Peter Lovesey - Upon A Dark Night

He glanced up at the clock. ‘What time is my press conference?’

‘Two-fifteen, sir,’ the press liaison sergeant told him. ‘The hand-outs are ready if you want to see them. Everyone gets a head-and-shoulders of Rose.’

He scanned the press release. ‘Fine.’ He turned back to Julie. ‘There’s time for you to drive me out to Westbury. A pub lunch with the double-barrels.’

‘The who?’

‘Dunkley-something. The people who ran into Rose on the A46. Oh, and there will be another passenger, a scene of crime officer.’

The ex-mayor and his lady were, as Diamond anticipated, having a liquid lunch at the Westbury Hotel. The barmaid pointed them out at one of the tables under the Spy cartoons, a grinning, gnome-ish man opposite a dark-haired woman wearing enough mascara for a chorus-line.

‘We’ll leave you here at the bar,’ Diamond said quietly to Jim Marsh, the SOCO he had recruited for this exercise. ‘What are you drinking?’

‘It had better be a grapefruit juice, sir.’

‘God help us. What are you – a blood-pressure case?’

‘I’m working, sir.’

The affable mood at the table changed dramatically when Diamond announced who he was and introduced Julie.

The gnome, Ned Dunkley-Brown, reddened and said, ‘I told you we hadn’t heard the last of it, Pippa. All that malarkey about things spoken in confidence.’

His wife said, ‘Ned, I think we should hear what they have to say.’ She gave Diamond a patronising stare. ‘My husband is an ex-mayor of Bradford on Avon. He served on the police committee.’

‘But that was Wiltshire County,’ said Dunkley-Brown. ‘These officers are from Bath.’

‘Avon and Somerset,’ she corrected him.

‘Now we’ve got that straight,’ Diamond said, under some strain to stay civil with this couple, ‘I’d like to hear about the evening you had the accident on the A46. That’s inside our boundary, by the way.’

‘Accident?’ shrilled Pippa Dunkley-Brown, folding her thin arms.

‘Don’t say another word,’ Dunkley-Brown commanded his wife. ‘No comment.’

Diamond took a long, therapeutic swig of beer. ‘We’re not from Traffic Division, sir. We’re CID. People’s mistakes at the wheel are someone else’s pigeon.’

The Dunkley-Browns exchanged looks.

‘We’re investigating the young woman you met that evening. Called herself Rose.’

‘Oh, yes?’ said Dunkley-Brown in a faraway tone.

‘She’s a mystery all round. Lost her memory, or so she claimed. And now she’s missing.’

Pippa Dunkley-Brown was still coming to terms with an earlier statement. ‘What do you mean – “mistakes at the wheel”? There was no question of a mistake.’

‘Leave it,’ said Dunkley-Brown through his teeth. The training in local politics took over as he diverted along the safer avenue. ‘Missing, you say. But she was in here speaking to us, with a large woman.’

‘Ada Shaftsbury, yes. Rose hasn’t been seen since the day you spoke to them.’

Julie put in quickly, ‘We’re not accusing you of anything.’

‘I should damned well hope not!’ said the wife.

Indifferent to the mood of mild hysteria, Diamond explained patiently, ‘We’re retracing Rose’s movements, as far as they’re known. It all started with you meeting her on the road and transporting her to the hospital. We don’t know anything about her before that evening.’

‘Nor do we,’ said Dunkley-Brown. ‘She was unconscious.’

‘Unconscious when she walked into the road?’

‘Not then, but after. We didn’t get a word out of her. We took her to the nearest hospital.’

‘Hospital car park.’ In spite of his efforts Diamond was getting increasingly irritated with this couple.

Julie said, ‘Did she appear to be waving you down?’

‘She put up her arms,’ said Dunkley-Brown, ‘but she was out in the road by then.’

‘Lunacy,’ said his wife.

He added, ‘Anyone would raise an arm if a car was bearing down on them.’

‘We weren’t speeding,’ said she.

‘It’s dark along that stretch,’ said he.

‘So you slammed on the brakes,’ said Diamond.

‘And tried to avoid her,’ said the husband. ‘We skidded a bit to the right. By the time we hit her, the car was virtually at a standstill. It nudged her off balance and I suppose she took a bump on the head.’ He made it sound like an incident in a bouncy-castle.

‘She was unconscious,’ Diamond reminded him.

‘Yes, so we did our best to revive her at the side of the road, and when it was obvious that we weren’t going to be successful, we lifted her into the car-’

‘The back seat?’

‘Yes.’

‘Lying across the seat?’

‘Propped up against one corner really.’

Diamond sat forward, interested. ‘Which side was her head? The nearside?’

‘The left, yes. After that we drove her to the Hinton Clinic. She was very soon taken in, I understand.’

‘But you’d already pissed off out of it.’

‘That’s offensive,’ said Pippa.

‘Pippa phoned a day or so later to enquire about her,’ Dunkley-Brown was anxious to stress. ‘The people at the hospital said she was so much better that she’d been discharged. We assumed she’d made a full recovery.’

‘Very reassuring.’

‘We didn’t know about her loss of memory.’

Diamond finished his beer. ‘We’d like to look at your car. Is it back at the house?’

The colour drained from Dunkley-Brown’s face. ‘But you said you weren’t here to inquire into the accident.’

‘As a traffic offence, it doesn’t concern me, sir. As an incident involving a missing person, it does. Do you see the tall man at the bar drinking fruit juice? He’s trained to look for evidence. He can back up your story by examining the car.’

‘But we’ve been perfectly frank.’

‘No problem, then. Shall we go?’

‘Do you use it much, Mr Dunkley-Brown?’ Diamond asked after the Bentley had been backed out of the garage for inspection.

‘Not a great deal these days. If we go to the pub, we tend to walk. It’s exercise, which is good at our age, and we can enjoy a couple of drinks without being breathalysed.’

‘Shopping?’

‘We do use the car for that, but it’s only a trip to the local supermarket.’

‘We’ll join you presently, then,’ Diamond said. ‘DI Hargreaves wouldn’t mind a coffee if your wife would oblige.’ When Dunkley-Brown was out of earshot he told the SOCO. ‘If nothing else, find me some long, dark hairs on the nearside of the back seat and you’re on for a double Scotch.’

When Jim Marsh came in to report that he’d finished his examination of the car, he didn’t have the look of a man who has just earned a double Scotch.

‘No joy?’ said Diamond.

‘It’s been vacuumed inside,’ said the SOCO, ‘and very thoroughly.’

Diamond turned to look at Dunkley-Brown. ‘Is that a fact?’

A shrug and a smile. ‘There’s no law against Hoovering one’s car, is there?’

‘I know why you did it.’

‘You may well be right, Mr Diamond. We’d have been fools to have left any evidence of the girl there.’

‘May we see your Hoover?’

‘Certainly, only at the risk of upsetting you I’d better admit that we emptied the dust-bag right away. It was collected by the dustmen the same week.’

Diamond was not at his best during the drive back to Bath. Not a word was said about the abortive search of the Bentley’s interior. Nothing much at all was said. Each of them knew how essential it was to find a sample of Rose’s hair. Diamond’s far-from-convincing theory linking her to Gladstone’s murder could only be taken seriously if the hairs found at the farmhouse were proved to be hers. The idea behind the trip to Westbury had been an inspiration, but unhappily inspirations sometimes come to nothing.