The Summons

by Peter Lovesey

  Tott said, “No, we’re not.”

  Farr-Jones piled on the reproach. “You’re a fine one to talk about communication.”

  Diamond was more than willing to tough it out with them; that was one of the perks of being a civilian. “What’s been happening, then? It’s a siege. I thought the first priority was to set up some line of communication.”

  Farr-Jones said acidly, “The first priority is to establish where Mountjoy is, and where he’s holding Miss Tott.”

  “Haven’t you done that?”

  “They’re somewhere on the fifth or sixth floor. They moved from the place where they were sighted. We’ve occupied floors one to four.”

  Diamond erupted at this. “You sent men in? Jesus Christ, you gave me your word that you wouldn’t storm the building.”

  Farr-Jones checked him curtly, “Don’t over dramatize. We haven’t stormed the place. We made an orderly move. That was a decision I took an hour ago.”

  “Armed men?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t send them in with batons and shields when the fellow has a handgun.”

  “But you gave me an undertaking. I had until midnight to talk him down, you said. You’d stand off until midnight. You bloody agreed!”

  Farr-Jones thrust a finger at Diamond. “Don’t tangle with me, Diamond. This is a police operation and I’m responsible, here, on the spot, taking stock from minute to minute and giving the orders. You weren’t anywhere about, and you haven’t been in touch.”

  “What exactly are these orders?” Diamond asked, appalled at the potential for a blood bath.

  “To seal every possible escape route and advance as high up the stairs as they can without personal risk.”

  Tott did his best to take out some of the sting. “We’re working from maps the City Council have supplied. The problem is that the building is a honeycomb. Most of the rooms on the top floors have access to roof spaces. The plumbing is extraordinary. They say it’s like the engine room of a battleship up there.”

  “Where’s Warrilow?” Diamond asked, as a disquieting thought surfaced.

  Farr-Jones said firmly, “Commander Warrilow is directing the team inside the hotel. We’re in radiophonic communication.”

  It was as dire as he had feared. Warrilow could justify any action by claiming he was in the firing line. “Tell him I’m coming in right away and order him to put the action on hold.”

  “You’ve got some neck, Diamond.”

  He kept control, just. “What I’ve got, Mr. Farr-Jones, is what I promised: the means to bring this siege to an end. I’m ready to talk to Mountjoy, only not with gunmen moving in for a shot.”

  “What are you saying—that something has turned up, something relevant to the case?”

  “Nothing turned up,” muttered Diamond, his distaste for the words made clear. “We turned it up, Julie Hargreaves and I, through solid detective work. We can prove that Mountjoy didn’t murder Britt Strand.”

  Tott clenched his fist and said, “Nice work.”

  The Chief Constable was less charitable. “Who the devil did murder her, then?”

  If he thought he was entitled to be handed the name on a platter, he was disappointed.

  Diamond said rigidly, “We’re dealing with the siege. Would you tell Commander Warrilow I’m coming in and order him to pull back his men to the third floor? I won’t talk to Mountjoy under armed threat.”

  “You don’t seem to understand,” said Farr-Jones. “This is a high-risk incident.”

  “It is now.”

  “We have men deployed all over the building.”

  “Yes, in disregard of the promise I was given,” said Diamond, and then played his highest card. “Are you dispensing with my services, Chief Constable? Is it down to Warrilow to end the siege in a shoot-out?”

  Tott exclaimed, “God forbid—no!”

  Farr-Jones took refuge in silence.

  “I’d like to have that confirmed,” Diamond pressed him. “Strictly off the record, as our friends out there express it.”

  The allusion to the press struck home. There was a sharp intake of breath. Then Farr-Jones turned to the radio operator and said, “Get Mr. Warrilow for me.”

  Diamond didn’t wait to hear the outcome. He headed straight for the front of the hotel, ignoring the press people who trotted beside him, thrusting microphones at his face and badgering him with questions all the way. At the top of the flight of stone steps under the white, wrought-iron portico, he was waved inside by the constable standing guard.

  The once-gracious entrance hall that Diamond was seeing for the first time was ungraciously lit by the striplights installed during the time the civil service had occupied the hotel. There were armed men in combat suits at the foot of a fine mahogany staircase that must once have been carpeted and now was fitted with lino treads and metal strips. To the right was a modern-looking counter normally occupied by the security firm who patrolled the hotel. Warrilow stepped from behind it like the bell captain, his deportment proclaiming that he was the man in charge.

  “I suppose the lift isn’t working?” Diamond cut through any tedious preliminaries.

  Warrilow astutely decided that obstruction wasn’t the best way to deal with this charging rhino. “If you’re serious about wanting to go up, you’ll be forced to use the stairs. I hope you’re in good shape.”

  “And I hope the Chief Constable made himself clear,” Diamond stated firmly. “I’m not going up there with guns in support and I don’t want to be interrupted, however long it takes. My brief is to talk him down, and I want his trust.”

  Warrilow threw in a spanner. “Do you happen to know where he is?” He asked the question as if he, personally, would give anything to know.

  “Don’t you?”

  “It’s far from clear. We believe he moved out of that room under the gables.”

  “The room with the balcony, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Taking the girl with him?”

  “We assume so. We’re getting no sound from that end of the building.”

  “Where else would they have gone? Do you have plans?”

  With a world-weary manner, as if going through the motions of cooperating with an awkward hotel guest, Warrilow led him to the desk, picked up a sheaf of papers and handed them across. Diamond leafed through them. The fifth floor, where Samantha had been sighted on the balcony, was a V-shape, with some twenty-five rooms divided by a corridor. One side overlooked Orange Grove, the other Grand Parade and Pulteney Weir. The point of the V ended in a heptagonal shape that he took to be the base of the turret that dominated the eastern end of the hotel facade. “I reckon this is where they went,” he said.

  “I doubt it,” commented Warrilow, taking the plans and flicking over to the sheet that showed the sixth floor. “Look, the turret goes up to another level and is quite cut off. It’s partitioned into three rooms, each with just the one door. They’d be trapped rats in there.”

  “Access is by a spiral staircase,” Diamond pondered aloud, ignoring what had just been said. “He could defend that. And this looks like another set of stairs to the roof. A fire escape, by the look of it. If he kept the girl tied up in one of the rooms, he could stand here”—he touched the point on the plan—“and have a view of the fire escape and the spiral staircase at the same time.”

  “He’d still be trapped,” Warrilow insisted. “I have men on the roof.”

  Diamond took a sharp breath. “How did they get up there?”

  “The exterior fire escape at the back of the building.”

  “What are their orders?”

  “They’re patrolling the roof. They won’t go in until I radio them. It’s under tight control, Diamond. When Mount-joy understands that there’s no way out wherever he is, he’ll surrender peacefully. He’d better.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Diamond said in a quiet, implacable tone.

  “You still want to do this?”

  It wasn’t worthy of a
n answer. He put down the plans and looked about him.

  “What now?” Warrilow asked. “A gun?”

  He shook his head.

  “You’ll need one. Are you armed?”

  He said, “A bat phone.”

  “What?”

  “Personal radio. Isn’t that what you call them these days?”

  Warrilow beckoned to one of the constables by the door and had him lend his radio to Diamond, who then needed instructions in how to use the thing. He had such a deep-rooted dislike of mechanical appliances that even those he’d been forced to master were later expunged from his memory.

  “You’re insisting on doing this?” Warrilow repeated himself with something not far short of actual concern. His hostility had been rather defused by Diamond’s ineptness with the radio.

  “Of course.”

  “And you won’t be carrying a gun?”

  “No.”

  “Then for God’s sake use the radio at the first hint of trouble.”

  “I’m giving the radio to Mountjoy,” Diamond told him casually.

  Having asked for another guarantee that no police personnel were on floors five or six, he started up the grand staircase like a freshly arrived guest, pausing to check the angle of his hat in the triple mirror on the second landing.

  At the third floor, a shade less exuberant, he stopped for breath and spoke to a group in combat jackets holding automatic rifles. They told him that sounds had been heard in the tank loft on the fifth floor, but no one was sure if it was water circulating, because earlier someone had used one of the old wooden-seated toilets.

  He met another six armed men on the next flight and they assured him that they were the advance party, the Special Operations Unit, marksmen every one; they had been on the point of occupying the fifth just as Warrilow had given the order to withdraw to level four. To Diamond’s eyes, they looked disturbingly young, yet they insisted that they could have “taken” Mountjoy and freed Samantha. He didn’t recognize a single one of them from the old days and they didn’t look as if they wanted to be friendly. That didn’t stop him from reminding them to stay off the top floors while he was up there.

  He wasn’t built for all these flights of stairs. As he got higher, breathing more heavily, wishing he’d brought a torch for the dark corridors, he thought seriously of the risk he was taking—principally the risk of being shot by his own side. He would have liked to have cleared the entire hotel of armed police. These young men brandishing their guns made him uncomfortable. They scared him more than Mountjoy did.

  Here he was, a civilian, staking his life on his ability to talk an armed man down from a siege. Why? Because it was personal. Because of the mistakes he’d made four years ago. He owed Mountjoy this.

  And there was another reason for doing this, wasn’t there? It wasn’t just altruism. What the hell was it? His memory wasn’t functioning too well. Got it! He wanted the damned job back, didn’t he? Nobody would have thought so when he was slagging off the Chief Constable; in truth, he’d rather undermined his job prospects then, but Farr-Jones had broken a promise, however he liked to put it. He’d handed over effective control to Warrilow. In a short time those eager young men with guns would have located Mountjoy and started firing. This needed to end peacefully. It cried out for the old, unfashionable policing he represented. He wasn’t remotely like your chummy old English bobby, Dixon of Dock Green— thank God—but at least he pursued the truth, whatever the cost. That was what had kept him from being kicked off the force all the times he’d traded aggro with people like Farr-Jones. His values were right.

  He was approaching the fifth floor. He bent his back as he prepared to go up the last steps. It was an unconscious action and he was annoyed with himself for doing it and instantly straightened up. The right signal to give Mountjoy was openness, not stealth. In fact, he needed to announce that he was coming.

  “Mountjoy, it’s me, Peter Diamond.” He raised his voice and said, “I want to talk to you. I promised to come and here I am.”

  Midway up the last flight, he paused and listened. He thought he detected a movement.

  “Mountjoy, is that you?” he asked.

  Someone fired a shot.

  He slammed himself against the wall.

  Immediately after was a second shot.

  The firing had come from just above him, on the fifth floor. The echo was still ringing through the building.

  His first thought was that Warrilow had double-crossed him and marksmen were posted up here. He was incensed.

  Boneheads.

  But presently he decided that they weren’t firing at him, or he’d be dead. He was an easy target. The action was in the corridor. They must have spotted Mountjoy.

  He waited almost a minute without moving, his ears ringing. Then another sound blended in, a high-pitched intermittent beep.

  The personal radio. He snatched it off his chest, pressed the switch and heard the crackle of static, followed by Warrilow’s voice. “Control to Diamond. Are you receiving?”

  Diamond hissed into the thing, “You told me there were no guns up here. Someone fired two shots.”

  “We heard them. Where are you now?”

  “On the fifth floor.”

  “We don’t have anybody higher than the fourth apart from the team on the roof, and they haven’t moved.”

  “Someone must have.”

  “I’m in communication, for God’s sake. I know where the men are. Nobody has moved. Nobody. Mountjoy must be doing the shooting. Listen, I’m sending a team up to you now.”

  “Don’t,” said Diamond at once. “I can handle this.”

  “That’s ridiculous. He’s out of control. He may have shot the hostage.” This crushing possibility had hit Diamond almost as it was spoken. Horrible as it was, it had to be faced. He spoke his thoughts aloud as they came to him: “There were two shots, so he may have killed himself as well. Hold back your men until I’ve clarified what happened.”

  Warrilow said, “I don’t take orders from you.”

  “I’m on the spot and it’s got to be my decision,” Diamond told him with passionate conviction. “Hold everything. Do you hear me, Mr. Warrilow? Do you hear me? I’ll radio down when I’ve checked.”

  He couldn’t rely on Warrilow, but with luck he had bought himself a few minutes. He shut off the radio and shouted into the darkness, “Mountjoy?”

  There was just the echo from the bare walls. The burnt gunpowder lingered in the air.

  “Mountjoy, this is Peter Diamond. Where are you? Do you need help?”

  No answer, but he expected none. The most likely explanation of the silence was that Mountjoy had cracked under the strain and blown his brains out, but that didn’t entirely account for the shooting. It takes one shot to commit suicide and there had definitely been two. A double killing? He had to be prepared for it.

  He got up and mounted the last couple of steps and stood on the fifth floor. “I’m alone,” he shouted once more. “Unarmed. Can you hear me?”

  Apparently not.

  But he fancied he could hear a slight movement higher in the building. Possibly it was coming from the men on the roof. He strained to listen.

  It had stopped.

  Across the corridor he could just make out the angle of the V, where the spiral staircase ought to be. He stepped forward, through a space where the walls didn’t run exactly parallel, into what had to be the lower level of the turret. The way ahead was practically pitch black.

  “Mountjoy?”

  Nothing.

  “If you’re up there—” He was stopped in mid-sentence by another series of beeps from the personal radio he was carrying. He clasped the thing and fumbled with the controls, wanting just to silence it, but then there was a crackle of static and Warrilow’s voice came over.

  “Command Control to Diamond. Our monitors are picking up sound from the top floor of the turret. Are you receiving me? The top floor of the—”

  The sentence was
never completed because he snatched the radio off his chest and crunched it savagely against the wall.

  If there was sound, there was life. “Mountjoy, it’s just me, Diamond.”

  Reaching into the space ahead, he found the handrail of the staircase. “I’m unarmed. I want to help you.”

  This time he was certain he heard something. Not a response. More the sound of someone whispering. He dared to hope again.

  He located the first step and started climbing. “I’m coming up to you,” he said. “I’m not armed. I promised to come back and I have.” Steadily, scarcely pausing, he mounted the steps. At one point he froze when the whole staircase was made visible by a moving light, the rails casting long revolving shadows that threatened to give him vertigo. It was the searchlight beam scanning across the front of the building and it moved away just as suddenly.

  The whispering upstairs—if that was what he had heard—had stopped since he had spoken.

  The problem about going up a spiral staircase in darkness is that you lose all sense of direction. It was only when the handrail ended that he realized he’d reached the top. At a loss, he tried for a mental picture of the sixth floor plan; there was a landing at the top of the stairs, wasn’t there? There were three doors, each leading to a room, a segment of the heptagon.

  Choose the right one, he thought grimly, and you must expect to look down a gun barrel.

  “I’m at the top,” he said, wishing he sounded more in control. “In case you didn’t hear, this is Peter Diamond and I’m alone.”

  He spread his arms. Where were the doors? One should be to the left, one ahead, one to the right. His outstretched fingers didn’t make contact with anything. Maybe the sensible thing was to wait for the searchlight to pan across this end of the building again.

  No. He’d spoken. Mountjoy expected him now. To wait was just to plant suspicion of a trap.

  He moved forward a step. His right hand touched a flat surface that moved away from him with the contact—certainly the door. He faced it and pushed. “Are you in here?”