Upon A Dark Night

Fifteen

Ten days after his hypertension due to underwork was diagnosed, Diamond did something about it. He went to work on a Sunday morning. The average Sunday in a police station is busier than outsiders realise. The rowdies and the drunks emerge from a night in the cells and Saturday night’s alarms and indiscretions are sorted out. Occasionally a serious incident needs investigating. On the other hand, the phone rings less and the top brass are not around. Or not expected to be. Diamond was surprised, not to say shocked, to have the new Assistant Chief Constable walk into his office. On a Sunday morning a man of his rank ought to be sitting in the Conservative Club knocking back malt whisky.

The ACC parked himself in the armchair and said as if he had just discovered the origin of the universe, ‘Have you ever noticed that people here get depressed?’

Diamond frowned. ‘Can’t say I have.’ In case the question was meant personally, he stopped frowning and put on a cheerful front.

‘It’s something to do with the air quality,’ the ACC explained, ‘the fact that we’re surrounded by hills. The air gets trapped. People get listless. Lethargic. Haven’t you ever felt that you needed to get away?’

‘Every day around four-thirty.’

‘Because of the air, I mean.’

There was a thoughtful silence.

Diamond then asked, ‘Are we going to get air-conditioning?’

‘Lord, no.’

The ACC was pussyfooting. Diamond could guess what was coming. His best efforts to occupy the murder squad on a couple of unsolved killings from four years ago were not succeeding. Too many of the stupid gumbos were being seen at the snooker table in the canteen.

The ACC tried again. ‘It would be fascinating to know if the suicide rate is higher here than in other parts of the country.’

It might fascinate you, matey, but I’d rather watch my toe-nails growing, thought Diamond as he said a faint, ‘Yes?’

‘Mind you, other factors play a part. The papers are full of gloom and doom. People being laid off work, businesses failing, the homeless on the streets.’

‘So it’s not the air,’ said Diamond. ‘It’s the press.’

‘That isn’t what I’m saying, Peter.’

‘You mean we need some good news?’

‘We’ve got quite a log-jam of suicides,’ said the ACC, getting closer to the point.

‘On the force?’

‘For God’s sake, no. On our patch.’ He went on to itemise them. The farmer, up at Tormarton two weeks ago. A foreign student found yesterday in a garage, killed by exhaust fumes from his car. And – this very morning – a young woman in her twenties who had chosen the spectacular way, leaping off the balustrade of the Royal Crescent.

‘Looking on the bright side,’ said Diamond after this catalogue of tragedies, ‘at least we have the bodies. The ones who disappear take up most time.’

The ACC made a dismissive gesture. ‘Be a good man, Peter. You’re not fully stretched on the murder squad. John Wigfull discovered that the farmer wasn’t the simple matter he appeared to be at first. We still haven’t had the post-mortem.’

‘You want me to take it over?’ he said, trying not to sound over-eager.

‘No. John will see it through. It’s just a matter of contacting people now, and he’s good at that. Help him out by taking a look at one of the other two, you and your team.’

‘It would be no hardship, sir. The farmer, I mean. I visited the scene at the time.’

‘No point. Wigfull has it buttoned up.’

His offer spurned, Diamond mentally compared the remaining two suicides. If taking a look was meant literally, he thought the asphyxiated student might be easier on the eye than the high diver. ‘Any particular one?’

‘Talk to John. He’s co-ordinating this.’

His knee behaved as if someone had hit it with a rubber hammer. ‘In charge, you mean?’

‘I said co-ordinating.’

‘Co-ordinating what? There’s no connection, is there? Serial suicides?’

This new ACC had no sense of humour. ‘I don’t think I follow you.’

‘Where’s the co-ordinating?’

‘Just the manpower, Peter. Co-ordinating the manpower.’

‘Wigfull is not co-ordinating me. I out-rank him.’

‘We know that. You can handle this with your well-known tact.’

A look passed between them. No more was said.

The desk sergeant buzzed him. ‘I’ve got a lady here, sir, asking to see the senior detective on duty.’

‘What about?’

‘Suspicious circumstances, she says.’

‘Concerning what?’

‘Hold on a minute, Mr Diamond.’ There was a pause, then: ‘A possible abduction.’

‘What of-a child?’

‘A woman friend of hers.’ Some angry shouting could be heard at the end of the line. The sergeant’s voice dropped to a confidential mutter. ‘She’s been here over an hour, Mr Diamond. She won’t speak to anyone else. She’s a right pain, sir.’

‘In what way?’

‘Mouthing off about how bloody useless we are.’

‘So she is speaking to other people.’

‘Everyone who comes in. Even the postman copped an earful.’

‘Get someone to take a statement and I’ll look at it. I’m on a suicide right now.’

‘I tried that. She wants to see the top man, she says.’

Over the background noise came a shout: ‘I said the head dick, dickhead.’

He thought he recognised the voice. This was not turning out to be much of a day. ‘Do you know this woman?’

‘No, sir, but she seems to think I should. I’m new here. I’m normally based at Yeovil.’

‘You don’t need to tell me that, laddie. What’s her name?’

‘Just a sec’

Diamond pressed the earpiece closer, but it wasn’t necessary. He heard the name clearly.

The sergeant started to say, ‘She’s-’

‘Just now I said I was on a suicide,’ Diamond cut him off. ‘That was wrong. I’m on three suicides.’

‘So can’t you see her right now, Mr Diamond?’

‘Right now, sergeant, I’d rather see my dentist standing over me with the needle.’

Ada Shaftsbury’s treatment of police officers was a well-known hazard at Manvers Street. She had a stream of abuse worthy of a camel-driver. Rookies and recent arrivals would bring her in for shoplifting and suffer public humiliation. When Ada was in full flow the older hands would leave their offices to listen.

‘Too busy?’ said the sergeant, near desperation.

‘Ask her to put it in writing.’

‘Sir, I don’t think she’ll go away.’

‘Maybe so, but I will, sergeant.’ He put down the phone.

Detective Chief Inspector John Wigfull wasn’t his favourite person by any stretch of the imagination, but compared to Ada he was a baa-lamb. On entering Wigfull’s office, Diamond caught the end of his briefing of three detectives who looked straight out of school. ‘… and I don’t want to hear anyone use the word “suicide”. This is a suspicious death until proved otherwise, do you understand? Get to it, then.’

Before the trio were out of the door, Diamond said, ‘Morning, John. I’m told you’ve got three suicides now.’

Wigfull sat up even taller and grasped the edge of his desk. His moustache, less perky these days, was into a Mexican phase that hid most of his mouth. ‘I’m assuming nothing.’

‘So I heard.’

‘Then shall we get our terminology straight?’

‘Before we do,’ said Diamond. ‘I’m quoting the ACC. He asked me to take over one of these…suicides.’

‘Oh.’

‘If it’s all the same to you, I was thinking about the fellow found in the garage.’

‘Chou.’

The Mexican phase was confirmed.‘Ciao? ‘

‘Yes, Chou,’ said Wigfull. ‘From Singapore. A final-year student of engineering. Found last night. He left a note. Very organised. If it’s all the same to you, I’d value your help more on the case at the Royal Crescent.’

Diamond played the phrase over in his mind. ‘Value your help’ was Wigfull at his most diplomatic. And the organised engineering student did sound dull, even though he was less messy. ‘What’s the story, then?’

‘This was also last night. We don’t know her name yet. The start of it was when two couples won the lottery. When I say “won”, they had four numbers up. They watched the draw in the Grapes in Westgate Street – that pub that’s always full of music and young people – and of course there were celebrations and soon it transferred to the Crescent, where they live.’

‘Four numbers isn’t the jackpot,’ said Diamond.

‘Any excuse, isn’t it? The word went round the pubs that some lucky blighter had won and was giving a party, and in no time half young Bath was making a beeline for the house. It was out of control. People who didn’t know the tenants were letting in other people. There wasn’t much drink, but there was music. At ten-thirty or thereabouts, one of the neighbours complained about the noise. Two of our lads went in and tried to find the tenants. They got the volume turned down a bit and left. By this time, the discos in town were open and quite a few were leaving. We thought the problem was over. Around seven-thirty this morning we had a call to say a woman was lying dead in the basement yard, apparently from a fall.’

‘That’s certain, is it?’

‘The fall? The injuries bear it out.’

Diamond said as if to a child, ‘What I mean, John, is was it a fall or did she jump?’

‘How would I know?’ Wigfull said with irritation. ‘That’s what we’ve got to find out. All we know is that at some point after eleven – eleven the previous evening, I mean – a couple who were leaving heard a sound, looked up and spotted a figure on the roof.’

‘The roof?’

‘You know the Crescent, Peter. It’s three storeys high with a balustrade at the level of the roof. You reach it from the attic windows. The witnesses saw her sitting on the balustrade with her legs dangling.’

‘In the dark?’

‘There’s a street lamp right outside.’

‘What did they do about it? Bugger all?’

‘No. They showed some responsibility. Went back to tell someone, and by degrees the message got to the tenants, who went to look, they think about eleven-thirty. There was no sign of her there. The attic window was still open, but they assumed she’d gone inside the house again.’

‘No one checked downstairs?’

‘The body wasn’t found until this morning.’

‘Who by?’

‘A paper-boy on his round. What happened was that the woman fell into the well of the basement – the coalhole, as it would have been originally – in shadow and out of sight of people leaving the party unless they had some reason to look over the railings. She must have died instantly. The skull was badly impacted. It was a fall of sixty feet or so.’

The injuries were all too easy to imagine in full colour.

‘Where’s the body now?’

‘At the Royal United. We had the police surgeon on the scene quite fast. If you’d like to go up to the Crescent now, you can still see where the head met the flagstones.’

Diamond backpedalled. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to take on the Chinese student instead? This one could run and run. Did she fall, did she jump or was she pushed?’

‘I don’t think there’s any question of pushing,’ said Wigfull, with a sudden twitch of the eyebrows.

‘I thought your line was that these are unexplained deaths.’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Got to keep an open mind, then.’ Artfully, knowing how Wigfull’s mind worked, he said, ‘We can’t rule out murder.’ After a pause to let that sink in, he enquired, ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to deal with this yourself, John?’

‘Sorry. I’m committed to the farmer. Those lads I sent out…’

‘They looked half-baked to me.’

‘They are. That’s why I’ve got to take a personal interest.’

For once, Diamond had been outflanked by Wigfull.

An unexplained death may be a misfortune, but it may also be someone else’s opportunity. This was the first solid job in months for Diamond, even if it was not his first choice. Generously he opted to share it with Julie Hargreaves. He phoned her at home and asked if she would sacrifice whatever she was doing for a crack at an unexplained death. she said she was cooking the Sunday roast, but if this was action stations, she would have to ask Charlie to take over. In that case, Diamond said, hand the apron to Charlie and he would expect her in the next half-hour.

Every tourist worthy of the name makes a pilgrimage north-west of the city to see the Royal Crescent. Without question John Wood the younger’s spectacular terrace with its hundred and fourteen columns was the crowning achievement of Georgian architecture, but oddly, Diamond’s work rarely took him past the place. So this morning the sweep of the great curved monolith outlined against a powder blue sky above the lawns of Royal Victoria Park still made him catch his breath. Or so he convinced himself, unwilling to accept that the bumping from the cobbled roadway may have winded him.

‘Take it easy, Julie. Nobody’s expecting us.’

The house where last night’s party had been was towards the Crescent’s west end.

Police tape had been used to cordon off an area in front. On emerging from the car, Diamond and Julie were approached by an official-looking man with a clipboard.

Diamond took him to be one of the scene of the crime team – until he spoke in an accent that would have made a Viceroy feel inferior.

‘I say, you there.’

Sensing trouble, Diamond did his deaf act.

‘Yes, you in the trilby hat. Are you connected with the police?’

He sighed and turned round. ‘We are.’

‘Then be so good as to tell me, will you, when you propose to remove these unsightly tapes and restore the place to normal? I’ve been here with my crew and some very distinguished actors since eight this morning and we haven’t shot a single frame of film.’

‘You’re filming the Crescent?’

‘I ought to be. It’s Sunday morning. The light is perfect. We went to no end of trouble and expense arranging for all the residents to park elsewhere – and here we are, faced with one house sectioned off with ghastly black and yellow tape, not to mention two police vans and now another eyesore in the shape of your car.’

Diamond turned his head to take in the full majestic panorama of the building. ‘Can’t you point your camera at the other end?’

‘My dear sir, the camera is over there by the trees. The whole object is to capture the entire frontage in one establishing shot.’

‘What’s the film?’

‘The Pickwick Papers.’

‘So is the Crescent mentioned in The Pickwick Papers?’

‘Is it mentioned? Mr Pickwick took rooms here. Several chapters are set in Bath. He visits the Pump Room, the Assembly Rooms-’

Diamond put up his hand. ‘Then I suggest you take your cameras down the road to the Assembly Rooms and keep your actors busy there. These tapes are staying as long as I want them, and I’ve only just arrived.’

The film director reddened. ‘We’re not scheduled to be at the Assembly Rooms today.’

‘And I’m not scheduled to be here, sir. I’m scheduled to be in my office having a nice cup of coffee and a chocolate biscuit. The best laid plans-’

‘You obviously know as little about filming as you do about The Pickwick Papers.’

‘Right, sir,’ said Diamond. ‘I’m wery much afeard you’re right.’ He lifted the barrier tape for Julie and they went inside.

At Diamond’s request, the uniformed sergeant at the door gave them a rundown of the use of the building. A couple called Allardyce had the top floor and the attic. The first and ground floors were tenanted by Guy Treadwell, ARIBA, Chartered Architect, and Emma Treadwell, FRICS, Chartered Surveyor (the card above their doorbell stated). The basement flat was vacant. The Allardyces and the Treadwells were on good terms, the sergeant said, and were at this minute together in the upper apartment.

Diamond took his time in the entrance hall, taking stock of the artwork displayed on the walls, a set of gilt-framed engravings of local buildings and a number of eighteenth-century county maps. Predictable for people in architecture, he reflected. You wouldn’t expect them to decorate their hall with Michael Jackson posters. Entrance halls were all about making the right impression. He nodded to Julie and moved on.

Litter from the party lay all over the staircase. After picking their way up two flights through beer-cans and cigarette-ends, they were admitted by Guy Treadwell. In case the card downstairs was not enough to establish his credentials, Treadwell wore a bow-tie, a black corduroy suit, half-glasses on a retaining-cord and a goatee beard – bizarre on a man not much over twenty-five.

‘The state of the whole house is disgusting, we know,’ this fashion plate said, ‘but your people gave us strict instructions to leave everything exactly as it is.’

‘Just the ticket,’ said Diamond with a glance around the Allardyces’ living-room. Just about every surface was crowded with mugs, glasses, cans, empty cigarette packs, half-eaten pizzas and soiled tissues. The pink carpet looked like the floor of an exhibition stand at the end of a busy Saturday. His eyes travelled upwards. ‘I like your ceiling.’

‘We’re not really in a mood for humour, officer,’ said Treadwell in a condescending tone meant to establish the pecking order.

When it came to pecking, Diamond had seen off better men than Guy Treadwell. ‘Who said anything about humour? That’s handsome plasterwork. What sort of leaves are they around the centre bit?’

‘In the first place it isn’t my ceiling, and in the second I’ve no idea.’

‘Let’s hear from someone who has, then. Your ceiling, is it?’ said Diamond, switching to the other young man in the room.

‘We’re the tenants, yes,’ came the answer, ‘but eighteenth-century plasterwork isn’t our thing.’

‘You don’t recognise the leaves either? I’m sure the ladies do.’

‘Acanthus, I believe,’ Julie Hargreaves unexpectedly said.

Surprised and impressed, Diamond held out his hands as if to gather the approval of the others. ‘If you want to know about your antique ceilings, ask a policewoman.’

Treadwell tried a second time to bring him to heel by pointing out that they were not introduced yet.

‘Detective Inspector Julie Hargreaves,’ said Diamond, ‘my ceiling consultant.’

Stiffly, Treadwell introduced his wife Emma and his neighbours the Allardyces. They had the jaded look of people badly missing their Sunday morning lie-in. Sally Allardyce, a tall, willowy black woman with glossy hair drawn back into a red velvet scrunch, offered coffee.

Diamond thanked her and said they’d had some.

Her husband William apologised because there was no sherry left in the house. It was a poor show considering he was employed in public relations, he said with a tired smile, but everything in bottles had gone. William Allardyce was white, about as white as a man can look whose heart is still pumping. He had a white T-shirt as well, with some lettering across the chest that was difficult to read. He was wearing an old-fashioned grey tracksuit, baggy at the waist and ankles, and the top was only partially unzipped. The letters IGHT were all that could be seen.

Guy Turnbull added, ‘They even drank our bloody cider-vinegar.’

‘It was a nightmare,’ said Emma Treadwell, large-eyed, pale and anxious. She must have showered recently, because she was still in a white bath-robe and flip-flops and her head was draped in a towel. ‘Three-quarters of the people were strangers to us.’

‘Including the woman who fell off the roof?’ asked Diamond.

‘Guy says we didn’t know her. I didn’t go out to look. I couldn’t bear to.’

‘Total stranger to me,’ said her husband.

‘And you, sir?’ Diamond asked William Allardyce. ‘You went to look at the body as well, I gather. Had you ever seen her before?’

‘Only briefly.’

‘So you remember seeing her at the party?’ Julie asked.

Allardyce nodded. ‘We discussed that just before you came in. I’m the only one who remembers her. She was sitting on the stairs with a fellow in a leather jacket. Large, dark hair, drinking lager.’

‘Our lager,’ stressed his wife.

‘You mean the fellow was large, with dark hair?’ asked Diamond.

Allardyce took this as humour and smiled. ‘The man, yes.’

‘How large?’

‘They were seated, of course, but anyone could see from the width of his shoulders and the size of his hands that he was bigger, say, than any of us.’

‘Drinking lager, you say. Lager from a can?’

Treadwell said in his withering voice, ‘It wasn’t the kind of party where glasses were handed out. The blighters helped themselves.’

Allardyce was more forgiving. ‘Let’s face it, Guy. Most of those people were under the impression that we’d won a fortune and opened our house to them.’

‘Was the woman drinking, too?’ Diamond asked.

Allardyce answered, ‘I believe she had a can in her hand.’

‘And how was she dressed?’

‘A pink top and dark jeans. She had short brown hair. Large brown eyes. Full lips. One of those faces you had to notice.’

‘You did, obviously,’ said his wife with a sharp glance.

‘I’m trying to be helpful, Sally.’

‘Good-looking, you mean?’ said Diamond.

‘Attractive, certainly.’

‘Jewellery?’

‘Can’t remember any.’

‘Let’s come to the crunch,’ said Diamond insensitively, considering the nature of the incident. ‘When did you learn that someone was on the roof?’

Emma Treadwell spoke up. ‘Getting on for midnight. Eleven-thirty, at least. Someone who was leaving told me they’d looked up and seen a woman up there, sitting on the stonework, dangling her legs.’

‘They came back especially to tell you?’

‘Well, wouldn’t you? It was bloody dangerous,’ said Guy Treadwell.

Allardyce said, ‘Most of the people there were decent folk. If you saw someone taking a stupid risk, you’d want to do something about it.’

‘Who was it who told you?’ Diamond asked Emma.

‘A stranger. A man in his thirties, with a woman about the same age. He must have known I lived here because I was trying to protect my things, asking people to use the ashtrays I’d put out.’

‘He found you especially?’

‘Yes. I told Guy…’

Treadwell nodded. ‘And I spoke to William.’ He looked over his half-glasses at Allardyce.

Diamond said, ‘And you investigated and found nobody?’

The PR man blushed. ‘I went straight upstairs to check. The window was open-’

‘This is the attic window?’

‘Yes. But nobody was out there. I was too late. At the time, I had no idea, of course. I thought she must have come to her senses and gone downstairs. It didn’t enter my mind that she’d jumped.’

‘Did you step outside, onto the roof?’

‘I leaned out.’

‘But you didn’t step right out?’

‘No.’

‘Could you see enough from there?’

‘It was a dark night. A new moon, I think. But the street-lamp helps. I could see nobody was out there.’

Diamond thought about challenging this assumption and then decided there was more of value to be learned by moving on. ‘You viewed the body this morning?’ he asked Allardyce.

‘This morning, yes. What happened was that the paperboy found her first. He knocked on Guy’s door-’

‘Repeatedly, about seven-fifteen, when I was feeling like death myself,’ Treadwell pitched in, unwilling to have his part in these events reported second-hand. ‘When I got up to look and saw her lying there, it was obvious that she was past help. I called the police and then went up to tell William.’

‘I came down and we were together when your patrol car arrived,’ Allardyce completed it.

‘So you both saw the body?’

Treadwell answered for them, ‘We were asked by your people to go down the basement stairs and look. Not a pleasant duty when you’re totally unused to the sight of blood. We confirmed that we don’t know who the poor woman is.’

‘Other than my seeing her on the stairs with her friend the evening before,’ Allardyce added. ‘But as to her identity, we can’t help.’

Diamond nodded to register that he’d digested all of that. ‘We’d like to see how she got onto the roof. I expect our people have already been up there?’

‘I think half the police force have been up there,’ Allardyce said. ‘The access is from the attic room, which is above the room we sleep in. I’ll show you. You’ll have to excuse the chaos. We haven’t even had time to make our bed.’

‘There were people in here while the party was on?’ Diamond asked in the bedroom, a vast high-ceilinged room with pale blue drapes on the wall above a kingsize bed.

‘They were everywhere. You can’t imagine how crowded it was. When we finally came to bed, there were beer-cans scattered about the room. We pushed them to the edges, as you see. I don’t like to contemplate what else we’ll find when we begin to clear up properly.’

‘But you won’t do that until I give the word,’ said Diamond.

‘Save your breath. We’ve had our instructions.’ Allardyce escorted them across the room to the door leading to the attic. He offered to show them up.

Diamond said there was no need. He and Julie went up the stairs to what must once have been a servant’s room. Now it was a junk room largely taken up with packing-cases and luggage. The window was open and it took no great effort for Diamond to shift his bulk across the sill and stand outside.

‘Fabulous view,’ said Julie as she joined him.

‘That isn’t why we’re here.’

‘But it is terrific, you must admit.’

He gave a nod without actually facing the view. ‘Where did you learn about eighteenth-century plasterwork?’

‘I didn’t. We’ve got an acanthus in our garden.’ She leaned over the balustrade. Quite far over. ‘It is a fair drop.’

‘I wouldn’t do that, Julie.’

She drew herself back and gave a faint smile with a suggestion of mockery. ‘Do you have a fear of heights, Mr Diamond?’

‘No, no. Not at all.’

‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of.’

‘I said I’m all right. I only spoke because…’

‘Yes?’

‘Your skirt’s undone.’

‘Oh, hell.’ Blushing deeply she felt for the zip and pulled the tab over a small white V of exposed underwear.

Diamond was tempted to make some remark about the view, but for once he behaved impeccably. ‘The woman was seen sitting here on the ledge, apparently. It doesn’t suggest she was forced over.’

‘She could have been pushed.’

‘True. But she’d got herself into a dangerous position. The odds are that she meant to jump.’

‘Or fly.’

He let that sink in. ‘You’re thinking drugs?’

‘It was a party.’

‘We’ll see what the blood shows.’

‘The other possibility is that she fell by mistake,’ said Julie. ‘She could have been sitting here to show off, made braver by a few drinks, and then lost her balance. Easy to do.’

They returned to the living-room where the shocked tenants sat in silence.

‘How much did you win?’ Diamond asked no one in particular.

‘Win?’ said Sally Allardyce.

‘The lottery.’

‘We don’t know yet,’ said Treadwell. ‘It won’t be much. The mob who descended on us seemed to think we’d won the jackpot.’

‘Four numbers should get you something over fifty pounds,’ said Diamond. ‘Maybe as much as a hundred. Enough to get your carpets cleaned.’

‘Not enough to pay for the food and drink we were robbed of last night. Where did we go wrong?’

Treadwell’s wife reminded him, ‘Our problems are nothing beside the tragedy of the young woman’s death.’

Treadwell grasped how insensitive his remark had been. ‘What a fatal chain of circumstances. If we hadn’t shouted about our winnings in a public bar, she’d still be alive.’

‘We were all looking out for the numbers on the TV,’ said Sally. ‘We couldn’t have kept quiet, Guy.’

‘Who picked the numbers?’ Diamond asked.

‘Guy,’ said Sally. ‘We all have faith in Guy. He’s one of those amazing people who win things all the time.’

‘That’s an exaggeration,’ Treadwell pointed out.

‘Have you won the lottery before, then?’

‘It was our first time as a syndicate.’

‘First time winners. You should do it again.’

‘No way,’ said Emma.

Diamond adopted a sagelike expression and commented, ‘“He who can predict winning numbers has no need to let off crackers.”’

‘What are you on about?’ said Treadwell.

‘I was quoting from Kai Lung.’

The relevance of the saying – if relevant it was – escaped them all.

‘So how does this lucky streak manifest itself, Mr Treadwell?’

There was a huff of impatience from the lucky man.

Sally said, ‘Own up, Guy. There was that inheritance that came out of the blue. Five grand from a cousin in the Channel Islands you hadn’t even met. And that Sunday paper that featured you as the architect of the nineties. A big spread in the colour supplement.’

‘That wasn’t luck,’ said Treadwell.

Emma chimed in, ‘The lucky bit was that you went to the same Cambridge college as the editor.’

He snapped back, ‘So are you inferring it wasn’t in the paper on merit?’

‘Of course not. We’re saying you’re a winner, and you are. You go on your digs and you’re the only one who finds anything all weekend.’

“What’s this,’ said Diamond. ‘Archaeology?’

‘A pastime, at a very amateur level,’ said Treadwell.

‘You found those gorgeous old bottles on the river bank,’ said Emma.

‘They’re nothing special,’ said Treadwell.

‘Admit it, Guy. You get all the breaks.’

Allardyce said gallantly, ‘And your luckiest break of all was getting hitched to Emma.’

Emma blushed at the compliment, but her churlish husband said nothing.

Sally added for Diamond’s benefit, ‘He’ll go on denying he has a charmed life, but just don’t get into a poker game with him.’

Diamond asked what time the gatecrashers had started arriving and was told they first appeared around 9pm and soon it became unstoppable. The pressure only eased about 10.30, after the two policemen had called, following the complaint from a neighbour. By that time all the drink was gone and the clubs and discos were opening in town.

‘And some remained?’

‘Plenty,’ said Sally. ‘For hours.’

‘But you had no knowledge that anyone was on the roof?’

‘Not until we were told.’

Diamond went downstairs and talked to the sergeant at the door, a grizzled man with a face you could have struck a match on. ‘Do you have a personal radio?’

‘Yes, sir. Want to use it?’

He might as well have invited Diamond to perform brain surgery. ‘No. Has there been any word about the victim? Has anyone reported her missing?’

‘Nothing’s come through to me, sir.’

‘Were you here when they took her away?’

‘I helped put her on the stretcher, sir.’

‘In that case, you can tell me what she was like.’

‘A right mess, to tell you the truth. The crack in her head-’

‘Yes, I know all about that,’ Diamond firmly cut him off. ‘I was wanting some idea of her normal appearance.’

‘She was a brunette, sir. Quite short hair actually. Good figure.’

‘Clothes?’

‘She was covered with a blanket when I arrived.’

‘But you helped lift her onto the stretcher, right? What did you take hold of? Her arms?’

‘The legs. Well, the feet. She had black jeans, white socks, black and white trainers. Only one trainer, in point of fact. One was missing.’

‘Fell off, you mean?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Was it in the yard? Did anyone pick it up?’ Diamond’s voice had an edge of urgency that produced a nervous response from the sergeant.

‘Em…’

‘Think, man.’

‘I couldn’t say, sir.’

The missing trainer had galvanised Diamond. ‘Get on that radio of yours and find out if anyone has the shoe. Tell Manvers Street from me to contact everyone who was here at the scene, including the SOCOs, the police surgeon, the mortuary. If we have the shoe, I want to know exactly where it was found, on the roof, in the basement, or any other place. Do it now, Sergeant.’

Sixteen

Early the same afternoon, the filming of The Pickwick Papers was abandoned after two minibuses joined the other police vehicles in front of the Royal Crescent and a dozen officers emerged. The director said he would be consulting lawyers.

Inside the house the reinforcements began a ‘sweep’; collecting, bagging and labelling each item discarded by the party-goers the previous night. The residents took turns to make tea and coffee, and tried without much conviction to behave as if it were a normal Sunday. Diamond had asked them to remain indoors until the sweep was over. Complications could occur, he said darkly, if people weren’t present when their house was being checked for evidence. To encourage co-operation, he asked Julie to stay there. Any hope she had of lunch with Charlie had long since been abandoned.

The big man himself made a reluctant appearance at the Royal United Hospital mortuary. The corpse of the young woman, still in her bloodstained clothes, was wheeled out for his inspection.

He held his breath, but the injuries were less disfiguring than he had prepared himself for. The back of her skull had taken the main impact. Blood had congealed and encrusted in a patch not strikingly different from the dark brown of her hair. The unmarked face had the look of wax. Its serenity was an appearance, not an expression, confirming the melancholy truth that a detective’s job is doomed to be unsatisfying, for the best it can do is reconstruct facts and determine what happened and who was responsible. Nothing he could discover or deduce, however brilliant, would diminish the tragedy of a young life lost.

He stepped away for a moment, and the attendant asked if he’d finished.

‘Far from it.’ He approached the other end of the trolley and spent some time examining the black and white Reebok trainer on the left foot and the white sock on the right. The remaining shoe was fairly new, with little wear. It fitted snugly and was laced and tied with a double bow. The sock on the other, shoeless foot had been tugged down a little, so that the heel was hanging slackly. He attached no importance to this. It could easily have been done as the body was being moved. But he was intrigued to find the underside of the sock perfectly clean.

‘What it shows clearly,’ he told DCI John Wigfull in his Manvers Street lair, ‘is that she didn’t put her foot on the ground without the shoe. The dirt runs off the roof and collects in the gully behind the balustrade. You can’t avoid stepping in muck.’

‘What did she do, then? Hop?’

Diamond shot him a surprised look. Sarcasm wasn’t Wigfull’s style. He was about as waggish as a Rottweiler.

‘I suppose she kicked the shoe off as she jumped,’ Wigfull said, more soberly.

‘But where is it? That shoe is missing. I’ve checked with everyone. No sign of it, on the roof or down in the basement yard.’

‘The adjoining basement?’

‘My lads aren’t amateurs, John. I said it’s missing.’

Wigfull’s unappreciative gaze rested on Diamond for a moment. ‘You have a theory, I suppose?’

‘Someone picked up the damned shoe and took it away.’ Having delivered this startling opinion, Diamond paused. ‘You’re going to ask me why.’

A sound very like a snort of contempt escaped from under the Mexican moustache. ‘I wouldn’t give you that satisfaction.’ Wigfull was definitely getting uppish.

‘Suit yourself.’

‘Before you dash off, I think I’m entitled to know what you’re doing about this woman up at the Crescent.’

‘She isn’t up at the Crescent any more. She’s down at the RUH.’

‘This missing shoe. What does it mean, in your opinion?’

A grin spread across Diamond’s face. ‘I thought you weren’t going to ask. There are two questions, aren’t there? How did the shoe get parted from her foot, and where is it?’

‘Well?’

‘Question One, then. If you take it from me that she didn’t put her foot to the ground, then the shoe must have come off while she was sitting on the balustrade. She was seen up there some time around eleven-thirty to midnight, “dangling her legs”, so I was told. If her legs were visible, she was facing outwards looking at the lights of Bath. Of course, she may have dangled so energetically that it simply…’

‘Slipped off her foot?’

‘Yes. Or, more likely, she struck her heel against one of the stone things underneath. What are they called?’

‘Balusters.’

‘Against one of the balusters, loosening the shoe, in which case it dropped to the ground, or the basement.’

‘But you said it hasn’t been found.’

‘Don’t rush me, John. Something I didn’t say is that the other trainer, on the left foot, is securely tied, laced with a double bow.’ He paused. ‘Now, you were saying…?’

Wigfull was not so laid-back now. In fact, he was hunched forward. ‘Where is the damned shoe?’

‘Thank you. That’s my Question Two. It isn’t there any more, so – as I said a few minutes ago – it must have been removed from the scene.’

‘But who by?’

‘This is just a theory. Someone else was up there on the roof. The woman hears something and turns, feeling vulnerable. The other party goes to her and there’s a struggle in which the shoe is tugged off. The victim falls to her death.’

Wigfull’s brown eyes widened. ‘Peter, you’re talking murder now.’

‘I didn’t say the word.’

‘You were about to.’

‘Hold on,’ said Diamond, deliberately playing down the obvious. ‘The second person could have been trying to prevent the victim jumping off. It could have been a rescue attempt that didn’t succeed.’

Wigfull was unconvinced. ‘Why would the rescuer want to get rid of the shoe?’

Diamond didn’t offer a theory.

‘The only certain thing,’ said Wigfull, ‘is that she fell to her death – or was pushed.’

‘No, there is another certain thing, and that’s that her shoe is missing.’

‘Quite true, and that’s difficult to reconcile with a rescue attempt.’

‘Agreed.’

Diamond, forceful by reputation, was rather relishing this softly-softly approach with his old antagonist. He wasn’t going to thump the desk and say this stood out as a case of murder.

Wigfull said, ‘Do you really think someone else is involved?’

‘Allowing that the shoe went missing, yes. Otherwise, where is it?’

Wigfull sank back into his chair and said with an air of martyrdom, ‘God, why didn’t I ask you to take on the student?’

‘I offered.’

‘I know. You’re saying because the shoe is missing someone else must be involved. What do they gain from disposing of the shoe? What are they worried about? Prints? Fibres?’

‘You know what forensic say: every contact leaves its traces.’

‘Which makes murder a strong bet. But why? Why attack her at all?’

Diamond spread his hands wide, like Moses arriving at the Promised Land. ‘That’s all to be discovered.’

‘You don’t even know the victim’s name. Is anyone reported missing?’

‘What time is it?’ asked Diamond.

‘Two-thirty.’

‘Most of that crowd who were partying last night will be scarcely out of bed. And when they are, a lot of them won’t know whose bed it is. To expect them to notice someone is missing is asking a lot, John.’

‘What was she like, this woman?’

‘Mid-twenties. Dark, with shortish hair. Average height and build. Brown eyes. Dressed for an evening out, in a pink sweater and black jeans.’

‘White socks and one Reebok trainer,’ Wigfull made a point of completing it for him. He liked his reputation as a stickler for detail.

‘She was seen at the party sitting on the stairs with some bruiser in a leather jacket.’

‘And he hasn’t come forward?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Is that the best description you’ve got?’

‘Of the victim? I could do better. I could circulate a picture if we’re serious about murder. This is what I wanted to talk to you about. Unless she’s identified, the post-mortem will have to be delayed, just like it is for your farmer. I’m about to put out a press statement asking for information. Do you want a hand in it?’

Wigfull sighed. If he’d known this unexplained death would shape up as a murder inquiry, he’d have grabbed it for himself. Now that he’d handed the job to Diamond, the official head of the murder squad, he could hardly claim it back.

He conceded bleakly, ‘This one is yours.’

At his own desk Diamond cleared a space with a swimmer’s movement and started drafting the press release, a task he would have handed to Julie if she were not still at the Crescent. Julie was good with words – only she was also a model of tact, the ideal person to have in charge at the scene of the incident, keeping the tenants from getting stroppy. She’d radioed in to say that the sweep through the house was complete. Nothing of obvious significance had been found, certainly no Reebok trainer.

He had radioed back and ordered a search of the building, a specific search this time, for the missing trainer. Yes, a search, he emphasised to Julie. A different exercise from the sweep. This time the team would open cupboards, look into drawers, between layers of bedding, under loose floorboards. When Julie pointed out that they had no search warrant, Diamond told her brusquely that a DI with her experience ought to have the personal authority to carry through an exercise like this. It wasn’t as if anyone was under suspicion of hiding drugs or stolen goods. It was a pesky shoe they were looking for. Julie, caught in the trap familiar to female police officers – the suggestion that they lack assertiveness – bit back her objections and went off to supervise the search.

The press release.

He wrote in his bold lettering, A woman aged between twenty-five and thirty died, apparently from a fall, at a party at number?? [He’d need to check the number again] The Royal Crescent, Bath, late on Saturday night. Police are anxious to identify the woman and trace witnesses who may have seen her before the incident. She was wearing… Then he looked up.

A sergeant had come through the open door, embarrassment writ large across his face. Before any words were spoken, the reason was clear. Apparent behind the sergeant, too large to be obscured by his merely average physique, followed Ada Shaftsbury.

The sergeant started saying, ‘Sir, I did my-’

Ada elbowed him aside and advanced on Diamond. This female lacked nothing in assertiveness. ‘Here he is, the original shrinking violet. Just who do you think you are -the Scarlet sodding Pimpernel? I spend half the day sitting on my butt waiting for a sight of you and you don’t even get up to shake hands. What are you afraid of- that I’ll get mine around your throat?’

Diamond had nothing personal against Ada. In small amounts, and at the right time, he enjoyed listening to her. As a senior officer, he had tried once or twice to stop her causing mayhem in the charge room and quickly came to appreciate her sharp humour and agile brain. Also the strong moral values that, ironically, many habitual criminals possess. Her morality happened to be a little out of kilter with the law, that was all. It allowed her to shoplift with impunity, but never to steal from individuals.

‘Ada, if I had the time…’ He waved the wretched sergeant away. ‘I can give you three minutes. It’s red alert here.’

‘It always bloody is,’ she said, tugging a revolving chair from the desk Julie used and sinking onto it with a force that would forever impair its spring mechanism. ‘I’ve waited all the frigging morning to see you, Mr Sexton bloody Blake, and now you’re going to listen. They asked me to make a written statement. What use is that? I know what happens to bits of paper in places like this. I’ve seen it.’

‘What’s your gripe, Ada?’ Diamond asked.

‘No gripe.’

‘Apart from being kept waiting.’

A brief smile escaped. ‘Well, that. I’m bothered something chronic about my friend, that’s the problem. I live in one of them social security hostels, Harmer House, up Bathwick Street. Do you know it?’

He gave a nod.

‘A couple of weeks ago – it was on the Wednesday – a social worker brought in this girl who’d lost her memory – all of her memory, up to when she was dumped in some private hospital grounds, with broken ribs, bruising, all the signs of an accident. She couldn’t remember a sodding thing, not even her name. Seeing that she wasn’t a paying patient, this hospital patched her up and passed her on to Social Services, which is how she came to us. She’s in your records. Your people photographed her and everything. Don’t know what you called her. She was Rose to us in the hostel. I shared a room with her.’

Diamond warned her, ‘I said three minutes, Ada.’

‘I’m keeping it short, Kojak. Rose was desperate to get her memory back and no one seemed to care. The best hope the hospital could hold out was sending her to a shrink, and she’d have to wait weeks – just to be made even more confused. Not bloody good enough, I said, and rolled up my sleeves and did something about it – what you lot should have been doing – tracking down the old lady who found her in the hospital grounds, and the car that brought her there and the toe-rags who knocked her down.’

‘You did all this, Ada?’ he said in a flat tone, thinking with resignation of the chain of false assumptions and mistaken identities that it probably represented.

‘Yes, and there’s more to it than a road accident, I promise you. We was coming back to the hostel – Rose and me – in broad daylight, when some yobbo jumped out of a car and grabbed her. He talked like he knew her. Said he was taking her home. She told me later she’d never clapped eyes on him before. He’d just about bundled her into the back seat before either one of us caught our breath. There was another oik driving and they would have got clean away if I hadn’t taken a hand. I managed to hook her out in time.’

‘You saved her?’

‘I can knock the stuffing out of most men.’

‘What did they do about it?’

‘Drove off like it was the bloody Grand Prix.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Think, dark-haired, early twenties. A hard case. I’d know him again.’

‘And is this what you’ve waited all day to tell me?’

‘I haven’t come to the main part,’ said Ada, moving on without pausing for breath. ‘Like I said, we found these people who ran into Rose in their car. This happened early one evening way up the A46, between that poncy great house that’s open to visitors – what’s it called?’

‘Dereham Park?’

‘Between there and the motorway. They said she stepped out of nowhere, right in front of their car. Could have killed her. As it was, they managed to brake and she wasn’t hit too hard.’

‘Did they report it?’

‘Get wise, Mr Diamond. They wouldn’t have left her lying dead to the world in the hospital grounds if they’d reported it, would they?’

‘You say they admitted all this? You’re quite sure they didn’t say it under duress?’

‘Duress? What’s that when it’s at home? Listen, we were on track, Rose and me, steaming along, getting to the truth, when – boom! – we ran into a buffer. We got back to the hostel right after seeing these two, to find the social worker in our room with some woman claiming to be Rose’s sister, or stepsister, or something. She seemed to know all about her. Brought out some photos that were definitely Rose with some old woman she said was their mother, at Twickenham. Where’s that?’

‘West London.’

‘She said Rose lived in Hounslow.’

‘Not far from Twickenham,’ said Diamond.

‘This woman said her name was Jenkins, Doreen Jenkins. she said she’d come to Bath with her boyfriend especially to look for Rose. Mind, Rose didn’t seem to know her.’

‘But Rose had lost her memory.’

‘Right.’

‘So she wouldn’t have recognised her.’

‘Let me finish, will you? I could see Rose was really unhappy. She wouldn’t have gone with the Jenkins woman, I’m sure, but that silly cow Imogen forced the issue.’

‘Imogen?’

‘The social worker. The case was closed, in her opinion. Her office wasn’t responsible no more. Rose had been claimed. So she had to go. Rose was cut up about it, I can tell you. Now this is the worrying bit. She promised to keep in touch whatever happened. We both promised. I gave her a postcard specially. She was going to write to me directly she got back to Hounslow. I’ve heard sod all, Mr Diamond, and it’s been the best part of two weeks.’

‘Is that it?’ he asked.

Ada thrust out her chin. ‘What do you mean – “Is that it?”’

‘You’ve come to us simply because you haven’t had a card from your friend? Ada, she had a lot on her mind. People forget.’

‘I never liked the look of that sister,’ said Ada.

‘You’re wasting my time.’

‘Wait,’ said Ada. ‘I tried writing to her – Miss Rosamund Black, Hounslow, and the letter came back yesterday with “return to sender” written on it.’

‘What do you expect? There are probably thirty or forty people called Black in Hounslow. The postman isn’t going to knock on every door.’

‘I looked in the phone book and there’s no Miss R. Black in Hounslow.’

‘Maybe she doesn’t have a phone. Ada, I said three minutes and you’ve had ten.’

‘She’s been abducted.’

‘Oh, come on. You just told me what happened and it was her choice.’

‘Hobson’s bloody choice. What about the bloke who tried to drag her into the car?’

‘Ada, that was another incident. You’re not suggesting the sister had any connection with him? She behaved properly. She went to Avon Social Services. They were satisfied she was speaking the truth.’

Ada was outraged. ‘Rose could be dead for all you care, you idle slob. If you’re the best Bath can afford, God help us all. You don’t know sheepshit from cherrypips.’

He stood up. ‘Out.’

‘Dorkbrain. Something’s happened to my friend, and when I find out the truth you’ll wish you hadn’t been born, you…you feather-merchant.’

Before drafting the rest of the press release, he sent one of the police cadets shopping. The recent extension in Sunday trading was a lifesaver to anyone whose eating arrangements were as makeshift as Diamond’s.

When he returned to the house in the Crescent at the end of the afternoon, he was holding two plastic carriers. Julie met him in the entrance hall, which was now restored to something like a respectable state. She told him the search squad had left a few minutes before with a vast collection of rubbish.

He set the bags down on a marble-topped table. ‘No shoe?’

‘We went through the place with a small-tooth comb, the attic to the basement. I’m positive it isn’t here.’

‘Outside?’

‘I had six men out there for two and a half hours.’

He ran his fingers through what remained of his hair. ‘I’m mystified, Julie. I can think of three or four ways the shoe may have come off. I’m trying to think of one good reason why anyone would wish to remove it from the scene.’

She shook her head and shrugged. ‘One shoe’s no use to anyone.’

‘If it incriminated someone, I’d understand,’ he said. ‘But how could it? Let’s take the extreme case, say she was murdered, shoved off the balustrade after a struggle in which the shoe came off. What does her killer do with the shoe? He’d sling it after her, wouldn’t he, down into the basement? Then we’d assume it got knocked off her foot when she hit the ground. It would still look like an accident, or suicide. Keeping it, hiding it, disposing of it, is self-defeating. It announces that someone else was involved.’

‘People aren’t always rational,’ Julie pointed out. ‘This killer – if there is one – may have been drunk.’

‘Could have been.’ Diamond didn’t say so, but he thought it unlikely that a drunk would bother to pick up a shoe and smuggle it out of the house.

‘Have we finished here?’ she asked.

‘Where are the tenants – still upstairs?’

‘Yes.’

‘How are they taking it?’

‘They’re not happy, but would anyone be? They couldn’t understand the reason for the search. They’re just ordinary people – well, not all that ordinary, or they wouldn’t be living at an address like this – but you know what I mean. They were really unlucky the way this party came about.’

‘Or unwise.’

Julie didn’t agree. ‘I doubt if anyone could have prevented what happened.’

He showed his disagreement with a sniff. ‘If you won the lottery, you wouldn’t shout it out in a pub.’

‘I might. Anyway, their luck was really out when the woman was killed. You can’t dispute that.’

‘You’ve obviously come to like these people.’

‘They’ve been helpful, making tea and things. I’m hungry, though.’

His eyes slid away, to a framed print of John Wood’s 1727 plan of Queen Square. ‘The Treadwells are architects, right?’

‘Yes, and making a good living at it, I get the impression. They have an office in Gay Street. He designs those enormous out-of-town supermarkets. She’s the surveyor. Knows all about maps and land use and so on. She sizes up the site and he draws the plans.’

‘Cosy.’

‘I think they’re doing all right. Not much of the building industry is booming these days, but supermarkets are going up everywhere.’

‘Red-brick barracks with green-tiled roofs.’ Diamond had no love of them, whatever their design. He knew them from the inside, as a trolley-man in his spell in London. ‘It’s a cancer, Julie, scarring the countryside and bleeding the life out of the city centres. So the geniuses who design them choose to live in a posh Georgian terrace and work in a building that was here when Beau Nash was alive. I bet they don’t drive out of town to do their shopping.’

‘They don’t have a car.’

‘There you are, then.’

She hesitated. ‘Does it matter how they make their living?’

‘They’ve won you over, haven’t they?’

‘I take people as I find them, Mr Diamond.’

He was forced to smile. She’d scored a point. Here he was, ranting on again, no better than a feather-merchant, whatever that was. Thank God there were people like Julie to nudge him out of it. ‘And you find them more agreeable than your boss?’

She blushed deeply. ‘Actually, the couple upstairs are the friendlier ones. Mr Treadwell is still angry about having his house invaded and I think his mood rubs off on her, although she does her best to sound civilised. The Allardyces seem to take a more fatalistic view of the whole weekend.’

‘It was fatal for someone, anyway. They’re the people in public relations, aren’t they?’ He held up a pacifying hand. ‘All right, Julie, I won’t give you my views on public relations. Remind me of their first names.’

‘Sally and William.’

‘And they’re still approachable, after having their house turned over? It beggars belief.’

‘It’s in the breeding. Grin and bear it.’

‘Let’s go up and pay our respects to these models of restraint.’ He picked up his shopping. He was feeling chipper. Not a hint of hypertension.

Sally Allardyce admitted them to the living-room that featured the acanthus-leaf ceiling. Both couples were present. The lights were on and a simulated fire was flickering yellow and blue in the grate. A game of cards was in progress at the round table at the end nearest the main casement window.

Emma Treadwell had changed from her bath-robe into a pale blue dress. Made-up, bright-featured and pretty, she still showed some strain, fingering the ends of her long, dark hair.

Diamond glanced at the way the cards were arranged. ‘Whist?’

‘Solo whist, actually,’ said William Allardyce. His tracksuit top was unzipped lower than before and the lettering entirely revealed. Aptly for the man Julie had found the more friendly, it read MR RIGHT.

‘Finish the hand, then,’ Diamond urged them. ‘You can’t stop in the middle. Is someone on an abundance?’

‘Misère,’ said Treadwell, without looking up from the cards in his hand. ‘It’s me, and it just about sums up the weekend.’

Sally Allardyce said, ‘We were only filling in time. Your inspector -Julie – said you’d be along soon. I’ll make some fresh tea.’

Diamond seized his opportunity to earn some goodwill. He became masterful. ‘No, you won’t. You’ll take your place at the table and give Mr Treadwell the chance to glory in his misère. Where’s the kitchen? Through there?’

‘What exactly…?’

‘Julie and I will prepare – what is it you call it in all the best circles? – high tea. I heard you were cleaned out by all your visitors, so I brought some food in. Is anyone game for scrambled eggs on toast? My specialty.’

After some hesitation, it was agreed. They would finish the game and take their chances with Peter Diamond’s specialty.

In the kitchen, he grabbed an apron off the back of the door and tied it on. ‘I’m a clumsy bugger,’ he explained to Julie as if it were news to her. ‘This is my best suit. There’s a cut loaf in the bag. Why don’t you get some toast and tea on the go and leave the eggs to me?’

Mastering the cooker was the first challenge. It was electric and easy and he popped in half a dozen plates, informing Julie that nothing was worse than serving a warm meal on a cold plate. The gas hob proved less amenable. The spark wouldn’t ignite the burner for some seconds, and when it finally did with a small explosion, there was a distinct whiff of singed hair. He rubbed the back of his right hand.

Sally Allardyce called out from the card-game, ‘Are you managing all right?’

Julie answered that they were and Diamond began robustly cracking eggs into a large bowl and tossing the shells across the room, aiming for – and not always reaching – the sink. ‘You need a dozen for a party this size, so I got some extra in case of accidents,’ he informed Julie with a wave of his sticky hand covered in bits of broken shell. But he seemed to know what he was doing. When she offered to pass him the milk he said, ‘Never use milk in scrambled eggs. Cream, if you want them rich. But I prefer to serve them fluffy. A little water, that’s the secret. The whole thing will be light as air.’ He found an old-fashioned whisk and attacked the mixture vigorously. ‘How’s the toast?’

‘Almost there.’

‘The tea?’

‘Will be.’ Julie hesitated. ‘What’s misère, Mr Diamond?’

‘A call in solo. You have to lose every trick.’

‘And then what?’

‘You make your misère – and the others pay up. Being a total loser isn’t so easy as you think.’

‘Guy Treadwell should be all right. He’s supposed to be the lucky one.’

He worked with two frying pans and generous knobs of butter, tipped some of the mixture into each and worked it into the right consistency with a wooden spatula. At this moment the cooking took priority over police work. He was absorbed. ‘I hope to God they’ve finished the hand. Timing is everything.’

Some deft work from Julie ensured that six portions of approximately equal size were carried steaming into the living-room. Place mats and cutlery were quickly produced.

‘They’re going to like this,’ he murmured to Julie.

Until they see the state of their kitchen, she thought.

‘Did you get it, Mr Treadwell?’ Diamond asked after compliments had been paid to the scrambled eggs on toast.

Treadwell looked up inquiringly.

‘The misère.’

‘He got it,’ said his wife. ‘With a hand like that he could have made misère ouverte.’

‘When the cards are exposed on the table,’ Diamond explained to Julie. ‘Do you tip horses, Mr Treadwell?’

A sour-faced shake of the head.

‘I only wish William were half so lucky,’ said Sally. ‘He’s never found a blessed thing on his country walks. Not so much as a bad penny.’

The attention of the CID shifted to Allardyce. ‘You’re one of those ramblers I see out with their trousers tucked into their socks?’

William Allardyce smiled. ‘Nothing so ambitious as that. Just a Sunday afternoon walk when I can get it. It’s good to get out after a week in the office.’

‘Public relations – what does it come down to?’

‘It doesn’t come down to anything – ever. If PR is doing what it should, it’s rising. We raise the profile of our clients by increasing the goodwill and understanding they achieve with their customers.’

‘Through the media?’

‘Much more than that. We’re concerned with the entire public perception of the client and his product.’

‘The image?’

‘If that’s what you choose to call it, yes.’ Mindful of his own public perception, he raked his fingers through his dark hair, tidying it.

‘You buff up the image?’

‘We begin by examining what they’ve achieved already in public esteem, if anything. Good opinion has to be earned. Then we suggest how it may be enhanced. We don’t distort, if that’s what you mean by polishing.’

‘You’re freelance?’

‘A consultancy, yes.’

Diamond turned to Sally Allardyce. ‘And are you in the firm?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I work in local television.’

‘So you must be a useful PR contact.’

‘Not really. I’m in make-up.’

‘Useful with the grooming of the clients?’

She smiled in a way that told him it was a damn-fool comment. That avenue was closed.

Diamond turned back to the husband. There was still some mileage in this topic. He hadn’t brought it up simply to make conversation. ‘I was wondering what PR could do for me – assuming the police could afford your fees and I was a client. Would you change my image?’

Allardyce smiled uncertainly and looked down at his empty plate. ‘I’d, em, I’d need to know a great deal more about you and the nature of your work. All I know is that you’re a detective superintendent.’

‘I’m head of the murder squad.’

The statement had the impact Diamond expected, some sharp intakes of breath and a general twitching of facial muscles. Across the table, Treadwell tugged at his bow tie as if it was suddenly uncomfortable.

His wife rested a hand on his arm. ‘Surely there’s no suggestion that this woman was murdered?’

‘That’s all we wanted to hear,’ said Treadwell, grinding his teeth.

‘It was an accident,’ said Sally Allardyce. ‘She was playing about on the roof and she fell.’

‘I wish we could be certain of that, ma’am,’ said Diamond. ‘It’s my job to consider all possibilities. To come back to my image, Mr Allardyce…’ He got up from the table and executed a mannequin-like half-turn. ‘…I suppose you’ll tell me I should get a sharp new suit and a striped tie.’

‘I wouldn’t presume to advise you as to clothes,’ said Allardyce, his voice flat, unwilling to continue with this.

Julie told Diamond, ‘But I will. You should definitely leave off the apron.’

The head of the murder squad looked down at the butcher’s vertical stripes and smoothed them over his belly. ‘Ah. Forgot.’

The tension eased a little, but Treadwell continued making sounds suggesting his blood pressure was dangerously high.

Allardyce made an effort to recoup. ‘I suppose a detective needs to blend in easily with his surroundings.’

‘Should I lose weight?’

‘No, I was about to say that there’s a paradox. If there is such a thing as a detective image, you don’t want it, or you give yourself away.’

‘Fair comment, sir – except that I don’t often go in disguise. No need to make a secret of my job. I don’t always announce myself at the outset, but sooner or later people get to know who I am – the murder man.’

That word again. In the short pause that followed, Diamond picked a volume off the bookshelf and flicked through the pages. It was a book of local walks. Whilst pretending to take an interest in the text he studied the contrasting reactions of the two couples. The Allardyces were flustered, but staunchly trying not to show it, whereas the experience of the night before and this day’s infliction of policemen seemed to have reduced the Treadwells to red-faced gloom, certainly the husband. Misère was right.

On balance, the Treadwells’ reaction was easier to understand.

‘I’d like to get a couple of things clear in my mind and then we’ll leave you in peace, Julie and I,’ said Diamond. ‘Which pub was it last night?’

‘The Grapes,’ said Sally Allardyce.

‘Down in Westgate Street? Long walk from here.’

‘It has a TV. Not so many pubs do.’

‘And when your numbers came up…?’

‘There was rejoicing, obviously. People started asking if it was drinks all round. We bought a round, but if we’d remained we’d have been cleaned out.’

‘So you left the Grapes and came back here and got cleaned out at home.’

‘They just assumed it would be open house here.’

‘Are you sure you didn’t invite people?’

‘A few friends – but only a few friends,’ Allardyce admitted. ‘We were misunderstood. These things happen.’

‘Did you walk back?’

‘What?’

‘Mr Allardyce enjoys a walk.’

‘For God’s sake,’ said Treadwell in a spasm of anger. ‘Are you trying to catch us out on drunk driving? Look, only one of us has a car, and that’s William, and his bloody car was sitting in Brock Street all evening. We took a taxi. Satisfied?’

‘I’m getting the timing right in my head,’ said Diamond, who wasn’t noted for fine calculations. ‘The lottery is announced about eight. You buy a round. At let’s say eight-fifteen, or eight-twenty, you decide to return here. You go out and look for a taxi – or did you find one?’

‘They line up in Kingsmead Square. We got one there.’

‘And were back here by – what? – eight-thirty?’

‘Later than that. We stopped at the off-license and picked up some booze.’

‘It was planned as a party, then?’

‘Drinks for a few friends,’ said Treadwell with disdain. ‘I don’t call that a party.’

‘The trouble is, the rest of Bath did,’ said his wife.

The daylight was fading when Diamond and Julie emerged from the house.

‘Do you do the lottery?’ she asked.

‘Do I look like a winner?’ he said. ‘We tried a few times. Nothing. Then someone told me a sobering fact. No matter who you are, what age you are, what kind of life you lead, it’s more likely you’ll drop dead by eight o’clock Saturday night than win the big one. So I don’t do it any more.’

‘If you did drop dead and won, you’d be given a lovely send-off.’

He didn’t comment.

‘So are we any wiser?’ she asked.

‘About what?’

‘The dead woman.’

He ignored the question – more interested, apparently, in the scene in front of the Crescent. ‘Something’s different.’

‘Well, the cars are back,’ said Julie. ‘Or a lot of them are.’

‘Cars?’

‘The film crew wanted them out of sight by this morning. The residents got twenty pounds a car for the inconvenience.’ She studied his face to see if a joke would be timely. ‘Not many Mercedes in The Pickwick Papers.’

‘You’re right. That was why Allardyce’s car was parked in Brock Street last night.’ He shook his head, chiding himself. ‘I should have asked when he moved it and what he drives.’

‘About six-thirty last evening,’ said Julie. ‘Before they went out to the pub. And it’s a pale blue BMW.’

Not for the first time, he had underestimated Julie. Her hours stuck in this house with the tenants had been put to good use. He received the information as if it went without saying that she would have discovered such things, but she may have seen his eyebrows prick up.

He glanced along the rank of parked cars. ‘Then it isn’t back yet.’

‘He hasn’t been out,’ said Julie. ‘None of them have.’ She waited a moment before asking, ‘Are you suspicious of him?’

‘Wouldn’t put it as strongly as that, but there’s something. Got to be suspicious of a man with MR RIGHT written across his chest.’

‘He is in public relations.’

‘Mm.’ He got into the passenger seat of the car. ‘Drive us out of the Crescent and stop in Brock Street. We’ll wait there for a bit.’

Seventeen

This being Sunday evening, Julie had no trouble in finding space to park on the south side of Brock Street, the road that links the Royal Crescent to the Circus. She took a position opposite a wine shop, facing the entrance to the Crescent. Anyone approaching would be easily spotted under an ornate lamp-post that from there looked taller than the far side of the building, just visible across the residents’ lawn. In the next ten minutes five individuals came by. Three collected their cars from Brock Street and returned them to the front of the Crescent. William Allardyce was not among them, though his blue BMW was parked in the street, opposite an art gallery.

‘What are you expecting to see exactly?’ Julie asked when the clock in the car showed they had been there twenty minutes.

Diamond took exception to the last word. I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that. “Possibly” is more like it.’‘Exactly?

‘Possibly, then?’

‘There’s a possibility that we may see Allardyce come round that corner and walk to his car. There’s a chance – and I wouldn’t put it higher than that – a chance that he’ll have the shoe with him.’

‘I don’t see how. We covered every inch of that house.’

‘And every inch of the tenants?’

‘Come off it, Mr Diamond,’ said Julie, reddening. ‘We had no authority to make body searches. Besides, you can’t hide something as big as a shoe…’ Her voice trailed off and she stared at him with wide, enlightened eyes. ‘The tracksuit. William could have been carrying it around all day in the tracksuit.’

‘Baggy enough to hide a shoe, I’ll grant you,’ he said as if the idea were hers.

‘But that would mean he…’

‘Yes.’

But it seemed to Julie that on this occasion the magus of the murder squad had picked the wrong star to follow. Inspired as he may have been in the past, his record wasn’t perfect. And now he waited smug as a toad for her to tease out the arcane reasoning that had them sitting there. She leaned against the head-restraint and composed herself. She was not too proud to put a direct question to him. Others might balk at the prospect. Not Julie. ‘What makes William Allardyce a suspect?’

As if marshalling his thoughts, he was slow to answer. ‘The missing shoe is the key to it. She was wearing it when she sat on the balustrade. Must have been. Her sock was perfectly-’ He didn’t complete the sentence.

Someone had just come into view around the railings fronting the end house of the Crescent, a man of Allardyce’s height and build. He was wearing a cap and raincoat and carrying a plastic bag that clearly contained an object whose general shape and solidity demanded their whole attention. Neither Diamond nor Julie spoke. They watched the man cross the cobbles to a shadowy area at the edge of the lamp-post’s arc of light, close to the residents’ lawn. There he halted. After glancing right and left, he stooped, as if to examine the low stone ridge that supported the railings. Still crouching, he took the object from the bag and they saw that it was not a shoe, but a trowel. Next he scraped at the ground with the trowel and shoveled something into the bag. Then he gave a whistle and a large dog bounded out of the shadows and joined him. With his dog, his trowel and the contents of the carrier bag, he walked back with pious tread towards the Crescent.

That was not William Allardyce.

Diamond resumed without comment. ‘That shoe disappeared, so we can assume that someone is concealing it. Are you with me?’

After the day she had spent exploring every inch of that house, she thought his ‘Are you with me?’ was the bloody limit.

‘I kept asking myself why,’ he said, oblivious. ‘If we are dealing with a killer here, what’s his game? The fact that the shoe is missing is what gives rise to suspicion. If it had been found beside her, you and I wouldn’t be here, Julie. We’d have thought it came off when she hit the ground. An accident: that’s what we’d have taken it to be. So why didn’t our killer chuck the shoe where the body was? I think I have the answer.’

She stared impassively ahead. She’d had about enough of Peter Diamond for one day.

‘Theoretically,’ he said in the same clever-dick tone, ‘any one of the scores of people who crashed the party could have shoved her off the ledge. They didn’t. This has to be one of the tenants, and I’ll tell you why. The killer didn’t realise that the shoe had come off until it was too late to do anything about it. The next morning. If you recall what happened, the paper-boy discovered the body and knocked on the door of the house. Treadwell came out. He alerted Allardyce, who also came to have a look. That was the moment when one of them – and it must be Allardyce for a reason I shall explain – saw to his horror that the dead woman was missing one shoe. It had come off in the struggle and was still lying somewhere on the roof.’ Diamond turned to face her and stepped up his delivery. ‘What can he do? It’s too late now to plant it beside the body. The police are on the way and two witnesses have viewed the scene. He belts upstairs and finds the shoe, maybe with a torn lace, scuffing, signs of the struggle she put up. So he hides it, meaning to dispose of it later.’

Julie saved him the trouble of explaining why Allardyce was preferred as the suspect. ‘As the Allardyces live upstairs, he could get up to the roof without arousing any suspicion.’

‘Right, and this links up with another moment. Let’s backtrack to the party. When someone reported the woman on the roof, who was it who went up to investigate, but the master of the house, the caring Mr Allardyce?’

He paused for some show of admiration, but he didn’t get it.

Beginning to sound huffy, he picked up the thread again. ‘If you’re still with me, Allardyce claims he saw no one on the roof. He’d like us to suppose the woman must have fallen or jumped in the interval between the people spotting her and the moment he looked out of his attic window. He states that he didn’t climb out of the window to check. He just leaned out and saw no one on the balustrade and assumed she’d given up and come down. That’s his version. Have I given it fairly?’

He got a curt nod from Julie.

Outside, the darkness had set in and the grey mass of the Crescent appeared to merge at the top with the night sky. Unusually for such a well-known building there was no floodlighting. The reason was that it was residential, and residents in their living rooms have no desire to be in the spotlight to that degree. So the only lighting was supplied by those pseudo-Victorian lamp-posts painted black and gilt, with their iron cross-pieces supposedly to support the lamplighter’s ladder.

‘He claims not to have climbed onto the roof for a thorough look,’ Diamond went on. ‘Why not? We climbed out ourselves. You’ll agree with me that it’s as easy as getting into a bath. In spite of what he suggests, there are parts of the roof you can’t see from inside the attic. She could have been up on the tiles behind him. Or she could have moved along the balustrade over one of his neighbours’ houses. Wasn’t he interested enough to check?’

‘You can’t blame him for that,’ Julie found herself saying in the man’s defence. ‘His house had been taken over. He was concerned about what was going on inside.’

‘Fair point,’ Diamond admitted. ‘There’s some good stuff there. Antique ornaments. Period furniture. A beautiful music centre in the living-room with hundreds of CDs. If it had been my house full of strangers whooping it up, I’d have been going spare.’

‘Perhaps he was. He can afford to be cool about it now it’s over.’

He turned to her again. ‘Julie, you’re so right. He’s not making an issue of what happened, as Treadwell is. He’s incredibly blasé. What happened was okay by Allardyce, perfectly understandable. That’s the impression I got. Did you?’

‘Well, yes, now it’s over.’

‘But was he so happy at the time, I wonder? There’s a ruthless young man behind that smooth exterior. You don’t get results in business simply by being charming. Public relations is dog eat dog.’

‘Being tough in business is one thing. Murder is something else,’ she said, far from convinced.

‘Hold on. I doubt if this would stand as murder,’ he told her. ‘Manslaughter, maybe. This wasn’t premeditated. It was an impulse killing. What I picture is Allardyce made angry by events – extremely angry – in complete contrast to the PR front he was presenting this afternoon.’

‘Mr Right as Mr Raving Mad?’ she said, meaning it to be ironical.

He seized on that. ‘Spot on. He’s all fired up. He goes up to the attic and sees the woman seated on the balustrade. He has a wild impulse to push her. He climbs out of the window and starts towards her, but she hears him. She half-turns. Instead of giving her one quick shove in the back, he has a fight on his hands. That’s when the shoe falls off. He doesn’t notice that, of course. He’s totally involved in forcing her over the edge. Nobody has seen him and luckily for him the woman falls into the well of the basement. It’s a dark night, and she isn’t noticed by any of the people leaving the house. It’s daylight before she is found. The rest I’ve explained, his problem with the shoe, and so forth. Is it plausible?’

She could almost feel the heat of his expectation. ‘So far as it goes, I can’t see any obvious holes. The only thing is…’

‘Yes?’

‘This vicious side to his character is difficult for me to picture.’

‘You called him Mr Raving Mad.’

‘Just picking up on what you were saying. I didn’t agree with it.’

‘So he’s Mr Nice Guy, is he?’

‘Mr Right, anyway.’

‘You must have been out with men on their best behaviour who suddenly turned nasty when you didn’t let them have their wicked way.’

‘Not homicidal.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

She said after an interval for reflection, ‘My experiences with men have got nothing to do with this.’

‘Just making a point,’ he said. ‘We’re all prisoners of our hormones – you know that.’

‘Bollocks.’

‘Those, too.’

She was forced to smile. ‘Am I mistaken, or is the window steaming up?’

He rubbed it with the sleeve of his coat. ‘Well, it’s all speculation up to now. Unless we catch him with that ruddy shoe, we’ve got nothing worth making into a prosecution. Even then, I doubt if it will stick. A half-decent barrister would get him off.’

‘So are we wasting our time here?’

‘Not at all.’

But as it turned out, they were. After almost two hours of waiting, he radioed Manvers Street and asked for someone to take over.

And the blue BMW stayed where it was in Brock Street until Monday morning, when Allardyce drove to work.

Monday morning in Manvers Street Police Station brought John Wigfull to Diamond’s office. And when the two detectives had finished discussing every facet of the Royal Crescent incident, they were forced to agree that little more could be achieved until they had a post-mortem report on the victim.

The priority was to identify her. Diamond’s press release appealing for information had been distributed, but because the local news machine grinds to a virtual halt on Sundays, a response couldn’t be expected until the story broke at midday in the Bath Chronicle and on local radio and television.

‘It’s strange that nobody who was at the party has come forward,’ Wigfull commented. ‘Word must have got around the city that someone was found there. The papers may not have been printed yesterday, but the pubs were open, and most of the people at the party were only there because they happened to hear about it in a pub.’

‘They haven’t had the description,’ Diamond said.

‘What is she like, then?’

‘Apart from dead? Dark-haired with brown eyes, about thirty or younger, slim build, average height.’

‘Good-looking?’

‘Do you know, John, it must be something lacking in me, but I find it hard to think of corpses as good-looking. She had one of those trendy haircuts, shorn severely at the sides, and with a thick mop on top that soaked up quite a lot of the blood from the head wound. Is that good-looking? Oh, and she painted her fingernails. They were damaged, some of them, whether from hitting the ground or fighting off an attacker I wouldn’t know.’

‘We could publish a photo if all else fails.’

‘And put it out on TV about six-thirty when people are just sitting down in front of the box with their meat and two veg. Isn’t it marvelous what they find to show you about that time? Mad cows, magnified head-lice and battered old ladies appear on my screen night after night, so why shouldn’t we show them a face from the morgue? But do me a favour and choose a night when I’m not at home.’

Wigfull had never been able to tell when Diamond was serious. He said, ‘That dead farmer I’m investigating is no picnic.’

‘Your farmer at Tormarton? Haven’t you put that one to bed yet?’

‘Just about.’ Wigfull hesitated in a way that told Diamond the Tormarton farmer had not been put to bed. ‘Virtually, anyway. The post-mortem hasn’t been done yet.’

‘What’s the hold-up?’

‘Identification. I was trying to get a relative, but we haven’t traced anyone yet. It looks as if we’ll be using his social worker and maybe one of the meals-on-wheels people. He didn’t have much to do with his neighbours. Nothing is ever as simple as it first appears, is it?’

Diamond said, ‘Surely there’s no question that the corpse is Daniel Gladstone?’

‘You know me by now, Peter. I don’t cut corners.’ Wigfull brought his hands together in a way that signaled he wanted an end to the discussion.

‘Speaking for myself, I like to get on with things,’ said Diamond. ‘I don’t want a delay on the Royal Crescent woman. Full publicity. Someone who knows her will read about her in the paper and we’ll get a PM this week.’

‘Speaking of people coming forward…’ Wigfull said in a tentative manner.

‘Yes?’

‘Ada Shaftsbury was here again first thing, raising Cain about this friend of hers who she says is abducted.’

‘Ada?’ The hypertension kicked in again. ‘Look, Ada and I are not on the best of terms. She was practically at my throat yesterday morning. She called me – what was it? – a feather-merchant. Now, I haven’t yet discovered what a feather-merchant is or does, but it doesn’t make me want to spend more time with Ada.’

‘This is only a suggestion,’ said Wigfull. ‘If someone could sort Ada’s problem, he’d do us all a service.’

‘It’s a non-existent problem. Her friend left Bath a couple of weeks ago and hasn’t written to Ada since. That isn’t a police matter, John.’

‘I was only passing it on.’

‘Consider it passed on, then.’

As the sound of the chief inspector’s steps died away, Diamond found himself remembering a saying of Kai Lung he had read in bed the previous night: ‘Even a goat and an ox must keep in step if they are to plough together.’ Shaking his head, he got up and went to look for Julie.

She was in the canteen finishing a coffee, watching two of the murder squad perfecting their snooker. She asked Diamond if anything fresh had come up at the Royal Crescent and he made a sweeping gesture that disposed of that line of conversation. He commented that this was early in the day for coffee and Julie said she needed one after meeting Ada Shaftsbury as she arrived for work.

‘You, too?’ he said. ‘Wigfull had a blast this morning and I had a basinful yesterday.’

Julie said she knew about his basinful because Ada had referred to him.

‘That’s a delicate way of phrasing it, Julie.’

She laughed. ‘We agreed on one or two things, Ada and I.’

‘Thanks.’

She said, ‘I don’t know if it crossed your mind, but when she was talking about this Rose or Rosamund, the woman who hasn’t been in touch, I couldn’t help comparing her description with the woman who was killed at the party.’

‘Really?’ The word was drained of all interest the way he spoke it.

‘Some of the details do compare,’ she pressed on. ‘The age, the colour and length of the hair, the slim figure.’

‘All that applies to thousands of women. Could easily be a description of you.’

‘Do you mind? I paid a bomb for these blonde highlights.’

‘You can’t deny it’s short.’ He made a pretence of swaying to ride a punch. ‘Fair enough, I was ignoring the highlights. They look, em, good value. Would you like your coffee topped up?’

She shook her blonde highlights.

‘A fresh one, then?’

Conscious that he had some fence-mending to do, he also offered to buy her a bun. When he returned with a tray and two mugs and set them on the table Julie had chosen, well away from the snooker game, she remarked, ‘I still think you ought to speak to Ada. One of the things she goes on about is that some man tried to grab her friend Rose outside the hostel and force her into a car.’

‘She told me.’

She mopped up some of the coffee he’d slopped on the tray. ‘Well, it isn’t a fantasy. It really happened. Remember a week or so ago, the morning we met at the Lilliput, I was late because of a German woman I had to take to the Tourist Information Office? That afternoon I was given a statement in English of what she said, and it turns out that she was a witness to this incident in Bathwick Street. She lives in the hostel and she happened to be right across the street when the bloke tried to snatch Rose.’

‘I didn’t say it was a fantasy, Julie.’

‘I’m just passing on my thoughts about Ada. I know it doesn’t interest you particularly, but she’s in a fair old state about her friend.’

He sighed. ‘Tell me something new, Julie.’

She wasn’t giving up. ‘Ada may be a chronic shoplifter, but she’s not stupid. If she thinks there’s something iffy about the woman who collected her friend, she may be right.’

He admitted as much with a shrug. ‘But it isn’t my job to investigate iffy women.’

Julie’s blue eyes locked with his. ‘You could take Ada down to the RUH and give her a sight of the corpse.’

‘What use would that be?’

‘Who knows – it could be her friend Rose in the chiller.’

‘No chance.’

‘Yes, but it might get Ada off your back.’

‘Now you’re talking.’A slow smile spread across his face. ‘What a neat idea.’

Eighteen

Ada was so stunned that she stopped speaking for about five seconds. When she restarted, it was to ask in a faltering voice for a drop of brandy. Most of the morning she had been sounding off to all and sundry that her friend could easily be dead by now. She was not expecting this early opportunity to find out. she said her legs were going.

She was guided to a chair and something alcoholic in a paper cup was placed in her plump, trembling hand. Peter Diamond, prepared to do a deal, told her gently that if she didn’t feel able to accompany him to the mortuary, nobody would insist. She could leave the police station and nobody would think any the worse of her – provided she stayed away in future. As for the likelihood of the dead woman turning out to be her friend, it was extremely remote. ‘A shot in the dark,’ he said – an unfortunate phrase that caused Ada to squeeze the cup and spill some of the drink. Hastily he went on to explain that he doubted if Rose, or Rosamund, last heard of returning to Hounslow with her stepsister, had come back to Bath and fallen off the roof of the Royal Crescent on Saturday night. There were just the similarities in description, all superficial, and the importance Ada herself attached to Rose’s well-being. If Ada cared to go through the points with him now, she would probably find some detail that didn’t match and save herself a harrowing experience.

He read the description to her. She asked for more brandy. A short while later, he drove her to the hospital.

From the back seat, Ada confided to him that she had never seen a dead person. ‘They said I could look at my poor old mother after she went, but I didn’t want to.’

‘You’re in the majority,’ he said. ‘I get queasy myself.’

‘But you’ve seen this one?’

‘Oh, yes. Looking very peaceful. You wouldn’t know she’d, em… Well, you wouldn’t know.’

She said in a shaky voice, ‘I want to tell you something, Mr Diamond.’

He leaned back in the seat, trying to be both a good driver and a good listener. ‘What’s that?’

She said huskily into his ear, ‘If this does turn out to be Rose, and you tossers could have saved her, I’ll push your face through the back of your neck and wee on your grave.’

The mortuary attendant was a woman. Diamond took her aside and asked if a chair could be provided for Ada. ‘The lady is nervous and if she passed out I doubt if you and I could hold her up between us.’

With Ada seated and shredding a tissue between her fingers, the trolley was wheeled out and the cover unzipped to reveal the features of the dead woman.

‘You may need to stand for a moment, my dear,’the attendant advised.

Ada got to her feet and glanced down at the face. She gave a gasp of recognition, said, ‘Strike a light!’ and passed out.

The chair collapsed with her.

He phoned Julie from the mortuary.

‘Was Ada any help?’ she asked.

‘She was, as it happens. She recognised the body. Gave her a real shock. She passed out, in fact. But it isn’t her friend. Not that friend. It’s someone else she knew from Harmer House, someone you’ve met, a German woman called Hildegarde.’

Nineteen

Julie Hargreaves was still at Manvers Street, at work on a computer keyboard, when Diamond looked in. She was logging her report on a phone call to Imogen Starr, the social worker responsible for Hildegarde Henkel, the woman who had fallen to her death at the Royal Crescent.

‘Aren’t you just kicking yourself?’ he said.

‘What for?’ she asked.

‘For not paying more attention to this woman when she tapped you on the arm that morning she appeared downstairs.’

‘She didn’t tap me on the arm, Mr Diamond. The desk sergeant asked me to help him out. I gave her all the attention I could considering she hardly spoke a word of English. I walked with her personally all the way to the Tourist Information Office and left her in the care of someone who did speak her language. If there’s something else I should have done, perhaps you’ll enlighten me.’

He muttered something about not going off the deep end and said he would need to take a close look at the statement, but he’d need some background first.

‘Can you give it to me in a nutshell?’ he asked. ‘I was supposed to be home early tonight.’

Barely containing her irritation, Julie said, ‘I could have a printout waiting on your desk tomorrow morning if you’re in that much of a hurry.’

‘I’ll have it now.’

She stared at the screen. ‘Well, she’s German, from Bonn. A drop-out from school who lost touch with her people. Got friendly with a young English guy working as an interpreter at the British Embassy and married him. Soon after, they moved to England. He turned out to be a fly-by-night and was away in a matter of weeks. This poor girl found herself jobless and without much knowledge of the language.’

‘Couldn’t she have gone back to Germany?’

‘Didn’t want to. Her life was a mess. She’d walked out on her parents. As the wife of a British subject she was entitled to remain in Britain, and that was her best hope, she thought. She soon used up what little money she had, lived rough for a while, got treated for depression and ended up as one of Imogen’s case-load at Avon Social Services. That’s it, in your nutshell.’

‘The husband. Was his name Henkel, then?’

‘Perkins, or something like that. She wanted to forget him, and no wonder, poor girl.’

‘Wanted it both ways. Wipe him out of her life and use him to qualify as a resident.’

Julie’s eyebrows pricked up. ‘That’s harsh, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t know about that. Your version sounded a shade too sisterly for my taste.’

‘Well, she is dead, for God’s sake. Aren’t we allowed any pity at all in this job?’ She switched off the machine, rolled back the chair and quit the room.

With a sigh, he ran his hand over his head. He held Julie in high regard. Out of churlishness, he’d upset her just to make a point about some woman he had never met except on a mortuary trolley.

Exactly how unfortunate the upset was became clear presently, when he went to his desk to look at the messages. On top was a note from the local Home Office pathologist stating that now that formal identification had taken place, he proposed carrying out the post-mortem on Hildegarde Henkel at 8.30am the next morning. Normally Diamond would have found some pretext for missing the autopsy. It was the one part of CID work he tried to avoid. At least one senior detective on the case was routinely supposed to be present, listening to the pathologist’s running commentary and discussing the findings immediately afterwards. The only possible stand-in was Julie, who had deputised on several similar occasions.

A call to Julie at home?

Even Peter Diamond didn’t have the brass neck for that.

He did not, after all, get home early. He drove over Pulteney Bridge, ignoring the ban on private vehicles, and up Henrietta Street to Bathwick Street, to call at Harmer House. He had two objectives. The first was to examine Hildegarde Henkel’s room. The second was to call on Ada Shaftsbury, a prospect he didn’t relish, but against all reason he felt some sympathy for Ada after the shock she had suffered. True, she had not had to endure the ordeal of watching a pathologist at work, but by her own lights she had gone through a traumatic experience and it had been at his behest.

He found her in her room eating iced bun-rings. Her voice, when she called out to him to come in, was faint, and he prepared to find her in a depleted state. It transpired that her mouth was full of bun.

‘You,’ she said accusingly. ‘You’re the last person I want to see.’

For a moment the feeling was mutual, and he almost turned round and left. She presented such a gross spectacle seated on her bed, her enormous lap heaped with paper bags filled at the baker’s.

‘I called to see how you are – after this morning.’

‘Shaky,’ said Ada. ‘Very shaky.’

‘I didn’t expect it to be someone you knew. I can honestly tell you that, Ada.’

‘She was a true mate of mine,’ said Ada, starting on another bun-ring. ‘She cooked my breakfast every day, you know. She was wonderful in the kitchen. Germans are good learners, and I showed her what an English breakfast should be. I don’t know what I’m going to do without her.’

‘Did you talk to her much?’

She managed a faint grin. ‘Quite a bit. But she didn’t say a lot to me. Her English wasn’t up to it. I taught her a few essential words.’

‘So you wouldn’t know about her state of mind? If she was depressed, say?’

‘You can tell a lot just by looking at people,’ said Ada. ‘Take yourself, Mr Diamond. I can see you’re on pins in case I mention my friend Rose again. You can’t wait to get out of here.’

He ignored the shrewd and accurate observation. ‘And Hildegarde?’

‘She was happier here than she’d been for a long time. She wasn’t suicidal.’

‘Any friends?’

‘Don’t know. I never saw her with any. Not here. She used to go out evenings sometimes. Maybe she knew some German people. They stick together. I can’t think how she got to that party at the Crescent unless she was with some people.’

Diamond pondered the possibility and it seemed sensible. ‘If she was with anyone, they haven’t come forward yet.’

‘Maybe I’m wrong, then. She could have just followed the crowd. Germans are more easily led than us, wouldn’t you say?’

He gave a shrug. These sweeping statements about the Germans left him cold. He was interested only in Hildegarde’s individual actions.

‘Do you want a bun?’ Ada offered. ‘There’s plenty for both of us.’

He was hungry, he realised. ‘Just a section, then. Not the whole ring.’

‘You look as if you could put it away, easy. You and I are built the same way.’

‘Oh, thanks.’

She missed the intended irony. ‘Got to keep body and soul together.’

‘I’m eating later.’

‘I could make tea if you like.’

‘This is fine. Really.’

After a pause for ingestion, Ada said, ‘Help yourself to another one. Do you think she jumped?’

‘I can’t answer that,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know her. You did.’

‘Someone else’s house is a funny place to choose to end it all,’ Ada speculated. ‘But if she wasn’t planning to kill herself, what was she doing on the ledge? Had she taken something?’

‘We haven’t heard from the lab yet. It’s possible. I’m going to look at her room presently.’

‘She didn’t leave a suicide note, I can tell you that.’

‘You’ve been in to check, I suppose?’

‘It’s open house here, always has been,’ Ada said, unabashed. ‘Are you going to talk to that ball of fire, Imogen, her social worker?’

‘I expect so.’

‘Hildegarde was on her list, same as Rose was. Imogen keeps shedding clients, have you noticed? Dropping them faster than a peep-show girl.’

‘You can’t blame the social worker.’

‘Try me, ducky. Rose didn’t know the woman who came to collect her, but did it cross Imogen’s tiny mind that it might be a try-on? Not on your nelly.’

Here we go, thought Diamond.

She went on, ‘I’ve been thinking about those photos. They didn’t prove this woman was Rose’s stepsister. The only thing they proved is that she’d brought in some photos of Rose with some old woman. If there had been a picture of the step-sister with Rose, the two of them in one picture, I’d shut up, but there wasn’t. And I still haven’t had that postcard.’

‘Her memory was dodgy,’ said Diamond.

‘Her short-term memory was spot on.’

‘You won’t let go, will you? Look, when I speak to the social worker I’ll check on your friend Rose as well, right? Now point me towards Hildegarde’s room.’

Ada escorted him downstairs, still griping about Rose. After she’d thrust open a door, he thanked her and said he would examine the room alone. He had to repeat it before she left him in peace.

Had she remained, she would have told him, he was certain, that Germans are very methodical. Everything in sight in the room – and there was not much – was tidily arranged. It was rather like entering a hotel room. The bed, unlike Ada’s, was made without a loose fold anywhere. Hildegarde’s few items of make-up and her brush and comb were grouped in front of the mirror on the makeshift dressing-table consisting of two sets of plastic drawers linked by a sheet of plate glass.

He started opening drawers and the contrast with the sights and smells he’d recoiled from in Daniel Gladstone’s cottage could not have been more complete. Everything from thick-knit sweaters to knickers and bras was arranged in layers and each drawer had its bag of sweet-smelling herbs in the front right-hand corner.

The room was conspicuously short of the personal documents that Hildegarde Henkel must have possessed: passport, wedding certificate and social security papers. Their absence tended to confirm his view that she had carried them in a handbag that some opportunist thief had picked up at the party in the Royal Crescent. He doubted if Ada had taken anything from the room. As far as he knew she never stole from individuals.

Anything of more than passing interest he threw on the immaculate bed. At the end of the exercise he had a photo of a dog, two books in German, a German/English dictionary, a packet of birth control pills, a set of wedding photos, a Walkman and a couple of Oasis tapes and a bar of chocolate. No suicide note, diary, address book, drugs. He scooped up the lot and replaced them in a drawer.

In sombre mood, he drove home.

Twenty

Peter Diamond’s moods may have been uncertain to his colleagues, but his wife Stephanie reckoned he was transparent ninety-nine per cent of the time. This morning was the one per cent exception. His behaviour was totally out of character. After bringing her the tea that was her daily treat, he rolled back into bed and opened the Guardian instead of going for his shower and shave and starting the routine of grooming, dressing, eating and listening to the radio that he’d observed for years. When he finally put down the paper, he went for a bath. A bath. He simply didn’t take baths in the morning. There was never time. He preferred evenings after work, when he would linger for hours with a book, topping up the hot water from time to time by deft action with his big toe against the tap.

She tapped on the bathroom door. ‘Are you all right in there?’

‘Why? Are you waiting to come in?’ he called.

‘No, I’m only asking.’ She was more discreet than to mention his blood pressure. ‘As long as you know how the time is going.’

‘Sixty minutes an hour when I last heard.’

‘Sorry I spoke, my lord.’

She’d finished her breakfast and was on the point of going out when he came downstairs.

The sight of him still in his dressing-gown and slippers evoked a grim memory and her face creased in concern. ‘Peter, should you be telling me something? You haven’t resigned again?’

He smiled and reached for her hand. The two-year exile from the police had been a rough passage for them both. ‘No, love.’

‘And they haven’t…?’

‘Given me the old heave-ho? No. It’s just that I don’t have to go in first thing. I’m supposed to be down at the RUH.’

‘Oh?’ White-faced, she said, ‘Another appointment?’

‘A post-mortem.’

A moment of incomprehension, then, as the light dawned, ‘Oh.’

‘You know, Steph, it never occurred to me when we bought this place that it was just up the road from the hospital. When we lived on Wellsway I could say I’d been sitting in a line of traffic for ages and be believed. That little wrinkle isn’t much use now I live in Weston and can walk down to the mortuary in five minutes. If I want a reason for not showing up on time I’ve got to think of something smarter.’

‘And have you?’

‘I’m giving it my full attention.’

‘Do you really need to be there?’

‘Need? No. But it’s expected. This one is what we term a suspicious death. The pathologist points out anything worthy of note, and discusses it with CID. I’m supposed to take an active interest, or one of us on the case is.’

‘Isn’t there someone else, then? I mean, if you’re practically allergic, as we know you are…’

‘Not this time. I had a bit of a run-in with Julie last night.’

‘Oh, Pete!’

‘Can’t really ask her a favour. No, I’ll tough it out, but I don’t have to watch the whole performance, so long as I appear at some point with a good story.’ He rolled his eyes upwards, trying to conjure something up. ‘We could have a problem with the plumbing. Water all over the floor. Or the cat had kittens.’

‘A neutered male?’

‘Surprised us all. There’s no stopping Raffles.’

‘I’d think of something better if I were you.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as your wife, finally driven berserk, clobbering you with a rolling-pin. No one would find that hard to understand.’

Eventually he drove into the RUH about the time he judged the pathologist would be peeling off his rubber gloves. He parked in a space beside one of the police photographers, who had his window down and was smoking.

‘Taken your pictures, then?’ Diamond called out to him matily and got a nod. ‘Are they going to be long in there?’

‘Twenty minutes more, I reckon,’ came the heartening answer.

He made a slow performance of unwrapping an extra-strong peppermint. He thought he might listen to the latest news on Radio Bristol before getting out of the car, just (he told himself) to see if anything new had come up. Then they played a Beatles track and he had to listen to that.

Finally he got out and ambled towards the mortuary block just as the door opened and Jim Middleton, the senior histopathologist at the RUH, came out accompanied by – of all people – John Wigfull. Well, if Wigfull had represented the CID, so be it. He was welcome to attend as many autopsies as he wished.

Middleton, a Yorkshireman, still wearing his rubber apron, greeted Diamond with a mock salute. ‘Good to see you, Superintendent. Nice timing.’

‘Family crisis that I won’t go into,’ Diamond said in a well-rehearsed phrase. ‘Why do they always blow up at the most awkward times? I dare say John can fill me in, unless there’s something unexpected I should hear about at once.’

‘Unexpected?’ Middleton shook his head. ‘The only thing you won’t have been expecting is that we switched the running order. I’ve just examined Mr Wigfull’s farmer. All done. Your young woman is next, which is why I said your timing was nice. We’re on in ten minutes or so, after I’ve had some fresh air.’

No one needed the fresh air more than Diamond. His eyes glazed over. ‘I had a message that it was to be eight-thirty.’

‘I know, and we were ready to go, but we didn’t like to start without anyone from CID. Isn’t it fortunate that Chief-Inspector Wigfull phoned in to find out what time he would be needed for the farmer? “As soon as you can get here,” I told him.’

Wigfull didn’t actually smirk. He didn’t need to.

There was no ducking it now. In a short time, Diamond stood numbly in attendance in the post-mortem room with a scenes of crime officer, two photographers and a number of medical students. First the photographs were taken as each item of Hildegarde Henkel’s clothing was removed. It was a slow process. A continuous record had to be provided.

Jim Middleton clearly regarded all this as wearisome and unconnected with his medical expertise, so he filled the gaps with conversation about the previous autopsy. ‘Poor old sod, lying dead that long. It’s a sad comment on our times that anyone can be left for up to a week and nobody knows or cares.’

He stepped forward and loosened the dead woman’s left shoe and removed it. The sock inside was as clean as the other. ‘Double bow, securely tied. Yes, he was far from fresh. An interesting suicide, though. I don’t think I’ve heard of a case where the gun is fired from under the chin. A shotgun, I mean. All the cases I’ve seen, they either put the muzzle against the forehead or in the mouth.’

‘Why is that?’ Diamond asked, happy to absent himself from what was going on under his nose.

‘Think about it. It’s bloody difficult firing a shotgun at yourself anyway. You’ve got to stretch your arm down the length of the barrel and work the trigger. I haven’t tried it and I hope I never will, but I imagine it just adds to the difficulty if you can’t see what you’re doing.’

Unnoticed by anyone else, Diamond mimed the action, jutting out his chin like Mussolini making a speech, and at the same time holding his right arm rigid in front of himself and making the trigger movement with his thumb. Middleton had made a telling point. The victim couldn’t possibly have seen his finger on the trigger without moving the muzzle into the mouth or against the front of his face. But would it really matter to someone about to kill himself? Wouldn’t he be content to grope for the trigger?

Middleton continued to find the farmer’s death more interesting than that of the woman in front of him. ‘It’s not unknown for shotgun suicides to take off their shoe and sock and press the trigger with their big toe. That didn’t happen in this case.’

The words were lost on Diamond. Mentally he was yet another remove from here, up the A46 and across the motorway at Gladstone’s farm. The scene in the cottage came back vividly. He pictured the position of the chair and the chalked outlines of the farmer’s feet. How he wished he had seen it before the body was taken away. He made a mental note to look at the photos, for he had thought of another problem with the suicide. He brooded on the matter for a long time, going over it repeatedly, pondering the way it was done. If you are about to blow your brains out, do you choose the most simple way? In that state of mind, are you capable of taking practical decisions?

Such was his concentration that he didn’t get much involved in the activity at the dissecting table.

When he emerged from the reverie, he heard Middleton saying, ‘…nothing inconsistent with a fall from a considerable height. Obviously we’ll see what Chepstow have to say about the samples, but them’s me findings for what they’re worth, ladies and gentlemen, and unless you have any questions I recommend an early lunch.’

The early lunch was part of the patter, a pay-off that the pathologist took a morbid pleasure in inflicting. Judging by the queasy looks around the table it would be a long time before his audience could face anything to eat.

Before returning to the nick, Diamond called at Avon Social Services at Lewis House in Manvers Street. Having heard about Imogen from Ada and Julie, he was intrigued to meet the lady. He knew most of the social workers. This one couldn’t have been long in the job.

She came out to reception specially and extended a slim hand with silver-painted nails. ‘Is it about poor Hilde Henkel? I heard the news from your Inspector Hargreaves.’ She seemed genuinely troubled, with worry lines extending across her pale features. ‘Why don’t you come through to my office?’

He followed her, wondering if the bouncy blonde curls and willowy figure could be in any degree responsible for Ada’s contempt.

‘Before we start,’ he said when they were seated, ‘how long have you been with Avon, Miss, em…?’

‘Starr.’ She went slightly pink. She must have taken some leg-pulling for that name in the past. ‘Just over a year actually.’

‘And before that?’

‘University. If you’re thinking I haven’t had much experience, you’re right. This is the first tragedy I’ve had among my clients.’

‘They’re all tragedies in a sense, aren’t they?’ he said. ‘I know what you mean, though. I’m not a knocker of social workers and I don’t blame you for being inexperienced. Got to start somewhere. If it’s anything like the police, you’re new so you get lumbered with some of the hardest cases.’

She said, ‘I didn’t think of Hilde as a hard case. There are others I’d have thought more at risk.’

‘You have a file on her?’

She reddened again. ‘I can’t let you see it.’

‘But she’s dead now.’

‘The notes are personal to me.’

‘I don’t mind if you consult them and give me a summary. How many times have you met her?’

She went to the filing cabinet in the corner and withdrew a tabbed file.

‘You don’t keep your case-notes on computer, then?’ he commented.

She said, ‘These are people. I think they deserve the fullest confidentiality. I don’t trust computers.’

‘Miss Starr, I totally agree.’

She asked him to call her Imogen, as everyone else did. ‘You were asking how many meetings I had with Hilde. Six altogether. Do you know the story, how she got onto our list?’

He pretended he had not, so as to hear it directly from her.

‘This depression she had,’ he said when she had finished. ‘Didn’t you think it serious?’

She said, ‘Difficult to judge. I thought it came from her situation, being homeless in a foreign country and abandoned by her husband. Once she was in Harmer House she seemed to improve in spirits.’

‘Her life looked up, her present life?’

‘Well, she went out in the day and in the evenings sometimes. Mind you, she didn’t have money to spend. Precious little, anyway.’

‘Did she mention any people she met in Bath?’

‘Not to me.’

‘She didn’t know anyone in the Royal Crescent?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘On the night of the party someone saw her sitting on the balustrade, high up on the roof, dangling her legs. It sounds as if she was having a wild time.’

She digested this. ‘It’s difficult to picture. The people I see here are in a formal situation. It’s impossible to tell what they’re like in party mood.’

‘After a few drinks or drugs?’

‘That’s speculation, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m waiting for the blood test results. You didn’t ever notice a devil-may-care side to Hilde’s character?’

‘It may have been there, but I wasn’t likely to see it.’

He’d heard nothing from Imogen that Julie hadn’t already reported, but there was another matter he’d promised to raise. ‘While I’m here, I want to ask about another young woman at Harmer House, who was also one of yours – Rose, is it, or Rosamund?’

She shifted in her chair and he noticed that her hands came together and were clasped tight. ‘Rosamund Black. She’s no longer there. She lost her memory, but her people came for her. They took her back to West London a couple of weeks ago.’

‘Have you heard from her since?’

‘No, but I wouldn’t expect to.’

‘You have an address for her, though? We’d like to get in touch with her.’

Imogen got up and returned to the filing cabinet. Presently she said, ‘It’s Twelve Turpin Street, Hounslow.’

‘And the people who came for her? Where do they live?’

‘Somewhere near, I gathered. The mother is in Twickenham.’ She gave a sigh, chiding herself as she stared at the notes. ‘I didn’t get their address. Their name is Jenkins. The stepsister is Doreen Jenkins.’

‘How exactly did this lady, Doreen Jenkins, get to know about Rose?’

She closed her eyes in an effort to remember. Something else wasn’t in the notes. ‘She heard from someone, a friend of Rose’s, that Rose had gone to Bath on a weekend hotel break. When Rose didn’t make her regular phone call, the old mother got worried, and the following weekend the stepsister and her partner came to Bath to try and get in touch with her. They saw a piece in the paper about a woman who had lost her memory and recognised the picture as Rose.’

‘And was it a happy reunion?’

‘Rose didn’t seem to know her sister, if that’s what you’re asking, but her memory still wasn’t functioning. She went with them of her own free will.’

‘You satisfied her that they were definitely her family?’

‘They satisfied her. And they satisfied me as well. They had photos with them, of Rose, alone and with the mother. There wasn’t any doubt.’

‘I’m not suggesting there is.’

Imogen’s lips tightened. ‘This is Ada, isn’t it? She’s been agitating because Rose hasn’t written to her. I keep telling her not to make waves. Rose will write in her own good time if she wishes to. She’s got enough on her plate trying to get back to normal.’

‘Quite probably. What is normal? Did you find out? Did the stepsister have anything else to say about Rose’s life in Hounslow?’

‘I can’t recall anything, except that Rose had been on a trip to Florida some time and still managed to phone her mother.’

The mention of the phone gave him an idea. ‘Do you have a set of London phone directories in this place?’

‘Behind you.’

He picked the first one off the shelf and looked up the name Black. ‘Hounslow, you said. Miss R. Black, 12 Turpin Street.’ Slowly he ran his finger down the columns. ‘Can’t find it here, Imogen.’

‘Perhaps she’s ex-directory.’

He replaced the directory. Beside it were a number of street atlases, including a London A-Z, which he picked up to study the index. ‘Turpin Street. You’re quite sure of that?’

‘I suppose it could have been Turpin Road.’

‘Doesn’t matter. There’s only one Turpin in this book and that’s Turpin Way in Wallington, a long way from Hounslow.

I hate to say this, my dear, but it looks as if you’ve been given a fast shuffle by this woman. Ada may be onto something after all.’

Twenty-one

It was ‘Be Nice to Julie’ day. ‘In case you’re waiting for me, I’m afraid I’ve got to work through,’ he thoughtfully told her. ‘But you can go off as soon as you like. Take your time. You’ve earned it twice over.’

Julie suppressed a smile. She knew why the old gannet couldn’t face lunch. She’d heard about his belated arrival at the mortuary only to discover that the autopsy on Hildegarde Henkel had been rescheduled, forcing him to watch the whole thing.

‘So don’t let me stop you, if you want to go down to the…’ he said, the voice trailing off, unable to articulate the word ‘canteen’.

She told him she’d eaten earlier. She asked if there was anything new on the case.

‘Depends which case you mean.’ The awkwardness between them was not only due to his nausea.

She said, not without irony, ‘I was under the impression we were working on Hildegarde Henkel.’

‘No progress there.’

‘Nothing came out of the post-mortem?’

‘Nothing we don’t know already.’

He was unwilling to say more than the minimum and she had no desire to pump him for information. People of his rank were supposed to communicate.

She waited.

Finally he felt compelled to speak. ‘We ought to put things right between us, Julie. Some straight-talking. That wasn’t very professional yesterday.’

‘Do you mean your sexist remark, or my reaction to it?’

‘Sexist, was it?’

‘No more than usual. The difference was that you made it personal.’

‘I can’t even remember what I said.’

‘I’ll tell you, then,’ she said. ‘I made some sympathetic remark about the dead woman and you said I was being a shade too sisterly for your taste, which I thought was bloody mean considering how much I take from you without bitching.’

‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘It was a light-hearted comment. I wasn’t attacking you.’

‘It was sarcasm.’

‘Yes, and I know what they say about that, but I thought you had enough of a sense of humour to take it with a smile.’

‘Spare me that old line, Mr Diamond.’

He gave a twitchy smile. ‘Look, it was only because you’re not one of those die-hard feminists that I made the remark. You call it sarcastic: I meant it to be ironic. I didn’t expect to touch a raw nerve. You and I know better than to fall out over a word, Julie.’

She said, ‘We’d have fallen out long before this if I’d objected to words. It’s the assumption behind them. You make snide remarks about my so-called feminist opinions as if I ride a broomstick and put curses on men. I’m another human being doing a job. I don’t ask for any more consideration than the men get. It’s about being treated as one of the human race instead of a lesser species.’

‘I’ve never thought of you as lesser anything,’ he told her.

She rolled her eyes upwards and said nothing.

‘Look at me,’ Diamond went on. ‘Would a fat, arrogant git like this choose anyone less than the best for a deputy? I rate you, Julie. I’m not going to turn into a New Man overnight, but I’m big enough to say that I rate you – and I wouldn’t say that about many others in this God-forsaken nick, male or female.’

She held his gaze. It was the nearest thing to an apology she was likely to get. Nothing more was said for an interval. Finally she looked away and told him, ‘God help you if you ever meet a real feminist.’

The air was not entirely clear, but it had improved.

He nearly ruined it by the lordly way he extended his hand towards a chair. With a sigh, she sat down.

Normal business resumed. ‘You asked about progress,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure if this fits the heading, but I discovered that Ada Shaftsbury may be right after all in raising the alarm about her friend, the one who lost her memory and hasn’t been in contact.’

‘Rose.’

‘I just called at Social Services. The people who collected her gave a bogus address.’

‘She isn’t living there?’

‘The street doesn’t even exist.’

Their minds were working in concert now. ‘Then the woman really is missing.’

‘She can’t be contacted, anyway.’

Julie weighed the implications. ‘If something dodgy happened, it’s quite a coincidence that Hildegarde was staying in the same hostel.’

‘Or quite a connection.’

‘One woman dead and one missing out of how many staying there?’

‘Only three, as far as I can make out. Ada is the only one left.’

‘Then she does have reason to be concerned,’ said Julie. ‘We’ve been treating her like the boy who cried “Wolf!”’

Diamond introduced a note of caution. ‘On the other hand, people like these – living in a hostel, I mean – are more unstable than your average citizens.’

‘Meaning what? That one suspicious death and one abduction are par for the course?’

He smiled. ‘No, but it’s not impossible that two people at the same address turn out to be victims of different crimes.’

‘But are they different crimes?’ said Julie. ‘We don’t know what happened to Rose. She could be dead, the same as Hildegarde.’

He shook his head. ‘Not the same at all, Julie. There’s no evidence that Hildegarde’s death was planned. How could it have been, when the party at the Royal Crescent was a surprise even to the tenants? Compare it to the planning that seems to have gone into the abduction of Rose Black, or whatever her name may be.’

She thought it through and grudgingly concluded that he had a point. The abduction of Rose, if it was an abduction, must have involved some sophisticated planning. To have gone to the Social Services claiming to be her family and producing photographs as evidence was a high-risk operation that could only have worked if it was carried through with conviction. She spoke her next thought aloud: ‘But is it right to assume something sinister just because the woman gave a false address to Social Services? Could there be a reason for it?’

He said flippantly, ‘Like winning the lottery and wanting no publicity?’

Julie treated the remark seriously. ‘In a way, yes. I was thinking that the family knew something they wanted to keep to themselves. Suppose they discovered that Rose lost her memory in a car accident she caused, killing or maiming someone. They’d have reason enough for whisking her away and leaving no traces.’

Diamond’s eyebrows pricked up. ‘That’s good. That’s very good.’ He leaned back in his chair, confirming that her theory made sense. ‘If I remember right, she was found wandering on the A46 by some people from Westbury.’

‘Some people Ada is being cagey about in case we prosecute them,’ said Julie.

‘Prosecute them – why?’

‘Oh, come on, Mr Diamond. Rose stepped into the road and their car struck her and knocked her out. They drove her to the Hinton Clinic and dumped her in the car park.’

‘Then they damned well should be nicked.’ But he allowed that trifling thought to pass. ‘Why was she wandering in the first place? That’s the nub of it. You’ve got a point. An earlier incident, on the motorway perhaps. It’s not unknown for people in shock to walk away from an accident. Do we know the date she was found?’

‘It’s on file,’ Julie reminded him. ‘The clinic notified us when she was brought in. There are photographs of her injuries. If you’d care to see them-’

‘Not now,’ he said quickly. He’d seen enough gore for one day.

Julie added, ‘We checked at the time for road accidents on the motorway and every other road within a five-mile radius. There weren’t any that fitted the circumstances.’

‘There weren’t any we heard about. That’s not quite the same thing, Julie.’ He drummed his fingertips on the chair-arm. ‘Look, by rights this could be farmed out to one of Wigfull’s people.’

She listened with amusement, confident of what was coming.

‘But it could be argued that Harmer House provides a link with the Royal Crescent case, so I think we’ll take this on board, Julie. See what you can do with it. Have a talk yourself with Imogen Starr, the social worker, and see what she remembers of Doreen Jenkins, the woman who collected Rose. Then check every detail of the story for accuracy. Find out where Jenkins was staying in Bath. See if there really was a man in tow, as she claimed. Check Hounslow, Twickenham. Check the mother, if you can.’

‘Do you want me to involve Ada at this stage?’

‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I don’t feel strong enough. It’s up to you.’

She got up. At the door she turned and asked, “Will you be concentrating on Hildegarde Henkel’s death?’

‘Someone has to,’ he said with a martyred air.

But the first move he made after Julie had left was to the room where items of evidence were stored, and the item he asked to examine had not belonged to Hildegarde Henkel.

‘A shotgun,’ he told the sergeant in charge. ‘Property of Daniel Gladstone, deceased.’

There was some hesitation. ‘That’s Mr Wigfull’s case, sir.’

‘You think I don’t know whose case it is, sergeant?’

‘Mr Wigfull is very hot on exhibits, sir.’ And so was this sergeant, a real stickler for procedure.

‘I’m sure he is, and he’s right to be. He and I are working hand in hand on several cases, as you heard, no doubt. The gun has been seen by forensic, I take it – checked for prints and so on.’

‘I believe it has, sir.’

‘It’s bagged up, then? Bagged up and labelled?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Said with a note of finality.

‘Good.’ Diamond grinned like a chess-player who has watched his opponent make the wrong move. ‘Just what the doctor ordered.’

‘Is it, sir?’

‘Because I won’t need to disturb the bag. I can examine it without breaking the seal, and no one need get uptight.’

‘Mr Diamond, I don’t wish to be obstructive-’

‘Nor me, sergeant, nor me. So I’ll save your reputation by coming round the back and checking the item here on the premises. It won’t have left your control. Just lift the flap for me, would you?’

Minutes after, the sergeant was privy to the bizarre spectacle of Detective Superintendent Diamond seated on a chair, with the shotgun in its polythene wrapping poised between his legs, the butt supported on the floor, the muzzle under his chin, while his fingers groped along the barrel towards the trigger guard.

‘Be a sport, sergeant, and keep this to yourself. There are things a man wouldn’t like his best friends to know about.’

With his mind still on Farmer Gladstone, he drove out to Tormarton to have another look at the farm. Crime-scene tape was still spread across the gate and the front door. He left the car in the lane and lifted his leg over the tape.

There were several large heaps of earth in the field outside. He went over to one of the pits and looked inside. They had dug to the bedrock.

He detached the tape from the front door of the farmhouse and was pleased to find that he could open it. He went through the kitchen to the back room. The Bible he had found was still on the window-sill, obviously of no interest to John Wigfull. He picked it up and glanced at the family tree in the front, the long line of male descendants ending with a female, May Turner, who had married Daniel Gladstone here in Tormarton in 1943. Then he let the pages fall open at the old Christmas card. He wanted another look at the photo inside, of the woman and child, and the wording on the card, concise, touching and yet remote: ‘I thought you would like this picture of your family. God’s blessings to us all at

this time. Meg.’ Was it really meant to bless, he wondered, or to damn?

He closed the Bible and slipped it into his coat pocket, trying not to feel furtive.

Outside, he made a more thorough tour of the outhouses than before. They had been ravaged by the winds endemic in this exposed place, and patched up from time to time with tarpaulin and pieces of corrugated iron. They should have been torn down long ago and rebuilt. Someone, he noticed, had recently fed and watered the chickens. It was one of life’s few certainties that whenever there were animals at a crime scene, you could count on one of the police seeing to their needs. He scraped away some straw in the hen-house in case there had been recent digging underneath, but the surface was brick-hard.

Then he returned to his car and drove through the lanes to Tormarton village, a cluster of grey houses, cottages and farm buildings behind drystone walls. Rustic it may have appeared, yet there was the steady drone of traffic from the motorway only a quarter of a mile to the south. The inhabitants must have been willing to trade the noise for the convenience. It didn’t take a detective to tell that many were escapees from suburban life. The old buildings remained, but gentrified, cleaned up and adapted to a car-owning population. The Old School House no longer catered for children. The shop and sub-Post Office had been converted into a pub. The Cotswold Way, another modern gloss on ancient features, snaked between the cottages and across the fields.

He parked opposite the church and called at Church Cottage nearby. A woman answered, rubbing her hands on a towel. She smiled as if she knew why he was there. The fragrance of fried onions gusted from behind her, causing Diamond some unease over his still-turbulent stomach. He explained who he was.

‘You’re looking for the vicar, are you?’ The woman grinned. ‘Don’t worry. You’re not the first to make that mistake. Our vicar lives at Marshfield. We have to share him with two other parishes.’

‘Is there a church warden in the village, then?’

‘There is, but if you want the vicar, he may be in the church, still. There was a funeral earlier.’ Her gaze shifted from Diamond. ‘No, get your skates on – there he goes, at the end of the street.’

‘Thanks.’ He gave a shout and stepped out briskly after a tall, silver-haired man in the act of bundling his vestments into the back seat of a car.

The vicar straightened up and looked round. Diamond introduced himself.

‘You’re a detective? This is to do with poor old Gladstone, I suppose.’

‘Can you spare a few minutes, sir?’

The vicar said that he doubted if he could help much, but he would answer any questions he could. ‘Have you had lunch? The Portcullis has a rather good bar menu.’

Diamond patted his ample belly. ‘I’m giving it a miss today.’

‘Then why don’t we talk inside the church?’’ Whatever suits you, sir.’

St Mary Magdalene, the vicar explained as they approached it, was pre-Conquest in origin. There were Saxon stones in the structure of the tower. The priest of Tormarton, he said, was mentioned in Domesday.

‘So you’re one of a long line, sir?’ Diamond commented, willing to listen to some potted history in exchange for goodwill and, he hoped, the local gossip.

‘Yes, indeed. The line probably goes back two or three centuries earlier than that. There are various theories about the origin of the name of our village. The first syllable, ‘Tor”, may refer to “torr”, a hill, or the pagan deity Thor, or it may derive from a thorn tree. But there’s no dispute about the second part of the name. The derivation is “macre tun” – the farm on the boundary, or border. We stand, you see – and it’s rather exciting – on the ancient border of the Kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex.’

‘Mercia and Wessex,’ Diamond said without sharing the excitement. There was a danger of the history over-running. ‘But the present church is basically late Norman, as you must have noted already.’

‘Certainly have, sir. Must take a lot of upkeep. Do you have a good-sized congregation?’

‘It depends what you take to be a good size. I suppose we do reasonably well for these times.’ The vicar opened the wooden gate and led the way up a small avenue of yew trees, through the genteel end of the churchyard, where a high complement of raised tombs blackened by age stood at odd angles. The main entrance was round the right-hand side of the church.

‘Was Daniel Gladstone one of your flock?’

‘They all are,’ said the vicar. ‘But I know what you’re asking. He didn’t join in the worship. He didn’t join in anything much. Quite a solitary figure.’ He paused, then sighed and said, ‘The manner of his death is on all our consciences. And it was too long before he was found, far too long.’

‘Several days, anyway.’

‘Dreadful. Every parish priest has a few like that, insisting on going on in their own way, shutting the world out. It’s a dilemma. I called on him occasionally and he was barely civil.’

‘No family?’

‘Not in the neighbourhood. Both his marriages failed. It was a hard life, and I don’t think the wives could take it.’

‘So there were two marriages?’ said Diamond. They stepped into the small arched porch and the vicar turned the iron ring of the church door and parted the red curtains inside.

‘Two, yes. He was married here the first time during the war, long before I came. She wasn’t a local girl, I understand. From London, I think, to escape the bombing. Old Daniel must have been more sociable in those days. Young and carefree. His father would have owned the farm, then.’

They had paused in front of a sculptured wall monument to one Edward Topp, who had died in 1699. The Topp coat of arms consisted of a gloved hand gripping a severed arm, the soggy end painted red. Diamond thought of the post-mortem, took a deep breath and switched his gaze to a floor brass of a figure in a long garment, with all his limbs intact.

‘Fifteenth century. John Ceysill, a steward. Note the pen and inkhorn at his waist,’ the vicar informed him. ‘The Gladstones are one of the village families from generations back. If you’re looking for their name on the memorials 192

– of which we have some fine examples – you will be disappointed. Ordinary folk were not commemorated like the gentry.’

‘Unless they’re on the war memorial.’

‘Good point. The two world wars had slipped my mind.’

‘Easily done.’

‘But there are many fine features here in St Mary’s.’

Diamond’s gaze had already moved up to the fine feature of the timbered roof, not to admire it, but to work out how to stave off a lecture on its history. He produced the Bible from his pocket, an inspired move.

It was enough to stop the vicar in his tracks. True, they were in the right place, but policemen didn’t usually carry the Good Book.

‘So was old Daniel the last of the line?’

‘To my knowledge, yes.’

‘His first wife was only nineteen.’

Then Diamond opened the inside page with the family tree and passed it across.

‘I didn’t know he possessed a Bible,’ said the vicar, quick to understand. ‘This evidently came from the wife’s family, the Turners. Ah. May Turner married Daniel Gladstone, 1943, St Mary Magdalene’s.’

‘But it didn’t last long, you say?’

‘That was my understanding. They separated quite soon and she must have left her Bible behind. I heard that she left suddenly. Can’t tell you when.’

‘If there was a second marriage…’

‘There must have been a death or a divorce,’ the vicar completed it for him. ‘I can’t tell you which. His second marriage would have been in the nineteen-sixties. She was another very young woman, the daughter of the publican, I was told.’

‘Would her name have been Meg?’

‘Meg?’ He sounded doubtful.

‘Short for Margaret.’

‘Well, we can check in the marriage register, if you like. I keep that in the safe with the silver. How did you discover her name?’

‘If you look in the Book of Psalms…’

He peered over his glasses at Diamond, deeply skeptical that anyone called Meg was mentioned in the Psalms. ‘Ah.’ He had let the Bible fall open at the Christmas card. ‘Now I see what you mean. Bibles have so many uses, not least as a filing system.’

‘Look inside the card,’ said Diamond. The vicar opened it and found the photo of the woman and child and read the writing on the card. ‘How very moving. It’s coming back to me now. I did once hear that there was a daughter of the second marriage. This must be Margaret with her little girl. If you’re thinking of returning the Bible to them, I don’t know how you’d make contact. She left him when the child was very young. Let’s check the marriage register, shall we?’ He returned the Bible to Diamond and led him through a passageway (that he couldn’t resist naming as yet another feature of St Mary’s, its ambulatory) to the chancel and across the aisle to the vestry.

‘You said he was a loner – a solitary man.’

‘In his old age, he was.’ The vicar smiled. ‘I see what you mean. For a loner, two wives isn’t a bad achievement. He must have been more sociable in his youth, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Did something happen, I wonder, that turned him off people?’

‘I wouldn’t know about that.’ The vicar took the keys from his pocket and unlocked a wall-safe.

‘Was there any gossip?’

‘I’m not the right person to ask. Not much Tormarton gossip reaches me at Marshfield. There were stories that he was miserly, sleeping on a mattress stuffed with money, and so on, but almost any old person living alone has to put up with that sort of nonsense.’

‘Some small amount of cash was found in the house.’

‘That’s a relief – that anything was left, I mean. I shouldn’t say this, but I know of one or two locally who wouldn’t think twice about robbing the dead.’ He lifted a leather-bound register from the safe and rested it on the table where the choir’s hymn-books were stacked. ‘There were not so many weddings in the sixties, before they built the motorway. This shouldn’t take long.’

He found the year 1960 and began turning the pages.

‘So many familiar names.’ He stopped at 1967. ‘Here we are. 15th July. Daniel Gladstone, forty-four - no spring chicken – widower, farmer. That’s one question answered, then. The first wife must have died. Margaret Ann Torrington, twenty, spinster, barmaid.’

‘Do you have the record of Baptisms? While you’ve got the books out, I’d like to see if we can find the child’s name.’

They started on another register and eventually found the entry for Christine Gladstone, baptised 20th February, 1970. ‘They stayed together this long, anyway,’ said the vicar. ‘What is it – two and a half years?’

Diamond thanked him for his trouble, still wondering if there was more to be discovered here about Gladstone’s death. ‘Who are the neighbours? Were they on good terms with the old man?’

‘You’ve put your finger on one of the problems,’ said the vicar. ‘The adjacent farm, Liversedge Farm, changed hands a number of times in recent years. It’s much larger in acreage than Gladstone’s. His is no more than a smallholding, as you’ve seen, and the way it is placed is just a nuisance to the neighbours. If you took an aerial view, you’d see it’s in the shape of a frying pan, slightly elongated – the handle being the access lane – almost entirely surrounded by Liversedge land. He was approached a number of times about selling up, but he refused.’

‘Who are the present owners?’

‘A company. One of these faceless organisations. They do rather nicely out of the European farm subsidies. Much of their land isn’t being farmed at all.’

‘“Set-aside”?’

‘Yes. The rationale is beyond me, paying farmers not to grow things when much of the world is starving.’

‘Some of their land must be in use.’

‘For grazing, yes. Low maintenance. Nice for the share-holders.’

Diamond had a bizarre mental picture of some portly shareholders on their knees nibbling the grass. ‘Isn’t it good land for farming?’

‘Not the easiest. Remember we’re six hundred feet high up here, being on a scarp of the Cotswolds, but it’s all there is.’

‘A time-honoured occupation, like yours and mine.’

‘Indeed. Farming has gone on here for thousands of years. There has been human occupation in the area since the mesolithic period. Stone Age flints are picked up from time to time. Why, only as recently as 1986, when some work was being done in a barn, a stone coffin was excavated containing the skeleton of a child aged about five. They estimated it as 1,800 years old.’

Another disturbing mental image. Having just looked at the photograph of Gladstone’s daughter Christine with her mother, Diamond had no difficulty picturing a small, dead girl of about that age. ‘There’s evidence of recent digging on Gladstone’s farm. Quite recent. Since his death, I mean. Would you know anything about that?’

The vicar closed the safe and locked it. ‘I heard that you policemen were busy with spades. Everyone in the village has a theory as to what you will unearth. I hope they’re wrong.’

‘It’s all but finished now. We found nothing.’

‘That’s a relief.’

‘But we’d like to know who disturbed the land in the first place, and why.’

‘I’ve heard nothing about that.’

‘No stories of people digging?’

‘Not until you folk arrived. I wonder who they were. Do you think someone had a theory that the old man had buried his money there?’

‘That’s one possibility.’

‘It’s very peculiar. Whatever the purpose of the digging was, they must have known he was dead, or they wouldn’t have started digging. Why didn’t they notify anyone if they knew poor old Daniel was lying inside the farmhouse?’

‘They wouldn’t, would they, if they were nicking his savings?’

‘Good thinking,’ said the vicar. He smiled. ‘Perhaps I should stick to preaching and leave the detecting to people like you.’

The drive back to Bath found Diamond in a better frame of mind. He had made real progress over the mystery of the farmer’s death. Pity it was the one case he had no business investigating. John Wigfull would not be happy. But then Wigfull had virtually written off the farmer as a suicide victim. And as Diamond had decided there was a strong suspicion of murder, it would be out of Wigfull’s orbit.

He had not driven far along the A46 when he recalled that this was a significant stretch of road, the long approach to Dyrham where Ada’s friend Rose had wandered into the path of an approaching car. Some way short of the Crown Inn, he pulled off the main carriageway and got out to look around.

It was a bleak, windswept spot, one of those vast landscapes that made you feel insignificant. Miles of farmland lay on either side of the road and a row of power-lines on pylons stretched almost to infinity. The traffic sped by, oblivious, intent on reaching the next road-sign. He had often driven through himself without ever noticing anyone on foot along here.

Where had she come from that night? There were only two possibilities he could think of: one was that she had been set down at the motorway junction and walked this far, the other that she had made her way from the nearest village, perhaps a mile and a half back along the road. And that village was Tormarton.

Twenty-two

On his return to Manvers Street Police Station, Diamond was handed a message from the Forensic Science Lab. Tests on the blood sample taken from the dead woman found at the Royal Crescent on Sunday morning had proved negative for drugs and so low for alcohol that she could not have drunk much more than a glass of wine. He gave a told-you-so grunt. Hildegarde Henkel had not fallen off that roof because of her physical state.

The phone had been beeping steadily since he came in. He picked it up and heard from the desk sergeant that ‘some nerd’ had come in an hour ago in response to the appeal for information about the party up at the Crescent.

‘What do you mean – “some nerd”?’

‘A member of the public, then, sir. Sorry about that.’

‘Sergeant, I’m not complaining. I only want to know what makes him a nerd.’

‘The impression I got, Mr Diamond. I could be mistaken.’

‘You could, but now that you’ve dumped on this public-spirited person, you’d better be more specific.’

‘Well, I think he’s harmless.’

‘A weirdo?’

‘That’s a bit strong.’

‘A nerd, then.’

‘That about sums it up, sir.’

‘Wasting our time?’

‘I wouldn’t know that.’

He said with a sigh, ‘Have him brought up. I’ll see him now.’

‘Not possible, sir. He wouldn’t wait. There was no one here to see him at the time, Mr Wigfull being out and DI Hargreaves as well.’

‘So you didn’t even get a statement?’

“He said he’d be in the Grapes if you wanted to talk to him.’

Diamond made a sound deep in his throat that mingled contempt and amusement in equal measure. ‘That’s why he couldn’t wait. Urgent business at the Grapes. This isn’t a nerd, Sergeant, it’s a barfly. What name does he go under?’

‘Gary Paternoster.’

‘God help us. What’s that – South African?’

Before going out, he phoned the pathologist, Jim Middleton.

‘You got those blood-test results, then,’ Middleton’s rich Yorkshire brogue came down the line, confident that he knew the reason for the call.

‘On the woman, yes,’ Diamond said.

‘So did I. No drugs and very little alcohol, which greatly simplifies your job, doesn’t it?’

‘This isn’t about her. If you don’t mind, I’ve got a question about the other PM you did this morning.’

‘The old farmer? Fire away.’

This required tact from Diamond; the medical profession don’t like laymen giving them advice. ‘I was thinking over what you said, about it being unusual in suicides, aiming the muzzle under the chin.’

‘This one was the first I’ve come across,’ Middleton confirmed, ‘but there’s always something new in this game.’

‘He must have had a long reach. I had a look at the gun earlier. The distance from muzzle to trigger is twenty-eight inches.’

‘Actually, he was on the short side.’A pause. ‘You’ve got a point there, my friend.’ The tone of that ‘my friend’rather undermined the sentiment. ‘I’d better check my measurements.’

‘When the body was found, there wasn’t any sign that he was tied to the chair,’ Diamond started to say.

‘Hold on,’ said Middleton. ‘What the fuck are you suggesting, inspector?’

‘Superintendent.’

‘What?’

‘Peter will do. Is it conceivable that this was set up to look like a suicide when it was something else?’

There was another awkward silence before Middleton said, ‘I found no marks of ligatures, if that’s what you’re suggesting.’

‘He was in a wooden armchair,’ Diamond said. ‘If his arms were pinioned in some way to the chair, he’d be helpless. He was in his seventies.’

‘I said I found no marks.’

‘He was wearing several layers of clothes: jacket, pullover, shirt and long-sleeved vest. If a ligature was over the clothes, would the pressure marks show through?’

‘You’re bloody persistent, aren’t you? It depends how tight this theoretical ligature was, but, no, it need not. This was a corpse after a week of putrefaction. We’re not dealing in subtleties at that stage. What are you suggesting – that he was trussed up for slaughter and then untied after death?’

Twenty minutes and a brisk walk later, Diamond entered the pub in Westgate Street where the Allardyces and the Treadwells had begun their celebrations on the fateful Saturday night. Not many were in. Six-fifteen this Tuesday evening was too early for the youthful regulars who nightly turned the Grapes into Bath’s hottest drinking spot. The sound from the music system was well short of the decibels it would reach later, but still loud for a man whose peaks of listening came on Radio Two.

He sauntered through the narrow low-beamed bar with its low-watt electric lights masquerading as oil-lamps. The dark wood panelling and antique paintings lived up to the claim, inscribed along a crossbeam, that the present facade dated from the seventeenth century; the fruit machines on every side undermined the impression. He saw the TV set at the far end of the bar that must have given the Treadwells and the Allardyces the news of their lottery success. There were bottled drinks he’d never heard of on display behind the bar. A man of his maturity stood out in this place, he thought. Anyone expecting a visitor from the police ought to give him a second glance. No one did. He strolled the length of the bar eyeing all the lone drinkers. He was beginning to take against Gary Paternoster before having met him, which was stupid. This one might be a nerd, and a barfly into the bargain, but he had gone to the trouble of calling at the nick. He could be about to provide the information that would nail a killer.

So quit racing your motor, Diamond told himself. Watch your blood pressure.

He asked a barmaid for help.

‘Dunno, love, but it could be him over there, under the fish.’

The fish was a trompe l’oeil, a pike carved in wood to look as if it was in a showcase. It was mounted on the wall near the door. Alone at a table, a youth sat like a more convincing stuffed specimen, staring ahead with glazed eyes. He was in a suit, a businessman’s three-piece, navy blue with a faint white pinstripe. He had an old-fashioned short-back-and-sides and owlish glasses. When Diamond spoke his name, he jerked and stood up.

‘Take it easy,’ Diamond told him. ‘What’s that you’re drinking?’

‘Lemonade shandy.’

A pained expression came over Diamond’s features. It was a long time since he’d come across anyone drinking shandy. The very notion of mixing good beer with lemonade…

In his innocence Gary Paternoster added, ‘But one is enough for me, thank you, sir.’

Diamond went back to the bar and collected a pint of best bitter for himself, a chance to focus his thoughts. This wasn’t the class of nerd he’d expected. This was a throwback to some time in the dim past when kids in their teens respected their elders and stayed sober and wore their Sunday best for talking to the police. Did it matter? Not if the boy was reliable as a witness.

At the table again, he perched uncomfortably on a padded stool with his back to a fruit machine called Monte Carlo or Bust and said, ‘Didn’t you want to wait at the nick, Mr Paternoster?’

A nervous smile. ‘To be honest, they made me a little uncomfortable. Not the police officers. Some of the people who came in.’

‘I don’t blame you. They give me the creeps. So you offered to wait here. More relaxing, eh?’ They were sitting under a throbbing loudspeaker that didn’t relax Diamond much, but the music did guarantee that their conversation wasn’t overheard.

‘This was the only place I could think of. It’s mentioned in the newspaper.’ The boy took a cutting from his top pocket and passed it across the table. ‘They said you were out making inquiries. They couldn’t tell me where.’

Diamond left the cutting where it was. ‘I see. You thought I might be here.’

‘I thought I’d come and see.’

‘Local, are you?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘From Bath, I mean?’

‘Great Pulteney Street, actually.’

‘Very local, then. Nice address.’

‘It’s my mother’s.’

He lived with his mother, and who would have guessed, Diamond cynically thought. ‘And are you in a job?’

‘I work at the Treasure House.’

‘What’s that – a Chinese restaurant?’

Gary Paternoster blushed scarlet. ‘No. It’s a shop in Walcot Street, for detectorists.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Diamond’s confidence in his star witness plunged another fathom. ‘Like me, you mean?’

‘Are you a detectorist?’

Save us, he thought. ‘Detective Superintendent. Will that do?’

The young man blushed again. ‘I don’t think you understand. I’m talking about people who use metal detectors.’

Normally Diamond was quick, but it took a moment for the penny to drop. ‘What – treasure-hunters? The guys you see on the beach with those probe-things looking for money and watches other people have lost?’

Gary Paternoster swallowed hard and said with disapproval, ‘Those people get us a bad name. Real detectorists aren’t interested in lost property – well, not modern lost property. You’ll find us in a ploughed field looking for ancient relics.’

‘Do you do it?’

‘Quite often, yes.’

‘Detectoring, you call it?’’ Yes.’

‘Ever found anything?’

‘Plenty.’ Self-congratulation lit the boyish features for a moment.

Diamond pretended not to believe. ‘What – horseshoes and nails and bits of barbed wire?’

‘No. Medieval bronze buckles. Roman coins. Brooches and things. You learn a lot about history.’

‘Lonely hobby, I should think, for a young man like you.’

This gentle goading was not wasted. Faint glimmers of a personality were emerging from behind the shop-assistant’s manner. ‘I find it very satisfying, actually.’

‘And profitable?’

‘Not yet, but you never know what you might find – and profit isn’t really the point of it. We’re uncovering the past.’

Uncovering the past summed up Gary Paternoster. He was a relic looking for relics.

‘But you weren’t out with your metal detector last Saturday night,’ Diamond said in an unsubtle shift to the matter under investigation.

He looked at Diamond as if the question did him no credit. ‘It’s no good going out after dark. You wouldn’t find a thing.’

‘Mr Paternoster.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I’m inviting you to tell me what happened.’

‘Oh.’ He fastened a button on his suit. ‘I was up at the Royal Crescent, at that party.’

Surprised, for Gary Paternoster didn’t look like a party-goer, Diamond said, ‘By invitation?’

‘Not in point of fact. It was open to everyone, wasn’t it? The shop was open late that evening, being Saturday. I was on my way home, about nine, I suppose, when I met some people I knew in Northgate Street. One of them was at school with me, quite a forceful personality. They were all on their way to this party and they asked me to join them. They said things I’m too embarrassed to repeat, about getting…getting…’

‘Laid?’

‘I was going to say getting lucky with girls. I didn’t really want to, and I said I wasn’t invited, but they said none of them were. I’m not very good at standing up to people like that.’

‘So you tagged along.’ Now he understood. The kid had been press-ganged.

‘I thought I’d slip away as soon as I got a chance. Parties make me tense. There seemed to be dozens going up there. They said someone here – in the Grapes – had won the lottery and thrown their house open for a party. That was what I heard and I think it’s true. When we got to the house, the door was open and we just walked in. There was loud music and beer. It seemed to be on several floors. We went upstairs to the first floor and that was where I saw the young lady who was killed.’

‘Already dead?’

‘No, at this point she was alive.’

‘You’re sure it was her?’

‘She’s the one whose picture is in the paper today. She was German, wasn’t she? She had a pink jumper thing and jeans – black or dark blue. A pretty face with dark hair, quite short. My friends seemed to know her from the pub – this place. She used to come here most evenings. It turned out that she didn’t know any English, because they were talking about her, making fun of her, saying suggestive things to her face.’

‘Such as?’

‘Stupid stuff, like she was desperate for…’ He cleared his throat. Simply couldn’t bring himself to say the word.

‘Sex?’

Paternoster took an intense interest in his shandy. ‘And they tried to embarrass me by telling her I wanted to go upstairs with her. She didn’t understand.’

‘She must have guessed what was going on,’ said Diamond. ‘She must have known what it was about from the sniggering. How did she take it? Was she upset?’

‘She ignored it. She seemed to be thinking about other things. She kept looking away, across the room.’

‘What at?’

‘The door, I think. She wasn’t looking at people. After a short time she just turned her back and moved off. They told me to go after her. They said she wanted me to follow her. I didn’t really believe it, but they were making me very embarrassed, so I went, just to get out of the room, really.’ He paused. ‘I don’t want you to think I had anything to do with her falling off the roof.’

‘It hasn’t crossed my mind,’ Diamond said in gospel truth. ‘Did you see where she went?’

‘Upstairs to the top flat. It was open. The party was going on there as well.’

‘And you followed?’

The young man took a deep, audible breath through his mouth. ‘On the stairs she looked round to see who was following. I was at the bottom of the stairs, and our eyes met. I’m not very confident with girls as a rule, and I didn’t really expect anything, but the look she gave wasn’t unfriendly. It was kind of amused, as if she’d expected one of the others to be coming after her and was pleased to find it was me instead. I knew she was foreign and couldn’t speak the language and that was a help actually because I get tongue-tied when I talk to them. She was older than me by a few years and that was nice. Girls my age seem more hostile. Older women like my mother’s friends say I’m nice. She wasn’t as old as Mum’s friends, but she was in her twenties, I should think.’

‘So you began to fancy your chances?’

He fingered his tie. ‘No, don’t misunderstand me. I was pleased because she’d noticed me and hadn’t pulled a face or something. I followed her upstairs. There were quite a number of people in the top flat, drinking and talking. I think some of them were dancing. It’s quite a big room.’

‘I’ve seen it. What did the woman do?’

‘She stood for a bit, watching. She went into the kitchen, I think, and came out.’

‘Was anyone with her?’

‘No.’

‘Are you certain of that? Did you notice a tall man in a leather jacket and jeans?’

‘I wasn’t looking much at the other people there. I was watching her.’

‘Try and remember. It’s important.’

Paternoster frowned. ‘How tall do you mean?’

‘Really big. Well over six foot. Large hands, wide shoulders.’

‘No. I don’t remember anyone like that.’

‘Do you remember anyone at all, any of the guests who stood out?’

‘There was a black lady, but she was talking to people as if she belonged there.’

‘You’re probably right about that. Sally Allardyce is black and she lives in the top flat. You said she was talking to people. Can’t you picture any of them?’

‘No. They must have been friends. They seemed to know each other.’

‘Perhaps she was with the Treadwells, from downstairs.’

‘Not Mrs Treadwell. I know her and she wasn’t with them. I saw her downstairs. She was definitely downstairs.’

‘You know Mrs Treadwell?’

‘I’ve seen her in our shop.’

‘She’s a detectorist?’

He smiled. ‘No. I know all the people in Bath who do it seriously. She came in out of interest one afternoon and looked at some books and magazines. A lot of people drop in just to see what it’s about. I think they expect us to have some treasure on view.’

‘How did you find out her name?’

‘Saw a picture of her in the paper almost the next day with her husband. In the business section. Something about a supermarket they designed. I remembered her face.’

Diamond returned to the more pressing matter of Hildegarde Henkel. ‘You were telling me how you watched the German woman.’

‘Yes. She was there some time, getting on for half an hour, I’d say, and I was trying to pluck up the courage to go over to her.’

‘I know the feeling.’

He was unsettled by Diamond’s comment. ‘Oh, but I was only wanting to let her know that not everyone in the place was unfriendly. I kept trying to catch her eye and smile or something, only she didn’t look my way. Like I said before, she didn’t seem to be looking at people. Then I got distracted – someone dropped a glass, I think – and when I looked up, she’d gone. I knew she hadn’t left the flat, because I was by the door and, believe me, I would have noticed if she’d come that close.’

‘I believe you,’ Diamond said. ‘So what did you do about it?’

‘Well, there was a small passageway at the end with two doors leading off it. One was the bathroom. I’d heard the toilet flushing as people came out. The other room had to be the bedroom. I assumed she’d gone to the bathroom. I waited some minutes to see if she would come out, but when the door opened, it was a man. So…so I guessed she’d gone into the bedroom.’

‘Did you follow?’

He eased a finger between his collar and his neck. ‘In the end, I did.’

Diamond was almost moved to remind this wimp that he was not his mother and didn’t give a damn whether he followed a woman into a bedroom at a party.

The confession resumed. ‘It was dark inside. I couldn’t really see much, just the shape of a large bed, and I could hear people on it. From the sounds it was obvious that they were…’

‘Hard at it?’

‘Yes. Me being there didn’t make any difference to them. I was amazed.’

‘That they ignored you?’

‘No. What surprised me was that it happened so fast. The man must have been in there waiting for her. I haven’t the faintest idea who he was.’

He had put the wrong construction on this altogether. Diamond said, ‘So what did you do?’

‘I came out. Left them to it. That’s all I can tell you, because I walked downstairs and out of the house at that point’

Having made the first bold decision of his life by stepping into that bedroom, the boy had been cruelly disillusioned. Humiliated, he had quit the scene. It was easy to imagine, and it rang true.

Diamond had heard all he needed. He could have thanked young Paternoster and arranged for someone else to take the statement. But some inner prompting, the memory, probably, of his own adolescent rebuffs, made him merciful. ‘I think you should know that there’s a second door in that bedroom. It’s on the far side. You wouldn’t have seen it unless you were looking for it, but I know it’s there because I’ve seen it. You said the German woman wasn’t looking at people. She’d worked out that there was an extra room – the attic room – upstairs. She looked everywhere else, and decided that the access to the attic had to be from the bedroom. I believe she found it and went up the stairs and eventually onto the roof.’

‘But… the people on the bed.’

‘Some other couple. You and I know what parties are like, Gary. We wouldn’t choose someone else’s house for a legover, but there’s always some randy couple who will.’

‘She wasn’t there?’

‘When you came in, she’d already found the door and gone up to the attic.’

Diamond’s statement acted like a reprieve. The boy’s posture altered. His face lit up. ‘That never occurred to me.’

Diamond nodded. ‘I’m going to get you a beer, son. A regular beer.’

He remained with the lad for some time, talking of the high expectations of women and how even a man of his experience could never hope to match their dreams. ‘That’s their agony, Gary, and ours. We’re all trying to make the best of what we’ve got. They have to accept that you’re not Elvis, or Bill Gates, or Jesus Christ, and if you keep talking, make them laugh a little, show them you’re neither a rapist nor a rabbit, you may find one willing to stretch a point and spend some time with you.’ The boy said he lacked confidence. Talking more like a best mate than the father he had not been, Diamond pointed out that the party hadn’t been the personal disaster it seemed. To have faltered at the bedroom door would have been a failure. The lad had proved to himself that he was man enough to go in. Now it was just a question of some fine tuning. Trendy clothes. A different haircut. Drinking beer was a good start.

The time had not been wasted.

Twenty-three

‘John, I’m setting up a murder inquiry.’

Wigfull stiffened and pressed himself back in his chair. ‘This German woman?’

‘No.’

‘Who, then?’

‘The farmer.’

‘Gladstone?’

In a pacifying gesture, Diamond put up his palms. ‘It was your case, I know, and you had it down as a suicide.’

Wigfull snatched up a manila folder. ‘It’s here, ready for the coroner.’

There was a moment’s silence out of respect for all the work contained in the manila folder. ‘As you know,’ Diamond resumed, ‘I was out at Tormarton the afternoon you were there. I’ve been back since.’

The Chief Inspector’s face turned geranium red. ‘You had no right.’

Diamond went on in a steady tone, neither apologetic nor triumphant, ‘The first test of suicide is to make sure that the death wound was self-inflicted. I’ve looked at the shotgun, in its wrapper. I measured it. Have you seen it? The length, I mean. I tucked it under my chin and tried the position he is supposed to have used to blow his own brains out. I’m a larger man than old Gladstone was and I tell you, John, my fingers can’t reach the trigger with my arms fully stretched. If the muzzle was in my mouth, yes, I could fire it, just. If it was against my forehead, easier still. But the cartridge went through his jaw from underneath. The little old man was physically incapable of doing that.’

Wigfull was unwilling to be persuaded. ‘We found his prints on the breechblock and on the barrel.’

‘But you would. The gun was his.’’ There were no other prints.’

Diamond gave him a long, unadmiring look. ‘If you were handling a murder weapon, would you leave your prints on it?’

‘The gun was found beside him.’

‘To make it look like suicide.’

‘Are you saying I’m incompetent?’

‘John, for pity’s sake, listen. This was set up as a suicide. It looked cut and dried. Dead man in a chair with his shotgun beside him. You saw it yourself before forensic removed the body from the scene. Difficult to reconstruct later, of course. That’s the fault of the procedure. We store the gun in one place and the corpse in another and it’s easy to overlook the mechanics. I’m not getting at you personally. Any of us.’

‘Except you,’ Wigfull said with ill-concealed resentment.

‘But do you see what I’m driving at?’

‘What put you onto it?’

The question signalled that Wigfull was listening to reason, and Diamond treated it with restraint. ‘I couldn’t understand why the ground was disturbed at the farm after Gladstone’s death.’

‘I knew all about that,’ Wigfull waded in again, still making this an issue of personal rivalry. ‘In fact I was the one who told you about it.’

‘Perfectly true.’

‘And I wouldn’t pin too much on it,’ he added, seeing a possible flaw in Diamond’s reasoning. ‘What was it – five days the body lay there? You can bet some evil bastard noticed that the old farmer wasn’t about. Maybe they looked in and thought this was an opportunity. There were rumours Gladstone was miserly. Someone could have thought he buried his savings. If they dug a few holes, it might make them trespassers and thieves, but it doesn’t make them murderers.’

‘Fair point,’ said Diamond. ‘You may still be right about the digging. But you wanted to know what put me onto homicide as a possibility, and I’m telling you. When I see signs of a third party at the scene, I automatically think murder. It’s my job. I asked myself if Gladstone’s death could have been caused by the person or people who dug his land. Ran it through my mind as a faked suicide. Looked at the scene and checked the weapon. And unless the old boy had arms like an orangutan, I’m right.’

Wigfull resigned the contest. The moustache hung over his downturned mouth like the wings of a caged vulture. ‘So what was the motive? Theft?’

‘That isn’t clear yet. But I have a suspect.’

He sat forward, animated again. ‘You do?’

Diamond’s bland expression didn’t alter. ‘But if you don’t mind, John, I’ll sleep on it. Tomorrow we’ll set up an incident room and a squad and I’ll take them through the evidence. I expect you’ll want to be in on it.’

He went to look for Julie.

She had not returned, so he ambled down to the canteen for some supper. Baked beans, bacon, fried eggs, chips and toast, with a mug of tea. ‘You’re a credit to us, Mr Diamond,’ the manageress told him.

‘Stoking up,’ he said. ‘Heavy session in prospect.’

It was almost eight when Julie got back to the nick.

‘Have you eaten?’ he asked her first.

‘Not since lunch.’

‘Why don’t we go across to Bloomsburys? I don’t think I can face the canteen tonight.’ Coming from a man who was a credit to the police canteen, it was a betrayal. What a good thing the manageress didn’t hear him.

Julie said, ‘On one condition: that you stay off the beer.’ Seeing his eyes widen at that, she explained, ‘No disrespect, but you’ve had enough for one day if you’re driving home after.’

‘How do you know that?’

Her slightly raised eyebrows said enough.

Bloomsburys Cafe-Bar was their local, just across the street from the nick, a place with bewildering decor that amused Diamond each time he came in. Pink and green dominated and the portraits of Virginia Woolf and members of the Bloomsbury Set co-existed with non-stop TV and plastic tablecloths, lulled by rock ballads and the click of billiard balls from the games room behind the bar.

They chose a round table in a window bay. Diamond circled it first, assessing the fit of the chairs. On previous visits he’d discovered a variation in size, although they were all painted pale green. A big man had to be alert to such things. While Julie started on a chicken curry with rice and poppadom, he sampled the apple pie and custard, stared at the Diet Coke in front of him and brought her up to date on his long afternoon, recalling how he handled the shotgun, examined the church registers at Tormarton and gave advice on women to a detectorist. Unusually, he went to some trouble to explain how each experience had an impact on their investigations. In total, he said, it had been a satisfactory afternoon – and how was it for her?

Less exciting, she told him. She had started, as per instructions, by visiting Imogen Starr, the social worker, and questioning her about Doreen Jenkins, the woman who had collected Rose. In Imogen’s opinion, Jenkins was an intelligent and well-disposed woman, concerned about Rose and well capable of caring for her.

‘Ho-hum,’ commented Diamond. ‘Did you get a description from her?’

‘A good one. I’ll say that for Imogen: she’d make a cracking witness. She puts the woman’s age at thirty or slightly younger. Height five-eight. Broad-shouldered. Healthy complexion. Regular, good-looking features, but with large cheek-bones. Good teeth, quite large. Brown eyes. Fine, chestnut brown hair worn in a ponytail. She was beautifully made-up, face, nails, the lot. White silk blouse, black leggings, black lace-up shoes. Oh, and she had a mock-leather jacket that she put on at the end and one of those large leather shoulder-bags with a zip.’

‘Accent?’

‘Home counties. Educated.’

‘Your memory isn’t so bad either. I take it that Imogen hasn’t changed her opinion about this elegant dame?’

‘She still believes Rose is in good hands.’

He clicked his tongue in dissent. ‘And I told her myself that the Hounslow address is false.’

‘She thinks it quite feasible that the family wanted to protect Rose from the press.’

‘Talk about Starr. Starry-eyed,’ he said.

‘Inexperienced,’ said Julie.

Doreen Jenkins’s integrity had unravelled as Julie had got on the trail, phoning around and checking the information. None of it had stood up to examination. Nothing was known of the family in Twickenham or Hounslow, nor of Jackie Mays, the friend who had been mentioned. Rose’s mother was supposed to have got a divorce and remarried in 1972. A check of all the marriages that year of men named Black had failed to link any with a woman whose surname was Jenkins.

Doreen Jenkins and her partner Jerry were supposed to have been staying at a bed and breakfast place in Bathford. Not one of the licensed boarding houses could recall a couple staying that week and being joined later by someone of Rose’s name or description.

‘Ada Shaftsbury was right all the time,’ Julie summed up. ‘This woman was lying through her teeth.’

‘Except for the photos,’ he said. ‘They must have been genuine to have convinced Ada as well as Imogen. They definitely showed Rose with an older woman.’

‘I’d be more impressed if they’d shown Doreen Jenkins in the same picture.’

‘You doubt if she’s the stepsister?’

‘Having spent this afternoon the way I did, I doubt everything the bloody woman said.’

Hunched over the drink, which he was taking in small sips like cough medicine, he said, ‘Why then? Why all the subterfuge?’

Julie shook her head, at a loss. ‘I spent the last two hours with Ada, going over everything again.’

‘With Ada?’

She nodded.

He shook his head. ‘You need a socking great drink.’

‘And some.’

‘I’ll join you.’ He closed his eyes and downed the last of the Diet Coke.

‘In that case,’ she said, ‘make it Diet Cokes for both of us.’

His mouth may have turned down at the edges, but he didn’t protest. Meekly he stepped back to the bar and when he returned with the drinks he told her, ‘Yours has vodka added.’

She said, ‘They look the same to me.’

‘Colourless, isn’t it?’ He took a long swig of his. ‘Now, Julie, I want to try out a theory on you. If it holds up, we may have a suspect for Gladstone’s murder.’

Rain turning to sleet, sweeping in on an east wind, rattled the metal-framed windows of the Manvers Street building as Diamond briefed the murder squad. It was nine-twenty on Wednesday morning. Sixteen of them had assembled, most in their twenties, in leather and denim, the ‘plain-clothes’ that is almost a CID uniform, their hair either close-cropped or overlong. John Wigfull, the only suit in the room, sat slightly apart, closest to the door. Behind Diamond was a display board with a map of north-east Avon showing Tormarton Farm marked with a red arrow. There were several eight-by-ten photos of the scene inside the farmhouse, the corpse slumped in an armchair, the back of the head blown away, the shotgun lying on the floor. That same gun in its transparent wrapping lay across a table. Already this morning Diamond had demonstrated the impossibility of Daniel Gladstone’s ‘suicide’. He had talked about the digging on the farm at Tormarton and the possible motive of theft. Now he turned to another incident.

‘Monday, October 3rd, about six-thirty. An elderly couple called Dunkley-Brown are driving back from Bristol to Westbury on the M4. At Junction Eighteen…’ He took a step towards the map and touched the point. ‘…they decide to take a detour through Bath to collect a Chinese takeaway. They start down the A46 and after maybe three-quarters of a mile – before Dyrham, anyway – they are forced to brake. A young woman has wandered into the road. They can’t avoid hitting her, but they think they’ve avoided a serious accident. She fell across the bonnet. But when they go to help her it’s clear that she’s lost consciousness. They try to revive her at the side of the road. This is a real dilemma for them because the man has endorsements for drunk driving and he’s had a few beers during the day. They don’t want to be identified. What they do is this: drive her to the nearest hospital, a private clinic, here…’ He touched the map again. ‘…the Hinton Clinic – and dump her unconscious in the car park. But they are seen leaving the hospital and they have a Bentley with a distinctive mascot, and that’s how we know as much as we do.

‘The woman is found and taken into the hospital still in a coma and at this point it becomes a police matter. We send someone to the Hinton, but without much result, because although the patient is nursed back to consciousness, she is apparently suffering from a total loss of memory about her past, everything leading up to and including the accident. However, her physical injuries amount to no more than a cracked rib and some bruising and she’s handed over to Bath Social Services. We send a photographer to get some pics of the damage. Screen, please.’

One of the squad unfurled the screen on the front wall. Diamond switched on a slide-projector and the back view of a naked woman appeared and was hailed with approving noises by the largely male audience. Julie Hargreaves shook her head at the juvenile reaction, but they quieted down when Diamond pointed out the cuts and bruising on the thighs and legs. The next slide, a frontal shot, still got a few rutting sounds, if more muted than before. The woman on the screen had attractive breasts and a trim waist, yet her discomfort at being photographed was evident in the pose.

‘That’s the end of the floorshow, gentlemen.’

Some good-humoured dissent was heard.

Diamond slotted in another slide, a close-up of the woman’s face, and left it on the screen while he told the story of Rose’s short stay at Harmer House, eventually concluding it with: ‘…and after she is collected by the woman claiming to be her stepsister, we hear no more of her. Nobody hears a dickybird, not Social Services, not Ada, not the Old Bill.’

The room had gone silent except for the steady drumming of the rain. To a murder squad, the disappearance of a woman is ominous.

‘What is more,’ Diamond added, ‘nothing holds up in the stepsister’s story. Julie spent most of yesterday checking.’ He paused and looked at the tense, troubled face on the screen. ‘It’s already two weeks since she was collected. We thought we knew her name and background, but we can’t be sure of it any more. We’ll continue to call her Rose. Take a long look. She’s top priority. We’ve got to find her.’

He made eye contact with Julie. ‘DI Hargreaves is in charge of the search.’

He turned back to the map. ‘Now, look at this, the point on the A46, here, where she wanders into the road out of nowhere, the first anyone has heard of her. It’s not a great distance from Tormarton, is it? Not a great distance from Daniel Gladstone’s farm.’ He spanned it roughly with his outstretched forefinger and thumb. ‘Two miles at most. Think about that, will you? And think about when it happened, Monday, October 3rd. Curious, isn’t it, that the Friday previous is the pathologist’s best estimate of the old farmer’s date of death?’

‘You think she killed him, sir?’ someone asked.

Diamond faced the screen, saying nothing.

‘How could she?’ one of the younger detectives asked. ‘You’d need two people. One to pull the trigger and the other to hold the old bloke still.’

Another chipped in. ‘Bloody risky, holding his head over a shotgun. I wouldn’t do it. You could get your face blown away, easy.’

‘What you do,’ said Keith Halliwell, the longest-serving member of the squad, ‘is tie him to the chair first.’

‘You think a woman trussed him up?’

‘No problem. He was seventy-plus. Did you look at her physique?’

‘Well…’

‘Keith did,’ said a mocking voice. ‘Keefy likes ‘em beefy.’

Diamond swung around, glaring at the unfortunate who had spoken. ‘Oh, dead funny. Why don’t you come up here and do your act from the front? We’ll all club together, buy a red nose and a whoopee cushion and get you into show business.’ With silence reinstated, he said, ‘Someone asked if I think Rose killed the farmer. I was coming to that.’ He let them stew for another interval while he walked across to the window and looked at the rain. ‘Yes. It’s a possibility. She was in the area at approximately the time he was killed. Very approximately. The pathologist will tell you we’re dealing in rough figures here. A couple of days either side. So let’s not get carried away. However-’ He paused to wipe some condensation from the window. ‘-if the loss of memory is genuine, it will have been caused by some deeply stressful, traumatic event. And not just concussion from the accident. That’s different. You don’t lose your long-term memory from a bump on the head. This woman is suffering from acute neurosis. The scene in that farmhouse was scary enough to throw anyone’s mind off beam. True, it seems to have been a cold-blooded execution, but the effect of that shotgun blasting the back of old Gladstone’s skull off may have been more of a shock to the killer than she expected. Enough to suppress her memory and wipe out her own identity. And for those of you thinking I know sod-all about traumatic disorders, I did consult a couple of textbooks. There have been cases like it.

‘And now you’re going to ask me about a motive and I can’t tell you one because I don’t know who the woman is. But the possibilities are there. You can say she hates him because of something evil he did in the past, like abusing her when she was a child, or raping her mother. Or she could be the cold-blooded sort, after his savings. She may be mad, of course.’

‘She may have no connection with the case,’ said Julie unexpectedly.

Diamond stopped for a moment as if Julie’s words were being played back to him. Then he turned to face her. ‘I thought I made that clear. This is just a hypothesis.’

‘So long as we don’t lose sight of it,’ she said.

The strains were showing. ‘So you think she’s a red herring?’

‘No, Mr Diamond, I’m agreeing with you that she’s got to be found. She may be dangerous, as you say, more dangerous than she herself realises. Or she may be in danger. I spent most of yesterday checking out the woman who took her away and finding everything she said is bogus, so you’ll understand why I see it this way. I got used to thinking of Rose as a victim, not a villain. Just another hypothesis.’

He drew himself back from the brink. He’d given Julie the job yesterday, the kind of research she did so well, systematically uncovering the deception. Moreover, she’d been exposed for a couple of hours to Ada’s anxieties about the missing woman. Was it any wonder that she took a different line?

‘Thanks, Julie. Point taken.’ He pitched his voice to the entire room again. ‘I propose to bring in the press at this stage. I’m issuing this picture of the missing woman with the few real facts we know about her. For public consumption we’re appealing for information because there’s concern for her safety. Understood? Julie, you’d better warn Social Services to be ready for some flak over this.’ He crossed the room and switched off the projector. ‘We’ll also go public on the killing of Daniel Gladstone. It’s going to make large headlines, I’m afraid. The execution-style killing of an old man is sure to excite the tabloids. For the time being we’ll treat the incidents as unrelated. Let’s see what the publicity brings in. And of course it’s all systems go on the murder inquiry. Keith, would you set up the incident room here? Frank, you’re in charge of the hunt for Rose Black. Jerry, the farmer’s background is your job. His life history – family, work, the state of his finances, the lot. I can give you some pointers if you see me presently.’ He went on assigning duties for several minutes more. This had always been one of his strengths, instilling urgency into an inquiry.

After Diamond had left the room, Keith Halliwell put a hand on Julie’s shoulder. ‘You’ve got more guts than the rest of us, kiddo, speaking out like that.’

She shook her head. ‘I knew what was coming. Had more time to think it over.’

‘What do you reckon?’ he asked. ‘Has the old buzzard flipped?

‘In what way?’

‘Picking on this woman as a suspect. Can you see a woman trussing up an old man and firing a shotgun at his head?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ she answered, sensitive to the discrimination. ‘Any fit woman is capable of it.’

He shrugged. ‘But would they carry it out? Don’t you think it’s too brutal?’

‘It’s a question of motivation.’

‘Unlikely, though.’ He stretched and yawned. ‘He made such a brilliant start, too, all that stuff about the shotgun. No one else in CID would have sussed that it was murder. John Wigfull didn’t, and he was supposed to be handling the case.’

Julie declined the invitation to rubbish Wigfull.

Halliwell continued to fret about Diamond’s startling theory. ‘I mean, all he’s got on the woman is that she was in the area – well, a couple of miles away – at the time of the killing, give or take a few days.’

‘Behaving strangely.’

‘Okay. Give you that.’

‘With loss of memory. And then she gets spirited away by someone telling a heap of lies.’

He laughed. ‘I should have known you’d back the old sod.’

‘The thing is,’ Julie said, ‘he’s not often wrong.’