The House Sitter

by Peter Lovesey

  Raffles might have other ideas.

  In the back of the car were the luxurious cat-bed, the tins of gourmet salmon and tuna, the special dishes with Sultan’s name on them, the large plastic litter-box with its modesty hood, the toys, the grooming comb and brush-and the box containing the user of all these products, who was yowling piteously.

  Fortunately, when they arrived at Weston, Raffles wasn’t at home. Having the freedom of the cat flap, he would be out hunting on the farmland at the end of the street.

  Diamond gave Sultan a bedroom to himself, installing all his paraphernalia with him. Opened a tin of the gourmet food and found himself promising the steamed fillet of lemon sole if only the yowling ceased. Closed the door firmly before going out again.

  Ingeborg Smith was alone at a computer in the incident room when Diamond looked in.

  “Hi, guv.”

  “Any progress on Ken Bellman?” he asked, forcing his mind back to the Emma Tysoe investigation.

  “Quite a bit, actually. What he said about being at Liverpool University in the same year as Emma is true. He was reading electronic engineering and she was a psychologist. They both got firsts. He stayed on to do a higher degree and she transferred to University College, London, to do hers.”

  “Good brains, then, both of them.”

  “Yes. I’m trying to find someone from their year who would remember how friendly they were. No success so far. She lived in a hall of residence, so I may get something from the warden, or someone on the staff, if they stayed in the job that long. I’m waiting for a phone call about that.”

  “Nice work.”

  “I went up to Claverton this morning and talked to Helen Sparks, the woman lecturer you mentioned. According to her, Emma never spoke much about Liverpool. She says she was guarded about her private life as well. But she got the impression there was some man in the background. Emma didn’t speak of him, but the confident way she dealt with the men on the psychology staff showed she wasn’t in awe of any of them, even the ones who fancied their chances.”

  “That’s something she didn’t tell me,” he said, slightly miffed.

  “It’s not a thing a woman would say to a man,” Ingeborg said. “I asked if there were theories doing the rounds of the staff.”

  “About Emma’s murder?”

  “Yes. The consensus seems to be that anyone who does offender profiling is taking a risk.”

  “They think some villain was out to get her before she fingered him?”

  “Almost as if it was her own fault, yes. Helen Sparks hinted that there was a certain amount of envy that Emma was the only one approached by the Home Office.”

  “Envy, eh?” he said, putting a hand to the back of his neck and easing a finger around his collar.

  “But not enough to be a motive for murder.”

  “How would Helen Sparks know?”

  “She’s a pretty good judge, guv.”

  “You’re probably right. Is that it, then?”

  “As far as I’ve got. I haven’t yet talked to the people at Knowhow & Fix. That’s next.”

  “In short, we haven’t come up with anything that conflicts with what he told us at the interview?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Keep at it,” he said. “I’m putting more and more resources into the Mariner enquiry. If you can nail Ken Bellman by your own efforts, you’ll do us all a good turn, Ingeborg.”

  He went out to get lunch and buy some lemon sole.

  On his return he was told there had been a call from Bognor CID. He got through to Hen. She asked if anything new had come up and he told her about the latest note from the Mariner.

  She was shocked. “So he’s in Bath already?”

  “Yes-sooner than I expected. Still ahead of the game.”

  “Could he know where Anna Walpurgis is?”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “If he wants to find out, all he has to do is follow you, Peter. He knows you’ll lead him there at some point.”

  “I hope I’m not so obvious as that,” he said with injured pride.

  She switched to the matter she’d originally called about. “Want to hear my news? We’ve found Emma’s car.”

  “The Lotus? Where?”

  “Only a couple of miles from the beach, in a caravan park. The key was still in the ignition. It was parked beside an empty caravan and hidden under one of those fabric covers people put over cars. It’s at the vehicle centre now, being examined for fingerprints and DNA. The forensic guys are confident.”

  “A breakthrough at last.”

  “We hope so. Have you fingerprinted Ken Bellman?”

  “We will now, Hen. We will now.”

  22

  So how was it for you?”

  “If you’re asking me is she still alive, the answer is yes.” After a night on watch outside Georgina Dallymore’s house, Keith Halliwell was in no mood to trade humour with his boss. He’d come into the police station on sufferance, under instructions to report on the vigil.

  “Have you actually spoken to her?” Diamond asked.

  “Only on the mobile. The curtains were still drawn at nine, when John Leaman took over from me, so I checked. She wasn’t thrilled to get a wake-up call, but she answered. At least she knows we care.”

  “Any signs of suspicious behaviour in the street?”

  Halliwell shook his head. “It was dead quiet.”

  “You checked the parked cars?”

  “Made a list of all the numbers. I know a lot about Bennett Street I never knew before. It has more lace curtains per house than any other street in the city. And I can tell you how many chimney pots there are. The average is nine.”

  Diamond said, “What I really want to know is how the Mariner found out she was in Bath and staying at the Bath Spa. He’s too well informed, Keith.”

  “I can give you the answer to that.”

  This straightforward statement in the same downbeat tone almost passed Diamond by. When it registered after a couple of seconds he grabbed the arms of his chair. “Go on, then.”

  Halliwell said, “It was on Galaxy 101.”

  “Come again.”

  “A radio station. I was talking to one of the young guys on watch with me. He heard it the night she arrived.”

  “On radio?”

  “Yes. Some DJ played one of her hits, saying he’d heard a rumour she’d been spotted in Bath. The next thing of course is that a listener calls in to say he saw her checking in to the Bath Spa Hotel.”

  “And the Mariner happened to be tuned in.”

  “Or heard of it from someone else.”

  “As simple as that,” Diamond murmured as if he’d just been told the secret of a conjuring trick. “Who’d have thought that kind of stuff would go out on radio?”

  Halliwell looked too tired to enlighten his boss about the way broadcasting had changed since commercial radio came in. Some people never listened to anything except the BBC.

  But Diamond wasn’t blaming the DJ. “It wouldn’t have happened if Special Branch were doing their job,” he complained. “They should have smuggled her in through the back entrance of the hotel instead of parading her at the check-in. My God, I’ve lost all respect.”

  Halliwell’s head was starting to sink from sheer fatigue.

  “If I’m honest,” Diamond added, “I didn’t have much in the first place.” Still fretting over the security lapse, he sent Halliwell home to catch up on some sleep.

  One mystery solved, then. And a little of the gloss rubbed off the Mariner’s shining reputation. He’d heard it on the radio.

  Ideally Diamond would have called a case conference this morning to bring everyone up to date on recent developments. Instead, information was being circulated through the bush telegraph. Bath’s small murder squad was fully stretched to maintain this round-the-clock vigil. John Leaman was now on watch in Bennett Street with four plain clothes officers. After the lapse in the hotel, Diamond reckoned, he should be f
ully alert.

  Towards the end of the morning he looked into the incident room. Soon the least experienced member of the squad would have to take a shift on the Bennett Street roster. He’d kept Ingeborg busy digging into Ken Bellman’s past, shielding her from front-line duties. It wasn’t good practice. In theory, she should face the same risks as anyone else. Knowing how sod’s law worked, when she was on watch, the killer would make his move.

  “Did you get out to Knowhow & Fix?” he asked her.

  “Yes, guv. They look like a bunch of students to me, all shorts and T-shirts. Bellman is one of about ten consultants on their list. He’s liable to be called out at any time, including weekends, but a lot of the work is done from home, so they don’t keep track of his movements.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “We know where he was in the hours leading up to the murder. That’s on record, so he’s got no alibi. What do they say about him as an employee?”

  “No complaints. They’re satisfied with his work. He seems to be up with the latest technology, which is what counts in IT.”

  “Previous employment?”

  “Like he said, he was with a London firm.”

  “In SW1,” Diamond recalled.

  “As a techie-a technical support programmer.”

  This meant little to Diamond, but he knew London pretty well from his days in the Met. “SW1. That’s very central. Westminster, Downing Street, St James’s. Scotland Yard is there. Not many computer firms, I would think. It’s all government departments. Civil servants.”

  “They use computers, guv.”

  “I suppose they do. Why did he move to Bath? Do his bosses know?”

  She shook her head. “They say he came with good references. He’s quiet. Doesn’t talk about himself or anything personal.”

  “They don’t know what brought him here?”

  “No.”

  “Did we ask when we interviewed him? I don’t believe we did. For a young man with a good job in IT in central London, a move to the provinces seems a strange career choice.”

  “Did he move to be nearer to Emma?” Ingeborg asked.

  “That wasn’t the impression I got. If I remember right, he said they met by chance one day in the library-as if he didn’t expect it.”

  “I can believe she didn’t.”

  He was quick to pick up on the point. “You’re thinking he was lying-that he followed her here? Good point, Ingeborg. It crossed my mind, too. The way he told it, you’d believe they hadn’t spoken since their student days at Liverpool.”

  “That was my impression, listening to the tape,” Ingeborg agreed.

  “I’d like to know more,” he said. “We’ve only got his version of the way it happened.”

  “A long-term stalker?”

  “Possibly. He certainly pursued her for the last hours of her life. He admitted it. Could have been obsessed with her for much longer.”

  “Does it make a difference?”

  “What do you mean-does it make a difference?”

  Ingeborg said with an embarrassed laugh, “I mean, if he was the killer anyway, does it matter how long he knew her?”

  “It strengthens the motive.” Slipping into his superintendent mode, he told her, “Something you’re going to have to learn, Constable, is that we aren’t here just to name the guilty man. We have to make the case to the CPS, and if it isn’t rock solid they won’t prosecute. If Bellman was fixated on this woman for years and finally got into the relationship he’d fantasised over, only to find she dropped him and started up with someone else, he’d take it badly. That’s motivation. That’s going to help the prosecution.”

  “Is it worth questioning him again?”

  “I wouldn’t mind another go.”

  The opportunity came sooner than either of them expected, in fact within twenty minutes. The desk sergeant called up to say a Mr Bellman had walked into the station and asked to speak to the officer in charge of the Emma Tysoe investigation.

  Diamond asked Ingeborg to join him.

  She was starry-eyed at the prospect. “Do you think he’s ready to cough, guv?”

  “We can always hope.”

  In the interview room, Bellman didn’t have the look of a man about to confess. He sat completely still, studying his fingernails, apparently unimpressed when Diamond and Ingeborg entered the room and took their places. Last time, he’d slopped coffee onto his jeans. This morning, on Diamond’s instructions, he’d already been brought coffee in a cup and saucer-not to prevent further spillage, but because china is a suitable surface for collecting fingerprints.

  “You’ve already met DC Smith,” Diamond said by way of introduction. “You don’t mind if we tape this?”

  “Whatever you want. It won’t take long.”

  Ingeborg spoke the formal preamble for a voluntary statement, and then Diamond said, “You’ve got something to tell us, Ken?”

  “To show you, more like,” he answered. “When we were speaking before, there was some question about where I was on the afternoon Emma was killed. I told you I left Wightview Sands at the end of the morning and drove back here and you asked if I could prove it.”

  “Right.”

  “We looked in my car to see if there was a petrol receipt.”

  “Correct. Have you found one?”

  His mouth drew wide in a triumphant grin. “Actually, yes.” He opened his right hand to show a slip of paper lying on his palm.

  “Where did you find this?” Diamond asked as he took it, his voice betraying nothing of the plunging anticlimax he felt.

  “Down in the slot where the handbrake is fitted. There are two sets of brushes, nylon, I would guess, and the brake moves between them. Sometimes I run my fingertips along the gap when I’m waiting in traffic, and a small piece of paper could easily slip down there. It was stuck there, out of sight. I thought I’d have another search, on the off chance, and there it was.”

  “Fortunate.”

  “Very. Without it, I’d be getting worried.”

  Diamond studied the data on the receipt. Beyond dispute, it showed someone had bought 35.46 litres of unleaded petrol from pump five at a cost of £25.50 at the Star service station, Trow-bridge Road, Beckington, Bath BA3, at three forty-seven on the afternoon of the murder. A kick in the guts. Trying to salvage some respect, he said, “Pity you didn’t use a card for this transaction. It was a cash sale, evidently. There’s nothing to link this receipt to you personally.”

  Bellman was unmoved. “What are you suggesting-that it’s someone else’s receipt?”

  “Could be.”

  “Knock it off, will you?” He was confident enough for sarcasm. “Ah, I know what you’re thinking. I suppose it stuck to the bottom of my shoe when I came along later and then a freak gust of wind blew it off the shoe and up to the handbrake? That’s a long shot, isn’t it?”

  “We’ll examine it, anyway,” Diamond said, passing the receipt to Ingeborg. “Thanks for bringing it in.”

  “By the way, I’ve photocopied it,” Bellman said, adding, in the same sarcastic vein, “Just in case it goes astray.”

  “Wise.”

  “I’ll be off, then.”

  “Before you are,” Diamond said, “I wonder if you’d clarify a couple of things you said at your previous interview. Only a matter of tidying up details. You said you worked in London prior to coming to Bath.”

  “That’s right.”

  “In SW1. Did we have that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t name your employer.”

  “You didn’t ask. Mitchkin Systems Limited.”

  “Would you mind spelling that?”

  Bellman did. “I was a technical support programmer.”

  “Yes, we got that first time around. Good job, I should think, based in central London.”

  “They’ve got a good name.”

  “I’m wondering why you left. What brought you to Bath?”

  He answered smoothly, “
I’d had enough of London by then. I’m single. With my training I can work pretty well where I choose.”

  “But why Bath, of all places?”

  A shrug and a smile. He was confidence personified now. “Nice city. Clean air. Less hassle.”

  “Are you sure there wasn’t another attraction-the fact that Emma Tysoe moved here.”

  A touch of colour sprang to his cheek and he raised his hand as if to fend off a loose throw. “Oh, no. No way.”

  “Before you say any more,” Diamond came in, sensing a hit, “we’ve done some digging, DC Smith and other detectives in my squad, and we know you contacted Emma quite soon after arriving here-very soon, in fact. That story about meeting her by chance in the library was a little misleading, wasn’t it?”

  Bellman frowned, back on the defensive. “I don’t think so.”

  A note of caution that Diamond was quick to pick up on. This line of questioning had been a fishing expedition, no more, and now there was the promise of a catch. “Let me put it this way. I’m willing to believe you met in the library, but I don’t buy your story that it was pure chance. She was an old friend from your student days. You had every right to seek her out. Any one of us would have done the same.”

  The man was silent.

  Diamond continued in these uncharted waters. “I’m not suggesting you harboured romantic feelings about her for all those years, checking what happened to her, where she lived, and so on. But I can’t help wondering if you were reading your paper one day, and happened to see her name. She was rather well known in her professional life-as a psychological offender profiler, helping the police with their inquiries.”

  He said firmly, “I don’t have time to read the papers. All my reading is technical. Computer magazines.”

  “So you didn’t know about the profiling?” Diamond paused, apparently to exercise his thoughts on this mistaken assumption. “Maybe I was wrong, then. Maybe you did still carry a torch for her after all those years.”