The Last Detective

'You took your bloody time.'

'Sorry, sir. Mrs Troop was in a bit of a state. She needed advice.'

'John, if you want to join the bloody Marriage Guidance people and hold hands with weeping wives, why don't you go ahead? I happen to be working on a murder inquiry, and if that isn't your particular bent, I suggest you tell me right now so that I can ask for someone I can rely on.'

'She'd been assaulted by her husband, sir. I was telling her to lodge a complaint this time.'

'Social work,' said Diamond as if he were speaking of some disease brought on by lack of hygiene. 'You're supposed to be a detective. Meanwhile I'm stuck here like a lupin waiting for a bee.'

'Has there been a development?'

Diamond flung out his hand and knocked over a box of paper clips. 'Of course there bloody hasn't. How can there be when you're listening to sob stories over coffee in Chewton Mendip? Three days, and all I've got for it is a sunburnt scalp. We're literally up the creek until we can put a name to this corpse.'

'Should we have another look at missing persons?' the hapless inspector suggested.

There was a tensing of shoulders right around the room, unnecessarily as it turned out. Diamond, deciding that he had raised his blood pressure to dangerous levels, said in the mild register that he knew was more effective than a bellow, 'That is what I have been trying to do.'

'But in this area alone?'

'And Wiltshire.' He snatched up a sheaf of flimsy papers and flapped it. 'A bloody long list, growing by seventy-plus every week.'

Wigfull cleared his throat and said, 'Surely the PNC can helpus.'

Diamond had to think a moment. His mind didn't work in abbreviations, and people who knew him better were more tactful than to press the cause of the Police National Computer. 'Yes,' he said with contempt, -by giving us twenty thousand names.'

'You limit it by keying in the data you have,' Wigfull tried to explain. 'In this case, females under thirty with red hair.'

In reality, Diamond had a reasonable grasp of the PNC's functions; otherwise he couldn't have survived in the CID. What he deplored was the general belief that it was the cure-all. 'For the present, we'll work with the county lists,' he said. 'I want updates on each of the names I've marked. Call the local stations. Get descriptions, real descriptions, not sodding data, as you insist on calling it. I want to know what they're like as people. By 3.30 this afternoon. I'm calling a conference.'

'Very good, Mr Diamond.'

'That remains to be seen. You may have sensed that I'm feeling somewhat frayed at the edges, Mr Wigfull. Somewhere out there is a murderer. We're making precious little progress towards arresting him. Jesus Christ, we don't even know how it was done.'

'Looks as if we'll need the PNC,' said Wigfull.

Diamond turned away, muttering, to check more responses to the local appeal for information. Copies of the artist's impression had appeared in Monday's Bath Evening Chronicle and the Bristol Evening Post. 'Two more for Candice Milner,' he presendy called across to Wigfull. 'It says a lot about contemporary values when people can't discriminate between real life and a flaming television serial.' It would take a breakthrough of cosmic proportions to shake him out of this embittered mood.

Wanting to get away from the constant bleep of the phones, he chose to hold his case conference in the minibus parked beside the incident room. So at 3.30, the four senior officers in the squad sat with him in the rear of the vehicle in uncomfortable proximity and in turn reported their findings.

Wigfull's work on the phone had yielded results of a sort: he had fuller details of three missing women whose descriptions broadly tallied with the woman found in the lake. 'Janet Hepple is divorced, thirty-three, a part-time artists' model in Coventry. Red hair, five foot seven. She left her flat seven weeks ago, leaving rent unpaid, and hasn't been seen since. Evidently this was out of character. Everyone spoke of her as honest and reliable.'

Diamond was unimpressed. 'And the second?'

'Sally Shepton-Howe, from Manchester, missing since 21 May, when she had a row with her husband and ran off. She sells cosmetics in a department store in the city. Hair described as auburn, green eyes, thirty-two, good-looking. A woman of her description was seen that night at Knutsford Services on the M6 trying to hitch a lift south.'

'Asking for it. Who else?'

'This is an odd one. An author, from west London, Hounslow. Writes romance. What are those books women buy everywhere?'

'Bodice-rippers?' someone suggested.

'No, the name of the publisher.'

'Don't ask me. I only read science fiction.'

'Anyway, she writes them. She's called Meg Zoomer.'

'Zoomer. Is that a pen name?'

'It's real, apparently, the name of her third husband.'

'Third?' said Diamond. 'What age is this woman?'

'Thirty-four. She appears to carry on as if she's one of the characters in her books. Hungry for romance. She wears a dark green cloak and grows her hair long. It's chestnut red. Anyway, she drives about in an MG sports car looking for experiences to use in her books.'

'Someone's having you on, John,' said Keith Halliwell, the inspector supervising the house-to-house inquiries.

'They'd better not be,' Diamond said gravely, 'This is a murder hunt, not a night out at the pub. Let's have the rest. When was Mrs Zoomer last seen?'

'The nineteenth of May, at a party in Richmond. She left soon after midnight with a man who seems to have been a gatecrasher. Everyone assumed he came with somebody else. Tall, dark-haired, aged about thirty, powerfully built, a trace of a French accent.'

'Straight out of one of the books,' commented Halliwell. 'What did he drive – a Porsche, or a four-in-hand?'

'Wrap up, will you?' Diamond snapped. He regarded Halliwell as a pain, which was why he was on house-to-house. 'Who was the informant?'

'The woman who lives next door, sir. She took in the milk each day until there was no room left in her fridge.'

'Has anyone shown her the picture yet?'

That's being done. And Scotland Yard are trying to locate Mrs Zoomer's dental records.'

'A model, a shopgirl and a writer,' Diamond summed it up, and sniffed. 'That's all?'

'Those are the missing redheads more or less fitting our description, sir.'

'I thought you would come up with more than that.'

Wigfull countered this by saying, 'With respect, sir, the PNC would have given us more.'

After an uneasy silence, Diamond said tamely, 'All right. See to it.'

Wigfull tilted an eyebrow in Halliwell's direction and it was his undoing.

'As we're going to cast the net more widely,' continued Diamond in a reasonable tone, 'maybe we should broaden our data-base.'

The jargon from the lips of the Last Detective ambushed everyone. 'In what way, exactly, Mr Diamond?' Wigfull innocently asked.

'Brunettes. People have different ideas about red hair. Our woman isn't what you'd call ginger. The hair is reddish brown.'

'More red than brown, sir.'

'Some people might call it brown. Check the brunettes on the PNC as well.'

That silenced Wigfull rather pleasingly. The conference continued for another twenty minutes, dispiritingly chronicling the failure of the door-to-door enquiries, the searches and the appeals in the media to throw up anything of real significance. At the end of it, when they had climbed out of the minibus and were flexing their limbs, Inspector Croxley, a quietly ambitious man – an ascending angel, by his own lights – who was co-ordinating the search around the lake, approached Diamond and said, 'I didn't raise this inside, sir, but it crossed my mind. We're all assuming murder because she was found nude, but there isn't any evidence of violence.'