'How did you get rid of him?'
'By holding out.'
'Didn't he get violent?'
Diamond had struck a wrong note. Fiona stared at him with her large brown eyes. 'No. He's never laid a hand on me. He wouldn't.'
'Don't count on it,' he warned.
Gina murmured, 'We don't. Which is why she's here.'
'So there's more to this?'
'You can tell them,' Gina said. She was now resigned to everything being in the open.
Fiona had her hands across her stomach inside the tracksuit top. She curled her legs more tightly. 'After he'd gone, I thought about what he'd told me. All that money he was counting on. There had to be something criminal going on, and something very big. People don't pay vast sums without due cause. It troubled me. That night I couldn't sleep. All kinds of horrible ideas crept into my head. I thought of the Gulf War. It was never really resolved, was it? Suppose these Arabs he'd met were Iraqi agents planing to assassinate one of the Kuwaiti royal family? If that happened, and I knew in advance and did nothing about it, I'd have to live with the knowledge that I could have prevented a tragedy. Ted was hopelessly dependent. He wouldn't have a conscience. He didn't think past his next fix. It was up to me to do something about it. So I phoned the Foreign Office. And they took it seriously. They sent someone to see me the same day.'
Gina cut in. 'Fiona's information prevented a serious crime. Not an assassination attempt as it turned out, but a huge scam involving diamonds. Our people laid on a stake-out at very short notice and stopped the handover, but through a combination of problems the perpetrators got away.'
'Not much of a stake-out,' Stormy commented.
'These are international terrorists. They're highly organised.'
'Unlike you and me, Stormy,' Diamond said to take the heat out of the exchange. 'So who do they work for?'
'That's secure information.'
'In short, then, Fiona needs protection now, not just from Dixon-Bligh, but these Arab bandits as well. Do you know their names?'
'It's under investigation.'
'Meaning 'no',' Stormy said.
'Do you know where Dixon-Bligh is?'
'He's in the process of being traced.'
'Another 'no',' Stormy said, all too ready with the slick comment.
Diamond gave him a murderous glare. They didn't want to provoke Gina at this stage. 'Leave it out,' he said more for Gina's ears than Stormy's. 'We're as much in the dark as anyone else.'
'Sorry. I'm always shooting off at the mouth,' Stormy said, sounding genuine, and it was a pity his face wouldn't register a blush, because one was probably lurking there.
Diamond hesitated, uncertain if there was anything more of importance to be learned.
There was, and it came from the least likely source -Stormy.
'Peter, I can't clam up now. I've been listening to all this and getting more and more steamed up. My wife, my Patsy, worked with the District Drugs Unit for two or three years before she retired. It was part of her job to visit the drop-in centres in Hammersmith Road and Earls Court Road. She knew all the heroin-users in West London. That's the link, Peter. Dixon-Bligh was on her patch. She must have known him when he was living in Blyth Road, and I didn't think of it.'
31
All this came like a wake-up call to Diamond. He now remembered Stormy mentioning how Patsy Weather worked with junkies at some stage. Like much else, it had been squirreled away in his memory, unlikely to have been recovered but for this.
Gina was just as fired up as the two detectives. 'Can you be certain she knew Dixon-Bligh?'
'If he was on her patch using drugs, you can almost bank on it,' Stormy told her, eyes dilated enough to have you believe he, too, was high on something.
'Why would he want to murder her? She'd retired from the police, you said.'
'He wasn't to know that, was he? I don't know how they met again. Pure chance, I guess. Patsy was always ready to talk to someone she knew. He'd assume she was still on the strength.'
'So he put a gun to her head and shot her?' she said in a rising tone of disbelief. 'What for?'
'Fear of arrest. He thought he was nicked.'
'For petty thieving to fund his habit?'
'No, no, no,' Stormy cut in. 'He was on the run. He faced a murder rap. He'd already shot Peter's wife.'
'Ah.' She raised her hand like a tennis player who has just been served an ace. Then turned to Diamond. 'I'm not thinking straight today. When was your wife murdered?'
'February the twenty-third.'
