The Finisher

26

Diamond hated being humbled. He thrived on self-confidence and it was in short supply right now. After the accident and the disciplinary hearing he hadn’t expected fate to kick him in the guts yet again.

Sodden, in his drenched, mud-spattered suit, he leaned on his crutches and waited for Bertram Sealy to re-emerge from the shaft. Sealy was the last person on earth he wanted to enlighten, but it needed to be done.

The first to show his helmeted head was Keith Halliwell. No one was nearby to help him transfer from the rope ladder to the surface. All interest was elsewhere now that the body had been recovered. He scrambled out on hands and knees, looked up and said, “You’ll get pneumonia, guv.”

Diamond wasn’t thinking about his health. “You saw who it is?”

“The stiff? Some runner.”

Halliwell didn’t know. He’d never met the man. He may have seen his picture, but that wasn’t the same.

“Forget it,” Diamond said. “Help Sealy out of the hole.”

A second hard hat had appeared. Halliwell went over.

“You’re a useful fellow,” Sealy said. “Why don’t you give up this policing nonsense and do a proper job as my assistant?”

When this attempt at humour didn’t get an answer, Sealy switched to Diamond. “What are you waiting for, peg leg? I can’t tell you anything I haven’t already. From the look of you, I’ll have you on my slab before long.”

“I know who he is,” Diamond said.

“Took a peek, did you? Some people have no respect for the departed.”

“I can save time getting him identified. His name is Tony Pinto. He’s an ex-con on parole. A violent sexual predator. I put him away years ago.”

“No great loss to the world, then.”

“How soon can you do the autopsy?”

“I’ll have to look at my diary.”

“Give it priority, please. He’s been dead for a week and you know how important the first few hours of an investigation are.”

“You’re sunk, then, and the crime scene is a quagmire. Call me later.”

A trip home for a change of clothes would have been nice, but a fast return to Concorde House came before anything else. He got a lift from Ingeborg and spent most of the trip sending a text to Bertram Sealy. That autopsy couldn’t be delayed.

The team were grouped around the kettle when he got there. They deserved their break, but it couldn’t last long. He told them to be in the briefing room on the hour, which was under fifteen minutes away.

A text came back from Sealy, which was quicker than he expected, but the offer of 3 p.m. on Tuesday was no good at all. He got through for a live call which was more of a blast than a conversation.

The muddy suit troubled him until the ever-resourceful Ingeborg visited the traffic section and charmed a police motorcyclist into lending her guv’nor a set of leathers. Getting into it was a challenge that he embraced. Zipped, sibilant with every movement and feeling more macho than Brando in The Wild One, he appeared before his squad as never before and got a reaction he didn’t expect or deserve. Middle-aged bikers are nothing unusual, he told himself, so what are the sly smiles for?

He told them to get over it.

He could have said the same to himself. He was still in shock from learning that the killer he’d been pursuing was in fact the victim. Until he got his own thoughts in order, he wasn’t ready to trade theories about how the death had occurred and why. The briefing would be all about action.

“I’ve twisted the pathologist’s arm and the autopsy takes place at six p.m. tonight, with Keith in attendance.”

This was the first Halliwell had heard of it. He’d known Diamond too long to complain. And in truth he wouldn’t have expected any different. No one could remember Diamond attending a postmortem.

“As well as that, you’re the admin officer dealing with duty rosters and the bloody budget. Keeping Georgina off my back, in other words.”

Halliwell nodded.

“We’ll use this as our incident room and, John, you’re the office manager. Get it up and running as soon as possible or quicker.”

Leaman, a borderline obsessive-compulsive, would have gone into a strop if anyone else had been named.

Diamond turned to Ingeborg. “I want a profile of Pinto from you. Every facet of his life. I’ll speak to the probation officer, who was quite sniffy about releasing information and can’t refuse now. We’ll get the prison record, the current address, next of kin, his employment details and anything of interest from their supervision. Your job is to get the gen on everyone else who came into contact with him and draw up a list of possible suspects. Ex-cons, anyone he worked with, everyone affected by his pursuit of women, including angry boyfriends, of course, and possibly other runners he knew.”

“Is that all?” she said with irony and immediately wished she hadn’t.

“No. There’s more. Get close up and personal with the Police National Computer and HOLMES. I’m relying on you to cover the field — and it could be a large one. Now, Paul.”

DC Gilbert flexed. “Guv?”

“You get several jobs rolled into one. Basically, you chase forensics for information until we get it. We’re off to a really slow start. It’s over a week since the day we think he was murdered. You’re the exhibits officer, the receiver and the indexer. Any problem with that lot?”

“I don’t think so, guv.”

“See Keith if you need backup.”

He went on to delegate more duties to other staff. Already he was certain the team needed to grow by at least ten more officers. He’d get reinforcements from downstairs and square it with Georgina when she found out.

“Get to it, people.” To show solidarity, he made an effort to get his own body on the move as well. The crutches undermined the macho look of the biking leathers.

From the quiet of his office he put through a call to Deirdre, his stonewalling contact in the probation service. When he announced himself, she said, “Before you say another word, Superintendent, I’m not allowed to say any more than I already have about Tony Pinto.”

“But you are,” he told her. “You’re liberated. In fact, it’s your duty. I’m conducting a homicide enquiry now.”

She needed time to take in what he’d said.

“He’s dead?”

“For over a week.”

“Are you sure?”

“His body was recovered from a mineshaft this afternoon. I saw him close-up. No question it was Tony.” He allowed her a few more seconds. “You were his probation officer, weren’t you?”

She’d refused to confirm this up to now. A whispered, “Yes.”

“You told me he failed to report for his weekly appointment.”

“I did.”

“Well, then.”

Untypically of the Deirdre he thought he knew, her voice was subdued, breathy with emotion. “This is dreadful. He was doing so well.”

He didn’t trust himself to comment on Pinto’s rehabilitation. “So where was he living? All I have is a box number.”

“Duke Street.”

“He was doing well.” Duke Street is one of the best addresses in Bath, a fine Georgian terrace close to the centre of town. “How the hell did an ex-con manage to get in there?”

“It was only a basement flat, I understand.”

“Better than you or I could afford, Deirdre. You’d need a small fortune to pay the rent. And flats don’t come on the market too often.”

“Well, yes. I gather it was a private arrangement through a friend.”

“Did you get some background on his situation? Did he have a job?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Or you didn’t ask?”

“Oh God.” She paused, apparently on the verge of tears. She tried to recover her official voice and didn’t quite succeed. “Tony could be charming and evasive at the same time. My main concern was that he was keeping out of trouble and he assured me that he was.”

“He would say that. Wasn’t he tagged?”

The scorn in his question helped her recover some of the old Deirdre. “I told you before, he was judged to be no risk. We don’t put everyone under surveillance. There were conditions attached to his parole and as far as I’m aware he kept to them. No nightclubbing, for instance. No unapproved travel. The first and only breach in his probation was the missed appointment.”

“He must have missed a second by now. And we know why. He was killed on the Sunday they ran the half marathon. He was still wearing the kit. Are you looking at a screen with his details on it?”

“I am.”

“I’ll have the number of the house, then, and the flat, if it has one, and everything else of assistance, including his prison record, however spotless it is.”

After ending the call, he levered himself to a standing position, stumped back to the incident room and asked Ingeborg if she’d boned up on Tony Pinto.

“It’s underway,” she said. “There isn’t much to go on.”

“Which is why you need to see inside his flat, which I just discovered is in Duke Street.”

“With you on board, guv?”

“Nothing gets past you, does it?”

John Wood the elder, the man whose vision transformed Bath from cramped, timber-framed medieval to the gracious, spacious, cream-coloured city of local stone it became in the eighteenth century, had Duke Street high in his thinking. His Essay Towards a Description of the city of Bath proposed “a grand place of assembly to be called the Royal Forum of Bath” which would occupy the Abbey Orchard, twenty-five low-lying acres reaching southwards from the Abbey precincts to the bank of the River Avon. Duke Street was to be one of two access routes to this spectacular site of assembly rooms and promenades softened by the backdrop of leafy Lyncombe Hill. Sadly, in Wood’s own lifetime the project fell victim to small-minded municipal officials and get-rich-quick developers, and in the next century Lord Manvers owned the land and did a deal with the Great Western Railway that blighted the area past redemption. All you see now is the mayhem of Manvers Street with its office blocks, a two-storey car park, pubs, shops, churches, student quarters and the railway station. The lone relic of Wood’s great plan is Duke Street. Elegant Georgian terraces stand either side of a flagged pavement, the widest in Bath and open only to pedestrians.

Ingeborg found a space in the car park next to what was now known as the Virgil Building, formerly the main police station, now said to be a learning centre. Each time Diamond passed the place, he felt withdrawal symptoms, so he tried not to look. He needed anyway to give full attention to what he was doing with the crutches. Fortunately, Duke Street was only a short distance away, across South Parade.

“I’d dearly like to know how a jailbird can afford to live here,” he told Ingeborg as they made their way there. “He wasn’t a bank robber, for pity’s sake.”

The terrace was three storeys high. Three storeys and an attic, and that wasn’t counting the basement. Iron railings and gates dissuaded passers-by from going down the steep stone steps — a long way down.

“This is too much,” Ingeborg said. “You’d better wait up here, guv.”

“You’re joking, I hope.”

He let her go first, and then started his own precarious descent going backwards using only one crutch and relying on the railing for balance. The spare crutch ended up beside Ingeborg at the bottom of the stairwell. He felt the pressure on his good leg right away and wished he was as slim as she was. With dogged determination and some swearing he reached the bottom. It had a strong smell of decay.

“I wouldn’t want to do that every day, even on two legs,” he said.

“Do you have a key?” she asked him.

“How would I?”

“Shame about that.”

“It’s an old-fashioned Yale lock. Use a credit card.”

“Not one of mine, thank you.” She emptied the plastic water bottle she was carrying, took a penknife from her pocket and cut a rectangular strip from it that she bent double. Then she slid the improvised tool downwards between door and frame and freed the latch.

The inside was larger than you would guess from the street. Georgian terraced houses are like books on a shelf, the spines a compressed indication of the large interior. The hallway stretched about forty feet, with five doors on either side, all closed.

“This can’t all be his,” Diamond said. “Any guess which door we try?”

“Better keep our voices down, guv.”

“No point,” he said. “We need help. Let’s make ourselves known.” He rapped on the first door to his left.

It opened wide at once, suggesting that the tenant had been waiting behind her door. A very large woman in a very large wheelchair. How large? XXL for sure. Do they have XXXL? She looked not much over thirty, but every other statistic was way beyond that. Above the chins and between the cheeks was a pretty face. Blue, intelligent eyes, neat nose and small, well-defined mouth. What was an outsize chair-bound woman doing in a basement flat? Best not to ask at this stage. Anyway, other matters were more pressing.

Before they spoke, she said, “I’m sure it’s a good cause, but I don’t have any spare change.”

Those pesky crutches.

Ingeborg explained that they weren’t asking for a donation. “We’re trying to find Mr. Pinto.”

“You mean Tony?” she said. “You’ve made a mistake, then. This is my room.”

“Which one is his?”

“Last on the left, next to the kitchen, but he isn’t in. He hasn’t been home for over a week. Friend of yours, is he?”

“We’re police officers making enquiries.” She showed her ID.

“I’ll need my glasses to read that.”

“It says I’m Detective Sergeant Smith and this is Superintendent Diamond. Who are you?”

She rolled her eyes and spoke in a mock-posh voice. “Beatrice Henson, but everyone has always called me Beattie and so can you. There’s nothing seriously wrong, is there?”

“It sounds as if you know Tony quite well.”

“He’s the only one I do know and he’s good to me.”

“Friendly, then?”

“Not the way you mean. I can do without that sort of nonsense in my situation. Tony is my rescuer. They march in here, brazen as you like, as if they own the place.”

“The other tenants?” Diamond said.

“Spiders, honey. Big ones, and not just in September. That’s one of the drawbacks of life below stairs.”

“Nasty.”

“Somebody told me they come out of the vaults under the street.”

“I didn’t know about the vaults.”

“Nobody uses them. They’re damp and horrible. When this place was built three hundred years ago or whenever it was, everything had to be raised up because the ground underneath was a swamp, being as close to the river as it is, so Duke Street is built over vaults and that’s where the spiders come from. They make my hair stand on end. Thank goodness Tony knows what to do.”

“Traps them in a jar?”

“Stamps on them. I couldn’t do that.”

Diamond pictured Pinto doing it, no problem.

“I couldn’t do it either,” Ingeborg said. “I take them out to the garden.”

“Where they die anyway, if they’re house spiders,” Diamond said, to steer this exchange to a conclusion. More important topics needed airing. “They can’t survive long outside. I’ve got a cat who takes care of the problem. Keep a cat and you won’t often see a spider.”

“We aren’t allowed pets.”

“Shame,” Ingeborg said.

Diamond got the conversation back on track by asking if Pinto was equally popular with the other tenants.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Beattie said. “They don’t speak much English, any of them. Come to think of it, he does go upstairs and sees them off in the mornings, which is rather sweet. They’re all blokes. I’m the only woman down here apart from the ones Tony brings home.”

“He’s still one for the ladies, is he?”

She laughed. “Do you know about that? I hear him bring them in sometimes. I’ve got perfect hearing. When they come through the front door like you just did, I know about it. I can’t always pick up the words, but I know the difference between a bloke’s voice and a woman’s and you don’t expect ladies, as you call them, to be coming in here unless they’re invited back. He makes them giggle and I hear it and think that’s Tony up to his games again. What he gets up to after that isn’t my business. I don’t judge him.”

“Do the other residents have lady friends?”

“They don’t have the privacy for that sort of thing. Four or five to a room and maybe more.”

Diamond glanced at Ingeborg and then at Beattie. “Migrants, are they?”

“I expect so, but they’re not taking advantage and claiming benefits. Quite the opposite. They work long hours, poor things, collected at seven every morning and driven off in a silver van that only gets back about eight in the evening. That’s a long day if they’re doing hard work and I think they must be because their faces show it. They use the kitchen at the end of the passage and make themselves some sort of meal and then by nine or nine-thirty everything goes quiet until next morning.”

“You share the kitchen with them, I expect,” Ingeborg said.

“No, my dear, I’m self-sufficient. I buy everything online and have it delivered. I have a fridge freezer and a microwave in here and I don’t need to cook the old-fashioned way.”

“Have you lived here a long time, Beattie?”

“Eight years this August. I didn’t have to use the chair in those days, but my legs won’t hold me up anymore. It’s my own fault. Comfort-eating, it’s called. People were friendlier when I started here, but they all left for one reason and another. The rents going up made a difference. I wasn’t budging.” She laughed. “They’d never get me up the stairs. I like it down here, apart from the spiders. After everyone left, the place was empty except for me for six weeks, which wasn’t nice. I put on a lot of weight to cheer myself up. And then it filled up almost overnight with these foreign blokes. Before Tony, there was someone with tattoos and a shaved head called Alex who seemed to act as their foreman, if you could call him that. He had the room where Tony is now, up the corridor. He didn’t ever have much to say to me.”

“Who is your landlord?”

She laughed. “That’s a joke.”

“Why?”

“It’s some agency in London and they keep changing their name. It was Howes and Watts when I first got here and two weeks later it was something else and one of the tenants called them Whys and Wherefores, which I thought was very witty. It’s Zodiac now or something with the letter Z. I pay by direct debit and, fingers crossed, they haven’t put the rent up in the past two years.”

“So apart from when you find a spider, you don’t see much of Tony?”

“Only his legs going up and down the steps. I know they’re his because of the good strong muscles and the nice tan.” She blushed at what she’d said. “Can’t avoid seeing them, living in this room with a view of nothing else except the steps, and if he chooses to wear shorts that’s his business. He’s sporty, you see. He goes for runs.”

“He was in the half marathon last week. Did you know?”

“Sunday, wasn’t it? He left in the middle of the morning in his sky-blue shorts.”

“Did you see him come back?”

“This is it: he didn’t. Has something happened to him? Is that why you’re here?”

“We’re investigating,” Diamond said. “Has anyone else come visiting since the day of the race?”

“Who do you mean?”

“A stranger. Someone who might have been interested in Tony and maybe wanting to see inside his room.”

She shook her head. “You’re the first I’ve seen, and I don’t miss much.”

“I can believe that, Beattie. Just to be sure, we’ll check the room ourselves.”

“I’ll come with you. The chair just fits in his doorway.”

“You’d better not. We don’t know what we’re going to find.”

Beattie clapped her hand to her mouth.

“Stay in your room. We’ll deal with it.”

No sounds came from behind the other doors when they passed them. The rest of the basement seemed to be empty, bearing out the story of the early morning working party. Diamond strongly suspected modern slavery overseen by Pinto and he’d be alerting colleagues who dealt with trafficking. He felt sickened by the exploitation of vulnerable people.

At the end of the corridor, Ingeborg produced her piece of plastic and opened Pinto’s door at the second swipe.

Diamond found the light switch and revealed a room no bigger than a mobile home and with the same attention to space-saving. At first sight, it was a sitting room dominated by a two-seater sofa bed in red upholstery. Floor cushions, a large shaggy rug, a Tiffany mirror, spotlights, a fully stocked wine rack, plasma TV, music system with loudspeakers — clearly Pinto’s seduction salon. Yet it could easily convert to a breakfast room, with a hinged tabletop fitted to the wall and above it a cupboard probably containing crockery and food items. And there was storage for clothes in a fitted wardrobe. The wallpaper had vertical red and white stripes topped off with a pseudo-classical frieze that combined the tenant’s known preoccupations — athletics and sex — showing naked runners, male and female, in the style of Greek vase painting. No detail had been left out. If anything, the details were accentuated. Some of the males had prodigious erections.

“What would his lady visitors think of this?” Diamond asked.

“They’d soon get the idea.”

“Cosy?”

“Creepy is the word I’d use.”

They started the search. “I’m looking for his phone,” Diamond said, “and failing that I’ll settle for his laptop and his wallet.”

“Won’t he have taken them with him?”

“In a half marathon?”

“Runners often carry phones.”

“Nothing like that was with the body.”

They checked every surface, every drawer, the backs of things, the tops of cupboards and wardrobe, and found no electronic device other than the TV remote and no paperwork other than a few shop receipts. The pockets of his clothes were empty.

“Disappointing,” Ingeborg said. “Do you think his killer has been by?”

“And nicked the phone and things? Possible, but risky.”

“If there was incriminating stuff...”

“We’ll keep an open mind. Beattie hadn’t seen anyone and I get the feeling she knows every time a visitor comes down those steps.” He took another look inside the wardrobe. Pinto seemed to have worn nothing but sports kit, T-shirts, shorts, running jackets and tracksuits for all weather conditions. “I wonder where he bought this stuff.”

“Argyle Street,” Ingeborg said. “Two of the shop receipts were for John Moore.”

“We’ll take them with us.”

On the way out, he said to the shut door, “All clear, Beattie. Any problem, give us a call.”

The major incident room was a reality when they returned, twenty or more officers behind screens. John Leaman was in his element, crisscrossing between desks making sure that the computers were installed and working. He’d labelled every desk with a notice in large letters describing its intended use. The staff who knew him well had screwed up the paper and binned it. If you were the exhibits officer or the CCTV viewing officer, it was obvious enough. But he deserved credit for the speed of the operation.

Diamond’s brain worked in a different way from Leaman’s. He’d been playing Queen numbers in his head to get to the elusive mnemonic he wanted, and after deciding “We Are the Champions” was no help, the right one came to him. “Get me ROCU, will you. I need to report something before I do anything else.”

He was given a phone and spoke to a sergeant at Portishead who promised to pass on the news about the suspicious activity in the Duke Street house. If a basement stuffed with exhausted foreigners driven off each morning in a van wasn’t organised crime, pigs could fly and the moon was made of green cheese.

The main players in his team apart from Leaman were known in incident-room jargon as the outside officers. They were given desks and computers, but most of their work would be off-site. Diamond limped across to Ingeborg and asked her to move her screen aside so that he could sit on her desk. She didn’t complain. If he parked himself in a chair, like Beattie, he’d have difficulty getting up. He gestured to the others to come closer for a short briefing and filled them in on the visit to Duke Street. Leaman, emphatically an inside officer but who missed nothing, made sure he was near enough to join in.

“In short,” Diamond said when he’d been through the details, “a main question was answered. How could Pinto have gone straight from prison to one of the top addresses in Bath? It seems one of the head honchos in Berwyn Jail did a deal with him. In return for a comfortable pad, he would see that the illegals in the basement caused no trouble and went to work each day. Easy-peasy for Pinto and he could still find time to go chasing women and bring them back for sex. I notified the Regional Organised Crime Unit a few minutes ago.”

“Will they be taking over?” Paul Gilbert asked.

“Christ, no. We still have a homicide on our patch.”

“But if it’s linked to people-smuggling—”

Diamond closed him down. “How do we know that? We don’t. Let ROCU make the case. Your job and mine remains the same, to get a grip on what happened on Combe Down, right?”

No one objected.

“First question: was Pinto killed there, or some other place?”

“Hold on, guv.”

Diamond glared. Leaman was supposed to be setting up the room.

“That’s not the first question,” Leaman said.

The glare turned thunderous.

“Surely the first question is was he killed?”

Typical of Leaman to butt in, but he was the team’s logic man, and his intellectual rigour had proved useful before.

“It can’t be suicide, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Diamond said. “The iron grille was back over the shaft when the search party got to it. Someone else had to be involved.”

“Accident, then.”

“How in the name of sanity is that possible?”

Leaman was unabashed. “He was pestering that woman Belinda, right? She quit the race and made her way to Combe Down. Fact, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Pinto went looking for her—”

“Speculation,” Ingeborg cut in.

“This is what we’re doing, testing theories,” Leaman said with a convenient sidestep. “Nobody here knows for certain what happened. If you don’t want my ideas, I’ll shut up.”

Ingeborg gave a shrug. Everyone was used to being harangued by Leaman. You had to remember it wasn’t personal.

“He got a sight of her in the wood, then lost her again. He found the shaft—”

“Just like that?” Ingeborg said.

“It’s Combe Down, for pity’s sake. The place has more holes than a slab of Swiss cheese. He lifted the cover thinking maybe she was hiding down there.”

“Thirty feet down?”

“He didn’t know how deep it was and neither did Belinda. He lost his footing and fell in when he was lifting the grille. Either it slammed back into place then or Belinda was somewhere nearby and saw what happened and closed it — which would explain why she panicked and went AWOL.”

Ingeborg was the first to react. “It’s not impossible, but it’s bloody unlikely, John, as you well know. It’s far more likely he was murdered. If you want to get rid of a body, a disused mineshaft is a good solution.”

Paul Gilbert said in support, “Easy to do and difficult to find.”

Leaman sniffed. “The boss found it.”

“At a cost,” Diamond said, tapping his injured leg and getting sympathetic smiles. He was always looking for ways to defuse the tensions Leaman caused. “Who agrees with Inge that this was more likely a murder?”

“I do, for one,” Gilbert said, “and I wouldn’t mind betting the postmortem confirms it. A knife wound or a bullet hole. You can’t argue with that.”

“We won’t have long to wait, I hope,” Diamond said, checking his watch. The autopsy would be into its second hour already. “Any thoughts on a possible motive?”

“Where do I start?” Ingeborg said. “He was a sexual predator. This could be someone who heard he was out of prison and wanted revenge for the attack on Bryony Lancaster, or it could be down to a new encounter.”

“A woman he just met?”

“Or her boyfriend or father or some family member angry at how he’d treated her. We know he was back to his old ways.”

“We’re assuming he was, from what Beattie told us,” Diamond said, sounding as finicky as Leaman.

“No, we heard from Belinda, and you saw for yourself. He was pestering her so much that she quit the race.”

“Could Belinda have killed him, trying to fend him off?” Gilbert asked. “She’s the only person we know for sure who was on Combe Down.”

“I don’t see how,” Ingeborg said.

“You don’t think a woman’s strong enough?”

“I didn’t say that. She couldn’t have killed him because she wasn’t there with him. He was still in the race when she was at Combe Down. He finished at least two hours later and then made his way there.”

“Why?” Diamond said. “Did he expect to find Belinda still up there? Had they arranged to meet? I can’t believe she would have agreed to that. Why would he have gone to Combe Down except to meet someone?”

“Does she have a boyfriend?” Gilbert asked.

“In the words of her landlady, Mrs. Hector, she’s shyer than a limpet,” Diamond said. “The boyfriend theory doesn’t hold up, I’m afraid.”

“Hasn’t it occurred to any of you that he may not have been killed because of how he behaved with women?” Leaman said. “Look at it another way. He spent twelve years in prison. He must have made enemies in that time.”

“Fair point, John,” Diamond said. “Old scores to settle when he gets out, but why kill him on Combe Down?”

“Who said he was killed there?” Leaman said. “It’s a great place to hide a corpse, we all agree, but the murder needn’t have been done there. He could have been killed in Bath and moved there after he was dead.”

“When you say moved, you mean driven,” Ingeborg said, “in which case there will be tyre tracks.”

“The best of luck finding the right ones,” Gilbert said. “The field looks like it was used for a motocross rally.”

“Not our job,” Diamond said. “We’re going to rely heavily on scenes of crime and forensics — which we all know will take an age, which is why the early progress has to come the old-fashioned way, through deduction. If John is right, and the body was moved to the shaft from somewhere else, the killer has local knowledge.”

“And wheels,” Gilbert said. “And the strength to do the lifting.”

“I sense a sexist deduction coming on,” Ingeborg said. “Let’s hear it for the female murderer. We’re not incapable of loading a body into a vehicle and dropping it down a mineshaft. Anyway, what if the victim was brought to Combe Down alive and forced at gunpoint to lift the grille and jump in?”

“He wouldn’t necessarily die.”

“With a thirty-foot drop he’d not be in good shape. Who’s there to help? He wouldn’t survive long.”

“You made your point,” Diamond said. “We’ll keep the fair sex in the frame, along with the jealous boyfriends and the ex-cons. Back to work, everyone.”

He limped across to the exhibits desk just as Paul Gilbert returned there. The task of bagging up material securely and making sure it had a valid chain of evidence would occupy the young man for days to come. “Did we give you the receipts we found in Pinto’s room?”

“For food and clothes? Yes, guv. I dealt with them.”

“Let me see the John Moore ones.”

One of Bath’s longest-surviving businesses, John Moore had been founded in the days when sportsmen wore baggy shorts reaching to the knees and sportswomen were still in long skirts.

Diamond read the first receipt through the transparent zipper bag. “He paid cash, I notice. Pair of trainers. Serious money. You get a proper fitting in a shop like that. Where do you go for your trainers, Paul?”

“Sports Direct.”

“And try them on yourself, quick decision and pay?”

Gilbert grinned.

“Buying shoes will be a full-on performance in Moore’s,” Diamond went on. “They’ll remember a regular customer like Pinto. First thing tomorrow, take a trip into town and see what they can tell you about him. Personal stuff. We’re not interested in shoe sizes. What’s that?” He’d heard a shriller sound than the humming computers.

“Your phone.” Ingeborg raised a thumb in approval. For once it had been turned on.

He looked at the display. “Keith, from the mortuary.” He jammed it to his ear, eager for the findings. “Is it over?”

“Only a tea break in the office, guv,” Halliwell told him. “This could be a late night. We’ve done the photographs and the external examination.”

“Is that all? What’s the story so far?”

“Broken bones for sure, as you’d expect with a body falling down a shaft. Bruising and cuts, but nothing like a knife wound or a bullet hole. And he thinks there may have been a struggle, He’s hopeful of getting DNA from under the fingernails. Did you hear that?”

“I did. I’m taking it in. No obvious cause of death, then?”

“Not yet. We’ll find out later if some of the injuries happened before death.”

“Make sure the clothes are sent to the lab as soon as possible. Sealy is quite capable of bagging them up and leaving them on a shelf until someone asks.”

“Hey-ho,” Halliwell said, “looks like they’re going back in. I’ll need to go. Do you want me to phone you when it’s over?”

“Depends. I’ve had a long day. No later than eleven.”

“Jesus, I hope it isn’t that late. I had a sandwich for lunch and that’s all. I’ll be ravenous.”

How anyone could be ravenous after witnessing an autopsy was beyond Diamond’s understanding.