The Stone Wife
- Автор: Ловси Питер
- Серия: Peter Diamond #14
- Год: 2014
- Язык: английский
- Год: Sphere
- ISBN: 978-0-7515-5405-2
- Жанр: Полицейские детективы
Электронная книга - «The Stone Wife». Краткое содержание книги:
‘We want to know if he was dead before he entered the water.’
‘Can’t tell you, old sport. I may discover more after I’ve opened him up, but don’t count on it.’
‘But you’ll know if he was dead?’
‘Not necessarily. There will be extensive impact injuries, probably multiple fracturing of the thoracic cage and maybe the skull, but that would happen regardless. If you have information that someone was seen pushing a lifeless body off the bridge, you’d better tell me now.’
‘Nothing like that. We’re thinking he could have been murdered and placed in the water further upstream.’
‘Unlikely. He hit something pretty damn hard, I can tell you. But then it’s seventy-five metres down. Quite some drop.’
Diamond exchanged a shocked look with Ingeborg. It was starting to sound as if they had pushed Paul off the suspension bridge.
Sealy unzipped his white paper overall and started pulling it off. ‘I’ve done all I can here. I’ll perform the necessary tomorrow morning. Move him as soon as you like,’ he told the sergeant.
‘We’ll wait for low tide, sir.’
‘Sensible, yes. Did you hear that, superintendent? Tomorrow morning.’
‘I heard.’ Diamond wasn’t thinking about tomorrow. He was steeling himself for what he would see inside the tent. Turning to Ingeborg, he said, ‘You don’t have to come in unless you want to.’
‘I’ll be okay, guv.’
They stooped, stepped inside and looked at the body flat on its back, the clothes coated with mud, the face smeared with filth and blood, but wiped clean around the eyes, nose and mouth.
Ingeborg said, ‘Oh my God!’
Diamond said, ‘That’s not Paul.’
Ingeborg said, ‘It’s Nathan.’
27
Diamond’s first action after returning to Bath in the afternoon was to send Ingeborg home. She needed some proper sleep. But before that, she would have the thankless job of breaking the news to Lee Li about Nathan. The cause of death wouldn’t be confirmed until the autopsy was performed, but Sealy, the pathologist, had been confident the firearms supplier had fallen from the suspension bridge.
Suicide?
It seemed the only explanation. Difficult to credit, a millionaire criminal choosing to top himself. Even allowing that his secret gunroom had been found by an undercover police officer and he faced a long prison term if convicted, he’d got the weapons off the premises before they could be used as evidence. He’d quit the house in time. He had other places to go, a reasonable chance of staying at liberty. From his point of view, the raid on his house should have been more of a setback than a disaster.
But as Ingeborg had reminded Diamond on the drive back from Bristol, Nathan had suffered a devastating emotional wound. Lee Li had dumped him. If he had been under any illusion that she still loved him after seeking sanctuary with Marcus Tone, he couldn’t ignore the fact that the next day she had run off a second time. ‘He doted on her, guv. He built that studio and the gym and he bankrolled her singing career. Whatever she thought of the arrangement, he was crazy about her.’
Supplying guns to murderers and bank robbers didn’t sit well with unrequited love, but Diamond had seen the recording studio and the gym. He’d seen the bedroom the couple had shared, the king-size bed draped in pink chiffon, the matching soft toys and the wardrobe stuffed with designer clothes. It all testified to a man hopelessly besotted.
Nathan must have driven across the suspension bridge thousands of times. He would have known it was Britain’s leading suicide bridge and from time to time he would surely have given thought to what it would be like to jump. No great surprise if he preferred that way to blowing his brains out with one of his own revolvers.
For Diamond and everyone in the team, the overriding question was what had happened to Paul Gilbert. No reports had come in of a second body. The Daimler limousines had not been sighted.
And it wasn’t only Bath CID who needed to know. Somebody else would be going out of her mind with worry. Diamond found a safety pin and reattached the torn sleeve to his jacket.
‘Can’t leave it any longer,’ he told Halliwell. ‘I’m off to visit his mother. She’ll expect him home tonight.’
‘I could do that,’ his deputy offered, thinking, perhaps, of the poor woman finding Diamond, grim-faced, on her doorstep. The boss in his dark suit looked uncannily like a harbinger of death.
A shake of the head. ‘You can do me another favour.’
‘Nathan’s autopsy tomorrow?’
A faint grin. ‘How did you guess?’
He was back within the hour, looking relieved.
‘How did she take it?’ Halliwell asked.
‘She didn’t. She isn’t there. The neighbour told me she’s on a bus tour in the Lake District and not expected back until the weekend.’
‘We may have found him by then.’
He gave a melancholy nod. ‘I suppose it will spare her the extra pain of not knowing for certain.’
This state of limbo was, of course, weighing on everyone in Manvers Street police station. Nothing active they could do. It was a matter of waiting for the confirmation they all dreaded. The right way forward was to keep occupied on the investigation, do the painstaking work they were trained for.
Diamond went over to his most reliable civilian assistant, a woman in her fifties called Penny. She had been given the task of analysing Nathan’s paperwork recovered from the gunroom. ‘What did you discover?’
‘He was selling or renting firearms at the rate of three or four a week,’ she said. ‘A variety of weapons, too, from Kalashnikovs to nine-millimetre pistols.’
‘I’m interested in the two Webleys Ingeborg saw.’
‘It’s not an inventory,’ Penny said. ‘It’s a record of the guns that went out. Nobody rented a Webley, not even one.’
‘Pity. That was the type of gun that killed Professor Gildersleeve. How about the customers? Can we identify anyone?’
‘You might,’ she said. ‘I haven’t — but then I only have initials to go by.’
‘Was he using a code, or are they the real initials?’
‘They look real to me. Four months ago, there was an armed robbery at a jeweller’s in Keynsham. A Bristol man by the name of Leslie Beech was charged and is now awaiting trial. He was found in possession of a Browning self-loading pistol. If you look at November seventeenth, you’ll see a Browning nine millimetre out to someone listed as LB.’
‘No argument about that,’ Diamond said, studying the sheet, now enclosed in a transparent filing pocket. ‘Is there any link to our suspects Bernie Wefers, Archie Poke or Monica Gildersleeve?’
‘Sorry, Mr. Diamond, but their initials don’t feature at all.’
‘Too bad. We know Bernie oversaw the building of the sound studio and the gym and probably the gunroom as well, so he had opportunities to help himself and not be listed here, but the others, no.’ He dropped the sheet on her desk. ‘I was hoping we’d learn more from this. I was thinking it might be in code, but you say it makes sense the way it is.’
Penny looked up at him. ‘You like a puzzle, do you, Mr. Diamond?’
‘Not sure about that. I like a challenge.’
‘Crosswords?’
‘I don’t do crosswords.’ His face softened as the memory of an earlier time stirred in his brain. ‘When Steph was alive — she was my wife — we did the occasional jigsaw, but I was more of a hindrance than a help. We’d use up all the pieces we’d got and find one missing and it would be stuck to the bottom of my shoe.’
‘But you found it in the end.’
‘Most times, yes. I don’t give up easily.’ He returned to his office and found the Wife of Bath back in occupation, returned from her photocall. ‘And neither do you.’