“By the nineties, when I came to Bath, the place was on the slide. The rugby lads had sold up and left.” Diamond shook his head and sighed. This could become a lament. “The Island Club got to be a student dive, more of a pulling club than anything else. The new owners packed in the punters, two hundred or more on Wednesdays, their big night, and didn’t do enough in the way of maintenance and it smelt like the public loo it was originally. What with the heat and sweat of the dancing, drips of condensation and God knows what else falling from the ceiling, it got dangerous in the end. Subsidence. Health and safety was an issue. The council closed it down, but not before Tony Pinto became a regular.”
“What was he up to? Drugs?”
“Picking up girls. Nothing criminal in that, you’re going to tell me. The thing is, Pinto wanted a different one for sex each time. Once he’d had them, he dropped them, and he had the gall to go back to the same club and look for more.”
“Fuck ’em and forget ’em.”
“Crudely, yes. He was in his twenties, a few years older than the students, good-looking, well turned-out, not short of money, and they fell for it.”
“Didn’t they spread the word about him?”
“One in particular did, a second-year called Bryony Lancaster, barely nineteen. She went all the way with him one night and was shocked when he ignored her the next time and chatted up some other girls. While he was buying drinks she went over and warned them about him. Pinto didn’t make out with anyone that night and he found out why. He waited outside for Bryony and went to work on her face with a knife. She was scarred for life. Her upper lip needed stitching together and there were two long slashes on her right cheek.”
Gilbert’s eyes squeezed shut. “That’s horrible.”
Diamond didn’t need telling. He looked away, remembering. Runners streamed past and didn’t register on his attention. “If you’d met her, as I did, you’d know how horrible. Unsurprisingly, she was traumatised. I couldn’t get a proper victim statement from her, even weeks afterwards. She wouldn’t speak about her attacker.”
“Weren’t there witnesses?”
“Nobody came forward. We made the usual appeals for help and got nowhere.”
“Who reported it?”
“A taxi driver who came along later found her near the cab rank and saw she was in trouble. Good man. He called 999 and our people were first at the scene, followed soon after by the ambulance. I was put on the case next morning and hit a problem right away. No one was talking other than that cabbie.”
“Too scared?”
“The girls who could have shopped him were. Like I said, we got nowhere with our witness appeals, so our best hope was finding the exact spot where the knifing took place. It’s an area without much cover.”
“The Parade Gardens?” The obvious place to go for outdoor sex. The gardens just across the street from Bog Island, more than two acres of them, fringed by trees and bushes, sloping down to the river.
“That was my first thought. They’re kept locked at night, but there was an emergency exit from the club, a tunnel that gave access to the gardens.”
Bizarrely, the talk of the knifing and its aftermath was being punctuated by screams, cheers and yells of encouragement as the crowd spotted runners they knew.
“Did you search there?”
“The gardens? Of course. Found all the junk you’d expect in a public park, but no weapon and no evidence of a recent assault.”
“I can’t think where else it could have happened.”
“There are rows of shops facing two sides of the island. I had them searched minutely and eventually got a result. A small bloodstain on the tiled floor of a shop entrance in Terrace Walk.”
“Bryony’s blood?”
“Yes, and only thirty yards from the club exit. He must have forced her across the street. She professed not to have any memory where the attack had happened, but I have my doubts about that.”
“She could have blocked it out, guv.”
“It amounts to the same thing. She was terrified of being attacked again. When forensics went to work, they found another smear of blood on the shop door itself and a thumbprint.”
“His?”
Diamond nodded.
“Bit of luck.”
“We didn’t call it that after fifteen days of searching.”
“Wasn’t there any CCTV footage?”
“Fifteen years ago in Bath? You’re joking. And this was way before phones had built-in cameras. The next time the club opened, we had our people there. I wasn’t expecting the knife man to show, and he didn’t, but some of the regulars — blokes, exclusively — recalled seeing this guy they’d noticed in the past chatting up the talent. A loner, they said. Nobody knew him by name. It took some hard questioning to get a reasonable description. People’s memories aren’t all that reliable.”
“In the dark, half pissed.”
“There speaks a hardened clubber. Time went by and the ACC scaled down the hunt, which really hacked me off. This was personal for me.” Even now, all those years on, Diamond’s voice thickened with emotion. “I had teams planted in clubs all over Bath and Bristol and there were suggestions from on high that they were having a good time at taxpayers’ expense. Ridiculous.”
“But you caught him?”
“Julie did. Julie Hargreaves, one of the best detectives I ever worked with. Pinto had stopped going to the Island. He was on the pull at another club, Chemies, in Seven Dials. Julie saw what he was up to and we collared him as he was leaving with some tanked-up young woman.”
“He matched the description?”
“More important than that, his thumbprint matched the one from the crime scene.”
“Did the victim ID him?”
“Bryony? No. She wasn’t up for it and I wasn’t going to put her through more pain. The mental scarring was as bad as the physical. Worse, I’d say. She wouldn’t testify in court and I think she was right. Any cross-examination would have destroyed her. It’s the same dilemma we have in rape cases.”
“Getting a conviction must have been hard.”
“We got a confession.”
Gilbert’s eyebrows shot up.
“Don’t ask.”
11
Murat, being so large and seriously undernourished, might have had more need of food than Spiro. On the day of the race, he set off for the recreation ground. Those goody bags had preyed on his mind. He offered to bring one back for Spiro.
Spiro told him not to bother and gave the impression he would have nothing to do with the race. But he’d secretly gone to the trouble of getting a free newspaper with a map of the course, which he’d torn out and put in his pocket. After his foolhardy companion had departed, he planned to visit the drink station along the route. There, he’d pick up some bottled water just to demonstrate to Murat that there were safe ways of doing things.
He needed to borrow a bike again and this time he didn’t have to use the ballpoint-pen trick. As if it was fated, some trusting person — probably one of the runners caught up in the bonhomie of the day — had left a shining blue roadster unlocked in a stack of bikes to the left of the station entrance. Spiro, an avowed atheist, turned his face to the sky, crossed himself and rode off through the tunnel. Like any law-abiding Bathonian, he dismounted and walked the bike over the footbridge they had used before.
The map unfortunately didn’t show contours and he wasn’t pleased to find, once he was back in the saddle, that the direct route was by way of a road called Widcombe Hill. The climb was so stiff that he had to get off the bike and walk. He watched a few serious cyclists in helmets and skinsuits battling with the gradient and knew it was not for him. Even when he’d walked for ten minutes and the slope eased enough for him to use the bike again, grateful for the gears, there was plenty of hill remaining. This was strange because he was supposed to be on his way to a drinks station beside a canal, which to his logical thinking ought to be on even ground.