The Last Detective

Chapter Five

IN THE MODERN POLICE, AS any detective will tell you, a murder mystery is rarely, if ever, solved by scintillating deductions from clues that baffle inferior minds. Unless the killer's identity is so obvious that the case is cleared up in the first hours, the investigative process is likely to be laborious, involving hundreds of man-hours by police officers, forensic scientists and clerical staff. If any credit attaches ultimately to a conviction, it is diffused among numerous individuals, and has to be qualified by administrative delays, false assumptions and sometimes fatal errors. These days criminal investigation is not a sport for glory hunters.

After the unproductive interview with Mrs Pietri, Diamond returned to the mobile incident room and pounded the floor again. He demanded another look at the missing persons files for Avon and Somerset and the adjacent counties and vented his anger on a filing clerk when he found that the list hadn't been updated since he had last seen it. The atmosphere in the caravan was sulphurous as he reduced the girl to tears, blaming her for other shortcomings in the list that were apparently not her responsibility.

Inspector Wigfull's return should have defused the tension. Wigfull, the sunbeam of the squad, as Diamond unkindly dubbed him, always had a word of encouragement for everyone, including the civilian clerks, each of whom he knew by their first names. His was the shoulder to cry on. He smiled a lot, and when he wasn't smiling he still appeared to be, because of the tendency of his exuberant moustache to curl upwards at the ends. This time the mere sight of him coming up the steps – playing a catching game with his car keys – triggered Diamond into another tirade.

'You took your bloody time.'

'Sorry, sir. Mrs Troop was in a bit of a state. She needed advice.'

'John, if you want to join the bloody Marriage Guidance people and hold hands with weeping wives, why don't you go ahead? I happen to be working on a murder inquiry, and if that isn't your particular bent, I suggest you tell me right now so that I can ask for someone I can rely on.'

'She'd been assaulted by her husband, sir. I was telling her to lodge a complaint this time.'

'Social work,' said Diamond as if he were speaking of some disease brought on by lack of hygiene. 'You're supposed to be a detective. Meanwhile I'm stuck here like a lupin waiting for a bee.'

'Has there been a development?'

Diamond flung out his hand and knocked over a box of paper clips. 'Of course there bloody hasn't. How can there be when you're listening to sob stories over coffee in Chewton Mendip? Three days, and all I've got for it is a sunburnt scalp. We're literally up the creek until we can put a name to this corpse.'

'Should we have another look at missing persons?' the hapless inspector suggested.

There was a tensing of shoulders right around the room, unnecessarily as it turned out. Diamond, deciding that he had raised his blood pressure to dangerous levels, said in the mild register that he knew was more effective than a bellow, 'That is what I have been trying to do.'

'But in this area alone?'

'And Wiltshire.' He snatched up a sheaf of flimsy papers and flapped it. 'A bloody long list, growing by seventy-plus every week.'

Wigfull cleared his throat and said, 'Surely the PNC can helpus.'

Diamond had to think a moment. His mind didn't work in abbreviations, and people who knew him better were more tactful than to press the cause of the Police National Computer. 'Yes,' he said with contempt, -by giving us twenty thousand names.'

'You limit it by keying in the data you have,' Wigfull tried to explain. 'In this case, females under thirty with red hair.'

In reality, Diamond had a reasonable grasp of the PNC's functions; otherwise he couldn't have survived in the CID. What he deplored was the general belief that it was the cure-all. 'For the present, we'll work with the county lists,' he said. 'I want updates on each of the names I've marked. Call the local stations. Get descriptions, real descriptions, not sodding data, as you insist on calling it. I want to know what they're like as people. By 3.30 this afternoon. I'm calling a conference.'

'Very good, Mr Diamond.'

'That remains to be seen. You may have sensed that I'm feeling somewhat frayed at the edges, Mr Wigfull. Somewhere out there is a murderer. We're making precious little progress towards arresting him. Jesus Christ, we don't even know how it was done.'

'Looks as if we'll need the PNC,' said Wigfull.

Diamond turned away, muttering, to check more responses to the local appeal for information. Copies of the artist's impression had appeared in Monday's Bath Evening Chronicle and the Bristol Evening Post. 'Two more for Candice Milner,' he presendy called across to Wigfull. 'It says a lot about contemporary values when people can't discriminate between real life and a flaming television serial.' It would take a breakthrough of cosmic proportions to shake him out of this embittered mood.

Wanting to get away from the constant bleep of the phones, he chose to hold his case conference in the minibus parked beside the incident room. So at 3.30, the four senior officers in the squad sat with him in the rear of the vehicle in uncomfortable proximity and in turn reported their findings.

Wigfull's work on the phone had yielded results of a sort: he had fuller details of three missing women whose descriptions broadly tallied with the woman found in the lake. 'Janet Hepple is divorced, thirty-three, a part-time artists' model in Coventry. Red hair, five foot seven. She left her flat seven weeks ago, leaving rent unpaid, and hasn't been seen since. Evidently this was out of character. Everyone spoke of her as honest and reliable.'

Diamond was unimpressed. 'And the second?'

'Sally Shepton-Howe, from Manchester, missing since 21 May, when she had a row with her husband and ran off. She sells cosmetics in a department store in the city. Hair described as auburn, green eyes, thirty-two, good-looking. A woman of her description was seen that night at Knutsford Services on the M6 trying to hitch a lift south.'

'Asking for it. Who else?'

'This is an odd one. An author, from west London, Hounslow. Writes romance. What are those books women buy everywhere?'

'Bodice-rippers?' someone suggested.

'No, the name of the publisher.'

'Don't ask me. I only read science fiction.'

'Anyway, she writes them. She's called Meg Zoomer.'

'Zoomer. Is that a pen name?'

'It's real, apparently, the name of her third husband.'

'Third?' said Diamond. 'What age is this woman?'

'Thirty-four. She appears to carry on as if she's one of the characters in her books. Hungry for romance. She wears a dark green cloak and grows her hair long. It's chestnut red. Anyway, she drives about in an MG sports car looking for experiences to use in her books.'

'Someone's having you on, John,' said Keith Halliwell, the inspector supervising the house-to-house inquiries.

'They'd better not be,' Diamond said gravely, 'This is a murder hunt, not a night out at the pub. Let's have the rest. When was Mrs Zoomer last seen?'

'The nineteenth of May, at a party in Richmond. She left soon after midnight with a man who seems to have been a gatecrasher. Everyone assumed he came with somebody else. Tall, dark-haired, aged about thirty, powerfully built, a trace of a French accent.'

'Straight out of one of the books,' commented Halliwell. 'What did he drive – a Porsche, or a four-in-hand?'

'Wrap up, will you?' Diamond snapped. He regarded Halliwell as a pain, which was why he was on house-to-house. 'Who was the informant?'

'The woman who lives next door, sir. She took in the milk each day until there was no room left in her fridge.'

'Has anyone shown her the picture yet?'

That's being done. And Scotland Yard are trying to locate Mrs Zoomer's dental records.'

'A model, a shopgirl and a writer,' Diamond summed it up, and sniffed. 'That's all?'

'Those are the missing redheads more or less fitting our description, sir.'

'I thought you would come up with more than that.'

Wigfull countered this by saying, 'With respect, sir, the PNC would have given us more.'

After an uneasy silence, Diamond said tamely, 'All right. See to it.'

Wigfull tilted an eyebrow in Halliwell's direction and it was his undoing.

'As we're going to cast the net more widely,' continued Diamond in a reasonable tone, 'maybe we should broaden our data-base.'

The jargon from the lips of the Last Detective ambushed everyone. 'In what way, exactly, Mr Diamond?' Wigfull innocently asked.

'Brunettes. People have different ideas about red hair. Our woman isn't what you'd call ginger. The hair is reddish brown.'

'More red than brown, sir.'

'Some people might call it brown. Check the brunettes on the PNC as well.'

That silenced Wigfull rather pleasingly. The conference continued for another twenty minutes, dispiritingly chronicling the failure of the door-to-door enquiries, the searches and the appeals in the media to throw up anything of real significance. At the end of it, when they had climbed out of the minibus and were flexing their limbs, Inspector Croxley, a quietly ambitious man – an ascending angel, by his own lights – who was co-ordinating the search around the lake, approached Diamond and said, 'I didn't raise this inside, sir, but it crossed my mind. We're all assuming murder because she was found nude, but there isn't any evidence of violence.'

'Up to now. The pathologist's report isn't in.'

'If it does turn out to be the writer, I wonder what you think of suicide as a possibility, sir?'

'What?'

'Suicide. I saw a thing on television once about a famous writer. I mean a documentary, not a play. She was out of her mind, I admit, but she killed herself by walking into a river. Back in the 1940s, this was, in the war. She drowned. We know this Zoomer woman has fantasies about herself, the way she dresses and what have you. Suppose she got depressed and decided to do away with herself. Isn't this the way she might do it – a dramatic gesture?'

'Starkers? Did this woman on TV strip off before she drowned herself?'

'Well, no, sir.'

'That's gilding the lily, is it?'

'I beg your pardon.'

'The dramatic gesture. An extra touch?'

'Something like that. It's only an idea.'

'I'll say one thing for your theory, Inspector. I've heard of cases when people have left a heap of clothes on a shoreline. It's not uncommon. That Labour MP-'

'Stonehouse.'.

'Right. The difference is that he faked his suicide. People were meant to find the clothes and assumed he'd drowned. What we have here, Inspector, isn't a pile of clothes and no corpse. It's a corpse and no clothes. You find me a pile of women's garments including a long, green cloak and I might buy your theory.' With a swagger, Diamond ambled off to the incident room.

Occasionally during the long summer, when his caseload had been lighter, he had bought sandwiches for lunch and found a seat among the tourists on one of the wooden benches in the Abbey Churchyard, the paved open area facing the West Front of the Abbey. There he d regularly whiled away a pleasant twenty minutes reading Fabian of the Yard, which he'd acquired in the Oxfam shop for lOp.

Fabian of the Yard. Lovely title. No wonder so many big-name detectives from Fred Cherrill to Jack Slipper had used that…of the Yard tag for their memoirs. Diamond of Avon and Somerset didn't have the same ring to it. Good thing he wasn't planning to go into print.

At intervals in those summer lunchbreaks he had looked up from his reading. The towers on each side of the great west window were decorated with sixteenth-century carvings representing angels on two ladders – to Diamond's eye more curious than decorative. These weatherbeaten figures were perched at mathematically precise intervals on the rungs of the two ladders reaching up to heaven. Many people assumed that it was a representation of Jacob's ladder. The official version, however, was that it was Oliver King's ladder, for the bishop of that name who rebuilt the church, starting in 1499, had stoutly insisted that the dream of a ladder to heaven was his own, and who can doubt the integrity of a bishop? Fixed in perpetuity in their positions, unaltered except by the eroding effects of wind, rain and contamination, those luckless angels seemed emblematic of hope deferred, rather than celestial promise. Peter Diamond knew the feeling. Staring up at the West Front one lunchtime, he had been charmed by a revelation of his own, picturing the senior CID of Avon and Somerset clinging to the rungs. The image often came back to him when he saw them together.

Midway through Wednesday morning came a call from Dr Merlin, the pathologist. For no obvious reason Diamond had started the day in a benign mood. He strolled across the room, thanked the girl who handed him the phone, put it to his ear and said, 'Glorious morning here, Jack. What's it doing in Reading?'

'Look here, I've been badgering the lab on your account,' Merlin announced, sounding quite piqued at the bonhomie. 'Off the record they've given me some early results.'

'And?'

'Nothing has been found to indicate conclusively how she died.'

'You call that a result?'

'It supports my preliminary opinion.'

'I never doubted you.'

The absence of doubt in Diamond's mind appeared not to settle the question for the pathologist. 'It's still quite conceivable that she drowned.'

Diamond sighed. 'We've been over this before. Aren't we any closer to a definite cause of death? Let's put it this way, Jack,' he added quickly, not wanting the phone slammed down. 'Is there anything I can rule out? Toxic substances?'

'Too early to say. Nothing very obvious, but you have to remember that if someone has drowned, especially in fresh water, there's a tremendous increase in blood volume – up to a hundred per cent within a couple of minutes – due to the osmotic absorption of fresh water through the lung membranes. This has the effect of diluting any concentration of drugs or alcohol in the blood by up to a hundred per cent. So any analysis result on a post-mortem sample may give only half the true value which was present just before death.'

'Jack, suppose she didn't drown. Suppose the body was dumped in the lake after death. Is there anything pointing to a cause of death?'

'Essentially she appears to have been a healthy young woman. We can rule out coronary artery disease or myocarditis, or diabetic coma, or epilepsy.'

'I sense that you do know something,' said Diamond. 'You're keeping me in suspense, you bugger.'

'I'm telling you these things, Superintendent, because without them my conclusion is tentative, at best. At the autopsy I found a number of pinhead haemorrhages in the eye membranes and there were some in the scalp and to a lesser extent in the brain and the lungs. The presence of petechial haemorrhages is open to different interpretations depending on other findings.'

'All right, mate, I get the point. You can't be a hundred per cent certain. But what would you put your money on?'

Down the line, Merlin's tone of voice revealed that he didn't much like his opinion equated with gambling. 'In the absence of external injuries, one is drawn along the road-'

'Oh, come on, man!'

'… of asphyxia 'Asphyxia?'

'So you appreciate the difficulty. Drowning is a form of asphyxia.'

Diamond groaned. 'But I just ruled out drowning.'

'I didn't.' After a pause, Merlin said, 'There's a phenomenon known as dry drowning.'

Diamond wondered briefly whether he was being sent up. 'Did you say dry drowning?'

'It happens in about one case in every five. The victim's larynx goes into spasm with the first intake of water and very little of it enters the lungs. They drown without actually gulping or inhaling water. Dry drowning, you see.'

'What about those haemorrhages you found?'

'Would be observed, as in any case of asphyxia.'

'Meaning she may have drowned after all? That doesn't help me much. It doesn't help at all.' Diamond was heating up again. 'This wasn't a swimming accident, Jack. People aren't allowed to swim in reservoirs. Anyway, she was nude. Her wedding ring was missing.'

'Are you listening to me?' said Merlin.

'Go on.'

'To answer your question, if you exclude drowning as a possibility, and if we can eliminate drugs and alcohol, the most likely explanation is that before she got into the water she was smothered with some soft object, say a cushion or a pillow.'

'We've got there,' said Diamond to his audience in the caravan.

'I didn't say that. I'm trying to balance the probabilities. Death by smothering is hard to detect at the best of times,' said the pathologist tartly.

'You said the same about drowning. I sometimes wonder, Jack, if you'd say the same about a dagger through the heart.' Diamond banged down the phone and looked around. 'Where the hell is Wigfull?'

'Outside, sir,' said a sergeant. 'The press has arrived.'

Diamond swore and left the room.

One of the filing clerks said to nobody in particular, 'I wish we were back in headquarters.'

'Why?' the sergeant asked her.

'He intimidates me, that's why. I don't like to be so near him. You can't get away from him in this poky caravan. There's more room in a proper incident room. And he breaks things. Have you watched him? He breaks things -paper cups, pencils, anything he gets his hands on. It gets on my nerves.'

The sergeant grinned. 'That's how he got where he is today, by breaking things.'

Outside, at a signal from Diamond, John Wigfull terminated the press interview and the two men took a walk along the edge of the lake, past fishermen spaced at intervals. Wigfull waited until Diamond had given him the gist of the news from Merlin, and then said with his habitual optimism,'That's a big step forward.'

'It may be, when we eventually find out who she is,' Diamond said, and was moved to confide to his assistant, 'I can't even feel sorry for the woman without knowing anything about her – her name, her background. I need to care about what happened to the victim, but I don't. She's just a stiff. That isn't enough.'

'We know a certain amount,' Wigfull pointed out. 'She was married. She cared about her appearance. She wasn't a down-and-out.'

'I keep telling myself that. Someone ought to have noticed that this woman is missing by now. It's over two weeks. She must have had people she knew, friends, family or workmates. Where are they?'

'I'm following up those missing women we talked about yesterday and I've got a long list of brunettes who could be worth checking on.'

Diamond aimed a vicious kick at a fir cone.

They retraced their steps. Before they reached the encampment of blue and black vehicles inside the taped cordon, a police motorcyclist rode along the track and stopped by the incident room. He went inside, was evidently told where to deliver his message, came out and walked across to Diamond and handed him a brown envelope, sent from police headquarters at Bristol.

'My promotion, no doubt,' Diamond quipped as he opened it. Inside was a faxed diagram. 'No,' he said. 'It's from the Yard. Mrs Zoomer's dental record. I regret to inform you, Mr Wigfull, that by the look of this your eccentric author has two superfluous wisdom teeth. Two more than our lady of the lake.'

Later that afternoon, the decision was taken to decamp. The house-to-house enquiries and the search of the lake perimeter had been completed. The scenes-of-crime officers had long since left. It made sense to transfer to Bristol.

The midges in their millions were casting their evening haze over the water when the last police car left the site and headed through Bishop Sutton towards the A37. In the back seat, Diamond remarked, 'You know what depressed me most about that spot?'

John Wigfull shook his head.

'Those goddam fishermen. They were showing us up.'

Just short of Whitchurch, a message came through on the car radio. It was the desk sergeant at Manvers Street Police Station in Bath.

'Don't know if this is relevant to your inquiry, sir. A man has come in and reported that his wife is missing. Her name is Geraldine Snoo, sir.' name is Geraldine

'Snoozer?'

'Snoo. Geraldine Snoo.'

Beside him, Wigfull opened his mouth to speak, but Diamond put up a restraining hand.

The sergeant added, 'She's thirty-three and he describes her hair as auburn.'

'When did he see her last?'

'Almost three weeks ago.'

Diamond cast his eyes upwards in an expression of gratitude that was almost worshipful. 'Is he still with you?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Keep him there. For God's sake don't let him leave. What's his name?'

'Professor Jackman.'

'Professor? Hold on. You say his name is Jackman, and he's the husband, but you just gave me the woman's name as Snoo.'

'That's the name she's known by, sir. She's an actress. Well, that's an understatement. She's a star. Do you ever watch The Milners on TV? Geraldine Snoo played the part of Candice.'

Diamond had taken too strong a grip on the window handle. It jerked out of its socket.