The House Sitter

22

So how was it for you?”

“If you’re asking me is she still alive, the answer is yes.” After a night on watch outside Georgina Dallymore’s house, Keith Halliwell was in no mood to trade humour with his boss. He’d come into the police station on sufferance, under instructions to report on the vigil.

“Have you actually spoken to her?” Diamond asked.

“Only on the mobile. The curtains were still drawn at nine, when John Leaman took over from me, so I checked. She wasn’t thrilled to get a wake-up call, but she answered. At least she knows we care.”

“Any signs of suspicious behaviour in the street?”

Halliwell shook his head. “It was dead quiet.”

“You checked the parked cars?”

“Made a list of all the numbers. I know a lot about Bennett Street I never knew before. It has more lace curtains per house than any other street in the city. And I can tell you how many chimney pots there are. The average is nine.”

Diamond said, “What I really want to know is how the Mariner found out she was in Bath and staying at the Bath Spa. He’s too well informed, Keith.”

“I can give you the answer to that.”

This straightforward statement in the same downbeat tone almost passed Diamond by. When it registered after a couple of seconds he grabbed the arms of his chair. “Go on, then.”

Halliwell said, “It was on Galaxy 101.”

“Come again.”

“A radio station. I was talking to one of the young guys on watch with me. He heard it the night she arrived.”

“On radio?”

“Yes. Some DJ played one of her hits, saying he’d heard a rumour she’d been spotted in Bath. The next thing of course is that a listener calls in to say he saw her checking in to the Bath Spa Hotel.”

“And the Mariner happened to be tuned in.”

“Or heard of it from someone else.”

“As simple as that,” Diamond murmured as if he’d just been told the secret of a conjuring trick. “Who’d have thought that kind of stuff would go out on radio?”

Halliwell looked too tired to enlighten his boss about the way broadcasting had changed since commercial radio came in. Some people never listened to anything except the BBC.

But Diamond wasn’t blaming the DJ. “It wouldn’t have happened if Special Branch were doing their job,” he complained. “They should have smuggled her in through the back entrance of the hotel instead of parading her at the check-in. My God, I’ve lost all respect.”

Halliwell’s head was starting to sink from sheer fatigue.

“If I’m honest,” Diamond added, “I didn’t have much in the first place.” Still fretting over the security lapse, he sent Halliwell home to catch up on some sleep.

One mystery solved, then. And a little of the gloss rubbed off the Mariner’s shining reputation. He’d heard it on the radio.

Ideally Diamond would have called a case conference this morning to bring everyone up to date on recent developments. Instead, information was being circulated through the bush telegraph. Bath’s small murder squad was fully stretched to maintain this round-the-clock vigil. John Leaman was now on watch in Bennett Street with four plain clothes officers. After the lapse in the hotel, Diamond reckoned, he should be fully alert.

Towards the end of the morning he looked into the incident room. Soon the least experienced member of the squad would have to take a shift on the Bennett Street roster. He’d kept Ingeborg busy digging into Ken Bellman’s past, shielding her from front-line duties. It wasn’t good practice. In theory, she should face the same risks as anyone else. Knowing how sod’s law worked, when she was on watch, the killer would make his move.

“Did you get out to Knowhow & Fix?” he asked her.

“Yes, guv. They look like a bunch of students to me, all shorts and T-shirts. Bellman is one of about ten consultants on their list. He’s liable to be called out at any time, including weekends, but a lot of the work is done from home, so they don’t keep track of his movements.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “We know where he was in the hours leading up to the murder. That’s on record, so he’s got no alibi. What do they say about him as an employee?”

“No complaints. They’re satisfied with his work. He seems to be up with the latest technology, which is what counts in IT.”

“Previous employment?”

“Like he said, he was with a London firm.”

“In SW1,” Diamond recalled.

“As a techie-a technical support programmer.”

This meant little to Diamond, but he knew London pretty well from his days in the Met. “SW1. That’s very central. Westminster, Downing Street, St James’s. Scotland Yard is there. Not many computer firms, I would think. It’s all government departments. Civil servants.”

“They use computers, guv.”

“I suppose they do. Why did he move to Bath? Do his bosses know?”

She shook her head. “They say he came with good references. He’s quiet. Doesn’t talk about himself or anything personal.”

“They don’t know what brought him here?”

“No.”

“Did we ask when we interviewed him? I don’t believe we did. For a young man with a good job in IT in central London, a move to the provinces seems a strange career choice.”

“Did he move to be nearer to Emma?” Ingeborg asked.

“That wasn’t the impression I got. If I remember right, he said they met by chance one day in the library-as if he didn’t expect it.”

“I can believe she didn’t.”

He was quick to pick up on the point. “You’re thinking he was lying-that he followed her here? Good point, Ingeborg. It crossed my mind, too. The way he told it, you’d believe they hadn’t spoken since their student days at Liverpool.”

“That was my impression, listening to the tape,” Ingeborg agreed.

“I’d like to know more,” he said. “We’ve only got his version of the way it happened.”

“A long-term stalker?”

“Possibly. He certainly pursued her for the last hours of her life. He admitted it. Could have been obsessed with her for much longer.”

“Does it make a difference?”

“What do you mean-does it make a difference?”

Ingeborg said with an embarrassed laugh, “I mean, if he was the killer anyway, does it matter how long he knew her?”

“It strengthens the motive.” Slipping into his superintendent mode, he told her, “Something you’re going to have to learn, Constable, is that we aren’t here just to name the guilty man. We have to make the case to the CPS, and if it isn’t rock solid they won’t prosecute. If Bellman was fixated on this woman for years and finally got into the relationship he’d fantasised over, only to find she dropped him and started up with someone else, he’d take it badly. That’s motivation. That’s going to help the prosecution.”

“Is it worth questioning him again?”

“I wouldn’t mind another go.”

The opportunity came sooner than either of them expected, in fact within twenty minutes. The desk sergeant called up to say a Mr Bellman had walked into the station and asked to speak to the officer in charge of the Emma Tysoe investigation.

Diamond asked Ingeborg to join him.

She was starry-eyed at the prospect. “Do you think he’s ready to cough, guv?”

“We can always hope.”

In the interview room, Bellman didn’t have the look of a man about to confess. He sat completely still, studying his fingernails, apparently unimpressed when Diamond and Ingeborg entered the room and took their places. Last time, he’d slopped coffee onto his jeans. This morning, on Diamond’s instructions, he’d already been brought coffee in a cup and saucer-not to prevent further spillage, but because china is a suitable surface for collecting fingerprints.

“You’ve already met DC Smith,” Diamond said by way of introduction. “You don’t mind if we tape this?”

“Whatever you want. It won’t take long.”

Ingeborg spoke the formal preamble for a voluntary statement, and then Diamond said, “You’ve got something to tell us, Ken?”

“To show you, more like,” he answered. “When we were speaking before, there was some question about where I was on the afternoon Emma was killed. I told you I left Wightview Sands at the end of the morning and drove back here and you asked if I could prove it.”

“Right.”

“We looked in my car to see if there was a petrol receipt.”

“Correct. Have you found one?”

His mouth drew wide in a triumphant grin. “Actually, yes.” He opened his right hand to show a slip of paper lying on his palm.

“Where did you find this?” Diamond asked as he took it, his voice betraying nothing of the plunging anticlimax he felt.

“Down in the slot where the handbrake is fitted. There are two sets of brushes, nylon, I would guess, and the brake moves between them. Sometimes I run my fingertips along the gap when I’m waiting in traffic, and a small piece of paper could easily slip down there. It was stuck there, out of sight. I thought I’d have another search, on the off chance, and there it was.”

“Fortunate.”

“Very. Without it, I’d be getting worried.”

Diamond studied the data on the receipt. Beyond dispute, it showed someone had bought 35.46 litres of unleaded petrol from pump five at a cost of £25.50 at the Star service station, Trow-bridge Road, Beckington, Bath BA3, at three forty-seven on the afternoon of the murder. A kick in the guts. Trying to salvage some respect, he said, “Pity you didn’t use a card for this transaction. It was a cash sale, evidently. There’s nothing to link this receipt to you personally.”

Bellman was unmoved. “What are you suggesting-that it’s someone else’s receipt?”

“Could be.”

“Knock it off, will you?” He was confident enough for sarcasm. “Ah, I know what you’re thinking. I suppose it stuck to the bottom of my shoe when I came along later and then a freak gust of wind blew it off the shoe and up to the handbrake? That’s a long shot, isn’t it?”

“We’ll examine it, anyway,” Diamond said, passing the receipt to Ingeborg. “Thanks for bringing it in.”

“By the way, I’ve photocopied it,” Bellman said, adding, in the same sarcastic vein, “Just in case it goes astray.”

“Wise.”

“I’ll be off, then.”

“Before you are,” Diamond said, “I wonder if you’d clarify a couple of things you said at your previous interview. Only a matter of tidying up details. You said you worked in London prior to coming to Bath.”

“That’s right.”

“In SW1. Did we have that right?”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t name your employer.”

“You didn’t ask. Mitchkin Systems Limited.”

“Would you mind spelling that?”

Bellman did. “I was a technical support programmer.”

“Yes, we got that first time around. Good job, I should think, based in central London.”

“They’ve got a good name.”

“I’m wondering why you left. What brought you to Bath?”

He answered smoothly, “I’d had enough of London by then. I’m single. With my training I can work pretty well where I choose.”

“But why Bath, of all places?”

A shrug and a smile. He was confidence personified now. “Nice city. Clean air. Less hassle.”

“Are you sure there wasn’t another attraction-the fact that Emma Tysoe moved here.”

A touch of colour sprang to his cheek and he raised his hand as if to fend off a loose throw. “Oh, no. No way.”

“Before you say any more,” Diamond came in, sensing a hit, “we’ve done some digging, DC Smith and other detectives in my squad, and we know you contacted Emma quite soon after arriving here-very soon, in fact. That story about meeting her by chance in the library was a little misleading, wasn’t it?”

Bellman frowned, back on the defensive. “I don’t think so.”

A note of caution that Diamond was quick to pick up on. This line of questioning had been a fishing expedition, no more, and now there was the promise of a catch. “Let me put it this way. I’m willing to believe you met in the library, but I don’t buy your story that it was pure chance. She was an old friend from your student days. You had every right to seek her out. Any one of us would have done the same.”

The man was silent.

Diamond continued in these uncharted waters. “I’m not suggesting you harboured romantic feelings about her for all those years, checking what happened to her, where she lived, and so on. But I can’t help wondering if you were reading your paper one day, and happened to see her name. She was rather well known in her professional life-as a psychological offender profiler, helping the police with their inquiries.”

He said firmly, “I don’t have time to read the papers. All my reading is technical. Computer magazines.”

“So you didn’t know about the profiling?” Diamond paused, apparently to exercise his thoughts on this mistaken assumption. “Maybe I was wrong, then. Maybe you did still carry a torch for her after all those years.”

Bellman’s eyes flicked rapidly from side to side as if he knew he’d been led into a trap. “I don’t know what you’re on about.”

Keen, it would appear, to move on to things of more importance, Diamond said, “It’s simple enough and it doesn’t really amount to anything. We know you were attracted to Emma. You had a relationship with her. You’ve just handed us the proof that you couldn’t have killed her. All I’m asking is if you kept tabs on her ever since university.”

“And if I say yes?”

“Then I’ll ask you again: did you get your job in Bath just to be nearer to Emma?”

After a pause worthy of a Pinter play, Bellman said, “Yes.”

Diamond beamed, and sounded amiable. “Even an IT consultant is allowed to be a romantic. Thanks for coming in, Ken. I’ll show you out.”

Bellman was quickly out of his chair and through the door. Diamond got up to follow and had a sudden afterthought. He wheeled around and saw Ingeborg’s hand reach helpfully towards the cup and saucer on Bellman’s side of the table. Just in time, he made a sweeping gesture with his arms. Ingeborg, startled, drew back from the fingerprinted cup.

Diamond caught up with Bellman. “You’ll probably be interested,” he told him. “We finally found her car.”

Bellman turned to look at him, nodded, and said nothing.

There was no denying the disappointment. It wasn’t in Diamond’s nature to make light of a setback so serious. They’d devoted many hours to Bellman that could have been put to better use.

Ingeborg tried to console him by pointing out that it wouldn’t be all that difficult to forge a petrol receipt. “He’s a computer geek. He’d have no trouble reproducing the right font and printing it on the sort of paper they use. No way is this the alibi he claims it is.”

“It looks like the real thing to me.”

“Well, it would, guv. I could make another one just like it, no problem.”

“They ought to have a copy at the garage, didn’t they?” he said, starting to function as a detective again.

“What’s more,” Ingeborg chimed in, “many garages have security videos running. If we tell them the date and the time, it shouldn’t be any problem to check. We even know it was pump five.”

“Do it, then,” he told her. “Get on to them now. Go out to Beckington and collect any video evidence the garage have for the time he claims to have been there. Let’s call his bluff-if we can.”

“And the fingerprints?”

“I’ll see to them.”

Hen Mallin had already sent through the fingerprints lifted from Emma Tysoe’s car, an incomplete set, but enough, certainly, to make a comparison if the cup and saucer yielded good results. Diamond went in search of a SOCO.

Prints left on a china or porcelain surface and leaving no visible marks are known as “latents”. They require dusting with a chemical. Any marks revealed in this way have to be sealed by exposure to SuperGlue vapour for several hours.

Frustrating.

In truth, he wasn’t optimistic. Ken Bellman had been on the defensive for sure, yet this didn’t automatically indicate guilt. The man knew he was under suspicion. These days anyone picked up by the police was entitled to be apprehensive. There were too many stories, too many proven cases, of wrongful arrest and stitch-ups. He had been caught out in a lie about the circumstances of the reunion with Emma, but that could be put down to self-preservation. He was a weirdo and a stalker, but not necessarily a killer. They seldom are.

A call to John Leaman brought reassurance. Anna Walpurgis was still in the house in Bennett Street and had ordered the same lunch as yesterday and a long list of CDs and videos that Leaman had promised from the MVC shop in Seven Dials. “So it sounds as if she’s resigned to staying indoors, guv.”

“Make sure she does. Who’s buying these things?”

“Uniform. I can’t spare anyone.”

“I hope they don’t know who they’re for.”

“They think it’s all for me. My street cred is sky high.”

“And what’s happening in the street? All quiet?”

“So quiet I can see parking spaces.”

“Is there any way he could gain access from the back of the house?”

“I can’t see how. The back gardens are enclosed. Sealed off.”

“Make quite sure, John. Have someone check.”

“Do you think he knows she’s here, guv?”

“It’s only a matter of time.”

Time that hung heavily for Diamond.

He called Hen and told her that Bellman seemed to be in the clear.

She said, “In your shoes, darling, I’d have my suspicions about a bloke who produced his alibi as late as this. Where did he say the damned thing was hidden? Somewhere under the handbrake?”

He explained about the gap between the brushes.

“And it happened to be the one receipt he needed? Sounds dodgy to me.”

“We’re checking. If it’s a try-on, we’ll know shortly.”

“You sound as if you’re not expecting a good result.”

“He’s laughing up his sleeve, Hen. I’m sure he was stringing me along. Probably had the sodding receipt all the time and just wanted to hit us with this at the last minute. That’s the impression I get.”

“Dickhead. Do him for wasting police time.”

“Not worth it.”

“Don’t the fingerprints match?”

“Don’t know yet. They could be my last throw.”

“With this guy, perhaps,” she said, leaving no doubt that she had something up her sleeve. “You haven’t heard my latest. Remember the lifeguards, those two who called themselves Emerson and Laver? Stella Gregson has spent the past week trying to track them down. Finally, she found an ex-girlfriend, someone they each had a fling with, apparently, and now we know their real names, as well as their mobile numbers. They were travelling west, towards Dorset. Stella is confident of finding them today or tomorrow.”

“What are the names, then-Rosewall and Hoad?”

“I’m being serious, ducky. These two are my most wanted. Trevor Donald and Jim Leighton, both from Perth, Western Australia. Dorset police are on the case. Do you want to join in when we catch up with them?”

“I’d love to,” he said, “but-”

“But you’re hoping to catch an even bigger fish. Say no more.”

“You’ll keep me informed?”

“Depend on it.”

As always, he felt buoyed up after speaking to Hen. Her hearty self-confidence didn’t even contemplate failure. She deserved a result, and he wouldn’t begrudge it in the least if one of those Australians turned out to be the beach murderer.

Ingeborg returned from the Star service station late in the afternoon with the news that the cashier had found the duplicate receipt for the one Bellman had produced.

“Genuine, then,” Diamond said with disappointment he couldn’t disguise. “We can forget the clever forgery theory.”

Ingeborg said, “But there’s still no proof it was Bellman who bought the petrol. He may have come to the garage later and picked up a receipt someone else had thrown away. Easy to do.”

“Difficult to prove.”

“Not impossible,” Ingeborg said. “They gave me the video for pump five.” She patted her shoulderbag.

They slotted the cassette into the machine in Georgina’s office and sat on the leather sofa to watch the rather tedious images of cars moving up to the pump and drivers getting out to fill up. Fortunately a digital record of the time was displayed in the bottom left corner.

“What was the time on the receipt?”

“Three forty-seven.”

“He’ll have filled up around three forty-five. Can you fast forward it?”

Ingeborg worked the remote control and the visuals became more entertaining as figures darted out of cars like Keystone Cops in an old movie.

“We must be getting close. Slow up.”

The pictures reverted to normal speed. The time was showing three forty-one. A grey Toyota was at the pump. The elderly driver filled up, went to pay, returned, and picked up a cloth to clean his windscreen.

“Get off, you old git,” Diamond said to the screen.

The man got in and drove away his Toyota and a blue BMW glided into its place.

“Oh, fuck a duck!” Diamond said-by his moderate standards, a cry of desperation, if not despair.

There could be no argument. The man who got out to use the pump was in a black T-shirt and jeans. He had dark, curly hair. There was no mistaking Ken Bellman.

Further proof followed at the end of the afternoon. When the fingerprints were compared, it was obvious that the last person to drive Emma Tysoe’s stolen car was not Ken Bellman. They could forget him.