The Finisher

27

At 10 p.m. Diamond was at home and talking to his cat. An early night was indicated after the tiring day he’d had. Getting to bed in his disabled state was a slow process these days. The problem was that Raffles worked to his own timetable, wanting to go out at 10:30 and return a few minutes after. It wasn’t wise for an elderly cat to stay out all night among younger toms eager to fight for territory. One orange tabby had come visiting several times through the cat flap and sprayed the kitchen, forcing Diamond to keep the flap secured overnight. He couldn’t lift Raffles and shove him out of the back door, so it was down to persuasion, which wasn’t working. Raffles sat eyeing him from across the room, indifferent to every appeal. More of a sit-in than a stand-off.

Twenty minutes later when the phone rang, Raffles hadn’t budged.

In this battle of wills, Diamond had forgotten Keith Halliwell’s offer to call.

“I hope I’m not too late, guv.”

“Too late? No. What time is it?”

“I only just got in. The postmortem finished twenty minutes ago.”

“Got you. And what was the cause of death?”

“Bleeding on the brain.”

“He’s sure?”

“There was nothing so obvious as a bullet wound or a stabbing.”

“You told me that already. So what are we talking about here — a crack on the head?”

“Right.” But there was a note in that one-word response that spoke of problems.

“You don’t sound confident.”

“The difficulty is deciding what happened before and after death. The brain injury killed him.”

“You already said.”

“But most of the damage was to the legs and pelvis because it seems they hit the floor of the quarry first.”

Diamond felt a twinge from his own bad foot.

“The head wasn’t such a mess,” Halliwell went on. “Sealy shaved off the hair and found this injury to the back of the skull, a fracture.”

“Blunt instrument?”

“No, he ruled that out. Hitting someone over the head produces a different kind of injury.”

“More of a dent, I expect.”

“Yes, usually circular, or else stellate — like a starburst. He called Pinto’s a simple linear fracture, like if you drop a hard-boiled egg on the floor.”

Diamond would have preferred not to be told about the egg so soon after supper.

“As he explained it,” Halliwell continued, “our skulls are lined with bony plates and that sort of impact puts pressure on the edges and they snap and look like the cracked egg, see?”

“I can picture it, thank you.”

“When he removed the brain, he found bleeding from the under-surface of the frontal lobes.”

“Hold on. You said he was hit on the back of the head.”

“This was from a secondary fracture at the front.”

“Now you’re losing me.”

“The brain sits inside the skull surrounded by membranes and fluid, so it’s not fixed in position. If it gets a big jolt, it will smack against the thin bone of the orbital roof and fracture it. He said this is called the contre-coup effect. It’s not unusual in traffic accidents.” Halliwell had attended so many autopsies on Diamond’s behalf, he could be excused for trying to sound like the pathologist he wasn’t.

“Can we cut to the chase, Keith?”

“He said it was typical of someone falling backwards and striking the ground.”

Diamond’s theories about the killing were being challenged. “Is that certain? We know Pinto had a fall, straight down the shaft.”

“Yes, but a long fall like that produces horrendous injuries if it’s head first. The skull and cervical spine are forced together and—”

“Spare me the details. If that didn’t cause the injury and he wasn’t bashed with a blunt instrument, what happened?”

“Like I said, a fall.”

“Above ground, is that it?”

“You can’t tell from the injury where it was done.”

“You’re starting to sound more and more like bloody Sealy. Was Pinto alive when it happened?”

“You can tell from the bleeding on the brain.”

“I’ll take your word for that — or Sealy’s. I’m trying to arrive at a likely sequence of events, Keith. It’s not impossible he was attacked above ground and killed outright and dropped down the shaft. But equally he could have got the brain injury from his head hitting the quarry floor, right?”

“Or the wall. The legs hit the floor first. That was obvious from the state of them. But the rest of his body felt the impact and you’d expect the head, being heavy, to strike something. It’s surprising the skull wasn’t more marked. I suppose it could have been protected by an arm or the chest.”

“Were there any other signs of a physical attack?”

“A cut and some bruising on the left cheek.”

“I saw when I did the ID.”

“Could have been caused when he hit the quarry floor.”

“Do bruises still appear after death?”

“Even I know the answer to that one,” Halliwell said. “I’ve been to autopsies where the bruise gets bigger as the day goes on.”

“I’ve got the picture, I think,” Diamond said to save himself from more titbits from the mortuary. “Is Sealy expecting anything from the lab tests?”

“Maybe, but don’t hold your breath. He took clippings from the fingernails. There was slight bruising to the knuckles of the right hand. If there was a fight, there may be some of his attacker’s DNA.”

“That would be a bonus. You left him in no doubt we need those results as soon as possible?”

“He’s aware of it.”

“Okay, I’ve heard enough for now.” Some gratitude was wanted here. “Well done, Keith. I appreciate this, as always. Did you get something to eat?”

“No, and I’m famished, but there’s some liver in the freezer. I’ll fry that with bacon and a couple of tomatoes.”

The man had a cast-iron stomach.

When Diamond put down the phone, his cat had moved and was waiting by the back door. It was 10:30.

Raffles had won.

In the incident room next morning, a detective constable called Sharp was assigned to trawl through the CCTV footage of the Other Half. She would need to live up to her name. Picking out Tony Pinto from five thousand runners wasn’t too difficult when you had his timing at various checkpoints, but Diamond wanted the race numbers of everyone who passed each camera within five minutes of him. Any who featured more than once would come in for special attention. The job would take days.

The man himself was in his office with a detective inspector from ROCU who’d shown him a card with the name Jones on it. Jones had the air of a man who could recite the Official Secrets Act like the Lord’s Prayer. He’d insisted on a private room for the conversation. He probably had visiting cards with Smith, Brown and Robinson in his wallet as well. His true identity wasn’t an issue with Diamond. If he wished to be coy, let him.

“Are you soundproofed?” Jones stepped over to the wall and tapped on the plasterboard.

“No one is listening, if that’s what you mean,” Diamond said. “We all bat for the same team here.”

Jones moved to the window and looked down, as if some eavesdropper might be out there on a ladder.

Satisfied, it seemed, he sat opposite Diamond and struck a more positive note, but pianissimo. “You did the right thing, notifying us about the house in Duke Street.”

“Doing my job.”

An approving nod.

“Will you deal with it?” Diamond asked.

Jones looked wounded by the directness of the question. After a pause, he said, “Let’s put it this way: we’re aware of the situation.”

Diamond pictured a police aware notice stuck onto an abandoned vehicle at the side of the road. In no way did he consider the Pinto case abandoned.

“That’s it,” Jones continued, as if pleased by the form of words he’d used, “aware of the situation.”

“I guessed as much.” ROCU would say they were aware. Like every other department in the police service, they were over-stretched and short-staffed. They didn’t keep tabs on everything. “So why are you here?”

“Just touching base,” Jones said. “I gather you’re interested in one of the tenants.”

“Tony Pinto.”

“Pinto,” he said, and added, as if he knew the name, “Aha.”

“It’s more than interest,” Diamond said. “It’s an investigation into his death. I reported this to your lot because I’m suspicious he was involved in people-smuggling and modern slavery. I’m assuming he was put there to manage the day-to-day operation.”

“Conceivably.” Even this vague word was a stretch for Jones.

“If I’m right,” Diamond said, “it’s organised crime.”

“People-smuggling? Certainly.”

“That’s why I reported it.”

“Good man.”

Diamond waited for more. Jones looked left and right as if deciding whether to test the walls again. “Without for a moment wishing to denigrate the people at the coal face such as your good self, we work from a different perspective.”

“Okay.”

“We focus on the high-ups, the people at the top. Identify, disrupt and dismantle. The Duke Street operation, if there is one, will have been masterminded elsewhere.”

“Obviously. Was Pinto recruited in prison?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because he’s only been out a few months. He didn’t ask for help finding a place to live. He moved straight into the bedsit in the basement.”

“You’re well-informed.”

“I put him behind bars in the first place.”

“There’s some history with you, then?”

“I don’t let it get in the way,” Diamond said, sensing a trap. “Do you know all about him?”

“We have our people inside prison.”

“Grasses?”

“I’m speaking of the RPIU.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Good. You can forget them again after I’ve told you. They’re the Regional Prison Intelligence Unit. Any contacts he made will have been monitored.”

“You know who the villains are, then?”

Jones didn’t. Transparently, he’d never even heard of Duke Street until Diamond reported it. He trotted out another of his bland responses. “Bringing the ringleaders to justice isn’t easy. It’s all in the timing.”

“What can I expect to see next?”

“That’s a strategic decision.”

“Simultaneous arrests?”

“Probably.”

“Nothing in the near future?”

“I’m not at liberty to say. In the meantime, ROCU can’t allow anything to compromise the progress we’re making with our own investigation.”

Diamond said with eyebrows raised, “How could that arise?”

“We look to you to soft-pedal. Pinto’s death isn’t high priority.”

They were round to the reason for the visit. Finally.

“It’s still a homicide,” Diamond said. “Someone out there killed him and dumped him down a mineshaft.”

“And you’ve got an excellent clear-up record. You’ll catch up with your perpetrator when the time is right. As of now, we don’t want the human slavery story all over the media. Softly, softly, as the saying goes.” Jones ended the exchange by widening his eyes as if to say we’re all in this together, aren’t we?

Diamond, being Diamond, didn’t bat an eyelid.

Alone again, he sat back in his well-padded swivel chair and pondered his next move. There was a chance Pinto had been murdered because of some failure in his duties at the Duke Street house. Working for traffickers was high-risk. As a minor player, he was dispensable, and he knew too much to be allowed to live. If so, this would have been a contract killing ordered by the high-ups Jones had spoken about. So what could Bath CID do about it? Catching the killer wouldn’t be enough. It was only a step on the way to exposing the so-called masterminds. No argument: ROCU were better equipped to take that on.

But if the homicide was unconnected with the slavery scam, Diamond had a duty to track the killer down. He would investigate, even if it meant going back to Duke Street to eliminate the slavers from his enquiries. That was the way he worked, following up each lead until he got his man — or woman.

He reached for the crutches and moved out to the incident room. Everyone knew about the ROCU visitor. “Relax,” he told them. “We’re still on the case. Nothing is off limits except careless talk about people-smuggling. I’m not even sure he knew what was going on in Duke Street.”

Ingeborg looked up from her keyboard. “Did he know about Pinto?”

“Probably not. Our Tony is small fry to them.”

“He must have been small fry to the slavers. They haven’t replaced him and they haven’t moved the men to another location, or Beattie would have known for sure.”

Leaman, hovering nearby as usual, said, “Why don’t they just walk away?”

“The men in the basement? Isn’t that obvious?” Ingeborg said.

“Not to me.”

Ingeborg wasn’t bluffing. Modern slavery was a scourge on humanity she’d hated ever since first hearing about it. The visit to Duke Street had brought the evil closer and she’d made sure she knew how it functioned. “Debt bondage, for one thing.”

“What’s that, then?”

“Typically, they’re allowed to earn a small wage at whatever menial job they do, but they’re told they owe the slavers big money for smuggling them in and providing them with a place to live, so what they get is a pittance.”

“All the more reason to escape.”

“Escape to what? They’re stateless. If any of them had passports, they’ll have been taken by the traffickers. They’re in terror of being repatriated. They have a place to live and the van still comes for them each day, so they climb in and go to work. They’re conditioned to it.”

“What an existence,” Gilbert said.

“It’s vile, and it’s more widespread in Britain than you think. Nobody knows how many for sure. More than six thousand, anyway.”

“How can anyone put a figure on it?” Leaman said.

“Reported cases.”

“And how many are not reported?”

“Leave it,” Diamond said. “Back to work, people.”

Gilbert remained, obviously with something else to say. “I did as you asked, guv, called in at John Moore Sports this morning.”

“Anything helpful?”

“They were shocked to hear he was dead. All the staff seemed to know him and he was well liked, chatty and cheerful.”

“Especially with the women, no doubt,” Diamond said.

“Nobody said.”

“I did. Tony Pinto would score in a nunnery. I’m asking if you heard anything of use to us.”

“They said he’d set himself up as a personal trainer.”

“Nice work if you can get it. He was doing the same in prison, and now he gets to visit rich people in their homes. They work up a sweat on the bike and he tells them to keep pedalling.”

“Spinning, guv.”

Diamond missed the point and Gilbert didn’t enlighten him.

“Did you find out who he trained?”

“One of their main customers. Very rich. Buys only the best kit. She couldn’t speak highly enough of him.”

“As a trainer, you mean?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Name?”

“Olga something. Russian.”

A feature of recent times in Bath was the influx of oil-rich billionaires who had bought properties, but a Russian community had thrived here for over fifty years. The devout had their own Orthodox church in Alexandra Road. How many of the ultra-rich attended church was an open question, but clearly they patronised the sports shop.

“What’s her address?”