Upon a Dark Night (36 page)

‘Chief Inspector Wigfull?’

‘I told you it was barmy letting him take over. He’s got sod-all interest in how my friend Hilde died. All he cares about is a frigging flat tyre. Bastard. Well, he’s got egg all over his mean face now, because I had a copper-bottom alibi, didn’t I? I was doing my night job.’

‘You’ve got a job?’

She sniffed and drew herself up. ‘Two nights a week, ten till six. I sit in a shabby little office in Bilbury Lane answering the phone and talking to taxi-drivers over the radio. So I’ve got ten to fifteen blokes who can vouch for me last night. They all know when I’m on duty. We have some good laughs over the short wave, I can tell you.’

‘And Chief Inspector Wigfull is investigating damaged cars now? Are you sure of this, Ada?’

‘Sure? Of course I’m bloody sure. I wasn’t brought in here for my health. I’m his number one suspect, or I was until I put him straight.’

This was difficult to believe. No officer of Wigfull’s rank looked into minor acts of vandalism unless there was an overriding reason. ‘Do you happen to know whose car it was? Not a police vehicle, I hope?’

She told him. ‘One of them people up the Crescent. Alley something, is it?’

‘Allardyce, I expect.’ Diamond was intrigued.

‘That was it and that’s why Wigwam fingered me. He reckons I got a grudge against them because of my friend Hilde dying up there. It’s not true, Mr Diamond. I don’t blame them for what happened to Hilde. I never even met them.’

Diamond turned to Julie. ‘Would you see Ada safely to the door?’

Julie gave him a mutinous look.

He explained, ‘I want to get things straight with JW. This is a development I hadn’t expected.’

Ada said, ‘Throw the book at him. He’s out of order, victimising innocent women.’

‘Come on, love,’ said Julie. ‘Don’t waste our valuable time.’

‘And you’re no better,’ Ada shouted at Diamond as she was led away. ‘What about poor Rose, then? If you lot had the sense to listen to me, you’d solve your bleeding cases and have time to spare,’ was Ada’s parting shot.

He spent twenty minutes with Wigfull, going over the implications of the slashing of Allardyce’s tyre. Now that Ada had been eliminated as the suspect, Wigfull fell back on his original theory that it had been a random act by a teenager.

Diamond was like a dog with a bone. ‘Did you ask Allardyce if he could think of anyone holding a grudge against him?’

‘I did.’

‘And what did he answer?’

‘Negative.’

‘Was he being totally honest?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Was he hiding anything? Bad feelings with someone else?’

‘Why should he?’ Wigfull said, reasonably enough. ‘If he’d wanted to keep it quiet he wouldn’t have come to me in the first place. A slashed tyre is no big deal. He could have put on the spare and got on with his life.’

‘You see, if it
was
deliberate, the circle of suspects is fairly small. Not many people knew where he’d left his car last night. Not many would know his car anyway. You said it was new.’

‘He’s not the sort who makes enemies of his neighbours,’ said Wigfull. ‘There’s nothing to dislike in him. The only person I could think of who might have taken against him was Ada. She’s still upset about Hildegarde Henkel’s death at the party they had, and she’s an unstable personality anyway, but she’s got this alibi for last night. I really think we’re wasting our time talking about it.’

Diamond carried on as if nothing had been said. ‘Is the car still up there at the Circus?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Did you go to see it?’

‘What would have been the point?’

He picked up Wigfull’s phone. ‘Get me William Allardyce, will you?…The Crescent, yes.’

Wigfull tapped his fingers on the desk and looked out of the window at the early evening traffic jam, trying to appear nonchalant while listening keenly to Diamond’s end of the conversation.

‘Who is this?…Mrs Allardyce. Peter Diamond here, from Bath Police. …He isn’t? Well, I have the pleasure of speaking to you instead. I was perturbed to hear about the damage to your husband’s car this morning…After you’d left for work? You must start early. Of course, you do. I forget the television runs right through the day. Personally I prefer the radio in the morning…Do you have a car of your own?…I agree. The train is much the best way to travel if you can…Yes, it only just reached my attention. We’re having a meeting about it right now. Tell me, has he had the tyre fixed yet?…He has? No use me trotting up to the Circus to look at the damage, then…I dare say the filming has finished in the Crescent, so he’ll be able to park in his usual spot tonight…These things happen, sadly, but I think it’s unlikely. Just in case, I’ll ask our night patrol to keep a lookout…No trouble at all. Just tell him we’re working on it, would you? Thank you, ma’am.’

‘Perturbed, are you?’ said Wigfull.

‘Yes, John, I am. Let me know if you get any further with it, won’t you?’

He returned to the incident room, now transformed into a bustling workplace. Halliwell had a message from Jim Marsh: would Mr Diamond call if convenient?

‘
If convenient?’
He snatched up the phone and got through. ‘Well, John?’

‘It’s a match, Mr Diamond. The hair from the clothing comes from the same individual as the two hairs found at the scene of the murder.’

‘So Rose was definitely in the farmhouse?’

‘That’s for you to say. I was looking at hairs.’

‘And now you’re splitting them.’

‘I’m simply reporting our findings.’

Diamond turned and gave a triumphant thumbs-up to the entire incident room. ‘Cheers, mate,’ he said into the phone. ‘You can bill me for that beer next time we meet.’

‘Double Scotch.’

‘What?’

‘It was a double Scotch you offered before.’

‘Was it? Mad, impetuous fool. You’re on, then.’

The news buoyed everyone up. Few had been willing to back Diamond when he picked on Rose as the main suspect. Now they had to admit he was justified. It wasn’t quite the surge of exhilaration that comes when a case is buttoned up. They didn’t shake him by the hand or pat him on the back, but they clustered around him, united in support. Then in the passion of the moment the computer operator who had called him a great oaf gave him a hug and retired immediately to the ladies.

He took the whole thing equably (even the hug, which no one would forget), reminding everyone that the time to celebrate would be when they picked up Rose and she admitted everything.

So there was no popping of corks. Just a quiet coffee in Bloomsburys. Alone.

This should have been a defining moment in the inquiry. It was…and yet. He found himself thinking increasingly not of Rose, but the people in the house in the Royal Crescent - the Allardyces and the Treadwells. The trivial incident of the ripped tyre would not bed down with the rest of the day’s events. It niggled. It had brought the two couples back into the frame,
his
frame, anyway. Speaking on the phone to Sally Allardyce, the slim, softly spoken black woman working in television, he was reminded of the tensions he had noticed. Superficially, they were good neighbours and firm friends. Their ill-starred weekend had started with an evening in the pub. Together they had coped with a party much larger than they anticipated. In the aftermath they shared the inconvenience of policemen taking over their apartments. They had got up a card game to pass the time when their Sunday was so disrupted. But under questioning, the men, in particular, had taken different stances over the party, Turnbull agitated and resentful, while Allardyce was more tolerant.

If anyone had deliberately slashed Allardyce’s tyre, the betting was strong that it was somebody from that house. Who else would have known where it was parked on that one night? Another neighbour, maybe. Less likely, though.

Why was it done then, then?

Out of malice, sheer frustration, or for a practical reason?

In his mind he could cast Guy Treadwell as a tyre-slasher with no difficulty. The young man bristled with resentment. Exactly why it should be directed at his neighbour was another question, except that people like Treadwell rarely got on with their neighbours.

Emma Treadwell? A woman could rip a tyre with a sharp blade as easily as a man. If anything, she was a more forceful personality than Guy.
‘Infirm of purpose! Give me the daggers.’

And what of Sally Allardyce? She had left early for work that morning. Her walk to the station would have taken her through the Circus, very likely when it was still dark. If she had wanted, for some reason, to limit her husband’s movements that day, she could have done the deed.

The motive? In each case he could only guess, and he didn’t do that.

He would find out.

Twenty-nine

He crossed the street from Bloomsburys and returned to the police station the quick way, by the public entrance. Before going home, he meant to have a few pointed words with Halliwell about manning the incident room at all times. But he got no further than the enquiry counter. The sergeant on duty had spotted him.

‘Mr Diamond.’

‘At your service.’

‘You’re wanted upstairs, sir. A taxi-driver came in ten minutes ago, reckons he knows where your missing lady is.’

Caught in freeze-frame, as it were, Diamond let the magic words sink in. In his experience taxi-drivers didn’t volunteer information unless it was reliable. This had to be taken more seriously than the so-called sightings up to now.

Two old men and a dog were waiting by the enquiry window. As one, they turned to see who it was who needed to find a missing lady. And he was so elated by the news that he performed a slow pirouette for them - with surprising grace for a big man.

‘The incident room?’

‘Your office.’

‘I’m on my way.’

Upstairs, Halliwell, caught off guard again, sprang up from Diamond’s chair and introduced Mr John Beevers, from Astra Taxis.

John Beevers did not spring up. He was in the one comfortable armchair in the room, basking in limelight and cigar smoke. He took a cellophane-wrapped corona from an inside pocket and held it out to Diamond in a way that was faintly vulgar.

‘Non-smoker. What have you got to tell us?’

Now the driver produced the
Bath Chronicle
from his car-coat. ‘This woman in the paper. You want to find her, m’ dear?’

Diamond had worked in the West Country long enough to be used to being a stranger’s ‘dear’ or ‘love’, but it grated when coming from someone he disliked on sight. ‘That’s the general idea.’

‘Well, I got news for you. I had her in my cab. Her and another woman.’

A vulgar quip would have been all too easy. ‘When was this?’

‘Two and a half weeks back, I reckon. It was her, no question.’

Diamond’s hopes plummeted. ‘As long ago as that?’

‘If ‘tis no use, m’ dear, I’ll save my breath.’

‘It could still be useful. Go on.’

The driver exhaled copiously in Diamond’s normally smoke-free office. ‘I can’t tell you the date. ‘Twere the afternoon and it had been raining. The first woman - not her you’re looking for - hailed me in Laura Place, by the fountain. She wanted Harmer House, the women’s hostel in Bathwick Street.’

So it was that far back in Rose’s history. Diamond’s elation was ebbing away.

‘I gave her a close look to see if she were a paying customer. You hear the word “hostel” and you got to be careful, if you understand me. She were quite respectable actually. Mind, I weren’t over-pleased with the job. It were no fare at all from Laura Place. No more than six hundred yards, I reckon. I told her, polite like, she’d do better to walk it and save herself the fare, but she said she were picking someone up, with luggage. She wanted me to bide awhile outside, and then we’d go up St James’s Square.’

‘Tucked away behind the Royal Crescent?’

‘Right. That sounded more like a job of work to me. I warned her it would all be on the clock, and she weren’t bothered. So that’s what we did.’

‘What was she like?’

‘The one who hired me? Now you’re asking. This were some days back, you know.’

‘Try.’

‘Dark-haired, I b’lieve. Thirty, maybe. Bit of a madam. She weren’t having no lip from a common cabbie.’

‘The hair. Can you tell me anything about it?’

‘What do you mean, m’dear? I said it were dark. I can’t tell one style from another.’

‘Curly?’

‘No, not curly. Straight, and combed back, fixed behind her head. What do they call that?’

Diamond knew, but he wasn’t going to put words into the witness’s mouth.

Beever was getting there by stages. ’’ Orse-tail. Is that it?’

Halliwell looked ready to supply the word, so Diamond cut in, ‘We’ve got to hear it from you to be of any use, Mr Beever.’

’’ Orse-tail, I said. No, that b’ain’t right. Pony-tail. She had a pony-tail. If you ask me, pony-tails look nice on little girls and really scrawny women. Her’d had too many good dinners to get away with it.’

‘And the face. Can you picture the face?’

‘You want a lot for nothing. ‘Twere the other woman I came in about. Well, I don’t know if this be any help, but she made me think of them women in boots.’

‘Boots?’ said Diamond.

‘The tarty ones on the make-up counters. Heavy on the war-paint.’

‘Ah, Boot’s the chemist.’

‘I was telling thee what happened. She made a great to-do about could she rely on me to wait. I told her if she were paying, I didn’t mind how long it took. So that’s what happened. We drove to Bathwick Street. I bided my time outside Harmer House, reading my paper for a good half-hour, maybe longer. Then she came out with this other woman, the one you’re trying to find. She’d said sommat about luggage, but it were only a couple of carrier bags, so I didn’t open the boot. I drove them up to St James’s Square—’

‘Was anything said?’

‘Could have been. I don’t recall. When we got up to the Square - off Julian Road, behind the Royal Crescent—’

‘We established that.’

‘Be that as it may, m’ dear, nine out of ten people couldn’t take you to it without a map. When we got up there, she pointed out the house. I can’t tell you the number. It were on the south side, with a red door. That’s all I got to say, really. She settled the fare - something over twenty-five by that time - and I give her a receipt and out they got. They went in with their bags and I haven’t seen hide nor hair of them since.’