Dying to Know (30 page)

This man is mad, I thought.

‘He cried out as he fell, I remember. Not loud, but almost plaintive. I peeped over the handrail but he was out cold. Once again, I had little time to act. I picked up the hammer, went down the stairs and wrapped his fingers around the handle, then dropped it beside him. I didn't know then whether he was dead or alive, but I didn't have the time to find out. I had to find that book.'

Max asked in a slightly strained voice, ‘What about the safe? Did you know that was there?'

‘Not at first, but I came across it when I searched. I was rather annoyed that Doris hadn't told me about it in the first place. In fact, I went back upstairs and told her off.'

I think that both Max and I could tell what he meant by that; from her expression, she felt as sick as I did. Smith felt no such nausea as he said, ‘She gave me the combination, though, but imagine my disappointment when it was empty.'

‘Yes,' I said softly. ‘I can imagine it.'

‘I was going to tell her off again, but she was no longer very communicative, so I went through as much of the ground floor as I could, but then I heard a key going into the front door and I decided that I would be advised to make my escape.'

His use of terms – ‘annoyed', ‘told her off' – when describing murders, some of them atrocities, suggested that he was completely unhinged. Max was staring at him, her mouth slightly open; I doubt she had ever had the chance to study a stark staring loony at such close range before and, clearly, she didn't want to miss a moment. The gun barrel was dropping again.

‘I take it that it was you who employed Robbins to break back in and look.'

‘Yes. Another one who owes me. A little matter of forged MOT certificates that I hushed up for him; he does odd jobs for me now and again.'

‘And he found the book.'

‘Yes, but the diamonds were gone. The spine was ripped open and the only thing inside the book was a receipt of some sort.' He frowned. ‘I was starting to think that there were supernatural forces working against me.'

‘Are you sure that Victor didn't take the diamonds himself?'

He smiled. ‘You know, I thought about that. I questioned him fairly closely and assured him that I would take a similar approach to his little boy should he lie, but he was fairly convincing that that was how he found the book, and I believe him.'

With every sentence, his mental state became plainer; every syllable painted a further detail in the picture of his criminal insanity. The gun barrel kept going up and down as if it were bouncing on elastic; his grip on the handle was quite loose but there was no chance that either of us was going to get to him before it tightened on the trigger.

‘So, again, I had to wait. I had really begun to think that it was all over, that I would never find them, but then Mr Holversum so kindly came to tell me about a peculiar phone call he'd received this morning.'

‘But that was a lie,' insisted Max. ‘I just made the calls to—'

‘To open an auction,' he interrupted. ‘Yes, that's what I thought. Very clever.'

‘No, we told Tom—'

‘You told Tom that you had the diamonds, and then you denied it again. I know.'

‘There you are then.'

He was shaking his head. ‘He doesn't believe you, though, does he? He was about to find out the truth when I came in.'

‘He wouldn't have found them, no matter what he did,' I said. I kept my voice as calm as I could but made sure that it was also urgent and forceful. ‘We really don't have them.'

‘I don't believe you.' There was no arguing with that decision. ‘You're the logical ones to have them. You took up residence in your father's house; you –' he indicated Max – ‘broke into the Lightollers. The diamonds had already gone from the book by then. No one had any other chance.'

Max looked at me, her face full of horror, but I was looking at the gun barrel; it was horizontal and perky again, pointing purposefully away from a fist that gripped the handle and the trigger tightly. We had missed our chance.

‘Now,' he said calmly and he was smiling again, ‘I want you to give them to me, or I will kill you.'

FORTY-ONE

O
ut of the corner of my eye, I saw Max looking in my direction but all I could think about was the hole of that gun barrel looking in front of me. It was obvious that he was serious and that he was just mad enough to shoot us both if we didn't do as he wanted very quickly. Which, considering that we didn't have the diamonds, was a problem.

But there was something . . .

‘Come on,' Smith urged. ‘Don't dally. I have to get back to the station.'

Max still thought he was contactable by the kind of logic that the rest of us lived by. ‘But you don't understand, constable. This was just a trick we played to try to entice the murderer to make himself known.'

I would ordinarily have taken issue with her choice of personal pronoun, but this was not a time of ordinariness and, anyway, I was thinking . . .

Smith sighed and was not taken in. ‘And you succeeded, Miss Christy. Your scheme was wonderful in its simplicity and for that I applaud you. Now, though, it is time to hand over what I want.'

‘But we haven't got them!'

‘Yes, you have. You must have. Nobody else has.'

Max looked again to me, her face showing understandable stress but things were happening in my cranium and I was undergoing a completely novel experience.

I was solving a mystery.

Smith stood up and walked around the room; he did not take his eyes from us, did not dissuade the barrel from its fascination with us. When he was standing behind us and we were craning around to look at him, he said, ‘Who's first?'

Which is one of those questions to which there can never be an answer.

But I was close to an answer to another question.

He put the barrel to Max's forehead. She pulled away but the barrel followed her. When she squealed and twisted round to grab my arm and bury her head in my shoulder, all he did was to lean forward on the back of the sofa and dig it into the back of her head. ‘I think you,' he breathed. There was an unmistakable pitch of excitement in the sound of his words.

Max cried out and squeezed my arm so tight that I almost lost the thread of my thoughts and, to gain time, I said loudly and urgently, ‘OK! OK!'

I was craning my head to look at him, hugging Max to me. He didn't withdraw the gun. ‘OK, what?'

I still hadn't worked it through completely, but I couldn't let that stop me. I had to say something to stop him firing that gun. ‘I'll take you to the diamonds.'

The only movement he made was on his face as his expression changed to one of suspicion. ‘Take me to them? What does that mean?'

‘They're not here.' I managed to say that with total sincerity.

‘Where are they, then?'

I took a deep breath. I didn't know and I would have to lie.

‘On my father's allotment.'

FORTY-TWO

A
t which he grinned. ‘No,' he said. There was a degree of certainty in that syllable that no one of sound mind could ever produce. ‘No, you're having me on.'

The gun dug into Max's neck; I could feel her shaking as she in turn pressed ever harder into me. ‘No, not this time. Believe me, Smith. I'm telling the truth. The diamonds aren't here; they never were, because Dad found them when he called at the shop just after you killed Lightoller. He lied when he said that he hadn't found Lightoller.'

He considered me, looked at me and I saw him wondering, judging, calculating. ‘Masson told me that your old man was crackers but honest. He couldn't ever get his head around the possibility that he might have killed Oliver Lightoller, let alone Doris. Are you saying he's a thief?'

‘But Dad didn't like the Lightollers, remember? He might not have had the temperament to kill them and he might not ordinarily be a thief, but he was mad at Lightoller because of the watch. He only found the diamonds because he was looking for his watch.'

‘Where did he find them?'

‘In the watch cabinet.'

I held my breath and tried not to show that I was doing it; if he had happened to look in the watch cabinet, then Max and I were dead.

‘What about the book, then? Why did Doris Lightoller say that they were in the book?'

It was a good question.

A bloody good question, actually . . .

Suddenly Max emerged from my arm and said, ‘Probably because they were, once. I expect he hadn't told his wife that he'd decided to take them out of the book; it was a stupid place to hide them, don't you think?
Diamonds Are Forever
? Do me a favour. You said that Baines was stupid, and that proves it.'

I saw it work on Smith. He couldn't resist a spot of staring, but it was qualitatively different; it held now a faint dawning of realization that she might have a point.

He hesitated a long time but then stood up. ‘Take me to them.'

My father, who likes to believe that he is of a philosophical bent of mind, has talked often of his belief that allotments are the spiritual centre of the universe, that they are a perfect microcosm. ‘All of life – not just human life – is here, Lance,' he used to say and I, for one, thought he was talking rubbish but never said so. He also used to go on about the Circle of Life long before Disney ever got in on the act. ‘Everything comes back to this place, you know,' he would add. ‘And then there is rebirth.'

Since my father is allowed out without a straitjacket only because he is clever enough to fool the psychiatrists, I had always thought these words to be mere ravings but I have to admit to a certain sense of coming home as I drove to the allotments, Smith in the back of the car with the gun still pressed into Max's side, aware that the climax of this whole episode was once again going to be enacted on my father's allotment.

I just hoped that the silly old fool hadn't listened to me for once and disposed of the grenade.

All through the trip I kept catching Max's eye in the rear-view mirror; understandably, she had a puzzled and worried expression, since she didn't know about Dad's little souvenir; the trouble was, I
did
know about it, and I still wasn't feeling particularly chipper. Even if it was in the shed, I wasn't sure how I could use it on Smith without a fair amount of collateral damage to both myself and Max. It had been a plan borne of desperation, to get us out of the house, to prolong our lives for a while, nothing more.

As we drove on to the allotment site, Smith looked around us; it was very dark and very cold, with the fog as thick as ever. ‘How did the diamonds get here?' he asked.

I had been wondering about that myself.

‘Because this is where Dad hid them as soon as he found them.'

It must have sounded unlikely to him; I couldn't blame him because it certainly sounded so to me.

‘Why didn't he hide them in his house?' he continued.

‘Because my father's rather eccentric.'

He thought about this. ‘Masson told me he was cracked,' he admitted.

There was silence for a moment, and then he asked, ‘So how do you know where they are?'

‘His memory's coming back. The last time we were visiting, he waited until Percy Bailey had gone to the toilet and told us where they were.'

He made a noise that sounded very suspicious, but said nothing more. I drove as slowly as I could along the lane, trying to formulate some plan all the while, then stopped at Dad's plot. Maybe it was my imagination, but maybe I really was walking as if through molasses; who could tell?

He made me get out first, then got out himself, pulling Max after him roughly. We stood there, in the dark until I switched on the torch that he had made me bring. He said, ‘This gun is going to remain in contact with your girlfriend come what may, so just be sensible, Dr Elliot.'

We moved along the path, through the long damp grass; it wasn't long before my shoes had let in enough freezing moisture to make me worry about trench foot. I crossed over the allotment, past Dad's bean trench, heading for the shed with Smith and Max following. I called over my shoulder, ‘They're in the shed.'

‘Get them, then.'

Dad, of course, had not locked it (he would not consider the presence of an ancient explosive device to be sufficient reason for such responsible measures) and I opened the door. I pointed the torch here and there, trying to locate first the tin with the grenade. I saw a lot of large spiders suspended worryingly close to my head but I had other things to worry about. If I couldn't find the tin of Crawford's biscuits, I would have to adopt plan B. The trouble was that I hadn't yet got around to formulating plan B.

For a minute or two I shone the torch around, looking for the telltale red of the tin without success. I tried not to panic, tried to think. Perhaps, I decided, he had hidden it away, just in case.

My eye fell upon some brown paper bags lined up on a shelf that tilted at an angle of at least twenty degrees. The first two were filled with substances that would not have looked out of place in a witch's toilet, but the third was a different shape – perhaps biscuit tin-shaped.

I had found the grenade.

FORTY-THREE

‘
W
hat's taking the time?' Smith's voice, as it came into the shed, sounded angry, jumpy.

I called out, ‘I can't find them.'

‘You've got two minutes, Dr Elliot. Two minutes and then I'm going to fire this gun.'