Authors: Peter Lovesey
“You told me when we spoke before that you kept in touch with her. Was that correct?”
“Sure. We stayed friends.”
“And she never mentioned the accident or the car?”
“I told you it was a sensitive area.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“About three weeks before she died. In Milsom Street, by chance. She was alone, shopping.”
“What was said?”
“Nothing much. We got up to date. I gave her the dope on the bands I was working with and she talked about the magazines she was in. That’s all. Just a few minutes in the street.”
“Did you speak on the phone after that?”
“No. It was definitely the last time. I’ve told you everything now, honest to God.”
“What was the point of all that?” Farr-Jones demanded in an irritated tone. “I was led to believe you were about to extract a confession of murder.”
“Murder? No. Vital information, yes,” said Diamond.
“Hearsay, most of it.”
“True,” he conceded.
“He did admit to keeping the car hidden,” said Julie. “He conspired with her to withhold evidence.”
“You’re not seriously proposing to charge him with that?” said Farr-Jones. “I’ve had a very long day, you know, and it’s late. Personally, I’m adjourning until tomorrow.”
“Right, sir,” said Diamond mildly. “What time would you care to see us?”
“Is there any more to discuss?”
“Some clearing up.”
“Eleven o’clock, then.” The thought of another day made Farr-Jones yawn.
“Fine,” said Diamond. “Outside the church?”
“Which church? It isn’t Sunday, is it?”
“Steeple Ashton.”
“Whatever for?”
When Farr-Jones had left, Diamond shook his head slowly.
“He’s
had a very long day. Doesn’t it bring tears to your eyes, Julie?”
By one of those contradictions that enhance the charm of the English countryside, the parish church at Steeple Ashton has no steeple. A storm removed it in 1670. The tower survived and dominated the village and the landscape north of Westbury Hill, for even in its truncated form St. Mary’s is a tall church. Knobbly pinnacles in profusion compensate for the lack of a steeple, and, if anything, the building looks over-ostentatious rather than incomplete. The lavishness of the decoration is a testimony to the profits of the wool trade in medieval Wiltshire and curiously most of the gargoyles carved on its hood molds and battlements have the chunky character of knitted toys.
All this was lost on the group of senior policemen stamping their feet and rubbing their gloved hands while they stood under the south porch like mourners waiting to line up behind a coffin. A hard frost had whitened the churchyard and a sharp east wind was blowing.
Precisely as the hour of eleven showed on the blue and gold dial of the church clock, Peter Diamond and Julie Hargreaves came around the side of the building.
“Good day to you, gentlemen. Is everyone here?”
It was a gratifying turnout. As well as Farr-Jones and Tott, there were John Wigfull, Keith Halliwell and a pair of uniformed inspectors who had earlier been assigned to Commander Warrilow. The latter, to everyone’s relief, had returned in triumph to the Isle of Wight the same morning with his patched-up prisoner.
Diamond and Julie had arrived more than an hour before and made use of every minute; their comings and goings in the frost showed as gray tracks between the graves in the section of churchyard to the west of the church.
“Would you care to follow me, then? This won’t take long.” Diamond picked a fresh track over the crisp turf, leading the others in single file toward a layout of graves as regular as an actor’s teeth. Eventually he stopped beside a plot with a short stone cross as headstone. On it was a simple inscription:
GEORGINA MAY HIGGINSON
13/9/1981 - 17/10/1988
“Barely seven,” remarked Tott.
“Dreadfully sad,” murmured Halliwell, the most sensitive of the group. Something else had needed to be said, even though words were inadequate.
“You’ll have noticed the date, sir,” Diamond said for the benefit of Farr-Jones.
“October,‘88. You’re assuming this little girl was the victim of the hit-and-run accident?”
“We’re certain of it. This is the only child’s grave we could find for 1988.”
Farr-Jones blew out a plume of white breath. “Did this child actually die in a road accident? Have you checked with records?”
“DI Hargreaves just has, on her personal.”
Julie reported, “A child of this name was knocked down and killed by a car, here in Steeple Ashton, opposite the village stores, at 4:45 P.M. on this date. The driver was never traced.”
Diamond added, “The next of kin are John Higginson, father, resident in Belfast, and Prue Shorter, mother, who still lives here. She is the photographer who worked with Britt Strand.”
Up to now, each statement had made sense to Farr-Jones. The last one did not, and his face showed it.
Diamond explained, “Miss Shorter offered to work for Britt some time in the summer of 1990, almost two years after the child was killed. She had a strong suspicion by then that Britt had been the driver of that car, but she wanted to be certain, because she planned to avenge the killing of her daughter by taking the life of the person who caused it. So she worked as her photographer through the summer and autumn of 1990 until she was totally sure, and the right opportunity came.”
“Weren’t we aware of any of this at this time?”
“The accident? It was in the records as a hit and run, but we had no reason to link it with the Britt Strand murder. We routinely checked all the witnesses for previous convictions and Miss Shorter was clean. The fact that she happened to be the parent of an accident victim didn’t show on the computer.”
“It wouldn’t,” Wigfull confirmed.
Farr-Jones asked, “How did you get on to her, then?”
Diamond unexpectedly tiptoed on the spot like one of the cygnets in
Swan Lake.
“You’ll have to forgive me, sir, but I need to take a leak. It must be the cold.”
“Here?” said Farr-Jones, frowning.
“I happened to notice that Prue Shorter has a fire going in her cottage. What say we nick her now?”
It was the most civilized arrest in the combined experience of all the detectives. The timing couldn’t have been bettered. “How many of you are there?” Prue Shorter asked. “Eight, is it? I’m afraid I haven’t got chairs for all of you. Would you like to handle the knife, Mr. Diamond? It’s the large one in the drawer behind you.”
She passed a steaming Dundee cake across the kitchen table for Diamond to cut.
Several of the officers looked to the Chief Constable for guidance in this unprecedented situation. He had the good sense to give it his endorsement. “When I was a small boy, I used to read the Rupert books,” he surprised them all by saying. “Rupert Bear—the original ones by Mary Tourtel with yellow covers and black-and-white illustrations. They always seemed to end with Rupert coming home from some adventure to find that homely Mrs. Bear had baked a cake.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Senior policemen rarely provided such insights into their personal lives.
Prue Shorter ended it by saying, “Personally, I could never believe in animals wearing clothes. I liked the Famous Five.”
“Enid Blyton,” said Wigfull, the walking encyclopedia.
Tott said, “Wasn’t one of them known as—”
“George. Yes,” Prue Shorter said quickly, and added almost unheard, “Georgina.”
Their arrival at the cottage door had not fazed her. She had asked them in and said, “Now that you’ve come, I can’t tell you how relieved I am. What do you want first, my dears, a slice of cake or my confession?”
After that, it had seemed churlish to mention that two uniformed officers were posted outside the back door to prevent her escaping. Regardless, she had welcomed them in and made filter coffee for all.
Diamond finished cutting the cake and put the knife into the kitchen sink, out of Prue Shorter’s reach. He still had a vivid memory of Britt Strand’s lacerated body. This homely Mrs. Bear could wield a knife as well as bake cakes. “Are you ready to talk?” he asked her.
She said with sublime composure, “Don’t you want to tell them how you sussed me out, ducky? Take your applause while you’ve got the chance. I’m totally gobsmacked by your brilliant detective work, but I’m not sure if the rest of them are.”
Farr-Jones, in thrall to this redoubtable woman, said, “Yes, Mr. Diamond, why don’t you give us the rundown on your investigation?”
“Not only mine,” Diamond pointed out. “There were two of us. DI Hargreaves must take a lot of the credit. In fact, she deserves a commendation.”
Julie looked down at her coffee.
Diamond was less modest. “You want to know what led us here?” he said. “It was the old, old story of observation and deduction. Some of it didn’t mean much at the beginning. For example, when Julie and I first came to this cottage we noticed a child’s violin in one of the alcoves in the other room. There was also a drawing pinned to the notice board, a stick figure, obviously the work of a young child. Not much to go on, but the next time I visited, the violin was gone. It emerged that Miss Shorter had been married briefly and given birth to a girl, who had died young, at the age of seven. I didn’t follow up by asking what she died of, and you may think that was a mistake on my part, but with the benefit of hindsight I doubt if I’d have got the truthful answer. I was straying into dangerous territory. Right?”
Prue Shorter gave a nod.
“Of course,” Diamond went on, “you’re constantly recording things in your memory and ninety-nine percent turn out to be unimportant. It took some painstaking work and smart deduction on Julie’s part and mine to discover that Britt Strand had once owned a car, an MGB. Still does, according to the computer records. She suddenly stopped driving at the end of 1988. We found the car eventually and discovered clear evidence of a collision. Jake Pinkerton, her boyfriend at the time, allowed her to hide the thing in the woods behind his recording studio at Conkwell. Naturally, we questioned him. At the time of the incident, Britt Strand confided to Pinkerton that she’d knocked someone down, but she wouldn’t say whether it was a man or woman. Why? I thought. Why did it matter what sex the victim was? The reason she wouldn’t even tell her boyfriend was that she was too ashamed to give him the whole truth. She had knocked down a child and done nothing about it.”
“Left her lying in the road with a fractured skull,” added Prue Shorter in a hard, accusing tone in sharp contrast to the genial persona she had projected up to now. “It was in the papers next day and she still didn’t come forward.”
Tott said, “Deplorable.”
“Even so,” Farr-Jones remarked to Diamond, “the link between a child’s violin and a hit-and-run accident is pretty tenuous.”
Diamond said sharply, “There’s more to it than that.” He was piqued. “A whole lot more. There’s the drinking. We heard from Jake Pinkerton that Britt had been a whiskey drinker in the old days. She gave it up completely after the accident. Went TT.”
“That was a great help after my little girl was dead,” said Prue Shorter acidly.
“Let’s come to you, then.” Diamond addressed her directly for the first time. “A resourceful lady. A whiz at making cakes. A good mixer in more senses than one.”
She laughed.
“I mean it,” he insisted. “You’re a natural at making friends, or what are we all doing here around your kitchen table? You could charm anybody, even your worst enemy, and that’s precisely what you did. But not with cakes. You had your expertise as a professional photographer. Local freelance, taking news pictures for the
Bath Chronicle
and the
Wiltshire
Times
and sometimes selling stuff to the nationals. Really good pictures. You were nicely placed to show your work to Britt and convince her that she’d be better off using the local talent than some hotshot from London. This was mid-1990, wasn’t it.”
Prue Shorter nodded.
“The dates are important,” he said, looking around the table. “The little girl was killed in October, 1988, so we’re talking about a time at least a year and a half later. Quite a long interval.” He turned to Prue Shorter again. “What I haven’t mentioned yet is how you got to know that Britt was responsible. After all, you didn’t know that her car was still in existence. You got to the truth by an altogether different route from ours.”
She said, “‘Responsible’ isn’t the word I’d use for her.”
“How did you discover that it was Britt who killed your daughter?” he pressed her.
“The roses,” she answered in a voice drained of the animation she’d displayed before. “They appeared on the grave the day after the funeral. A dozen in a plain transparent wrapper. No message. No indication who supplied them. I spent weeks trying to find out, asking at all the florists in Bath, Bristol, Trowbridge, Westbury, Melksham. I guessed they were placed there by the hit-and-run driver, you see. I
knew.
But I couldn’t trace the shop. She must have got them from London. I had to wait a whole year before I got any closer to her.”
“On the anniversary of the accident?”
“Yes. I should have realized and watched the churchyard, but I didn’t. A fresh bunch appeared, still with no clue as to who brought them. But instead of doing the rounds of the florists this time, I asked the people who live in Church Road, outside the church, if they’d seen anyone. Not many cars go up there, except at the weekend, unless there’s a funeral. This happened to be a Tuesday. Well, one of the people opposite had noticed a taxi draw up toward dusk, and a woman in a headscarf and black coat get out and go into the churchyard. The taxi waited about ten minutes, until she came back. It had one of those illuminated signs on the top. It was from Abbey Taxis, who work out of Bath.”
“Ah. You traced the driver?”
“The next day. He remembered her. And she’d had the roses with her. Even better, she had a slight foreign accent and he gave me a good description. She was blond, attractive, well dressed. The trouble was that he couldn’t tell me her name or address. She’d picked up the taxi from the rank outside the station and that’s where he put her down at the end. I got him to drive me around Bath several afternoons in the hope that he would spot her, but we had no luck. Then one evening some weeks after all this he phoned me and said he’d been talking to one of the other Abbey drivers who believed he knew the woman. He’d driven her more than once from the station to a house in Larkhall and she was a Swedish journalist.” She spread her hands. “That was all I had, but it was enough. I asked in the newspaper office. She didn’t work for the local rag, but they knew about her. It’s their business to know about local people. It wasn’t too promising when I discovered that this woman didn’t drive or drink, but I’m not easily discouraged. I got to know everything I could about her. I got the job with her, joined her on a couple of stories, at Longleat and the Trim Street squat.”
“You’re so good with people that you managed to suppress the anger you felt toward the woman who killed your daughter.”
“No,” she interrupted Diamond. “You’re telling it wrong. I wasn’t certain she’d done it. If I’d been certain, I would have killed her before I did. I couldn’t have waited!”
The way she stated this was chilling.
Diamond accepted the correction with a nod. “I was saying that you won Britt’s confidence completely, took all the photos she wanted and took them well. Visited her flat in Larkhall. Got to know her routine, her friends, her landlord, and I’m sure this was one-sided. She didn’t visit you. She wouldn’t. You were the photographer, the junior partner in this team, so you brought the prints to her to see. She didn’t know you lived in Steeple Ashton where she’d killed the child. Your phone has a Devizes number, and that was all she needed to know to stay in contact.”
He took some more coffee. No one else spoke. He took a bite of the cake. He had their attention for as long as he chose to go on. “In September or October of 1990, Britt got on to John Mountjoy’s enrollment racket. As usual, she confided in you, gave you the background, the suspicion that he was enrolling Iraqis who had no intention of becoming students, except to satisfy their visa requirements. You took some external shots of the college. And now we come to the day before the murder, October the seventeenth—two years to the day since your daughter was killed in the car accident. This was the day you confirmed beyond all doubt that Britt had been the driver of that car.”