Upon a Dark Night (24 page)

Imogen’s lips tightened. ‘This is Ada, isn’t it? She’s been agitating because Rose hasn’t written to her. I keep telling her not to make waves. Rose will write in her own good time if she wishes to. She’s got enough on her plate trying to get back to normal.’

‘Quite probably. What is normal? Did you find out? Did the stepsister have anything else to say about Rose’s life in Hounslow?’

‘I can’t recall anything, except that Rose had been on a trip to Florida some time and still managed to phone her mother.’

The mention of the phone gave him an idea. ‘Do you have a set of London phone directories in this place?’

‘Behind you.’

He picked the first one off the shelf and looked up the name Black. ‘Hounslow, you said. Miss R. Black, 12 Turpin Street.’ Slowly he ran his finger down the columns. ‘Can’t find it here, Imogen.’

‘Perhaps she’s ex-directory.’

He replaced the directory. Beside it were a number of street atlases, including a London A-Z, which he picked up to study the index. ‘Turpin Street. You’re quite sure of that?’

‘I suppose it could have been Turpin Road.’

‘Doesn’t matter. There’s only one Turpin in this book and that’s Turpin Way in Wallington, a long way from Hounslow.

I hate to say this, my dear, but it looks as if you’ve been given a fast shuffle by this woman. Ada may be onto something after all.’

Twenty-one

It was ‘Be Nice to Julie’ day. ‘In case you’re waiting for me, I’m afraid I’ve got to work through,’ he thoughtfully told her. ‘But you can go off as soon as you like. Take your time. You’ve earned it twice over.’

Julie suppressed a smile. She knew why the old gannet couldn’t face lunch. She’d heard about his belated arrival at the mortuary only to discover that the autopsy on Hildegarde Henkel had been rescheduled, forcing him to watch the whole thing.

‘So don’t let me stop you, if you want to go down to the…’ he said, the voice trailing off, unable to articulate the word ‘canteen’.

She told him she’d eaten earlier. She asked if there was anything new on the case.

‘Depends which case you mean.’ The awkwardness between them was not only due to his nausea.

She said, not without irony, ‘I was under the impression we were working on Hildegarde Henkel.’

‘No progress there.’

‘Nothing came out of the post-mortem?’

‘Nothing we don’t know already.’

He was unwilling to say more than the minimum and she had no desire to pump him for information. People of his rank were supposed to communicate.

She waited.

Finally he felt compelled to speak. ‘We ought to put things right between us, Julie. Some straight-talking. That wasn’t very professional yesterday.’

‘Do you mean your sexist remark, or my reaction to it?’

‘Sexist, was it?’

‘No more than usual. The difference was that you made it personal.’

‘I can’t even remember what I said.’

‘I’ll tell you, then,’ she said. ‘I made some sympathetic remark about the dead woman and you said I was being a shade too sisterly for your taste, which I thought was bloody mean considering how much I take from you without bitching.’

‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘It was a light-hearted comment. I wasn’t attacking you.’

‘It was sarcasm.’

‘Yes, and I know what they say about that, but I thought you had enough of a sense of humour to take it with a smile.’

‘Spare me that old line, Mr Diamond.’

He gave a twitchy smile. ‘Look, it was only because you’re not one of those die-hard feminists that I made the remark. You call it sarcastic: I meant it to be ironic. I didn’t expect to touch a raw nerve. You and I know better than to fall out over a word, Julie.’

She said, ‘We’d have fallen out long before this if I’d objected to words. It’s the assumption behind them. You make snide remarks about my so-called feminist opinions as if I ride a broomstick and put curses on men. I’m another human being doing a job. I don’t ask for any more consideration than the men get. It’s about being treated as one of the human race instead of a lesser species.’

‘I’ve never thought of you as lesser anything,’ he told her.

She rolled her eyes upwards and said nothing.

‘Look at me,’ Diamond went on. ‘Would a fat, arrogant git like this choose anyone less than the best for a deputy? I rate you, Julie. I’m not going to turn into a New Man overnight, but I’m big enough to say that I rate you - and I wouldn’t say that about many others in this God-forsaken nick, male or female.’

She held his gaze. It was the nearest thing to an apology she was likely to get. Nothing more was said for an interval. Finally she looked away and told him, ‘God help you if you ever meet a real feminist.’

The air was not entirely clear, but it had improved.

He nearly ruined it by the lordly way he extended his hand towards a chair. With a sigh, she sat down.

Normal business resumed. ‘You asked about progress,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure if this fits the heading, but I discovered that Ada Shaftsbury may be right after all in raising the alarm about her friend, the one who lost her memory and hasn’t been in contact.’

‘Rose.’

‘I just called at Social Services. The people who collected her gave a bogus address.’

‘She isn’t living there?’

‘The street doesn’t even exist.’

Their minds were working in concert now. ‘Then the woman really is missing.’

‘She can’t be contacted, anyway.’

Julie weighed the implications. ‘If something dodgy happened, it’s quite a coincidence that Hildegarde was staying in the same hostel.’

‘Or quite a connection.’

‘One woman dead and one missing out of how many staying there?’

‘Only three, as far as I can make out. Ada is the only one left.’

‘Then she does have reason to be concerned,’ said Julie. ‘We’ve been treating her like the boy who cried “Wolf!”’

Diamond introduced a note of caution. ‘On the other hand, people like these - living in a hostel, I mean - are more unstable than your average citizens.’

‘Meaning what? That one suspicious death and one abduction are par for the course?’

He smiled. ‘No, but it’s not impossible that two people at the same address turn out to be victims of different crimes.’

‘But are they different crimes?’ said Julie. ‘We don’t know what happened to Rose. She could be dead, the same as Hildegarde.’

He shook his head. ‘Not the same at all, Julie. There’s no evidence that Hildegarde’s death was planned. How could it have been, when the party at the Royal Crescent was a surprise even to the tenants? Compare it to the planning that seems to have gone into the abduction of Rose Black, or whatever her name may be.’

She thought it through and grudgingly concluded that he had a point. The abduction of Rose, if it was an abduction, must have involved some sophisticated planning. To have gone to the Social Services claiming to be her family and producing photographs as evidence was a high-risk operation that could only have worked if it was carried through with conviction. She spoke her next thought aloud: ‘But is it right to assume something sinister just because the woman gave a false address to Social Services? Could there be a reason for it?’

He said flippantly, ‘Like winning the lottery and wanting no publicity?’

Julie treated the remark seriously. ‘In a way, yes. I was thinking that the family knew something they wanted to keep to themselves. Suppose they discovered that Rose lost her memory in a car accident she caused, killing or maiming someone. They’d have reason enough for whisking her away and leaving no traces.’

Diamond’s eyebrows pricked up. ‘That’s good. That’s very good.’ He leaned back in his chair, confirming that her theory made sense. ‘If I remember right, she was found wandering on the A46 by some people from Westbury.’

‘Some people Ada is being cagey about in case we prosecute them,’ said Julie.

‘Prosecute them - why?’

‘Oh, come on, Mr Diamond. Rose stepped into the road and their car struck her and knocked her out. They drove her to the Hinton Clinic and dumped her in the car park.’

‘Then they damned well should be nicked.’ But he allowed that trifling thought to pass. ‘Why was she wandering in the first place? That’s the nub of it. You’ve got a point. An earlier incident, on the motorway perhaps. It’s not unknown for people in shock to walk away from an accident. Do we know the date she was found?’

‘It’s on file,’ Julie reminded him. ‘The clinic notified us when she was brought in. There are photographs of her injuries. If you’d care to see them—’

‘Not now,’ he said quickly. He’d seen enough gore for one day.

Julie added, ‘We checked at the time for road accidents on the motorway and every other road within a five-mile radius. There weren’t any that fitted the circumstances.’

‘There weren’t any we heard about. That’s not quite the same thing, Julie.’ He drummed his fingertips on the chair-arm. ‘Look, by rights this could be farmed out to one of Wigfull’s people.’

She listened with amusement, confident of what was coming.

‘But it could be argued that Harmer House provides a link with the Royal Crescent case, so I think we’ll take this on board, Julie. See what you can do with it. Have a talk yourself with Imogen Starr, the social worker, and see what she remembers of Doreen Jenkins, the woman who collected Rose. Then check every detail of the story for accuracy. Find out where Jenkins was staying in Bath. See if there really was a man in tow, as she claimed. Check Hounslow, Twickenham. Check the mother, if you can.’

‘Do you want me to involve Ada at this stage?’

‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I don’t feel strong enough. It’s up to you.’

She got up. At the door she turned and asked, “Will you be concentrating on Hildegarde Henkel’s death?’

‘Someone has to,’ he said with a martyred air.

But the first move he made after Julie had left was to the room where items of evidence were stored, and the item he asked to examine had not belonged to Hildegarde Henkel.

‘A shotgun,’ he told the sergeant in charge. ‘Property of Daniel Gladstone, deceased.’

There was some hesitation. ‘That’s Mr Wigfull’s case, sir.’

‘You think I don’t know whose case it is, sergeant?’

‘Mr Wigfull is very hot on exhibits, sir.’ And so was this sergeant, a real stickler for procedure.

‘I’m sure he is, and he’s right to be. He and I are working hand in hand on several cases, as you heard, no doubt. The gun has been seen by forensic, I take it - checked for prints and so on.’

‘I believe it has, sir.’

‘It’s bagged up, then? Bagged up and labelled?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Said with a note of finality.

‘Good.’ Diamond grinned like a chess-player who has watched his opponent make the wrong move. ‘Just what the doctor ordered.’

‘Is it, sir?’

‘Because I won’t need to disturb the bag. I can examine it without breaking the seal, and no one need get uptight.’

‘Mr Diamond, I don’t wish to be obstructive—’

‘Nor me, sergeant, nor me. So I’ll save your reputation by coming round the back and checking the item here on the premises. It won’t have left your control. Just lift the flap for me, would you?’

Minutes after, the sergeant was privy to the bizarre spectacle of Detective Superintendent Diamond seated on a chair, with the shotgun in its polythene wrapping poised between his legs, the butt supported on the floor, the muzzle under his chin, while his fingers groped along the barrel towards the trigger guard.

‘Be a sport, sergeant, and keep this to yourself. There are things a man wouldn’t like his best friends to know about.’

With his mind still on Farmer Gladstone, he drove out to Tormarton to have another look at the farm. Crime-scene tape was still spread across the gate and the front door. He left the car in the lane and lifted his leg over the tape.

There were several large heaps of earth in the field outside. He went over to one of the pits and looked inside. They had dug to the bedrock.

He detached the tape from the front door of the farmhouse and was pleased to find that he could open it. He went through the kitchen to the back room. The Bible he had found was still on the window-sill, obviously of no interest to John Wigfull. He picked it up and glanced at the family tree in the front, the long line of male descendants ending with a female, May Turner, who had married Daniel Gladstone here in Tormarton in 1943. Then he let the pages fall open at the old Christmas card. He wanted another look at the photo inside, of the woman and child, and the wording on the card, concise, touching and yet remote:
‘I
thought you would like this picture of your family. God’s blessings to us all at

this time. Meg.’
Was it really meant to bless, he wondered, or to damn?

He closed the Bible and slipped it into his coat pocket, trying not to feel furtive.

Outside, he made a more thorough tour of the outhouses than before. They had been ravaged by the winds endemic in this exposed place, and patched up from time to time with tarpaulin and pieces of corrugated iron. They should have been torn down long ago and rebuilt. Someone, he noticed, had recently fed and watered the chickens. It was one of life’s few certainties that whenever there were animals at a crime scene, you could count on one of the police seeing to their needs. He scraped away some straw in the hen-house in case there had been recent digging underneath, but the surface was brick-hard.

Then he returned to his car and drove through the lanes to Tormarton village, a cluster of grey houses, cottages and farm buildings behind drystone walls. Rustic it may have appeared, yet there was the steady drone of traffic from the motorway only a quarter of a mile to the south. The inhabitants must have been willing to trade the noise for the convenience. It didn’t take a detective to tell that many were escapees from suburban life. The old buildings remained, but gentrified, cleaned up and adapted to a car-owning population. The Old School House no longer catered for children. The shop and sub-Post Office had been converted into a pub. The Cotswold Way, another modern gloss on ancient features, snaked between the cottages and across the fields.