Peter Lovesey - The Secret Hangman

‘By the station. You know where the railway crosses the river and the road, that thing that looks like a castle wall, with battlements? Uniform have closed the entire southern approach to the city and they want to cut him down. It’s going to cause horrendous traffic problems, but of course it could be tied in with this case of yours. Get down there, will you, and deal with it?’

Some people start the day with a fried breakfast, he thought. I get a hanged man.

Disturbing images crowded his brain. The black, turreted viaduct where trains thundered across. The corpse twisting above the road. Traffic queues. SOCOs. That sarky pathologist. All to be faced. His thigh was getting damp. He rolled out of bed and felt splintered glass under his bare foot. Not a good beginning.

When Isambard Kingdom Brunel brought the Great Western Railway to Bath in 1840 he had a sharp sense of what the city fathers would tolerate. Starting from the Bristol end he cut a direct route through streets of working-class housing but steered south and east of the Georgian glories of the city. The track had to cross the main road and the River Avon and he did it in style with a handsome viaduct dressed to look as if it was a section of the city wall, grand in concept, with twin turrets, ornamental shields and a crenellated top outlined against the green of Lyncombe Hill. Never mind that the fortifications faced inwards as if the city had to be protected against itself. Never mind that the south side was as plain as a prison. The facade visible from across the river was what mattered. Bathonians compared it to the classic front of a Cambridge college. You would never suspect it was a railway until you saw an inter-city express crossing the battlements.

No one was thinking of Brunel’s achievement when Diamond arrived. Such was the traffic chaos that he had to leave his car across the river and walk over the Churchill Bridge. The fire brigade were at the scene — a good thought on someone’s part because it would take more than a household ladder to recover the body. They had positioned a cherry picker under the bridge.

The corpse was dressed in black jeans and a tank top. Worn trainers that must have been white when bought. Dark, close-cropped hair from what could be made out from below.

‘Do you want a closer look at him?’ the fire officer asked after Diamond made himself known.

He’d had more tempting invitations in his time. ‘Has anyone been up already?’

‘We were told to wait for you.’

‘And I didn’t let you down. Has the pathologist arrived? I left a message for him.’

‘Not yet.’

‘He’s the man to go up. He shouldn’t be long. How do you propose to recover the body?’

‘We’ll work from the top. Hoist him up.’

Diamond looked up at the body again. From where he was the ligature looked like plastic again. The top end was attached to one of the battlements. ‘How do I get up there — without getting into that thing, I mean?’

‘You’ll need to go up to the station and come back along the track. The cherry picker is quicker.’

The phrase conjured up summer afternoons in Kent orchards.

‘I appreciate that,’ Diamond said, but appreciation didn’t mean assent. This wasn’t his kind of cherry-picking. He looked at his watch. ‘The doctor shouldn’t be long.’ A pious hope. He remembered having to wait for Dr Sealy the morning Delia Williamson was found.

He walked across to where a uniformed police inspector was talking into his mobile. Someone at the other end was going spare by the sound of things. It was after seven and the traffic was backed right to the top of Widcombe Hill in one direction and Wellsway in the other. ‘Can I use your phone?’

‘What?’

He pointed to the phone.

‘I’m speaking to traffic control.’

‘Stuff them. Nothing is moving until I make this call.’

It was handed to him.

He had to call headquarters first to get Sealy’s mobile number. Then he got through. The pathologist was going nowhere, sitting in his car in the queue on the Lower Bristol Road.

‘We’ll get a motorcycle escort for him,’ the inspector said. ‘Good idea of yours.’

‘I thought it was obvious.’

Sealy eventually arrived with his outrider. ‘God help us — am I stuck with you again?’ he said to Diamond.

All he could think of as a riposte was: ‘Hope you’ve got a head for heights. You’ll need more than your milk crate for this one.’

‘I’ll cope.’ And, annoyingly, Sealy did, stepping into the cherry picker as if it was a taxi and rising with arms folded. Up there, he turned the corpse to face him and made his inspection. He was talking into his recorder for at least fifteen minutes. Above, on the rampart, four firemen got ready to lift the body upwards.

When Sealy had been lowered, he said, ‘What do you want to know apart from the obvious?’

‘What’s obvious?’ Diamond asked.

‘This isn’t like the woman in the park. This is a proper hanging. Fractured vertebrae. It was a long drop.’

‘Unrelated, then?’

‘Pathologically speaking, yes. I’ll tell you more when I’ve done the PM. Make sure they handle him with care, would you?’

‘What age would he be?’

‘Thirty to forty. Nobody looks at their best when they’re dangling on the end of a cord. Why don’t you take a look?’

‘They want him off the bridge so the traffic can move.’

‘The places people choose,’ Sealy said. ‘What was he after? Maximum disruption? He achieved that all right.’

After Sealy had gone, Diamond took the short walk to the railway station and emerged along the platform and down the slope to the gravel beside the lines. It didn’t take long. Ahead the firemen were approaching with the corpse in a body bag on a stretcher.

‘I’ll take a look,’ he said.

One of them unzipped the top end. A short length of the noose was still tied with a slip knot round the neck.

He recognised the victim.

No question. He’d been circulating pictures of the same face for days. This was the missing man, Danny Geaves, the one-time partner of Delia Williamson.

His first reaction was guilt. They’d failed to find Danny in time. This could have been prevented. Then he told himself they’d made every reasonable effort to find the man. The police are not guardian angels. They are limited by resources and manpower.

He zipped the bag, walked on and checked the parapet. He’d get the SOCOs up here to search everything, but this had the look of a suicide. Danny had slung the cord twice round one of the battlements and secured it with a good knot. It was still in place. It was easy to picture him fastening the noose round his neck, sitting between the battlements and choosing his moment to drop.

‘Y ou can relax,’ he told Ingeborg when he looked in at the incident room. ‘Your search is over. The hanged man is Danny.’

‘Topped himself because of what he’d done?’

‘What do you think?’

She tapped a pencil against her chin. ‘So Danny is the killer.’

‘Was.’

‘Murdered Delia and then killed himself?’

‘So it appears.’

‘What drove him to it — jealousy, I bet. He couldn’t have her, so neither could anyone else. You guys are so possessive.’

‘Hang on, Ingeborg,’ he said. ‘Before you slag off the whole of my sex, the story we had from Ashley Corcoran was that Danny had given up on Delia and the children. He took no interest. That doesn’t sound like jealousy.’

‘Why would he have killed her, then?’

‘Maybe his life wasn’t worth living any more, and he blamed her for all his troubles.’

‘So if it’s not jealousy, it’s the blame game. That doesn’t say much for the whole of your sex.’