“You share the kitchen with them, I expect,” Ingeborg said.
“No, my dear, I’m self-sufficient. I buy everything online and have it delivered. I have a fridge freezer and a microwave in here and I don’t need to cook the old-fashioned way.”
“Have you lived here a long time, Beattie?”
“Eight years this August. I didn’t have to use the chair in those days, but my legs won’t hold me up anymore. It’s my own fault. Comfort-eating, it’s called. People were friendlier when I started here, but they all left for one reason and another. The rents going up made a difference. I wasn’t budging.” She laughed. “They’d never get me up the stairs. I like it down here, apart from the spiders. After everyone left, the place was empty except for me for six weeks, which wasn’t nice. I put on a lot of weight to cheer myself up. And then it filled up almost overnight with these foreign blokes. Before Tony, there was someone with tattoos and a shaved head called Alex who seemed to act as their foreman, if you could call him that. He had the room where Tony is now, up the corridor. He didn’t ever have much to say to me.”
“Who is your landlord?”
She laughed. “That’s a joke.”
“Why?”
“It’s some agency in London and they keep changing their name. It was Howes and Watts when I first got here and two weeks later it was something else and one of the tenants called them Whys and Wherefores, which I thought was very witty. It’s Zodiac now or something with the letter Z. I pay by direct debit and, fingers crossed, they haven’t put the rent up in the past two years.”
“So apart from when you find a spider, you don’t see much of Tony?”
“Only his legs going up and down the steps. I know they’re his because of the good strong muscles and the nice tan.” She blushed at what she’d said. “Can’t avoid seeing them, living in this room with a view of nothing else except the steps, and if he chooses to wear shorts that’s his business. He’s sporty, you see. He goes for runs.”
“He was in the half marathon last week. Did you know?”
“Sunday, wasn’t it? He left in the middle of the morning in his sky-blue shorts.”
“Did you see him come back?”
“This is it: he didn’t. Has something happened to him? Is that why you’re here?”
“We’re investigating,” Diamond said. “Has anyone else come visiting since the day of the race?”
“Who do you mean?”
“A stranger. Someone who might have been interested in Tony and maybe wanting to see inside his room.”
She shook her head. “You’re the first I’ve seen, and I don’t miss much.”
“I can believe that, Beattie. Just to be sure, we’ll check the room ourselves.”
“I’ll come with you. The chair just fits in his doorway.”
“You’d better not. We don’t know what we’re going to find.”
Beattie clapped her hand to her mouth.
“Stay in your room. We’ll deal with it.”
No sounds came from behind the other doors when they passed them. The rest of the basement seemed to be empty, bearing out the story of the early morning working party. Diamond strongly suspected modern slavery overseen by Pinto and he’d be alerting colleagues who dealt with trafficking. He felt sickened by the exploitation of vulnerable people.
At the end of the corridor, Ingeborg produced her piece of plastic and opened Pinto’s door at the second swipe.
Diamond found the light switch and revealed a room no bigger than a mobile home and with the same attention to space-saving. At first sight, it was a sitting room dominated by a two-seater sofa bed in red upholstery. Floor cushions, a large shaggy rug, a Tiffany mirror, spotlights, a fully stocked wine rack, plasma TV, music system with loudspeakers — clearly Pinto’s seduction salon. Yet it could easily convert to a breakfast room, with a hinged tabletop fitted to the wall and above it a cupboard probably containing crockery and food items. And there was storage for clothes in a fitted wardrobe. The wallpaper had vertical red and white stripes topped off with a pseudo-classical frieze that combined the tenant’s known preoccupations — athletics and sex — showing naked runners, male and female, in the style of Greek vase painting. No detail had been left out. If anything, the details were accentuated. Some of the males had prodigious erections.
“What would his lady visitors think of this?” Diamond asked.
“They’d soon get the idea.”
“Cosy?”
“Creepy is the word I’d use.”
They started the search. “I’m looking for his phone,” Diamond said, “and failing that I’ll settle for his laptop and his wallet.”
“Won’t he have taken them with him?”
“In a half marathon?”
“Runners often carry phones.”
“Nothing like that was with the body.”
They checked every surface, every drawer, the backs of things, the tops of cupboards and wardrobe, and found no electronic device other than the TV remote and no paperwork other than a few shop receipts. The pockets of his clothes were empty.
“Disappointing,” Ingeborg said. “Do you think his killer has been by?”
“And nicked the phone and things? Possible, but risky.”
“If there was incriminating stuff...”
“We’ll keep an open mind. Beattie hadn’t seen anyone and I get the feeling she knows every time a visitor comes down those steps.” He took another look inside the wardrobe. Pinto seemed to have worn nothing but sports kit, T-shirts, shorts, running jackets and tracksuits for all weather conditions. “I wonder where he bought this stuff.”
“Argyle Street,” Ingeborg said. “Two of the shop receipts were for John Moore.”
“We’ll take them with us.”
On the way out, he said to the shut door, “All clear, Beattie. Any problem, give us a call.”
The major incident room was a reality when they returned, twenty or more officers behind screens. John Leaman was in his element, crisscrossing between desks making sure that the computers were installed and working. He’d labelled every desk with a notice in large letters describing its intended use. The staff who knew him well had screwed up the paper and binned it. If you were the exhibits officer or the CCTV viewing officer, it was obvious enough. But he deserved credit for the speed of the operation.
Diamond’s brain worked in a different way from Leaman’s. He’d been playing Queen numbers in his head to get to the elusive mnemonic he wanted, and after deciding “We Are the Champions” was no help, the right one came to him. “Get me ROCU, will you. I need to report something before I do anything else.”
He was given a phone and spoke to a sergeant at Portishead who promised to pass on the news about the suspicious activity in the Duke Street house. If a basement stuffed with exhausted foreigners driven off each morning in a van wasn’t organised crime, pigs could fly and the moon was made of green cheese.
The main players in his team apart from Leaman were known in incident-room jargon as the outside officers. They were given desks and computers, but most of their work would be off-site. Diamond limped across to Ingeborg and asked her to move her screen aside so that he could sit on her desk. She didn’t complain. If he parked himself in a chair, like Beattie, he’d have difficulty getting up. He gestured to the others to come closer for a short briefing and filled them in on the visit to Duke Street. Leaman, emphatically an inside officer but who missed nothing, made sure he was near enough to join in.
“In short,” Diamond said when he’d been through the details, “a main question was answered. How could Pinto have gone straight from prison to one of the top addresses in Bath? It seems one of the head honchos in Berwyn Jail did a deal with him. In return for a comfortable pad, he would see that the illegals in the basement caused no trouble and went to work each day. Easy-peasy for Pinto and he could still find time to go chasing women and bring them back for sex. I notified the Regional Organised Crime Unit a few minutes ago.”