Authors: Peter Lovesey
Paternoster frowned. ‘How tall do you mean?’
‘Really big. Well over six foot. Large hands, wide shoulders.’
‘No. I don’t remember anyone like that.’
‘Do you remember anyone at all, any of the guests who stood out?’
‘There was a black lady, but she was talking to people as if she belonged there.’
‘You’re probably right about that. Sally Allardyce is black and she lives in the top flat. You said she was talking to people. Can’t you picture any of them?’
‘No. They must have been friends. They seemed to know each other.’
‘Perhaps she was with the Treadwells, from downstairs.’
‘Not Mrs Treadwell. I know her and she wasn’t with them. I saw her downstairs. She was definitely downstairs.’
‘You know Mrs Treadwell?’
‘I’ve seen her in our shop.’
‘She’s a detectorist?’
He smiled. ‘No. I know all the people in Bath who do it seriously. She came in out of interest one afternoon and looked at some books and magazines. A lot of people drop in just to see what it’s about. I think they expect us to have some treasure on view.’
‘How did you find out her name?’
‘Saw a picture of her in the paper almost the next day with her husband. In the business section. Something about a supermarket they designed. I remembered her face.’
Diamond returned to the more pressing matter of Hildegarde Henkel. ‘You were telling me how you watched the German woman.’
‘Yes. She was there some time, getting on for half an hour, I’d say, and I was trying to pluck up the courage to go over to her.’
‘I know the feeling.’
He was unsettled by Diamond’s comment. ‘Oh, but I was only wanting to let her know that not everyone in the place was unfriendly. I kept trying to catch her eye and smile or something, only she didn’t look my way. Like I said before, she didn’t seem to be looking at people. Then I got distracted - someone dropped a glass, I think - and when I looked up, she’d gone. I knew she hadn’t left the flat, because I was by the door and, believe me, I would have noticed if she’d come that close.’
‘I believe you,’ Diamond said. ‘So what did you do about it?’
‘Well, there was a small passageway at the end with two doors leading off it. One was the bathroom. I’d heard the toilet flushing as people came out. The other room had to be the bedroom. I assumed she’d gone to the bathroom. I waited some minutes to see if she would come out, but when the door opened, it was a man. So…so I guessed she’d gone into the bedroom.’
‘Did you follow?’
He eased a finger between his collar and his neck. ‘In the end, I did.’
Diamond was almost moved to remind this wimp that he was not his mother and didn’t give a damn whether he followed a woman into a bedroom at a party.
The confession resumed. ‘It was dark inside. I couldn’t really see much, just the shape of a large bed, and I could hear people on it. From the sounds it was obvious that they were …’
‘Hard at it?’
‘Yes. Me being there didn’t make any difference to them. I was amazed.’
‘That they ignored you?’
‘No. What surprised me was that it happened so fast. The man must have been in there waiting for her. I haven’t the faintest idea who he was.’
He had put the wrong construction on this altogether. Diamond said, ‘So what did you do?’
‘I came out. Left them to it. That’s all I can tell you, because I walked downstairs and out of the house at that point’
Having made the first bold decision of his life by stepping into that bedroom, the boy had been cruelly disillusioned. Humiliated, he had quit the scene. It was easy to imagine, and it rang true.
Diamond had heard all he needed. He could have thanked young Paternoster and arranged for someone else to take the statement. But some inner prompting, the memory, probably, of his own adolescent rebuffs, made him merciful. ‘I think you should know that there’s a second door in that bedroom. It’s on the far side. You wouldn’t have seen it unless you were looking for it, but I know it’s there because I’ve seen it. You said the German woman wasn’t looking at people. She’d worked out that there was an extra room - the attic room - upstairs. She looked everywhere else, and decided that the access to the attic had to be from the bedroom. I believe she found it and went up the stairs and eventually onto the roof.’
‘But… the people on the bed.’
‘Some other couple. You and I know what parties are like, Gary. We wouldn’t choose someone else’s house for a legover, but there’s always some randy couple who will.’
‘She wasn’t there?’
‘When you came in, she’d already found the door and gone up to the attic.’
Diamond’s statement acted like a reprieve. The boy’s posture altered. His face lit up. ‘That never occurred to me.’
Diamond nodded. ‘I’m going to get you a beer, son. A regular beer.’
He remained with the lad for some time, talking of the high expectations of women and how even a man of his experience could never hope to match their dreams. ‘That’s their agony, Gary, and ours. We’re all trying to make the best of what we’ve got. They have to accept that you’re not Elvis, or Bill Gates, or Jesus Christ, and if you keep talking, make them laugh a little, show them you’re neither a rapist nor a rabbit, you may find one willing to stretch a point and spend some time with you.’ The boy said he lacked confidence. Talking more like a best mate than the father he had not been, Diamond pointed out that the party hadn’t been the personal disaster it seemed. To have faltered at the bedroom door would have been a failure. The lad had proved to himself that he was man enough to go in. Now it was just a question of some fine tuning. Trendy clothes. A different haircut. Drinking beer was a good start.
The time had not been wasted.
‘John, I’m setting up a murder inquiry.’
Wigfull stiffened and pressed himself back in his chair. ‘This German woman?’
‘No.’
‘Who, then?’
‘The farmer.’
‘Gladstone
?’
In a pacifying gesture, Diamond put up his palms. ‘It was your case, I know, and you had it down as a suicide.’
Wigfull snatched up a manila folder. ‘It’s here, ready for the coroner.’
There was a moment’s silence out of respect for all the work contained in the manila folder. ‘As you know,’ Diamond resumed, ‘I was out at Tormarton the afternoon you were there. I’ve been back since.’
The Chief Inspector’s face turned geranium red. ‘You had no right.’
Diamond went on in a steady tone, neither apologetic nor triumphant, ‘The first test of suicide is to make sure that the death wound was self-inflicted. I’ve looked at the shotgun, in its wrapper. I measured it. Have you seen it? The length, I mean. I tucked it under my chin and tried the position he is supposed to have used to blow his own brains out. I’m a larger man than old Gladstone was and I tell you, John, my fingers can’t reach the trigger with my arms fully stretched. If the muzzle was in my mouth, yes, I could fire it, just. If it was against my forehead, easier still. But the cartridge went through his jaw from underneath. The little old man was physically incapable of doing that.’
Wigfull was unwilling to be persuaded. ‘We found his prints on the breechblock and on the barrel.’
‘But you would. The gun was his.’’ There were no other prints.’
Diamond gave him a long, unadmiring look. ‘If you were handling a murder weapon, would you leave your prints on it?’
‘The gun was found beside him.’
‘To make it look like suicide.’
‘Are you saying I’m incompetent?’
‘John, for pity’s sake, listen. This was set up as a suicide. It looked cut and dried. Dead man in a chair with his shotgun beside him. You saw it yourself before forensic removed the body from the scene. Difficult to reconstruct later, of course. That’s the fault of the procedure. We store the gun in one place and the corpse in another and it’s easy to overlook the mechanics. I’m not getting at you personally. Any of us.’
‘Except you,’ Wigfull said with ill-concealed resentment.
‘But do you see what I’m driving at?’
‘What put you onto it?’
The question signalled that Wigfull was listening to reason, and Diamond treated it with restraint. ‘I couldn’t understand why the ground was disturbed at the farm after Gladstone’s death.’
‘I knew all about that,’ Wigfull waded in again, still making this an issue of personal rivalry. ‘In fact I was the one who told you about it.’
‘Perfectly true.’
‘And I wouldn’t pin too much on it,’ he added, seeing a possible flaw in Diamond’s reasoning. ‘What was it - five days the body lay there? You can bet some evil bastard noticed that the old farmer wasn’t about. Maybe they looked in and thought this was an opportunity. There were rumours Gladstone was miserly. Someone could have thought he buried his savings. If they dug a few holes, it might make them trespassers and thieves, but it doesn’t make them murderers.’
‘Fair point,’ said Diamond. ‘You may still be right about the digging. But you wanted to know what put me onto homicide as a possibility, and I’m telling you. When I see signs of a third party at the scene, I automatically think murder. It’s my job. I asked myself if Gladstone’s death could have been caused by the person or people who dug his land. Ran it through my mind as a faked suicide. Looked at the scene and checked the weapon. And unless the old boy had arms like an orangutan, I’m right.’
Wigfull resigned the contest. The moustache hung over his downturned mouth like the wings of a caged vulture. ‘So what was the motive? Theft?’
‘That isn’t clear yet. But I have a suspect.’
He sat forward, animated again. ‘You do?’
Diamond’s bland expression didn’t alter. ‘But if you don’t mind, John, I’ll sleep on it. Tomorrow we’ll set up an incident room and a squad and I’ll take them through the evidence. I expect you’ll want to be in on it.’
He went to look for Julie.
She had not returned, so he ambled down to the canteen for some supper. Baked beans, bacon, fried eggs, chips and toast, with a mug of tea. ‘You’re a credit to us, Mr Diamond,’ the manageress told him.
‘Stoking up,’ he said. ‘Heavy session in prospect.’
It was almost eight when Julie got back to the nick.
‘Have you eaten?’ he asked her first.
‘Not since lunch.’
‘Why don’t we go across to Bloomsburys? I don’t think I can face the canteen tonight.’ Coming from a man who was a credit to the police canteen, it was a betrayal. What a good thing the manageress didn’t hear him.
Julie said, ‘On one condition: that you stay off the beer.’ Seeing his eyes widen at that, she explained, ‘No disrespect, but you’ve had enough for one day if you’re driving home after.’
‘How do you know that?’
Her slightly raised eyebrows said enough.
Bloomsburys Cafe-Bar was their local, just across the street from the nick, a place with bewildering decor that amused Diamond each time he came in. Pink and green dominated and the portraits of Virginia Woolf and members of the Bloomsbury Set co-existed with non-stop TV and plastic tablecloths, lulled by rock ballads and the click of billiard balls from the games room behind the bar.
They chose a round table in a window bay. Diamond circled it first, assessing the fit of the chairs. On previous visits he’d discovered a variation in size, although they were all painted pale green. A big man had to be alert to such things. While Julie started on a chicken curry with rice and poppadom, he sampled the apple pie and custard, stared at the Diet Coke in front of him and brought her up to date on his long afternoon, recalling how he handled the shotgun, examined the church registers at Tormarton and gave advice on women to a detectorist. Unusually, he went to some trouble to explain how each experience had an impact on their investigations. In total, he said, it had been a satisfactory afternoon - and how was it for her?
Less exciting, she told him. She had started, as per instructions, by visiting Imogen Starr, the social worker, and questioning her about Doreen Jenkins, the woman who had collected Rose. In Imogen’s opinion, Jenkins was an intelligent and well-disposed woman, concerned about Rose and well capable of caring for her.
‘Ho-hum,’ commented Diamond. ‘Did you get a description from her?’
‘A good one. I’ll say that for Imogen: she’d make a cracking witness. She puts the woman’s age at thirty or slightly younger. Height five-eight. Broad-shouldered. Healthy complexion. Regular, good-looking features, but with large cheek-bones. Good teeth, quite large. Brown eyes. Fine, chestnut brown hair worn in a ponytail. She was beautifully made-up, face, nails, the lot. White silk blouse, black leggings, black lace-up shoes. Oh, and she had a mock-leather jacket that she put on at the end and one of those large leather shoulder-bags with a zip.’
‘Accent?’
‘Home counties. Educated.’
‘Your memory isn’t so bad either. I take it that Imogen hasn’t changed her opinion about this elegant dame?’
‘She still believes Rose is in good hands.’
He clicked his tongue in dissent. ‘And I told her myself that the Hounslow address is false.’
‘She thinks it quite feasible that the family wanted to protect Rose from the press.’
‘Talk about Starr. Starry-eyed,’ he said.
‘Inexperienced,’ said Julie.
Doreen Jenkins’s integrity had unravelled as Julie had got on the trail, phoning around and checking the information. None of it had stood up to examination. Nothing was known of the family in Twickenham or Hounslow, nor of Jackie Mays, the friend who had been mentioned. Rose’s mother was supposed to have got a divorce and remarried in 1972. A check of all the marriages that year of men named Black had failed to link any with a woman whose surname was Jenkins.
Doreen Jenkins and her partner Jerry were supposed to have been staying at a bed and breakfast place in Bathford. Not one of the licensed boarding houses could recall a couple staying that week and being joined later by someone of Rose’s name or description.
‘Ada Shaftsbury was right all the time,’ Julie summed up. ‘This woman was lying through her teeth.’
‘Except for the photos,’ he said. ‘They must have been genuine to have convinced Ada as well as Imogen. They definitely showed Rose with an older woman.’