“Let me see.” She caught her breath several times as she glanced through the text. “What do you make of it, guv?”
“I keep seeing those cremation urns lined up on a shelf in his workshop… like trophies.”
“With three names on,” Ingeborg said, eyes widening with the horror of what had been suggested. “And Filiput makes four. We may be dealing with a serial killer here.”
Diamond had kept his suspicions bottled up for too long. He was relieved to share them with the team at last. They understood how slender the evidence was, but they also trusted him and he could rely on them. He had a suspicion the old man in intensive care could be a murderer and that was enough for Halliwell and Ingeborg. They’d work their socks off for a result. What was more, they would be discreet. The rest of CID wouldn’t hear a word before it became necessary.
“I’m getting angry,” Ingeborg said. “This is hideous.”
“Hideously clever,” Halliwell said, “knocking off old people who aren’t expected to live much longer anyway.”
“Why would he do it?” Ingeborg said. “What’s his motive?”
“Greed,” Halliwell said. “He gets to know other anoraks like himself, rich ones, and starts nicking their stuff. They’re old guys, mostly. When they find out what’s going on, he totals them.”
“How do you know that? You’re guessing.”
“None of us are sure of anything yet, except he’s a thief.”
“And we’re not a hundred percent sure of that,” Diamond said.
“I’m putting up a theory, that’s all,” Halliwell said.
“Go on, then. What does he steal from the others?” Ingeborg asked.
“Railway memorabilia, mainly. You have to understand what serious collectors are like. It’s a mania. There’s a massive trade in bits of old trains, name-plates, steam whistles, uniforms, flags, signals, badges, firemen’s shovels.”
“Oh, come on. Shovels?”
“I mean it, Inge. You won’t get a rusty old shovel for under sixty quid. A name-plate will cost you twenty grand at auction.”
“Are you into this stuff yourself, Keith?” Diamond asked in some surprise.
He reddened. “I’ve got a brother who drives his wife round the bend with it. You should see their house.”
“All this is rather persuasive,” Ingeborg said. “I’ll give you that. But it doesn’t explain the really weird part, keeping those urns on a shelf in his workshop.”
“That’s a power thing,” Halliwell said, unstoppable now he’d started. “He’s proud of his killing. Some psychopaths like to keep souvenirs of their victims and gloat over them. Possessions, items of clothing, even body hair in one case I read about. He can sit in his workshop and look at those urns and remind himself three men he knew are reduced to ashes because of him.”
“I thought we’d agreed he scatters the ashes on the railway track.”
“He does. There’s no conflict. A group of saddos agree among themselves that after they die they want to become a part of the railway they idolise. Whoever survives will perform this last service for his old friends. Of course, they don’t realise Pellegrini isn’t just scattering the ashes. He’s created a production line.”
“And he keeps the urns as mementos,” Ingeborg said, grimacing.
“Like I said, he enjoys being in control. But if anyone sees them and asks what they’re doing in his workshop, he can say it’s his way of remembering old buddies.”
She turned to Diamond. “Are we helping, guv?”
“I think there’s more.”
“More victims?”
“Let’s hope not.”
She looked as if she was trying to whistle. “His wife, Trixie?”
“It crossed my mind, I have to say. Order a copy of her death certificate just in case, would you, Inge.” He took a long sip of his beer, wanting to keep the talk from getting over-heated. “We haven’t even discussed the method he might have used. He’s a clever man, a trained engineer. It will be methodical and well worked-out.”
“He’s done his research, we know that,” Halliwell said.
“Poison?” Ingeborg said.
“Hard to say,” Diamond said.
“Impossible to say after the victims have been cremated,” Halliwell said.
“Trixie wasn’t,” Ingeborg said. “She’s buried somewhere local.”
“We can’t even get a search warrant, so we’re not going to get an exhumation order,” Halliwell said.
“I may be mistaken over Trixie,” Diamond said. “She doesn’t fit the pattern for several reasons. The way forward is to find out all we can about these railway enthusiasts, the ones who ended up in the urns I saw. Then there’s Filiput. And, of course, Pellegrini himself.”
“We know where he is and we know he’s not going anywhere,” Ingeborg said. “Is there any chance he’ll recover?”
“The medics won’t say.”
“Won’t-or can’t?”
“To me, he looks a lost cause, but I’m no doctor.”
“Shall I dig into his past?” Ingeborg said.
“You’re volunteering?”
“I’m fascinated to know how it happened, a guy with a good, analytical brain, successful career, long marriage, who appears to have no empathy whatsoever. He can form friendships and think nothing of killing his so-called friends.”
“That’s a psychopath for you,” Halliwell said.
“Come off it, Keith. That’s a meaningless word,” she said with scorn. “Any psychologist will tell you it doesn’t describe a condition. It may sound scientific but it’s no more than a label that says, in effect, these are cold-blooded killers we don’t understand.”
Halliwell looked blitzed. “I only chipped in to back up what you were saying.”
Ingeborg eased up on him. “Sorry. I blew a fuse. Over-excitement. But I intend to find out more about this one.”
“And you must,” Diamond said. Such commitment had to be encouraged.
She raised a thumb.
“While you’re at it,” he added, “see if you can make sense of what Pellegrini was saying about the rabbits. I doubt if he has a sense of humour or even much of an imagination. There may be something we’ve missed.”
“Remind me, then,” she said. “They were hopping a mile a night and heading towards Bath, right?”
“And he knew where to find them because he could hear them digging their holes. Sounds like fantasy but I’m not certain it was.”
“What can I do?” Halliwell asked.
The rivalry between these two was paying dividends. Both wanted a piece of the action.
Encouraged, Diamond asked Halliwell to find out everything he could on the three men named on the urns.
“And what will you be doing, guv?” Ingeborg asked.
“Looking for a railway enthusiast who isn’t dead or in a coma.”
Not so simple as it sounded.
He discovered that the electronic revolution had transformed the model-train business. All the local shops had closed or gone over to computer games. There was one in Corsham still trading but only through the Internet. Yet the newsagents’ shelves were stacked with titles like Rail Express, Steam News, The Railway Magazine, Heritage Railway, Steam Railway and Old Glory.
Where do you look for a railway enthusiast?
The railway.
Bath Spa station is at the bottom of Manvers Street. Another engineer, the renowned Isambard Kingdom Brunel, sited it there in 1840 at the edge of the city rather than cutting through the centre. His grand design based on a twenty-arch castellated viaduct in the Tudor style made a strong impression, but the interior was plain. The modern revamped ticket hall retains Brunel’s supporting structure in a twenty-first-century context with open areas where partitions had been when Diamond first came to Bath. He liked it.
“I’m not here for a ticket,” he explained at one of the desks.
“You want to know about trains,” the booking clerk said in a voice that had handled the same enquiry a thousand times before.
“People, actually.”