Down Among the Dead Men

19

After the trip to Slindon, Diamond decided to visit Hen. Her black mood when he’d phoned the previous evening had been all too apparent. His efforts to shake her out of it hadn’t made any difference. A face to face meeting — without Georgina looking on — might get a better result.

Up there on the third floor of her apartment block, he was surprised to find the morning’s mail sticking out of the letterbox. He rang the bell and got no answer. Shame, he thought, but maybe it’s a good sign if she’s gone out.

Then he noticed some freshly splintered wood close to the latch. The door had been forced. At a push it swung open.

A chill spread through him.

Inside the small flat, he called her name.

Nobody answered.

The curtains were still drawn in the living room. There was no obvious sign of a burglary. His heart pounding, he stepped to a door at the end and crossed a small passage to the bedroom.

Drawn curtains again. He reached for the light switch.

Hen wasn’t there. The duvet was half off the bed. On the bedside cupboard were an empty bottle of vodka, a glass tumbler and a used blister pack that had contained prescription capsules. He snatched it up.

Temazepam.

‘Hen, what have you done?’ he said aloud. ‘Crazy.’

On his way out he was met by a woman with shopping bags.

She said, ‘Did you want Hen? I live next door.’

‘What happened?’

‘She was taken off in an ambulance in the middle of the night. They had to break in. It woke us all up. She’s been awfully down, poor darling. I think she lost her job.’

‘Where will they have taken her?’

‘St Richard’s. That’s the nearest.’

‘Is that Chichester?’

‘It’s the main hospital. Off Spitalfields Lane.’

‘I’ll find it.’

He’d sent the police driver on his way, but he stopped a taxi in the Hornet and was at A&E reception inside ten minutes.

His ID didn’t get him any favours. The receptionist confirmed that Hen had been brought in as an emergency during the night and he was told to wait with all the others.

Things have to be serious when the medics bar the police from going in.

With his own blood pressure rising to dangerous levels, he took his place in a crowded seating area among people in various states of unease and distress. A half hour soon passed. At one point his phone went and he got disapproving looks. He went outside with it and saw that the call was from Georgina. He wasn’t ready to talk to his supremo about what Hen may or may not have done, so he switched off and returned to the waiting area.

He’d never understood why people topped themselves. Even in his darkest crisis after Steph’s death, he’d not contemplated that way out. But you can’t get inside people’s minds. Depression is an illness. It’s futile to judge.

A new face was now behind the reception desk, so he had another try at explaining why he was there. He was told firmly to return to his seat. Twenty more palm-sweating minutes went by before his name was called.

‘Are you Henrietta Mallin’s partner?’

‘Partner? No. I don’t think she has a partner.’

‘Next of kin?’

‘No.’

‘Then why are you here?’

Fair question, but he took it as an attack and snapped back, ‘I keep telling you people. She’s a police officer and so am I.’ He brandished his ID again. ‘I’m also a friend. I know her personally, is that good enough?’

She held up a finger. ‘We’re all under pressure here, sir. Let’s not give way to it. Henrietta has been admitted. She’s had some treatment and she’s no longer critical, but she needs time here to recover. She’s waiting for a bed now. You can go through and see her if you wish.’

Of course he wished. He’d been waiting almost an hour.

As he turned from the desk he heard the nurse say, ‘She’s probably sedated and if she isn’t she’ll seem that way.’

He found Hen on a trolley in the corridor, her head bandaged. She opened her eyes when he spoke her name.

After a moment’s uncertainty, she said, ‘Hell’s bells.’

‘It’s me,’ he said, ‘Peter Diamond.’

‘I can see who you are, dingbat. I was expecting another wet-behind-the-ears doctor. How did you...?’

‘Never mind me. What happened? Did you fall?’

She screwed up her face. ‘Don’t ask.’

‘I’ve been to your flat,’ he said. ‘I was able to walk in. The paramedics had to break in.’

‘I was on the vodka — nuff said?’ Hen in confessional mode again.

‘You were depressed.’

‘I’m not exactly jumping for joy right now.’

‘We’ve all had a few drinks in our time.’

‘Thought in my own home I could do as I liked. Woke up, needed the bathroom, stepped out in the dark and straight into a bookshelf. Hit my head and saw stars. It bled a bit. I thought I was all right and then I passed out. Tried standing up and it happened again, so next time I came round I crawled to the phone and called the ambulance. I don’t remember much about it.’

‘You did the right thing. You can’t take chances with head wounds.’

‘They say I’ll survive. Brute of a headache. I don’t know if it’s a hangover or the bonk on the conk. They insist I spend some time in a recovery ward. Help me up, Pete. I want to be out of here now.’

‘Take their advice. They won’t keep you any longer than necessary.’

‘I’m dying for a smoke. You don’t happen to...?’

‘This is a hospital, Hen.’

‘You could push this damned trolley outside.’

‘No.’

‘What a mess.’

‘Did something else happen — or is it the situation you’re in?’

‘There’s that, of course, and Joss.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘And there’s Danny Stapleton. He was on my mind after you and the she-wolf came to visit. To be honest, I hadn’t thought much about him in recent years. Out of sight, out of mind. I have to face the possibility that it wasn’t a pack of lies he gave me about how he came into possession of that stolen BMW. I could have put him away mistakenly for a life stretch and I feel wretched about it, thinking of him in jail all this time.’

‘If it was a mistake, it was a reasonable one,’ he said. ‘It convinced a judge and jury. We know Danny is a crook.’

‘A small-time crook. You saw him in Parkhurst and he stands by his story after all this time.’

‘Hen, I listened to him and he makes it sound plausible, but I was left in two minds. He’ll say whatever he can to get another hearing. Any prisoner will.’

‘I know, but as things are turning out, he could be on the level. He’s on my conscience and it’s doing my head in. That’s why I took to the bottle last night.’

‘The bottle — and the sleeping tablets.’

She blinked and looked more alert. ‘Pete, I wasn’t trying to kill myself, if that’s what you think — else why would I have called the ambulance?’

‘You didn’t let them in.’

‘You’re right. I don’t remember. I must have passed out again. You know what I hit my head on?’

‘You told me — a bookshelf.’

‘It’s the one in the passage outside the bathroom. My Agatha Christie paperbacks.’

‘The Queen of Crime strikes again.’

A nurse and a porter arrived and told Hen they were moving her to the ward. She tried to sit up, said she was ready to leave, but they insisted she remained and Diamond gave the nurse his backing.

‘I’ll keep her company and when you say she’s OK to go home I’ll call a taxi and go with her.’

‘You don’t have to talk about me as if I’m a pet rabbit,’ Hen said. ‘I can hear you. I’m fine now. I’ll be all right.’

But she wasn’t believed.

He passed twenty minutes seated beside the bed drinking lukewarm tea in a ward full of old ladies who stared at him.

Hen said, ‘Where’s the dragon?’

‘Georgina? Still at the nick, I hope.’

‘My nick?’

‘That’s where I sent her this morning.’

‘You sent her?’

‘I went to see the Reverend Conybeare and I didn’t want her muscling in. She’s sniffing out a possible conspiracy in your CID.’

She shifted herself higher on the pillow. ‘Go on.’

‘The search for Joss. I suggested they might be soft-pedalling.’

‘God, I hope not. Why would they do that?’

‘Out of loyalty to you.’

‘I don’t follow you. I don’t want any soft-pedalling. I want Joss found as soon as possible, the same as everyone else. Her family are going spare with worry. We all are.’

‘I know — and it won’t hurt for Georgina to crack the whip.’

‘You’d better watch it, chummy. She’s not daft. She’ll rumble you.’

‘She often does.’

‘I don’t know how you stand it, Peter. I lost my cool with her, as you saw.’

‘Practice. Georgina and I understand each other. In fact, I’ve got to know her a lot better since we came on this trip. I discovered she has a soft underbelly.’

The crossed swords of the Victory Arch in Baghdad were no higher than Hen’s eyebrows. ‘The mind boggles.’

‘Oh, come on,’ he said. ‘A weak point. Insecurity.’

‘I get you. Which you will now exploit.’

‘I doubt if I will, but I can read her better.’

Now Hen’s mouth curved at the ends. ‘After all this time I do believe you’re starting to understand the female psyche.’

‘No chance.’

Each was silent for a while. Another patient on a trolley was wheeled past.

‘So did you learn anything new from the sky pilot?’

‘Conybeare? Well, you didn’t tell me he’s a member of the Magic Circle.’

‘Why would you want to know? What the vicar does in his spare time doesn’t have any bearing on the murder.’

‘Ah, but it told me something interesting about the victim, Joe Rigden. He didn’t approve.’

‘Of the conjuring? How come?’

‘For some reason it touched a raw nerve. There was an occasion when Conybeare performed a little trick, snapped his fingers and produced a bunch of flowers. They were only paper, but they unsettled Rigden so much that he slung them aside “like a piece of waste,” according to the vicar.’

‘Why? It was just a bit of fun.’

‘His explanation is that Rigden liked his world solid and real. For the same reason he didn’t have any time for religion — which you would think made problems for their friendship, but they seemed to respect each other’s point of view.’

Hen shook her head. ‘Peter, I don’t know how you do it. You have this knack of rooting out information that goes over my head.’

‘Well, you’re only four foot something.’

‘Bloody cheek.’

He became serious again. ‘The same raw nerve twitched the last time the two of them were together. Rigden used to give the rector a lift into Chichester on a Sunday when there wasn’t a service in the church at Slindon. The day before the murder, they had a strong argument on the way home. Conybeare didn’t want to tell me anything about it. I had to prise the story out of him. He’d been listening to a sermon about one of the miracles in the New Testament, the widow’s son who is raised from the dead. Rigden said there was probably a rational explanation.’

‘Talk about a raw nerve,’ Hen said. ‘I should think that was a problem for the reverend.’

‘Exactly — and it was. He felt bound to defend the story and miracles in general and Rigden got very angry and when they parted at the end of the ride, they were both feeling frayed. It shows Rigden’s state of mind was edgy not long before he was killed. Everyone speaks of him as a nice, obliging guy, almost saintly, yet here was a topic that got him rattled.’

‘No sense of proportion.’

‘You could put it that way. Whatever it was, I can see how it may have got him into trouble.’

‘You’re not suggesting Conybeare shot Rigden?’

‘No. Like you, I’ve racked my brains for a reason why such a well-regarded bloke was murdered. Thanks to the vicar I now know there was a different side to him. Call it obstinate, or bloody-minded, he gave no ground when he felt the issue mattered.’

‘I can see that, but I can’t see how it helps unless the killer was an evangelist or a magician.’

He nodded. ‘I agree it’s not much to go on.’

A nurse came by and said to Diamond, ‘Don’t overtax her. She’s supposed to be resting her brain.’

He waited until the nurse was halfway up the ward and said, ‘One more question, then. Did you interview each of the people Rigden worked for?’

‘Every one,’ Hen said. ‘No conjurers and no clergymen, I’m afraid.’

‘How many?’

‘That’s two.’

He frowned. She’d lost him. ‘Two employers?’

‘Two questions. You said you would only ask one more. From memory, he worked in seven different gardens.’ Hen’s power of recall seemed to be unaffected by the injury.

‘So which was the last he worked in?’

‘It belonged to Mrs Shah, an Asian lady who has since died.’

‘Of natural causes, I hope.’

‘She was almost a hundred, poor old duck. She lived some miles from his place.’

‘Alone?’

‘That generation are very independent. According to Joe’s Filofax, he was due there the day he was murdered, the Monday.’

‘And did he come? Did the old lady confirm it?’

‘No chance. She hadn’t the foggiest. She never left the house. She relied on the phone and direct debits for all her needs. Joe would turn up and do the work, whatever he decided needed doing, and never see her.’

‘You must have checked the garden.’

‘I’m not a total beginner, Pete.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘Big enough to be called an estate in my opinion. There’s a wild section, an orchard, several lawns. We searched for evidence of the shooting and found nothing. Dragged the pond. The job took several days.’

‘Did you find where he’d been working?’

‘Even that was uncertain. The lawns weren’t cut recently and the mower was in the garden shed along with a load of other equipment and the old padded jacket he used when the weather was cold.’

‘He could have been weeding or pruning. This was September and gardens are still growing at that time of year.’

‘I’m aware of that, ducky. If you take a trip there, you’ll see what I mean, but don’t expect to find anything.’

A young woman doctor came by and checked Hen’s condition. ‘She should be all right to travel now,’ she told Diamond. ‘Did you bring her day clothes?’

‘Er... no.’

‘She’s in a hospital gown. She can’t leave like that.’

‘I came in a pink-striped nightie,’ Hen said.

‘They’ll bring it presently,’ the doctor said and turned to Diamond again. ‘You can help her on with it.’

‘Probably not,’ he said. ‘She might not welcome that.’

Hen said softly, ‘Coward.’

From the doctor he got a look that said he was no gentleman and might well have been responsible for Hen’s injury.

When the nightdress arrived and the curtains around the bed were being drawn, Diamond muttered something about calling a taxi and quit the ward at speed.

When he eventually got back to the hotel, it was after seven. He hadn’t been in his room two minutes before the phone rang.

‘There you are at last,’ Georgina said in a voice drained of all tolerance. ‘I’ve been trying to reach you on your mobile all afternoon. Was it switched off?’

He could so easily have said he’d been on hospital premises and was keeping to their rules about phones, but he didn’t want Georgina knowing of Hen’s misadventure and putting the worst possible construction on it.

‘Funny. I’ll check.’ He let a few seconds pass before saying, ‘Ah, you’re quite right. It was switched off. Sometimes I wonder if there are gremlins in this damn thing. You didn’t need me urgently, I hope?’

‘Fat use if I had,’ she said. ‘Come to my room and tell me what you learned from the Reverend Conybeare. And I want to know what else you’ve been up to. You can’t have spent all day at his cottage.’

‘Can you give me twenty minutes? I was about to take a shower.’ Enough time, he hoped, to dream up some story that would satisfy her.

After giving a detailed account of the Conybeare interview, he made a firm attempt to switch roles and invite Georgina to summarise her day. She was having none of it.

‘You haven’t told me where you were all afternoon.’

He’d told a few untruths in his time, but experience had taught him to stay as close to the facts as possible without actually revealing all. ‘Not much to do in Slindon,’ he said. ‘I came back here and told the driver he wouldn’t be needed again. I thought about joining you at the nick and then decided against it. You don’t need me hanging on your coattails. So I went out again. Fresh air and exercise to get the brain working. We haven’t had a case conference since we got here, so I held my own, so to speak, reviewing what we’ve done and discovered.’

She said with suspicion, ‘Where was this — in some pub?’

‘No, no. I needed a clear head. Do you know Spitalfields Lane?’ He was confident she didn’t. ‘That’s where I ended up, if you want to know.’

‘And did you come to any startling conclusion?’

‘Startling? No.’

‘But you thought of something important?’

‘Maybe.’ Anything to steer Georgina away from how he’d passed the afternoon. ‘I was thinking of Danny Singleton and his story about the stolen BMW. Let’s suppose it really happened just as he described: the car arriving outside the pub where he was and by good luck being the make his gizmo would unlock. I was asking myself why the car containing the body was parked in that particular spot in Littlehampton. The person wearing the hooded jacket got out and walked away across the bridge, right?’

‘That’s Danny’s story — which has to be taken with more than a pinch of salt.’

‘Let’s go with it for a moment. The hoodie wouldn’t run the risk of leaving the car there and later returning. He’d leave it there because—’

‘She would leave it there,’ Georgina said. ‘We’re thinking Joss was the hoodie because her DNA was found in the car.’

‘OK. Joss would leave it there because those were her instructions. There was an arrangement. After dark the body would be removed from the car by whoever it is who has been disposing of these missing persons. That was the plan. But Danny messed it up by stealing the car and driving off, unaware of what was in the boot.’

Georgina leaned forward. ‘Peter, this is clever. I think you’re on to something. I hadn’t linked this case to the missing persons.’

‘And if I’m right, we now have an insight into the method used.’

‘How is that?’

‘The location. The bodies are brought to this quiet spot by the river—’

‘And dropped off the bridge?’

He was about to say, ‘Nothing so crude,’ and he stopped himself. ‘It has to be smarter than that. My guess is that they’re transferred to a boat and taken out to sea, probably weighted down and dropped overboard somewhere in coastal waters. The disposer — if we call him that — would make damn sure they’d stay submerged.’

‘And officially they remain as missing persons. It answers a lot of the questions. Do you think it’s still going on, leaving the bodies at Littlehampton?’

‘Going on, yes, but I doubt if the location is the same. The Rigden case will have required a rethink. But from what we hear, people are still going missing all along the south coast.’

Georgina clearly liked what she’d heard. ‘No one in Chichester CID has thought of this.’

‘It’s just a theory,’ Diamond said.

‘But not obvious. If you and I can find Joe Rigden’s killer, we’re more than halfway to collaring the ghoul who is making so many bodies disappear without trace.’

‘Or there’s another way of looking at it.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Catch the ghoul first and he can lead us to our killer.’

She shook her head. ‘Far too difficult. He could be anywhere along the coast.’

‘He’s known to the people who use his services, else how would they contact him?’

‘Peter, I’m impressed. You’ve really thought this through. It wasn’t a day wasted.’

Here was a perfect opening ‘And how was your day, Georgina?’

This casual use of her name gave her a jolt. It practically gave her whiplash. Earlier on the trip she’d invited the liberty, but she hadn’t expected him to take it up. ‘My day?’ she eventually managed to say. ‘I was at the police station. I banged a few heads together, but basically they’re doing all they can. Soft-pedalling? I wouldn’t say so. Finding Joss is their priority and they’ve done all the right things, issued photos to the media, given a press conference, followed up on every lead.’

‘But no success?’

‘It’s not for want of trying.’

‘So DI Montacute can’t be faulted?’

‘He’s not the easiest person to get on with, but I’m used to dealing with awkward detectives.’

Diamond grinned.

‘However,’ Georgina went on, ‘I’m a little concerned about something that happened towards the end of the afternoon. It could so easily distract them. Well, it must, to some extent.’

He waited for her to go on.

‘In my opinion, it’s scarcely a CID matter at all. We deal with things like this all the time.’

‘Like what?’

‘A schoolgirl whose parents don’t know where she is. You and I know there’s nothing to get excited about when a teenager goes off the rails. In ninety-nine per cent of the cases they come back.’

His interest quickened. ‘Which school?’

‘Priory Park. She’s only been missing a few hours.’

‘Did you catch the name?’

‘Melanie Mason. Everyone calls her Mel.’