Down Among the Dead Men

8

The car left the prison and headed along a deserted road towards the ferry. Georgina was still acting as if they were dealing in state secrets.

‘Are you going to fill me in?’ Diamond said.

‘First, tell me what you made of him.’

‘Pathetic. No different from the thousand other small-time crooks I’ve come across.’

‘But convincing?’

‘He tells a good story. He’s had plenty of time to work on it.’

‘You didn’t believe him?’

Staring out of the window at the bleak fields, he said, ‘I haven’t been told enough to form an opinion.’

‘You don’t have to sound so deprived, Peter. I’ll brief you fully in a moment. To be fair to Danny Stapleton, what he said to us is no different from what he was saying when he was first interviewed. He insists he’s a car thief and not a murderer. He seems to have made a living from it until the manufacturers went electronic with their security.’

‘The man Stew, the plates man — does he exist?’

‘Chichester police don’t have any record of him, but of course if he was any good they wouldn’t. The crooks in the stolen car business are very elusive.’

‘He was Stapleton’s best hope. Surely his lawyers would have pulled out all the stops to find him.’

‘I’m sure they did. And I’m sure Stew moved on and covered his tracks as soon as he heard about the arrest. He’d know it would be the end of his activities.’ Georgina seemed willing to swallow everything they’d been told in the prison.

‘Wasn’t the call Stapleton made traceable from the phone?’

‘No phone was found.’

He gave a soft laugh.

She said, ‘I expect he got rid of it when he was arrested. It was dark, remember.’

‘They searched him.’

‘He got rid of it earlier, then, at the time he made the call.’

‘But after the arrest he needed to prove he was just a car thief and not a murderer. The phone was his best hope. If he’d slung it into a field he could have told his lawyers where to look for it. That’s if he really made this call and if Stew the plates man wasn’t invented just to enrich his story.’

‘You really are a sceptic, aren’t you?’

‘From the way you’re holding out on me, ma’am, I sense that the guy must have something going in his favour.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll give it to you just as I got it from Archie Hahn last night. It was too much to hope that Stapleton’s first-hand account might spark off a few original thoughts. You’re obviously not at your best.’

He ignored the put-down. He’d had worse from Georgina.

She was in full flow. ‘The murder of the gardener, Joe Rigden, was investigated by the local CID. As you heard, there was a couple of weeks’ delay in identifying the victim, and in the initial stage of the enquiry the focus was very much on Danny Stapleton as the potential killer. The BMW was quickly reported as missing from a public car park in Arundel. The owner was a man in his eighties, very absent-minded, who frankly shouldn’t have been in charge of a wheelchair, let alone a powerful executive car. He may well have forgotten to lock it. I suppose we can be grateful that he noticed the blessed thing was missing and reported it. The car was thoroughly examined for traces of the perpetrator, of course, and various items were collected, including fingerprints and hairs, most from the owner, but several from Stapleton as well and from the victim.’

‘Wasn’t the body at the bottom of a refuse bag?’

‘An open polypropylene bag of the kind gardeners and builders use. The policewoman who opened the boot got a few strands of Rigden’s hair on her sleeve. There were also a number of additional hairs found in the interior of the car. As you may know, hair as such doesn’t contain any nuclear DNA, but the hair follicles do and hair pulled from the head is OK for testing. There is also mitochondrial DNA in the cellular debris that forms a part of the growing hair shaft.’

Georgina showing off. Diamond preferred to leave the details of forensic science to the white-coated brigade. He’d once been nominated for a course at one of the Home Office labs and had DNA written on his personal file: Did Not Attend.

Georgina cruised on: ‘Three individuals were isolated and DNA profiles obtained. Potentially this was vital evidence. Two were from males and one female. They didn’t match anything in the national database and unfortunately the owner of the car was hopeless at remembering who had recently travelled with him. However, some good detective work identified one of the males as the mechanic who had last serviced the vehicle. On investigation he was eliminated from the inquiry and the other two profiles were kept on file. After that, the body was identified as Rigden and the whole inquiry shifted to his village and the various people who used his services as a gardener.’

‘Any with a motive?’ Diamond asked.

‘Apparently not.’

‘What was he like, this gardener? Ever been in trouble?’

‘Far from it. I gather he had a spotless reputation locally. Always ready to help people out, shopping for the elderly, meals on wheels, looked after the graves in the churchyard for no reward.’

‘Except in the life to come.’

Georgina shook her head. ‘He was an agnostic. Didn’t go to church. A total abstainer from alcohol. No philandering with either sex. Financial affairs all in order after he died. Sober, clean-living and honest sums him up.’

‘Sounds a prime candidate for a shot through the head.’

‘Now you’re being cynical.’

‘People like that don’t make themselves popular.’

‘Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, no suspect was found, even though the fact that Rigden was murdered was undeniable.’

‘Did they discover where it happened?’

‘No.’

‘They must have searched his cottage for evidence of the shooting.’

‘It was all in perfect order.’

‘A perfect man living a perfect home life.’

‘Apparently so. The people whose gardens he tended all spoke highly of him.’

‘Not an easy case to crack.’

‘Stapleton was offered the prospect of a lighter sentence if he’d name the killer, but he continued to insist he had nothing to do with it. He was brought to court as an accessory and was found guilty by a majority verdict and given the mandatory life sentence. After several months, the inquiry was wound down.’

‘Until now, when someone wound it up again.’

‘Yes — and this is the unfortunate part. Recently an anonymous letter arrived at Sussex police headquarters claiming that a DNA sample obtained in 2011 from a drunk and disorderly suspect matched the profile of one of the two unknown people whose hair was found in the BMW. The senior investigating officer on the original case was informed, but no action was taken.’

‘Why not? It would have been simple enough.’

‘It wasn’t all that simple. The match was with the unknown woman.’

‘The woman?’

‘Yes, get your head around that, Peter. Two women get into a fight outside some nightclub in Portsmouth. They are arrested and held overnight. Their DNA is taken. One of them is the woman whose hair was found in the car used to transport Rigden’s corpse.’

This required a rethink. Danny Stapleton had claimed he’d seen someone driving the BMW, and from everything he’d said he’d taken them to be male. Could he have been mistaken?

‘Wearing a hoodie,’ Diamond said as much to himself as Georgina. ‘Danny didn’t get a proper look, he told us. Could have been female, I suppose. Yes, it’s easy to assume otherwise.’

‘There’s worse. The writer of the anonymous letter stated that the drunk woman was related to the senior investigating officer. She was the niece.’

A grunt of distaste came from deep in his throat. ‘A family connection. That looks bad, I have to say. Is it true?’

Georgina nodded. ‘The SIO has been suspended. The entire CID team is under suspicion of corruption. Do you understand now why it was necessary to bring us in?’

‘I understand,’ he said, ‘but I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.’