Peter Lovesey - Upon A Dark Night

‘You satisfied her that they were definitely her family?’

‘They satisfied her. And they satisfied me as well. They had photos with them, of Rose, alone and with the mother. There wasn’t any doubt.’

‘I’m not suggesting there is.’

Imogen’s lips tightened. ‘This is Ada, isn’t it? She’s been agitating because Rose hasn’t written to her. I keep telling her not to make waves. Rose will write in her own good time if she wishes to. She’s got enough on her plate trying to get back to normal.’

‘Quite probably. What is normal? Did you find out? Did the stepsister have anything else to say about Rose’s life in Hounslow?’

‘I can’t recall anything, except that Rose had been on a trip to Florida some time and still managed to phone her mother.’

The mention of the phone gave him an idea. ‘Do you have a set of London phone directories in this place?’

‘Behind you.’

He picked the first one off the shelf and looked up the name Black. ‘Hounslow, you said. Miss R. Black, 12 Turpin Street.’ Slowly he ran his finger down the columns. ‘Can’t find it here, Imogen.’

‘Perhaps she’s ex-directory.’

He replaced the directory. Beside it were a number of street atlases, including a London A-Z, which he picked up to study the index. ‘Turpin Street. You’re quite sure of that?’

‘I suppose it could have been Turpin Road.’

‘Doesn’t matter. There’s only one Turpin in this book and that’s Turpin Way in Wallington, a long way from Hounslow.

I hate to say this, my dear, but it looks as if you’ve been given a fast shuffle by this woman. Ada may be onto something after all.’

It was ‘Be Nice to Julie’ day. ‘In case you’re waiting for me, I’m afraid I’ve got to work through,’ he thoughtfully told her. ‘But you can go off as soon as you like. Take your time. You’ve earned it twice over.’

Julie suppressed a smile. She knew why the old gannet couldn’t face lunch. She’d heard about his belated arrival at the mortuary only to discover that the autopsy on Hildegarde Henkel had been rescheduled, forcing him to watch the whole thing.

‘So don’t let me stop you, if you want to go down to the…’ he said, the voice trailing off, unable to articulate the word ‘canteen’.

She told him she’d eaten earlier. She asked if there was anything new on the case.

‘Depends which case you mean.’ The awkwardness between them was not only due to his nausea.

She said, not without irony, ‘I was under the impression we were working on Hildegarde Henkel.’

‘No progress there.’

‘Nothing came out of the post-mortem?’

‘Nothing we don’t know already.’

He was unwilling to say more than the minimum and she had no desire to pump him for information. People of his rank were supposed to communicate.

She waited.

Finally he felt compelled to speak. ‘We ought to put things right between us, Julie. Some straight-talking. That wasn’t very professional yesterday.’

‘Do you mean your sexist remark, or my reaction to it?’

‘Sexist, was it?’

‘No more than usual. The difference was that you made it personal.’

‘I can’t even remember what I said.’

‘I’ll tell you, then,’ she said. ‘I made some sympathetic remark about the dead woman and you said I was being a shade too sisterly for your taste, which I thought was bloody mean considering how much I take from you without bitching.’

‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘It was a light-hearted comment. I wasn’t attacking you.’

‘It was sarcasm.’

‘Yes, and I know what they say about that, but I thought you had enough of a sense of humour to take it with a smile.’

‘Spare me that old line, Mr Diamond.’

He gave a twitchy smile. ‘Look, it was only because you’re not one of those die-hard feminists that I made the remark. You call it sarcastic: I meant it to be ironic. I didn’t expect to touch a raw nerve. You and I know better than to fall out over a word, Julie.’

She said, ‘We’d have fallen out long before this if I’d objected to words. It’s the assumption behind them. You make snide remarks about my so-called feminist opinions as if I ride a broomstick and put curses on men. I’m another human being doing a job. I don’t ask for any more consideration than the men get. It’s about being treated as one of the human race instead of a lesser species.’

‘I’ve never thought of you as lesser anything,’ he told her.

She rolled her eyes upwards and said nothing.

‘Look at me,’ Diamond went on. ‘Would a fat, arrogant git like this choose anyone less than the best for a deputy? I rate you, Julie. I’m not going to turn into a New Man overnight, but I’m big enough to say that I rate you – and I wouldn’t say that about many others in this God-forsaken nick, male or female.’

She held his gaze. It was the nearest thing to an apology she was likely to get. Nothing more was said for an interval. Finally she looked away and told him, ‘God help you if you ever meet a real feminist.’

The air was not entirely clear, but it had improved.

He nearly ruined it by the lordly way he extended his hand towards a chair. With a sigh, she sat down.

Normal business resumed. ‘You asked about progress,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure if this fits the heading, but I discovered that Ada Shaftsbury may be right after all in raising the alarm about her friend, the one who lost her memory and hasn’t been in contact.’

‘Rose.’

‘I just called at Social Services. The people who collected her gave a bogus address.’

‘She isn’t living there?’

‘The street doesn’t even exist.’

Their minds were working in concert now. ‘Then the woman really is missing.’

‘She can’t be contacted, anyway.’

Julie weighed the implications. ‘If something dodgy happened, it’s quite a coincidence that Hildegarde was staying in the same hostel.’

‘Or quite a connection.’

‘One woman dead and one missing out of how many staying there?’

‘Only three, as far as I can make out. Ada is the only one left.’

‘Then she does have reason to be concerned,’ said Julie. ‘We’ve been treating her like the boy who cried “Wolf!”’

Diamond introduced a note of caution. ‘On the other hand, people like these – living in a hostel, I mean – are more unstable than your average citizens.’

‘Meaning what? That one suspicious death and one abduction are par for the course?’

He smiled. ‘No, but it’s not impossible that two people at the same address turn out to be victims of different crimes.’

‘But are they different crimes?’ said Julie. ‘We don’t know what happened to Rose. She could be dead, the same as Hildegarde.’

He shook his head. ‘Not the same at all, Julie. There’s no evidence that Hildegarde’s death was planned. How could it have been, when the party at the Royal Crescent was a surprise even to the tenants? Compare it to the planning that seems to have gone into the abduction of Rose Black, or whatever her name may be.’

She thought it through and grudgingly concluded that he had a point. The abduction of Rose, if it was an abduction, must have involved some sophisticated planning. To have gone to the Social Services claiming to be her family and producing photographs as evidence was a high-risk operation that could only have worked if it was carried through with conviction. She spoke her next thought aloud: ‘But is it right to assume something sinister just because the woman gave a false address to Social Services? Could there be a reason for it?’

He said flippantly, ‘Like winning the lottery and wanting no publicity?’