Down Among the Dead Men

10

They returned to Chichester to read the file on the Joe Rigden murder. It couldn’t be shirked. Georgina’s knowledge was second-hand — from her college friend, Archie Hahn, in that moonlit stroll along West Wittering beach — and Diamond’s was third-hand. He hated being underinformed. The original witness statements would give them both a better grasp. Georgina saw the sense in it. And there was another factor neither of them mentioned: they were at screaming point from being together so long.

In the circumstances, they didn’t expect a warm welcome at the police station and it wasn’t given.

‘We were warned to expect you,’ the desk sergeant said as if they were the flu virus. ‘I’ll tell them in CID.’

They were kept waiting ten minutes. ‘This isn’t good enough,’ Georgina said loudly enough to be heard.

A young woman in plain clothes finally appeared and asked to see their IDs.

‘We already produced them,’ Georgina said. ‘Who are you?’

‘Pat Gomez.’

‘Pat Gomez, ma’am. And we don’t need to know your given name. Rank?’

‘I’m on the civilian staff, ma’am.’

Pat Gomez showed them upstairs into a CID office not unlike their own in Bath except that the faces looking up from computer screens might just have sucked lemons.

‘Who’s in charge here?’

Pat Gomez pointed to an open door.

They crossed the room and stepped inside. The bearded man on the phone behind the large desk continued talking into it and didn’t even make eye contact.

‘This is too much,’ Georgina told Diamond.

‘I wouldn’t make an issue of it, ma’am.’ Hearing a click from her tongue, he remembered too late that for him, at least, ‘ma’am’ was no longer protocol. Instead of calming her down, he’d added to her annoyance.

Georgina looked to be on the point of snatching that phone and jumping on it.

The call came to an end. ‘We’re short-staffed and busy,’ the bearded man said. ‘I take it you’re the Bath contingent.’

‘And what are you?’ Georgina asked as if he was the lowest level of pond life.

‘DI Montacute, currently running this department as a stopgap.’

‘Standing in for the DCI?’

‘Regrettably, yes.’

Georgina made a performance of introducing herself and Diamond. All it lacked was a twenty-one-gun salute. ‘So in future when you speak to me, I expect to be addressed as “ma’am”. We’ll begin by examining the file on the Rigden murder from 2007.’

‘I’ll see if it’s available... ma’am.’

‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

‘It’s been in Malling House for some weeks.’

‘Where on earth is that?’

‘Lewes. Sussex police headquarters. They took the decisions over this. Actually we must have made a photocopy before sending it off.’ He spoke into an intercom, then nodded. ‘No problem. The original is back.’

Georgina said they would need the spare copy as well. They were offered the use of a stationery store as their base. She was outraged.

‘Haven’t you got anything better than that?’

Montacute shook his head. ‘Like I said, ma’am, we’re fully stretched. The briefing room is doubling up as an incident room for a murder inquiry and the interview rooms are constantly in use. It’s been non-stop for weeks.’

They were shown the storeroom. Chairs could be brought in, they were told, and more space created by restacking boxes of envelopes. Georgina wasn’t having it. ‘There isn’t even a window,’ she said to Diamond. ‘It’s a glorified cupboard, that’s all it is. We’re being treated as pariahs because of what we’re here for. I don’t accept all this talk of being run off their feet. Have a look round and find us somewhere more suitable.’

He didn’t fancy touring the corridors opening doors, so he had a quiet word with a uniformed sergeant he saw coming up the stairs. There really was pressure on rooms, he learned. A spate of serious crimes in recent weeks meant that resources were stretched to the limit.

‘Leave it to me,’ Georgina said, when told. She was in no mood to cave in.

She marched into Montacute’s office. ‘Are you overseeing the murder investigation as well?’

‘I’m not the SIO, ma’am, but I see it as my responsibility to keep up with it, if that’s what you’re asking.’

‘As well as these other serious crimes I’m hearing about?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Multitasking?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘In that case, you can’t be sitting behind a desk all day. That’s no way to keep up.’

‘Oh I’m on my feet a lot, ma’am. Anyone here will vouch for that.’

‘As I thought. You’re peripatetic. This office is under-used. We’ll move a couple of extra desks in and make this our base.’

‘You can’t do that.’

‘Of course we can’t. I wasn’t speaking literally. Get a couple of your team to shift the furniture. If you’ve got a problem with it, speak to Commander Hahn at headquarters. He’ll want us treated right. We’re doing you people a favour, coming here and taking on your little local difficulty. We’d like tea and biscuits as well.’

Georgina at her unstoppable best. Diamond almost felt proud.

They didn’t take long to get installed. DI Montacute cleared his desk without another word and migrated somewhere else. Tactfully they avoided asking if it was the stationery store.

The desk beside the window with the view of the canal basin was claimed by Georgina. Diamond would be facing a wall on the far side of the room, but he didn’t mind.

the case file and its duplicate were wheeled in on a trolley by Pat Gomez while they were finishing their tea. CID work had still been largely supported by paper records back in 2007. Diamond was given the bulkier of the two — three box-files of material — and it turned out to be the original. Enough reading to take care of the rest of this day and the next. Fortunately, whoever had dealt with all the documents had done an excellent job of arranging them by date and indexing them. Occurrence reports, witness statements, diagrams, photos, everything was so methodically sorted that you could be forgiven for thinking the case was solved and the killer sent down.

He supposed he should have started with the earliest stuff and worked through, but he couldn’t resist looking at the most recent. Right on top was a handwritten note that caught his attention because it was headed ACC Dallymore, Avon & Somerset. It was on Sussex police headquarters notepaper.

A note for Georgina?

No, it was about Georgina.

Unlike everything else, it wasn’t referenced or indexed. Someone must have received this private note and carelessly left it in the box. The paper looked and felt fresh, as if it had been written recently.

He glanced over his shoulder at Georgina. She had her glasses on and was already reading.

If the note had been written at headquarters in the last few days, it wouldn’t be among the papers in front of her — which was just as well.

It was initialled in ink, AH. With friends like Archie Hahn, who needs enemies?

Diamond folded the note and put it in his pocket. He hadn’t often felt sympathy for Georgina, but he did over this. She must never see it.

He couldn’t fault the character sketch, but, as written down by her supposed old chum, it was a betrayal. If anything more damaging did emerge, he would make damn sure it wasn’t missed or buried. The one point that intrigued him was the last. Why was a woman the ideal choice? Pure prejudice? The idea that women were put on this earth to rock the cradle and never to rock the boat?

Grinding his teeth, he turned to the earliest material, the statements by the officers who had stopped the stolen BMW that September evening in 2007 and found the body in the boot. Their accounts chimed with what he had learned from Georgina and Danny Stapleton himself.

One of the statements added:

A signed statement from Danny the next day struck a different note, starting with the admission that he had lied to the arresting officers. He now claimed that half an hour before his arrest he had stolen the car from River Road in Littlehampton using an electronic jammer and a key programmer.

The wording was unmistakable police-speak, but there was nothing sinister in that if the facts were essentially true and Danny had checked them and signed the thing. Faced with a statement form, many witnesses suffer from writer’s block and need prompting.

Usefully, the next page was a transcript of the taped interview and Danny’s authentic voice came through:

Q. Why did you lie about the money?

A. I was bricking it, wasn’t I?

Q. Scared? Scared of what would happen when the boot was opened?

A. No, mate. I didn’t know about that.

Q. You’re lying again, aren’t you? You knew the body was in there because you put it there. You were in deep trouble. That’s what scared you.

A. Honest, I was as shocked as they was.

Q. You were shocked at being caught red-handed. You’d already shot the man through the head and robbed him. Then you had to get rid of the body, so you stole the BMW in Arundel—

A. Arundel? Did you say Arundel? No, you’re wrong there. It was LA.

Q. Danny, this isn’t funny. A man has been murdered.

A. LA — Littlehampton.

Q. The murder took place in Littlehampton? Is that what you’re telling us?

A. No, that’s where I nicked the car.

Q. Untrue. You’ve got to do better than this. It was definitely taken from the Mill Road car park in Arundel, opposite the castle.

A. Wrong. I know where I was.

Q. The car was reported stolen from Arundel. It’s a fact. It’s on record. That’s why you were stopped.

A. Now you’re confusing me.

Q. If you tell lies, you’re going to get caught out. Let’s have the truth of it.

A. I’m giving it to you. I don’t understand what you’re on about.

Q. Murder, that’s what we’re on about. When you were stopped you were on your way to dump the body somewhere. Where were you taking it — the reservoir at Westhampnett? You were heading that way.

A. I wouldn’t do that.

Q. You had other plans? Were you just going to leave it somewhere in the stolen car and hope it wouldn’t be traced to you?

A. Jesus Christ, I’m saying I never killed this geezer. You got to believe me. I never touched him.

Q. You touched his money. Your prints are all over it. And you might as well know your prints are on the sack the body was wrapped in.

A. Oh shit. (Long pause.) That’s because the cops in the car told me to drag the sack to the front of the boot so they could see who it was.

Q. They didn’t say anything about that in their statements. You’re at it again, aren’t you — making it up as you go along? It’s not clever, Danny. You keep tripping yourself up. Much better to front up and tell us what really happened.

A. I already told you.

Q. All that Littlehampton crap? You cooked a story up overnight to try and confuse us, but it hasn’t worked. The car was stolen from Arundel. That’s where the owner left it. All our patrols were notified the day before yesterday. You should have changed the plates.

A. I tried. I was too late.

Q. Well, that sounds like an honest admission at last.

A. I mean I was on my way to a plates man in Chichester when I was stopped. I told you about him.

Q. And we checked and there’s no one called Stew on the trading estate.

A. He’s not going to have a board with his name, is he? He’s in a dodgy trade.

Q. He isn’t there. He doesn’t exist. Just imagine trying to get this story of yours past a prosecution lawyer. He’d eat you up.

Diamond flicked through more pages and found photos of the BMW and the body in the boot. Easy to understand the horrified reactions of the officers. You stop a stolen car and routinely open the boot and are faced with a sight like this. The wound to the head looked hideous: a bullet hole in front of the left ear and an exit wound that had blown a gaping hole the other side big enough for most of the brain to have been shot away. Yet the face was unblemished. As sometimes occurs after a shooting, the victim appeared serene, eyes closed, mouth slightly open and without strain.

A set of pictures from the autopsy was included, but Diamond had seen as much as he could take.

There were also mugshots of Danny looking bewildered, mouth in a tiny o and eyebrows arching. He had a God-given talent for appearing wide-eyed and misunderstood. In the same document sleeve were some more youthful photos projecting even more innocence. They must have been taken years earlier when he was caught stealing cars. Same expression, except he’d put on weight since then.

Various forensic reports stacked up more evidence implicating Danny. The tools of his trade, the jammer and the programmer, had been found in a carrier under the passenger seat, marked with his fingerprints and DNA. He had definitely handled the banknotes and the sack the body had been contained in.

The autopsy report confirmed the obvious — that the victim had died from a gunshot close to the head. No other injuries were found.

Diamond’s grasp of events was being helped by the methodical filing by date. A full two weeks had passed before the dead man was identified. Meanwhile Danny had been in custody, charged with stealing the car. The more serious charge had waited while more evidence had been gathered.

The focus shifted to the South Downs village of Slindon after Joe Rigden was reported missing and duly confirmed as the victim. The reports showed that Rigden’s isolated cottage had been searched and photographed, but no signs of violence or a break-in were found there and none of his property seemed to be missing.

A thick sheaf of statements showed how extensive the interviewing had been in Slindon. The murdered man had been well known locally and seemed to have led a blameless life earning an honest living. His skills as a self-employed gardener were appreciated and he wasn’t short of work. Statements had been collected from the people he worked for and they read like testimonials. ‘Reliable and knowledgeable... often worked long past the time he was paid for... came in all weathers... brought his own tools... got rid of the moles that were ruining my lawn... advised me on my roses and came with me to pick the best specimens at the garden centre... I trusted him absolutely.’

Three weeks in, the detectives working on the murder had held a case review. Reading between the lines, they were frustrated by the lack of information. The investigation was hampered by the absence of any obvious motive. The early suspicions that Danny had killed for the two thousand pounds had been scaled down when it became clear that the money couldn’t have been Rigden’s. The gardener banked his earnings regularly on Saturdays and his bank statements confirmed he hadn’t made any large withdrawals in the last three years. You might have expected a self-employed man paid in cash to have salted some of it away and avoided paying tax. Not so Joe Rigden. He kept accounts and was almost unbelievably straight with the inland revenue. Even his tips were declared. There was little chance that he had a large amount of cash in his house or on his person waiting to be stolen.

A month into the investigation, Chichester CID were forced to conclude that Danny had not acted alone and was not the prime mover in the murder, but an accessory. The money appeared to have been his payment for disposing of the dead body in a way that wouldn’t connect the killer to the crime. As a professional car thief, he had been hired to steal a vehicle and either dump the body in some remote place or leave it to be discovered in the abandoned car. Unluckily for him, he had been caught.

The case against Danny as a paid accessory was always more likely to succeed than charging him as the killer. Substantial efforts were made to pinpoint the main perpetrator. Danny was repeatedly questioned and continued to deny all knowledge of the murder. He couldn’t deny being in possession of the money and being caught with the body in the stolen car. And he was a self-confessed liar.

The Crown Prosecution Service took on the case and eventually it came to trial. Reading the summary, Diamond concluded that Danny had done himself no service by pleading not guilty and denying almost everything. The judge had come to the view that this habitual criminal knew the identity of the killer and was shielding him from justice. After a summing up stressing that the killing bore all the hallmarks of professional involvement and that Danny’s part in it was for financial gain, a unanimous verdict of guilty was returned by the jury. The life sentence came with a minimum term of ten years before he could be considered for release.

If Danny’s conviction drew a line under the case, it was only a dotted line. The team were conscious that the main man was still at liberty and reviews were held periodically, but each time they came back to the unanswerable question: why would anyone want to kill a popular working man who had never been involved in anything underhand? Without a motive they were hamstrung.

‘How far have you got?’

Diamond was so immersed that he took a moment to register that Georgina had spoken. ‘Ah. I’m up to the trial.’

‘We’ve been here almost two hours. I’m starting to skip things and I shouldn’t. I say we need a break.’

‘Can’t disagree.’

‘I’ll phone Pat Gomez and ask her for some tea.’

‘Mine didn’t taste too good. I don’t know what they put in it. Fresh air would suit me better.’

‘I can see the canal basin from here,’ Georgina said. ‘People are walking there and there’s a café of some sort with tables outside.’

They found that the Canal Trust had its own shop and the tea was drinkable. Apart from a family of swans, there wasn’t much activity on the water, but the path around it was ideal for a stroll and the locals were taking advantage of a fine afternoon. A group of schoolchildren had taken over a bench. There were cyclists and anglers.

‘I’m not too impressed by these CID people,’ Georgina said. ‘Barely civil, don’t you think?’

‘I can understand how they feel, their regular boss suspended and a jerk like Montacute in charge. There were some grins when you turfed him out of the office.’

‘I missed that.’

‘And one of them must be the whistleblower. There are going to be tensions in the team.’

‘So you think the anonymous letter came from an insider?’

‘Don’t you? It was sent from here. It had to be someone in the know.’

‘I expect you’re right,’ Georgina said. ‘Yes, it would put everyone under strain.’

‘Were you shown the letter?’

She flushed a shade deeper. ‘I was told what it had to say. Brief and to the point, I gather.’

‘You haven’t seen it yourself, then?’

‘I don’t think anyone disputes the accuracy of it.’

‘The SIO’s career is at stake and we’ve been asked to investigate. I would say we have a duty to look at it.’

‘Peter, we’re not investigating the whistle-blower.’

‘That isn’t my point. This is evidence. We’d be negligent if we didn’t ask to see it.’

She sighed. ‘You’re right. I’ll speak to Archie.’ She took out her phone.

When she got through, she got up from her chair and moved away from Diamond, along the towpath. A private call.

She soon returned and said, ‘It’s being sent by messenger. We’ll get it before we leave.’

After that small victory, Diamond waited a few moments before saying, ‘Up to now I haven’t asked the name of this unfortunate SIO.’

‘That’s true.’

He waited and got nothing more and finally said, ‘Who is he, then?’

‘It’s a woman, a DCI Henrietta Mallin.’