Halliwell folded his arms defiantly. “That’s not possible. It was Jessie’s hairbrush. You found it under her bed at Little Langford.”
“This is going to be difficult for you to get your heads round, but I’ve had all night to think about it. The killer obtained a brush belonging to Maria and planted it under Jessie’s bed in the expectation someone would find it and send it for DNA analysis and get a false result.”
Ingeborg was shaking her head. “Pellegrini placed it there the evening he went to Little Langford? But Jessie was still alive then.”
“She was out when he arrived,” Halliwell said.
“Oh, come on. How on earth did he get hold of a prostitute’s hairbrush?”
“He must have been one of her clients. They both lived in Bath.”
She rolled her eyes. “Ridiculous. He’s seventy years old.”
“Doesn’t mean he’s given up sex. At that age, he’d need to pay for it.”
“I don’t believe a word of this,” she said. “Why would he do such a thing?”
“Because it was in the blueprint. You’ve read his diary. Everything he does is thought through like some engineering project. He set out to fool us, and that’s what he achieved.” Halliwell glanced Diamond’s way. “But only up to now. Thanks to the guv’nor’s good work, we aren’t totally suckered.”
Diamond had lit the touchpaper and stepped back in the hope of a flash of insight he hadn’t envisaged. The short spat between his two colleagues hadn’t sparked anything new. They’d repeated the line of reasoning he’d been through in his own mind.
“You’re right to mention the diary,” he said. “There was an entry about misdirection, remember?”
Ingeborg was on to it at once. “The conjuror’s trick. ‘I’ve baited the trap and we’ll see if it works.’”
“Right. Doesn’t this have the feel of a trap?”
“Just what I’m saying,” Halliwell said. “He fooled us.”
Ingeborg spoke the actual words of the diary entry. They’d all been over the text so many times that she knew them by heart. “‘A situation has arisen giving me the chance to insure my secrets against discovery. It’s the conjuror’s trick of misdirection, simple but effective. The nice thing is that I am uniquely placed to pull this off.’ He must have been in the habit of visiting Maria. He nicked that pink plastic brush with some of her hair attached.”
“Now she believes me,” Halliwell said to Diamond. “She just said Pellegrini paying for sex was ridiculous.”
Ingeborg ignored him. “He took it to Little Langford when he visited Cyril and must have said he was going upstairs to visit the bathroom and instead went into Jessie’s room and planted the brush under her bed. ‘I’ve baited the trap and we’ll see if it works. No worry if it doesn’t.’”
“This was what he meant by misdirection,” Halliwell said. “Making us believe Jessie was doubling up as a tom. ‘Today I’m rather pleased with myself.’ He would be, the tosser.”
“The calculation behind it!” Ingeborg said. “Let’s not forget Cyril and Jessie were both still alive when Pellegrini visited the house.”
“Under sentence of death as far as he was concerned,” Halliwell said.
“What I’m saying is that he did his bit of misdirection with the hairbrush, sneaking it under Jessie’s bed, the same evening he murdered Cyril. It’s chilling. He was already planning to kill her as well.”
“Except,” Diamond said.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
“Except what?” Halliwell said.
“There’s a flaw in all this. When is Pellegrini supposed to have nicked the brush from Maria?”
“On one of his visits for sex. It wouldn’t be difficult, finding a brush she used.”
“If that’s true, how did he know in advance that she would die in someone else’s arms and end up in the river?”
25
“Another problem,” Diamond said. “If Jessie wasn’t the woman in the river, what happened to her? We know she reported Cyril’s death the morning after Pellegrini visited, but then she upped sticks and left. No one has seen her since.”
“Dead,” Halliwell said as if it was a well-known fact. “He went back and murdered her.”
“At Little Langford?”
“Obviously.”
“How exactly?”
Halliwell shrugged. “We never discovered his method, did we? We looked at all those suggestions on the printout in his workshop-the air bubble in the bloodstream and the sharpened icicle-and none of them fitted the facts.”
“It’s got to be simpler than any of those,” Ingeborg said. “He says so in the journal. They don’t see it coming and they don’t know anything about it.”
“What does he mean by that?”
“Painless, I should think.”
“Like some powerful drug?”
“Look at the logistics for a moment,” Ingeborg said. “You’re saying he killed Jessie at Little Langford the day after Cyril was murdered, right?”
Halliwell nodded.
“First, he had to get there.”
“Taxi, same as before,” he said. “He went to the rank and took a taxi.”
“What, and asked the driver to wait outside the cottage while he committed a murder? ‘I won’t be long, driver. Just got to total the housekeeper.’”
Her sarcasm went unchallenged.
She tightened the screw. “Well? He had to think about getting home afterwards, didn’t he?”
A smile spread across Halliwell’s face. He had the answer. “No, he didn’t tell the driver to wait. He had alternative transport. Jessie had a car of her own. She used to drive Cyril around in it. It wasn’t left at the cottage, so Pellegrini used it for his getaway. We know he could drive. It’s probably still parked on some street in Bath.”
“With her body inside?”
“Christ, I hadn’t thought of that.” He scratched his head. “No, he wouldn’t bring her back to his own territory. He’s too smart to make that mistake. Far better to leave her at Little Langford.”
“Where? You’ve been there. The boss has been there. Neither of you found another corpse.”
“The garden is a wilderness. She could have been dumped in the bushes.”
“Didn’t you make a search?”
“We weren’t looking for another body at the time.”
Ingeborg switched to Diamond. “You started this, guv, asking what happened to Jessie. She hasn’t been seen or heard of in more than six weeks. Do you think he killed her?”
“It looks that way,” he said. “He went to some trouble to plant the hairbrush in her room so we’d get a false DNA result. Keith is right. It’s worth going to Little Langford and making a search. Find Jessie’s corpse, and we’ll have all the proof we need.”
Inside ten minutes all three were heading out of Bath in Ingeborg’s tangerine-coloured Ka. Diamond, being the boss, not to say the largest, was in the front passenger seat. Halliwell, wedged in the back, was not alone.
“What the fuck is this?” he said when he found himself next to Nutty, the monstrous squirrel.
“It shouldn’t be there,” Ingeborg said. “Someone I won’t name promised to transfer it to his car last night. Conveniently he forgot.”
The unnamed someone stayed silent.
“Can you move it?” she said. “It’s blocking my rear-view mirror.”
“What do you want me to do-cuddle it?”
“Good idea. And take it with you when you get out.”
Diamond was oblivious to all this. Mentally he was already at Pellegrini’s bedside having the crucial face-to-face that would settle everything.
The crunch.
He fully intended it should happen before the day was out, whatever the nursing staff said. Another night would hand Pellegrini an advantage, a chance to prepare a defence. Much better to catch him off guard.