If true, this really was sensational and Diamond didn’t conceal the excitement he felt. “Did anyone come to the door with him?”
“She was there, yes. I had a clear view.”
“You mean Britt?”
“Who else?”
“You’re sure of this?”
“Hundred percent.”
“How was she dressed?”
“In a skirt and blouse buttoned to the neck-and if that surprises you, it’s nothing to the surprise I had. What’s more, there was no embrace, nothing. Not even a few civil words. She shut the door fast, before he was through the gate. He didn’t look back, either. Marched off up the street. That was the end of it. He didn’t kill her. You banged up an innocent man, Mr. Diamond.”
“And you withheld vital information from the police,” Diamond retorted, which was an agile reaction considering the force of what had just been said. “Why didn’t you come forward?”
“A crusty? You’re joking. You’d have swung it on me, no problem. I’d have been the poor, benighted sod who did four years in Albany. I mean, I was there in Larkhall. I had the motive and the opportunity.”
“So what’s changed? Why are you talking about it now?”
G.B. fielded the question smoothly. “What’s changed, Mr. Diamond, is that you’re sitting in my mobile home asking questions about the murder. I’ve got to defend myself.”
“Right. How do we know you didn’t go into the house and kill her?”
“Someone else did.”
“That’s easily said.”
“I saw them.”
Diamond’s pulse quickened.
G.B. took his time over continuing, probably sensing the need to pick his words with care. “After Mountjoy left, I thought about going in. I was still pissed off about the way she’d used me and then dropped me. I wanted a civilized discussion.”
It sounded unlikely, but Diamond observed a tactful silence.
“The thing is,” G.B. continued, “I was thrown by what I’d just seen, the way her date had been shown the door. You’d think he’d insulted her mother or kicked the cat, or something. I stood about for a bit, not sure whether to go over and knock on the door or leave it for another day. I must have been deep in thought because I didn’t notice this other old git walking up the street. I don’t know where he came from. There he was, opening the front gate and stepping up to the door like he owned the place. He took a key from his pocket and let himself in.”
“He had a door key? What was he like?”
“I only had the back view. Thin. Average height. Wearing a flat cap and overcoat. Middle-aged, going by the way he moved. I saw him for about ten seconds, that’s all.”
“This couldn’t have been Mountjoy returning?”
“No way. He’s bigger, and they were differently dressed.”
“Was he carrying anything? Like a bunch of flowers, for instance?”
“I didn’t see any flowers.”
“Roses, I’m talking about.”
G.B. shook his head.
“And then what?” Diamond asked.
“I left. Seeing him arrive made up my mind. He was sure to come to the door if I knocked and I didn’t want any hassle.”
“You assumed he was the landlord?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean when you say you didn’t want any hassle?”
G.B. grinned good-naturedly. “I might have thumped him.”
“And after that a civilized discussion with Britt would have been unlikely?”
“Right. It was only later when I read about the murder in the papers that I found out that the owners were away in the Canaries. When they got back they discovered the body, so it couldn’t have been the landlord I saw, could it?”
Diamond took the question as rhetorical. Mentally he was already in another place, putting questions to someone else. He went through the motions of asking G.B. whether he had returned directly to Trim Street on the night of these events. Then he tried for a better description of the mystery caller, but got nothing new. G.B. had said it all the first time.
Diamond led Julie out of the camper. He felt sick to the stomach. What he’d just heard was devastating if it was true: the confirmation that he’d blundered back in 1990 and sent down the wrong man.
“You’d better drive,” he told Julie.
Chapter Fifteen
Frank Wiggs, a television engineer living in Morford Street, one of the surviving Georgian terraces of artisan dwellings on the lower slopes of Lansdown Hill, called out to his wife Nina that he wouldn’t be long. Nina called back that if he was, he’d find the door bolted. It was their usual affectionate exchange before Frank left for a night at his usual pub, the Pig and Fiddle in Saracen Street, where they served Ash Vine, “the bitter for serious drinkers.” Nina had long ago given up going with him.
Having checked that he had some cash and a pack of cigarettes, Frank closed the front door behind him and set off at a brisk walk down the hill.
Left to her own resources for the evening, Nina was not despondent. She reached for the television remote control and silenced the inane panel game that was showing. She opened a drawer of the sideboard and took out a box of Belgian chocolates she had bought that afternoon from the little shop on Pulteney Bridge. She popped a truffle into her mouth, crushed it rapturously between her teeth, swallowed it fast and treated herself to another, followed by a violet cream. Needing something to lubricate her throat, she opened the lower section of the sideboard and reached to the back where she kept the brandy-in a place where Frank never looked except at Christmas when the family came. All he ever drank was beer. She poured herself what she thought of as a half measure-half filling a brandy glass-put it on a tray with the chocolates and the portable phone and carried them upstairs to the bathroom where she converted the cistern over the toilet into her private altar. While running the water, she tipped in some bubble bath. Then she removed her clothes, trimmed her toenails, tried the scales and took another three truffles. Satisfied that the water was right, she stepped in and immersed herself to the shoulders. Bliss. She reached for the brandy and the phone.
Twenty minutes later, in sprightly conversation with her friend Molly in Aldershot, Nina heard a sound from downstairs like the shattering of glass. Her immediate thought was that she must have left the sideboard door open and the cat had crept inside and knocked over some wine glasses. The silly animal had got in once before and snapped the stem of their last Waterford goblet from the set her Aunt Maeve had given them as a wedding present. The damage would be done by now and the cat would have run off, so Nina scarcely paused for breath in giving Molly the story of this French film she had videoed about a rich woman who hired young men as servants and seduced them.
A short time after this she was conscious of the stairs creaking, but the central heating caused the wood to contract, so there was no reason for unease.
Then the bathroom door opened and a man looked round the door.
Nina slammed the phone against her breasts. She found the pluck to say, “Get out!”
He said, “Stay calm. I won’t touch you.”
Molly in Aldershot said, “I think we’ve got a crossed line. I can hear someone else.”
Nina lowered everything but her head under the water and in Aldershot Molly heard strange noises on the line before it went dead. She was to spend the next twenty minutes trying to get reconnected.
Meanwhile Nina said to the man, “I’ll call the police.” Considering that the phone was now under a foot of water, this was no threat. She should have said, “I’ve just called the police.”
The man’s brown eyes locked with Nina’s. He wasn’t in his teens or his twenties as most rapists are said to be. She estimated that he was around forty. He had dark, frightening eyes and a gaunt face. But he hadn’t stepped fully into the room. He said, “You’d better get out of there.”
Nina thought, like hell I will.
There was a bathrobe made of
toweling hanging on the door. He unhooked it and slung it over the taps. “Put that around you. I don’t have much time. I’m John Mountjoy and I want some help.”
“Mountjoy-the man who escaped?”
“From Albany.”
Nina gave a gasp.
He said, “Now you know why I’m here.”
She said in a whisper, “Danny?” Her thoughts turned back ten years to the evening she had last seen Danny Boon, the night before they picked him up for shooting the postmaster. For almost a year she and Danny had held up sub-post offices in the West Country. They had become famous in the press as Bristol Bonnie and Clifton Clyde. Her nerves had been steel-hard in those days and she’d carried her own gun and would have used it, though probably not to kill. Together they’d netted a big sum and she’d bought this house from part of her share. It was Danny who had shot the Warminster postmaster who decided to “have a go.” He hadn’t meant to kill-but how do you explain that to a court of law? Someone had seen enough of Danny to provide the police with a good photofit and they found him in their records. With his name in all the papers and on TV, he had fixed a last meeting with Nina on a cold, damp February night at Sham Castle. He had promised her he’d say nothing to the police about her and he’d kept his word. She’d kept her promise to Danny to stop when she was ahead. Not once had she visited him in prison. Their collaboration was a closed book.
Ever since that evening Nina had been an exemplary citizen, even in that long, cold winter when neither she nor Frank had been in work. She’d married Frank on the rebound, out of grief for Danny, and, it has to be said, to confuse the police, who continued to hunt for her. Frank wouldn’t know an automatic from a banana, but he’d happened to step into her life at the critical time. She’d told him nothing of her past.
Mountjoy said, “Danny’s a good man.”
“You know him?” Nina whispered.
“A bit. We went to art classes. Inside, I mean. Listen, you’re going to have to help me. I need food, clothes, blankets, money. And I’m going to borrow your car. I’ll tell you where to find it later. Now would you get out of the bath and help me?”
Deeply shocked and disbelieving, she said, “Danny didn’t send you. He wouldn’t do that. Not Danny.”
He took a step into the room. “No. He told nobody. But I’m here. I worked it out.”
“What?”
He leaned over the bath and twisted the handle that released the plug. The water started flowing away. He picked up the bathrobe and handed it to her.
Nina drew it around her shoulders for protection and managed to stand up with what she hoped was decorum, if not dignity. Stepping out, she made an effort to sound in control. “What kind of clothes?”
“For a woman.”
“A woman?”
“A complete change. Warm stuff. Trousers, sweaters, underclothes.”
“Is someone with you?”
“Fetch them now. Fast.”
“She may not be my size.”
“We’ll make do.”
Tying the belt of the bathrobe tightly across her middle, she went through to the small bedroom she shared with Frank. She opened a fitted wardrobe. “You’d better take the stretch jeans and the double-knit sweater on the top shelf.” She opened a dressing-table drawer and picked out some knickers and a packet of tights she hadn’t opened yet. “If she’s on the run with you, she must be suffering. You can take whatever you need.”
She tried to sound cooperative. She would willingly give him all the clothes she possessed to buy his goodwill. The physical threat had receded a little, but a petrifying fear gripped her. The man knew of her involvement with Danny. He had it in his power to shop her to the police, to have her put away for murder. With the zeal of a charity worker, she delved into the wardrobe for a holdall and started stuffing things in. Anything to humor him.
“Will this be enough? I could fill another case if you like.”
He took the two spare blankets she kept in the chest under the window. “The man who went out just now-where was he going?”
“The pub.” She thought of adding the reassurance that Frank wouldn’t be home until well after closing time, after a slow, unsteady plod up Broad Street, but she checked herself. She wanted Mountjoy out of here as quickly as possible.
He was looking out of the window. “Where do you keep your car?”
Parking wasn’t permitted in Morford Street. “The garages at the back. It should be open.”
“What is it?”
“An old Renault Eight. Green.”
“Keys?”
“Downstairs. Shall I fetch them?”
“Pick up the bag. Don’t try anything. I’ll be right behind you.”
As she came downstairs she saw the broken windowpane in the back door and the glass splinters on the doormat. He’d simply reached through and let himself in. How many times had she told Frank they were insecure?
“Car keys,” he prompted her.
She went into the back room and found her handbag.
“Now some food.”
In the kitchen they filled two carriers, emptying her fridge of everything that could be eaten fresh and then taking cans from the cupboards, and biscuits and bread.
“The man who went to the pub,” he said. “Is he your husband, or what?”
She answered, “Yes.”
“Husband?”
“Yes.” She added the reassurance, “I won’t tell him about you. He knows nothing about my past.”
“And I suppose Danny knows nothing about him,” Mountjoy commented with an accusing glare, and Nina, the proof of the cynical expectation of prisoners that their women will abandon them, wished she had not spoken.
Mountjoy told her, “You’ll have to explain the car being gone.”
“He won’t even notice.” When she had helped him put the carriers beside the front door with the holdall and the blankets, she said, “How is Danny coping?”
“He’s all right. He’s strong.”
“You said just now that he didn’t tell you about me.”
Mountjoy said, “It was in the papers, wasn’t it? I lived here when you were in the news. You’re the one they called Bristol Bonnie.”
“But nobody knows my name.”
“Nor do I. I know where you live, that’s all.”
“How-if Danny didn’t tell you?”
He took time over answering, as if uncertain whether to tell, whether he felt she deserved to know. “They lay on classes. Education. I did art and so did he. The only picture he ever finished was an acrylic. He worked at it for months on end. It was a street scene, viewed straight on, with no perspective to mess him up. Some Georgian terraced houses on a steep slope. They had railings outside and you could just see the basement windows. The detail was pretty good. Two of the houses had a set of Venetian windows, the central one arched, with rectangular casements on each side, with small square panes. Pretty striking. There was a woman’s face looking out of one of them. Sad eyes. But Danny isn’t much good at painting people.”
“Me?” She sucked in her cheeks and clamped her teeth on them. With emotion heaped on to all the stress, she was afraid she might cry.
He said, “It had to be you, didn’t it? I knew you and Danny used to operate somewhere in these parts and I know the streets of Bath. The way he painted it was what they would term naive in the art world, but he took no end of trouble to get it right, the steep slope and those windows and the railings in front of the basements and the wrought-iron stands for window boxes on the house next door that didn’t have the Venetian windows. He must have a photographic memory. Of course, it could have been one of a dozen streets except for one thing: the doors. He painted them without doorknobs, or locks, or letterboxes. And to my knowledge there’s only one street with front doors that never open and that’s the lower half of Morford Street. You have access from the back, through the arch halfway along the terrace.”
She didn’t compliment him on his powers of
observation. He didn’t seem to need humoring.
He said, “I thought you would want to help me.”
She nodded, wishing with all her might that he would leave.
He rattled the keys. “I’ll leave the car in the station car park. You can pick it up in the morning. There’s one other thing.”
“Yes?”
“Those post office jobs you did with Danny. You both carried guns. What happened to yours?”
“I got rid of it.”
His expression hardened. “I don’t think so. You’ll have hidden it, but you won’t have got rid of it.”
“Truly.”
“Lying bitch. I had a wife who lied to me. Want to know what I did to her?”
She shook her head.
He was right. She had it in the house, under the loose floorboard in the front room, covered by a carpet and a table with a bronze flowerpot. She’d judged that it was safer to keep the gun all these years than risk it being found somewhere and traced back to her by forensic scientists. Up to this minute she had been right. Nina said, “I threw it into the river.”
Mountjoy said, “Come here.”
Chapter Sixteen
Peter Diamond had faults-more, perhaps, than most- but reticence wasn’t one of them. He needed to talk. At this minute his self-esteem was at rock bottom. He’d really messed up in 1990 unless G.B. had invented all that stuff about the comings and goings at the murder house. A killer had escaped thanks to his inept investigation.
So when he and Julie retraced their route through the woods to the road in silence, the break in communication wasn’t of his choosing. He was bursting to speak, but inconveniently the evening was closing in fast, obliging them to concentrate on their footing. All speculation as to the identity of the man G.B. had seen entering Britt’s lodging on the night of the murder had to wait until they were back in the car.
“Winston Billington,” he finally said, struggling to persuade the buckle of the seat belt across his middle. “Who else could it be but the landlord, letting himself in at that time of night?”
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