Peter Lovesey - The House Sitter

“So Emma got to be one of your star performers.”

The staring eye told Diamond he still hadn’t clicked with this mandarin. “Please. This isn’t show business. Her name came up more frequently after that. Word travels from one authority to another.”

“Do you, personally, deal with all the requests?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Her latest assignment?”

“That’s confidential, also.”

He couldn’t take much more of this evasion. “I’m investigating a murder, Mr Cameron. I’m entitled to some answers.”

“Correction. Bognor Police are handling the investigation, not you. Chief Inspector Mallin is the SIO.” Cameron was well briefed.

“But the victim lived on my patch. In that sense it’s a joint enquiry.”

“Does she know you’re here?”

“Hen Mallin? She will, if I manage to chip out any information at all.”

“In other words, you’re doing this off your own bat,” Cameron said. “That’s the way you work, I’m told. Bull at a gate.”

Better a bull at a gate than a dog in a manger, Diamond thought, and wisely kept it to himself. Instead, he said with so much tact it was painful, “You obviously have a high regard for Dr Tysoe’s work as a profiler. Why not help us find her murderer?”

“By passing on classified information?”

“Sensitive, is it?”

“We run this service on the need to know principle. Our judgement is that you don’t need to know.”

Great, he thought. More malpractice and corruption is perpetrated under the banner of the need to know principle than in the mafia. “So I’ve come all this way for nothing.”

Cameron didn’t answer. He looked at the ceiling with the air of a bored host waiting for the last guest to leave.

“If Hen Mallin came, would you do business with her?”

“We don’t ‘do business’.”

“Would you tell her any more than you’ve told me?”

“No-for the same reason.”

All this stonewalling had incensed Diamond. He couldn’t pull his punches any longer. “In the real world, Mr Cameron, I’d have you for obstructing a police officer in the course of his duty.”

“I’m sure you’d try, superintendent.”

“She was one of your experts. Don’t you give a toss what happened to her?”

That touched a raw nerve. “Of course we care, damn it! There’s no evidence of a link between her murder and the case she was advising on.”

“The evidence isn’t there because it hasn’t been investigated.”

“The incidents are unrelated.”

“How can you be so sure? She was strangled for no apparent reason.”

“Have you enquired into her personal life?” Cameron asked in an unsubtle shifting of the ground.

“There isn’t much to speak of.”

“Her work, then? The university?”

“We’re looking at it, of course. The problem is that we have this black hole-the last ten days of her life when we don’t know what she was doing, who she was meeting, where she was based, even. Her body turns up on a beach in Sussex. That’s it. How can we conduct a murder enquiry without knowing any of these things?”

Cameron didn’t move a muscle.

“You might as well tell me,” Diamond persisted. “You’ve obviously been looking at my personal file, so you’ll know I’m a stubborn cuss.”

“Anyone can see that.”

“Well, then?”

Cameron shook his head and sighed.

Sensing a small advantage, Diamond weighed in with another attempt. “If I don’t get answers from you today, I’ll start rooting for them.”

No response.

“It’s my job.”

And no response to that, either.

“How else can I find the truth? I’ll beetle away until I get there. It could be far more damaging than finding out from you today.”

He seemed to have made some impact at last, because Cameron said, “Sit there, will you? I have to speak to someone.” He got up and left the room.

Trying not to be over-encouraged, Diamond amused himself swaying back in the chair, looking for the gleam of a camera lens in the panelled walls. He was sure this interview would be kept for training purposes. How to deal with dickheads from the sticks.

Five minutes at least passed before Cameron returned and invited Diamond to go with him. He was out of that chair like a game-show volunteer. They entered the south-east wing, the business end of the house, by way of a magnificent drawing room with a marble chimneypiece and tapestries of classical scenes, and so into the library, a place of quite different proportions, which in the heyday of the house must have been the Long Gallery where the inmates and their guests promenaded. He was taken through a recessed, almost hidden door into a low-ceilinged office where a small man with a shock of white hair stood looking at a computer screen. Whatever was on the screen was more gripping than his visitors, because he didn’t give them a glance.

Cameron stated Diamond’s rank and name without any attempt at a two-way introduction. The need to know principle in action again. Obviously this was someone pretty high in the Bramshill pecking order. Diamond privately dubbed him the Big White Chief.

Closing the door after him, Cameron left the room, which was a relief.

Still without turning from the screen, the Big White Chief said, as if he were continuing the conversation in Cameron’s office, “This black hole of which you spoke, these missing days in Dr Tysoe’s life.”

This came across as a definition of what was to be discussed, not a question, so Diamond said nothing.

It was the right thing to do. “If I fill in some detail for you, you’ll have to treat it as top secret.”

Progress at last. “Understood.”

“You’re not known for your discretion, Mr Diamond.”

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

“No, it’s a matter of record. What makes you think you can keep your mouth shut this time?”

“If you don’t tell me what it’s about, how can I answer that?”

The Big White Chief turned, unable any longer to resist a look at this visitor, and Diamond was glad to see he possessed two eyes and there was a spark of humanity, if not a twinkle, in each of them. He had a pencil-thin moustache of the sort military men, and few others, cultivate. “There you go again, shooting off at the mouth. All right, you have a point. You may be a loose cannon, Diamond, but you hit the target more often than most. I’ll take you on your own terms, and I may regret it. Let’s hope not. The matter Emma Tysoe was engaged in is highly sensitive. If I tell you about it, you become one of a very small group who are privy to this knowledge.”

“I’m OK with that.”

“You may be OK with it, but is it safe with you?”

Diamond didn’t dignify the question with a response.

“All right. Sit down.” The little man turned back to his computer, switched to a screensaver and swung his chair right round to face Diamond. He assessed him with a penetrating look, as if still reluctant to go on. “You won’t have heard about this. On June the fourteenth, a man was murdered in the grounds of his house-a rather fine house-in Sussex. Nothing was taken. There was a wallet in his pocket containing just over three hundred pounds and his credit cards. The house was open. It was hung with valuable paintings by Michael Ayrton, John Piper and others, and there are cabinets of fine china and pottery. Everything was left intact.”

“Except the owner.”

“Yes. He was shot through the head.”

“What with?”

“A bolt from a crossbow.”

“From a what ?”

“Crossbow.”

Diamond took this in slowly. “Different.”

“But effective.”

“It’s a medieval weapon.”