'Are you saying that after all this he remembers what he was doing on February the twenty-third?'
Joe Florida pointed to the tape recorder mounted on the wall. 'Turn that fucker off, and I'll tell you.'
'Typical breakdown in communications,' Diamond grumbled on the drive to Chichester. 'If someone is brought into hospital with blood all over him and no explanation, it's a police matter. The local CID must have been out at that beach looking for evidence. Why didn't we hear about it?'
'Because we were with Gina's lot,' Stormy pointed out. 'They're not exactly the local plod.'
Thanks to Stormy's driving they reached St Richard's Hospital inside half an hour. The doctor in Accident &Emergency took them into an office at once. A stethoscope hung from his neck and he fingered the sound- receiver as he spoke. 'Yes, I was on duty yesterday when the man was brought in from West Wittering. From the contents of his pocket he was called Edward Dixon-Bligh, but he hasn't been formally identified yet'
'So he's dead?'
'On arrival.'
'Do you know the cause?'
'Loss of blood.'
'But where from?'
'His mouth. This is hard to believe, but someone cut out his tongue.'
32
The next afternoon Diamond, back in Bath, was summoned to the top-floor suite known as the Eagle's Nest. Curtis McGarvie was there already, seated in the armchair closest to Georgina's desk. He had a half-empty mug of coffee in his fist, revealing he'd been there some time. And he was sitting at an uncomfortable angle with his knees pointing at Diamond, presumably to line himself up with the inquisition.
Georgina cleared her throat. 'Thank you for coming, Peter.' The greeting had a faintiy pejorative edge, and the follow-up confirmed it. 'If you were expecting a pat on the back, think again. Just because the Yard are treating you like some footballer who scored the winning goal, it doesn't excuse your conduct here. You defied my explicit instruction to stay out of the investigation into your wife's death.'
'I did stay out, ma'am.'
'What?'
'Ask DCI McGarvie. I haven't troubled him at all. When did we last speak?'
McGarvie glared and said, 'That isn't the point.'
'You ran what amounted to a parallel investigation,' Georgina steamed on. 'You visited the crime scenes and interviewed witnesses. What's that, if it isn't interference?'
'Am I prohibited from visiting the place where my wife was murdered? No one made that clear to me.'
McGarvie said, 'You also turned up at the scene of the Patricia Weather murder - even before I did.'
'Nobody barred me from other cases.'
'Come off it, Peter. We all know it was a carbon copy of your wife's shooting.'
'We didn't know at the time. Stormy Weather is an old colleague. I was with him at Fulham. I'm allowed to have some sympathy for an old mate who goes through a similar experience, aren't I?'
Georgina said, 'This is evasion. You teamed up with DCI Weather and drove all over the south of England like . . .' She turned to McGarvie for help, and got none. '. . . like a re-run of
'If you knew my driving, ma'am, you wouldn't make that comparison.'
'Don't mess with me. You go off on your own without any consultation, riding roughshod over sensitive lines of enquiry, blundering into this safe house where the witness was being kept.'
'That was to enquire about Ted Dixon-Bligh, ma'am.'
'And you're going to justify it on the grounds that he was the killer.'
'No, ma'am. He was family.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'My wife's ex-husband. I wanted to see him on a family matter.'
Georgina made a puffing sound of irritation.
Diamond explained, unfazed, 'DCI McGarvie told me he was holed up somewhere, and the Met couldn't find him. You'll confirm those were your words, Curtis?'
McGarvie wasn't willing to confirm anything. He stared straight ahead.
'You don't seem to remember. You'd lost all interest in Dixon-Bligh, or so it appeared to me at the time. You were getting very interested in Joe Florida. What happened about Florida?'
'Released without charge,' McGarvie said after a pained pause. 'After eleven hours, he finally decided to tell us he had an alibi.'
'What was that?'
'He was having his car tyres replaced at a garage in Hammersmith.'
