His spirits plummeted again on learning from a hairy young man in army fatigues that Una had moved out.
“Where can I find her?”
“Who are you, then?”
“A friend.”
“What time is it?”
Diamond usually asked that himself, and expected to be told. “Around two-thirty, I imagine. Where will I find her at this time?”
“Up the uni.”
“The university?”
“Unicycle.”
“Ah.” Diamond’s face registered the strain of this mental leap.
“Down by the abbey,” his informant volunteered, and then asked, “If you’re a friend, how come you don’t know she juggles?”
Diamond got back in the cab.
A crowd of perhaps eighty had formed a semicircle around two performers in the Abbey Churchyard, close to the Pump Room. A man in a scruffy evening suit and top hat was doing a fire-eating act before handing the lighted torches to a young woman wobbling on a unicycle, who juggled with them. Not a convenient moment to question her about the Trim Street squat.
She was as thin as a reed, with a face like a ballerina’s and fine, dark hair in a plait that flicked about on her back with her movements controlling her bike. Ms. Moon, beyond any doubt.
A church clock chimed the third quarter and Diamond seriously considered interrupting the performance, regardless that it wouldn’t be a popular move, and might be dangerous. He decided to give them two minutes more, two minutes he could use to update himself on the siege, for the north end of the Abbey Churchyard led to Orange Grove. He strode in that direction.
Street barriers had been placed across the pedestrian crossing by the Guildhall, blocking the access to Orange Grove. A constable was stretching a band of checkered tape across the pavement.
Diamond explained who he was and asked what was happening now. On Commander Warrilow’s orders, he learned, the area in front of the Empire Hotel had been closed to traffic and pedestrians. Sensitive listening equipment had been set up and certain landmarks around Orange Grove were being used as observation points. Someone was posted on the roof of the abbey in the tower at the northeast end; not a marksman, the constable thought. It wouldn’t be good public relations, would it, to use a place of worship as a gun emplacement?
“Have they appeared at the window at all since the girl was spotted?” Diamond asked.
“Not so far as I know, sir. He won’t let her do that again, will he? He’s got the whole hotel to himself, so he might as well keep her in a room at the back. There’s plenty of choice.” This policeman seemed to be making a bid for CID work.
“Yes, but he’ll want to see what’s going on down here,” Diamond pointed out.
“He’d do better to watch the stairs inside the building. That’s how we’ll reach him-unless Mr. Warrilow is planning something dramatic with a helicopter.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me.”
It was time he returned to the buskers. The crowd was clapping as he crossed the yard. Evidently the show was ending. People on the fringe started moving away. A few generous souls stayed long enough to throw coins into the top hat. The next act, a string quartet, was waiting to take over the pitch.
Una Moon was gathering up smoking torches when Diamond approached her and introduced himself. The moment Samantha was mentioned she stood up and said earnestly, “Is she all right? Have you found her?”
“Let me get you some tea and we can talk,” he offered without answering the question. “There’s a cafe in the covered market with a place to sit down, or used to be.”
She asked if her friend the fire-eater could join them. Buskers stick together when hospitality is on offer. The fellow in the top hat winked companionably.
Diamond fished in his pocket for a few silver coins and asked the fire-eater to cool his mouth somewhere else. And returned the wink.
He offered to carry the unicycle the short way to the Guildhall market, which is hidden behind the Empire Hotel and the Guildhall. The market cafe wasn’t quite in the class of the Pump Room for afternoon tea, but it was almost as convenient, and a better place to interview a busker. Seated opposite Diamond, across a table with a green Formica top, she warmed her hands around the thick china mug and watched him speculatively with her dark brown eyes.
“You ought to wear more in this weather,” he told her, eyeing the thin black sweatshirt she had on.
She ignored that. “Tell me about Sam.”
He could ignore things, too, when it suited him. “We don’t have much time. Una Moon. That’s your real name, is it?”
She frowned. “What’s it to you?”
“Not many of you people use your real names, do you?”
“Why should we?” she rounded on him. “It’s a free world. We have a right to protect ourselves from goons like you slotting us into the system. I want to be an individual, not a piece of computer data.”
“But Una Moon is your own name?”
“How do you know that?”
“From a computer. And before you protest about your civil liberty, it’s a national computer. I’m on it, too, and so is the Prime Minister and everyone who keeps a car.”
She scowled. “I don’t keep a car.”
He said, “We needn’t go into the reason why you appear.” He’d decided a touch of intimidation would speed the process.
She stared defiantly.
“Sam also uses her own name,” he pointed out.
“She’s new to this. She’ll learn-if she survives. It’s bloody disgraceful that you haven’t caught the bloke by now.” Una was more aggressive than the girlish features and plait suggested.
He remarked, “I sense that you’re not comfortable with somebody like me knowing your name.”
“Piss off, copper.”
“By the way you speak, you had a middle-class upbringing and a good education. Were you at university?”
“Listen,” she said. “Whether I went to university doesn’t matter a toss. What are you-trying to relate to me, or something? There are more important things to do, you know.”
“You’ve been living this life for some years, I take it?”
“What do you mean-‘this life’? The squatting? Of course I bloody have, ever since I dropped out of Oxford. Now I’ve told you-I was in college for a year and a bit. Can we move on to some more useful topic, like what you’re going to do about Sam?”
He persisted. “You were living in the Trim Street squat at the time Britt Strand was murdered. I’ve seen your photo.”
She became more defensive. “She wasn’t killed in that house. None of us had anything to do with that.”
“She visited the squat to research an article and have the pictures taken. That was only ten days before she died. How much do you remember about it?”
“Have you got a cigarette?”
He shook his head. “Have to use one of your own.”
She produced a matchbox from her pocket and took out a half-smoked cigarette and a match and lit up. “Britt Strand knew what she wanted and how to get it. She picked up one of the guys in the squat-well, the number one guy really, and got to work on him to soften up the rest of us for this piece she was going to write.”
“You mean G.B.?”
She nodded.
“Another one who prefers to be nameless,” commented Diamond.
“That’s his choice.”
“Fine, but I’m willing to bet he doesn’t have G.B. written on his social security documents.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Were you ever his girl?”
She gave him a glare. “That’s typical of the way you people see us. Just because we lived in the same building it doesn’t mean we screwed. There were other people around, you know. It was a community, right?”
“So nobody minded him bringing this smart Swedish blonde to write up the story of your squat?”
“I wouldn’t say nobody minded, but it was G.B.’s gaff. He staked
it out and made sure it was empty.”
“How’s that done?”
“Lots of ways. You slide dry leaves in the slits in the door and check if they’ve moved in a couple of days. You can shove fly posters through the letter box and see if they get picked up. Of course you go back and see if there are lights at night. G.B. did all that. He was the first one in. It was thanks to him we had a place to doss down.”
“G.B. is a bright lad.”
“He’s switched on, but he lost cred with some of us when it was obvious the Swedish bird had him on a string. He really got it bad.”
“How do you know?”
She sighed and glared. “They’d been seen around. There isn’t much you can do in this poky town without everyone knowing about it.”
“But he consulted you all about bringing her to the house, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he told us what she was asking. We talked it through. Some of our crowd didn’t want their faces in the papers. G.B. said the piece Britt was supposed to be writing wasn’t for a British magazine. She was going to sell it abroad, so in the end we agreed. After all, she was willing to pay for it.”
“No one had second thoughts?”
“What do you mean?”
“After the visit, was anyone nervous over what she would write?”
“Like what-getting labeled as scroungers, or something? We’re used to that.”
“Did she ask any personal questions?”
“Not to me.” Una reached for the tin ashtray between them. “What are you driving at? Do you think one of our lot topped her?”
“It’s possible. Maybe-as you said-someone objected to being photographed.”
“If they did, they should have topped the photographer, not the writer.”
“Too late. The pictures were taken,” said Diamond. “The article was never written, so the pictures were never published.”
“Where did you see them?” she asked.
“At the photographer’s. Do you remember Prue Shorter, a large lady?”
She gave a nod, eyed his physique and seemed on the point of saying something, before thinking better of it and putting the cigarette to her lips instead.
“I’ve seen all the shots that were taken that afternoon,” he went on. “Not the kind of stuff you find in glossy magazines. I’ve been trying to work out why Britt was so interested in you lot. There isn’t much glamor in a bunch of crusties and their dogs and a heap of beer cans in a back street in Bath.”
“Some of us cleaned the place up for those pictures,” Una recalled.
“I beg your pardon. But it wasn’t long after the murder that you all moved out, am I right?”
“Not long.”
“Any reason?”
“G.B.,” she said. “Trim Street was his gaff. He got depressed. The entire house was pit city when he was feeling low. There were rows all the time. Some of us couldn’t stand it and shoved off. I must have been in six different gaffs since then.”
“With some of the old crowd?”
“Here and there.”
“G.B. is still about.”
“Yes.” She grinned. “He’s got it made. He’s a cool cat now.”
“You’re not bitter toward him?”
“G.B. is all right.” The words didn’t convey the way she spoke. This was a high compliment.
“A regular guy?”
“Better than that. He could have made us pay. I’ve heard of guys who open up empty houses and act as squat brokers. G.B. never asked for a penny.”
“I think he makes his money pushing drugs,” said Diamond.
She blew out smoke and looked up into the domed roof.
“How about Samantha?” He switched the subject. “When did she move in?”
“To Widcombe Hill? Not so long ago. In the summer. She had a bust-up with her parents. The usual story. She’s younger than I am, hasn’t had the corners knocked off yet, if you know what I mean, but I like Sam. It was bloody irresponsible when the papers printed that stuff about her busking- her old man being in the police and all that.”
“You can’t blame the press for what happened.”
“I can and I do.” Her small mouth tightened so hard that the color drained from her lips.
“You know her,” said Diamond. “How will she stand up to this kidnapping?”
“She’s quite strong mentally. She’ll hold out if she gets the chance. My fear is that this Mountjoy guy will get heavy with her. The asshole has been violent to women before. I remember reading about him after he was sentenced. His marriage broke up through the way he treated his wife. And there was some other woman he beat up.” Una jabbed her cigarette into the ashtray. “You’ve got to find her fast.”
“Oh, but we have. She’s in the next building to this.” While Diamond told her about the incident at the window of the Empire Hotel, Una stared like an extra overacting in a silent film. “What we’ve got now,” he summed it up, “is a siege, an armed siege.”
“He’s armed?” she whispered.
“If we want to avert a tragedy, someone must talk him down, and that’s me. But he isn’t interested unless I crack the Britt Strand case. I’m ninety-nine percent sure Mountjoy wasn’t the murderer. It’s down to a handful of suspects, which is why I’m talking to you.”
“You suspect me?”
Under her anxious scrutiny, he answered candidly, “I’ve no reason to, but you’re one of the people I didn’t question four years ago. You may know something nobody else does.”
“Is that why you asked me about G.B.? You suspect him?”
He swirled the dregs of his tea and put the mug to his mouth.
“He’s not violent,” she said, the outraged words tumbling so fast from her lips that they merged and practically lost their sense. “I’ve never known G.B. to attack anyone. Never. Just because he’s big doesn’t mean he’s dangerous. You’re so wrong about this.”
He sat back and passed a hand over his smooth head. “I haven’t made up my mind.”
She said, “G.B. had a thing for Britt. He wouldn’t have harmed her.”
He didn’t spell out the logic that a man in love, even a man with no violent tendencies, might be driven to kill if he learned that his lover was entertaining someone else. “What I’d really like to discover,” he said, “was why Britt Strand went stalking G.B. in the first place.”
“Obviously she was using him to get inside the house.”
“But why? As I said just now, what was so special about you lot?”
“It wasn’t us,” said Una. “It was a previous tenant.”
Intrigued, he waited for her to elaborate.
And she waited, before saying, “Well, you know who lived in Trim Street.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Jane Austen.”
He frowned. “The writer?” It was a dumb thing to say, but he had been thinking in terms of the twentieth century.
“Well, she did produce four or five of the greatest novels in the English language, yes.”
“Jane Austen once lived in the house you squatted in? Are you sure?” Here it was, apparently, the answer he’d been seeking for days.
“No,” she answered. “I’m not sure, and nobody can be, because the house number isn’t mentioned in the letters. The only certain thing is that she and her mother had to take lodgings in Trim Street after her father died. It was a poor address and they hated it.”
He felt elated. He couldn’t take much credit for rooting out the information, but it was one part of the mystery solved apparently. “How do you know all this?”
“Before I dropped out of Oxford I read Jane Austen. She was the only author I could stomach. I devoured all the novels and the juvenilia and the collected letters. I thought I remembered Trim Street and after we moved in, I went to the Central Library to check. In one letter, before the family even moved to Bath, Jane wrote that her mother would do everything in her power to avoid Trim Street, so you can imagine their feeling
s when they ended up there, in 1806. It must have been hell. But you can see why it interested Britt Strand.”
He was trying to contain his excitement, and not succeeding. “A Jane Austen house taken over by squatters? Yes, I can. It was the hook to hang her story on.”
Una had obviously reached this conclusion some time ago. “It isn’t known which house in Trim Street the Austen family actually lived in, so Britt could pick on our squat in the certainty that nobody could prove her wrong. It was as likely as any other.”
“Dead right,” he agreed. “You see those photos and you need no persuading. Gracious Georgian fireplaces heaped with beercans. Graffiti. Crusties and their dogs sprawled around. Jane Austen’s home desecrated.”
This was a touch too strong for Una. “Hold on, we didn’t desecrate anything. We used the toilets properly. We didn’t smash windows or start a fire.”
“The point isn’t how you behaved. It’s how the story would have read in the magazine. Jane Austen-”
She cut in savagely. “Bugger Jane Austen. While you sit here talking about some dead writer, Sam is tied up in that hotel with a gun at her head waiting for you to do something.”
He was unmoved. “This isn’t a one-man show. The place is under surveillance. What you’ve just told me is more important than you realize. I needed to know this. Who else have you told.”
“Nobody. Who’s interested, for God’s sake?”
“G.B.? Are you sure you didn’t tell G.B.?”
She shook her head.
“Positive?”
“Why give him unnecessary grief?” she asked.
“Grief? Why should it grieve him?”
“He thought Britt fancied him, poor sap.”
Julie was in their office at Manvers Street when Diamond walked in. “I couldn’t trace you,” she said, and when it sounded like a lame excuse she added more assertively, “Don’t you think you ought to carry a personal radio or a mobile phone?”
If it was meant as a serious suggestion, she could have saved her breath. “Did you follow that woman, Billington’s visitor?” he asked.
“I did.”
“And…?”
“She isn’t his sister.”
“Who is she?”
“Her name is Denise Hathaway and she runs the sub-post office in Iford.”
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