answer to me,' said Diamond. 'Now Inspector Hargreaves will read out the teams.'
He was content to let others carry out the interviews. An act of mercy to the witnesses, given the mood he was in. Instead, he decided to walk the short distance across Churchill Bridge and up the Lower Bristol Road as far as Oak Street to look at Sid Towers s flat. He asked Julie to come with him. On the way he thanked her for her contribution to the briefing. 'I was too heavy, even by my standards,' he admitted. 'You got the thing back to what it should be. I don't know what came over me. Lack of sleep, I suppose.'
'You're not at your best conducting meetings,' she was bold enough to tell him.
'Was I an ogre, Julie?'
'Can I be frank?'
'You generally are.'
'You were appalling.'
'That bad?'
'The way you jumped on that new man. He was only trying to answer one of your questions. He didn't know that the form is to stay quiet until you've had your say.'
'He will in future, won't he?'
'And I know there's a history between you and John Wigfull, but you didn't have to hammer him in front of his team. They know what he's like without you pointing it out.'
'I'm not running the Women's Institute.'
'A pity. They'd sort you out in no time.'
He laughed. 'You're probably right, Julie. My wife was a Brown Owl, and she keeps me in order.'
She said, 'Since I've gone out on a limb already, I might as well say it. You'd get more input from the team if you weren't so domineering. They don't like to speak out.'
'Are they scared of me?' he asked, genuinely surprised.
'I don't think you have any idea how stroppy you sound.'
He stared over the bridge along the gray ribbon of water. 'If you want the truth, Julie, none of them is as scared as I am. Remember, I've been off for a couple of years. I don't know everybody anymore. I call a meeting, and it's a minefield. I can give instructions. I can interview a suspect. Put me in front of a crowd of faces wanting to see how I function as top dog, and I won't say I panic, but my insides don't like it.'
'Well, it didn't show this morning.'
The traffic halted conversation as they stepped toward the mills and warehouses, long since converted into the engineering and construction businesses that line this stretch of the Lower Bristol Road. Diamond knew the area from the days when he lived on Wellsway. On a fine day, or when his car was giving trouble, he would come this way into the city, down the steps from Wells Road and under the railway viaduct, passing the arches where the winos and derelicts spent the night. It amused him to think that some of these same arches once housed a police station. There was also once a mortuary for the storage of corpses dragged from the Avon.
Most of the Lower Bristol Road was an eyesore that some city planner would want to flatten before long, but there was still a dignity to the mills with their wooden hoist-covers projecting above the street, just clear of the container lorries that rumbled past. This was Bath's oldest surviving industrial landscape, and it was pleasing that the buildings were in use, even if the quays behind them no longer functioned.
To their right was the Bayer Building, a tall red-brick structure more ornate than the others, with arched windows and Bath stone trimmings. Seeing an opportunity to strike a lighter mood, Diamond said, 'Bet you can't tell me what this was built for.'
Julie gave it a look. 'Something to do with engineering?'
'In a sense, yes.'
'Plumbing?'
'Stays.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'Corsets. Charles Bayer was the corset king. Our great-grandmothers had a lot to thank him for.'
'Questionable,' said Julie. 'Some of them suffered agonies.'
'Ah, but he also invented a little item that no woman should be without.'
'What's that?'
'The safety pin.'
Directly opposite the Bayer Building was the street where Sid Towers, had lived until so recently. Presumably it had once housed the corset workers. Directly below the viaduct-it actually ran under one of the arches-and so close to the main artery to Bristol, Oak Street was not a place many would have chosen to reside in, except from necessity.
The houses were on one side only; a scrap merchant had the other side, with his business concentrated in the arches. The sound of metal-cutting shrilled above the noise of jugger-nauts from the end of the street. Several houses appeared to be empty. One or two presented a trim front, but the majority had surrendered. They were two-story terraced dwellings in local stone stained black at the top by coal dust. Remarkably, considering how small they were, several had been converted into flats.
They had to go under the arch to find Sid's flat, past some children throwing sticks for a dog that looked as if it should have been muzzled.
'This is the number I was given,' Diamond said. There was nothing so helpful as a set of marked bell pushes.
'You did bring the key?' Julie queried.
He produced it from his pocket and opened the front door. 'He lived upstairs, I gather.'
The house they had let themselves into smelled of cat, and the probable offender bolted out of sight behind some rolls of lino at the far end of the hall. The stairs were bare and speckled with pink paint. But when they opened the door at the top, Towers's home turned out to be a barrack room ready for inspection. A narrow passage carpeted in red had four doors leading off. The first, the bedroom, was in immaculate order, the clothes put away, the duvet squared at each corner. The furniture may have been cheap and functional, but everything was dusted.
'The sort of place that depresses me the minute I enter it,' grumbled Diamond. 'No photographs, no pictures on the wall. Where's the evidence of the man who lived here? It could be a bloody hotel.' He opened a wardrobe door and looked at the jackets hanging there and the shirts folded and stacked as if in a shop.
Julie said, 'Almost as if he knew he was about to die.'
'Not even a copy of yesterday's paper by the bed.'
'If he buys one, you can bet it was tidied away before he left the house,' said Julie.
'I get a sense of a stunted life when I see a place like this.'
'An organized life doesn't have to be stunted,' Julie commented. 'He put things away, that's all.'
'No use to us.'
They looked into the kitchen across the passage and still found nothing out of place. The contents of the fridge were meager, but neatly positioned. There was a microwave oven and an electric hob, each spotless.
'Is this obsessive, would you say?' Diamond asked.
The living room was slightly more promising. It had one wall lined to the ceiling with white bookshelves, the books mostly without wrappers, though some had transparent covers and evidently came from libraries. There was a small television set and an armchair facing it. A Victorian writing desk interested Diamond. He opened the front and was gratified to find various things stacked in the pigeonholes: a checkbook, some payslips, electricity invoices, an address book, a writing pad and envelopes, and some second-class postage stamps.
'He liked his John Dickson Carr,' said Julie, standing in front of the books. 'He's got at least forty here. The other writer he collected has a similar name in a way-Carter Dickson. I wonder if there's a connection.'
'Does it matter?' said Diamond, leafing through the address book. It was full of blank pages. The man seemed to have no friends or family worth listing.
Julie removed a Carter Dickson from the shelf. 'The Reader Is Warned. Good title.' She opened it. 'Written in 1939-before the war. So were the Dickson Carrs, weren't they? When was The Hollow Man published?'
'Years ago. In the thirties.'
'Are these books valuable, do you think? Was he a collector?'
'What are you thinking-that some valuable first edition provided the motive? Hey, that's an idea.'
