Diamond Dust

13

Ten days went by.

Ten more days in the process of grieving, this grudging acceptance of the stark reality. One day he decided he would take all Steph's clothes to a charity shop because that was what she would have wished (so long as it was not the one where she worked). He carried the dresses downstairs and draped them across the back seat of the car so as not to crease them. If the helpers in the shop decided to throw them in a corner in the back room or stuff them into plastic sacks, so be it. He wouldn't do it himself. Then, in a fit of sentiment he picked out one of her favourites, the fuchsia-coloured silk one she'd worn to the theatre last time they'd gone, carried it upstairs again and returned it to the wardrobe. It should have gone with the rest. There was no logical reason to keep it. He simply couldn't part with it yet. And when he looked at the other clothes, he couldn't be separated from them either. He drove around with those dresses on the back seat for days, reaching back to touch them at moments when he felt really down. You're a pathetic old idiot, he told himself when he finally removed them from the car and put them back on their hangers.

Of course he tried immersing himself in work, but that was fraught with problems he hadn't experienced before. The danger of working in isolation, he learned the hard way, is that you are forced to rely on hunches and theories. In a CID team, you have information coming in all the time, ninety-five per cent of it useless, but at least your brain is occupied reading reports and statements and checking the records. In the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry they had so many statements on file that the floor of the incident room started to cave in. The storage problem is less in this computer age, more a matter of pressing the right keys. McGarvie could cross-reference all known cases of murder using.38 revolvers; shootings in public parks; suspicious deaths of police and their families. He could analyse statements, classify the long list of objects found in Victoria Park and Charlotte Street Car Park, go through years of Peter Diamond's case notes looking for people with grudges. Bloody McGarvie had plenty to occupy him.

This parallel investigation of Diamond's had to be run on a wing and a prayer. A certain amount leaked out of the incident room, of course, through old colleagues, and he barged in there repeatedly on the flimsiest of pretexts, but it was obvious the team were under instructions not to tell him things.

One afternoon, in a quiet corner of the canteen, Keith Halliwell confided to him, 'The lads are on your side, guv, even if it doesn't look like it. There's a lot of anger about the way you're being treated.'

'I'm not looking for sympathy, Keith. A result is all I want.'

'It isn't sympathy. Well, you know what I mean. We do feel for you. Of course we do. This is something else. Personality.'

'The Big Mac?'

'He doesn't speak for the rest of us. We want you to know that.'

'He's doing the same as I would. I'm a hard-nosed git when I'm on a case, as you well know.'

In truth, he wasn't impervious to sympathy, or support from his colleagues. However, he would trade it for hard facts on where the investigation was leading – if anywhere. Too many theories are a pain. They keep you awake at night. They're difficult to disprove without the back-up of the murder squad.

His only back-up was the snout, Bernie Hescott, and he hadn't anything to offer when Diamond drove to Bristol for the fourth time and looked him up in the Rummer. 'I'm working on it, Mr D. Got more feelers out than a family of bugs. I'm not sleeping at nights.'

'Join the club.'

'Give me another week and I might have something for you.'

'This isn't what I came to hear, Bernie.'

'It's all the people I have to see.'

'You wouldn't be stringing me along?'

'No way. Wednesday, then. And Mr D…'

'Yep?'

'I've run through my expenses.'

He got twenty more.

Next morning, appallingly early, Peter Diamond's lie-in after a night of little sleep was disturbed by a heavy vehicle drawing up outside the house, followed by a voice issuing orders. He would have sworn and turned over in bed if the voice had not been pitched so low that it was obvious something underhand was going on. He groaned, sat up, shuffled to the bedroom window, and was amazed to see men in police-issue Kevlar body armour scrambling out of the back of a van. Two of them carried an enforcer, the 'fifty-pound key' used by rapid entry teams as a battering ram. Curtis McGarvie got out of a separate car and marched up the short path to the front door.

Diamond belted downstairs in the T-shirt and shorts he slept in and flung open the door. 'What the fuck is going on?'

McGarvie raised his palms in a pacifying way. 'Stay cool, Peter. We need to make a further search.'

'Go to hell.'

'Can we speak inside?'

'You're out of your mind.'

'I'd rather not have this conversation on your doorstep.'

'What are you looking for?'

'The firearm used in the murder of your wife.'

'For crying out loud.'

'So I'm formally requesting permission to search your house and garden.'

'You can piss off, McGarvie.'

'I thought that would be your response.' He handed over a sheet of paper. 'This is your copy of a warrant issued by a magistrate last night.'

'A search warrant} This isn't happening.'

But it was. And you don't argue with a warrant unless you want your door smashed in. Diamond stepped aside, and three of the ninjas moved in. 'Why wasn't I told? You can pick up a phone.'

'Do you want it straight? I had reason to think you might dispose of the evidence.'

He was speechless.

McGarvie admitted more men, and every one avoided eye contact with Diamond. They obviously had their orders. They must have been briefed before dawn. Some went straight upstairs, others through to the kitchen.

Diamond slumped into a chair in the front room.

McGarvie told him, 'You know you have the right to ask a friend or neighbour to witness the search?'

'I don't need lecturing on my rights.'

'Don't you want to see what's going on?'

'No. This whole charade is a waste of time.'

'In that case why don't you get dressed? I'm going to take you in, whether we find anything or not.'

'You'll find sod all. You're out of order. I'll hang you out to dry for this.'

'It's all according to the book.'

'I opened the place to you before. You've been through here already.'

'That wasn't a full search.'

'God help us.' Diamond trudged upstairs and saw what he meant. Three men in the bedroom were ripping the fitted carpet from its stays. His entire wardrobe had been emptied and the clothes were on the bed. All the drawers had been removed from the chests and sideboard.

He looked out of the window. Two officers with metal detectors were at work in the garden.

He grabbed a pair of trousers and got into them.

At the nick – his own nick – they offered to call his solicitor. He said he'd done nothing wrong, so he didn't need one.

They kept him waiting over three hours.

His anger hadn't subsided. In the interview room with the tapes running he stared McGarvie out like a boxer at the weigh-in. A sergeant he'd never seen before was in the other chair. He was damned sure Georgina and most of the senior detectives were watching on video monitors.

McGarvie said in that voice like a rusty lawn mower, 'At the previous interview, you stated that you didn't possess a gun. Is that still your position?'

His thoughts flew to the empty shoebox in the loft. They couldn't have found anything. He'd gone through the place. 'Yes, it is.'

'When you served in the Met, you were an authorised shot – right?'

'We've been over this.'

'For the tape, would you confirm it?'

'I was trained to use firearms, yes.'

'Were there occasions when you were issued with a handgun?'

'Yes.'

'A Smith & Wesson revolver?'

He said with mounting unease, 'That was the standard sidearm before they switched to automatics.'

'Point three-eight?'

'You know as well as I do.'

'At Fulham, where you served, guns were issued and returned according to procedure, were they?'

'To my knowledge, yes.'

'You always returned the guns you carried?'

'Of course.' This could only be leading one way, he thought with disaster bearing down on him. How could McGarvie have learned that he acquired that gun back in the nineteen-eighties? It had been signed out and signed in again.

'Before we go on,' McGarvie said with obvious relish in prolonging this, 'I'd better give you some background. We've been in contact with the Met.'

'The Met – what for?'

'A certain Smith & Wesson revolver at Fulham – where you served – went missing in nineteen eighty-six, about the time the change to automatics took place. It hasn't been traced since.'

'Nothing to do with me.'

'You were the last to be issued with it.'

'And I bet I returned it. Always did.'

'Yes, the paperwork was in order. But after that, there's no record of the gun with that serial number.'

'Not my fault. You can't stick that on me.'

McGarvie smiled with the confidence of a player with trumps in hand. 'Procedures at Fulham in the eighties were somewhat relaxed – shall we say? It's not impossible the issuing officer made a mistake.'

'Not in my case, he didn't. You just agreed it was returned and signed in.'

'The officer in question later appeared before a disciplinary board charged with negligence. A number of weapons couldn't be accounted for. Clearly the rules were breached in some way.'

'Am I missing something here? What has this got to do with my wife's murder?'

'She was shot with a point three-eight revolver. When I questioned you before, you denied owning one. You just repeated that denial.' McGarvie's brown eyes glittered. Reaching under the desk he took out a sealed evidence bag and passed it across. 'For the purposes of the tape, I am now showing the witness exhibit D03, a police-issue point three-eight Smith & Wesson revolver recovered this morning from the garden of his house in Lower Weston.'

Diamond's voice shrilled in disbelief. 'What are you saying? You found this in my garden?'

'With some ammunition. Wrapped in a cloth in a biscuit tin buried in the vegetable patch.'

Vegetable patch? This had to mean the little plot where Steph grew tomatoes last summer. He was silent while his brain raced, trying to make sense of it.

McGarvie added, 'The serial number confirms this gun as one missing from Fulham since nineteen eighty-six. You were issued with it and apparently returned it. Do you have any explanation?'

He was up to his eyeballs now. A horrible hissing started in his ears – the old blood pressure problem threatening. After a long pause he said, 'I wasn't strictly straight with you just now. This gun has been in my possession ever since I was in the Met.'

McGarvie gave a grunt of satisfaction. 'So you lied.'

'Well-'

'You lied.'

'They were dangerous times. We had some hard men on our patch.'

'Face it, Peter.'

'You asked if I owned a gun. I don't. It's still police property.'

'Now you're playing with words.'

'Okay. I should have come clean when you asked me.'

'What stopped you?'

'Didn't want to draw you up a blind alley. All this horse-shit about the gun has nothing to do with my wife's murder.'

'Ho.' McGarvie turned to exchange a look with the sergeant beside him. 'And if it turns out to be the murder weapon…?'

'No chance. It was in the loft of my house, in a shoebox.'

'Until when?'

Another crushing uncertainty hit him.

'Don't know,' he was forced to admit. 'After you interviewed me last time, I went up to the loft to look for it, and the box was empty.'

'Is this another half-truth?'

'No.'

'Why did you need the gun?'

'For protection. If you want it straight, I was losing confidence in your investigation. I thought I might need to open up some fresh lines of inquiry.'

'With a gun in your hand? Going it alone, eh – contrary to the ACC's instructions?'

Diamond shrugged. There were more important issues now than defying Georgina.

'If the gun wasn't in the loft, who could have moved it except you or your wife?'

'I've tried to think ever since I noticed it was gone. I don't have an answer.'

'You don't have answers to much. Sure you didn't panic after we visited the house? Sure you didn't take the gun from the loft and bury it in the garden?'

'I didn't bury it'

'You didn't?'

He sighed heavily.

'Then who did? Someone trying to fit you up, I suppose?' McGarvie said with sarcasm.

'I've no idea. This is a total shock to me. Listen, if I wanted to get rid of the thing, why would I bury it in my own garden?'

'No one suggested you wanted to get rid of it. Far from it. You thought you might need it again.'

'This is unreal.'

'It isn't looking good, Peter. There's a time period on the morning of the murder when you have no alibi. You say you came into work, but no one here saw you before eleven.'

'I was in my office.'

'Keeping your head down – to quote you. Then, ten days ago, you brought in your wife's handbag.'

Incensed at the way things were being twisted, he blurted out, 'That was a responsible act.'

'In the bag was her diary with certain entries suggesting she'd been in contact with someone referred to as "T", and who – apparently – she'd arranged to meet in Victoria Park on the morning of her death.'

'Well?'

'We can't say for sure if those entries were written by your wife.'

'Jesus! Of course they were.'

'We've checked the record of phone calls made from your number. There's nothing on the fifteenth or the nineteenth. Both days are blank. There were no calls to "T".

'Doesn't mean they didn't happen.' He cast about for an explanation. 'Maybe she used the phone at work, or went out to the callbox up the street.'

'Why?'

'For privacy. Or maybe she intended to call, but "T" called her first. There won't be any record of incoming calls.'

'I think it's more likely the diary entries are forgeries. Manufactured evidence.'

'Oh, come on.'

'An attempt to deflect attention.'

'It's Steph's handwriting, for Christ's sake.'

'I wouldn't call it handwriting. Most of the entries are printed.'

'Her printing, then.'

'Easy to fake.'

Diamond gave an exasperated sigh.

McGarvie added, 'You had plenty of time to work on it'

'The diary was in the bloody handbag in the stone vase in the park.'

'That's open to question. Our search team didn't find it.'

'Because they didn't look in the right place.'

'They tell me they did.'

'They're covering their arses. Ask Warburton. He slung the bag in there.'

'He's a dipso. His memory isn't reliable.'

'He remembered enough to tell me.'

'So you say. You didn't pass the information on to us. That bag was potentially crucial evidence and you recovered it yourself, if your account is true, with no witness. Hours later, you handed it in.'

'I told you at the time, I looked at what was inside.'

'Did you write anything in the diary?'

'Did I what?'

'You heard me.'

'Oh, get away! You're losing it, McGarvie.'

McGarvie reached for the package containing the gun and drew it back across the table like a gambler who has scooped the pool. 'The next step is to have this test-fired and see if the rifling matches the bullets found at the scene.'

'You really want to stick this on me, don't you?' Diamond said. 'Have you given any thought at all as to why I would murder my wife?'

McGarvie was unfazed. 'Why would anyone murder her? She appears to have been a popular, charming, inoffensive woman. If anyone has a reason, it's you, and it's well hidden. I don't know what happened in your marriage, but it'll come out – unless you want to open up now.'

'You disgust me.'

'In my shoes, you'd think the same, Peter. The husband has to be the number-one suspect, and when he brings suspicion on himself, you act.'

A telling comment.

Diamond said bleakly, without conceding anything, 'What happens now?'

'I'll get you to write a statement about the gun. When ballistics have checked it, we can talk again. I'm not going to hold you here.'

'Am I supposed to be grateful? In the meantime, the real killer is laughing up his sleeve.'

'We're pursuing every possible lead.'

'Oh, sure.'

'Interview terminated at four twenty-six.'