Another One Goes Tonight

21

His bad day was about to get worse, but he didn’t know it when he first returned to the office.

Alex the techie had left a voicemail message asking him to get in touch.

“I thought I’d ask for you in person,” Alex said. “It’s about that file in ciphertext you asked me to work on.”

“Did you crack it?” Diamond asked.

“Sure. It wasn’t all that difficult. Pretty basic, really. A programme they were using ten years ago. I didn’t expect to come across it again in my lifetime.”

“The person using it is quite elderly.”

“That figures. Well, I have it in plaintext for you.”

“Makes good sense, does it?”

“Sense, sure. Good, I’m less sure.”

Diamond didn’t pick up on that. He wanted to make up his own mind about the merits of the thing. It might be nothing to do with Pellegrini’s secret life, just some treatise on engineering. “Where can I pick it up?”

“This is what I was about to ask. Emailing may not suit you. And I got the impression you didn’t want me calling at the police station.”

“Understood. Where are you now? Can we meet?”

“In the Internet café in Manvers Street. Do you know it?”

“I know Manvers Street. I ought to, after working there almost twenty years.” Diamond had a troubling thought. “You didn’t print this out in a café?”

“What do you take me for, Mr. D? I like the coffee here, that’s all.”

“I can be with you in half an hour. As you say, a personal handover would be best.”

Fully two hours later, one poleaxed policeman remained in the Internet café with his third cup of coffee. Alex had long since left, duly rewarded for his expert help. He’d handed across a printout of the decrypted computer file and it was devastating.

Diamond had needed to read the thing in stages, forced to break off many times to get his head straight. Once through, he’d made himself start again. The shocks were just as jarring at the second reading. The pages shook in his hands. There was no way he could face his colleagues yet. Face them he must, but not in the blitzed state he was in after going through this material.

No wonder the file had been encrypted.

It was in the form of a journal. Not so much a diary as an outpouring of arrogance that left no doubt that the writer had committed a series of murders.

To think that by this morning, Pellegrini had been absolved of all guilt-at least, in Diamond’s estimation. That heart-warming touch of fingers at the bedside, linking the two men in their grief as widowers, was now exposed as a cruel con.

The big detective was close to tears. Tears of rage more than regret.

Needing yet more time to collect himself, he finally left the café and moved like a sleepwalker up Manvers Street and across the square to Abbey Churchyard, the place where he’d found consolation before at critical moments of his life. He wasn’t drawn there by religion, but the need for some kind of therapy.

On the west front of the Abbey were carved a number of figures attached to twin stone ladders. The founder from five hundred years ago, Bishop Oliver King, had dreamed of angels ascending to heaven and his vision had been immortalised this way. An assorted host by any criteria, the angels had been sculpted in different centuries, the lowest and most dilapidated in the sixteenth century, the next pair as recently as 1960 and the top ones from 1900. But the replacements were based on the originals. And as sometimes happened in medieval church architecture, a touch of humour had crept in. At odds with the iconography, certain of the angels were clearly descending the ladders head first.

Diamond’s sympathies were wholly with these misfits trying to come down against the flow. How they would pass the aspiring ones just below them was anyone’s guess. Maybe before they bumped heads they would be persuaded to turn and resume the climb. Or would they tell the high-flyers that heaven wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and the only way was down?

The dilemma spoke to his troubled brain in times of personal crisis and never failed to lift his spirits.

Sure, the latest twist in the investigation had wrong-footed him, but he was still clinging to the ladder. He’d find a way to move on. He always did.

Back in the CID office, he didn’t immediately speak to Ingeborg and Keith. Bath’s criminal fraternity provided unending challenges. They stole cars and burgled and dealt drugs every day of the year. Enquiring into serious crimes ought not to be thought of as a displacement activity, but that was how it worked for him today. He had earnest discussions with John Leaman and Paul Gilbert about their caseloads. Another hour passed before he asked his two closest colleagues to step into his office.

“I owe you both an apology,” he said after making sure the door was closed. “You said this morning there was only one possible killer and I disagreed. I doubted if murder had been done at all. How wrong I was.” He slapped down the sheets he’d collected from Alex. “Take a look. This is the decrypted version of the file you found on Pellegrini’s hard disk, Inge. It’s chilling.”

Ingeborg picked up the first page.

Another one goes tonight.

This time I’m ahead of myself so this isn’t a to-do list. Everything is in place, as they say. But being methodical I want something on record to look at when it’s all over. You’re on your own in this game, so any debriefing is with myself.

The only thing left is to make sure I get the timing right. I’m going for 2 a.m. when he’ll be sleeping soundly, guaranteed. Get gloved up, let myself in, do the necessary and get out without leaving any trace. The police have no idea and I’m not doing them any favours.

He’ll rest in peace and so will I, with the difference that I’ll wake up tomorrow morning.

She looked up with eyes that had stared into the abyss.

Halliwell had been sitting close enough to Ingeborg to have read it at the same time. “The calculation behind it. You said it, guv. It’s chilling.”

“How much more is there?” Ingeborg asked.

“Pages and pages,” Diamond told her.

“Why has he written it down?”

“He addresses that later.” He sifted through and handed her another page.

This isn’t a compulsion. I’m not psychotic. I can stop at any time. And when I do, the world won’t be any the wiser, which will be a personal success. I keep this record of my ordered state of mind at every stage so I can look back at each episode and recall exactly why it was necessary to put an end to a life and how I dealt with it. Of course there are glitches sometimes. I think back to the first and cringe at how naïve I was. Fortunately no one noticed except me.

Right now I’m thinking another one may be beckoning, but not in the near future, not before I’ve taken time to make all the arrangements. Good preparation is the key.

“What an ego. Is there any pity at all for his victims?”

“None that I’ve seen.” He reached for the pages and leafed through them. “The nearest he comes to it is this, but it’s hardly pity.” He handed over another sheet.

I was thinking today about the first two. I’m not stony-hearted but I’ve made it a rule never to mention names or dates in these occasional jottings. I’m not going to forget who I helped on their way. If I ever DO forget, it will be time to stop. No, I remember every one, some with more regret than others.

There are times when I wish I could share my experience with someone else, but it can’t happen. If ever I’m feeling isolated, I can glance through these notes and take stock of myself and how I handled matters. It’s not as if I’m lonely. There’s this area of my life that is private, that’s all.

“Bloody hypocrite,” she said, “talking about regret.”

“It’s all about self-congratulation,” Halliwell said. He’d looked higher up the sheet and read aloud:

Today I’m rather pleased with myself. A situation has arisen giving me the chance to insure my secrets against discovery. It’s the conjuror’s trick of misdirection, simple, but effective. The nice thing is that I am uniquely placed to pull this off. I’ve baited the trap and we’ll see if it works. No worry if it doesn’t.

“Do you think he wanted this to be found?” Ingeborg said.

“Not while he was alive,” Diamond said. “It’s meant to be a voice from the grave. If there’s a theme running through all this, it’s the knowledge that he wants recognition for his brilliance and knows he can’t get it in his lifetime.”

“Give me a break,” Ingeborg said.

“But in all his careful planning he didn’t expect to become an accident victim on life support. That undermined him.”

“No, guv,” she said. “He could have had the accident and got away with it. What undermined him was you illegally entering his workshop and finding the printout of the Internet forum on murder.”

He summoned the faintest of smiles. “True, I suppose.”

Ingeborg was already thinking ahead. “When he comes out of the coma, he won’t expect us to know any of this. If we handle it right, we’ll get a proper confession. This stuff is hot, but it doesn’t name any names, unless there’s something I haven’t seen yet.”

“He comes close to it here.” He pointed to another section:

A lot has happened since I last put anything in the diary. How events move on. Memo to myself: must do better in keeping the record updated. If I leave it too late, there’s no point really.

What can I say about the last one? He was an overdue train that needed taking into the terminus (he’d appreciate that). After his wife went, he found life increasingly difficult. He had vague suspicions certain people were taking advantage, but he was in no condition to stop them. I did him a service, ending his journey.

“That’s got to be Max,” Ingeborg said.

“I agree,” he said, “but we still don’t know for sure who all the victims are.”

“Max, Cyril and Jessie.”

Diamond clasped the back of his head with locked fingers. “I wish it were so simple. Take a look at this entry. I’ve been trying to relate it to what we know, and I can’t.”

The best-laid plans… I made my preparations and knew what ought to work, but the current one behaved out of character. People, being people, have minds of their own. I mustn’t let it get to me. I can’t bail out this time, because this one knows far too much and has to go. Knows I’m coming? Possibly. It’s a new challenge for me. I simply have to be equal to it.

Cool is the rule.

“Something went wrong,” Ingeborg said. “The intended victim ducked out in some way and it really upset him.”

“Who does he mean?” Halliwell said. “Who was it?”

“That’s what I’m asking you,” Diamond said.

“Jessie, obviously,” Ingeborg said. “He’s had to change his method. She doesn’t die at home like the others. She’s younger and more mobile. He has to take extra risks with her, but she knows too much about Cyril’s death, so there’s no choice but to kill her. She ends up in the river, apparently drowned. Major change in the modus operandi.”

“I wish I could feel so confident,” Diamond said.

“What’s your problem with it, guv?”

“I thought of Jessie when I read it first time, just as you did. But what if it referred to somebody else who knew far too much for Pellegrini’s liking?”

“Another victim?”

“That’s my worry. He talks about the conjuror’s trick of misdirection.”

“‘I’ve baited the trap and we’ll see if it works.’”

“Exactly. Are we walking into his trap? I’ve got the advantage of having read this thing right through more than once and it’s clear to me they aren’t the only killings. There’s a history of homicide here.”

“The railway friends?”

“Maybe them, maybe not. It’s tempting to lay every death at his door, but we’ve already looked into this and some of them may be from natural causes. There must be others. I get the impression it goes back years.”

“Nobody who ever met him was safe,” Halliwell said.

“They said that about Graham Young,” Diamond said.

“Who’s he?”

“Who was he? A poisoner who came to trial in the early 1970s. Most people haven’t heard of him. He’s not up there in the top ten with Nilsen and Shipman and murderers like that, but he ought to be.”

“I sense a story coming on,” Ingeborg said, knowing of Diamond’s reading habits. “Is it X-rated?”

“I’ll tell you about him because there are parallels. He was just a bright teenager when he started, fourteen, I think. A grammar-school boy. First his stepmother died mysteriously, and then others in his circle became ill-his father, his sister and a school friend. It was pretty obvious something extraordinary was happening and Young was accused of poisoning them with arsenic. He told the local toxicologist how incompetent he was. He was very opinionated.”

“I can see one parallel already,” Halliwell said.

“Yes, but he went on to say it was obvious he hadn’t used arsenic because the symptoms were typical of another poison, antimony.”

“Crazy.”

“Arrogant, anyway. He boasted he’d used it on his stepmother. They decided the boy was criminally insane and locked him up in Broadmoor. He convinced the authorities there that he was interested in science and wished to spend time in the prison library studying chemistry and medicine. After nine years the Broadmoor psychiatrist decided this scholarly young man had made a full recovery and was fit for discharge. He was neat in appearance, knowledgeable and serious and there was no difficulty placing him in a job as assistant storeman in a photographic works in Hertfordshire.”

“With access to chemicals. Here we go,” Ingeborg said, seeing the point at once.

“Exactly. Christmas had come early for Graham Young that year. It wasn’t long before the head warehouseman became ill with stomach pains and died in St. Albans hospital of what they decided was ‘peripheral neuritis.’”

“A nerve thing?”

“It is, weakness, numbness and pain, often the legacy of a number of different illnesses. But the real cause was thallium poisoning. Young had moved on from antimony. His researches had told him this would do the job better. Thallium is a heavy metal, similar to lead and mercury, but colourless, tasteless and easily dissolved in water. As the newest recruit, he’d been made the tea-boy.”

“Bad choice,” Ingeborg said. “I suppose they got it in their cuppas.”

“Twice a day sometimes. It’s cumulative.”

“Nasty,” Halliwell said. “How did he get hold of thallium in the first place?”

“Good question. Although it’s sometimes used in the manufacture of lenses, this company used a different method. There wasn’t any in the store where he worked, so he ordered his own supply from a London pharmacist. He dosed his victims methodically, little by little, gradually increasing the amount and keeping a record in his diary.”

“A diary? He wrote it down, like Pellegrini?”

“Like him, yes. That’s good scientific practice, logging each stage in the process. He didn’t stop at one victim. He poisoned the replacement storeman the same year.”

“Killed him?”

“Yes.”

“Same way?”

“He’d found a method that worked, hadn’t he? After that, it was open season. Six more workmates developed symptoms of numbness, stomach cramps and hair loss. Some sort of bug was suspected, but one of the management feared some chemical used at the works might be responsible and a medical team was called in. They invited all the staff to a meeting and who do you think had most to say?”

“Showing off again?” Ingeborg said.

“And how! He demanded to know why they hadn’t considered thallium poisoning.”

Halliwell said, “That’s dumb.”

“It’s attention-seeking,” Ingeborg said. “He couldn’t bear to have anyone else take the credit.”

“Still dumb.”

“It’s the dilemma Pellegrini writes about in these notes,” Diamond said. “He commits a perfect murder and wants the world to know how clever he is.”

“Was that how he was caught?” Halliwell asked.

Diamond nodded. “The management checked him out. They didn’t know he’d already done time for poisoning, but when they dug out his original job application it stated that he’d studied chemistry and toxicology. After that they called in the police and his previous was revealed. They searched his home and found more than enough to convict him, quantities of thallium, antimony and aconitine and, most damning of all, the diary.”

“Was it cryptic, like Pellegrini’s?” Halliwell asked.

“More explicit, along the lines of, ‘I have now administered a fatal dose. I gave him three doses altogether.’ Such attention to detail didn’t do much for his defence case. He claimed he was writing a crime novel. Oh, and there’s another parallel: Young’s first victims, his stepmother and the store-keeper, were both cremated, making it unlikely the murder would be discovered. However, the store-keeper’s ashes were sent for analysis and, thanks to a new forensic technique called atomic absorption spectrometry, traces of thallium were found.”

“So there was never any question of his guilt?”

“You’re joking, I hope? After his conviction he announced that he could have killed many more if he’d wished. To quote him: ‘But I allowed them to live.’”

“Generous.”

Ingeborg smoothed back her hair with both hands and gripped it. “You’ve told us this for a purpose. Graham Young managed to fool a lot of people, but gave himself away through boasting. Pellegrini is smarter.”

“From all we know so far.”

“But highly conceited, if this stuff is anything to go by.”

“He won’t crack easily,” Halliwell said.

Diamond shrugged. “Can’t tell until we interview him.”

Ingeborg was nodding. “So we hit him with what we know.”

Not the best choice of words for a recovering coma patient, but Diamond knew what she meant. “And the more we have up our sleeves, the better chance we have. We need to delve deeper, investigate his past and look at every death with a possible link to him.”

There was a moment when nothing was said.

Ingeborg frowned. “When you say ‘we,’ are you talking about the three of us? That’s a massive undertaking.”

“I don’t underrate it.”

“Can’t we turn this into a major inquiry now we’ve got the evidence of the journal?”

“Not yet,” he said.

She frowned. “Why not?”

“As you said a moment ago, we’re relying on illegally obtained evidence. He’s got to be persuaded to make a confession statement.”

Halliwell said, “The guv’nor’s right. If Pellegrini denies everything and wants his day in court, we’re mincemeat.”

“Yes, but…” Running out of words, Ingeborg let go of the hair and let it slide over her shoulders.

Halliwell added, “And we really must discover the method he uses. Isn’t there anything in these pages that gives it away?”

“No more than you’ve just read,” Diamond told them. “If we can believe him, they don’t know anything about it, which I take to mean they don’t suffer-unlike Young’s victims, who were put through serious pain.”

“Confirms what we worked out for ourselves,” Ingeborg said. “It’s some sort of knockout drug. Has to be. They’re found dead in bed without marks. What do those clinics in Switzerland use for assisted death?”

“Pentobarbital,” Diamond said. “They administer an antiemetic first, and then about an hour later the lethal dose. The patient goes into a coma and dies.”

“Peacefully?”

He nodded.

“How would Pellegrini get hold of the stuff?” Halliwell asked.

“Get with it, Keith,” Ingeborg said. “You can buy anything online: landmines, Kalashnikovs, a US army tank if you want.”

“Can’t we find out from his computer?”

She sighed. “Don’t you think I spent enough hours on this already?”

Halliwell was in dog-with-bone mode. “Is there a second computer somewhere in the house? He must have a laptop or a tablet he uses for emails.”

“Are you suggesting we break in again?” she asked.

“Please,” Diamond said. “We didn’t break in. I borrowed the key.”

Ingeborg swung back to him. “That’s the workshop key. You don’t have the key to the house?”

“No.”

“We could get inside with the help of that cleaning woman you met.”

“Mrs. Halliday?”

“She must have her own key. She’d let herself in the day you called. It’s worth a try, guv. Did she say where she lives?”

“Fairfield Park.”

“Let’s find her, then. We need to do it fast if he’s coming out of the coma.”