Peter Lovesey: The Summons

Diamond and Julie had arrived more than an hour before and made use of every minute; their comings and goings in the frost showed as gray tracks between the graves in the section of churchyard to the west of the church.

“Would you care to follow me, then? This won’t take long.” Diamond picked a fresh track over the crisp turf, leading the others in single file toward a layout of graves as regular as an actor’s teeth. Eventually he stopped beside a plot with a short stone cross as headstone. On it was a simple inscription:

GEORGINA MAY HIGGINSON

13/9/1981 – 17/10/1988

“Barely seven,” remarked Tott.

“Dreadfully sad,” murmured Halliwell, the most sensitive of the group. Something else had needed to be said, even though words were inadequate.

“You’ll have noticed the date, sir,” Diamond said for the benefit of Farr-Jones.

“October,‘88. You’re assuming this little girl was the victim of the hit-and-run accident?”

“We’re certain of it. This is the only child’s grave we could find for 1988.”

Farr-Jones blew out a plume of white breath. “Did this child actually die in a road accident? Have you checked with records?”

“DI Hargreaves just has, on her personal.”

Julie reported, “A child of this name was knocked down and killed by a car, here in Steeple Ashton, opposite the village stores, at 4:45 P.M. on this date. The driver was never traced.”

Diamond added, “The next of kin are John Higginson, father, resident in Belfast, and Prue Shorter, mother, who still lives here. She is the photographer who worked with Britt Strand.”

Up to now, each statement had made sense to Farr-Jones. The last one did not, and his face showed it.

Diamond explained, “Miss Shorter offered to work for Britt some time in the summer of 1990, almost two years after the child was killed. She had a strong suspicion by then that Britt had been the driver of that car, but she wanted to be certain, because she planned to avenge the killing of her daughter by taking the life of the person who caused it. So she worked as her photographer through the summer and autumn of 1990 until she was totally sure, and the right opportunity came.”

“Weren’t we aware of any of this at this time?”

“The accident? It was in the records as a hit and run, but we had no reason to link it with the Britt Strand murder. We routinely checked all the witnesses for previous convictions and Miss Shorter was clean. The fact that she happened to be the parent of an accident victim didn’t show on the computer.”

“It wouldn’t,” Wigfull confirmed.

Farr-Jones asked, “How did you get on to her, then?”

Diamond unexpectedly tiptoed on the spot like one of the cygnets in Swan Lake. “You’ll have to forgive me, sir, but I need to take a leak. It must be the cold.”

“Here?” said Farr-Jones, frowning.

“I happened to notice that Prue Shorter has a fire going in her cottage. What say we nick her now?”

It was the most civilized arrest in the combined experience of all the detectives. The timing couldn’t have been bettered. “How many of you are there?” Prue Shorter asked. “Eight, is it? I’m afraid I haven’t got chairs for all of you. Would you like to handle the knife, Mr. Diamond? It’s the large one in the drawer behind you.”

She passed a steaming Dundee cake across the kitchen table for Diamond to cut.

Several of the officers looked to the Chief Constable for guidance in this unprecedented situation. He had the good sense to give it his endorsement. “When I was a small boy, I used to read the Rupert books,” he surprised them all by saying. “Rupert Bear-the original ones by Mary Tourtel with yellow covers and black-and-white illustrations. They always seemed to end with Rupert coming home from some adventure to find that homely Mrs. Bear had baked a cake.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Senior policemen rarely provided such insights into their personal lives.

Prue Shorter ended it by saying, “Personally, I could never believe in animals wearing clothes. I liked the Famous Five.”

“Enid Blyton,” said Wigfull, the walking encyclopedia.

Tott said, “Wasn’t one of them known as-”

“George. Yes,” Prue Shorter said quickly, and added almost unheard, “Georgina.”

Their arrival at the cottage door had not fazed her. She had asked them in and said, “Now that you’ve come, I can’t tell you how relieved I am. What do you want first, my dears, a slice of cake or my confession?”

After that, it had seemed churlish to mention that two uniformed officers were posted outside the back door to prevent her escaping. Regardless, she had welcomed them in and made filter coffee for all.

Diamond finished cutting the cake and put the knife into the kitchen sink, out of Prue Shorter’s reach. He still had a vivid memory of Britt Strand’s lacerated body. This homely Mrs. Bear could wield a knife as well as bake cakes. “Are you ready to talk?” he asked her.

She said with sublime composure, “Don’t you want to tell them how you sussed me out, ducky? Take your applause while you’ve got the chance. I’m totally gobsmacked by your brilliant detective work, but I’m not sure if the rest of them are.”

Farr-Jones, in thrall to this redoubtable woman, said, “Yes, Mr. Diamond, why don’t you give us the rundown on your investigation?”

“Not only mine,” Diamond pointed out. “There were two of us. DI Hargreaves must take a lot of the credit. In fact, she deserves a commendation.”

Julie looked down at her coffee.

Diamond was less modest. “You want to know what led us here?” he said. “It was the old, old story of observation and deduction. Some of it didn’t mean much at the beginning. For example, when Julie and I first came to this cottage we noticed a child’s violin in one of the alcoves in the other room. There was also a drawing pinned to the notice board, a stick figure, obviously the work of a young child. Not much to go on, but the next time I visited, the violin was gone. It emerged that Miss Shorter had been married briefly and given birth to a girl, who had died young, at the age of seven. I didn’t follow up by asking what she died of, and you may think that was a mistake on my part, but with the benefit of hindsight I doubt if I’d have got the truthful answer. I was straying into dangerous territory. Right?”

Prue Shorter gave a nod.

“Of course,” Diamond went on, “you’re constantly recording things in your memory and ninety-nine percent turn out to be unimportant. It took some painstaking work and smart deduction on Julie’s part and mine to discover that Britt Strand had once owned a car, an MGB. Still does, according to the computer records. She suddenly stopped driving at the end of 1988. We found the car eventually and discovered clear evidence of a collision. Jake Pinkerton, her boyfriend at the time, allowed her to hide the thing in the woods behind his recording studio at Conkwell. Naturally, we questioned him. At the time of the incident, Britt Strand confided to Pinkerton that she’d knocked someone down, but she wouldn’t say whether it was a man or woman. Why? I thought. Why did it matter what sex the victim was? The reason she wouldn’t even tell her boyfriend was that she was too ashamed to give him the whole truth. She had knocked down a child and done nothing about it.”

“Left her lying in the road with a fractured skull,” added Prue Shorter in a hard, accusing tone in sharp contrast to the genial persona she had projected up to now. “It was in the papers next day and she still didn’t come forward.”

Tott said, “Deplorable.”

“Even so,” Farr-Jones remarked to Diamond, “the link between a child’s violin and a hit-and-run accident is pretty tenuous.”