The Last Detective (14 page)

'Yes.'

'And that was the last time you saw your wife. Was she awake?'

Jackman tilted his head. 'I told you that, too.'

'What exactly was said?'

'I told her I was going after Junker, to ask about the letters.'

Across the table, Diamond shifted in his chair and said, 'That wasn't the way you put it to us. You said you had to see various people about the loan of manuscripts.' A comment calculated to show that he, too, retained a memory of what had been said before.

Without turning to look at Diamond, Jackman said, 'When I first spoke to you, I didn't think it would be necessary to bring up the business of the missing letters.' necessary to bring up the business of the 'You wanted to keep it to yourself?'

'If possible, yes.'

Diamond commented to Wigfull, 'Worth picking up these discrepancies. Carry on.'

'What happened?' Wigfull asked the professor. 'Did you catch up with Dr Junker?'

'He didn't, after all, visit University College. He missed his appointment with Dalrymple, which made me suspicious. He'd phoned Dalrymple from Heathrow with some excuse about a late change in his flight arrangements to Paris, so I beetled off down to Heathrow with all speed and took the first flight I could to Paris.'

'Did you know where he was staying?'

'No, and I knew he hadn't made a reservation, because he wasn't expecting to leave London before Tuesday, so when I arrived at Charles de Gaulle, I went straight to the Tourist Information Office at the airport and asked for their help. I said I needed urgently to find a colleague. He
had
called there and they'd sent him to a small hotel near the Sorbonne.'

'Was he there?'

'Not when I arrived, but he had taken a room. I booked in at the same place and settled down to wait for as long as necessary. Finally, about eleven, he came in. He was surprised to see me, but not obviously alarmed. I explained my reason for being there, putting it as delicately as I could that maybe the Jane Austen letters had got among his papers in error - an invitation, in effect, to return them to me, and no recriminations. I'd thought it through. I didn't want to bring charges. I just wanted those letters back.'

'Did he have them?'

Jackman shook his head. 'I'm satisfied that he didn't. If he
was
deceiving me, he did it brilliantly. He was troubled for me and yet sufficiently shocked that I could have suspected him of taking them. He invited me up to his room and we went through his luggage together. He turned out his pockets, his wallet, everything. I had to admit in the end that Geraldine must have taken them. I flew back the next day, meaning to get the truth from her - and of course she wasn't there.'

'You didn't regard it as a police matter?' i

'The theft of the letters? Who else could have taken them but Gerry? I believed I could get the truth from her without making it public. And I didn't want the donor of the letters to know that they were missing.'

'You haven't given us the name of this generous benefactor.'

'I told you. It's confidential.'

Diamond said, 'Come off it, Professor. This is murder we're investigating, not kiss and run.'

Adamantly, Jackman said, 'I gave my word. That's it.'

'There's such a thing as obstructing the police in the course of their inquiries, you know.'

'I am not being obstructive. It has no direct relevance to Gerry's death.'

'That's for us to decide.'

'No,' insisted Jackman. 'The decision is mine.'

'ANY QUESTIONS?'

Diamond eyed the CID officers assembled in the briefing room at Milsom Street. He expected no questions. His instructions had been plain enough. He wanted the interviews with the murdered woman's friends to establish when they had last seen her alive; when they had last spoken to her on the telephone; what had been said; and, finally - an invitation to the purveyors of gossip always encountered in such an exercise - whether they knew of any reason why she might have been murdered.

'Go to it, then.'

Alone in the briefing room, Diamond turned to Wigfull. 'You, too, John. The boyfriend, Roger Plato. And his wife. What was her name?'

'Val.'

He hadn't expected so immediate and confident a response. In a burst of
bonhomie,
he remarked, 'Instant retrieval, eh? Why do we clutter the place with computers when we've got you? Take an hour off from the custody suite, John, and see what you can get out of the Platos. They're too important to leave to boys straight out of training school.'

As a good detective, Wigfull was bound to respect the reasoning behind the command, but he was plainly unhappy at being shunted to other duties. 'What about the professor? We haven't finished with him, have we?'

'He can stew for a bit,' Diamond said airily.

The prospect of the professor stewing for any appreciable time failed to satisfy Wigfull. 'He was getting stroppy in there. He's free to leave unless we formally arrest him.'

'He's torn, isn't he?' said Diamond. 'He doesn't want to be unco-operative. That could go against him later.'

'We've had twenty-four hours of his co-operation.'

'And barely scratched the surface. There's more to come, depend upon it.'

'Will you arrest him, then?'

'Would
you?'
In the minds

In the minds of both men were the time limitations set out in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. An officer of Diamond's rank was entitled to detain a suspect for up to thirty-six hours without charging him, _ after which a magistrate's warrant would have to be obtained.

'I'd want to see the lab report first,' said Wigfull.

'We won't get that tonight.'

Wigfull said flatly, 'He won't spend another night with us.'

'And if we let him walk out of here,' said Diamond, 'he could do a runner.'

After a moment's further thought, Wigfull said, 'We can check whether he was on that flight to Paris on 11 September.'

'That's already in hand.'

'And the University College professor - Dalrymple?'

'Boon is dealing with it.'

'So what's the plan, sir?'

Diamond avoided a direct answer. 'The case is stacking up nicely. Opportunity: plainly - he was in the house with her. Motive: the marriage was on the rocks and she was bloody dangerous by his own account.'

'It doesn't justify killing her.'

'I'm not postulating a cold-blooded killing,' Diamond's irritation sounded in his voice. 'It's most likely to have happened during a violent argument. Those letters went missing, and - rightly or wrongly — he accused her of stealing them. A woman with fire in her belly isn't going to take that sort of abuse. She lashes out. If it was a violent row that Sunday night and he stuffed a pillow over her face and killed her, he'd know that it was curtains for his career - unless he disposed of the body. He put it in the car and drove to the lake and dumped it there after removing the clothes and the wedding ring. Next day, to establish some kind of alibi, he behaved as if his wife was still alive and he suspected the American of stealing the letters.'

The explanation, compelling as it was, appeared not to have swept up Wigfull in its wake. 'If the letters were the cause of the argument that resulted in her death, why did he mention them to us?'

'Because he's a clever bugger, John. The way he tells it, they're his alibi. I've no doubt he was telling the truth when he said he flew to Paris and saw Dr Junker. I'll bet you a double whiskey if we can trace Junker he'll testify that the conversations took place exactly as Jackman described them. And has it occurred to you-' Diamond said, smoothly disguising the fact that it had only just dawned on him '- that the missing letters could be one enormous red herring? He could have killed her for some totally different reason.'

That is a possibility,' Wigfull generously admitted.

Diamond nodded, drew closer and thrust a fat finger in front of the inspector's face. 'I've given you motive. And now ..." A third finger.'... his conduct. He behaved like a guilty man, waiting over two weeks - until after the corpse was discovered - before reporting that she was missing. Why? Because he hoped she would sink to the bottom of the lake and stay there. Once she was found and we put her picture on the telly, he had no option but to come forward. People were certain to recognize the actress who played Candice Milner.'

'Even the murder squad, eventually,' murmured Wigfull.

The irony didn't deflect Peter Diamond. 'He'd had plenty of time to concoct a story. It's not bad, but it's far from perfect. He's scared out of his shoes by the prospect of what the lab will come up with. Did you see his face when the doctor came in to take the blood sample? That could nail him well and truly.'

'The men in white coats have their uses,' Wigfull remarked.

Diamond gave a half-smile. 'As a last resort, yes. They may even prove that his car was used to transport the body. So, being an intelligent man, Jackman lays the foundations for a fallback position - impresses upon us what a nutter Geraldine was, and how dangerous she had become. If the forensic evidence proves beyond doubt that he smothered her and dumped her in the lake, he's all ready to plead that he was provoked past endurance. He'll get a nominal sentence.' The way Diamond spoke the last words left no doubt of his view on lenient sentencing.

It was an intriguing test of Wigfull's true role in the investigation. Was he really only there in reserve, as the Chief Constable had asserted, or was he supposed to prevent an outbreak of intimidation? If so, Diamond had set him a problem. In the time it would take Wigfull to get to Bristol and obtain a statement from the Plato couple, Diamond was capable of tyrannizing the professor into a confession. More by accident than design, the language he had just been using was spiked with aggression: so many of the terms he had used to analyse Jackman's situation were physical.
'He's torn . . . scared out of his shoes . . . Did you see his
face?'

'If you're planning another session with him, I'd like to be present,' Wigfull stated resolutely.

'No problem,' Diamond airily said. 'I'll wait for you.'

'But will
he?
I could interview the Platos later.'

A grunt of dissent from Diamond. 'The whole point of the exercise is that everyone is interviewed at the same time. We don't want one set of friends phoning another to warn them that the rozzers are on their way and tell them the questions they have to answer. Roger Plato is a big cheese, John. He's yours, right?' He pushed a piece of paper at Wigfull. Upon it the addresses of all of Geraldine Jackman's friends had been listed.

With undisguised reluctance, Wigfull took the paper and looked for the address of the Platos.

Diamond yawned, stretched and said, 'I might go out for a breath of fresh air.'

He walked with Wigfull through the reception area. Immediately a group of people who had been sitting in a huddle got up and surrounded them. The press.

'Any developments, Mr Diamond?'

'None at all. Why don't you get off home? I intend to, quite soon.'

'You're interviewing a man? Are you holding him?'

'Will you be charging him?'

'You're interviewing a man?

'We're interviewing anyone able to help.'

The detectives made their way out to the forecourt where the cars were parked. Wigfull got into his Toyota, started up and drove out.

Diamond watched him go. Then he turned and marched briskly back up the station steps.

DIAMOND MARCHED THROUGH THE INCIDENT room without a word to anyone. Information was flowing in at a rate that kept six civilian clerks and the computer operators fully occupied. A heap of action sheets and computer print-outs awaited inspection, but there was a higher priority for the man in charge. He was confident that he could extract a confession before John Wigfull returned from Bristol.

He pushed open the door of the interview room.

Jackman, on his feet in a stance that was assertive, if not actually combative, his face taut, obviously primed for the third degree, said, 'Look, I'd like to have something clear from you. Am I under arrest, or what?'

'Arrest?'
Diamond repeated, as if the word were unknown in the modern police.

'I came here of my own free will, to help you. I could walk out.'

Diamond conceded the truth of this with a nod. 'But I'd rather you didn't. We haven't cleared everything up yet, have we?' He felt profoundly encouraged that his man had become so tense. The laid-back academic had been a difficult adversary.

Jackman's expression had darkened. 'What else is there? I've told you everything I know.'

Diamond smiled benignly and said, 'You've been extremely helpful, sir.' A deferential touch that heralded a significant change of tactics. 'Did I say earlier that my name is Peter, by the way? I wouldn't mind making this more informal now that we're alone.'

The offer drew a hollow laugh from Jackman. 'Informal?' His eyes travelled scornfully over the acoustic wall-linings.

'We haven't been taping the conversations,' Diamond was able to say truthfully. 'Wouldn't do it without telling you. That's why the girl was taking notes.' He paused briefly to make certain that the shorthand-writer's absence was fully appreciated. 'If you want to move somewhere else, it can be arranged. I would have suggested an evening stroll outside, but we'd have the press for company. You know how they are, Gregory.'

Jackman, already unsettled by this outbreak of
bonhomie,
winced at the mention of his name. 'Greg, if you must.'

'Sorry . . . Greg.'

Diamond might have been talking to his oldest friend. Contrary to the rumours that had circulated after his transfer to Avon and Somerset, he didn't actually bully suspects into submission. He was more subtle. He liked to Win their confidence. When he judged that the moment was right, his normally abrasive manner gave way to a charm that was difficult to resist after hours of interrogation. By that stage, a smile from Peter Diamond was more productive than a clenched fist. He had believed at the time that this was how Hedley Missendale had been coaxed into confessing; the lad had appeared so bemused that he'd poured out the story as if he were proud to join the company of Bonnie and Clyde and hold-up murderers in general. In Diamond's book, that isolated mistake hadn't destroyed the effectiveness of the technique.

'You'll have to forgive me for some of the things I said earlier,' he went on in the same companionable vein. 'In my job you get so obsessed with the facts of a case that human considerations get pushed aside. I mean, it's easy for me to overlook the fact that you came here as a volunteer, to render assistance.'

'Which I have rendered to the point of exhaustion,' said Jackman acidly. He seemed to find the charm resistible.

Diamond nodded. 'Too true. You could probably do with another coffee, Greg.'

Perplexed by the change, but correctly spotting it as a cynical manoeuvre, Jackman leapt from there to a wrong conclusion. 'Is this where you soften me up before your oppo comes back and puts the boot in?'

This brought a smile of genuine amusement from Diamond as he savoured the notion of John Wigfull, Mr Clean from headquarters, laying into a suspect. 'He's gone to Bristol to talk to a witness.'

'It was meant as a joke,' said Jackman unconvincingly.

Diamond grinned again. 'I'm beginning to understand your sense of humour.'

'I think I would like that coffee.'

'Fine. Let's go down to the canteen. I don't know about you, but I'm famished.' He looked at his watch and picked up the phone. 'Do you mind?' he asked Jackman. 'I ought to have phoned before this. She's used to this, but she likes to be told.' He pressed out a number. 'Me,' he said presently into the mouthpiece. 'How's it going? . . . I'm not quite sure, my love, but soon as I can. What are you up to yourself? . . . I'd forgotten it was on . . . Well, yes, of course, but don't wait for me.' He replaced the phone and said to Jackman, 'She's watching the football. When I'm at home and want to look at it, she complains. I'll never understand women.'

He deliberately pursued this theme at some length downstairs over toasted sandwiches and coffee, to a background of old Beatles' songs and a noisy card game in one corner led by a former sergeant, now employed as a civilian computer operator. Once or twice Diamond's reminiscences of quirky women he had met succeeded in relaxing the muscles at the side of Jackman's face, the next thing to raising a smile. Encouraged, he went on to talk disarmingly of his difficulties courting Stephanie, his wife who, when they had met, had been Brown Owl to the local troop of Brownies. He had visited them in Hammersmith as community involvement officer, to instruct them in road safety, and had been enchanted by their winsome leader. A fuse had been lit that evening, and almost every spark and splutter in the consequent relationship had been witnessed by little girls in brown uniforms.

'I must have been bloody dedicated to put up with it,' he recalled. 'Steph had to take me seriously when I turned up at the summer camp with a couple of donkeys. The desk sergeant at Hammersmith had opened a sanctuary for old mokes after he retired. He was a good mate. I think those donkeys swung it for me. Steph and I got engaged soon after. I was slimmer in those days.' He grinned. 'Relatively. Well, I could sit astride a donkey without someone complaining to the RSPCA.'

He paused, crammed the last of the sandwich into his mouth, and asked, 'Do you believe in love, Greg?'

'In
lover

Diamond nodded. 'Is there such a thing, or are we all deluding ourselves? Is it just a con trick by songwriters and authors? Desire I can understand. Admiration and respect. But love is something else. I mean, did you love Geraldine when you married her?'

Jackman gave him a long look. 'Is this what you've been leading up to? You want to know more about my relationship with my wife? Why didn't you come straight out with it?'

'Skip it, if you feel like that,' Diamond responded, piqued. 'I'm only trying to find some common ground.'

'Peter, my old chum,' Jackman said sarcastically, 'if it's going to get you off my back, I'll tell you anything.' He cleared his throat and said, 'I'd better rephrase that. If there are things you want to ask, let's get them over with. I want to get home tonight. Yes, I believe I loved her. Later we ran into problems, but I retained some tender feelings towards her. Does that cover it?'

'Apart from her good looks, what was her appeal?'

'I thought we'd been over this. I was flattered that she seemed to prefer me to the glamorous TV people she worked with.'

'That isn't love.'

'Look, what are you trying to prove now - that I'm devoid of human feelings - some sort of psychopath? Do you have some theory about murder that you want to slot me into? I loved Gerry because she was like no one else I'd ever met. She was witty, observant, brave and optimistic. In a unique and mysterious way, her mind was in touch with mine. The same things amused and delighted us. Will that do?'

The tribute was brief, but convincing.

'And then it went wrong,' Jackman continued. 'Catastrophically wrong. That precious contact between our minds was lost. I don't know why. Up to a point I can understand - her career falling apart - but why she turned on me as if I was the enemy, I'll never know. With her friends she was still the same Gerry, bubbling over with vitality. Not any more with me.'

'She made your life intolerable,' Diamond prompted. 'You made that clear.'

'No,'Jackman was quick to correct him. 'Not intolerable. I didn't use that word. The point is that I
did
tolerate her.'

'That'll teach me to feed words to a professor of English,' said Diamond wryly, not wanting to stem the flow. 'Let's just say that she was being difficult. Why didn't you divorce her, Greg? Wasn't that the obvious way to deal with the problem?'

Jackman let out a sharp breath as if to mark a protest that he was being prodded into the bull-ring again. 'You're still implying that I solved the problem by killing her.'

'I didn't say that.'

'You didn't have to.' He pushed away the plate with his half-eaten sandwich. 'If you want to know, I wasn't opposed to divorce, and nor was Gerry. I think we both knew that we were travelling rapidly down that path, but we hadn't discussed it.'

'Why not?'

'First you've got to remember that we'd only been married two years. Okay, I'd seen astonishing changes in Gerry's personality in that time, but I could understand why. She'd been through a traumatic time, having to leave the BBC, pull up her roots and come and live in the country with me. It wasn't the way we'd planned to run our lives. Maybe I was being naive, but I was convinced that the woman she had become wasn't the real Gerry. She needed more time to adjust to being an ordinary human being instead of a media figure.' His eyes darted left and right, signalling a disclosure more profound. No one else in the canteen could have heard anything over 'She Loves You'. 'This is going to sound quite loopy, but I sometimes felt as if some demon had taken possession of her. If I could have exorcised it, we might have saved our marriage. To come back to your question, I didn't talk to her about divorce because I didn't want to abandon her. The love we had felt for each other ought to have got us through the crisis.'

'You still had blazing rows.'

'Of course - she was bugging me at every opportunity.'

'Did you kill her, Greg?'

'No.'

Question and answer, straight out.

'Without premeditation, I mean.'

'Ah.' Jackman opened his eyes a fraction wider. 'That's the bait, is it? Manslaughter, rather than murder.'

'You've studied the terminology, then.'

'I do read other things, besides Milton and Shakespeare. No, Mr Diamond, I won't settle for manslaughter. I'm not settling for anything you suggest. If you want to stitch me up, that's going to be your mistake entirely. Don't expect me to conspire in it.'

Diamond ground his teeth. For a moment he didn't trust himself to go on.

'Speaking of writers,' Jackman added, 'I think it was a character in a Joe Orton play who said that policemen, like red squirrels, must be protected. Your bushy tail could be at risk if you make a mistake over me.'

How it happened so swiftly, Diamond was uncertain, but there was no denying that the interview had been turned around and he was on the defensive now. An unpleasant suspicion crept into his mind that this smart-mouthed professor knew about the Missendale case. Maybe the thought was timely; the temptation to pound the truth out of him had to be suppressed at all costs.

Instead he swallowed his pride and turned for support to the men in white coats. 'You can't buck the lab reports. If you killed her, the forensic evidence will stitch you up, as you put it, not me. Your blood, fingerprints, the samples from your car. I'm willing to wait a few more hours.'

'What does my car have to do with it?'

'The body must have been transported to the lake by some means.' He thought as he heard himself saying these things, I'm losing my grip. I was supposed to be charming the truth from him, not scaring him rigid.

'I'm allowed to have fingerprints on my own car,'Jack-man said, frowning.

'Yes, but if, for example, some human hair was found in the boot and proved beyond doubt to have been your wife's, you would have some questions to answer.'

Jackman looked dubious. 'Can they identify hair like that?'

'It isn't the hair itself,' Diamond backtracked. 'It's the microscopic particles of skin attached to the roots.'

'Did
they find any hairs?'

'They're very assiduous. They find all sorts of dust and debris.'

'You
are
going to stitch me up.'

'You should stick with Milton and Shakespeare, Greg. You're way off beam.'

Jackman said defiantly, 'You have a hunch that I killed her, and you won't let go.'

The whole tone of the conversation had changed irreversibly. Diamond shook his head slowly for a measured interval, conveying the message that he had more than a hunch, infinitely more.

Jackman said, 'How do I convince you that you're wrong?'

'You begin by explaining why you waited almost three weeks before notifying us that your wife was missing.'

'I should have thought that was obvious.'

'Not to me.'

'I wasn't surprised to find she'd gone. She'd stolen the Jane Austen letters and was unwilling to face me with the truth.'

'Where did you think she was?'

'With some friend or other. She wasn't short of bolt-holes.'

'Did you phone around?'

'I tried the obvious people and got nowhere. It was quite possible that she'd asked them not to tell me anything.'

'But you didn't report to us that she was missing. You didn't even report that the letters were missing.'

'Because I wanted to deal with it myself,' Jackman insisted. 'I was certain that she'd taken them. If I ran straight to the police and branded her as a thief, what was that going to achieve? I didn't want the story getting to the newspapers.' His answers were sounding plausible, disturbingly plausible.

'How
did
you deal with it - apart from phoning her friends?'

'I thought she might try to get the letters valued, so I made inquiries at auctioneers and dealers in the West Country as well as London. Again, I drew a blank.'

'Let's get this clear,' said Diamond. 'You're telling me now that you expected her to sell the letters? You told us earlier that you thought she must have taken them out of malice.'