This was a medical emergency. Up to now, Peter Diamond had thought of himself as an observer, but someone had to take some initiative here because there was no telling how seriously these men were affected. They’d been unconscious for some time. Heatstroke and even brain damage was a possibility. Barneston was entirely taken up with extracting any information he could, so Diamond told the nearest man with a mobile to call an ambulance.
When Barneston stood up, muttering in frustration at getting so little out of the guards, Diamond drew him aside and told him what he’d arranged. It was a courtesy. You don’t muscle in on someone else’s incident. But the message didn’t seem to register. JB was extremely keyed up. He turned his back on Diamond and returned to the more coherent of the two men.
“This isn’t getting anywhere,” Diamond confided to Hen. “It’s up to Barneston to do something.”
“He’s in shock,” she said. “I’ve never seen him like this. If there’s stuff he should be doing, you’d better tell him. You’ve got experience.”
In fact, this wasn’t really about experience. Every incident brings its own unique problems, and the challenge is to stay cool and deal with them as well as resources allow. Considering Barneston was one of the generation who made ‘cool’ into a cardinal virtue, he wasn’t shaping up at all.
So Diamond tapped him on the shoulder and discreetly suggested he ordered everyone off the grass and onto the lane.
“What’s the problem?” Barneston asked. “What’s up now?”
At least there was communication this time.
“Crime scene procedure. You’ve dealt with the incident. Now it’s a matter of preserving what you can of the scene.” For a man who had never been a slave to the rulebook this was rather rich, but Diamond was putting it in language the new generation of CID should understand. “Particularly the treadmarks.”
“Oh, yeah?” Barneston said vaguely.
“Not the Range Rover’s marks.”
“No?”
“The Mariner’s. The Mariner had his car waiting here.”
“You think so?” Those blue eyes showed little understanding.
“You’ve got the picture, haven’t you, Jimmy?” But it was obvious Barneston’s brain hadn’t made the jump, so Diamond laid out the facts as he saw them. “Back at the house he gassed these blokes and Porter and trussed them up and put them in the Range Rover and drove here. He must have had a vehicle waiting, right? So he transferred Porter into his own motor and drove off, God knows where. The least we can do is find the treadmarks his tyres made.”
The last twenty minutes had been too frantic and traumatic for Barneston to give a thought to anything so basic as treadmarks, but he nodded his head sagely as if it had always been in his plans and ordered everyone off the turf and onto the hard surface of the lane. The ground was already marked with many footprints as well as the contents of the guard’s stomach. Crime scene tape was fetched and used to seal off the area.
Hen said, “That’s better. Feel as if we’re getting a grip, even if we aren’t.”
“He’s away,” Barneston said bleakly. “He’s hung us out to dry.”
“Snap out of it, Jimmy,” Diamond told him. “Have you sent for the SOCOs yet? I’d get one of those sergeants onto it if I were you.”
“Good point.” He went over to arrange it.
When he came back, he was still in the same fateful frame of mind. “We can check the motor inside and out and every inch of the field, but let’s face it, we knew fuck all about this guy before this, and we’re still up shit creek.”
That kind of talk didn’t go down well with Diamond. “Haven’t you heard of DNA?”
“What use is that without a suspect? We don’t know a thing about him.”
“We know several things,” Diamond said. “He’s extremely well informed on our security. Somehow he found out Porter was transferred here. He knew how to get in without activating the alarms or panicking the dog. He must have had some kind of training or inside information. He has access to gas, not CS, but something that knocks you out completely. He’s well organised, very focused. He could have killed the guards, but he chose not to.”
“Christ, that’s not bad,” Barneston said, the interest reviving in his eyes.
“Common sense,” Diamond said dismissively.
But Hen wasn’t letting it pass so lightly. “Uncommon good sense, more like, and a lot better sense than any of those berks at Bramshill ever talk. Isn’t that right, Jimmy?”
Barneston appeared to agree, because he asked Diamond what he recommended next, and there wasn’t a hint of irony in his voice.
“The Mariner’s car is the thing to concentrate on,” the big man answered. “Obviously it was parked in this lane for some time. There’s a chance someone drove by and noticed it. A farmhand, maybe. These are quiet lanes, but people are moving farm machinery around a lot of the time. I’d order a house-to-house on all the inhabited places in the vicinity, asking (a), if they saw anyone along the lanes, or crossing the field-which I think is more likely-and (b), if they noticed a vehicle parked here, or being driven away.”
“I was thinking along those lines myself,” Barneston said.
“Great minds,” Hen said with a wink that only Diamond saw. “And, of course, you’ll have your SOCOs going over the house and the Range Rover and all of this area. We ought to get some of his DNA out of this.”
“We can hope.” He moved off to speak to one of his team.
Diamond turned to Hen and said, “Any more of that and I’ll buy you a damned great spoon.”
“Why?”
“Stirring it up between Barneston and me. ‘Uncommon good sense’.”
“Quite the opposite, Pete. I was throwing him a lifeline. Can’t you see he’s poleaxed, poor love? His whole world has blown up in his face. He’s lost the man he was supposed to be protecting. He’s got a neurotic woman in another so-called safe house who is going to go bananas when she hears about this, and who wouldn’t? He knows Bramshill will come down on him like a ton of bricks, and what’s more they’re going to decrypt those deeply embarrassing files any time. No wonder he’s in such a state.”
He couldn’t feel the same degree of sympathy. He said (and immediately regretted it), “Why don’t you give him a cuddle, then?”
“Sod off, mate. He badly needs advice from someone with sand in his boots and a few ideas in his head. If you want to stay involved in the hunt for the Mariner, ducky, this is your opportunity.”
“
“That goes without saying,” Hen said. “You’d better talk to him man to man.”
They remained there while the paramedics arrived and took the two SO12 guards away for treatment. They would be questioned again, but there was little prospect that they’d remember any more. Not long after, a team of three SOCOs drove up and pulled on their white protective overalls. Jimmy Barneston pointed out some potential treadmarks to the right of the Range Rover. The SOCOs looked at all the other marks they had to contend with and didn’t seem overly impressed.
Barneston eventually came back to where Diamond and Hen were watching the action from behind the tapes. He was looking marginally more in control. “All the farms and houses in the area are being visited.” He cleared his throat. “There was something you said just now. You suggested this could be an inside job, seeing that the Mariner found out about Porter being moved here.”
Diamond lifted his shoulders a fraction. “He must have got it from somewhere.”
“Or someone,” Hen added.
“You’re right, and it’s a bloody nightmare,” Barneston said, the anxiety returning to his features. “I don’t know who I can trust any more. I
“If we had a suspicion, we’d let you know,” Diamond told him.
“The worst of it is that I’ve got someone else under protection. Well, you read the files, so you know who she is. The Mariner found his way to Porter, so what’s to stop him finding Anna Walpurgis? She’s more of a risk than Porter was.”
“Why is that?” Hen said, as if, like some High Court judge insulated from the real world, she’d never heard of
