The House Sitter

15

Littlegreen Place was a large, brick-built house standing in chain-fenced grounds on the northern escarpment of the South Downs. There was no other building within sight. When Diamond drove up, with Hen Mallin seated beside him, the electric gates were open and three police minibuses, two patrol cars and a Skoda were parked on the drive

Someone with a tripod over his shoulder and a camera in his free hand came from the open front door, heading for the Skoda, and Diamond asked him if DCI Barneston was about. The man nodded towards the interior.

“Got your pictures already?” Diamond said, just to be civil to someone else in the pay of the government.

“Waste of time,” came the reply, and it set the tone for what was to come.

They went inside, through a sizeable entrance hall, in the direction of voices that turned out to be from the kitchen. Jimmy Barneston, looking like a football manager whose team has just been relegated, was slumped at the table, his head in his hands. Two others in plain clothes, holding mugs, were standing together watching a uniformed inspector speaking urgent orders into a mobile phone.

“Are you supposed to be here?” one of them asked.

Diamond identified himself and Hen and asked what was happening.

“You tell us.”

Hen said, “Jimmy?”

Barneston raised his eyes, but that was the extent of it.

Diamond asked, “Is someone going to let us in on this?”

Barneston gave a groan that was part threat, part protest, as if his sleep had been disturbed.

The inspector using the phone moved out of the kitchen into what was probably a laundry room.

Diamond put a hand on Barneston’s shoulder. “You cocked up, is that it?”

This got a response. He looked up and said with a heavy emphasis, “Not me.”

“The people on duty?”

He nodded, all too ready to shift any blame. “Two hours ago, a call was made to this place, a scheduled call, to the Special Branch officers supposed to be guarding, em, a person under threat.”

“Matthew Porter,” Hen said.

She wasn’t supposed to know the name. Barneston took note with a twitch of the eyebrows. “This was only a routine check. It’s done at regular intervals. There was no response. They kept trying. Still nothing. So an RRV was sent here. They found the front gate wide open. The double doors at the front of the house were also open. No one was inside, except a police dog, shut in the garage. The bulk of the security system was disabled. Two armed officers vanished.”

“And Matthew Porter?”

“Yes. The Range Rover used by one of the officers is also missing. There’s no sign of a struggle, nothing out of place.”

“Like the fucking Mary Celeste,” one of the others, obviously a romantic, summed it up.

“Video cameras?” Diamond enquired.

“All disabled from the control room upstairs. We’re checking the cassettes in case anything was caught earlier.” Barneston scraped his fingers through his thick black hair and then held his hand out, palm upwards. “What can you do? This is the state-of-the-art safe house-allegedly. We moved him here from another address because it was more secure. The Mariner has found it and strolled in and out as if it was a public toilet. Someone’s going to swing for this.”

“Are you certain this is the Mariner?” Hen asked.

“How could it be anyone else?”

“Matthew Porter didn’t like being cooped up in Streatham. What if he didn’t like it here and walked out? Wouldn’t the guards go after him?”

Barneston glared at her. “What do you know about Streatham?”

“We can talk about that at a calmer time.”

“Sod that. We’ve had a major balls-up in security and you people know too fucking much for my liking. Tell me now. It could be relevant.”

Hen flushed bright pink, and not because of the language. She shouldn’t have mentioned Streatham at this stage.

Diamond felt the muscles tighten across his shoulders. Working as a double act had its drawbacks. This wasn’t the moment he would have chosen, and there was no way now of putting it off. He let his eyes meet Barneston’s. “Emma Tysoe- whose death we are investigating-kept some files on computer.”

“I know about Tysoe’s files,” Barneston said with impatience. “They haven’t been decrypted yet.” After a beat, he said lamely, “Have they?”

Hen gave a nod. “She kept a record of her visit to Streatham.”

“And much more besides,” Diamond couldn’t resist adding.

“Oh, shit.”

“I have a copy with me, as decrypted by a lad in my nick.”

It wasn’t Jimmy Barneston’s day. While he was taking that in, Hen tried to divert him, “Coming back to the present emergency, don’t you think it possible Porter simply got brassed off with all the security and made a break for it?”

“No, I don’t,” he said. “Come and see this.” Whatever the incentive was, it got him to his feet. He led them out of the kitchen, across the hall and upstairs. He pushed open the first door on the landing. “Porter’s bedroom.”

The interior was in pretty good order, a bed with a quilt doubled back, a couple of books on the bedside table. On the pillow was a sheet of A4 paper with words in newsprint pasted to it.

“Don’t touch it,” Barneston cautioned them.

Diamond took a step closer and bent over to read the message.

“Three under par.”

“You know what that is?” Barneston said.

“A reference to golf, I suppose.”

“Three under par is an albatross. The albatross is the bird the Ancient Mariner killed. Now tell me the bastard wasn’t here.”

They stood in silence, absorbing the force of the words and feeling a chilling contact with the mind of their author, as if they’d been touched by him. This gallows humour was at one with the note left when Summers was murdered. It dashed any hope that Porter would survive.

“Who are we dealing with here-Superman?” Hen said with awe. “How the heck does he find out about this place? How does he get in and overcome two armed guards?”

“And a dog,” Barneston said. “You tell me. No signs of a break-in. No shooting. Nothing out of place.”

“Have you got roadblocks in operation?” Diamond asked.

“Full-scale alert, but it could have happened four hours ago. The last check-in we logged was at noon.”

“Who are these Special Branch guys?”

“Good men, I’ve been told, one with ARV experience, the other a dog handler. Both of them Sergeant rank. They’re not wet behind the ears.”

“And the building has been searched?”

“From top to bottom.”

They returned downstairs. In the kitchen, Barneston seemed to be getting a grip again. “Was anything useful in those files?”

“Depends where you’re coming from,” Diamond told him.

“Explain.”

“We’ve learned a lot more about our murder victim and the job she was on.”

“Do you think the Mariner strangled her?”

Diamond didn’t answer directly. Why confide in a man who had just treated them like plods? “He’s capable of it. He doesn’t lack anything in daring.”

“Because he feared she would finger him?”

“She was the top profiler.”

“Does she say anything in these files that will help me right now?” Barneston asked. “Did she put together a profile I can use?”

“How do I know what’s going to be helpful to you?” Diamond told him testily. “Read it yourself. Is there a computer here?”

“Upstairs.” The man looked as if he would sink back into his lethargic gloom, and then he changed his mind. “OK. There’s sod all happening, so I might as well make use of the time. Where’s the disk?”

Diamond took the tiny USB drive from his inside pocket and handed it across.

“This is it?”

“All of it.”

“Do you want to stick around in the meantime?”

Diamond didn’t need to ask Hen.“We’re as keen as you are to find out what’s been going on.”

They remained downstairs, leaving Barneston to read Emma’s files in private. The officers in the kitchen said there was no progress yet in the hunt for the Range Rover. The Sussex police helicopter had been called into use and every car within a thirty mile radius was on alert.

It can be frustrating standing about, waiting for news. Hen went outside for a smoke. Diamond got on the mobile to Ingeborg and asked how the hunt for Ken was progressing.

Even Ingeborg seemed to be lacking in zest this afternoon. “Still trying, guv. I went through those credit card receipts.”

“No joy?”

“No Kens, anyway. Do you think he could have paid cash?”

“It’s possible, I suppose. You’d be better off asking Popjoy’s, not me. Have you talked to the neighbours?”

“The thing is,” she said, on a note that immediately told him this, too, had not helped, “she had her own entrance, living, as she did, in the basement flat. The people upstairs didn’t see very much of her and they don’t have any memory of seeing her with anyone.”

“What about the people across the street?”

“You know how wide Great Pulteney Street is. They’d need binoculars. I’ve been across and asked, but no, it’s another world.”

“You’re going to have to track down everyone who dined at Popjoy’s the evening they were there, and see how much they remember about the other guests. A description would be a start, even if we don’t have his name. You’ve talked to the waiters, I hope? Did you ask them about that overgenerous tip she mentions? Surely one of the staff pocketed that and remembers where it came from.”

“I’ll get onto that,” she promised. Apparently she’d been talking to the management, not the waiters.

He joined Hen outside. The area near the kitchen door had an overgrown look. This safe house had once been someone’s home, and there were the remnants of a vegetable patch and an apple orchard, but garden maintenance wasn’t high priority in Special Branch. Across a stretch of meadow that had once been a lawn, a line of officers searched the undergrowth near the fence. Somewhere overhead the helicopter buzzed.

“Are you all right for time?” he asked Hen.

“I’m seeing this through if it takes till midnight, matey.”

“He could be clean away.”

“With three hostages? I doubt it. What’s his game, Peter?”

He gave a shrug and shook his head. “Whatever it is, I’m certain it’s just as he planned it.”

“That message upstairs doesn’t give any grounds for hope.”

“No.”

“He brought it with him like a calling card, the bastard. It’s bloody arrogance. I mean, we don’t need telling he was here.”

He smiled faintly. “Don’t we? Didn’t I hear you suggesting to Jimmy Barneston that Porter might have got pissed off with the place and made a break for it?”

She gave him a sharp look. “At that stage I couldn’t believe anyone was capable of penetrating the security. Now we know.”

She finished her smoke and they returned to the kitchen. One look at the others told them no news had come through. Diamond picked someone’s Daily Mail off the table and looked for news of the rugby. Bath were slipping in the league.

There was still nothing to report to Barneston when he came downstairs and found them in the garden again. He had the look of a man in deep shock, thoughts whirling in his brain. He made a visible effort to focus on the immediate problem. “He’ll be clean away by now.”

“It doesn’t look good,” Diamond agreed.

A short, nervy sigh. “It bears out what she wrote in the files- he knows he can outwit the police.”

“She didn’t put it quite like that, if I remember,” Hen said. “It was something like ‘has an exalted belief he can outwit us’. There’s a difference. He’ll get overconfident.”

“Breaking into this place will have done his confidence a power of good,” Barneston said gloomily. “Mine is at rock bottom.”

“Shouldn’t be,” she said. “Come on, Jim lad, some of that stuff in the files was a massive boost to your self-esteem. A clever and attractive woman slavering over you-what more does a guy want?”

He didn’t answer.

Diamond took a more head-on approach. “We need to know if she spent the night with you, the last night of her life.”

Barneston confirmed it with a nod.

“At your house again?”

“What do you mean-‘again’? It was only the second time.”

Diamond had never scored points for sensitivity. “So she did what she planned, came to Horsham with a list of questions for Anna Walpurgis?”

“Yup.”

“For you to ask Walpurgis?”

“That’s correct. Things are pretty fraught with Walpurgis. I didn’t want to panic her. Emma came to my house and we went out for a meal and spent the night together.”

“Did she say anything to you about this man Ken she mentions in the files?”

“Not directly.”

“But…?”

“She told me she’d been in another relationship that was finished. She didn’t give a name.”

Hen said, “Jimmy, you’ll appreciate that he’s under suspicion of murdering her. Can you remember anything she said about him that will help us to identify him?”

“No.”

“Did you get any impression of his age, or whether he lived near her, or what kind of job he did?”

“Nothing at all. She only mentioned him in passing, and I didn’t probe. I’d rather not know who slept with her before I did.”

Diamond asked, “How did she refer to him-as a boyfriend, or a long-term lover, or what?”

“I told you. She simply said, ‘I was in a relationship and it’s over now.’ ”

This wasn’t helping overmuch. Diamond said, “We know she dumped him. Do you think it’s possible he could have found out about you?”

“I don’t see how. I didn’t visit her in Bath.”

“We’re wondering if he followed her to Horsham and saw you together. Did you have a sense of anyone following you, or watching you?”

“No.”

“Was Emma relaxed?” Hen asked.

“I thought so. She seemed to be enjoying herself.” He spread his hands in a gesture of openness. “Listen, if there was anything I could think of to help you, I would. She was a sweet girl. I really enjoyed being with her. I can tell you, I freaked out when I heard what happened to her.”

This little tribute didn’t melt Peter Diamond’s heart. “But you didn’t come forward and say you spent the night with her. You didn’t even tell us when we met you at the hospital.”

“Because it was a red herring. You could have wasted time questioning me when you should have been after her killer.”

“You just hoped we’d make an early arrest and leave you out of it?”

No answer. Diamond had hit the mark.

He said, “Tell us about the morning of the day she was murdered. Did she talk about her plans?”

Barneston looked down at the ground, shifting a stone a short way with his well-polished right shoe. “She did her best to persuade me to spend the day with her at the beach. Said she knew I was working flat out on the Mariner enquiry, but I’d function better for a few hours away from it. Six days shalt thou labour, and all that. It was Sunday morning, of course.” He paused and sighed. “I was almost persuaded, too.”

“So what happened, exactly?”

He continued to poke at the stone with his toecap. “I gave her breakfast in bed and told her to take her time getting up. When I left around nine, she was about to take a shower.”

“You left her alone in your house?”

“Sure. I trusted her.”

“Did she say anything about going to the beach alone?”

“Oh, yes. It was a beautiful day. She was going, with or without me.”

“She must have driven there,” Diamond said.

“Yes, her sports car was on my drive. And that’s about all I can tell you.” He rubbed his hands together, ready to move on to other matters.

“There is something else,” Diamond said. “Would you mind telling us how you actually spent the rest of the day?”

Barneston frowned, glared and then gave a hollow laugh. “You’re not asking me to account for my time?”

“You’ve got it in one, Jimmy.”

“You know what you can do.”

“Not until this is sorted,” Diamond said with a look as unrelenting as his voice. “Did you go into work?”

Barneston hesitated for a long time, perhaps to show dissent. Diamond’s eyes, unblinking, had never left his. Finally, he submitted. “I went to the nick and worked on the case.”

“Until when?”

“I don’t know. Late morning, early afternoon. I had a canteen lunch. Do you want to know if it was roast beef and two veg?”

“And then?”

“A stroll around the park.”

“Alone?”

Barneston’s face reddened. “I don’t have to take these innuendoes. Who do you think you’re questioning here?”

“Alone, then,” Diamond said. “How about the rest of the afternoon, Jimmy?”

“Didn’t you hear me? I’ve had enough of this crap.”

Hen put in gently, “He’s doing his job, Jimmy. He’s got a duty to ask.”

Making every word sound like an infliction, Barneston said, “I returned to my office for about an hour and finished the job I was on. Then I went home and looked at the cricket on TV. I guess it was about two-thirty when I left the nick. No, I didn’t make any phone calls, and nobody knocked on my door, so if you want to fit me up it’s perfectly feasible that I could have driven to Wightview Sands inside an hour, found Emma and strangled her.”

Hen said, “Jimmy, calm down.”

He carried on in the same embittered flow: “Of course, you have the minor problem of the motive-establishing how we fell out after a night together-but I guess that’s not beyond your fertile imagination.”

“Probably not,” Diamond said evenly, “but there is another problem. How would you drive two cars away from the scene? Hers hasn’t been seen since the murder.”

Barneston was silent while he played this over in his mind. After a longish interval he saw the point. “So you’re not about to caution me?” It was an attempt to recoup, a feeble joke.

Diamond indulged him with a grin.

Above them, the helicopter crossed so low that they saw the trees bowing in the down-draught.

Hen said, “Do you think they’ve spotted something?”

After the tension of the past few minutes it was a relief to go back inside the house and check developments. But nothing had developed. The Mariner had come and gone as he did in Bramber, leaving no clue except his newsprint taunt.

“How could he have conned his way in?” Diamond asked.

“God only knows,” Barneston said. “The guards have an entry code that even I don’t know. Anyone at the gate is under video surveillance from the control room upstairs.”

“Are you sure of the guards?”

“Special Branch is. One hundred per cent.”

“And the system is fully tested?”

“It’s the best they have. We only moved him here three days ago. And, yes, it was tested, every item of equipment. Infrared sensors in every room, lasers, cameras, the lot.”

“Fine-so long as they’re activated.”

“Well, yes, but you need to know the codes before you can tamper with anything.”

“Who knows the codes?”

“Only the guards-and if you want to know how many are involved in this operation, there are six men, all experienced, all armed with Glock 17s and Heckler and Koch machine guns. They rotate their duties, of course. And in addition there are four dog-handlers. At any one time, there are always two officers and a dog on the premises.”

“Did Matthew Porter approve of all this?” Hen asked.

“Sure. He was given more freedom than he had in the Streatham safe house. It’s considerably bigger, with an outdoor heated pool and a games room. He was OK.”

“I mean, potentially he’s the security risk, isn’t he, even though it’s all set up to protect him?”

“You mean if he wanted out? That could have been a risk in Streatham. Not here, I think.”

A personal radio gave off the sound of static and a voice came through clearly enough for everyone to hear. “Oscar Bravo to Control, reporting a sighting from the chopper. A four by four, possibly Range Rover, stationary in Caseys Lane, reference six-eight-five-eight-zero-three. Repeat six-eight-five-eight-zero-three. Shall we investigate? Over.”

“Await instructions. Over.”

“Caseys Lane. Where?” Barneston demanded, already poring over the map on the kitchen table.

Hen found it. “Less than a mile, I’d say.”

“Give me that,” Barneston said to the officer holding the radio. He touched the press-to-talk switch. “We’re on the way. Over and out.”

There was a stampede to the cars.