Authors: Peter Lovesey
‘I’d be more impressed if they’d shown Doreen Jenkins in the same picture.’
‘You doubt if she’s the stepsister?’
‘Having spent this afternoon the way I did, I doubt everything the bloody woman said.’
Hunched over the drink, which he was taking in small sips like cough medicine, he said, ‘Why then? Why all the subterfuge?’
Julie shook her head, at a loss. ‘I spent the last two hours with Ada, going over everything again.’
‘With Ada?’
She nodded.
He shook his head. ‘You need a socking great drink.’
‘And some.’
‘I’ll join you.’ He closed his eyes and downed the last of the Diet Coke.
‘In that case,’ she said, ‘make it Diet Cokes for both of us.’
His mouth may have turned down at the edges, but he didn’t protest. Meekly he stepped back to the bar and when he returned with the drinks he told her, ‘Yours has vodka added.’
She said, ‘They look the same to me.’
‘Colourless, isn’t it?’ He took a long swig of his. ‘Now, Julie, I want to try out a theory on you. If it holds up, we may have a suspect for Gladstone’s murder.’
Rain turning to sleet, sweeping in on an east wind, rattled the metal-framed windows of the Manvers Street building as Diamond briefed the murder squad. It was nine-twenty on Wednesday morning. Sixteen of them had assembled, most in their twenties, in leather and denim, the ‘plain-clothes’ that is almost a CID uniform, their hair either close-cropped or overlong. John Wigfull, the only suit in the room, sat slightly apart, closest to the door. Behind Diamond was a display board with a map of north-east Avon showing Tormarton Farm marked with a red arrow. There were several eight-by-ten photos of the scene inside the farmhouse, the corpse slumped in an armchair, the back of the head blown away, the shotgun lying on the floor. That same gun in its transparent wrapping lay across a table. Already this morning Diamond had demonstrated the impossibility of Daniel Gladstone’s ‘suicide’. He had talked about the digging on the farm at Tormarton and the possible motive of theft. Now he turned to another incident.
‘Monday, October 3rd, about six-thirty. An elderly couple called Dunkley-Brown are driving back from Bristol to Westbury on the M4. At Junction Eighteen…’ He took a step towards the map and touched the point. ‘…they decide to take a detour through Bath to collect a Chinese takeaway. They start down the A46 and after maybe three-quarters of a mile - before Dyrham, anyway - they are forced to brake. A young woman has wandered into the road. They can’t avoid hitting her, but they think they’ve avoided a serious accident. She fell across the bonnet. But when they go to help her it’s clear that she’s lost consciousness. They try to revive her at the side of the road. This is a real dilemma for them because the man has endorsements for drunk driving and he’s had a few beers during the day. They don’t want to be identified. What they do is this: drive her to the nearest hospital, a private clinic, here…’ He touched the map again. ‘…the Hinton Clinic - and dump her unconscious in the car park. But they are seen leaving the hospital and they have a Bentley with a distinctive mascot, and that’s how we know as much as we do.
‘The woman is found and taken into the hospital still in a coma and at this point it becomes a police matter. We send someone to the Hinton, but without much result, because although the patient is nursed back to consciousness, she is apparently suffering from a total loss of memory about her past, everything leading up to and including the accident. However, her physical injuries amount to no more than a cracked rib and some bruising and she’s handed over to Bath Social Services. We send a photographer to get some pics of the damage. Screen, please.’
One of the squad unfurled the screen on the front wall. Diamond switched on a slide-projector and the back view of a naked woman appeared and was hailed with approving noises by the largely male audience. Julie Hargreaves shook her head at the juvenile reaction, but they quieted down when Diamond pointed out the cuts and bruising on the thighs and legs. The next slide, a frontal shot, still got a few rutting sounds, if more muted than before. The woman on the screen had attractive breasts and a trim waist, yet her discomfort at being photographed was evident in the pose.
‘That’s the end of the floorshow, gentlemen.’
Some good-humoured dissent was heard.
Diamond slotted in another slide, a close-up of the woman’s face, and left it on the screen while he told the story of Rose’s short stay at Harmer House, eventually concluding it with: ‘…and after she is collected by the woman claiming to be her stepsister, we hear no more of her. Nobody hears a dickybird, not Social Services, not Ada, not the Old Bill.’
The room had gone silent except for the steady drumming of the rain. To a murder squad, the disappearance of a woman is ominous.
‘What is more,’ Diamond added, ‘nothing holds up in the stepsister’s story. Julie spent most of yesterday checking.’ He paused and looked at the tense, troubled face on the screen. ‘It’s already two weeks since she was collected. We thought we knew her name and background, but we can’t be sure of it any more. We’ll continue to call her Rose. Take a long look. She’s top priority. We’ve got to find her.’
He made eye contact with Julie. ‘DI Hargreaves is in charge of the search.’
He turned back to the map. ‘Now, look at this, the point on the A46, here, where she wanders into the road out of nowhere, the first anyone has heard of her. It’s not a great distance from Tormarton, is it? Not a great distance from Daniel Gladstone’s farm.’ He spanned it roughly with his outstretched forefinger and thumb. ‘Two miles at most. Think about that, will you? And think about when it happened, Monday, October 3rd. Curious, isn’t it, that the Friday previous is the pathologist’s best estimate of the old farmer’s date of death?’
‘You think she killed him, sir?’ someone asked.
Diamond faced the screen, saying nothing.
‘How could she?’ one of the younger detectives asked. ‘You’d need two people. One to pull the trigger and the other to hold the old bloke still.’
Another chipped in. ‘Bloody risky, holding his head over a shotgun. I wouldn’t do it. You could get your face blown away, easy.’
‘What you do,’ said Keith Halliwell, the longest-serving member of the squad, ‘is tie him to the chair first.’
‘You think a woman trussed him up?’
‘No problem. He was seventy-plus. Did you look at her physique?’
‘Well…’
‘Keith did,’ said a mocking voice. ‘Keefy likes ‘em beefy.’
Diamond swung around, glaring at the unfortunate who had spoken. ‘Oh, dead funny. Why don’t you come up here and do your act from the front? We’ll all club together, buy a red nose and a whoopee cushion and get you into show business.’ With silence reinstated, he said, ‘Someone asked if I think Rose killed the farmer. I was coming to that.’ He let them stew for another interval while he walked across to the window and looked at the rain. ‘Yes. It’s a possibility. She was in the area at approximately the time he was killed. Very approximately. The pathologist will tell you we’re dealing in rough figures here. A couple of days either side. So let’s not get carried away. However—’ He paused to wipe some condensation from the window. ‘—if the loss of memory is genuine, it will have been caused by some deeply stressful, traumatic event. And not just concussion from the accident. That’s different. You don’t lose your long-term memory from a bump on the head. This woman is suffering from acute neurosis. The scene in that farmhouse was scary enough to throw anyone’s mind off beam. True, it seems to have been a cold-blooded execution, but the effect of that shotgun blasting the back of old Gladstone’s skull off may have been more of a shock to the killer than she expected. Enough to suppress her memory and wipe out her own identity. And for those of you thinking I know sod-all about traumatic disorders, I did consult a couple of textbooks. There have been cases like it.
‘And now you’re going to ask me about a motive and I can’t tell you one because I don’t know who the woman is. But the possibilities are there. You can say she hates him because of something evil he did in the past, like abusing her when she was a child, or raping her mother. Or she could be the cold-blooded sort, after his savings. She may be mad, of course.’
‘She may have no connection with the case,’ said Julie unexpectedly.
Diamond stopped for a moment as if Julie’s words were being played back to him. Then he turned to face her. ‘I thought I made that clear. This is just a hypothesis.’
‘So long as we don’t lose sight of it,’ she said.
The strains were showing. ‘So you think she’s a red herring?’
‘No, Mr Diamond, I’m agreeing with you that she’s got to be found. She may be dangerous, as you say, more dangerous than she herself realises. Or she may be
in
danger. I spent most of yesterday checking out the woman who took her away and finding everything she said is bogus, so you’ll understand why I see it this way. I got used to thinking of Rose as a victim, not a villain. Just another hypothesis.’
He drew himself back from the brink. He’d given Julie the job yesterday, the kind of research she did so well, systematically uncovering the deception. Moreover, she’d been exposed for a couple of hours to Ada’s anxieties about the missing woman. Was it any wonder that she took a different line?
‘Thanks, Julie. Point taken.’ He pitched his voice to the entire room again. ‘I propose to bring in the press at this stage. I’m issuing this picture of the missing woman with the few real facts we know about her. For public consumption we’re appealing for information because there’s concern for her safety. Understood? Julie, you’d better warn Social Services to be ready for some flak over this.’ He crossed the room and switched off the projector. ‘We’ll also go public on the killing of Daniel Gladstone. It’s going to make large headlines, I’m afraid. The execution-style killing of an old man is sure to excite the tabloids. For the time being we’ll treat the incidents as unrelated. Let’s see what the publicity brings in. And of course it’s all systems go on the murder inquiry. Keith, would you set up the incident room here? Frank, you’re in charge of the hunt for Rose Black. Jerry, the farmer’s background is your job. His life history - family, work, the state of his finances, the lot. I can give you some pointers if you see me presently.’ He went on assigning duties for several minutes more. This had always been one of his strengths, instilling urgency into an inquiry.
After Diamond had left the room, Keith Halliwell put a hand on Julie’s shoulder. ‘You’ve got more guts than the rest of us, kiddo, speaking out like that.’
She shook her head. ‘I knew what was coming. Had more time to think it over.’
‘What do you reckon?’ he asked. ‘Has the old buzzard flipped?
‘In what way?’
‘Picking on this woman as a suspect. Can you see a woman trussing up an old man and firing a shotgun at his head?’
‘I don’t see why not,’ she answered, sensitive to the discrimination. ‘Any fit woman is capable of it.’
He shrugged. ‘But would they carry it out? Don’t you think it’s too brutal?’
‘It’s a question of motivation.’
‘Unlikely, though.’ He stretched and yawned. ‘He made such a brilliant start, too, all that stuff about the shotgun. No one else in CID would have sussed that it was murder. John Wigfull didn’t, and he was supposed to be handling the case.’
Julie declined the invitation to rubbish Wigfull.
Halliwell continued to fret about Diamond’s startling theory. ‘I mean, all he’s got on the woman is that she was in the area - well, a couple of miles away - at the time of the killing, give or take a few days.’
‘Behaving strangely.’
‘Okay. Give you that.’
‘With loss of memory. And then she gets spirited away by someone telling a heap of lies.’
He laughed. ‘I should have known you’d back the old sod.’
‘The thing is,’ Julie said, ‘he’s not often wrong.’
John Wigfull was pencil thin and a brisk mover, so Diamond was breathless when he finally drew level on the stairs.
‘A word in your ear, John.’
Wigfull stopped with one leg bent like a wading bird. He didn’t turn to look.
Diamond spoke more than a word into the ear. ‘I didn’t mention this in the meeting, but I need to take over any exhibits you picked up at the scene. Gladstone’s personal papers. Prints, fibres, hairs. Can I take it that the Sellotapers went through the farmhouse?’
‘Sellotapers?’
‘The scenes of crime lads.’
‘SOCOs.’
Diamond nodded. Something deep in his psyche balked at using the acronyms accepted by everyone else in the police. ‘I was sure you must have called them out, even though it looked like a routine suicide.’
‘A suspicious death. I know the drill.’
‘I never doubted.’
There was a glint in Wigfull’s eye. ‘Forensic had a field day. The place hadn’t been swept or dusted in months. The bloodstains alone are a major task. So if you’re looking for results, you may have to wait a while.’
‘I’ll check with them.’
‘You could try.’
‘Is the rest of the stuff with you?’
‘Yes. You can have it. Is that all?’ The bent leg started to move again.
‘Not quite. There’s the question of the other inquiry, into Hildegarde Henkel’s death.’
Wigfull turned to look at Diamond. ‘What about it?’
‘Difficult for me to manage at the same time as the Tormarton case.’
Wigfull’s eyebrows reared up like caterpillars meeting. ‘You want me to take it back?’
‘I do and I don’t. It could well be another murder.’
‘Work under your direction?’
‘I know. You’d rather have a seat in a galley-ship. Listen, all I want is a watching brief. You tell me what progress you make and I won’t interfere. We’ve had our differences, but, sod it, John, you ran the squad when I was away.’
‘I’m not saying I couldn’t do it.’
‘Shall we square it with the boss, then?’
‘Would you give me a free hand?’
Diamond swallowed hard.