“Not my doing, Beattie,” he said, which wasn’t strictly true. “You’ll get a nice taxi ride out of it.”
“What’s it all about? Has one of the tenants misbehaved?”
“Nobody knows for sure. They want your opinion.”
“I told you everything I know when you were here last time. They’re all good blokes.”
He told her he would see what else he could find out, giving him a reason to squeeze past the chair and move along the corridor to where three of the search team were in conversation outside the damaged open door of Pinto’s room.
“Found much?” he asked, eager to know whether their search had yielded more than his and Ingeborg’s.
“Sod all, really,” one said. “This was obviously the gangmaster’s drum, as you see.”
“The alleged gangmaster,” another said.
“Fuck that. He’s dead. He was killed running the half marathon. I can call him what I bloody like.”
“Pity he’s dead,” the second man said. “We’d have got a load of information from the tosser, wouldn’t we Jimmy?”
“He was smart enough not to leave his phone or wallet here.” Jimmy had a voice and believed in using it. “He must have owned a laptop or some such. Without phone records and card transactions we’ll never get a case to stick. None of that stuff was on his person when he was killed, so where is it?”
Just what Diamond was here to find out.
Jimmy’s words hadn’t been aimed directly at anyone. They were more of an appeal to the gods in general — or whichever god looks after frustrated policemen.
Diamond was no god, but he had a suggestion. “Has anyone checked with the marathon organisers?”
“What would they know about it?”
“They’re sure to have some unclaimed bags.”
“Why would he leave a bag with them when he lives so near? The runners’ village was barely a stone’s throw from here.”
“Safer,” Diamond said. “He wouldn’t trust the people here.”
“We can mention that to the boss.”
Diamond looked through the doorway at the seduction salon, as he thought of it, where Pinto had entertained the women he brought back. To his eye, it was as sexy as a car crash, but it was Pinto’s private knocking shop as well as his office, sitting room, music room, bedroom and breakfast room. The scumbag had spent a large amount of his time here. Surely it held more clues. “Mind if I step inside?”
Jimmy shrugged. “I guess one more set of shoe prints is neither here nor there.”
When Diamond had last been here, he and Ingeborg had done what the search team had done — looked for the hardware that stored the data so vital to modern evidence-gathering. Pinto must have had access to the internet to function as a gangmaster.
Try a different approach, he told himself.
Instead of searching for equipment that wasn’t here, why not look more closely at things that were?
Modern slavery was a world-wide twenty-first-century crime utilising con-tricks that had worked since Eve was persuaded to pick the forbidden fruit. The gangs recruited vulnerable people in places abroad where they had no hope of betterment and offered them jobs and places to live in more advanced countries where casual labour was in demand. The traffickers demanded a fee, of course, and the transport was basic and illegal. On arrival, the victims were taken to open a bank account to receive their wages. They were issued with debit cards that the slavers took over. As the cash flowed in, it was creamed off. Any objections were met with the answer that the rent had to be funded and the debt repaid.
All the unfortunates under Pinto’s charge would have gone through something similar. He must have controlled twenty or more bank accounts. Each came with its password, pin and security number. Remembering so many details wasn’t possible. Put them on computer and you run the risk of being hacked and losing the lot.
Diamond had trouble managing his own account data along with all the other passwords and pins he needed to function. He kept his in a notebook he was always updating.
What was Pinto’s system? Surely more devious than that. Yet he’d need to keep a record somewhere. He’d be an idiot to keep it on his phone.
The only paper items found in the room had been the receipts from the sports shop.
Was anything noted on some surface you wouldn’t expect?
He looked inside the wardrobe and the crockery cupboard. Pulled the folding table from the wall and examined the underside. The edge of a door might have been a smart place, but Pinto hadn’t used that.
What was his secret?
It had to be somewhere here in this basement.
Beattie’s room?
Unless she was a genius at bluffing, Beattie had no active role in the slavery operation and it was unlikely Pinto would have asked her to take care of anything. However, it was not impossible that he’d gone into her room on some pretext and lodged stuff out of sight and out of her reach on top of a cupboard.
He spoke to the guys at the door. “Have all the rooms been searched?”
“All except one.” Jimmy lowered his voice. “We’ll get in there shortly.”
“While she’s at headquarters?”
A nod. He didn’t have to tell them their job. They’d know where to look.
What else, then?
Having checked every conceivable piece of furniture in Pinto’s room, he was left studying the walls.
And now he saw what had been so easy to miss.
“Jimmy, you might like to photograph this.”
The striped wallpaper was topped by the frieze with the nude runners of both sexes chasing each other endlessly around the room. The pink figures were enclosed between narrow bands of a repeating Greek meander pattern in black on a sand-coloured background.
Just above the lower band, in small, neat letters you wouldn’t see unless you got close up, was a long line of words and numbers, several hundred. They went around three walls, so neatly done that they seemed to be part of the pattern.
“Cool,” Jimmy said. “But what the fuck is it?”
“It looks to me like his record of all the accounts under his control. Each guy’s name followed by the bank, account number and pin.”
“I’ve been staring at that fucking wallpaper and all I saw was bollock-naked people.”
“You would,” Diamond said and added tactfully, “Anyone would.”
“I don’t know how you thought of it.”
He didn’t answer. He’d stepped over to the fourth wall, the one with the door. The frieze along here was empty of writing — or almost so. A number had been written just below the light switch in the same minute hand and the same black ink: 50598.
“Any thoughts what this might be?”
“Search me,” the sergeant said. “A pin number?”
“They’re usually four digits.”
“Phone?”
“If it’s a local number, they’re six digits, aren’t they?”
“I’m stumped, then.”
“It seems to be here by the door as a reminder before he steps outside.” He scratched his unshaven chin. He was trying to dredge up a conversation tiptoeing on the edge of his memory and refusing to make itself known, an insight Beattie had unexpectedly provided. Not from today. Must have been when he was here with Ingeborg. He’d been impressed at the time because it had been a snippet of local knowledge he hadn’t heard about in more than twenty years of living in Bath. Suddenly it mattered.
There had been some connection with Duke Street. But how it linked up with the number under the light switch was a mystery known only to Diamond’s unconscious.