Peter Lovesey - Upon A Dark Night

This being Sunday evening, Julie had no trouble in finding space to park on the south side of Brock Street, the road that links the Royal Crescent to the Circus. She took a position opposite a wine shop, facing the entrance to the Crescent. Anyone approaching would be easily spotted under an ornate lamp-post that from there looked taller than the far side of the building, just visible across the residents’ lawn. In the next ten minutes five individuals came by. Three collected their cars from Brock Street and returned them to the front of the Crescent. William Allardyce was not among them, though his blue BMW was parked in the street, opposite an art gallery.

‘What are you expecting to see exactly?’ Julie asked when the clock in the car showed they had been there twenty minutes.

Diamond took exception to the last word. I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that. “Possibly” is more like it.’ ‘Exactly ?

‘Possibly, then?’

‘There’s a possibility that we may see Allardyce come round that corner and walk to his car. There’s a chance – and I wouldn’t put it higher than that – a chance that he’ll have the shoe with him.’

‘I don’t see how. We covered every inch of that house.’

‘And every inch of the tenants?’

‘Come off it, Mr Diamond,’ said Julie, reddening. ‘We had no authority to make body searches. Besides, you can’t hide something as big as a shoe…’ Her voice trailed off and she stared at him with wide, enlightened eyes. ‘The tracksuit. William could have been carrying it around all day in the tracksuit.’

‘Baggy enough to hide a shoe, I’ll grant you,’ he said as if the idea were hers.

‘But that would mean he…’

‘Yes.’

But it seemed to Julie that on this occasion the magus of the murder squad had picked the wrong star to follow. Inspired as he may have been in the past, his record wasn’t perfect. And now he waited smug as a toad for her to tease out the arcane reasoning that had them sitting there. She leaned against the head-restraint and composed herself. She was not too proud to put a direct question to him. Others might balk at the prospect. Not Julie. ‘What makes William Allardyce a suspect?’

As if marshalling his thoughts, he was slow to answer. ‘The missing shoe is the key to it. She was wearing it when she sat on the balustrade. Must have been. Her sock was perfectly-’ He didn’t complete the sentence.

Someone had just come into view around the railings fronting the end house of the Crescent, a man of Allardyce’s height and build. He was wearing a cap and raincoat and carrying a plastic bag that clearly contained an object whose general shape and solidity demanded their whole attention. Neither Diamond nor Julie spoke. They watched the man cross the cobbles to a shadowy area at the edge of the lamp-post’s arc of light, close to the residents’ lawn. There he halted. After glancing right and left, he stooped, as if to examine the low stone ridge that supported the railings. Still crouching, he took the object from the bag and they saw that it was not a shoe, but a trowel. Next he scraped at the ground with the trowel and shoveled something into the bag. Then he gave a whistle and a large dog bounded out of the shadows and joined him. With his dog, his trowel and the contents of the carrier bag, he walked back with pious tread towards the Crescent.

That was not William Allardyce.

Diamond resumed without comment. ‘That shoe disappeared, so we can assume that someone is concealing it. Are you with me?’

After the day she had spent exploring every inch of that house, she thought his ‘Are you with me?’ was the bloody limit.

‘I kept asking myself why,’ he said, oblivious. ‘If we are dealing with a killer here, what’s his game? The fact that the shoe is missing is what gives rise to suspicion. If it had been found beside her, you and I wouldn’t be here, Julie. We’d have thought it came off when she hit the ground. An accident: that’s what we’d have taken it to be. So why didn’t our killer chuck the shoe where the body was? I think I have the answer.’

She stared impassively ahead. She’d had about enough of Peter Diamond for one day.

‘Theoretically,’ he said in the same clever-dick tone, ‘any one of the scores of people who crashed the party could have shoved her off the ledge. They didn’t. This has to be one of the tenants, and I’ll tell you why. The killer didn’t realise that the shoe had come off until it was too late to do anything about it. The next morning. If you recall what happened, the paper-boy discovered the body and knocked on the door of the house. Treadwell came out. He alerted Allardyce, who also came to have a look. That was the moment when one of them – and it must be Allardyce for a reason I shall explain – saw to his horror that the dead woman was missing one shoe. It had come off in the struggle and was still lying somewhere on the roof.’ Diamond turned to face her and stepped up his delivery. ‘What can he do? It’s too late now to plant it beside the body. The police are on the way and two witnesses have viewed the scene. He belts upstairs and finds the shoe, maybe with a torn lace, scuffing, signs of the struggle she put up. So he hides it, meaning to dispose of it later.’

Julie saved him the trouble of explaining why Allardyce was preferred as the suspect. ‘As the Allardyces live upstairs, he could get up to the roof without arousing any suspicion.’

‘Right, and this links up with another moment. Let’s backtrack to the party. When someone reported the woman on the roof, who was it who went up to investigate, but the master of the house, the caring Mr Allardyce?’

He paused for some show of admiration, but he didn’t get it.

Beginning to sound huffy, he picked up the thread again. ‘If you’re still with me, Allardyce claims he saw no one on the roof. He’d like us to suppose the woman must have fallen or jumped in the interval between the people spotting her and the moment he looked out of his attic window. He states that he didn’t climb out of the window to check. He just leaned out and saw no one on the balustrade and assumed she’d given up and come down. That’s his version. Have I given it fairly?’

He got a curt nod from Julie.

Outside, the darkness had set in and the grey mass of the Crescent appeared to merge at the top with the night sky. Unusually for such a well-known building there was no floodlighting. The reason was that it was residential, and residents in their living rooms have no desire to be in the spotlight to that degree. So the only lighting was supplied by those pseudo-Victorian lamp-posts painted black and gilt, with their iron cross-pieces supposedly to support the lamplighter’s ladder.

‘He claims not to have climbed onto the roof for a thorough look,’ Diamond went on. ‘Why not? We climbed out ourselves. You’ll agree with me that it’s as easy as getting into a bath. In spite of what he suggests, there are parts of the roof you can’t see from inside the attic. She could have been up on the tiles behind him. Or she could have moved along the balustrade over one of his neighbours’ houses. Wasn’t he interested enough to check?’

‘You can’t blame him for that,’ Julie found herself saying in the man’s defence. ‘His house had been taken over. He was concerned about what was going on inside.’

‘Fair point,’ Diamond admitted. ‘There’s some good stuff there. Antique ornaments. Period furniture. A beautiful music centre in the living-room with hundreds of CDs. If it had been my house full of strangers whooping it up, I’d have been going spare.’

‘Perhaps he was. He can afford to be cool about it now it’s over.’