The Last Detective (23 page)

'Would your son remember?'

'No. He has school dinners.'

'So what did you do next?'

'Sat and thought for a bit. Then put on the television to try and shut out the image I had in my brain.'

'You didn't report what you'd found?'

'No.'

'Not that afternoon, nor the evening, nor the next day, nor ever. Why not? Why didn't you notify us?'

She was silent.

'Did you discuss it with anyone at all?'

She shook her head.

Diamond rested his hands on the table and drew himself up in the chair. 'You'll appreciate that it doesn't reflect too favourably.'

Still she made no comment.

'See it from our point of view,' he suggested to her. 'When we called on you this afternoon, you ran out of the back door. When we caught up with you and asked you to help us, you told us a certain amount and tried to have us believe that it was all you knew. You only admitted going to the house on the last day Mrs Jackman was seen alive because we told you your car had been seen there And now you ask us to believe that you found her dead and for some undisclosed reason decided to do nothing about it. It isn't good, Mrs Didrikson. In fact, it stinks.'

Ripples of shock or tension disturbed her cheeks. Her lips remained tightly compressed.

He tried repeating the case against her point by point, demanding explanations, but she refused to speak at all. At his side, he could sense Wigfull's impatience with the procedure. The man was agitating to try the theory he'd been nursing all day.

It couldn't be less productive than the last ten minutes, so Diamond gave him a nod.

Wigfull said without preamble. 'Let's face it, Mrs Didrikson. You and Jackman are lovers, aren't you?'

It rocked her. 'No!'

'What's wrong? He was unhappily married. You're divorced. You met by chance, found each other attractive, and did what millions of people do.'

'That isn't true,' she said vehemently. 'There was nothing like that.'

'No sex?'

'No.'

'Come on, Dana, we're grown-ups.'

'You're wrong,' she insisted. 'We never did anything like that. Never. Not even a kiss.'

The way she spoke the last four words revealed more than she meant to. Wigfull paused a moment and suggested with a knowing smile, 'But you wouldn't have minded a kiss.'

She reddened and said, 'This is intolerable.'

'But true?'

'I've given my answer.'

'Fair enough, you say you didn't sleep with him.'

'And it's the truth.'

'I hope everything you tell us is the truth. Let me suggest something else to you. You thought the Jane Austen letters would please him.'

'What's wrong with that?'

'You went to no end of trouble to acquire them. In your heart of hearts, didn't you hope to rise in his estimation?' heart of hearts, didn't you hope to rise 'I may have done,' she conceded.

'The letters weren't just a way of thanking him for saving Matthew's life. They were a bid for his affection.'

'That wasn't why I did it.'

'But that afternoon when you drove home from Crew-kerne with the letters in your car, you must have fancied your chances a little bit, Dana. Am I right?'

Again the colour rose in her cheeks.

'You're entitled to your private fantasies,' Wigfull pressed on. 'No one can blame you for that.'

With an intake of breath that sounded very like a hiss, she answered, 'Even if I did, it's not what you were saying a moment ago.'

'But it's broadly true?'

'I wouldn't say broadly.'

'Marginally, then?'

'I suppose so.'

Wigfull had scored a useful point, and he wanted more. 'And you came home to Geraldine and a right old rollicking. She accused you of - what was the word? - humping her husband, which wasn't true, and she brought your son into it, which infuriated you. More to the point, she scotched those romantic thoughts of yours, however marginal they may have been, and made it impossible for you or Matthew to go on seeing Professor Jackman. You were in two minds about what to do with the letters.'

The more Wigfull steamed on, the more Diamond felt that he was fitting the theory around insufficient facts. From the way Dana Didrikson had conducted herself so far, she wasn't about to break down and confess. She would stonewall all night if necessary. They needed stronger evidence. With commendable restraint, he let the monologue run its length and listened to Dana Didrikson's firm denial. Then, while Wigfull recovered his breath, Diamond asked her if she wouldn't mind having her fingerprints taken and submitting to a blood test in the morning.

She agreed, whereupon Diamond called an end to the interrogation for that day.

Outside, Wigfull was generous enough to admit that he had been over-eager, and the forensic back-up was necessary. 'We must also have her car checked for traces.'

'Yes. I intend to ask her for the keys in the morning.'

'No need.' Wigfull felt in his pocket and dangled a key-ring a foot from Diamond's nose. 'I drove it last, remember?'

Smart-arse, Diamond thought.

HE AWARDED HIMSELF A LIE-IN until eight the next morning, followed by a decent breakfast - and why not? His presence wouldn't be required first thing in Bath. The fingerprinting and the blood test were laid on for eight-thirty and the car was due to be taken away for forensic examination at about the same time. Meanwhile Wigfull could play at being chief of the murder squad for an hour.

So a fortified Peter Diamond drove into the city at an hour when the sun was high enough to pick out all of the tiered ranks of Georgian housing in the familiar, yet still spectacular view from the slope of Wells Road, the gleaming limestone terraces topped with slate roofs as blue-grey as the backcloth of Lansdown. In the foreground, the castellated railway viaduct with its Gothic arches contrived to blend into the scene, dominated from this view by the pinnacled tower of the Abbey beyond it, and softened by patches of gold and copper foliage. A day when Diamond was almost willing to forget that the backs of most of the elegant streets and crescents were eyesores of blackened masonry, abandoned for two centuries to the ravages of the weather, builders and plumbers. Almost, but not quite. The policeman in him couldn't overlook the hidden side, just as he never took the citizens of Bath entirely at face value.

He hoped that cynicism hadn't taken permanent root in his character. He preferred to think of it more positively, as professional discernment. Experience had taught him that you cannot discount anyone as a possible murderer. Faced with a model of innocence, a bishop or a flower-arranger, you needed to be that much more alert, to guard against slack thinking. The Jackman case demonstrated the principle neatly. Who but a case-hardened policeman would be willing to believe that a professor from the university could be drugged and almost incinerated by his paranoid wife; and that a respectable working mother would suffocate the obnoxious woman and dump the body in a lake? Actually, if pressed to charge Mrs Didrikson on the evidence so far, he would jib. Certainly she had been evasive and obstructive, but he remained less sure than Wigfull of her guilt. She had discredited herself with her evasions, and now some evidence was needed. By the end of the day he expected to have it from the forensic lab. And at the end of the day he would be sorry; he had a sneaking regard for the woman. Perhaps in the last analysis there
was
a dash of the romantic in him.

Then his spirits took their usual downward lurch at the sight of the four-square institutional-looking building wedged between the Baptist church and the National Car Park. The best you could say for Manvers Street Police Station was that it was one of the few buildings in Bath that looked no worse from the rear. Inside, it was typical of pennypinching post-war architecture, drably functional and fitted with cheap wood and striplighting, a workplace where you needed to make a conscious effort to start the day cheerfully. His 'Grand day out there, isn't it?' drew no response from the men on duty, which was understandable, yet worrying. He wasn't used to being ignored and there sprang into his brain a suspicion that everyone else in the place knew something to his discredit and didn't wish to give him the bad news. The sergeant at the reception desk suddenly started leafing through the phone book and the computer operators in the incident room appeared mesmerized by their screens. All this was threatening to become a chapter out of Kafka until he caught the eye of Croxley and asked what had happened to Wigfull and was stutteringly informed that he was with the Assistant Chief Constable. Mr Tott had appeared without warning at 9 a.m. and asked to see Diamond. Soon after, Wigfull had been called upstairs. It was now 9.48.

The obvious assumption, Diamond reassured himself, was that the official copies of the Missendale Report had arrived, and Mr Tott was obliged to hand him one in person. If that were so, there should be no sweat. His own belated appearance need not be an embarrassment; he could supply a hundred reasons for being elsewhere in the course of duty. But he still didn't fathom how Wigfull came into it. And it did seem odd that the Assistant Chief Constable was acting as a delivery-boy.

He went up to the carpeted meeting-room on the top floor where Mr Tott installed himself on his rare visits. The girl posted as sentinel in the outer office asked him to wait.

If John Wigfull was making some excuse on his behalf, it was a protracted one. A further ten minutes passed before the door opened and Wigfull emerged. On seeing Diamond, he gestured with open hands and a lift of the shoulders that he was powerless to influence whatever was going on. Diamond was making a dumb-show of asking what it was about when the Assistant Chief Constable appeared in the doorway and crooked his finger.

'Shut the door behind you.'

Ominously there was no invitation to be seated. Mr Tott, in uniform today, all braid and silver buttons, positioned himself at the far end of the oval table. On its surface were a cup and saucer, two biscuits on a plate, Mr Tott's peaked cap and his white gloves, but no copy of the Missendale Report. He seemed unwilling to speak. In fact, he looked immobile, a wax figure in a costume museum, assistant chief constable
circa
1910. Diamond wondered fleetingly whether it was a sign of incipient paranoia if you believed you were being persecuted by men with ridiculous moustaches.

He decided he had better apologize for being unavailable earlier.

The substance of what he said was ignored, but it did induce an utterance from Mr Tott. 'I gather from Inspector Wigfull that you expect to charge the Didrikson woman with the Jackman murder.'

'It's possible, sir.'

'Possible?
You put it no higher?'

'Not until I have the lab reports.'

'But you held her overnight?'

'Yes, sir.'

'And she is still downstairs?'

'I believe so.'

This encounter was markedly less friendly than their previous one. Mr Tott let out a troubled gust of breath and started pacing the section of floor at the far end of the room. 'You'd better tell me precisely what happened when you arrested her. I've already had Wigfull's account, you understand.'

'Is something up, sir?' Diamond asked in the hope of finding out what this was about before he committed himself. Clearly something
was
up.

'I am waiting, Superintendent.'

A lapse in procedure? he asked himself as he outlined what had happened. Some pettifogging breach of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act?

When he had finished, Mr Tott said, 'The boy.'

'Matthew?'

'Yes. He tried to stop you from entering the house?'

'We wanted to speak to his mother, as I explained.'

'And he challenged your right to go in?'

'He did more than that. He put in the boot, sir.'

'A twelve-year-old?'

'He caught me where it hurts most.'

'So you retaliated?'

With petrifying certainty, Diamond saw the drift of this cross-examination. 'That isn't what happened, sir. He was clinging to me and I pushed him away, as I described to you.'

'What you neglected to say is that he hit a wall.'

'It was a very narrow hallway, sir.'

'Do you deny that he was thrown against the wall, and hit it head-first?'

While his mind leapt ahead, picturing dire possibilities, Diamond tried to cling to the facts. 'He couldn't have been badly hurt because he got up and ran off.'

Mr Tott uncharitably allowed the remark to stand as long as it took Diamond to modify it.

'He wasn't hurt - was he?'

In a voice as dry as antique tapestry, Mr Tott said, 'He was admitted to hospital last night, as an emergency.'

'Hospital?
Whatever for?'

'He blacked out. The school quite properly called the emergency number. It seems that concussion has been diagnosed.' Mr Tott gave out the information routinely, as if he were a hospital spokesman. Routinely and unsparingly.

'He was all right when I saw him last,' Diamond said, conscious how feeble this sounded. 'Conversing normally, quite relaxed.'

'The effects aren't always immediate,' commented Mr Tott, and then continued with the bulletin. 'They are taking X-rays, in case the skull is fractured. It's too early to tell if there is permanent damage.'

The whole thing was so incredible that Diamond wanted to ask if anyone had considered whether the boy was play-acting, but he checked himself. Such a suggestion was most unlikely to ease his predicament. Mr Tott was taking it seriously, and Mr Tott wouldn't take kindly to being duped.

Instead, he confined himself to a defence of his own actions. 'If the kid did crack his head on the wall, it was accidental. He kicked me in the privates first and then made a dive for my leg. All I did was push him away. John Wigfull saw it. He was right behind me, sir.'

Mr Tott shook his head. 'That's where you're mistaken. Inspector Wigfull didn't see it. His attention was directed to Mrs Didrikson. He had just caught sight of her making her getaway through the back of the house. He wasn't looking at you or the boy.'

Thanks a bunch, John, Diamond thought bitterly. Any brother officer with an ounce of loyalty would have given me some backing. Wigfull
knew
there was nothing deliberate in the hand-off.

'Whatever the rights and wrongs of it,' Mr Tott said in a cold, judicial tone, 'I have to consider the way it could be interpreted by others, outside the police. I mean the school and the parent. This morning I took a pretty irate call from the boy's headmaster.'

'Oh, no!'

The school had not been informed that the boy had received a blow to the head.'

'It wasn't a blow, sir. Nobody struck him.'

'I'm not here to argue terminologies, Diamond. This is too serious for that. The headmaster registered a complaint and he assumes - not without reason - that Mrs Didrikson will wish to do the same.' He tilted his head back a fraction, signalling a significant statement. 'In the circumstances, I have asked Wigfull to take over the investigation into Geraldine Jackman's death. With the acting rank of chief inspector.'

'What?' Diamond's skin prickled and a pulse started thumping in his head.

'I'm relieving you of your command, pending a possible inquiry into your conduct. I have no option. What has happened may already have undermined our case against this woman.'

Even the semblance of respect cracked now. 'This must be Toytown. It's bloody Toytown. I don't believe it.'

'Have a care what you say, Superintendent.'

But Peter Diamond was in no frame of mind to care any more. 'Too late for that, Mr Tott. I've got your number now. I know what this is - your golden opportunity. You're terrified of my record. All that horseshit about no blame attaching to me from the Missendale inquiry and you hit the panic button at the first whisper against me. It suits your book beautifully. Your stooge was sitting in, waiting for me to screw up, and now he takes over. Well, I just hope he delivers. You bloody deserve each other. As for me, I'll save you the trouble of an inquiry. I'm quitting. You have my resignation.'

After which, he had nothing else to do but walk out and down the stairs.