Peter Diamond - 09 - The Secret Hangman (7 page)

8

O
ne thing is worse than an alarm clock going off when you are sleeping, and that’s a phone. Diamond didn’t know where he was. He reached out to the sound and knocked over his glass of water.

Now he knew. He’d been dreaming. This wasn’t Paloma’s bedroom. This was home.

‘Jesus,’ he said when he got the thing to his ear.

This seemed to confuse the caller. After a long pause came a tentative, ‘Sir?’

‘I don’t expect calls in the middle of the night.’

‘Is that Mr Diamond?’

‘What do you want?’

‘I’ve got the Assistant Chief Constable for you, sir.’

‘On a plate?’

‘On the other line.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Six fifteen just gone, sir.’

‘Nearly lunchtime,’ he said with sarcasm that was wasted on the switchboard operator.

‘I’m about to connect you.’

‘Do I have a choice?’

Georgina greeted him as brightly as if she was suggesting coffee and crumpets in the Pump Room. ‘Peter, are you up and about?’

He could feel a tide of cold water advancing across the sheet he was lying on. ‘I will be shortly.’

‘You’re not an early riser, then? Listen, something has happened overnight. Another hanging, a man this time.’

He was jolted fully awake. ‘Where?’

‘This is it, Peter. It couldn’t be more public. He’s over the Bristol Road near the railway station. Motorists are calling in to report it.’

He couldn’t picture this. ‘Over the road?’

‘Hanging from the viaduct.’

‘What viaduct?’

‘By the station. You know where the railway crosses the river and the road, that thing that looks like a castle wall, with battlements? Uniform have closed the entire southern approach to the city and they want to cut him down. It’s going to cause horrendous traffic problems, but of course it could be tied in with this case of yours. Get down there, will you, and deal with it?’

Some people start the day with a fried breakfast, he thought. I get a hanged man.

Disturbing images crowded his brain. The black, turreted viaduct where trains thundered across. The corpse twisting above the road. Traffic queues. SOCOs. That sarky pathologist. All to be faced. His thigh was getting damp. He rolled out of bed and felt splintered glass under his bare foot. Not a good beginning.

When Isambard Kingdom Brunel brought the Great Western Railway to Bath in 1840 he had a sharp sense of what the city fathers would tolerate. Starting from the Bristol end he cut a direct route through streets of working-class housing but steered south and east of the Georgian glories of the city. The track had to cross the main road and the River Avon and he did it in style with a handsome viaduct dressed to look as if it was a section of the city wall, grand in concept, with twin turrets, ornamental shields and a crenellated top outlined against the green of Lyncombe Hill. Never mind that the fortifications faced inwards as if the city had to be protected against itself. Never mind that the south side was as plain as a prison. The facade visible from across the river was what mattered. Bathonians compared it to the classic front of a Cambridge college. You would never suspect it was a railway until you saw an inter-city express crossing the battlements.

No one was thinking of Brunel’s achievement when Diamond arrived. Such was the traffic chaos that he had to leave his car across the river and walk over the Churchill Bridge. The fire brigade were at the scene – a good thought on someone’s part because it would take more than a household ladder to recover the body. They had positioned a cherry picker under the bridge.

The corpse was dressed in black jeans and a tank top. Worn trainers that must have been white when bought. Dark, close-cropped hair from what could be made out from below.

‘Do you want a closer look at him?’ the fire officer asked after Diamond made himself known.

He’d had more tempting invitations in his time. ‘Has anyone been up already?’

‘We were told to wait for you.’

‘And I didn’t let you down. Has the pathologist arrived? I left a message for him.’

‘Not yet.’

‘He’s the man to go up. He shouldn’t be long. How do you propose to recover the body?’

‘We’ll work from the top. Hoist him up.’

Diamond looked up at the body again. From where he was the ligature looked like plastic again. The top end was attached to one of the battlements. ‘How do I get up there – without getting into that thing, I mean?’

‘You’ll need to go up to the station and come back along the track. The cherry picker is quicker.’

The phrase conjured up summer afternoons in Kent orchards.

‘I appreciate that,’ Diamond said, but appreciation didn’t mean assent. This wasn’t his kind of cherry-picking. He looked at his watch. ‘The doctor shouldn’t be long.’ A pious hope. He remembered having to wait for Dr Sealy the morning Delia Williamson was found.

He walked across to where a uniformed police inspector was talking into his mobile. Someone at the other end was going spare by the sound of things. It was after seven and the traffic was backed right to the top of Widcombe Hill in one direction and Wellsway in the other. ‘Can I use your phone?’

‘What?’

He pointed to the phone.

‘I’m speaking to traffic control.’

‘Stuff them. Nothing is moving until I make this call.’

It was handed to him.

He had to call headquarters first to get Sealy’s mobile number. Then he got through. The pathologist was going nowhere, sitting in his car in the queue on the Lower Bristol Road.

‘We’ll get a motorcycle escort for him,’ the inspector said. ‘Good idea of yours.’

‘I thought it was obvious.’

Sealy eventually arrived with his outrider. ‘God help us – am I stuck with you again?’ he said to Diamond.

All he could think of as a riposte was: ‘Hope you’ve got a head for heights. You’ll need more than your milk crate for this one.’

‘I’ll cope.’ And, annoyingly, Sealy did, stepping into the cherry picker as if it was a taxi and rising with arms folded. Up there, he turned the corpse to face him and made his inspection. He was talking into his recorder for at least fifteen minutes. Above, on the rampart, four firemen got ready to lift the body upwards.

When Sealy had been lowered, he said, ‘What do you want to know apart from the obvious?’

‘What’s obvious?’ Diamond asked.

‘This isn’t like the woman in the park. This is a proper hanging. Fractured vertebrae. It was a long drop.’

‘Unrelated, then?’

‘Pathologically speaking, yes. I’ll tell you more when I’ve done the PM. Make sure they handle him with care, would you?’

‘What age would he be?’

‘Thirty to forty. Nobody looks at their best when they’re dangling on the end of a cord. Why don’t you take a look?’

‘They want him off the bridge so the traffic can move.’

‘The places people choose,’ Sealy said. ‘What was he after? Maximum disruption? He achieved that all right.’

After Sealy had gone, Diamond took the short walk to the railway station and emerged along the platform and down the slope to the gravel beside the lines. It didn’t take long. Ahead the firemen were approaching with the corpse in a body bag on a stretcher.

‘I’ll take a look,’ he said.

One of them unzipped the top end. A short length of the noose was still tied with a slip knot round the neck.

He recognised the victim.

No question. He’d been circulating pictures of the same face for days. This was the missing man, Danny Geaves, the one-time partner of Delia Williamson.

His first reaction was guilt. They’d failed to find Danny in time. This could have been prevented. Then he told himself they’d made every reasonable effort to find the man. The police are not guardian angels. They are limited by resources and manpower.

He zipped the bag, walked on and checked the parapet. He’d get the SOCOs up here to search everything, but this had the look of a suicide. Danny had slung the cord twice round one of the battlements and secured it with a good knot. It was still in place. It was easy to picture him fastening the noose round his neck, sitting between the battlements and choosing his moment to drop.

9

‘Y
ou can relax,’ he told Ingeborg when he looked in at the incident room. ‘Your search is over. The hanged man is Danny.’

‘Topped himself because of what he’d done?’

‘What do you think?’

She tapped a pencil against her chin. ‘So Danny is the killer.’

‘Was.’

‘Murdered Delia and then killed himself?’

‘So it appears.’

‘What drove him to it – jealousy, I bet. He couldn’t have her, so neither could anyone else. You guys are so possessive.’

‘Hang on, Ingeborg,’ he said. ‘Before you slag off the whole of my sex, the story we had from Ashley Corcoran was that Danny had given up on Delia and the children. He took no interest. That doesn’t sound like jealousy.’

‘Why would he have killed her, then?’

‘Maybe his life wasn’t worth living any more, and he blamed her for all his troubles.’

‘So if it’s not jealousy, it’s the blame game. That doesn’t say much for the whole of your sex.’

‘Give it a break, Ingeborg,’ he said. ‘I’ve been on the go since six this morning. Bloody phone ringing and a wet bed into the bargain.’

She said no more. Even an enquiring mind like hers didn’t want to know about Diamond’s wet bed.

From across the room Halliwell said, ‘So what do we do, guv? Dismantle this lot?’

‘We wait for the post-mortem report. Meanwhile you and DC Gilbert had better get into his lodgings in Freshford and see if he left any clues. A suicide note is too much to hope for.’

He went through to his office and shut the door. His thoughts had turned away from Geaves and Delia Williamson to the children they had left behind. Deprived of both parents in horrific circumstances, those two small girls couldn’t have faced a worse shock. He hoped they would find inner strength. He picked up the phone and called their grandmother, Amanda Williamson.

Her voice was nervous. She’d heard on the local radio that a body had been found. ‘I didn’t like to think who it might be. They haven’t named him, have they?’

‘It’s not officially confirmed, but I think you should be prepared to hear that he’s the girls’ father, Daniel Geaves,’ he said, trying to break it gently.

There was a pause, and then she said, ‘Dreadful.’

‘It is, ma’am.’

‘You’re certain of this?’

‘I’ve seen the body myself.’

‘Is he . . . did he kill my daughter?’

‘That’s what we have to find out. There will be an inquest. We should all know more after that. I’m calling you now because you may want to think about the children, what they should be told, and whether you want to take them away for a few days. The press are going to want pictures if they can get them.’

‘Pictures of the girls?’

‘It’s what they call a human-interest story. It will soon blow over. If they aren’t there to be photographed when the story breaks, no one will pester them in a few days.’

‘I understand. I’ll see what can be done.’

She sounded a good woman, calm in a crisis, controlling her own emotions while she was responsible for the children.

Looking at the phone he’d just cradled he tried to understand why Geaves had chosen to hang himself in such a public place. Almost all suicidal hangings are carried out in familiar surroundings, the home, or garage or workplace. This one had been done covertly, at night, but the location couldn’t have been more public. Perhaps, Diamond mused, the man had felt some remorse for the way he’d strung up his ex-wife in the park. Perhaps he’d condemned himself as he’d condemned her, to be a public spectacle after death. Skewed thinking, but then it needs a skewed mind to top yourself.

For Diamond personally this was a grinding anticlimax. Until this morning, he’d had an intriguing murder case with suspects and lines of inquiry. The killer had snatched it away from him. There was only paperwork in prospect now, and plenty of that.

First he’d go downstairs for a late breakfast.

In the corridor he saw Georgina coming. At this minute he didn’t want to be told he was looking peaky, or peakier, so he opened the first door on his right and found himself face to face with a large poster of a dog with teeth bared. To his left was a desk and behind it was seated the sergeant in charge of dogs, head cocked, eyes shining.

‘Sorry, wrong door.’

‘No problem, sir.’

The good manners were being tested again. ‘But now I’m here I’ve been meaning to ask you something.’

‘Yes?’

Something canine, if he could think of it. He dredged deep.

‘Bloodhounds. Whatever happened to bloodhounds?’

The sergeant frowned. ‘We don’t use them, sir. They’re not well suited to the work.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘They pick up a scent faster than anything, but they tire easily.’

‘Good sniffers but poor athletes?’

‘In a nutshell, yes. And their temperament isn’t good. They’re timid by nature. When you’re pursuing a suspect you don’t want a dog that won’t follow through. A German shepherd does the job better.’

‘That explains it, then,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’

He opened the door and looked along the corridor. Georgina was not in sight. Deciding it was safe, he stepped out.

As if it were fated, Georgina came out of the room opposite. ‘Peter, there you are.’ She stared at him. ‘Are you all right? You look as if someone just walked over your grave.’

‘My temperament,’ he said. ‘Timid by nature.’

‘I’d never noticed.’

He was going to add that he was a good sniffer even so, but it would have been lost on Georgina. She’d think he was snorting coke.

‘If you’re really all right, can we talk about the hanging?’

She was up with the morning’s developments. She just wanted his take on them. In her office upstairs he settled into a leather armchair and confirmed that it looked as if Geaves had killed himself.

‘Is there any doubt?’ Georgina said.

‘We haven’t had Dr Sealy’s report yet, but at the scene he called it a proper hanging.’

‘That’s straight talking from a pathologist. By that he meant there weren’t any signs the man had been strangled first, as Delia Williamson was?’

He nodded. ‘It’s all about the marks on the neck.’

‘So Geaves killed his ex-wife and then took his own life. Why – because he despised himself for what he’d done?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Or because he didn’t want to face the hue and cry? You were on to him.’

‘I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that, ma’am.’

‘You were actively searching for him. He’d disappeared from his lodging in Freshford and no one had seen him for days.’

‘I can’t argue with that.’

Georgina drummed her fingers on the desk. She wanted closure on this case and she wasn’t getting much help from the man in charge. At some stage she would have to face her fellow chorister, Amanda. ‘Get a grip, Peter. You must have a view of what happened.’

‘I’m puzzled about the choice of location.’

‘The viaduct? What’s wrong with that? I thought a long drop was the best way to do it. The jerk on the rope must have broken his neck immediately. People who do it by stepping off a chair condemn themselves to slow strangulation.’

‘You’re missing my point, ma’am. This was so public. Why didn’t he hang himself in private as most suicides do?’

She drew in a sharp, impatient breath. ‘Well, the place where he strung Delia up was public. He treated himself the way he’d treated her.’

‘Out of conscience?’

‘Presumably. We don’t know what was going on in his mind.’

‘That’s the problem,’ he said.

‘There was no note?’

‘Not at the scene. I’m having his place searched.’

‘Good. You might find evidence linking him to the murder.’

‘That would be a bonus.’

‘Don’t think of it like that,’ Georgina said in a tone of reproof, actually wagging her finger. ‘Just because the killer and his victim are both dead it doesn’t mean we treat the investigation lightly. We must make every effort to prove he murdered the woman.’

‘I intend to,’ he said.

‘Have you got the motive?’

‘Motive?’

‘The reason he killed her.’

‘Not yet.’

‘I suggest you work on that as a priority instead of waiting for evidence to fall into your lap.’

‘Right you are, ma’am,’ he said, and he stood up as if to prove he wasn’t waiting for anything. If he stayed here any longer being treated like a schoolkid he would say something mutinous.

She flapped her hand and he left the room.

The late breakfast was so late it became lunch. Afterwards he called Keith Halliwell, by now inside the Freshford house Geaves had lived in. ‘What’s it like?’

‘Tidy, guv. Horribly tidy. No sign of recent occupation. The stuff in the fridge is past its sell-by.’

‘Nothing so helpful as a suicide note?’

‘No letters at all except junk mail. No bank statements, passport, credit cards, address book. I get the impression he took everything important with him when he left.’

‘Not intending to come back?’

‘There are clothes in the bedroom, but he wouldn’t need a suit if he was planning to top himself.’

‘Wouldn’t need a passport, so far as I know. Have you talked to the neighbours?’

‘They never got much out of him. The one thing that’s certain is that he hasn’t been living here the last few days.’

‘Do you think he had a bolt hole somewhere else?’

‘Looks that way, guv. We did find one thing – a weird photo that had slipped down the back of a chest of drawers, but I wouldn’t read too much into it. Could have been left by some previous tenant.’

‘Weird in what way?’

‘You can’t see much. It’s badly focused or taken in very poor light. Some kind of hairy creature with eyes and teeth, but like nothing I’ve ever seen. Might be a still from a horror movie.’

‘Bring it in. I’ll take a look at it. You’d better come back here, then.’

‘See you shortly.’

‘Probably not,’ Diamond said. He’d been on the go since the crack of dawn and he was knocking off early.