known at that time as Hector Dacreman.’
‘Quite a leap from Strangeways to Sergeant of Police,’ Dawkins said, unimpressed, as if there was room for doubt.
‘Yes, but you’re good at what you do. I asked for the names of prisoners active in the drama group that flourished then, the group Denise Pearsall supervised as a visiting tutor, and I was told convict Dacremen, 5189, was one of the leads in the 1988 production of
‘It’s of Estragon, presumably.’
‘Dacreman, I said. That was the name you were known by.’
‘Is the actor wearing make-up? Is it really me, do you think? They say everyone has a double somewhere in the world.’
‘You kept the same initials, too. Hector Dacreman. Horatio Dawkins.’
He gave a sarcastic laugh. ‘Nothing gets past you.’
‘They’re sending your fingerprints.’
‘One way or another, you seem to think you have snared me.’
‘You snared yourself,’ Diamond said, ‘the first day you worked in CID.’
A slight frown. ‘How was that?’
‘Your version of the interview with Denise in the case file. I asked you to type up all the witness statements. When I compared the printout with the notes Dawn Reed made with her speed-writing, I noticed you left off the first words Denise spoke when she saw you: “Have we met before?”’
‘Small talk,’ Dawkins said. ‘You don’t put small talk in a witness statement.’
‘Not small in this case. It came as a huge shock for you that Denise thought she recognised you. You quickly glossed over that by saying she must have seen you patrolling the streets of Bath and she seems to have accepted that. She wouldn’t have expected one of her former convict actors to reinvent himself as a police officer.’
Dawkins smirked in self-congratulation.
‘In your prison days she wouldn’t even have known you were a con artist,’ Diamond continued. ‘It’s not the thing for visiting tutors to ask the inmates about their crimes.’
‘Please go on. I’m learning volumes.’
‘So the moment you met again at the theatre and she thought she knew you, she was at risk of being murdered. You’re a vastly ambitious man. Conning your way into the police after serving a prison term was a triumph, difficult and dangerous, but you managed it, a massive investment of time and deception. I’ve seen your record, the lies, the forged references that got you into Hendon as a recruit.’
‘And if you’ve seen my file you’ll know Horatio Dawkins was the star of his year at Hendon.’
‘Amazingly, yes. Praised for supporting the young recruits straight out of school and improving morale. Eighteen weeks of training and then a job in the Met, and within four years a sergeant’s stripes and the move to Bath Central. Not enough. You set your sights on a transfer to CID. And what an opportunity arrived when the Assistant Chief Constable joined the BLOGs group you were choreographing.’
He smiled again. ‘There is a saying: he dances well to whom fortune pipes.’ His ego couldn’t resist these asides, regardless that they were confirming Diamond’s case.
‘And yet Denise had the knowledge to destroy all you’d achieved. She had to be eliminated. You thought of a way of killing her that would be passed off as suicide. You set an elaborate trap. First you armed yourself with Rohypnol. As a sergeant from uniform you’d had ample opportunities to acquire the drug, confiscating it from night-clubbers. An opportunist like you isn’t going to surrender all the drugs he snatches.’
‘Speculation.’
‘We found traces in dressing room eleven.’
‘I know that, but you can’t link it with me.’
‘Forensics will. Let’s stay with the trap you set for Denise. You sent her some kind of message to lure her into the theatre on Tuesday night after everyone else had left. My guess is that you offered to tell her the true explanation for Clarion’s accident. Poor woman, she was distraught about it, half fearing she’d made some terrible mistake with the make-up, so the chance of redemption was sure to reel her in. She was to meet you in dressing room eleven. You’re familiar with the layout of the theatre, having choreographed several BLOGs productions. Knowing the door codes, as you did, you could come and go at will. You met Denise, slipped Rohypnol into her drink, took her onto the riggers’ platform in the fly tower and pushed her off. It was meant to be interpreted as suicide.’
‘And does that complete the case for the prosecution?’ Dawkins asked in a measured voice as if he was a judge, not the accused.
‘No. There’s more. It became increasingly clear to me that someone on our side of the investigation was bent. The murderer was getting inside information.’
‘Such as…?’
‘The call that came in from Bristol Police about Clarion discharging herself from hospital. You put it on computer instead of telling me directly.’
‘I acted properly, filing the call. As a newcomer I wasn’t to know you need telling everything by word of mouth.’
‘That wasn’t the reason. You were alarmed. Clarion was a loose cannon. None of us knew what she’d been thinking while she was stuck in hospital or what she intended to do next. You could see the suicide theory being blown out of the water.’
