‘Never.’
‘You’d better believe it, Peter. This is a major cock-up. I’ve had my ear chewed by the Head of Operations. A raid like this doesn’t come cheap, you know, and highly trained officers aren’t amused at being bussed to Claverton in the small hours to pick up a load of plastic toys.’
‘They looked real to me.’
Georgina exhaled sharply. ‘The whole point of replicas is that they’re made to look real. They’re constructed with minute attention to detail. Even the weight and balance match the original. But the fact remains that they are not the genuine article. It was a wild-goose chase, a total shambles.’
‘Aren’t imitation guns still illegal?’ he said, clutching at straws.
‘Not on private property they’re not. Brandish one in the street and you’re committing an offence, but these are strictly for use in war games within the walls of Mr. Nuttall’s estate. He’s entitled to own them and play soldiers with them and so are his members, so long as they don’t venture outside.’
He clutched the back of his neck in despair. Nothing was going right.
Georgina was relentless. ‘Because of you, I’ve spent most of the morning grovelling. Headquarters are incandescent. Cyril Nuttall has been onto me several times threatening legal action for invasion of privacy, damage to property and wrongful arrest.’
‘Damage? What damage?’
‘His wrought-iron gates were bulldozed and his front door was battered in. He puts the cost at over two thousand pounds.’
‘Didn’t they find anything incriminating? He must have some real guns on the premises to use on the range.’
‘All legal and licensed and properly stored. He’s squeaky clean and we’re up to our necks in ordure. Thank you very much, Peter.’
An embarrassing story can’t be suppressed. All of Manvers Street knew of it. Downstairs in the incident room, everyone was waiting for Diamond to show his face again. Jack Gull was grinning from ear to ear.
‘Here comes the man of the moment. Looking for a new job, Peter? Something in plastics?’
Ignoring them all, Diamond stepped across the room to his office and closed the door, careful not to slam it and let them know how he felt. The only way he knew of surmounting the ridicule was to apply himself to the unanswered questions that remained. He reached for the phone and got the number of the forensic science company who were examining the rifle recovered from the river.
‘Any results on the G36 yet?’
‘Who is this?’ the voice on the line asked.
‘Peter Diamond, Bath CID. I’m the SIO on the sniper enquiry.’
‘Diamond. Aren’t you the chap who set up the dawn raid on Soldier Nuttall’s plastic gun collection?’
His knuckles went white squeezing the phone. ‘How the hell did you hear about that?’
‘I had Jack Gull pestering me for results only ten minutes ago. Amusing story. Look, we’ve worked miracles already cleaning up the gun and we’ve done some test firings, but we haven’t finished analysing them. We understand the urgency, the custody clock ticking and all that. We’ll let you know as soon as we have anything definite. You’ll be pleased to hear one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a real gun. Not one of your plastic jobs.’
He could hear faint giggling before he ended the call.
Stay positive.
He opened the door and asked Ingeborg to come in.
‘What’s happening with the man in custody?’ he asked her. He wasn’t going to ask Gull and present him with the opening for yet another clever dick remark.
At least Ingeborg was straight-faced. ‘He still hasn’t said a word yet. Your theory that he’s an illegal immigrant is looking good.’
‘There must be a link with Westwood or Avoncliff or Bradford on Avon. Else why would he have holed up there?’
‘Jack Gull says it was close to Bath and handy for the third shooting.’
‘I don’t buy that,’ Diamond said. ‘Have they traced the owner of the motorcycle?’
Alert as always, Ingeborg had already checked with the DVLC at Swansea. ‘His name is Hamish Macintosh.’
‘Doesn’t sound like an asylum seeker.’ His mouth twitched into a smile. ‘Unless he escaped from Scotland.’
She still couldn’t rise to a shaft of humour from Diamond. ‘He’s from Shepton Mallet. I’ve spoken to him on the phone. He lives in a thatched cottage there. The bike was stolen some time in the last five months from the stone shed at the back, along with his helmet and leathers. Hamish was away in Argentina on an engineering job and didn’t report it missing until he got back a few days ago.’
‘Shepton Mallet is right in our territory, right in the sniper’s territory, come to that. How do you start a motorbike without a key?’
‘They use pigtail leads to bypass the ignition. It worked well for the thief because the bike was taxed and registered and no one knew it was stolen property.’
Diamond began fleshing out his theory with this new information. ‘Wells, Radstock, Shepton Mallet — three towns southwest of here and no more than ten miles from each other. This is where our friends the profilers with their criminal maps would be getting excited. He was operating within quite a small area.’
‘Avoncliff where he was caught isn’t far off from those places, fifteen miles at most.’
‘You’re right, Inge. Bradford on Avon, Becky Addy Wood — all very local. A motorbike would be useful to any criminal. Fast, easy to manoeuvre, even over rough ground, and he was well disguised in the helmet.’
‘I haven’t seen him,’ Ingeborg said. ‘Is it obvious he’s a foreigner?’
‘Not at all. He could pass for British. You can’t go by appearances.’
She lifted an eyebrow. ‘But you’re very confident he’s an illegal?’
‘From how he reacted when I mentioned a consulate, yes.’
‘He won’t be from one of the EU countries, then. Could he have escaped from a detention centre? Some do.’
He shook his head. ‘I’ve already been over that with Jack Gull. Everyone who goes into one of those places is photographed and fingerprinted. He’d be in the system and he isn’t.’
‘So he probably arrived in a container and is anxious not to be caught. Why start shooting policemen when you want to keep a low profile?’
‘I’ll say this. The guy we’re holding appears to be hyped up, angry and fearful at the same time.’
‘Angry at being roughed up by Jack Gull?’
‘Much more than that.’
‘Angry at being reeled in?’
‘That’s part of it, I’m sure. And fearful of being sent back. He got very agitated when I said his consulate must be informed. He doesn’t expect sympathy from his own government.’
‘Perhaps he committed crimes there.’
‘Could be. Or it’s just that they’re repressive. Someone like that, desperate not to be picked up by the police, decides to arm himself. He’s served in the army in his own country and knows how to use a gun, so he buys one from someone in the criminal underworld, in Bristol, say, where we know there’s a trade in weapons. He steals the bike and starts to feel more confident. He’s got wheels and he’s got an assault rifle. It’s a short jump from defending yourself to going on the offensive. He hates the police so he begins murdering us.’
‘That’s an awful lot to infer from one angry guy in custody.’
He gave a smile that admitted as much. ‘Lost faith in my powers of reasoning, have you?’
‘I don’t know about reasoning,’ she said. ‘If I put up a theory like that, you’d be saying unkind things about feminine intuition.’
‘Never.’
‘How about the West Country connection?’
‘Here’s an idea I’ve been mulling over,’ he said. ‘There was a lot in the papers last year about private colleges
