Warrilow threw in a spanner. “Do you happen to know where he is?” He asked the question as if he, personally, would give anything to know.
“Don’t you?”
“It’s far from clear. We believe he moved out of that room under the gables.”
“The room with the balcony, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Taking the girl with him?”
“We assume so. We’re getting no sound from that end of the building.”
“Where else would they have gone? Do you have plans?”
With a world-weary manner, as if going through the motions of cooperating with an awkward hotel guest, Warrilow led him to the desk, picked up a sheaf of papers and handed them across. Diamond leafed through them. The fifth floor, where Samantha had been sighted on the balcony, was a V-shape, with some twenty-five rooms divided by a corridor. One side overlooked Orange Grove, the other Grand Parade and Pulteney Weir. The point of the V ended in a heptagonal shape that he took to be the base of the turret that dominated the eastern end of the hotel facade. “I reckon this is where they went,” he said.
“I doubt it,” commented Warrilow, taking the plans and flicking over to the sheet that showed the sixth floor. “Look, the turret goes up to another level and is quite cut off. It’s partitioned into three rooms, each with just the one door. They’d be trapped rats in there.”
“Access is by a spiral staircase,” Diamond pondered aloud, ignoring what had just been said. “He could defend that. And this looks like another set of stairs to the roof. A fire escape, by the look of it. If he kept the girl tied up in one of the rooms, he could stand here”-he touched the point on the plan-“and have a view of the fire escape and the spiral staircase at the same time.”
“He’d still be trapped,” Warrilow insisted. “I have men on the roof.”
Diamond took a sharp breath. “How did they get up there?”
“The exterior fire escape at the back of the building.”
“What are their orders?”
“They’re patrolling the roof. They won’t go in until I radio them. It’s under tight control, Diamond. When Mount-joy understands that there’s no way out wherever he is, he’ll surrender peacefully. He’d better.”
“I’ll tell him,” Diamond said in a quiet, implacable tone.
“You still want to do this?”
It wasn’t worthy of an answer. He put down the plans and looked about him.
“What now?” Warrilow asked. “A gun?”
He shook his head.
“You’ll need one. Are you armed?”
He said, “A bat phone.”
“What?”
“Personal radio. Isn’t that what you call them these days?”
Warrilow beckoned to one of the constables by the door and had him lend his radio to Diamond, who then needed instructions in how to use the thing. He had such a deep-rooted dislike of mechanical appliances that even those he’d been forced to master were later expunged from his memory.
“You’re insisting on doing this?” Warrilow repeated himself with something not far short of actual concern. His hostility had been rather defused by Diamond’s ineptness with the radio.
“Of course.”
“And you won’t be carrying a gun?”
“No.”
“Then for God’s sake use the radio at the first hint of trouble.”
“I’m giving the radio to Mountjoy,” Diamond told him casually.
Having asked for another guarantee that no police personnel were on floors five or six, he started up the grand staircase like a freshly arrived guest, pausing to check the angle of his hat in the triple mirror on the second landing.
At the third floor, a shade less exuberant, he stopped for breath and spoke to a group in combat jackets holding automatic rifles. They told him that sounds had been heard in the tank loft on the fifth floor, but no one was sure if it was water circulating, because earlier someone had used one of the old wooden-seated toilets.
He met another six armed men on the next flight and they assured him that they were the advance party, the Special Operations Unit, marksmen every one; they had been on the point of occupying the fifth just as Warrilow had given the order to withdraw to level four. To Diamond’s eyes, they looked disturbingly young, yet they insisted that they could have “taken” Mountjoy and freed Samantha. He didn’t recognize a single one of them from the old days and they didn’t look as if they wanted to be friendly. That didn’t stop him from reminding them to stay off the top floors while he was up there.
He wasn’t built for all these flights of stairs. As he got higher, breathing more heavily, wishing he’d brought a torch for the dark corridors, he thought seriously of the risk he was taking-principally the risk of being shot by his own side. He would have liked to have cleared the entire hotel of armed police. These young men brandishing their guns made him uncomfortable. They scared him more than Mountjoy did.
Here he was, a civilian, staking his life on his ability to talk an armed man down from a siege. Why? Because it was personal. Because of the mistakes he’d made four years ago. He owed Mountjoy this.
And there was another reason for doing this, wasn’t there? It wasn’t just altruism. What the hell was it? His memory wasn’t functioning too well. Got it! He wanted the damned job back, didn’t he? Nobody would have thought so when he was slagging off the Chief Constable; in truth, he’d rather undermined his job prospects then, but Farr-Jones had broken a promise, however he liked to put it. He’d handed over effective control to Warrilow. In a short time those eager young men with guns would have located Mountjoy and started firing. This needed to end peacefully. It cried out for the old, unfashionable policing he represented. He wasn’t remotely like your chummy old English bobby, Dixon of Dock Green- thank God-but at least he pursued the truth, whatever the cost. That was what had kept him from being kicked off the force all the times he’d traded aggro with people like Farr-Jones. His values were right.
He was approaching the fifth floor. He bent his back as he prepared to go up the last steps. It was an unconscious action and he was annoyed with himself for doing it and instantly straightened up. The right signal to give Mountjoy was openness, not stealth. In fact, he needed to announce that he was coming.
“Mountjoy, it’s me, Peter Diamond.” He raised his voice and said, “I want to talk to you. I promised to come and here I am.”
Midway up the last flight, he paused and listened. He thought he detected a movement.
“Mountjoy, is that you?” he asked.
Someone fired a shot.
He slammed himself against the wall.
Immediately after was a second shot.
The firing had come from just above him, on the fifth floor. The echo was still ringing through the building.
His first thought was that Warrilow had double-crossed him and marksmen were posted up here. He was incensed.
Boneheads.
But presently he decided that they weren’t firing at him, or he’d be dead. He was an easy target. The action was in the corridor. They must have spotted Mountjoy.
He waited almost a minute without moving, his ears ringing. Then another sound blended in, a high-pitched intermittent beep.
The personal radio. He snatched it off his chest, pressed the switch and heard the crackle of static, followed by Warrilow’s voice. “Control to Diamond. Are you receiving?”
Diamond hissed into the thing, “You told me there were no guns up here. Someone fired two shots.”
“We heard them. Where are you now?”
“On the fifth floor.”
“We don’t have anybody higher than the fourth apart from the team on the roof, and they haven’t moved.”
“Someone must have.”
“I’m in communication, for God’s sake. I know where the men are. Nobody has moved. Nobody. Mountjoy must be doing the shooting. Listen, I’m sending a team up to you now.”
“Don’t,” said Diamond at once. “I can handle this.”