A Death in Diamonds

The bedroom door sat open today and Darbishire walked inside. The room was dominated by a big brass bedstead topped with a fat mattress, stripped of all bedding. It sat against the back wall, facing a bay window that overlooked the cobbled street. This was where the blonde was found, lying on her back, arms crossed over her chest, with a posy of flowers tucked inside them. The male victim was curled on the floor at the foot of the bed in a pool of blood, trousers round his knees, with a slim blade sticking out of his right eye. No wonder the char’s screams were heard halfway down the street.

Woolgar hovered in the doorway and cracked his knuckles.

‘What did Deedar say, sir?’

The pathologist visited by Darbishire was called Johnson, but was universally known as Deedar. It related to all the Sheffield steel involved in his profession, apparently. Sheffielders were known as ‘Dee-Dars’, because of the way they said ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ for ‘you’. As a native of Aberdeen, Johnson didn’t do this, so it had taken Darbishire a long time to work out the etymology of the nickname. By now, most officers assumed it was something to do with police sirens. But the inspector didn’t trust easy answers. He tended to ask questions until he got the hard ones.

Darbishire also knew that Woolgar didn’t miss today’s appointment at the mortuary with him because of a misunderstanding about timings, but because the smell of formaldehyde made him sick. If there was a future great detective inside that burly frame, it had a very long way to come out.

‘It’s largely as we thought,’ he said. ‘Did you make any progress with the other girl, by the way? The original one?’

Woolgar shook his head. ‘She’s vamoosed, no surprises. Beryl, her name is.’

‘I don’t need the name, I need the individual.’

Beryl was the lucky girl who was supposed to be meeting up with the male victim on the evening of Sunday the thirty-first – a blonde, like he’d requested from the Raffles escort agency. For some reason, this girl – Gina – had stood in for Beryl at the last minute.

Darbishire didn’t believe in luck. Another question.

A modern ladies’ vanity unit upholstered in smoky blue velvet sat under the window, topped with a triple mirror and an empty Venetian glass ashtray. It didn’t align at all with the battered antiques downstairs: this room was kept for special assignations and decorated as such. There was also a large art deco wardrobe in the far corner, ideal in size for a couple of men of murderous bent to wait, unseen, for their victims – except that it was found to be full of catering-size boxes of tins of spam and a broken chair, awaiting repair. There wouldn’t have been enough space to house a five-year-old.

In his forties, with the slicked-back hair of a Mediterranean or South American, the male victim had been identified by the papers in his pockets as Dino Perez from Argentina. The Raffles escort agency had been the first to confirm the couple’s identities, although they had initially misidentified the girl. They said Perez had told them he was staying at the Dorchester, but the hotel had no record of him.

Darbishire walked over to the far side of the bed. He wanted to picture the scene as Deedar and his team thought it went, see if it worked.

‘According to the forensics, Perez would have been standing between the bed and the door when the killers came in, with his back to them. The state of his trousers suggests his concentration was elsewhere. He was stabbed in the side with a slim blade, about six inches long, almost certainly the knife that was jabbed into his eye post-mortem. Given the way the knife twisted as it went in, it was likely he turned and caught them off guard.’

It would have been a painful wound, but not fatal straightaway. Hardly the most efficient way to kill a man.

Woolgar watched silently from the doorway, where the assailants must have entered, knives out. He was trying to picture it too.

‘Somehow Perez got free,’ Darbishire went on, moving towards the bay window. ‘There was a struggle. He got as far as the foot of the bed, where they managed to cosh him on the back of the head. Right-handed, Deedar thinks. Why they didn’t do that first, I don’t know. Still no sign of the cosh. Perez fell . . .’ he checked against the bloodstain on the carpet ‘. . . here. And that’s where he was garrotted. Using cheese wire, or something like it, Deedar says. The stocking we found round the neck was superfluous. The wire’d already gone halfway through his windpipe.’

Woolgar nodded. ‘Belt and braces, you might say.’

You might, though Darbishire wouldn’t. It was an odd thing to do, though. Were they squeamish, these thugs? Did they want to cover up the wound with the stocking? Or in their fury, did they both want a go? That made sense, given the stag-handled flick knife someone ghoulishly parked in his eye afterwards. It was a slim, evil-looking affair, of the type the Italians called a stiletto. He’d seen many like it before.