Peter Lovesey - Upon A Dark Night

‘Did you follow?’

He eased a finger between his collar and his neck. ‘In the end, I did.’

Diamond was almost moved to remind this wimp that he was not his mother and didn’t give a damn whether he followed a woman into a bedroom at a party.

The confession resumed. ‘It was dark inside. I couldn’t really see much, just the shape of a large bed, and I could hear people on it. From the sounds it was obvious that they were…’

‘Hard at it?’

‘Yes. Me being there didn’t make any difference to them. I was amazed.’

‘That they ignored you?’

‘No. What surprised me was that it happened so fast. The man must have been in there waiting for her. I haven’t the faintest idea who he was.’

He had put the wrong construction on this altogether. Diamond said, ‘So what did you do?’

‘I came out. Left them to it. That’s all I can tell you, because I walked downstairs and out of the house at that point’

Having made the first bold decision of his life by stepping into that bedroom, the boy had been cruelly disillusioned. Humiliated, he had quit the scene. It was easy to imagine, and it rang true.

Diamond had heard all he needed. He could have thanked young Paternoster and arranged for someone else to take the statement. But some inner prompting, the memory, probably, of his own adolescent rebuffs, made him merciful. ‘I think you should know that there’s a second door in that bedroom. It’s on the far side. You wouldn’t have seen it unless you were looking for it, but I know it’s there because I’ve seen it. You said the German woman wasn’t looking at people. She’d worked out that there was an extra room – the attic room – upstairs. She looked everywhere else, and decided that the access to the attic had to be from the bedroom. I believe she found it and went up the stairs and eventually onto the roof.’

‘But… the people on the bed.’

‘Some other couple. You and I know what parties are like, Gary. We wouldn’t choose someone else’s house for a legover, but there’s always some randy couple who will.’

‘She wasn’t there?’

‘When you came in, she’d already found the door and gone up to the attic.’

Diamond’s statement acted like a reprieve. The boy’s posture altered. His face lit up. ‘That never occurred to me.’

Diamond nodded. ‘I’m going to get you a beer, son. A regular beer.’

He remained with the lad for some time, talking of the high expectations of women and how even a man of his experience could never hope to match their dreams. ‘That’s their agony, Gary, and ours. We’re all trying to make the best of what we’ve got. They have to accept that you’re not Elvis, or Bill Gates, or Jesus Christ, and if you keep talking, make them laugh a little, show them you’re neither a rapist nor a rabbit, you may find one willing to stretch a point and spend some time with you.’ The boy said he lacked confidence. Talking more like a best mate than the father he had not been, Diamond pointed out that the party hadn’t been the personal disaster it seemed. To have faltered at the bedroom door would have been a failure. The lad had proved to himself that he was man enough to go in. Now it was just a question of some fine tuning. Trendy clothes. A different haircut. Drinking beer was a good start.

The time had not been wasted.

‘John, I’m setting up a murder inquiry.’

Wigfull stiffened and pressed himself back in his chair. ‘This German woman?’

‘No.’

‘Who, then?’

‘The farmer.’

‘Gladstone ?’

In a pacifying gesture, Diamond put up his palms. ‘It was your case, I know, and you had it down as a suicide.’

Wigfull snatched up a manila folder. ‘It’s here, ready for the coroner.’

There was a moment’s silence out of respect for all the work contained in the manila folder. ‘As you know,’ Diamond resumed, ‘I was out at Tormarton the afternoon you were there. I’ve been back since.’

The Chief Inspector’s face turned geranium red. ‘You had no right.’

Diamond went on in a steady tone, neither apologetic nor triumphant, ‘The first test of suicide is to make sure that the death wound was self-inflicted. I’ve looked at the shotgun, in its wrapper. I measured it. Have you seen it? The length, I mean. I tucked it under my chin and tried the position he is supposed to have used to blow his own brains out. I’m a larger man than old Gladstone was and I tell you, John, my fingers can’t reach the trigger with my arms fully stretched. If the muzzle was in my mouth, yes, I could fire it, just. If it was against my forehead, easier still. But the cartridge went through his jaw from underneath. The little old man was physically incapable of doing that.’

Wigfull was unwilling to be persuaded. ‘We found his prints on the breechblock and on the barrel.’

‘But you would. The gun was his.’’ There were no other prints.’

Diamond gave him a long, unadmiring look. ‘If you were handling a murder weapon, would you leave your prints on it?’

‘The gun was found beside him.’

‘To make it look like suicide.’

‘Are you saying I’m incompetent?’

‘John, for pity’s sake, listen. This was set up as a suicide. It looked cut and dried. Dead man in a chair with his shotgun beside him. You saw it yourself before forensic removed the body from the scene. Difficult to reconstruct later, of course. That’s the fault of the procedure. We store the gun in one place and the corpse in another and it’s easy to overlook the mechanics. I’m not getting at you personally. Any of us.’

‘Except you,’ Wigfull said with ill-concealed resentment.

‘But do you see what I’m driving at?’

‘What put you onto it?’

The question signalled that Wigfull was listening to reason, and Diamond treated it with restraint. ‘I couldn’t understand why the ground was disturbed at the farm after Gladstone’s death.’

‘I knew all about that,’ Wigfull waded in again, still making this an issue of personal rivalry. ‘In fact I was the one who told you about it.’

‘Perfectly true.’

‘And I wouldn’t pin too much on it,’ he added, seeing a possible flaw in Diamond’s reasoning. ‘What was it – five days the body lay there? You can bet some evil bastard noticed that the old farmer wasn’t about. Maybe they looked in and thought this was an opportunity. There were rumours Gladstone was miserly. Someone could have thought he buried his savings. If they dug a few holes, it might make them trespassers and thieves, but it doesn’t make them murderers.’

‘Fair point,’ said Diamond. ‘You may still be right about the digging. But you wanted to know what put me onto homicide as a possibility, and I’m telling you. When I see signs of a third party at the scene, I automatically think murder. It’s my job. I asked myself if Gladstone’s death could have been caused by the person or people who dug his land. Ran it through my mind as a faked suicide. Looked at the scene and checked the weapon. And unless the old boy had arms like an orangutan, I’m right.’

Wigfull resigned the contest. The moustache hung over his downturned mouth like the wings of a caged vulture. ‘So what was the motive? Theft?’

‘That isn’t clear yet. But I have a suspect.’

He sat forward, animated again. ‘You do?’

Diamond’s bland expression didn’t alter. ‘But if you don’t mind, John, I’ll sleep on it. Tomorrow we’ll set up an incident room and a squad and I’ll take them through the evidence. I expect you’ll want to be in on it.’

He went to look for Julie.

She had not returned, so he ambled down to the canteen for some supper. Baked beans, bacon, fried eggs, chips and toast, with a mug of tea. ‘You’re a credit to us, Mr Diamond,’ the manageress told him.