Back at the start, screams of excitement were heard as the first of the orange pen crowd finally got their adventure under way, multicoloured, dazzling to watch. The tension of the long wait evaporated. This group had the biggest spread of age, shape and ability and was the most fun. Among them were the fancy-dress entrants, the pirates, pantomime horses, fairies, carrots, bananas, spacemen, dinosaurs — and at least one policeman carrying an old-fashioned truncheon.
For the real police, all leave was cancelled. Aside from enforcing traffic diversions, they needed to be alert for every kind of crime from theft to terrorism. Any event that attracts large crowds brings concerns. The 2013 Boston Marathon bombing was a recurring nightmare. Officers were deployed along the course in what the Deputy Chief Constable described as overt and covert roles.
Difficult to tell whether Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond, on duty in the gardens, was overt or covert. If he had been in the race, you would have taken him for one of the jokers in fancy dress. He might have stepped out of a 1940s film, a sleuth on the trail of Sydney Greenstreet. The gabardine trench coat and dark brown trilby, his so-called plain clothes, weren’t plain at all in twenty-first-century Bath.
Diamond had watched too many half marathons to get much pleasure from the day. They had been fixtures here longer than he had. Running had never appealed to him. Sitting was more his thing, several hours every day in a comfortable chair. When necessary he would stand up. He’d even amble short distances. But he had never understood why joggers put themselves through such discomfort, let alone did it in competition. At an earlier stage in life he had played rugby for the Metropolitan Police and twice a week had been forced to trot a few training laps around the Imber Court pitch, always without breaking sweat. He didn’t want to shed much weight. Poundage was needed in the scrum.
Cheering from the museum end signalled the first sight of the leading group. The central walk through Sydney Gardens was wide and straight, so this was a good viewpoint.
“There’s your winner,” Diamond told DC Paul Gilbert, who was with him mainly to allow for occasional tea breaks in the museum’s garden café.
“Who’s that, guv?”
“The black lad in fourth place. He’ll be a Kenyan or an Ethiopian. They’re natural runners. Look at him, scarcely breathing. They live at altitude, you see. Less oxygen. Makes them work harder at their running, so when they come down to sea level, they can beat anyone.” He made common knowledge sound like revelations from on high, and no one had better say so.
Gilbert studied the smooth action of the black athlete.
“He’ll be a professional,” Diamond added. “They use this as a training run.”
Gilbert waited for the race leaders to get closer before saying, “I know him.”
“Watched him on TV?” Diamond said.
“I was at school with him.”
“Come off it. You’re a local lad.”
“So is he. Harry Hobbs from Midsomer Norton,” Gilbert said.
“Get away. Are you sure?”
“Hundred per cent. He always won the cross-country.”
“It must be in the blood, then. Kenyan parents.”
“Birmingham, he told me. He’s third-generation British.”
Diamond didn’t pursue the point. He’d reached the limit of his expertise on distance running. And genealogy.
Seconds later, the scene was transformed by the colours of a thousand runners in close order funnelled between the lines of watchers. Seen in close-up, the flickering pattern could almost have triggered a seizure.
They were moving with ease and the mood was boisterous. Not for much longer. The serious stuff began now, the grind along lonely stretches out in the country, on footpaths across fields and through the mile-long Combe Down Tunnel, once a feature of the Somerset and Dorset Railway, known locally as the Slow and Dirty. Out on the course they were truly in need of the goodwill of spectators.
“Would you credit it?” Diamond said suddenly, breaking the spell. “What’s that dickhead doing in the race?”
The dickhead was a dapper, dark-haired man of about forty-five, below average height and as slim as the silver birches he was running past. Dark blue headband with white polka-dots. Yellow T-shirt, blue shorts and trainers. Gold chain bouncing on his chest. He was running with a blonde woman in a British Heart Foundation shirt. From her expression, he was trying to chat her up and not succeeding.
Gilbert had never seen either of them before.
“Tony Pinto,” Diamond said as if everyone in Bath should know the name. “He’s evil.”
People nearby turned to see who had spoken. If Gilbert hadn’t been outranked, he’d have told Diamond to keep his voice down.
“He’s supposed to be banged up. I put him away for a fifteen stretch soon after I got here.”
“How long have you worked here, guv?” Gilbert asked. “He must have served it out.”
Diamond wasn’t listening. The sight of Tony Pinto fit, flash and at liberty was too disturbing. “And not a grey hair on his head.”
“What did you get him for?”
Diamond was still getting looks and now it dawned on him that he was causing a distraction. “Step back a bit.”
They found a less crowded spot in front of a bank of roses. “Well, you know Bog Island?”
Gilbert nodded. Every copper knew Bog Island, the paved triangle in the middle of the huge road junction opposite Terrace Gardens.
“And how it got its name?”
“The underground toilets.”
“Right, but you’ve never been down there, have you?”
“It’s been locked up for years, hasn’t it, locked up and condemned?”
“Like Pinto should be.”
Gilbert looked at his boss. Was that what he’d been leading up to, a tired old quip?
But Diamond was singing the praises of Bog Island. “It was a palace in its time. When the council first extended Pierrepont Street and linked it with Orange Grove, they decided to excavate and put in a public convenience worthy of the handsome city this is. This was in the 1930s, when they still liked to do things in style. Coloured tiles, brass fittings, skylights, big glass cisterns overhead, no expense spared. Male and female attendants, dressing rooms, a left-luggage room, bathrooms and all the usual offices. It was such a showpiece that about forty years ago it became a drinking club.”
“What... while it was still a toilet?”
“Give me strength. Of course not. It was a change of use. What do you call it? — a relaunch. Then it was opened as a nightclub.”
“How do you know all this, guv?”
“I support the rugby club, don’t I?”
Diamond had this habit of making unrelated statements, challenging his listener to find a connection. Gilbert had learned that the only solution was to keep your mouth shut and wait for the follow-up.
“Bath RFC bought the place. Well, three of the players did, Roger Spurrell and two others. Spruced it up and called it the Island Club. You’ll have seen the archway over the entrance.”
Two handsome archways, in fact, with the club’s name picked out in ironwork. You couldn’t fail to notice them if you came by, one over the ladies’ side, the other the gents’.
“It became the hot spot in town because it had a late licence at a time when most places closed at eleven. Anyone who played for the first team got in free. You went there and rubbed shoulders with your heroes. Great nights, they were. They cleared the floor one night and one of the All Blacks performed the haka.”
“Were you there?”
“Wish I was. Bit before my time, the 1980s. That was when Bath RFC started dominating British rugby.”
Gilbert knew about Diamond’s passion for the oval-ball game, but he couldn’t see what Bog Island had to do with a crook called Tony Pinto who was already across the railway bridge and out of sight.