“If it was an accident and she fell and hit her head on the table, as you were suggesting, his behaviour is still suspicious. You don’t leave your wife lying unconscious in a pool of blood.”
“No.” For a moment his eyes glazed over, his thoughts far away, to a park in Bath over a year ago.
“Did I say something?” Hen asked.
He took a sip of beer and forced himself to return to the here and now. “What I was getting at-what I’m trying to say, Hen- is that when I looked at that bank statement with the large cash deposits I revised my thoughts about this man Smith. You find figures like that and you have to think this fellow is onto a scam.”
“Agreed. But how does that change anything?”
“It could be why he avoids us, why he didn’t stick around at Wightview Sands to answer questions after the body was found. And why he did a runner yesterday after he heard the police had been to his house.”
“You’re saying he may be in the clear? He didn’t have anything to do with Emma Tysoe’s murder?”
“I’m not ruling anything out at present. It’s another way of interpreting his actions, that’s all.”
“Take him out of the frame, and we don’t have anyone,” she said with mock reproach. “Is zees ze way you work, Monsieur Poirot? Me, I suspect everyone, including the cat.”
“And a couple of thousand others who were on that beach.”
“Them, too.”
“Was there a cat in the Tysoe house?” he asked.
“I didn’t notice one.”
He grinned.
They looked at the menu. Diamond said he fancied the steak and Guinness pie with chips, and Hen surprised him by saying she’d join him. He hadn’t yet heard her ship-of-the-desert theory of nutrition.
“The other thing about Smith,” he said, “is that he’s a family man. Not the most considerate of men, as Mrs Mead informed us, but a husband and a father, for all that. I find it difficult to cast a family man as the killer of Axel Summers.”
“You’re sure the two killings are connected? The top brass at Bramshill didn’t agree with you.”
“I’m not sure of anything, Hen. But I don’t buy the theory that this killer is so rigid in his thinking that he wouldn’t dispose of someone like Emma Tysoe who might have fingered him before he completed his quota of murders.”
“The method was different.”
“He had to be flexible. Strangulation was a suitable MO for the beach.”
“It’s almost unknown.”
“What?”
“For a killer to use a different MO,” Hen pointed out. “They find a method that suits them and stick to it.”
“This Ancient Mariner guy is out on his own,” he said in a way that blended disgust and respect. “He’s something else, Hen, totally callous. Self-centred. Committed. He kills to make some kind of point. He doesn’t pick his victims because he hates them, but because they fit his plan.”
“But how would he have known Emma Tysoe was at work on the case? There was nothing in the papers. Even her workmates didn’t know.”
“He’d expect a case like this to be referred to a profiler. He’s read all the books on serial killers. You can bet he has. He’ll know about the Home Office approved list. It’s circulated. He’ll have worked out which of the names were most likely to be consulted. Wouldn’t be difficult to make a shortlist and find out who was currently off work doing some profiling.”
“Crafty.”
“He is.”
“I meant you, sport,” she said, “thinking it out.”
“Thanks, but I’d prefer some other word. How about brilliant?”
“I could even run to that if you find me an ashtray.”
After he brought one to the table, she said, “Peter, has it crossed your mind that when a profiler is murdered for being on a case, the police must be at risk as well?”
He played this down. “Emma Tysoe was killed because she was clever-clever enough, given time, to finger the killer. He wouldn’t expect the poor old plods to suss him out. Your ace detective Jimmy Barneston needn’t miss any sleep over it.”
“What about you and me?”
He smiled. “He’s never heard of us.”
“I’ve been on TV appealing for information.”
“I wouldn’t worry, Hen. That would just confirm his belief that we’re up shit creek.”
“Oh, thanks!”
Their food arrived, pub-sized portions, and he looked at hers wondering where she could possibly stow it all. She was just a sparrow, the shortest officer he’d met in years, and she wasn’t chunky, either. “So what got you into this job?”
She rolled her eyes upwards. “You want the story? I was looking for respect. Didn’t get much in my family, being the youngest, with two older sisters and a brother. Wanted to prove I could hack it, and picked the toughest job I could think of. I was supposed to be five foot four, minimum, so I wore heels for the interview and put up my hair in a topknot. They had some fun at my expense, said the ballet school was up the street and stuff like that, but they liked my nerve and let me in. I was sent to Portsmouth Central first, and had to tough it out with the lads. If the sarge tells you to break up a fight in a pub on a Friday night, you don’t argue. It’s a funny thing how many of these bruisers turn out to be pussy cats when a woman shows up.”
“Respect.”
She laughed. “No way. They’re just embarrassed.”
“You get respect from your family now, I bet.”
“That’s true. My big sisters phone me up and tell me their problems.”
“And you put in for CID and got it?”
“That was lucky timing on my part, just when they’d seen the need for more women. Some of the guys thought it was preferential treatment. Most of them want to get out of uniform, don’t they? I didn’t have any conscience. I’d put up with a lot to get where I was. And I’ve not done badly.”
“You’ve earned that respect.”
Hen grinned broadly. “Oh yes?”
They might have gone on to discuss Diamond’s in-and-out career, but they didn’t. Instead, they talked strategy. Hen was still uneasy about Bramshill. “They’ve put up the shutters-as they see it-on the Axel Summers murder, so we’re right out of order trying to pin these two killings on the same guy.”
“I’m not worried,” Diamond said. “Let’s play it by the book. We’re investigating the killing of Emma Tysoe and we’ve every right to find out what she was doing in the last month of her life. They can’t stop us following up anything suspicious. We don’t know where it will lead us, but if it takes us into forbidden territory we simply say we’re doing our job.”
“Like finding out what’s on her computer?”
“Exactly.”
“You’re confident we can decrypt her hard disk?”
“I’m confident Clive can-given time.”
A surprise awaited them when they returned to the hospital. Instead of the saturnine DI Bradley in his leather jacket and jeans, a tall man in a grey three-piece greeted them outside the intensive care ward. He couldn’t have been much over thirty, with dark, swept-back hair making him look as Italian as the cut of his suit, except that he was blue-eyed. Diamond’s first thought was that this was a doctor with bad news, but Hen stepped forward and shook hands. “For all that’s wonderful! Jimmy the Priest! Peter, meet Jimmy Barneston.”
The man himself.
“The Priest?” Diamond queried, after he’d felt the firm handshake.
“He’s always hearing confessions.”
“It’s not down to me. It’s the Sussex Inquisition. People like Hen Mallin,” Barneston told Diamond. He had an air of confidence it had taken Diamond twenty years to acquire. “I decided to join you for this. We can be frank with each other, can’t we?”
“Say no more.”
Diamond came under sharp scrutiny from the ice-blue eyes.
Barneston went on, “Bramshill brought me up to speed on your investigation and they tell me you know about the case I’m on. Something of interest may be developing here, so I’d like to hear what Mrs Smith has to say.”