Diamond Solitaire pd-2

  Diamond Solitaire

  ( Peter Diamond - 2 )

  Peter Lovesey

  Diamond Solitaire

  Peter Lovesey

  CHAPTER ONE

  An alert shattered the silence in Harrods, a piercing, continuous note. The guard on duty in the security control room, Lionel Kenton, drew himself up in his chair. His hands went to his neck and tightened the knot in his tie. On the control panel in front of him, one of the light-emitting diodes, a red one, was blinking. If the system was functioning properly, someone-or something-had triggered a sensor on the seventh floor. He pressed a control that triggered the video surveillance for that floor. Nothing moved on the monitors.

  Kenton was the senior security guard that night. He was so senior that he had a shelf above the radiator for his exclusive use. On it were framed photos of his wife, two daughters, the Pope and Catherine Deneuve; an ebony elephant; and a cassette rack of opera tapes. Puccini kept him alert through the night, he told anyone so philistine as to question opera in the control room. None shall sleep. Listening to music was more responsible than reading a paper or a paperback. His eyes were alert to anything on the panel and his ears to any sound that clashed with the music.

  He silenced Pavarotti and touched the button that gave him a direct line to Knightsbridge Police Station. They must already have received the alert electronically. He identified himself and said, “Intruder alert. I’m getting a signal from the seventh floor. Furniture. Section nine. Nothing on screen.”

  “Message received 2247 hours.”

  “Someone is coming?”

  “It’s automatic.”

  Of course it was. He was betraying some nervousness. He tried another survey of the seventh floor. Nothing untoward was visible, but then he hadn’t much faith in video surveillance. Every terrorist knows to keep out of range of a camera.

  And he had to assume this was a terrorist.

  Twenty-two night security officers were posted in various parts of the store. He put out a general alert and asked for a second check that all the elevators were switched off. The security doors between sections were already in position and had been since the cleaners left. In the business of counter-terrorism nothing can be taken for granted, but really it wasn’t feasible to break into Harrods. The intruder-if one was up there-must have hidden when the store closed and remained out of sight. If so, someone’s job was on the line. Someone who should have checked section nine. You weren’t allowed one mistake in this line of work.

  His second-in-command that night, George Bullen, burst in. He’d been patrolling when the alert sounded.

  “Where’s it from?”

  “Seventh.”

  “It bloody would be.”

  The furniture department was high risk: a brute to patrol. Wardrobes, cupboards, chests of drawers and units of every description. The nightly check for devices was a wearisome chore. It was conceivable-but in no way excusable-that the guard on duty had been so bogged down opening cupboards and peering into drawers that he’d missed someone lurking out of sight behind the damned things.

  Another light flashed on the console and one of the monitors showed headlights entering the delivery bay. The police response couldn’t be faulted. Kenton told Bullen to take over and went down to meet them.

  Three patrol cars and two vans already. Marksmen and dog-handlers climbing out More cars arriving, their flashing alarms giving an eerie, blue luminosity to the delivery bay. Kenton felt a flutter in his bowels. The police weren’t going to vote him security man of the year if this emergency had been triggered by a blip in the system.

  A plainclothes officer stepped out of a car and ran across to him. “You’re?”

  “Kenton.”

  “Senior man?”

  He nodded.

  “You put out the call?”

  He admitted it, and his stomach lurched.

  “Seventh floor?”

  “Furniture department.”

  “Points of access?”

  “Two sets of stairs.”

  “Only two?”

  “The section is sealed off by security doors.”

  “No lifts?”

  “Switched off.”

  “Any of your lads on the stairs?”

  “Yes. That’s routine. They’ll be guarding the stairways above and below level seven.”

  “Lead the way, then.”

  Thirty or more uniformed officers, dog-handlers and men in plain clothes, several carrying guns, came with him as he set off at a run through the ground floor to the first stairway. A squad of a dozen or so peeled off and raced up that staircase while he led the remainder to the next.

  Mounting seven floors was a fitness test for Lionel Kenton. He was relieved to be told to stop after six and a half, and even more relieved to find four of his own security staff in position as he’d claimed they would be. Now he had a chance to recover normal breathing while radio contact was made with the party on the other stairs.

  “What’s the layout here?”

  Essentially the police marksmen wanted to know how much cover they could rely on. One of Kenton’s team, a burly ex-CID officer named Diamond, gave a rapid rundown of the furniture display positioned nearest to the stairs. Peter Diamond was the man responsible tonight for this section. You poor bugger, thought Kenton. You look more sick than I feel.

  A team of three marksmen went up the final flight Others took up positions on the stairs. The rest moved down to the landing below.

  This was the worst-waiting for the unknown, while others went up to deal with it.

  Someone offered Kenton some chewing gum and he took it gratefully.

  Perhaps six nerve-racking minutes went by before there was a crackle on the senior policeman’s ratio and a voice reported, “Negative”

  Two dogs and their handlers were sent up to help.

  Another long interval of silence.

  Security Officer Diamond was just to the left of Kenton. He had his hands clasped, the fingers interlaced as if in prayer, except that the fingernails Were white with pressure.

  The last dregs of Kenton’s confidence were draining away when someone announced over the scratchy intercom, “We’ve got your intruder.”

  “Got him under restraint?” said the man in charge.

  “Come and see.”

  “You’re sure he’s the only one?”

  “Positive.”

  The tone was reassuring. Strangely so, as if the tension had lifted altogether. Police and security staff dashed up the stairs.

  The seventh floor lights were fully on. The marksmen had converged on a section where armchairs and settees were displayed. But they weren’t in the attitude of gunmen. They were lounging about as if at a wine and cheese party. Two were seated on the arms of chairs. There was no sign of anyone under arrest.

  Suddenly cold with his own sweat, Kenton went over with the others. “But you said you found someone?”

  One of them flicked his eyes downwards, towards a sofa.

  It was the kind of vast, black corduroy thing that an advertising executive would have in his outer office. At one end was a heap of scatter cushions, brilliant in color. The face looking out from under the cushions was that of a small girl, her hair black and fringed, her eyes Asian in shape. Nothing else of her was visible.

  Kenton stared in bewilderment.

  “Ah, so,” said the senior policeman.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “You’re sacking me.” Peter Diamond, the guard responsible for section nine on the night the child was found, spoke without rancor. “I know the score.”

  The score was heavily against him. He wasn’t young. Forty-eight, according to his file. Married. Living in West Ken. No kids. An ex-policem
an. He’d got to the rank of detective superintendent and then resigned from Avon and Somerset over some dispute with the Assistant Chief Constable. A misunderstanding, someone said, someone who knew someone. Diamond had been too proud to ask for his job back. After quitting the police, he’d taken a series of part-time jobs and finally moved to London and joined the Harrods team.

  “I shouldn’t say this, Peter,” the security director told him, “but you’re blood unlucky. Your record here has been exemplary apart from this. You could have looked forward to a more senior post”

  “Rules are rules.”

  “Unfortunately, yes. We’ll do the best we can in the way of a reference, but, er���”

  “��� security jobs are out, right?” said Diamond. He was inscrutable. Fat men-and he was fat-often have faces that seem on the point of turning angry or amused. The trick is to guess which.

  The director didn’t mind exhibiting his own unease. He shook his head and spread his hands in an attitude of helplessness. “Believe me, Peter, I feel sick to the stomach about this.”

  “Spare me that”

  “I mean it I’m not confident I would have spotted the kid myself. She was practically invisible under the cushions.”

  “I lifted the cushions,” Diamond admitted.

  “Oh?”

  “She wasn’t on that sofa when I did my round. I definitely checked. I always do. It’s an obvious place to plant a device. The kid must have been somewhere else and got under them later.”

  “How could you have missed her?”

  “I reckon I took her for one of the cleaners’ kids. They bring them in sometimes. Some of them are Vietnamese.”

  “She’s Japanese, I think.”

  Diamond snapped out of his defeated mood. “You think? Hasn’t she been claimed?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Doesn’t she know her name?”

  “Hasn’t spoken a word since she was found. Over at the nick, they spent the whole of today with a string of interpreters trying to coax her to say something. Not a syllable.”

  “She isn’t dumb, is she?”

  “Apparently not, but she says nothing intelligible. There’s almost no reaction from the child.”

  “Deaf?”

  “No. She reacts to sound. It’s a mystery.”

  “They’ll have to go on TV with her. Someone will know her. A kid found in Harrods at night-it’s just the sort of story the media pick up on.”

  “No doubt.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “I’m convinced, Peter, all too easily convinced. But there are other considerations, not least our reputation. I don’t particularly want it broadcast that a little girl penetrated our security. If the press get on to you, I’d appreciate your not making any statements.”

  “About security? I wouldn’t.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But you can’t muzzle the police. They have no interest in keeping the story confidential. It’s going to break somewhere, and soon.”

  A sigh from the director, followed by an uncomfortable silence.

  “So when do I clear my locker?” Diamond asked. “Right away?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The priest looked into the widow’s trusting eyes and rashly told her, “It’s not as if it’s the end of the world.”

  The words of comfort were spoken on a fine summer evening in the sitting room of a country villa in Lombardy, between Milan and Cremona. Pastoral care, Father Faustini termed it Ministering to the bereaved, the sacred obligation of a priest. True, the ministering in mis instance had continued longer than was customary, actually into a second year. But Claudia Coppi, cruelly widowed at twenty-eight, was an exceptional case.

  Giovanni, the husband, had been killed freakishly, struck by lightning on a football field. “Why did it have to be my husband when twenty-one other players, the referee and two linesmen were out there?” Claudia demanded of the priest each time he came on a visit. “Is that the Lord’s will? My Giovanni, of all those men?”

  Father Faustini always reminded Claudia that the Lord works in mysterious ways. She always gazed at him trustingly with her large, dark, expressive eyes (she had worked as a fashion model) and he always told her that it was a mistake to dwell on the past.

  The priest and the young widow were seated on a padded cushion that extended around the perimeter of the sunken floor. As usual, Claudia had hospitably uncorked a Barolo, a plummy vintage from Mascarello, and there were cheese biscuits to nibble. The sun had just about sunk out of sight, but to have switched on electric lights on such an evening would have been churlish. The scent of stocks, heavy on the cooler air, reached them through the open patio doors. The villa had a fine garden, watered by a sprinkler system. Giovanni, not short of money-he’d made it to the top as a fashion photographer-had called in a landscape architect when the place was built. For Father Faustini, the remote location of the villa meant a three-mile trip on his moped, but he never complained. He was forty and in good health. A rugged man with tight, black curls and a thick moustache.

  “You’re doing so much better, now,” he remarked to the widow Coppi.

  “It’s window dressing, Father. Inside, I’m still very tense.”

  “Really?” He frowned, and only partly out of concern for the tension she was under. It was a good thing the room had become so shadowy that his disquietude wouldn’t be obvious to her.

  “My usual problem,” she explained. “Stress. It shows up in the muscles. I feel it in my shoulders, right across the top.”

  “As before?”

  There was a silence. Father Faustini was experiencing some tension, also.

  Claudia said, “Last week you really succeeded in loosening the muscles.”

  “Really?” he said abstractedly.

  “It was miraculous.”

  He cleared his throat, unhappy with the choice of word.

  She amended it to, “Marvelous, then. Oh, the relief! I can’t tell you how much better I felt.”

  “Did it last?”

  “For days, Father.” While he was absorbing that, she added plaintively, “There’s no one else I can ask.”

  She made it sound like a plea for charity. Father Faustini sometimes fetched shopping for elderly members of his flock. He often collected medicine for their ailments. He’d been known to chop wood and cook soup for poor souls in trouble, so what was the difference in massaging Claudia Coppi’s aching shoulders? Only that it set up conflicts within himself. Was it right 10 deny her Christian help because of his moral and spiritual frailty?

  On the last two Friday evenings he had performed this service for her. Willingly he would have chopped wood instead, but the villa’s central heating was oil-fired. He would have fetched shopping with alacrity, but she had a twice-weekly delivery from the best supermarket in Cremona. She had a gardener, a cook and a cleaner. What it came down to in practice was that the only assistance Father Faustini could render to Claudia Coppi was what she was suggesting. The poor young woman couldn’t massage her own shoulders. Not well enough to remove muscular tension.

  There was another factor that made him hesitate. Once a week in church he heard Claudia Coppi’s confession, and lately-he wasn’t certain how many times this had occurred, and didn’t intend to make a calculation-she had admitted to impure thoughts, or carnal desires, or some such form of words. It wasn’t his custom to ask for more details in the confessional once the commission of a sin was established, so he couldn’t know for sure that there was a connection with his visits to the villa.

  “I found something you could rub in, if you would,” she said.

  He coughed nervously and crossed his legs. This was new in the routine. “Embrocation?” he queried, striving to limit his thoughts to muscular treatment, remembering the overpowering reek of a certain brand favored by footballers. The stuff brought tears to the eyes.

  “More of a moisturizer really. It’s better for my skin. Really smooth. Try.”
She reached out and smeared some on the back of his hand.

  He wiped it off immediately. “It’s scented.”

  “There’s a hint of musk,” she admitted. “If you’d like to hold the pot, I’ll just slip my blouse off.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” he quickly said.

  “Father, it’s silk. I don’t want it marked.”

  “No, no, signora, cover yourself up.”

  “But I haven’t unbuttoned yet” She laughed and added, “Is it as dark as all that?”

  “I wasn’t looking,” he said.

  “That’s all right. I’ve got my back to you anyway.”

  As she was speaking he heard the blouse being slipped off her shoulders. Now he was in a real dilemma. She sounded so matter-of-fact, so nonchalant By protesting, he was liable to inflate this into a moral crisis. It could appear as if he were letting himself be influenced by things she had said in the confessional.

  “Not too much at once,” she cautioned. “It goes a long way.”

  He suppressed his misgivings, dipped in a finger and spread some over his palm.

  Claudia’s back was towards him, as she had claimed. He reached out and applied some of the moisturizer to the back of her neck.

  She said, “Oh dear, the straps are going to get in your way.”

  “Not at all,” protested Father Faustini, but the brassiere straps were tugged aside, regardless.

  On the previous visits, he’d been persuaded to massage Claudia, without using a liniment, through her T-shirt. This was a new experience. The contact with her flesh unsettled him more than he cared to admit. He traced the slope of her shoulders, feeling the warmth under his fingers. The smoothness was a revelation. When his hands cupped the round extremities of her shoulders he was compelled to pause.

  She sighed and said, “Bliss.”

  In a moment he felt sufficiently in control to resume, spreading the moisturizer liberally across the shoulder blades and up the spine to her neck. She had her head bowed so that her long, dark brown hair hung in front of her. He gave some attention to the deltoid muscles, gently isolating them, probing their form. In spite of what Claudia had said about tension, everything felt reasonably flexible to him, but he was the first to admit that he was no physiotherapist.