The Last Detective

Chapter Two

'Before we go back, John…'

'Yes?'

'A word.'

Wigfull, eyebrows arching above that comic-opera moustache, appeared to have no idea what was on Peter Diamond's mind. Leaving Dana Didrikson in the interview room to mull over what she had so far failed to disclose, the two detectives had busied themselves independently for twenty minutes or so, Diamond at his desk, Wigfull at a phone in the incident room. They now faced each other at the top of the stairs.

Diamond came to the point. 'We're at cross-purposes in there. I get her going and you keep chucking spanners in the works.'

'Such as…?'

'You know damned well what I mean.'

'If you have a complaint about me, I'd rather you specified exactly what it is, Mr Diamond.'

How typical of his whole nitpicking approach, Diamond thought in a spasm of anger which he had difficulty in containing. 'It's more fundamental, John. You and I are not on the same wavelength. You're basically hostile to the woman and it shows.'

This was received with a cold stare. 7'm hostile? She did a runner.'

'That doesn't mean we have to come down hard.'

'Great,' muttered Wigfull, plainly implying that this kind of talk from the man who had put Hedley Missendale away didn't cut much ice.

Diamond would not allow himself to be deflected. 'Look, the object is to gei at the truth.'

'Yes, and the truth is that she was besotted with Jackman and murdered his wife.'

To Wigfull, it was all so obvious.

'You could be right, but there's still another dimension to this,' Diamond told him.

'The sob story, you mean?'

'I can't say. There's definitely more to come, if we give her a chance to tell us.'

'In other words, you want me to button my hairy lip.'

The note of self-mockery was a concession, a step back from cold-eyed hostility, and Diamond acknowledged it with a grin. 'The chance of that has gone. She's dug a bloody trench for herself. We've got to move in, but to a purpose. In my judgement, she won't respond to threats.'

'Okay, I said I'll shut up.'

'No, I want you to chip in. I need your command of the details. That's how we'll tackle her, with the truth, testing her story with the facts we know to be true, you and me, John, working as a team.'

This earned a grudging nod from Wigfull, and a sharp enquiry as to what line the questioning was to take.

Diamond was equal to it. They would begin by suggesting to Dana Didrikson that she had been at the Jackman house on the day of the murder. Whatever her response, they would commit her to an account of her movements on that Monday. Only when they had got a full picture of her day would they probe her motives or point out inconsistencies. It was the structured interview so beloved of training school instructors, and Wigfull couldn't fault it. Diamond added, to bring a human dimension to the exchange, that all this would be at great personal cost, because his wife Stephanie was using the late nights as ammunition in her campaign to have her kitchen modernized. She was serving him burnt offerings nightly.

'You should get her a microwave oven,' Wigfull advised him.

'I don't trust them.'

'They're part of the new technology. I wouldn't be without ours.'

That figures,' said Diamond, prepared to believe that Wigfull's home was indistinguishable from an electricity showroom.

'Maybe you saw me on the phone just now,' Wigfull went on. 'I wasn't calling my wife. I don't, now that we have a microwave.' While Diamond was pondering the cause and effect behind that, Wigfull added casually, but with a note of archness. 'As a matter of fact, I was phoning Mrs Didrikson's employer, Buckle.'

'What for?"

'I told him she wouldn't be in to work tomorrow.'

'Wasn't it a bit late for that?'

'I got him at home.'

'I see.' Slightly put out, but wary, Diamond started walking towards the interview room. 'She'll be grateful, I'm sure.'

Behind him, he heard Wigfull raise his voice to say, 'I didn't do it out of the goodness of my heart, Mr Diamond. I asked him if she reported for duty on Monday, 11 September.'

He wheeled around.

Wigfull was looking as smug as a cat in the best chair. 'And she didn't. Buckle checked his diary. She took the day off. She wasn't at work on the day of the murder.' He spaced the words like an actor in a radio serial rounding off an episode. It demanded a burst of music.

Diamond wasn't moved to supply any. He merely nodded his head.

'You knew already?' Wigfull piped in disbelief.

Diamond answered in throwaway style, 'The statements are in from the door-to-door lads. I've just been through them. A woman in a black Mercedes was seen turning into the drive of John Brydon House shortly after 11.15.'

It was a much better pay-off.

She had her back to the door when they returned, and the tension was evident in her stance. A slight figure staring out of the window at the lights of Bath, arms crossed in front of her. Diamond was moved to think how little he'd learned of this woman's character in the two or three hours of question and answer. Part of the difficulty was that she'd obviously rehearsed her story in her mind, knowing that sooner or later the police would catch up with her. The smoothness of the performance had given few insights, save for those bursts of waspishness at Wigfull's interruptions towards the end. Admittedly she had projected a strong sense of moral obligation, whether towards her disagreeable son, her dodgy boss or the knight in shining armour, Professor Jackman, but how much of that was window-dressing remained to be discovered. One other pointer Diamond had noted: the still-potent sense of triumph in her account of the quest for the Jane Austen letters – the letters that looked increasingly like the spur to murder.

'Shall we resume?' he said.

'I've nothing else to tell you.' She need not have spoken. He could read the defiance in the set of her shoulders.

He nodded to Wigfull to run another tape and speak the preliminaries. When it was done, he reminded her of the formal caution before saying, 'We've just had some information about you, Mrs Didrikson.'

All this had no appreciable effect.

'We know you visited Geraldine Jackman on the day she was murdered. You were seen.'

This time a tremor of shock went through her, which she tried to convert into the action of rubbing her arms.

Diamond concluded his statement. 'So there must be something else to tell.'

Wigfull said, in his new, non-aggressive guise. 'Why don't you sit down?'

She half-turned and looked over her shoulder, in two minds, and then walked to the table and took her place opposite Diamond, her eyes glazed, as if too much was going on in her brain for it to interpret what she was seeing.

'You do admit going to the house?' Diamond put to her.

She dipped her head in what may have been meant as a positive response.

'Why?' Diamond asked, already departing from the structured interview he had proposed. 'Why did you go there?'

She spoke in a whisper too low to register on the recording equipment, 'To ask her to hand over the letters.'

'Geraldine?'

She nodded, and said in a slightly louder voice, 'I was sure she had them hidden in the house.' Her eyes began to function intelligently again. 'It was obvious that she must have taken them.'

Wigfull asked, 'How did you know they were missing?'

'Greg phoned me early that morning, about half past seven. He believed Dr Junker had taken them. He was going after him, on the train to London.'

'But why should he have told you about it?'

'He was sure Geraldine would call me out of spite, just to gloat. He didn't want me to hear it from her.'

On rapid reflection Diamond decided that this explanation was plausible. It was reasonably consistent with Jackman's suspicions of his wife.

'And did Geraldine call you?'

'No.' Mrs Didrikson leaned forward, her dark eyes suddenly in strong focus again. 'Which makes it even more certain that she had the letters herself. Greg was mistaken. I was positive she had them.' She used the word 'she' with unconcealed contempt, with a passionate dislike that had not been expunged by the killing. The animus between the two women must have amounted to more, far more, than the events so far described had justified.

Diamond knew he was in danger of being sidetracked, and this time he kept to the record of what had happened on the fatal Monday. 'So what did you decide to do about it?'

'I didn't do anything at first. I waited some hours. It really got to me, that she could be so bloody-minded. I was in such a state that I phoned my boss and made some excuse to get off work. About eight-thirty I drove Matthew to school and did some shopping in Bath. Had a coffee in one of those places by the bus station and did some thinking. While I was sitting there, a phrase came back to me, something Geraldine had said when I handed the letters over to Greg. She tried to rubbish them. She called them musty old things with no literary merit.'

A detail, Diamond noted, that they had heard almost verbatim from Dr Junker. Dana Didrikson hadn't previously mentioned it herself.

'You must understand the appalling thought that came to me,' she said, scanning their faces for a sympathetic response. 'She wouldn't think twice about destroying those precious letters. She would put a match to them rather than admit to Greg that she'd hidden them out of spite. It was up to me to stop her. It mattered more that she was stopped than any misgivings I had about crossing swords with her again.'

'So you drove out to Brydon House?'

'Yes.'

'What time?'

'When I got there? I suppose about half past eleven. Maybe slightly earlier. I rang the doorbell. Got no answer. Assumed she was out. Walked around the side of the house to see if by any chance a door was open. And the back door was.' She paused and stared at the back of her right hand, as if the memory was too taxing on her nerves to continue.

'So you let yourself in?' Diamond prompted.

'Yes.'

'And?'

'I called out. Called her name several times. Got no reply. Decided to make a search.'

'Go on.'

'Starting with the bedroom. If I'd been in her position, that's where I would have hidden them. So I went upstairs and called her name once more in case she hadn't heard before. I located their bedroom and looked inside. She was there.'

'What?'

'In bed. She was in the bed.'

Diamond kept his eyes on her.

It seemed that Dana Didrikson couldn't bring herself to say that Geraldine had been lying dead, but it was implicit in the way she had spoken. That was what she had intended to convey.

Diamond's first response was to treat it as another attempt to cut short the questioning. He didn't believe her.

Nor plainly did Wigfull. 'Are you serious?'

She answered, 'I'm telling you what I saw.' She had removed her hands from the table, but beneath it she was pressing them together with such force that her head and shoulders trembled.

'Mrs Didrikson,' said Diamond, 'for the record, I must ask you to state your meaning clearly. You said she was in the bed.'

'Yes.'

'And…?"

She whispered, 'Dead.'

'You're certain?'

'I didn't imagine it.'

'You'd better describe what you saw.'

She took a long breath. 'She was lying face upwards. Her eyes were open and seemed to be staring at the ceiling until… until I saw that they didn't move. Her face was a dreadful colour, as if she'd put on a facepack. Her lips were blue.'

Lividity, notably of the lips and ears, is a sign of asphyxiation. 'Did you touch her, feel her pulse or anything?'

'No. She'd gone. It was obvious.'

Painstakingly, as if they accepted every word of her story, they got her to describe the scene. Diamond had laid the ground rules: they would test the facts she gave them, and this was the method, inducing her to talk, suppressing their scepticism until the right opportunity came.

The body, she told them, had been lying diagonally in the bed, the congested and livid face at one edge, the auburn hair tousled, some of it below the pillow that lay beside her head in the normal position. Both arms were under the pale green quilt. Mrs Didrikson had not disturbed the bedding, nor touched the body, but enough of the shoulders were visible for her to see that it was clothed in a white sleeveless nightdress. She had noticed no scratches on the flesh.

The bedroom itself had revealed no obvious signs of a struggle except an empty glass tumbler lying on its side on the bedside table nearest to the corpse. The second bed had a matching quilt folded back on itself, and she thought she remembered a man's pyjama trousers lying across the pillow. She had not looked into either of the dressing rooms. The door to the bedroom had been open and the sash window partly raised. The curtains had been drawn back, giving abundant light.

'What did you do?'

'I thought I was going to faint. I went to the window and took some gulps of fresh air. Then I fled the room without looking at her again. I think I drew some water from the tap in the kitchen. I was functioning like a robot, as if it wasn't me.'

Diamond couldn't allow this to pass. 'Explain.'

'I suppose what I mean is that I was on autopilot.'

Wigfull said eagerly, too eagerly, 'Not responsible for your actions?'

She glared at him. 'You're trying to trap me, aren't you?'

It was left to Diamond to provide reassurance. 'We're trying to understand you, Mrs Didrikson.'

'Haven't you ever been shocked rigid?' she said. 'Don't you see that I'm trying to explain what it means to be in shock? I knew what I was doing throughout, if that's what you're asking. I felt stunned by what I'd seen.'

'And after you drank the water?'

'I left.'

'The way you'd entered – by the back door?'

'Yes. I made my way back to the car and drove home.'

'And then?'

'Had some brandy, I think.'

'What time was this?'

'I can't remember exactly – some time between twelve and one.'

'Would your son remember?'

'No. He has school dinners.'

'So what did you do next?'

'Sat and thought for a bit. Then put on the television to try and shut out the image I had in my brain.'

'You didn't report what you'd found?'

'No.'

'Not that afternoon, nor the evening, nor the next day, nor ever. Why not? Why didn't you notify us?'

She was silent.

'Did you discuss it with anyone at all?'

She shook her head.

Diamond rested his hands on the table and drew himself up in the chair. 'You'll appreciate that it doesn't reflect too favourably.'

Still she made no comment.

'See it from our point of view,' he suggested to her. 'When we called on you this afternoon, you ran out of the back door. When we caught up with you and asked you to help us, you told us a certain amount and tried to have us believe that it was all you knew. You only admitted going to the house on the last day Mrs Jackman was seen alive because we told you your car had been seen there And now you ask us to believe that you found her dead and for some undisclosed reason decided to do nothing about it. It isn't good, Mrs Didrikson. In fact, it stinks.'

Ripples of shock or tension disturbed her cheeks. Her lips remained tightly compressed.

He tried repeating the case against her point by point, demanding explanations, but she refused to speak at all. At his side, he could sense Wigfull's impatience with the procedure. The man was agitating to try the theory he'd been nursing all day.

It couldn't be less productive than the last ten minutes, so Diamond gave him a nod.

Wigfull said without preamble. 'Let's face it, Mrs Didrikson. You and Jackman are lovers, aren't you?'

It rocked her. 'No!'

'What's wrong? He was unhappily married. You're divorced. You met by chance, found each other attractive, and did what millions of people do.'

'That isn't true,' she said vehemently. 'There was nothing like that.'

'No sex?'

'No.'

'Come on, Dana, we're grown-ups.'

'You're wrong,' she insisted. 'We never did anything like that. Never. Not even a kiss.'

The way she spoke the last four words revealed more than she meant to. Wigfull paused a moment and suggested with a knowing smile, 'But you wouldn't have minded a kiss.'

She reddened and said, 'This is intolerable.'

'But true?'

'I've given my answer.'

'Fair enough, you say you didn't sleep with him.'

'And it's the truth.'

'I hope everything you tell us is the truth. Let me suggest something else to you. You thought the Jane Austen letters would please him.'

'What's wrong with that?'

'You went to no end of trouble to acquire them. In your heart of hearts, didn't you hope to rise in his estimation?' heart of hearts, didn't you hope to rise 'I may have done,' she conceded.

'The letters weren't just a way of thanking him for saving Matthew's life. They were a bid for his affection.'

'That wasn't why I did it.'

'But that afternoon when you drove home from Crew-kerne with the letters in your car, you must have fancied your chances a little bit, Dana. Am I right?'

Again the colour rose in her cheeks.

'You're entitled to your private fantasies,' Wigfull pressed on. 'No one can blame you for that.'

With an intake of breath that sounded very like a hiss, she answered, 'Even if I did, it's not what you were saying a moment ago.'

'But it's broadly true?'

'I wouldn't say broadly.'

'Marginally, then?'

'I suppose so.'

Wigfull had scored a useful point, and he wanted more. 'And you came home to Geraldine and a right old rollicking. She accused you of – what was the word? – humping her husband, which wasn't true, and she brought your son into it, which infuriated you. More to the point, she scotched those romantic thoughts of yours, however marginal they may have been, and made it impossible for you or Matthew to go on seeing Professor Jackman. You were in two minds about what to do with the letters.'

The more Wigfull steamed on, the more Diamond felt that he was fitting the theory around insufficient facts. From the way Dana Didrikson had conducted herself so far, she wasn't about to break down and confess. She would stonewall all night if necessary. They needed stronger evidence. With commendable restraint, he let the monologue run its length and listened to Dana Didrikson's firm denial. Then, while Wigfull recovered his breath, Diamond asked her if she wouldn't mind having her fingerprints taken and submitting to a blood test in the morning.

She agreed, whereupon Diamond called an end to the interrogation for that day.

Outside, Wigfull was generous enough to admit that he had been over-eager, and the forensic back-up was necessary. 'We must also have her car checked for traces.'

'Yes. I intend to ask her for the keys in the morning.'

'No need.' Wigfull felt in his pocket and dangled a key-ring a foot from Diamond's nose. 'I drove it last, remember?'

Smart-arse, Diamond thought.