Питер Ловси - The Finisher

Lyncombe Hill is paved on one side only. Ten-foot walls front the road on the other side, guarding large properties, so everyone uses the pavement on the side where two-storey terraces stretch down most of the way. Hartley hadn’t got far when he met quite a procession of men and women, twelve or more, toiling up the gradient from the opposite direction, mostly a few yards apart from each other.

Diamond’s first thought was that a train had come in and they were commuters on their way up from the station. On getting closer, he decided they didn’t have the tired look of office workers. Nor were they out for an evening on the town. Soberly dressed, the women mostly in heeled shoes and skirts and the men in suits, they had a sense of purpose about them — and that was all he could tell.

Being a cat owner, as Paloma had put it, he didn’t foresee what happened next. He was so interested in the advancing cohort that he forgot about Hartley. The excited beagle was already among the skirted and trousered legs. A sudden interest in a lamppost and the cord tightened behind the heels of a frail silver-haired woman with a stick, across the shiny black toecaps of a stout man and under the heel of a younger woman in stilettos.

“Watch out,” someone shouted.

Everyone watched out, including Hartley. To give the small dog his due, he stopped and looked round at Diamond.

The elderly woman felt the cord move against the back of her ankles and screamed.

Diamond yelled, “Hartley!”

A blonde woman who wasn’t in the tangle acted swiftly. She ran forward, reached down, grabbed Hartley around the chest, scooped him up and averted mayhem.

Mortified and shaking his head, Diamond stepped forward. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” he said to the people disengaging themselves. Hartley was immobilised, but because he was off the ground the long cord of the lead had ridden up the back of the elderly woman’s legs and revealed a white lace slip. She didn’t seem to have noticed.

“Excuse me.” Diamond moved around the back of her to slacken the cord. She said something he didn’t understand. The stout man spoke, also in a foreign language.

Order was restored, the cord reeled in. Diamond reached out with his free hand to collect Hartley and found himself face to face with Olga Ivanova.

“What on earth did you find to say to her?” Paloma asked later, when the casserole was served and he’d given his account of the incident.

“I forget the actual words. I felt like a horse’s arse at the time. I can’t blame Hartley for what happened. I didn’t see the problem coming. Olga’s husband, Konstantin, is in custody on suspicion of murder and she was on her way to chapel, to pray for him or herself, I suppose. That’s where all these people were heading in their formal clothes.”

“They’ll be from the Orthodox church,” Paloma said. “They have a chapel on Lyncombe Hill they use for Vespers, or whatever the evening service is called. How did she react to you?”

“She was as surprised as I was, but she wanted to talk when she recognised me. There wasn’t time, unfortunately. She would be late for the service, so I arranged to meet her tomorrow. She’s staying with Maeve, her friend. The house in Sydney Place is off limits while ROCU look for evidence.”

“Is Konstantin your murderer, then?”

“Some people think he is.”

“But you don’t? Have they caught the wrong person? How awful.”

“It’s not so awful as you might suppose. Konstantin is a trafficker and a slaver and deserves to be banged up for the rest of his life, but I don’t believe he killed Tony Pinto.”

The next morning was a Saturday, but there was no weekend lie-in for the senior members of the murder squad. They had all been summoned to a 7 a.m. briefing. And when they heard the boss sum up his conclusions about the case in his brusque, workmanlike way, they were at first puzzled, then disbelieving, but ultimately won over. There could be no other explanation. Diamond himself had always been a pragmatist with the rare ability to see through the cleverest of deceptions. Justice was about to be served.

By 7:30, they had their orders and were on the road. Soon after 8, three unmarked cars parked in a Larkhall side street close to Bella Vista Road, where Maeve Kelly lived and Olga Ivanova was temporarily her guest. The glare of the early morning sun made the yellow stonework of the block more offensive to Diamond’s eye than he remembered. With Detective Sergeant Ingeborg Smith at his side, he walked the rest of the way to the small terraced house.

“She’ll be emotional for sure. Her life has hit the buffers,” he warned Ingeborg. “She might get physical and she’s strong, which is why I asked you to come with me.”

“How about Maeve?” Ingeborg asked. “If it comes to a fight, will she wade in?”

“They’re friends, so it’s possible, but I’d say she’s too smart to get involved.”

“Your impressions of women aren’t always reliable, guv.”

“Why did you ask, then?”

He stepped up and rang the bell.

Maeve, dressed in a blue tracksuit, opened the door. She was barefoot, blinking in the bright light, but not altogether surprised to see Diamond on her doorstep. “You’re early.”

“I don’t think I fixed a time.”

“At the weekend, eight-fifteen is early. I think she’s up and about. You’d better come in.”

As soon as they were shown into the strange, cluttered living room he wished he’d told Ingeborg in advance about the hippo collection. He didn’t want to spend time on explanations. Good thing she had the sense to say nothing. “This is Sergeant Ingeborg Smith, I should have said.”

Maeve gave Ingeborg no more than a glance. Her blue eyes, wide, tormented by her personal demons, fastened on Diamond. “Olga still doesn’t know.”

“Doesn’t know what?”

“About me and Tony in that grotty pub. Do you need to tell her?”

“I’m sure she’s got other things on her mind.”

“I feel so mean. She’s suffered enough and she’s being incredibly brave.”

“We’ll see how this develops. Before she comes in, there are a couple of questions for you. You told me you finished the race.”

“The race?”

She was so fixated on her disloyalty to Olga that she could think of nothing else.

“Get with it, Maeve. The Other Half.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t ask who else you saw during the run.”

“Thousands of people.”

“Any you know?”

“I wasn’t counting. At least a hundred.”

An answer he hadn’t expected until he remembered she was a schoolteacher and would have been cheered on by the kids she taught. “Was Tony Pinto one of them?”

Her face tightened at the mention of the name. “He started ahead of me. He would have been in a different pen. No, I didn’t spot him.”

“At some stage in the race you must have overtaken him. He finished long after you did.”

“I told you I didn’t see him.”

“The official results say so.” He was interrupted by sounds from upstairs. The cheap 1960s house had narrow joists and a thin ceiling. “Did I hear voices?”

“She talks to herself a lot,” Maeve said, but there was no disguising her own startled expression. “Poor darling, she’s going through hell. I don’t know if she heard you come in. I’ll go up and see.” Seizing the chance to cut short the questioning about Pinto, she was through the door before she finished speaking.

Diamond exchanged a disbelieving look with Ingeborg. “Sounded to me like more than one voice upstairs.”

“How many bedrooms are there?”

“In a place this size? Two, maximum.”

They both heard Maeve clearly, and then Olga’s deeper response. Two voices only. Possibly Maeve had spoken the truth about her stressed-out visitor talking to herself.