Diamond flipped through the sheets, his brain buzzing with this discovery. He knew weird things were debated on the Internet but finding them here, printed out as if they needed to be kept and read again, was disturbing.
Another thread was debating ingenious methods used in fiction:
One of the best was in a short story by Roald Dahl called Lamb to the Slaughter but you have to read it yourself. I don’t do spoilers. -Calamity Jane
Everyone has heard of that one. What about a colourless, odourless poison like ricin? That’s getting into spy stories quite often since it was shown to have been used by some secret service agent. -Jonesy
A sharpened icicle driven into the heart and after it melts. No evidence, see? -Calamity Jane
Cool. -Clare de Lune
One of the cleverest ideas was in Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train. I guess most people have read it or seen the movie. She sets up a situation where the killer has no obvious connection with the victim. I won’t spoil it by saying any more. -Highsmith fan
My number one film. -Tom Ripley
Injecting an air bubble into the bloodstream. Writers have been thinking up this stuff for more than a century. -Crime Reader
The writer you mean (let’s spare her blushes) injected an artery with a hypodermic instead of a vein, but it was still neat, I thought. Like I said I favour poison. There’s so much of it about, in the garden, the garage, the medicine cabinet. A good method I once read about was adding the poison to a tube of toothpaste. A drop of pure nicotine killed the victim. You only have to do some background reading to make sure it works quickly and without anyone noticing. -Jonesy
Are you favouring poison or recommending it? This is too creepy for me. -Normal Norm
Diamond folded the papers and pocketed them. Chilling. He’d seen enough to cause him to stand up and look again at that row of plastic pots.
Sinister or innocent?
Each was about nine inches high, in the shape of a classic Grecian urn with a neck and topped with a lid. They could be used for any kind of storage. And since everything in this workshop had a reason for being here, why not these?
Better check.
He moved the chair across the room, stepped up and took a closer look, and he now saw that the train designs were stickers someone had cut out and attached to the plastic.
But there was something more. Something disturbing. Printed labels had been fixed to the lids of all three urns.
Each had a man’s name, a lifespan in years and a location.
The first was Edmund Seaton 1949-2013 Gloucester Castle.
A rapid rethink was necessary. He’d been right the first time. These, after all, had to be cremation urns.
Diamond reached for Edmund Seaton’s pot and felt its weight, mainly to judge whether the ashes were still inside. It lifted so easily that he knew at once that they were not. Just to be certain, he checked Roger Matthew Carnforth 1943-2014 Oxburgh Hall. Roger’s remains were elsewhere.
And so were the ashes of Jeremy Marshall-Tomkin 1937-2014 Forthampton Grange.
Reassuring, really. It would have been macabre to have stored three sets of human ashes in a workshop, however cheerfully the urns were decorated.
He was about to get down when, as an afterthought, he felt for the lid of the first urn and lifted it off.
The pot wasn’t empty after all.
Something was inside, but not ashes. A piece of fine, cream-coloured silk was coiled to fit into the space. He lifted it out and stepped down from the chair. The lightweight silk unfurled into a finely pleated, exquisitely tailored, full-length gown. In spite of the way the garment had been stored, there was scarcely a crease to be seen.
At this point, logic abandoned him.
What in the name of sanity was a woman’s evening dress doing in a cremation pot in an engineer’s workshop?
And whose dress was it? Some unknown woman’s? The late Edward Seaton’s? Or Ivor Pellegrini’s?
Having started this, he had to go on. He climbed on the chair again and checked the other urns. Each contained a coiled silk dress. The one in Roger Matthew Carnforth’s urn was pink, Jeremy Marshall-Tomkin’s blue. At a loss for an explanation, he replaced all the lids and stepped down, his brain reeling from the discovery.
He hadn’t found the answer to Pellegrini’s secret life. He’d found a question, a much bigger question.
“Wow-it’s stunning,” Ingeborg said, holding the creamy silk dress at arm’s length. “Gorgeous. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“I have,” Diamond said. “I’ve seen two more.”
He’d left everything else in place in the workshop and returned the keys to the sister at the RUH with the good news that Hornby had been rescued in time and was now in a good home and on a special diet.
His solo investigation was already compromised. He’d needed a woman’s help. And he couldn’t get Ingeborg’s opinion without upsetting Halliwell. So they were both with him in the privacy of his office.
For the moment, he was getting little else from Ingeborg than “oohs” and “ahs.” Keith Halliwell was lost for words as well, but for a different reason, which anyone might take to be that dresses weren’t his thing at all.
“I’ve had longer to think about it than you two,” Diamond said, “and I’m still stumped.”
“You want our opinion?” Halliwell said finally.
Diamond heard the reserve in the tone. “That’s why I called you in.”
“I thought Inge and I had been returned to normal duties.”
So that was it: hurt feelings.
“The Professional Standards job is done. Finito. This is over and above the call of duty. I’m sounding you out, okay?”
“No,” Halliwell said. “It’s not okay. I’m pissed off, if you want to know the truth. Either you want us on board or you don’t. Which is it?”
He could feel the degree of hurt. He’d known Halliwell for most of their working lives and now he’d treated him like a rookie. He’d treated both colleagues shabbily.
“Can we rerun this? I’m sorry if it seemed I was excluding you. That wasn’t the intention.”
“You couldn’t have made it more clear,” Halliwell said. “‘You can go back to normal duties.’”
He remembered saying the words. “I should have expressed it better. It’s not a one-man show. In fact, I’m in real difficulty with it. This guy Pellegrini has got under my skin since I gave him CPR. I want to take a step back, see him for what he is, good or bad, and there’s no chance I can do it without you, but it has to be extra to our other work.”
“Okay,” Halliwell said, with slightly less pique in the voice. “What do we know about Mrs. Pellegrini? I’m assuming the gowns belonged to her.”
“Trixie? I wouldn’t bet on it,” Diamond said. “The neighbour, Mrs. Roberts, gave a dull picture of her, always in a hat, flat shoes and twinsets.”
Halliwell managed a grin. “If that’s all she wore, I wouldn’t call it dull.”
“Oh come on.” He grinned back. The remark wasn’t all that witty but he appreciated it as a peace offering. “She was shy, wore no make-up, used a shopping trolley. None of it goes with glamorous silk dresses.”
“Not exactly day wear, are they?” Halliwell was trying to draw Ingeborg into the debate but all her attention was wholly on the dress, smoothing her fingertips along the fine seams.
“They were hidden,” Diamond said. “Rolled up and kept out of sight on a high shelf in the workshop where no one went except Pellegrini himself.”
“Are you thinking he was a transvestite, guv?”
He blinked at the suggestion. “Hadn’t crossed my mind. It’s not impossible. He liked dressing up.”