Down Among the Dead Men (30 page)

She clutched at her hair. “That's dreadful. I can't believe what you're saying.”

“Believe me, it's true. She came to the police station to see what was being done to find you. I spoke to her myself. Are you certain she didn't come here?”

“How would she know I was staying in the cottage? I heard nothing. No, that isn't correct. The sounds from the party carried a long way. I could hear the beat of the music on this side of the wall. And some time after midnight they let off some fireworks. Several loud bangs woke me up. I hate sudden noise.”

“Fireworks?” Diamond exchanged a shocked glance with Hen. “We weren't told they had fireworks. The party was over before midnight.”

Hen asked her, “Could it have been shooting you heard? Did it go on for long?”

“No, it was soon over. Two or three loud bangs.”

“Gunfire must be a possibility.”

“Oh, don't say that. This is deeply disturbing—and so much more so if Melanie came here looking for me. Please God, tell me nothing dreadful has happened.”

33

D
iamond tried phoning once more. And had to stop himself from flinging down the phone and kicking it.

Dave Albison was still not taking calls. The recovery operation at sea must have been under way for three hours or more. No sense in thinking these guys on a gruesome mission would be using phones.

The waiting was hell to endure.

The shadows of early evening were spreading across the neglected garden as he left Holly Blue Cottage with Hen. He'd counted on hearing something by now.

“Is it back to Chichester?” Hen asked.

It was not. “I want to take a look next door. I'm curious about those voices you heard. Were they male or female?”

“Both, I thought. Whoever it was has gone by now. It's so quiet you can hear the snails saying their prayers.”

He gave her a look. “Where did that come from?”

“My grandma. She had some quaint expressions. If you want to go trespassing I'll collect the torch from my car.” Which sounded like another of Grandma's sayings.

Left alone, he assessed his fitness for the task. If he was ever going to crack this case, it would be tonight. The back of his head felt sore, but he was steadier on his feet now. And his brain was sharper than it had been all day. He needed to steel himself for horrible discoveries. Things said and things noticed were coming together and making sense, and none of it was good.

His phone buzzed. He tugged it out.

“Yes?”

“It took longer than we thought.” Albison at last. “The wind got up. A real blast. The seagulls were flying backwards.”

“Where are you now?”

“Pagham.”

“Well?”

“We managed to bring two up. They'd be the most recent.”

He took a sharp, short breath. “And?”

“Female, both of them. And both with bullet wounds. One is almost certainly the missing schoolgirl. She's wearing the motorcycle jacket in the description, purple and black, with reflective panels.”

A stark, pitiless statement from a bearer of bad news who in fairness had no reason to feel pity.

Diamond had been hit by a wrecking ball. The last hope that Mel had somehow survived was dashed.

Cruel.

A huge lump came to his throat. He wanted to give vent to his sorrow, but this wasn't the moment and Albison's wouldn't be a sympathetic ear. “And the other?”

“Older. In her twenties. A redhead. Slim build. Silver ring on her right hand. Black leather jacket and trousers. The killer must have been so confident they would never be found that he left them in the clothes they had when they were shot.”

The second body was almost certainly Joss. The silver ring had been mentioned by her mother. The age, build and hair colour were right. Devastating for those troubled parents. And for Hen.

“So the plan is to take them to the mortuary now and see how many more we can bring up tomorrow.” Albison made it sound like baggage handling. But who could blame him? On a job as horrific as this you have to find some way of insulating yourself from personal reactions that would overwhelm anyone else. “Do you want calls about all the others as we find them?”

The words hadn't penetrated Diamond's jangling brain.

“The others,” Albison repeated. “The bodies.”

Mentally, he put himself on autopilot. “DI Montacute will need to know. Best report to him as you go along. These are the two I wanted to know about.”

Mel and Joss. The two he
least
wanted to know about. The grieving, the long sleepless nights of self-doubt, lay ahead.

He pocketed the phone. Hen was already through the gate on her way back, jaunty and confident as she habitually was. In his present emotional state it wouldn't be right to blurt out the bad news. He would find a way of telling her before the day was out.

“How's your head now?” she asked him. “Jesus Christ, you're looking groggy again. Don't you think we should call it a day and get you back to the hotel?”

“I'm better than I look.” He was lying, but so what?

“Men have been saying that to me all my adult life and it just ain't true. What is it you expect to find here?”

He ignored the question. “Let's get to it, Hen.” Stepping out briskly to leave no doubt that he was fit again, he took the route around the cottage and along the well-trodden path towards the connecting door in the high brick wall. Tom must have come this way regularly to deliver supplies to Miss Gibbon. Where the grass grew sparsely in the shadow of the wall, it was wise to watch for the mushroom hazards. A repeat of yesterday's slip-up wouldn't be clever.

“Did you make a meal of those mushrooms you collected?” he asked.

“I did—and very tasty they were in a two-egg omelette.”

“You said you'd be checking them for safety.”

“Of course. Chucked out a couple of liberties. They're really abundant in this garden.”

“Liberties?”

“Liberty caps. In my state of stress I don't need that sort of trip, thank you.”

They'd reached the door. He turned to face her.

“When you say ‘trip' you don't mean slipping over like I did the other day.”

“Correct, my innocent. ‘Trip' as in psychedelic experience. The liberty cap is the good old magic shroom beloved by hippies.”

Diamond said a simple, “Ha,”—but he might as well have said “Eureka!” The mystery he'd been wrestling with for days was solved. Surrounding them on the shadowy ground were clusters of the delicate helmet-shaped fungi on long stalks.

Within his recent memory freshly picked hallucinogenic mushrooms had been openly on sale, although their psychoactive constituents were deemed class A drugs under the Misuse of Drugs Act. The police had a thankless task deciding whether they had been “dried or altered by the hand of man” and were therefore illegal. But in 2005 the act had been tightened to include fresh mushrooms of the liberty cap variety. In the eyes of the law they were as dangerous as heroin and cocaine.

Hen added, “Cutesy critters, aren't they, with their pixie hats? Have you tried one? The trip is similar to LSD, but not so powerful.”

“I hope you're not serious. I've had enough head-blasting for one day,” he said. “It's going to be dark soon. If we don't get a move on, we'll see nothing.”

“All right, all right. Only joking.”

They tore their thoughts away from dangerous drugs. Diamond opened the door to the grounds of Fortiman House.

And what a change of scene. Not a mushroom in sight and not a blade of grass more than a centimetre high.

A faintly purple October mist was settling over the lower levels, but the main features of the garden could still be made out: the house and outbuildings to the left and the striped lawns down to the lake. Nobody was in sight.

“Something's different,” Hen said.

Diamond couldn't think what she meant.

“By the lake. What are they building down there?”

He looked where she was pointing and was able to make out a tall skeletal structure outlined against the silver water. Recognizing it, he smiled. Good things happened, even on bad days. “That will have been the noise you heard. They were rebuilding the House of Usher. It's not finished, but they've made a good start.”

“Looks more like the House of Lobster,” Hen said.

“Yes, it's basically lobster pots lashed together. Ella's A level project. I suggested they moved it here from the school. The voices you heard must have been some of the girls with Tom.”

“Good man, giving up his Sunday afternoon.”

Diamond was silent.

“One mystery solved, then,” Hen said.

“Hm?”

She said in a tone that left no doubt he was acting in an absent-minded way. “We've worked out who the voices belonged to.”

“I'm going down there.”

“To the lobster pots? What for?”

“Come with me and I'll tell you as we go.”

“They all say that, and I fall for it every time.”

They stepped out sharply towards the lake.

“You reminded me earlier that you're a countrywoman,” Diamond told her. “Answer me this if you can. How do mushrooms travel?”

“Is this a riddle? They go ‘Shroom, shroom,' and cover the ground. Here's one for you. Why does the mushroom get invited to all the parties?”

“It was a serious question, Hen.”

“What do you mean—how do they travel?”

“Is it root systems spreading through the ground?”

“It's spores. Don't you know that, dumbo? The mature mushroom reaches a stage when it ejects these tiny cells of almost no weight at all that are carried by the wind and reproduce somewhere else.”

“Then they colonise a place?”

“Like Holly Blue Cottage. Some spores must have been blown there in the first place.”

“That's the reason I asked. And if you've spent years cultivating a garden, you won't be overpleased when mushrooms start popping up all over it. This must have happened back in September 2007, to Joe Rigden's pride and joy. He wasn't a happy man.”

“They're a natural phenomenon, Pete. You can't control spores.”

“I'm not sure about that. Magic mushrooms aren't all that common, are they?”

“No, but they grow naturally in this country.”

“And they could be cultivated.”

“That would be illegal and very risky.”

“Rigden, as a horticulturist, would have known what these were,” Diamond said. “He found some growing in Mrs. Shah's garden. As a man of principle, clean-living and all the rest, he would have disapproved of them on moral grounds as well as finding them a bloody nuisance.”

Hen screwed up her nose in a way that said she wasn't fully persuaded.

Diamond saw it and said, “Now think back to a man you and I both interviewed at different times—the Reverend Conybeare, not quite a buddy of Joe's, but the nearest thing he had to a buddy. Do you recall what he said about the word ‘magic' being like a red rag to a bull when Joe was around?”

“Go on,” she said. “You're starting to interest me.”

“The vicar was an amateur magician, a member of the Magic Circle, but Joe insisted on calling him a conjurer because he had a thing about magic.”

“And you think there's a link with the magic mushrooms? Joe tasted them and got addicted?”

“No. He wasn't the sort. They were getting to him in a different way, making him mad because they were spreading over the garden, I found his old coat in the garden shed and in one of the pockets there were dried-up remains of some sort of fungus that I now believe to have been liberty caps.”

“Why would he put them in his pocket?”

“To keep them separate from other garden waste. He didn't want them spreading.”

“No offence, but this is all rather iffy, Pete. A few shrivelled bits from his pocket. You'd need to get them checked by a scientist.”

“That may not be necessary.”

They'd entered the copse beside the lake. Ahead, at the limit of the solid ground, two columns of the House of Usher were in place and a third had been partly constructed. A stack of loose pots nearby showed that the work was only half done, but it was already possible to see how spectacular the completed house would look in the new setting. In this fading light it had an eerie look. If Diamond had read the story—which he had not—he would surely have recognised that “sense of insufferable gloom” Edgar Allan Poe had noted.

“Help me with this,” he told Hen as he grasped one end of the incomplete column, four large creels fastened end to end with stout fishing cord.

Between them they lifted the pots as one object about eight feet long. For two people it wasn't all that heavy, but it would be awkward to carry.

“I can't think what you have in mind, matey,” she said. “It's a good thing I've got a modicum of trust that you're not completely barmy.”

With Diamond leading, they bore the thing back up the sloping lawn towards the dividing wall. There they stopped.

“My little legs are going to be black and blue,” Hen said.

“You'll survive.”

“Are we nicking it, or what?”

“That's not the plan. Are you game to go on?”

“How much further? Through the door in the wall?”

“Past that by fifty yards—as far as the walled garden.”

“The orchid collection? You're not aiming to take it in there? It's locked and alarmed. He doesn't want his precious orchids contaminated.”

“We're going to use this as a ladder.”

“To scale the wall?”

“If possible.”

“Better be, after all this effort.”

They hoisted the column and moved off again, staying close to the wall.

“So why
does
the mushroom get invited to all the parties?” Diamond asked, to keep her on side.

“Because he's a fun guy. Get it?”

“If I stop to laugh, I might drop it.”

They reached the outside of the walled garden and took another brief rest. The short transition from daylight through dusk to night was almost over. They couldn't see back as far as the lake.

“Mind if I smoke?” Hen said.

“Be my guest.”

Her lighter flared. “What's phase two of this crazy adventure?”

“I'm going over the wall.”

“Leaving the little woman to mind the lobster pots? I guessed as much. The world has moved on, Pete. We gals want a slice of the action. I can get over this wall as well as you, probably better.”

“Oh, I don't—”

She interrupted. “Yes, you do. In your state of health you need protecting more than the pots.” She produced the torch and switched it on. “Let's see if this is doable.”

They propped the column of pots against the wall. It was some feet short of the top, but it made a serviceable ladder, using the trap-holes as steps.