The Last Detective

'Up to now. The pathologist's report isn't in.'

'If it does turn out to be the writer, I wonder what you think of suicide as a possibility, sir?'

'What?'

'Suicide. I saw a thing on television once about a famous writer. I mean a documentary, not a play. She was out of her mind, I admit, but she killed herself by walking into a river. Back in the 1940s, this was, in the war. She drowned. We know this Zoomer woman has fantasies about herself, the way she dresses and what have you. Suppose she got depressed and decided to do away with herself. Isn't this the way she might do it – a dramatic gesture?'

'Starkers? Did this woman on TV strip off before she drowned herself?'

'Well, no, sir.'

'That's gilding the lily, is it?'

'I beg your pardon.'

'The dramatic gesture. An extra touch?'

'Something like that. It's only an idea.'

'I'll say one thing for your theory, Inspector. I've heard of cases when people have left a heap of clothes on a shoreline. It's not uncommon. That Labour MP-'

'Stonehouse.'.

'Right. The difference is that he faked his suicide. People were meant to find the clothes and assumed he'd drowned. What we have here, Inspector, isn't a pile of clothes and no corpse. It's a corpse and no clothes. You find me a pile of women's garments including a long, green cloak and I might buy your theory.' With a swagger, Diamond ambled off to the incident room.

Occasionally during the long summer, when his caseload had been lighter, he had bought sandwiches for lunch and found a seat among the tourists on one of the wooden benches in the Abbey Churchyard, the paved open area facing the West Front of the Abbey. There he d regularly whiled away a pleasant twenty minutes reading Fabian of the Yard, which he'd acquired in the Oxfam shop for lOp.

Fabian of the Yard. Lovely title. No wonder so many big-name detectives from Fred Cherrill to Jack Slipper had used that…of the Yard tag for their memoirs. Diamond of Avon and Somerset didn't have the same ring to it. Good thing he wasn't planning to go into print.

At intervals in those summer lunchbreaks he had looked up from his reading. The towers on each side of the great west window were decorated with sixteenth-century carvings representing angels on two ladders – to Diamond's eye more curious than decorative. These weatherbeaten figures were perched at mathematically precise intervals on the rungs of the two ladders reaching up to heaven. Many people assumed that it was a representation of Jacob's ladder. The official version, however, was that it was Oliver King's ladder, for the bishop of that name who rebuilt the church, starting in 1499, had stoutly insisted that the dream of a ladder to heaven was his own, and who can doubt the integrity of a bishop? Fixed in perpetuity in their positions, unaltered except by the eroding effects of wind, rain and contamination, those luckless angels seemed emblematic of hope deferred, rather than celestial promise. Peter Diamond knew the feeling. Staring up at the West Front one lunchtime, he had been charmed by a revelation of his own, picturing the senior CID of Avon and Somerset clinging to the rungs. The image often came back to him when he saw them together.

Midway through Wednesday morning came a call from Dr Merlin, the pathologist. For no obvious reason Diamond had started the day in a benign mood. He strolled across the room, thanked the girl who handed him the phone, put it to his ear and said, 'Glorious morning here, Jack. What's it doing in Reading?'

'Look here, I've been badgering the lab on your account,' Merlin announced, sounding quite piqued at the bonhomie. 'Off the record they've given me some early results.'

'And?'

'Nothing has been found to indicate conclusively how she died.'

'You call that a result?'

'It supports my preliminary opinion.'

'I never doubted you.'

The absence of doubt in Diamond's mind appeared not to settle the question for the pathologist. 'It's still quite conceivable that she drowned.'

Diamond sighed. 'We've been over this before. Aren't we any closer to a definite cause of death? Let's put it this way, Jack,' he added quickly, not wanting the phone slammed down. 'Is there anything I can rule out? Toxic substances?'

'Too early to say. Nothing very obvious, but you have to remember that if someone has drowned, especially in fresh water, there's a tremendous increase in blood volume – up to a hundred per cent within a couple of minutes – due to the osmotic absorption of fresh water through the lung membranes. This has the effect of diluting any concentration of drugs or alcohol in the blood by up to a hundred per cent. So any analysis result on a post-mortem sample may give only half the true value which was present just before death.'

'Jack, suppose she didn't drown. Suppose the body was dumped in the lake after death. Is there anything pointing to a cause of death?'

'Essentially she appears to have been a healthy young woman. We can rule out coronary artery disease or myocarditis, or diabetic coma, or epilepsy.'

'I sense that you do know something,' said Diamond. 'You're keeping me in suspense, you bugger.'

'I'm telling you these things, Superintendent, because without them my conclusion is tentative, at best. At the autopsy I found a number of pinhead haemorrhages in the eye membranes and there were some in the scalp and to a lesser extent in the brain and the lungs. The presence of petechial haemorrhages is open to different interpretations depending on other findings.'

'All right, mate, I get the point. You can't be a hundred per cent certain. But what would you put your money on?'

Down the line, Merlin's tone of voice revealed that he didn't much like his opinion equated with gambling. 'In the absence of external injuries, one is drawn along the road-'

'Oh, come on, man!'

'… of asphyxia 'Asphyxia?'

'So you appreciate the difficulty. Drowning is a form of asphyxia.'

Diamond groaned. 'But I just ruled out drowning.'

'I didn't.' After a pause, Merlin said, 'There's a phenomenon known as dry drowning.'

Diamond wondered briefly whether he was being sent up. 'Did you say dry drowning?'

'It happens in about one case in every five. The victim's larynx goes into spasm with the first intake of water and very little of it enters the lungs. They drown without actually gulping or inhaling water. Dry drowning, you see.'

'What about those haemorrhages you found?'

'Would be observed, as in any case of asphyxia.'

'Meaning she may have drowned after all? That doesn't help me much. It doesn't help at all.' Diamond was heating up again. 'This wasn't a swimming accident, Jack. People aren't allowed to swim in reservoirs. Anyway, she was nude. Her wedding ring was missing.'

'Are you listening to me?' said Merlin.

'Go on.'

'To answer your question, if you exclude drowning as a possibility, and if we can eliminate drugs and alcohol, the most likely explanation is that before she got into the water she was smothered with some soft object, say a cushion or a pillow.'

'We've got there,' said Diamond to his audience in the caravan.

'I didn't say that. I'm trying to balance the probabilities. Death by smothering is hard to detect at the best of times,' said the pathologist tartly.

'You said the same about drowning. I sometimes wonder, Jack, if you'd say the same about a dagger through the heart.' Diamond banged down the phone and looked around. 'Where the hell is Wigfull?'

'Outside, sir,' said a sergeant. 'The press has arrived.'