The Finisher

31

Diamond had set his alarm and was up before dawn. A rare event.

He didn’t waste time showering or shaving. A swish of tap water took the sleep from his eyes and a squirt of deodorant completed his grooming. Unshaven jowls were standard among the younger members of his team.

If he’d read the runes correctly (the runes being the hints from the ROCU man who called himself Jones), the wretched slaves living in the Duke Street basement were about to be liberated and he intended to be there when it happened, regardless of operational secrecy. So Raffles was fed earlier than usual and breakfast for Diamond was a banana eaten in the car on the drive in from Weston.

The Lower Bristol Road was blessedly clear. The only problem with such an early start was the dazzle from the rising sun.

His first thought was to use the pull-in at the top end of North Parade Road opposite Duke Street, but when he got near, it occurred to him that this was precisely where the transport for the working party was likely to park, so he motored past, did a U-turn and ended up with his nearside wheels on the pavement in nearby Pierrepont Street. A short way farther up, two police minibuses had done the same and he could see heads inside.

He’d read the runes right.

He sat at the wheel and tried not to doze off, wishing he was in radio contact to get a sense of what was planned. He should have got tough with Jones and insisted he had a right to be here as head of the murder enquiry. Would it have worked? Probably not. Jones, like God, worked in mysterious ways, and, like God, he issued commandments.

An hour later, nobody had moved. Clearly this raid wasn’t going to follow the usual pattern of a forced entry with a battering ram (“a five-pound door key”) when everyone in the house was asleep. The traffic increased, people walked by on their way to work and Diamond stroked his bristles and reflected that he could have fitted in that shave and shower or better still had another hour in bed.

And then everything happened.

Two squad cars came from nowhere and turned up North Parade Road.

One of the minibuses started up and headed in the same direction.

Diamond flung open the door, stepped out, remembered his stick just in time, made his way as best he could around the corner and tried to appear like one more nosy member of the public wanting to check the action.

Give ROCU their due: the operation was neatly planned. The stretch of North Parade Road from Pierrepont Street to the bridge was already taped off and guarded by armed officers. Traffic from both directions was halted and backing up. The pull-in Diamond had rashly thought of using was occupied by a silver transit van trapped between the two flashing police cars parked diagonally at front and rear. The minibus had halted laterally, preventing anything from entering the taped-off section. Armed officers were scrambling out and taking up positions either side of the terraces that fronted Duke Street.

In the centre of North Parade Road, a man was lying handcuffed with one officer holding him down and two others training their assault rifles on him.

The police guarding the scene were some of Bath’s authorised firearms officers. Diamond didn’t need to produce his warrant card to get past.

He approached the van and spoke to a constable he recognised.

“Are there people inside?”

“A lot, sir. Twenty or more crammed in, poor devils. They look done in already and they’re supposed to be working a twelve-hour day. We’ll be transferring them shortly to a minibus.”

“Foreign?”

“Trafficked.”

“Any idea where from?”

“Whichever language it is, I don’t recognise it.”

“Who’s the guy in cuffs?”

“The driver, British. Small fry, we think.”

“Is there a gangmaster?”

“If there is, we haven’t got him yet.”

“Was anyone with them when they walked out to the van?”

The constable shook his head. “It’s weird. They could have escaped, any of them, and they didn’t try.”

“That’s down to conditioning,” Diamond said. “Their brains work differently from yours and mine. It wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve been living in that house for days without a gangmaster.”

“I don’t get it.”

“They don’t need to be whipped into submission like slaves picking cotton. They believe working for a pittance at the waste-disposal place is better than being sent back to the hell they came from, so they go to work and return from work and eat and sleep and start the same cycle again.”

“I’d make a run for it.”

“You don’t know what it’s like where they came from.”

“That’s for sure.”

“How do you come to be involved in this? You’re not from ROCU.”

“They’re running the show, sir, but they used our armed response team. We were notified last night. Very hush-hush.”

“I can believe that. Is anyone left in the house where this lot were living?”

“I saw a team from Bristol go in. It’s a big operation. Simultaneous raids at several addresses.”

He stepped up Duke Street to the house and this time had to show his ID. “Are you from ROCU, sir?” the sergeant with the Heckler & Koch asked.

“Working with them.” A stretch of the truth, but forgivable, even if Jones might not agree. “Who’s inside?”

“The search team and one very large lady in a wheelchair. I can’t think how she fits into this.”

Diamond couldn’t think how Beattie fitted into anything. “She doesn’t know it, but she’s the respectable face of the scam, living in the first flat you come to. She’s sharp. She’ll make a key witness.”

“They’re taking her to headquarters. They’ve sent for a taxi with wheelchair access. I’m looking forward to seeing the driver’s face.”

“The small problem of getting her up the steps? Do they know they’ll need some kind of hoist?”

“Like a crane?”

“Be kind.” Diamond looked over the railings into the basement. “Will I get shot to bits if I go down there?”

“They finished their check for suspicious persons, sir. There was just the wheelchair woman. They’re waiting for the crime scene unit now. If you like, I can radio to say you’re coming down.”

“Please do.”

Steadier with his footwork than the last time, he picked his way down the steps and got the musty smell he recalled from the previous visit. Almost every bit of rubbish blown through an open-ended street in Georgian Bath ends up in basement wells. Mouldering paper and plastic anchored in dust and leaves was heaped up at either end. A few hardy weeds had sprouted from cracks in the stone. No one from this flat had cleaned up in months, even though there were three wheelie bins along one side.

After stepping through the open door he didn’t get far. Beattie was occupying most of the corridor. “Another one of them,” she said with distaste and then saw who it was and changed her tone. “Oh, it’s you. Did you arrange all this, smashing doors down and treating the place like it’s some cop show on the TV? I don’t know what the landlord’s going to say.”

“Not my doing, Beattie,” he said, which wasn’t strictly true. “You’ll get a nice taxi ride out of it.”

“What’s it all about? Has one of the tenants misbehaved?”

“Nobody knows for sure. They want your opinion.”

“I told you everything I know when you were here last time. They’re all good blokes.”

He told her he would see what else he could find out, giving him a reason to squeeze past the chair and move along the corridor to where three of the search team were in conversation outside the damaged open door of Pinto’s room.

“Found much?” he asked, eager to know whether their search had yielded more than his and Ingeborg’s.

“Sod all, really,” one said. “This was obviously the gangmaster’s drum, as you see.”

“The alleged gangmaster,” another said.

“Fuck that. He’s dead. He was killed running the half marathon. I can call him what I bloody like.”

“Pity he’s dead,” the second man said. “We’d have got a load of information from the tosser, wouldn’t we Jimmy?”

“He was smart enough not to leave his phone or wallet here.” Jimmy had a voice and believed in using it. “He must have owned a laptop or some such. Without phone records and card transactions we’ll never get a case to stick. None of that stuff was on his person when he was killed, so where is it?”

Just what Diamond was here to find out.

Jimmy’s words hadn’t been aimed directly at anyone. They were more of an appeal to the gods in general — or whichever god looks after frustrated policemen.

Diamond was no god, but he had a suggestion. “Has anyone checked with the marathon organisers?”

“What would they know about it?”

“They’re sure to have some unclaimed bags.”

“Why would he leave a bag with them when he lives so near? The runners’ village was barely a stone’s throw from here.”

“Safer,” Diamond said. “He wouldn’t trust the people here.”

“We can mention that to the boss.”

Diamond looked through the doorway at the seduction salon, as he thought of it, where Pinto had entertained the women he brought back. To his eye, it was as sexy as a car crash, but it was Pinto’s private knocking shop as well as his office, sitting room, music room, bedroom and breakfast room. The scumbag had spent a large amount of his time here. Surely it held more clues. “Mind if I step inside?”

Jimmy shrugged. “I guess one more set of shoe prints is neither here nor there.”

When Diamond had last been here, he and Ingeborg had done what the search team had done — looked for the hardware that stored the data so vital to modern evidence-gathering. Pinto must have had access to the internet to function as a gangmaster.

Try a different approach, he told himself.

Instead of searching for equipment that wasn’t here, why not look more closely at things that were?

Modern slavery was a world-wide twenty-first-century crime utilising con-tricks that had worked since Eve was persuaded to pick the forbidden fruit. The gangs recruited vulnerable people in places abroad where they had no hope of betterment and offered them jobs and places to live in more advanced countries where casual labour was in demand. The traffickers demanded a fee, of course, and the transport was basic and illegal. On arrival, the victims were taken to open a bank account to receive their wages. They were issued with debit cards that the slavers took over. As the cash flowed in, it was creamed off. Any objections were met with the answer that the rent had to be funded and the debt repaid.

All the unfortunates under Pinto’s charge would have gone through something similar. He must have controlled twenty or more bank accounts. Each came with its password, pin and security number. Remembering so many details wasn’t possible. Put them on computer and you run the risk of being hacked and losing the lot.

Diamond had trouble managing his own account data along with all the other passwords and pins he needed to function. He kept his in a notebook he was always updating.

What was Pinto’s system? Surely more devious than that. Yet he’d need to keep a record somewhere. He’d be an idiot to keep it on his phone.

The only paper items found in the room had been the receipts from the sports shop.

Was anything noted on some surface you wouldn’t expect?

He looked inside the wardrobe and the crockery cupboard. Pulled the folding table from the wall and examined the underside. The edge of a door might have been a smart place, but Pinto hadn’t used that.

What was his secret?

It had to be somewhere here in this basement.

Beattie’s room?

Unless she was a genius at bluffing, Beattie had no active role in the slavery operation and it was unlikely Pinto would have asked her to take care of anything. However, it was not impossible that he’d gone into her room on some pretext and lodged stuff out of sight and out of her reach on top of a cupboard.

He spoke to the guys at the door. “Have all the rooms been searched?”

“All except one.” Jimmy lowered his voice. “We’ll get in there shortly.”

“While she’s at headquarters?”

A nod. He didn’t have to tell them their job. They’d know where to look.

What else, then?

Having checked every conceivable piece of furniture in Pinto’s room, he was left studying the walls.

And now he saw what had been so easy to miss.

“Jimmy, you might like to photograph this.”

The striped wallpaper was topped by the frieze with the nude runners of both sexes chasing each other endlessly around the room. The pink figures were enclosed between narrow bands of a repeating Greek meander pattern in black on a sand-coloured background.

Just above the lower band, in small, neat letters you wouldn’t see unless you got close up, was a long line of words and numbers, several hundred. They went around three walls, so neatly done that they seemed to be part of the pattern.

“Cool,” Jimmy said. “But what the fuck is it?”

“It looks to me like his record of all the accounts under his control. Each guy’s name followed by the bank, account number and pin.”

“I’ve been staring at that fucking wallpaper and all I saw was bollock-naked people.”

“You would,” Diamond said and added tactfully, “Anyone would.”

“I don’t know how you thought of it.”

He didn’t answer. He’d stepped over to the fourth wall, the one with the door. The frieze along here was empty of writing — or almost so. A number had been written just below the light switch in the same minute hand and the same black ink: 50598.

“Any thoughts what this might be?”

“Search me,” the sergeant said. “A pin number?”

“They’re usually four digits.”

“Phone?”

“If it’s a local number, they’re six digits, aren’t they?”

“I’m stumped, then.”

“It seems to be here by the door as a reminder before he steps outside.” He scratched his unshaven chin. He was trying to dredge up a conversation tiptoeing on the edge of his memory and refusing to make itself known, an insight Beattie had unexpectedly provided. Not from today. Must have been when he was here with Ingeborg. He’d been impressed at the time because it had been a snippet of local knowledge he hadn’t heard about in more than twenty years of living in Bath. Suddenly it mattered.

There had been some connection with Duke Street. But how it linked up with the number under the light switch was a mystery known only to Diamond’s unconscious.

“Thanks, anyway.” He left the room and started up the corridor to where Beattie still awaited her taxi.

She was chuntering on about the outrage of the dawn raid. “They won’t let me lock my door,” she told him. “They said they have a search warrant for the whole basement. I don’t want strange men going in my room when I’m not here and opening my underwear drawer. I’m a law-abiding woman. How can I be a suspicious person when I’m stuck in this chair all day?”

“I’ll make sure they respect your belongings,” he said.

“If I find anything gone, I’ll sue you.”

There’s gratitude, he thought. “Did Tony visit your room before he went out to run in the Other Half?”

“What are you suggesting now?” Beattie said. “You lot with your dirty minds take my breath away.”

“That’s not what I meant, Beattie. He could have left some of his valuables in your care, or even his phone. I’m sure he trusted you.”

“Are you calling me a thief now? I’ve got nothing of Tony’s. God knows I’d tell you if I had.”

“But did he visit your room just to let you know what was happening?”

“Will you listen?” she said. “The only time Tony Pinto has ever been across my threshold is when I had an unwelcome visitor.”

“Oh? Who was that?”

“A spider, silly.”

“Ah.” But the “ah” in this case wasn’t downbeat. It was the “ah” of enlightenment, a Eureka moment. That elusive conversation at the back of his brain had come back to him and of course it was the spider invasion. They came from the vaults under the street, she had said. Duke Street was built on a raised platform over vaults that elevated it by five metres above marshy ground once thought to have been uninhabitable.

Thanks to Beattie’s eight-legged visitors he believed he knew why Pinto had written the five-digit number on his wall.

“I’m coming by.” He edged around the back of the wheelchair and left Beattie muttering to herself. Without another word, he passed the armed officer on duty at the basement’s main door and stepped into the walk-out area nobody had bothered to clear of leaves and rubbish. Being so far below pavement level, this shaft was shadowy as well as smelly. Before anything was built, this would have been ground level, the swamp Beattie had spoken about. The grey stone walls were part of the foundations supporting the street above.

The space below the street had to be searched. Years ago, the residents would have stored their coal there and may have stowed a few unwanted pieces of furniture as well.

The stout wooden door was half hidden by the wheelie bins. He dragged them aside and found what he was expecting: the entrance to the vault secured by a strong hasp and staple and a heavy-duty shiny brass padlock.

A five-digit combination padlock.

He rotated the disks to get 50598 and the shackle sprang up. One mystery solved. The door groaned on its hinges.

The vault’s interior was cold, pitch black and smelt rank. He took out his phone and found the torch function. The beam picked out a massive limestone arch over a flagged floor. Beattie had been right about the spiders. Generations of webs like filthy net curtains hung from either side. But the centre looked clear to walk through, suggesting somebody had come this way not long before.

He turned the beam of light in all directions before taking a few shuffling steps, prodding the flagstones with his stick. Ahead, the archway opened up to a stone passage that crossed laterally. He didn’t need to go far. Just behind the base of the first archway his light picked out a plastic storage box and through the transparent lid he could see a laptop, an iPhone and a stack of bank cards held together with a rubber band. Enough data to employ the computer forensics geeks for months.

And two knives.

The vault was Pinto’s office storeroom.

He shone the light across the rest of the space to check for more and was startled by a movement on the far side. A large rat had emerged from under what looked like a folded tarpaulin, its eyes caught in the beam for a second before it raced away and out of sight.

This wasn’t a nice place to be. Diamond had found what he came for and wouldn’t be staying much longer, but out of a sense of duty he crossed the floor for a closer look and uttered an untypically genteel “oh, no” at the feel of a cobweb draping itself around his face. In the act of brushing himself down, he made things worse by dropping the phone. Fortunately, the light stayed on. He had to go on one knee to pick it up.

Then he went rigid.

Ahead, caught in the beam a little more than a yard away, a hand was poking out from under the tarpaulin, the fleshy underside chewed to the bone.