Ingeborg found a space in the car park next to what was now known as the Virgil Building, formerly the main police station, now said to be a learning centre. Each time Diamond passed the place, he felt withdrawal symptoms, so he tried not to look. He needed anyway to give full attention to what he was doing with the crutches. Fortunately, Duke Street was only a short distance away, across South Parade.
“I’d dearly like to know how a jailbird can afford to live here,” he told Ingeborg as they made their way there. “He wasn’t a bank robber, for pity’s sake.”
The terrace was three storeys high. Three storeys and an attic, and that wasn’t counting the basement. Iron railings and gates dissuaded passers-by from going down the steep stone steps — a long way down.
“This is too much,” Ingeborg said. “You’d better wait up here, guv.”
“You’re joking, I hope.”
He let her go first, and then started his own precarious descent going backwards using only one crutch and relying on the railing for balance. The spare crutch ended up beside Ingeborg at the bottom of the stairwell. He felt the pressure on his good leg right away and wished he was as slim as she was. With dogged determination and some swearing he reached the bottom. It had a strong smell of decay.
“I wouldn’t want to do that every day, even on two legs,” he said.
“Do you have a key?” she asked him.
“How would I?”
“Shame about that.”
“It’s an old-fashioned Yale lock. Use a credit card.”
“Not one of mine, thank you.” She emptied the plastic water bottle she was carrying, took a penknife from her pocket and cut a rectangular strip from it that she bent double. Then she slid the improvised tool downwards between door and frame and freed the latch.
The inside was larger than you would guess from the street. Georgian terraced houses are like books on a shelf, the spines a compressed indication of the large interior. The hallway stretched about forty feet, with five doors on either side, all closed.
“This can’t all be his,” Diamond said. “Any guess which door we try?”
“Better keep our voices down, guv.”
“No point,” he said. “We need help. Let’s make ourselves known.” He rapped on the first door to his left.
It opened wide at once, suggesting that the tenant had been waiting behind her door. A very large woman in a very large wheelchair. How large? XXL for sure. Do they have XXXL? She looked not much over thirty, but every other statistic was way beyond that. Above the chins and between the cheeks was a pretty face. Blue, intelligent eyes, neat nose and small, well-defined mouth. What was an outsize chair-bound woman doing in a basement flat? Best not to ask at this stage. Anyway, other matters were more pressing.
Before they spoke, she said, “I’m sure it’s a good cause, but I don’t have any spare change.”
Those pesky crutches.
Ingeborg explained that they weren’t asking for a donation. “We’re trying to find Mr. Pinto.”
“You mean Tony?” she said. “You’ve made a mistake, then. This is my room.”
“Which one is his?”
“Last on the left, next to the kitchen, but he isn’t in. He hasn’t been home for over a week. Friend of yours, is he?”
“We’re police officers making enquiries.” She showed her ID.
“I’ll need my glasses to read that.”
“It says I’m Detective Sergeant Smith and this is Superintendent Diamond. Who are you?”
She rolled her eyes and spoke in a mock-posh voice. “Beatrice Henson, but everyone has always called me Beattie and so can you. There’s nothing seriously wrong, is there?”
“It sounds as if you know Tony quite well.”
“He’s the only one I do know and he’s good to me.”
“Friendly, then?”
“Not the way you mean. I can do without that sort of nonsense in my situation. Tony is my rescuer. They march in here, brazen as you like, as if they own the place.”
“The other tenants?” Diamond said.
“Spiders, honey. Big ones, and not just in September. That’s one of the drawbacks of life below stairs.”
“Nasty.”
“Somebody told me they come out of the vaults under the street.”
“I didn’t know about the vaults.”
“Nobody uses them. They’re damp and horrible. When this place was built three hundred years ago or whenever it was, everything had to be raised up because the ground underneath was a swamp, being as close to the river as it is, so Duke Street is built over vaults and that’s where the spiders come from. They make my hair stand on end. Thank goodness Tony knows what to do.”
“Traps them in a jar?”
“Stamps on them. I couldn’t do that.”
Diamond pictured Pinto doing it, no problem.
“I couldn’t do it either,” Ingeborg said. “I take them out to the garden.”
“Where they die anyway, if they’re house spiders,” Diamond said, to steer this exchange to a conclusion. More important topics needed airing. “They can’t survive long outside. I’ve got a cat who takes care of the problem. Keep a cat and you won’t often see a spider.”
“We aren’t allowed pets.”
“Shame,” Ingeborg said.
Diamond got the conversation back on track by asking if Pinto was equally popular with the other tenants.
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Beattie said. “They don’t speak much English, any of them. Come to think of it, he does go upstairs and sees them off in the mornings, which is rather sweet. They’re all blokes. I’m the only woman down here apart from the ones Tony brings home.”
“He’s still one for the ladies, is he?”
She laughed. “Do you know about that? I hear him bring them in sometimes. I’ve got perfect hearing. When they come through the front door like you just did, I know about it. I can’t always pick up the words, but I know the difference between a bloke’s voice and a woman’s and you don’t expect ladies, as you call them, to be coming in here unless they’re invited back. He makes them giggle and I hear it and think that’s Tony up to his games again. What he gets up to after that isn’t my business. I don’t judge him.”
“Do the other residents have lady friends?”
“They don’t have the privacy for that sort of thing. Four or five to a room and maybe more.”
Diamond glanced at Ingeborg and then at Beattie. “Migrants, are they?”
“I expect so, but they’re not taking advantage and claiming benefits. Quite the opposite. They work long hours, poor things, collected at seven every morning and driven off in a silver van that only gets back about eight in the evening. That’s a long day if they’re doing hard work and I think they must be because their faces show it. They use the kitchen at the end of the passage and make themselves some sort of meal and then by nine or nine-thirty everything goes quiet until next morning.”