‘He’s all right if you do the job. Now what are you calling yourself?’
‘Sir John Mason. There are several in Who’s Who. A computer-hacking friend of mine has found me the credit card details of one of them, and I’ve had my own card made by someone in the business. Satisfied?’
‘It will do, I guess.’ Rhadi cleared his throat nervously. ‘Now, these are your instructions. Listen carefully. When the time is right – and we don’t know when that will be – you’ll get a call from someone who won’t give his name.’
‘This ex-RAF type?’
‘He’ll simply tell you that the goods you ordered are coming in on… and he’ll name a date.’
‘The payday?’
‘Yes. Thank him and put the phone down. Don’t say any more. Then it will be all systems go. First, you pass on the info to me.’
‘This will be the date the Prince has booked at the hotel?’
‘Right. Then you go to a payphone at some suitable place – let’s say the Festival Hall – and call the Dorchester as – who was it?’
‘Sir John Mason.’
‘… and reserve one of the roof garden suites. Say you want it for a week.’
‘A week from when?’
‘The day following the date you have just been given. The Prince will be well installed by then.’
‘I give them the credit card details. If they check, they’ll find it’s all kosher.’
‘All right. You still have some money left, I hope?’
‘A little. Good suits don’t come cheap.’
‘You will also need some new luggage. A case, of superior quality. Fill it with bulky objects unconnected with yourself. Cushions, newspapers – something like that. Be careful not to leave fingerprints.’
‘I wasn’t born yesterday.’
Rhadi said primly, ‘I’m telling you all this because we won’t be in contact again – not until after it’s over. On the day, you must arrive in disguise, by a taxi hired outside one of the main railway stations. You will be carrying the suitcase. You check in to the Dorchester at two in the afternoon. No earlier, no later.’
‘How do I let you know which suite I’ve been given?’
‘Do you have a mobile?’
‘Of course.’
‘Get a new one. New number. Use it only for this. Once you’re alone in the suite, call Zahir and tell him where you are. This is his number. Got a pen?’
‘Go ahead.’ Harry noted it. ‘Do I call you as well?’
‘No need. Shortly after, Zahir will knock. You will admit him, and Ibrahim, and your job will be over, apart from leaving discreetly.’
‘I think I can manage that.’
‘Where will you go?’
‘Straight to Ireland. I have a cottage there.’
‘Good man.’
‘But I’ll be back for the payout. A hundred grand, we agreed. I have to say this, Rhadi. Perish the thought, but if your friends should be so unwise as to change their minds about my share, I know enough to put you all away, and I can arrange it at no risk to myself.’
‘Harry, that won’t happen. These are men of honour. When they give their word, they keep to it.’
‘They’d better.’
Georgina looked into Diamond’s office on the Thursday, two days after the search of his house. ‘Don’t get up.’
Unusually he was at the computer, checking the Scotland Yard site for the latest on the missing wife of DCI Weather, the old colleague Julie had mentioned. There was nothing new.
‘You look busy,’ she told him.
‘Raking through the embers, that’s all.’ He looked at her over the screen, fearing the worst. ‘Have you heard from forensics?’
‘About the gun? No. You know what they’re like. It could take another week.’ She remained standing, with her hands on the back of the chair in front of his desk. ‘Peter, I’m sorry the search had to be done the way it was, without even telling you in advance. I sanctioned the application for the warrant after Curtis McGarvie convinced me you probably had the gun in your possession. It wasn’t just a hunch. He looked at your service record, found you were an authorised shot’
‘He told me.’
‘The point is that the fatal bullets could have been fired from a police handgun. The calibre-‘
‘I know this, ma’am.’
‘And when he learned there were problems over the firearms issued from Fulham in your time there, and asked to see the records and found you were the last to use that particular gun, it couldn’t be shirked. You’d already denied owning a weapon. You weren’t going to put your hand up unless we produced it.’
‘Which you have.’
‘We’re not being po-faced about this. You wouldn’t be the first officer, or the last, to acquire a gun for his own protection. Because you denied it, we don’t automatically disbelieve everything else you said.’
He listened in silence, thinking this wasn’t the heart-to-heart it was meant to appear. She was doing her best to soften him up. When this didn’t work, McGarvie would put the boot in.
‘There’s tremendous sympathy for you in CID – as there is throughout the station,’ Georgina went on. ‘You’re under huge stress even without the extra pressure of the investigation. I have to say that Curtis has risked a lot of unpopularity from the ranks.’
‘My heart bleeds.’
‘He knew what the job implied when he took it on. He’ll get to the truth.’
‘He’s taking his time.’
‘That isn’t fair, Peter. He’s working flat out, and so are the team. If you’d been frank about the gun, you’d have saved him many hours of work.’
That angered him. ‘If you really want to know, I didn’t own up to the gun because I knew it would distract them. Yes, I’m out of order to have kept the thing, but everyone’s wasting their time on it. It’s six weeks since the murder and the trail’s gone cold.’
‘We don’t know that. Other lines of enquiry are being followed.’
‘Give it another two weeks and you’ll be standing people down. We both know the score.’
‘We’re giving this top priority.’
‘Next you’ll be telling me budgets don’t exist, Headquarters aren’t already breathing down your neck for a budget report.’
‘Peter, people are working overtime for nothing because of their loyalty to you. They want this killer caught.’
He nodded. ‘So why are you talking to me, ma’am? What’s behind this?’
Sounding almost maternal in her concern to keep him sweet, she said, ‘Is there anything else you haven’t mentioned? Anything we should know?’
She was fishing for the motive. The confession that his marriage was in trouble.
The devil in him made him lead her on a bit. ‘Off the record?’
‘There are only the two of us here.’
He could almost feel the heat of her charm.
‘I’ll come clean, then.’ Leaning forward, he said, ‘I loved my wife. Still do. Long after McGarvie has folded his tent and crept away I’ll be on the case. It may never come to court, but it’ll be solved, I promise you.’
Georgina’s voice altered. He’d touched a raw nerve. She told him, ‘How do I get through to you, Peter? We can’t allow you to get involved. It would sabotage everything. You know that.’
‘But I am involved. I’m your number-one suspect.’
‘Now, come on. That’s a bit much.’
‘So who’s in the frame apart from me?’
She was unprepared for that one. She could only counter it with an impatient sigh.
He said, ‘If I don’t point you in the right direction, I’m hung, drawn and quartered.’
‘Oh, be reasonable.’
‘Be reasonable? My place was searched twice. You authorised a warrant. You’ve taken away my wife’s private letters, interviewed me on tape, looked for dirt in my career record, accused me of forging the things in her diary. Is it any wonder I’m starting to sound
paranoid?’
She said, ‘I’ve told you I’m sorry about the way some of this has been handled. You and Curtis are totally opposite in most ways, but you share one thing. You don’t believe in sugaring the pill. I should have seen there would be personality problems when I asked for him. He’s still the best detective I could get. He has my confidence – I want to make that clear.’
‘You have, ma’am.’
‘And in case you’re wondering whose idea this conversation was, it was mine. I haven’t known you as long as most of the people in this place, but I share their respect for you, and their concern. I want to see you come through this.’
‘I will,‘he told her. ‘I will.’
On Monday morning he attended the inquest. It was mercifully straightforward, since the salient facts of Steph’s identity, and where, when and how she came to be dead were manifestly clear. As the coroner explained, apportioning blame was outside his jurisdiction. The jury might decide murder was done, but the process of identifying who was responsible would be up to the criminal court. Diamond listened to the two main witnesses, Warburton, passably sober this morning and wearing a suit, and Jim Middleton, the pathologist. The facts of the case were so firmly lodged in Diamond’s own mind that he could listen impassively, even when the phrase ‘an execution-style shooting’ was used. His own testimony was limited to stating when he had last seen Steph alive and explaining that he couldn’t account for her being found in the park.
The police were represented by McGarvie, who gave evidence about the recovery of the bullets and the finding of the handbag and the diary entry. He said nothing about the discovery of the handgun in Diamond’s garden, merely informing the court that enquiries were continuing.
The coroner adjourned the inquest, pending further investigations.
Outside, Diamond declined to make any kind of comment when the press converged. They took their photos on the move, while he marched briskly to the car park.
And then stopped.
McGarvie was beside his car. ‘I know you’ve been waiting on the ballistics tests, as we all have,’ he said. ‘I called them first thing this morning.’
‘And…?’
‘The results are inconclusive.’
‘You mean the bullets weren’t fired from the gun?’
‘No. They can’t say either way, so they’re test-firing again.’
‘At your request, I suppose.’
‘Yours, also, I expect,’ McGarvie said with a faint smirk. ‘It’s in everyone’s interest to have the truth, I would have thought’
‘Did they find any prints on the gun?’
‘Wiped. It was wrapped in a cloth.’
Diamond got into his car and drove back to Bath.
‘Inconclusive’ meant that the rifling on the test round was not identical with the bullets they’d found, but close enough for suspicion. One bullet had been crushed by some emergency vehicle and was probably unsuitable for ballistic analysis. The other had passed through bone and possibly struck stone when hitting the ground, and the match was likely to be less than perfect. Like fingerprinting, ballistic proof depends on sufficient points of similarity.
So he still faced the sickening possibility that Steph had been murdered with the gun he had stupidly kept all those years. How the killer had found it, he could only guess. He had two hypotheses, equally painful to accept. Firstly, it was possible Steph had discovered the gun herself and instead of asking him what the hell he was doing with it she had confided in someone she mistakenly believed she could trust – this T’. Theory number two: she had trusted; someone, some Trojan Horse, so well that he was given the run of the house and went up into the loft and found the gun. It seemed fantastic, but a fantastic crime required a fantastic explanation.
He bought a burger and a beer and sat in his usual seat below the west front of the Abbey where the mediaeval stone angels scarred and mutilated by five hundred years of weather clung resolutely to their ladders. Watching them at the edge of his vision he sometimes caught them on the move. He’d fix his gaze on the left side, and the angels on the right would climb up a rung or two, always upwards. He knew it was impossible and an optical illusion, but it lifted his own spirits when it happened.
The events of the last twenty-four hours were being manipulated by the police to make him break faith with Steph. Uncomfortable facts had to be faced. What other construction was there to put on the entries she’d made in the diary than that she was meeting somebody she’d never mentioned to him? None he could think of. Fair enough, she was his wife, not his ten-year-old daughter, and she had a perfect right to meet people without telling him every detail. She didn’t demand to know how he spent every hour of each day. Yet it wasn’t in Steph’s nature to have secrets from him. She was open about everything. She would enjoy telling him how she’d spent each day and he’d looked forward every evening to hearing her lively slant on the things she’d done and the contacts she’d made. This had been one of the strengths of their marriage. Nothing had been off-limits.
Nothing except…
He sat forward and his hand went to his face. There was a part of her life they scarcely ever mentioned. Her first marriage, a time of such unhappiness that it never lost the power to hurt.
Her dipstick ex-husband, who hadn’t bothered to turn up to the funeral, nor even leave a message that he regretted her cruel death, had been called Edward. That was the name she’d used on the rare occasions she spoke of him. Edward. The formality distanced him from her.
Edward Dixon-Bligh.
What a mouthful.
Surely when she lived with him she would have called him Ted.
His eyes travelled up the Abbey front. One of those angels had just moved.
16
That evening he repeatedly tried the London number he believed was Dixon-Bligh’s and kept getting the same answerphone message: a plummy voice asking the caller to leave a name and number and ‘I’ll get back to you toot-sweet’ It grated after the third or fourth try, especially as the message didn’t supply a name. Never having met the man, he couldn’t tell for certain if the voice belonged to Steph’s ex.
He left a message saying it was extremely important that they spoke, however late.
But in this case, ‘toot-sweet’ meant ‘not tonight’.
Lying awake waiting for the call that didn’t come, he tried to think of a reason why that pig of a husband might have resurfaced in Steph’s life. The most plausible was that he’d run through his money and appealed to her for funds. She’d always been a soft touch, helping scatty friends who couldn’t pay the phone bill and were threatened with disconnection. She sometimes bought the same Big Issue three times over to help homeless people. It wouldn’t have required much of a sob story from Dixon-Bligh to have her reaching for her chequebook. She hadn’t forgotten the misery of life with him, but she’d still fork out.
Even Steph, generous as she was, must have sensed that it wasn’t a good idea to meet her ex-husband. She would have preferred dealing with him by phone and post. Most likely he concocted some reason for meeting her in the park. It had been written in her diary, so it was fixed ahead of time. Maybe he’d offered to hand over something that belonged to her.
Surely he wasn’t blackmailing her?
Blackmail?
At night, a tired brain can dredge up dark thoughts, and Diamond’s years in the police had given him plenty of practice. Was it possible Dixon-Bligh had evidence -letters, photos, press clippings – touching on some part of Steph’s early life she had wanted to forget? Some youthful indiscretion? A drugs episode? Drunk-driving? A relationship with some notorious character? No, it wasn’t about covering up old scars. It had to be more damaging. Could she have committed some criminal act that had gone undetected?
Come off it, he told himself. This isn’t Steph you’re thinking about. She was no more of a saint than any other spirited woman, but she wasn’t into crime.
He turned over and looked at the clock.
One-fifteen.
Then he sat up and switched on the light. This had to be thought through. If he was dealing with anyone else but Steph, he’d put blackmail top of the list. It was a classic set-up: the no-good ex-husband worming back into her life and threatening to tell all. He’d offer to hand over the evidence in return for cash. She’d agree to meet him on neutral ground. The diary appeared to confirm it.
Then what?
My God, he thought, as the scenario flashed up in his brain. She had armed herself. She must have gone up to the loft one ill-starred day and found that sodding gun. When Dixon-Bligh resurfaced in her life making threats and demanding money she’d taken it with her to meet him in the park. Most likely she had no thought of killing him. She’d meant to produce the gun and demand the return of whatever he was using as the basis of blackmail. That much was consistent with Steph’s character. She had a streak of defiance and was as fearless as a tigress.
She had taken the gun with her, but she had no experience of handling it. Dixon-Bligh had grabbed it and shot her. If charged, he would offer that well-tried defence: there was a struggle and the gun went off.
But right now, he’d be thinking he’d got away with it. He’d have judged, correctly, that Steph wouldn’t have mentioned the blackmail to anyone else. He wouldn’t know about the diary entries.
Certain he wouldn’t get to sleep for hours now, Diamond got up and pulled on the clothes he’d dropped in a heap in the corner a couple of hours before. He needed physical activity. Fresh air.
Fresh it was. A sharp east wind was blowing up Weston High Street, shifting the discarded packs and paper cups outside the takeaway. He pulled up the collar of his overcoat and jammed his old trilby more tightly over his bald patch. The occasional car passed him, but no one else was desperate enough to be walking the streets.
It was painful, this process of speculating on the bits of Steph’s life she may have wanted to keep from him. It was alien to their relationship. She had known the worst about him and taken him on with all his faults, and he’d always told her everything. No, he thought, that isn’t true. Who am I kidding? I kept things back. I didn’t tell her I kept the gun all those years, mainly because I knew she’d hate to have such a thing in the house. And if I wasn’t open with Steph, and she found out, she was entided to feel let down. Was it any wonder she kept quiet about what happened after she found it?
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