The Summons

Chapter Eleven

He swung the door open. Then he stopped.

He had just come back to the storeroom they had given him as an office. On his desk was a bee the size of a walnut.

Anyone could see it was not a live bee.

He felt an idiot to have reacted as he did on first sight, furious at the gooseflesh that covered his arms. Grinding his teeth, he picked up the thing.

Made of black and yellow wool, with wire antennae, gauze wings and Perspex eyes with black pupils that moved, it was basically a soft toy. A ridiculous object. Someone’s feeble idea of a joke. Would Julie Hargreaves have planted it there? Not Julie, he decided, his investigative skills at work on something tangible at last. She hadn’t had the opportunity. She had been with him ever since she’d heard about the bee sting in his thumb and now she was-or should be-in the Abbey Churchyard, inquiring about G.B. the crusty.

Who would have thought it amusing? Any of the bunch he’d worked with in the old days. On arriving that morning, he’d mentioned his misfortune to the desk sergeant-a cardinal error. The story must have been passed around the entire station.

Footsteps were approaching, so he opened the top drawer, slid the bee inside, sat back and faced the door, fascinated to see if anyone came in. It is well-known that the first person on the scene after a crime will often turn out to have been the perpetrator.

John Wigfull walked in.

Surely not Wigfull! He was too po-faced to stoop to something so childish.

“How’s it going?” he asked Diamond innocently enough.

“Depends what you mean by going. There isn’t much activity.”

“Good thing.”

“Maybe.”

“I mean that the case is cast iron. Everyone says you sent the right man down.”

“Thanks.”

“So this is just a trip down memory lane for you.”

“A double-check,” said Diamond.

There was something faintly comical about John Wigfull foraging, like some small rodent with whiskers twitching. “Has anything fresh come up?”

“We’ve seen a couple of people I didn’t have time to interview the first time round.”

“With any result?”

“Nothing to get excited over.”

If Wigfull wasn’t there to assess the result of the bee tease, there had to be something else he wanted to know. He wouldn’t linger to indulge in casual conversation. He reached for Julie’s chair and then couldn’t summon the nerve to sit down, so he gripped the back and leaned over it. “It must be boring for you, all this inactivity. It shouldn’t be long before we catch up with Mountjoy.”

Diamond agreed that it shouldn’t be long, privately thinking it was down to the efficiency of the searchers.

“We got damned close last night,” said Wigfull.

“I was there.”

“We’ve stepped up the hunt. It will help us enormously if Mountjoy gets in touch again. He said he’d want another meeting to see what progress you’d made. Is that right?”

Diamond gave a wary nod.

“You would let us know if he contacted you directly?”

So that was what he had been leading up to. Far from being hot on the trail, they were desperate. “You know me, John.”

“Yes.” Wigfull looked at the shelves of blank stationery as if they would supply information as good as any Diamond gave, which was probably the case. “If you’re bored out of your skull, you might like to try some offender profiling.”

“Oh, yes?”

The voice took on a self-congratulatory note. “Do you know about offender profiling? It was being pioneered before you, em, moved to London. It’s a way of using statistics to build up the profile of an offender.”

“With a computer?”

Wigfull’s face lit up. “Yes. It’s a program called CATCH-EM.”

“Called what?”

“CATCHEM. That’s an acronym for the Central Analytical Team Collating Homicide Expertise and Management. The initial letters spell