‘Did anyone visit you in your room?’
‘No.’
‘She didn’t phone?’
‘The waitress? No.’
‘Is there any way you can prove you were in the hotel? Did you make any calls yourself?’
‘It was after midnight. You don’t start phoning people in the small hours.’
‘You didn’t ask for room service?’
‘I took a shower and got into bed.’
‘Next morning did you have breakfast in the hotel?’
‘I don’t bother with breakfast. I left early.’
‘After checking out?’
An impatient sigh. ‘They had a voucher from my firm’s travel agent. If I have any extras they have my card details, so I didn’t need to.’
‘You got in your car and drove away without speaking to a soul?’
‘You’re making me sound like a guilty man.’
‘Agreed, Mr Monnington. It’s a pity, because we’ve only got your word for it that you spent the night in the Hilton. May we look inside your car?’
‘What’s that going to tell you?’
‘We believe the victim was driven to the park where she was found.’
‘Fuck off, will you?’ His salesman’s facade had crashed.
Diamond reached for the door. ‘We’ll take a look at your car.’
Outside, Angie was waiting. She may have heard it all. If so, she wasn’t giving much away. ‘Are you finished? Your meal’s ready, Dalt.’
‘Shove it in the oven.’
‘Charming. You’re not going out, are you?’
He ignored her and led the detectives out to the black Mondeo. Diamond asked him to unlock it. ‘Nice condition. When was it cleaned?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘So recently?’
‘I’m meeting clients all the time. Appearances matter.’
Leaman had the door open. ‘Valeted inside as well as out.’
Diamond unfastened the boot and looked inside. ‘The full works, by the look of it.’ He leaned over for a closer inspection. A vacuuming doesn’t always remove everything. That young DC Gilbert was right. A single hair, a piece of fingernail, an eyelash even, could prove that Delia Williamson’s body had been lying here. But he couldn’t see anything obvious. He said to Leaman, ‘Got your phone? I’d like a crime scene expert to go over this.’
From the doorway, Angie called out, ‘Don’t they need a warrant, or something?’
‘Yes, where’s your warrant?’ Monnington asked Diamond while Leaman was using the mobile.
‘Why? Aren’t you going to cooperate?’
‘This car is my livelihood.’
‘Because if you get awkward, we can look at the tread on your tyres and check your emissions. Why don’t you leave this to us? Go and eat.’
This salesman wasn’t equal to Diamond’s hard sell. With a shrug and a shake of the head he left them to it.
Wimbledon CID said they would arrange for a crime scene investigator to come out within the hour. She was faster than that, under twenty minutes. She looked about seventeen, but had the confidence of someone twice that age. She put on her white zipper overall — causing some curtains to twitch across the street — and went over the interior of the car and the boot minutely, using adhesive strips to lift fibres and particles and then a hand vacuum for anything she might have missed.
‘Would you still buy one of his hot tubs?’ Diamond asked Leaman on the drive home.
‘Possibly not, guv, but we didn’t see him at his best.’
‘At his best! He was bricking it from start to finish.’
‘He didn’t want Angie finding out too much.’
‘Angie — or you and me?’
‘Any of us, I guess.’
Diamond said nothing while they made a turn at a roundabout. London drivers took no prisoners. He took it up again with: ‘Would you say it was one big lie, about returning to the hotel and spending the night there?’
‘He went back to the hotel without a doubt.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘He’d left his room number, hadn’t he? He’d have been waiting to see if she called.’
‘Good point.’ There was logic in what Leaman was saying. He could be a pain, but he was one of the brightest on the squad. ‘Did she visit his room or did he go out to meet her? That’s the question. Did you notice any CCTV at the Hilton?’
‘They must have it.’
‘Get it checked, John.’
‘I’m not a betting man,’ Leaman said when they reached the motorway, ‘but there’s something odd about that guy. I’ve got a gut feeling.’
‘You’ve got a gut feeling? I’ve had a gut feeling ever since you started the car,’ Diamond said. ‘Do me a favour and drive a little slower, will you?’
6
B ack in Bath he got in his own car and made his regular shopping trip to Sainsbury’s. These days he relied mainly on tinned food, pasta and eggs. He was capable of more adventurous cooking, but it wasn’t high in his priorities. Wasn’t everyone supposed to have oily fish two or three times a week? Well, he consumed his quota of tinned pilchards, several times over. The fact that everyone was also supposed to have fresh salad didn’t impress him. Salad was too fiddly. He had better things to do than washing lettuce and cutting up beetroot.
He also shopped for Raffles, his cat. More tins. When the Whiskas ran out, Raffles was willing to stretch a point and subsist on pilchards. Between them they must have sent a thousand empty tins for recycling. ‘We’re saving the world, you and me, puss.’
This evening he picked the cashier he called Fast Edie and was soon through her queue, pushing his trolley of bags to the exit. Traffic permitting, he’d be home for Channel Four News.
Then the usual challenge: where had he left the car? This was one of Sainsbury’s most elegant sites in Britain, at the converted Green Park station, a Victorian building with bold architectural features that tended to distract when you arrived. He clicked his tongue, thought hard, and headed in the right direction. Loaded the boot, returned the trolley to the bay, got into the car, started up, made sure his way was clear and reversed.
Something was wrong. He felt some resistance, as if he’d left the handbrake on. A glance at the control panel told him he hadn’t. He checked in both mirrors and continued reversing and now there was a definite lumpy feeling to the movement. A flat tyre?
‘That’s all I need.’
Then a man rapped on the window.
He wound it down.
‘Can’t you see what you’re doing, you berk?’ the man said. ‘You’re going over your shopping.’
He got out and had a look at a sorry mess. He’d reversed over two Sainsbury’s carriers. The first must have contained at least a dozen eggs and some milk. Egg yolk was dripping from his tyre into a puddle of milk, egg and what looked like jam or pickled beetroot. The second was still wedged under the wheel. Little, if anything, could be salvaged.
He said to the man, ‘It isn’t my shopping.’
‘It’s nobody’s now,’ the man said. ‘It’s history.’
He said by way of an excuse, ‘You can’t see from inside the car. It wasn’t there when I got in. I would have noticed.’
A few more people came over to look. ‘That’s them expensive free-range eggs,’ one woman said, bending for a closer inspection. ‘Extra-large free-range eggs. I can see the packet.’
‘Semi-skimmed milk,’ another woman said. ‘Scottish shortbread. What a waste.’
‘Who does it belong to?’ Diamond asked loudly enough to be heard by everyone. ‘It’s not my stuff.’ He crouched and tried without success to free the second bag. If he could move the car forward a few inches he might save some of the contents. He stepped back inside.
One of the women said, ‘He’s going to drive off.’
‘Hit and run,’ said someone else. ‘That’s someone’s shopping you’ve squashed. Bastard.’ She started hammering on the back window.
Diamond eased the car forward and got out. All the excitement had attracted quite a gathering, and the mood was not sympathetic. Not to him, anyway. He felt under the car and retrieved the second carrier bag. It dripped strange liquid over his shoe.
‘I can smell garlic,’ the woman who’d called him a bastard said. ‘That’s their best pesto sauce.’