The Diamond Rosary Murders (12 page)

‘We’ll find it, Mac.’

‘Over the years, I’ve come across some very strange murder weapons … such as a wee candlestick, a boiling pan of chip oil, the leg of a chair, a billiard ball in a sock, the side of a bairn’s cot, a sheet of corrugated steel … I could go on. I’ve come across all of those in my time. No. This is something very unusual.’

‘Well, thank you, Mac,’ Angel said thoughtfully. ‘I must find the weapon. I’ll have another look round Haydn King’s place. There might be something there.’

‘Aye,’ Mac said. ‘Before you do that, I have something else to tell you that you will want to know … something perhaps even more critical to solving the case than knowing the murder weapon … and even more curious.’

‘Well, stop teasing me then, you old haggis-eater, and tell me.’

‘When I was transcribing these notes and I came to the cause of death, I realized that the wound on King’s head had superficial similarities to that on the body of the man brought in here this morning, so I had the body brought out onto the table. I
examined
it, and I can confirm that the wound is the same shape – and
delivered with approximately the same force. I fished around in the man’s brain for anything left by the weapon and found several particles which appear to be the same compound I found in Haydn King’s skull.’

Angel was astounded.

‘So whoever murdered Haydn King,’ he said, ‘also murdered the man brought out of the canal.’

‘Exactly so.’

Angel’s heart began to thump as if it was trying to break out through his shirt. The hot tremor in his stomach spread rapidly up to his chest.

This information was much more important than knowing why and how the poor man had received the cuts to his face.

T
here was a knock on the door.

‘Come in,’ Angel called.

It was Ahmed waving a sheet of A4. ‘I’ve had a result from the CRO about the fingerprints of the man pulled out of the canal, sir.’

Angel looked up. He was all ears.

‘Records advise that his name was Reuben Paschal, age 50, sir. Came out of Senford Open Prison in August last. Before that he was in Lincoln. Small-time thief and confidence trickster.’

Angel screwed up his eyebrows. ‘Any address?’

‘No fixed abode. There is an address. It’s his sister’s. He was staying with her temporarily.’

‘Right. Find Trevor Crisp for me right away. Anything else?’

‘Had an email back from the Met, sir. It’s a reply to our request to them to check on the addresses of Charles Domino and Joseph Memoré, who were staying at the King George Hotel the night the blonde woman’s body disappeared and then re-appeared alive, if you know what I mean. And, as you thought, sir, the addresses were false.’

‘Huh. Well, surprise, surprise! Anyway, things are moving a bit now, lad. Ask Don Taylor to come down to see me. I’ve got to keep all the balls in the air, lad. And I mustn’t let anything slip me by.’

‘Right, sir,’ Ahmed said with a smile. He was thinking that it was highly unlikely that that would happen.

He went out.

Minutes later, Don Taylor came in. He was carrying an A4 loose-leaf file. ‘You wanted me, sir? I hope you are not going to bawl me out because we are so far behind with everything?’

Angel knew that he had rather overwhelmed SOCO in the past few days. He was also snowed under with work, so he understood.

‘No, Don,’ Angel said, ‘but investigations have to go on and we have to keep up.’

‘Yes, sir. Well, the searches and analyses were all done at the time. It’s just that they haven’t been collated in sequence, put into good English and written up.’

‘That’s all right. You can do all that later, maybe, when there isn’t as much going on. In the meantime, can you tell me what you found in the rooms on the top floor and on the second floor at the King George Hotel.’

‘Both rooms had been cleaned and vacuumed by hotel staff when we arrived there, sir,’ Taylor said as he opened the file. ‘There were no recent prints in either room.’

Angel nodded and rubbed his chin. ‘Anything else?’ he said.

‘No. The wastepaper baskets had been emptied, and we found nothing out of the ordinary in our vacuuming.’

‘What about Haydn King’s house?’ Angel said. ‘Now you were looking for prints that didn’t belong to King, Fleming or any member of the staff.’

‘We didn’t find any prints of strangers, sir, on doorknobs, handles, light switches, push-buttons, ledges and the like. And, as you know, King’s bedroom had been thoroughly vacuumed, dusted and polished before we arrived. Even the bed linen had been changed.’

Angel’s face muscles tightened. He knew it was true. ‘Yes. So you found nothing?’

‘We found a tiny amount of red dust in the bottom of the bag
after vacuuming King’s bedroom. We couldn’t identify it though, and it was such an insignificant sample that I didn’t think to mention it at the time. But it was unusual.’

‘Mmm,’ Angel said. He agreed. ‘Is it hard or soft?’

‘It’s hard, sir. Like grit. I have saved it on sticky tape.’ He opened the file and put the piece of transparent adhesive tape on the desk on top of a white envelope.

Angel picked it up and held it to the light. Then he dug a thumbnail into it. It was hard, very hard.

‘It’s like builder’s dust. Where did you find it?’

‘Under the bed. About twelve inches from the wall.’

Angel agreed it didn’t seem significant, but he always wanted to know about anything that could be evidence. ‘I can’t think what it is, but I’ll keep it in mind,’ he said as he handed it back.

‘I think the only other matter we haven’t discussed is about the place where Reuben Paschal was pulled out of the canal earlier this morning.’

Taylor took a memory stick out of his pocket. ‘We took a lot of photographs of the area, sir. You can see them on your laptop now if you want to.’

Angel turned round to the table behind him and brought the computer across to the desk and raised the lid. A minute later they were looking at the photographs taken earlier that morning on the laptop monitor.

Taylor clicked the photographs through quickly, stopping sometimes to point out matters of interest.

‘The body was snagged in those bulrushes,’ Taylor said. ‘There was a lager can and a small, plastic tub, floating by his head. That was about all.’

‘So he wasn’t totally submerged, then?’

‘No, sir. When we found him he was partly under water. I don’t think he could have moved far from where he was dumped because he was snagged in the bulrushes. There was a fresh
bicycle tyre mark in the mud on the bank. Look, there’s a better pic of it somewhere. We have taken a mould of it.’

Angel looked thoughtful. ‘Good. Although we don’t know anybody in this case who has a bicycle.’

They finished reviewing the pics. There was very little reliable evidence from that scene.

Angel wasn’t pleased. He wrinkled his nose.

‘You didn’t want a diver to go in, did you, sir?’ Taylor said.

‘We don’t know what we are looking for lad, do we? Only something associated with him … and we wouldn’t know if it was.’

There was a knock at the door. ‘Come in,’ Angel called.

It was Crisp. ‘You wanted me, sir?’

Angel’s eyes flashed. ‘Aye, come in lad,’ he said, then he turned back to Taylor. ‘I think we’ve about done, Don, haven’t we?’

Taylor nodded, then stood up, made for the door and went out.

Angel looked up at Crisp.

Crisp grinned back at him.

Angel’s lips tightened back against his teeth. He shook his head patiently and said, ‘Where have you been, lad? I asked Ahmed to find you ages ago.’

‘Ah, well, sir,’ he began, ‘Vera Winstone has been in—’

‘Not that woman from Vera’s again, that posh dress shop?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Angel’s fists tightened. ‘What’s going on?’ he said. ‘How is it that whenever you are missing there’s always a woman involved?’

‘I’ve not been missing, sir.’

‘Well it must be half an hour since I asked Ahmed to find you. And that woman is never away from the station. What’s the matter with her
now
? Is she chasing
you,
or are
you
chasing her?’

‘No, sir. It’s not like that. You always say things like that. She wants the robber who broke her shop window, and stole that stuff to be caught and all her things returned.’

‘Well, perfectly understandable. We
all
want that. Has she come with some new evidence, then?’

His eyebrows dropped. His eyes were almost closed. He
hesitated.
‘No, sir,’ he said. He rubbed his chin. ‘No. I think she thinks that the more she pesters us the more likely we are to catch him.’

‘Huh. I think she must have taken a fancy to you, lad.’

‘No, sir. It’s not like that.’

‘Well, if you’re sure you can tear yourself away from her, I want you to go to Nottingham and interview Reuben Paschal’s sister. She’s a married woman, so there’s no need to wine her, dine her and … anything else that might come into your mind. You just have to ask her questions, that’s all. We have his record coming from the CRO, so you don’t need to ask her about that. What I want you to find out is when she last saw him alive, if he had any plans to go anywhere, who his associates were, particularly since August, when he was released, and what work he managed to get recently, if any. I also want to know where he was living, if he wasn’t living with her. Oh yes, and somebody will have to identify his body. She’s the obvious one. That’s not nice. But you’ll have to put that to her. You can get her full name and address from Ahmed. All right?’

Crisp looked at his watch then at Angel and said, ‘It’s gone two o’clock, sir. I’d better go tomorrow.’

‘No,’ Angel said. ‘It’s only an hour and ten minutes on the motorway. You can be there by quarter past three. Bags of time. Go on. Hop it. Tell me all about it in the morning.’

Crisp screwed up his face. He wasn’t happy. ‘Right, sir,’ he said as he went out.

Angel looked across his desk, trying to decide his next priority. These murders were getting too frequent … he wondered what was happening out there … whatever it was, everything was happening at once.

The phone rang. He glared at it then snatched it up. It was Ahmed.

‘What is it, lad,’ he said.

‘I thought you’d want to know that there have been several calls for you from the
Bromersley Chronicle,
the
Daily Telegraph, The Sun
and ITV news. The switchboard put them through to the CID office because your line was busy. They weren’t pleased when I said that your phone was engaged. When I tell them that, they start asking me questions.’

‘What do you say?’

‘I always say I don’t know, sir, which is usually true anyway.’

‘That’s right. Good lad. What were they asking about?’

‘They’re mostly asking about Queen Mary’s Rosary, sir … whether it’s been found … and about the murder of Haydn King and the other murders … and has anybody been charged … and so on. And they want to know when you’ll be available to speak to them, and if you’re having a press conference. The man from the
Telegraph
said that the people are concerned about these matters and are entitled to be told, and he said that there is a definite feeling of fear among some members of the community.’

Angel agreed that facts that
could
be told
should
be told, but he would not have admitted it to the pressmen. And although it was always uncomfortable to know that a murderer was roaming around free, he didn’t think that there was any need yet for the public to panic.

He sighed. ‘Right, lad. I’ll deal with it.’

He replaced the phone, then ran his hand hard across his chin. The current situation in all truth was that he didn’t have time to give press conferences and interviews. In any case, he reckoned that his job was to gather information, not dispense it. However, he knew he couldn’t hold the media back for ever and that he might soon simply have to
make
the time.

The phone rang yet again. Angel frowned and reached out for it.

It was his friend DI Mathew Elliot from the Antiques and Fine Art squad.

‘I must tell you, Michael,’ Elliot said. ‘I have just heard, and I was sure you would want to know, that the body of James Argyle has just been found in a bedroom at the Rexis Hotel in the West End. He has a stab wound through his heart.’

Angel gasped. This was dreadful and alarming. Another victim of the Chameleon. Angel hardly knew what to say. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Mathew. The Met will be dealing with it, I suppose. Are there any leads?’

‘Don’t know. I’ve only just heard.’

‘There’s one thing certain.’

‘What’s that?’

‘If he had the Rosary, he won’t have it now.’

Angel was reading the report and looking at the criminal record of Lee Ellis, fitness freak, extracted from the PNC. It made depressing reading, but was typical of so many small-time thieves, rogues and vagabonds clogging up the prisons. The only recorded employment he ever seemed to have had was as a coaching assistant in a gym. He had had a difficult childhood, his father had walked out when he was five, his mother had had various unsavoury partners, turned to drink, then drugs and
prostitution
. Her only son was in trouble for assaulting and robbing an elderly woman when he was fifteen, and thereafter followed a string of offences for robbery, assault, and handling
amphetamines
.

Angel uncovered the interesting fact that Lee Ellis served his last term in prison in Armley in 1999; coincidentally, so did James Argyle.

He had just finished reading the last page when the church clock chimed five. He looked up. Five o’clock. The end of the day. Unusually, he breathed a gentle sigh of relief and began to hum the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ as he squared up the papers on his desk.

It had been a tiring day with tedious information coming in thick and fast, but still insufficient for him to be able to point to a murderer or indicate the whereabouts of the Rosary.

He stood up, and reached out for his coat.

He was fairly certain that the Chameleon was responsible for the death of James Argyle; the tidy stab-wound to the heart from a stiletto indicated that. He thought that the Chameleon was merciless in his (or her) search for the Rosary. He must be the meanest of mean creatures and Angel couldn’t wait to get him behind bars.

He fastened the buttons of his coat, switched off the light, closed the door and made his way down the corridor. He licked his lower lip as he pulled up the overcoat collar in anticipation of the cold outside.

It was worrying him that progress in actually detecting the villain was virtually negligible. He hoped he wasn’t losing his touch. He sometimes felt that somebody or something was out there anticipating what he intended to do, and putting up
obstacles
to frustrate him in every move he chose to make. He would love to pack it all in and vanish to the warmth of the Maldives with Mary for a month and let somebody else deal with it all. However, the mortgage had to be paid, and the bills for the gas and electricity were relentless, progressively increasing month over month. He was fed up of running around the house closing windows, switching off lights and turning down thermostats to reduce consumption.

He reached the station cells, said, ‘Goodnight,’ to the duty jailer and went out through the back door.

It was freezing cold and the moon was already up in a clear black sky. He reached the BMW, pressed the key remote, got into the car, started the engine and switched on the headlights.

He pursed his lips. He would have much preferred to have his own team examine the body of James Argyle and take responsibility
for the scene of the crime, but he had to accept that, because of the location, it was entirely a matter for the Met.