Peter Lovesey - Diamond Dust

She was checking alternately between the two. 'Your wife was shot in a park in Bath?'

Diamond nodded. He'd cross-checked everything in his own mind, and he was as sure of the facts as Stormy, though he tried to appear calm.

'And Dixon-Bligh was once married to your wife? Why would he want to kill her?' Gina asked.

'For money, for his drugs.' Put bluntly like that, it was chilling. But every explanation he'd ever imagined was guaranteed to chill.

She kept her bright, shrewd eyes on him, inviting him to say more.

Patiently, he took her through the crucial details. 'I told you there were entries in her diary about phoning someone she knew as "T". Dixon-Bligh's name is Edward. Ted, right? That's the name you've been using yourself, I notice.'

'Right.'

He switched to a more immediate way of telling it. 'She reminds herself when I'm coming in late: "P out. Must call T." He says he needs to see her, and she promises to think it over. She gets her hair done – and that's typical of Steph, wanting to look right, even for a meeting with that berk. She calls him again – from a public phone, so the calls won't appear on our statement – and arranges this meeting in the park on the Tuesday. She says nothing to me about any of this, and Steph wasn't like that. Since reading what she wrote, I've driven myself nuts trying to understand why she set up those phone calls and meetings and kept me out of it. But now I learn he was a drug-addict, it's all much clearer. This is the set-up. He's pestering her for money, and she doesn't want me to know about it. Steph is confident of handling him herself. He's her ex, and she thinks she knows him. She may well have been sending him small amounts of cash for some time. She'd know my reaction.'

'Unsympathetic?'

'To put it mildly.'

'Does he possess a gun?'

Unexpectedly, Fiona Appleby spoke up. 'Yes.'

All eyes were on her.

'What sort?' Diamond asked.

'Pistol.'

'Revolver?'

'Yes. He did some shooting in the Air Force. He was on the command team at Bisley. The gun was his own. He kept it in the drawer beside the till. Said he'd produce it if ever anyone tried to hold up the restaurant.'

Stormy turned up his palms as if no more needed saying.

But Gina still required convincing. 'Why shoot her when all he wanted was money for drugs?'

Diamond answered in a measured tone, drained of emotion. 'He brings the gun with him intending to force her to hand over more money than she intends, or credit cards, maybe, instead of the small handout she offers. She refuses. Steph was very strong-willed. He points the gun at her head. She tries to push him away or says something that angers him and he squeezes the trigger.'

This had directness, the simplicity of cause and effect that carried conviction.

Gina had listened impassively. She pointed a finger at him. 'Okay. It's payback time. You said just now you knew of places he might be hiding in. Were you bullshitting, or can you deliver?'

In point of fact, all the bullshitting had come from Stormy, but sometimes when your bluff is called, the brain goes into overdrive. Without hesitation Diamond launched into the story Steph had once told him about the beach hut. 'At one time when he was in the Air Force and married to Steph they were based at Tangmere, in Sussex. They lived in married quarters, I think, and didn't like it much. The one good thing about it was that they were close to the sea, and on his days off they'd escape to some local beach with a peculiar name I'm trying to remember. Wittlesham?'

'Wittering?' Gina said, following this acutely. 'West Wittering isn't far from Tangmere.'

'You've got it. West Wittering. Steph told me they rented a beach hut one summer. They'd use it to change into swimming things, and brew up tea on an oil stove and so on. The point about this is that even after the rental ended, he kept a spare key, and for years he used to go back and open up the hut and use it.'

Gina was frowning. 'After it was rented to someone else?'

'People only use them a fraction of the time.'

'Sneaky.'

'That was Steph's reaction. She wouldn't join him.'

Gina was ahead of him now. 'You're thinking he might be holed up at the beach?'

'It wouldn't be a bad place to hide.'

'Out of season, too,' Stormy added support. 'Nice and quiet. You could survive pretty well in a beach hut.'

Diamond put in a note of caution. 'I don't even know if the huts are still there. Do they still have them at West Wittering?

'All the way along,' Gina said. 'I'm going to call my guvnor.'

Eleven hours in, Curtis McGarvie tried another tactic on Joe Florida. Strictly speaking, the murder of Patricia Weather was being handled by DCI Billy Bowers. He'd informed Bowers of the arrest and invited him to join in the questioning, but up to now he hadn't appeared.

'Where were you on Friday, March the twelfth?'

Florida answered casually, 'Who knows?'

'London?'

'Maybe.'

'South-west London? Your own manor?'

'What's this about?'

'A woman went missing that day.'

'Hold on, will you?' Florida said. 'Are you trying to stick something else on me?'

'Her body wasn't found until a few days ago, on a railway embankment in Surrey.'

'Jesus, I don't believe this,' Florida said, turning to his brief. 'These assholes want to fit me up with a double murder.'

The solicitor said, 'My client wasn't informed of this at the time of his arrest.'

'Correct,' McGarvie told him without apologising. 'I was getting ahead of myself. At this stage we're questioning him about the murder of Stephanie Diamond.'

'What does he mean – "at this stage"?' Florida demanded. 'They can't do this to me.'

'We'll take a break,' McGarvie said. 'We've got a long session ahead of us.'

West Wittering was less than an hour's drive from the safe house. The long stretch of coast on the Selsey peninsula is girdled by salt-marsh, sand dunes and fields where geese congregate in hundreds. On summer weekends the beach attracts large crowds, but in October is left to a few dog-walkers, windsurfers and the occasional scavenger with a metal detector. The land above the beach is owned by the West Wittering Estate and you enter through a coin-operated barrier. When the tide is out, as it was when the armed response team arrived, the stretch of sand is vast.

Officers in helmets and black body armour and carrying Heckler & Koch MP5s were already checking the beach huts with dogs when Diamond and Stormy Weather drove up. There was an air of confidence about the search. Apparently a local shopkeeper had been shown a picture of Dixon-Bligh and was certain he had bought food a number of times in the past two weeks.

Stormy looked at Diamond as if he was Nostradamus.

The wooden huts, about a hundred and fifty on a turf promenade above the beach, were a testimony to people's individuality. They had obviously been there long enough for some to have been replaced and others given a facelift, so the doors and walls were decorated in a host of different styles and colours. Shuttered windows, verandahs and payed fronts were desirable extras. The majority were padlocked. A few of the oldest had conventional mortice locks built into the doors. It would be one of these Dixon-Bligh had illicitly used.

Diamond eyed the line of pitched roofs stretching almost to the sand dunes on the skyline at East Head, and asked the senior man how long the search would take.

'Not long, sir. The dogs will know if he's inside.'

This confident prediction was followed shortly by a result. The two springer spaniels started yelping and scratching at the door of one shabby hut towards the near end of the row. Their handlers had to haul them away.

'Game on,' the man in charge said.