us?’
‘Black humour.’
‘If that’s humour, I don’t get it.’
Diamond was listening keenly. To get his own thoughts straight, he had earlier run through a raft of similar possibilities. He wanted the team to reach its own consensus that the note was fundamental to the investigation.
Halliwell was sticking with his joke theory. ‘Well, it may have nothing to do with the shootings. Suppose Harry was one of those guys who never buy a round of drinks? A note like that would amuse his mates.’
‘Was he a tightwad?’ someone asked.
‘Now you’re speaking ill of the dead,’ Leaman said.
‘Why would he keep the note, anyway?’ another voice said.
Then Ingeborg spoke up. She’d driven back from Radstock in the last hour. ‘We’ve got a duty to take it seriously. Unless we can prove it’s unimportant we have to assume it’s evidence.’
‘I’m not dismissing it,’ Halliwell said. ‘I’m keeping an open mind. We don’t know how long he’s had it in his pocket.’
‘May I see?’ Ingeborg said. ‘I did the forensics course a few weeks ago.’
Smiles all round at this naked self-promotion. Even Diamond grinned.
‘No need to remind us,’ one of the older DCs said. ‘We filled in for you.’
She ignored him, well used to backchat from colleagues.
Gilbert handed her the evidence bag.
Ingeborg inspected it from several angles and then turned it over. ‘Printed on an A4 sheet in Times New Roman, font size 14. It looks very much as if the person who wrote it didn’t want to be detected. The sheet was trimmed with scissors. The top is even, but the lower cut isn’t a perfect match. A document examiner might get more information.’
Looks were exchanged. The team was more amused than annoyed by the Sherlock Holmes impersonation. Ingeborg was popular, for all her striving.
She hadn’t finished. ‘Latent fingerprints may be the best hope, but we must allow that at least five different people have handled it since it was printed.’
‘Five?’ Halliwell’s eyebrows arched in surprise.
‘The person who printed it, Harry himself, the mortuary person who removed it from his pocket, Emma and our esteemed leader.’
The spotlight was back on Diamond, not renowned for handling evidence to the highest forensic standards.
‘How do you know I didn’t use tweezers?’ he said. No one gave this a moment’s credence, so he continued, ‘To be truthful, I didn’t. Inge is right. If there are prints, they’ll include a bunch of extras on top of the ones that interest us. I don’t expect any miracles from forensics. However, Inge is also correct in saying we can’t ignore this as a likely death threat.’
‘Meaning the random killer theory could be wrong,’ Leaman said. ‘Jack Gull could be barking up the wrong tree.’
‘And the media and most of the public,’ Ingeborg said.
‘Right.’ Diamond folded his arms. ‘That was hard going. Are you lot still half asleep, or what?’
‘Are you going to tell him, guv?’ Halliwell asked.
‘Tell Gull? When I do, I know what he’ll say.’
‘It’s a red herring.’
‘Except Jack will put it a touch more forcefully.’ He took a look around the room and made sure he missed no one on the team. ‘Are you with me now, all of you? The note appears to show that the killer knew Harry. If the other two victims received similar notes, he knew them as well. If so, our job has just got a whole lot simpler.’
‘Simpler?’ Halliwell said.
‘We’ve narrowed the search.’
‘Someone with a grudge against all the victims?’
‘Who knew each of them, tracked them down and murdered them.’
‘In three different towns?’
The last comment was supposed to sound a sceptical note, but Diamond treated it as support. ‘Right. And there’s another factor. It wasn’t just a matter of shooting at any cop who walked by. The sniper knew when these individuals were going on duty.’
‘That begs some tough questions,’ Ingeborg said. ‘He’d need inside knowledge.’
‘One of our own?’ Halliwell said in rampant disbelief. ‘A cop?’
Murmurs of dissent rumbled around the incident room. Suddenly the looks Diamond was getting weren’t complimentary. They weren’t just disbelieving. They were unfriendly. One cop killing another was too much to swallow.
‘It has to be faced,’ he said, and he’d had an hour or so longer to come to terms with it. ‘Cop, PCSO or civilian support staff. Who else sees the duty rosters?’
The murmurs turned to a buzz of angry voices talking among themselves. Diamond became anxious. He was in serious danger of losing control. In his long years of service here, he’d not had many run-ins with the team. This hostile reception was ominous.
He believed they would agree with him when they were over the first shock. All they needed was longer to think this through, as he had. Better move on, he decided.
He had to shout to be heard. ‘Ingeborg!’
The noise reduced, giving way to interest in whether Diamond’s blue-eyed girl had just said something really over the top and the old ogre had picked it up.
Ingeborg glared back at him as if he were recruiting for the devil.
He made an effort to sound reasonable. ‘We haven’t heard from you about your visits to Wells and Radstock. How did you get on?’
Her intake of breath sounded like a blowtorch. ‘I’m trying to get over what I just heard. It’s beyond belief that any police officer would gun down three of our own. If this is the price of taking that scrap of paper seriously, I’m not sure I’m with you any more.’
‘You don’t like it, I don’t either,’ he said, appealing to everyone in the room. ‘I could be out on a limb here, but as you said a moment ago we have a duty to investigate. Now, Inge, do us the favour of reporting back, as I asked.’
She tossed her head, more to suppress the outrage she felt than in defiance. ‘There’s not much to add to what we have on file. I spent last evening with some of the lads from Wells CID. They’ve had longer to come to terms with all this than we have and they’re in no doubt that it was a random shooting.’
Nudge, nudge, he thought. He could hear murmurs of approval for the Wells lads.
‘You’ve made your point. Now what did you pick up?’
‘Only snippets. Ossy Hart came to Wells as a probationer and had just four years of service there.’
‘Where did he train?’
‘Foundation training at Portishead. Before that he was a PE teacher.’
‘In Minehead. We know this already.’
‘Sorry I spoke,’ Ingeborg said, still fractious.
‘Go on. I’m impatient — as if that wasn’t bloody obvious.’
‘I was going to say that the Wells bunch liked Ossy. He ticked most of the boxes. Reliable, good timekeeper, very fit, so hardly a day off duty, good at dealing with the public, always well turned out.’
‘Which are the boxes he didn’t tick?’
She reflected on that for a moment. ‘He was a tad too ambitious for some of them. It showed. He was looking to get promoted as soon as he could.’
‘Promoted? He’d only just completed his probation.’
‘Two years, guv.’ There was more than a hint of protest in the remark. Ingeborg was a high flyer herself, looking to get a sergeant’s stripes soon.
‘Okay,’ Diamond said. ‘I can see it would rankle with the others. What else?’
