“He disapproved of her efforts to get fit.”
“He can’t have it all ways. He tells her she’s fat and when she tries to do something about it, thinking it will please him, he’s like, what are you playing at, you stupid cow?”
“She seems to have worked hard at the slimming.”
“Really hard. She was too heavy to run far, so she took up walking and was out on a fitness walk the evening she was mugged. That didn’t stop her. Instead of using the streets she found a circuit in Henrietta Park, close to where they live, and did laps. I can’t walk at that pace for long.”
“She must have got fit to have walked the Other Half.”
“Yes, she kept quiet about that until after it was over, in case she failed, I suppose. I didn’t even know she’d entered. You’ve got to admire her spirit.”
“You said she’d hit back if Konstantin attacked her.”
“I’m sure of that. She’s got the upper body strength. I’ve seen her working out with weights. I wouldn’t pick a fight with Olga.”
“Strong enough to take out a pint-size guy like Pinto?”
“Pint size?” She didn’t like the description.
“Compared to her.”
She reached for a felt hippo and for a moment Diamond thought she would throw it at him. Instead, she kneaded it like bread. “Oh, come on. What are you suggesting? She liked Tony. She fancied him.”
He followed up with a combination that would have floored anyone. “And if he didn’t come across?” Before she had a chance to deal with the jab, he hit her with the uppercut. “And she discovered he’d screwed one of her trusted friends?”
Her look of panic said it all before she spoke. She was open-mouthed. “How do you know that?”
He hadn’t for certain, not until this moment. He’d inferred it from her answers, dangled the bait and she’d swallowed the hook. “Your reaction when we spoke of him just now. You don’t have to look so guilty, Maeve. Your sex life is your own and I’m sure he made you feel special.”
The stuffed animal in her grip would burst at the seams any second. “It was a one-off. A couple of drinks in a bar on Wellsway supposedly to talk about my running and he’d pre-booked a room. I had no idea he wanted me.” She shook her head, remembering. “The thrill of finding out was overpowering. I wouldn’t have hurt Olga for all the world.”
“I believe you.”
She dropped the hippo and ran her fingers through her hair. “Does she know? Who would have told her? Tony himself? How cruel is that?”
“If he did,” Diamond said, wanting to calm her now that he knew, “he paid for it with his life. But this is only me speculating. All angles, as I said just now.”
“When was he killed?”
“After he finished the race. He was still wearing the kit.”
“But the finish is far too public for anyone to kill a man. Where was the body found?”
“Combe Down.”
“The race goes past there, but where they finished is two miles north of there, easily. Did he go back for some reason?”
“It seems so.”
“And was murdered somewhere near the mineshaft?”
“That’s our supposition, unless the body was driven there.”
“Could Olga manage that? I guess she could. But how would she know about a mineshaft on Combe Down?”
“She’d just walked the course,” he said. “She may have gone there previously to practise. How far is it from Sydney Place? Two miles, you said?”
“Will you question her again?”
“That’s likely.”
“You won’t tell her I did it with Tony?” she said, and then added with a stricken sigh, “I suppose I can’t stop you. What an idiot I was.”
30
Messages were waiting when Diamond got back to his desk. His staff knew the best way to get his attention wasn’t by phone or online. Sticky yellow Post-it notes were arrayed across the top of his computer like Widow Twankey’s laundry. Some he glanced at and screwed up. When the sorting was done, three were left. Keith Halliwell had left one, so the big man limped over to his deputy’s desk.
“How was the Russian lady, guv?” Halliwell asked.
“On the large side. I can say that, because she’s larger than me. You wouldn’t want us both in your balloon. But I liked her, which is never a good sign. I always seem to get on well with the guilty party.”
“Capable of killing a man and throwing him down a mineshaft?”
“Without a doubt. And the same can be said for the husband, except he’s thinner than my wallet and fit as a butcher’s dog. He runs marathons, real ones. You wanted to see me, your note said.”
“It’s a follow-up on the autopsy from Dr. Sealy.”
“A postscript to the postmortem?” When Diamond played on words, it was a sign of positivity. “Helpful, I hope?”
Halliwell wasn’t saying yet. “He sent off the usual samples of tissues and body fluids for testing by the lab.”
“And the results are back already? I can’t believe this.”
“They aren’t. But you know what he’s like. He leaves nothing to chance. He keeps a second set of samples himself in case of disputes or something going missing at the lab. It’s a way of covering himself.”
“Typical Sealy.”
“It’s paid off this time, because he kept some of the hair he shaved off the back of the scalp to reveal the fracture.”
“What use is that?”
“He had an idea of what he might find. Under a microscope certain hairs were shown up as stained.”
Diamond smiled faintly. “Don’t tell me Pinto dyed his hair.”
“No. These were grass stains.”
“Grass?”
“When the head hit the ground it picked up traces from the turf. He analysed it under infrared and found cellulose and chlorophyll and all the main constituents in grass. He checked with the lab and grass staining was also present on the T-shirt. Do you see the point? The fatal fall must have been above ground. There’s no grass growing inside a stone quarry.”
“Smart,” Diamond said, but in a voice drained of admiration.
Halliwell joined the dots. “So now we know the fight, the incident, or whatever we call it, happened above ground.”
“And killed him?” There was a momentary hiatus while Diamond absorbed this. He pulled a disbelieving face. “I’ve hit my head many times playing rugby and I’m still here.”
Halliwell’s first thought was disrespectful. He rightly sensed that this wasn’t a moment for levity. “I guess it comes down to the force of the impact.”
“And we’re a hundred per cent sure there’s no chance he was bashed from behind, as we first thought?”
“Sealy says so. We can forget it.”
“But was he in a fight?”
“Apparently. Some kind of punch-up, because of the secondary injuries like the bruising on the face and hand.”
Halliwell was ahead of Diamond on the implications of all this and he seemed to be waiting for Diamond to reach the same bleak conclusion.
The big man looked as if he, too, was about to fall flat on his back.
Finally, he said, “We’ll never get a murder conviction from a fall. Manslaughter at best. What it boils down to is homicide, but not murder.”
Anticlimax had deflated Diamond like a punctured beachball. He gazed the length of the incident room at the team and the civilian staff beavering away at what they believed was a murder enquiry.
Eventually, he said, “I can’t face them yet, Keith. I’ll need to take this in properly.”
“We still have a duty to investigate, don’t we?”
He shrugged. “Can’t call it off now.” Shaking his head, he hobbled back to his own desk and sat hunched and inert, staring at the empty screen. Minutes passed before he picked off another of the Post-its. He read the words without fully taking them in. They were from Samantha Sharp, the DC he’d assigned to trawl through every official video of the race. She’d written: Sir, if you would like to see, I have footage of Pinto at the drinks station and the 10K point.