Peter Lovesey - The House Sitter

The disappointment in both men was palpable, although nothing was said. Even when you achieved the aim of anticipating this killer’s movements, it wasn’t enough.

Halliwell started stating the obvious just to fill the silence. “Nobody saw them leave. He’d need transport. Every car in the street has been checked.”

“Then they’re still here.”

“No, guv. I promise you, I went through every room myself.”

“Including the basement?”

Halliwell nodded. “It’s filled with cartons and packing material for the boss’s electrical appliances, and, believe me, we looked in every box.”

“Was it locked?”

“The basement?”

“ Yes . Was it locked?”

“The door to the street was. And bolted. As I told you, all the external doors in the house were locked, and none of them show any sign of being tampered with.”

“I’m going to take a look myself. The stairs down…?”

“The internal staircase? Next to the kitchen.”

Diamond stepped out of the front room into the hall. An internal door was fitted at the top of the basement stairs. The lock had obviously been forced, the strike plate ripped from the woodwork. “Who did this?”

“We did. She obviously keeps it locked. There wasn’t time to go looking for the key.”

“What if the key was in the lock and the Mariner locked it himself and took the key with him?”

Halliwell stared back with a slight frown, failing to see what difference it would make.

Without adding to his question, Diamond pulled open the door, switched on the light and went down into the basement. Just as it had been described to him, the back room, the largest, was in use as a box room, each box labelled.

“They were stacked tidily when we came in,” Halliwell said.

Diamond rapidly checked the other rooms. In the front room was a second door. “What’s this-a cupboard?”

“Sort of,” Halliwell said. “It’s more storage space, but she doesn’t use it. Actually it’s a kind of cellar. Goes right under the street. All these old houses have them. There’s no one in there. Just some wood and a heap of coal left by a previous owner.”

Diamond opened the door. “Someone get me a torch.”

One was handed to him and he probed the interior with the beam. He’d have called this a vault. Basically it was a single arch constructed of Bath stone, and tall enough to drive a bus through, except that a wall blocked off the end. Yet it was obvious no living creature larger than a spider was lurking there.

Halliwell said, “It’s not connected to any other house, if that’s what you were thinking, guv. They used them as wine cellars two hundred years ago. There’s been a lot of concern about them because they weren’t built to support the modern traffic going over them.”

Diamond stepped around a dust-covered heap of coal that had probably been there since the Clean Air Act came in, and moved towards the back wall. He swung the torch beam over the stonework and bent down to look at some chips of broken mortar he’d noticed among the coal. “This is recent.”

Halliwell came closer.

Diamond shone the torch close to the wall itself. “You see where this comes from? Some of these blocks of stone have been drilled out and moved. They’re not attached to anything. The wall isn’t surface-bearing here. It’s just a screen to separate this side of the street from the house opposite. Someone has broken through and replaced everything later.”

Halliwell crouched down to look. “Sonofabitch!”

Now it was Diamond who felt the need to speak the obvious. “He must have got in from the house across the street, down into their basement. He got to work on some stones in the wall and cut his way through. And that’s the way he got out with his prisoners. When they were through he shoved the blocks back into position from the other side.”

“But the door to the basement was locked,” Halliwell said.

“From the inside. He locked it when he left, and took the key with him. I don’t believe it was locked when he came in the first time. It was in the lock, but he was able to open the door and get into the house.”

“Cunning bastard,” Halliwell said. “And none of us spotted this.”

“You were looking for people, not means of entry.” Diamond’s mind was on the next decision, not past mistakes.

“I can shift this lot, no trouble,” Halliwell said.

“Not yet. We’ll go in from upstairs. Get some men down here, but have them in radio contact, ready to go when I say, and not before.”

“Armed Response are waiting in the street.”

“Good. But I don’t want a shoot-out in a confined space. He’s got his hostages and he’ll have his crossbow with him. We don’t know what we’ll find when we go in.”

He ran upstairs and out to the street. It was already closed to traffic. He briefed the inspector in charge of the ARU, telling him how he proposed to handle the situation. Men were posted at strategic points. Diamond was fitted with a radio.

Exactly as he expected, there were signs of a break-in when he went down the basement steps of the house across the street from Georgina’s. The door had been forced with some kind of jemmy. Like several of the basements along the street, this one was unoccupied, though the flats on the upper floors were all in use.

With two armed officers close behind him, Diamond entered as silently as possible, stood in the passageway and listened. The place was ominously quiet. He felt the cool air on his skin. He waited a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the restricted light. Then he reached for the handle of the door to the front room, the one with access to the vault below the street.

Nobody was in this unfurnished room, so he crossed to the door to the vault and cautiously opened it. One glance confirmed that no one was inside. However, there were tools lying against the wall, including a power drill, hammer and chisels. Any lingering doubt was removed that the Mariner had been here.

Turning away, he indicated to the marksmen that he would check the other rooms. He returned to the passageway and looked into a small room once used as a kitchen. Nothing was in there except some bottled water.

There remained the back room, presumably used as a bedroom when the flat was occupied. He looked towards the back-up men and gestured to them with a downward movement of his hand. He wasn’t going to rush in. The door was slightly ajar, so he put his foot against it and gently pushed it fully open.

A crossbow was targeted at his chest. The Mariner, in baseball cap and leather jacket, stood against the wall. Beside him, on the floor, were two motionless bodies.

Diamond’s heart raced and a thousand pinpricks erupted all over his skin. For this was a triple shock. There was the sight of the dead-still women; there was the threat from the crossbow; and there was the hammer blow of who the Mariner was. With a huge effort to keep control he managed to say, “It’s all over, Ken. I wouldn’t shoot if I were you. Killing me isn’t in the script.”

But Ken Bellman kept the crossbow firmly on target.

Ken-boring old Ken, the lover Emma Tysoe had dumped without ever realising he was the killer she’d been asked to profile. Ken, the man Diamond and Hen had put through the wringer, or so they believed. Ken-the wrongly accused, the man who’d proved beyond doubt that he didn’t carry out the murder on the beach.

Ken Bellman was the Mariner.

Diamond’s best-his only-option was to talk, steadily and as calmly as he could manage, as if he’d fully expected to be facing this. “You’re not going to shoot that thing. You’ve settled the score, several times over. If you take me out-as you could-you’ll be gunned down yourself. The men behind me are armed.”