‘Neat.’ Not for the first time, he valued Ingeborg’s quick brain. ‘What time is it? Wake her up and tell her we want her here before they start the PM.’
‘Now?’
‘Call me back as soon as you’ve fixed it. I’m at home.’ He put down the phone.
Raffles was pressing against his leg, reminding him of a duty that couldn’t be ducked. There was barely time to open a pouch of tuna before the phone rang.
‘She’s catching an early train,’ Ingeborg told him. ‘I’m meeting her at the station and driving her to the mortuary.’
‘She’d heard, of course?’
‘Oh, yes. She’s been up some time answering the phone.’
‘You can you handle this, can’t you, Inge?’
‘Getting her to open up? No problem, guv.’
‘She’s a hard nut.’
‘Brittle. I watched you deal with her.’
This sounded like a compliment, but it wasn’t. Cracking a difficult witness was a skill Ingeborg had learned in her days as a journalist. There were times when Diamond suspected she could crack him, too. Right now he wanted her opinion on the excesses of her age group. ‘You hear quite a lot about self-inflicted injuries among young women. Why do they do it?’
‘Guys do it as well.’
He smiled to himself. ‘Point taken.’
‘It’s often a teenage thing,’ she said, and then conceded a little. ‘I don’t know what the stats say, but you could be right that females are in the majority here. As to why, you’d better ask a shrink.’
Perish the thought. ‘I was hoping to get an opinion out of you.’
She took a moment to think. ‘It’s often triggered by stress. Situations they can’t cope with. I did see a theory that they’re suffering such pain from within that they take to cutting themselves to transfer the pain to the outside.’
‘There’s something wrong with the logic there.’
‘I don’t think so. The cutting brings temporary relief.’
‘By pain from within, you mean anxieties?’
‘Out of all proportion. You know how tough it can be when you’re growing up.’
‘Clarion was no teenager.’
‘Right, but what kind of adolescence did she have? She was into the world of pop from an early age. Her growing up must have been distorted.’
‘Arrested development?’
‘If you want to put a label on it. She would have been okay while things were going well but as she sank in the charts she would have been deeply troubled. Her great days as a singer were over. We don’t know when she started cutting herself. It may have been when she was younger, but all the recent disappointment must have been hell to endure.’
‘Are you saying she was immature?’
A sigh came down the phone. ‘Emotionally, maybe. Unable to cope. She had the acting as a back-up, but everyone says she was rubbish in rehearsals. First night nerves plus the knowledge that she couldn’t hack it as an actor must have really got to her.’
‘Damaging her own face would be a step on from cutting her arms,’ Diamond said.
‘I know, but self-harmers use anything that comes to hand, a hot iron sometimes, a lighter, boiling water, acid.’
His flesh prickled.
She went on, ‘And she had the extra incentive that scarring her face would save her from being savaged by the critics and all the bad publicity, which she must have been dreading.’
‘I thought self-harming was done in secret and covered up.’
‘She did cover it up by blaming the theatre.’
‘But the pain was very public.’
‘No one knew it was her own doing. She would have secretly brushed caustic soda on her face just before going on, so the cause of it wasn’t obvious. She had the credit of making an entrance and the agony that followed actually saved her from having to remain on stage.’
‘This is getting too deep for me. We didn’t find any trace of the stuff in her dressing room.’
‘She would have flushed it away, wouldn’t she?’
‘You really believe this, Inge, don’t you?’
‘It makes sense to me, guv.’
‘Why did she threaten to sue? Wouldn’t a self-harmer stay silent?’
