Peter Lovesey - The Last Detective

However, there was a more persuasive scenario. Andy Coventry had clearly been Geraldine Jackman's supplier. He'd kept her in cocaine and systematically emptied her bank account. Fine, until her funds ran out. She had been heavily overdrawn at the bank. He must have watched her become increasingly desperate, knowing that ultimately there would be no point in offering the stuff to someone who couldn't pay. Maybe he'd told her the arrangement was at an end. Then – the scenario ran – Geraldine had got in touch again. She'd offered something of value in exchange for drugs. Coventry had gone to the house, and she had shown him the Jane Austen letters she had pilfered from her husband.

Coventry must have been unimpressed. He would have foreseen the problems in turning the letters into cash. The discussion had turned ugly. Gerry, in one of her towering rages, had threatened to expose him as a pusher, and the hell with the consequences for herself, because without cocaine her life was closing down anyway. Andy Coventry, driven desperate, had silenced her for ever.

Through the months since then, the man must have lived in dread of the truth emerging. When he became aware in the Baths that someone had been watching him stow away drugs, he had panicked. He had killed once to stop someone blowing the whistle on his dealing, so why not a second time?

Towards the end of the week Gregory Jackman came to the hospital on a visit. Hollow-eyed and drooping at the shoulders, he looked ten years older than when Diamond had seen him last. 'The drug story has broken,' he explained. 'They came to the house – Chief Inspector Wigfull and some people from the drugs squad – and I showed them the bags of flour. Today it's all over the tabloids. Drugs Find in Profs House. Dead Woman's Cocaine Habit. The top brass in the university don't like it one bit. I've been told to take a year's sabbatical directly the trial is over.

'Told? Do they have the right?'

'Asked, then. They're being as decent as they can. I'll get a year's salary, but the understanding is that I'll go to America on a research fellowship, and while I'm there I'll apply for other posts.'

'Welcome to the club,' said Diamond.

'What?'

'It's the old heave-ho. Will you go?'

'Try and stop me.'

'Can it really be as quick as you say?'

'Thanks to the wonders of fax, yes. The only thing to be settled is the day I fly out. I've been called as a witness, naturally.'

'Presumably a prosecution witness.'

'Yes. It's a warrant. I've talked to Dana's lawyers. I don't seem to have a choice in the matter. It's the way they want to play it, apparently.'

Diamond explained the strategy. 'These days the forensic evidence is often so cut and dried that you don't call defence experts to challenge it. If the defence calls no witnesses except Dana, they'll have the right to make the final speech to the jury before the judge sums up.'

Jackman said bleakly, 'I just hope they've talked to Dana about this. God knows what she's going to make of me appearing for the prosecution.'

'She still intends to plead not guilty, does she?'

Jackman tilted his head, surprised by the question. 'Certainly. Is there any reason why she shouldn't?'

'I don't know. Wigfull was here a day or two ago, looking as smug as a winning jockey. He's sure they'll convict.'

'So I gathered.'

'Nothing has altered, then?'

Jackman said gloomily, 'It looks as hopeless as ever. I thought perhaps what happened to you would help the defence by pointing to Andy Coventry as an alternative suspect.'

'Well, doesn't it?'

He shook his head. 'Her lawyers don't want to go down that road.'

'Why not, for God's sake?'

'They say it doesn't address the crucial points that the prosecution will raise – the fact that Dana admits she was at the house on the morning of the murder, and the evidence that her car was used to transport the body to Chew Valley Lake. That forensic report is dynamite. She has no answer to it. And that leaves out all the circumstantial stuff about motive. A good prosecutor will have her on toast.'

Privately, Diamond had to admit that the lawyers were right.

By Friday he felt sufficiently recovered to phone Siddons the solicitor and ask whether the defence team were fully aware of Andy Coventry's involvement in the case.

'Absolutely,' Siddons assured him. 'The drugs bring another dimension to it. Mrs Jackman's outbursts obviously had their origin in her cocaine habit.'

'Yes, but have you considered the possibility that Coventry killed her?' He outlined his theory.

From the tone of Siddons' responses – the polite, yet qualified murmurs that came down the phone each time Diamond paused – it was clear that the solicitor wasn't exactly turning cartwheels of joy at the other end. He thanked Diamond mildly for his interest and said, 'Unfortunately for us, your theory isn't tenable. Coventry was questioned by the police about his movements at the time of the murder, and he was three hundred miles away, in Newcastle. For the entire week. They checked it. He was lecturing to an Open University course at Hadrian's Wall. It's a cast-iron alibi. Infuriating, isn't it?'

DEPRESSING AS IT WAS, THE doctors were right. Peter Diamond was still in hospital when Dana Didrikson's trial for murder opened at Bristol Crown Court. True, he'd reached a stage of convalescence when he was no longer considered enough of an emergency to justify occupying a room of his own near the sister's office; instead, he'd been moved into a six-bedded ward near the stairs that was, in effect, a poker school. The inmates were all concussion cases restored to sufficient consciousness to tell a sequence from a flush. Their slick play was a testimony to the nursing. Diamond had never been much of a card-player, so after a few hands to demonstrate goodwill he had escaped to the day room and the morning papers.

There was not much call in the RUH for the quality newspapers, according to the newsagent who supplied the wards. Diamond's information about the first day of the trial had to be drawn from the tabloids. Among the glamour shots of Gerry Snoo and banner headlines of the ANGRY GERRY'S LAST HOURS variety were meagre accounts of the court proceedings. Diamond managed to glean that Dana had pleaded not guilty and a jury of eight men and four women had been empanelled. Prosecuting counsel, Sir Job Mogg, QC – known in and out of the courts as 'Claws' – had opened the prosecution's case with his outline of the events leading up to the charge of murder. Reference was made to the accident at Pulteney Weir that had brought Dana Didrikson into the ambit of the Jack-mans. She was portrayed as a single parent – DESPERATE DANA, in one paper – struggling to bring up a son and stretched to pay his school fees. Jackman's fatherly acts of kindness to the boy in the summer months were seen as the seed of a motive – LONE MUM'S LOVE PLOT- nurtured by Dana's discovery that the Jackman marriage was in crisis. The lengths to which she had gone to obtain the Jane Austen letters as a gift for Jackman were stressed as significant, and so was the acrimonious visit of Mrs Jackman to her home – GERRY'S MAN-STEALER FURY. It was pointed out that Dana had admitted visiting the Jackman house on the morning of the murder when she'd heard that the letters were missing. Motive and opportunity were thus spelt out to the readers at least as vividly as they had been to the jury.

The papers all insisted that recent developments in forensic science would dominate the case. The Crown would be calling experts in DNA analysis – genetic fingerprinting -to prove that the body had been placed in the boot of Dana's car prior to its being recovered from Chew Valley Lake. She had sworn a statement that the car had never been driven by anyone but herself. And she had been unable to explain the disappearance of the mileage log.