The Summons

Chapter Twenty-four

Approaching the pub called the Weston, they saw brake lights coming on and remembered the tailback caused every evening along that section of the Upper Bristol Road. Diamond was fretting. He asked if there wasn’t some shortcut.

“The best I can do is cross the river at Windsor Bridge,” Julie offered. “I was going that way anyway. Why Conkwell?”

“Mm?”

“You did say you wanted to be driven to Conkwell. I was asking why, that’s all.”

“Don’t you remember anything?” he chided her. “It’s where Jake Pinkerton has his recording studio. In the woods at Conkwell.”

She said icily, “I wasn’t there when you interviewed Pinkerton. “

“Where were you, then?”

“Don’t you remember?” She echoed his words of a moment before, without adding the “anything.” “I was sent to meet Prue Shorter, much to my disappointment. I haven’t ever spoken to a pop star.”

“You didn’t miss anything special,” he said.

She inhaled sharply. “Ten years ago I would have scratched your eyes out for saying that. I had him on a poster in my bedroom.”

“Was that a four-poster?”

She thawed and laughed. “At the time, I wouldn’t have minded.”

“They’re dumbos, most of these pop stars.”

“He must know how many beans make five to have survived this long.” She joined the right-hand stream of traffic that was waiting to cross the bridge. “So you’re willing to gamble that Jake Pinkerton is the fellow who helped Britt over this problem, whatever it was?”

“Gamble-no,” said he. “It’s a mathematical certainty. We know this person was a friend, male, lives locally, was in a position to help and knew Britt a couple of years before the murder. How many points of similarity is that?”

She declined to answer.

“It’s all coming together,” Diamond said. “Seeing those young girls with their roses at the horse funeral reminded me of something Pinkerton told me. He said some idiot-some nerd, I think, was the word he used-sent a dozen red roses to Britt’s funeral. So Pinkerton was in my mind, you see.”

“Nerd is probably right,” said Julie. “How insensitive!”

“Unless it was deliberate,” Diamond said. “Unless the murderer sent them.”

“Is that likely?”

“I don’t know about likely, but it’s possible.” He looked ahead, at the line of cars. “Move it. The lights are changing. We’re dealing with the kind of weirdo who turns a corpse into a flower arrangement, so what’s strange about sending more roses to the funeral?”

After Windsor Bridge the traffic was moving again, but remained heavy. They progressed steadily along the Lower Bristol Road as far as Widcombe Hill, then made the shortcut over Claverton Down only to find another tailback at the bottom of Brassknocker, where it linked with the A36. Diamond was drumming his fingers on the head restraint in front of him. “Do we have a torch on board?” he asked.

“I haven’t looked,” said Julie.

“We’re going to need a torch.”

In motion again, they made a detour to the post office in Limpley Stoke and bought a serviceable lamp with a good beam that they tested on the wall of the pub across the street. By now it was pitch dark outside.

“Do you know the way from here?” Diamond asked, as Julie was turning the car.

“I think I can get you to Conkwell,” she said. “I’ve often passed the sign on the Winsley Road.”

“There’s a good walk to Conkwell,” he said. “You start at the Dundas Aqueduct and make your way across a field and up a steep track through the woods. Not today, though.”

Another insight into his private life? “I didn’t know you were a walker,” Julie remarked.

“My neighbor,” he explained. “Boots, knapsack, flat cap, walking stick, the lot. What a pillock!”

They located the turn and started up a one-track lane between high hedges. A mist was making driving difficult; the full beam of the headlight simply exaggerated the effect. Julie settled for dipped lights, giving visibility of twenty yards or so. Driving at forty in these conditions seemed an act of folly. The lane was so narrow that they couldn’t even have passed a cyclist. Summoning some self-control, Diamond was silent, allowing Julie to concentrate. He was playing his own mind-game of willing all other traffic to stay clear of this small lane for the next five minutes, and simultaneously willing Julie to keep her foot on the accelerator.

A mile or so along the lane they reached a cluster of buildings. A sign warned that there was no turning point in the lane to their left, so they drove onto a verge and got out. The lamp was about to prove its worth.

Conkwell is a hamlet of stone-built cottages stacked a hundred and fifty feet up the steep escarpment of the Avon valley. By day it is a joy to visit, by night daunting. At this early stage of the evening there were lights at several windows. Diamond knocked at one of the first they came to and asked the elderly man who came to the door to direct them to the recording studio. The old fellow knew what they were asking about. It was a walk of less than a mile, they were told, but he wouldn’t advise going through the wood after dark.

They thanked him and ignored his advice, taking a footpath that looked as if it might lead into someone’s garden, yet presently brought them into Conkwell Wood. With the flashlight picking out the path, Diamond strode ahead, forcing his feet through inches of leaves. “At certain times of the year, you can still hear nightingales,” he informed Julie, as if he were leading a nature ramble, then added, “so my neighbor told me.” The only sound on this particular evening was the steady drone of traffic across the valley cruising along the A36. Occasionally they saw the moving headlights, for the wood dipped sheerly to their right.

Diamond was still on his nightingale theme. “These days, in this neck of the woods, you’re more likely to have your eardrums blasted by rock music.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” Julie told him. “The studio must be soundproofed.”

Every few steps, he raised the torch beam to see what was ahead, but for the present there was no variation in the tree trunks and bushes except that some of the trees were dead and had fallen at odd angles against the branches of others and become festooned with creepers. The path was reasonably clear thanks to regular use by walkers and horse riders, but there was thick scrub on either side, mainly of brambles. Once they disturbed a roosting bird and sent it screeching in search of a safer place.

After some minutes of careful walking, because hidden rocks were a real hazard, they passed a six-foot chain-link fence with a triple band of barbed wire along its top. Examination with the flashlight revealed that it was too thick in rust to have been erected by Jake Pinkerton, who had built his studio in the mid-eighties. The path skirted the fence, so they moved on.

Pinkerton’s fence, when it came in sight, was taller, clear of rust, and electrified along the top. The name of a security firm was displayed at intervals. They walked around it looking for the entrance. From time to time Diamond waved the flashlight across a section of the interior.

“Looking for something in particular?” Julie asked.

“Maybe,” he muttered. “But it’s going to be well hidden.”

“Difficult with a torch.”

“Yes.”

A moment later, almost at the highest point of the wood, they activated a double set of floodlights. Dazzled and immobilized as rabbits on a motorway, they had found the entrance. A respectably wide road led up to the studio.

“So I needn’t have ruined these shoes,” Julie commented in an effort to reduce the whole expedition to basics and restore her nerve.

Diamond wasn’t listening. He had found a box with a two-way communication system and a surveillance camera above it. “Police,” he said after the speaker had crackled, “for Mr. Jake Pinkerton.”

“Mr. Pinkerton has left,” came the answer.

“We’d still like to come in.”

“Wait for the barrier, then.”

They passed through a security gate. Ahead, a man in a silver-buttoned black uniform and peaked hat opened a door and asked if he could be of some assistance-but in a manner that made clear that the “some” was meant as a limitation rather than infinite generosity.

“I’m sure you can,” said Diamond, who in his time had done a similar job and knew about dealing with visitors without appointments. “This is Inspector Hargreaves and my name is Diamond. Show him your ID, Julie, would you? How long ago did Mr. Pinkerton leave?”

“At least an hour.”

“Was he going home?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir.”

“I expect he has a car phone,” Julie chimed in.

“Good idea,” said Diamond, and told the security man, “Better let him know we’re here. Is there anyone else about?”

“Two of the studios are in use. A band is making a recording right now.”

“Regular staff, I meant.”

“The chief sound engineer is in the control room with the studio manager, but they wouldn’t want to be disturbed unless it’s extremely urgent.”

“We won’t bother them in that case. You can show me what I want to see, Mr., em, Humphrey. Are you ex-police, by any chance?” On the principle that you get better service if you address people by name, he had gone close enough to read Cyril Humphrey’s identity tag.

The security man flushed crimson. “I can’t help you. I know nothing about the workings of the studios.”

“The studios don’t interest us,” said Diamond, in the knowledge that he was speaking only for himself, not Julie. “I want to see where you park your cars.”

“That’s round the back.”

“Then we’d like to look round the back.”

As it worked out, they had privileged views of the studios on their way to the car park, because the modern trend in studio architecture is for huge windows where soundproof cladding was once thought indispensable. The artists need no longer feel enclosed in a bunker. So the recording session and the rehearsal were on display to anyone passing the window; hence, presumably, the elaborate security. However, nobody in the studios seemed to be doing anything; long-haired youths lounged around looking bored, drinking from paper cups.

“The car park’s this way,” Humphrey informed them.

About ten vehicles stood on a square of tarmac with space for three times that number. Diamond flicked the flashlight across them. “Does the boss leave his car here?”

“Mr. Pinkerton? No, sir. He has his private garage round the other side.”

“We’d like to see that next.”

“No chance. It opens electronically.”

“From outside, you mean.”

“Yes, he has a sensor thing in his car.”

“It triggers the mechanism?”

“Yes. We don’t have a spare.”

“When the door has opened and he’s driven in, does it close behind him?”

“Yes, sir.” Cyril Humphrey seemed smugly satisfied that he had conveyed the principle-and the impossibility of letting them see inside the garage.

“So there must be an interior door,” said Diamond, “leading to his office, right? Then we’ll all go inside and get to it that way.”

“I couldn’t take responsibility for letting you into Mr. Pinkerton’s office. Not without permission.” This was becoming a battle of wills.

“The office doesn’t interest us,” said Diamond. “We want to see the garage.”

“It’s empty.”

“I said the garage, not the car.”

“You could phone him,” Julie reminded the man.

Faced with the prospect of informing Pinkerton that the police wanted to look inside his garage, Humphrey backed down. He admitted them inside the building, along a carpeted corridor hung with modern paintings, through a secretary’s office and into the sanctum, a room furnished like a set from a Wagner opera, all black and silver, with ironwork thrones (you couldn’t call them chairs), avast round iron table, braziers for lights and the walls hung with suits of armor.

They were shepherded across to a stretch of black wall where a door was artfully concealed. Then down some stone steps to Jake Pinkerton’s private garage, a clean, concrete place with space for four vehicles.

“You see?” said Humphrey. “Nothing here.”

Diamond made a short walking tour and then said, “Is this the only garage? What about the other top people? Do they have anywhere to leave their cars under cover?”

“This is the only one.”

“Thanks, then. What sort of security do you have outside?”

Humphrey looked uncomfortable. “What do you mean- the fence?”

“The grounds. Dog patrols? Lights? Alarms?”

He gave a guarded answer. “It’s an effective system.”

“Can I take a walk around the grounds without having a Doberman at my throat?”

Humphrey realized that he was dealing with a real eccentric. “You want to go outside, in the grounds? That’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“Well, for one thing it’s uncultivated. Thick woods.”

“We know. We walked around the fence. Let’s get on with it, Mr. Humphrey. We’ve got a deadline.”

“Nobody goes there,” Humphrey tried to reason with him. “There’s nothing out there.”

“There will be presently,” Diamond told him. “There’ll be Inspector Hargreaves and me with our flashlight and anyone willing to join us. You’ll need a torch if you’re coming. In fact, two torches would be even better.”

At a loss to understand why these people had come to torment him, Humphrey capitulated. He led them back to the security control room near the entrance to pick up the torches. “What exactly are you hoping to find?”

“The Lost City of the Incas,” Diamond muttered.

“Out there? There’s nothing there, I promise you.”

“How do you know, if nobody goes there?”

“Well…”

“Anything hidden six years ago is going to be well covered by now.” He led them around the building waving the flashlight until they reached the place where the bushes came within a few yards of the car park. Distances can be deceptive in the dark, but he estimated that the studio was sited in an area the size of half a football pitch, and most of the spare ground lay behind the buildings.

The undergrowth was a prickly, formidable barrier. Diamond picked up a stick and beat a space between two bushes. He plunged in, swore a little, and returned with two stout sticks that he handed to Julie and Humphrey. But before the expedition started, more people came from inside the studios wanting to know what was going on. The pop performers had decided that this was a “good laugh” and opted to join the fun. So did some technicians. Resourcefully Diamoned requisitioned three cars and positioned them with their headlamps lighting up the wood. It took on the character of a police search, with Diamond marshaling a line of helpers to make a sweep of the grounds.

The rustle of feet through scrub took over, punctuated by hacking and the occasional shout as someone discovered some piece of rubbish. It was cold, uncomfortable but good-humored work; the novelty of the exercise kept everyone going until there was a shout from one of the pop group on the far left side: “What do I do now?”

“What’s the problem?” Diamond called across.

“I’m stuck. Can’t go no further.”

“Why not?”

“There’s some kind of shed here.”

“I’ll come over.”

By the time he got there, others had converged on the place. It was indeed a brick-built shed with a corrugated iron roof, abundantly overgrown, quite impossible to have been seen from the recording studio or the perimeter fence. They had to rip away masses of ivy and convolvulus to get at the door. A heavily corroded padlock came away more easily than some of the creepers and the door split into two pieces as they tugged it open.

The torches probed the dark interior. Someone asked, “Is this what we’re looking for?”

The light was picking out a curved surface that enclosed the dented chrome rim of a car headlamp. The glass had been removed except for a few shards. Diamond stooped to wipe the center of the bonnet. The color was red and the octagonal MG badge was mounted over a black polyurethane bumper. His pulse beat faster. He bent lower and cleared a layer of muck and moss off the registration plate. The number was the one he’d banked on finding: VPL 294S. This was Britt Strand’s car, off the road since 1988.

“Give me more light, someone,” he demanded, squeezing between the wall and the side of the car, brushing away leaf mold and dust that must have been falling through holes in the garage roof for years. Julie’s flashlight gave him a better view.

“There’s damage to the nearside wing, you see?” he said. “It’s badly dented here. Is the other side okay?”

Someone shone a torch over it and said, “There’s nothing wrong with this side.”

“Well, this headlamp is smashed and the bumper is out of alignment,” Diamond went on. “The car definitely hit something.” He looked up at Julie. “That’s it, then. How long have we got?”

She glanced at her watch. “To midnight? Just under four hours.”