The Last Detective (22 page)

'She didn't actually threaten you, or give you some kind of ultimatum?'

'No, it was just a torrent of abuse.'

'How did you feel at the end? Bloody angry, I imagine.'

'Dazed is more like it. Reeling. The first thing I did was talk to Mat and tell him that the woman was obviously unhinged. He apologized for letting her into the house, but she had been perfectly agreeable until I showed my face. That's how it is with that kind of madness. Ninety-nine per cent of the time they seem perfectly sane.'

Diamond nodded.

'Just in case Matthew was tempted to believe any of her crazy claims, I gave him a solemn promise that they were all untrue. We agreed that Greg had a terrible problem with a woman like that on his hands. I told Mat that after what had been said I didn't think he should go swimming with Greg again.'

To Diamond's ear, this struck a note of bathos, but he treated it solemnly. 'How did he take it?'

'Manfully, for a kid of his age. Oh, he couldn't see the sense in it at first. After all, Greg had been like a second father to him through the months of July and August. So it was a wrench. I had to point out that Greg himself would be bound to put a stop to the swimming in view of what Geraldine was saying.'

'Did he see the point then?'

'Yes.'

All of this had given Diamond some vital insights. The incident may not have provided a direct motive for murder, but it had clearly struck deep into Dana Didrikson's psyche. Not only had her moral conduct been under attack; so had her integrity as a mother - and that was enough to goad any woman dangerously. Even this long after the incident, a feral outrage had shown in her eyes and voice as she spoke of Geraldine Jackman.

He steered her back to the main line of inquiry. 'And you had another problem on your hands - the Jane Austen letters.'

'Now do you understand why I didn't hand them over the same evening?'

'But you did eventually.'

'Yes. After a couple of sleepless nights. I thought why should I let that pathetically jealous woman deprive Greg of the satisfaction of owning those precious letters? They were of no use to me, but in his hands they were sure to make a stir in the literary world. They would guarantee the success of his exhibition. After the tremendous risk he'd taken to save my son, I'd have to be an absolute wimp not to face another roasting from Geraldine. So on the Friday evening, the night before the opening, I steeled myself to call at the house.'

'You could have posted the letters, surely, and avoided seeing Mrs Jackman?' said Wigfull.

'They were too precious to put in the post. Besides, there wasn't time.'

Diamond commented with more understanding, 'And I daresay you wanted to see his reaction when you produced them.'

The corners of her mouth curved, confirming that he was right. 'If I'm honest, yes. I phoned first, to make sure he was going to be there, merely telling him I had something I wanted to give him, and would it be convenient if I came over right away. And I took the opportunity over the phone to thank him again for his kindness to Mat and me, and to make clear that I'd decided that the swimming sessions must come to an end.'

'Did you say why?'

'I think he knew. No doubt Geraldine had told him her suspicions. She wasn't noted for being reticent. Anyway, he didn't press me. And when I got to the house it was Greg who opened the door, much to my relief, of course. And when I showed him the letters in the front room, oh, it was a terrific moment! I was
so
pleased I'd come. He was over the moon. He made me tell him exactly how I'd tracked them down, every detail. And then a man I didn't know came in, an American.'

'Dr Junker.'

'That was the name. He seemed to be an authority on Jane Austen, and when he saw the letters he was agog with excitement. He was confident that they were in Jane's hand. So when Geraldine Jackman made an entrance a few minutes later, she didn't get the attention she felt was hers by right. She played up like a spoilt child.'

Fascinating as it was to listen to a fresh point of view on an episode that was becoming familiar, Diamond fixed his mind on the facts as he continued to listen, rather than looking for insights into character. Dana Didrikson's account corresponded impressively closely with what Jackman and Junker had said. She had noticed Geraldine's blatant passes at Junker and she repeated that lady's mischievous suggestion that Jackman should show his gratitude by taking her - Dana Didrikson - out for a meal.

'Just for the record, you made no arrangement to visit the house again?'

'Didn't I make that clear?' she said. 'I was ending our association with the Jackmans.'

'And did you?'

'Yes.' She leaned back, fatigue showing in her brown eyes. 'That's it. I've nothing else to tell you.'

Diamond stared at her, uncertain for a moment whether she had spoken out of mischief or defiance. Suddenly he was fazed, mentally unprepared for the show to stop in mid-performance.

'You mean you need a break now?'

'No,' she said. 'That isn't what I mean.'

'Come now, Mrs Didrikson,' he said gently. 'There must be more to come. We know there's more.'

Her eyes may have given a clue that he was right, but she wasn't willing to admit to it. 'Am I under arrest, then?' wasn't willing to admit 'Not up to now.'

'In that case I'd like to leave.'

'In that case,' said Diamond, 'I shall be forced to arrest you.'

'For what?'

'Driving without due care and attention will do.'

'That's absurd.'

'Sorry. You're nicked, Mrs Didrikson.'

'What does that mean?'

'It means we can detain you for twenty-four hours, or thirty-six, if I so decide.'

Her lip quivered. 'But I'm expected at work tomorrow. My boss relies on me to drive him about.'

'He'll have to use a taxi, won't he?' He looked at Wigfull. 'Stop the tape there. We'll need a fresh one shortly.'

'BEFORE WE GO BACK, JOHN ...'

'Yes?'

'A word.'

Wigfull, eyebrows arching above that comic-opera moustache, appeared to have no idea what was on Peter Diamond's mind. Leaving Dana Didrikson in the interview room to mull over what she had so far failed to disclose, the two detectives had busied themselves independently for twenty minutes or so, Diamond at his desk, Wigfull at a phone in the incident room. They now faced each other at the top of the stairs.

Diamond came to the point. 'We're at cross-purposes in there. I get her going and you keep chucking spanners in the works.'

'Such as...?'

'You know damned well what I mean.'

'If you have a complaint about me, I'd rather you specified exactly what it is, Mr Diamond.'

How typical of his whole nitpicking approach, Diamond thought in a spasm of anger which he had difficulty in containing. 'It's more fundamental, John. You and I are not on the same wavelength. You're basically hostile to the woman and it shows.'

This was received with a cold stare. 7'm hostile?
She
did a runner.'

'That doesn't mean we have to come down hard.'

'Great,' muttered Wigfull, plainly implying that this kind of talk from the man who had put Hedley Missendale away didn't cut much ice.

Diamond would not allow himself to be deflected. 'Look, the object is to gei at the truth.'

'Yes, and the truth is that she was besotted with Jackman and murdered his wife.'

To Wigfull, it was all so obvious.

'You could be right, but there's still another dimension to this,' Diamond told him.

'The sob story, you mean?'

'I can't say. There's definitely more to come, if we give her a chance to tell us.'

'In other words, you want me to button my hairy lip.'

The note of self-mockery was a concession, a step back from cold-eyed hostility, and Diamond acknowledged it with a grin. 'The chance of that has gone. She's dug a bloody trench for herself. We've got to move in, but to a purpose. In my judgement, she won't respond to threats.'

'Okay, I said I'll shut up.'

'No, I want you to chip in. I need your command of the details. That's how we'll tackle her, with the truth, testing her story with the facts we know to be true, you and me, John, working as a team.'

This earned a grudging nod from Wigfull, and a sharp enquiry as to what line the questioning was to take.

Diamond was equal to it. They would begin by suggesting to Dana Didrikson that she had been at the Jackman house on the day of the murder. Whatever her response, they would commit her to an account of her movements on that Monday. Only when they had got a full picture of her day would they probe her motives or point out inconsistencies. It was the structured interview so beloved of training school instructors, and Wigfull couldn't fault it. Diamond added, to bring a human dimension to the exchange, that all this would be at great personal cost, because his wife Stephanie was using the late nights as ammunition in her campaign to have her kitchen modernized. She was serving him burnt offerings nightly.

'You should get her a microwave oven,' Wigfull advised him.

'I don't trust them.'

'They're part of the new technology. I wouldn't be without ours.'

That figures,' said Diamond, prepared to believe that Wigfull's home was indistinguishable from an electricity showroom.

'Maybe you saw me on the phone just now,' Wigfull went on. 'I wasn't calling my wife. I don't, now that we have a microwave.' While Diamond was pondering the cause and effect behind that, Wigfull added casually, but with a note of archness. 'As a matter of fact, I was phoning Mrs Didrikson's employer, Buckle.'

'What for?"

'I told him she wouldn't be in to work tomorrow.'

'Wasn't it a bit late for that?'

'I got him at home.'

'I see.' Slightly put out, but wary, Diamond started walking towards the interview room. 'She'll be grateful, I'm sure.'

Behind him, he heard Wigfull raise his voice to say, 'I didn't do it out of the goodness of my heart, Mr Diamond. I asked him if she reported for duty on Monday, 11 September.'

He wheeled around.

Wigfull was looking as smug as a cat in the best chair. 'And she didn't. Buckle checked his diary. She took the day off. She wasn't at work on the day of the murder.' He spaced the words like an actor in a radio serial rounding off an episode. It demanded a burst of music.

Diamond wasn't moved to supply any. He merely nodded his head.

'You knew already?' Wigfull piped in disbelief.

Diamond answered in throwaway style, 'The statements are in from the door-to-door lads. I've just been through them. A woman in a black Mercedes was seen turning into the drive of John Brydon House shortly after 11.15.'

It was a much better pay-off.

She had her back to the door when they returned, and the tension was evident in her stance. A slight figure staring out of the window at the lights of Bath, arms crossed in front of her. Diamond was moved to think how little he'd learned of this woman's character in the two or three hours of question and answer. Part of the difficulty was that she'd obviously rehearsed her story in her mind, knowing that sooner or later the police would catch up with her. The smoothness of the performance had given few insights, save for those bursts of waspishness at Wigfull's interruptions towards the end. Admittedly she had projected a strong sense of moral obligation, whether towards her disagreeable son, her dodgy boss or the knight in shining armour, Professor Jackman, but how much of that was window-dressing remained to be discovered. One other pointer Diamond had noted: the still-potent sense of triumph in her account of the quest for the Jane Austen letters — the letters that looked increasingly like the spur to murder.

'Shall we resume?' he said.

'I've nothing else to tell you.' She need not have spoken. He could read the defiance in the set of her shoulders.

He nodded to Wigfull to run another tape and speak the preliminaries. When it was done, he reminded her of the formal caution before saying, 'We've just had some information about you, Mrs Didrikson.'

All this had no appreciable effect.

'We know you visited Geraldine Jackman on the day she was murdered. You were seen.'

This time a tremor of shock went through her, which she tried to convert into the action of rubbing her arms.

Diamond concluded his statement. 'So there must be something else to tell.'

Wigfull said, in his new, non-aggressive guise. 'Why don't you sit down?'

She half-turned and looked over her shoulder, in two minds, and then walked to the table and took her place opposite Diamond, her eyes glazed, as if too much was going on in her brain for it to interpret what she was seeing.

'You do admit going to the house?' Diamond put to her.

She dipped her head in what may have been meant as a positive response.

'Why?' Diamond asked, already departing from the structured interview he had proposed. 'Why did you go there?'

She spoke in a whisper too low to register on the recording equipment, 'To ask her to hand over the letters.'

'Geraldine?'

She nodded, and said in a slightly louder voice, 'I was sure she had them hidden in the house.' Her eyes began to function intelligently again. 'It was obvious that she must have taken them.'

Wigfull asked, 'How did you know they were missing?'

'Greg phoned me early that morning, about half past seven. He believed Dr Junker had taken them. He was going after him, on the train to London.'

'But why should he have told you about it?'

'He was sure Geraldine would call me out of spite, just to gloat. He didn't want me to hear it from her.'

On rapid reflection Diamond decided that this explanation was plausible. It was reasonably consistent with Jackman's suspicions of his wife.

'And did Geraldine call you?'

'No.' Mrs Didrikson leaned forward, her dark eyes suddenly in strong focus again. 'Which makes it even more certain that she had the letters herself. Greg was mistaken. I was positive she had them.' She used the word 'she' with unconcealed contempt, with a passionate dislike that had not been expunged by the killing. The animus between the two women must have amounted to more, far more, than the events so far described had justified.

Diamond knew he was in danger of being sidetracked, and this time he kept to the record of what had happened on the fatal Monday. 'So what did you decide to do about it?'

'I didn't do anything at first. I waited some hours. It really got to me, that she could be so bloody-minded. I was in such a state that I phoned my boss and made some excuse to get off work. About eight-thirty I drove Matthew to school and did some shopping in Bath. Had a coffee in one of those places by the bus station and did some thinking. While I was sitting there, a phrase came back to me, something Geraldine had said when I handed the letters over to Greg. She tried to rubbish them. She called them musty old things with no literary merit.'

A detail, Diamond noted, that they had heard almost verbatim from Dr Junker. Dana Didrikson hadn't previously mentioned it herself.

'You
must
understand the appalling thought that came to me,' she said, scanning their faces for a sympathetic response. 'She wouldn't think twice about destroying those precious letters. She would put a match to them rather than admit to Greg that she'd hidden them out of spite. It was up to me to stop her. It mattered more that she was stopped than any misgivings I had about crossing swords with her again.'

'So you drove out to Brydon House?'

'Yes.'

'What time?'

'When I got there? I suppose about half past eleven. Maybe slightly earlier. I rang the doorbell. Got no answer. Assumed she was out. Walked around the side of the house to see if by any chance a door was open. And the back door was.' She paused and stared at the back of her right hand, as if the memory was too taxing on her nerves to continue.

'So you let yourself in?' Diamond prompted.

'Yes.'

'And?'

'I called out. Called her name several times. Got no reply. Decided to make a search.'

'Go on.'

'Starting with the bedroom. If I'd been in her position, that's where I would have hidden them. So I went upstairs and called her name once more in case she hadn't heard before. I located their bedroom and looked inside. She was there.'

'What?'

'In bed. She was in the bed.'

Diamond kept his eyes on her.

It seemed that Dana Didrikson couldn't bring herself to say that Geraldine had been lying dead, but it was implicit in the way she had spoken. That was what she had intended to convey.

Diamond's first response was to treat it as another attempt to cut short the questioning. He didn't believe her.

Nor plainly did Wigfull. 'Are you serious?'

She answered, 'I'm telling you what I saw.' She had removed her hands from the table, but beneath it she was pressing them together with such force that her head and shoulders trembled.

'Mrs Didrikson,' said Diamond, 'for the record, I must ask you to state your meaning clearly. You said she was in the bed.'

'Yes.'

'And . ..?"

She whispered, 'Dead.'

'You're certain?'

'I didn't imagine it.'

'You'd better describe what you saw.'

She took a long breath. 'She was lying face upwards. Her eyes were open and seemed to be staring at the ceiling until... until I saw that they didn't move. Her face was a dreadful colour, as if she'd put on a facepack. Her lips were blue.'

Lividity, notably of the lips and ears, is a sign of asphyxiation. 'Did you touch her, feel her pulse or anything?'

'No. She'd gone. It was obvious.'

Painstakingly, as if they accepted every word of her story, they got her to describe the scene. Diamond had laid the ground rules: they would test the facts she gave them, and this was the method, inducing her to talk, suppressing their scepticism until the right opportunity came.

The body, she told them, had been lying diagonally in the bed, the congested and livid face at one edge, the auburn hair tousled, some of it below the pillow that lay beside her head in the normal position. Both arms were under the pale green quilt. Mrs Didrikson had not disturbed the bedding, nor touched the body, but enough of the shoulders were visible for her to see that it was clothed in a white sleeveless nightdress. She had noticed no scratches on the flesh.

The bedroom itself had revealed no obvious signs of a struggle except an empty glass tumbler lying on its side on the bedside table nearest to the corpse. The second bed had a matching quilt folded back on itself, and she thought she remembered a man's pyjama trousers lying across the pillow. She had not looked into either of the dressing rooms. The door to the bedroom had been open and the sash window partly raised. The curtains had been drawn back, giving abundant light.

'What did you do?'

'I thought I was going to faint. I went to the window and took some gulps of fresh air. Then I fled the room without looking at her again. I think I drew some water from the tap in the kitchen. I was functioning like a robot, as if it wasn't me.'

Diamond couldn't allow this to pass. 'Explain.'

'I suppose what I mean is that I was on autopilot.'

Wigfull said eagerly, too eagerly, 'Not responsible for your actions?'

She glared at him. 'You're trying to trap me, aren't you?'

It was left to Diamond to provide reassurance. 'We're trying to understand you, Mrs Didrikson.'

'Haven't you ever been shocked rigid?' she said. 'Don't you see that I'm trying to explain what it means to be in shock? I knew what I was doing throughout, if that's what you're asking. I felt stunned by what I'd seen.'

'And after you drank the water?'

'I left.'

'The way you'd entered - by the back door?'

'Yes. I made my way back to the car and drove home.'

'And then?'

'Had some brandy, I think.'

'What time was this?'

'I can't remember exactly - some time between twelve and one.'