Peter Lovesey - Diamond Dust

'You were the last to be issued with it.'

'And I bet I returned it. Always did.'

'Yes, the paperwork was in order. But after that, there's no record of the gun with that serial number.'

'Not my fault. You can't stick that on me.'

McGarvie smiled with the confidence of a player with trumps in hand. 'Procedures at Fulham in the eighties were somewhat relaxed – shall we say? It's not impossible the issuing officer made a mistake.'

'Not in my case, he didn't. You just agreed it was returned and signed in.'

'The officer in question later appeared before a disciplinary board charged with negligence. A number of weapons couldn't be accounted for. Clearly the rules were breached in some way.'

'Am I missing something here? What has this got to do with my wife's murder?'

'She was shot with a point three-eight revolver. When I questioned you before, you denied owning one. You just repeated that denial.' McGarvie's brown eyes glittered. Reaching under the desk he took out a sealed evidence bag and passed it across. 'For the purposes of the tape, I am now showing the witness exhibit D03, a police-issue point three-eight Smith & Wesson revolver recovered this morning from the garden of his house in Lower Weston.'

Diamond's voice shrilled in disbelief. 'What are you saying? You found this in my garden?'

'With some ammunition. Wrapped in a cloth in a biscuit tin buried in the vegetable patch.'

Vegetable patch? This had to mean the little plot where Steph grew tomatoes last summer. He was silent while his brain raced, trying to make sense of it.

McGarvie added, 'The serial number confirms this gun as one missing from Fulham since nineteen eighty-six. You were issued with it and apparently returned it. Do you have any explanation?'

He was up to his eyeballs now. A horrible hissing started in his ears – the old blood pressure problem threatening. After a long pause he said, 'I wasn't strictly straight with you just now. This gun has been in my possession ever since I was in the Met.'

McGarvie gave a grunt of satisfaction. 'So you lied.'

'Well-'

'You lied.'

'They were dangerous times. We had some hard men on our patch.'

'Face it, Peter.'

'You asked if I owned a gun. I don't. It's still police property.'

'Now you're playing with words.'

'Okay. I should have come clean when you asked me.'

'What stopped you?'

'Didn't want to draw you up a blind alley. All this horse-shit about the gun has nothing to do with my wife's murder.'

'Ho.' McGarvie turned to exchange a look with the sergeant beside him. 'And if it turns out to be the murder weapon…?'

'No chance. It was in the loft of my house, in a shoebox.'

'Until when?'

Another crushing uncertainty hit him.

'Don't know,' he was forced to admit. 'After you interviewed me last time, I went up to the loft to look for it, and the box was empty.'

'Is this another half-truth?'

'No.'

'Why did you need the gun?'

'For protection. If you want it straight, I was losing confidence in your investigation. I thought I might need to open up some fresh lines of inquiry.'

'With a gun in your hand? Going it alone, eh – contrary to the ACC's instructions?'

Diamond shrugged. There were more important issues now than defying Georgina.

'If the gun wasn't in the loft, who could have moved it except you or your wife?'

'I've tried to think ever since I noticed it was gone. I don't have an answer.'

'You don't have answers to much. Sure you didn't panic after we visited the house? Sure you didn't take the gun from the loft and bury it in the garden?'

'I didn't bury it'

'You didn't?'

He sighed heavily.

'Then who did? Someone trying to fit you up, I suppose?' McGarvie said with sarcasm.

'I've no idea. This is a total shock to me. Listen, if I wanted to get rid of the thing, why would I bury it in my own garden?'

'No one suggested you wanted to get rid of it. Far from it. You thought you might need it again.'

'This is unreal.'

'It isn't looking good, Peter. There's a time period on the morning of the murder when you have no alibi. You say you came into work, but no one here saw you before eleven.'

'I was in my office.'

'Keeping your head down – to quote you. Then, ten days ago, you brought in your wife's handbag.'

Incensed at the way things were being twisted, he blurted out, 'That was a responsible act.'

'In the bag was her diary with certain entries suggesting she'd been in contact with someone referred to as "T", and who – apparently – she'd arranged to meet in Victoria Park on the morning of her death.'

'Well?'

'We can't say for sure if those entries were written by your wife.'

'Jesus! Of course they were.'

'We've checked the record of phone calls made from your number. There's nothing on the fifteenth or the nineteenth. Both days are blank. There were no calls to "T".

'Doesn't mean they didn't happen.' He cast about for an explanation. 'Maybe she used the phone at work, or went out to the callbox up the street.'

'Why?'

'For privacy. Or maybe she intended to call, but "T" called her first. There won't be any record of incoming calls.'

'I think it's more likely the diary entries are forgeries. Manufactured evidence.'

'Oh, come on.'

'An attempt to deflect attention.'

'It's Steph's handwriting, for Christ's sake.'

'I wouldn't call it handwriting. Most of the entries are printed.'

'Her printing, then.'

'Easy to fake.'

Diamond gave an exasperated sigh.

McGarvie added, 'You had plenty of time to work on it'

'The diary was in the bloody handbag in the stone vase in the park.'

'That's open to question. Our search team didn't find it.'

'Because they didn't look in the right place.'

'They tell me they did.'

'They're covering their arses. Ask Warburton. He slung the bag in there.'

'He's a dipso. His memory isn't reliable.'

'He remembered enough to tell me.'

'So you say. You didn't pass the information on to us. That bag was potentially crucial evidence and you recovered it yourself, if your account is true, with no witness. Hours later, you handed it in.'

'I told you at the time, I looked at what was inside.'

'Did you write anything in the diary?'

'Did I what?'

'You heard me.'

'Oh, get away! You're losing it, McGarvie.'

McGarvie reached for the package containing the gun and drew it back across the table like a gambler who has scooped the pool. 'The next step is to have this test-fired and see if the rifling matches the bullets found at the scene.'

'You really want to stick this on me, don't you?' Diamond said. 'Have you given any thought at all as to why I would murder my wife?'

McGarvie was unfazed. 'Why would anyone murder her? She appears to have been a popular, charming, inoffensive woman. If anyone has a reason, it's you, and it's well hidden. I don't know what happened in your marriage, but it'll come out – unless you want to open up now.'

'You disgust me.'

'In my shoes, you'd think the same, Peter. The husband has to be the number-one suspect, and when he brings suspicion on himself, you act.'

A telling comment.

Diamond said bleakly, without conceding anything, 'What happens now?'

'I'll get you to write a statement about the gun. When ballistics have checked it, we can talk again. I'm not going to hold you here.'

'Am I supposed to be grateful? In the meantime, the real killer is laughing up his sleeve.'

'We're pursuing every possible lead.'

'Oh, sure.'

'Interview terminated at four twenty-six.'

The phone was going when he finally got home after six. He'd had all the hassle he could take for one day, so he didn't pick it up. They'd give up presently. He and Steph had experimented with an answerphone for a time. It hadn't survived long. It was faulty (or, more likely, his attempt to install it was faulty) and kept running the messages into each other. You'd get a 'Hi, Diamonds' from Steph's sister and then a male voice would come in selling double glazing, followed by the tail end of a message about a parcel some unknown firm had been trying to deliver for days. He'd ripped out the contraption in a fury and plugged in the simple phone they'd used before.