Peter Lovesey - Upon A Dark Night

One of the squad unfurled the screen on the front wall. Diamond switched on a slide-projector and the back view of a naked woman appeared and was hailed with approving noises by the largely male audience. Julie Hargreaves shook her head at the juvenile reaction, but they quieted down when Diamond pointed out the cuts and bruising on the thighs and legs. The next slide, a frontal shot, still got a few rutting sounds, if more muted than before. The woman on the screen had attractive breasts and a trim waist, yet her discomfort at being photographed was evident in the pose.

‘That’s the end of the floorshow, gentlemen.’

Some good-humoured dissent was heard.

Diamond slotted in another slide, a close-up of the woman’s face, and left it on the screen while he told the story of Rose’s short stay at Harmer House, eventually concluding it with: ‘…and after she is collected by the woman claiming to be her stepsister, we hear no more of her. Nobody hears a dickybird, not Social Services, not Ada, not the Old Bill.’

The room had gone silent except for the steady drumming of the rain. To a murder squad, the disappearance of a woman is ominous.

‘What is more,’ Diamond added, ‘nothing holds up in the stepsister’s story. Julie spent most of yesterday checking.’ He paused and looked at the tense, troubled face on the screen. ‘It’s already two weeks since she was collected. We thought we knew her name and background, but we can’t be sure of it any more. We’ll continue to call her Rose. Take a long look. She’s top priority. We’ve got to find her.’

He made eye contact with Julie. ‘DI Hargreaves is in charge of the search.’

He turned back to the map. ‘Now, look at this, the point on the A46, here, where she wanders into the road out of nowhere, the first anyone has heard of her. It’s not a great distance from Tormarton, is it? Not a great distance from Daniel Gladstone’s farm.’ He spanned it roughly with his outstretched forefinger and thumb. ‘Two miles at most. Think about that, will you? And think about when it happened, Monday, October 3rd. Curious, isn’t it, that the Friday previous is the pathologist’s best estimate of the old farmer’s date of death?’

‘You think she killed him, sir?’ someone asked.

Diamond faced the screen, saying nothing.

‘How could she?’ one of the younger detectives asked. ‘You’d need two people. One to pull the trigger and the other to hold the old bloke still.’

Another chipped in. ‘Bloody risky, holding his head over a shotgun. I wouldn’t do it. You could get your face blown away, easy.’

‘What you do,’ said Keith Halliwell, the longest-serving member of the squad, ‘is tie him to the chair first.’

‘You think a woman trussed him up?’

‘No problem. He was seventy-plus. Did you look at her physique?’

‘Well…’

‘Keith did,’ said a mocking voice. ‘Keefy likes ‘em beefy.’

Diamond swung around, glaring at the unfortunate who had spoken. ‘Oh, dead funny. Why don’t you come up here and do your act from the front? We’ll all club together, buy a red nose and a whoopee cushion and get you into show business.’ With silence reinstated, he said, ‘Someone asked if I think Rose killed the farmer. I was coming to that.’ He let them stew for another interval while he walked across to the window and looked at the rain. ‘Yes. It’s a possibility. She was in the area at approximately the time he was killed. Very approximately. The pathologist will tell you we’re dealing in rough figures here. A couple of days either side. So let’s not get carried away. However-’ He paused to wipe some condensation from the window. ‘-if the loss of memory is genuine, it will have been caused by some deeply stressful, traumatic event. And not just concussion from the accident. That’s different. You don’t lose your long-term memory from a bump on the head. This woman is suffering from acute neurosis. The scene in that farmhouse was scary enough to throw anyone’s mind off beam. True, it seems to have been a cold-blooded execution, but the effect of that shotgun blasting the back of old Gladstone’s skull off may have been more of a shock to the killer than she expected. Enough to suppress her memory and wipe out her own identity. And for those of you thinking I know sod-all about traumatic disorders, I did consult a couple of textbooks. There have been cases like it.

‘And now you’re going to ask me about a motive and I can’t tell you one because I don’t know who the woman is. But the possibilities are there. You can say she hates him because of something evil he did in the past, like abusing her when she was a child, or raping her mother. Or she could be the cold-blooded sort, after his savings. She may be mad, of course.’

‘She may have no connection with the case,’ said Julie unexpectedly.

Diamond stopped for a moment as if Julie’s words were being played back to him. Then he turned to face her. ‘I thought I made that clear. This is just a hypothesis.’

‘So long as we don’t lose sight of it,’ she said.

The strains were showing. ‘So you think she’s a red herring?’

‘No, Mr Diamond, I’m agreeing with you that she’s got to be found. She may be dangerous, as you say, more dangerous than she herself realises. Or she may be in danger. I spent most of yesterday checking out the woman who took her away and finding everything she said is bogus, so you’ll understand why I see it this way. I got used to thinking of Rose as a victim, not a villain. Just another hypothesis.’

He drew himself back from the brink. He’d given Julie the job yesterday, the kind of research she did so well, systematically uncovering the deception. Moreover, she’d been exposed for a couple of hours to Ada’s anxieties about the missing woman. Was it any wonder that she took a different line?

‘Thanks, Julie. Point taken.’ He pitched his voice to the entire room again. ‘I propose to bring in the press at this stage. I’m issuing this picture of the missing woman with the few real facts we know about her. For public consumption we’re appealing for information because there’s concern for her safety. Understood? Julie, you’d better warn Social Services to be ready for some flak over this.’ He crossed the room and switched off the projector. ‘We’ll also go public on the killing of Daniel Gladstone. It’s going to make large headlines, I’m afraid. The execution-style killing of an old man is sure to excite the tabloids. For the time being we’ll treat the incidents as unrelated. Let’s see what the publicity brings in. And of course it’s all systems go on the murder inquiry. Keith, would you set up the incident room here? Frank, you’re in charge of the hunt for Rose Black. Jerry, the farmer’s background is your job. His life history – family, work, the state of his finances, the lot. I can give you some pointers if you see me presently.’ He went on assigning duties for several minutes more. This had always been one of his strengths, instilling urgency into an inquiry.

After Diamond had left the room, Keith Halliwell put a hand on Julie’s shoulder. ‘You’ve got more guts than the rest of us, kiddo, speaking out like that.’

She shook her head. ‘I knew what was coming. Had more time to think it over.’

‘What do you reckon?’ he asked. ‘Has the old buzzard flipped?

‘In what way?’

‘Picking on this woman as a suspect. Can you see a woman trussing up an old man and firing a shotgun at his head?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ she answered, sensitive to the discrimination. ‘Any fit woman is capable of it.’

He shrugged. ‘But would they carry it out? Don’t you think it’s too brutal?’

‘It’s a question of motivation.’