The Tooth Tattoo(41)

‘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.’