Peter Lovesey - The House Sitter

“Did he move to be nearer to Emma?” Ingeborg asked.

“That wasn’t the impression I got. If I remember right, he said they met by chance one day in the library-as if he didn’t expect it.”

“I can believe she didn’t.”

He was quick to pick up on the point. “You’re thinking he was lying-that he followed her here? Good point, Ingeborg. It crossed my mind, too. The way he told it, you’d believe they hadn’t spoken since their student days at Liverpool.”

“That was my impression, listening to the tape,” Ingeborg agreed.

“I’d like to know more,” he said. “We’ve only got his version of the way it happened.”

“A long-term stalker?”

“Possibly. He certainly pursued her for the last hours of her life. He admitted it. Could have been obsessed with her for much longer.”

“Does it make a difference?”

“What do you mean-does it make a difference?”

Ingeborg said with an embarrassed laugh, “I mean, if he was the killer anyway, does it matter how long he knew her?”

“It strengthens the motive.” Slipping into his superintendent mode, he told her, “Something you’re going to have to learn, Constable, is that we aren’t here just to name the guilty man. We have to make the case to the CPS, and if it isn’t rock solid they won’t prosecute. If Bellman was fixated on this woman for years and finally got into the relationship he’d fantasised over, only to find she dropped him and started up with someone else, he’d take it badly. That’s motivation. That’s going to help the prosecution.”

“Is it worth questioning him again?”

“I wouldn’t mind another go.”

The opportunity came sooner than either of them expected, in fact within twenty minutes. The desk sergeant called up to say a Mr Bellman had walked into the station and asked to speak to the officer in charge of the Emma Tysoe investigation.

Diamond asked Ingeborg to join him.

She was starry-eyed at the prospect. “Do you think he’s ready to cough, guv?”

“We can always hope.”

In the interview room, Bellman didn’t have the look of a man about to confess. He sat completely still, studying his fingernails, apparently unimpressed when Diamond and Ingeborg entered the room and took their places. Last time, he’d slopped coffee onto his jeans. This morning, on Diamond’s instructions, he’d already been brought coffee in a cup and saucer-not to prevent further spillage, but because china is a suitable surface for collecting fingerprints.

“You’ve already met DC Smith,” Diamond said by way of introduction. “You don’t mind if we tape this?”

“Whatever you want. It won’t take long.”

Ingeborg spoke the formal preamble for a voluntary statement, and then Diamond said, “You’ve got something to tell us, Ken?”

“To show you, more like,” he answered. “When we were speaking before, there was some question about where I was on the afternoon Emma was killed. I told you I left Wightview Sands at the end of the morning and drove back here and you asked if I could prove it.”

“Right.”

“We looked in my car to see if there was a petrol receipt.”

“Correct. Have you found one?”

His mouth drew wide in a triumphant grin. “Actually, yes.” He opened his right hand to show a slip of paper lying on his palm.

“Where did you find this?” Diamond asked as he took it, his voice betraying nothing of the plunging anticlimax he felt.

“Down in the slot where the handbrake is fitted. There are two sets of brushes, nylon, I would guess, and the brake moves between them. Sometimes I run my fingertips along the gap when I’m waiting in traffic, and a small piece of paper could easily slip down there. It was stuck there, out of sight. I thought I’d have another search, on the off chance, and there it was.”

“Fortunate.”

“Very. Without it, I’d be getting worried.”

Diamond studied the data on the receipt. Beyond dispute, it showed someone had bought 35.46 litres of unleaded petrol from pump five at a cost of £25.50 at the Star service station, Trow-bridge Road, Beckington, Bath BA3, at three forty-seven on the afternoon of the murder. A kick in the guts. Trying to salvage some respect, he said, “Pity you didn’t use a card for this transaction. It was a cash sale, evidently. There’s nothing to link this receipt to you personally.”

Bellman was unmoved. “What are you suggesting-that it’s someone else’s receipt?”

“Could be.”

“Knock it off, will you?” He was confident enough for sarcasm. “Ah, I know what you’re thinking. I suppose it stuck to the bottom of my shoe when I came along later and then a freak gust of wind blew it off the shoe and up to the handbrake? That’s a long shot, isn’t it?”

“We’ll examine it, anyway,” Diamond said, passing the receipt to Ingeborg. “Thanks for bringing it in.”

“By the way, I’ve photocopied it,” Bellman said, adding, in the same sarcastic vein, “Just in case it goes astray.”

“Wise.”

“I’ll be off, then.”

“Before you are,” Diamond said, “I wonder if you’d clarify a couple of things you said at your previous interview. Only a matter of tidying up details. You said you worked in London prior to coming to Bath.”

“That’s right.”

“In SW1. Did we have that right?”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t name your employer.”

“You didn’t ask. Mitchkin Systems Limited.”

“Would you mind spelling that?”

Bellman did. “I was a technical support programmer.”

“Yes, we got that first time around. Good job, I should think, based in central London.”

“They’ve got a good name.”

“I’m wondering why you left. What brought you to Bath?”

He answered smoothly, “I’d had enough of London by then. I’m single. With my training I can work pretty well where I choose.”

“But why Bath, of all places?”

A shrug and a smile. He was confidence personified now. “Nice city. Clean air. Less hassle.”

“Are you sure there wasn’t another attraction-the fact that Emma Tysoe moved here.”

A touch of colour sprang to his cheek and he raised his hand as if to fend off a loose throw. “Oh, no. No way.”

“Before you say any more,” Diamond came in, sensing a hit, “we’ve done some digging, DC Smith and other detectives in my squad, and we know you contacted Emma quite soon after arriving here-very soon, in fact. That story about meeting her by chance in the library was a little misleading, wasn’t it?”

Bellman frowned, back on the defensive. “I don’t think so.”

A note of caution that Diamond was quick to pick up on. This line of questioning had been a fishing expedition, no more, and now there was the promise of a catch. “Let me put it this way. I’m willing to believe you met in the library, but I don’t buy your story that it was pure chance. She was an old friend from your student days. You had every right to seek her out. Any one of us would have done the same.”

The man was silent.

Diamond continued in these uncharted waters. “I’m not suggesting you harboured romantic feelings about her for all those years, checking what happened to her, where she lived, and so on. But I can’t help wondering if you were reading your paper one day, and happened to see her name. She was rather well known in her professional life-as a psychological offender profiler, helping the police with their inquiries.”

He said firmly, “I don’t have time to read the papers. All my reading is technical. Computer magazines.”

“So you didn’t know about the profiling?” Diamond paused, apparently to exercise his thoughts on this mistaken assumption. “Maybe I was wrong, then. Maybe you did still carry a torch for her after all those years.”