In the incident room next morning, a detective constable called Sharp was assigned to trawl through the CCTV footage of the Other Half. She would need to live up to her name. Picking out Tony Pinto from five thousand runners wasn’t too difficult when you had his timing at various checkpoints, but Diamond wanted the race numbers of everyone who passed each camera within five minutes of him. Any who featured more than once would come in for special attention. The job would take days.
The man himself was in his office with a detective inspector from ROCU who’d shown him a card with the name Jones on it. Jones had the air of a man who could recite the Official Secrets Act like the Lord’s Prayer. He’d insisted on a private room for the conversation. He probably had visiting cards with Smith, Brown and Robinson in his wallet as well. His true identity wasn’t an issue with Diamond. If he wished to be coy, let him.
“Are you soundproofed?” Jones stepped over to the wall and tapped on the plasterboard.
“No one is listening, if that’s what you mean,” Diamond said. “We all bat for the same team here.”
Jones moved to the window and looked down, as if some eavesdropper might be out there on a ladder.
Satisfied, it seemed, he sat opposite Diamond and struck a more positive note, but pianissimo. “You did the right thing, notifying us about the house in Duke Street.”
“Doing my job.”
An approving nod.
“Will you deal with it?” Diamond asked.
Jones looked wounded by the directness of the question. After a pause, he said, “Let’s put it this way: we’re aware of the situation.”
Diamond pictured a police aware notice stuck onto an abandoned vehicle at the side of the road. In no way did he consider the Pinto case abandoned.
“That’s it,” Jones continued, as if pleased by the form of words he’d used, “aware of the situation.”
“I guessed as much.” ROCU would say they were aware. Like every other department in the police service, they were over-stretched and short-staffed. They didn’t keep tabs on everything. “So why are you here?”
“Just touching base,” Jones said. “I gather you’re interested in one of the tenants.”
“Tony Pinto.”
“Pinto,” he said, and added, as if he knew the name, “Aha.”
“It’s more than interest,” Diamond said. “It’s an investigation into his death. I reported this to your lot because I’m suspicious he was involved in people-smuggling and modern slavery. I’m assuming he was put there to manage the day-to-day operation.”
“Conceivably.” Even this vague word was a stretch for Jones.
“If I’m right,” Diamond said, “it’s organised crime.”
“People-smuggling? Certainly.”
“That’s why I reported it.”
“Good man.”
Diamond waited for more. Jones looked left and right as if deciding whether to test the walls again. “Without for a moment wishing to denigrate the people at the coal face such as your good self, we work from a different perspective.”
“Okay.”
“We focus on the high-ups, the people at the top. Identify, disrupt and dismantle. The Duke Street operation, if there is one, will have been masterminded elsewhere.”
“Obviously. Was Pinto recruited in prison?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because he’s only been out a few months. He didn’t ask for help finding a place to live. He moved straight into the bedsit in the basement.”
“You’re well-informed.”
“I put him behind bars in the first place.”
“There’s some history with you, then?”
“I don’t let it get in the way,” Diamond said, sensing a trap. “Do you know all about him?”
“We have our people inside prison.”
“Grasses?”
“I’m speaking of the RPIU.”
“Never heard of them.”
“Good. You can forget them again after I’ve told you. They’re the Regional Prison Intelligence Unit. Any contacts he made will have been monitored.”
“You know who the villains are, then?”
Jones didn’t. Transparently, he’d never even heard of Duke Street until Diamond reported it. He trotted out another of his bland responses. “Bringing the ringleaders to justice isn’t easy. It’s all in the timing.”
“What can I expect to see next?”
“That’s a strategic decision.”
“Simultaneous arrests?”
“Probably.”
“Nothing in the near future?”
“I’m not at liberty to say. In the meantime, ROCU can’t allow anything to compromise the progress we’re making with our own investigation.”
Diamond said with eyebrows raised, “How could that arise?”
“We look to you to soft-pedal. Pinto’s death isn’t high priority.”
They were round to the reason for the visit. Finally.
“It’s still a homicide,” Diamond said. “Someone out there killed him and dumped him down a mineshaft.”
“And you’ve got an excellent clear-up record. You’ll catch up with your perpetrator when the time is right. As of now, we don’t want the human slavery story all over the media. Softly, softly, as the saying goes.” Jones ended the exchange by widening his eyes as if to say we’re all in this together, aren’t we?
Diamond, being Diamond, didn’t bat an eyelid.
Alone again, he sat back in his well-padded swivel chair and pondered his next move. There was a chance Pinto had been murdered because of some failure in his duties at the Duke Street house. Working for traffickers was high-risk. As a minor player, he was dispensable, and he knew too much to be allowed to live. If so, this would have been a contract killing ordered by the high-ups Jones had spoken about. So what could Bath CID do about it? Catching the killer wouldn’t be enough. It was only a step on the way to exposing the so-called masterminds. No argument: ROCU were better equipped to take that on.
But if the homicide was unconnected with the slavery scam, Diamond had a duty to track the killer down. He would investigate, even if it meant going back to Duke Street to eliminate the slavers from his enquiries. That was the way he worked, following up each lead until he got his man — or woman.
He reached for the crutches and moved out to the incident room. Everyone knew about the ROCU visitor. “Relax,” he told them. “We’re still on the case. Nothing is off limits except careless talk about people-smuggling. I’m not even sure he knew what was going on in Duke Street.”
Ingeborg looked up from her keyboard. “Did he know about Pinto?”
“Probably not. Our Tony is small fry to them.”
“He must have been small fry to the slavers. They haven’t replaced him and they haven’t moved the men to another location, or Beattie would have known for sure.”
Leaman, hovering nearby as usual, said, “Why don’t they just walk away?”
“The men in the basement? Isn’t that obvious?” Ingeborg said.
“Not to me.”
Ingeborg wasn’t bluffing. Modern slavery was a scourge on humanity she’d hated ever since first hearing about it. The visit to Duke Street had brought the evil closer and she’d made sure she knew how it functioned. “Debt bondage, for one thing.”
“What’s that, then?”
“Typically, they’re allowed to earn a small wage at whatever menial job they do, but they’re told they owe the slavers big money for smuggling them in and providing them with a place to live, so what they get is a pittance.”
“All the more reason to escape.”
“Escape to what? They’re stateless. If any of them had passports, they’ll have been taken by the traffickers. They’re in terror of being repatriated. They have a place to live and the van still comes for them each day, so they climb in and go to work. They’re conditioned to it.”