Peter Lovesey - The Secret Hangman

‘But you were never as desperate as this.’

‘Sometimes I don’t know which world you inhabit, Keith. What I’m thinking is we’d better not assume anything until the pathologist has been by.’

Halliwell backtracked fast. ‘I get you now.’

Ingeborg arrived in ten minutes. She put her head around the screen and said, ‘Oh, poor soul. Haven’t you cut her down yet?’

Another pointless question. The body was rotating in the breeze.

‘Just show us the picture,’ Diamond said.

Ingeborg had brought two photos, a head-and-shoulders shot taken in a booth and an outdoor one of the mother and her two small daughters. Beyond any doubt the dead woman was Delia Williamson. Diamond looked at the smiles of the children and felt his stomach clench. Someone would have to break it to those little girls that their mother was dead. They would ask questions and that same someone would have the choice between merciful lying and the appalling truth.

Ingeborg said, ‘Guv.’

‘Mm?’

‘Do you want me to speak to the family?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not your job.’

She took a closer look at the body. ‘Armani jeans.’

‘Yep, I read the label.’

‘And the sweater is cashmere.’

This he hadn’t spotted. ‘So she wasn’t short of a bob or two.’

The pathologist turned up eventually. This Dr Bertram Sealy was new to Diamond but not new to the game. He’d brought a flask of hot coffee and poured himself a cup before stepping around the screen. The smell was tantalising. ‘Do you have a gofer I can borrow?’ he asked.

There were times when Diamond was hard on his staff, but he didn’t think of them like that. He let the remark pass. People come out with insensitive things in stressful situations. Instead, he beckoned to Ingeborg and introduced her.

‘You’re CID?’ Dr Sealy said to her with approval. ‘I thought you all chewed gum and shaved your heads. Do me a favour, my beauty. The boot of my car is unlocked. Inside you’ll find an essential tool of the trade, my blue plastic milk crate. Would you mind fetching it?’

Ingeborg obeyed, but only after a look that said she didn’t like being patronised.

Dr Sealy winked at Diamond while Ingeborg opened the boot and bent over it for the crate. ‘It’s not a job that appeals to everyone, mine. I make the best of it.’

Diamond stared through him.

Sealy screwed the cup back on his flask. ‘Make yourself useful and hold this for me, would you? Got to put on my surgical gloves.’

Diamond kept his hands behind his back. It was Halliwell who stepped forward for the flask.

The purpose of the crate was made clear. Sealy needed to step up and he wasn’t going to risk standing on the seat of one of the swings. He asked Ingeborg to place the crate upside down on the ground behind the suspended body. With a hand resting on her shoulder he stepped up level with the woman’s neck. He spent some time studying the marks made by the plastic cord. When he’d finished he made sure Ingeborg gave him a hand down. Then he asked her to move the crate to the front, all the while watching as if he’d never seen a woman in his life. Once again, he steadied himself by grasping and squeezing her shoulder. Almost as an afterthought he turned his attention to the corpse and used an electronic thermometer with a digital read-out to measure the temperature in the nostrils. Then he stepped down, smiled at Ingeborg and took out a notebook to record his reading. He invited the photographer to stand on the crate and take some close-ups. While this was going on, he examined the dead woman’s hands.

Finally he stepped away. ‘I’ve done. When you bring her down, I want the cord cut a foot above the head and left in place round the neck.’

‘Any first impressions?’ Diamond asked.

‘Some remarkable features.’ He turned for another look at Ingeborg. ‘And the corpse is not without interest.’

If he’d expected a reaction from Diamond, he got none.

‘I wouldn’t have expected the cyanosis to be so marked.’

‘The purple colour of the face?’

‘And there’s something else. She has two sets of ligature marks, overlapping in places, but diverging at the side of the neck where she is suspended.’

‘Two sets of marks?’

‘Be my guest, Mr Diamond. Step on the crate.’

Diamond wasn’t built for step-ups. Ingeborg said, ‘All right, guv,’ and steadied his arm with a willingness that showed where her loyalty lay.

His face was six inches from the dead woman’s neck.

Sealy said, ‘See the brownish horizontal line below the knot, going right round, like a collar? That’s the one that interests me.’

‘So what does this mean — that she was strangled first, and strung up?’

‘Don’t rush your fences, Inspector.’

‘Superintendent.’

‘Oops,’ said Sealy, and made a mock salute.

‘Someone could have faked the suicide to cover up a murder?’

‘I’d have thought a superintendent would know we men of science like to assemble all the facts before reaching an opinion.’

‘Pompous twit,’ Diamond muttered.

Sealy was making more notes.

Diamond stepped off the crate and waited for him to finish.

Without looking up from the notebook Sealy asked, ‘How do you spell your name?’

‘The usual way.’

‘You’re a bit of a card, then?’

That old joke fell flat.

But Sealy wanted to run with it. ‘The king, the ace or the joker?’

Diamond said nothing. Why encourage him?

‘If it isn’t a card you are,’ Sealy said, ‘you must be a gem. Diamond… gem… Follow me? In which case you might be interested in a little-known service they provide in America. You look reasonably fit to me, Mr Diamond, but of course we all have to make provision for what lies ahead. The one certainty, as they say. You may have decided already what you want done with your mortal remains. Even if you have, I suggest you think about this, a beautiful prospect for a man lucky enough to bear the name you do. There’s a firm in California who will take a cadaver and subject it to intense heat and pressure for eighteen weeks, reducing it to carbon atoms. The end product is a small, but exquisite, one-carat diamond.’

The only one to smile was Sealy.

‘And if you’re quick’ — he looked at his watch — ‘I can do the PM

… p.m.’ He took back his vacuum flask and strutted towards his car as if he’d knocked out the heavyweight champ.

Diamond arranged with Halliwell to oversee the removal of the body to an undertaker’s van already parked nearby. The duty of observing the post-mortem also fell to Halliwell.

Diamond said, ‘Ingeborg.’

‘Guv?’ She was about to pick up the crate and return it to Dr Sealy’s car.

‘Leave that.’

‘But he’s going to forget it.’

‘Yes.’

Ingeborg had recently treated herself to one of those bug-shaped Fords known as a Ka, comfortable once Diamond had persuaded his bulk into the passenger seat and drawn the belt across. He asked her to drive him to the house in Walcot.

‘Tell me about the men in this lady’s life.’

‘The one I met is Ashley Corcoran, her partner. He’s cool.’

Aware that the last word had refinements he hadn’t kept up with, Diamond said, ‘Which is…?

‘In control. No panic. He strikes me as responsible, if a little too laid back,’ she told him. ‘He’s great with the kids. He collects them from school every day. Reads to them at bedtime.’

‘What’s his job?’

‘Composing theme music for television. He’s got a Steinway piano and all kinds of synthesisers and stuff.’

‘Swish place, then?’

‘A converted warehouse close to the river. Made me envious.’