The Summons Page 20

  Warrilow took this as more sniping, and scowled.

  “Looking for Mountjoy,” Diamond prompted him.

  Without shifting his gaze from the map, Warrilow said, “If you really want to know, we’re looking at an area just a few streets away. A man answering Mountjoy’s description was seen in Julian Road earlier this evening and we had another sighting about the same time in Morford Street.”

  “Alone?”

  “What do you expect?” said Warrilow, turning to glare at him. “He’s got the girl trussed up somewhere, poor kid. I’m told that there’s quite an amount of empty property around Julian Road, sometimes used by dossers. I’m having it searched.”

  “You’re convinced he’s in the city, then?”

  “It’s looking more and more like it. Whether Samantha is here with him—in fact, whether she’s still alive—I wouldn’t like to speculate. I’m getting increasingly worried about her.”

  Diamond eased himself off the desk and glided to the exit. This wasn’t a tactful moment to go off duty, but he’d had enough.

  In twenty minutes he was in the Roman Bar at his hotel, the solitary Englishman among three groups of German and Canadian tourists. Inevitably after a few brandies he was drawn into their conversation and just as predictably he found himself having to account for the presence of the crusties in such a prosperous-seeming city.

  “It’s a mistake to lump them together,” he found himself pontificating. “There are distinctly different groups. You have the so-called new age travelers, dropouts, mostly in their twenties, usually in combat fatigues or leather. Hair either very short or very long. Never anything in between. They have dogs on string or running loose and they can seem quite threatening. Actually they ignore people like us, unless they want money. We inhabit another planet to theirs. Then there’s a hard core of alkies—men about my age—always with a can or bottle in their hands. They’re shabby, weather-beaten, but conventionally dressed in sports jackets and corduroys. They sometimes shout abuse. So do I when I feel brave enough.”

  This earned a laugh.

  “I’m serious. I could easily join them soon,” he confided as he drained the brandy glass. “I don’t have a proper job. Chucked it in two years ago. So I look at those guys and know it’s only a matter of time.” Having unburdened himself of this maudlin prediction, he rose, unsteadily. “Sleep well, my friends, and be thankful it isn’t a shop doorway you’re lying in.”

  As he was moving off he overheard someone saying, “Britain is just teeming with eccentrics.”

  To which someone else added, “And crazies.”

  He didn’t look round. He made his way ponderously to the lift. He’d talked (or drunk) himself into a melancholy mood and he knew why. The solving of the Britt Strand case was going to hurl him back into the abyss of part-time work in London. These few days had been a cruel reminder of better times and he hadn’t needed to be reminded. He wanted to be back in Bath and more than anything he wanted his old job back.

  Outside his room he was fumbling with the key when he became aware of a slight pressure in the small of his back. In his bosky state he didn’t immediately interpret it as sinister. Assuming he must have backed into someone, he murmured, “Beg your pardon.”

  From behind him came the command, “Open the door and step inside.”

  He knew who it was.

  A gun at your back is more sobering than black coffee; a gun held by a convicted murderer is doubly efficacious. Diamond’s rehabilitation was immediate.

  It was no bluff, either. A black automatic was leveled at him when he turned to face John Mount joy.

  “The gun isn’t necessary,” Diamond said.

  The change in Mount joy was dramatic. On Lansdown a couple of days before he’d looked gaunt and pale as prisoners do, yet he’d seemed well in control. Now he was twitchy and the dark eyes had a look of desperation, as if he’d discovered that freedom is not so precious or desirable as he’d supposed. The strain of being on the run was getting to him, unless the unspeakable had happened and he was marked by violence.

  Speaking in a clipped, strident voice, he ordered Diamond to remove his jacket and throw it on the bed. What did he suppose—that it contained some weapon or listening device? He waved him to a chair by the window.

  It would not be wise to disobey.

  “What have you got to tell me?” he demanded. “Speak up.”

  “Would you mind lowering that thing?”

  “I’ll use it if you don’t speak up.”

  Whether the threat was real, Diamond didn’t know, but there was real danger that he would fire it inadvertently, the way he was brandishing it like an aerosol.

  “There is progress,” Diamond told him, spacing his words, doing his utmost to project calm whilst thinking how much to tell. “Definite progress. I now have a witness who saw you leaving the house where the murder took place. At approximately eleven o’clock. More important, he’s positive he saw Britt at the front door showing you—”

  Mountjoy cut him short. “Who is this?”

  “Someone she knew.”

  “‘He,’ you said. What was he doing there? I didn’t see him.”

  Diamond continued the drip, drip of information, trying to dictate the tempo of this dangerous dialogue. “Watching the house, he says.”

  “Who was he? You must know who he was.”

  “He fancied his chances as the boyfriend. Someone told him you’d taken her out for a meal. He was jealous. He went to the house to see for himself if it was true. Stood outside in the street. He says you left without even shaking her hand and moved off fast.”

  “That much is true,” Mountjoy admitted. “Is he the killer? Why did he tell you this? Who is he?”

  The advantage had shifted. Mount joy’s hunger to have the name was making him just a shade more conciliatory. Diamond was far too experienced to miss the opportunity to trade. “What’s happening to Samantha? Is she all right?”

  “Don’t mess with me,” said Mountjoy, touchy at the mention of Samantha. “I want the name of this toe rag.”

  “Better not abuse him,” Diamond cautioned. “He’s your best hope so far.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Is Sam still alive?”

  No response.

  “You know if you hurt her, laid a finger on her, they’d get you.”

  “What do you mean—‘they’? You’re one of them.”

  A slip of the tongue. He said, “The top brass.”

  “They will anyway.”

  “If you play it right,” Diamond broached a more positive offer, “you ought to survive. The gun isn’t going to help. I don’t know where you got it, but you’d be safer without it.”

  The warning seemed timely when Mountjoy used the back of the hand that was holding the gun to wipe his mouth. Whatever the man’s misdemeanors, he was no gunman.

  Diamond sensed that he was on the brink of getting some information about Samantha. It was worth giving more. “As a matter of fact,” he volunteered, “I don’t have the name of this witness who saw you leaving the house. He’s a crusty, a traveler.”

  “One of that lot? Who’s going to believe him?”

  “I do, for one.”

  This caused Mountjoy to frown. “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sent me down. Are you actually admitting you got it wrong?”

  “It’s beginning to look that way.”

  “Was this crusty the killer?”

  “Probably not.”

  This wasn’t the answer Mountjoy had expected. The muscles in his face tensed and he said thickly, “Who the hell is it, then?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “What?”

  “—but I’m closing in,” Diamond added quickly. “That’s why it’s so important that Samantha is released unhurt. She is all right still, isn’t she?” And after receiving no reply, he said, “Look, the people who are running the manhunt are getting anxious. If you could give them
some proof that she is still alive, it might buy us both some time. If not”—he glanced at the gun—“it could end very soon, John, and in a bloody shoot-out.”

  Mountjoy’s troubled eyes held his for a moment, but he gave no response.

  “Will you tell me something else?” Diamond asked him, his brain in overdrive. “That last evening you spent with Britt: did she mention anyone she was seeing?”

  “Other men, you mean? I don’t remember.”

  “Try.”

  “I mean no. Why would she want to talk to me about boyfriends?”

  “Perhaps to give you the message that she was already dating someone.”

  “Well, she didn’t. I did most of the talking, chatting her up, you could say.”

  “Didn’t that involve asking her questions about herself?”

  “Yes, but you don’t ask a woman who else she’s sleeping with.”

  Fair point. Diamond was compelled to admit that on a first date the conversation was unlikely to venture down such byways. It was a long time since he’d been on a first date. “Who paid for the meal in the Beaujolais?”

  “I used my credit card, but she insisted on giving me money to cover her share. She said something about modern women valuing their independence.”

  “You must have expected her to offer.” Diamond moved on—smoothly, considering the circumstances—to the real point that interested him. “Did you by any chance give her some flowers?”

  Mountjoy was annoyed by the question. Muscles tensed in his cheek. “The roses? No. Will you get it into your thick head that I didn’t murder her?”

  “There’s a big difference between buying flowers for a lady and murdering her,” Diamond said. “Someone else could have seen your flowers and taken it to mean she was two-timing.”

  “They were not my flowers.”

  “Pity. It would have made a nice gesture, the kind of gift a woman would appreciate from a mature man such as yourself. You wouldn’t have to arrive at the restaurant with them. You could have had them delivered to the house.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “So did you notice any roses in the flat when you went back there?”

  “No.”

  “Would you have noticed?”

  “Probably.”

  “So—getting back to your conversation over dinner— did you talk about her work?”

  “Hardly at all. Mostly we discussed Swedish cooking and various cars I’ve owned.”

  Heady stuff! Diamond thought. “You’re a keen driver?”

  “Used to be.”

  “Was she?” He already knew the answer, but he wanted to keep the man talking.

  “She seemed to understand what I was on about, only I don’t think she owned a car. She said you could manage easily in Bath without one, what with the minibuses and the trains.”

  “And friends with cars. You drove her back to Larkhall after the meal in the Beaujolais?”

  “Yes.” Mountjoy was becoming twitchy again, rubbing the gun against his sleeve.

  “Did you get the impression that the house was empty?”

  “It was. It was in darkness. We had it to ourselves. I thought I had it made until she started on about the Iraqi students I was enrolling. Then I knew she’d set me up. I was pretty sure she had a tape recorder running somewhere.”

  “Of course,” Diamond said aloud, and it sounded as if he’d expected nothing less, whereas in reality he spoke the words self-critically. Of course she would have used a tape recorder, a top journalist. “Did you look for it?”

  “There was no need. She went on about evidence and pictures and documentation, but I admitted nothing. Didn’t even finish the coffee. I got up and left. I was pretty upset, but I saw no point in giving her abuse.”

  “She saw you to the door?”

  “If you mean she followed me downstairs saying she’d got all the evidence she wanted and I deserved everything that was coming to me, yes. She slammed the door after me. I walked to where I’d parked my car in St. Saviours Road and drove home.”

  “Did you see anybody along the street?”

  For some reason this inflamed Mountjoy. “I was too bloody angry to notice. Look, I’ve told you all this at least a dozen times before, you fat slob. You’re just trying to fob me off with this horseshit about the crusty. Britt Strand was a class act. She wouldn’t mix with rubbish.”

  “She didn’t normally. She was using him, the same as she used you.”

  “What for?”

  “A story about a squat in Bath.”

  “That’s no story. That wouldn’t even make an inside page in the local paper. I’m not satisfied, Diamond. We had an arrangement. I trusted you. When are you going to deliver?”

  “Soon.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  Diamond thought fleetingly of the man lying unconscious in the RUH. “That’s too soon.”

  “Tomorrow—or never.” He tugged open the door and was gone.

  All Diamond had to do was pick up the phone and tip off Warrilow. Instead, he went to the kettle and switched it on, picked a sachet of coffee from the bowl and emptied it into a cup. He spilled some of the Nescafe, not because he was in a state of shock, but because he was cack-handed. Always had been. Couldn’t help it. He could handle an interview.

  Well, considering his interview wasn’t planned, he hadn’t done too badly. True, he hadn’t confirmed whether Samantha Tott was still alive, but he had just teased out the clue that would transform the investigation.

  If there was time.

  His elation was short-lived. There was a strange sound in the room, a whine, rising to a fast crescendo, followed by a click. Acrid fumes invaded his nose. There was no water in the kettle and he’d burnt out the element.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Regardless of Peter Diamond’s warning that the day ahead promised to be a demanding one, his assistant Julie turned down the offer of the Heritage Platter. She breakfasted on muesli and tea, refusing to be tempted by the appetizing smell of crisp bacon and fried eggs wafting across the table. Diamond had once heard muesli likened to the sweepings from a hamster’s cage and had never touched the stuff since. He decently refrained from saying so.

  They had a window table overlooking the lawn of Queen Square with its mighty plane trees. A table with starched linen cloth, silver tea service, silver cutlery and fresh flowers. Never mind the gray sky outside; the big, bald ex-detective, chatting affably to his attractive escort, was oblivious of the weather. He was basking in the interested glances of the Germans and Americans he had met in the bar the previous evening, for none of them had seen Julie arrive at the hotel entrance at 8:30.

  “Brought my wife here for a meal once,” he reminisced with her. “Bit of a scene I caused. We must have had something to celebrate. Maybe it was when I got promoted to superintendent. Well, we ate a good meal and I asked Steph if she wanted a liqueur with her coffee. We’re not liqueur-drinking people normally. She likes to surprise me, though. She said she’d like a glass of that Italian stuff they set alight and serve with a coffee bean floating in it. We’d seen it once and she’d been keen to try.”

  “Sambuca.”

  “That’s right. Sambuca. It smells of aniseed. I wouldn’t touch it myself, but I was feeling chuffed that night and willing to order whatever the love of my life requested. It duly arrived at the table flaming merrily. We watched it for a bit and then Steph asked how long it would go on burning, because she wanted a taste. I said I thought you had to put the flame out. There wasn’t anything to hand except an empty wine glass, so, having told her the scientific principle that a flame needs air to keep it alight, I put the bottom of the wine glass over the liqueur glass. Result: the flame disappeared. I lifted up the wine glass. What I’d forgotten is that liqueurs are sticky. The rim of the glass stuck to the wine glass and it came up with it—”

  “Oh God!” said Julie, beginning to laugh.

  “—and then dropped on the table and tipped over.”

&
nbsp; “No!”

  “Unfortunately the flame hadn’t gone out completely. Next thing we had a fire going. Flames leaping up in front of me. I had to grab a soda syphon to put it out. The tablecloth was scorched and we had to be moved to another table to finish our coffee.”

  Tears of amusement ran down Julie’s face. “I heard you were accident prone.”

  “Who told you that?”

  She wiped her eyes. “We’ve all got our weak points. My trouble is, I can never remember who told me things.”

  True to his promise, he said nothing about the investigation until they had finished eating. Then he gave her a near-verbatim account of his latest brush with Mountjoy. “And now I’ve got a real problem,” he confided. “A jumbo-sized dilemma. Do I report all this to the top brass at Manvers Street? You’ll say I’m duty bound.”

  “I think you are,” said she.

  “But I’ve got nothing of substance to pass on except the fact that he is armed.”

  “That’s more than enough.”

  He continued as if Julie hadn’t spoken, “I learned sweet FA about Samantha, or where they are holed up. If I tell Warrilow that Mountjoy is carrying a handgun, he’ll issue weapons and some idiot will shoot him on sight.”

  “You can’t not tell them,” she argued. “He could shoot an officer and you’d have to live with that knowledge.”

  He sighed heavily. “He’s an idiot. He’s supposed to be trying to prove his innocence. Why does he need a bloody gun? I wasn’t going to jump him.”

  “I suppose he wanted to give you a fright. He wants quick results.”

  “In his shoes, so would I. But he’s getting good value from me. We’re in there pitching, Julie.” He spotted an uneaten slice of toast on the next table and reached for it. “I don’t need a gun at my head.”

  She nudged the conversation forward. “You spoke of something Mountjoy said that throws the whole inquiry into uncertainty again.”

  “Right.” Diamond’s mood improved; with a return to London looming, any delay in the unraveling of the mystery was to be welcomed. “Picture it, Julie. He’s back at the house with Britt, right?”