The House Sitter

by Peter Lovesey

  “Apart from a woman with her head bashed in and a broken arm?” Bradley said. “What do you want? Teeth all over the room?”

  Diamond could have erupted, but it was a fair point, forcefully made, and he kept quiet.

  Like Bradley, Hen was in no doubt as to Michael Smith’s guilt, and now she threw in more damning information. “Yesterday you asked me who called the ambulance. It wasn’t Smith. It was the woman next door, Mrs Mead.”

  “How come?” Diamond said.

  Hen invited Bradley to explain.

  “What happened was that the Smiths’ sprog-”

  “Haley,” Diamond put in. He hated children being downgraded.

  “Haley comes home on the school bus around three forty-five, can’t get in, gets no answer when she knocks, so goes next door, knowing Mrs Mead has a spare key. Mrs Mead goes round and finds Olga Smith lying here and calls an ambulance.”

  “Was it also Mrs Mead who noticed Michael Smith’s Honda parked outside between two and three?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to meet this splendid woman.”

  First, they looked into the other rooms. You learn a lot about the occupants of a house by seeing how they treat their surroundings. This seemed a lived-in home, with reassuring (or misleading) signs of family harmony. Holiday photos and postcards around the kitchen. A noticeboard with reminders pinned to it. Recipes cut from colour magazines. A sliced homemade cake under a perspex cover. Coffee mugs waiting to be washed. Haley’s school blouse hanging up to dry. A wooden chest for her toys, with her name painted on it.

  Diamond sifted through a batch of photos of the Smiths. The father had the same expression in all of them, with half-closed, ungenerous eyes and only the vestige of a smile. Olga Smith, a short, pretty blonde, projected a warmer personality. He picked out a head and shoulders shot of the pair of them in their garden and pocketed it.

  Upstairs, the duvets were turned back to air, and clean clothes waited to be put away. The Smiths’ bedroom didn’t have the look of a battleground. They shared a kingsize bed. Each had a pile of books. He was reading Jeffrey Archer (but you can’t condemn a man for that) and she Victoria Beckham’s autobiography. His bedside drawer contained a bottle of massage oil and a gross-size box of condoms, with only a handful left; hers, a pack of tissues, a Miss Dior spray, a half-eaten bar of chocolate and a mini Cointreau.

  One glance into Haley’s room left them in no doubt that she was well treated. She had a vast collection of stuffed toys, a wigwam, a riding helmet, a computer, her own TV and three shelves of books.

  The third bedroom had been converted into an office, with two filing cabinets and a computer. Diamond picked some letters off the desk. One was a bank statement.

  “The argument wasn’t over money by the look of things.” He showed it to Hen. It was a fourteen-day notice account. Michael L. Smith had a hundred and twenty thousand on deposit. “Is that the kind of money a bookshop manager stacks away?”

  “If it is, we’re in the wrong job,” Hen said. “Maybe he came into money.”

  “Regularly, by the look of it. He makes two deposits in cash in August, one of fifteen hundred, the other of two grand. Cash, Hen.”

  “A tax dodge?”

  “Or some other scam.”

  “Defrauding the shop?”

  “On this scale? I doubt it. Anything so big would soon be picked up by the auditors.”

  Agreeing to pursue the source of Mike Smith’s cash deposits at an early opportunity, they went next door to call on Mrs Mead, a short, bright-eyed woman in her sixties with permed silver hair that matched the colour of a yapping Yorkshire terrier held against her chest. “Let him sniff the back of your hand and he’ll quieten down,” she told Diamond, and it worked. She insisted each of them went through this ritual. Then she put the dog down, said, “Basket,” and it trotted off somewhere.

  Pity you couldn’t do that with people, Diamond thought. He’d be saying “Basket” quite often.

  Bradley introduced them and asked Mrs Mead to repeat her account of what had happened. She would make a useful witness, if needed in court. In precise, clear words, she described the day’s events as she had seen them: the arrival of Mike Smith’s car at two, or soon after, and the sight of him entering the house at a brisk step and leaving some fifty minutes later and driving off again. Haley had knocked about three forty-five saying her mummy hadn’t met her from school and wasn’t answering the door. “Olga is a good little mother,” Mrs Mead went on. “She collects the child at the school gate every day, so I was worried something was wrong. They gave me a front door key some time ago and I let myself in and to my amazement discovered her lying in the sitting room unconscious. I called an ambulance, and that was it, really. Haley stayed with me last night. An aunt came down from London this morning and collected her.”

  “What sort of man is the husband?” Hen asked.

  “A good neighbour. I’ve no complaints.”

  “Good to his wife?”

  “What are you implying, exactly?”

  “You’re obviously friendly with Olga Smith. Does he treat her well?”

  “She’s never complained to me about him.”

  “And you’ve heard nothing?”

  “Do you mean arguments?”

  “Or anything else.”

  “No violence, if that’s what you mean. He has his moods, as most men do. A bit inconsiderate at times, unlike my Lionel, who was wonderful to me for over forty years, but he was an exceptional man. I find it hard to believe Mike struck her.”

  Bradley said without much grace, “You’re the one who found her. You saw the state of her.”

  But Diamond was quick to say, “We don’t know what happened yet. When you say ‘a bit inconsiderate’, what do you mean?”

  “Nothing so dreadful as hitting her. Small things I’ve noticed. For example, he doesn’t ever help her with the shopping. She does it all, struggles back from the supermarket where she works laden down with bags. It wouldn’t hurt him to pick it up in the car once in a while, would it? Those places are open well into the evening.”

  “Doesn’t she have the use of the car?”

  “She doesn’t drive, and that’s a handicap these days, as I’m well aware because I never learned and it’s too late now, but I’m not shopping for three.”

  “Why doesn’t she drive?”

  “She confided to me once that she was banned. I didn’t ask her for the details. We’re on neighbourly terms, but not so close as that. There’s a difference in our ages. I think she regards me as something of a mother figure, and you don’t tell your mother all the mistakes you make.”

  Hen asked if Olga Smith had spoken of a recent trip to Wightview Sands beach. She had not. Perhaps that, also, fell into the category of things you wouldn’t tell Mother.

  They left Mrs Mead. Diamond asked DI Bradley if he could recommend a pub for lunch, guessing, rightly, that the local man would be glad of a chance to say he was far too busy to idle away his time. So it was agreed that he would meet them again at four at the hospital, while they filled the unforgiving minute, or hour, or two, at the Boar’s Head, south of the town, on the Worthing Road.

  In his car, Diamond used his mobile-a toy he rarely played with-to check on the driving career of Mrs Olga Smith. When was she banned, and what was the offence? He was given an answer of sorts before he drove into the car park of the Boar’s Head. The DVLC at Swansea had no record of Olga Smith.

  He got out and ambled across to Hen. This time would not be wasted. They found a comfortable corner seat in a part of the main lounge no one else was using. Hen lit up a cigar while Diamond fetched beer for himself and dry white wine for the lady. Each felt able to relax in the other’s company now that Bradley was gone, and they knew crucial things had to be debated.

  “You seemed to be back-pedalling this morning,” Hen commented.

  “In what way?”

  “With DI Bradley, over what may or may not have happen
ed to Olga Smith.”

  “Inserting a note of caution, that’s all. Just because Michael Smith is a dodgy character who doesn’t welcome the idea of a chat with the Old Bill, we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that he bashed his wife.”

  “If it was an accident and she fell and hit her head on the table, as you were suggesting, his behaviour is still suspicious. You don’t leave your wife lying unconscious in a pool of blood.”

  “No.” For a moment his eyes glazed over, his thoughts far away, to a park in Bath over a year ago.

  “Did I say something?” Hen asked.

  He took a sip of beer and forced himself to return to the here and now. “What I was getting at-what I’m trying to say, Hen- is that when I looked at that bank statement with the large cash deposits I revised my thoughts about this man Smith. You find figures like that and you have to think this fellow is onto a scam.”

  “Agreed. But how does that change anything?”

  “It could be why he avoids us, why he didn’t stick around at Wightview Sands to answer questions after the body was found. And why he did a runner yesterday after he heard the police had been to his house.”

  “You’re saying he may be in the clear? He didn’t have anything to do with Emma Tysoe’s murder?”

  “I’m not ruling anything out at present. It’s another way of interpreting his actions, that’s all.”

  “Take him out of the frame, and we don’t have anyone,” she said with mock reproach. “Is zees ze way you work, Monsieur Poirot? Me, I suspect everyone, including the cat.”

  “And a couple of thousand others who were on that beach.”

  “Them, too.”

  “Was there a cat in the Tysoe house?” he asked.

  “I didn’t notice one.”

  He grinned.

  They looked at the menu. Diamond said he fancied the steak and Guinness pie with chips, and Hen surprised him by saying she’d join him. He hadn’t yet heard her ship-of-the-desert theory of nutrition.

  “The other thing about Smith,” he said, “is that he’s a family man. Not the most considerate of men, as Mrs Mead informed us, but a husband and a father, for all that. I find it difficult to cast a family man as the killer of Axel Summers.”

  “You’re sure the two killings are connected? The top brass at Bramshill didn’t agree with you.”

  “I’m not sure of anything, Hen. But I don’t buy the theory that this killer is so rigid in his thinking that he wouldn’t dispose of someone like Emma Tysoe who might have fingered him before he completed his quota of murders.”

  “The method was different.”

  “He had to be flexible. Strangulation was a suitable MO for the beach.”

  “It’s almost unknown.”

  “What?”

  “For a killer to use a different MO,” Hen pointed out. “They find a method that suits them and stick to it.”

  “This Ancient Mariner guy is out on his own,” he said in a way that blended disgust and respect. “He’s something else, Hen, totally callous. Self-centred. Committed. He kills to make some kind of point. He doesn’t pick his victims because he hates them, but because they fit his plan.”

  “But how would he have known Emma Tysoe was at work on the case? There was nothing in the papers. Even her workmates didn’t know.”

  “He’d expect a case like this to be referred to a profiler. He’s read all the books on serial killers. You can bet he has. He’ll know about the Home Office approved list. It’s circulated. He’ll have worked out which of the names were most likely to be consulted. Wouldn’t be difficult to make a shortlist and find out who was currently off work doing some profiling.”

  “Crafty.”

  “He is.”

  “I meant you, sport,” she said, “thinking it out.”

  “Thanks, but I’d prefer some other word. How about brilliant?”

  “I could even run to that if you find me an ashtray.”

  After he brought one to the table, she said, “Peter, has it crossed your mind that when a profiler is murdered for being on a case, the police must be at risk as well?”

  He played this down. “Emma Tysoe was killed because she was clever-clever enough, given time, to finger the killer. He wouldn’t expect the poor old plods to suss him out. Your ace detective Jimmy Barneston needn’t miss any sleep over it.”

  “What about you and me?”

  He smiled. “He’s never heard of us.”

  “I’ve been on TV appealing for information.”

  “I wouldn’t worry, Hen. That would just confirm his belief that we’re up shit creek.”

  “Oh, thanks!”

  Their food arrived, pub-sized portions, and he looked at hers wondering where she could possibly stow it all. She was just a sparrow, the shortest officer he’d met in years, and she wasn’t chunky, either. “So what got you into this job?”

  She rolled her eyes upwards. “You want the story? I was looking for respect. Didn’t get much in my family, being the youngest, with two older sisters and a brother. Wanted to prove I could hack it, and picked the toughest job I could think of. I was supposed to be five foot four, minimum, so I wore heels for the interview and put up my hair in a topknot. They had some fun at my expense, said the ballet school was up the street and stuff like that, but they liked my nerve and let me in. I was sent to Portsmouth Central first, and had to tough it out with the lads. If the sarge tells you to break up a fight in a pub on a Friday night, you don’t argue. It’s a funny thing how many of these bruisers turn out to be pussy cats when a woman shows up.”

  “Respect.”

  She laughed. “No way. They’re just embarrassed.”

  “You get respect from your family now, I bet.”

  “That’s true. My big sisters phone me up and tell me their problems.”

  “And you put in for CID and got it?”

  “That was lucky timing on my part, just when they’d seen the need for more women. Some of the guys thought it was preferential treatment. Most of them want to get out of uniform, don’t they? I didn’t have any conscience. I’d put up with a lot to get where I was. And I’ve not done badly.”

  “You’ve earned that respect.”

  Hen grinned broadly. “Oh yes?”

  They might have gone on to discuss Diamond’s in-and-out career, but they didn’t. Instead, they talked strategy. Hen was still uneasy about Bramshill. “They’ve put up the shutters-as they see it-on the Axel Summers murder, so we’re right out of order trying to pin these two killings on the same guy.”

  “I’m not worried,” Diamond said. “Let’s play it by the book. We’re investigating the killing of Emma Tysoe and we’ve every right to find out what she was doing in the last month of her life. They can’t stop us following up anything suspicious. We don’t know where it will lead us, but if it takes us into forbidden territory we simply say we’re doing our job.”

  “Like finding out what’s on her computer?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You’re confident we can decrypt her hard disk?”

  “I’m confident Clive can-given time.”

  A surprise awaited them when they returned to the hospital. Instead of the saturnine DI Bradley in his leather jacket and jeans, a tall man in a grey three-piece greeted them outside the intensive care ward. He couldn’t have been much over thirty, with dark, swept-back hair making him look as Italian as the cut of his suit, except that he was blue-eyed. Diamond’s first thought was that this was a doctor with bad news, but Hen stepped forward and shook hands. “For all that’s wonderful! Jimmy the Priest! Peter, meet Jimmy Barneston.”

  The man himself.

  “The Priest?” Diamond queried, after he’d felt the firm handshake.

  “He’s always hearing confessions.”

  “It’s not down to me. It’s the Sussex Inquisition. People like Hen Mallin,” Barneston told Diamond. He had an air of confidence it had taken Diamond twenty years to acquire. “I decided to join you for this
. We can be frank with each other, can’t we?”

  “Say no more.”

  Diamond came under sharp scrutiny from the ice-blue eyes.

  Barneston went on, “Bramshill brought me up to speed on your investigation and they tell me you know about the case I’m on. Something of interest may be developing here, so I’d like to hear what Mrs Smith has to say.”

  Which wasn’t the Bramshill line at all. Jimmy Barneston shouldn’t be underestimated.

  “No problem,” Diamond said cheerfully. “Let’s see if they’re ready for us.”

  The sister asked them to keep the questioning to five minutes or less and showed them into the room where Olga Smith lay tubed up, with her head bandaged and cradled in a support. Only her eyes moved, and they were bloodshot. Her right arm was in plaster to above the elbow.

  Diamond suggested to Hen, “Why don’t you ask the questions?”

  Jimmy Barneston didn’t object.

  Hen stepped closer and said who the visitors were. “Olga, we need to know how this happened. Can you remember?”

  She mouthed the word “no”. The voice came as a delayed reaction, and feebly.

  “Do you have any recollection of anything at all about the day?”

  She tried clearing her throat, and something hurt, because she winced. “A little.”

  “Do you recall Sergeant Gregson coming to the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “She told you she’d spoken to your little girl Haley, right?”

  “Is Haley-”

  Seeing the sudden concern in Olga’s features, Hen said quickly, “She’s fine, perfectly OK. Your sister is looking after her.”

  “Ah.” The muscles relaxed a little.

  “We’re interested in what happened after my sergeant, Stella Gregson, visited you. I expect you phoned your husband to tell him. Am I right?”

  “Yes, I spoke to Mike.”

  “Did he come home at once?”

  “Yes.”

  “You remember?”

  “He was upset. Didn’t think it was fair, asking Haley questions.”

  “Upset. You mean angry?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what happened? You seem to have a memory of this. Did you talk at all?”