Trevor emitted a sigh that was as good as confirmation.
“The waiting must have been painful for you. Where were you — inside the pub, or standing out in the street?”
Now he took a deep breath, remembering. “I didn’t go inside until after they came out. She would have seen me. The seating area wasn’t much bigger than this room. Then I spoke to the barman, like Pinto was my friend and we had a bet over whether he’d...” He couldn’t get the words out.
“Made out with her?”
He lowered his face again. “The arsehole had hired an upstairs room in advance.”
In Trevor’s mind all the blame was heaped on Pinto. Maeve was still Snow White.
“The next hours must have been hell for you.”
He made no response, suspicious, perhaps, that he was being lured into admitting he planned the killing.
Diamond chose not to press him. They would go over this again in an interview room before he made his statement.
“The next day, instead of accompanying Maeve on your bike during the race, you followed Pinto and watched him chat up another woman who was clearly unsettled by him. Am I right?”
This time he spoke a clear, “Yes.”
“The young woman decided to quit the race rather than enter the mile-long tunnel with Pinto. He went after her and fortunately she got away. Was that because you tackled him on Combe Down?”
He nodded.
“Tell me about it.”
“You seem to know it all.”
“You’re the only one who knows how he ended up where he did.”
Trevor straightened in the chair. No doubt he’d rehearsed this a hundred times, trying to make sure he gave it the best possible gloss — not easy when you’ve killed a man and disposed of the body. “He was crossing a field on the side of a hill. I left my bike at the side of the road to follow him. He turned round and there I was, a few steps behind him. Like you say, I was mad. Angry, I mean. I hadn’t slept at all. I called him names. I wanted to hit him, I don’t mind telling you, but it wasn’t much of a fight. He slung a punch or two and so did I, not enough to hurt him. He had a longer reach than me. But when he aimed another punch and missed my chin, I put both hands against his chest and pushed him and he fell back like a skittle and cracked his head. It was stone where he fell, with only a thin covering of turf. I could see straight away he was out to the world.”
“Dead?”
“He didn’t move. Is that what you want to know?”
His version chimed in with what Dr. Sealy had said about the linear fracture suggesting Pinto had fallen backwards and hit his head.
“I want to hear the rest, Trevor — what you did when he was lying still.”
“It’s weird. It should have been satisfying, knocking him out, but it wasn’t. All I’d done was shove him in the chest. I wanted him to get up and I’d throw a real punch at him, but he didn’t. I stood over him and he didn’t move. After a bit I started to walk away. Then I thought better of it. What if I’d killed him? I went back and felt for a pulse at the side of his neck. There wasn’t any. I didn’t panic exactly, but I knew I’d be in deep trouble if he was found. I decided to get the body out of sight. There was a copse at the edge of the field and I dragged him there, thinking I’d cover him with bracken and stuff. After I got him there, I saw this iron grille almost covered in weeds and I knew what it was.”
“A ventilation shaft.”
He nodded. “We’ve had school trips to Combe Down to teach the kids about the old mines. I’ve seen a covered shaft before. I managed to lift the grille and dropped him in. That’s it, really.”
No, it isn’t, Diamond thought. You don’t want to tell me the rest because it implicates you even more. “Bad luck for you that we found him down there. We were searching for someone else — Belinda Pye, the young woman he was pursuing.”
“So how did you get onto me?”
“It wasn’t easy,” Diamond said. “There was nothing obvious to connect you to the killing. And you made our job more difficult by making it appear that he finished the race. Covering your tracks, you thought. We studied the video of the finish, the exact time he was supposed to have crossed the line. Pinto’s name appears in the results, but the runner wasn’t Pinto, it was you, trying to hide from the camera behind some fun-runner with the Royal Crescent on his back. Your number wasn’t visible, but your head and shoulders were, briefly.”
“I thought I was out of shot.”
“But registering a time?”
“And I did. He’s in the results.”
“And there had to be an explanation,” Diamond said.
Trevor waited to hear it, still wanting to give nothing away.
“You were carrying Pinto’s chip. The timing system is electronic, so every runner has to wear one. Before you dumped the body down the shaft, you removed the chip from his shoe. With that, you could masquerade as a competitor. You took a short cut through Lyncombe and joined the stragglers completing the last section of the race and carried the chip across the line, right? The electronics showed Pinto finished, so what happened on Combe Down was neatly erased as far as anyone could tell. But I’ve studied the video and it was definitely you.”
Trevor felt for the baseball cap again and pushed the peak higher up his forehead. “In a strange way, I’m relieved it’s over. What happens next?”
“We take you in as a suspect and get a statement from you. A confession is your best option.”
“Concealing a body is a serious crime, isn’t it?”
“Serious, but not the worst.”
“I didn’t intend to kill him.”
“You’ve made that clear.”
Diamond nodded to Halliwell, who told Trevor to stand up. He cuffed him and said, “Let’s go.”
Paloma joined Diamond that evening for what he called a painkiller — a therapeutic pint in his local, the Old Crown at Weston, a dog-friendly pub where Hartley seemed to know he was appreciated and lay on his side as if to announce that all shoes and chair legs in this sanctum were safe from his attention.
“So Olga comes out of this best,” Paloma said after she’d heard the story of Diamond’s day. “She escapes from Konstantin, who is the real villain, and ends up with the gorgeous Murat.”
“Gorgeous he is not,” Diamond said. “He left me with one good arm and a pain in the neck that isn’t going to go away for the rest of the week.”
“But you won’t turn him in?”
“My battered body tells me to lock him up and throw away the key, but I guess not. He was trafficked. If I reported him, the taxpayer would have to pay for his keep while his asylum application was considered. Allowing him to move in with Olga at her expense is a better option.”
“And Trevor. What will happen to him?”
“The police have some discretion in dealing with first-time offenders who make full confessions. Have you heard of out-of-court disposals? They’re a way of dealing with someone without prosecuting them and saddling them with a criminal record. I said nothing to him about this, but I’ll speak to Georgina.”
“The other baddy in this case, apart from Konstantin, was Tony Pinto, as you said from the start.”
“And there’s a twist,” he said. “Pinto liked to be known as the Finisher, striking fear into everyone under his control. As it turned out, the real Finisher was Trevor, and in more than one sense.”
“He finished off Pinto,” Paloma said. “What else?”
“He finished the race. He hadn’t run the course, but he finished and carried Pinto’s microchip over the line.”
“Neat.”