The Last Detective

Chapter Four

'Any questions?'

Diamond eyed the CID officers assembled in the briefing room at Milsom Street. He expected no questions. His instructions had been plain enough. He wanted the interviews with the murdered woman's friends to establish when they had last seen her alive; when they had last spoken to her on the telephone; what had been said; and, finally – an invitation to the purveyors of gossip always encountered in such an exercise – whether they knew of any reason why she might have been murdered.

'Go to it, then.'

Alone in the briefing room, Diamond turned to Wigfull. 'You, too, John. The boyfriend, Roger Plato. And his wife. What was her name?'

'Val.'

He hadn't expected so immediate and confident a response. In a burst of bonhomie, he remarked, 'Instant retrieval, eh? Why do we clutter the place with computers when we've got you? Take an hour off from the custody suite, John, and see what you can get out of the Platos. They're too important to leave to boys straight out of training school.'

As a good detective, Wigfull was bound to respect the reasoning behind the command, but he was plainly unhappy at being shunted to other duties. 'What about the professor? We haven't finished with him, have we?'

'He can stew for a bit,' Diamond said airily.

The prospect of the professor stewing for any appreciable time failed to satisfy Wigfull. 'He was getting stroppy in there. He's free to leave unless we formally arrest him.'

'He's torn, isn't he?' said Diamond. 'He doesn't want to be unco-operative. That could go against him later.'

'We've had twenty-four hours of his co-operation.'

'And barely scratched the surface. There's more to come, depend upon it.'

'Will you arrest him, then?'

'Would you?' In the minds

In the minds of both men were the time limitations set out in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. An officer of Diamond's rank was entitled to detain a suspect for up to thirty-six hours without charging him, _ after which a magistrate's warrant would have to be obtained.

'I'd want to see the lab report first,' said Wigfull.

'We won't get that tonight.'

Wigfull said flatly, 'He won't spend another night with us.'

'And if we let him walk out of here,' said Diamond, 'he could do a runner.'

After a moment's further thought, Wigfull said, 'We can check whether he was on that flight to Paris on 11 September.'

'That's already in hand.'

'And the University College professor – Dalrymple?'

'Boon is dealing with it.'

'So what's the plan, sir?'

Diamond avoided a direct answer. 'The case is stacking up nicely. Opportunity: plainly – he was in the house with her. Motive: the marriage was on the rocks and she was bloody dangerous by his own account.'

'It doesn't justify killing her.'

'I'm not postulating a cold-blooded killing,' Diamond's irritation sounded in his voice. 'It's most likely to have happened during a violent argument. Those letters went missing, and – rightly or wrongly – he accused her of stealing them. A woman with fire in her belly isn't going to take that sort of abuse. She lashes out. If it was a violent row that Sunday night and he stuffed a pillow over her face and killed her, he'd know that it was curtains for his career – unless he disposed of the body. He put it in the car and drove to the lake and dumped it there after removing the clothes and the wedding ring. Next day, to establish some kind of alibi, he behaved as if his wife was still alive and he suspected the American of stealing the letters.'

The explanation, compelling as it was, appeared not to have swept up Wigfull in its wake. 'If the letters were the cause of the argument that resulted in her death, why did he mention them to us?'

'Because he's a clever bugger, John. The way he tells it, they're his alibi. I've no doubt he was telling the truth when he said he flew to Paris and saw Dr Junker. I'll bet you a double whiskey if we can trace Junker he'll testify that the conversations took place exactly as Jackman described them. And has it occurred to you-' Diamond said, smoothly disguising the fact that it had only just dawned on him 'that the missing letters could be one enormous red herring? He could have killed her for some totally different reason.'

That is a possibility,' Wigfull generously admitted.

Diamond nodded, drew closer and thrust a fat finger in front of the inspector's face. 'I've given you motive. And now…" A third finger.'… his conduct. He behaved like a guilty man, waiting over two weeks – until after the corpse was discovered – before reporting that she was missing. Why? Because he hoped she would sink to the bottom of the lake and stay there. Once she was found and we put her picture on the telly, he had no option but to come forward. People were certain to recognize the actress who played Candice Milner.'

'Even the murder squad, eventually,' murmured Wigfull.

The irony didn't deflect Peter Diamond. 'He'd had plenty of time to concoct a story. It's not bad, but it's far from perfect. He's scared out of his shoes by the prospect of what the lab will come up with. Did you see his face when the doctor came in to take the blood sample? That could nail him well and truly.'

'The men in white coats have their uses,' Wigfull remarked.

Diamond gave a half-smile. 'As a last resort, yes. They may even prove that his car was used to transport the body. So, being an intelligent man, Jackman lays the foundations for a fallback position – impresses upon us what a nutter Geraldine was, and how dangerous she had become. If the forensic evidence proves beyond doubt that he smothered her and dumped her in the lake, he's all ready to plead that he was provoked past endurance. He'll get a nominal sentence.' The way Diamond spoke the last words left no doubt of his view on lenient sentencing.

It was an intriguing test of Wigfull's true role in the investigation. Was he really only there in reserve, as the Chief Constable had asserted, or was he supposed to prevent an outbreak of intimidation? If so, Diamond had set him a problem. In the time it would take Wigfull to get to Bristol and obtain a statement from the Plato couple, Diamond was capable of tyrannizing the professor into a confession. More by accident than design, the language he had just been using was spiked with aggression: so many of the terms he had used to analyse Jackman's situation were physical. 'He's torn… scared out of his shoes… Did you see his face?'

'If you're planning another session with him, I'd like to be present,' Wigfull stated resolutely.

'No problem,' Diamond airily said. 'I'll wait for you.'

'But will he? I could interview the Platos later.'

A grunt of dissent from Diamond. 'The whole point of the exercise is that everyone is interviewed at the same time. We don't want one set of friends phoning another to warn them that the rozzers are on their way and tell them the questions they have to answer. Roger Plato is a big cheese, John. He's yours, right?' He pushed a piece of paper at Wigfull. Upon it the addresses of all of Geraldine Jackman's friends had been listed.

With undisguised reluctance, Wigfull took the paper and looked for the address of the Platos.

Diamond yawned, stretched and said, 'I might go out for a breath of fresh air.'

He walked with Wigfull through the reception area. Immediately a group of people who had been sitting in a huddle got up and surrounded them. The press.

'Any developments, Mr Diamond?'

'None at all. Why don't you get off home? I intend to, quite soon.'

'You're interviewing a man? Are you holding him?'

'Will you be charging him?'

'You're interviewing a man?

'We're interviewing anyone able to help.'

The detectives made their way out to the forecourt where the cars were parked. Wigfull got into his Toyota, started up and drove out.

Diamond watched him go. Then he turned and marched briskly back up the station steps.