Authors: Peter Lovesey
“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 Inge borg, 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.”
27
Diamond’s first action after returning to Bath in the afternoon was to send Ingeborg home. She needed some proper sleep. But before that, she would have the thankless job of breaking the news to Lee Li about Nathan. The cause of death wouldn’t be confirmed until the autopsy was performed, but Sealy, the pathologist, had been confident the firearms supplier had fallen from the suspension bridge.
Suicide?
It seemed the only explanation. Difficult to credit, a millionaire criminal choosing to top himself. Even allowing that his secret gunroom had been found by an undercover police officer and he faced a long prison term if convicted, he’d got the weapons off the premises before they could be used as evidence. He’d quit the house in time. He had other places to go, a reasonable chance of staying at liberty. From his point of view, the raid on his house should have been more of a setback than a disaster.
But as Ingeborg had reminded Diamond on the drive back from Bristol, Nathan had suffered a devastating emotional wound. Lee Li had dumped him. If he had been under any illusion that she still loved him after seeking sanctuary with Marcus Tone, he couldn’t ignore the fact that the next day she had run off a second time. “He doted on her, guv. He built that studio and the gym and he bankrolled her singing career. Whatever she thought of the arrangement, he was crazy about her.”
Supplying guns to murderers and bank robbers didn’t sit well with unrequited love, but Diamond had seen the
recording studio and the gym. He’d seen the bedroom the couple had shared, the king-size bed draped in pink chiffon, the matching soft toys and the wardrobe stuffed with designer clothes. It all testified to a man hopelessly besotted.
Nathan must have driven across the suspension bridge thousands of times. He would have known it was Britain’s leading suicide bridge and from time to time he would surely have given thought to what it would be like to jump. No great surprise if he preferred that way to blowing his brains out with one of his own revolvers.
For Diamond and everyone in the team, the overriding question was what had happened to Paul Gilbert. No reports had come in of a second body. The Daimler limousines had not been sighted.
And it wasn’t only Bath CID who needed to know. Somebody else would be going out of her mind with worry. Diamond found a safety pin and reattached the torn sleeve to his jacket.
“Can’t leave it any longer,” he told Halliwell. “I’m off to visit his mother. She’ll expect him home tonight.”
“I could do that,” his deputy offered, thinking, perhaps, of the poor woman finding Diamond, grim-faced, on her doorstep. The boss in his dark suit looked uncannily like a harbinger of death.
A shake of the head. “You can do me another favour.”
“Nathan’s autopsy tomorrow?”
A faint grin. “How did you guess?”
He was back within the hour, looking relieved.
“How did she take it?” Halliwell asked.
“She didn’t. She isn’t there. The neighbour told me she’s on a bus tour in the Lake District and not expected back until the weekend.”
“We may have found him by then.”
He gave a melancholy nod. “I suppose it will spare her the extra pain of not knowing for certain.”
This state of limbo was, of course, weighing on everyone
in Manvers Street police station. Nothing active they could do. It was a matter of waiting for the confirmation they all dreaded. The right way forward was to keep occupied on the investigation, do the painstaking work they were trained for.
Diamond went over to his most reliable civilian assistant, a woman in her fifties called Penny. She had been given the task of analysing Nathan’s paperwork recovered from the gunroom. “What did you discover?”
“He was selling or renting firearms at the rate of three or four a week,” she said. “A variety of weapons, too, from Kalashnikovs to nine-millimetre pistols.”
“I’m interested in the two Webleys Ingeborg saw.”
“It’s not an inventory,” Penny said. “It’s a record of the guns that went out. Nobody rented a Webley, not even one.”
“Pity. That was the type of gun that killed Professor Gildersleeve. How about the customers? Can we identify anyone?”
“You might,” she said. “I haven’t—but then I only have initials to go by.”
“Was he using a code, or are they the real initials?”
“They look real to me. Four months ago, there was an armed robbery at a jeweller’s in Keynsham. A Bristol man by the name of Leslie Beech was charged and is now awaiting trial. He was found in possession of a Browning self-loading pistol. If you look at November seventeenth, you’ll see a Browning nine millimetre out to someone listed as LB.”
“No argument about that,” Diamond said, studying the sheet, now enclosed in a transparent filing pocket. “Is there any link to our suspects Bernie Wefers, Archie Poke or Monica Gildersleeve?”
“Sorry, Mr. Diamond, but their initials don’t feature at all.”
“Too bad. We know Bernie oversaw the building of the sound studio and the gym and probably the gunroom as well, so he had opportunities to help himself and not be listed here, but the others, no.” He dropped the sheet on her desk. “I was hoping we’d learn more from this. I was thinking it might be in code, but you say it makes sense the way it is.”
Penny looked up at him. “You like a puzzle, do you, Mr. Diamond?”
“Not sure about that. I like a challenge.”
“Crosswords?”
“I don’t do crosswords.” His face softened as the memory of an earlier time stirred in his brain. “When Steph was alive—she was my wife—we did the occasional jigsaw, but I was more of a hindrance than a help. We’d use up all the pieces we’d got and find one missing and it would be stuck to the bottom of my shoe.”
“But you found it in the end.”
“Most times, yes. I don’t give up easily.” He returned to his office and found the
Wife of Bath
back in occupation, returned from her photocall. “And neither do you.”