Authors: Peter Lovesey
‘Get your doctor to prescribe something.’
Her voice took on the hard edge of the previous day. ‘You’ve done this before, haven’t you? You’re the duty comforter, the guy they send to all the police widows. Couldn’t they rake up anyone better than you?’
‘If you’d prefer me to leave …’
She shook her head. ‘You’re all as bad as each other. I had to identify Harry this morning at the mortuary. They sent a car and two officers, male and female. They treated me as if I was ninety, calling me dear and trying to hold my arm. I didn’t take kindly to it and I told them.’
He had no difficulty picturing it.
She was able to talk openly about the experience. ‘The sight of him wasn’t as bad as I expected. His face was hardly damaged
at all. Of course they were careful to cover the sides of his head where the bullet went through. He looked fairly normal.’
He gave a nod, rather than chancing any comment.
Her account moved on. ‘They told me they’re releasing the body later today. I don’t want one of those big police funerals with hundreds of bobbies who never knew him lining the street and all the top brass showing off their medals in the church. Harry’s send-off is going to be low key. Just a few family and friends.’
This time he had to respond. ‘Whatever you say. We’ll respect your wishes. Some of his close colleagues will want to be there, I’m sure, but it doesn’t have to be too formal. You won’t be able to keep the press away, unfortunately.’
‘I’ve got used to them already. It’s ghoulish, all this interest in photographing the widow.’
‘If you’d like some of our lads to keep them from troubling you, I can arrange it.’
‘No need.’
A pause in the outflow of words made him think this was the opportunity to leave. ‘I’ll pass on what you said about the funeral, just in case the high-ups were planning anything. Is that why asked me to come?’
‘No.’ She pointed across the room. ‘On the table there’s a small piece of paper, folded. Bring it over.’
The square dining table had various things on it: a heap of coins, some credit cards in a small leather case, keys on a ring and the paper, white, small and folded once. He handed it to her.
‘The contents of his pockets,’ she said. ‘They returned them to me at the mortuary. This was tucked in among the credit cards.’ She unfolded the paper and handed it to Diamond. ‘What do you make of that?’
13
T
he limp remained, but Diamond had progressed to a walking stick. In truth the soreness in the leg felt about the same. Knowing how appearances influence people’s opinion of you, he’d discarded the crutches for good and arranged for them to be returned to the Royal United Hospital.
The team noted a change in his looks when he stood to update them on the morning’s discoveries. The unhealthy pallor was gone, replaced by unhealthy ruddiness from high blood pressure.
The guv’nor restored.
The improvement was largely due to a rise in confidence. He’d floated the idea with John Leaman that the killings might not, after all, be random, as Jack Gull and everyone else assumed. The latest discovery appeared to support his thinking.
‘Some of you know Harry Tasker’s widow Emma asked to see me this morning,’ he said. ‘Between ourselves, I was surprised to hear from her. She’d already given me a hard time – and I don’t blame her in the least – when I first broke the news of Harry’s murder. You never know how anyone will react to a shock like that. She’s bitter that Harry was on beat duty the night he was shot and she blames us almost as much as his killer. I did a poor job of comforting her. So today I was expecting more aggravation. I won’t say it was all sweetness and light, but we discussed a few things. She wants Harry to have a low-key funeral.’
‘Is that possible?’ Halliwell asked.
‘No uniforms, no guard of honour. A simple service for close friends and family.’
‘No police?’
‘A few of his closest mates from uniform. If we want to honour him ourselves we’ll have to find some other way.’
‘She won’t stop the media being there.’
‘We make damn sure they behave.’ He turned to the main matter. ‘But the reason Mrs. Tasker wanted to see me was something I wasn’t expecting. Harry’s personal possessions – the contents of his pockets when he was shot – were returned to her this morning. Among them was this.’
He raised it for all to see, a strip of white now enclosed in a transparent evidence bag. ‘Found in the little case he kept his credit cards in. A scrap of paper with two words on it obviously produced on a computer printer.’ He passed the bag to the youngest member of the team. ‘Read them out, would you?’
‘Me?’ DC Paul Gilbert did as he was asked, but in a throwaway tone that meant nothing. ‘ “You’re next”.’
A moment of bemused silence followed.
‘
You’re next
,’ Diamond repeated, spacing the words to give them their full sinister meaning. ‘Do I need to say more?’
No one was willing to commit.
‘Come on. Liven up.’
Finally John Leaman said, ‘A note from the killer?’
‘That’s the obvious interpretation, and we can’t ignore it. However Harry came by the note, he must have thought it was worth keeping. Whether he took it as a death threat, we can’t say. He didn’t behave as if he was going in fear of his life.’
‘Some kind of practical joke,’ Keith Halliwell said. ‘That’s what I would think if it was sent to me.’
‘Joke?’ John Leaman said. ‘ “You’re next” – what kind of joke is that when some madman is targeting us?’
‘Black humour.’
‘If that’s humour, I don’t get it.’
Diamond was listening keenly. To get his own thoughts straight, he had earlier run through a raft of similar possibilities. He wanted the team to reach its own consensus that the note was fundamental to the investigation.
Halliwell was sticking with his joke theory. ‘Well, it may have nothing to do with the shootings. Suppose Harry was one of those guys who never buy a round of drinks? A note like that would amuse his mates.’
‘Was he a tightwad?’ someone asked.
‘Now you’re speaking ill of the dead,’ Leaman said.
‘Why would he keep the note, anyway?’ another voice said.
Then Ingeborg spoke up. She’d driven back from Radstock in the last hour. ‘We’ve got a duty to take it seriously. Unless we can prove it’s unimportant we have to assume it’s evidence.’
‘I’m not dismissing it,’ Halliwell said. ‘I’m keeping an open mind. We don’t know how long he’s had it in his pocket.’
‘May I see?’ Ingeborg said. ‘I did the forensics course a few weeks ago.’
Smiles all round at this naked self-promotion. Even Diamond grinned.
‘No need to remind us,’ one of the older DCs said. ‘We filled in for you.’
She ignored him, well used to backchat from colleagues.
Gilbert handed her the evidence bag.
Ingeborg inspected it from several angles and then turned it over. ‘Printed on an A4 sheet in Times New Roman, font size 14. It looks very much as if the person who wrote it didn’t want to be detected. The sheet was trimmed with scissors. The top is even, but the lower cut isn’t a perfect match. A document examiner might get more information.’
Looks were exchanged. The team was more amused than annoyed by the Sherlock Holmes impersonation. Ingeborg was popular, for all her striving.
She hadn’t finished. ‘Latent fingerprints may be the best hope, but we must allow that at least five different people have handled it since it was printed.’
‘Five?’ Halliwell’s eyebrows arched in surprise.
‘The person who printed it, Harry himself, the mortuary person who removed it from his pocket, Emma and our esteemed leader.’
The spotlight was back on Diamond, not renowned for handling evidence to the highest forensic standards.
‘How do you know I didn’t use tweezers?’ he said. No one gave this a moment’s credence, so he continued, ‘To be truthful, I didn’t. Inge is right. If there are prints, they’ll include a bunch of extras on top of the ones that interest us. I don’t expect any miracles from forensics. However, Inge is also correct in saying we can’t ignore this as a likely death threat.’
‘Meaning the random killer theory could be wrong,’ Leaman said. ‘Jack Gull could be barking up the wrong tree.’
‘And the media and most of the public,’ Ingeborg said.
‘Right.’ Diamond folded his arms. ‘That was hard going. Are you lot still half asleep, or what?’
‘Are you going to tell him, guv?’ Halliwell asked.
‘Tell Gull? When I do, I know what he’ll say.’
‘It’s a red herring.’
‘Except Jack will put it a touch more forcefully.’ He took a look around the room and made sure he missed no one on the team. ‘Are you with me now, all of you? The note appears to show that the killer knew Harry. If the other two victims received similar notes, he knew them as well. If so, our job has just got a whole lot simpler.’
‘Simpler?’ Halliwell said.
‘We’ve narrowed the search.’
‘Someone with a grudge against all the victims?’
‘Who knew each of them, tracked them down and murdered them.’
‘In three different towns?’
The last comment was supposed to sound a sceptical note, but Diamond treated it as support. ‘Right. And there’s another factor. It wasn’t just a matter of shooting at any cop who walked by. The sniper knew when these individuals were going on duty.’
‘That begs some tough questions,’ Ingeborg said. ‘He’d need inside knowledge.’
‘One of our own?’ Halliwell said in rampant disbelief. ‘A cop?’
Murmurs of dissent rumbled around the incident room. Suddenly the looks Diamond was getting weren’t complimentary. They weren’t just disbelieving. They were unfriendly. One cop killing another was too much to swallow.
‘It has to be faced,’ he said, and he’d had an hour or so longer to come to terms with it. ‘Cop, PCSO or civilian support staff. Who else sees the duty rosters?’
The murmurs turned to a buzz of angry voices talking among themselves. Diamond became anxious. He was in serious danger of losing control. In his long years of service here, he’d not had many run-ins with the team. This hostile reception was ominous.
He believed they would agree with him when they were over the first shock. All they needed was longer to think this through, as he had. Better move on, he decided.
He had to shout to be heard. ‘Ingeborg!’
The noise reduced, giving way to interest in whether Diamond’s blue-eyed girl had just said something really over the top and the old ogre had picked it up.
Ingeborg glared back at him as if he were recruiting for the devil.
He made an effort to sound reasonable. ‘We haven’t heard from you about your visits to Wells and Radstock. How did you get on?’
Her intake of breath sounded like a blowtorch. ‘I’m trying to get over what I just heard. It’s beyond belief that any police officer would gun down three of our own. If this is the price of taking that scrap of paper seriously, I’m not sure I’m with you any more.’
‘You don’t like it, I don’t either,’ he said, appealing to everyone in the room. ‘I could be out on a limb here, but as you said a moment ago we have a duty to investigate. Now, Inge, do us the favour of reporting back, as I asked.’
She tossed her head, more to suppress the outrage she felt than in defiance. ‘There’s not much to add to what we have on file. I spent last evening with some of the lads from Wells CID. They’ve had longer to come to terms with all this than we have and they’re in no doubt that it was a random shooting.’
Nudge, nudge, he thought. He could hear murmurs of approval for the Wells lads.
‘You’ve made your point. Now what did you pick up?’
‘Only snippets. Ossy Hart came to Wells as a probationer and had just four years of service there.’
‘Where did he train?’
‘Foundation training at Portishead. Before that he was a PE teacher.’
‘In Minehead. We know this already.’
‘Sorry I spoke,’ Ingeborg said, still fractious.
‘Go on. I’m impatient – as if that wasn’t bloody obvious.’
‘I was going to say that the Wells bunch liked Ossy. He ticked most of the boxes. Reliable, good timekeeper, very fit, so hardly a day off duty, good at dealing with the public, always well turned out.’
‘Which are the boxes he didn’t tick?’
She reflected on that for a moment. ‘He was a tad too ambitious for some of them. It showed. He was looking to get promoted as soon as he could.’
‘Promoted? He’d only just completed his probation.’
‘Two years, guv.’ There was more than a hint of protest in the
remark. Ingeborg was a high flyer herself, looking to get a sergeant’s stripes soon.
‘Okay,’ Diamond said. ‘I can see it would rankle with the others. What else?’
‘He didn’t like paperwork.’
‘He’s not alone there.’
‘Yes, but he skimped and got caught out a few times.’
‘Hardly a capital offence if it didn’t upset the running of the place too much. Anything else?’
‘They said he was a bit physical.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Being strong, he’d grab people by the arm to make a point and let them know he had a firm grip. I’m talking about his colleagues, not just villains. A couple of the girls said he’d left bruises and they told him to be more considerate, but he never seemed to learn.’
‘Annoying, but not enough to make anyone want to murder him. Did he make any real enemies at Wells?’
She gave an impatient sigh. ‘If he did, no one was saying.’
‘I can understand why. And what about the nickname? Where did that come from?’
‘The “Ossy”? I didn’t find out. They said he was given it before he joined the police. He didn’t seem to mind. When he started at Wells he said he preferred Ossy to to his real name of Martin.’
‘Nobody asked where it came from?’
‘If they did, they didn’t get an answer. No one could tell me. Does it matter?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. Nicknames are usually given to people for a reason, some quirk of character they have, or an incident that happened to them. I was hoping we might learn something we don’t know already.’
‘If you really want to find out, his widow would know.’