Authors: Peter Lovesey
Julie saved him the trouble of explaining why Allardyce was preferred as the suspect. ‘As the Allardyces live upstairs, he could get up to the roof without arousing any suspicion.’
‘Right, and this links up with another moment. Let’s backtrack to the party. When someone reported the woman on the roof, who was it who went up to investigate, but the master of the house, the caring Mr Allardyce?’
He paused for some show of admiration, but he didn’t get it.
Beginning to sound huffy, he picked up the thread again. ‘If you’re still with me, Allardyce claims he saw no one on the roof. He’d like us to suppose the woman must have fallen or jumped in the interval between the people spotting her and the moment he looked out of his attic window. He states that he didn’t climb out of the window to check. He just leaned out and saw no one on the balustrade and assumed she’d given up and come down. That’s his version. Have I given it fairly?’
He got a curt nod from Julie.
Outside, the darkness had set in and the grey mass of the Crescent appeared to merge at the top with the night sky. Unusually for such a well-known building there was no floodlighting. The reason was that it was residential, and residents in their living rooms have no desire to be in the spotlight to that degree. So the only lighting was supplied by those pseudo-Victorian lamp-posts painted black and gilt, with their iron cross-pieces supposedly to support the lamplighter’s ladder.
‘He claims not to have climbed onto the roof for a thorough look,’ Diamond went on. ‘Why not? We climbed out ourselves. You’ll agree with me that it’s as easy as getting into a bath. In spite of what he suggests, there are parts of the roof you can’t see from inside the attic. She could have been up on the tiles behind him. Or she could have moved along the balustrade over one of his neighbours’ houses. Wasn’t he interested enough to check?’
‘You can’t blame him for that,’ Julie found herself saying in the man’s defence. ‘His house had been taken over. He was concerned about what was going on inside.’
‘Fair point,’ Diamond admitted. ‘There’s some good stuff there. Antique ornaments. Period furniture. A beautiful music centre in the living-room with hundreds of CDs. If it had been my house full of strangers whooping it up, I’d have been going spare.’
‘Perhaps he was. He can afford to be cool about it now it’s over.’
He turned to her again. ‘Julie, you’re so right. He’s not making an issue of what happened, as Treadwell is. He’s incredibly blasé. What happened was okay by Allardyce, perfectly understandable. That’s the impression I got. Did you?’
‘Well, yes, now it’s over.’
‘But was he so happy at the time, I wonder? There’s a ruthless young man behind that smooth exterior. You don’t get results in business simply by being charming. Public relations is dog eat dog.’
‘Being tough in business is one thing. Murder is something else,’ she said, far from convinced.
‘Hold on. I doubt if this would stand as murder,’ he told her. ‘Manslaughter, maybe. This wasn’t premeditated. It was an impulse killing. What I picture is Allardyce made angry by events - extremely angry - in complete contrast to the PR front he was presenting this afternoon.’
‘Mr Right as Mr Raving Mad?’ she said, meaning it to be ironical.
He seized on that. ‘Spot on. He’s all fired up. He goes up to the attic and sees the woman seated on the balustrade. He has a wild impulse to push her. He climbs out of the window and starts towards her, but she hears him. She half-turns. Instead of giving her one quick shove in the back, he has a fight on his hands. That’s when the shoe falls off. He doesn’t notice that, of course. He’s totally involved in forcing her over the edge. Nobody has seen him and luckily for him the woman falls into the well of the basement. It’s a dark night, and she isn’t noticed by any of the people leaving the house. It’s daylight before she is found. The rest I’ve explained, his problem with the shoe, and so forth. Is it plausible?’
She could almost feel the heat of his expectation. ‘So far as it goes, I can’t see any obvious holes. The only thing is…’
‘Yes?’
‘This vicious side to his character is difficult for me to picture.’
‘You called him Mr Raving Mad.’
‘Just picking up on what you were saying. I didn’t agree with it.’
‘So he’s Mr Nice Guy, is he?’
‘Mr Right, anyway.’
‘You must have been out with men on their best behaviour who suddenly turned nasty when you didn’t let them have their wicked way.’
‘Not homicidal.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
She said after an interval for reflection, ‘My experiences with men have got nothing to do with this.’
‘Just making a point,’ he said. ‘We’re all prisoners of our hormones - you know that.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘Those, too.’
She was forced to smile. ‘Am I mistaken, or is the window steaming up?’
He rubbed it with the sleeve of his coat. ‘Well, it’s all speculation up to now. Unless we catch him with that ruddy shoe, we’ve got nothing worth making into a prosecution. Even then, I doubt if it will stick. A half-decent barrister would get him off.’
‘So are we wasting our time here?’
‘Not at all.’
But as it turned out, they were. After almost two hours of waiting, he radioed Manvers Street and asked for someone to take over.
And the blue BMW stayed where it was in Brock Street until Monday morning, when Allardyce drove to work.
Monday morning in Manvers Street Police Station brought John Wigfull to Diamond’s office. And when the two detectives had finished discussing every facet of the Royal Crescent incident, they were forced to agree that little more could be achieved until they had a post-mortem report on the victim.
The priority was to identify her. Diamond’s press release appealing for information had been distributed, but because the local news machine grinds to a virtual halt on Sundays, a response couldn’t be expected until the story broke at midday in the
Bath Chronicle
and on local radio and television.
‘It’s strange that nobody who was at the party has come forward,’ Wigfull commented. ‘Word must have got around the city that someone was found there. The papers may not have been printed yesterday, but the pubs were open, and most of the people at the party were only there because they happened to hear about it in a pub.’
‘They haven’t had the description,’ Diamond said.
‘What
is
she like, then?’
‘Apart from dead? Dark-haired with brown eyes, about thirty or younger, slim build, average height.’
‘Good-looking?’
‘Do you know, John, it must be something lacking in me, but I find it hard to think of corpses as good-looking. She had one of those trendy haircuts, shorn severely at the sides, and with a thick mop on top that soaked up quite a lot of the blood from the head wound. Is that good-looking? Oh, and she painted her fingernails. They were damaged, some of them, whether from hitting the ground or fighting off an attacker I wouldn’t know.’
‘We could publish a photo if all else fails.’
‘And put it out on TV about six-thirty when people are just sitting down in front of the box with their meat and two veg. Isn’t it marvelous what they find to show you about that time? Mad cows, magnified head-lice and battered old ladies appear on my screen night after night, so why shouldn’t we show them a face from the morgue? But do me a favour and choose a night when I’m not at home.’
Wigfull had never been able to tell when Diamond was serious. He said, ‘That dead farmer I’m investigating is no picnic.’
‘Your farmer at Tormarton? Haven’t you put that one to bed yet?’
‘Just about.’ Wigfull hesitated in a way that told Diamond the Tormarton farmer had
not
been put to bed. ‘Virtually, anyway. The post-mortem hasn’t been done yet.’
‘What’s the hold-up?’
‘Identification. I was trying to get a relative, but we haven’t traced anyone yet. It looks as if we’ll be using his social worker and maybe one of the meals-on-wheels people. He didn’t have much to do with his neighbours. Nothing is ever as simple as it first appears, is it?’
Diamond said, ‘Surely there’s no question that the corpse
is
Daniel Gladstone?’
‘You know me by now, Peter. I don’t cut corners.’ Wigfull brought his hands together in a way that signaled he wanted an end to the discussion.
‘Speaking for myself, I like to get on with things,’ said Diamond. ‘I don’t want a delay on the Royal Crescent woman. Full publicity. Someone who knows her will read about her in the paper and we’ll get a PM this week.’
‘Speaking of people coming forward…’ Wigfull said in a tentative manner.
‘Yes?’
‘Ada Shaftsbury was here again first thing, raising Cain about this friend of hers who she says is abducted.’
‘Ada?’ The hypertension kicked in again. ‘Look, Ada and I are not on the best of terms. She was practically at my throat yesterday morning. She called me - what was it? - a feather-merchant. Now, I haven’t yet discovered what a feather-merchant is or does, but it doesn’t make me want to spend more time with Ada.’
‘This is only a suggestion,’ said Wigfull. ‘If someone could sort Ada’s problem, he’d do us all a service.’
‘It’s a non-existent problem. Her friend left Bath a couple of weeks ago and hasn’t written to Ada since. That isn’t a police matter, John.’
‘I was only passing it on.’
‘Consider it passed on, then.’
As the sound of the chief inspector’s steps died away, Diamond found himself remembering a saying of Kai Lung he had read in bed the previous night: ‘Even a goat and an ox must keep in step if they are to plough together.’ Shaking his head, he got up and went to look for Julie.
She was in the canteen finishing a coffee, watching two of the murder squad perfecting their snooker. She asked Diamond if anything fresh had come up at the Royal Crescent and he made a sweeping gesture that disposed of that line of conversation. He commented that this was early in the day for coffee and Julie said she needed one after meeting Ada Shaftsbury as she arrived for work.
‘You, too?’ he said. ‘Wigfull had a blast this morning and I had a basinful yesterday.’
Julie said she knew about his basinful because Ada had referred to him.
‘That’s a delicate way of phrasing it, Julie.’
She laughed. ‘We agreed on one or two things, Ada and I.’
‘Thanks.’
She said, ‘I don’t know if it crossed your mind, but when she was talking about this Rose or Rosamund, the woman who hasn’t been in touch, I couldn’t help comparing her description with the woman who was killed at the party.’
‘Really?’ The word was drained of all interest the way he spoke it.
‘Some of the details do compare,’ she pressed on. ‘The age, the colour and length of the hair, the slim figure.’
‘All that applies to thousands of women. Could easily be a description of you.’
‘Do you mind? I paid a bomb for these blonde highlights.’
‘You can’t deny it’s short.’ He made a pretence of swaying to ride a punch. ‘Fair enough, I was ignoring the highlights. They look, em, good value. Would you like your coffee topped up?’
She shook her blonde highlights.
‘A fresh one, then?’
Conscious that he had some fence-mending to do, he also offered to buy her a bun. When he returned with a tray and two mugs and set them on the table Julie had chosen, well away from the snooker game, she remarked, ‘I still think you ought to speak to Ada. One of the things she goes on about is that some man tried to grab her friend Rose outside the hostel and force her into a car.’
‘She told me.’
She mopped up some of the coffee he’d slopped on the tray. ‘Well, it isn’t a fantasy. It really happened. Remember a week or so ago, the morning we met at the Lilliput, I was late because of a German woman I had to take to the Tourist Information Office? That afternoon I was given a statement in English of what she said, and it turns out that she was a witness to this incident in Bathwick Street. She lives in the hostel and she happened to be right across the street when the bloke tried to snatch Rose.’
‘I didn’t say it was a fantasy, Julie.’
‘I’m just passing on my thoughts about Ada. I know it doesn’t interest you particularly, but she’s in a fair old state about her friend.’
He sighed. ‘Tell me something new, Julie.’
She wasn’t giving up. ‘Ada may be a chronic shoplifter, but she’s not stupid. If she thinks there’s something iffy about the woman who collected her friend, she may be right.’
He admitted as much with a shrug. ‘But it isn’t my job to investigate iffy women.’
Julie’s blue eyes locked with his. ‘You could take Ada down to the RUH and give her a sight of the corpse.’
‘What use would that be?’
‘Who knows - it could be her friend Rose in the chiller.’
‘No chance.’
‘Yes, but it might get Ada off your back.’
‘Now you’re talking.’A slow smile spread across his face. ‘What a neat idea.’
Ada was so stunned that she stopped speaking for about five seconds. When she restarted, it was to ask in a faltering voice for a drop of brandy. Most of the morning she had been sounding off to all and sundry that her friend could easily be dead by now. She was not expecting this early opportunity to find out. she said her legs were going.
She was guided to a chair and something alcoholic in a paper cup was placed in her plump, trembling hand. Peter Diamond, prepared to do a deal, told her gently that if she didn’t feel able to accompany him to the mortuary, nobody would insist. She could leave the police station and nobody would think any the worse of her - provided she stayed away in future. As for the likelihood of the dead woman turning out to be her friend, it was extremely remote. ‘A shot in the dark,’ he said - an unfortunate phrase that caused Ada to squeeze the cup and spill some of the drink. Hastily he went on to explain that he doubted if Rose, or Rosamund, last heard of returning to Hounslow with her stepsister, had come back to Bath and fallen off the roof of the Royal Crescent on Saturday night. There were just the similarities in description, all superficial, and the importance Ada herself attached to Rose’s well-being. If Ada cared to go through the points with him now, she would probably find some detail that didn’t match and save herself a harrowing experience.