Still the brother was silent.
'PC Plod could have handled the case,' Diamond pressed on recklessly. 'Okay, Celia and the other women stood outside the court giving me lip, and one of them clawed my face, but they know it wasn't down to me. Your brother Jake is a stupid, sadistic killer.'
'Still family,' Danny said in a low voice, without challenging the statement.
'What's happening to Janie, then?'
'Who?'
'His girlfriend. The woman who marked me.'
Danny shrugged. He appeared to have no interest in Janie. Or what she had done to Diamond.
Diamond reminded him, 'She was wanting to visit Jake. She said you and Des monopolised all the visits.'
'She'd better piss off back to London,' Danny said. 'She's nothing to Jake.'
'You haven't spoken to her since the trial?'
Danny shook his head.
'Is it possible Janie felt so strongly about the case that she fired the shots?'
'Don't ask me.'
'I'm trying to get your opinion, Danny. You said if the family was out for revenge you wouldn't target my wife. You'd go for me. Well, Janie isn't family. Is this a woman's way of setding the score? Does she have a gun?'
Danny turned to face him. 'You're boring me. Why don't you leave?'
'Maybe I should.'
He'd got as much or as little from this member of the Carpenter family as he was likely to. The trick in making home visits to known criminals is judging when to leave.
13
Ten days went by.
Ten more days in the process of grieving, this grudging acceptance of the stark reality. One day he decided he would take all Steph's clothes to a charity shop because that was what she would have wished (so long as it was not the one where she worked). He carried the dresses downstairs and draped them across the back seat of the car so as not to crease them. If the helpers in the shop decided to throw them in a corner in the back room or stuff them into plastic sacks, so be it. He wouldn't do it himself. Then, in a fit of sentiment he picked out one of her favourites, the fuchsia-coloured silk one she'd worn to the theatre last time they'd gone, carried it upstairs again and returned it to the wardrobe. It should have gone with the rest. There was no logical reason to keep it. He simply couldn't part with it yet. And when he looked at the other clothes, he couldn't be separated from them either. He drove around with those dresses on the back seat for days, reaching back to touch them at moments when he felt really down. You're a pathetic old idiot, he told himself when he finally removed them from the car and put them back on their hangers.
Of course he tried immersing himself in work, but that was fraught with problems he hadn't experienced before. The danger of working in isolation, he learned the hard way, is that you are forced to rely on hunches and theories. In a CID team, you have information coming in all the time, ninety-five per cent of it useless, but at least your brain is occupied reading reports and statements and checking the records. In the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry they had so many statements on file that the floor of the incident room started to cave in. The storage problem is less in this computer age, more a matter of pressing the right keys. McGarvie could cross-reference all known cases of murder using .38 revolvers; shootings in public parks; suspicious deaths of police and their families. He could analyse statements, classify the long list of objects found in Victoria Park and Charlotte Street Car Park, go through years of Peter Diamond's case notes looking for people with grudges. Bloody McGarvie had plenty to occupy him.
This parallel investigation of Diamond's had to be run on a wing and a prayer. A certain amount leaked out of the incident room, of course, through old colleagues, and he barged in there repeatedly on the flimsiest of pretexts, but it was obvious the team were under instructions not to tell him things.
One afternoon, in a quiet corner of the canteen, Keith Halliwell confided to him, 'The lads are on your side, guv, even if it doesn't look like it. There's a lot of anger about the way you're being treated.'
'I'm not looking for sympathy, Keith. A result is all I want.'
'It isn't sympathy. Well, you know what I mean. We do feel for you. Of course we do. This is something else. Personality.'
'The Big Mac?'
'He doesn't speak for the rest of us. We want you to know that.'
'He's doing the same as I would. I'm a hard-nosed git when I'm on a case, as you well know.'
In truth, he wasn't impervious to sympathy, or support from his colleagues. However, he would trade it for hard facts on where the investigation was leading - if anywhere. Too many theories are a pain. They keep you awake at night. They're difficult to disprove without the back-up of the murder squad.
His only back-up was the snout, Bernie Hescott, and he hadn't anything to offer when Diamond drove to Bristol for the fourth time and looked him up in the Rummer. 'I'm working on it, Mr D. Got more feelers out than a family of bugs. I'm not sleeping at nights.'
'Join the club.'
'Give me another week and I might have something for you.'
'This isn't what I came to hear, Bernie.'
'It's all the people I have to see.'
