Peter Lovesey: Stagestruck

Centre stage was new territory for Peter Diamond. He wasn’t comfortable in this position, being invited to lay out his case, yet he couldn’t risk walking off when he had the man in sight. The sensible response was to engage with Dawkins for as long as possible in the hope that George Pidgeon would see what was going on and come to his aid. So he started to voice some of the things that properly should have been spoken under caution in an interview room with a tape running. ‘I got your number, quite literally,’ he told Dawkins. ‘Five-one-eight-nine, on a seven year rap in Manchester Prison, Strangeways as it was known then, 1983 to 1990, for fraud, embezzlement, false pretences, depriving old ladies of their life’s savings. I spoke to the deputy governor this evening. You’re a con man, known at that time as Hector Dacreman.’

‘Quite a leap from Strangeways to Sergeant of Police,’ Dawkins said, unimpressed, as if there was room for doubt.

‘Yes, but you’re good at what you do. I asked for the names of prisoners active in the drama group that flourished then, the group Denise Pearsall supervised as a visiting tutor, and I was told convict Dacremen, 5189, was one of the leads in the 1988 production of Waiting for Godot. There is even a photo from the prison magazine, scanned and e-mailed to me. The likeness satisfies me. It would satisfy anyone.’

‘It’s of Estragon, presumably.’

‘Dacreman, I said. That was the name you were known by.’

‘Is the actor wearing make-up? Is it really me, do you think? They say everyone has a double somewhere in the world.’

‘You kept the same initials, too. Hector Dacreman. Horatio Dawkins.’

He gave a sarcastic laugh. ‘Nothing gets past you.’

‘They’re sending your fingerprints.’

‘One way or another, you seem to think you have snared me.’

‘You snared yourself,’ Diamond said, ‘the first day you worked in CID.’

A slight frown. ‘How was that?’

‘Your version of the interview with Denise in the case file. I asked you to type up all the witness statements. When I compared the printout with the notes Dawn Reed made with her speed-writing, I noticed you left off the first words Denise spoke when she saw you: “Have we met before?”’

‘Small talk,’ Dawkins said. ‘You don’t put small talk in a witness statement.’

‘Not small in this case. It came as a huge shock for you that Denise thought she recognised you. You quickly glossed over that by saying she must have seen you patrolling the streets of Bath and she seems to have accepted that. She wouldn’t have expected one of her former convict actors to reinvent himself as a police officer.’

Dawkins smirked in self-congratulation.

‘In your prison days she wouldn’t even have known you were a con artist,’ Diamond continued. ‘It’s not the thing for visiting tutors to ask the inmates about their crimes.’

‘Please go on. I’m learning volumes.’

‘So the moment you met again at the theatre and she thought she knew you, she was at risk of being murdered. You’re a vastly ambitious man. Conning your way into the police after serving a prison term was a triumph, difficult and dangerous, but you managed it, a massive investment of time and deception. I’ve seen your record, the lies, the forged references that got you into Hendon as a recruit.’

‘And if you’ve seen my file you’ll know Horatio Dawkins was the star of his year at Hendon.’

‘Amazingly, yes. Praised for supporting the young recruits straight out of school and improving morale. Eighteen weeks of training and then a job in the Met, and within four years a sergeant’s stripes and the move to Bath Central. Not enough. You set your sights on a transfer to CID. And what an opportunity arrived when the Assistant Chief Constable joined the BLOGs group you were choreographing.’

He smiled again. ‘There is a saying: he dances well to whom fortune pipes.’ His ego couldn’t resist these asides, regardless that they were confirming Diamond’s case.

‘And yet Denise had the knowledge to destroy all you’d achieved. She had to be eliminated. You thought of a way of killing her that would be passed off as suicide. You set an elaborate trap. First you armed yourself with Rohypnol. As a sergeant from uniform you’d had ample opportunities to acquire the drug, confiscating it from night-clubbers. An opportunist like you isn’t going to surrender all the drugs he snatches.’

‘Speculation.’

‘We found traces in dressing room eleven.’

‘I know that, but you can’t link it with me.’

‘Forensics will. Let’s stay with the trap you set for Denise. You sent her some kind of message to lure her into the theatre on Tuesday night after everyone else had left. My guess is that you offered to tell her the true explanation for Clarion’s accident. Poor woman, she was distraught about it, half fearing she’d made some terrible mistake with the make-up, so the chance of redemption was sure to reel her in. She was to meet you in dressing room eleven. You’re familiar with the layout of the theatre, having choreographed several BLOGs productions. Knowing the door codes, as you did, you could come and go at will. You met Denise, slipped Rohypnol into her drink, took her onto the riggers’ platform in the fly tower and pushed her off. It was meant to be interpreted as suicide.’

‘And does that complete the case for the prosecution?’ Dawkins asked in a measured voice as if he was a judge, not the accused.

‘No. There’s more. It became increasingly clear to me that someone on our side of the investigation was bent. The murderer was getting inside information.’

‘Such as…?’

‘The call that came in from Bristol Police about Clarion discharging herself from hospital. You put it on computer instead of telling me directly.’

‘I acted properly, filing the call. As a newcomer I wasn’t to know you need telling everything by word of mouth.’

‘That wasn’t the reason. You were alarmed. Clarion was a loose cannon. None of us knew what she’d been thinking while she was stuck in hospital or what she intended to do next. You could see the suicide theory being blown out of the water.’

‘Immaterial,’ Dawkins said. ‘You insisted on keeping an open mind about Denise’s suicide.’

‘Which was precisely why you decided the time had come to remove all doubt.’

‘You can’t believe the suicide note was my doing.’

‘Oh, but I do. I know. It was deviously planned, I give you that. You came up with the suggestion that an extra powder-box spiked with caustic soda was hidden somewhere backstage. I sent you and Ingeborg to search for it. You had the fake note ready in your pocket. While you were making the search, you planted the note in the German oven and of course it was discovered after I arrived. Neat. But there was a flaw.’

‘The famous specks of ink?’ Dawkins said, still unruffled.

‘Yes. I had Paul Gilbert checking everyone’s printer and he couldn’t find the right one. The reason is that it was in our own CID room. Tonight after everyone had gone I examined the statements you typed and I looked at Denise Pearsall’s and saw the telltale specks in exactly the formation we found on the suicide note. It was bloody obvious that it had been printed in our own office and we had a killer on the team.’

‘No prizes for guessing who you thought of first.’

‘I had to be certain. I wanted to know precisely who Horatio Dawkins was and how he came to join the police service. I had a hunch that you used the old trick of stealing a dead man’s identity, so I looked in the death registers for someone called Dawkins of about your age who fell off the perch between 1990 and 1994. I found him, got his date and place of birth and matched them to the details on your file.’