The Summons

by Peter Lovesey

“But why? As I said just now, what was so special about you lot?”

  “It wasn’t us,” said Una. “It was a previous tenant.”

  Intrigued, he waited for her to elaborate.

  And she waited, before saying, “Well, you know who lived in Trim Street.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Jane Austen.”

  He frowned. “The writer?” It was a dumb thing to say, but he had been thinking in terms of the twentieth century.

  “Well, she did produce four or five of the greatest novels in the English language, yes.”

  “Jane Austen once lived in the house you squatted in? Are you sure?” Here it was, apparently, the answer he’d been seeking for days.

  “No,” she answered. “I’m not sure, and nobody can be, because the house number isn’t mentioned in the letters. The only certain thing is that she and her mother had to take lodgings in Trim Street after her father died. It was a poor address and they hated it.”

  He felt elated. He couldn’t take much credit for rooting out the information, but it was one part of the mystery solved apparently. “How do you know all this?”

  “Before I dropped out of Oxford I read Jane Austen. She was the only author I could stomach. I devoured all the novels and the juvenilia and the collected letters. I thought I remembered Trim Street and after we moved in, I went to the Central Library to check. In one letter, before the family even moved to Bath, Jane wrote that her mother would do everything in her power to avoid Trim Street, so you can imagine their feelings when they ended up there, in 1806. It must have been hell. But you can see why it interested Britt Strand.”

  He was trying to contain his excitement, and not succeeding. “A Jane Austen house taken over by squatters? Yes, I can. It was the hook to hang her story on.”

  Una had obviously reached this conclusion some time ago. “It isn’t known which house in Trim Street the Austen family actually lived in, so Britt could pick on our squat in the certainty that nobody could prove her wrong. It was as likely as any other.”

  “Dead right,” he agreed. “You see those photos and you need no persuading. Gracious Georgian fireplaces heaped with beercans. Graffiti. Crusties and their dogs sprawled around. Jane Austen’s home desecrated.”

  This was a touch too strong for Una. “Hold on, we didn’t desecrate anything. We used the toilets properly. We didn’t smash windows or start a fire.”

  “The point isn’t how you behaved. It’s how the story would have read in the magazine. Jane Austen—”

  She cut in savagely. “Bugger Jane Austen. While you sit here talking about some dead writer, Sam is tied up in that hotel with a gun at her head waiting for you to do something.”

  He was unmoved. “This isn’t a one-man show. The place is under surveillance. What you’ve just told me is more important than you realize. I needed to know this. Who else have you told.”

  “Nobody. Who’s interested, for God’s sake?”

  “G.B.? Are you sure you didn’t tell G.B.?”

  She shook her head.

  “Positive?”

  “Why give him unnecessary grief?” she asked.

  “Grief? Why should it grieve him?”

  “He thought Britt fancied him, poor sap.”

  Julie was in their office at Manvers Street when Diamond walked in. “I couldn’t trace you,” she said, and when it sounded like a lame excuse she added more assertively, “Don’t you think you ought to carry a personal radio or a mobile phone?”

  If it was meant as a serious suggestion, she could have saved her breath. “Did you follow that woman, Billington’s visitor?” he asked.

  “I did.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “She isn’t his sister.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Her name is Denise Hathaway and she runs the sub-post office in Iford.”

  “Near Bradford-on-Avon?”

  “Yes. I followed her home.”

  “And spoke to her, I hope?”

  “Of course.” Julie paused and changed the tempo of question and answer. “I don’t know if this is good news, or bad. She confirmed Winston Billington’s alibi. On the night of the murder, they both stayed at the Brunei Hotel in Bristol. They’d been lovers for about a year, ever since he chatted her up trying to persuade her to stock his greeting cards in the post office.”

  Diamond was frowning. “On the night of the murder, Billington was in Bath.”

  “It all fits in, if you’ll let me finish. He was in Bath, as you say. He called at his house to collect his car keys, just as he claimed. Mrs. Hathaway—”

  “She’s married, then?”

  “Yes. She’s tried to keep this relationship a secret. She has a horror of all her customers in Iford finding out about her infidelity.”

  “What about her husband?”

  “He works nights at the post office in Bath. She doesn’t seem so worried about him. It’s the neighbors who alarm her. I had no end of a task wheedling out the truth by threats and promises. It’s a real hush-hush affair. She insists that they use separate cars and check in at the hotel at different times. They each book single rooms and he creeps along the corridor to her room when the hotel is quiet.”

  “Sounds like a scene from a Victorian novel.”

  “This is English village life in 1994, the way Mrs. Hathaway lives it, at any rate. On October the eighteenth, Winston was back from Tenerife and they planned to spend the night together in Bristol. She checked in at the Brunei about eight in the evening and had a meal served in her room. Winston phoned her from Bath to find out the room number and then went to his house and collected his car key, before driving to Bristol. About half-past midnight, he tapped on her door. And he had some flowers with him, from Tenerife.”

  “So he bought them for her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Roses?”

  “Carnations. She loves carnations. Next morning, they breakfasted separately and left in their different cars.”

  “Discreet.”

  “They are.”

  “I meant the way you put it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But is it really an alibi?” said Diamond.

  “It fits with Billington’s own statement and G.B.’s. I’ve checked with the hotel and he signed the register at 12:15 A.M.”

  “His own name?”

  “Yes.”

  “It takes us one step further,” he conceded, “only it isn’t an alibi. Remember the timing. G.B. told us it was around eleven when he saw Mountjoy leave the house and Billington enter it soon after. Let’s say 11:15. He could have killed Britt and been on the road to Bristol by 11:30. How long does it take to Bristol?”

  “That depends on the traffic. All right,” she admitted, “late in the evening, on quiet roads, he could have driven there in the time.”

  “Easily.”

  “But is it likely that he’d make love to Mrs. Hathaway after committing a murder?”

  “Who knows?” Diamond threw in. “The excitement may have turned him on.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “We’re talking about Winston Billington, not Jack the Ripper.”

  He smiled faintly. “Fair enough. Did Mrs. Hathaway tell you what kind of performance Winston gave after tapping on her door?”

  She was unamused. “Of course not. She’s acutely embarrassed about all this.”

  “You didn’t press her?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Maybe Winston didn’t, either.”

  Julie made a sideward twitch of her mouth and flicked her eyes upward—her way of registering disdain when the Manvers Street men made sexually ambiguous remarks.

  “But you’ve solved one mystery.” Diamond picked up the thread before Julie said any more. “We know where Winston Billington spent the rest of that night. Meanwhile, I’ve solved another.” He told her what he had learned from Una Moon about Jane Austen’s connection with Trim Street.

  “Where does it get
us?” she asked, when he had finished. “It doesn’t give anyone a motive for murder, does it? I feel as if we’re picking at scabs when we should be performing a major operation.”

  For once he was undefended. He pulled out the chair from his desk and sat opposite her. “Julie, I can’t argue with that. Let’s face it, we’re short-handed. This isn’t a murder inquiry as we know it.”

  “Let’s get reinforcements, then,” she said.

  He shook his head. “They’d be better employed on the stakeout. We’ve got until midnight—barely eight hours— and that’s only if Farr-Jones keeps his word. With Warrilow champing at the bit, I’m not counting on it. We simply don’t have time to brief people who know damn-all about the case.”

  “So what’s next?” said Julie bleakly. “We’ve interviewed all the suspects we can dredge up. The only one we’ve been able to eliminate is Mrs. Billington because she was out of the country. I put everyone through the PNC as you asked, and it got us no further.”

  “Everyone?” Diamond repeated, seeming to expect some fresh insight.

  “Jake Pinkerton, Marcus Martin, Winston Billington, Prue Shorter, Una Moon. As I told you, I didn’t solve the mystery of G.B.’s name, so I couldn’t access him. Is that what we should be working on?”

  He was silent, his face set, his expression anxious. Finally he said, “It all originated with Britt. She’s the one we should be concentrating on. Is she on the computer?”

  “Britt?” Julie gave him a disbelieving look. “She shouldn’t be. She’s dead.”

  “Did we look her up on the ruddy computer at the time of her death?”

  “Would she have been on it, as a foreign national?”

  “She kept a car at one time, an MGB.”

  “In that case, she ought to be. There could be a printout. It should have been done as a matter of routine,” Julie said, “but I wasn’t around. I can look through the file if you wish.”

  “Yes,” said he. “Do that.”

  “At this minute?”

  He nodded.

  Julie reached for the box files containing all the papers. While she sifted through the material, Diamond sat back, brooding, rocking the chair on its back legs. He was profoundly grateful for Julie’s calm support in these critical hours. She was on the receiving end of the taunts and rebukes intrinsic to his way of working. Usually the entire murder squad shared the suffering.

  “It is here,” she said, taking a sheet of computer paper from the file and handing it across. “But there isn’t much.”

  He examined it.

  Below Britt Strand’s name and address were the details of the car, a private MGB, registration VPL 294S, licensed from 01/08/88 for twelve months.

  Diamond tugged at the chunk of flesh under his chin.

  “So she was still the owner of the car at the time she died. Is that what this means?”

  “May I see it?” Julie looked at it. “Apparently, yes. If she’d sold it, the data would have been transferred to the new registered keeper.”

  “What happened to it, then? I didn’t hear anything about a car when we investigated the murder. We’d have examined it, obviously.”

  “It could be a computer error,” Julie said. “The license isn’t updated. According to this, it would have expired in August, 1989, more than a year before this printout. If you like I can get the current owner checked against the registration.”

  He nodded and Julie went out to check with the PNC.

  Instead of feeling encouraged that more pieces of the puzzle were in place—he now knew the reason why Britt had taken such an interest in the Trim Street squat and he also knew where Billington had spent the night of the murder— he was nervous. He wasn’t used to working like this. In his murder squad days he would have had his best detectives simultaneously at work on several lines of investigation. It didn’t matter that nine-tenths of it came to nothing. The team would get results and he’d interpret them. His skill—and it was a skill—was panning the gold, picking out the nuggets from the silt. But in the present case he was doing all his own digging- With only Julie to help and the time running out, he had to be damned sure the spadework was productive. The pressure was intense. There could be no error.

  Julie returned, shaking her head. “It’s strange. I checked VPL 294S and Britt is still registered as the keeper.”

  Diamond’s contempt for computers was reinforced. “She’s been dead since 1990.”

  “The computer hasn’t got that information. That isn’t so uncommon. What is surprising is that no one else took over the car. What became of it after she died?”

  “Surely somebody must have thought an MGB was worth owning,” said Diamond.

  “Stolen?”

  “If it was, there ought to be something on the computer entry.”

  “Well, there isn’t.”

  “Let’s think this through, Julie. The car was last licensed on the first of August, 1988, for a year. The license expired fourteen months before she was killed. She didn’t renew it. No one else appears to own it. So where is it?” As he was speaking, a supplementary question bombarded his thoughts: Is the red MG just a red herring? In a piece of lateral thinking that must have bewildered Julie, he said, “Those damned roses. We’ve never traced them.”

  She waited for him to go on.

  “A car that vanishes. A dozen roses that come from nowhere. We need answers Julie.”

  She said, “We seem to have reached a stop with the car.”

  “All right. Let’s think about the roses, then. Someone sends you a dozen red roses. As a woman, how do you react?”

  “I’m pleased. Most probably it’s Valentine’s Day and I have an admirer.”

  He said, “It isn’t and you don’t.”

  “Thanks,” she said acidly. “I really needed that.”

  “Don’t take it personally. We’re hypothesizing. The murder was October the eighteenth, not February the fourteenth. Was there anything special about the date? Her birthday?”

  Julie went to the file again. “She was born on April the twelfth.”

  “No help there. Red roses are a token of love, am I right? Even a slob like me knows that’s the language of the flowers.”

  “They can be a way of saying sorry,” Julie suggested.

  “I don’t see how that helps us.”

  “I’m just considering other possibilities.”

  He didn’t sound grateful. “What do we know for sure? Every florist in the city and in all the towns around was checked to see if they made a delivery of roses, and we drew a blank. It’s likely that someone bought them in a shop without leaving a name and took them to the house in person.”

  “And it’s safe to assume it was someone she knew,” added Julie. “She wouldn’t have let a stranger into the house so late.”

  “Agreed. Let’s go through her visitors. Mountjoy is the obvious man, going on a date, but he didn’t bring the roses, or claims he didn’t. He doesn’t remember seeing any in the flat. Billington bought flowers, but for another woman.”

  “And they weren’t roses.”

  “And G.B. claims he didn’t call at all.”

  “Julie said, “Why would anyone want to lie about giving her a bunch of red roses? Surely the killer isn’t the person who gave her the flowers. It’s someone else.”

  “Why?”

  “It must be. Surely. Someone made jealous by them.”

  Diamond pondered this briefly, then said, “You could be wrong there. Let’s assume for a moment that nobody is lying.”

  “The flowers were already in the flat?”

  “No. We already established that they weren’t delivered by a florist and Mountjoy didn’t see any when he visited. I think we must face the possibility that the killer was the bringer of the roses.”

  “Why?”

  “We couldn’t trace them back to any shop. There’s no record of any transaction, no memory of anyone remotely like our suspects buying roses that day. What does that mean? P
robably that the person who took the roses to the house went to some trouble to conceal his identity. Maybe he bought them in some other town, too far away to trace.”

  “That would mean he had murder in mind before he bought the flowers.”

  Diamond held up a finger in confirmation. “You’re with me now. A premeditated murder.”

  It was plain from Julie’s puzzled expression that she wasn’t totally with him. “Are you saying that someone bought red roses and took them to the house meaning to commit murder? Why? What would be the point?”

  “To make a point.”

  “You’ve lost me altogether now,” she told him.

  “Instead of a token of love, the roses were a token of revenge that Britt understood.” He appealed to her visual imagination. “Think of the scene—the cut rosebuds stuffed into her mouth. That’s indicative of something else besides murderous intent. The flowers meant something, Julie.”

  “You mean they were symbolic?”

  “They had some significance known to the victim and the killer. Maybe there had been a gift of roses at some point in the past, when there was love and trust that the killer now felt was betrayed.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “It’s ugly,” said Diamond, “but it does make sense. We’ve always assumed that the killer found the flowers at the scene and took them to be a gift from a lover and couldn’t resist mutilating them and desecrating the body with them. I’m suggesting that they were always intended to be part of the murder scene. The killer went to some lengths to buy the flowers at some place miles away from Bath. It was a premeditated killing, not some sudden outbreak of violence. If I’m right, Britt Strand wasn’t killed because of something that happened that evening, but as a coldly planned act.”

  Julie absorbed this. “Because of something that happened previously? Is that what you’re saying?”

  He gave a nod. “We’ve given most of our attention to the evening of the murder and the people we know were in Larkhall that night: Mountjoy, Billington and G.B., each of them attracted to Britt and willing to admit it. But there are two others who pointedly claim their affairs with the lady were over.”

  “Jake Pinkerton and Marcus Martin.”

  “Yes. They become rather more interesting now.”