missed. Still the thought nagged at him that there could be other information waiting for him. Unseen by the team, he stepped into his office to check the in-box.
There wasn’t much. Headquarters had issued a new online procedure for budget reports. Stuff that, he said to himself. Keith Halliwell had called in from the mortuary. Old news. He’d seen Keith since then. Clarion Calhoun was moving out of the burns unit to a private hotel in Clifton called the Cedar of Lebanon and would become an out- patient. Nothing remarkable in that. There was always pressure on bed-space in hospitals. Finally, there was a note that the crime scene investigation team had started work in dressing room eleven.
He regarded one oval-shaped button on the keyboard as his friend. A tiny image of the moon put the computer into sleep mode. He pressed it and watched the screen go dark. Magic.
With two separate searches now under way, he could keep the appointment with his old school friend. On this fine afternoon, he chose to walk to the Abbey Churchyard and treated himself to the carnival atmosphere as he zigzagged between crocodiles of French schoolkids waiting to tour the Roman Baths and cheering the buskers balancing on unicycles juggling flaming torches. He didn’t have time to watch, unfortunately. No matter, he thought. Later, he’d do some flame-throwing of his own when he caught up with Sergeant Dawkins.
The short fat guy in a pork-pie hat was standing below the bottom rung of the famous ladder to heaven carved into the Abbey front, and not realising the symbolic stance he was making. The years had been kind to Mike Glazebrook; he could have passed for forty-five. Diamond shook his hand and suggested they had tea at one of the outdoor tables on the sunny side.
‘You’ve put on some weight since I saw you last,’ Glazebrook said. ‘Is it fattening, this police work?’
‘I was going to ask the same about structural engineering.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t get a safety certificate, but I hold up, just about.’
The banter was a useful way to roll back forty years and revive the mateyness that passed for friendship at school. They chose a table and each ordered a cream tea as if to affirm that healthy eating wasn’t for them.
‘I wasn’t sure you’d remember me,’ Diamond said. ‘It wasn’t as if we were at secondary school together.’
‘Spotted you straight away. It’s the onset of senility,’ Glaze-brook said, straight-faced. ‘The short-term memory goes, but we can recall trivial details from our childhood.’
‘Are you calling me trivial?’
‘Sorry. Make that significant.’
Straight to business, Diamond decided. ‘My recollection is that we got to know each other through that play we were in as the boy princes.’
‘
‘Except they didn’t call it that. Wasn’t it
‘Shakespeare?’ Glazebrook rocked back and laughed. ‘Who did they think they were kidding? Even at that age I could tell it was crap. But you’re right about the title. Didn’t one of the actors write it?’
‘Very likely. Maybe the art teacher who recruited you and me. Now what was he called?’
‘Mr White – Flakey, to us kids.’
Diamond raised his thumb. ‘Of course.’ This was promising. The man had a reliable memory.
‘I don’t remember him doing any writing,’ Glazebrook added.
‘He painted the scenery, I expect.’
‘He must have, and probably did the posters and the programme.’
‘He would have been useful to them with his art skills and his link to the school,’ Diamond said. ‘That’s how we got roped in. There was no audition. I can’t think why he picked you and me out of all the kids.’
‘Can’t you?’ Glazebrook said with a suggestive smile.
‘We must have looked the part. Princely.’
Glazebrook laughed again. ‘No chance. We were two miserable little perishers. I used to have a photo of us in costume and we didn’t look overjoyed in our breeches and tights. My mother tore it up when she read about Flakey in the
Diamond tensed, played the words over and felt a vein pulsing in his temple. ‘Read what?’
‘Didn’t you hear? He wasn’t called Flakey for nothing. He was sent down for five years for interfering with schoolchildren, as they called it then. Dirty old perv.’
The pulsing spread through his arms and chest. ‘I heard nothing of this.’
‘Really? And you a cop? We’d long since left the school when he was found out. It must have been five or six years later. I was put through the inquisition by my parents, wanting to know if he’d got up to anything with me. He hadn’t, but I wouldn’t have told them if he had. You try and forget stuff like that.’
‘Right,’ Diamond said automatically, his thoughts in ferment.
‘He didn’t try it on with you, did he? You’d have told me at the time, wouldn’t you?’ He gave Diamond a speculative look. ‘I guess not, if I wouldn’t discuss it with my parents. But at this distance in time we can be open with each other.’
‘Sure.’
But he wasn’t. He was trying to remember.
‘In my opinion weirdos like that should be locked away indefinitely or offered the chance of chemical castration,’ Glazebrook was saying. ‘You can bet he didn’t serve five years. He’d have been out on probation, back in society, looking for more little kids to abuse.’
