‘Whose job is it to record the finds?’
‘The British Museum. They have conservators who wash them and separate them. It’s specialised work. Coins get stuck hard together over time. Some of them can be really rare and worth a lot of money and you probably know what I’m thinking.’
We did. By now we were all thinking along the same lines. It would be all too easy for a dishonest curator to pick out some special items that never get sent to London. The metal detectorist has no idea how many coins or objects there are in a hoard, and the British Museum staff only get to see what arrives there.
I was the one who said it. ‘These short trips to European cities could be John Smith selling coins and other finds to foreign collectors. It would explain why he never makes the booking himself and why his wife collects the tickets from city break man. Vicky, you’re brilliant. I think you’ve sussed it.’
Anita had been listening to this with awe. ‘A profitable little scam. How do we prove it?’
‘With help from Francesca,’ Vicky went. ‘She’s very knowledgable and I think she may have her suspicions already. If certain rare Roman coins are starting to be traded in Europe she’ll be alerted. When we tell her about the city breaks Anita has been arranging, she can check the dates Smith is supposed to have spent in Cornwall.’
‘Proving he’s on the take is going to be difficult,’ Anita insisted.
‘Not at all,’ Vicky went. She’d had longer to think about this than Anita and me. ‘Next time John Smith arranges another city break, we do what you did before, tip off the girls at the check-in and they can speak to the customs men. He’ll be caught with the goods on him. Whatever he says, you can’t export stuff like that without a licence.’
I was like, ‘Brilliant.’
Even Anita gave her a hug.
It’s so nice that we’ve all played a part and Vicky has brought it to fruition.
The sleuthing sisters will shortly wrap up their first case.
So what’s next?
30
He was so wrapped up in the blog that he didn’t notice Ingeborg enter his office until she spoke.
‘Guv.’
‘Mm?’
‘A result.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I managed to contact the inspector who investigated the bogus college at Bradford on Avon.’
‘You did?’ For a moment he was floundering. Then the bogus college clicked into place, possibly the alma mater of the silent man in the cells. This could be the chance to prove the suspect was an illegal immigrant on a student visa. ‘What did you find out?’
‘The case came to trial at the end of last year and there was a successful prosecution. As we expected, the principal had shredded all the enrolment records, but he was still convicted and jailed for six years. They found some of the so-called students and got them to testify. But countless others disappeared off the radar.’
‘Interesting.’
‘And there’s something else. More than half of them were Iranian. He had some kind of arrangement with Tehran.’
‘Iran?’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘That would explain a lot. If you escaped from there you wouldn’t want to be sent back. What do you think they do to defectors?’
The way Ingeborg scrunched the front of her t-shirt was answer enough.
Diamond drummed his fingers on the desk-top. ‘What we need now is a Persian-English dictionary.’
‘You want to look up the word “consul”?’ she said. ‘We can do it on the internet.’
He shook his head in awe or despair at the limitless uses of the web while Ingeborg leaned across him and worked the keys. In seconds she had a website that allowed you to type in an English word and get the Persian, or Farsi, equivalent. ‘Consul’ produced some Persian script and the pronunciation ‘Konsul’.
‘Spot on,’ Diamond said. ‘Now we can tell Gull which fucking interpreter he needs.’
Ingeborg blinked. She’d missed the earlier exchange.
Without more comment Diamond moved on. ‘I finished reading the blogs.’
She locked in at once. She was staking her reputation on the account of the three sleuths being germane to the case. ‘What do you think?’
Under her earnest gaze, he couldn’t resist being playful. ‘I think you and I are in the right job. Sleuthing is cool.’
‘Do you agree it must be about Bath?’
‘Seems so.’
Her voice was charged with urgency as she told him, ‘It can’t be anywhere else, guv. I picked up any number of local references. She says somewhere that they’re living in the West Country and several times calls the place a city. The department store they met in sounds exactly like Jolly’s — the restaurant on the first floor, the cream teas with miniature scones, even the placing of the loos upstairs next to the hairdressing salon. It could all be coincidence, you may be thinking, but the details add up. When she comes out of the store and follows city break man she goes up the hill, as you would up Milsom Street.’
‘To cut this short,’ he said, ‘I think you’ll find that in blog number three she mentions delivering red roses to a lady in the Royal Crescent. There aren’t many West Country cities with that address.’
She gave a little cry of delight. And now he felt the heat of her enthusiasm. ‘You
‘You mean how seriously should we take it? I’m not about to arrest the museum curator, if that’s what you’re asking.’
‘You know very well that’s not what I’m asking.’
‘Tim, the weird husband?’
‘That may not be his real name. Well, I’m sure it can’t be. She says at the beginning she changed the names.’
‘Whoever he is, if he’s real, he ticks some of our boxes,’ he said. ‘In the army on active service, so he knows how to use a rifle. Lived in a city twenty miles down the road. Must be Wells. Drove a taxi, so he had wheels. Is held responsible for the teenager’s death.’
‘The policeman’s daughter’s death,’ she put in.
‘True, which is why he is harassed by the Wells police, or believes he is, so he moves here and starts going out at nights and being secretive and moody. There’s not much doubt that these women think he could be the sniper. Motive, opportunity and possibly the means as well if somehow he managed to hang on to his service rifle after being discharged.’ He leaned back in the chair and linked his hands around the back of his neck. He’d indulged Ingeborg enough. ‘But we arrested the sniper and he’s sitting in the cells. We have the weapon and we have the shoeprint evidence. Is there any point in looking for Tim?’
Her large, eager eyes were fixed on his. ‘You tell me. You’re the boss.’
‘Here’s a question for you, Inge, as a computer buff. All that stuff in the first blog about making it untraceable by bouncing the text around the internet through a series of volunteers — is that true?’
‘I’m sure it is. She over-simplifies, but the principle is correct. It’s known as the onion method. The text is encrypted and goes through a series of proxy handlers. Each one can tell where it comes from and where to send it, but that’s all they know, and all they’ll ever know.’
‘Then we’d have an impossible job trying to find out who wrote this thing and who the people are?’
‘Through the internet, yes.’
‘So the mighty computer does have its limitations?’ He rubbed his hands. ‘We’d have to find these sleuthing ladies through old-fashioned detective work, picking up clues about where they live. I’m almost inclined to start —
