Peter Lovesey - Diamond Dust

They reached the spot where Steph had fallen. That sad bunch of flowers was still in place, yellow tulips spread wide, roses dropping their petals.

'Right. You came back here. You had a few minutes in hand. Was this when you helped yourself to the money?'

Warburton didn't answer.

'I'm giving you a chance. Tell me what you did with the bag and I may not charge you with theft.'

The last word sank in. Warburton looked about him as if coming out of a trance and then started walking to the left side of the bandstand where one of the Empress Josephine's vases stood. He reached under his shirt and tugged out the document wallet. 'Want me to chuck it in there?'

'In the vase?' The great stone amphora was large enough to take a dozen handbags. Surely the searchers had looked inside. Or was it possible they'd been so absorbed in their fingertip search of the shrubbery, lawns and car park that they'd omitted something so scream-ingly obvious?

'If you're wasting my time 'Not.'

Diamond stepped over the railing, pushed aside an overgrown rose bush and climbed on the plinth. Put an arm into the huge vase and groped around. Dead leaves, for sure. He felt for something more solid and brought out a rust-covered lager can and chucked it angrily aside. The lurcher chased it.

'There's no bag here, you berk.'

'Some bleeder took it, then.'

'Bullshit.' He climbed down, scratching his hand on the rose. 'Where is it, Warburton?'

'It was in there. I swear.'

'You don't even remember, you piss artist. Give me that.' He grabbed his car documents. 'Find your own way home. I've wasted enough time.' He turned and marched back to the car, angry and disappointed.

Driving home, he tried telling himself that it hadn't been totally fruidess. He was sure now that Warburton had taken the money. Probably the bag had been slung into the river, or a builder's skip. It might yet turn up.

The frustration was that he'd appeared to be succeeding where McGarvie had failed. The bag could have been lying inside that pesky vase.

He was halfway to Weston when he thought of the obvious. Talk about Warburton's bosky state: what kind of state was he in?

He did a fast, illegal U-turn, and drove back to the park.

The handbag was in the second vase.

Curious as to what this fascinating object might be, Raffles arrived on the table with an agile leap whilst Diamond was performing a delicate operation with salad-servers and a chopstick.

'Get out of it.' He didn't want paw prints on Steph's handbag.

Raffles jumped down and went to look at the feeding dish instead.

Neither did he want more of his own fingerprints. He must have left some when he picked the bag out of the stone vase. Since then he'd been careful to handle only the strap. Forensics would bellyache about contaminated evidence. So he eased the sides open with the chopstick and started removing the contents with the salad-servers.

Plastic rain-hat.

Kleenex tissues, soggy and disintegrating. The damp had penetrated the bag.

Compact.

Oxfam ballpoint.

Lipstick (a devil to grip with the servers).

Purse, unzipped and empty except for a few small coins. But the credit cards were still in place in the side pocket. Warburton must have known no one would believe he possessed a credit card. He'd gone for the cash.

Keys.

Aspirin bottle.

Her little book of photos, of her parents, a group of her Brownies and Diamond himself, in uniform, the year they'd met. The pictures had suffered in the damp.

But where was the one thing he wanted to find?

He probed with the servers. Held the entire bag upside down on the end of the chopstick. A Malteser fell out and rolled across the floor. He watched Raffles hunt it down and flick it with a paw before discovering it was coated in chocolate. One item forensics would have to manage without.

They would get everything else. Presently he'd go into work and take quiet satisfaction in presenting McGarvie with the handbag and saying he'd found it at the scene. What was the figure they kept quoting – over a hundred officers involved in a fingertip search?

In truth, he knew how easy it was to miss something as obvious as the stone vases. Could have happened to anyone.

He poked with the chopstick at the objects on the table, trying to work out where Steph's diary was. Not in the house. She always had it with her. That little book was essential to the way she ran her life. Dates, times, important phone numbers and addresses. She didn't use it as some people use a diary, to write up a daily record of their lives. Recording the past was alien to her outlook. She was forward-looking. She scribbled in appointments, names, birthdays.

That diary was of no conceivable interest to anyone else.

So where was it?

He said, 'Stupid arse.'

The answer was as obvious as the stone vase in the park. In the lining inside the bag was a zip. She kept the diary in an inner pocket. Impatient now, he dropped the chopstick and used his finger and thumb to open the zip and feel inside.

Result.

The diary was dry and in near perfect condition. He turned to the date of the murder, Tuesday, February the twenty-third, and found an entry. Steph had written in her blue ballpoint:

T. 10 a.m. Viet. Pk, opp. bandstand

He frowned at the page, baffled, disbelieving, shocked. He'd been telling everyone it was most unlikely Steph had arranged to visit the park – because she hadn't said a word to him. But why hadn't she mentioned it? She was so open about her life. Always told him everything.

Didn't she?

All at once his hands shook.

He hesitated to check the rest of the diary. It would be an invasion of her privacy. Already he felt shabby for opening it. Then an inner voice told him the murder squad would pore over every page after he handed it in, and he was more entitled than they to know what was in the damned thing.

He had this gut-wrenching fear that his trust in Steph was about to unravel. Up to now he'd never had a doubt about her loyalty. Theirs had been an honest, blissful marriage. That had been one of the few certainties in his case-hardened life. Was it possible he'd been mistaken, that she had secrets she'd never discussed with him?

This looked horribly like one, this appointment in the park. Did 'T' stand for a name, someone she'd met, or – please, please – something totally different and innocent that happened in parks, like… like what, for Christ's sake?

Tennis?

Outdoors, in February? Ridiculous.

T'ai Chi, then?

Why not? Steph was forever trying therapies, holistic this and alternative that. Didn't always speak of them, because she knew he dismissed all of it as baloney. It was not impossible she'd joined a group who exercised in the park.

Somehow, he couldn't picture it.

Briefly he was tempted to destroy the diary without looking at any more of it. If he'd been living an illusion, wasn't it preferable to hold onto precious memories, even though they might turn out to have been unfounded?

He dismissed that. The diary was pivotal evidence, whatever else was in it. The killer had to be caught, and this proved Steph had made an appointment to go to her place of execution. The chance that some casual mugger had killed her was now so unlikely that it could be discounted. She'd obviously been lured to her death. The murder squad had to be told.

So he started leafing through. It was a small diary with seven days spread over two pages, and Steph's entries were short. They took some interpreting. 'Ox' meant her stints at the Oxfam shop. They varied a bit from one week to the next, so she had to keep a record of them. She'd also scribbled in appointments with the doctor and dentist, family birthdays, dinner invitations and theatre bookings. He was looking for other things.