The Finisher

15

Diamond’s fears for Belinda were built on the flimsiest of foundations — a single sighting in the park — but they were as strong as the building he worked in. That inner voice of his was insisting he must see this through, or he’d have regrets for the rest of his life. The next obvious move was to visit Tony Pinto, only there were sound reasons not to. The creep would be sure to complain to his probation officer that he was being victimised. Without real evidence, the whole thing could backfire.

Before driving off from Spring Gardens Road, he looked at his phone. Ingeborg had texted to say that the check of runners’ unclaimed bags had proved negative. No surprise, that. More concerning, she was not responding to emails or answering her phone.

A voice message asked him to contact DCI Halliwell.

“Keith, you wanted me.”

“Guv. It’s just to tell you I followed up on the drones and we’re in luck.”

“Are we?” He couldn’t raise any enthusiasm. He’d forgotten about the pesky drones.

“Ever heard of The Sky’s No Limit? It’s a family firm based here in Bath. Brother and sister with degrees in engineering build and fly the drones and their father manages the business side. They’re at Claverton, near the university.”

“Handy.”

“They’re good. They’ve won loads of international awards with their UAVs.”

“You’ve lost me already, Keith.”

“Unmanned aerial vehicles. I spoke to the father and they don’t mind helping the police as long as it’s ethical.”

“What does he mean by that?”

“They’re Quakers. They live by certain principles.”

“How did you answer that?”

“I said it was about making searches, like for a lost child.”

“Sounds ethical to me.”

“Yes, he’d heard about them being used to spy on people in protest marches and he doesn’t care for that. I told him we’d draw up some guidelines.”

“Smart thinking. Will he be tricky to deal with?”

“I don’t think so. Once we’d got that settled, he was fine.”

“Did you offer to appoint them as special constables?”

“I wasn’t sure how he’d take it, so I didn’t. He might not want to be identified with our lot.”

“You surprise me. So how did you leave it?”

“He’ll talk to the others and fix a time when we can see the drones in action.”

“Where?” An idea sprouted in Diamond’s brain.

“Up at the campus site on Claverton Down.”

“Which part?”

“The playing fields.”

“That’s no use.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a billiard table. We want to give them a real test. Combe Down is the place. Plenty of scrub and uneven ground, trees, old quarries, the canal. Let’s see how they perform over difficult terrain.”

“They won’t want to damage their drones.”

“They’re no bloody use to us if they can’t work in testing conditions. Get the demo sorted for as soon as possible. I’ll be there and I’ll make sure Georgina is as well.”

He still hadn’t found where Pinto was living. Posting Paul Gilbert outside the probation office all afternoon had not worked. Paul had called to report that he’d waited and seen nothing of the guy. The safest bet would have been to try contacting the police delegate to the MAPPA committee, but going through official channels would be a giveaway that he was hot on the trail of an allegedly reformed ex-con. He called Brian Johns, the helpful guy from the Other Half team, and listened patiently to the speech about confidentiality.

“I appreciate where you’re coming from, but I really do need to know. It’s a police matter.”

“Yes,” Johns said, “but there has to be some overriding emergency. I gave you the details of that woman — I forget her name...”

“Belinda Pye.”

“... because she didn’t finish the race and there was concern about her.”

“Correct, and now I’m concerned about another runner called Tony Pinto.”

“Did he finish?”

Finished Belinda, if my worst fears are right, Diamond thought. “One of the last, I think, but we need to contact him urgently.”

“Is it a medical emergency?”

“It may well be.”

A sigh. “Wait a moment.” A few seconds passed. “All we have for Pinto’s address is a post office box number. There’s a mobile number.”

Diamond noted them. Should have expected this, he thought. The far side of the moon is easier to reach than bloody Pinto.

With no confidence of a result, he tried the mobile number.

Unrecognised.

The box number would be impenetrable without legal documentation. For the present, Pinto’s privacy was safe.

Spiro felt bad about abandoning Murat. The desolation on that already troubled face would stay in his memory forever. The plain truth was that Murat now had a better chance of remaining free if he was unaccompanied. Whether he could survive alone on the streets was another question. He wasn’t streetwise or independent-minded. He didn’t want to make decisions for himself. He was loyal, truthful, uncomplaining and willing to learn, but alone with his memories he would be a tortured soul.

“I’ve been thinking about your situation,” Spiro said when they were both in their blow-up beds. They generally exchanged a few words before sleeping. “Maybe after all you should stay on in Bath. You’re much better than me at picking up the language and you make friends and blend in.” He was speaking as much to his own conscience as to Murat. “You’ll get to know some of these guys we see every night at the food van. They aren’t all druggies and alcoholics. They can tell you’re no threat to them. They’ll show you what’s safe to do in this town and what isn’t.”

“If it’s okay for me, why can’t you stay here as well?” Murat asked.

“Me, I’m a marked man now. I don’t think I said before. I was unlucky. I was recognised. The Finisher knows I’m here. I’m getting out.”

“Him?” Murat said, and he rolled over to look at Spiro. “How can he know? Did someone tell him?”

“Something like that.” Spiro didn’t want to revisit the moment, even in his imagination.

“But nobody in this town knows who we are,” Murat said. “I haven’t told a soul.”

“I’m not blaming you. It’s my own stupid fault. The wrong place at the wrong time. Say your prayers and go to sleep.”

Some minutes later, Murat started up again. “Where will you be if I want to link up with you later?”

“How would I know? Anything could happen.”

“Where are you heading?”

“Shut the fuck up and get some sleep, man.”

They were the last words spoken between them. Spiro would be burdened by guilt, but he knew what would happen if he gave even a hint of his plan to Murat.

Before dawn when Murat was mumbling in his sleep, Spiro got up, stuffed a few things into a carrier bag and left. He didn’t take the inflatable bed or the blanket, figuring they would come in useful to Murat as goodwill offerings to other rough sleepers.

In fact, he returned to the railway station where a few bikes had been left in the racks overnight, helped himself to his best ride yet, a Claud Butler with a wide spread of gears and semi-slick tyres, and was out of Bath on the Kennet and Avon Canal towpath before Murat would be awake. This time he headed in a new direction out of town, the way the runners had gone in the half marathon, a winding route that almost turned back on itself to bypass the hills to the east, but one that should be quiet at this time of day.

He was going nicely when the rain started after only about thirty minutes. He didn’t intend to get soaked, so he vowed to take shelter under the next bridge he reached, a huge four-arched construction that turned out to be an aqueduct allowing the canal to pass over the river and the railway. This, he realised with a shock, was the scene of his nerve-shattering experience the day before: the Dundas Aqueduct. He’d approached it from another direction.

Quick change of plan. He’d take the drenching and ride on. There was no reason why the Finisher should be around today, but this place gave Spiro the creeps.

At intervals along this canal, longboats were moored, apparently privately owned. Some were people’s homes and some looked as if they hadn’t been used in months. He had the wild idea of boarding one and seeing if he could get the engine working. He knew how to hotwire a car, so why not a boat? He could take the bike on board and make slower but less obvious progress and he’d have a roof over his head at nights. There might even be food inside.

An attractive idea, but he felt a visceral need to put quick miles between himself and Bath.

By mid-morning he was as wet as any of the ducks in the canal, yet starting to feel safer. He’d reached a place called Caen Hill and was looking downhill towards a town called Devizes. So how did the canal continue to function? By means of a flight of sixteen locks, side by side, enough to test the patience and arm muscles of anyone using a longboat. Spiro, freewheeling, sped by them all and congratulated himself on resisting his earlier temptation to become a bargee.

How would he survive in the longer term? He liked what he’d seen so far of England. The people, the down-and-outs he’d met, were mostly all right and less nosy than Albanians. What he would need was a job that paid a living wage, cash in hand and no questions asked. Not easy, but not impossible. He’d learned a few skills back home. He could clean cars but, from all he’d seen, the car-cleaning was monopolised here by immigrant groups who made sure the work was shared only by people of their own nationality. Cleaning shop windows was more open to private enterprise, but first you needed the bucket, squeegee and a portable A-frame ladder. Every job brought its own problems.

Near Devizes he found a board with a map of the canal. Miles of it were left to travel before it joined the River Kennet and a town called Reading. At the speed he was going he’d be there by nightfall.

Diamond drove back to Concorde House through a thunderstorm while asking himself how a prisoner on parole could find thirty pounds a month to pay for a box number. The money this man was lashing out was a mystery in itself.

In the CID office, he was greeted by Keith Halliwell with the news that The Sky’s No Limit were willing to demonstrate their latest UAV at Combe Down on Wednesday morning. The rough terrain would be no problem.

He bristled at the use of the acronym. “What are you on about?”

“The drone, guv.”

“Call it that, then, so people can understand. Will it have a camera attached?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“We’re not interested in a flying display. Get back to them.”

This sounded like a putdown, and Halliwell’s face showed it, but an order was an order. He reached for the phone.

After Diamond went upstairs to tell Georgina about Wednesday, there were mutterings in the team. Halliwell, clearly bruised, shook his head. “I don’t know what’s got into him. First he wants the show moved to Combe Down and I fix that and now he wants a drone with a camera. I wish he’d make up his mind.”

“I can tell you,” Ingeborg said from across the office. “It’s on the marathon route and he thinks there could be a body up there. The woman he saw running with Tony Pinto didn’t finish the race and no one has seen her since.”

“Doesn’t mean Pinto clobbered her. It’s supposition.”

“It’s more than that for him. It goes deep. He was telling me what Pinto did to that girl Bryony.”

“I know,” Halliwell said. “I was here at the time and the scarring was horrible, but you can’t let a thing like that take root in your brain. You move on. Christ only knows we’ve seen some evil bastards over the years. What’s so different about this one?”

Paul Gilbert had just walked in after his frustrating afternoon. “It was the shock of seeing Pinto at liberty chatting to a woman like old times, like nothing had happened.”

“Maybe,” Halliwell said, “but Pinto is basically a lech. He likes one-night stands. He’s not going to change. Cutting Bryony Lancaster was an exceptional act.”

“I don’t believe I’m hearing this,” Ingeborg said.

“What I’m saying is that he doesn’t routinely attack women. He did it once and paid the price and there’s no certainty he’ll do it again.”

“Oh, come on. Get real, Keith. All she did was warn other women about him. For that, she gets her face slashed with a Stanley knife. The guv’nor says he’s evil and I’m with him.”

“And I’m not here to argue Pinto’s case, but there’s such a thing as redemption.”

“A leopard can’t change its spots.”

“No point in reasoning with you, then.”

That evening, Diamond visited Paloma in her house on Lyncombe Hill and told her about the drone demonstration.

“Have you seen one of them close up?” he asked. “You might like to come along.”

“Normally I would,” she said, “but my neighbour Miriam had to go off to Liverpool in a hurry this morning, poor soul. Her mother’s had a massive stroke. I’m keeping an eye on things for her.”

“Round the clock?”

She smiled. “In a way, yes. I’ll show you.” She walked through the sitting room to the patio door and opened it. Out in the garden under an apple tree in blossom was a small brown and white dog with floppy ears. “That’s Hartley. I’m in charge of him as well.”

Hartley lifted his head, barked several times, scampered across the lawn and allowed himself to be fussed over, or, to phrase it accurately, demanded to be fussed over. “Friendly little guy,” Diamond said, straightening up. “A beagle, isn’t he?”

“Yes. He’s a charmer, but he needs watching in the house. Miriam warned me not to leave him alone because he’s very destructive. He chewed through several of her shoes, a Persian rug and an electric cable. The cable is worrying. I’ve got so much electrical gear.”

“You could bring him to the drone show. Up at Combe Down he won’t get bored.”

“He’d eat the drone.”

He laughed. “I’d enjoy that.”

“I suppose I could keep him on the leash.”

“Bring him, then.”

She didn’t answer immediately. “Why are you doing this? Does it have something to do with that man who was released from prison?”

“Pinto. Yes and no. The interest in drones comes from Georgina.”

“She’s forward-looking.”

Piqued, he said, “It’s not her idea. She got it from another police authority.”

“Fair enough. Henry Ford didn’t invent the motor car.”

“Are you comparing Georgina Dallymore to Henry Ford?”

“Okay, Amelia Earhart might fit better. Georgina is smart enough to embrace the new technology. That’s how she gets ahead.”

“I wouldn’t call it new,” he said. “I was flying remote-controlled model aircraft when I was a boy. That’s all it is.”

She smiled at his reluctance to give any credit to Georgina. “A moment ago I asked what’s in it for you?”

“The half marathon went over Combe Down. Pinto finished in a very slow time, but the woman he was pestering didn’t and she didn’t go home that night. It’s a wild, overgrown stretch. Need I spell it out?”

“Do you know who the woman was? Does she have a job?”

“Computer stuff. She works from home.”

“He’s never killed anyone, has he?”

“Not that we know about. I’m sure he’s capable of it.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I spent more hours with the scumbag than I want to remember. How he got paroled, I don’t know.”

“There could be an innocent explanation.”

“Like what?”

“Let’s go indoors.” Paloma picked up a stuffed toy and threw it for the dog before quickly ushering Diamond inside and closing the patio door. “Like they knew each other before the race and ran it together until she got blisters. He stayed with her, but in the end she couldn’t manage another step and told him to finish the race alone, which he did.”

“And then?”

“He went back for her and took her to his place where they spent the night together.”

Fitted the facts, he couldn’t deny, and maybe was more realistic than his own theory. Gut instinct told him not to be swayed. “We’ll see. How about Wednesday, then? Will you be coming?”

“I’ll let you know. I need to see how much work comes in.”

“Do you good to get out.” He added casually, as if it was an afterthought, “Are you still running?”

“Of course. I enjoy it.”

Before he left home in the morning, he phoned the CID room to see if there was any news of Belinda.

Nothing.

He tried the landlady, Mrs. Hector, at the risk of alarming her even more. She said she’d left the chain off the door all night in case Belinda returned, but she hadn’t. “I got almost no sleep and when I did my dreams were horrible.”

He called Deirdre at the probation service. She didn’t sound pleased.

“What is it now, Superintendent?”

“You told me Pinto was due to meet his probation officer yesterday afternoon. Did he show up?”

“Why are you asking?”

Why was he asking? He was always being told to watch his high blood pressure. He could feel it right now. “It’s a simple question. I told you my concerns about him.”

“He missed the appointment. I’m not surprised.”

So casual. “Why not?”

“If he ran in that half marathon on Sunday, he’s probably exhausted.”

“Have you checked? Has anyone checked? Isn’t it normal to check if your clients, or whatever you call them, miss their appointments?”

“He’s been reliable up to now. I expect we’ll hear from him. I don’t understand why you keep calling us.”

“Because I’m a lot more concerned now. When I saw him in the half marathon, he was running beside a woman who plainly wasn’t amused by what he was saying. I checked with the organisers and she didn’t finish the race. She hasn’t been home since.”

“I expect there’s an explanation.”

“That’s my fear.”

“An innocent explanation is what I mean.”

“I thought so.” He let the silence speak.

“Are you telling me my job, Superintendent?”

The “my” didn’t escape him: almost an admission that Pinto was on her caseload.

“If there isn’t anything else...” She wanted to end this.

“The name of the woman was Belinda Pye and she lived in a rented room in Spring Gardens Road.”

“I’m sure there’s no need to speak in the past tense, Superintendent.”

“I wish I could be sure, ma’am.”