“Will they be taking over?” Paul Gilbert asked.
“Christ, no. We still have a homicide on our patch.”
“But if it’s linked to people-smuggling—”
Diamond closed him down. “How do we know that? We don’t. Let ROCU make the case. Your job and mine remains the same, to get a grip on what happened on Combe Down, right?”
No one objected.
“First question: was Pinto killed there, or some other place?”
“Hold on, guv.”
Diamond glared. Leaman was supposed to be setting up the room.
“That’s not the first question,” Leaman said.
The glare turned thunderous.
“Surely the first question is was he killed?”
Typical of Leaman to butt in, but he was the team’s logic man, and his intellectual rigour had proved useful before.
“It can’t be suicide, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Diamond said. “The iron grille was back over the shaft when the search party got to it. Someone else had to be involved.”
“Accident, then.”
“How in the name of sanity is that possible?”
Leaman was unabashed. “He was pestering that woman Belinda, right? She quit the race and made her way to Combe Down. Fact, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Pinto went looking for her—”
“Speculation,” Ingeborg cut in.
“This is what we’re doing, testing theories,” Leaman said with a convenient sidestep. “Nobody here knows for certain what happened. If you don’t want my ideas, I’ll shut up.”
Ingeborg gave a shrug. Everyone was used to being harangued by Leaman. You had to remember it wasn’t personal.
“He got a sight of her in the wood, then lost her again. He found the shaft—”
“Just like that?” Ingeborg said.
“It’s Combe Down, for pity’s sake. The place has more holes than a slab of Swiss cheese. He lifted the cover thinking maybe she was hiding down there.”
“Thirty feet down?”
“He didn’t know how deep it was and neither did Belinda. He lost his footing and fell in when he was lifting the grille. Either it slammed back into place then or Belinda was somewhere nearby and saw what happened and closed it — which would explain why she panicked and went AWOL.”
Ingeborg was the first to react. “It’s not impossible, but it’s bloody unlikely, John, as you well know. It’s far more likely he was murdered. If you want to get rid of a body, a disused mineshaft is a good solution.”
Paul Gilbert said in support, “Easy to do and difficult to find.”
Leaman sniffed. “The boss found it.”
“At a cost,” Diamond said, tapping his injured leg and getting sympathetic smiles. He was always looking for ways to defuse the tensions Leaman caused. “Who agrees with Inge that this was more likely a murder?”
“I do, for one,” Gilbert said, “and I wouldn’t mind betting the postmortem confirms it. A knife wound or a bullet hole. You can’t argue with that.”
“We won’t have long to wait, I hope,” Diamond said, checking his watch. The autopsy would be into its second hour already. “Any thoughts on a possible motive?”
“Where do I start?” Ingeborg said. “He was a sexual predator. This could be someone who heard he was out of prison and wanted revenge for the attack on Bryony Lancaster, or it could be down to a new encounter.”
“A woman he just met?”
“Or her boyfriend or father or some family member angry at how he’d treated her. We know he was back to his old ways.”
“We’re assuming he was, from what Beattie told us,” Diamond said, sounding as finicky as Leaman.
“No, we heard from Belinda, and you saw for yourself. He was pestering her so much that she quit the race.”
“Could Belinda have killed him, trying to fend him off?” Gilbert asked. “She’s the only person we know for sure who was on Combe Down.”
“I don’t see how,” Ingeborg said.
“You don’t think a woman’s strong enough?”
“I didn’t say that. She couldn’t have killed him because she wasn’t there with him. He was still in the race when she was at Combe Down. He finished at least two hours later and then made his way there.”
“Why?” Diamond said. “Did he expect to find Belinda still up there? Had they arranged to meet? I can’t believe she would have agreed to that. Why would he have gone to Combe Down except to meet someone?”
“Does she have a boyfriend?” Gilbert asked.
“In the words of her landlady, Mrs. Hector, she’s shyer than a limpet,” Diamond said. “The boyfriend theory doesn’t hold up, I’m afraid.”
“Hasn’t it occurred to any of you that he may not have been killed because of how he behaved with women?” Leaman said. “Look at it another way. He spent twelve years in prison. He must have made enemies in that time.”
“Fair point, John,” Diamond said. “Old scores to settle when he gets out, but why kill him on Combe Down?”
“Who said he was killed there?” Leaman said. “It’s a great place to hide a corpse, we all agree, but the murder needn’t have been done there. He could have been killed in Bath and moved there after he was dead.”
“When you say moved, you mean driven,” Ingeborg said, “in which case there will be tyre tracks.”
“The best of luck finding the right ones,” Gilbert said. “The field looks like it was used for a motocross rally.”
“Not our job,” Diamond said. “We’re going to rely heavily on scenes of crime and forensics — which we all know will take an age, which is why the early progress has to come the old-fashioned way, through deduction. If John is right, and the body was moved to the shaft from somewhere else, the killer has local knowledge.”
“And wheels,” Gilbert said. “And the strength to do the lifting.”
“I sense a sexist deduction coming on,” Ingeborg said. “Let’s hear it for the female murderer. We’re not incapable of loading a body into a vehicle and dropping it down a mineshaft. Anyway, what if the victim was brought to Combe Down alive and forced at gunpoint to lift the grille and jump in?”
“He wouldn’t necessarily die.”
“With a thirty-foot drop he’d not be in good shape. Who’s there to help? He wouldn’t survive long.”
“You made your point,” Diamond said. “We’ll keep the fair sex in the frame, along with the jealous boyfriends and the ex-cons. Back to work, everyone.”
He limped across to the exhibits desk just as Paul Gilbert returned there. The task of bagging up material securely and making sure it had a valid chain of evidence would occupy the young man for days to come. “Did we give you the receipts we found in Pinto’s room?”
“For food and clothes? Yes, guv. I dealt with them.”
“Let me see the John Moore ones.”
One of Bath’s longest-surviving businesses, John Moore had been founded in the days when sportsmen wore baggy shorts reaching to the knees and sportswomen were still in long skirts.
Diamond read the first receipt through the transparent zipper bag. “He paid cash, I notice. Pair of trainers. Serious money. You get a proper fitting in a shop like that. Where do you go for your trainers, Paul?”
“Sports Direct.”
“And try them on yourself, quick decision and pay?”
Gilbert grinned.
“Buying shoes will be a full-on performance in Moore’s,” Diamond went on. “They’ll remember a regular customer like Pinto. First thing tomorrow, take a trip into town and see what they can tell you about him. Personal stuff. We’re not interested in shoe sizes. What’s that?” He’d heard a shriller sound than the humming computers.