Down Among the Dead Men (31 page)

“Me first,” Hen said. Before Diamond had a chance to argue, she handed over the torch and started climbing, still with the small cigar between her lips. Reminding him of a koala scrambling up a eucalyptus, she reached the top with ease. “It's going to be okay,” she said. “There's a shed this side and we can step onto the roof.”

He followed her up, but more ponderously. Supporting his less sure-footed ascent, the ramshackle structure rasped several times under his weight. He got one leg over the wall, hauled himself up and recovered his breath.

Hen was already standing on the felt-covered sloping roof she'd mentioned and she helped Diamond to join her. From its size, the building appeared to be some kind of office or packing shed. Three much larger long metal sheds without windows filled most of the space, running from end to end.

“What now, action man?”

“We come down to earth.”

“And not before time.”

A stack of filled compost sacks lined most of the wall Diamond and Hen had climbed over—which was helpful, providing a cushioned landing.

“Bigger than I expected,” Hen said, when they were standing on a wide concrete path that ran the length of the nearest shed. “Looks like a business enterprise. I had the impression the orchids are just a hobby that pays well. If you can grow them successfully, that is. My efforts with the two or three I've been given over the years were disastrous. I kept them about two weeks before they gave up the ghost—and they were supposed to be hardy specimens anyone can grow.”

“Keep your voice down,” he said. “We may not be alone.”

“It's after dark. Who's going to be here now?”

“Let's see if we can get inside.”

Using the torch beam, they walked half the length of the shed before coming to a large sliding door. Something was written on it. “That'll be about closing the door after you,” Hen said. “They hate draughts. I do know that much.”

In fact when they shone the torch, the sign said:
entry only by authorised persons. controlled humidity and temperature.

“Same thing really,” Hen said.

Without debate as to whether they were authorised persons, Diamond grasped the door handle and slid it open, triggering a rapid high-pitched beeping.

“Jesus, what's that?”

“Step inside fast.” He pushed the door back and the sound stopped. “Just a reminder . . . I hope.”

Hen wasn't listening. She stood in awe of what was revealed. For one thing, the interior was brilliantly lit and for another there wasn't an orchid in sight. Ranged as far as they could see were trays containing slender cream-coloured mushrooms in their thousands. Above the trays were strip lights and a spray system. Compared with the cool of the evening outside, the warm, moist atmosphere felt tropical.

“Did you ever see anything like this, countrywoman?”

“Awesome. Enough to supply every ageing hippy in Europe.”

“With the two other sheds, they'll have the capacity to dry them or freeze them and I expect the one we climbed onto was the packing shed.”

“The scale of it. You can't call it a crime scene, Pete, it's a crime spectacular—and in my manor. I didn't dream such a place existed.”

“Just to be certain, they
are
liberty caps?”

“Every one a class A drug,” Hen said. “Are you as drop-dead flabbergasted as I am? You don't look it.”

“I had my suspicions about the walled garden, but I wasn't thinking of magic mushrooms until you mentioned them.”

“I didn't think past orchids. They can be grown under glass, but growing rooms like this are often preferred because you have complete control of the lighting and humidity.”

Diamond walked up one of the three aisles between the tables of trays and examined the crop. The spindly mushrooms were being grown in phases. The youngest were pale and sticky-looking, while the taller they got, the browner they had turned. The most mature were four inches tall and chestnut brown. They were dryer, too. The spraying must have been phased as well.

“There's huge investment here.”

“And huge returns,” Hen said, from a different aisle where she was getting her own perspective on the crop. “They'll have cornered the market in the south of England.”

Diamond couldn't disagree with that. “Before the law was strengthened, there was a flourishing mail order industry in fresh ones. You could buy them openly, even in my snobby city of Bath. All that stopped overnight.”

“But how did it lead to murder, Pete?”

“This is high risk.”

“Can't argue with that.”

“My reading of it is that some spores escaped. Next, Joe Rigden started noticing rogue mushrooms in Mrs. Shah's garden and decided to take it up with the people next door. He wasn't the sort to turn a blind eye to law-breaking and he did some snooping. And when he learned the truth and took it up with his neighbours, he signed his own death warrant. I don't know if there was panic or if it was a cold-blooded shooting, but Joe got taken out.”

“And they arranged for Davy to dispose of the body?”

“That was the plan.”

“The plan that misfired. I can see how Davy came into the equation. He did his modelling here. Presumably his disposal business was known about. But how did Joss get involved?”

The subject of Joss's fate had been coming like a train down the line and Diamond knew he couldn't talk about her without breaking the dreadful news to Hen. “Probably it was like this. She was into drugs herself, right?”

“At one stage, no question.”

“Magic mushrooms?”

“Among other substances, yes. She tried them all, my sister told me.”

“Then if she was a customer of Fortiman House, some kind of deal was struck, such as a supply of liberty caps in exchange for driving a stolen car to Littlehampton. I doubt whether she knew what was in the boot. And she didn't meet Davy, so his part in the operation was concealed.”

He was steeling himself to reveal that Joss was dead. But it wasn't to be. A heavy trundling sound interrupted him. He swung around and saw the sliding door moving.

Hen had seen what was happening and ducked. That piercing electronic beep was sounding. All too clearly it was linked to an alarm system.

In different aisles, Diamond and Hen had taken cover under the tables bearing the trays of mushrooms. Clearly they were in danger of their lives. Any doubt about that was removed a moment later.

“Okay, I'm armed. I know you're here,” a male voice shouted, echoing through the long building. “You have five seconds to show yourself, or you get it.”

Not much scope for negotiation there.

Heart thumping, Diamond stayed out of sight and silent under the table and Hen did the same. He had a view of her hunkered between the trestles two aisles to his left. If the gunman came along either aisle they'd be easy targets. Any fool would know they'd taken cover.

What now? Wait here passively or do something? Diamond wasn't the passive sort. The difference between survival and a bullet through the head was all in the timing. The obvious move was to create a distraction. But how, without getting shot?

The gunman had entered by the same door they had, so he wasn't all that far away. After the chilling first threat, he'd gone silent. His feet weren't making any sound, very likely because he was wearing trainers. Diamond held his breath and strained to listen for the softest footfall.

It came, a steady padding along the aisle he was in. He felt in his pocket for his mobile phone, the one solid object he had apart from his shoes. His heart thumped faster than the advancing footsteps. Get this right, Peter Diamond, or you're history, and so is Hen Mallin.

The gunman slowed, as if he sensed someone nearby.

Diamond waited.

Two short steps closer and already he could see the feet and the faded blue jeans. They'd stopped again. The legs angled forward a little as if the gunman was stooping for a better look.

Diamond didn't move a muscle.

The front shoe lifted at the heel and advanced almost to within touching distance.

Now.

Diamond slung his phone as far and as fast to his right as he could, aiming below the tables. It didn't get far before it clattered against one of the metal trestles. It still should have been enough to create a diversion and draw fire.

But instead of loosing off a reaction shot, the gunman hesitated.

This wasn't supposed to happen.

After five agonizing seconds came a blast of what sounded like rapid machine gun fire.

A machine gun?

Diamond rolled into the aisle, grabbed the gunman's legs and brought him down. Surprise is a weapon in itself.

At the same time a heavy object clattered against the ground and slid under the table.

A brief bout of wrestling, and Diamond grasped an arm and yanked it upwards behind the man's back. He had him in an armlock.

He didn't need to shout to Hen. She was already on her feet, dashing between the tables to snatch up the weapon.

A chainsaw.

What Diamond had taken to be machine gun fire had been the saw on full throttle.

With his weight bearing down, he hadn't much of a sense of who he'd captured, except that he was large and strong. There was something he hadn't expected. Instead of the solid feel of back and shoulders, his chin was up against a padded surface that felt like wool. He pulled back for a better view.

A Rastafarian crocheted tam.

The chainsaw man was Manny, the cartoonist gardener.

34

T
he blast from the chainsaw had deafened Diamond temporarily.

He didn't relax his hold, even though Hen was standing over them, gripping the chainsaw as if she meant to use it. There was no struggling from Manny, just swift, shallow breathing. All resistance seemed to be over.

Hen said something inaudible, probably meant for Manny.

After almost a minute, Diamond decided it might be safe to move. His legs were shaking when he put weight on them, but he didn't want to show frailty, so he propped himself against the nearest table edge.

It took a while for his hearing to return. He caught the last part of something Hen was saying, “. . . to tie him up with.”

Good thinking. Manny was disarmed, but he also needed to be disabled.

In a horticultural building this size there should be some twine or wire lying about.

“Thank Christ for a man who dresses well,” Hen said—and he heard her clearly this time. “Take off your tie, sunshine.”

Needs must. It was his Bath rugby club tie—but he could buy another. He secured Manny's wrists. Then he removed the laces from his trainers and bound the ankles together. Hen was still ready for action, gripping the chainsaw handle with her left hand and the pull-cord with her right.

Diamond told her it was okay now. “He's not the main man. He's only the gardener.”

“I don't care who he is. He was dangerous. This thing can inflict horrific injuries.”

Manny said from the floor, “No, lady. I mean to scare, that's all.”

“Shut up.” To Diamond she said, “Is your phone broken, squire?”

“Who cares?” He was doing his best to appear cool.

“I do. Mine's in the car and we need armed back-up.”

His phone was in pieces in the next aisle. He shook his head.

“He'll have one in his pocket.” Hen was never short of a suggestion.

Diamond used Manny's phone to call Chichester police.

“What we do now is sit tight,” Hen said. “We can't go looking for suspects with a chainsaw.”

She'd summed it up. This resourceful and quick-thinking officer would be a huge loss to the police if Archie Hahn had his way and her dismissal was confirmed.

Diamond was steeling himself to tell her about the recovery of Joss's body. No time would be right, but he had a duty to break the news. He chose to do so now, as sensitively as he was able. “Let me tell you about—”

Her eyes had the sudden force of a blowtorch. She understood at once where he was going with it. “They found her?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“Brought her ashore?”

“This afternoon.”

She turned as white as paper and the veins showed in her face and neck, but she didn't shed a tear as he went through it.

Hen's private grief was allowed to last about three minutes before a noise outside galvanized them. The door started to slide open. Diamond snapped back into full alert. The police reinforcements couldn't have got here so soon.

This time, he and Hen didn't duck out of sight. Empowered by the chainsaw, they stood their ground and waited. Two men stepped through: Tom Standforth, followed by his father. Ferdie had a rifle under his arm. But it wasn't levelled and threatening.

“Let me deal with this,” Diamond muttered to Hen. He shouted across the shed, “It's all over, isn't it? We've called the police. Drop the gun, Ferdie. Nobody wants to add to the bloodshed.”

Ferdie didn't take long to make up his mind. He did as he was told.

Tom spoke first. “How did you—?”

“Over the wall.”

“No, I mean . . . find out about this?”

“The magic mushrooms? You've been next door, the same as we have. They're taking over.”

Ferdie said to his son, “What does he mean?”

“You haven't been in there lately, Dad. There are more than there used to be.”

“Growing wild,” Diamond said, “in the garden a certain Joe Rigden, once had in his care.”

“Why do you say that?” Tom said.

“Because Rigden objected to them and was shot dead.”

Tom couldn't have looked more bemused if Diamond had spoken in Serbo-Croat.

Now Ferdie joined in, his voice more regretful than angry. “If it hadn't been for the bloody man interfering, complaining, threatening to expose me to the drugs squad, he would be alive today and—”

“And so would your two other victims, Joss Green and Mel Mason.”

Stopped in full flow, Ferdie put his hand to his throat. “That's an extraordinary claim.”

“Not really. Their bodies were recovered this afternoon.”

Tom switched his disbelieving stare from Diamond to Ferdie.

“He's bluffing,” Ferdie said. “Ignore it, son.”

“I saw them today,” Diamond said, “out at the wreck where Davy hid them.”

Tom swung round to face his father. “Davy? Does he mean our Davy? The model?”

It was already obvious that Tom was only on the fringe of the major crimes committed here. He knew about the mushrooms, but little else. The main man was Ferdie—the ever-obliging, self-effacing Ferdie.

“I can't take this in,” Tom said. “Davy hides bodies at sea?”

Diamond said, “On an industrial scale. But he won't any longer. Davy is dead of an overdose. We found him on his yacht at the marina.”

Father and son were lost for words.

After the news had sunk in, Diamond said to Ferdie, “Let's have the truth about Rigden in 2007. You eliminated him because he threatened to expose you.”

“I had a profitable business.”

“Still have, by the look of it. How did you get into it?”

Ferdie glanced at his confused and troubled son as if to check whether he objected to the story coming out. Tom was in no state to decide.

“I used to cultivate orchids here and did quite well, but I couldn't see the business expanding,” Ferdie said. “Then as a sideline I experimented with a few of the so-called magic shrooms. This was before liberty caps were demonized by the Home Office. They're a challenge to grow, but I persevered and found a way to do it and made it profitable. By degrees, I phased out the orchids. The growing requirements are not all that different. I already had these growing rooms in a secure place behind high walls.”

“It took over completely?”

“I'm the main supplier in the south of England. No one else would take the risk after liberties were made class A drugs. When Rigden came calling one afternoon he told me straight that he was going to report me. He was one of those bloody-minded, holier-than-thou people you couldn't argue with. I would have been banged up for fourteen years, minimum. Maybe life. Really. They can give you life for doing this commercially.”

“You shot him.”

“You know I did.”

“And arranged to have his body disposed of.”

“Yes. By then I had contacts who knew about such things.”

Ferdie seemed resigned to the truth coming out, but Tom had put his hands to his face and covered his eyes.

“And the plan backfired,” Diamond said.

“Thanks to bloody Davy. His method was supposed to be foolproof. He wanted big money up front, but those in the know spoke well of him, so I approached him.”

“And you wish you never had.”

“His system was too elaborate. I had to provide a driver and a stolen car. The driver wasn't to know what she was transporting.”

“This was Joss?”

“Yes, she was only eighteen at the time, but bright and up for anything. I knew her through the dealing she did in shrooms. She did what I asked, stole the BMW and brought it here. I loaded the body into the boot, just as Davy had insisted, making sure Joss didn't know what she was carrying. She drove to Littlehampton and left the car where Davy wanted it. Then the plan went belly up. Some idiot nicked the car before Davy got to it and was stopped and arrested and ended up doing time.”

“A life sentence.”

“His own stupid fault.”

“You were content to let him rot in jail.”

“Him or me, wasn't it?”

The callous comment ignored the horror Ferdie had expressed a minute before at the prospect of doing a life sentence himself. Empathy is a state of mind unknown to killers.

“And for a time,” Diamond said, “your crisis blew over. You thought you'd got away with it. Seven years passed before you heard any more. Out of the blue came the news that a senior detective was suspended for failing to follow up a DNA match linking her niece to a car theft and murder in 2007. The niece was Joss, your driver. I don't know if she came to see you of her own volition or if you got in touch and asked her to come. Either way, she was now linked to a murder, and so were you. Joss was a threat to your freedom. She knew too much and had to be silenced.”

“She was unstable,” Ferdie said. “All druggies are. Sooner or later she would have shopped me.”

Listening to this, Hen observed a brave silence. She must have been desperate to wade in on behalf of Joss, but she left Diamond to deal with Ferdie as he had asked.

“How did you do it?”

“She came here, as you said, and she was in a state, swinging from blame to panic. I could see there was only one way to deal with her. She and I were alone here at the time. Tom was teaching and Manny had the morning off. I shot her on the driveway after she left the house.”

A shudder ran through Hen and she shut her eyes, but managed to maintain her stoic self-control.

“And you handed the body over to Davy.”

“Not directly. He always safeguarded himself by collecting them from a neutral vehicle. And this time the system worked—or seemed to.”

Diamond paused for a few seconds out of respect for Hen's feelings. Then he said, “And now we need to know what could possibly have possessed you to shoot an innocent schoolgirl.”

Ferdie sighed and shook his head. “That was deeply unfortunate. There was a party here. Tom holds them regularly for his artist friends. It's been going on for years. I help with the drinks. But something went terribly wrong.”

Tom looked up and said, “Ella gate-crashed.”

“One of his students,” Ferdie said. “She was texting her friends, showing off, I suppose. Only later did I realize the havoc she caused. She was soon spaced out on Ecstasy. She'd brought some with her. Full credit to Tom, he hooked her out of the studio fast and settled her in the house.”

“By then she was too far gone to take home,” Tom said. From his stunned appearance he might have been on a drug trip himself while listening to his father's revelations.

“The party didn't go on all that late,” Ferdie said. “I always clear the drinks after, so I stayed on in the studio for a bit, then turned out the lights and was making my way back to the house when I spotted someone riding a motor scooter across the lawn straight towards the walled garden and my growing rooms. My immediate concern was that one of the party guests meant to break in and see what was there and maybe help themselves. I was angry. It was abuse of hospitality. More alarming than that, it was a breach of security. I'd killed two people to keep my business a secret. It could all unravel if they managed to get in there and saw my crop. I fetched my gun from the cabinet where I keep it. All these thoughts were rushing through my head as I went in pursuit.”

“It didn't cross your mind that there might be another explanation?”

“What else could there be? It was obvious it was an attempted break-in. As I got nearer I saw that the rider was off the scooter and at the door of the walled garden. It has a combination lock and they seemed to be trying the numbers.”

“Couldn't you tell it was one of the schoolgirls?”

“I wasn't close enough. There was a full moon, but she was in the shadow of the wall. I couldn't even tell if the figure was male or female. At that stage she still had the crash helmet on. I fired a warning shot into the air and that created panic. Instead of getting back on the scooter, she made a run for it, trying to stay in the shadow of the wall. She took off the helmet, for ease of movement, I suppose, and sprinted away at a rate I knew I'd never match. You may not have noticed, but along that wall there's a door that connects to the next garden.”

“We used it today,” Diamond said.

“You know what I was thinking, then. I could see she would escape, and I was alarmed, telling myself I shouldn't have fired the shot because it showed I had something of value to protect. But as I'd pulled the trigger once, it wouldn't hurt if I fired another.” He stopped and dragged a hand through his silver hair. “It's hard to explain why I did what I did next. You have to be in charge of a gun to know the strength of the impulse. A moving target is compelling, asking to be hit. I took aim and fired. She went down straight away. I think I hit her in the back. When I caught up, she was lying still, making no sound. I didn't know if she was alive or dead. To me, in that situation, she would be better off dead, so I put another one through her.”

In the stunned silence, they could all picture the scene, Ferdie like a huntsman despatching his quarry.

“Didn't you recognise her as Mel?” Diamond asked. “You must have met her.”

“After she was dead I did.”

Tom's eyes were like searchlights. He'd listened in mounting horror. Now he faced his father. “How could you be so callous? She was a just a kid, one of the sweetest I ever taught. I'm revolted, sick to my stomach. My own father. I trusted you. I thought the worst you were doing was growing illegal shrooms and I was willing to turn a blind eye. I brought my students here in the belief they would benefit. They should have been safe. But you shot Mel, little more than a child. She died because of my pathetic loyalty to you. You and your disgusting greed, preserving your dirty profits at all costs. Three killings—it's obscene. You deserve all that's coming to you.”