The Secret Hangman

26

O n fine mornings like this one, Giuseppe Tosi liked to imagine he was back in sunny Padua. In reality George Street, Bath, didn’t much resemble Via Angelina, but when Tosi leaned on the railing at the top of the basement stairs with the warmth on his face he had no difficulty picturing blue shutters on the windows across the street and tiling the roofs in terracotta. Humming ‘O Sole Mio’, he beamed at everyone passing as if they were friends and neighbours. This was how he failed to recognise the policeman who had called before.

It was excusable. This time Diamond had Ingeborg in tow, and any full-blooded male from Padua was going to have eyes only for a woman as stunning as she.

Diamond greeted Tosi by name and got an, ‘Uh?’ in response.

‘Remember me?’ Diamond prompted. ‘Detective Superintendent Diamond?’ To Ingeborg he said, ‘He’s the owner, and he has less English than any of them.’ To Tosi, he said, ‘Carabinieri.’

Tosi said, ‘Mamma mia.’

‘There’s a waiter called Luigi who speaks English,’ Diamond said to Ingeborg.

Tosi heard the name. ‘You come take Luigi?’ He beckoned with his hand and led the way downstairs.

They followed. Before going inside, Diamond pointed out the bike resting against the wall under the stairs. ‘Good, Luigi’s in work.’

This was early in the restaurant day. No cloths were on the tables. Tosi pushed a vacuum cleaner to one side to let them through. Luigi, in T-shirt and jeans, came from the back and recognised Diamond and gave Ingeborg the up-and-down with those large brown eyes. ‘More questions?’

‘A few things we didn’t cover last time. Do you mind?’

‘No problem.’ COOL IT was written on Luigi’s shirt. He wasn’t even making eye contact. Not with Diamond, anyway.

‘So how long has this restaurant been going?’

Luigi shrugged and asked Tosi in Italian and then translated the response. ‘He says six years last September.’

‘And when did you start?’

There was hesitation and Diamond recalled that Luigi disliked personal questions. ‘I don’t know. About four years ago, I guess.’

‘And the cook, Carlo?’

‘You’ll have to ask him. He was here before me.’

‘So all three of you were working here for at least four years. When did Delia start?’

He folded his arms. ‘Are you still investigating Delia? I read in the paper that her boyfriend did it and hanged himself.’

An attempt to divert that didn’t work with Diamond. ‘Answer the question, please. When did she start?’

‘What is the problem with Delia?’

Diamond waited, saying nothing.

Luigi rolled his eyes and then gave Ingeborg a long-suffering look. ‘Two and a half years, maybe three. Do you want me to ask the boss? He may have it on paper somewhere.’

‘I’ll take your word for it. Another question. What happens about reservations in this place? Is there a book?’

‘We went over this,’ Luigi said. ‘The night Delia died, we had only nine people in all evening.’

‘I’m not asking about that night.’

‘Sure, there’s a book.’ He went over to the bar, a small counter framed in plastic vine leaves. It doubled as the reservations desk.

Tosi said something in agitated Italian and Luigi replied and there was much shrugging and hand gesturing before the book was handed to Diamond.

He turned to the front. ‘This only starts in September. Where are the earlier books?’

More consultation. Then Luigi said, ‘He chucked them.’

‘Threw them out? Are you sure?’

‘He just told me.’

Ingeborg, silent up to now, said, ‘That’s right, guv. I know enough to follow what was said.’

Luigi flashed her a big, approving smile. ‘It’s only reservations. It’s not like he threw away the accounts.’

‘But the accounts wouldn’t show the names of customers, would they?’ Diamond said.

‘Nothing gets past you.’

Diamond bit back a rebuke. There was another way to go. Taking out the photo he had been given by Harold Twining, he asked, ‘Recognise this couple?’

Luigi, so adept at ducking, said straight away, ‘Who are they?’

‘Never mind. Have they eaten here? It would have been some while back, say two or three years ago.’

‘A long time.’ He sidestepped the question by passing the photo to Tosi.

A nice moment followed. Tosi’s big bulk started to wobble. He made a crowing sound and extended his hand and stretched all the fingers wide as if catching the memory. ‘My friends. Good friends.’

‘They came here?’ Diamond said.

‘Plenty times,’ Tosi said, turning to Luigi for an animated exchange.

‘What are they saying?’ Diamond asked Ingeborg.

‘He seems to be telling Luigi he’s bound to remember these people because they always gave good tips. But Luigi is saying they must have been before his time.’

Tosi gave up on his waiter and shouted towards the kitchen. ‘Carlo, Carlo.’

‘This should be interesting,’ Diamond said.

Carlo surfaced, wiping his hands on a cloth. Tosi gave him an earful of Italian and handed him the photo. Carlo was slow to react. He peered at the picture for some seconds. Then his mouth curved and he made a sound like a steam train leaving the station. Finally he said, ‘Si.’

‘Is he faking it just to please the boss?’ Diamond asked Ingeborg.

Luigi must have overheard what was meant to be a quiet aside, because he grinned and nodded at Diamond.

‘I’m sure about Signor Tosi,’ Ingeborg said. ‘He’s positive he’s seen them before.’

‘Who are they?’ Luigi said for the second time.

‘Doesn’t matter, does it?’ Diamond said. ‘You obviously haven’t met them.’

Then Tosi clicked his fingers and said, ‘Cristina.’ He grabbed the photo from Carlo and said with an air of triumph, ‘Cristina.’

‘Pretty close,’ Diamond said.

‘Cristina e Giovanni.’

‘Not so close.’

Ingeborg said, ‘Closer than you think, guv. Giovanni is John in Italian.’

On the walk back to the nick he told Ingeborg, ‘Tosi remembered them. I’d bet my house on that. They came to the restaurant often enough for him to know their first names.’

‘The first real link we have,’ she said.

‘“Link” is putting it strongly.’

‘OK, let’s say their paths may have crossed.’

‘More like it. The Twinings were customers and Delia could have been their waitress.’

‘Which was when?’

‘They died two years ago, didn’t they?’

‘Two to three years ago, then?’

‘Maybe before then, if Luigi had no memory of them.’

‘But can we believe Luigi?’

Diamond nodded. ‘Shifty character, isn’t he? The first time we interviewed him, I had him down as a suspect. He was on duty the night Delia was murdered, the last one to see her alive. The others had gone home. There were just the two of them. He said he locked up the restaurant and they went their different ways.’

‘If he came on to Delia and was cold-shouldered he could have turned nasty. He’s used to getting his way with women.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Trust me, guv. I can tell.’

‘You think he strangled her and rigged it up as a hanging?’

‘It does sound a bit far-fetched, put like that,’ she said. ‘Particularly as he’d need to move her and he only has the bike.’

‘He has a Honda at home in Twerton. I asked him.’

‘Do you still rate him?’

‘What interests me more,’ Diamond said, ‘is what we were talking about — this blank spot about the Twinings.’

‘When you pressed him, he said he started at Tosi’s four years ago. He must have met the Twinings if they were regulars.’

‘That was my thought, too.’

‘He’s not the sort to have a blank spot, guv. He’s sharper than broken glass.’

‘You don’t like him?’

‘I wouldn’t believe a word he told me.’

They reached the bottom of Milsom Street before Diamond spoke again. ‘My problem with Luigi is that there’s more to this case than a man trying it on and getting the frost. We’re pretty certain there’s a link with the Twinings.’

‘Which he’s in denial about,’ Ingeborg said. ‘Could it be that he murdered Christine Twining and strung her up the same way and nobody at the time suspected it was murder?’

‘And the husband hanged himself because he couldn’t bear to live without her?’

‘No, guv. Luigi killed the husband as well.’

‘Why?’

‘To cover up the first crime.’

He said with disbelief, ‘And it wasn’t picked up at autopsy?’

Ingeborg seized on that. Her journalistic training was in play. Her words came in a burst. ‘The same pathologist carried out both autopsies.’

‘So?’

‘I sent for the reports, if you remember.’

‘And I was impressed by them. Unlike our friend Dr Sealy, he set out his findings in a way I could follow.’

‘Shinwari,’ she said as the name came back to her. ‘Dr Manzoor Shinwari.’

‘Correct, and he isn’t available to speak to us. He returned to Pakistan and the Medical Council have lost contact with him.’

Her eyes were saucer-wide. ‘Why? Was there a scandal?’

‘None that I heard of.’

‘Maybe he got out in time. There were all these high-profile cases involving mistakes by pathologists. What if Dr Shinwari saw the writing on the wall and did a runner?’

‘You’re speculating, Inge.’

‘I’m going to check.’

‘You’ll find that difficult. The medical profession is notorious for looking after its own.’

‘We’ve got copies of the autopsy reports. Can we get a second opinion?’

‘Like I said, they stick together. This isn’t a second opinion on someone’s medical condition. This is asking one doctor to pick holes in another’s work.’ As he spoke, he was thinking of Jim Middleton, the ballroom king, the obvious man to ask. The prospect of approaching Jim once again didn’t appeal.

‘Suppose Dr Shinwari got it wrong,’ Ingeborg pressed him. ‘Suppose both Twinings were murdered. We could be dealing with a serial killer. We can’t take the risk, guv.’