your time. I’m sure she’s innocent.’
Diamond turned to Halliwell. ‘Didn’t we ask everyone to stay in contact?’
He nodded.
‘We have a phone number. Try it.’
Halliwell took out his mobile and dialled. ‘Nothing. She’s switched off.’
Diamond cast his thoughts back to the interview he’d had with Kate shortly after Denise had been found dead, the obvious coolness, if not open hostility. She’d used the phrase ‘tough as old boots’ about her colleague and said she was ‘calm as a lake in heaven’ when going off to attend to Clarion’s make-up. He’d questioned how anyone could be calm if they were about to smear caustic soda on another woman’s face and Kate had said he’d have to work that out for himself.
He said to Shearman, ‘I picked up some tension between Kate and Denise.’
‘Did you?’ he said, as if it didn’t surprise him. ‘I wouldn’t make too much of that if I were you. Denise came under Kate’s supervision in the wardrobe department, but she’d worked here for six years, rather more than Kate had. There was bound to be some professional awkwardness.’
‘Kate didn’t seem too cut up about Denise’s death.’
‘I expect she was putting a brave face on it. A terrible thing like that takes people in different ways.’
‘Maybe. Just now I commented that wardrobe was a mess and you said her heart wasn’t in it. What did you mean by that?’
Shearman hesitated. ‘Oh, I was talking about the dreadful things that have happened. It’s enough to sap anyone’s morale.’
Smart answer, but not convincing, Diamond thought. ‘Going by the state of the place, it didn’t get like that in a couple of days.’
‘I’m sure the disorder is more apparent than real. She knows where everything is – or she did until your search party turned the lot upside down.’
Diamond hadn’t been swayed by the manager’s defence. Kate was definitely in the frame now. Her strong dislike of Denise had been obvious all along. She’d portrayed her as tough, calm and so indifferent to Clarion’s scarring that she could well have inflicted it. Coming from a colleague, that was quite a character assassination. It wasn’t beyond her to have lured Denise upstairs, slipped her the drug and pushed her to her death to fake the suicide. Working so closely with Denise, she would be familiar with her signature and well able to forge the note. Up to that point everything seemed to be going to plan. Then she’d found out that Clarion was making this secret visit to the theatre. Did alarm bells go off in her head – that Clarion had worked out the truth and was coming to confront her or even expose her as the killer? How simple to have picked up one of the many plastic bags in wardrobe and gone to the box and suffocated Clarion.
He turned to Halliwell. ‘This stinks. I’m going out to Warminster to see her.’
Shearman was shaking his head. ‘You’ll send her into a panic. She’ll think she’s under suspicion.’
‘She is. I don’t want you tipping her off,’ he said and told Halliwell to stay with Shearman for the next hour.
‘Don’t you people understand that I have a job to do?’ Shearman demanded.
‘There’s no job. The theatre is dark now.’
‘That’s when things get busy for me. I’ll be organising a team to strike the set.’
‘To
Halliwell said, ‘He means moving the scenery, guv. They want to clear the stage so it’s ready for the next production.’
Diamond pointed a finger at Shearman. ‘Don’t even think about shifting it. Leave everything in place, exactly as it is. That’s an order.’
20
South-east of Bath in the thick of the Friday afternoon commute along the A36, Diamond drove at his usual steady forty, heading a procession increasingly desperate to overtake. At his side was a detective sergeant almost his own age who had transferred from Chipping Sodbury a couple of months back, a soft-speaking, dependable type. Lew Rogers had merged into the CID room almost unnoticed. This was a chance to get to know him better. About all Diamond had discovered was that he cycled to work from Batheaston. Either a fitness freak or a green, he had decided.
‘I’ll be relying on you to guide me to the street where this woman lives,’ Diamond said. ‘I generally steer clear of Warminster.’
‘Why is that? All the sightings of UFOs?’
‘No. The bypass.’
They both smiled. Back in the sixties and seventies there had been persistent reports of flying saucers over Warminster and the nearby downs. There were claims that some local residents had been abducted. Books had been written about extra-terrestrial visitors.
‘Have you thought about getting a sat-nav?’ Rogers asked in his innocence.
‘Got one.’
‘Where is it?’
‘It’s you, sat here and navving for me. More reliable, I hope, and with extras, like hands. If you look in the glove compartment you’ll find some Softmints. Have one yourself.’
