Cop to Corpse

13

The limp remained, but Diamond had progressed to a walking stick. In truth the soreness in the leg felt about the same. Knowing how appearances influence people’s opinion of you, he’d discarded the crutches for good and arranged for them to be returned to the Royal United Hospital.

The team noted a change in his looks when he stood to update them on the morning’s discoveries. The unhealthy pallor was gone, replaced by unhealthy ruddiness from high blood pressure.

The guv’nor restored.

The improvement was largely due to a rise in confidence. He’d floated the idea with John Leaman that the killings might not, after all, be random, as Jack Gull and everyone else assumed. The latest discovery appeared to support his thinking.

‘Some of you know Harry Tasker’s widow Emma asked to see me this morning,’ he said. ‘Between ourselves, I was surprised to hear from her. She’d already given me a hard time — and I don’t blame her in the least — when I first broke the news of Harry’s murder. You never know how anyone will react to a shock like that. She’s bitter that Harry was on beat duty the night he was shot and she blames us almost as much as his killer. I did a poor job of comforting her. So today I was expecting more aggravation. I won’t say it was all sweetness and light, but we discussed a few things. She wants Harry to have a low-key funeral.’

‘Is that possible?’ Halliwell asked.

‘No uniforms, no guard of honour. A simple service for close friends and family.’

‘No police?’

‘A few of his closest mates from uniform. If we want to honour him ourselves we’ll have to find some other way.’

‘She won’t stop the media being there.’

‘We make damn sure they behave.’ He turned to the main matter. ‘But the reason Mrs. Tasker wanted to see me was something I wasn’t expecting. Harry’s personal possessions — the contents of his pockets when he was shot — were returned to her this morning. Among them was this.’

He raised it for all to see, a strip of white now enclosed in a transparent evidence bag. ‘Found in the little case he kept his credit cards in. A scrap of paper with two words on it obviously produced on a computer printer.’ He passed the bag to the youngest member of the team. ‘Read them out, would you?’

‘Me?’ DC Paul Gilbert did as he was asked, but in a throwaway tone that meant nothing. ‘ “You’re next”.’

A moment of bemused silence followed.

‘You’re next,’ Diamond repeated, spacing the words to give them their full sinister meaning. ‘Do I need to say more?’

No one was willing to commit.

‘Come on. Liven up.’

Finally John Leaman said, ‘A note from the killer?’

‘That’s the obvious interpretation, and we can’t ignore it. However Harry came by the note, he must have thought it was worth keeping. Whether he took it as a death threat, we can’t say. He didn’t behave as if he was going in fear of his life.’

‘Some kind of practical joke,’ Keith Halliwell said. ‘That’s what I would think if it was sent to me.’

‘Joke?’ John Leaman said. ‘ “You’re next” — what kind of joke is that when some madman is targeting us?’

‘Black humour.’

‘If that’s humour, I don’t get it.’

Diamond was listening keenly. To get his own thoughts straight, he had earlier run through a raft of similar possibilities. He wanted the team to reach its own consensus that the note was fundamental to the investigation.

Halliwell was sticking with his joke theory. ‘Well, it may have nothing to do with the shootings. Suppose Harry was one of those guys who never buy a round of drinks? A note like that would amuse his mates.’

‘Was he a tightwad?’ someone asked.

‘Now you’re speaking ill of the dead,’ Leaman said.

‘Why would he keep the note, anyway?’ another voice said.

Then Ingeborg spoke up. She’d driven back from Radstock in the last hour. ‘We’ve got a duty to take it seriously. Unless we can prove it’s unimportant we have to assume it’s evidence.’

‘I’m not dismissing it,’ Halliwell said. ‘I’m keeping an open mind. We don’t know how long he’s had it in his pocket.’

‘May I see?’ Ingeborg said. ‘I did the forensics course a few weeks ago.’

Smiles all round at this naked self-promotion. Even Diamond grinned.

‘No need to remind us,’ one of the older DCs said. ‘We filled in for you.’

She ignored him, well used to backchat from colleagues.

Gilbert handed her the evidence bag.

Ingeborg inspected it from several angles and then turned it over. ‘Printed on an A4 sheet in Times New Roman, font size 14. It looks very much as if the person who wrote it didn’t want to be detected. The sheet was trimmed with scissors. The top is even, but the lower cut isn’t a perfect match. A document examiner might get more information.’

Looks were exchanged. The team was more amused than annoyed by the Sherlock Holmes impersonation. Ingeborg was popular, for all her striving.

She hadn’t finished. ‘Latent fingerprints may be the best hope, but we must allow that at least five different people have handled it since it was printed.’

‘Five?’ Halliwell’s eyebrows arched in surprise.

‘The person who printed it, Harry himself, the mortuary person who removed it from his pocket, Emma and our esteemed leader.’

The spotlight was back on Diamond, not renowned for handling evidence to the highest forensic standards.

‘How do you know I didn’t use tweezers?’ he said. No one gave this a moment’s credence, so he continued, ‘To be truthful, I didn’t. Inge is right. If there are prints, they’ll include a bunch of extras on top of the ones that interest us. I don’t expect any miracles from forensics. However, Inge is also correct in saying we can’t ignore this as a likely death threat.’

‘Meaning the random killer theory could be wrong,’ Leaman said. ‘Jack Gull could be barking up the wrong tree.’

‘And the media and most of the public,’ Ingeborg said.

‘Right.’ Diamond folded his arms. ‘That was hard going. Are you lot still half asleep, or what?’

‘Are you going to tell him, guv?’ Halliwell asked.

‘Tell Gull? When I do, I know what he’ll say.’

‘It’s a red herring.’

‘Except Jack will put it a touch more forcefully.’ He took a look around the room and made sure he missed no one on the team. ‘Are you with me now, all of you? The note appears to show that the killer knew Harry. If the other two victims received similar notes, he knew them as well. If so, our job has just got a whole lot simpler.’

‘Simpler?’ Halliwell said.

‘We’ve narrowed the search.’

‘Someone with a grudge against all the victims?’

‘Who knew each of them, tracked them down and murdered them.’

‘In three different towns?’

The last comment was supposed to sound a sceptical note, but Diamond treated it as support. ‘Right. And there’s another factor. It wasn’t just a matter of shooting at any cop who walked by. The sniper knew when these individuals were going on duty.’

‘That begs some tough questions,’ Ingeborg said. ‘He’d need inside knowledge.’

‘One of our own?’ Halliwell said in rampant disbelief. ‘A cop?’

Murmurs of dissent rumbled around the incident room. Suddenly the looks Diamond was getting weren’t complimentary. They weren’t just disbelieving. They were unfriendly. One cop killing another was too much to swallow.

‘It has to be faced,’ he said, and he’d had an hour or so longer to come to terms with it. ‘Cop, PCSO or civilian support staff. Who else sees the duty rosters?’

The murmurs turned to a buzz of angry voices talking among themselves. Diamond became anxious. He was in serious danger of losing control. In his long years of service here, he’d not had many run-ins with the team. This hostile reception was ominous.

He believed they would agree with him when they were over the first shock. All they needed was longer to think this through, as he had. Better move on, he decided.

He had to shout to be heard. ‘Ingeborg!’

The noise reduced, giving way to interest in whether Diamond’s blue-eyed girl had just said something really over the top and the old ogre had picked it up.

Ingeborg glared back at him as if he were recruiting for the devil.

He made an effort to sound reasonable. ‘We haven’t heard from you about your visits to Wells and Radstock. How did you get on?’

Her intake of breath sounded like a blowtorch. ‘I’m trying to get over what I just heard. It’s beyond belief that any police officer would gun down three of our own. If this is the price of taking that scrap of paper seriously, I’m not sure I’m with you any more.’

‘You don’t like it, I don’t either,’ he said, appealing to everyone in the room. ‘I could be out on a limb here, but as you said a moment ago we have a duty to investigate. Now, Inge, do us the favour of reporting back, as I asked.’

She tossed her head, more to suppress the outrage she felt than in defiance. ‘There’s not much to add to what we have on file. I spent last evening with some of the lads from Wells CID. They’ve had longer to come to terms with all this than we have and they’re in no doubt that it was a random shooting.’

Nudge, nudge, he thought. He could hear murmurs of approval for the Wells lads.

‘You’ve made your point. Now what did you pick up?’

‘Only snippets. Ossy Hart came to Wells as a probationer and had just four years of service there.’

‘Where did he train?’

‘Foundation training at Portishead. Before that he was a PE teacher.’

‘In Minehead. We know this already.’

‘Sorry I spoke,’ Ingeborg said, still fractious.

‘Go on. I’m impatient — as if that wasn’t bloody obvious.’

‘I was going to say that the Wells bunch liked Ossy. He ticked most of the boxes. Reliable, good timekeeper, very fit, so hardly a day off duty, good at dealing with the public, always well turned out.’

‘Which are the boxes he didn’t tick?’

She reflected on that for a moment. ‘He was a tad too ambitious for some of them. It showed. He was looking to get promoted as soon as he could.’

‘Promoted? He’d only just completed his probation.’

‘Two years, guv.’ There was more than a hint of protest in the remark. Ingeborg was a high flyer herself, looking to get a sergeant’s stripes soon.

‘Okay,’ Diamond said. ‘I can see it would rankle with the others. What else?’

‘He didn’t like paperwork.’

‘He’s not alone there.’

‘Yes, but he skimped and got caught out a few times.’

‘Hardly a capital offence if it didn’t upset the running of the place too much. Anything else?’

‘They said he was a bit physical.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Being strong, he’d grab people by the arm to make a point and let them know he had a firm grip. I’m talking about his colleagues, not just villains. A couple of the girls said he’d left bruises and they told him to be more considerate, but he never seemed to learn.’

‘Annoying, but not enough to make anyone want to murder him. Did he make any real enemies at Wells?’

She gave an impatient sigh. ‘If he did, no one was saying.’

‘I can understand why. And what about the nickname? Where did that come from?’

‘The “Ossy”? I didn’t find out. They said he was given it before he joined the police. He didn’t seem to mind. When he started at Wells he said he preferred Ossy to to his real name of Martin.’

‘Nobody asked where it came from?’

‘If they did, they didn’t get an answer. No one could tell me. Does it matter?’

‘Maybe, maybe not. Nicknames are usually given to people for a reason, some quirk of character they have, or an incident that happened to them. I was hoping we might learn something we don’t know already.’

‘If you really want to find out, his widow would know.’

He snapped his fingers. ‘Good thought. And she might tell us a whole lot more that could be useful.’ Then he hesitated. ‘No, I’d prefer not to approach her at this stage. I’m assuming she’s been interviewed already by Jack Gull or one of his team.’

‘A widow too far?’ Ingeborg said.

He frowned. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I’m wondering if Emma Tasker has put you off interviewing widows. I don’t mind going to see this lady if you want.’

He wasn’t amused. ‘It’s not that. I don’t intend to give Gull any grounds for complaint. He could close us down if he gets the idea we’re running a rival show.’

‘Which we are,’ John Leaman said.

‘In the interest of the truth. But let’s face it, Gull is the headquarters man and his remit is to investigate serial crimes. Ours is to assist him over the murder of Harry Tasker. We need to tread carefully.’

‘That’ll be a first,’ a voice said from the back, and got a laugh. The mood of Bath CID was still bordering on rebellion.

Diamond had the sense not to jump down the joker’s throat. ‘Inge, did you learn anything else from Wells?’

‘Not really.’

‘And you went on to Radstock and made enquiries about PC Richmond. Did he have a nickname?’

‘None that I heard about. He was Stan to everyone there. A loner, wrapped up in his folklore hobby. Always willing to talk about ancient fairs and stone circles, but clueless about the things the others were into, like football and last night’s television. He often had his head in a book.’

‘A good copper?’

‘No one had any complaints. He did the job and evidently knew the law better than most. Unlike Ossy Hart, he had no desire to be promoted. He worked his shift and overtime when required, and that was all he seemed to want. They used to joke that he was away with the fairies the rest of the time.’

‘How did he take that?’

‘In good humour. He didn’t seem to mind.’

‘He wasn’t gay?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘The fairies they meant were the little people.’

‘He didn’t make enemies?’

‘No. It was a massive shock to everyone when he was shot. There’s no question Stan Richmond was well liked. They were genuinely sad that he was killed.’ She paused. ‘They’d be amazed to hear it suggested he was shot by someone who worked with him.’

Another nudge. More like a dig in the ribs.

He was trying to stay calm. ‘Stan Richmond moved around a lot in his career. Is it possible he overlapped with either Ossy Hart or Harry Tasker?’

‘Certainly not Ossy. He only ever served at Wells.’

‘He trained at Portishead.’

‘Yes, but almost twenty years after Stan Richmond went through. As for Harry, I wouldn’t know about his service record before he came to Bath.’

Halliwell was shaking his head. ‘I’ve looked at his postings. There’s no overlap.’

‘Okay,’ Diamond said, needing to lay out the realities. ‘Let’s deal with what we know so far. The sniper uses a G36 rifle — and that’s also a police-issue weapon — with deadly accuracy. He’s well informed about foot patrols. He’s good at hiding up and escaping stake-outs. He seems to anticipate our moves and know our routines. I’m going to need a list of all personnel who served with the three victims — and I mean everyone, top brass, CID, uniform, PCSOs and civilian staff.’

Total silence.

Ingeborg was the first to speak. ‘That sounds to me like a witch-hunt.’

‘And that’s a comment that does you no credit, Inge,’ he said. ‘This is a murder enquiry, remember? “You’re next” — right? If we take it seriously — and I’m telling you that’s our duty — Harry was picked out to be shot. We must assume the others were picked, too, all serving policemen. If they were lorry-drivers or construction workers, you wouldn’t think twice about checking the career records of people who served with them. I’ve been around long enough to know that not all police officers are angels. In fact I could name several who committed murder. This may go against the grain, but it has to be done.’

Ingeborg shook her head and went silent.

You could have built a wall from the antagonism in the room. Still, he wasn’t backing off.

‘Keith, you can take this on,’ he told Halliwell.

‘Do I have to?’

‘What?’ This time the shock was on Diamond’s side and it was like being hit by a demolition ball. For his oldest colleague to question an order, this had to be a full-blown revolt. ‘It’s a routine job, for pity’s sake. Someone in personnel will press a computer key and the names will roll out at your end.’

Halliwell had turned crimson. ‘I’m not happy with it, guv. It seems disloyal.’

‘Not to me, it isn’t.’

‘You’re putting me in an impossible position. We’re being asked to investigate hundreds of brother officers for murder. I’ve never done that before.’

‘If we had a union,’ Ingeborg started up again, ‘it would be a strike issue.’

She earned sounds of support for saying that.

‘But we don’t,’ Diamond said, ‘and our job is to uncover the truth. I don’t like what I’m hearing. All I want at this stage is that list of names. No one is being fingered. We’ll eliminate most of them straight away.’

‘And finger the ones who are left,’ Ingeborg said.

He was incensed. ‘That’s out of order.’

Flushing all over her blonde skin, Ingeborg paused before saying, ‘Guv, have you any idea what this kind of shakeout is going to do for everyone’s confidence, morale, team spirit — all those things we pay lip service to.’

He hadn’t expected this degree of opposition. No one was siding with him and neither could he expect them to now that Keith Halliwell had dug his heels in. Ingeborg sounding off was one thing, but Keith wasn’t a hothead. He carried the respect of the entire team.

It came down to a test of Diamond’s own self-belief. He’d been arguing that the killer’s knowledge of police duty rosters made it inevitable that the crimes were internal. Was there a flaw in his logic?

There was. He had been expecting someone on the team to nail him.

In their stroppy mood they had failed to see that if the sniper was a policeman targeting specific victims he had to know the beat rosters at three different stations over a period of twelve weeks.

Just about impossible.

So there was still a chance that the “You’re next” note was a joke, as Halliwell had first suggested, unrelated to Harry Tasker’s shooting and not connected to the crime. If so, then Gull, blast him, could be right in his assumption that the choice of victims was random.

I’m losing my authority here, he thought, and my case isn’t watertight. I’ve failed to convince my team. Usually I have a sense of what is solid evidence, but have I been too hasty here?

He had a nagging suspicion that he was motivated by the rivalry with Jack Gull. Had he let the man get under his skin to that degree?

Uncharacteristically, he backed down.

‘I’m not going to make an insubordination issue out of this,’ he told them, making it sound as much like a smooth transition as he could. ‘We’ve been together too long to allow a difference of opinion to stop us from functioning. I don’t mind admitting that what I suggested takes some swallowing. I’ve had longer than you to think it over. Keith …’

Halliwell did a fair impersonation of a rabbit in headlights. ‘Guv?’

‘You can disregard that order I just gave you. I’ll re-examine everything I just said. In return I’m asking you — all of you — to reflect further. If you have any better ideas, then for God’s sake make them known to me.’

This, from their shit-or-bust leader, created as big a sensation as the issue itself.

In the Wife of Bath (a Pierrepont Street restaurant renowned for its generous portions) that evening with Paloma Kean, his friend and occasional partner, the shit-or-bust leader confessed to bust. ‘I boxed myself in. Messed up totally. I could feel the ground crumbling under me and there was nothing I could do. Even as I was speaking I knew if I were one of them I’d feel just as angry.’

‘But if you believe a policeman is involved in the crimes, it has to be faced,’ she said.

‘Only if it’s true. The question is whether the evidence stacks up, and it does — but not enough.’

‘Go on.’

‘I can’t work out how he knew so much about the day-to-day running of three different police stations.’

‘Was he transferred? That happens, doesn’t it?’

‘Not twice in three months.’

‘Are the beat duties notified to your headquarters?’

‘Good thinking, but no. It’s decided at the local level. There’s enough form-filling without that.’

‘I’ve run out of ideas, then.’

‘Me, too, more’s the pity.’

‘There’s another thing I can’t understand,’ Paloma said. ‘Why would the sniper send a note like that? What’s the point?’

His eyes widened. This was a different angle. ‘Bragging, I suppose.’

‘It conflicts with everything else he does. He’s secretive, stealthy, keeps his distance. Why risk sending a note and potentially revealing information about himself?’

He started thinking aloud. ‘Maybe all the secrecy doesn’t satisfy him. He wanted Harry Tasker to know he was next for execution.’ He leaned back in his chair and rested the knife and fork on the plate. ‘You’re onto something here. The note doesn’t have much point unless there’s some history behind it. I wonder if Harry himself knew why the others had been murdered. There could have been bad blood that involved all three — and the killer. Then the note makes sense. It was sent out of malice. Harry received it and knew his turn had come. For the sniper, that brought satisfaction.’

‘Sadistic.’

‘That’s my reading, anyway.’

‘If I received a note like that and knew what it meant, I wouldn’t agree to walk the beat at night,’ Paloma said. ‘I’d find any excuse to save my skin.’

‘Fair point, but where would you be safe? This is a clinical killer. You’d have to resign your job and never leave your home. And would you feel any safer in there? I doubt it.’

‘So you’re saying each of the victims knew who their killer was?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘Couldn’t they have informed on him?’

‘If they all got death notes, you mean? It depends what motivated the murders. I’m speculating now, but it could have been some bad business they didn’t want made public at any cost.’

‘Bad business?’

‘Some kind of scam.’

‘But they were police officers.’

‘We’re not all angels, as I had to remind the team. Corruption gets exposed once in a while, and some goes undetected.’

‘I thought you said the three victims never served together.’

‘Yes, but the sniper could have served with all three at different times. That’s why I’m so committed to getting staff lists and going through the names.’

‘You’re sticking with that?’

‘Definitely, but as a solo effort. My team is dead against it.’

‘They’ll find out,’ she told him.

He nodded. ‘They know me, anyway. Obstinate old bugger.’

‘I’ll second that. You should have gone for that X-ray.’

‘I went. Just didn’t stay.’

‘Is it still painful? You seemed to be limping on the way here.’

‘Trying for sympathy. I can’t get enough.’

‘Well, you look tired.’

‘Lady, that’s not sympathy. That’s a taunt. You don’t tell your date he looks tired.’

She smiled. ‘I wasn’t thinking of this as a date. If it’s sympathy you want, I’ll offer some, but forget the date bit. Men feeling sorry for themselves aren’t much of a turn-on.’

All in all, this hadn’t been his day. He regrouped rapidly. ‘Okay, here’s the deal. Leave out the sympathy, come home with me and we’ll crack open another bottle of wine. Does that sound more like a turn-on?’

Paloma laughed. ‘Kind of.’