The Last Detective

'You'll have to forgive me for some of the things I said earlier,' he went on in the same companionable vein. 'In my job you get so obsessed with the facts of a case that human considerations get pushed aside. I mean, it's easy for me to overlook the fact that you came here as a volunteer, to render assistance.'

'Which I have rendered to the point of exhaustion,' said Jackman acidly. He seemed to find the charm resistible.

Diamond nodded. 'Too true. You could probably do with another coffee, Greg.'

Perplexed by the change, but correctly spotting it as a cynical manoeuvre, Jackman leapt from there to a wrong conclusion. 'Is this where you soften me up before your oppo comes back and puts the boot in?'

This brought a smile of genuine amusement from Diamond as he savoured the notion of John Wigfull, Mr Clean from headquarters, laying into a suspect. 'He's gone to Bristol to talk to a witness.'

'It was meant as a joke,' said Jackman unconvincingly.

Diamond grinned again. 'I'm beginning to understand your sense of humour.'

'I think I would like that coffee.'

'Fine. Let's go down to the canteen. I don't know about you, but I'm famished.' He looked at his watch and picked up the phone. 'Do you mind?' he asked Jackman. 'I ought to have phoned before this. She's used to this, but she likes to be told.' He pressed out a number. 'Me,' he said presently into the mouthpiece. 'How's it going?… I'm not quite sure, my love, but soon as I can. What are you up to yourself?… I'd forgotten it was on… Well, yes, of course, but don't wait for me.' He replaced the phone and said to Jackman, 'She's watching the football. When I'm at home and want to look at it, she complains. I'll never understand women.'

He deliberately pursued this theme at some length downstairs over toasted sandwiches and coffee, to a background of old Beatles' songs and a noisy card game in one corner led by a former sergeant, now employed as a civilian computer operator. Once or twice Diamond's reminiscences of quirky women he had met succeeded in relaxing the muscles at the side of Jackman's face, the next thing to raising a smile. Encouraged, he went on to talk disarmingly of his difficulties courting Stephanie, his wife who, when they had met, had been Brown Owl to the local troop of Brownies. He had visited them in Hammersmith as community involvement officer, to instruct them in road safety, and had been enchanted by their winsome leader. A fuse had been lit that evening, and almost every spark and splutter in the consequent relationship had been witnessed by little girls in brown uniforms.

'I must have been bloody dedicated to put up with it,' he recalled. 'Steph had to take me seriously when I turned up at the summer camp with a couple of donkeys. The desk sergeant at Hammersmith had opened a sanctuary for old mokes after he retired. He was a good mate. I think those donkeys swung it for me. Steph and I got engaged soon after. I was slimmer in those days.' He grinned. 'Relatively. Well, I could sit astride a donkey without someone complaining to the RSPCA.'

He paused, crammed the last of the sandwich into his mouth, and asked, 'Do you believe in love, Greg?'

'In lover

Diamond nodded. 'Is there such a thing, or are we all deluding ourselves? Is it just a con trick by songwriters and authors? Desire I can understand. Admiration and respect. But love is something else. I mean, did you love Geraldine when you married her?'

Jackman gave him a long look. 'Is this what you've been leading up to? You want to know more about my relationship with my wife? Why didn't you come straight out with it?'

'Skip it, if you feel like that,' Diamond responded, piqued. 'I'm only trying to find some common ground.'

'Peter, my old chum,' Jackman said sarcastically, 'if it's going to get you off my back, I'll tell you anything.' He cleared his throat and said, 'I'd better rephrase that. If there are things you want to ask, let's get them over with. I want to get home tonight. Yes, I believe I loved her. Later we ran into problems, but I retained some tender feelings towards her. Does that cover it?'

'Apart from her good looks, what was her appeal?'

'I thought we'd been over this. I was flattered that she seemed to prefer me to the glamorous TV people she worked with.'

'That isn't love.'

'Look, what are you trying to prove now – that I'm devoid of human feelings – some sort of psychopath? Do you have some theory about murder that you want to slot me into? I loved Gerry because she was like no one else I'd ever met. She was witty, observant, brave and optimistic. In a unique and mysterious way, her mind was in touch with mine. The same things amused and delighted us. Will that do?'

The tribute was brief, but convincing.

'And then it went wrong,' Jackman continued. 'Catastrophically wrong. That precious contact between our minds was lost. I don't know why. Up to a point I can understand – her career falling apart – but why she turned on me as if I was the enemy, I'll never know. With her friends she was still the same Gerry, bubbling over with vitality. Not any more with me.'

'She made your life intolerable,' Diamond prompted. 'You made that clear.'

'No,'Jackman was quick to correct him. 'Not intolerable. I didn't use that word. The point is that I did tolerate her.'

'That'll teach me to feed words to a professor of English,' said Diamond wryly, not wanting to stem the flow. 'Let's just say that she was being difficult. Why didn't you divorce her, Greg? Wasn't that the obvious way to deal with the problem?'

Jackman let out a sharp breath as if to mark a protest that he was being prodded into the bull-ring again. 'You're still implying that I solved the problem by killing her.'

'I didn't say that.'

'You didn't have to.' He pushed away the plate with his half-eaten sandwich. 'If you want to know, I wasn't opposed to divorce, and nor was Gerry. I think we both knew that we were travelling rapidly down that path, but we hadn't discussed it.'

'Why not?'

'First you've got to remember that we'd only been married two years. Okay, I'd seen astonishing changes in Gerry's personality in that time, but I could understand why. She'd been through a traumatic time, having to leave the BBC, pull up her roots and come and live in the country with me. It wasn't the way we'd planned to run our lives. Maybe I was being naive, but I was convinced that the woman she had become wasn't the real Gerry. She needed more time to adjust to being an ordinary human being instead of a media figure.' His eyes darted left and right, signalling a disclosure more profound. No one else in the canteen could have heard anything over 'She Loves You'. 'This is going to sound quite loopy, but I sometimes felt as if some demon had taken possession of her. If I could have exorcised it, we might have saved our marriage. To come back to your question, I didn't talk to her about divorce because I didn't want to abandon her. The love we had felt for each other ought to have got us through the crisis.'

'You still had blazing rows.'

'Of course – she was bugging me at every opportunity.'

'Did you kill her, Greg?'

'No.'

Question and answer, straight out.

'Without premeditation, I mean.'

'Ah.' Jackman opened his eyes a fraction wider. 'That's the bait, is it? Manslaughter, rather than murder.'

'You've studied the terminology, then.'

'I do read other things, besides Milton and Shakespeare. No, Mr Diamond, I won't settle for manslaughter. I'm not settling for anything you suggest. If you want to stitch me up, that's going to be your mistake entirely. Don't expect me to conspire in it.'

Diamond ground his teeth. For a moment he didn't trust himself to go on.

'Speaking of writers,' Jackman added, 'I think it was a character in a Joe Orton play who said that policemen, like red squirrels, must be protected. Your bushy tail could be at risk if you make a mistake over me.'