The Finisher

10

Five thousand men and women were jammed shoulder to shoulder in Great Pulteney Street. Here they started and here they would finish.

If they survived.

This was the worst time, waiting for the start. The tension showed in a variety of ways: muscles twitched, hands were rubbed together, hair was tugged, scraped and smoothed, watches checked many times over, water bottles upended. Some stared fixedly ahead and some tried joking with the people around them.

In the runners’ village at the Sports Centre, North Parade Road, marshals with loudhailers had been issuing instructions for the past hour. People were graded by ability and sent to the start by different routes. The white pen was for the elite group, the ones who took the front position and already stood with fingers poised on their own stopwatches. Green was for those with some experience who weren’t expected to challenge for a top-fifty finish. Orange, by far the largest, filtered by way of the riverside path and Grove Street, where most were waiting, was for the tenderfoots, starters who might never have tried such a distance. They would probably walk some of the way.

The last ten seconds were counted down to 11 a.m.

The hooter blared.

The elite runners led the charge. The white pen emptied like rice from a packet and the greens were close behind. The winner would finish in little more than an hour.

That first dash towards Sydney Gardens at the top of the street was thrilling to watch, cheered by hundreds crushed into the space along the sides. Sydney Place was closed to traffic, so they headed straight across the road, through the entrance to the gardens and around the Holburne Museum to the central walk, where lines of marshals kept control.

The route took them over the bridge across the railway cutting, heading for the canal path and south, right through the tunnel under Cleveland House, where tolls were once collected from the barges through a hole in the roof. From here they would follow the Kennet and Avon Canal until it merged with a stretch of the old Somerset Coal Canal. Ancient canal paths and disused railways made up much of the Other Half course.

All who came after the elite runners passed at a slower tempo, competing mainly with themselves. A personal best or the triumph of finishing at all was their aim. They didn’t worry about starting some minutes after the hooter. They all had timing chips fastened to their shoelaces that emitted a unique code when the shoes passed over the antennas sheathed in the rubber mat that was the start line. Everyone from the winner to the wackiest fancy-dress runner would be timed.

The prizes weren’t huge. The first male and female finishers would each get a thousand pounds. Others who placed in the first five would get scaled-down sums. There was a similar prize list for the best British finishers, so in theory a Brit might win in each category and earn two thousand. The big beneficiaries were the charities. Among them, they would scoop a cool two million. Their main outlay was a T-shirt for each supporter. Some proud wearers of the shirts would have spent more time getting sponsors than getting fit. When they suffered, as they would, they had the consolation of knowing it was for a good cause.

Back at the start, screams of excitement were heard as the first of the orange pen crowd finally got their adventure under way, multicoloured, dazzling to watch. The tension of the long wait evaporated. This group had the biggest spread of age, shape and ability and was the most fun. Among them were the fancy-dress entrants, the pirates, pantomime horses, fairies, carrots, bananas, spacemen, dinosaurs — and at least one policeman carrying an old-fashioned truncheon.

For the real police, all leave was cancelled. Aside from enforcing traffic diversions, they needed to be alert for every kind of crime from theft to terrorism. Any event that attracts large crowds brings concerns. The 2013 Boston Marathon bombing was a recurring nightmare. Officers were deployed along the course in what the Deputy Chief Constable described as overt and covert roles.

Difficult to tell whether Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond, on duty in the gardens, was overt or covert. If he had been in the race, you would have taken him for one of the jokers in fancy dress. He might have stepped out of a 1940s film, a sleuth on the trail of Sydney Greenstreet. The gabardine trench coat and dark brown trilby, his so-called plain clothes, weren’t plain at all in twenty-first-century Bath.

Diamond had watched too many half marathons to get much pleasure from the day. They had been fixtures here longer than he had. Running had never appealed to him. Sitting was more his thing, several hours every day in a comfortable chair. When necessary he would stand up. He’d even amble short distances. But he had never understood why joggers put themselves through such discomfort, let alone did it in competition. At an earlier stage in life he had played rugby for the Metropolitan Police and twice a week had been forced to trot a few training laps around the Imber Court pitch, always without breaking sweat. He didn’t want to shed much weight. Poundage was needed in the scrum.

Cheering from the museum end signalled the first sight of the leading group. The central walk through Sydney Gardens was wide and straight, so this was a good viewpoint.

“There’s your winner,” Diamond told DC Paul Gilbert, who was with him mainly to allow for occasional tea breaks in the museum’s garden café.

“Who’s that, guv?”

“The black lad in fourth place. He’ll be a Kenyan or an Ethiopian. They’re natural runners. Look at him, scarcely breathing. They live at altitude, you see. Less oxygen. Makes them work harder at their running, so when they come down to sea level, they can beat anyone.” He made common knowledge sound like revelations from on high, and no one had better say so.

Gilbert studied the smooth action of the black athlete.

“He’ll be a professional,” Diamond added. “They use this as a training run.”

Gilbert waited for the race leaders to get closer before saying, “I know him.”

“Watched him on TV?” Diamond said.

“I was at school with him.”

“Come off it. You’re a local lad.”

“So is he. Harry Hobbs from Midsomer Norton,” Gilbert said.

“Get away. Are you sure?”

“Hundred per cent. He always won the cross-country.”

“It must be in the blood, then. Kenyan parents.”

“Birmingham, he told me. He’s third-generation British.”

Diamond didn’t pursue the point. He’d reached the limit of his expertise on distance running. And genealogy.

Seconds later, the scene was transformed by the colours of a thousand runners in close order funnelled between the lines of watchers. Seen in close-up, the flickering pattern could almost have triggered a seizure.

They were moving with ease and the mood was boisterous. Not for much longer. The serious stuff began now, the grind along lonely stretches out in the country, on footpaths across fields and through the mile-long Combe Down Tunnel, once a feature of the Somerset and Dorset Railway, known locally as the Slow and Dirty. Out on the course they were truly in need of the goodwill of spectators.

“Would you credit it?” Diamond said suddenly, breaking the spell. “What’s that dickhead doing in the race?”

The dickhead was a dapper, dark-haired man of about forty-five, below average height and as slim as the silver birches he was running past. Dark blue headband with white polka-dots. Yellow T-shirt, blue shorts and trainers. Gold chain bouncing on his chest. He was running with a blonde woman in a British Heart Foundation shirt. From her expression, he was trying to chat her up and not succeeding.

Gilbert had never seen either of them before.

“Tony Pinto,” Diamond said as if everyone in Bath should know the name. “He’s evil.”

People nearby turned to see who had spoken. If Gilbert hadn’t been outranked, he’d have told Diamond to keep his voice down.

“He’s supposed to be banged up. I put him away for a fifteen stretch soon after I got here.”

“How long have you worked here, guv?” Gilbert asked. “He must have served it out.”

Diamond wasn’t listening. The sight of Tony Pinto fit, flash and at liberty was too disturbing. “And not a grey hair on his head.”

“What did you get him for?”

Diamond was still getting looks and now it dawned on him that he was causing a distraction. “Step back a bit.”

They found a less crowded spot in front of a bank of roses. “Well, you know Bog Island?”

Gilbert nodded. Every copper knew Bog Island, the paved triangle in the middle of the huge road junction opposite Terrace Gardens.

“And how it got its name?”

“The underground toilets.”

“Right, but you’ve never been down there, have you?”

“It’s been locked up for years, hasn’t it, locked up and condemned?”

“Like Pinto should be.”

Gilbert looked at his boss. Was that what he’d been leading up to, a tired old quip?

But Diamond was singing the praises of Bog Island. “It was a palace in its time. When the council first extended Pierrepont Street and linked it with Orange Grove, they decided to excavate and put in a public convenience worthy of the handsome city this is. This was in the 1930s, when they still liked to do things in style. Coloured tiles, brass fittings, skylights, big glass cisterns overhead, no expense spared. Male and female attendants, dressing rooms, a left-luggage room, bathrooms and all the usual offices. It was such a showpiece that about forty years ago it became a drinking club.”

“What... while it was still a toilet?”

“Give me strength. Of course not. It was a change of use. What do you call it? — a relaunch. Then it was opened as a nightclub.”

“How do you know all this, guv?”

“I support the rugby club, don’t I?”

Diamond had this habit of making unrelated statements, challenging his listener to find a connection. Gilbert had learned that the only solution was to keep your mouth shut and wait for the follow-up.

“Bath RFC bought the place. Well, three of the players did, Roger Spurrell and two others. Spruced it up and called it the Island Club. You’ll have seen the archway over the entrance.”

Two handsome archways, in fact, with the club’s name picked out in ironwork. You couldn’t fail to notice them if you came by, one over the ladies’ side, the other the gents’.

“It became the hot spot in town because it had a late licence at a time when most places closed at eleven. Anyone who played for the first team got in free. You went there and rubbed shoulders with your heroes. Great nights, they were. They cleared the floor one night and one of the All Blacks performed the haka.”

“Were you there?”

“Wish I was. Bit before my time, the 1980s. That was when Bath RFC started dominating British rugby.”

Gilbert knew about Diamond’s passion for the oval-ball game, but he couldn’t see what Bog Island had to do with a crook called Tony Pinto who was already across the railway bridge and out of sight.

“By the nineties, when I came to Bath, the place was on the slide. The rugby lads had sold up and left.” Diamond shook his head and sighed. This could become a lament. “The Island Club got to be a student dive, more of a pulling club than anything else. The new owners packed in the punters, two hundred or more on Wednesdays, their big night, and didn’t do enough in the way of maintenance and it smelt like the public loo it was originally. What with the heat and sweat of the dancing, drips of condensation and God knows what else falling from the ceiling, it got dangerous in the end. Subsidence. Health and safety was an issue. The council closed it down, but not before Tony Pinto became a regular.”

“What was he up to? Drugs?”

“Picking up girls. Nothing criminal in that, you’re going to tell me. The thing is, Pinto wanted a different one for sex each time. Once he’d had them, he dropped them, and he had the gall to go back to the same club and look for more.”

“Fuck ’em and forget ’em.”

“Crudely, yes. He was in his twenties, a few years older than the students, good-looking, well turned-out, not short of money, and they fell for it.”

“Didn’t they spread the word about him?”

“One in particular did, a second-year called Bryony Lancaster, barely nineteen. She went all the way with him one night and was shocked when he ignored her the next time and chatted up some other girls. While he was buying drinks she went over and warned them about him. Pinto didn’t make out with anyone that night and he found out why. He waited outside for Bryony and went to work on her face with a knife. She was scarred for life. Her upper lip needed stitching together and there were two long slashes on her right cheek.”

Gilbert’s eyes squeezed shut. “That’s horrible.”

Diamond didn’t need telling. He looked away, remembering. Runners streamed past and didn’t register on his attention. “If you’d met her, as I did, you’d know how horrible. Unsurprisingly, she was traumatised. I couldn’t get a proper victim statement from her, even weeks afterwards. She wouldn’t speak about her attacker.”

“Weren’t there witnesses?”

“Nobody came forward. We made the usual appeals for help and got nowhere.”

“Who reported it?”

“A taxi driver who came along later found her near the cab rank and saw she was in trouble. Good man. He called 999 and our people were first at the scene, followed soon after by the ambulance. I was put on the case next morning and hit a problem right away. No one was talking other than that cabbie.”

“Too scared?”

“The girls who could have shopped him were. Like I said, we got nowhere with our witness appeals, so our best hope was finding the exact spot where the knifing took place. It’s an area without much cover.”

“The Parade Gardens?” The obvious place to go for outdoor sex. The gardens just across the street from Bog Island, more than two acres of them, fringed by trees and bushes, sloping down to the river.

“That was my first thought. They’re kept locked at night, but there was an emergency exit from the club, a tunnel that gave access to the gardens.”

Bizarrely, the talk of the knifing and its aftermath was being punctuated by screams, cheers and yells of encouragement as the crowd spotted runners they knew.

“Did you search there?”

“The gardens? Of course. Found all the junk you’d expect in a public park, but no weapon and no evidence of a recent assault.”

“I can’t think where else it could have happened.”

“There are rows of shops facing two sides of the island. I had them searched minutely and eventually got a result. A small bloodstain on the tiled floor of a shop entrance in Terrace Walk.”

“Bryony’s blood?”

“Yes, and only thirty yards from the club exit. He must have forced her across the street. She professed not to have any memory where the attack had happened, but I have my doubts about that.”

“She could have blocked it out, guv.”

“It amounts to the same thing. She was terrified of being attacked again. When forensics went to work, they found another smear of blood on the shop door itself and a thumbprint.”

“His?”

Diamond nodded.

“Bit of luck.”

“We didn’t call it that after fifteen days of searching.”

“Wasn’t there any CCTV footage?”

“Fifteen years ago in Bath? You’re joking. And this was way before phones had built-in cameras. The next time the club opened, we had our people there. I wasn’t expecting the knife man to show, and he didn’t, but some of the regulars — blokes, exclusively — recalled seeing this guy they’d noticed in the past chatting up the talent. A loner, they said. Nobody knew him by name. It took some hard questioning to get a reasonable description. People’s memories aren’t all that reliable.”

“In the dark, half pissed.”

“There speaks a hardened clubber. Time went by and the ACC scaled down the hunt, which really hacked me off. This was personal for me.” Even now, all those years on, Diamond’s voice thickened with emotion. “I had teams planted in clubs all over Bath and Bristol and there were suggestions from on high that they were having a good time at taxpayers’ expense. Ridiculous.”

“But you caught him?”

“Julie did. Julie Hargreaves, one of the best detectives I ever worked with. Pinto had stopped going to the Island. He was on the pull at another club, Chemies, in Seven Dials. Julie saw what he was up to and we collared him as he was leaving with some tanked-up young woman.”

“He matched the description?”

“More important than that, his thumbprint matched the one from the crime scene.”

“Did the victim ID him?”

“Bryony? No. She wasn’t up for it and I wasn’t going to put her through more pain. The mental scarring was as bad as the physical. Worse, I’d say. She wouldn’t testify in court and I think she was right. Any cross-examination would have destroyed her. It’s the same dilemma we have in rape cases.”

“Getting a conviction must have been hard.”

“We got a confession.”

Gilbert’s eyebrows shot up.

“Don’t ask.”