Showstopper

24

Humiliation crushed Peter Diamond. The weight of it was overwhelming. At this low point of his career all the experience of a lifetime’s service, the cases he had solved, the killers he had brought to justice over the years, counted for nothing. He’d come here confident of a triumph and was hopelessly, ridiculously wrong.

Dr. Sealy had a grin wider than a body bag. The forensic photographer had turned his back and was shaking with mirth. Diamond, in his undignified position, his bonneted head inside the tent and the rest of him outside, bent over as if inviting someone to kick him, was at a loss.

Sealy said, “Are you going to tell them or shall I?”

He was right. They all had to be told they had been brought here on a fool’s errand — Earnshaw, the divers, Wolfgang, Halliwell, Leaman, Ingeborg and Sharp. There was no ducking who had cocked up.

Still in a state of shock, Diamond removed his head from the tent.

A cloud had covered the sun and a cool breeze blew across the marina, creating ripples he could hear lapping the sides of the moored boats.

“Sorry, people,” he said in his stricken voice. “It’s not what I expected. It’s a dead snake.”

Earnshaw said, “Speak up.”

Wolfgang said, “You can take off the mask now.”

He dragged it below his chin. “A snake.”

“What sort of snake?”

“A python, we think.”

They had to see for themselves. Diamond was practically pushed off the jetty. Only one person hadn’t moved. Keith Halliwell waited on the deck of the Daisy Belle, the boat berthed next to Deck the Halls. “You’d better look in here, guv,” Keith said. “I got a bit ahead of myself and opened up.”

Diamond had prepared himself to think of the second narrowboat as a charnel house, a murderer’s store where bodies were locked away prior to disposal in the water. He crossed the walkway and stepped on deck. The padlock was still in place. Halliwell had forced the hasp away from the wood.

He pushed the door open and went in.

The interior was so dimly lit that he had to wait a second or two for his eyes to adjust. He could hear a faint mechanical humming he took to be a fridge motor.

That much was correct. He could now make out a large cabinet freezer with the fridge beside it and shelving opposite. Above him was a double tube of strip lighting.

“There’s got to be a switch,” he said.

“Found it,” Halliwell said and flicked it on.

The entire length of the boat was revealed, taken up with huge glass tanks two metres high and twice as long, reinforced with steel. Their slatted covers appeared to work on a roller-glide system. Two stood each side of a narrow aisle. Inside each tank was a jungle in miniature, forked logs and branches projecting upwards from a ground cover of stones, ferns and broad-leaved plants.

“I think it’s called a vivarium,” Halliwell said. “He keeps snakes.”

Diamond moved along the row in silence, taking it in. At first he couldn’t see anything alive. There was no movement. In the second tank he noticed a mottled brownish green surface that wasn’t part of the log that lay across the middle.

A coiled unmoving serpent as thick as a man’s thigh.

“Can you tell the difference between a boa constrictor and a python?” Halliwell said. “I can’t, but I reckon he’s got both.”

Diamond said nothing.

“Part of his macho lifestyle, I suppose,” Halliwell went on. “I’ve never wanted to keep exotic reptiles myself. Are you okay, guv?”

Diamond said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Back on deck, he stood facing the open water and not seeing anything. At least his brain was functioning again, seeking to find some understanding of the bizarre things forced on his consciousness.

After some thought, he said, “What do they feed on — chicks and mice, isn’t it?”

“I’ve never asked.”

“He’ll keep them in the fridge.”

“I expect so. I didn’t look inside.”

“In the wild, they can go for weeks without eating and then they want something substantial. Big snakes like those are man-eaters, given a chance.”

“That’s an ugly thought, guv.”

“I’m in an ugly mood.”

Halliwell had his phone out and was googling man-eating snakes. “It’s rare, but not unknown. A fully-grown python will crush you and try to swallow you whole. The jaws are flexible and expand. Swallowing the shoulders is the hard part.”

“If the body was butchered into joints of meat, the python wouldn’t have any difficulty.”

Halliwell screwed up his face in disgust. “Is that what Fergus did?”

“At this stage, Keith, your guess is as good as mine. It would account for the people who disappeared and were never seen again.”

“That’s gross.”

“Keeping large reptiles in captivity is gross. I don’t understand the mentality behind it. I’m going to question Candida again and see how much she knows. I don’t think Fergus will be here any time soon.” With more of an agenda, he might recover from the humbling he’d let himself in for. Peeling off the forensic suit was a start.

With Ingeborg at his side, he stepped aboard Deck the Halls. “I won’t spare her,” he said. “I tried being nice cop and it didn’t work.”

Candida, too, started on a combative note. At the door, she said, “If you’re here to apologise, forget it.”

“Apologise for what, ma’am?” he said.

“Trashing our reputation, that’s what. All of Bath and Bristol knows Fergus and me are the reason for the police divers. I’ve had reporters on at me day and night. Cameramen all over the boat. Next thing we’ll be asked to leave and find another mooring.”

“If you’d been more honest before, none of it would have been necessary,” he told her. “We’re bound to be suspicious when you give us half-truths and lies.”

“Like what?”

“Like the horseshit about Mary Wroxeter. You never once mentioned she was your mother.”

Straight to it. She made a sound like one of the pythons hissing. “Who told you that?”

“We’d better talk inside. It’s time to front up, Candida.”

She turned round and stepped into her main cabin, her shoulders and back rigid with tension. Bart was on the floor chewing on an apple.

Candida faced them and said with fury, “There’s no reason I should tell you or anyone who my parents were.”

“Oh, but there is when Mary’s death is under investigation and you were the last person to see her alive.”

“Jesus Christ, you’re not accusing me of murdering her?”

“Not yet. I want the truth about that night. You said you drove her home from the pub and told her you were pregnant. Why wait? Your own mother? Why not pick up the phone and tell her as soon as you knew about it?”

“I only knew that afternoon, that’s why. I couldn’t call Mary while she was filming. I didn’t lie to you. I gave her my news in the car.”

“You didn’t go in with her? That’s hard to believe.”

“It’s the truth. I had no more to say to her. I knew she’d want to celebrate the only way she knew how and drinking was one thing I shouldn’t do, being pregnant. I left her outside her door and drove straight back here. If you think I encouraged her to drink herself to death, you’re nuts.”

“You kept it quiet — the fact that you were her daughter — even after she died.”

“She would have wanted that. The studio took charge and fixed the funeral. They gave her a lovely send-off as I knew they would. I was there as someone who’d worked with her, that’s all.”

“No regrets about that?”

She clicked her tongue. “We were never that close. In all her life I never called her mum. As a kid I was farmed out to foster parents and packed off to a crap private boarding school. I scarcely ever saw my birth parents. My dad died years ago anyway. The one good thing they gave me was my name. At least, I thought it was until my schoolmates found out it’s also the name of a fungal infection and called me Thrush.”

Ingeborg said, “Mary must have cared. She found you the job at Bottle Yard.”

“Years later. I was on her conscience by then. I left school with nothing to show for all the fees and went through a really bad patch. Hard drugs, sleeping rough, nicking stuff, the lot. She found me a flat and fixed it for me to make a start as a runner on the understanding that we’d tell no one I was her daughter. I loved the job straight away and stayed. End of story.”

“Not quite the end. You met Fergus, got pregnant and moved in here.”

She laughed. A bitter laugh. “Shit-for-brains, me.”

Diamond asked, “How much did you know about Fergus?”

“He fancied me. That’s all I wanted to know.”

“Did you know he kept snakes?”

“He only had the one when we met, the one that died of old age and had the suitcase for its coffin. I refused to have it in here while it was alive, so he bought the old tub you see next to us and spent far too much doing it up and turning it into a snake house. I can’t stand them. I never go in there.”

“You say he fancied you,” Ingeborg said. “Was it more than that?”

“I told myself it was. I wouldn’t have got pregnant twice if I didn’t think he loved me. I’m not a total slag. I lost the first one and then Bart was born.”

“And what are your feelings now?”

She flared up again. “What is this — sex therapy? I don’t have to tell you what goes on in my private life.”

Diamond said, “We’re asking because we want to know how deeply you’re involved. People are missing, believed dead. You could be aiding and abetting a serial killer.”

“Give me strength,” she said, eyes blazing, each word charged with outrage. “You think Fergus topped those guys? What for? He may be thick, but he’s not that thick.”

“Two nights ago,” he said, “they finished the filming at Milroy Court. It was late in the day. The de-rigging would have been the last thing to happen and Fergus was in charge so he would have got home late. Do you recall what time it was?”

“This was when?” she said. “Tuesday? Let me think.” She bent down and took the partially eaten apple from Bart and pushed a sippy cup against his mouth before he could protest. “God, this is ridiculous. Yes, he was late. I was about to watch The News at Ten when he got in and wanted to eat. He’s always late when they de-rig. They have to load the trucks and return them to Gripmasters up at Cold Ashton. He leaves his motorbike there by day and then rides home.”

“Okay,” Diamond said without sounding okay. She’d reminded him Fergus was a motorcyclist. It complicated the scenario. You can’t transport a body on a motorbike. But there had been a bike in the field where Greg Deans was attacked. “How was his mood? Any different from usual?”

“I didn’t notice anything different. He was ready for his Irish stew when he got in, hungry as always.”

“What was he wearing? His motorcycle gear?”

“Black leathers.”

“He took them off, I expect.”

“Slung them over the back of the chair like he always does.”

“Does he have a spare set?”

“Of leathers? Do you have any idea what they cost? You don’t get much change out of a grand.”

“The answer is no, I take it. He’ll be wearing the same jacket and trousers today at the shoot at Jacob’s Ladder.”

“Is that where he is?” she said. “You know more than I do.”

They didn’t get anything else from Candida. The nasty cop approach might have brought out new details, but the value of them was far from apparent.

Everyone had left the jetty by the time they emerged from Deck the Halls. The forensic tent was gone and so were the divers and their equipment. All that remained, like a rebuke, was the suitcase containing the dead snake.

“She knew all along what was in the case,” Diamond said. “She could have told the divers straight away.”

“You can bet she phoned Fergus,” Ingeborg said. “I expect he told her to play dumb. She has to live with him. She wouldn’t defy him. I’ve always had the feeling he’s a bully, if not an out-and-out wife-beater.”

“He certainly played it cool himself, staying well away.”

“What’s going to happen to the snake?” she asked.

“Don’t know. Doesn’t belong to me.”

“We can’t let Fergus throw it back in the marina.”

“We’ll notify the council. They know what to do. Somerset gets more roadkill than anywhere else in Britain.”

“I don’t suppose they get many pythons.”

On the drive back to their base at Concorde House, Ingeborg said, “Candida has been devious in the past, feeding the jinx story to the paper, but I felt she was telling the truth this time. Her personal story rather moved me, actually.”

“I was touched by it as well,” Diamond admitted. “Almost stopped me in my tracks.”

“If she was being truthful, she wasn’t at Combe Hay herself and she provided an alibi for Fergus. She said he got home before ten the night Greg was stabbed. I can’t think of any way he could have done the killing and got back to Saltford. The dash cam showed nine twenty. He’d have needed to hide the body somewhere, clean up, change into his leathers and ride back from Combe Hay in under forty minutes. Theoretically possible for someone like Houdini, but... Fergus?” She blew a soft raspberry.

“Like you, I believed her,” Diamond said. “There was the moment I asked what time he got home and it was clear she had to cast her mind back. She hadn’t prepared for the question or she wouldn’t have hesitated. I’ve interviewed enough witnesses in my time to know when an answer is spontaneous and genuine.”

“Two in one day,” Ingeborg said.

“You mean Natalie and Candida?”

“Two honest women.”

“Both can’t be. Who do you prefer to believe?”

She drove on for a while without answering. The next comment came from Diamond, complaining about farmers who didn’t trim their hedges: an indirect way of suggesting she drove more slowly through the narrow lanes.

When Ingeborg spoke again, it was to say, “I can think of only one of our suspects who ticks all the boxes: motive, means and opportunity. He’s already acting as if he is Greg’s replacement, he carries a knife and he was just a short walk from the scene. The killer has to be Will Legat.”