The Last Detective (6 page)

'This is a huge waste of everyone's time,' muttered the beleaguered Professor.

'I've got a brother-in-law in Doncaster,' Diamond volunteered as a way of easing the tension, 'and each time we visit him, I hardly set foot in the house before he draws me away from the ladies and says, "Come and see the back garden". Now I'm no gardener. I wouldn't pretend to know when to prune the roses, but I do know enough to see that Reggie's garden is a bloody wilderness. Some of the nettles are chest high. We poke about searching for the path while Reggie points to pathetic plants weighted down with blackfly and bindweed and tells me their names. After an hour of this, there's a shout from my sister that tea is ready, so we beat a route back to the house for a reviving cup. No sooner have I had a bite of cake than Reggie turns to me and says, "You haven't seen the front garden. Come out and see the front". I'm supposed to be a detective and I don't know why he does it. Is he afraid to go out there unaccompanied? Or is the house stuffed with stolen goods he doesn't want me to notice? I'm still trying to work it out.'

Jackman seemed unwilling to supply a theory, but he had, at least, consented to walk beside the superintendent. They made an incongruous pair, the broad-shouldered academic moving with sinewy step beside the fat policeman forced by sheer girth to throw out his feet in a ponderous strut. The setting for this spectacle consisted of stretches of lawn separated by clumps of shrubs and a number of well-established trees. There were enough apple trees at the far end to give it the status of an orchard.

Abruptly, Diamond moved from homely matters to the business of the day. 'Your wife. I need to know everything about her. Background, family, friends past and present - and enemies, if any - daily routines, personal finances, state of health, drinking habits, hobbies, places she visited, shops she used.'

'We've only been married two years,'Jackman said in a tone that protested at the length and comprehensiveness of the list.

'Long enough to know all those things, surely?' Diamond pressed. 'We'll take it from the beginning. How did you meet?'

This approach yielded a dividend. Jackman made a sound that was halfway to being a laugh, shook his head wistfully as some memory surfaced and said, 'It was because of a pigeon, or so Gerry always claimed. The pigeon may or may not have existed, but it became part of our private mythology. She was motoring along Great Russell Street in her Renault 5—'

'This was when?' Diamond cut in.

'Just over two years ago. As I was saying, she was driving along when this slow-witted or stubborn London pigeon allegedly stepped across the road and refused to take flight. Unable to bear the prospect of killing a living thing, Gerry swung the wheel and crumpled the nearside wing -of the car, not the pigeon - against a parked van. You must be hearing stories like this all the time.'

'I'm not in the traffic division.'

'Well, this was in the month of May, I think, and I was in my final term at Birkbeck College prior to taking up the professorship here. I'd been working in the British Library that particular morning and I came out for a lunchtime stroll. I didn't see the pigeon, but I heard the bump. I was the first to reach the car, open the door and enquire if she was hurt. I can see her now staring at me, pale with shock, and beautiful, surpassingly beautiful. She was suffering nothing worse than the shakes, so I helped her to move the car into a space, found her a seat in the nearest sandwich bar and ordered strong, sweet tea. Then, not missing a chance to play Galahad, I went to look for the van driver. He turned out to be a Buddhist monk.'

'A monk - in London?'

'Doing research, just as I was. I'd seen him once or twice in the Reading Room. When I told him about the collision he was serenely unconcerned at one extra dent on his van. In fact, he went out of his way to praise Gerry's action in averting an accident to the pigeon. She was moving towards enlightenment, in his estimation. So I nipped back to the sandwich bar and set her mind at rest.'

'Advising her, no doubt, to go to the nearest police station and report the accident,' Diamond said sardonically.

Jackman stayed with his story. 'I found her perched on the high stool, dabbing the edges of her eyes with that amazing red hair. The bump was the first she'd ever had, she told me, and she felt stupid at having caused damage just to avoid a scruffy pigeon. I remember springing to the defence of the pigeon and upholding its rights to cross the street without being flattened. Made her smile again. She had a stunning smile. Then she announced that she was due at the Television Centre in twenty minutes, so I offered to drive her to White City. Embarrassing. It was transparently clear that I didn't know she was famous. I hardly ever watch the box.'

They stopped at the edge of the apple orchard, where the grass was too overgrown for comfortable walking. Diamond pulled off a long stalk and chewed it, pleased with himself for having the patience to listen to this boy-meets-girl stuff. There was time enough to get to the violence. 'You arranged to meet again, I take it?'

'Well, yes. We got on well. The attraction was mutual -though I suppose there was over-glamorizing on both sides. She had a few 'O' levels to her name, and that was all, so she was flattered to have a professor-designate in tow. And apart from finding her extremely attractive, as every red-blooded male in the country did, I rather basked in the envy of people who watched
The Milners
and couldn't fathom how some egghead professor had managed to hook television's top girl.'

'What about her conversation?'

'What do you mean?'

'Was she on your wavelength?'

'Oh, she was as bright as a button. If her schooling hadn't been interrupted, she'd certainly have got to university.'

Diamond noticed something in the way Jackman made this remark. It was spoken with a measure of detachment rather than the pride you would have expected from a devoted husband. Yet everything else he had said - all the memories from two years ago - had been related with warmth. The story of their first meeting rang true. Undoubtedly the man had been charmed by her and it wasn't difficult to see why she had been attracted to him. He was handsome. He wasn't stuffy. He wasn't at all the stereotype of the lofty intellectual.

This was underlined when Jackman went on to say, 'We first made love under the stars in Richmond Park. Didn't realize the gates closed at sundown. Had to climb over the wall to get out, and our energies were somewhat depleted by then.' He smiled faintly. 'We came to a more comfortable arrangement after that. She moved into my semi in Teddington. We married in September, a registry office do followed by a trip up the Thames in a pleasure steamer for two hundred and fifty.'

Diamond took mental stock of the number, troubled by it. Tracing the victim's friends, if it came to that, was going to require a large task force.

'Surprising, really,' Jackman remarked. 'The worlds of academe and showbiz got on famously. They strutted their stuff to a jazz quartet until well into the next day.'

'This was September, 1987, you said? So when did you move to Bath?' Diamond asked.

'Directly. My term was about to start. Gerry was still with the BBC. We had no idea that her days with
The Milners
were numbered. She rented a flat in Ealing to use when she was filming. As I mentioned to you, we were each committed to our careers, so we tied the knot less strongly than is traditional. We kept separate bank accounts. The house here is in my name; I'd already found it and set the legal wheels in motion before I met Gerry.'

'Did she approve your choice?'

The professor put a hand to his face and passed it across his mouth and down to the point of his chin as he considered the question. 'I think she liked it, yes. It's a little far from the centre, but she had the car.'

The Renault?'

'A Metro. She bought a new one. It's in the garage. Want to see it?'

'Later.' Now it was Diamond's turn to take stock. 'If her car is still in the garage, didn't that worry you when she went missing?'

'Not really. She often used taxis for getting about, particularly if she was likely to have a few drinks.'

'Was she a heavy drinker?'

'She could put it away, but I wouldn't say she drank to excess.'

Inside the house, John Wigfull, in the approved polythene oversocks, had been called upstairs by the scenes-of-crime officer to look at the main bedroom. They watched one of the forensic team, on his knees, collecting fibre samples on strips of adhesive tape.

Wigfull folded his arms and took in the essentials of the room. 'Twin beds, then.'

'Some people prefer them.'

'Would you - married to Gerry Snoo?'

A smile from the scenes-of-crime officer. 'I'm a simple scientist, John. No imagination at all.'

Both beds had been stripped to the mattress for forensic examination, enough to dispossess any bedroom of its character. It was a large, gracefully proportioned room decorated in a mushroom colour and pale green. There was a television set and video-recorder on a stand facing the beds. Two abstract paintings in the style of Mondrian enlivened the walls, yet to Wigfull's eye reinforced the feeling of hotel-like neutrality.

He got a strikingly different impression when he crossed the room and looked into one of the adjacent dressing rooms. It was a shrine to Gerry Snoo's television career. The walls were thick with silver-framed stills from
The Milners,
interspersed with press pictures of herself with celebrities at parties. Her dressing table had the mirror fringed with light bulbs that was supposed to be a feature of every star's dressing room, and the wall behind it was festooned with silver horseshoes, telemessages, greetings cards and sprigs of heather. Across the room was a folding screen entirely pasted over with press clippings. A system of shelving between the built-in wardrobe and the window was stacked with video-cassettes and paperbacks of
The Milners.

'Missing the big time, would you say?' the scenes-of-crime officer called out.

'Looks remarkably like it.' Wigfull returned to the bedroom. 'Have you found much?'

'A few microscopic spots on the duvet that could be blood. May be significant, may be not. We'll see what the tests show. Plenty of prints on the surface of the dressing table, presumably her own. Hardly any elsewhere. I reckon the chest of drawers and the wardrobe have been wiped clean. Did he do it?'

'The husband, you mean?'

'Who else? Murder's generally in the family, isn't it?'

Wigfull gave a shrug.

The scenes-of-crime officer snapped shut the metal case containing his instruments. 'If he
is
guilty, I back your boss to nail him. I've seen the way Diamond works. It's cat and mouse with him. Playful for a bit. Then he pounces. If he doesn't bite their heads off he breaks their backbones.'

Wigfull said, 'Before it comes to that, I'd like to know the motive.'

'Obvious. They weren't sleeping in the same bed. She must have been getting it from someone else. Husband found out. Curtains for Candice.'

In the garden, Diamond was patiently unravelling the story of the marriage. 'You were telling me in the car about the blow it was when your wife was written out of the television serial. You seemed to imply that after the initial shock, she was quite positive in the way she faced up to it.'

'That's perfectly true,' Jackman answered. He was calmer now that the questions were more structured, more predictable. 'Of course she made her feelings plain to the director, but once she saw that it was a lost cause, she responded sensibly, I thought. She told me she meant to make up for the years she had missed.'

'What did she mean by that?'

'She had never been allowed the freedom girls in their teens are entitled to expect. At last she could break out -go on holidays, dance the night away, change her hairstyle, put on weight if she wanted and never answer another fan letter. I suppose it was the teenage rebellion ten years delayed.'

'Not the ideal start to a marriage,' ventured Diamond.

The answer came on a sharper note, as if Jackman knew what was behind the comment. 'We didn't view it that way. As I told you, we had agreed to leave enough space to be ourselves and pursue our interests independently. We didn't want the kind of arrangement where one partner tags along forever making sacrifices.'

'But the basis of your contract - your understanding, or whatever you called it - had altered,' Diamond pointed out. 'She no longer had a career.'

'So what? Just because Gerry was unemployed I didn't expect her to stay at home and darn my socks. She put her energies into building a social life for herself. She gave up the flat in Ealing, of course.'

'Difficult for a woman used to London, coming down here and not knowing anyone,' Diamond remarked, resolute in his belief that the marriage must have been fatally flawed.

'Not for Gerry. Word soon got round that she'd moved down here. The invitations came in thick and fast.'

'Did you get invited, too?'

'Quite often. I couldn't usually join her. I had a brand new department to set up, and that took up most of my time. I gradually got to know the crowd she spent her time with. We had the occasional party here.'

'People from Bath?'

'Bristol. All around, I gather.'

'You gather? You didn't get to know them
that
well, then? Weren't they your sort?'

Jackman gave him a cold stare. 'People don't have to be my sort, as you put it. Anyway, I didn't make a point of asking them where they lived. If you want their names and addresses, I dare say I can find her address book.'

'You mean you don't even know the names of your wife's friends?'

'I didn't say that. There were some people called Maltby. They were from Clevedon, I believe. Paula and John Hare. Liza somebody. A tall fellow by the name of Mike -I'm not sure where he lived.'

'Don't bother,' said Diamond. 'I'll go through the address book, as you suggest. Did your wife ever mention falling out with any of the friends she made?'

'Not that I recall.'

'Shall we move on again?' Diamond started back in the direction of the house by way of stepping-stones across a lawn still damp with dew that would probably remain all day. 'I sense from what you've been telling me about your marriage that she might not have discussed her friends with you,' he commented as he picked his way gingerly across the path.