with a couple of expensive white enamel fillings, varnished fingernails and toenails, a vaccination mark just below the knee and no operation scars, the mark of a wedding ring on the appropriate finger, and, yes, she was sexually experienced. Aren't you going to make notes or something? This is the distillation of twenty years wearing a rubber apron, I'll have you know.'
'Not pregnant, then?'
'No. The swelling of the abdomen was due entirely to the putrefactive gases.'
'Can you say whether she has borne a child?'
'Unlikely is as much as I'm prepared to say.'
'How long had she been in the lake?'
'What sort of weather have we been having? I've been too busy to notice.'
'Pretty warm the last fortnight.'
'At least a week, then.' Merlin put up his hands defensively. 'And don't even ask which day she died.' defensively. 'And don't even ask 'Within the last two weeks?'
'Probably. I suppose you've checked your missing persons?'
Diamond gave a nod. 'Nobody fits.'
Merlin beamed. 'You wouldn't have wanted it so easy, would you? This is when your technology is put to the test. All those incredibly expensive computers I keep reading about in Police Review.'
Diamond allowed him to make his dig and get away with it. He felt he couldn't do otherwise, knowing, as he did, the conditions that Merlin and his colleagues were sometimes obliged to work in: public mortuaries with inadequate space, lighting, ventilation, plumbing and drainage. Mortuary building would never be high on the list of social priorities. Mind, there were points Diamond wouldn't mind making himself about pay and conditions of work in the police, but not to Jack Merlin. So he simply repeated in a tone of disparagement, 'Computers?'
Merlin grinned. 'You know what I mean. Major Inquiry Systems.'
'Major Inquiry Systems, my arse. Common sense and door-stepping. That's how we get results.'
'Apart from the odd tip-off,' said Merlin and added quickly, 'So what will you do about this woman? Issue an artist's impression? A photo wouldn't bear much resemblance to the way she was before she got into the water.'
'Probably. First I want to collect any evidence that's going.'
'What sort?'
'Obviously we're searching for the clothes.'
'At the scene?'
Diamond shook his head. 'In this case the scene is unimportant. The body floated there. I gather from what you said that it must originally have sunk to the bottom, and later risen, as they do, unless they're weighted.'
'Correct.'
'So it came to the surface and floated with the breeze across the lake, We have to search the perimeter.'
'How many miles is that?'
'Ten, near enough.'
'That represents a lot of cancelled leave, I should think.'
'It's a sod. But we may get lucky. The lake is popular with anglers and picnickers. I'll be putting out an appeal to the public on TV and radio. If we cart pinpoint the place where the body was put into the water, that will give us a start.'
Merlin cleared his throat in a way that signalled dissent. 'There's a hefty assumption there.'
'A deduction,' said Diamond with a glare. 'Come on, what else am I to assume – that this young woman decided to go for a solitary swim when nobody was about, first removing her wedding ring and all her clothes, and then drowned? You'd have to be bloody naive to put this one down to natural causes.' He crushed the cup in his hand and dumped it into a bin.
Chapter Four
THE MURDER SQUAD WORKED FROM a mobile incident room from Sunday morning onwards. It was a large caravan parked on a stretch of turf as close as possible to the reeds where the body had been found. Each time Peter Diamond crossed the floor it sounded like beer-kegs being unloaded. The sound was heard until well into the evening as he directed the first crucial stages of the inquiry. Five telephones were steadily in use and a team of filing clerks transferred every message and every piece of information first on to action sheets and then on to cards. The standard four-tier carousel for up to 20,000 cards stood ominously in the centre of the room. Diamond felt comfortable with index cards, even if some of his younger staff muttered things about the superiority of computers. If there was no quick resolution to the inquiry, he'd be forced to install the despised VDUs, and God help the moaners when the things broke down.
The search for the dead woman's clothes was first concentrated on the sections of shoreline with easiest access from the three roads that enclosed the lake. A bizarre collection of mislaid garments began to be assembled, tokens of the variety of human activities around the lake. The items were painstakingly labelled, sealed in plastic bags, noted on the map and entered on the action sheets without much confidence that any were linked with the case.
Divers were brought in to search the stretch of water where the body had been found floating. It was not impossible that the clothes or other evidence had been dumped there. This was an exercise that had to be gone through, although most people, including Diamond, reckoned that the body had drifted there from further along the shore, or even across the lake.
At the same time, house-to-house inquiries were made in the villages and at each dwelling with a view of the lake, seeking witnesses to any unusual activity beside the water after dark in the previous month. A sheaf of statements soon confirmed what the squad already knew, that the area was popular around the hour of sunset with anglers, bird-watchers, dog-owners and courting couples. Nothing remotely resembling a naked body being dragged or carried into the water had been seen.
For Peter Diamond this dragnet process was a necessary, if largely unrewarding, preamble to what he thought of as real detective work: the identifying and questioning of suspects. For all the care that was being taken to refer to what had happened as an 'incident', this was a murder inquiry. He was as certain of that as the fact that one day follows another. Since his appointment to the Avon and Somerset murder squad three years previously, he had led five investigations, three domestic, two large-scale, all but one resulting in convictions. The odd one out was an extradition job, still to be resolved. It could drag on for another year. However, he was satisfied that he had nailed his man. An impressive record. And it might have been more impressive if his service in Avon had not been regularly interrupted by all the ballyhoo over the Missendale affair.
Four years earlier, a young black man called Hedley Missendale had been convicted of murder in the course of theft at a building society in Hammersmith, west London. A customer, an ex-sergeant-major, had tried to tackle the thief and had been shot in the head, dying almost immediately. The investigation had been headed by Detective Superintendent Jacob Blaize, of 'F' Division of the Metropolitan Police. Diamond, then with the rank of detective chief inspector, had been Blaize's second-in-command. Missendale, a known thief, had been pulled in quickly and had confessed under interrogation from Diamond. Then more than two years later, after Diamond had won his promotion to superintendent with the Avon and Somerset force, a second man had confessed to the crime after undergoing a religious conversion. He had produced the gun used in the killing. A second investigation by a fresh team of officers had been ordered, and late in 1987, after serving twenty-seven months of a life sentence, Hedley Missendale had been pardoned on the recommendation of the Home Secretary.
The press, of course, had roasted the police. Blaize and Diamond had been openly accused in the tabloids of beating a confession out of an innocent black youth. An official inquiry had been inevitable. Jacob Blaize – broken by the strain – had accepted full responsibility for the errors and had taken early retirement. The press had switched the full force of their attack to Diamond. They had wanted his head on a platter, but he had stood up well to tough questioning at the inquiry. What had yet to be seen was whether his strong rebuttal of the criticism had influenced the board of inquiry. People said he was on a hiding to nothing, because the principal charge was that his forceful
