'This man who was with them, did he say anything when they registered?'
'Do you figure he could have done this thing?'
'Would you answer me? Did you hear him speak? Was he British?'
'No, the woman was doing all the talking, trying to shut the kid up.'
'The child was upset?'
'She was giving them hell.'
From across the room Ken's tough front suddenly gave way to the realization of what that small girl must have been through. 'Oh, my God.'
Diamond, rigidly holding his imagination at bay, said to De Wint, 'Let's concentrate on the man for a minute. How was he behaving when they arrived?'
'He was smiling plenty.'
'While the child was giving them hell?'
'Yes, as if it embarrassed him.'
'Did he seem possessive towards the child?'
De Wint shook his head. 'He just grinned and left the woman to it. Don't know if this is any help, but there was a gold tooth somewhere. I noticed it when he smiled.'
'Upper. This side.'
'The left.'
The mention of the tooth must have brought the rest of the face into focus in the manager's recall. 'His eyes were brown and he had a nose you wouldn't forget easy, kind of narrow and elegant, like some movie actor.'
'Charlton Heston?'
De Wint looked impressed. He didn't know Diamond had been charged down with a luggage cart by the man with a Charlton Heston nose.
Resuming the search, he found a handbag upended and left between the beds. The ejected contents-comb, another lipstick, pens, compact, some keys, two matches and a roll of peppermints-lay scattered over the carpet. A purse was left containing six hundred dollars and a handful of British coins. This was not a murder for money.
He picked up the handbag. Every section had been unzipped and emptied.
So what was missing?
The passport.
The photo of Naomi that the woman had shown to Mrs. Straw.
Presumably a checkbook and credit cards.
The United flight tickets and boarding pass. She may have discarded these at JFK, but it was unlikely. People tended to dispose of them later.
In short, any documentary evidence that might have been used to identify the woman and child had gone.
He moved the beds and looked under them. Lifted the pillows and bedding. Went through the pockets of the jacket in the wardrobe.
Nothing.
Leather-jacket had taken what he wanted as efficiently as he had killed. With a terrified child looking on, he must have behaved with exceptional single-mindedness. Or callousness.
Diamond drew a hand across his bald crown, trying to decide if there was anything more to keep him here. The impulse to go in pursuit of the killer was almost irresistible. The man had Naomi. He might be taking her to some place to kill her too.
Yet where? It had to be faced that the trail was cold. Leather-jacket could have gone in any direction, anywhere in New York. Finding them wasn't a one-man assignment. It required the resources of the police.
He picked up the phone, got an outside line and dialed 911.
A patrol would be on its way directly, they promised. He was to stay where he was and touch nothing.
A bit bloody late for that, he thought.
He was racked with the helplessness of the situation. What a cock-up. Those cops were going to throw the book at him for handling the body and the dead woman's possessions, and so they should.
He'd defied the rules for Naomi's sake, and achieved precisely nothing.
He was so wound up that when Ken spoke from across the room there was a delay before her words got through. If the police were about to take over, she was telling him, she figured she didn't really want to stay, particularly as she couldn't do anything else to help.
He thanked her with as much warmth as he could muster, saying that she had come to his aid in a crisis and put up with him heroically. She said something about wishing the kid would be rescued real soon, and then she shook his hand and left.
This was no time for self-pity, but he was sorry she was leaving.
Alone in the room-De Wint having taken the opportunity to escort Ken downstairs-he found the wait unendurable. With nothing else to occupy him in the bedroom, he entered the bathroom again.
The corpse of Mrs. Tanaka lay face upwards, submerged, the eyes closed, the mouth gaping. There was no point in turning her facedown again, even if he could have managed it. He'd tell the patrolmen exactly what he had done since entering the room.
As he looked down at the body he recalled the rigidity of the thigh when he had gripped the clothes to turn her. He'd handled the dead as a matter of necessity in his work on murder squads; for some reason the rigor mortis- experienced through the sensation of touch-always affected him more profoundly than the sight of the corpse. The loss of flexibility in the muscles, transforming the body into something like a plaster cast, was such a contrast with living flesh.
Then he thought, hold on, this is wrong. She was killed less than an hour ago. I know that. I saw her at the airport. I followed her here in the car. Rigor mortis takes effect after
He bent over the bath and put a hand on the upper arm. The flesh was soft to the touch. He placed his hand on the thigh again, where he had gripped it before. It still felt rigid.
A memory was triggered, and he had the explanation. He recalled something the switchboard operator at Earls Court Police Station had said. 'Rohans are really something else- all those pockets.'
The stiffness wasn't the result of rigor mortis at all. On each side of the trousers there were two front pockets fitted over each other, the inner one fastened with a zip. He pulled the tab. The cause of the rigor mortis effect was inside that inner pocket.
He drew it out: a substantial leather wallet. He opened it and found a Japanese passport, issued in December 1988. The water had seeped through, damaging the edges of the pages, but the entries inside were unimpaired. Everything was written in English as well as Japanese. The passport holder was Mrs. Minori Tanaka, aged thirty-six. The photo was clearly of the dead woman.
She had a Yokohama address. He took out a pen and pad and noted it.
There was an entry for her child Emi, date of birth February 2,1984, sex female.
He sighed and shook his head. Emi… Naomi. Poor little kid.
Voices sounded downstairs and the tone was familiar to anyone who has worked in the police. They hadn't come to read the gas meter. There were solid footsteps on the stairs, and De Wint's voice came in at intervals, pitched high as he played the respectable hotelier who has never had trouble before.
Quickly Diamond examined the rest of the wallet. Those missing boarding passes were there, and the flight tickets. Also, tucked inside, a small batch of photographs. He glanced through them, picked one out and then stared at it in some surprise before slipping it into his pocket. On this occasion, he decided, he wouldn't declare everything to the police.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The two patrolmen first up the stairs had one thing, and one only, lodged in their brains: if this was murder, the
