The House Sitter

by Peter Lovesey

  Two response vehicles had got there before him. Halliwell was also there, ashen-faced, standing in the open doorway.

  “Well?”

  “Come and look at this, guv.”

  In the hallway of Georgina’s house someone had used a red marker pen to write on the wall in large letters:

  The game is done! I’ve won, I’ve won!

  Diamond stood blankly before it, shaking his head. He felt a throbbing sensation in his legs. Not the shakes. Not now. He didn’t want to get the shakes.

  He knew the line, and he was certain who’d written it. There was a scene in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner when Death was dicing with Life-in-Death for the ship’s crew and everyone except the Mariner himself dropped dead.

  Halliwell said, “We’ve been right through the building. There’s no one in there, guv.”

  “There won’t be.” Still staring at the wall, Diamond crossed his arms over his chest to control his hands. They were starting to shake. “What’s written here is the truth. He’s beaten us. I don’t know how, but he’s done it. He’s got to Anna, and he’s got Ingeborg as well.”

  One of the team on duty said in his own defence, “We’ve had round-the-clock surveillance, sir. No one went in except DC Smith.”

  “You saw no one go in,” Diamond said without even turning his head to look at the speaker.

  “But the place is empty. He got out as well, with the two women. It’s a bloody impossibility.”

  “Shut up, will you?” He looked to his right. “Keith.”

  “Guv?”

  “The roof. These are terraced houses. The roof is the only way I can think of.”

  Together they ran upstairs, up two storeys to the attic, a surprisingly spacious room with surprising contents-the secret Anna had wanted to impart to Diamond. Eccentric, weird even, but harmless and of small consequence now. Georgina’s attic was occupied by a family of people-sized teddy bears dressed in knitted garments and seated around a table laid for tea with real cups and saucers and a plate of biscuits. “Try the window,” Diamond said, blotting out the rest of the scene.

  It was a small double-sash, and Halliwell made an effort to shift it, but with no success. “I don’t think this has been opened, guv.”

  Diamond had a go, and felt the resistance. The thing wouldn’t budge a fraction.

  “Look, it’s been painted over at some time,” Halliwell said, pointing to where the bottom rail of the window met the sill. An unbroken coat of paint connected them. “He didn’t go this way.”

  “Bloody hell. How did he do it, then? The back of the house?”

  “I don’t think so. Every door and window is still locked from the inside. She had locks on all the ground floor windows and fingerbolts on the door.”

  Diamond pressed his hands to his forehead and shut his eyes, desperate to make the mental leap that was wanted. It wasn’t for want of trying that he didn’t succeed. But there was another way to approach this problem, and he had the vision to recognise it. All he’d done so far in this emergency was what the Mariner would have predicted, reacting to events by trying to understand them, charging up the stairs in the hope of finding which way the Mariner had escaped with the two women. Truly there wasn’t time for that. Ingeborg and Anna had been missing for an hour already. Not much could be gained from discovering how it had been done.

  He said to Halliwell, “Where has he taken them? That’s the priority. That’s what we’ve got to work out.”

  Halliwell didn’t say a word. The answer was beyond him.

  Beyond Diamond, too, it seemed. He shook his head and sighed heavily. After a long interval, he started to talk, more to himself than Halliwell. “This man has a sense of the dramatic. He went to all the trouble and risk of leaving Porter’s body on the eighteenth hole of a golf course-just for the effect. The act of murder wasn’t enough. It had to be done in the most symbolic way. He’ll have worked out something for Anna, some place of disposal that he considers fitting. But where?”

  Where? His body strained to do something, to race off in some direction with sirens blaring and stop the killing. But until his brain supplied the answer, any action would be futile. While he floundered like this, apparently indecisive but actually groping for the truth, two lives were on the line, for nothing was more certain than that the Mariner would kill again.

  Georgina’s giant teddies, immobile in their chairs, reinforced the inertia in his brain. He couldn’t stay in the room any longer. “No use standing here,” he told Halliwell. He led the way downstairs, still trying to animate his tired, shocked brain. But the physical action of moving about the house was no help. It solved nothing. Down on ground level again, he was still without an explanation or a plan.

  Forcing himself to face the worst outcome, he tried once again to work out the Mariner’s strategy. In all probability, he’d have killed Ingeborg first. Inge, poor kid, was extraneous to the plot. She’d walked into the crossfire because of inexperience and blind courage and the stupid overconfidence of her boss. I should never have left her in charge, he told himself. I could have stopped her if I hadn’t slept through the call they say she made to me. God knows I’ve made mistakes before, but this is the worst ever.

  And I failed Anna, the Mariner’s target, the last name on the death list, that free spirit, railing against all the constrictions in her witty, boisterous way, yet actually resting her trust in me. Arrogantly, I assumed I could protect her. How wrong we both were!

  Self-recrimination wasn’t going to help.

  Instead, he forced his thinking back to the Mariner and his embittered plot. He visualised the execution of Anna, first tied up, or drugged senseless, then despatched, almost certainly by a crossbow bolt to the head. The body would be driven to whichever location the Mariner had selected as appropriate.

  The game is done! I’ve won, I’ve won!

  Think ahead, he urged himself. It’s the only chance I’ve got now. I have to out-think him, anticipate him for once. He’s already picked the place where her body will be discovered, somewhere fitting, or symbolic, like that eighteenth hole. He wants the world to know how clever he is. Where is it?

  Somewhere appropriate to Anna. Her pop music career? Some place that links with a song title. Or her name?

  No, he told himself. The Mariner isn’t interested in her career. He’s entirely taken up with the part of her life that affected him. If I’m right, and he was one of those academics whose bursaries were taken away, he blames her personally for that. This is the climax of his killing spree. He’ll have thought of something that makes the point. He’s been hitting back at British Metal by killing the people they sponsor, but Anna is different from Summers or Porter. She hurt him. He’ll turn her death into some emblem of his anger.

  Now something was beginning to stir in his memory. Faint and tenuous, just out of reach, it tantalised him for what seemed an intolerable interval before vanishing again.

  He felt certain it was significant, and it derived from personal experience, an observation he’d made some time ago, not in the last twenty-four hours, or even the last week. Surely, he reasoned with himself, if it’s of any significance, it must have a connection with British Metal.

  And now the image surfaced. Concorde taking off.

  Because of British Metal.

  He gave a cry that was part-triumph, part self-reproach. He’d got there at last. That mechanical billboard he’d driven past on Wellsway with the rotating images. The slogan perfectly summed up the Mariner’s twisted rationale. All the bitterness, his justification for the killing, was encapsulated in those four words.

  He explained his reasoning to Halliwell. “And as far as I know,” he added, “it’s the only one of its kind in the city. Have you seen another?”

  “No, guv. I know the sign you mean. Shall we go?”

  He thought for a moment and shook his head. “I’d bet anything that’s where he means to leave the body, but not in broad daylight. It’s too busy up there.
He’ll go tonight, when it’s dark.”

  “And then we ambush him?”

  “Too late, Keith. He’ll have killed them both already. Remember he killed Matt Porter first and transported the body to the golf course. We’ve got to find him before tonight.”

  The disappointment in both men was palpable, although nothing was said. Even when you achieved the aim of anticipating this killer’s movements, it wasn’t enough.

  Halliwell started stating the obvious just to fill the silence. “Nobody saw them leave. He’d need transport. Every car in the street has been checked.”

  “Then they’re still here.”

  “No, guv. I promise you, I went through every room myself.”

  “Including the basement?”

  Halliwell nodded. “It’s filled with cartons and packing material for the boss’s electrical appliances, and, believe me, we looked in every box.”

  “Was it locked?”

  “The basement?”

  “Yes. Was it locked?”

  “The door to the street was. And bolted. As I told you, all the external doors in the house were locked, and none of them show any sign of being tampered with.”

  “I’m going to take a look myself. The stairs down…?”

  “The internal staircase? Next to the kitchen.”

  Diamond stepped out of the front room into the hall. An internal door was fitted at the top of the basement stairs. The lock had obviously been forced, the strike plate ripped from the woodwork. “Who did this?”

  “We did. She obviously keeps it locked. There wasn’t time to go looking for the key.”

  “What if the key was in the lock and the Mariner locked it himself and took the key with him?”

  Halliwell stared back with a slight frown, failing to see what difference it would make.

  Without adding to his question, Diamond pulled open the door, switched on the light and went down into the basement. Just as it had been described to him, the back room, the largest, was in use as a box room, each box labelled.

  “They were stacked tidily when we came in,” Halliwell said.

  Diamond rapidly checked the other rooms. In the front room was a second door. “What’s this-a cupboard?”

  “Sort of,” Halliwell said. “It’s more storage space, but she doesn’t use it. Actually it’s a kind of cellar. Goes right under the street. All these old houses have them. There’s no one in there. Just some wood and a heap of coal left by a previous owner.”

  Diamond opened the door. “Someone get me a torch.”

  One was handed to him and he probed the interior with the beam. He’d have called this a vault. Basically it was a single arch constructed of Bath stone, and tall enough to drive a bus through, except that a wall blocked off the end. Yet it was obvious no living creature larger than a spider was lurking there.

  Halliwell said, “It’s not connected to any other house, if that’s what you were thinking, guv. They used them as wine cellars two hundred years ago. There’s been a lot of concern about them because they weren’t built to support the modern traffic going over them.”

  Diamond stepped around a dust-covered heap of coal that had probably been there since the Clean Air Act came in, and moved towards the back wall. He swung the torch beam over the stonework and bent down to look at some chips of broken mortar he’d noticed among the coal. “This is recent.”

  Halliwell came closer.

  Diamond shone the torch close to the wall itself. “You see where this comes from? Some of these blocks of stone have been drilled out and moved. They’re not attached to anything. The wall isn’t surface-bearing here. It’s just a screen to separate this side of the street from the house opposite. Someone has broken through and replaced everything later.”

  Halliwell crouched down to look. “Sonofabitch!”

  Now it was Diamond who felt the need to speak the obvious. “He must have got in from the house across the street, down into their basement. He got to work on some stones in the wall and cut his way through. And that’s the way he got out with his prisoners. When they were through he shoved the blocks back into position from the other side.”

  “But the door to the basement was locked,” Halliwell said.

  “From the inside. He locked it when he left, and took the key with him. I don’t believe it was locked when he came in the first time. It was in the lock, but he was able to open the door and get into the house.”

  “Cunning bastard,” Halliwell said. “And none of us spotted this.”

  “You were looking for people, not means of entry.” Diamond’s mind was on the next decision, not past mistakes.

  “I can shift this lot, no trouble,” Halliwell said.

  “Not yet. We’ll go in from upstairs. Get some men down here, but have them in radio contact, ready to go when I say, and not before.”

  “Armed Response are waiting in the street.”

  “Good. But I don’t want a shoot-out in a confined space. He’s got his hostages and he’ll have his crossbow with him. We don’t know what we’ll find when we go in.”

  He ran upstairs and out to the street. It was already closed to traffic. He briefed the inspector in charge of the ARU, telling him how he proposed to handle the situation. Men were posted at strategic points. Diamond was fitted with a radio.

  Exactly as he expected, there were signs of a break-in when he went down the basement steps of the house across the street from Georgina’s. The door had been forced with some kind of jemmy. Like several of the basements along the street, this one was unoccupied, though the flats on the upper floors were all in use.

  With two armed officers close behind him, Diamond entered as silently as possible, stood in the passageway and listened. The place was ominously quiet. He felt the cool air on his skin. He waited a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the restricted light. Then he reached for the handle of the door to the front room, the one with access to the vault below the street.

  Nobody was in this unfurnished room, so he crossed to the door to the vault and cautiously opened it. One glance confirmed that no one was inside. However, there were tools lying against the wall, including a power drill, hammer and chisels. Any lingering doubt was removed that the Mariner had been here.

  Turning away, he indicated to the marksmen that he would check the other rooms. He returned to the passageway and looked into a small room once used as a kitchen. Nothing was in there except some bottled water.

  There remained the back room, presumably used as a bedroom when the flat was occupied. He looked towards the back-up men and gestured to them with a downward movement of his hand. He wasn’t going to rush in. The door was slightly ajar, so he put his foot against it and gently pushed it fully open.

  A crossbow was targeted at his chest. The Mariner, in baseball cap and leather jacket, stood against the wall. Beside him, on the floor, were two motionless bodies.

  Diamond’s heart raced and a thousand pinpricks erupted all over his skin. For this was a triple shock. There was the sight of the dead-still women; there was the threat from the crossbow; and there was the hammer blow of who the Mariner was. With a huge effort to keep control he managed to say, “It’s all over, Ken. I wouldn’t shoot if I were you. Killing me isn’t in the script.”

  But Ken Bellman kept the crossbow firmly on target.

  Ken-boring old Ken, the lover Emma Tysoe had dumped without ever realising he was the killer she’d been asked to profile. Ken, the man Diamond and Hen had put through the wringer, or so they believed. Ken-the wrongly accused, the man who’d proved beyond doubt that he didn’t carry out the murder on the beach.

  Ken Bellman was the Mariner.

  Diamond’s best-his only-option was to talk, steadily and as calmly as he could manage, as if he’d fully expected to be facing this. “You’re not going to shoot that thing. You’ve settled the score, several times over. If you take me out-as you could-you’ll be gunned down yourself. The men behind me are armed.”

  “Hold i
t there,” Bellman said, his eyes never shifting from Diamond. They looked dead eyes. He, too, was in deep shock. This was a petrifying humiliation for him and he was dangerous. He’d believed himself invincible.

  “The game is done, just as you wrote on the wall,” Diamond said with a huge effort to keep the same impassive tone, “and if you say you won, well who am I to argue? You outwitted the best brains in the Met and you had me on a string until a few minutes ago. I watched you arrive last night with your rucksack full of tools, and still I wasn’t smart enough to twig who you were, or what you were up to. OK, you didn’t get to your last location. That advertising board on Wellsway, wasn’t it? ‘Because of British Metal.’ Give me credit for working that out for myself. I don’t take much out of this. And now I’m asking you to call it quits.” He took a step towards the crossbow.

  Bellman warned in an agitated cry, “Don’t move!”

  But Diamond took another step, spreading his palms to show he was unarmed. This had become a contest of will power. “I’m going to ask you to hand me the crossbow, Ken. Then we’ll have a civilised talk, and you can tell me how you managed to achieve so much.”

  “I won’t say it again!”

  Diamond had taken three or four short steps and was almost level with the feet of one of the bodies. He said, “You know you’re not going to shoot now.”

  Then the unexpected happened. There was a moan from one of the women and Bellman reacted. He swung the crossbow downwards and released the bolt.

  In the same split second, Diamond threw himself forward and grabbed at the bow with both hands. The bolt missed Anna Walpurgis’s head by a fraction and hit the floor with a metallic sound, skidded towards the nearest corner and ricocheted off a couple of walls. Bellman let go of the bow and lurched backwards. The two ARU men hurled themselves on him.

  Suddenly the room was full of noise and people. Hands gripped Diamond’s arms and hauled him upright. “Get to the women,” he said. “Are they all right?”

  They were both alive. Their arms and legs were bound. Anna vomited when the straps came off her. Ingeborg said, “It’s the chloroform. He used it on both of us, several times.”