Diamond Dust

3

By morning the scratches on his face had darkened and were more obvious. He checked them in the car mirror on the way to work, in a line of traffic on the Upper Bristol Road. No sense in kidding himself people wouldn't notice. Nobody at the nick would be bold enough to ask how they'd got there, but he was damned sure the place would hum with gossip. His team would have noticed he hadn't turned up at the pub, of course. 'I had to go to another scene,' he'd tell them without saying that the other scene was his home.

He had this bullish reputation that shielded him from comments on his appearance, but inwardly he was more self-conscious than anyone realised. So he entered the nick by the back door, went straight upstairs to his office and closed the door. No one came in.

Just after eleven he was summoned upstairs to Georgina's lair. Georgina Dallymore, the Assistant Chief Constable, gave the scratches a look and may even have winced a little, but made no reference to them when she gestured to him to sit down. 'So one of the Carpenters is off the streets now. Nice work, Peter.'

'Don't know how long for.'

'Yes, he's going to appeal. His solicitor said so on TV.'

'Did he? I didn't watch the box last night.'

'His friends outside the court made a lot of noise.'

'Rentamob, ma'am.'

Georgina picked up a pen and scrutinised it as if the writing on the side held some important message. 'They're a dangerous family, Peter. I wish we had something major on the other two.'

'Des and Danny? No chance,' Diamond said. 'They don't soil their hands.'

'It's all contracted out, you mean?'

He nodded. 'The only reason we got Jake was that he let this girl become a personal issue.'

'He's not the smartest of the brothers, then?'

'Smart enough to live in a swish pad in its own grounds in Clifton – until yesterday.'

She examined the pen again. 'What will they do now? Regroup?'

'I expect so. Vice, or Drugs, have better tabs on the empire than I do.' He sensed, as he spoke, that he was walking into something, and Georgina's eyes confirmed it.

'Right on,' she said. 'It's organised crime.' She leaned forward a little and her eyes had a missionary gleam. 'You'd be good at that – detecting it, I mean.'

He reminded her guardedly, 'I'm your murder man, ma'am.'

'And a very effective one. But there are times, like now, when all we have on the books are the tough cases from years back that nobody ever got near to solving.'

'Doesn't mean we give up on them.' He didn't like the drift of this one bit.

'I'm thinking your skills might be better employed elsewhere, particularly as you know a lot more about the Carpenter family now.'

Elsewhere? He looked away, out of the window, across the grey tiled roofs towards Lansdown. There was an awkward silence.

'You might need to work out of Bristol Central, but it's not like moving house. What is it – under an hour's drive from where you live?'

He waited a long time before saying, 'Is this an order, ma'am?'

'It's about being flexible.'

"Well, you're talking to the wrong man. I'm not flexible. Never have been. I'm focused.'

Georgina's voice took on a harder note. 'Focus on the Carpenters, then. Yes, it is an order – while nothing new comes up on the murder front. Liaise with Mike Solly and George Eldon. Get an oversight of the entire operation – drugs, prostitution, protection. Put a surveillance team together if you want. This is the time to strike, Peter. They've lost Jake, so they have to put their heads above ground.'

'Have you finished?'

'Careful what you say,' Georgina warned him.

'That's someone else's empire. Not mine.'

'I've issued an order.'

'You want me out of Bath – is that it?' The old demons raged in his head, savaging any good intentions that might have lingered there. He hadn't felt so angry since the day he'd faced another Assistant Chief Constable in this room and resigned from the Force.

'It's not personal. It's about effective management.'

'Effective?' He threw the word back at her.

'I think you'd better get out.'

'Piss off.'

'How dare you!'

'I'm just summing up what you said to me. You've got no use for me here, so you want me to piss off to Bristol.' He turned and walked.

Down in his own office, he stood shaking his head, getting a grip on his emotions. Organised crime had nothing to do with this, he believed. Georgina wanted him out. While he'd been tied up with the court case she'd been plotting his removal. Wrongly, she thought he couldn't take orders from a woman. She didn't understand that he didn't let anybody push him around. No doubt she planned to put some pussycat in his place. John Wigfull was out of hospital and supposed to be returning to work any time. Bloody Wigfull would fit in beautifully: the Open University graduate who did everything by the book, never raised his voice and kept his desk as tidy as a church altar. Yes, she'd love to upgrade Wigfull to head of the murder squad.

He spent the next hour with his door closed, looking at the paper mountain on his desk, the filing cabinets that wouldn't close and the stacks of paper on the floor. Was it admitting defeat to tidy up? Wasn't it better to leave everything as it was, just to demonstrate that he'd be back?

He didn't go to the canteen for his usual coffee. And they had the sense not to disturb him.

At lunchtime he got out of the place for a walk, not towards the Abbey Churchyard, where he sometimes went when life had dealt him a wicked hand, but round the back of the railway station, across Widcombe Bridge and along the bank of the Avon as far as Pulteney Bridge -as dull a stretch of river as any he knew. Whenever he told people where he lived, they said how lucky he was, but in truth he wasn't attracted to the postcard scenes of Bath. The stately buildings, the rich history, the setting among green hills didn't excite him. He would have been just as content to work in Bristol if he'd been posted there six years ago. But he hadn't. Stuffy old Bath was his patch. He was in tune with it now. That was why he resented Georgina's attempt to move him.

He picked up a 'ploughman's' baguette – a contradiction, in his opinion – and a can of beer and sat on a bench in Parade Gardens. By now his rebellious thoughts were being toned down. He was starting to accept the inevitability of obeying orders. Georgina hadn't proposed a permanent move to Bristol Central. The best tactic was to let everyone know this was a short-term investigation. He'd make a point of calling in most days at Manvers Street and keeping track of what was going on there.

Still far from satisfied, he ambled back to the nick without any urgency. After all, nobody could expect him to drop everything and beetle off to Bristol the same day.

There was a sense of important things going on when he walked through the door.

'Mr Diamond, there you are,' the desk sergeant called across the room.

'Something up?'

'A shooting in Victoria Park. A woman is dead.'

His spirits soared. Bad news for someone could be a lifeline for him. 'Suicide?'

'Apparently not'

'So who's dealing with it?'

'DI Halliwell.'

Keith Halliwell was his deputy, and well capable of sussing out the scene. 'Even so, I think I'll take a look,' he said as calmly as if a rainbow had appeared over the city. 'Which part of the park?'

'Crescent Gardens. Down at the bottom, back of the Charlotte Street Car Park.'

On his way through the building he thought about leaving a message for Georgina – just to rub in the fact that sudden deaths did occur in Bath – and then decided against it. First, he'd find out for himself what this shooting amounted to. It could be one of those incidents that get cleared up the same day.

Please God, no.

The Royal Victoria Park, on sloping ground to the west of the city, is in effect two parks, one rather gracious, with lawns descending to a wooded area providing the Royal Crescent with its leafy view; and the other, larger and containing the Botanic Gardens, a fishpond and a children's playground overlooking the gasworks. They are bisected by Marlborough Buildings and its long gardens. The shooting had happened in the gracious part, near the bandstand on the south fringe of the park below the Crescent.

They had sealed off the scene with police tape. The inevitable gawpers had gathered at the margin, but helpfully the trees screened the place from the car park.

The scene-of-crime lads – with at least one lass – in their white zipper overalls were already at work. Halliwell was standing with the constable guarding the access path. Spotting Diamond, he came over to meet him, rubbing his hands.

'We're back in business, guv.'

'What do we know?'

'Middle-aged woman, shot twice in the head at close range. No sign of the weapon.'

'Apart from two holes in her head.'

Halliwell grinned. 'Well, I guess that counts as a sign.'

'Let's have a look, then.'

Halliwell led the way to where the SOCOs were combing the ground for traces of the crime. The corpse was covered with a white plastic sheet.

'Who found her?' Diamond asked.

'A Mr Warburton, walking his dog. About ten-twenty this morning he heard the shots and came over.'

'Did he see the killer?'

'No. Too far away. He was up the hill, not far from the Crescent. When he got here, there was just the woman lying dead.'

'Other people must have heard it. Well into the morning. People are about. The car park would have been filling up.'

'Yes, but he was the only one who bothered to check.'

Diamond didn't question this. The common reaction to the sound of shooting isn't to go and investigate. Most people dismiss it as a car backfiring. If they know it's a gun they head in the opposite direction. He stood over the covered corpse. 'What am I waiting for – someone to introduce us?'

Halliwell stooped and lifted the sheet from the head.

Diamond ran an experienced glance over the blanched face, one blood-red hole almost exactly in the centre of the forehead and another in front of the left ear. Then he stared. His skin prickled and his muscles went rigid as if volts were passing through them.

From deep in his throat came a sound more like a vomit than distress. He sank to his knees and snatched back the plastic sheet and looked at the woman's clothes. No question: she was wearing the black Burberry raincoat she'd bought from Jolly's last summer and the blue silk square he'd given her on her last birthday. He fingered a strand of her hair and it felt like straw. 'It's Steph,' he said, gagging on the words. 'The bastards have shot my wife.'