“What?”
“You give her the dirt, regret it later, go back and silence her.”
“No.” Martin hammered the seat in front with his fist. “I’ve told you the truth. Britt wasn’t interested in me or my career. She simply came to my place to ride. I fancied her, drove her home a few times, but she left me in no doubt that she wanted to be left alone. Is that too difficult for you to grasp?”
Outside, the daylight had gone. Dusk is a nonevent on some October evenings. All the other cars had left except a Range Rover that must have belonged to Martin. And still nothing of substance had emerged from this interview. Stubbornly Diamond began casting the net for one more trawl.
“All right, Mr. Martin. I’m accepting what you’ve told me. You didn’t make love to her. You didn’t give her material for a story. You didn’t kill her.” He let that sink in before saying, “You’re still a witness, and you could be a crucial one. You spoke to her several times in the last month of her life. You’ve told me about other men she mentioned-Billington and G.B. Was there anyone else?”
Martin thought a moment said, “No.”
Diamond continued to probe. “I asked you once before if she ever mentioned John Mountjoy.”
“I didn’t know of his existence until I heard he was arrested.”
“Right. Did she speak of anyone else indirectly, without speaking his name, any other man she was seeing?”
“No.”
“Someone, perhaps, who was watching her, someone she didn’t even know? Did you get the impression that she knew she was under threat?”
“No. Quite the contrary. She had this air of confidence.”
“As if she was in control of her life?”
“Yes. Well…” He stopped.
At Martin’s side in the darkness, Peter Diamond waited.
“She did once confide that she-how did she express it?-that she didn’t want to be under an obligation to anyone. I think I offered to forget the fee she owed me for the riding. She insisted on paying. She said once a friend had helped her out at a difficult time. She said something about acts of kindness putting the recipient under an obligation.”
“Did she tell you the name?”
“No.”
“A man?”
“Yes, I got that impression.”
“And he was troubling her?”
Martin shook his head. “She didn’t put it like that. I’m trying to remember what she did say. The sense I got was that she’d been through some major crisis a couple of years back.”
“Here-in this country?”
“I think so. It must have been here, because she talked about him as if he was still about, somewhere close. Anyway, he helped her through the crisis, and this involved some kind of risk on his part. She felt obligated and she wasn’t comfortable with that.”
“She was worried that he’d call in the debt, so to speak?”
“I don’t know.”
“And that was all?”
“It may be that I’ve got it out of proportion. It was only said to-”
Diamond closed him down abruptly. “You can leave now.” He leaned across and pushed open the car door.
When it was shut again, Diamond told Julie, “Conkwell. We’re going to Conkwell.”
She asked if he wished to move into the front seat.
“No,” he said. “We’ve got to be quick. We don’t have as much time as I thought.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Approaching the pub called the Weston, they saw brake lights coming on and remembered the tailback caused every evening along that section of the Upper Bristol Road. Diamond was fretting. He asked if there wasn’t some shortcut.
“The best I can do is cross the river at Windsor Bridge,” Julie offered. “I was going that way anyway. Why Conkwell?”
“Mm?”
“You did say you wanted to be driven to Conkwell. I was asking why, that’s all.”
“Don’t you remember anything?” he chided her. “It’s where Jake Pinkerton has his recording studio. In the woods at Conkwell.”
She said icily, “I wasn’t there when you interviewed Pinkerton. “
“Where were you, then?”
“Don’t you remember?” She echoed his words of a moment before, without adding the “anything.” “I was sent to meet Prue Shorter, much to my disappointment. I haven’t ever spoken to a pop star.”
“You didn’t miss anything special,” he said.
She inhaled sharply. “Ten years ago I would have scratched your eyes out for saying that. I had him on a poster in my bedroom.”
“Was that a four-poster?”
She thawed and laughed. “At the time, I wouldn’t have minded.”
“They’re dumbos, most of these pop stars.”
“He must know how many beans make five to have survived this long.” She joined the right-hand stream of traffic that was waiting to cross the bridge. “So you’re willing to gamble that Jake Pinkerton is the fellow who helped Britt over this problem, whatever it was?”
“Gamble-no,” said he. “It’s a mathematical certainty. We know this person was a friend, male, lives locally, was in a position to help and knew Britt a couple of years before the murder. How many points of similarity is that?”
She declined to answer.
“It’s all coming together,” Diamond said. “Seeing those young girls with their roses at the horse funeral reminded me of something Pinkerton told me. He said some idiot-some nerd, I think, was the word he used-sent a dozen red roses to Britt’s funeral. So Pinkerton was in my mind, you see.”
“Nerd is probably right,” said Julie. “How insensitive!”
“Unless it was deliberate,” Diamond said. “Unless the murderer sent them.”
“Is that likely?”
“I don’t know about likely, but it’s possible.” He looked ahead, at the line of cars. “Move it. The lights are changing. We’re dealing with the kind of weirdo who turns a corpse into a flower arrangement, so what’s strange about sending more roses to the funeral?”
After Windsor Bridge the traffic was moving again, but remained heavy. They progressed steadily along the Lower Bristol Road as far as Widcombe Hill, then made the shortcut over Claverton Down only to find another tailback at the bottom of Brassknocker, where it linked with the A36. Diamond was drumming his fingers on the head restraint in front of him. “Do we have a torch on board?” he asked.
“I haven’t looked,” said Julie.
“We’re going to need a torch.”
In motion again, they made a detour to the post office in Limpley Stoke and bought a serviceable lamp with a good beam that they tested on the wall of the pub across the street. By now it was pitch dark outside.
“Do you know the way from here?” Diamond asked, as Julie was turning the car.
“I think I can get you to Conkwell,” she said. “I’ve often passed the sign on the Winsley Road.”
“There’s a good walk to Conkwell,” he said. “You start at the Dundas Aqueduct and make your way across a field and up a steep track through the woods. Not today, though.”
Another insight into his private life? “I didn’t know you were a walker,” Julie remarked.
“My neighbor,” he explained. “Boots, knapsack, flat cap, walking stick, the lot. What a pillock!”
They located the turn and started up a one-track lane between high hedges. A mist was making driving difficult; the full beam of the headlight simply exaggerated the effect. Julie settled for dipped lights, giving visibility of twenty yards or so. Driving at forty in these conditions seemed an act of folly. The lane was so narrow that they couldn’t even have passed a cyclist. Summoning some self-control, Diamond was silent, allowing Julie to concentrate. He was playing his own mind-game of willing all other traffic to stay clear of this small lane for the next five minutes, and simultaneously willing Julie to keep her foot on the accelerator.
A mile or so along the lane they reached a cluster of buildings. A sign warned that there was no turning point in the lane to their left, so they drove onto a verge and got out. The lamp was about to prove its worth.
Conkwell is a hamlet of stone-built cottages stacked a hundred and fifty feet up the steep escarpment of the Avon valley. By day it is a joy to visit, by night daunting. At this early stage of the evening there were lights at several windows. Diamond knocked at one of the first they came to and asked the elderly man who came to the door to direct them to the recording studio. The old fellow knew what they were asking about. It was a walk of less than a mile, they were told, but he wouldn’t advise going through the wood after dark.