'That might explain why she went missing.'
'I'm going to let you in on something,' said Joe. 'Donna wouldn't go out on the streets after dark in a strange city if you paid her a million bucks. And the waiter was a young girl about fifteen years old. I think she was Greek. She didn't understand English. We had to point to the items on the menu. That little girl wouldn't know Mary Shelley from appleseed.'
It may have been Joe's imagination, but he thought the big moustache sagged a little. Certainly the mouth below it sagged. Wigfull had suffered a serious reverse.
The officer who had gone to look at the suitcases returned. He shook his head. Joe got his keys back.
He hitched his thumbs assertively in the waistband of his boxer shorts. 'Any other business, gentlemen? Or can I go back to sleep?'
nineteen
DIAMOND USUALLY TRIED TO keep Saturdays free for shopping and sport, or-more accurately-looking at shopping and sport. This morning there was no chance he would be standing in some dress shop while Steph tried on the latest creation. Or relaxing in front of the television. Dr Frankenstein had put paid to that.
Without much confidence of progress, he drove up to Chippenham to look at those bones. They were brought out in a cardboard evidence box tagged with the details of when and where they had been found. It was hard to believe they might have belonged to Hands. Stained yellowish brown, they were quite unlike the chalk-white bones from the vault. But he told himself these had spent time in the river and over ten years in this box.
He handled them with respect, as if the act of touching would give some clue to their origin. Dry bones, chipped and broken, difficult to think of as once having supported living tissue. A small, curved section of a rib- cage; a complete femur; a fibula; and the one that interested him most, the radius, or main bone of a forearm. This one was broken close to where the wrist would have been, and it was obvious that the bone had been shattered, not sawn through. He fingered the splintered end thoughtfully.
'Nothing's ever simple, is it?' he said to soften up the evidence sergeant who acted as curator of the macabre little collection. The man had already made it clear that he was a stickler for protocol and inclined to be pompous, a Jeeves in police uniform. 'The bones I want to compare them with' (Diamond said) 'are in another country.'
'That is inexpedient, sir.'
'But not a catastrophe. The country is Wales.'
'A pity. The Welsh are peculiarly possessive about bones, sir.'
'But these are in the forensic laboratory at Chepstow.'
'That's more promising.'
'Just across the water, but it might as well be Zanzibar,' said Diamond. 'They're a stubborn lot over there, as you were saying. They have a skeleton hand broken off at the wrist. I sent it to them myself. I'd like to see if it fits this arm bone, but do you know they won't let the hand out of the building?'
'They wouldn't be permitted to take such a liberty, sir. I'm under the same obligation myself.'
'Are you telling me these old bones aren't allowed out?'
'That is the rule.'
'It isn't as if I want them all. I'm only interested in this arm bone and it's broken already.'
'That's immaterial, sir. It's all about continuity of evidence.'
A fact well known to Diamond.
The sergeant coughed politely. 'One could make a sketch.'
'If you saw my sketching…'
'A photo?'
Diamond shook his head and introduced a hint of conspiracy. 'Be easier if you turned your back.'
'I'm not permitted to do that, sir.'
'One pesky bone that nobody has looked at in years?'
'Much as I would like to assist, sir, turning my back is not an option.'
'You'd get the thing back.'
The sergeant sensed the heavy pressure he was under. 'If I may tender a suggestion, I could make you a cast.'
'A cast?'
'A plaster cast.'
'How long will that take?'
'With quick-drying plaster of Paris? Less time than it would take to subvert me, sir.'
Clearly the sergeant also resembled Jeeves in resourcefulness. He went to a shelf and took down the wax for the mould and the packet of plaster.
CHEPSTOW IS an easy run from Chippenham, up the M4 motorway and across the old Severn Road Bridge. Diamond could have sent someone of lower rank, but after handling the bones himself, he had a boyish curiosity to see if the jigsaw fitted.
He was never going to be the flavour of the month at the Forensic Science Unit, having blasted the men in white coats for years, but by good fortune he was seen by a young officer called Amelia who had never heard of him. He had to brandish his ID to get in. Once admitted, he refrained from mentioning that the place was not exactly a hive of industry. They all stayed in bed on Saturday mornings, he supposed. And how many times had they told him they were working round the clock to get results?
Amelia had some difficulty in finding Hands, but eventually they tracked the bones to a lab bench upstairs. They had been cleaned of most of the cement.
'They must be working on them now,' said Amelia.
'Oh, yes?' Diamond said evenly. It was obvious that nobody had been in the lab all morning.
Humming 'Dry Bones' as he worked, he took the cast from his pocket and tried fitting it to the stump of bone, watched by the young woman.
It didn't match.
'Too bad,' he said, resisting the impulse to swear, and chucking the cast into the nearest bin. 'Thanks for your help, love. It was worth a try.'
Amelia gave a sympathetic murmur.
He asked if it was coffee time.
Amelia said tentatively, 'Do you mind if I have a go? You were a bit quick making up your mind.'
'It's a lost cause.'
She retrieved the cast and began trying it with more sensitivity than Diamond, rotating it minutely each time. He watched with a bored expression, thinking of that coffee. His clumsiness was renowned, but he was not expecting to be shown up.
She said as she worked, 'The thickness is about the same. Looking at the jagged end, I'd say it's quite likely that there was some splintering, in which case you're not going to get a perfect join.' She held the cast steady. 'Ah. Now look at the points where it's touching. They're coming together. Clearly there's a biggish piece missing, but if the bone shattered, that's to be expected.'
Diamond screwed up his eyes in the attempt to see.
Amelia said, 'I think it's worth looking at under a magnifier.'
In another ten minutes she had convinced him that the bones at Chippenham belonged to Hands.
HE FORGOT to wind up the window as he approached the nick, so half a dozen microphones were thrust in his face when he turned off Manvers Street. If anything, there were more hacks about than yesterday. They wanted something juicy for the Sunday papers.
No, he told them blandly, he had nothing new to say and he did not expect to make any kind of statement that day.
Inside the building, he was more forthcoming, treating Keith Halliwell to an overcoloured account of the morning's discovery. In this version, he took all the credit for the plaster cast and he surprised the scientists at Chepstow with his deft work matching the cast to the bone.
