He told her he didn’t work in traffic.
‘More of a back-room boy?’
‘Back-seat boy.’ He wasn’t going to volunteer that he was CID.
After the coffee, she said, ‘I’ve enjoyed this, Peter.’
‘You took the words out of my mouth.’
She signalled for the bill. ‘I must get back now and do an hour or so on the internet. My clients expect a quick response.’
He was relieved. She was drawing a line under this evening. She’d saved them both the awkwardness of the invitation home for another coffee or a drink, or whatever. He certainly wasn’t ready for whatever. She wasn’t pressing for a closer relationship and neither was he.
They walked back to Green Park and talked about films they’d seen. As if by mutual consent they’d done enough exchanging personal data. When they reached her car she opened her bag and took out a business card. ‘As I was saying, you can look me up if you’re interested in the agency.’
‘Thanks. I’m not so well organised as you,’ he said. ‘Don’t carry a card.’
‘Now I feel pushy.’
He shook his head. ‘I know when people are pushy, and you’re not.’
She got into her car. ‘Where’s yours?’
He pointed across the car park.
She said, ‘Watch out when you reverse.’
He came out with a line that made him cringe as soon as he’d said it. ‘After tonight no carrier bag is safe.’
She smiled and drove off.
8
O ne thing is worse than an alarm clock going off when you are sleeping, and that’s a phone. Diamond didn’t know where he was. He reached out to the sound and knocked over his glass of water.
Now he knew. He’d been dreaming. This wasn’t Paloma’s bedroom. This was home.
‘Jesus,’ he said when he got the thing to his ear.
This seemed to confuse the caller. After a long pause came a tentative, ‘Sir?’
‘I don’t expect calls in the middle of the night.’
‘Is that Mr Diamond?’
‘What do you want?’
‘I’ve got the Assistant Chief Constable for you, sir.’
‘On a plate?’
‘On the other line.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Six fifteen just gone, sir.’
‘Nearly lunchtime,’ he said with sarcasm that was wasted on the switchboard operator.
‘I’m about to connect you.’
‘Do I have a choice?’
Georgina greeted him as brightly as if she was suggesting coffee and crumpets in the Pump Room. ‘Peter, are you up and about?’
He could feel a tide of cold water advancing across the sheet he was lying on. ‘I will be shortly.’
‘You’re not an early riser, then? Listen, something has happened overnight. Another hanging, a man this time.’
He was jolted fully awake. ‘Where?’
‘This is it, Peter. It couldn’t be more public. He’s over the Bristol Road near the railway station. Motorists are calling in to report it.’
He couldn’t picture this. ‘Over the road?’
‘Hanging from the viaduct.’
‘What viaduct?’
‘By the station. You know where the railway crosses the river and the road, that thing that looks like a castle wall, with battlements? Uniform have closed the entire southern approach to the city and they want to cut him down. It’s going to cause horrendous traffic problems, but of course it could be tied in with this case of yours. Get down there, will you, and deal with it?’
Some people start the day with a fried breakfast, he thought. I get a hanged man.
Disturbing images crowded his brain. The black, turreted viaduct where trains thundered across. The corpse twisting above the road. Traffic queues. SOCOs. That sarky pathologist. All to be faced. His thigh was getting damp. He rolled out of bed and felt splintered glass under his bare foot. Not a good beginning.
When Isambard Kingdom Brunel brought the Great Western Railway to Bath in 1840 he had a sharp sense of what the city fathers would tolerate. Starting from the Bristol end he cut a direct route through streets of working-class housing but steered south and east of the Georgian glories of the city. The track had to cross the main road and the River Avon and he did it in style with a handsome viaduct dressed to look as if it was a section of the city wall, grand in concept, with twin turrets, ornamental shields and a crenellated top outlined against the green of Lyncombe Hill. Never mind that the fortifications faced inwards as if the city had to be protected against itself. Never mind that the south side was as plain as a prison. The facade visible from across the river was what mattered. Bathonians compared it to the classic front of a Cambridge college. You would never suspect it was a railway until you saw an inter-city express crossing the battlements.
No one was thinking of Brunel’s achievement when Diamond arrived. Such was the traffic chaos that he had to leave his car across the river and walk over the Churchill Bridge. The fire brigade were at the scene — a good thought on someone’s part because it would take more than a household ladder to recover the body. They had positioned a cherry picker under the bridge.
The corpse was dressed in black jeans and a tank top. Worn trainers that must have been white when bought. Dark, close-cropped hair from what could be made out from below.
‘Do you want a closer look at him?’ the fire officer asked after Diamond made himself known.
He’d had more tempting invitations in his time. ‘Has anyone been up already?’
‘We were told to wait for you.’
‘And I didn’t let you down. Has the pathologist arrived? I left a message for him.’
‘Not yet.’
‘He’s the man to go up. He shouldn’t be long. How do you propose to recover the body?’
‘We’ll work from the top. Hoist him up.’
Diamond looked up at the body again. From where he was the ligature looked like plastic again. The top end was attached to one of the battlements. ‘How do I get up there — without getting into that thing, I mean?’
‘You’ll need to go up to the station and come back along the track. The cherry picker is quicker.’
The phrase conjured up summer afternoons in Kent orchards.
‘I appreciate that,’ Diamond said, but appreciation didn’t mean assent. This wasn’t his kind of cherry-picking. He looked at his watch. ‘The doctor shouldn’t be long.’ A pious hope. He remembered having to wait for Dr Sealy the morning Delia Williamson was found.
He walked across to where a uniformed police inspector was talking into his mobile. Someone at the other end was going spare by the sound of things. It was after seven and the traffic was backed right to the top of Widcombe Hill in one direction and Wellsway in the other. ‘Can I use your phone?’
‘What?’
He pointed to the phone.
‘I’m speaking to traffic control.’
‘Stuff them. Nothing is moving until I make this call.’
It was handed to him.
He had to call headquarters first to get Sealy’s mobile number. Then he got through. The pathologist was going nowhere, sitting in his car in the queue on the Lower Bristol Road.
‘We’ll get a motorcycle escort for him,’ the inspector said. ‘Good idea of yours.’
‘I thought it was obvious.’
Sealy eventually arrived with his outrider. ‘God help us — am I stuck with you again?’ he said to Diamond.
All he could think of as a riposte was: ‘Hope you’ve got a head for heights. You’ll need more than your milk crate for this one.’
‘I’ll cope.’ And, annoyingly, Sealy did, stepping into the cherry picker as if it was a taxi and rising with arms folded. Up there, he turned the corpse to face him and made his inspection. He was talking into his recorder for at least fifteen minutes. Above, on the rampart, four firemen got ready to lift the body upwards.
When Sealy had been lowered, he said, ‘What do you want to know apart from the obvious?’
‘What’s obvious?’ Diamond asked.
‘This isn’t like the woman in the park. This is a proper hanging. Fractured vertebrae. It was a long drop.’