The Stone Wife

26

Bristol police informed Diamond that the location was difficult. The body was beached three hundred metres downstream from the Clifton suspension bridge, on the Leigh Woods side. The sheer sides of the gorge made access a problem.

‘So how do I get there?’ Diamond asked, his thoughts more on the grim task of identification than the practicalities.

‘Where are you now?’

‘Still at Nathan Hazael’s place.’

‘You could leg it through the woods but it would take at least an hour.’

‘Too long. Oh Christ, I’ll work something out.’

‘A bike?’ Ingeborg said, when he came off the phone.

‘Are you serious?’

‘That’s the quickest way I can think of. The cycle path runs the whole way along the gorge. I did it once.’

He hadn’t sat on a bike in twenty-five years, but this was an emergency. ‘Where do I get one?’

‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘We can phone ahead and have two bikes waiting for us at the car park in the woods. Won’t take us long to drive there and then we can cycle down to the river.’

‘You don’t have to come,’ he said, wanting to spare her the ordeal at the end.

‘You’ll never find your way alone.’

In the car they exchanged hardly a word. Each of them was grappling with anguished thoughts. Diamond kept telling himself this tragedy could have been averted — as it certainly could if he’d responded to Paul’s distress call the night before. But going to the young man’s aid with a police team would have put Ingeborg’s mission at risk and placed her in danger. A balance of risks with a bad outcome whatever he’d done.

For Ingeborg, the mental pain was more about grief than guilt. She was reflecting on a young life lost, on memories of duties she’d shared with Paul, like last year’s search of the Walcot Street pubs and clubs on the trail of the Somerset sniper. Wide-eyed and innocent, the young DC had tried hard to play the alpha male and amused her at the time. Now she remembered that evening with affection, but much more with a sense of loss. Paul’s death would leave a huge gap in the CID room.

The bikes were ready in the car park.

‘Small wheels,’ Diamond said.

‘They make them like that now,’ Ingeborg said. ‘Haven’t you noticed?’

‘Let’s go, then. You’d better lead.’

If she sensed him wobbling behind her, she had the tact not to turn and look. After a few minutes he steadied a bit and felt more in control of the thing, but the character of the terrain soon undid any confidence. The agreeable flat stretch didn’t last long. They swung right towards the gorge and started to descend. Of course the shortest route to the river was straight down the side of the gorge and would have ended in disaster. Whoever had designed the cycle trail had worked out a way of going diagonally across the steepest angle. Even so, once they started freewheeling and gathering speed, Diamond felt like closing his eyes.

‘Still with me, guv?’ Ingeborg shouted.

‘Do I have any choice?’

They sped down the ramp and in no time the gleam of the river showed below. Ingeborg had been right. This was certainly quicker than walking. Quicker than most forms of transport on this incline. Finally the angle of descent eased and they took a gentle right turn and linked with the riverside route.

‘If we kept going, we’d end up in Bath,’ Ingeborg said.

He didn’t comment. His legs were stiff as tree trunks, not from pedalling, but the tension of being on a runaway bike for the past three minutes.

On level ground they progressed along the base of the gorge in the shadow of the enormous cliff. The trick was not to study the scenery, or your steering suffered. But one feature stood out. Round an outcrop of limestone, a pale blue forensic tent came into view on a small strip of shoreline, a uniformed figure beside it.

They dismounted and leaned the bikes against the rock face.

Walking like a swan with sciatica, he needed a moment to get himself together.

‘Are you okay?’ Ingeborg asked.

‘I’m trying to work out the mechanics of bringing a body all the way down here without a car.’

‘I don’t suppose they used a bike.’

‘Well, they wouldn’t have used ropes and pulleys either. They must have been some way upstream from here. The tide would make a difference. Places to stand on the bank. The water will have been many feet lower than it is now.’

‘Near the bridge you can get a car closer to the river.’

‘Now you tell me.’

Both of them knew this was facile conversation, a way of filling a nervous interval with words, like people outside a crematorium talking about their journey. He hobbled across the cycle path and down a bank of rubble towards the tent.

‘Damaged your sleeve on the way down, sir?’ the sergeant on duty said.

‘That was earlier,’ Diamond said. ‘Let’s get on with this.’

The sergeant raised his hand as if on traffic duty. ‘I wouldn’t go in yet. The pathologist doesn’t want to be interrupted.’

‘How did he get here before us?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

The big man folded his arms in frustration. ‘So how was it found?’

‘A sighting upriver. The current tends to bring them to this side, so we were waiting. This isn’t the first jumper to have ended up on this little stretch of mud.’

‘Jumper?’ Diamond said. ‘You’re not thinking this was suicide?’

‘I’m not thinking anything else,’ the sergeant said. ‘I know they made it more difficult by raising the height of the barrier, but we still get four or five a year hell-bent on killing themselves. It’s the loveliest bridge in Britain, spectacular, but more saddos have topped themselves here than any other spot except Beachy Head.’

‘We suspect he was dead before he entered the water,’ Diamond said.

‘Get away.’

‘There was a fatal incident at a house off North Road last night that we’re investigating.’

‘That’s news to me,’ the sergeant said as if he didn’t believe a word.

‘It shouldn’t be,’ Diamond said. ‘We put out an all-units call. Two black Daimlers.’

‘That? Yes, I heard about that. Didn’t connect it with this.’

‘Four or five bodies a year, you said. How many do you reckon to find in a day?’ Diamond said, getting irritated — and it wasn’t the fault of the sergeant. The pathologist was making a meal out of this, considering he would have the postmortem to decide on the cause of death. It wasn’t as if the ground they were standing on was a crime scene. This was only the place where the corpse was beached.

Ingeborg must have seen her boss was on a short fuse because she chipped in with a question of her own. She asked the sergeant if he’d helped to recover the body from the river and he confirmed that he had.

‘Any signs of violence you wouldn’t expect? We wouldn’t be surprised if he was shot.’

‘Shot? I didn’t see any bullet wound.’

‘They’re not always obvious, especially if you were already thinking he’d drowned.’

‘They don’t drown,’ the sergeant said. ‘They hit the water at seventy-odd miles an hour. That’s what does for them.’

‘The impact, you mean?’

‘Water is like a brick wall at that speed.’

‘He wasn’t tied up, or anything?’

A disbelieving frown. ‘Christ, no.’

At last the pathologist emerged — Bertram Sealy, who had crossed swords, or scalpels, with Diamond many times before.

‘Hey ho,’ he said, ‘are you so short of work in Bath that you come looking for it here?’

Diamond wasn’t interested in sparring with Sealy. ‘How exactly did he die?’

‘If I may say so, that’s a pretty dumb question to put to me before I’ve done the autopsy.’

‘We want to know if he was dead before he entered the water.’

‘Can’t tell you, old sport. I may discover more after I’ve opened him up, but don’t count on it.’

‘But you’ll know if he was dead?’

‘Not necessarily. There will be extensive impact injuries, probably multiple fracturing of the thoracic cage and maybe the skull, but that would happen regardless. If you have information that someone was seen pushing a lifeless body off the bridge, you’d better tell me now.’

‘Nothing like that. We’re thinking he could have been murdered and placed in the water further upstream.’

‘Unlikely. He hit something pretty damn hard, I can tell you. But then it’s seventy-five metres down. Quite some drop.’

Diamond exchanged a shocked look with Ingeborg. It was starting to sound as if they had pushed Paul off the suspension bridge.

Sealy unzipped his white paper overall and started pulling it off. ‘I’ve done all I can here. I’ll perform the necessary tomorrow morning. Move him as soon as you like,’ he told the sergeant.

‘We’ll wait for low tide, sir.’

‘Sensible, yes. Did you hear that, superintendent? Tomorrow morning.’

‘I heard.’ Diamond wasn’t thinking about tomorrow. He was steeling himself for what he would see inside the tent. Turning to Ingeborg, he said, ‘You don’t have to come in unless you want to.’

‘I’ll be okay, guv.’

They stooped, stepped inside and looked at the body flat on its back, the clothes coated with mud, the face smeared with filth and blood, but wiped clean around the eyes, nose and mouth.

Ingeborg said, ‘Oh my God!’

Diamond said, ‘That’s not Paul.’

Ingeborg said, ‘It’s Nathan.’