Diamond Dust (24 page)

'Everything's OK, Fiona,' Gina said at once, and then introduced them as police officers in a way suggesting they had just driven up and called at the front door. 'They're trying to trace your ex-partner, and they have a few questions for you.'

She had the worry-lines of a woman close to breakdown. She turned up her hands in appeal. 'But I already told you, I haven't seen him in months. I've no idea where he is.'

'Do you mind if we go over familiar ground?' Diamond gently asked. 'When did you first meet him?'

'That isn't familiar ground. Nobody's asked me yet.' She closed her eyes, remembering. 'It would have been ninety-five. December.'

'Where?'

'A Christmas party at one of the City Livery companies. Mercers' Hall, I think. I was in advertising at the time and hating it. Ted was doing the catering. He's a brilliant cook.' Launched into this, she spoke with intensity, recalling the details. 'The canapes were like nothing I'd seen before. Delicious and wonderful to look at. One little pastry concoction with duck pate and cranberry was such a gorgeous bite that I made up my mind to ask the caterer how it was done. I'm passionate about cooking. I went into the kitchen and of course Ted was charming and good-looking and promised to give me the recipe if I went out for a drink with him the next evening. I was flattered. I really hadn't thought it would lead to anything. And we clicked at once because I've always loved to cook and we spent the evening discussing all the television cooks we would shoot on sight and the cookbooks we'd throw into their coffins. He was terrific fun to be with. That was the start of our relationship.'

'You teamed up right away?'

'Not immediately. It was more gradual. We had this dream of starting our own restaurant. It was just lovers' talk at first, and yet we began to believe it. The green and white colour scheme and the two little bay trees in tubs outside the door. We talked about where it should be - somewhere just outside London in the southern commuter belt. And before the end of the year we were looking at shop premises. The place at Guildford came onto the market - to rent, that is. The flat upstairs went with it. I had some savings to equip the shop, and I can tell you we did it beautifully. The crockery, the table linen, candles - it was our dream realised. And we got in all the top restaurant guides.'

'We've seen one. They rated you.'

'So did the public. We were fully booked most evenings, and people came back. They drove in from miles around. It should have been a tremendous success.'

'So what went wrong?'

Fiona's expression switched suddenly to a penetrating frown. 'Well you know, don't you?'

'We'd rather hear it from you,' Diamond improvised.

'His habit.'

He gave a nod that was meant to be knowing, encouraging her to say more, while he reeled from the mental jolt she'd just given him.

'I didn't suspect anything when we first met,' she went on. 'He was nothing like my idea of an addict. Not that I knew the first thing about drugs. I was incredibly naive. Ted handled the accounts, banked the takings. I trusted him. I had no idea he'd run through my savings and was putting nothing back. The money was all going to drug-dealers. And all this time he looked perfectly healthy, cooked beautifully, treated me like a goddess.'

'What was he on?'

'H,' Gina murmured.

Diamond's face registered nothing of this bombshell. Inwardly he cursed his sluggish brain for failing to think of drugs. What else could have brought a successful, articulate man to the squalor of that terrace behind Paddington Station?

'But you know all about him,' Fiona said.

'Hearing it just as you tell it is so much more helpful,' he said with all the calm he could drag up from his plunging self-esteem. The case against Dixon-Bligh was red-hot now. He wanted to run through it in his head, item by item, but he had to listen. There could be more.

Fiona said, 'It came to the point where even I found out what was going on - that we had a huge overdraft and a mass of unpaid bills. It was heart-breaking. Such deceit. I found a syringe and needles hidden in a casserole dish high up in a cupboard in the kitchen. He was full of repentance. Drug-users are when they're found out. I was stupid enough to trust him and expect him to stop. We went on for a few weeks more and the bills just mounted up. He was still buying the stuff, still injecting. We closed the restaurant and I used the rest of my savings to clear some of our debts. Ted went off to live in London and I didn't want or expect to hear from him ever again.'

'But you did?'

'Earlier this year. He knocked on my door one afternoon. I suppose it wasn't difficult to track me down. Everyone knows I live in Puttenham. Can you believe he was asking for money again? Addicts have no shame at all. He wanted a thousand pounds. Said it would be a loan and he'd pay me back at ten per cent interest. I told him in no uncertain terms that I was disgusted he had the gall to come back to me wanting more of my money. He went on arguing, saying he now had a very good job at the Dorchester Hotel.'

'The
Dorchester}'

'Assistant chef, or something. I didn't believe him, and then he fished in his pocket for some letter on headed notepaper confirming the appointment. I still said it made no difference and I didn't have money to lend him. But he's so crafty, nosing around the cottage, spotting nice bits of furniture he'd never seen before. He soon cottoned on to the fact that my father had died the December before last and I was the main beneficiary. Once he'd got the scent of the money, he said he'd take me into his confidence because he was on the verge of making so much that he'd soon be in a position to pay me back at twenty per cent if I wanted, and he'd still have so much left he'd never bother me again. I thought he was talking about the lottery or something and I treated it all with contempt, and I suppose that just fired him up. Next thing he was telling me about these Arabs he'd met.'

Gina said quickly, 'I think you should stop there, Fiona.'

'Why?'

'They've heard enough.'

'But we haven't We need to hear it all,' Diamond said at once. 'We know what Dixon-Bligh is like, and we're keen to stop him ruining more people's lives.' He ignored the foul look he got from Gina and said, 'Together, we'll do it'

Fiona turned to Gina. 'You told me they were the police.'

'We are,' Stormy said.

'I can trust them, can't I? I'd like to tell it.'

Gina, outgunned, sighed and said nothing.

Fiona took up her thread again. 'Ted told me these Arabs made a deal with him. They'd offered him twenty thousand in return for inside information from the Dorchester. All he had to do was find out in advance when some prince from Kuwait was due to stay. Apparently it's all done secretly for security reasons. Nobody is supposed to know until they arrive, but of course certain people have to be told, and Ted knew who to ask. As simple as that, he said.'

'And he'd tip off the Arabs?'

'And get paid. He was ready to write me an IOU on the strength of it. He needed money now for his drugs.

He couldn't wait for this payday, as he called it.'

'Did you give him any?'

'No. I wouldn't be so daft. You know that old saying? He that deceives me once, shame fall him; if he deceives me twice, shame fall me.' Fiona Appleby obviously didn't think she'd put her life at risk to preserve her self-respect.

'However, I've got to say this in Ted's favour. He wasn't lying this time. There really was some underhand arrangement going on. Whether these mysterious Arabs would pay him all that money I had no idea, but he believed it.

He was going through with it, I'm positive.'

'How did you get rid of him?'

'By holding out.'

'Didn't he get violent?'

Diamond had struck a wrong note. Fiona stared at him with her large brown eyes. 'No. He's never laid a hand on me. He wouldn't.'

'Don't count on it,' he warned.

Gina murmured, 'We don't. Which is why she's here.'

'So there's more to this?'

'You can tell them,' Gina said. She was now resigned to everything being in the open.

Fiona had her hands across her stomach inside the tracksuit top. She curled her legs more tightly. 'After he'd gone, I thought about what he'd told me. All that money he was counting on. There had to be something criminal going on, and something very big. People don't pay vast sums without due cause. It troubled me. That night I couldn't sleep. All kinds of horrible ideas crept into my head. I thought of the Gulf War. It was never really resolved, was it? Suppose these Arabs he'd met were Iraqi agents planing to assassinate one of the Kuwaiti royal family? If that happened, and I knew in advance and did nothing about it, I'd have to live with the knowledge that I could have prevented a tragedy. Ted was hopelessly dependent. He wouldn't have a conscience. He didn't think past his next fix. It was up to me to do something about it. So I phoned the Foreign Office. And they took it seriously. They sent someone to see me the same day.'

Gina cut in. 'Fiona's information prevented a serious crime. Not an assassination attempt as it turned out, but a huge scam involving diamonds. Our people laid on a stake-out at very short notice and stopped the handover, but through a combination of problems the perpetrators got away.'

'Not much of a stake-out,' Stormy commented.

'These are international terrorists. They're highly organised.'

'Unlike you and me, Stormy,' Diamond said to take the heat out of the exchange. 'So who do they work for?'

'That's secure information.'

'In short, then, Fiona needs protection now, not just from Dixon-Bligh, but these Arab bandits as well. Do you know their names?'

'It's under investigation.'

'Meaning "no",' Stormy said.

'Do you know where Dixon-Bligh is?'

'He's in the process of being traced.'

'Another "no",' Stormy said, all too ready with the slick comment.

Diamond gave him a murderous glare. They didn't want to provoke Gina at this stage. 'Leave it out,' he said more for Gina's ears than Stormy's. 'We're as much in the dark as anyone else.'

'Sorry. I'm always shooting off at the mouth,' Stormy said, sounding genuine, and it was a pity his face wouldn't register a blush, because one was probably lurking there.

Diamond hesitated, uncertain if there was anything more of importance to be learned.

There was, and it came from the least likely source -Stormy.

'Peter, I can't clam up now. I've been listening to all this and getting more and more steamed up. My wife, my Patsy, worked with the District Drugs Unit for two or three years before she retired. It was part of her job to visit the drop-in centres in Hammersmith Road and Earls Court Road. She knew all the heroin-users in West London. That's the link, Peter. Dixon-Bligh was on her patch. She must have known him when he was living in Blyth Road, and I didn't think of it.'

31

A
ll this came like a wake-up call to Diamond. He now remembered Stormy mentioning how Patsy Weather worked with junkies at some stage. Like much else, it had been squirreled away in his memory, unlikely to have been recovered but for this.

Gina was just as fired up as the two detectives. 'Can you be certain she knew Dixon-Bligh?'

'If he was on her patch using drugs, you can almost bank on it,' Stormy told her, eyes dilated enough to have you believe he, too, was high on something.

'Why would he want to murder her? She'd retired from the police, you said.'

'He wasn't to know that, was he? I don't know how they met again. Pure chance, I guess. Patsy was always ready to talk to someone she knew. He'd assume she was still on the strength.'

'So he put a gun to her head and shot her?' she said in a rising tone of disbelief. 'What for?'

'Fear of arrest. He thought he was nicked.'

'For petty thieving to fund his habit?'

'No, no, no,' Stormy cut in. 'He was on the run. He faced a murder rap. He'd already shot Peter's wife.'

'Ah.' She raised her hand like a tennis player who has just been served an ace. Then turned to Diamond. 'I'm not thinking straight today. When was your wife murdered?'

'February the twenty-third.'

'And your wife?' she asked Stormy.

'Disappeared on March the twelfth.'

'Two weeks after.'

'Just over.'

She was checking alternately between the two. 'Your wife was shot in a park in Bath?'

Diamond nodded. He'd cross-checked everything in his own mind, and he was as sure of the facts as Stormy, though he tried to appear calm.

'And Dixon-Bligh was once married to your wife? Why would he want to kill her?' Gina asked.

'For money, for his drugs.' Put bluntly like that, it was chilling. But every explanation he'd ever imagined was guaranteed to chill.

She kept her bright, shrewd eyes on him, inviting him to say more.

Patiently, he took her through the crucial details. 'I told you there were entries in her diary about phoning someone she knew as "T". Dixon-Bligh's name is Edward. Ted, right? That's the name you've been using yourself, I notice.'

'Right.'

He switched to a more immediate way of telling it. 'She reminds herself when I'm coming in late: "P out. Must call T." He says he needs to see her, and she promises to think it over. She gets her hair done - and that's typical of Steph, wanting to look right, even for a meeting with that berk. She calls him again - from a public phone, so the calls won't appear on our statement - and arranges this meeting in the park on the Tuesday. She says nothing to me about any of this, and Steph wasn't like that. Since reading what she wrote, I've driven myself nuts trying to understand why she set up those phone calls and meetings and kept me out of it. But now I learn he was a drug-addict, it's all much clearer. This is the set-up. He's pestering her for money, and she doesn't want me to know about it. Steph is confident of handling him herself. He's her ex, and she thinks she knows him. She may well have been sending him small amounts of cash for some time. She'd know my reaction.'

'Unsympathetic?'

'To put it mildly.'

'Does he possess a gun?'

Unexpectedly, Fiona Appleby spoke up. 'Yes.'

All eyes were on her.

'What sort?' Diamond asked.

'Pistol.'

'Revolver?'

'Yes. He did some shooting in the Air Force. He was on the command team at Bisley. The gun was his own. He kept it in the drawer beside the till. Said he'd produce it if ever anyone tried to hold up the restaurant.'

Stormy turned up his palms as if no more needed saying.

But Gina still required convincing. 'Why shoot her when all he wanted was money for drugs?'

Diamond answered in a measured tone, drained of emotion. 'He brings the gun with him intending to force her to hand over more money than she intends, or credit cards, maybe, instead of the small handout she offers. She refuses. Steph was very strong-willed. He points the gun at her head. She tries to push him away or says something that angers him and he squeezes the trigger.'

This had directness, the simplicity of cause and effect that carried conviction.

Gina had listened impassively. She pointed a finger at him. 'Okay. It's payback time. You said just now you knew of places he might be hiding in. Were you bullshitting, or can you deliver?'

In point of fact, all the bullshitting had come from Stormy, but sometimes when your bluff is called, the brain goes into overdrive. Without hesitation Diamond launched into the story Steph had once told him about the beach hut. 'At one time when he was in the Air Force and married to Steph they were based at Tangmere, in Sussex. They lived in married quarters, I think, and didn't like it much. The one good thing about it was that they were close to the sea, and on his days off they'd escape to some local beach with a peculiar name I'm trying to remember. Wittlesham?'

'Wittering?' Gina said, following this acutely. 'West Wittering isn't far from Tangmere.'

'You've got it. West Wittering. Steph told me they rented a beach hut one summer. They'd use it to change into swimming things, and brew up tea on an oil stove and so on. The point about this is that even after the rental ended, he kept a spare key, and for years he used to go back and open up the hut and use it.'

Gina was frowning. 'After it was rented to someone else?'

'People only use them a fraction of the time.'

'Sneaky.'

'That was Steph's reaction. She wouldn't join him.'

Gina was ahead of him now. 'You're thinking he might be holed up at the beach?'

'It wouldn't be a bad place to hide.'

'Out of season, too,' Stormy added support. 'Nice and quiet. You could survive pretty well in a beach hut.'

Diamond put in a note of caution. 'I don't even know if the huts are still there. Do they still have them at West Wittering?

'All the way along,' Gina said. 'I'm going to call my guvnor.'

* * *

Eleven hours in, Curtis McGarvie tried another tactic on Joe Florida. Strictly speaking, the murder of Patricia Weather was being handled by DCI Billy Bowers. He'd informed Bowers of the arrest and invited him to join in the questioning, but up to now he hadn't appeared.

'Where were you on Friday, March the twelfth?'

Florida answered casually, 'Who knows?'

'London?'

'Maybe.'

'South-west London? Your own manor?'

'What's this about?'

'A woman went missing that day.'

'Hold on, will you?' Florida said. 'Are you trying to stick something else on me?'

'Her body wasn't found until a few days ago, on a railway embankment in Surrey.'

'Jesus, I don't believe this,' Florida said, turning to his brief. 'These assholes want to fit me up with a double murder.'

The solicitor said, 'My client wasn't informed of this at the time of his arrest.'

'Correct,' McGarvie told him without apologising. 'I was getting ahead of myself. At this stage we're questioning him about the murder of Stephanie Diamond.'

'What does he mean - "at this stage"?' Florida demanded. 'They can't do this to me.'

'We'll take a break,' McGarvie said. 'We've got a long session ahead of us.'

West Wittering was less than an hour's drive from the safe house. The long stretch of coast on the Selsey peninsula is girdled by salt-marsh, sand dunes and fields where geese congregate in hundreds. On summer weekends the beach attracts large crowds, but in October is left to a few dog-walkers, windsurfers and the occasional scavenger with a metal detector. The land above the beach is owned by the West Wittering Estate and you enter through a coin-operated barrier. When the tide is out, as it was when the armed response team arrived, the stretch of sand is vast.

Officers in helmets and black body armour and carrying Heckler & Koch MP5s were already checking the beach huts with dogs when Diamond and Stormy Weather drove up. There was an air of confidence about the search. Apparently a local shopkeeper had been shown a picture of Dixon-Bligh and was certain he had bought food a number of times in the past two weeks.

Stormy looked at Diamond as if he was Nostradamus.

The wooden huts, about a hundred and fifty on a turf promenade above the beach, were a testimony to people's individuality. They had obviously been there long enough for some to have been replaced and others given a facelift, so the doors and walls were decorated in a host of different styles and colours. Shuttered windows, verandahs and payed fronts were desirable extras. The majority were padlocked. A few of the oldest had conventional mortice locks built into the doors. It would be one of these Dixon-Bligh had illicitly used.

Diamond eyed the line of pitched roofs stretching almost to the sand dunes on the skyline at East Head, and asked the senior man how long the search would take.

'Not long, sir. The dogs will know if he's inside.'

This confident prediction was followed shortly by a result. The two springer spaniels started yelping and scratching at the door of one shabby hut towards the near end of the row. Their handlers had to haul them away.

'Game on,' the man in charge said.

Everyone took up strategic positions. Officers with submachine-guns crouched and took aim in the shingle below the level of the huts, watched from behind a stout wooden groyne by the others, including Diamond and Weather.

Diamond told a senior man they didn't want the suspect killed and was informed they were using soft-point rounds.

Through a loudhailer the occupant of the hut was told that armed police were outside. He was instructed to come out, hands on head.

There was no response.

Two more warnings were given. Then the order came to force an entry. A distraction device, some kind of thunderflash, was lobbed behind the hut and went off with a terrific report.

Instantly four men armed with sub-machine-guns dashed to the hut from either side. The only way in was through the front and it wouldn't take much. The wooden door was half-rotten through years of exposure to salt spray. A burst of gunfire shot away the hinges.

The door fell outwards and hit the paving stones. It had not been locked.

But no one was inside.

The anticlimax silenced everyone. There was that feeling of sheepishness - not unknown to Diamond - when the long arm of the law has reached out and missed.

Finally the man in charge said, 'Stupid bloody dogs.'

'Back to it, lads,' some other officer said. 'There's a million more fucking huts.'

The man at Diamond's side said, 'Which genius gave us this tip-off?'

Diamond said nothing, and Stormy stayed silent as well.

Interestingly the dogs were still straining at their leashes to return to the empty hut. The handlers had a problem getting them back to work.

'I know it's obvious no one is in there,' Diamond told Stormy, 'but I want a closer look.'

They stepped up to the hut and over the bits of timber that had been the door. There were definite signs of recent occupation. Just inside the doorway was a folded sleeping bag. Also a torch, a cut loaf and a carton containing canned food and beer. An
A to
Zof West Sussex and a copy of the
Sunday Express -
last week's edition. He picked up the torch and switched it on. 'What do you make of that, Dave?'

Stormy bent closer to the area of flooring caught in the beam of light.

Diamond told him, 'That's what excited the dogs.'

'Stormy wetted his finger and touched the dark patch. 'You're right. It's blood.'

After the forensic team and SOCOs arrived there was the usual hiatus. Clearly someone or some animal had shed blood in the beach hut, but it was a mystery where they had gone. The sniffer dogs took no interest in any of the other huts, or the changing rooms, toilets or cafe higher up the beach. With nothing else to detain them, the armed response team packed up and drove away.

'Looks like the Arabs got to him first,' Stormy said.

'Killed him, you mean? For blabbing?'

He nodded. 'Those guys don't take prisoners. Did you ever see
Lawrence of Arabia?'

'If he's dead, I don't know where they left him.'

'Buried him on the beach, I expect. It wouldn't take long.’

'Wouldn't be long before he was found, either. Plenty of people come along here walking their dogs, even at this time of year, and when a dog gets a whiff of blood . . . And how would the Arabs have found him here?'

'They're smart operators, Peter. They escaped from the Dorchester under the noses of one of these hotshot teams of ninjas, so it's not beyond them to track Dixon-Bligh to his hideout.'

'Unless.'

'Unless what?'

'Unless this is a totally unrelated incident. Remember it was a hunch that brought us here.'

'Let's say a brainwave.'

Diamond sniffed. 'We can hope so.'

They sat on a wooden beam facing the band of grey sea and the misty outline of the Isle of Wight. Nearer to them, gulls and sandpipers in their hundreds had colonised the wet sand.

'I hope this smackhead isn't dead,' Stormy said. 'I want him put on trial.'

'Be better off dead when I catch up with him,' Diamond muttered.

'You don't want to foul up your career for a scumbag like that.'

'Watch me.'

'That's precisely why you and I are sidelined.'

From behind them a uniformed PC called Diamond over to where the incident tapes kept any onlookers out of the sterile area. 'Gentleman here wants a word, sir. He appears to know something.'

The informant was a tall, elderly man with a white moustache. He was wearing a windcheater and brown corduroys tucked into green Wellingtons. His red setter started forward and licked the back of Diamond's hand.

'Something to tell me, sir?'

'Seeing all the activity here I wondered if it's anything to do with that fellow they found on the beach yesterday.'

'What fellow?'

'Couldn't tell you who he was. I was walking the dog as usual and saw what happened. Some windsurfers spotted him half in, half out of the water at damned near high tide. Blood all over his shirt, but no wound that I could see. He was obviously in a bad way. Out to the world. They took him off in an ambulance.'