Peter Lovesey - The Secret Hangman

The voice altered, becoming taut and defensive. ‘That was a private matter. If it had any bearing on what happened to her I would have told you.’

‘You’d better tell me now, ma’am. It’s crucial to the case.’

‘I don’t see how.’

‘For pity’s sake,’ he said. ‘You may think you’re protecting her reputation, but I’m trying to stop her killer from murdering someone else tonight. Why was she depressed?’

There was a silence. Then: ‘She got pregnant again, disorganised as usual, poor darling. Stopped taking the pill for some days and wondered why she was putting on weight. It was a shock when she found out. She’d had a difficult time when Sophie was born and she didn’t want to go through all that again.’

‘And Danny wanted the child?’

‘No, it wasn’t like that. He supported her. So did her GP. He arranged for her to have the abortion at the Royal United.’

‘That’s all I need to know.’ He looked round at his team.

They had found the common factor.

E arly in the Diamonds’ marriage, Steph had been diagnosed with something the medics called RSM, Recurrent Spontaneous Miscarriage. She had lost four babies altogether. That word ‘lost’ is a euphemism that tries to downplay the grief, but can’t. He’d been amazed how she had found the courage to try again after each bereavement. She had wanted children with increasing desperation, and so had he, and her gynaecologist had said there was ‘no physiological limitation’, but after the fourth, the expert changed his opinion. She was given a hysterectomy.

So it was difficult to feel neutral about abortion. The result is the same — a pregnancy that fails — but there is a gulf between those who miscarry, the ‘have nots’, and those who seek abortions, the ‘haves’ who would rather be ‘have nots’. In their low moments he and Steph envied friends with children, and resented those who confided that they had ‘slipped up’ and gone for abortions.

He didn’t see it as a debate between the pro-choice and pro-life camps. He couldn’t side with either. Personal experience had convinced him that each case had to be judged on merit. In his job he’d seen abused and mentally handicapped women unable to cope with pregnancy and he would have argued strongly for their right to a termination. This was a profoundly complex issue.

Ingeborg was the first to react. Any intelligent woman would question what had been suggested. ‘Let me get this right, guv. Are you saying these couples were killed because they had abortions?’

‘Could have been.’

She fixed him with her wide blue eyes and her words came with the force of someone who has thought through the issues. ‘But it’s not logical. The people who oppose abortion are pro life. That’s their argument, that a foetus is a living human being and we have no right to kill it. They’re not going to murder anyone.’

Of all the team it was Leaman who rallied to Diamond’s defence. ‘They can and they do,’ he said in his blunt style. ‘There was a case in America a couple of years ago. A Presbyterian minister shot and killed a doctor who performed abortions.’

‘A minister?’

‘He’s the best known example, but there have been others. I don’t know how they square it with the sixth commandment.’

Ingeborg stared at him for a moment, frowning, thinking. Then her expression changed and her hand went to her mouth. ‘You’re right. I remember. He killed twice. It was in Florida and he was executed for it. I can’t believe this is happening here.’

‘These are emotive issues,’ Diamond said. ‘The logic can get pushed to one side.’

Paul Gilbert spoke up. ‘I may be out of order here, but couldn’t these abortions be a coincidence?’

This struck a more harmonious note with Ingeborg. ‘I agree, Paul. If you look hard enough — and God knows we have — you’re going to find something the victims have in common. That’s light years from proving it was the reason they were killed.’

Diamond was trying to keep this from getting heated. ‘OK. Let’s see what we’ve got. Three couples. Three abortions. So far as we know, not one was medically essential. They made a choice. The Twinings because they didn’t want their careers interrupted. Delia and Danny because they had two kids already and she’d had a difficult time with the second one. The Steels for the career reason again; they weren’t yet ready to start a family.’

‘How on earth could the killer have been aware of any of this?’ Ingeborg said.

‘He’d need to know each of them extremely well,’ Gilbert said.

‘Or their gynaecologist,’ Leaman said.

Ingeborg shook her head. ‘Medical ethics.’

‘A rogue nurse, then? An anaesthetist?’

‘They aren’t told the patients’ history.’

‘A medical secretary?’ Leaman said. ‘That stuff is written up in the records.’

Ingeborg digested that and nodded. ‘I suppose you could be right about that.’

‘Staying with what we know for certain,’ Diamond said, ‘the victims are taken from their homes to some secret location and kept there. The woman is strangled and taken by night to some city park and strung up to make it look like a hanging.’

‘Execution?’ Leaman said. ‘A life for a life?’

‘Maybe. A couple of nights later, the man is hanged. In Danny’s case, it was literally a hanging.’

‘Why wait?’ Leaman said. ‘Why doesn’t he string them up together?’

‘Logistics,’ Paul Gilbert said. ‘A double hanging would be almost impossible for one man to carry out.’

‘Agreed,’ Diamond said. ‘The transportation, rigging up the gallows. Too much.’

‘So he does it in stages.’

‘Yes, and taking big risks. The majority of murderers hide their crime by disposing of the body. He could bury his victims or dump them on a refuse tip. Instead he has the weird idea of displaying them. At great risk. Why?’

‘To make some kind of point?’ Gilbert said.

‘That’s how it looks to me. The bodies are left hanging as if an old-fashioned judicial execution has taken place.’

‘Except this is in public, not behind a prison wall,’ Gilbert said.

‘There was a time when they were hanged in public.’

‘And left for people to see, like that highwayman we heard about,’ Leaman said.

Ingeborg was nodding and her voice was more animated. ‘Guv, I wasn’t willing to believe you, but this is making sense now. This is about retribution. The killer casts himself as judge and executioner for what he perceives as the taking of life.’

Diamond heard her, but his reasoning had come to a grinding halt as the intuitive part of his brain leapt ahead. A pulse throbbed in his temple. He sensed with a horrid certainty that his world was about to implode.

Meanwhile Leaman was agreeing with Ingeborg. ‘There’s a kind of logic here, even if it’s misguided.’

‘Can we save Martin Steel?’

Another of Ingeborg’s unanswerable questions. If nothing else, it underlined how little time was left.

Diamond had to function, whatever was going on in his head. He mobilised his team. ‘We find out which hospital or clinic each of them attended. If it’s the same one, we’re not whistling in the dark.’ He assigned them people to contact. Leaman would call Harold Twining; Gilbert, Agnes Tidmarsh; and Ingeborg, Amanda Williamson.

Eager to begin, they didn’t notice the state he was in. They saw him step into his office and must have assumed he was leaving them to get on, declining to breathe down their necks. In truth, he was having difficulty moving his limbs. He was in turmoil. The nightmare he dreaded had come back to haunt him. He thought he’d banished it, but here it was, more stark than before.