The House Sitter

by Peter Lovesey

  “Do you remember what she was carrying?” Hen asked.

  “She had a windbreak with her, blue, I think. The first thing she did was put it up.”

  “Any kind of bag?”

  “I guess she must have had one, but I don’t remember any when we moved her. My wife is better at remembering stuff like that. Well, when she’s OK she is.”

  “Sunglasses?”

  “For sure. And a towel. She had this towel that she spread on the sand to lie on.”

  None of this added much to their knowledge, except that Emma Tysoe had arrived alone. The rest was familiar, its function mainly to assist Smith to visualise the scene. Now that the focus had moved away from Crawley, and he was less tense, he might contribute something of use.

  Diamond took up the questions again. “So she spread her towel quite near you?”

  “Just in front. But we couldn’t see her without standing up.”

  “That was because the windbreak was in the way? But you’d have noticed if anyone joined her at any stage?”

  “I guess I would have done. No, I don’t remember anyone arriving. People going by, like they do on a beach, but no one actually joining her.” He shrugged, and he seemed to be genuinely trying to think of an explanation. “Wait a bit. Olga said something about a guy who tried to chat the woman up, and she wasn’t having any of it.”

  “She did?” Diamond leaned forward eagerly. “When was this?”

  “Not long before lunch.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “No, I had my eyes closed. Well, I was probably sleeping, because I’ve got no memory of this.”

  “How can you be sure of the time?”

  “I’m going by what Olga said.”

  “Did she describe this man?”

  “Something about a black T-shirt. That’s all I recall.”

  “Come on. She must have noticed more than that.”

  “I didn’t ask. He didn’t interest me.”

  “He could be really important,” Hen said.

  Smith obviously didn’t think so. “I wouldn’t make too much of it if I were you. The woman was OK when he came by. And after.” He hesitated, dredging up another memory. “Actually, Olga told me the woman spoke to her.”

  Diamond’s eyebrows shot up. “They spoke?”

  “Only something about Haley, friendly like. You know how people talk to you about your kids.”

  Neither Diamond nor Hen had any such experience to draw on, but they could imagine.

  “It would help if you could remember what was said.”

  “It was Olga who spoke to her. I wasn’t listening. She told me later. It was only some friendly piece of chat.”

  “This was when-in the morning?”

  “Before we had lunch. I’m just making the point that she was all right at that stage. It was some hours after that she was killed.”

  “How do you know when she was killed?”

  He reddened. “It must have been the afternoon, mustn’t it? A dead body wouldn’t be lying there for hours with nobody noticing.”

  “So when do you think the murder happened?”

  “I’ve no idea, unless it was when Olga and I went for a swim.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Some while after the tide had turned, and was coming in.

  Towards four o’clock.”

  “Do you remember looking at her when you got up for your swim?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Not at all?”

  “To be honest, there were some attractive women not far away on our left, showing off their assets.”

  “Topless, you mean?”

  “If you’d been there, you wouldn’t have looked anywhere else, believe me.”

  Hen rolled her eyes, and said nothing.

  Diamond asked, “How long were you away? Any idea?”

  “For the swim? Half an hour to forty minutes. It was warmer than we expected, so we stayed in for some time. When we got out, the tide had covered a lot of the beach. It comes in fast. And that was when my wife panicked a bit-well, quite a lot-because we couldn’t see where Haley, our little girl, had gone. We’d left her playing with some other kids, chucking a Frisbee about. There was no sign of Haley or the other girls.”

  “This was after four thirty?”

  “Don’t know for sure. I wasn’t wearing a watch. I said I’d check with the lifeguards while my wife went back to our place on the beach. Someone had to be there in case Haley came back. So that’s what we did. I went up to the platform where the lifeguards keep watch, not far away from where we’d been sitting all day. I told them my kid was missing and gave them a description and they promised to make a search. They suggested I looked for her by the ice-cream queue outside the café, because lost kids often find their way there. I tried there first and couldn’t see her, so I went to look in the sections of beach either side of us. The groynes dividing it up are quite high in places.”

  “You keep saying ‘they’, as if there was more than one lifeguard,” Hen broke into his narrative.

  “Right.”

  “How many were there?”

  “Two, when I spoke to them.”

  “Because when the police arrived there was only one present.

  And I’ve only ever interviewed one, an Australian called Emerson.”

  “There were definitely two when I first told them Haley was missing. A shaven-headed one in red shorts and a tall, blond guy with a pony-tail.”

  “Were they both Australian?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I don’t recall one blond guy saying anything.

  But you’re right. He wasn’t around later, when I reported finding the woman. I expect he’d gone off duty.”

  “There should be two lifeguards on duty,” Diamond said. “It’s not a one-man job on a beach that size. Someone needs to be at the post all the time.”

  “I’m going to follow this up,” Hen said. “Tall, blond pony-tail… anything else?”

  “An earring, I think.”

  “Just the one?”

  “Yes. He was well tanned, as you’d expect, and built like an ox-well, an athlete, anyway. That’s about all I remember. I was thinking about Haley at the time.”

  “So it was Emerson who found her?” said Diamond, putting the story back on track.

  “Must have been. You see, I was still flogging up and down the beach looking for her when she was brought back. Olga was there. It seems one of the other children got a nose bleed from a Frisbee, or something, and all of them went up to the first aid hut-which of course confused Haley when she was left alone up there.”

  “You heard this from your wife?”

  “Yes, when I got back.”

  “Was that when you noticed the dead woman?”

  Smith nodded. “Haley drew our attention first. But we weren’t the only people who noticed she wasn’t moving. Some lads not far from us were having a good laugh about it, thinking she was asleep, I suppose, and about to get a drenching. Olga asked me to look and I went over and realised she was dead. Christ, that was a shock. I ran up to the lifeguard-”

  “One lifeguard?” Hen queried.

  “Only one at this point. Most people had left the beach because the tide had come right in and it was the end of the afternoon anyway. The whole place was closing down. He was the Aussie. He came quickly enough. Asked those lads for some help to get her up the beach. A couple of them volunteered. And that’s all there is.” He let out a long breath as if he’d been living through the crisis again.

  “These lads, as you call them,” Diamond said. “What age would they have been?”

  “Late teens or early twenties.”

  “You’d noticed them earlier?”

  “Right at the start. They were on the beach when we arrived. I can recall saying to Olga that we wouldn’t sit too close to them. They had their cans of lager with them. But as it turned out, they weren’t rowdy or anything.”

  “How many?”
r />   “Four or five. I’m not sure.”

  “None of them came forward when we asked for witnesses.”

  “That’s the young generation for you.”

  “Neither did you.”

  Smith gave an uneasy smile.

  Hen asked, “Did you notice anyone else sitting close enough to have seen what was happening?”

  “There were three girls on sunloungers right next to us.”

  “The topless ones?”

  “No, these were just schoolkids, about fifteen, doing some serious sunbathing, but they’d packed up and gone by the time the body was found. The topless women were some way over to our left, about thirty yards off. You can forget them.”

  “You obviously haven’t,” Hen murmured.

  “There was a French family on our right,” Smith went on. “Mother, father and three small kids. I’m pretty certain they’d left as well.”

  “That’s one reason why people haven’t come forward,” Diamond commented. “They’d left the beach before the body was found, so didn’t have the faintest idea they’d been sitting a few yards away from it.”

  Hen asked, “Did any of these people you’ve mentioned speak to the woman at any time during the day?”

  “Apart from the bloke in the black T-shirt? Nobody I noticed.”

  “Did she leave the beach at any stage?”

  “No-unless it was while we were swimming.”

  Diamond came in again. “And after you helped carry the body up to the hut, you collected your things and left?”

  “Right. We had to move anyway, because of the tide.”

  Diamond glanced towards Hen. They’d covered everything except the real reason for Smith’s avoidance of the police. He was a deeply worried man, almost certainly into something criminal for the first time in his life. But as a killer so cool that he’d strangled a woman within yards of his own wife and child, Michael Smith just didn’t cut it.

  12

  Diamond’s voicemail had been building up while he was in Sussex. He was not bothered. Much of it could be ignored now. And being out of the office has other advantages. He’d missed a meeting called by Georgina Dallymore, the Assistant Chief Constable, to discuss some desks and chairs that had mysteriously been dumped in the executive toilet upstairs. “Couldn’t have helped, anyway,” he said, as he called her to give his apologies.

  Georgina said, “Would you have any use for some extra desks?”

  “Not really, ma’am.”

  “I had to have them moved, and now they’re cluttering the corridor. I’m worried about fire regulations.”

  If that’s all you have to worry about, he thought, it’s not a bad old life on the top floor. “Someone will have a use for them, ma’am.”

  “I hope so. I’m going on holiday next week. When I come back, I don’t want to find them still there.”

  His interest quickened. Georgina off the premises was good news. “Anywhere nice?”

  “A Nile cruise.”

  “Sounds wonderful. How long?”

  “Ten days.”

  He made a mental note.

  Back to the voicemail. The one message that stood out was from Clive: “Mr D, I’ve got a result. Any time you want to go through those files, we’re ready to roll.”

  * * *

  Clive’s hours of work spoke of long nights on the Internet. He never came in until after eleven. Today, it was twenty minutes after, and he looked spent before he’d started. Eventually the two got together with black coffees and doughnuts in a small office in the basement. While the computer was booting up, Diamond told the young man he’d done well. “I just hope this is worth all the hours you put in.”

  “It will be.”

  “Hot stuff?”

  Clive grinned. “I haven’t looked at all of it, but hot’s the word, from what I saw.” He took something not much bigger than a cigarette lighter from his shirt pocket and attached it to a lead at the back of the computer tower.

  “What’s that?”

  “A USB-portable storage device. I had to work on this at home, you see.”

  “And that’s all there is?” Diamond couldn’t disguise his disappointment.

  “Mr D, this little item is a hard drive. Five hundred and twelve megabytes. You could put the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare on this and still have space.”

  “So how much is there in reality?”

  “Enough to keep you busy for the rest of the morning,” Clive told him as he worked the keys.

  He explained that there had been three encrypted files on Emma Tysoe’s hard disk, each allotted a number that he thought represented the date it was created. 1706 was the seventeenth of June. The next was the twenty-second. The last was the twenty-fifth.

  “Two days before she was murdered,” Diamond said to show he wasn’t completely adrift. “And we can now read it straight off the screen? Let’s go. It starts on the seventeenth, you said?”

  Clive had better ways of spending the rest of the morning than sitting beside Peter Diamond. He gave him a quick lesson with the mouse, showed him how to access the files and left him to it.

  Magic.

  The first lines of text were on the screen, and suddenly Diamond was right where he wanted to be, inside the mind of the murdered woman, getting that precious insight he’d been denied up to now. So direct was the contact, so vivid, it was almost too intimate to take in a sustained read.

  Had this 8.30 a.m. call about another profiling job. Just when I was starting to coast, and think of holidays. Bramshill insists no one else but me will do, and won’t give me any details except an address in Sussex. All very cloak and dagger. Just to cover my rear end, I’m going to keep this personal record of what happens and encrypt as I go along. I can’t keep everything in my head.

  I’m flattered in a way to get this assignment, kidding myself I’m indispensable, but it’s a bloody nuisance too if I’m going to have to make up excuses for not going out with Ken. We’re supposed to be eating at Popjoy’s tomorrow night. Just my luck. Even if I get there it takes the pleasure out of a beautiful meal (not to mention the shag later) when you’ve looked at a mangled corpse the day before.

  The upside is that I get out of the university for a bit. This end-of-semester time is when Chromik tries to think of jobs to keep people busy. I called the office and fixed it with Tara to take indefinite leave. More later.

  I dressed for the country, smart casual, and drove to this house overlooking Bramber, a village tucked away below the South Downs in Sussex, and rather a dinky place. In fact there wasn’t much to see-of the murder scene, I mean-except police photos. It all happened three days ago, so they’d already removed the corpse and finished their forensics. Victim was Axel Summers, that smooth old (fiftyish?) film director who can talk about anything. Saw him on Question Time a few weeks ago speaking up for the right to choose, and rather liked him. Someone didn’t, obviously. He’d been hit through the head with a nine-inch arrow-a bolt, they call it-from a crossbow.

  Archery isn’t my kind of sport. I had no idea a crossbow packed such force. In the photos you could see the point sticking out of the other side of his head. They tell me when it was a weapon of war a crossbow bolt was made to penetrate armour. The power is in the bow part (or ‘prod’), made of steel usually. The bowstring is pulled back to a catch, or ‘cocked’ (dear old Freud would have a field day with this jargon) with a lever or some winding mechanism far more powerful than you get with ordinary bows and arrows.

  The reason they asked for a profiler is that the killer left a note- the usual paper and paste job-with a quote from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “he stoppeth one of three,” and two extra names. Is this a serial murderer declaring himself? they want to know. Strictly between you and me, Computer, one of the names is the glamour boy golfer, Matthew Porter, and the other is gorgeous, pouting Anna Walpurgis, the one-time pop star.

  “Get away!” said Diamond aloud. These were huge names. Already the decrypt
ed files were yielding information he’d been denied. He took a gulp of coffee and scarcely noticed it was lukewarm.

  Media people-and named. My first thought is that this killer must be some kind of attention-seeker. Egocentric, and either extremely stupid to announce his plan, or brilliant. I don’t see much between. Summers has been filming a big-budget movie of The Ancient Mariner, that strange, long poem by Coleridge we did in the fifth year at school. The wording of the message was straight from the poem, and so was the weapon. The SIO reminded me that the Ancient Mariner in the poem uses a crossbow to kill the albatross. Coincidence? I don’t think so. This is someone using murder as a melodramatic statement.

  Does he have to be an insider, close enough to the victim to know what he was filming? Not necessarily. The Ancient Mariner project has been getting plenty of publicity. They brought over Patrick Devaney from Hollywood to play the main role, and he’s a megastar in the movie world. The budget runs to millions. With some arm-twisting from the Arts Council they managed to get some of Britain’s industrial giants to back it, companies like Superglass and British Metal. I said I couldn’t imagine how a poem, a long one admittedly, can be spun out into a feature-length film. The SIO-a literate policeman!-tells me they could do a lot with the life aboard ship and the character of the Mariner even before the story gets under way. There’s also a secondary plot involving the wedding guest the Mariner meets. And there are huge set-pieces ideal for all those special effects you expect in a movie these days.

  God knows what happens now, because a lot of the film still has to be shot. Summers had finished directing the scenes with the star and was having a few days off. Up to now, they’ve put some kind of press embargo on the news of his murder, but it’s bound to break soon.

  The police have already warned the other two “targets” and beefed up their security.

  So what are my early thoughts? This could be a one-off murder. If the killer-the police team call him the Mariner-is an attention-seeker he may have thrown in a couple more juicy names just to see the effect. Somehow, I doubt it. I think he really means to get Porter and Walpurgis as well. This is an off-the-cuff reaction on my part, but I get the impression of a cold-blooded killer (unscientific terminology, but I’m doing my best to avoid the term psychopath) at work here, untroubled by conscience or emotion, figuring he’s so far ahead of the game he can safely post his intentions. It’s new in my experience, actually to name future victims. I can’t remember anything like this.