’t degrade the DNA. We checked the national database. Currently it stands at six million DNA profiles.”

“Don’t tell me you found a match,” he said, more in hope than expectation.

“We did.”

“Frankie, you’re a star.”

She gave a grunt like a boxer taking a punch. Accepting a compliment was clearly difficult for her.

“So what’s her surname?” He was ready with the pencil.

“I can’t tell you.”

The pencil broke. “What?”

“The match is with an unknown woman.”

“Unknown? How can that be? If it’s a database it has names.”

“Not in her case. This individual was found dead in the River Avon two weeks ago.”

He needed a moment to take it in. “That’s awful. Did she drown?”

“The postmortem was inconclusive. Any pathologist will tell you drowning is difficult to be sure about.”

Thoughts flapped around his head like trapped birds. Jessie dead? He’d counted on her as his key witness. She’d been at Max’s funeral. She’d been in the cottage when Cyril died. She’d spoken to Rex, the taxi driver. She must have had words with Pellegrini that night. Soon after that, she’d gone missing, but the possibility that she’d died hadn’t seriously crossed his mind.

“Could there be a mistake?”

Stupid bloody question.

Frankie said after a couple of beats to register disapproval, “No two people have ever been found to have shared the same DNA, other than identical twins. I wouldn’t be speaking to you if there was any doubt.”

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “A woman’s body was found in the river. Where exactly?”

“A few miles west of Bath, near Swineford.”

“That’s a long way from Little Langford.”

“It’s not my job to explain how she got there,” Frankie said. “You asked for the location and that’s it. Your own police authority must have dealt with it.”

His own station.

He was looking at the map on his office wall and Swineford was barely two miles from Keynsham.

“I wasn’t informed. I’ll take it up with them. Will you be emailing your findings?”

“All you need to know.”

“Please make sure it reaches me personally. And, Frankie…”

“Yes?”

“I wasn’t really casting doubt. You knocked me for six.”

After ending the call, he went straight to the most senior uniformed officer on duty, Chief Inspector Richard Palmer.

“Was there a body fished out of the Avon recently?”

Palmer knew straight away. “Woman in her thirties, about two weeks ago. She hasn’t been named yet. Doesn’t match anyone reported missing.”

“We weren’t told about this in CID.”

“Get off your high horse, Peter. We’re dealing with it. If we gave you every death that got reported you wouldn’t be too thrilled. Accident or suicide, we believe. There’s no evidence of anything else.”

“It could tie in with a case we’re working on. I should have been informed.”

“It’s no secret. Been on the website all week. Don’t you look at it?”

A low blow that he ignored. “Show me.”

“Be my guest.” Richard Palmer found the Avon & Somerset Police website, clicked on “newsroom” and had the appeal on screen straight away:

unidentified woman-can YOU help?

The left side of the screen was filled with a photo of a blonde white woman you wouldn’t have known was dead unless you read the information. The eyes were open, as if looking at the camera. She had neatly shaped eyebrows, high cheekbones, a straight, small nose, fine, narrow lips and a dimpled chin. A good-looking woman probably in her late thirties.

The text at the side read:

A woman’s body was recovered from the River Avon, near the Avon Valley Country Park, Swineford, at 11 a.m. on Sunday, 29 March, and we are appealing for assistance from the public in identifying her. She is white, aged about 30-40, with tinted blonde hair and hazel eyes, of slim build and about 5ft 5in in height. She was wearing a light blue hip-length padded jacket made in China, white sweater size 10 from BHS and blue Chino style jeans and white socks with pink heels and toes. Her underwear was also from BHS, white, 34D bra and knickers. She was not wearing shoes or any form of jewellery. She is believed to have been in the water for up to twelve hours.

If you were in the vicinity of the country park on Saturday 28 or Sunday 29 March and remember seeing a woman of this description alone or in company or if you recognise her picture, please contact us on 101 and quote the reference number 7773250.

“Has anyone got in touch yet?” Diamond asked.

“No one useful. We still don’t have a clue who she is.”

“Has it got in the local press?”

“Not yet. It will soon.”

“And no signs of violence? What’s the thinking about her?”

“She could be an immigrant. To me, the shape of the face looks Slavic. The eyes, the cheekbones. I sent the DNA profile to Interpol in case she fits one of their mispers.”

“I meant, what’s the thinking about how she ended up in the river?”

“Accident, probably. Saturday-night drinking.”

“Round here, you mean?”

“Some of them are legless by the end of the evening, and not only the men. It’s either that or suicide.”

“Is there a pub at Swineford?”

“Nice one. The Swan.”

“I suppose you sent someone to ask?”

Palmer grinned. “Thinking of volunteering, Peter? Hard cheese. It’s been done. Actually the body was about a mile downstream from the Swan. It could have carried from there. Swineford weir gives a boost to the flow.”

“Was she checked for alcohol?”

“Negative, but it could have metabolized in the time she was in the water. Basically, we’re at a loss.”

Diamond decided he’d better share some of what he knew. “I may have some information for you, going by DNA evidence, but it won’t answer all the questions.” He told Palmer the little he knew about Jessie the housekeeper’s history, but he didn’t go into the case against Ivor Pellegrini. His feelings about the eccentric engineer had undergone another step change.

“Isn’t it likely someone in Little Langford knows this woman’s name?” Palmer asked.

Diamond shook his head. “I had a man doing door-to-door yesterday. If anything new turns up, I’ll let you know.”

“Likewise,” Palmer said.

“So how did he do it?” Ingeborg was quick to ask when Diamond told his small team how Jessie’s life had ended.

“Who are we talking about here?” he said.

Ingeborg and Halliwell exchanged startled looks.

“Come on, guv. Pellegrini, of course. It’s obvious Jessie knew too much and had to be silenced. She came back to the cottage that night and if she didn’t catch him red-handed murdering Cyril she was left in no doubt who was responsible. The only question is how an old guy in his eighties or whatever age he is succeeds in killing a fit woman forty years younger.”

“Seventy,” Halliwell said.

“What?”

“His age. He’s seventy. He may look older in his present state of health, but that’s his age.”

She swung round to face him. “How do you know that?”

“Because of that name-plate in his workshop. County of Somerset. The locomotive was built in 1945 and got its name the next year. I thought we’d all agreed they linked themselves to trains built in their birth years.”

“Did we?” She turned to Diamond.

The big man’s thoughts were elsewhere. “I’ve changed my mind about Pellegrini.”

“You don’t mean that,” she said, appalled.

“We assumed from the start that he was a murderer because of his wayward behaviour.”

“Wayward? I’d call it guilty.”

“Hold on, Inge. Highly suspicious, anyway, the night excursion, the cremation urns, the valuable gowns found in his workshop and the Internet material about perfect murders. We soon had him down as a serial killer, but we were forced to modify that when the death certificates came in and we found his railway friends died from things like flu and an aneurysm.” He could tell they were both on the point of interrupting again, so he raised his hand. “I know what you’re going to say, there were other deaths, Max’s and Cyril’s, and we found solid reasons why he might have wanted those two dead, basically to cover up the theft of the gowns. But Max and Cyril died in bed, like the others, and their doctors signed them off as natural deaths. No sign of a struggle, no marks. If he’d murdered them, we’d have found out by now.”

Ingeborg couldn’t contain herself. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Isn’t this the whole point, that he was researching murder methods? There’s a load of circumstantial evidence. We can place him at each scene shortly before the deaths. We just have to work out how he did it. We know why, basically-because his friends got wise to his thieving.”

And now Halliwell chimed in. “Let’s not forget the deaths of Trixie Pellegrini and Olga Filiput.”

Diamond shook his head. “They weren’t murders. Olga had a fall, which would be a crude and unreliable method for a man supposedly carrying out perfect murders. And there’s no reason for him to kill her.”

“Same motive,” Halliwell said. “She owned this stack of jewellery and antiques and he figured Max was easy prey once Olga was dead.”

“And his wife, Trixie? He didn’t murder her.”

“She probably found out she’d married a kleptomaniac and challenged him with it.”

“After a lifetime together? She would have found out sooner than that.”

“Okay, it was a long-term problem and she finally got sick of it and threatened to call the police.”

“I said he didn’t murder her and I’ll tell you why.” He shared with them yesterday’s experience in the hospital and the first thrilling sign of life from Pellegrini, the response to Trixie’s name. “He loved her. When his finger pressed into my hand like that, I don’t mind telling you I was moved. By then I’d gone through what I thought was a list of buzzwords and names, but it was Trixie who was the spark. It’s hard to explain. No one’s more hard-bitten and cynical than I am. This time there was communication, like some form of telepathy. He was telling me she was more important to him than all the railway stuff I’d been going through, all his friends and carers. He was coming alive for Trixie and her alone.”

The silence that followed told Diamond he hadn’t done a good job of explaining the extraordinary revelation Pellegrini’s touch had been for him.

The team looked embarrassed.

It was Ingeborg who finally spoke. “This is difficult to say, guv. Is it possible you were influenced by personal experience?”

“I don’t know what you’re on about.”

“Him responding when his dead wife’s name was spoken.”

“You mean…?” He couldn’t complete the sentence, couldn’t even say Steph’s name without getting a lump in his throat. “I don’t think so, don’t think so at all.” He forced himself to get a grip. “It’s not obvious to me, anyway.” But inside, he knew Inge could be right.

She now made an effort to cover the raw wound she’d exposed. “It doesn’t affect the point you’re making. You’re saying we may have misjudged him?”

But Halliwell wasn’t having any of that. “It’s too much to believe all these deaths are natural. Something very weird is going on, that’s for sure, and Pellegrini is the common factor. And now we can throw another killing into the mix. Do either of you seriously believe Jessie fell into the river by accident?”

“There was no evidence of violence,” Ingeborg said, back-pedalling out of consideration for Diamond’s feelings.

Halliwell wasn’t stopping now. “So she wasn’t shot or stabbed or knocked on the head, but she could have been pushed in or held under. Or drugged and dropped in the river unconscious. Or given so much drink she was incapable of saving herself. She knew what happened that night in the cottage and she had to die. And who was there with her? Pellegrini.”

“A double murder?” Ingeborg said on a rising note, all tact abandoned. “You think he killed them both?”

“Not the same night,” Halliwell said. “It was Jessie who reported Cyril’s death next morning. But she went missing soon after. He will have set a trap, lured her to Swineford on some pretext. He may have offered her hush money. It’s out in the country, quiet there most times. They meet somewhere-let’s say the Swan-and then do a bit of the Avon River Trail along the bank. He’ll have come prepared. He wouldn’t simply push her in and hope she’d drown. He could have used chloroform.”

“Not easy to obtain,” Ingeborg said.

“Unless you’re a scientist,” Halliwell said at once. “He was well capable of passing himself off as one. If it wasn’t chloroform it was some other knockout drug. He could have put something in her drink. We can work out the method later. His party trick is rendering people senseless and he used it on Jessie and dumped her in the river. With Jessie dead, he thought he was in the clear. No one could finger him for Cyril’s murder.”

“Except Rex the taxi driver.”

“He thought he’d covered that. He made sure Rex didn’t know his name or address. Have I made the case?”

Halliwell looked for a response from each of the others. Diamond was subdued, playing the scenario over in his torn mind. Ingeborg too was pensive, fingering her blonde hair.

Then she spoke. “There’s another way to look at it, isn’t there?”

“What’s that?”

“From Jessie’s point of view. She seemed to be coping well with Cyril, an old man with serious money worries. It was a job with a guaranteed wage because it was paid by the trust. A nice little earner-if she could stand being stuck in that cottage out in the country with just a ninety-year-old for company.”

“Her choice,” Halliwell said. “Caring was her job.”

“True. But when he dies suddenly she’s jobless. She has to think about her future. Seems to me she’ll look around urgently for a new employer.”

“Pellegrini, you mean?”

Ingeborg nodded. “She’ll have given him the once-over and decided he isn’t short of cash. His wife is dead and he’s getting on in years, so he might be glad of a live-in housekeeper. How will she approach him? Better do it fast. A meeting is set up.”

“At Swineford?”

“First she may have gone to the house and the next time-”

“Before you go any further,” Diamond interrupted her, “Pellegrini didn’t need a housekeeper. He was organised with a cleaner, Mrs. Halliday. I met her and she was doing the job nicely. He had someone from the church bringing him meals on wheels. I can’t see him wanting anyone extra.”

“That’s immaterial,” Ingeborg said. “I asked you to look at it from Jessie’s point of view. She’d make a pitch without knowing his arrangements.”

Fair point. Diamond wished he hadn’t spoken. It was increasingly obvious he was on a different wavelength.

“The upshot is the same,” Halliwell said. “She ends up dead in the river and there’s only one possible killer.”

Diamond wasn’t willing to listen to any more. He’d told them his current thinking and it pained him to have it disbelieved. Their arguments were rational, his intuitive, and it wasn’t the way he liked to work. “I’m out of here.”

“Are you okay, guv?” Ingeborg asked.

“Perfectly.”

“Something I said?” Halliwell asked.

“Leave it,” Ingeborg told him.

When the two were left alone, Ingeborg said, “Did you see his eyes?”

“What do you mean?”

“Kind of troubled, tortured almost. I’ve never seen him like that. Is he losing it, do you think?”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Halliwell said. “Overwork, do you think?”

She shook her head. “It’s got personal for him, this investigation, and he’s not used to that. Something seismic happened at the hospital yesterday. We know Pellegrini may be starting to come out of the coma, but it’s more than that. It goes really deep and I’m not sure what it’s about.”

“Holding his hand?”

“Maybe. I wish I hadn’t mentioned his own wife when he was telling us about Trixie being the name that triggered the result. That was tactless of me.”

“He doesn’t often talk about Steph,” Halliwell said, “but she’s in his thoughts still. They were very close.”

“Too painful to share with anyone?”

“Probably,” he said, tilting his head as if listening to some distant sound. “I’m forgetting this was before you joined CID. I was first at the scene that morning when we got the shout that a woman had been shot in Victoria Park. Neither of us had the slightest idea it would be Steph.”

“The shock,” Ingeborg said, crinkling her eyes. “I can’t imagine.”

“It was as bad as it gets. For fifteen, twenty minutes, maybe longer, he was on his knees beside her. It was obvious she was dead. I went to see if I could offer sympathy or support and he told me to back off. He wouldn’t let the police photographer near, the SOCOs. Anyone. All this time he was holding her hand, kind of cradling it.”

Ingeborg dragged her fingers through her hair. “Oh my God. I didn’t mean to hurt him. I really have messed up.”

Diamond walked steadily in the direction of the river-but not to throw himself in. Needing to get his thinking straight, he’d decided to visit the place where Jessie had been found. It was barely half a mile from the Keynsham police centre and the most direct route was up Pixash Lane over the London to Bristol railway and through an eighty-acre kids’ attraction known as the Avon Valley Adventure and Wildlife Park. From Brunel’s stone bridge he glanced down at the long stretch of track and gave a thought to Pellegrini. This might well have become a vantage point for a night visit after the HOPS moved on from Bath Spa station.

He showed his warrant at the park entrance and got a wary look, but didn’t explain the purpose of his visit.

Incongruously, on his way to a possible crime scene, he found himself among small, noisy people and their young mothers pushing strollers. Donkeys, goats, lambs and ducks were penned at either side and rides were offered on tractors and go-karts. Most of the kids, he suspected on this cool April day, were heading for the shelter of the play barn. One shrill voice said, “Let me go on the death slide, Mummy.”

Diamond left all that behind and approached the tree-lined riverbank.

He stood for a few minutes, imagining the scene. The water was flowing at a good rate. Although the body had been found along this stretch it didn’t follow she had got into the water here. About a mile upriver was Swineford weir and she may well have floated with the current from just below there and finally lodged against some obstruction. Behind him were moorings for narrow boats but the body had been found before reaching there. As so often happens, a person walking his dog had made the discovery. The immediate area would have been combed for her shoes, a bag or a suicide note, but by CID standards the search may not have lasted long.

Might as well keep a lookout along the bank in case some item had been missed by the search team.

Too much to hope?

On this bleak day, yes.

He understood the mystification-to put it mildly-of his two colleagues when he’d changed his mind about Pellegrini. After days of insisting they were dealing with a serial killer, he’d let them down with a bump and made a poor job of trying to explain why. How do you explain a gut feeling?

That Damascus Road moment in Critical Care was impossible to convey to anyone else, but from his new perspective he could see how flaky the whole case was. When suspicion alone is driving an investigation you’re on dangerous ground. You need evidence and it’s easy to kid yourself you’ve got it.

Evidence?

The urns had not been sinister after all. The night excursions on the trike were either to scatter ashes or visit the HOPS. The Internet forum was just that, an exchange of information on computer. The Fortuny gowns looked like stolen property, but may have been a gift. The visit to Little Langford could have been by invitation. Unless it could be proved that one or more of the unusually large number of deaths had been induced, there truly was no case to answer.

There had only ever been one suspect. Cyril was almost certainly a thief but there was no suggestion he’d murdered anyone. Max’s death hadn’t benefited him. On the contrary, it had closed down his thieving possibilities.

He kicked at a stone and watched it splash. Some ducks took flight.

It had been an investigation like no other in his experience. The crimes may not have been crimes at all. The only suspect couldn’t be questioned. The witnesses were dead-all the principal ones, anyway. The scenes weren’t accessible without a warrant and he wouldn’t get that. The evidence was no more solid than a sandcastle.

What had induced him to start on this?

Suspicion.

You sow a seed and it grows. Water it and it thrives. Throw on some feed and it spreads all over. But watch out for what you get. It may be a monstrous weed.

Here he was, angry with himself and unable to face his own team. He’d never invested so much for such a poor return.

Ahead he could see a beam bridge spanning the river, a solid-looking, dead-straight construction of metal and concrete supported at the centre by twin piers. Not the most beautiful of the bridges over the Avon, he reflected as he walked towards it, but sturdy enough to carry heavy traffic, conceivably even a train.

Out here in the middle of nowhere? Unlikely. The main line to Bristol was half a mile south of here, running parallel to the Bath Road. This pointed in another direction, north-west along the valley.

Yet it had the look of a railway bridge.

Death and the railway: the two constants.

Out of curiosity he climbed the embankment for a closer look and sure enough he found a single rail track heading north-west to only God knew where. A path for pedestrians and cyclists ran beside it.

Memories were stirring. He’d heard of the privatised Avon Valley Railway without ever having had reason to visit. Volunteers had been working for years to restore some abandoned branch line near Keynsham and this was obviously it. The southern end couldn’t be far off or it would run straight through Swineford.

Wouldn’t hurt to check, he thought. So he followed the track for a short distance. Presently the single rail became double, operated by a point, and a short way further on were twin platforms. A little station with its own name: Avon Riverside. Beyond were more points and a loop arrangement of the track to enable an engine to move from one end of the train to the other.

All local railway enthusiasts must have known about this.

Shaking his head, forced to accept another possible link between Pellegrini and Jessie’s death, Diamond returned to the bridge, leaned on the railing, peered over the edge and saw the reflection of his head and shoulders fragmenting in the shifting water. Summed up the way he’d felt all morning.

He’d never considered suicide, even in his darkest moments, and he wasn’t planning it now, but he could feel an inexplicable pull from the swirling water below. Could Jessie have stood here and looked over?

Or had she been brought here by her killer?