All this had no appreciable effect.
'We know you visited Geraldine Jackman on the day she was murdered. You were seen.'
This time a tremor of shock went through her, which she tried to convert into the action of rubbing her arms.
Diamond concluded his statement. 'So there must be something else to tell.'
Wigfull said, in his new, non-aggressive guise. 'Why don't you sit down?'
She half-turned and looked over her shoulder, in two minds, and then walked to the table and took her place opposite Diamond, her eyes glazed, as if too much was going on in her brain for it to interpret what she was seeing.
'You do admit going to the house?' Diamond put to her.
She dipped her head in what may have been meant as a positive response.
'Why?' Diamond asked, already departing from the structured interview he had proposed. 'Why did you go there?'
She spoke in a whisper too low to register on the recording equipment, 'To ask her to hand over the letters.'
'Geraldine?'
She nodded, and said in a slightly louder voice, 'I was sure she had them hidden in the house.' Her eyes began to function intelligently again. 'It was obvious that she must have taken them.'
Wigfull asked, 'How did you know they were missing?'
'Greg phoned me early that morning, about half past seven. He believed Dr Junker had taken them. He was going after him, on the train to London.'
'But why should he have told you about it?'
'He was sure Geraldine would call me out of spite, just to gloat. He didn't want me to hear it from her.'
On rapid reflection Diamond decided that this explanation was plausible. It was reasonably consistent with Jackman's suspicions of his wife.
'And did Geraldine call you?'
'No.' Mrs Didrikson leaned forward, her dark eyes suddenly in strong focus again. 'Which makes it even more certain that she had the letters herself. Greg was mistaken. I was positive she had them.' She used the word 'she' with unconcealed contempt, with a passionate dislike that had not been expunged by the killing. The animus between the two women must have amounted to more, far more, than the events so far described had justified.
Diamond knew he was in danger of being sidetracked, and this time he kept to the record of what had happened on the fatal Monday. 'So what did you decide to do about it?'
'I didn't do anything at first. I waited some hours. It really got to me, that she could be so bloody-minded. I was in such a state that I phoned my boss and made some excuse to get off work. About eight-thirty I drove Matthew to school and did some shopping in Bath. Had a coffee in one of those places by the bus station and did some thinking. While I was sitting there, a phrase came back to me, something Geraldine had said when I handed the letters over to Greg. She tried to rubbish them. She called them musty old things with no literary merit.'
A detail, Diamond noted, that they had heard almost verbatim from Dr Junker. Dana Didrikson hadn't previously mentioned it herself.
'You must understand the appalling thought that came to me,' she said, scanning their faces for a sympathetic response. 'She wouldn't think twice about destroying those precious letters. She would put a match to them rather than admit to Greg that she'd hidden them out of spite. It was up to me to stop her. It mattered more that she was stopped than any misgivings I had about crossing swords with her again.'
'So you drove out to Brydon House?'
'Yes.'
'What time?'
'When I got there? I suppose about half past eleven. Maybe slightly earlier. I rang the doorbell. Got no answer. Assumed she was out. Walked around the side of the house to see if by any chance a door was open. And the back door was.' She paused and stared at the back of her right hand, as if the memory was too taxing on her nerves to continue.
'So you let yourself in?' Diamond prompted.
'Yes.'
'And?'
'I called out. Called her name several times. Got no reply. Decided to make a search.'
'Go on.'
'Starting with the bedroom. If I'd been in her position, that's where I would have hidden them. So I went upstairs and called her name once more in case she hadn't heard before. I located their bedroom and looked inside. She was there.'
'What?'
'In bed. She was in the bed.'
Diamond kept his eyes on her.
It seemed that Dana Didrikson couldn't bring herself to say that Geraldine had been lying dead, but it was implicit in the way she had spoken. That was what she had intended to convey.
Diamond's first response was to treat it as another attempt to cut short the questioning. He didn't believe her.
Nor plainly did Wigfull. 'Are you serious?'
She answered, 'I'm telling you what I saw.' She had removed her hands from the table, but beneath it she was pressing them together with such force that her head and shoulders trembled.
'Mrs Didrikson,' said Diamond, 'for the record, I must ask you to state your meaning clearly. You said she was in the bed.'
'Yes.'
'And…?"
She whispered, 'Dead.'
'You're certain?'
'I didn't imagine it.'
'You'd better describe what you saw.'
She took a long breath. 'She was lying face upwards. Her eyes were open and seemed to be staring at the ceiling until… until I saw that they didn't move. Her face was a dreadful colour, as if she'd put on a facepack. Her lips were blue.'
Lividity, notably of the lips and ears, is a sign of asphyxiation. 'Did you touch her, feel her pulse or anything?'
'No. She'd gone. It was obvious.'
Painstakingly, as if they accepted every word of her story, they got her to describe the scene. Diamond had laid the ground rules: they would test the facts she gave them, and this was the method, inducing her to talk, suppressing their scepticism until the right opportunity came.
The body, she told them, had been lying diagonally in the bed, the congested and livid face at one edge, the auburn hair tousled, some of it below the pillow that lay beside her head in the normal position. Both arms were under the pale green quilt. Mrs Didrikson had not disturbed the bedding, nor touched the body, but enough of the shoulders were visible for her to see that it was clothed in a white sleeveless nightdress. She had noticed no scratches on the flesh.
The bedroom itself had revealed no obvious signs of a struggle except an empty glass tumbler lying on its side on the bedside table nearest to the corpse. The second bed had a matching quilt folded back on itself, and she thought she remembered a man's pyjama trousers lying across the pillow. She had not looked into either of the dressing rooms. The door to the bedroom had been open and the sash window partly raised. The curtains had been drawn back, giving abundant light.
'What did you do?'
'I thought I was going to faint. I went to the window and took some gulps of fresh air. Then I fled the room without looking at her again. I think I drew some water from the tap in the kitchen. I was functioning like a robot, as if it wasn't me.'
Diamond couldn't allow this to pass. 'Explain.'
'I suppose what I mean is that I was on autopilot.'
Wigfull said eagerly, too eagerly, 'Not responsible for your actions?'
She glared at him. 'You're trying to trap me, aren't you?'
It was left to Diamond to provide reassurance. 'We're trying to understand you, Mrs Didrikson.'
'Haven't you ever been shocked rigid?' she said. 'Don't you see that I'm trying to explain what it means to be in shock? I knew what I was doing throughout, if that's what you're asking. I felt stunned by what I'd seen.'
'And after you drank the water?'
'I left.'
'The way you'd entered – by the back door?'
'Yes. I made my way back to the car and drove home.'
'And then?'
'Had some brandy, I think.'
'What time was this?'
'I can't remember exactly – some
time between twelve and one.'
'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.
Chapter Three
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 fro
m 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.
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