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:
To keep his mind off the driving, he tried to think of the positives from the funeral. Basically, he’d got what he came for, the interviews with Monica Gildersleeve and Archie Poke. And there was an intriguing new lead to pursue. Who was the anonymous seller of the Chaucer portrait who had missed out on a fortune when John Gildersleeve gave his expert opinion?
29
Ingeborg arrived early at Manvers Street next morning to find Diamond already there making waves, on the phone to Bristol, asking if the search of Leigh Woods had resumed, firing a series of questions at the hapless inspector on the line. How much of the woods had they covered? Were they still using the dog team? How many dogs? How many men? He went on to ask about the camera footage at Clifton suspension bridge. The check had been completed, a long, laborious process, and it emerged that one of Nathan’s limousines had definitely crossed the bridge in the Bristol direction at 5:50 A.M. on the day Nathan’s body was recovered from the river. The second limo had not been spotted.
‘They split up, then,’ he said, talking to the Bristol inspector as if he was up to speed on every detail of the case. ‘It makes sense. The car caught on camera must have been carrying the gun collection to some secret lock-up in the docks area. The other was used to dump the body somewhere in the woods. Then that second car crossed the river by another route, most likely using Brunel Way and Avon Bridge. Nathan will have known every patrol car in the county was looking for those limos. He will have got them off the road and out of sight as soon as they’d shed their loads. Then he’ll have told his men to disperse and lie low. He’ll not have told them he was about to make his way on foot to the bridge to commit suicide.’
There was a short pause in Diamond’s flow when the inspector got a few words in.
Then: ‘I don’t know if you’ve got the manpower, but somebody needs to search for the weapons and the cars. I’m strongly of the opinion that you’ll find them in the docks area. But the search for DC Gilbert has priority over everything. Do you understand me? Top priority.’
Then he put down the phone and sighted Ingeborg, calm and groomed again, with her blonde hair in the ponytail she usually wore and her lightly pencilled eyes giving no clue as to the tough time she’d been through.
‘Rested now?’
‘Rested and ready to go.’
‘How did Lee Li take the news of Nathan’s death?’
‘Like I expected. Shock. Some tears. She felt responsible, she said, and I soon knocked that on the head. She’s now come round to the view that she was lucky to escape when she did. He could easily have turned angry and she might have ended up dead in the river. Now she can get on with her life and her singing career without looking over her shoulder every minute.’
‘Is she still at your flat?’
‘Only until this afternoon. She’ll be staying with a friend.’
‘You like her, don’t you?’
A shrug and a smile. ‘She’s sweet, but not empty-headed. She’ll have more success, I’m sure.’
‘When she collects her Brit Award, you’ll get a mention in her acceptance speech: “And finally Ingeborg Smith who rescued me from the clutches of a major crime baron.” ’ He updated her on the Reading trip. ‘So you see, there’s a lot happening,’ he concluded. ‘I’m off to Melksham presently to waylay Bernie Wefers.’
‘Want me to come?’ she offered.
He needed her instead to get on the trail of the mystery seller of the Chaucer drawing. ‘I have a strong hunch it’s worth finding out,’ he said. ‘We know the dealers were Matlock and Russell, who seem to have gone out of business. But it was only ten years ago. Someone must know the inside story.’
‘Were they London-based?’
‘I’m not even sure of that. Would one of your contacts from the newspaper world be able to help?’
Before she could answer, another fresh morning face in the CID room set Diamond on a different tack. ‘Hello, here’s the myrmidon of the mortuary.’
‘The what?’ Keith Halliwell said.
‘Never mind. What did you glean from yesterday’s autopsy?’
‘That you’re unlikely to survive if you jump off the suspension bridge. You hit the water at thirty-three metres per second. Your thoracic cage is crushed and the ribs penetrate your vital organs. Lacerated lungs, ruptured liver and heart. Do you want me to go on?’
‘Drowning didn’t come into it, then?’
‘Didn’t need to.’
‘I thought I once read about a woman who survived.’
‘The famous case of the Victorian lady in a crinoline that acted as a parachute. Tragically, Nathan wasn’t wearing his crinoline on this occasion.’
As a reward for that mortuary duty, Halliwell found himself driving Diamond to Melksham, where Bernie Wefers was due to touch down in his helicopter. ‘What are we trying to achieve?’ he asked Diamond.
‘Some straight answers. When you and I met Bernie at Marlborough we didn’t explore his links with Nathan.’
‘It didn’t come up,’ Halliwell said. ‘Can’t say I blame him. If you’re being interviewed by the police you’re not going to throw in a mention of Bristol’s leading arms supplier.’
‘Actually, it did come up.’
Halliwell frowned.
‘But Nathan wasn’t mentioned,’ Diamond went on. ‘If you cast your mind back, Bernie told us he went to Bristol to build an extension for a client, including a gym and a sound studio. We didn’t pick up the significance because at the time we hadn’t heard from Ingeborg about what she found at Nathan’s.’
‘So he gave us the partial truth.’
‘We wrung it out of him. We knew he’d been to Bristol.’
‘Did we?’
Diamond shook his head. As a memory man, Halliwell wasn’t in John Leaman’s class. ‘The pilot told us about flying Nathan there and we checked the log and found it.’
‘Percy Sinclair.’
‘Come again.’
‘The pilot.’
‘You remember all the stuff it’s safe to forget. I sometimes wonder about your reports on the autopsies, whether you give me every blessed detail about the stomach contents and then forget to say that the head was sawed off.’
‘If you doubt me, you could attend the autopsies yourself.’
‘One of these days, I might,’ Diamond said, a boast about as likely as his completing a triathlon. Then he moved on smoothly. ‘Bernie remains the prime suspect.’
‘But he has an alibi for the day of the killing.’
‘So does everyone else. He could still have hired some gunmen to hold up the auction. His motive is stronger than anyone’s. He threatened Gildersleeve outside the divorce court.’
‘You’ll pay for this.’
‘You’re doing better now. And going by his brutal revenge on Monica when he caught her out with Gildersleeve, he takes a strong line on retribution.’
‘But he didn’t attack Dr. Poke when he caught her out with him.’
‘I’m sure he meant to. Poke is a special case. There’s something about the squeaky voice and the wispy hair that disarms people. I noticed it myself. Are you an apologist for Bernie, or what?’
‘Devil’s advocate,’ Halliwell said. ‘I agree he’s got questions to answer.’
Melksham was only twenty minutes from Bath, even at the modest speed Diamond insisted on. A small working town that was also a traffic hub, it had few friends. ‘Of all the small towns of Wiltshire,’ wrote Nikolaus Pevsner in The Buildings of England, ‘Melksham has least character and least enjoyable buildings.’ Whichever way you approached the place, you saw a sewage farm or a caravan park or the twenty-eight acres of tyre manufacturing. So it was possible that Bernie Wefers was doing Melksham a favour with his new shopping centre.