Diamond said, ‘Where do you learn this stuff?’
‘Don’t you believe me?’
‘Let’s deal with what we know for certain. The body was rotting, so it must have been underwater for weeks. We now have a crime scene. With any luck, forensics will give us more information. But we know enough already to get headlines with the press release.’
‘Are we going to use the computer image?’ Halliwell asked.
‘You sound doubtful.’
‘I’m not convinced by the science.’
Leaman said at once, ‘It’s based on a scan.’
‘Did you say scam?’
Diamond said, ‘Silence in the ranks. The answer, Keith, is yes, I’m going to issue it to the media. A picture is worth a thousand words.’
‘And if the picture is nothing like her?’
‘There must be some resemblance.’
‘May be.’
Ingeborg said, ‘People don’t expect a computer image to be perfect. There’s news value in the fact that we’re using this method. And when we finally do get a photo of the victim they’ll want to compare it. So we get more publicity, a second bite at the cherry.’
‘So speaks our ex-journo,’ Diamond said.
Halliwell shrugged and was silent.
The Avon & Somerset sub-aqua team was sent to Green Park.
‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they found her handbag?’ Ingeborg said.
‘You’re joking,’ Halliwell said. ‘If the killer takes the trouble to dump the body in the river, he’s not going to dump her bag in the same place.’
‘I was trying to be positive. You’re getting as grouchy as the boss. Is it catching?’
Diamond’s 11 A.M. press conference was well attended. The Manvers Street media relations manager, John Wigfull, presided. He and Diamond — old adversaries from way back — sat in front of a large projected image of the computerised face. Diamond read his prepared statement and invited questions. It all went well until someone asked about the music on the victim’s iPod.
‘Classical music, you said, superintendent. The murdered woman liked listening to string quartets, is that right?’
‘You’ll find a note of it in the release we handed out.’
‘Would that be Haydn or Mozart?’
He hesitated. These smart-arse reporters were always trying to put the boot in. ‘Beethoven, actually.’
‘So you’ve listened to it. Are you a Beethoven expert, Mr. Diamond?’
‘I wouldn’t claim that, but I’m not a complete duffer.’
‘So was it the Amadeus?’
‘Trying to catch me with a trick question?’ he said. ‘That’s Mozart.’ He didn’t add that he’d seen the film.
‘The Amadeus Quartet. I thought every music-loving policeman would have heard of them.’
CID press conferences aren’t renowned for laughs, so when they come they are appreciated.
Diamond still wasn’t sure if he was being tricked. ‘I was stringing you along,’ he said, and got a satisfying groan for the pun. ‘And that’s a good note on which to finish.’
He asked Paul Gilbert to drive him back to Green Park. Already the cameramen were there in force, lined up behind the tape getting shots of the underwater team in their scuba suits. From now on the press would be tracking every development.
Duckett, arms folded, watched him arrive. Neither needed to treat the other with much deference, and neither did. But to their credit Duckett’s firm of crime scene investigators had been prompt this time in reporting the significance of the hair found at the scene.
‘Any more discoveries?’ Diamond asked after dipping under the ‘do not pass’ tape.
‘Haven’t they put you out to grass yet?’ Duckett said.
‘I was going to ask the same question, but come to think of it you look more at home up to your knees in mud.’
‘It may look like mud to you, my friend, but it could be the piece of evidence that gets you off the hook.’
‘So what else have you found, apart from the hair and the fibres?’
‘We won’t know until we get it cleaned up.’
‘Have you worked out what happened?’
‘You want it in a plate, don’t you?’ Duckett said. ‘What do you do all day in that police station — watch the racing on TV? It’s a pig of a scene, this one.’
‘Always is.’
‘Too many coppers have tramped through in their big boots. It’s a wonder we found the hair.’
‘Where was it?’
‘Caught on a bramble, quite low down. If you really want to know what happened, I reckon she was dead or out to the world before she got here. There’s no evidence of a struggle except dragging her to the bank and heaving her in. Have you seen the heel-marks?’
Diamond nodded. ‘If she was dead already, would she have floated?’
‘Not for long in the current. You see what it’s like. She’d have got waterlogged.’
‘And after she sank, wouldn’t the flow of the river continue to move her along the bottom?’
‘In this case it didn’t. My opinion is that the body lodged against something deep down. You want to speak to your frogmen. All kinds of stuff gets tipped into the river over time. We’re only a few hundred yards from Sainsbury’s here. Nothing pleases the yobbos more than heaving trolleys in.’
‘It’s true the body didn’t travel very far,’ Diamond said. ‘It was spotted at Lower Weston, three or four hundred yards away. But it had been submerged some weeks from the state of it.’
‘It will have inflated, as they do, and the pressure finally lifted it clear. The absence of the corpse at the scene is a real pain for me. We’re reduced to looking for traces. It’s not good for my back.’
‘Any traces of the killer?’
‘You’re an optimist. What do you expect — another hair? We’ll examine everything we’ve got under the microscope and let you know, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. Ninety percent of it is going to be rubbish blown across the park.’
‘When do you reckon to finish?’
‘In a couple of hours if people stop asking damn-fool questions.’
Diamond left him to it. To Paul Gilbert, he said, ‘You wouldn’t think we’re his paymasters, would you, cocky bastard? He’s not going to get work from anyone else.’
‘He seems to know what he’s talking about,’ Gilbert said.
‘He could say it in a more civil way. Now, I’d like your opinion. Come with me.’ They left the crime scene and moved some distance from the press people. ‘It’s a park, right? You can’t drive straight through it.’
‘You might with a four-by-four.’
‘The tyre tracks would be a giveaway. I haven’t seen any. And you wouldn’t get any kind of four-wheeled vehicle along the towpath. If you wanted to drop a body into the Avon, how would you get it here?’
‘Carry it, I suppose.’
‘Where from?’
‘Your transport.’
He tried picturing someone burdened with a corpse, stumbling the hundred yards or more from where the road ended. ‘You’d need to be strong.’
‘She was quite small, guv.’
‘True. But it would be easier with some kind of barrow.’
‘A supermarket trolley?’
‘Maybe, if there was one handy. And this would be done by night, I imagine. Anyway, the killer got her to the bank and dragged her down the last bit, leaving the heels trailing.’