Cop to Corpse by Peter Lovesey

Author:Peter Lovesey [Lovesey, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9781445828176
Google: MnXWFWYDRa4C
Amazon: 1410450163
Barnesnoble: 1410450163
Goodreads: 13531181
Publisher: Windsor
Published: 2011-12-31T18:30:00+00:00

17

His phone went, offering him a choice of traffic offences: use the mobile while driving or stop and block a passing-point in the narrow Somerset lane. He pulled over. He’d met nothing for some way, so he reckoned this was the better option.

‘Yes?’

‘Diamond, where the fuck are you?’

‘Is that you, Jack?’ As if anyone else spoke to him like that.

‘I said –’

‘Heard you. I’m on the way in.’ True. He was more than halfway back from Wells.

‘Do you know what time it is? I’ve been trying to reach you at Manvers Street. Some of us are at work this morning and we’ve struck gold.’

He yawned. He wasn’t in gold rush mode. ‘Tell me more.’

‘I can do better. Meet me in twenty minutes at Avoncliff railway station and I’ll show you.’

‘Can we make that forty?’

‘Are you still in your fucking pit?’

‘Would I tell you if I was? See you at twelve-thirty.’ He switched off.

Whatever Gull had discovered it would need to be good to outweigh this morning’s find. Ossy Hart and Stan Richmond both involved in folklore and with a prospect of film money in the offing. True, Ossy had by then retired from his role as the Sailor’s Horse, but the lure of thousands of dollars had revived his interest, even if he’d dismissed it as bullshit.

Big money brings its own temptations.

Next question: did Harry Tasker, boring old Harry who did nothing but pound the beat and go fishing according to his wife, get a sniff of the money? Did he have a passing interest in local customs that Emma had failed to mention?

And if any of this were true, why did all three get murdered?

Another session with Emma Tasker beckoned, and Diamond didn’t relish it. Good thing Stan Richmond hadn’t also left a widow to be interviewed. Be thankful for small mercies.

He looked in at the incident room and was told three times over that Jack Gull had been trying to reach him.

‘Don’t suppose he told you what it was about,’ he said to Ingeborg.

‘No, guv, except it was urgent.’

‘Always is with Jack. Makes him feel important.’

The tension from yesterday’s team meeting hadn’t all evaporated, but at least they were on speaking terms.

‘Did he ask where I was?’

‘We didn’t know,’ Keith Halliwell said, and it felt like a dig.

‘I was in Wells.’ He gave them the gist of what Juliet Hart had told him about the Minehead May Day ritual, adding only one comment. ‘And that, my friends, is how Martin Hart came to be known as Ossy.’

Usually the idea of one of the force up to something eccentric was sure to provoke some laughs. This morning’s response was a few bemused looks.

‘Does it make any difference?’ John Leaman asked in his habitual downbeat tone. ‘This all happened before he joined the police.’

‘The film offer was the new factor,’ Ingeborg said, sharp to the point as always. ‘And he was tempted, by the sound of things.’

Leaman was unmoved. ‘But it didn’t come to anything.’

She gave an impatient sigh. ‘It came up shortly before he was shot and it was big bucks.

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