Authors: Peter Lovesey
Harry stood up. 'You could be right. This damned case could be packed with explosives. They can detonate by remote control. We'd better get outta here.'
Jim was first through the door, followed closely by Harry. The corridor looked empty, but this was deceptive. Jim yelled, 'There could be a bomb in there. Clear the floor!' And immediately the doors of two other suites opened and men carrying sub-machine-guns came out. 'It's off,' Jim said. 'Everybody out.'
Harry had already picked his route. Instead of using the lift, which was open, he turned left and took the stairs. Before he was down the first flight he'd ripped off the moustache and pocketed the horn-rimmed glasses. On the third floor he emerged alone. The alarm system had just been switched on. Walking steadily, but without suspicious haste, he made his way along the corridors to the stairs on the opposite side of the building. He descended to ground level and strolled into the street and down the tube.
AND STILL THE KILLER WALKS FREE
Six months ago this week the wife of a Detective Superintendent
was gunned down and murdered in Bath's
elegant Royal Victoria Park, within view of the world-famous
Royal Crescent. The most intensive investigation
ever mounted in the city has so far failed to find the
killer of Stephanie Diamond. In this special report, we
examine the conduct of the inquiry and get the views of
two of the principal men involved: Detective Chief
Inspector Curtis McGarvie, who leads the investigation,
and Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond, the victim's
husband.
On Shrove Tuesday morning, last February 23rd, at 8.15, Peter Diamond kissed his wife Stephanie goodbye and drove to work as usual. It was the day in the week when Mrs Diamond caught up with household chores and shopping. On other days she worked as a volunteer in the Oxfam shop. That morning she was her usual cheerful self and showed no sign of stress. She didn't mention any arrangement to meet anyone, or visit the park, although a note was later found in her diary apparently fixing a meeting with someone she called 'T'. About 10.15, two shots were heard close to the Charlotte Street Car Park. An unemployed man walking his dog on the far side of the park heard the shots and presently found a woman's body in Crescent Gardens, beside the Victorian bandstand. Two bullets had been fired into her head at point-blank range.
Peter Diamond, the head of Bath's murder squad, arrived at the scene within a short time of the shooting, before anyone had identified the victim. One of several distressing features of this case is that he himself recognised the dead woman as his own wife. In spite of repeated appeals for witnesses, nobody appears to have seen the shooting. Police believe the gunman must have escaped through the car park, and video footage from the security cameras has been examined without any helpful result. A number of reports of drivers leaving around the time of the shooting have so far proved unhelpful. Eleven detectives and five civilians are working full-time on the case, which is believed to have cost three-quarters of a million pounds already.
The SIO (Senior Investigating Officer), DCI McGarvie, has appeared on
Crimewatch
and
Police
Five
appealing to the public for assistance. A reconstruction was staged at the scene of the crime with a policewoman dressed in similar clothes to the victim. 'There was a huge response from the television audience,' the Chief Inspector told our reporter, 'and we fed every piece of information into our database, but we still lack the crucial evidence that will identify the killer.' McGarvie is convinced there are people who know someone who acted suspiciously at the time of the murder, and he urges them to get in touch as soon as possible.
THEORIES
Sitting in the incident room surrounded by photos of the victim, in life and in death, and a computer-generated map of the crime scene, DCI McGarvie outlined the main theories his team have so far produced:
1. The killer acted under instructions from someone in the underworld with a grudge against Det. Supt. Diamond. As a murder squad detective in the Metropolitan Police and Bath CID, Peter Diamond has been responsible for many convictions over a twenty-three-year career. The problem with this theory is that a criminal bent on revenge is more likely to attack the officer who put him away than his wife.
2. The killer was hired by the wife or girlfriend of a convicted man. It is felt that an embittered woman might have ordered the killing in revenge for the loss of her own partner.
3. The wife or girlfriend of a convicted man fired the fatal shots herself as an act of revenge. Such a woman with underworld connections might have access to a firearm, though shootings by women are rare.
4. Stephanie Diamond, an attractive woman looking some years younger than her age of 43, was shot by some obsessive person or stalker, a 'loner' who believed she stood in the way of their fantasies. Stalkers have been known to 'punish' the women they idolise for what they see as infidelity.
5. The 'T' mentioned in her diary was trying to blackmail Mrs Diamond about some secret, or supposed secret, in her past and killed her in frustration when she refused to pay up.
6. The killing was a mugging that went wrong. The killer drew a gun. Mrs Diamond resisted, or even fought back. The first shot was accidental and the second was fired in panic.
The difficulty with theories 4, 5 and 6 is that the shooting has the hallmarks of a contract killing. The murderer timed the shooting at an hour when Victoria Park was quiet. The scene of the crime was close to the Charlotte Street Car Park, enabling the killer to get away rapidly to a vehicle, if the police theories are correct. A .38 revolver was used. 'Two shots to the head are characteristic of a professional gunman,' says DCI McGarvie. 'People have been known to survive a single shot to the head. The second bullet makes certain.'
CONFIDENT
Curtis McGarvie remains confident of an arrest. 'This is by far the biggest test of my career in CID,' he admits, 'and it's taking longer than I expected. I thought there would be more witnesses, considering where the shooting took place. We've been unlucky there, unless someone else can be persuaded to come forward. We've done reconstructions, and we know the killer took at least ten seconds to leave the scene and return to the car park. We are pretty sure they used a car. Somebody, surely, heard the shots and saw the gunman return quickly to the car park and drive off.' He is conscious that the costs of this case are mounting and there is already pressure to scale down the investigation. 'Up to now, I've had unqualified support from the Police Authority. A long-running case is automatically reviewed by the top brass. We've had two such reviews, and my leadership hasn't been faulted. But I can't expect to carry on indefinitely at this pitch when we're up against manpower shortages and budgets.'
Detectives speak of unsolved cases as 'stickers' and hate to have them haunting their careers. The murder of a police colleague's wife is particularly hard to consign to a file of unsolved cases. 'Peter Diamond is a man highly respected by everyone who knows him,' says McGarvie. 'No one here is going to give up while there is the faintest chance of progress. He's in a difficult position, because even though he is a fine detective with substantial experience it wouldn't be right or proper for him to investigate the murder of his own wife. We owe it to him to slog away as hard as he would to find the killer.'
That killer, according to the profilers who these days assist the police on all challenging murder inquiries, is most likely to be male, efficient, unexcitable, with a link to guns, and some knowledge of Bath. He drives a car. His friends or relatives probably have suspicions about him.
FRUSTRATION
Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond, the victim's husband, is 50, and has an outstanding record in bringing murderers to justice. He admits to frustration at having to stay at arm's length from the investigation. 'I know the reasons and I respect them. If I got involved I would be open to charges of bias. But it's hard. My heart wants to do what my head tells me I can't. I'd like to be working round the clock on this for Steph's sake. I'm an experienced investigator, and I have my own ideas on what should be done.' But he refuses to be critical of the detectives working on the case. 'This is about as tough as they come. You need luck on any case, and they haven't had much up to now.' Echoing McGarvie, he adds, 'My main worry is that soon the cost of all this will panic the people who hold the purse-strings into scaling everything down.'
When asked which of the main theories he subscribes to, Peter Diamond is cautious. 'They should rule nothing out until evidence justifies it. There are compelling reasons to suppose it was some kind of contract killing for revenge, but it's still possible that the killer was a loner acting for himself - or herself. It's not out of the question that a woman did this. And there may be a motive the murder squad are unaware of.'
The shooting of Stephanie Diamond on that February morning put tremendous strains on her husband. 'You find out how much you depended on someone when they are taken from you. She was a calmer personality than I could ever be, very positive, with a way of seeing to the heart of a problem. She understood me perfectly. I don't know of anything you could dislike in Steph, which makes her murder so hard to account for. The killer has to be someone who didn't know her at all, or some deluded crazy person.'
After the shooting there was the added ordeal of being questioned about his own movements. Peter Diamond shrugs and says, 'It had to be faced. I'd have pulled in the guy myself, whoever was the husband. You always take a long look at the husband in a case like this.' But if he was at work in Bath Police Station, surely he had a perfect alibi? 'Actually, no. On that morning I went straight to my office and worked alone. There was no one who could vouch for me.' He adds wryly, 'I may look big and threatening, but off duty I'm a baa-lamb. I think I convinced them in the end that I wouldn't have dreamed of harming my wife.'
Peter Diamond's fiftieth birthday came four weeks ago. 'I didn't do anything to mark it - but then I wouldn't have done much in normal circumstances. Oddly enough I discussed the birthday with Steph the night before she was killed, and persuaded her I didn't want a so-called surprise party with old cronies from years back. That's not my style. We would have gone out for a meal together, Steph and I, and had a glass or two.' He is in regular contact with Curtis McGarvie and has co-operated fully with the murder squad, even to having his home searched and his wife's private letters and diary taken away for examination. He is as puzzled as the murder squad over the diary entries mentioning somebody called T'. 'This must be the killer,' he says, 'and the odds are strong that the letter "T" was meant to mislead, but the diary mentions phone calls and an appointment in Royal Victoria Park, which Steph hardly ever visited, so it has to be the best clue we have. What foxes me completely is that she didn't say a word about going to the park that morning. My wife wasn't secretive. She was the most open of people. I find it hard to accept there was something hidden in her life, but what other explanation is there?'
Peter Diamond continues his work at Bath Police Station, busying himself on other cases, trying to block out the knowledge that the incident room for his wife's murder is just along the corridor. Shortly before the shooting he gave evidence in the murder trial of Jake Carpenter, a notorious Bristol gang leader who was given a life sentence for the sadistic killing of a young prostitute. The possibility of some kind of revenge killing by Carpenter's associates was a strong theory early in the case. It has still not been ruled out entirely, but intensive enquiries in Bristol have so far proved negative. Diamond himself agrees that it was probably a mistake to link the killing to the Carpenter conviction. 'My own reaction was the same as the squad's,' he says, 'but with hindsight we may have leapt to a premature conclusion and missed other leads. The first forty-eight hours in any inquiry are crucial.'
TENSION
They work in separate offices on the same floor of Bath Police Station in Manvers Street, these two experienced detectives. Curtis McGarvie is the outsider, the man drafted in from headquarters. He is at his desk by 8 a.m. There is an air of tension in the incident room and it isn't just the pressures of the case. For this should be Peter Diamond's domain. He has led the murder squad for eight years. McGarvie refuses to let sentiment trouble him. He is a gritty Glaswegian, thin as a thistle, with deep-set, watchful eyes, a professional to the tips of his toes, focused and unshakeable. 'If I were this killer on the run, I'd be sweating. I wouldn't want Curtis on my trail,' says a colleague at Avon & Somerset Headquarters who knows McGarvie well. He has a long string of successful prosecutions to his credit. But his team in Bath are Diamond's men and women, loyal to their chief, wanting passionately to achieve the breakthrough, yet unfamiliar with their temporary boss.
Meanwhile Peter Diamond sits alone in his office up the corridor sifting through other 'stickers', trying to give them his full concentration. He is a big, abrasive man who speaks his mind without fear or favour. Few in Bath's CID have escaped the rough edge of his tongue at some point in their careers. But right now there is a strong current of sympathy for this beleaguered man excluded from the action through no fault of his own. If commitment to the cause counts for anything, the killer of Stephanie Diamond will soon be found.
R
eading the
Chronicle
piece, Diamond was surprised how much the journalist had coaxed from him. He couldn't fault the quotes. She'd done her job well. Deprived of Steph's company for all this time, he'd been a soft touch for a bright woman journalist. The interview, over coffee in Sally Lunn's, hadn't seemed at all intrusive. He'd found her interest agreeable, almost therapeutic, having his brain exercised with a series of unthreatening questions, the sort Steph put to him when he was more under pressure than usual. Thank God he hadn't said what he really thought of McGarvie.
For obvious reasons he'd kept quiet about the cringe-making incident of the revolver the search party had dug up, and he was glad McGarvie had not mentioned it either. His feelings about that gun were complex. There was a basinful of guilt. He deeply regretted being so stupid as to hang on to the damned thing all those years. It pained him that Steph had found it and been so troubled that she buried it. He was sick to the stomach that her last communication to him - a beyond-the-grave message - had to be a kind of rebuke, for all its sensitive phrasing. But he had to be grateful she'd written the note and buried it with the gun. One last rescue act. She had removed a great burden of suspicion from his shoulders. Imagine McGarvie's fury, just when he felt he'd got the sensational evidence he needed, at finding the note that put Peter Diamond in the clear. The counter-theory about Diamond finding the gun and murdering Steph with it and then reburying it had been the sophistry of a desperate, disappointed man.
Among those theories listed in the newspaper there was no hint of the suspicion about Steph's former husband, Dixon-Bligh. He'd given away nothing on that front because it was a line of enquiry he was pursuing alone. He didn't want Steph's past life dissected by the press or the police unless it proved absolutely unavoidable. If Dixon-Bligh or anyone else had tried to blackmail her, he would root out the dusty old secrets himself - and he didn't expect they amounted to much.
One question the gently probing reporter hadn't put to him: was it bloody-mindedness that set him against McGarvie at every turn? Bloody-mindedness? It's not so simple as that, ma'am. It's force of circumstance. I'm under an embargo, you see, orders from above to leave the detective work to the murder squad. But don't you feel bitter about all the horseshit thrown at you by McGarvie, the false charges, the invasion of your privacy? I've got broad shoulders. I can take it. Or the abysmal lack of progress in the investigation? It's a brute of a case, my dear. But if I'm totally honest, if you were to tease the truth from me, I'd be forced to admit that, yes, there could be a tiny chip on these broad shoulders of mine: I hate the man.
In the next week, doggedly pursuing his own line of enquiry, he took another trip to London and looked up Dixon-Bligh - or tried to. There was a twist in the plot, and not a welcome one. The house in Westway Terrace was empty. The boxes and the few bits of furniture had gone from the front room. A neighbour said she hadn't seen the gent for weeks. The Post Office had no forwarding address. Dixon-Bligh had done another flit.
* * *
The trains on the Portsmouth line to Waterloo had run better than usual lately. The winter problems of frozen points and leaves on the line had meant a few delays and cancellations earlier in the year, but compared to previous years the service was improving. Whether the credit went to Mother Nature or the railway companies was much debated by the regular commuters. But as long as the wheels continued to roll along the tracks it was all good-humoured stuff.
Then one September morning when it was still too early for frosts or leaves, an 'incident' (unspecified, except it was 'up the line') brought everything to a prolonged halt. People don't like sitting in stationary trains for any length of time. For one thing they have places to go to, appointments to keep; and for another they feel unsafe.
There's that troublesome suspicion that the longer your train waits the more likely it is that another will come along behind and smash into it. There are signals to prevent such catastrophes, but signals have been known to fail.
In the 7.37 from Portsmouth, some people blocked out their nervous thoughts by turning to newspaper articles they would otherwise have skipped, about travel in the Greek Islands or training for the marathon. Others switched on their mobiles and rescheduled the morning. A few made eye contact with the passengers opposite and gave little tilts of the head that said you couldn't travel anywhere with confidence these days. This being Britain, not many words were exchanged at first, but after twenty minutes voices began to be heard.
'Where are we, exactly?'
'You talking to me?'
'I said where are we?'
'Almost at Woking, I reckon.'
'What do they mean - an "incident"?'
'Could be anything from a suicide to cows on the line.'
'I blame privatisation.'
'No, it goes back further than that. It all started going wrong about the time British Rail stopped calling us passengers. When I first heard myself being called a customer I knew they'd stopped trying to get us from A to B as their first aim. They were out to sell us things.'
'You mean the reason we're all sitting here is so they can empty the refreshment trolley?'
'Dead right'
One man in a pinstripe let down the window and looked out. 'There's another train pulled up ahead of us. Must be the 7.07.'
'My sainted aunt,' a reader of the
Independent
said. 'They won't let us move until that one's well clear.'
The pinstriped man turned from the window and reached for his hat and umbrella.
'Where the blazes are you going?' the
Independent
reader asked.
'Up the line. I can't afford to sit here all day. I'm going to board the 7.07. It's a more comfortable ride, anyway. Better than this old rolling stock.'
'You want to be careful.'
'It's safe enough. I know what I'm doing.' He opened the door and stepped down onto the gravel at the side of the track and started walking.
'There's always one, isn't there?' a woman in a suit said, looking up from
Pride and Prejudice.
'If he gets knocked down we'll have another hour to wait.'
But not two minutes later, pinstripe was back and asking his companions to open up and help him back inside. 'You're not going to believe this,' he said when the door was closed again. 'There's a leg down there.'
'What's he beefing about now?' the
Independent
reader asked.
'I said someone's leg is down there, or part of it, from the knee down.' Pinstripe put his hand to his spotted silk tie and tightened it. 'Horrible.'
'Where?'
'Just a short way along, by the side of the track at the bottom of the embankment. You wouldn't spot it unless you were down there.'
'It'll be a dummy from a dress shop.'
'No, it's real. I could see the raw flesh. It must have been chewed by a fox or something.'
'Leave it out, will you?' a
Sun
reader said. 'You're making me puke.'
'Has anyone got a mobile I can use? We ought to tell the police.'
'Do us all a favour, mate,' the
Sun
reader said. 'Leave it till we get to Waterloo. If you call the Old Bill now, we'll be here till lunchtime.'
Not everybody chimed in, but no one objected. Three minutes later, the 7.07 resumed its journey to London, and in another three minutes the 7.37 was in motion, leaving the leg behind.
The senior officers were sitting in armchairs and there was a table in front of them with filter coffee and chocolate digestives, but nobody was comfortable.
'As you know, I managed to get full backing from Headquarters,' Georgina was saying. 'We're in the seventh month of this inquiry, and they've given it one hundred per cent support.'
'So have my team,' McGarvie said. 'They've put in hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime.'
'I know. They've been terrific. We can be proud of them.'
Diamond said, 'But you're going to scale it down.'
'The office manager has shown me the costings, Peter. It's impossible to keep it running at this pitch.'
'You told me budgets didn't exist in this case. You'd see it through, whatever.'
'That was in February.'
'And we're no further on. That's the truth.'
McGarvie took this as a personal attack. 'We're miles further on. We've got statements, forensic reports, video footage, we've recovered her bag, her diary and the bullets, we've interviewed over six hundred people.'
'For what? Nobody's in the frame.'
'Are you saying I've mishandled it?'
'I'm saying this isn't the time to shut up shop.'
'Gentlemen,' Georgina called them to order. 'I don't want this to get personal. We're all under stress, me included. Headquarters are the paymasters, and I have to listen to them. Curtis, you're going to have to manage with six officers and two civilians.'
McGarvie swayed like a boxer riding a punch.
Georgina went on in the sock-it-to-them style she had to use with these obstreperous characters, 'You'd better decide who you want to keep. Peter, it's no use looking at me like that. I know how you feel. This is no reflection of how strongly we care about your loss and how keen we are to bring this murderer to justice. The commitment is still there. We have to face realities. Policing is about—'
'With respect, ma'am,' Diamond interrupted, 'I don't need reminding about priorities and neither does he. We both knew this was on the cards.'
'Right, then.'
'But why did you call me in?'
'You have a moral right to hear it.'
'Thanks.' He hesitated. 'I thought you might invite me to take a fresh look at the evidence.'
Georgina's lips tightened. 'That is not my intention, Peter, and you know why.'
'Off the record?'
'You're not to get involved. If you have any suggestions, you can pass them on now, and we'll be glad to look at them, but they won't get you on the team.'
He gave a slight nod, acknowledging the small, significant shift in Georgina's position. No longer was she treating him with suspicion, whatever the lingering doubts McGarvie harboured. 'So what's the focus now? Have we ruled out the Carpenters?'
Georgina looked towards McGarvie, who seemed reluctant to divulge the time of day while Diamond listened, but finally conceded, 'Our sources in Bristol haven't come up with anything. The word is that if some sort of revenge killing was authorised, Stephanie Diamond wouldn't have been the target.'
Georgina said, 'You mean they'd have targeted Peter?'
'Or the judge, or someone on the jury. Mrs Diamond would be well down the list'
She said, 'That would hold true for any of the criminal fraternity seeking revenge for a conviction.'
'Yes,' McGarvie said, 'unless the killing of Mrs Diamond was seen as like for like.'
'Meaning?'
'Someone who was deprived of their partner - and blamed Peter for it - decided he should suffer the same way.'
'This is the theory that a woman is responsible?'
'Or a man whose wife was put away.'
Georgina swung towards Diamond. 'When did you last arrest a woman for murder?'
He cast his mind back. 'Before you took over, ma'am. Ninety-four. But there wasn't a man in her life.'
'So for all practical purposes we're looking at vengeful women,' Georgina said. 'What about the one who scratched Peter's face?'
'Janie Forsyth.'
'She was shouting about a stitch-up, wasn't she? And she was Jake Carpenter's girlfriend.'
'I've interviewed her twice,' McGarvie said. 'The big objection to Janie as a suspect is her behaviour after the trial. If you're planning a murder you don't draw attention to yourself by screaming in the street and assaulting a senior detective.'
'She was in an emotional state,' Georgina said as if that was the prerogative of her sex. 'She could have got a gun and shot Stephanie. Let's remember the shooting happened the very next morning.'
McGarvie said, 'Let's also remember where it happened. Mrs Diamond went to the park by arrangement. We're confident of that. The diary shows she was due to meet the person known as "T" at ten.'
'You're right, of course,' Georgina admitted at once. 'And she'd been in touch with "T" for some days.'
'Just over a week.'
'You now believe the diary is reliable evidence?'
McGarvie coloured a little and avoided looking at Diamond. 'We were cautious at first, but we now accept that the entries were written by Mrs Diamond. And if the first contact was at least ten days before the murder—'
'Remind us what it said.'
'"Must call T." That was on Monday the fifteenth of February. It suggests a prior contact.'
'All of which makes it unlikely that the Carpenter verdict was the motive for the shooting.'
'That's my interpretation, ma'am.'
'Mine, too,' Diamond said. 'Early on, before the diary was found, I was sure they were behind it. Shows how wrong you can be.'
'You have another theory.' Georgina spoke this as a statement. Whether she got it from intuition or the nuances of his tone, she spoke from confidence.
He wavered. He hadn't meant to bring Dixon-Bligh into this without more evidence, but the man was so elusive it was becoming clear back-up would be needed to stay on his trail. 'I don't know about a theory. Her first husband was called Edward Dixon-Bligh. I'm not certain of this, but she may have called him Ted.'
It was as if he'd just said the word 'walk' to a pair of dogs. They sat up, ears pricked, eyes agleam, and if they'd hung out their tongues and panted, they could not have looked more eager.
They continued to give him undivided attention while he told them everything - well,
almost
everything - he knew about Dixon-Bligh, and Steph's unhappy first marriage. The one thing he did not reveal was the thump he'd given the man the last time they'd met.
This new avenue of enquiry so intrigued them that nothing was said about Diamond defying the injunction to stay off the case. By now, Georgina and McGarvie knew they couldn't stop him doing his solo investigation.