Peter Lovesey: The Summons

Diamond said sharply, “There’s more to it than that.” He was piqued. “A whole lot more. There’s the drinking. We heard from Jake Pinkerton that Britt had been a whiskey drinker in the old days. She gave it up completely after the accident. Went TT.”

“That was a great help after my little girl was dead,” said Prue Shorter acidly.

“Let’s come to you, then.” Diamond addressed her directly for the first time. “A resourceful lady. A whiz at making cakes. A good mixer in more senses than one.”

She laughed.

“I mean it,” he insisted. “You’re a natural at making friends, or what are we all doing here around your kitchen table? You could charm anybody, even your worst enemy, and that’s precisely what you did. But not with cakes. You had your expertise as a professional photographer. Local freelance, taking news pictures for the Bath Chronicle and the Wiltshire Times and sometimes selling stuff to the nationals. Really good pictures. You were nicely placed to show your work to Britt and convince her that she’d be better off using the local talent than some hotshot from London. This was mid-1990, wasn’t it.”

Prue Shorter nodded.

“The dates are important,” he said, looking around the table. “The little girl was killed in October, 1988, so we’re talking about a time at least a year and a half later. Quite a long interval.” He turned to Prue Shorter again. “What I haven’t mentioned yet is how you got to know that Britt was responsible. After all, you didn’t know that her car was still in existence. You got to the truth by an altogether different route from ours.”

She said, “‘Responsible’ isn’t the word I’d use for her.”

“How did you discover that it was Britt who killed your daughter?” he pressed her.

“The roses,” she answered in a voice drained of the animation she’d displayed before. “They appeared on the grave the day after the funeral. A dozen in a plain transparent wrapper. No message. No indication who supplied them. I spent weeks trying to find out, asking at all the florists in Bath, Bristol, Trowbridge, Westbury, Melksham. I guessed they were placed there by the hit-and-run driver, you see. I knew. But I couldn’t trace the shop. She must have got them from London. I had to wait a whole year before I got any closer to her.”

“On the anniversary of the accident?”

“Yes. I should have realized and watched the churchyard, but I didn’t. A fresh bunch appeared, still with no clue as to who brought them. But instead of doing the rounds of the florists this time, I asked the people who live in Church Road, outside the church, if they’d seen anyone. Not many cars go up there, except at the weekend, unless there’s a funeral. This happened to be a Tuesday. Well, one of the people opposite had noticed a taxi draw up toward dusk, and a woman in a headscarf and black coat get out and go into the churchyard. The taxi waited about ten minutes, until she came back. It had one of those illuminated signs on the top. It was from Abbey Taxis, who work out of Bath.”

“Ah. You traced the driver?”

“The next day. He remembered her. And she’d had the roses with her. Even better, she had a slight foreign accent and he gave me a good description. She was blond, attractive, well dressed. The trouble was that he couldn’t tell me her name or address. She’d picked up the taxi from the rank outside the station and that’s where he put her down at the end. I got him to drive me around Bath several afternoons in the hope that he would spot her, but we had no luck. Then one evening some weeks after all this he phoned me and said he’d been talking to one of the other Abbey drivers who believed he knew the woman. He’d driven her more than once from the station to a house in Larkhall and she was a Swedish journalist.” She spread her hands. “That was all I had, but it was enough. I asked in the newspaper office. She didn’t work for the local rag, but they knew about her. It’s their business to know about local people. It wasn’t too promising when I discovered that this woman didn’t drive or drink, but I’m not easily discouraged. I got to know everything I could about her. I got the job with her, joined her on a couple of stories, at Longleat and the Trim Street squat.”

“You’re so good with people that you managed to suppress the anger you felt toward the woman who killed your daughter.”

“No,” she interrupted Diamond. “You’re telling it wrong. I wasn’t certain she’d done it. If I’d been certain, I would have killed her before I did. I couldn’t have waited!”

The way she stated this was chilling.

Diamond accepted the correction with a nod. “I was saying that you won Britt’s confidence completely, took all the photos she wanted and took them well. Visited her flat in Larkhall. Got to know her routine, her friends, her landlord, and I’m sure this was one-sided. She didn’t visit you. She wouldn’t. You were the photographer, the junior partner in this team, so you brought the prints to her to see. She didn’t know you lived in Steeple Ashton where she’d killed the child. Your phone has a Devizes number, and that was all she needed to know to stay in contact.”

He took some more coffee. No one else spoke. He took a bite of the cake. He had their attention for as long as he chose to go on. “In September or October of 1990, Britt got on to John Mountjoy’s enrollment racket. As usual, she confided in you, gave you the background, the suspicion that he was enrolling Iraqis who had no intention of becoming students, except to satisfy their visa requirements. You took some external shots of the college. And now we come to the day before the murder, October the seventeenth-two years to the day since your daughter was killed in the car accident. This was the day you confirmed beyond all doubt that Britt had been the driver of that car.”

“The roses?” said Farr-Jones.

Prue Shorter nodded.

“You watched her bring them to the grave?” said Diamond.

“And I knew for sure,” she said in a low voice.

“You also had the opportunity to do something about it the next day. Britt had accepted the invitation to the meal with Mountjoy and told you she would take him back to Larkhall and tape the conversation. She aimed to confront him with the evidence that night, and she did. He admits it. But he didn’t kill her. Neither did G.B., her latest admirer, who was jealous as hell and followed them back to the house. Nor Billington, who came home unexpectedly to collect the key of his car. The murder was committed after each of the men had left. You visited her late that night, when she was alone in the house, around midnight or after, on some pretext you’d given over the phone-maybe even the truth, that you knew for certain that she was the hit-and-run driver.”

Prue Shorter gave a nod. “That was the only way I was going to get admitted at that time of night.”

“She agreed.”

“Right away.”

“And you went to the house armed with a knife-”

“A kitchen knife.”

Diamond thought fleetingly of the knife she had given him to cut the cake, then banished the idea. “She invited you upstairs. You also brought with you the roses she’d placed on your daughter’s grave. You stabbed her a number of times and filled her mouth with the roses.”

She eyed him challengingly.

“One question,” he said. “Before leaving the house, did you remove a cassette from her tape recorder?”

“You won’t find it here,” she said. “I chucked it in the river. She taped almost everything. It could have given me away.”

Speaking more to the police than to her, he admitted, “The significance of those roses was a real puzzle to DI Hargreaves and me. We hadn’t seen them in a churchyard. We only saw them at the scene of the murder. For a time we assumed the obvious, that they indicated a jealous lover. We also made the mistake of assuming that the person who killed her must have bought them. One thing was certain: whoever bought them took care to make sure we didn’t trace them to a local florist’s. It was only yesterday evening that we worked out that she had bought them herself, to place on the grave of the little girl she had knocked down and killed.”