Diamond Solitaire

CHAPTER FIVE

Kensington Library was built in 1960, yet the reference room upstairs has an ambience emphatically Victorian. The carpet is a dispiriting olive green and the chairs are upholstered in dark leather. Notices everywhere urge the readers to beware of pickpockets and to tell the staff immediately if they see anyone mutilating or taking newspapers. True, certain of the papers are heavily in demand. The Evening Standard, which arrives early in the afternoon, can be seen only on request-not because of anything unseemly in the contents, but because it would go from the open shelves and not be found again. The assistants at the desk get to recognize the beady-eyed men who hover from two p.m. onwards, each hopeful of being the first to spot a secondhand car bargain, a tip for the greyhound racing, or a job.

Peter Diamond-formerly of Harrods security staff-had become one of the job-seekers.

He got bis turn with the Standard and ran his thumb down the columns. If he could imagine himself filling any of the posts on offer, he would hurry to the nearest phone. Most of the ads were couched in a friendly style-Call Mandy or Ring Trish-and you were encouraged to picture a sweet-natured personnel officer on the end of the line eager to talk you into a thirty-grand job with bonus and pension. Today, as usual, no Mandy or Trish in London seemed to have an opening for a forty-eight-year-old ex-detective who couldn't be relied upon to patrol a floor of Harrods,

He gave up. The Standard reported another rise in unemployment with the headline DESPAIR OF LONDON'S JOBLESS. The despair wasn't much in evidence in High Street Kensington, apart from the droop of Diamond's shoulders. Young women with laminated carrier bags stuffed with goodies from the department stores stood by the curb waving for taxis. Middle- aged men in designer tracksuits jogged in the direction of Holland Park. The lunch crowd were still installed in Al Gallo D'Oro, the Italian restaurant across the street

For the past seven months, Diamond and his wife Stephanie had subsisted in a basement in Addison Road, a one-way street where the traffic noise is almost unendurable without double-glazing and earplugs. The house was a stuccoed three-story building with rotting window frames that never stopped shaking. Across the road was St. Barnabas, a great smog-stained block with a turret at each corner, not by any stretch of imagination an attractive church, but one that might have been improved by exterior cleaning. Someone had tried to distract attention from the grime by painting the doors in bold Oxford blue, only it wasn't visible from the Diamonds' foxhole. Apart from the towers of St Barnabas, all that they could see as they peered up were the topmost levels of multistory flats. It was a far cry from the view across Georgian Bath that they'd enjoyed until a year ago.

Not wishing to be idle, Diamond had refreshed the walls and ceilings of the flat with a coat of emulsion called primrose on the color chart. Turned out every drawer and cupboard, oiled every hinge, brushed the chimney, checked the electric plugs, changed the washers on the taps and fitted draft-excluders to all the doors. The drawback to this admirable zeal was that he was no handyman, so oil and paint got on the soles of his shoes and was transported everywhere; the taps dripped worse than ever; the doors stuck halfway; soot fell into the living room whenever the wind blew; and the cat had moved into the airing-cupboard for sanctuary.

Stephanie Diamond would have joined the cat if she could. She worked two mornings in the Save the Children shop and had lately upped this to four, just to be out of the house. To discourage the DIY, she'd started bringing home jigsaws people had donated, getting Peter to occupy himself assembling them to see if pieces were missing before they were sold in the shop. It was not the good idea it had first seemed. She woke up one night at four A.M. with something digging into her back.

"What on earth…?" She switched on the bedside lamp.

Diamond turned over to see. "Well, what do you know! It's that corner piece I was missing."

"For crying out loud, Peter."

"Fancy a cuppa?"

She remembered the taste of the

She remembered the taste of the tea since he'd descaled the kettle. "No, go back to sleep."

"God knows how it turned up here, of all places."

"Oh, forget it"

After an interval he said, "Are you awake, Steph?"

She sighed. "I am now."

"I was thinking about the kid."

"Which kid?"

"The Japanese girl I got sacked over. Why would anyone abandon a kid like that? She was nicely dressed. Clean. In no way neglected."

"Perhaps she ran away from home."

"And turned up on th & seventh floor of Harrods? I can't believe that"

"Fretting over it won't help," said Stephanie. "She's not your responsibility."

"True."

He was silent for a while.

She was almost asleep when he said, "There must be a way of keeping all the pieces in one place."

"Mm?"

"The jigsaws. I was thinking if I were to help in the shop-"

She sat upright. "Don't you dare!"

"I was going to say I could do the

"I was going to say I could do the jigsaws there, and if pieces went missing at least we'd know they were on the premises."

"If you so much as set foot in that shop, you'll leave it on a stretcher when I've finished with you, Peter Diamond." A bold claim-considering she was about 98 pounds and he 252, but she knew what havoc he would wreak-innocently, let it be said-in all that clutter. She'd known when she married him that he was accident-prone. He was badly coordinated. Some fat people are graceful movers. Her husband was not. He knocked things over. In the street he failed to notice curbstones. Hazards like dog-mess seemed almost to seek him out.

"This getting old-I don't care for it," he said at breakfast next morning.

"Fishing?" Stephanie said.

He gave a shrug.

"All right, I'll say it. You're not that old."

"Too old for work, apparently."

"Snap out of it, Pete."

"You want to see them lining up for unemployment benefit. Younger men than me. Much younger, some of them. Kids, straight out of school."

She heaped streaky bacon on his plate. "Things could be worse."

"You mean one of those unemployed kids could be ours."

She looked away, and he cursed himself for being so boorish. In her first marriage, to a shop manager, Steph had miscarried three times. She'd lost another baby when she married Diamond. That time she'd suffered complications that were finally resolved by a hysterectomy. Surgery had been the cure-all in the early seventies. She'd lost her womb, but not the maternal urge. Before he met her she'd taken on the role of leader to a pack of Brownies. Did it for years, and did much more than Baden-Powell had ever intended. Always willing to be a second mum to small girls whose parents neglected them. They were all young adults now and she still wrote to some of them.

He put his hand over hers and said, "Sorry about last night, love."

Her face creased into a bewildered look. "Last night?"

"In bed."

She stared at him with wide eyes.

"The jigsaw piece."

"Oh!" She laughed. "I'd forgotten that. I thought you were on about something entirely different. It didn't make sense at all."

The day was fine after more than a week of overcast skies and rain, so instead of joining the queue in the library again, he called in at the news agent's, treated himself to his own copy of the Evening Standard and took it into Holland Park to read. Finding that nothing in the jobs columns grabbed him, he put the paper aside and basked in the sun for a while on one of the wooden benches facing the pond beside the Orangery, watching people walk their dogs and push their prams along the length of the arched cloister. Everyone but he had some accessory, some visible reason for being in the park. A model airplane, a tennis racket, a camera, a spiked stick for picking up waste paper.

He got up decisively. Hell, he had no cause to be idle. He'd remembered an urgent job of work. Overnight a couple of air bubbles had appeared on the freshly emulsioned kitchen ceiling. Stephanie hadn't said anything, but he was sure she'd noticed them. He'd see if he could rub them out with sandpaper.

At home, trying to be tidy, he spread the sheets of the Standard across the kitchen floor below the bit of ceiling he was about to sand. Then he stood on a kitchen chair and examined the job. There were two bubbles the size of marshmallows. No question-they had to be removed. He picked at one with his fingernail. The paint was dry, so he gave it a tentative pull. It was pliant and springy, like plastic. He pulled harder and suddenly a sizeable piece of the coat of paint detached itself from the ceiling and flopped over his head and shoulders like a bridal veil.

He swore, stepped down from the chair, extricated himself, and examined the damage. This was no longer a simple sanding job. The entire ceiling would have to be stripped and repainted. Worse, it needed washing before he applied the paint It was obvious even to an incompetent that the grease and grime from years of cooking should have been removed before the first coat was applied. The emulsion hadn't adhered. By seeking quick results, he'd wasted an entire can of paint. In a couple of hours, Stephanie was going to come back from the shop to find her kitchen under occupation again.

Resigned to the major redecoration, he tugged off the rest of the coat of emulsion. It came away in large pieces and spread like dust sheets over the units, table and chairs. That done, he put on the kettle. He deserved a break before he washed that ceiling.

But it never did get washed, or repainted. Something more urgent came up.

When Stephanie got home, she found the kitchen a disaster area, the sheets of dried emulsion festooned over everything, the ceiling as gruesome as it had looked the day they moved in, newspapers and sandpaper scattered around the floor and a half-filled mug of cold tea on the table. Diamond wasn't there. He finally came home about seven, apologizing profusely.

"But I've had an interesting afternoon, Steph."

"So it appears."

He related the episode with the paint. "So when it was all off the ceiling I made myself some tea, feeling gutted after what had happened, and while I was drinking it, I happened to pick up a section of the Standard that I'd spread on the floor to protect it, you see?"

"You could have fooled me."

"I just wanted something for distraction, something to read and-"

"You found a job in the paper? Oh, Pete!" She turned to him, arms spread wide.

"A job? No."

Her arms flopped down. "What, then?"

"I was telling you. I picked up the paper and saw this." He handed her a scrap of newspaper.

MYSTERY GIRL STILL UNCLAIMED

The small girl who was the cause of a bomb scare when she was found in Harrods five weeks ago has still not been claimed or identified. The girl, believed to be about seven, and Japanese, is unable or unwilling to speak. A publicity campaign to find her parents has so 33 far been unsuccessful despite extensive enquiries among the Japanese community. Meanwhile she is in the care of Kensington & Chelsea social services department A spokesperson said, "We're at a loss to understand why no one has come forward yet"

"Poor mite," said Stephanie, ever ready to brush aside her own concerns to take pity on a child. "She must be terrified. First the police, and now the social workers. I'm not surprised she's silent."

"Then you don't mind if I try and help?" said Diamond.

She gave him a wary look. "If I did, would it make a jot of difference?"

"I found out where she's being kept."

Stephanie frowned, stared and then allowed her face to soften. "That's why you dropped everything and went out? To see mis little girl? Peter, you're a softie at heart"

"Softie?" he said. "You're calling an ex-cop a softie?"

"You always had time for kids," she insisted. "Who got a job as Father Christmas last year?"

"That was work. This abandoned kid is a challenge, Steph. A chance to do what I'm trained for instead of standing on a chair washing a ceiling-which I will do, I give you my word. Face it, I've got experience. I was a bloody good sleuth."

"With a heart of gold."

He rolled his eyes upwards in dissent-and found himself staring at the grease marks. "Anyway, I tried the town hall, and they weren't willing to release information. I don't blame them. I could have been a weirdo, or something. They were perfectly entitled to show me the door. I went round to the police, told them I was ex-CID, and got an address. Some kind of assessment center. Of course, when I got there, the kid had been moved on. I needed to be a bloody Sherlock Holmes to track her down. They put me onto some child psychiatrist, and he was no help, but his secretary took pity and handed me the address of a special school in Earls Court"

"Special?" Stephanie said dubiously. "You mean for kids with mental problems?"

He nodded.

"Is she retarded?" said Stephanie.

"No one actually said so, but that's where they've sent her."

"They must think she is. What kind of place is it?"

"It's residential. I didn't get there this afternoon, but I'm going to try tomorrow. Apparently they haven't given up entirely. A Japanese teacher visits the school and tries to get her to speak. Up to now she's had no success."

She was frowning. "If everyone else has failed, what can you do about it? You don't speak Japanese."

"I don't propose to try. It's just possible that everyone is too preoccupied with the speech problem. I'd like to tty other lines of inquiry."

"Such as?"

He wouldn't commit himself. "I'd need to win the kid's confidence first I've got the time to do it, Steph. For once in my life, I haven't got someone breathing down my neck."

"Well…" said Stephanie, letting her eyes slide upwards.

"Don't say it. I'll scrub the damned ceiling tonight."