her. If charged, he would offer that well-tried defence: there was a struggle and the gun went off.
But right now, he'd be thinking he'd got away with it. He'd have judged, correctly, that Steph wouldn't have mentioned the blackmail to anyone else. He wouldn't know about the diary entries.
Certain he wouldn't get to sleep for hours now, Diamond got up and pulled on the clothes he'd dropped in a heap in the corner a couple of hours before. He needed physical activity. Fresh air.
Fresh it was. A sharp east wind was blowing up Weston High Street, shifting the discarded packs and paper cups outside the takeaway. He pulled up the collar of his overcoat and jammed his old trilby more tightly over his bald patch. The occasional car passed him, but no one else was desperate enough to be walking the streets.
It was painful, this process of speculating on the bits of Steph's life she may have wanted to keep from him. It was alien to their relationship. She had known the worst about him and taken him on with all his faults, and he'd always told her everything. No, he thought, that isn't true. Who am I kidding? I kept things back. I didn't tell her I kept the gun all those years, mainly because I knew she'd hate to have such a thing in the house. And if I wasn't open with Steph, and she found out, she was entided to feel let down. Was it any wonder she kept quiet about what happened after she found it?
Those diary entries hurt him, just as she must have been hurt when she found the gun. You work at your marriage, trusting, believing, and the more honest the relationship is, the more devastating is any deceit. The people we love the most are capable of inflicting the greatest pain.
Still, if there were ugly things in her past, he couldn't ignore them. He might feel guilty probing, but he'd sworn over her dead body he would find her killer. That outweighed everything.
His thoughts were interrupted. A car had crept up and was cruising beside him at walking pace. He'd got to the top of the High Street and was approaching the Crown. They came so close that he heard the nearside window slide down. Someone who'd lost his way, he thought, and turned to see.
It was a police car with two young officers inside.
'Do you mind telling us where you're going?'
'Home, eventually,' he answered.
'And where's that?'
'Just up there, off Trafalgar Road.'
'Out for a walk, are you?'
'That's the idea.'
'At this time of night?'
'There's no law against it.'
'Most lawful people are in bed and asleep. Don't I know you, chummy?'
'You should . . . constable.'
There was a murmured consultation inside the car, followed by, 'Christ!' Then a pause, and, 'Sorry to have troubled you, sir. There was a break-in higher up, on Lansdown Lane, and we—'
The voice of the driver said, 'Leave it, Jock.'
'Night, sir.' The car drew off at speed.
He shook his head and walked on.
In the morning he called the nick and told the switchboard he'd be late in. These days nobody objected. They were relieved when he was out of the place. He was an unwelcome presence, reminding everyone of the poor progress so far. He had the files of unsolved crimes to keep him occupied, supposedly, but he was forever finding reasons to look into the incident room.
He took an early train to London and was in Kensington by ten. The last address he had for Dixon-Bligh was in Blyth Road, behind the exhibition halls at Olympia, not far from his old patch. He wasn't in a nostalgic mood.
The tall Victorian terraced house was split into flats and the modey collection of name cards stuffed into slots beside the doorbells didn't include a Dixon-Bligh. He stepped back to check the house number again. Definitely the one he had.
He rang the ground-floor bell. This was not the kind of establishment that operated with internal phones. After several tries no one came, so he pressed the next bell up, and got a response. Above him, a sash window was pulled up and a spiky hairdo appeared. Male, he thought.
'Yeah?'
He said he was looking for Dixon-Bligh and didn't know which flat he was in.
'Dick who?' the punk said.
'No, Edward. Edward Dixon-Bligh. Man in his forties. Ex-Air Force. Used to own a restaurant in Guildford. May be sharing with a younger woman.'
'Never heard of him.' The head disappeared and the window slammed shut.
It wasn't unusual for people in London flats to know nothing of their neighbours. Diamond studied the names beside the remaining doorbells, and wasn't encouraged. Both looked foreign.
He pressed the first and got no response. The second was answered eventually by a woman in a sari who came down two flights of stairs with a baby in her arms.
He stated his question again.
She shook her head.
'You don't know, or you think he's moved?'
She took a step back and smiled and shrugged. She didn't understand a word he was saying.
