Another One Goes Tonight

27

Diamond had asked Ingeborg to join him in the interview room at Keynsham. She’d proved yet again what a vital member of the team she was. Making the arrest had been a challenge enough, aside from dealing with the angry drivers on the hospital road. She’d succeeded by force of character, making the arrest without handcuffs, hailing the security men and getting them to remove the Ka as well as Jessie’s Fiat 500 and restore the flow of traffic.

As for the woman known to them as Jessie, she’d already made clear she knew her rights. She wanted legal representation-her own, and not one of the duty solicitors. Diamond had informed her-and she appeared to know already-that as an officer of superintendent rank he had the power under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act to question her for up to thirty-six hours about a serious arrestable offence.

The good thing was that she was vocal in asserting her rights. She hadn’t yet retreated behind the dreaded “no comment.”

So it began with her alone across the table, composed and still managing to look attractive, for all that had happened, her mouth playful, ready to take any shape she desired from disapproving to amused to amoral. At their only previous meeting, when she was posing as a do-gooder, her expression had promised rather more than he would have expected from a lady of the church.

After the formalities were gone through, Diamond asked the sort of question that would have made “no comment” ridiculous.

“Tea or coffee?”

“Coffee. Black, no sugar.”

The officer by the door went out to fetch some.

“Were you bruised by the fall?”

A shake of the head.

“We met briefly at Mr. Pellegrini’s house,” he said. “You in your red wig as Elspeth Blake from the church. I was drooling over the homemade quiche, remember? Tell me I’m not mistaken and you baked it yourself.”

“I’m a Cordon Bleu cook,” she said.

Promising. He’d already decided to play to her ego. “Multi-talented, then. I haven’t heard a single complaint about your housekeeping. Your talent for getting the confidence of lonely old men goes back a long way, doesn’t it?”

Too obvious a question. She shrugged and said nothing.

“I’ll cut to the chase,” he said. “I’ve read your diary. I call it a diary, anyway. You call it notes. Classy, intelligent writing, I must say, even though you take some side swipes at the police. And you were right about us. We didn’t have a clue for a long time. Pellegrini was on to you before I was. Clever old guy, he was your nemesis. I can understand why you did what you did today. Can’t condone it, of course, but I see why it happened.”

He paused as the tray of coffee was brought in. China mugs for Ingeborg and himself as well as the suspect.

And digestive biscuits. Maybe Keynsham wasn’t a total write-off.

When he resumed, he said, “You probably want to know how we got hold of the diary. That was thanks mainly to Pellegrini, as you suspected, and it all goes back to the little incident at Cavendish Crescent after Max’s funeral when he tipped coffee over your purple skirt. He’d make a good detective, would Pellegrini. You were in your Jessie persona then and he had suspicions you were stealing choice items of jewellery from the house, pieces that had once belonged to Olga Filiput. Poor old Max had just about despaired of keeping track of them. Pellegrini’s plan was to get hold of your handbag and see if you’d nicked another necklace. We both know you hadn’t. You’re too smart to take a risk like that. Instead there was something else in the bag.”

She said in a resigned tone of voice, “The flash drive.”

He nodded. “It was a Eureka moment when I worked out that this was what he must have found. Made sense for you, storing your wit and wisdom on a memory stick no bigger than a lipstick and keeping it with you at all times, encrypted as an extra precaution, even if no one else knew of its existence. Unfortunately for you, Pellegrini took his opportunity. He didn’t know at the time that the little memory stick contained better evidence of your crimes than a sack full of stolen jewellery and he never did find out. He downloaded the contents to his laptop at home and hit an immediate problem. The bloody thing was gobbledegook, so he never got to read it.”

She couldn’t stop herself rolling her eyes and saying, “Tough.”

“But you knew he wasn’t the sort to give up. Left to himself, he’d decrypt it, so you needed to eliminate him. I don’t know how many attempts you made. At least three to my knowledge.”

“Prove it,” she said. She was getting involved in the narrative, keen to discover how much she’d got away with.

“First, let’s discuss your method. You talk about it in the diary being beautifully simple, but you don’t describe the process in detail-I suppose because you were writing for yourself and you knew damn well how it was done. You make them drowsy first with some tranquilliser administered in food and then you smother them with a pillow. How am I doing?”

The hazel eyes slid upwards in reproach. “You really think I’m about to tell you?”

“No need. Our forensic people will analyse the cake crumbs on the plate beside his bed. I’ve got to admire those culinary skills. The date-and-walnut cake he had with him on his tricycle ride the evening of the collision must have been one of yours. I know it wasn’t meant to cause a fatal accident, but it did. He was supposed to eat the cake at home and drift into a state where you could easily kill him when you called later. Silly man, he went out and took the cake with him and stopped to eat it somewhere along the route. He was riding unsteadily all over the road when the police car hit him.”

“You can’t blame me for that,” she said.

“I don’t. I’m sure you went to the house the same night expecting to finish him off and found he wasn’t in.”

He could tell from her look that he’d told it right.

“But it didn’t stop you trying again. You didn’t know he was in hospital the morning you arrived with the quiche and ran into me with Mrs. Halliday, the home help. You made your retreat at the first opportunity, taking the doctored quiche with you. I’m glad now, but I would have cheerfully shared a slice at the time. Date-and-walnut cake, a quiche Lorraine and what was today’s offering?”

“Chocolate sponge.”

“Of course. The hospital told me. You don’t give up easily.”

“He could have died naturally, from the accident,” she said.

“Yes, and saved you a job. What a bummer when he started coming out of the coma. Still, you got here at the first opportunity ready to finish him off.”

“Is he…?”

“No.” He paused, looking keenly for the reaction. “They revived him. He’ll live.”

She closed her eyes, doing her best to ride the blow. One more death wouldn’t have troubled her, but Pellegrini fit enough to make a statement would.

“A hospital isn’t the ideal place to kill anyone,” Diamond said. “They’re rather good at reviving people.”

Beside him, Ingeborg smiled.

The suspect didn’t.

“Your method has much to commend it. No marks are ever found on the victim unless he puts up a fight-and of course your victims are far too relaxed to resist. Any pathologist will tell you the smothering of someone who doesn’t fight back is just about impossible to diagnose after death. Pellegrini is a fortunate man, twice rescued from the brink.”

“I wouldn’t have picked him,” she said.

A strange choice of words. He had to think what she meant.

Her meaning was clear when she added, “He became a threat.”

“By getting suspicious of you?”

“I was forced to take risks.”

“Softening him up by posing as the good Christian lady?”

“He wasn’t in my plans. I knew the others better and had more control.”

Diamond was pleased to have this on tape. She’d virtually admitted her guilt. He wanted more. “When you say ‘the others,’ how many were there?”

A slow smile played over her lips. “You tell me.”

“From reading the journal, I’d say you’ve been doing this a long time. You don’t get to be the wife of a crime baron without staking out a position of influence.”

“How do you know that?” she said, the amusement gone in the blink of an eye.

“That you had another identity as Dilly Sabin? I worked it out.”

Ingeborg almost spluttered over the coffee she was sipping. Diamond was way ahead of her.

He explained. “How else would you have got to know Cyril? He was up to his ears in debt to Bob Sabin, but he’d obviously found some source of money because he was making repayments. I may be wrong, but my reading of your relationship with Bob is that it was past its sell-by date. He made clear that you wouldn’t inherit the proverbial brass farthing-and you didn’t. When things go sour with a man as ruthless as that, something has to be done. Did you feed him cake or something more fitting for a crime baron? Bombe surprise, perhaps? Toad-in-the-hole? Anyhow, Bob went peacefully, same as the others.”

Beside him, Ingeborg took another sharp breath. She was learning so many things she hadn’t grasped until now. If she’d ever needed reminding of the sharp brain of her sometimes infuriating boss she had a prime example here.

His eyes hadn’t wavered from the suspect. “There was definitely some sympathy for you in the criminal world. To quote Larry Lincoln, you were given the double-shuffle.”

Jessie, or Elspeth, or Dilly, gave a shrug.

“But you had your own plan as usual. After killing Bob, you’d clear off to the country as housekeeper to Cyril Hardstaff. He was quite a charmer anyway, easy to get on with, and your salary was guaranteed by his late wife’s trust fund. More importantly, Cyril had an Aladdin’s cave somewhere. Didn’t take you long to track that to Cavendish Crescent and Max Filiput. You drove your new boss there for the Scrabble sessions and had a good look round while the two old gents were arguing over seven-letter words. It made a change from Little Langford, I imagine. Life must have been boring there.”

“Deadly,” she agreed.

“You made the best of it and then things went belly-up again. Max wasn’t as gaga as you’d first thought. He’d started to notice things were disappearing from the house. He got himself into quite a state about it.”

She actually nodded at that.

Diamond added, “Do you know, for some time we thought Pellegrini was the thief? He had three valuable Fortuny gowns, worth a small fortune, hidden in his workshop. How wrong we were. It only dawned on me recently that Max must have asked Pellegrini to take care of them for him. He feared they, too, would be stolen.”

“He needn’t have bothered,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Impossible to fence. No use to me.”

“Max didn’t know that. As I was saying, he was getting jumpy about the thefts. He suspected one of the railway club must be the thief and he confided his suspicions to Cyril, who was worried and told you. This was alarming. It was obvious the finger would soon be pointing at you and Cyril if something wasn’t done to silence Max. Another murder became necessary.”

She sniffed and looked away, as if the whole process was wearying her.

“The set-up made things easy for you,” Diamond went on. “I’m tempted to say a piece of cake. You often made tea for the two old men during the Scrabble afternoons. Simple to see that Max got some tranquilliser. And even simpler to return later and finish him off. The key to the house was kept behind a drainpipe near the front door.”

“You don’t miss much, do you?” she said and it wasn’t clear if it was meant as sarcasm or a compliment.

“So you let yourself in, go upstairs, do the business and leave. The cleaner, Mrs. Stratford, discovers the body next morning. From all appearances, it’s a peaceful death, just like your other victims. Old man at home in his own bed with no sign of violence. Dr. Mukherjee takes a look, certifies life is extinct and puts it down to heart failure and narrowing of the arteries. No need for an autopsy.”

Jessie reached for another biscuit.

“Some days later, you drove Cyril to Bath for the funeral, which ought to have been just a formality, like everything else up to then. It wasn’t. You didn’t realise Ivor Pellegrini would be playing detective. You’d never even met the guy. Your trips to the house had always been on different days from the railway people. Unknown to you, Max had treated Pellegrini as a confidant and even asked him to take care of those valuable gowns. The funeral reception was the last opportunity for any of you to be inside the house and clear out any remaining items of jewellery. Pellegrini was on the lookout for the thief. He may well have decided by then that the anoraks in the railway club were in the clear, which left you and Cyril as the prime suspects.”

“We’ve been through this,” she said. “He stained my skirt, I stupidly left the room without my bag and he found the flash drive.”

“Which meant-from your point of view-he couldn’t be allowed to live,” Diamond said. “And if you needed any more convincing, he made the trip to Little Langford and got talking to Cyril. All your tidy arrangements were under threat. You were sent out for the evening while God knows what was discussed between the two of them. I don’t believe you panicked, but you had to take emergency action. Cyril was killed the same night. His usefulness was over anyway. In the morning you were gone-but not before laying a trap for anyone who would come looking.”

“The hairbrush,” Ingeborg said.

“Near genius,” Diamond said, but the face across the table was expressionless, no longer susceptible to flattery.

He pressed on. “There was sympathy in the underworld for the harsh way you’d been treated after Bob’s death. You’d stayed in touch with some of them, like Larry Lincoln. Kept an ear to the ground. And when a working girl known as Maria from Sofia died literally on the job and ended up in the river, you offered your help removing all trace of her. You collected a sack full of her possessions, including the hairbrush with some of her hairs attached. This happened a few days before you murdered Cyril and you’re far too smart to miss an opportunity of faking your own death. It worked, too, until we compared your recent history and Maria’s. Even a woman as versatile as you are couldn’t be on the game in Oldfield Park at the same time as caring for dear old Cyril in Little Langdon. We rumbled you in the end, but it took some doing.”

“Is that it?” she asked as calmly as if enquiring whether dinner was ready. Her composure hadn’t been shaken at any stage.

“Going by your diary I strongly suspect it isn’t. We’ve still got hours of work to do, finding out when you started and who you killed in years past. You’re not new to this, are you?”

She didn’t need to say, “No comment.” It was in her eyes.

“You’re not going to tell us where it began and how many there are and how many false identities you’ve lived under, but you definitely knew what you were doing when you killed a man as powerful as Bob Sabin. I was about to add ‘and got away with it,’ but you didn’t.”

Her eyes gleamed a response.

Diamond smiled at her. “And it’s over now. If neither of you ladies wants the last biscuit, I’ll take it.”