‘Did you ask for any to be sent here?’
‘Well, no. We wouldn’t know what to do with them.’
‘Oh yes we would,’ Diamond said. ‘You missed the point, John. We’d stick them on our board and look as if we’re going places with this investigation. Get on to your friend at the RUH and tell him this is our baby and we need a copy of everything.’
In other respects the progress was less spectacular. All the listed hotels and boarding houses had been checked and there was not a single report of a missing Japanese woman.
‘If some of you can’t look busier than this,’ Diamond said, ‘I’ll tell the search party on the river bank that reinforcements are on the way.’
After he’d gone into his office and slammed the door, there was a spell of silence. Then Paul Gilbert said, ‘Who’s that Swedish detective Kenneth Branagh plays on TV?’
Better news came through after lunch. The coroner had reviewed the autopsy report and decided on a second post-mortem to be conducted by a Home Office approved forensic pathologist at 8 A.M. next morning. Diamond was invited to attend. He thanked the coroner and said he would do his level best to be there. If, however, something came up, his deputy would attend. After switching off the phone, he called across the room, ‘Keith.’
Halliwell looked up. ‘Guv?’
‘Are you a big breakfast man, bacon, eggs, the full English, as they say?’
‘When I can get it.’
‘Have a light one tomorrow. Early start for you.’
Autopsies and Peter Diamond didn’t mix.
Later in the afternoon came a call from the search squad. They’d found an iPod on the Green Park stretch of river bank between the Churchill Bridge and Midland Bridge. It looked as if it had been there some time.
Diamond said he would come at once. He asked Ingeborg to join him.
Green Park is a wedge-shaped space on the north side of the river, a piece of land that somehow escaped the builders of centuries past and enjoys some seclusion simply because it borders on the river and is a good distance from the main shops and tourist attractions.
‘I lose track,’ Diamond said to Ingeborg as they drove along Green Park Road. ‘What’s an iPod?’
‘You really don’t know?’ she said in disbelief.
‘I don’t have the patience to keep up.’
‘There are iPods and then there are iPods,’ she said.
‘Now you’re poking fun. It’s some kind of audio device, right?’
‘Or much more. There are touch-screen versions, video versions. Technology moves on.’
‘I can use a mobile phone.’
‘After much prodding.’
‘Am I missing something, not owning an iPod?’
‘Depends,’ Ingeborg said. ‘They can be good if you work out at the gym or go for a jog.’
He looked out of the window instead.
The sergeant from the search team was waiting for them beside a section of the river bank below the towpath now cordoned off with crime scene tape. Alder trees and bushes would have provided a useful screen for anyone up to no good.
‘Where is it?’ Diamond asked.
A transparent evidence bag was handed over. The object inside was small and square and so coated in mud you couldn’t tell what colour it was. A lead with two earpieces was coiled in one corner.
‘Good spotting on someone’s part,’ Diamond said. ‘This would have been easy to miss.’
‘There’s no certainty it belonged to the dead woman,’ the sergeant said. ‘On the other hand, people aren’t in the habit of slinging things like this away.’
‘One of the earpieces is broken,’ Ingeborg said. ‘It looks as if it’s been crushed, stepped on, or something.’
‘We noticed.’
‘The iPod itself looks all right. You might chuck out the earphones, but not that.’
‘I agree.’
‘The damage could have been done in a struggle.’
Diamond took a closer look. ‘Are there any signs of violence where it was picked up?’
‘Hard to tell, sir,’ the sergeant said. ‘Take a look if you like. We’ve marked an approach path. I made sure my lads didn’t trample all over the scene.’
Diamond could take a hint. His big feet wouldn’t aid the investigation. ‘We’ll get the crime scene professionals out here and have it mapped and photographed. Where are your people now?’
‘The other side of Midland Bridge continuing the search.’
Diamond turned to Ingeborg. ‘What do you think? Any way we can link the iPod with the victim?’
‘The best chance is to find some hair at the scene or match some fibres with her clothes.’
‘Put a call through to the men in blue overalls, then. I’ll get a sense of where we are and how she might have got here.’ He told the sergeant that the search could stop at Windsor Bridge. The body must have entered the water way before there.
If, as he was tempted to suspect, the Japanese woman had been murdered, this little triangle of parkland was as good a spot as any to dump the body in the river. Quiet, well away from houses, with plenty of trees and scrub screening the view, the site had much to commend itself to a killer. You could get a vehicle right to the end of the road known as Green Park, no great distance from the river bank.
And no one would hear the screams.
10
Georgina Dallymore, the Assistant Chief Constable, had spent the past week attending a Home Office course. Rumour had it that the top bananas were being instructed on how to maximise resources, government-speak for cuts. So a collective shudder should have gone through CID when she reappeared. In fact, the team were so busy that Georgina was scarcely noticed.
‘What’s going on here?’ she asked Peter Diamond. ‘I wasn’t told we had a major incident.’
‘You’ve been away, ma’am.’
‘I wasn’t away from my BlackBerry, if you know what that is. I expect to be kept informed. What’s it about?’
‘A body found in the river. We’re treating it as suspicious.’
She eyed the display board. ‘It looks like a full blown murder investigation. Is all this justified?’
‘It is when there’s an international dimension.’
She twitched in alarm. ‘In what way?’
‘The victim — the deceased, I should say — is almost certainly from Japan.’
‘A tourist?’
‘Possibly. We’re working closely with the Border Agency and the Japanese embassy.’
‘Do you know who it is?’
He shook his head. ‘Female, below average height, twenty to thirty, with a tooth tattoo as the only distinguishing feature.’
‘What on earth...?’
Diamond explained. After the dig about the BlackBerry he wasn’t missing a chance to let the boss know he was street smart.
Georgina peered at the close-up. ‘It looks like a music note.’
‘A quaver, actually.’
‘I didn’t know you read music, Peter.’
‘I have hidden depths, ma’am.’
‘I’ve known that for a long time, but music is something else. So is this the only clue?’
‘An iPod has been found on the river bank in Green Park.’
‘Hers?’
‘We can’t say yet. I’m having the scene examined for evidence of violence.’
‘Was she attacked, then?’
‘Unfortunately she was in the water too long to tell.’
She paused as if to play the statement over. ‘I hate to say it, but this has all the hallmarks of an unsolved case.’
He wasn’t being goaded into submission. ‘You’re entitled to your opinion, ma’am.’
‘What makes you think this isn’t an accidental drowning?’
‘In all my time here, I can’t recall any accidents below Pulteney weir, where she was found. You don’t find swimmers or canoeists there.’