“Orders from the top?”
“Without a doubt.”
“Do you have evidence of that?”
“We will. We’ve barely started transcribing all the data we seized.”
“How was the killing done, then?”
Jones had been talking freely up to now. Hubris loosens the tongue, even of a tight-lipped ROCU man. But the directness of the question made him hesitate and glance at the door to make sure it was closed. “What I am about to say is for your ears only. You need to understand that Duke Street was just one outpost of a vast international empire and only a handful of boss men had any idea of the full extent of it. Pinto was answerable to his controller in Bath and that was as much as he knew.”
“And who was the controller?”
“A Russian guy called Ivanov.”
“Konstantin Ivanov?”
“You’ve heard of him?” Jones frowned. “You’re better informed than I thought.”
Diamond could have added that he’d met Konstantin and had suspicions about him, but that would be the next thing to a debriefing.
“Until yesterday,” Jones went on, “Ivanov was living with his wife at a grand address in Sydney Place, a beautiful nineteenth-century terrace facing Sydney Gardens. Bath’s billionaires’ row. Kings and queens lived there when it was first built. Now it’s mostly expensive flats, but he and his wife occupied the entire house, bought by an anonymous company based in some tax haven.” The narrative flowed more easily again. “His cover story is that he’s one of those filthy-rich oligarchs who prefer to live outside Russia. Money-laundering is behind it, for sure. He buys top-of-the-range properties in Bath and rents them out. The Duke Street house is one such. The top two floors are used only occasionally by high-earning footballers who pay the rent and ask no questions about what happens in the basement. The ground floor flat isn’t occupied.”
“And Konstantin Ivanov oversees the modern slavery in Bath?”
Jones nodded. “What is more, he prides himself on his fitness. Marathon running, martial arts, wrestling. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
“Did he run in the Other Half?”
“No, and this is my point. You’d expect him to have taken part. His wife Olga was in it. She speed-walked the course. And who do you think they employed as Olga’s personal trainer? The organisation had recruited Pinto from prison, where he had become super-fit in the gym and quite a fitness fanatic. But in Bath he was under-employed, just seeing off the slaves early in the morning and checking them in at night. What is that saying about idle hands?”
“The devil finds work...?”
“That’s the one. To keep him occupied, he had to make regular visits to Sydney Place and supervise Olga’s training. We’re not sure about Olga. She doesn’t seem to have played an active part in the slavery operation, so she wasn’t arrested yesterday. Ivanov was. He denies everything, of course, but we have his phone and hard drive and we’ll nail him. The DNA evidence will prove he killed Pinto.”
“Ivanov?”
“No question. He was in dire trouble himself if he didn’t take decisive action.”
“How did he do it?”
“Karate. He’s a black belt. There’s a framed certificate in their basement gym. The cause of death was a brain injury from a fall, as you know. There seems to have been a short fight, if you can call it that. Pinto was a fit man, but I doubt whether he had the slightest idea how to defend himself.”
“And where did this fight take place?”
“On Combe Down.”
“Where the mineshaft is?”
“There, or thereabouts.”
“Do you also know when it happened?”
“Late afternoon or early evening, long after the race was over. Pinto was one of the last to finish because he ran off course chasing some girl he flirted with.” Jones was coming down to earth and getting more matey. “The man was a goat. He couldn’t get enough. She quit the race to get away from him and he followed.”
“Belinda Pye.”
“You know the name?” he piped in surprise.
“I’ve interviewed her,” Diamond said, peeved at being patronised. Peeved, also, that ROCU knew details of the case he and his team had worked so hard to discover.
“Did they have sex?” Jones asked.
“No. She got away, but she was so traumatised that she went off the radar for days.” He checked himself. He didn’t need to tell Belinda’s story right now, even though her experience was vivid in his memory. “What interests me is why Pinto went back to Combe Down after the race was over. All most runners want to do is rest up.”
“He hadn’t exerted himself,” Jones said. “He could have run it much faster. It must have been the pull of the girl. He had unfinished business with her.”
“More than two hours after he’d lost contact with her? I find that unconvincing.”
“There is another explanation.”
“Okay.”
“He was under orders. Ivanov had instructed him to report there at a certain time.”
“That’s more likely,” Diamond said. “It explains why Ivanov was there — which would have been my next question.”
“Ivanov has no alibi. He was supposed to be in his office in the Sydney Place house dealing with business matters, but of course his wife was in the race, so she can’t vouch for him. He’s the killer. He’ll plead manslaughter, but we’ll be able to show it was premeditated.”
“How?”
“Phone evidence. My people are going through Pinto’s call history — and Ivanov’s — as we speak.”
“You’ve got it buttoned up, then,” Diamond said.
Jones prised himself out of the chair. “I know this is disappointing for you and your team, but it’s crime on a scale you could never have known about. We at ROCU have the advantage over you fellows working at the coal face, but we do appreciate the work being done locally. Do you play golf?”
“No.”
“I wouldn’t mind meeting you again some time. Incidentally, my name isn’t really Jones. One of these days when we’re both off duty I’ll tell you what it is.”
Diamond was tempted to say it was Smart-arse, but he refrained. Inside he was seething, but his contempt for the man and his tinpot theory mattered less than pushing ahead and really cracking this case.
Alone again at his desk, he gathered all the information he had about the Other Half — the race-pack information, sponsorship rules, description of the course, the coloured map, the list of finishers and times at all the checkpoints. He turned on his computer and went to the race website and studied the photographs the organisers had posted. He was trying to reconcile Pinto coming in after four hours when he should have got round in two or less. Even if he had lost time chasing after Belinda, he should have finished sooner. He was a fitness freak, for God’s sake.
There was a limit to the amount of time the head of CID was willing to spend poring over details. After twenty minutes he’d had enough, so he took everything into the incident room and asked the efficient DC Sharp if she’d completed her searches into Pinto’s race at each checkpoint.
“Almost, sir,” she said.
“‘Guv’ is what most of them call me,” he said. “What they call me behind my back I can’t tell you, but ‘guv’ sits better with me than ‘sir.’ What’s your problem with the checkpoints?”
“He keeps up with the rest until Dundas Aqueduct. You’d expect him to get there with some of the people who started at the same time and he does.”
“You showed me.”
“But then we lose him.”
“He ran off the course, we think.”