‘I can’t disagree with you after all that’s happened, but they strike me as the end of civilisation as I know it, all those idiots walking along the street with their hands to their ears broadcasting to all and sundry.’
‘Peter, that’s not the point. Mobiles have their advantages.’
‘I haven’t discovered any yet.’
‘Like being in contact.’
‘I don’t always want to be in contact. Last night I didn’t want to be in contact. When your phone went this morning I was bricking it in case my colleagues had traced me to your house.’
‘They hadn’t.’
He nodded and smiled. ‘That’s why I don’t use a mobile.’
‘You don’t see it, do you?’ she said with amusement. ‘When someone calls you on a mobile they don’t know where you are. If you want to stay over with me another time — as I hope you will — you can make calls and take calls and they’ll assume you’re speaking from home. For a man with a complicated private life it’s the indispensable aid.’
The man with a complicated private life cradled his chin as if deep in thought. ‘There’s a flaw somewhere, but you’re very persuasive. And I had better go into work. They’ll be cockahoop to find out how I got on at the theatre.’
‘I could tell them,’ Paloma said. ‘You’re almost as good a drama critic as you are in bed.’
‘I’m not sure how to take that.’
‘It’s a compliment. When can I see you again?’
‘One day next week?’
‘Early next week — yes?’
23
A gainst all his expectation, no one asked how his theatre visit had gone. Frustrating. He’d have told them loftily to buy the evening edition of the Chronicle. All he got was the usual ‘Morning, guv’.
Better apply himself to the main job. On the pad on his desk he’d written KNOTS? as a reminder of what he’d heard from Jim Middleton. But he didn’t need reminding. The slip knot employed by Danny Geaves to hang himself was a puzzle. All the evidence suggested that Danny strangled his ex-partner Delia before stringing her up on the swing to give the appearance of a hanging. He’d used a conventional noose for her. So why use a different knot to hang himself?
Danny’s curious behaviour couldn’t be considered in isolation. The Twining couple had employed a noose. Ingeborg was right about the Twinings. There were enough points in common to make it a racing certainty that there was a link with the deaths of Delia and Danny.
‘The obvious explanation for the deaths of the Twinings is a suicide pact,’ he said to Halliwell and Leaman, freshly updated on the mystery of the slip knot. ‘They became convinced that they must die. Let’s leave aside the reason for the moment. The Twinings did it as planned, or nearly so. They hanged themselves in the conventional way except that the man delayed his suicide by a couple of days.’
‘Just like Danny,’ Leaman said.
‘But there’s a difference.’
‘Danny murdered her,’ Halliwell said.
‘Apparently, yes, but I had something else in mind.’
‘They were no longer a couple,’ Leaman said. ‘She’d found a new partner, so they wouldn’t have made a pact.’
‘You’ve got it. Now try this for size. Danny — like the Twinings — has this death wish and for some reason believes Delia should go with him. She agrees to meet him without realising what is being planned. She resists and he strangles her. Quick change of plan. It was supposed to be a hanging, so he fakes it. Three days later — just like John Twining — he hangs himself.’
‘Using a slip knot,’ Halliwell said. ‘Why use a different knot?’
‘He should have used the slip knot on Delia,’ Leaman said. ‘Then we might not have found out she was strangled.’
Diamond was thinking back to the morning he’d led the party up that steep climb in Bathford. ‘When we found the cave where he was sleeping rough there were fragments of a newspaper in the ashes of that fire.’
‘The Mail,’ Halliwell said.
‘For the day before he died.’
Neither of them had twigged.
Diamond said, ‘I gave a press conference the day before that and the nationals all carried the story. That issue of the Mail told Danny we were treating Delia’s death as murder.’
‘Are you thinking he read the report and decided to top himself, guv?’
‘Come off it, Keith. I’m more subtle than that, aren’t I? Danny was a man with a mission, to stage a double suicide, just as Twining did. He already planned to top himself. What really upset him was reading in the paper that we’d worked out that Delia was murdered.’
‘He’d messed up,’ Leaman said.
‘Precisely. And why had he messed up? Because the original ligature mark, the strangling mark, showed on her neck. If he’d used a slip knot to suspend the body from the swing he would very likely have got away with it. So what was his thinking at this point? He was about to hang himself anyway, so why not confuse everyone by using a slip knot? Then we might assume he, too, was killed in the same way as Delia, strangled first and then suspended from the viaduct to make it look like a hanging.’
‘What would that achieve?’ Halliwell said. ‘I thought this was all about making it look like suicide.’
Leaman said, ‘You’ve lost me, guv.’
‘Too subtle,’ Halliwell said with a faint grin.
‘Fair enough,’ Diamond said. He’d begun doubting himself even as he outlined the theory. ‘But there is an explanation. Got to be. OK, let’s deal with what we do know. Danny strangled Delia and there’s some kind of link with the Twining couple. We must put more effort into finding that link. Did they all belong to some weird sect? Did they meet?’
‘The Twinings didn’t have many friends,’ Leaman said. ‘The brother said they were too busy with their careers. What was it? If you want to be a success in life you don’t have much to do with other people unless you’re making money out of them.’
‘That brother’s a cynic,’ Diamond said. ‘John Twining was an architect, so he must have had clients. And his wife Christine had a top job with M amp;S. She would have met plenty of people through her job.’
‘Not the likes of Danny and Delia,’ Halliwell said. ‘He was on the social and she was bringing up two kids.’
‘I went to see Delia’s mother, Amanda,’ Diamond said. ‘She seemed to think Danny worked from home on the computer and got some kind of income. He was interested in wildlife, bats in particular.’
‘A world away from the Twinings,’ Leaman said.
Diamond sighed. ‘Yes, and Amanda told me he didn’t have many friends.’
‘The landlord at Freshford said the same. Danny was a loner.’
‘There must be a link and it’s the key to everything,’ Diamond insisted. ‘We’re going to have to dig back two or three years to when the Twinings were alive and Danny and Delia lived together. That’s the critical time. I’ll talk to Amanda again. I doubt if we’ll get much more out of Harold Twining, but Amanda must remember something.’
With that decided, he turned to the plan to intercept the ram raid on Sunday night. The swoop was still on. The two robbers, Romney and Jacob, were picking up the converted Land Rover from Jackman on Sunday morning. It would be fitted with a bug and monitored right up to the moment of the raid.
‘Do we know the shop?’ he asked.
‘You want it on a plate, guv,’ Halliwell said. ‘No, they’re keeping that to themselves.’
‘But you reckon we can pursue the Land Rover without giving ourselves away?’
