Upon a Dark Night (22 page)

He read the description to her. She asked for more brandy. A short while later, he drove her to the hospital.

From the back seat, Ada confided to him that she had never seen a dead person. ‘They said I could look at my poor old mother after she went, but I didn’t want to.’

‘You’re in the majority,’ he said. ‘I get queasy myself.’

‘But you’ve seen this one?’

‘Oh, yes. Looking very peaceful. You wouldn’t know she’d, em … Well, you wouldn’t know.’

She said in a shaky voice, ‘I want to tell you something, Mr Diamond.’

He leaned back in the seat, trying to be both a good driver and a good listener. ‘What’s that?’

She said huskily into his ear, ‘If this does turn out to be Rose, and you tossers could have saved her, I’ll push your face through the back of your neck and wee on your grave.’

The mortuary attendant was a woman. Diamond took her aside and asked if a chair could be provided for Ada. ‘The lady is nervous and if she passed out I doubt if you and I could hold her up between us.’

With Ada seated and shredding a tissue between her fingers, the trolley was wheeled out and the cover unzipped to reveal the features of the dead woman.

‘You may need to stand for a moment, my dear,’the attendant advised.

Ada got to her feet and glanced down at the face. She gave a gasp of recognition, said, ‘Strike a light!’ and passed out.

The chair collapsed with her.

He phoned Julie from the mortuary.

‘Was Ada any help?’ she asked.

‘She was, as it happens. She recognised the body. Gave her a real shock. She passed out, in fact. But it isn’t her friend. Not that friend. It’s someone else she knew from Harmer House, someone you’ve met, a German woman called Hildegarde.’

Nineteen

Julie Hargreaves was still at Manvers Street, at work on a computer keyboard, when Diamond looked in. She was logging her report on a phone call to Imogen Starr, the social worker responsible for Hildegarde Henkel, the woman who had fallen to her death at the Royal Crescent.

‘Aren’t you just kicking yourself?’ he said.

‘What for?’ she asked.

‘For not paying more attention to this woman when she tapped you on the arm that morning she appeared downstairs.’

‘She didn’t tap me on the arm, Mr Diamond. The desk sergeant asked me to help him out. I gave her all the attention I could considering she hardly spoke a word of English. I walked with her personally all the way to the Tourist Information Office and left her in the care of someone who did speak her language. If there’s something else I should have done, perhaps you’ll enlighten me.’

He muttered something about not going off the deep end and said he would need to take a close look at the statement, but he’d need some background first.

‘Can you give it to me in a nutshell?’ he asked. ‘I was supposed to be home early tonight.’

Barely containing her irritation, Julie said, ‘I could have a printout waiting on your desk tomorrow morning if you’re in that much of a hurry.’

‘I’ll have it now.’

She stared at the screen. ‘Well, she’s German, from Bonn. A drop-out from school who lost touch with her people. Got friendly with a young English guy working as an interpreter at the British Embassy and married him. Soon after, they moved to England. He turned out to be a fly-by-night and was away in a matter of weeks. This poor girl found herself jobless and without much knowledge of the language.’

‘Couldn’t she have gone back to Germany?’

‘Didn’t want to. Her life was a mess. She’d walked out on her parents. As the wife of a British subject she was entitled to remain in Britain, and that was her best hope, she thought. She soon used up what little money she had, lived rough for a while, got treated for depression and ended up as one of Imogen’s case-load at Avon Social Services. That’s it, in your nutshell.’

‘The husband. Was his name Henkel, then?’

‘Perkins, or something like that. She wanted to forget him, and no wonder, poor girl.’

‘Wanted it both ways. Wipe him out of her life and use him to qualify as a resident.’

Julie’s eyebrows pricked up. ‘That’s harsh, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t know about that. Your version sounded a shade too sisterly for my taste.’

‘Well, she is dead, for God’s sake. Aren’t we allowed any pity at all in this job?’ She switched off the machine, rolled back the chair and quit the room.

With a sigh, he ran his hand over his head. He held Julie in high regard. Out of churlishness, he’d upset her just to make a point about some woman he had never met except on a mortuary trolley.

Exactly how unfortunate the upset was became clear presently, when he went to his desk to look at the messages. On top was a note from the local Home Office pathologist stating that now that formal identification had taken place, he proposed carrying out the post-mortem on Hildegarde Henkel at 8.30am the next morning. Normally Diamond would have found some pretext for missing the autopsy. It was the one part of CID work he tried to avoid. At least one senior detective on the case was routinely supposed to be present, listening to the pathologist’s running commentary and discussing the findings immediately afterwards. The only possible stand-in was Julie, who had deputised on several similar occasions.

A call to Julie at home?

Even Peter Diamond didn’t have the brass neck for that.

He did not, after all, get home early. He drove over Pulteney Bridge, ignoring the ban on private vehicles, and up Henrietta Street to Bathwick Street, to call at Harmer House. He had two objectives. The first was to examine Hildegarde Henkel’s room. The second was to call on Ada Shaftsbury, a prospect he didn’t relish, but against all reason he felt some sympathy for Ada after the shock she had suffered. True, she had not had to endure the ordeal of watching a pathologist at work, but by her own lights she had gone through a traumatic experience and it had been at his behest.

He found her in her room eating iced bun-rings. Her voice, when she called out to him to come in, was faint, and he prepared to find her in a depleted state. It transpired that her mouth was full of bun.

‘You,’ she said accusingly. ‘You’re the last person I want to see.’

For a moment the feeling was mutual, and he almost turned round and left. She presented such a gross spectacle seated on her bed, her enormous lap heaped with paper bags filled at the baker’s.

‘I called to see how you are - after this morning.’

‘Shaky,’ said Ada. ‘Very shaky.’

‘I didn’t expect it to be someone you knew. I can honestly tell you that, Ada.’

‘She was a true mate of mine,’ said Ada, starting on another bun-ring. ‘She cooked my breakfast every day, you know. She was wonderful in the kitchen. Germans are good learners, and I showed her what an English breakfast should be. I don’t know what I’m going to do without her.’

‘Did you talk to her much?’

She managed a faint grin. ‘Quite a bit. But she didn’t say a lot to me. Her English wasn’t up to it. I taught her a few essential words.’

‘So you wouldn’t know about her state of mind? If she was depressed, say?’

‘You can tell a lot just by looking at people,’ said Ada. ‘Take yourself, Mr Diamond. I can see you’re on pins in case I mention my friend Rose again. You can’t wait to get out of here.’

He ignored the shrewd and accurate observation. ‘And Hildegarde?’

‘She was happier here than she’d been for a long time. She wasn’t suicidal.’

‘Any friends?’

‘Don’t know. I never saw her with any. Not here. She used to go out evenings sometimes. Maybe she knew some German people. They stick together. I can’t think how she got to that party at the Crescent unless she was with some people.’

Diamond pondered the possibility and it seemed sensible. ‘If she was with anyone, they haven’t come forward yet.’

‘Maybe I’m wrong, then. She could have just followed the crowd. Germans are more easily led than us, wouldn’t you say?’

He gave a shrug. These sweeping statements about the Germans left him cold. He was interested only in Hildegarde’s individual actions.

‘Do you want a bun?’ Ada offered. ‘There’s plenty for both of us.’

He was hungry, he realised. ‘Just a section, then. Not the whole ring.’

‘You look as if you could put it away, easy. You and I are built the same way.’

‘Oh, thanks.’

She missed the intended irony. ‘Got to keep body and soul together.’

‘I’m eating later.’

‘I could make tea if you like.’

‘This is fine. Really.’

After a pause for ingestion, Ada said, ‘Help yourself to another one. Do you think she jumped?’

‘I can’t answer that,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know her. You did.’

‘Someone else’s house is a funny place to choose to end it all,’ Ada speculated. ‘But if she wasn’t planning to kill herself, what was she doing on the ledge? Had she taken something?’

‘We haven’t heard from the lab yet. It’s possible. I’m going to look at her room presently.’

‘She didn’t leave a suicide note, I can tell you that.’

‘You’ve been in to check, I suppose?’

‘It’s open house here, always has been,’ Ada said, unabashed. ‘Are you going to talk to that ball of fire, Imogen, her social worker?’

‘I expect so.’

‘Hildegarde was on her list, same as Rose was. Imogen keeps shedding clients, have you noticed? Dropping them faster than a peep-show girl.’

‘You can’t blame the social worker.’

‘Try me, ducky. Rose didn’t know the woman who came to collect her, but did it cross Imogen’s tiny mind that it might be a try-on? Not on your nelly.’

Here we go, thought Diamond.

She went on, ‘I’ve been thinking about those photos. They didn’t
prove
this woman was Rose’s stepsister. The only thing they proved is that she’d brought in some photos of Rose with some old woman. If there had been a picture of the step-sister with Rose, the two of them in one picture, I’d shut up, but there wasn’t. And I still haven’t had that postcard.’

‘Her memory was dodgy,’ said Diamond.

‘Her short-term memory was spot on.’

‘You won’t let go, will you? Look, when I speak to the social worker I’ll check on your friend Rose as well, right? Now point me towards Hildegarde’s room.’

Ada escorted him downstairs, still griping about Rose. After she’d thrust open a door, he thanked her and said he would examine the room alone. He had to repeat it before she left him in peace.

Had she remained, she would have told him, he was certain, that Germans are very methodical. Everything in sight in the room - and there was not much - was tidily arranged. It was rather like entering a hotel room. The bed, unlike Ada’s, was made without a loose fold anywhere. Hildegarde’s few items of make-up and her brush and comb were grouped in front of the mirror on the makeshift dressing-table consisting of two sets of plastic drawers linked by a sheet of plate glass.

He started opening drawers and the contrast with the sights and smells he’d recoiled from in Daniel Gladstone’s cottage could not have been more complete. Everything from thick-knit sweaters to knickers and bras was arranged in layers and each drawer had its bag of sweet-smelling herbs in the front right-hand corner.

The room was conspicuously short of the personal documents that Hildegarde Henkel must have possessed: passport, wedding certificate and social security papers. Their absence tended to confirm his view that she had carried them in a handbag that some opportunist thief had picked up at the party in the Royal Crescent. He doubted if Ada had taken anything from the room. As far as he knew she never stole from individuals.

Anything of more than passing interest he threw on the immaculate bed. At the end of the exercise he had a photo of a dog, two books in German, a German/English dictionary, a packet of birth control pills, a set of wedding photos, a Walkman and a couple of Oasis tapes and a bar of chocolate. No suicide note, diary, address book, drugs. He scooped up the lot and replaced them in a drawer.

In sombre mood, he drove home.

Twenty

Peter Diamond’s moods may have been uncertain to his colleagues, but his wife Stephanie reckoned he was transparent ninety-nine per cent of the time. This morning was the one per cent exception. His behaviour was totally out of character. After bringing her the tea that was her daily treat, he rolled back into bed and opened the
Guardian
instead of going for his shower and shave and starting the routine of grooming, dressing, eating and listening to the radio that he’d observed for years. When he finally put down the paper, he went for a bath. A bath. He simply didn’t take baths in the morning. There was never time. He preferred evenings after work, when he would linger for hours with a book, topping up the hot water from time to time by deft action with his big toe against the tap.

She tapped on the bathroom door. ‘Are you all right in there?’

‘Why? Are you waiting to come in?’ he called.

‘No, I’m only asking.’ She was more discreet than to mention his blood pressure. ‘As long as you know how the time is going.’

‘Sixty minutes an hour when I last heard.’

‘Sorry I spoke, my lord.’