Peter Diamond - 09 - The Secret Hangman (28 page)

‘Nor me.’

‘He’s right,’ Leaman said. ‘I’ve done the sums now. The two cords from his car make circles just the size he says. And the laptop hasn’t given us a single name we know. It’s a lost cause. Shouldn’t we let him go?’

‘Fetch the tape. I want to hear it.’

In the incident room a few minutes later they ran the interview. Leaman, Ingeborg and Paul Gilbert huddled with Diamond over the machine. They were alert for Monnington’s responses, but Diamond had a curious feeling it was something Leaman had said that was significant.

After a couple of minutes, he said, ‘Stop it. Now play that sentence again.’

‘That was me, not Monnington,’ Leaman said.

‘Play it.’

Leaman’s voice came over:
The thing is, all these people were found
in Bath. That’s one common factor.

He nodded. ‘Common factor. That’s the cue. Now go back a bit further, to where Monnington was telling us about the kinds of people he targeted as customers.’

Leaman pressed the rewind. Now it was Monnington’s voice:
All I remember is that they fitted the profile of our customers. High-flyers,
professional people, singles or couples, generally with no kids.

Diamond snapped his fingers. ‘Stop there.’ The adrenalin rush was starting and his brain was making connections. ‘He’s talking about the Steels, right? Equally, he could have been talking about the Twinings.’

‘Except he claims not to have heard of the Twinings,’ Leaman said.

‘That’s not the point. Forget Monnington for a moment. Think of our victims and the common factor.’

‘But they weren’t all his customers.’ Leaman’s logical mind couldn’t follow Diamond’s free association of ideas.

‘I said forget him. It’s what he said.
Professional people, singles or
couples, generally with no kids
.’

Next Ingeborg sounded sceptical. ‘That may be true of the Steels and the Twinings, but Delia Williamson wasn’t a high-flyer. She was working as a waitress.’

‘Maybe,’ Paul Gilbert said, ‘but don’t forget she lived with that muso in a big house in Walcot.’

‘He wasn’t the one who was killed,’ Ingeborg pointed out. ‘It was Danny Geaves, her ex, and he can’t be described as a professional. What’s more, she had two kids by him, so that doesn’t fit the profile either.’

Diamond nodded. ‘Two little girls.’ But he wasn’t shaken. His thoughts were slotting into place. ‘I’m trying to remember stuff. I need to look at some witness statements. Can we get them up on the computer?’

‘No problem,’ Leaman said, ever ready to showcase his efficiency. ‘Who, in particular?’

‘Let’s start with that skiving teacher you and I met in the George.’

‘Harold Twining? He’s on file for sure. I logged everything he said.’

‘Find the bit about children – the children they didn’t have.’

Leaman used the mouse to bring up the report he’d written. ‘He mentioned it several times. Here’s what he told us, the exact words:
No kids, no ties, not even a budgie to look after
.’

‘I remember him saying that.’

‘Then he comments on what the coroner said.
He said if they’d
had children, or even a dependent relative, they might have felt their lives
had more purpose
. Then you asked if they wanted a child and couldn’t have one and he said – these were his actual words –
Another misguided theory. She had a baby stopped a year after they married.
They slipped up
.’

‘Right. Christine Twining had an abortion.’ Diamond’s gaze shifted swiftly from the screen to his team. ‘And so did Jocelyn Steel. Now who told us that?’

Paul Gilbert said at once, ‘The friend, Agnes Tidmarsh. I took down the witness statement. May I?’ He brought up another document on the screen and scanned rapidly to the sentence: ‘
. . . a
couple of years before they moved down here she had a termination. She
was in that high-pressure government job and it wasn’t the right time.
Neither of them was ready for a family then. She kept it quiet from everyone,
including her mother
.’

‘That’s two couples out of three,’ Diamond said. ‘Now, am I dreaming this, or did Amanda Williamson tell us her daughter had an abortion at some stage? Bring up the file.’

Gilbert returned to the list of files. ‘Williamson, Amanda? I don’t see it here, guv.’

‘Where the hell is it, then?’

‘Is the name exactly right?’

‘Of course it is.’

‘Well, who would have typed up the statement?’ Leaman asked.

‘Don’t know,’ Diamond said, his patience snapping. ‘I can’t remember every bloody thing. Who was with me that morning in Bradford on Avon?’

Nobody spoke.

He thought hard, gave a deep sigh, and said, ‘I was alone.’ As the full catastrophe dawned on him, he said, ‘Oh, buggery.’

Furious with himself, he sank his face into his hands and muttered more obscenities.

The rest of them were silent. Nobody knew what to say.

He struggled to recall the interview, but so much had happened since. He could picture the scene, seated on the bench in Amanda Williamson’s small garden overlooking the town, but the words she’d spoken eluded him. He could visualise it all with ease: the church spire, the cars crossing the old town bridge with its quaint lock-up, the landscape stretching right across to Westbury. Then another detail came back to him: the tape-recorder on the bench between them.

He’d taped the conversation.

‘Wait.’ He got up and went to his office. The recorder was there on his desk half buried under all the other clutter. He brought the thing back in triumph and declared that he’d meant to ask one of them to transcribe the interview. In a moment they were listening to Amanda Williamson’s voice. He fast-forwarded and picked up his own voice asking,
So what went wrong? Why did they
split up?

Amanda answered,
Who can tell what goes wrong in a relationship
except the people involved? I made a point of not interfering
.

He fast-forwarded a little, and she was saying,
She went through
a bad patch, needed lifting emotionally, and Danny didn’t see it, or was
too busy to notice. He was doing all the caring for the girls.

He switched off. ‘What does that mean – “a bad patch”?’

‘Depression, obviously,’ Ingeborg said. ‘Can we hear some more? Does she say what caused it?’

‘That’s as much as I got,’ he was forced to admit.

‘It’s not what you said, guv. Amanda doesn’t mention her daughter having an abortion.’

He refused to be downed. ‘But it crossed my mind at the time. I could sense she was holding back. Do we have her phone number?’

‘It’s here on file with all the other contact numbers,’ Gilbert said. ‘Do you want me to call her?’

In a moment they were listening to the amplified voice of Amanda speaking live. ‘What is it? Do you have some news for me?’

‘I may have soon,’ Diamond said. ‘First I need your help. When we met, you spoke of your daughter going through a bad patch in her marriage. You didn’t specify what it was and I didn’t ask.’

The voice altered, becoming taut and defensive. ‘That was a private matter. If it had any bearing on what happened to her I would have told you.’

‘You’d better tell me now, ma’am. It’s crucial to the case.’

‘I don’t see how.’

‘For pity’s sake,’ he said. ‘You may think you’re protecting her reputation, but I’m trying to stop her killer from murdering someone else tonight. Why was she depressed?’

There was a silence. Then: ‘She got pregnant again, disorganised as usual, poor darling. Stopped taking the pill for some days and wondered why she was putting on weight. It was a shock when she found out. She’d had a difficult time when Sophie was born and she didn’t want to go through all that again.’

‘And Danny wanted the child?’

‘No, it wasn’t like that. He supported her. So did her GP. He arranged for her to have the abortion at the Royal United.’

‘That’s all I need to know.’ He looked round at his team.

They had found the common factor.

46

E
arly in the Diamonds’ marriage, Steph had been diagnosed with something the medics called RSM, Recurrent Spontaneous Miscarriage. She had lost four babies altogether. That word ‘lost’ is a euphemism that tries to downplay the grief, but can’t. He’d been amazed how she had found the courage to try again after each bereavement. She had wanted children with increasing desperation, and so had he, and her gynaecologist had said there was ‘no physiological limitation’, but after the fourth, the expert changed his opinion. She was given a hysterectomy.

So it was difficult to feel neutral about abortion. The result is the same – a pregnancy that fails – but there is a gulf between those who miscarry, the ‘have nots’, and those who seek abortions, the ‘haves’ who would rather be ‘have nots’. In their low moments he and Steph envied friends with children, and resented those who confided that they had ‘slipped up’ and gone for abortions.

He didn’t see it as a debate between the pro-choice and pro-life camps. He couldn’t side with either. Personal experience had convinced him that each case had to be judged on merit. In his job he’d seen abused and mentally handicapped women unable to cope with pregnancy and he would have argued strongly for their right to a termination. This was a profoundly complex issue.

Ingeborg was the first to react. Any intelligent woman would question what had been suggested. ‘Let me get this right, guv. Are you saying these couples were killed because they had abortions?’

‘Could have been.’

She fixed him with her wide blue eyes and her words came with the force of someone who has thought through the issues. ‘But it’s not logical. The people who oppose abortion are pro life. That’s their argument, that a foetus is a living human being and we have no right to kill it. They’re not going to murder anyone.’

Of all the team it was Leaman who rallied to Diamond’s defence. ‘They can and they do,’ he said in his blunt style. ‘There was a case in America a couple of years ago. A Presbyterian minister shot and killed a doctor who performed abortions.’

‘A
minister
?’

‘He’s the best known example, but there have been others. I don’t know how they square it with the sixth commandment.’

Ingeborg stared at him for a moment, frowning, thinking. Then her expression changed and her hand went to her mouth. ‘You’re right. I remember. He killed twice. It was in Florida and he was executed for it. I can’t believe this is happening here.’

‘These are emotive issues,’ Diamond said. ‘The logic can get pushed to one side.’

Paul Gilbert spoke up. ‘I may be out of order here, but couldn’t these abortions be a coincidence?’

This struck a more harmonious note with Ingeborg. ‘I agree, Paul. If you look hard enough – and God knows we have – you’re going to find something the victims have in common. That’s light years from proving it was the reason they were killed.’

Diamond was trying to keep this from getting heated. ‘OK. Let’s see what we’ve got. Three couples. Three abortions. So far as we know, not one was medically essential. They made a choice. The Twinings because they didn’t want their careers interrupted. Delia and Danny because they had two kids already and she’d had a difficult time with the second one. The Steels for the career reason again; they weren’t yet ready to start a family.’

‘How on earth could the killer have been aware of any of this?’ Ingeborg said.

‘He’d need to know each of them extremely well,’ Gilbert said.

‘Or their gynaecologist,’ Leaman said.

Ingeborg shook her head. ‘Medical ethics.’

‘A rogue nurse, then? An anaesthetist?’

‘They aren’t told the patients’ history.’

‘A medical secretary?’ Leaman said. ‘That stuff is written up in the records.’

Ingeborg digested that and nodded. ‘I suppose you could be right about that.’

‘Staying with what we know for certain,’ Diamond said, ‘the victims are taken from their homes to some secret location and kept there. The woman is strangled and taken by night to some city park and strung up to make it look like a hanging.’

‘Execution?’ Leaman said. ‘A life for a life?’

‘Maybe. A couple of nights later, the man is hanged. In Danny’s case, it was literally a hanging.’

‘Why wait?’ Leaman said. ‘Why doesn’t he string them up together?’

‘Logistics,’ Paul Gilbert said. ‘A double hanging would be almost impossible for one man to carry out.’

‘Agreed,’ Diamond said. ‘The transportation, rigging up the gallows. Too much.’

‘So he does it in stages.’

‘Yes, and taking big risks. The majority of murderers hide their crime by disposing of the body. He could bury his victims or dump them on a refuse tip. Instead he has the weird idea of displaying them. At great risk. Why?’

‘To make some kind of point?’ Gilbert said.

‘That’s how it looks to me. The bodies are left hanging as if an old-fashioned judicial execution has taken place.’

‘Except this is in public, not behind a prison wall,’ Gilbert said.

‘There was a time when they were hanged in public.’

‘And left for people to see, like that highwayman we heard about,’ Leaman said.

Ingeborg was nodding and her voice was more animated. ‘Guv, I wasn’t willing to believe you, but this is making sense now. This is about retribution. The killer casts himself as judge and executioner for what he perceives as the taking of life.’

Diamond heard her, but his reasoning had come to a grinding halt as the intuitive part of his brain leapt ahead. A pulse throbbed in his temple. He sensed with a horrid certainty that his world was about to implode.

Meanwhile Leaman was agreeing with Ingeborg. ‘There’s a kind of logic here, even if it’s misguided.’

‘Can we save Martin Steel?’

Another of Ingeborg’s unanswerable questions. If nothing else, it underlined how little time was left.

Diamond had to function, whatever was going on in his head. He mobilised his team. ‘We find out which hospital or clinic each of them attended. If it’s the same one, we’re not whistling in the dark.’ He assigned them people to contact. Leaman would call Harold Twining; Gilbert, Agnes Tidmarsh; and Ingeborg, Amanda Williamson.

Eager to begin, they didn’t notice the state he was in. They saw him step into his office and must have assumed he was leaving them to get on, declining to breathe down their necks. In truth, he was having difficulty moving his limbs. He was in turmoil. The nightmare he dreaded had come back to haunt him. He thought he’d banished it, but here it was, more stark than before.

He slumped behind his desk and snatched up Jerry’s black totebag and took out Steph’s Agatha Christie book. The bookmark was still there at the page he’d inscribed for her. The throbbing in his head was a drum-beat. He felt as if Steph herself was communicating with him.

He looked at the bit about times of services and the invitation to ‘join us and be joyful’. Then he noticed the words printed along the bottom edge. It was the credo of the Hosannah Church.
We believe in the power of prayer, the sanctity of life and the Lord’s
commandments.

The sanctity of life
.