‘I don’t see that,’ Roop said. ‘Why should anyone take the risk of killing someone just to practise?’
‘Why should they take the risk of killing at all?’ George’s chin was up. ‘And killing in this crazy fashion, copying a hundred-year-old series of crimes?’
‘We’ve no evidence that that is what this is,’ Roop said. ‘It’s all surmise on your part.’
‘Oh, come on Roo – Inspector Dudley!’ she said. ‘How can you say that? Am I wrong so far? Haven’t we found the bodies just where the original Ripper left his? Isn’t the MO a sort of copy of the original one? How much more evidence do you want?’
‘It’s all circumstantial,’ Roop said. ‘It’d never stand up in court.’ And closed his file to glare at her. She glared back.
‘Well,’ Gus said, as emollient as he knew how to be. ‘Let’s leave the matter of Lord Scroop to one side at present. There’s more to be done with checking on him and his flat before we can get anywhere. Tim, you do that. Take DC Chalice with you. Now, the next thing. Alice Diamond. Mike, let’s hear from you about that situation.’
Mike told them succinctly, with a certain light glossing over of his own problems in keeping up with their quarry at Heathrow, just what had happened with Alice Diamond. They all listened, puzzled and fascinated, and when he’d finished a small buzz of talk broke out that Gus had to settle before he could make himself heard.
‘Shut up! If you want to contribute make sure we can hear it. You –’ He pointed to one of the CID men at the side of the room who had been muttering busily into his companion’s ear. ‘What were you saying, Hagerty?’
‘Drugs, Guv. It sounds like drugs to me. If they can get the stuff in as normal baggage, they’re on to a winner. We’ll have to find out why the Customs bods didn’t fuss over the amount of baggage she had and then we can follow up –’
‘We have checked,’ Mike said. ‘She’s a regular traveller, and she brings in a lot of stuff for her fashion shop as normal baggage. Apparently she prefers to pay the excess baggage charges rather than let it go as ordinary freight – she’s done it for years. She has all the proper paperwork for the gear – garments mostly, and some costume jewellery.’
‘Do we have proof of that?’ Hagerty asked. ‘Do the Customs search her bags?’
‘I got the impression they didn’t,’ Mike said. ‘They seemed to know her and be perfectly comfortable about what she’s bringing in. They’re not stupid, Ray. If she was using her business as a front for drugs they’d have pulled her by now. I reckon it’s something else. I just don’t know what – yet. I’d like the chance to look round her place, Guv. A warrant maybe? And for the shop as well.’
‘What’s the point?’ Rupert said. ‘You said yourself the extra bags were taken off by this other geezer, the one in the van. Has anyone tracked that yet?’
‘I’ve got the info here.’ Mike pulled out his own notebook. ‘I want to go after him today as well. The vehicle’s registered to a Max Hazell. He’s got an address on the Wembley Stadium Trading Estate.’
‘Then go after him, but leave Mrs Diamond alone at present. I’d rather someone just went and talked to her, but without a search warrant.’ He looked round the room. ‘Morley, you go with Sergeant Urquhart, talk to her, will you? And I want her treated carefully, understand? The fact that she was involved in smuggling or seems to have been doesn’t make her any less a woman whose husband has been murdered. And a husband who was an MP at that. So let’s not rock any boats till we have to. OK, has anyone anything else to give us this morning before we break up?’
‘Still nothing at Mitre Square?’ George ventured. ‘Don’t you think we should be looking there?’
‘I’ve got a sizeable police presence there twenty-four hours a day,’ Rupert said. ‘We can hardly do more. It is just surmise, after all.’
‘And you’re sure there isn’t any possibility that there’s already a body somewhere?’
He didn’t answer, refusing even to look at her, so she closed her mouth. Bad enough she had pointed out that there would be a body at Henriques Street; she didn’t have to compound her crime. Maybe she’d go and look for herself, she thought, and, smiling sweetly at Rupert Dudley, said no more.
‘I’m still concerned about Alice Diamond.’ Mike was stubborn. ‘There could well be information there that –’
‘You heard what we decided about her,’ Rupert said, but Gus put a hand on his arm.
‘Tell you what, Mike,’ he said genially. ‘If you can find a way to have a look round a woman’s shop full of fripperies without making any sort of fuss, we’ll be glad to see you do it, OK?’
There was a ripple of laughter and Gus shook his head at Mike, who was looking sour now. ‘I take your point, Mike,’ he said, ‘but we’ve no cause to search that shop and it’d cause trouble if we did. I feel it in my bones. Anyway, she’ll be there for a bit yet. We’ve time to get to her. Right now there’s a lot of other more pressing stuff to do. OK, here you are …’ And he was off, detailing each and every one of them with their day’s work. Julie, beside George still, sighed deeply when she found herself once again set to work on the computers, checking the incoming data and making sure it was all properly programmed.
‘Honestly, as though that was all that important,’ she muttered. ‘There’s Barnett over there’ – she jerked her head at another uniformed PC on the other side of the room – ‘he’s crazy about computers, loves doing the work and gets through it twice as fast as I do. Why can’t they let him get on with it and let me go off and do some real work?’
George looked at her and bit her lip, thinking hard. Then she grinned. ‘Could you go sick?’ she asked.
‘Eh? What for?’
‘To get out of here.’
Julie looked interested. ‘How d’you mean?’
‘I agree with Mike. Someone ought to go and look round that shop. Who knows what we might find? I agree with Gus too, though. You can’t send Mike thundering around in his size umpteens. But a couple of women, in ordinary clothes, of course, not uniforms – well, that’d be different, wouldn’t it?’
Julie looked at her, her eyes bright, then slowly smiled. ‘Ooh, Dr B.,’ she said loudly. ‘I do have the most awful belly ache. D’you think I ought to go and have a word with our nurse about it?’
‘Oh, yes,’ George said firmly, even more loudly. ‘Indeed you should. It’s probably dysmenorrhoea, you know. Painful periods. A day’s rest should sort it out.’
‘Bloody women,’ muttered one of the men as they pushed past, and Julie and George grinned delightedly at each other.
‘Yeah,’ George said. ‘Bloody women. Especially when we find things they don’t. Go and deal with the nurse, Julie. I’ll see you downstairs as soon as you get out. I’ll give you a lift home to change. And then, Sloane Square or bust!’
12
George loitered on the kerb, waiting for Julie, who seemed to be having some trouble convincing the nurse in the occupational health department at the nick that she needed to go off duty; certainly she had been gone far longer than George had expected and she was beginning to chafe. She could, after all, visit Alice Diamond’s Sloane Square shop perfectly well on her own. But she’d made a deal with Julie so she would have to wait for her; and of course it would look better to have two of them at the shop. One could prowl around while the other distracted attention in some way.
So she was still there when Gus came clattering down the steps on his way to Scotland Yard for a meeting with the Commissioner, who was, understandably enough, getting very twitchy at the rate at which Members of Parliament were being culled. He pulled up in surprise when he saw her. ‘I thought you said you had to go to the hospital this morning?’ he said. ‘Have you changed your mind?’
‘Oh, no.’ George, accomplished liar though she could be when it was necessary, hated deceiving Gus. ‘I just promised someone a lift who’s going that way. Er – if they don’t come soon, I’ll have to go.’ She scrabbled for a c
hange of subject. ‘Um, what are we doing tonight? Will you be working late? Or maybe –’
‘Of course I’m working late,’ he said. ‘We took last night off, ducky, but there’s a limit. Roop’s working every night. I can hardly let him if I don’t, can I?’
She ignored that. Getting on to the subject of Rupert Dudley would not be wise. ‘Is it something I can help with?’
‘Help with?’ He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘That needs thinking about.’
‘Well, then, think!’ Over Gus’s shoulder she saw Julie come out of the station and prayed she’d have the wit to hang back till Gus had gone. She came halfway down the steps looking pleased with herself and George, not even daring to glance at her, went on quickly. ‘Let me know and I’ll do it. I told you, I’ve taken this time off from the hospital and I don’t want to waste it!’ Just in time she saw the pit she was digging for her own feet. ‘That’s why I’m – um – going in this morning, to check all’s well so that I can go on staying away.’
‘You sound like Alice in Wonderland on a bad day,’ he said. ‘All right, I was considering it anyway. I’m going to see if I can wangle an invitation to dinner at the House of Lords. I’ve put a call into Joe Durnell. He got his lordship when he left the force three years ago. He’ll understand, and make sure we get some inside info. You can come along if you like. You might enjoy it.’
‘You’re on,’ she said fervently, not only because she was delighted at the proposal but also because of her relief that Julie had assessed the situation correctly and gone back up the steps to melt into the shadows under the portico. Sensible girl, George thought, and smiled brilliantly at Gus. ‘I’ll put on my best bib and so forth and meet you – where? At the House of Lords? Or at home?’
‘Keep your phone switched on and I’ll call you,’ he said. ‘I must go.’ He looked at his watch. ‘My meeting’s in ten minutes. I’ll have to use the blue light to make it as it is. S’long.’ And he flicked his thumb and forefinger at an imaginary hat brim and went, belting round to the side of the building to the yard where the cars waited.
Julie came down the steps a few moments later, and without a word followed George as she half trotted, half ran to the side street on the other side of the building where she had left her car. It would never do for Gus to come out and see them together; and she felt a stab of shame because of her duplicity. He hardly ever lied to her. But then, she argued inside her head as she unlocked the car door and Julie scrambled in to sit low in her seat (clearly fully aware of the need for discretion), he doesn’t have to. I don’t try and stop him doing things that need to be done, do I?
She pulled the car into the now thick morning traffic and headed away in the opposite direction to the one which Gus’s car would have to take when it left the yard, and took a deep breath, and Julie sat up straight and looked at her sideways.
‘Does he know where we’re going?’ she said.
‘Of course not. Would I drop you in it? What did the nurse say?’
‘I don’t think she believed me at first, but it’s a hard thing to prove isn’t it? Anyway, she gave me a couple of aspirin, and said I could go home if it really was that bad. I felt a right wimp, to tell you the truth.’
‘You have to do what you have to do if you want to get on with things,’ George said, as much to herself as to Julie. ‘Where do you live? The sooner we get up to Sloane Street and back the better. Then you can have a miraculous recovery, and go back to your computer.’
Julie was admirably swift. She left George waiting outside her flat in Wapping little more than ten minutes, reappearing looking a very different person in a short-skirted red suit and high-heeled shoes. George looked at her approvingly.
‘You look Sloane Street all the way through to your middle. I feel positively dowdy.’
Julie looked at her and said candidly, ‘Well, you’re not exactly formal, are you? I like the look, of course, but, well …’
George looked down at her black jeans and matching casual jacket over a green shirt, all underpinned with a pair of clean but all the same well-worn trainers, and had to agree. ‘Never mind. It gives us a reason to be together. I’m the out-of-towner needing to be dragged up into fashion and you’re my advisor. OK?’
‘OK,’ said Julie contentedly and settled to enjoy her morning. It mightn’t do much for her career, especially if she was caught sloping off, but at least it would give her some experience of real detection. She was a very happy young woman as the car slid its way through the hubbub that was London on this bright autumn day. And so was her driver.
‘I wish I could have been at Heathrow and seen what happened the other day,’ she said, carefully overtaking a lumpen slow van loaded with planks that stuck dangerously out of its back doors. ‘That’d have been useful.’
‘Why?’
‘You can learn a lot about people just by looking at them. The way they walk, the way they hold themselves. Like what sort of mood they’re in and the state of their health. You can spot where they have aches and pains and how long since they had a meal …’
‘You sound like Sherlock Holmes.’ Julie was admiring.
George laughed. ‘Not a bit of it. It’s straightforward medical training. You learn to look at people as specimens as well as people. As for Sherlock, of course, Conan Doyle based his Sherlock on a doctor he’d worked with, didn’t he? He was a doctor himself.’
‘If the only way I can get to be a detective is to take up medicine,’ Julie said, ‘then I’ll make a living waiting at tables. I wouldn’t do your job for anything.’ She shuddered. ‘All those bodies all the time.’
George looked happy. ‘Mmm. They are horrid sometimes. But very interesting. So interesting you stop noticing the nasty bits. Ah, now, here we are. But where the hell do we park?’
It took them half an hour to find a vacant meter, a sharp five-minute walk away from their target, and then to weave their way back to Sloane Street, but it was still the right side of ten a.m. when they got there. And the shop was closed.
It was a very pretty establishment. The windows were a mock-up of an eighteenth-century shop, complete with one or two panes of thick bottle glass in the corners, but not so faithful to the old design that the contents of the shop were not clearly visible. The window itself held a wisp of peach silk trimmed with double layers of lace drooping over a model of a prancing white horse with Pegasus wings, and a couple of matching panties lay coyly round its feet. There was also a great deal of ruched tulle and silk daffodils and sweet peas clustered in corners. Behind all the whimsy, there was a clear view of the shop’s interior, brilliantly lit with spotlights and filled with racks of sugared-almond-coloured garments. There was more ruched tulle and lots more artificial flowers. George leaned towards the window to look, cupping her hands round her eyes to improve her view, and almost snorted. ‘God, it looks like a brothel,’ she said.
‘I’ve never seen one,’ Julie giggled. ‘But I suppose you could be right. I think it’s rather pretty, actually.’
George shook her head. ‘Not my style. Well, now what? We just wait?’
Julie looked at her watch. ‘It’s five to ten,’ she said. ‘It’s my guess they’ll open then. These posh shops often do start late. Their customers don’t get up any earlier, do they?’
‘I suppose not,’ George said. ‘What’s smartest, do you think? Hanging around waiting or going off somewhere for ten minutes and then coming back?’
Julie considered. ‘Going away,’ she said. ‘It’ll make us look, well, anything but posh to hang around.’
‘Then we’ll wait,’ George said. ‘Because if she thinks we’re just hayseeds she’ll behave differently. More relaxed is my bet.’ And, folding her arms, she leaned against the shop door.
Julie looked mulish for a moment and seemed about to argue, then shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s up to you. I’ll just go and look in the other windows.’ She tittuped away to stare earnestly at the suits in the adjoining establishments.
She had moved five shops away by the time Alice Diamond arrived. A small sports car, which clearly held a great deal of power under its engine, pulled into the kerb and parked, the driver quite ignoring the double yellow lines, and she got out, unfolding a pair of long legs in navy-blue tights. George watched her, trying to look simply tired with waiting, but not missing a detail.
Much older than she dresses, she decided, watching the woman as she reached into the boot of her car. That blonde hair has to be touched up every week, I suspect. And the clothes look as though they cost a bomb, but she needs pretty firm corsetry under them. It was the face that gave away the most. The make-up was perfect, as George could clearly see when the woman at last locked her car and carried the two packages she had extracted from it towards the door of the shop, but, sleekly applied though it was, the fine network of lines and the soft sagging of a woman of fifty or so showed clearly in the cruel morning sunshine. Yet the effect was good. Just enough eye make-up to make her interesting, enough lipstick to add glamour; she looked both elegant and workmanlike. She is, George decided as she straightened up and made room at the door, an artefact and a credit to her maker, who is, of course, herself.
‘Good morning,’ the woman said brightly. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Oh, I just wanted to look about,’ George said, letting her American accent slide back. These days she rarely showed her origins except to people with educated ears. Most assumed she was Irish or a Northerner or something of that sort, now she’d been in Britain for so many years. But she suspected that this woman would be attracted by the thought of an American tourist with money to spend.
She was right. The blonde hair bobbed with the vigour of the woman’s nods and her earrings seemed to twinkle more as she stretched her mouth wider into a welcoming smile. ‘Well, of course, you must come right in! I’m so sorry you had to wait. Coffee at once. Ah, here you are, Maria!’ She looked over her shoulder as another woman arrived, a carbon copy of herself in terms of style, but a great deal younger and cheaper. ‘We have our first customer, Maria. Do make some coffee, right away, will you? And then I’ll see what it is we can do for you.’
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