who didn't know her at all, or some deluded crazy person.'
After the shooting there was the added ordeal of being questioned about his own movements. Peter Diamond shrugs and says, 'It had to be faced. I'd have pulled in the guy myself, whoever was the husband. You always take a long look at the husband in a case like this.' But if he was at work in Bath Police Station, surely he had a perfect alibi? 'Actually, no. On that morning I went straight to my office and worked alone. There was no one who could vouch for me.' He adds wryly, 'I may look big and threatening, but off duty I'm a baa-lamb. I think I convinced them in the end that I wouldn't have dreamed of harming my wife.'
Peter Diamond's fiftieth birthday came four weeks ago. 'I didn't do anything to mark it - but then I wouldn't have done much in normal circumstances. Oddly enough I discussed the birthday with Steph the night before she was killed, and persuaded her I didn't want a so-called surprise party with old cronies from years back. That's not my style. We would have gone out for a meal together, Steph and I, and had a glass or two.' He is in regular contact with Curtis McGarvie and has co-operated fully with the murder squad, even to having his home searched and his wife's private letters and diary taken away for examination. He is as puzzled as the murder squad over the diary entries mentioning somebody called T'. 'This must be the killer,' he says, 'and the odds are strong that the letter 'T' was meant to mislead, but the diary mentions phone calls and an appointment in Royal Victoria Park, which Steph hardly ever visited, so it has to be the best clue we have. What foxes me completely is that she didn't say a word about going to the park that morning. My wife wasn't secretive. She was the most open of people. I find it hard to accept there was something hidden in her life, but what other explanation is there?'
Peter Diamond continues his work at Bath Police Station, busying himself on other cases, trying to block out the knowledge that the incident room for his wife's murder is just along the corridor. Shortly before the shooting he gave evidence in the murder trial of Jake Carpenter, a notorious Bristol gang leader who was given a life sentence for the sadistic killing of a young prostitute. The possibility of some kind of revenge killing by Carpenter's associates was a strong theory early in the case. It has still not been ruled out entirely, but intensive enquiries in Bristol have so far proved negative. Diamond himself agrees that it was probably a mistake to link the killing to the Carpenter conviction. 'My own reaction was the same as the squad's,' he says, 'but with hindsight we may have leapt to a premature conclusion and missed other leads. The first forty-eight hours in any inquiry are crucial.'
TENSION
They work in separate offices on the same floor of Bath Police Station in Manvers Street, these two experienced detectives. Curtis McGarvie is the outsider, the man drafted in from headquarters. He is at his desk by 8 a.m. There is an air of tension in the incident room and it isn't just the pressures of the case. For this should be Peter Diamond's domain. He has led the murder squad for eight years. McGarvie refuses to let sentiment trouble him. He is a gritty Glaswegian, thin as a thistle, with deep-set, watchful eyes, a professional to the tips of his toes, focused and unshakeable. 'If I were this killer on the run, I'd be sweating. I wouldn't want Curtis on my trail,' says a colleague at Avon & Somerset Headquarters who knows McGarvie well. He has a long string of successful prosecutions to his credit. But his team in Bath are Diamond's men and women, loyal to their chief, wanting passionately to achieve the breakthrough, yet unfamiliar with their temporary boss.
Meanwhile Peter Diamond sits alone in his office up the corridor sifting through other 'stickers', trying to give them his full concentration. He is a big, abrasive man who speaks his mind without fear or favour. Few in Bath's CID have escaped the rough edge of his tongue at some point in their careers. But right now there is a strong current of sympathy for this beleaguered man excluded from the action through no fault of his own. If commitment to the cause counts for anything, the killer of Stephanie Diamond will soon be found.
22
Reading the
For obvious reasons he'd kept quiet about the cringe-making incident of the revolver the search party had dug up, and he was glad McGarvie had not mentioned it either. His feelings about that gun were complex. There was a basinful of guilt. He deeply regretted being so stupid as to hang on to the damned thing all those years. It pained him that Steph had found it and been so troubled that she buried it. He was sick to the stomach that her last communication to him - a beyond-the-grave message - had to be a kind of rebuke, for all its sensitive phrasing. But he had to be grateful she'd written the note and buried it with the gun. One last rescue act. She had removed a great burden of suspicion from his shoulders. Imagine McGarvie's fury, just when he felt he'd got the sensational evidence he needed, at finding the note that put Peter Diamond in the clear. The counter-theory about Diamond finding the gun and murdering Steph with it and then reburying it had been the sophistry of a desperate, disappointed man.
Among those theories listed in the newspaper there was no hint of the suspicion about Steph's former husband, Dixon-Bligh. He'd given away nothing on that front because it was a line of enquiry he was pursuing alone. He didn't want Steph's past life dissected by the press or the police unless it proved absolutely unavoidable. If Dixon-Bligh or anyone else had tried to blackmail her, he would root out the dusty old secrets himself - and he didn't expect they amounted to much.
One question the gently probing reporter hadn't put to him: was it bloody-mindedness that set him against McGarvie at every turn? Bloody-mindedness? It's not so simple as that, ma'am. It's force of circumstance. I'm under an embargo, you see, orders from above to leave the detective work to the murder squad. But don't you feel bitter about all the horseshit thrown at you by McGarvie, the false charges, the invasion of your privacy? I've got broad shoulders. I can take it. Or the abysmal lack of progress in the investigation? It's a brute of a case, my dear. But if I'm totally honest, if you were to tease the truth from me, I'd be forced to admit that, yes, there could be a tiny chip on these broad shoulders of mine: I hate the man.
In the next week, doggedly pursuing his own line of enquiry, he took another trip to London and looked up Dixon-Bligh - or tried to. There was a twist in the plot, and not a welcome one. The house in Westway Terrace was empty. The boxes and the few bits of furniture had gone from the front room. A neighbour said she hadn't seen the gent for weeks. The Post Office had no forwarding address. Dixon-Bligh had done another flit.
* * *
The trains on the Portsmouth line to Waterloo had run better than usual lately. The winter problems of frozen points and leaves on the line had meant a few delays and cancellations earlier in the year, but compared to previous years the service was improving. Whether the credit went to Mother Nature or the railway companies was much debated by the regular commuters. But as long as the wheels continued to roll along the tracks it was all good-humoured stuff.
Then one September morning when it was still too early for frosts or leaves, an 'incident' (unspecified, except it was 'up the line') brought everything to a prolonged halt. People don't like sitting in stationary trains for any length of time. For one thing they have places to go to, appointments to keep; and for another they feel unsafe.
There's that troublesome suspicion that the longer your train waits the more likely it is that another will come along behind and smash into it. There are signals to prevent such catastrophes, but signals have been known to fail.
