Beneath the Bleeding (41 page)

‘Who did Yousef deal with at B&R?’

‘No idea. He used to have regular meetings with them, going through new designs and product ranges, but that was his job. I don’t know who his contact was. It’s not like we would see them socially, know what I mean?’

‘No,’ Tony said. It was a lie but he wanted to hear if Sanjar knew who B&R were. ‘What do you mean?’

‘They’re Jewish, man. It’s not a problem when it comes to doing business, their money’s as good as anybody else’s. But we’re not going to be their friends, you catch my drift?’

‘I understand,’ Tony said. He glanced at his watch. In ten minutes, Paula would be waiting downstairs. ‘You do know that Benjamin Diamond from B&R died in the bombing on Saturday?’

A long silence. ‘No way,’ Sanjar eventually said.

‘I’m afraid so. Are you sure Yousef never mentioned him by name?’

‘No, he always just said “the B&R guy”. I’m pretty sure he never mentioned a name. So maybe it wasn’t this Diamond geezer that he dealt with?’

‘It’s possible. It just seemed like an odd coincidence,’ Tony said mildly.

‘Shit like that, it happens. You get coincidences all the time, right?’

‘We don’t really believe in them in my line of work. I need to go now, Sanjar. I hope you get to bury your brother with dignity.’

‘We’re trying to keep where we’re doing it a secret, he said gloomily. ‘The last thing we want is any trouble kicking off.’

‘Good luck.’ He ended the call and eased himself off the bed and on to his crutches. He’d had a very uncomfortable encounter with Mrs Chakrabarti that morning. The nurses had reported his absences and the contretemps between Carol and his mother. The surgeon had not been impressed.

‘You work in a hospital, Dr Hill,’ she’d said severely. ‘You should understand that patients have the best chance of getting better if they actually follow the
directives of those taking care of them. I was thinking we might discharge you today or tomorrow, but frankly, the way you’ve been behaving, I’m afraid to do that in case you have a relapse.’ Then she’d twinkled a smile at him. ‘I don’t want you playing football before the end of the week.’

She’d told him not to go out. But he didn’t have a choice. Somebody had to pursue the line of inquiry, and Carol had made it plain when he’d called her that it wasn’t high on her list of priorities.

‘I’ll go by myself, then,’ he’d told her.

‘I don’t think that’s one of your better ideas,’ Carol said.

‘What? You think I’ll say something I shouldn’t?’

‘No, I think you’ll fall over your crutches and that poor bereaved woman will have to pick you off the floor. I’ll send Paula, she can chaperone you.’

‘I bet she’ll be really thrilled.’

And so it had been agreed that Paula would pick him up outside the Outpatients Department. He didn’t want to pass the nurses’ station, so he decided to take the emergency stairs near his room.

One flight nearly killed him. He was bathed in sweat, his good leg was aching and his broken knee felt as if it was on fire. He wobbled along to the lift and managed to make it to their rendezvous without discovery. Paula was leaning on her car, parked in the ambulance-only zone.

‘You look like you’ve run a half marathon,’ she said, nose wrinkling in distaste.

‘It’s the jogging pants. They’re all I can get over my leg brace.’ Shaking her head in amusement, Paula opened the door and he let himself drop back into
the seat, then swung his legs round and in. ‘Just as well Carol didn’t send Kevin in his Ferrari,’ he gasped as he tried to make himself comfortable.

‘We’d have had to get a crane to get you in and out of that,’ Paula said, getting in the driver’s side.

‘Quite. So, what have you been up to?’

She brought him up to speed with their inquiries into Jack Anderson and his aliases. ‘He sounds a bit of an oddball,’ she added. ‘Apparently, when he was at school, he had this list of goals. Like Michael Heseltine’s “I’m going to be Prime Minister” list.’

Until then, nothing Paula had said had piqued Tony’s curiosity. But this was different. ‘Do we know what was on his list?’

‘According to Steve Mottishead, it was stuff like, get a Ferrari, get a house on Dunelm Drive, make a million by age thirty. Not the kind of thing that most people aspire to.’

Her words triggered a chain reaction in Tony’s brain. He gazed at Paula in appalled wonder. ‘Paula, Tom Cross lived on Dunelm Drive. Danny Wade won the lottery; he was a millionaire by age thirty. He’s killing people who went to his school who have achieved his goals.’

Paula took her foot off the accelerator in surprise. The jolt as the gears protested made Tony yelp. ‘That’s crazy,’ she said. ‘Even for you, that’s pretty wild. You’re saying he’s killing people out of envy? Because they’ve got what he wanted?’

Tony’s hands made incoherent shapes in the air. ‘There’s more to it than that…It’s something to do with having his dreams taken away from him, so he’s taking their lives from them. But in essence,
yes. His goal list is also his murder list. I bet you that “playing for Bradfield Victoria” or at the very least, “playing premiership football” was on that list too.’

‘You really think that’s it?’ Paula sounded incredulous.

‘It makes sense.’

‘That’s your idea of sense?’

‘Paula, in the world I work in, that’s not just sense, it’s celestial logic.’ He fell silent, holding up a finger to hush her when she tried to speak. He rubbed his eyelids with finger and thumb then turned in his seat to face her. ‘Kevin went to the Double Aitch,’ he said slowly.

‘Kevin? You don’t think-’

‘He drives a Ferrari. He’s Bradfield born, bred and buttered.’ Tony was already struggling to get his phone out of the pocket of his waxed jacket.

‘What are you doing?’ Paula asked.

‘I’m warning him.’ The phone was free and clear, Tony’s index finger poised to strike.

‘You can’t go off on one like that. You’ve got no evidence,’ Paula protested.

‘I’ve got about as much as I usually have when I draw up a profile,’ Tony said. ‘You lot are generally happy enough to act on that.’

Paula bit her lip. ‘Shouldn’t you talk to the chief first? See if she thinks there’s anything to it?’

‘Paula, I’m not asking Kevin to do anything operational. How would you feel if I didn’t say anything and…’ His voice trailed off. He knew exactly how she would feel. He’d listened to her enough to know the answer.

‘Phone him,’ she snapped. ‘You’re right, damn it. You’ve been the only one who’s had a fucking clue on this case. Do it.’

Tony dialled the number and waited. No ring tone, just a straight transfer to voicemail. ‘Shit, his phone’s off…Kevin, this is Tony. This is going to sound crazy, and I’ll explain it all later. I want you to avoid eating or drinking anything that could have been tampered with. Things in tins and bottles and vacuum packs are fine as long as the seals are intact. Or if you’re cooking with fresh ingredients, probably. Because I think there’s a chance you might be next on the poisoner’s list. I can’t go into it now, Paula and I are about to interview someone about Saturday. But…’ He heard a beep in his ear, indicating his time was up. ‘Voicemail,’ he said. ‘I hope he picks it up.’

Paula turned into a driveway. The house, he knew, must have cost the thick end of a couple of million, given its location, its acreage and its size. It was a beautifully proportioned manor house in mellow Victorian brick. Long herbaceous borders flanked the drive. Water features sparkled in the middle distance. It reeked of opulence and good taste.

Paula whistled. ‘Makes you wonder how all those crappy clothes get into the shops. Benjamin Diamond must have used up all his taste on the house.’

‘It’s very choice,’ Tony said. ‘But I don’t suppose any of it makes much difference to his widow right now.’

Paula looked chastened. She pulled up by a row of garages which had obviously started their working lives as stables. ‘Do you need a hand?’ she asked.

‘I think it’s better if I just struggle,’ Tony said, doing just that. Everything hurt today. Mrs Chakrabarti was right. He was in hospital for a reason. Unfortunately, killers never took things like that into consideration.

Rachel Diamond answered the door, introducing herself before Paula had the chance to speak. She wore a charcoal silk shirt tucked into a black skirt that swirled and flowed as she walked. Tony didn’t know much about clothes, but he felt pretty sure Rachel’s mourning outfit didn’t come from any of the chain stores B&R supplied. She ushered them into a large sitting room with a deep pentagonal bay window on one corner, giving on to a vista of shrubbery and trees. In a gap between foliage, there was a turquoise sliver of swimming pool. The room itself was furnished and decorated in a toned-down contemporary version of Victorian domestic style. It had the slightly scuffed air of a room that was used rather than displayed. A touch of vivid colour came from half a dozen bright, warm paintings of desert landscapes.

Rachel fussed over Tony, bringing him a couple of footstools and various cushions so they could establish the most comfortable position for his leg. She knelt by his feet, shifting and adjusting things till he was comfortable. Her dark hair was glossy and thick, but he could see some tiny flecks of silver at the roots. Then she looked up and he had the chance to look at her properly for the first time, free from the distraction of managing leg and crutches.

She had good skin, creamy and faintly olive tinted. He knew she was thirty-four, but if he hadn’t known, he would have placed her in her late twenties. Her well-shaped brows followed the high arch of her eye
sockets perfectly, drawing attention to almond-shaped hazel eyes rimmed with red and sporting a fan of faint lines at the corners. Plump cheeks, a nose like the inverted prow of a ship, a lean-lipped mouth bracketed by a pair of lines that gave the impression she smiled a lot. She was striking rather than beautiful, but she looked combatively intelligent and good fun. ‘How’s that?’ she said.

‘As comfortable as it’s been in a week,’ Tony said. ‘Thank you.’

Rachel got to her feet and curled her legs under her in a squashy chintz armchair. Paula was off to one side, happy to look like part of the furniture until she felt the need to make a contribution.

Now there was nothing practical to occupy her, Rachel looked sad and lost. She folded her arms across her chest as if she was hugging herself. The room was warm, but she gave a little shiver. ‘I’m not really clear why you wanted to see me,’ she said. ‘That’s probably me. Nothing’s really making much sense right now.’

‘I wouldn’t expect it to,’ Tony said gently. ‘And I’m sorry to intrude at a time when the last thing you want is strangers in your living room.’

Rachel relaxed slightly, her shoulders dropping and her arms loosening. ‘It fills some of the time,’ she said. ‘Nobody talks about that, do they? They all talk about the grief and the tears and the despair, but they don’t talk about the emptiness of your hours, the way the time stretches out.’ She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘I even thought about going into the office, just for something to do. But Lev’s home from school, I need to be here for him.’ She sighed. ‘Lev’s my little boy.
He’s only six. He doesn’t understand dead. He doesn’t grasp that it’s permanent. He thinks Daddy’s going to be like Aslan, coming back to life, and everything as it was before.’

Her grief, he thought, was almost tangible. It seemed to flow from her in waves, lapping around him as it filled the room. ‘There are some things I need to ask you,’ he said.

Rachel pressed her hands together as if in prayer, elbows on the chair arm, cheek against the back of one hand. ‘Ask what you like. But I don’t see how it can help you do whatever it is you do.’

There was no way to come at this question delicately. ‘Mrs Diamond, did you know Yousef Aziz?’

She looked startled, as if this was a name she never expected to hear in this house. ‘The bomber?’ She gagged, as if she was going to be sick.

‘Yes,’ Tony said.

‘How would I know some fundamentalist Islamic suicide bomber?’ Each word spilled out as if it took a huge effort. ‘We are Jewish. We go to temple, not to the mosque.’ She sat up convulsively, her hands jerking in irregular, spastic movements.

‘His family’s garment business traded with B&R,’ Paula said, her voice as gentle as Tony’s. ‘You are a director of B&R, Mrs Diamond.’

She looked hunted, an animal at bay. ‘I work in the office. Benjamin, he did all the…He was the one with the…I never heard this name before he blew up my husband.’

‘Is there anybody else at work he might have mentioned Aziz to?’ Paula asked.

‘There’s only us. It’s not a labour-intensive business,
our part of it. We did it together. No secretaries, no sales team.’ She smiled, a sad, wistful affair.

‘Are you sure? It’s been in all the papers, Rachel,’ Tony said. ‘His name. The family firm, First Fabrics. You didn’t recognize it?’

Rachel was rocking in her chair, her eyes flickering from one to the other. ‘I recognize the name. I see it in the B&R accounts. But I haven’t been reading the papers. Why would I want to read about this thing? Why would I want to read about how my husband died? You think I’ve been poring over the newspapers?’

‘Of course not,’ Tony said, trying to soothe her agitation. ‘I just thought you might have noticed it. But the thing is, B&R has been dealing directly with First Fabrics. Cutting out the middleman. So I’m thinking that Benjamin must have known Yousef Aziz. They must have spoken on the phone. They must have met. You see, it’s very unusual for there to be any relationship between a bomber and his victims.’

‘Relationship?’ Rachel made it sound as if she’d never heard the word before. ‘What do you mean, “relationship”? What are you suggesting about my husband?’

‘Nothing beyond the fact that they knew each other,’ Tony said hastily. This was not going well. ‘Generally, you see, one of the things that makes it possible for a bomber to carry out his mission is that he can depersonalize his victims. They’re not real people, they’re the enemy, they’re corrupt, whatever. If they have any personal connection to the potential victims, it makes it much harder for them to do what they’ve set their heart on. That’s why I’m curious
to know how well Benjamin knew his killer.’ He spread his hands, beseeching. ‘That’s all, Rachel.’