The Last Detective pd-1

by Peter Lovesey

  'You said something just now about a panic'

  He nodded. 'That happened later the same evening.'

  'On the Sunday?'

  'Right. I can't say whether this has any connection with Gerry's death. As a result of all the publicity in the run-up to the exhibition, I'd been offered a number of items with Austen connections – a model of a ship once captained by Jane's brother Frank, some silhouette pictures of characters from novels, early editions with special bindings and so on. Most of it was unsuitable for my purposes, but on the eve of the exhibition I was made a present of two letters dating from the year 1800 that, if genuine, could cause a sensation in literary circles. They were apparently written by Jane Austen to her Aunt Jane, who lived for some years in Bath.'

  'Some present!' Wigfull commented.

  As if concerned that he might have overstated the importance of the letters, Jackman said, 'They were quite short and they said nothing very startling, but their interest to scholars would be considerable. Obviously I couldn't put them on display without authentication. However, I was mightily excited about them, as you may imagine, and keen to add them to the exhibits if they proved to be genuine. Naturally I showed them to Dr Junker. He knows Jane's handwriting better than I, and his opinion was that she had written them.'

  'Really? And how did you say you came by them?'

  'They were handed to me by somebody who had seen me plugging the exhibition on TV. The donor didn't want any publicity, and I promised to respect that wish. I believe they were part of a batch of old letters sold by a philatelist for the postmarks. This was before postage stamps came in. Before envelopes were used. Letters would be written on one side of a sheet of paper, addressed on the other, then folded and sealed. The Post Office would frank them. People collect them for the postmarks, but they're not so sought after as are letters bearing Penny Blacks and other early Victorian stamps, and you can sometimes pick them up for peanuts.'

  'Unless they happen to have been written by a world-famous novelist.'

  Jackman permitted himself a fleeting smile. 'You mean unless the seller is smart enough to know what he is selling. These were signed 'Your affectionate niece, Jane'. Janes were pretty thick on the ground in 1800. You'd need to know that Mrs Leigh Perrot was Jane Austen's maternal aunt.'

  'What sort of price would a Jane Austen letter fetch?'

  'Hard to say. There are about a hundred and fifty letters extant, and they rarely come up for sale. I think one could be sure of a five-figure bid in a London auction.'

  'I wonder if the donor had any idea of the value,' Wigfull mused.

  Jackman shook his head. 'Highly unlikely. I intended to offer them back if they proved to be genuine.'

  His use of the past tense prompted Wigfull to say, 'Something went wrong?'

  Jackman looked sheepish as he admitted, 'They went missing from my desk drawer. I should have had them under lock and key. Foolishly, I didn't. That Sunday evening, when I happened to go to the drawer, they weren't there. Of course I took everything out and went through all the papers. I pulled out the drawer to see if they had fallen behind it. I asked Gerry if she'd taken them out for any reason. She said she hadn't.'

  'She knew of the letters' existence?'

  'Oh, yes. She was present when Junker examined them. Gentlemen, I felt sick to the stomach. I was damned sure somebody had been to that drawer and taken them. Of course I went through the house searching-1 was at it until well after midnight – but there was no reason why those letters should have been anywhere but in the desk. Finally, I had a blazing row with Gerry and accused her of stealing them. It was bloody ironic – I must have sounded just as paranoid as she had when she'd accused me of tampering with her car and things like that. Quite a head case.'

  Diamond had contained himself admirably. Now he couldn't resist coming in with, 'A blazing row? What do you mean by that? Did you knock her around?'

  'No. I don't go in for violence.' Jackman glared at him, affronted at the suggestion.

  'When was this – Sunday night or Monday morning?'

  'Monday, I suppose.'

  'You supposed

  'I mean it must have been in the small hours. I told you I spent the whole evening looking for the letters.'

  'Where did this row take place – in the bedroom?'

  Jackman's expression began to take on a hunted look. 'Yes, as a matter of fact. She was already in bed.'

  'Asleep? You woke her up and accused her of stealing them?'

  'Hold on,' said Jackman. 'She was still awake,'

  'You didn't take hold of her and shake her?'

  'Absolutely not.'

  'A blazing row, you said.'

  'There was shouting. I said

  'There was shouting. I said she must have taken them to spite me. I demanded to know where they were.'

  'Tell me precisely where you were standing when this exchange took place,' demanded Diamond.

  Jackman hesitated, frowning. 'I don't know. I moved. I wasn't in the same position.'

  'Moved towards the bed?'

  'Possibly. I didn't touch her, if that's what you're still on about. I didn't lay a finger on her.'

  'Not at that point?'

  'Nor later.'

  'The next morning?'

  'No.'

  'Sometimes, Professor, people have blazing rows and don't remember very much of what they said and did.' Diamond had switched to a more measured tempo. Interrogation ceases to be productive after a few minutes at the rhythm he had struck.

  'That isn't the case,' Jackmari insisted. 'I remember precisely what happened. We shouted some abuse at each other and she laughed at me, which only made me more angry. She said I deserved to lose the letters for not having locked them away. She was right, of course, but I didn't enjoy the way she rubbed it in when I suspected her all the time of having hidden them somewhere out of mischief or malice. After a while we just stopped talking to each other.'

  'Would you describe yourself as a man with a short fuse?' Diamond asked, reluctant to step down as the interrogator.

  'What do you mean – a quick temper? No, I don't often lose control.'

  'But you did on this occasion.'

  'Only in the sense that I spoke my angry thoughts spontaneously. If I'd attacked her physically – which is what you seem to want me to say – do you think I'd be telling you this?'

  Diamond gave a benign smile and commented, 'Sometimes it's a relief to talk about it.'

  The response to that suggestion was that Jackman's mouth clamped shut, whereupon Diamond withdrew from the skirmish and gestured to his assistant with a lordly extended hand.

  There was a pause. Then: 'Did you consider the possibility,' John Wigfull ventured, 'that Dr Junker had taken the letters?' It was as neat a way as any of restoring communication.

  After sustaining his silence a moment longer, the professor consented to answer. 'Of course it occurred to me later. Gerry was the obvious suspect, but I couldn't discount Junker. It's an unpleasant fact that academics aren't above stealing. They become so engrossed in a field of study that they consider it their right to acquire original documents and first editions, dishonestly if necessary. Every university librarian has horror stories of light-fingered researchers. To answer your question, yes, I began to believe that Junker couldn't be ruled out.' began to believe that Junker couldn't

  'But he'd left your house by then?'

  'Hours before. As I told you, I'd driven him to the station in time to catch the 4.12 to Paddington. He was planning to visit Professor Dalrymple at University College on the Monday, and then he was going on to Paris to begin his vacation. The more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself that I should go after him. So after not much sleep Sunday night, I got up early on Monday and caught a train to London.'

  'The 8.19, you told us when you first reported her disappearance.'

  This small feat of memory by the inspector clearly impressed Jackman, if not Diamond.

  'Yes.'


  'And that was the last time you saw your wife. Was she awake?'

  Jackman tilted his head. 'I told you that, too.'

  'What exactly was said?'

  'I told her I was going after Junker, to ask about the letters.'

  Across the table, Diamond shifted in his chair and said, 'That wasn't the way you put it to us. You said you had to see various people about the loan of manuscripts.' A comment calculated to show that he, too, retained a memory of what had been said before.

  Without turning to look at Diamond, Jackman said, 'When I first spoke to you, I didn't think it would be necessary to bring up the business of the missing letters.' necessary to bring up the business of the 'You wanted to keep it to yourself?'

  'If possible, yes.'

  Diamond commented to Wigfull, 'Worth picking up these discrepancies. Carry on.'

  'What happened?' Wigfull asked the professor. 'Did you catch up with Dr Junker?'

  'He didn't, after all, visit University College. He missed his appointment with Dalrymple, which made me suspicious. He'd phoned Dalrymple from Heathrow with some excuse about a late change in his flight arrangements to Paris, so I beetled off down to Heathrow with all speed and took the first flight I could to Paris.'

  'Did you know where he was staying?'

  'No, and I knew he hadn't made a reservation, because he wasn't expecting to leave London before Tuesday, so when I arrived at Charles de Gaulle, I went straight to the Tourist Information Office at the airport and asked for their help. I said I needed urgently to find a colleague. He had called there and they'd sent him to a small hotel near the Sorbonne.'

  'Was he there?'

  'Not when I arrived, but he had taken a room. I booked in at the same place and settled down to wait for as long as necessary. Finally, about eleven, he came in. He was surprised to see me, but not obviously alarmed. I explained my reason for being there, putting it as delicately as I could that maybe the Jane Austen letters had got among his papers in error – an invitation, in effect, to return them to me, and no recriminations. I'd thought it through. I didn't want to bring charges. I just wanted those letters back.'

  'Did he have them?'

  Jackman shook his head. 'I'm satisfied that he didn't. If he was deceiving me, he did it brilliantly. He was troubled for me and yet sufficiently shocked that I could have suspected him of taking them. He invited me up to his room and we went through his luggage together. He turned out his pockets, his wallet, everything. I had to admit in the end that Geraldine must have taken them. I flew back the next day, meaning to get the truth from her – and of course she wasn't there.'

  'You didn't regard it as a police matter?' i

  'The theft of the letters? Who else could have taken them but Gerry? I believed I could get the truth from her without making it public. And I didn't want the donor of the letters to know that they were missing.'

  'You haven't given us the name of this generous benefactor.'

  'I told you. It's confidential.'

  Diamond said, 'Come off it, Professor. This is murder we're investigating, not kiss and run.'

  Adamantly, Jackman said, 'I gave my word. That's it.'

  'There's such a thing as obstructing the police in the course of their inquiries, you know.'

  'I am not being obstructive. It has no direct relevance to Gerry's death.'

  'That's for us to decide.'

  'No,' insisted Jackman. 'The decision is mine.'

  Chapter Four

  'Any questions?'

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

  'Go to it, then.'

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

  'Val.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  'Will you arrest him, then?'

  'Would you?' In the minds

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

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

  'We won't get that tonight.'

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

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

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

  'That's already in hand.'

  'And the University College professor – Dalrymple?'

  'Boon is dealing with it.'

  'So what's the plan, sir?'

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

  'It doesn't justify killing her.'

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

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

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

  That is a possibility,' Wigfull generously admitted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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