Diamond explained, “Miss Shorter offered to work for Britt some time in the summer of 1990, almost two years after the child was killed. She had a strong suspicion by then that Britt had been the driver of that car, but she wanted to be certain, because she planned to avenge the killing of her daughter by taking the life of the person who caused it. So she worked as her photographer through the summer and autumn of 1990 until she was totally sure, and the right opportunity came.”
“Weren’t we aware of any of this at this time?”
“The accident? It was in the records as a hit and run, but we had no reason to link it with the Britt Strand murder. We routinely checked all the witnesses for previous convictions and Miss Shorter was clean. The fact that she happened to be the parent of an accident victim didn’t show on the computer.”
“It wouldn’t,” Wigfull confirmed.
Farr-Jones asked, “How did you get on to her, then?”
Diamond unexpectedly tiptoed on the spot like one of the cygnets in Swan Lake. “You’ll have to forgive me, sir, but I need to take a leak. It must be the cold.”
“Here?” said Farr-Jones, frowning.
“I happened to notice that Prue Shorter has a fire going in her cottage. What say we nick her now?”
It was the most civilized arrest in the combined experience of all the detectives. The timing couldn’t have been bettered. “How many of you are there?” Prue Shorter asked. “Eight, is it? I’m afraid I haven’t got chairs for all of you. Would you like to handle the knife, Mr. Diamond? It’s the large one in the drawer behind you.”
She passed a steaming Dundee cake across the kitchen table for Diamond to cut.
Several of the officers looked to the Chief Constable for guidance in this unprecedented situation. He had the good sense to give it his endorsement. “When I was a small boy, I used to read the Rupert books,” he surprised them all by saying. “Rupert Bear-the original ones by Mary Tourtel with yellow covers and black-and-white illustrations. They always seemed to end with Rupert coming home from some adventure to find that homely Mrs. Bear had baked a cake.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Senior policemen rarely provided such insights into their personal lives.
Prue Shorter ended it by saying, “Personally, I could never believe in animals wearing clothes. I liked the Famous Five.”
“Enid Blyton,” said Wigfull, the walking encyclopedia.
Tott said, “Wasn’t one of them known as-”
“George. Yes,” Prue Shorter said quickly, and added almost unheard, “Georgina.”
Their arrival at the cottage door had not fazed her. She had asked them in and said, “Now that you’ve come, I can’t tell you how relieved I am. What do you want first, my dears, a slice of cake or my confession?”
After that, it had seemed churlish to mention that two uniformed officers were posted outside the back door to prevent her escaping. Regardless, she had welcomed them in and made filter coffee for all.
Diamond finished cutting the cake and put the knife into the kitchen sink, out of Prue Shorter’s reach. He still had a vivid memory of Britt Strand’s lacerated body. This homely Mrs. Bear could wield a knife as well as bake cakes. “Are you ready to talk?” he asked her.
She said with sublime composure, “Don’t you want to tell them how you sussed me out, ducky? Take your applause while you’ve got the chance. I’m totally gobsmacked by your brilliant detective work, but I’m not sure if the rest of them are.”
Farr-Jones, in thrall to this redoubtable woman, said, “Yes, Mr. Diamond, why don’t you give us the rundown on your investigation?”
“Not only mine,” Diamond pointed out. “There were two of us. DI Hargreaves must take a lot of the credit. In fact, she deserves a commendation.”
Julie looked down at her coffee.
Diamond was less modest. “You want to know what led us here?” he said. “It was the old, old story of observation and deduction. Some of it didn’t mean much at the beginning. For example, when Julie and I first came to this cottage we noticed a child’s violin in one of the alcoves in the other room. There was also a drawing pinned to the notice board, a stick figure, obviously the work of a young child. Not much to go on, but the next time I visited, the violin was gone. It emerged that Miss Shorter had been married briefly and given birth to a girl, who had died young, at the age of seven. I didn’t follow up by asking what she died of, and you may think that was a mistake on my part, but with the benefit of hindsight I doubt if I’d have got the truthful answer. I was straying into dangerous territory. Right?”
Prue Shorter gave a nod.
“Of course,” Diamond went on, “you’re constantly recording things in your memory and ninety-nine percent turn out to be unimportant. It took some painstaking work and smart deduction on Julie’s part and mine to discover that Britt Strand had once owned a car, an MGB. Still does, according to the computer records. She suddenly stopped driving at the end of 1988. We found the car eventually and discovered clear evidence of a collision. Jake Pinkerton, her boyfriend at the time, allowed her to hide the thing in the woods behind his recording studio at Conkwell. Naturally, we questioned him. At the time of the incident, Britt Strand confided to Pinkerton that she’d knocked someone down, but she wouldn’t say whether it was a man or woman. Why? I thought. Why did it matter what sex the victim was? The reason she wouldn’t even tell her boyfriend was that she was too ashamed to give him the whole truth. She had knocked down a child and done nothing about it.”
“Left her lying in the road with a fractured skull,” added Prue Shorter in a hard, accusing tone in sharp contrast to the genial persona she had projected up to now. “It was in the papers next day and she still didn’t come forward.”
Tott said, “Deplorable.”
“Even so,” Farr-Jones remarked to Diamond, “the link between a child’s violin and a hit-and-run accident is pretty tenuous.”
Diamond said sharply, “There’s more to it than that.” He was piqued. “A whole lot more. There’s the drinking. We heard from Jake Pinkerton that Britt had been a whiskey drinker in the old days. She gave it up completely after the accident. Went TT.”
“That was a great help after my little girl was dead,” said Prue Shorter acidly.
“Let’s come to you, then.” Diamond addressed her directly for the first time. “A resourceful lady. A whiz at making cakes. A good mixer in more senses than one.”
She laughed.
“I mean it,” he insisted. “You’re a natural at making friends, or what are we all doing here around your kitchen table? You could charm anybody, even your worst enemy, and that’s precisely what you did. But not with cakes. You had your expertise as a professional photographer. Local freelance, taking news pictures for the Bath Chronicle and the Wiltshire Times and sometimes selling stuff to the nationals. Really good pictures. You were nicely placed to show your work to Britt and convince her that she’d be better off using the local talent than some hotshot from London. This was mid-1990, wasn’t it.”
Prue Shorter nodded.
“The dates are important,” he said, looking around the table. “The little girl was killed in October, 1988, so we’re talking about a time at least a year and a half later. Quite a long interval.” He turned to Prue Shorter again. “What I haven’t mentioned yet is how you got to know that Britt was responsible. After all, you didn’t know that her car was still in existence. You got to the truth by an altogether different route from ours.”
She said, “‘Responsible’ isn’t the word I’d use for her.”
“How did you discover that it was Britt who killed your daughter?” he pressed her.
“The roses,” she answered in a voice drained of the animation she’d displayed before. “They appeared on the grave the day after the funeral. A dozen in a plain transparent wrapper. No message. No indication who supplied them. I spent weeks trying to find out, asking at all the florists in Bath, Bristol, Trowbridge, Westbury, Melksham. I guessed they were placed there by the hit-and-run driver, you see. I knew. But I couldn’t trace the shop. She must have got them from London. I had to wait a whole year before I got any closer to her.”