The House Sitter (18 page)

“Fish and chips suit you?” she suggested when he reached her at the counter where the food was ordered. “We’ve plenty of time. A little bird told me Jimmy is out of the office until three.”

So he found a table in the main eating area, known as the conservatory, and fetched the drinks, two half-pints of Tanglefoot. He usually drank cheap lager, but this seemed the kind of place where you raised your sights and went for a full-bodied beer. Tom Jones was coming over the sound system.

“It’s not too loud, is it?” he remarked to Hen.

“I like it. But I’d forgotten they don’t let you smoke in this area,” she said. “Before you sit down, do you mind if we move to the patio?” She led him outside to a table with a plate of uneaten baked beans someone had also used as an ashtray. “I always find my level eventually.”

“But will they find us with the lunch?” he said.

“No problem.” She took out her cigars and lit one. “I told them I’d be with the Sean Connery lookalike.”

They talked for a while about films, or at least Hen did. He hadn’t been to a cinema since Steph died. It seemed Bognor was a good place to catch the latest movie. English seaside towns usually had more than one cinema, she remarked. There were so many wet afternoons when there was nowhere else to go.

Then they talked shop again. “Thanks for sending me Emma Tysoe’s files,” she said. “We’re a lot wiser about all kinds of things.”

“Well, it’s helpful to know the names on the Mariner’s death-list,” he said smoothly, as if Jimmy Barneston’s amours were well down the scale. “Bramshill had no intention of telling us.”

“Top names, too. Young Matt Porter is one of my pin-ups. I don’t want him getting killed.”

“He’ll be all right if he does as they say.”

“He sounded stroppy.”

“But his manager Macaulay makes the decisions, and he’ll crack the whip. The woman sounds more at risk.”

“Anna Walpurgis? Do you think she’ll quit the safe house?”

“It sounded as if she was causing problems.”

“And how,” Hen said. “Jimmy will bring us up to date.” She paused before saying, “How do you want to play this?”

“Straight bat. I’ve brought my copy of the files. I think we should let him have a read before we say a thing.”

“Good thinking. But then what?”

“We simply ask what happened next. We’re entitled to know if he slept with her the night before she was murdered. And anything she said that might throw light on it. Did she tell him she was planning a day on the beach? Did she feel under threat from anyone at all?”

“And what were Jimmy’s own movements that day? He’s got to prove he has an alibi.”

“Are you going to tell him?” Diamond said.

She blew out smoke and flashed a big, beguiling smile. “It would come better from you, sweetie.”

This time he didn’t argue. All along, he’d expected to be eyeball to eyeball with Barneston. He was confident of Hen’s support when the going got tough.

He said, “There’s another thing I’d like to find out from JB, and it goes back to when Emma Tysoe was first brought in on the case. How many people knew? Bramshill were in on it, obviously. So was Jimmy. But who else?”

She stared at him for a moment. “So you’re still holding on to the possibility she could have been killed by the Mariner?”

“I haven’t excluded it.” A bland admission. Deep down, he was more committed. From the beginning, everyone had told him the cases were unconnected, so his stubborn personality wanted to prove the opposite.

Their food arrived shortly after. Hen slid the vinegar towards him. “I expect you’re quite a connoisseur of fish and chips.”

“Living alone, you mean? Actually I’m a pizza specialist.”

“Do you cook for yourself at all?”

“Pizzas from the freezer. I sometimes open a tin of beans. I could be asking you these questions.”

“Me?” Hen said. “The canteen at Bognor nick is second to none.” She leaned back in the seat as if her attention was taken by a group of young office workers celebrating someone’s birthday. They all had paper hats. Then her eyes returned to Diamond and she took a long sip of beer before saying, “I heard about your wife being murdered last year. I know you don’t want sympathy. Just wanted to say—as a total outsider—you’re bearing up better than I would.”

“Thanks. I’ve learnt a few tips about living alone,” he said, sidestepping the heart-to-heart he saw coming. “One thing you can depend on absolutely. If you go to the bathroom, you just get settled and somebody will ring the doorbell. If you’re able to get there in time it’s a bloke selling oven gloves. If you don’t make it, you find a card to say you missed the postman and you’ve got to go into town and collect a parcel.”

She smiled. “Don’t I know! And when you collect, it isn’t a parcel at all, but a letter from some plonker who forgot to put on a stamp.”

“Yes, and when you pay up and open the letter it’s from the doctor to say you need a booster jab for anti-tetanus.”

“So what’s the tip?”

“Don’t use your own bathroom. Use the one at work.”

Hen shook her head. “There’s always someone in there.”

End of exchange, thanks be. He’d been told more than once not to bottle up the grief, but it wasn’t in his nature to discuss it with anyone. The process had been drawn out over many months, still without closure. The shooting, the funeral, the investigation, the arrest, the trial and, yet to come, an appeal. The open wound remained and the pain didn’t go away. Let no one underestimate the effect of murder on the surviving spouse.

The music had switched to
“Staying Alive
.” They finished their food as fast as possible and left on foot for the police station, a ten-minute walk through the park that would do them good after fish and chips, Hen assured him.

He asked how the Wightview Sands end of the investigation had been going, and she told him she hadn’t yet traced the second lifeguard, but she had a name and a mobile phone number— which had not helped, as they couldn’t make contact with it. The assumption was that the phone needed recharging.

“What’s his name?” Diamond asked.

“Laver.”

“Straight up?”

She frowned. “What’s wrong?”

“Just that the first lifeguard—the one we met—is called Emerson, or claimed to be. Laver and Emerson were two of the biggest names in Australian tennis in the sixties. They won God knows how many Grand Slam titles between them. They played doubles together as well.”

“You think they were having us on?”

“Having someone on for sure. It could be about casual labour and work permits, rather than what happened on the beach that day. They’d have thought up more original identities if they knew it was a murder enquiry. Is Emerson still working there?”

“The last I heard, he was,” Hen answered. “I’ll follow this up.”

They reached the north end of Horsham Park, where the three main emergency services are sited. At the police station, they were asked to wait in an office, because DCI Barneston was still not back.

“What time is it?” Diamond asked the sergeant. “He has a good lunch break.”

You could generally count on the lower ranks enjoying a poke at the high-ups, but this sergeant didn’t rise to it. Was Barneston an example of that rare breed, a chief inspector popular with the lower ranks?

They had an upstairs room to themselves. It was typically barren of anything of interest. There were three plastic chairs and a table stained with tea. On the wall facing the door were two notices about foot-and-mouth regulations and a map of West Sussex.

“A bloody ashtray would help,” Hen said as she lit up.

Diamond was looking at the map. “How far are we from Bognor, then?”

“About twenty-five. You take the A29.”

“And Wightview Sands?”

“Probably another ten miles on top. Why?”

“If Emma Tysoe was here with JB the night before she was murdered, she had a drive of thirty-five miles to Wightview Sands. From what I can see, Worthing or Brighton would have been nearer.”

“Or Bognor.”

“Or Bognor,” he echoed. “But why Wightview Sands?”

“It’s different, isn’t it?” Hen said. “All those places are seaside towns. Wightview is only a beach—well, there’s a small village set back from the shore, and some posh houses. There’s almost nothing along the front except one beach café and a long row of beach huts. You haven’t got piers and pubs and amusement machines by the hundred. It’s quiet.”

“Unspoilt.”

She wagged a finger. “Hold your horses, squire. You won’t get me to say Bognor is spoilt.”

“It sounds as if she went to Wightview because she knows the place. It was what she wanted. Somewhere to relax.”

“Presumably. Unless she’d agreed to meet someone.”

“Doesn’t appear so. She arrived on the beach late morning, after the Smiths, put up her windbreak, lay on her towel and that’s about all we know until she was found dead. We have about two thousand suspects.”

“A shortlist of four,” Hen said.

“Four? Let me try. The ex-lover, Ken. The two lifeguards under false names. And the Mariner.”

“Check.”

“But you left out Jimmy Barneston.”

She creased her features. “You don’t really rate him?”

“I want to hear his story. Where
is
the guy?”

Hen, unable to supply an answer, took the question as rhetorical. She was still brooding over the suspects. “There are problems with each of them. We don’t know how Ken or the Mariner knew she was on that beach on that particular morning.”

“But both are single-minded characters,” he said. “They could have followed her. What about the guy in the black T-shirt who tried to chat her up and got nowhere? He could have been Ken. Apparently they recognised each other. She wouldn’t have been too happy if he turned up unexpectedly. He got the brush-off, but he could have come back in the afternoon.”

“The two suspects we know for certain were on that beach are the two Australian guys,” Hen said, doggedly working through the possibilities, “but we don’t have a motive for them. There’s no suggestion that this was part of a sexual assault.”

“Theft? Her beachbag was missing.”

“But we agreed it’s dead simple to steal a bag on a beach. You don’t have to strangle someone if you’re only after cash and credit cards.”

He yawned, and checked the time again. “True.”

“However, we haven’t found her car yet.”

“Good point, Hen.” He snapped his fingers. “Now that raises the stakes. A Lotus Esprit might be a prize worth having for a young guy living on a shoestring without a work permit. He steals the bag—her bag and no other—because it contains her car key. He’s seen her park this beautiful car—”

“People have been killed for less.”

“A lot less. I rather like it, Hen. I’m not sure if I like it more than the Mariner, or Ken, or the man in the black T-shirt, but it’s persuasive, very persuasive. There’s only one problem with it.”

“Yes?”

“Any one of our other two thousand suspects could have done it.”

At this point the smoke alarm went off.

“You want to try patches,” Diamond told Hen when she took out her lighter again. They were standing outside the front entrance of the police station.

“You know where you can put your patches, chummy.”

The placid street life of Horsham continued in front of them while that cigar was reduced rather quickly to a tiny butt.

“It’s bloody near four o’clock. I’ll go inside and see if they can get a message to him,” Diamond said.

The desk sergeant had changed. This one didn’t appear to know that they were waiting outside. Diamond had to identify himself.

The sergeant apologised. “You’re waiting for DCI Barneston, sir? He won’t be coming back this afternoon. He’s dealing with an incident.”

“What kind of incident?”

“I wasn’t informed, sir—except that he’s tied up for the rest of the day and probably tomorrow as well.”

“Well, I’m going to need his mobile number. I’ve come from Bath to see him, and another officer outside has come up from the coast.”

Not so simple. Getting Barneston’s number was like trying to steal meat from a pride of lions. By sheer force of personality he eventually obtained it on the say-so of a CID inspector.

When he got through, he found Barneston incensed at being troubled. “Who the fuck put you onto me? Didn’t anyone tell you there’s a fucking emergency here?”

Diamond gritted his teeth. “We’re coming to see you.”

“You’re joking. I’m dealing with a crisis here.”

“So are we, and you’d better listen up, Jimmy, because it concerns you.”

“What are you on about?”

“Emma Tysoe came to see you the day before she was strangled.”

After a long hesitation, Barneston said, “You know about that?”

“There’s a whole lot more we know.”

Another pause. Then: “I’m at Littlegreen Place, South Harting. That’s near Petersfield. It’s laughingly described as a safe house.”

15

Someone with a tripod over his shoulder and a camera in his free hand came from the open front door, heading for the Skoda, and Diamond asked him if DCI Barneston was about. The man nodded towards the interior.

“Got your pictures already?” Diamond said, just to be civil to someone else in the pay of the government.

“Waste of time,” came the reply, and it set the tone for what was to come.

They went inside, through a sizeable entrance hall, in the direction of voices that turned out to be from the kitchen. Jimmy Barneston, looking like a football manager whose team has just been relegated, was slumped at the table, his head in his hands. Two others in plain clothes, holding mugs, were standing together watching a uniformed inspector speaking urgent orders into a mobile phone.

“Are you supposed to be here?” one of them asked.

Diamond identified himself and Hen and asked what was happening.

“You tell us.”

Hen said, “Jimmy?”

Barneston raised his eyes, but that was the extent of it.

Diamond asked, “Is someone going to let us in on this?”

Barneston gave a groan that was part threat, part protest, as if his sleep had been disturbed.

The inspector using the phone moved out of the kitchen into what was probably a laundry room.

Diamond put a hand on Barneston’s shoulder. “You cocked up, is that it?”

This got a response. He looked up and said with a heavy emphasis, “Not me.”

“The people on duty?”

He nodded, all too ready to shift any blame. “Two hours ago, a call was made to this place, a scheduled call, to the Special Branch officers supposed to be guarding, em, a person under threat.”

“Matthew Porter,” Hen said.

She wasn’t supposed to know the name. Barneston took note with a twitch of the eyebrows. “This was only a routine check. It’s done at regular intervals. There was no response. They kept trying. Still nothing. So an RRV was sent here. They found the front gate wide open. The double doors at the front of the house were also open. No one was inside, except a police dog, shut in the garage. The bulk of the security system was disabled. Two armed officers vanished.”

“And Matthew Porter?”

“Yes. The Range Rover used by one of the officers is also missing. There’s no sign of a struggle, nothing out of place.”

“Like the fucking
Mary Celeste,
” one of the others, obviously a romantic, summed it up.

“Video cameras?” Diamond enquired.

“All disabled from the control room upstairs. We’re checking the cassettes in case anything was caught earlier.” Barneston scraped his fingers through his thick black hair and then held his hand out, palm upwards. “What can you do? This is the state-of-the-art safe house—allegedly. We moved him here from another address because it was more secure. The Mariner has found it and strolled in and out as if it was a public toilet. Someone’s going to swing for this.”

“Are you certain this is the Mariner?” Hen asked.

“How could it be anyone else?”

“Matthew Porter didn’t like being cooped up in Streatham. What if he didn’t like it here and walked out? Wouldn’t the guards go after him?”

Barneston glared at her. “What do
you
know about Streatham?”

“We can talk about that at a calmer time.”

“Sod that. We’ve had a major balls-up in security and you people know too fucking much for my liking. Tell me now. It could be relevant.”

Hen flushed bright pink, and not because of the language. She shouldn’t have mentioned Streatham at this stage.

Diamond felt the muscles tighten across his shoulders. Working as a double act had its drawbacks. This wasn’t the moment he would have chosen, and there was no way now of putting it off. He let his eyes meet Barneston’s. “Emma Tysoe— whose death we are investigating—kept some files on computer.”

“I know about Tysoe’s files,” Barneston said with impatience. “They haven’t been decrypted yet.” After a beat, he said lamely, “Have they?”

Hen gave a nod. “She kept a record of her visit to Streatham.”

“And much more besides,” Diamond couldn’t resist adding.

“Oh, shit.”

“I have a copy with me, as decrypted by a lad in my nick.”

It wasn’t Jimmy Barneston’s day. While he was taking that in, Hen tried to divert him, “Coming back to the present emergency, don’t you think it possible Porter simply got brassed off with all the security and made a break for it?”

“No, I don’t,” he said. “Come and see this.” Whatever the incentive was, it got him to his feet. He led them out of the kitchen, across the hall and upstairs. He pushed open the first door on the landing. “Porter’s bedroom.”

The interior was in pretty good order, a bed with a quilt doubled back, a couple of books on the bedside table. On the pillow was a sheet of A4 paper with words in newsprint pasted to it.

“Don’t touch it,” Barneston cautioned them.

Diamond took a step closer and bent over to read the message.

“Three under par.”

“You know what that is?” Barneston said.

“A reference to golf, I suppose.”

“Three under par is an albatross. The albatross is the bird the Ancient Mariner killed. Now tell me the bastard wasn’t here.”

They stood in silence, absorbing the force of the words and feeling a chilling contact with the mind of their author, as if they’d been touched by him. This gallows humour was at one with the note left when Summers was murdered. It dashed any hope that Porter would survive.

“Who are we dealing with here—Superman?” Hen said with awe. “How the heck does he find out about this place? How does he get in and overcome two armed guards?”

“And a dog,” Barneston said. “You tell me. No signs of a break-in. No shooting. Nothing out of place.”

“Have you got roadblocks in operation?” Diamond asked.

“Full-scale alert, but it could have happened four hours ago. The last check-in we logged was at noon.”

“Who are these Special Branch guys?”

“Good men, I’ve been told, one with ARV experience, the other a dog handler. Both of them Sergeant rank. They’re not wet behind the ears.”

“And the building has been searched?”

“From top to bottom.”

They returned downstairs. In the kitchen, Barneston seemed to be getting a grip again. “Was anything useful in those files?”

“Depends where you’re coming from,” Diamond told him.

“Explain.”

“We’ve learned a lot more about our murder victim and the job she was on.”

“Do you think the Mariner strangled her?”

Diamond didn’t answer directly. Why confide in a man who had just treated them like plods? “He’s capable of it. He doesn’t lack anything in daring.”

“Because he feared she would finger him?”

“She was the top profiler.”

“Does she say anything in these files that will help me right now?” Barneston asked. “Did she put together a profile I can use?”

“How do I know what’s going to be helpful to you?” Diamond told him testily. “Read it yourself. Is there a computer here?”

“Upstairs.” The man looked as if he would sink back into his lethargic gloom, and then he changed his mind. “OK. There’s sod all happening, so I might as well make use of the time. Where’s the disk?”

Diamond took the tiny USB drive from his inside pocket and handed it across.

“This is it?”

“All of it.”

“Do you want to stick around in the meantime?”

Diamond didn’t need to ask Hen.“We’re as keen as you are to find out what’s been going on.”

They remained downstairs, leaving Barneston to read Emma’s files in private. The officers in the kitchen said there was no progress yet in the hunt for the Range Rover. The Sussex police helicopter had been called into use and every car within a thirty mile radius was on alert.

It can be frustrating standing about, waiting for news. Hen went outside for a smoke. Diamond got on the mobile to Ingeborg and asked how the hunt for Ken was progressing.

Even Ingeborg seemed to be lacking in zest this afternoon. “Still trying, guv. I went through those credit card receipts.”

“No joy?”

“No Kens, anyway. Do you think he could have paid cash?”

“It’s possible, I suppose. You’d be better off asking Popjoy’s, not me. Have you talked to the neighbours?”

“The thing is,” she said, on a note that immediately told him this, too, had not helped, “she had her own entrance, living, as she did, in the basement flat. The people upstairs didn’t see very much of her and they don’t have any memory of seeing her with anyone.”

“What about the people across the street?”

“You know how wide Great Pulteney Street is. They’d need binoculars. I’ve been across and asked, but no, it’s another world.”

“You’re going to have to track down everyone who dined at Popjoy’s the evening they were there, and see how much they remember about the other guests. A description would be a start, even if we don’t have his name. You’ve talked to the waiters, I hope? Did you ask them about that overgenerous tip she mentions? Surely one of the staff pocketed that and remembers where it came from.”

“I’ll get onto that,” she promised. Apparently she’d been talking to the management, not the waiters.

He joined Hen outside. The area near the kitchen door had an overgrown look. This safe house had once been someone’s home, and there were the remnants of a vegetable patch and an apple orchard, but garden maintenance wasn’t high priority in Special Branch. Across a stretch of meadow that had once been a lawn, a line of officers searched the undergrowth near the fence. Somewhere overhead the helicopter buzzed.

“Are you all right for time?” he asked Hen.

“I’m seeing this through if it takes till midnight, matey.”

“He could be clean away.”

“With three hostages? I doubt it. What’s his game, Peter?”

He gave a shrug and shook his head. “Whatever it is, I’m certain it’s just as he planned it.”

“That message upstairs doesn’t give any grounds for hope.”

“No.”

“He brought it with him like a calling card, the bastard. It’s bloody arrogance. I mean, we don’t need telling he was here.”

He smiled faintly. “Don’t we? Didn’t I hear you suggesting to Jimmy Barneston that Porter might have got pissed off with the place and made a break for it?”

She gave him a sharp look. “At that stage I couldn’t believe anyone was capable of penetrating the security. Now we know.”

She finished her smoke and they returned to the kitchen. One look at the others told them no news had come through. Diamond picked someone’s
Daily Mail
off the table and looked for news of the rugby. Bath were slipping in the league.

“It doesn’t look good,” Diamond agreed.

A short, nervy sigh. “It bears out what she wrote in the files— he knows he can outwit the police.”

“She didn’t put it quite like that, if I remember,” Hen said. “It was something like ‘has an exalted belief he can outwit us’. There’s a difference. He’ll get overconfident.”

“Breaking into this place will have done his confidence a power of good,” Barneston said gloomily. “Mine is at rock bottom.”

“Shouldn’t be,” she said. “Come on, Jim lad, some of that stuff in the files was a massive boost to your self-esteem. A clever and attractive woman slavering over you—what more does a guy want?”

He didn’t answer.

Diamond took a more head-on approach. “We need to know if she spent the night with you, the last night of her life.”

Barneston confirmed it with a nod.

“At your house again?”

“What do you mean—‘again’? It was only the second time.”

Diamond had never scored points for sensitivity. “So she did what she planned, came to Horsham with a list of questions for Anna Walpurgis?”

“Yup.”

“For
you
to ask Walpurgis?”

“That’s correct. Things are pretty fraught with Walpurgis. I didn’t want to panic her. Emma came to my house and we went out for a meal and spent the night together.”

“Did she say anything to you about this man Ken she mentions in the files?”

“Not directly.”

“But . . .?”

“She told me she’d been in another relationship that was finished. She didn’t give a name.”

Hen said, “Jimmy, you’ll appreciate that he’s under suspicion of murdering her. Can you remember anything she said about him that will help us to identify him?”

“No.”

“Did you get any impression of his age, or whether he lived near her, or what kind of job he did?”

“Nothing at all. She only mentioned him in passing, and I didn’t probe. I’d rather not know who slept with her before I did.”

Diamond asked, “How did she refer to him—as a boyfriend, or a long-term lover, or what?”

“I told you. She simply said, ‘I was in a relationship and it’s over now.’ ”

This wasn’t helping overmuch. Diamond said, “We know she dumped him. Do you think it’s possible he could have found out about you?”

“I don’t see how. I didn’t visit her in Bath.”

“We’re wondering if he followed her to Horsham and saw you together. Did you have a sense of anyone following you, or watching you?”

“No.”

“Was Emma relaxed?” Hen asked.

“I thought so. She seemed to be enjoying herself.” He spread his hands in a gesture of openness. “Listen, if there was anything I could think of to help you, I would. She was a sweet girl. I really enjoyed being with her. I can tell you, I freaked out when I heard what happened to her.”

This little tribute didn’t melt Peter Diamond’s heart. “But you didn’t come forward and say you spent the night with her. You didn’t even tell us when we met you at the hospital.”