The Tooth Tattoo(36)

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.