“And finally I shall need overnight accommodation.”
“That should be no problem,” Farr-Jones said in some relief, probably thinking that a section house would be available.
“At the Francis Hotel.”
“Is there a reason?”
“I like it there.”
When Julie Hargreaves reported to Diamond in his new office on the first floor she was in a black sweater and white jeans. Her blond hair was trimmed crisply at the back and sides, the choice of a young woman confident in her femininity. “Shall I see if I can find a couple of chairs from somewhere?” she offered.
“Good idea.”
Diamond’s center of operations was a storeroom. Not a converted storeroom; no attempt had been made to convert it. Hundreds of reams of paper and boxes of envelopes lined the walls on wooden stacks. A table and a filing cabinet had been pushed just inside the door.
“I’m not sure why I was chosen,” Julie said when she had returned with two stacking chairs and helped shift the furniture into position. “I know very little about the case.”
“You’ve answered your question. It needs a fresh mind. I could give you my version and it would be partisan. I’d like you to read the files yourself and let me have your opinion.”
“On whether the case was watertight?”
“Nothing ever is. Look for the holes, Julie. I’ll see you about three o’clock.”
He went shopping in Stall Street: two shirts, a pack of three pairs of pants, said to be XL size, and things for washing and shaving. He now regretted failing to mention expenses to Farr-Jones. After ambling to Queen Square he was on the point of claiming his room at the Francis when he thought of the bookshop only fifty yards away in Chapel Row. It didn’t disappoint. He came out with a rarity for his bedtime reading: a volume he didn’t know, published in 1947 and entitled Horwell of the Yard. Already he owned Cherrill of the Yard, Cornish of the Yard and Fabian ofthe Yard -not because he was a collector, but out of his hankering for the great days when the top detectives had some clout.
Having checked in and washed at the hotel, he renewed his acquaintance with the Roman Bar. A pint of Usher’s, the local brew, and then duty called.
“How is it, Julie?”
“Difficult, Mr. Diamond.”
“Difficult because you can’t find anything, or difficult because you can and you don’t know if I can take it?”
She sidestepped. “On the face of it, this is a straightforward case. Mountjoy had his life’s savings invested in this private college in Gay Street.”
“He chose a prime site,” Diamond commented as he tried his weight gingerly on the plastic stacking chair. “A listed Georgian building in the center of Bath. Which may help to explain why he was on the fiddle, enrolling students who just wanted a piece of paper for their embassy.”
She gave a nod. “According to this, at the time of his arrest, there were almost two hundred enrolled full time and paying fees of three grand a year, when the place could only hold eighty at a pinch.”
“Then enter a young Swedish lady with a phrase book in her hand and a juicy expose in prospect.”
Julie smoothly slotted Britt Strand into her narrative. “She signed on for part-time English language classes claiming to be an au pair. Mountjoy enrolled her.”
“He was only too pleased,” Diamond cut in again. “After all, he needed a core of genuine students. Everything I learned about Britt suggested that she was highly intelligent and very professional. For a foreign girl to be working as a freelance in Bath and supplying the international press with major stories is impressive.”
“They don’t have to work out of London these days. The technology makes it so easy.” Julie’s eyes scanned the sheet in front of her. “She had her contacts in the right places. Paris Match, Oggi, Stern.”
“Plenty of contacts here, too. And I doubt if most of them knew they were being used. She was a charmer, able to mix easily with all sorts. You’ve got it there in the statements. To one boyfriend she was a rock chick in leather and net tights; another guy took her for one of the Badminton set, squeezing in dates between three-day events and point-to-points; and to her college friends she was the hard-up au pair fitting in her studies with doing the chores for a mythical English family.”
Julie ventured a comment in support of the dead woman. “We all show different sides of ourselves to the sets of people we mix with.”
Diamond wasn’t having it. “Britt Strand was doing much more than that. This was deception, professional deception, and that’s dangerous. Fatal, in her case.”
“Maybe.”
He said sharply, “Do you have another explanation?”
“Wouldn’t you expect it from a fresh mind?”
He glared at her briefly, recognized his own phrase and softened his expression. “Sorry. You’re telling the story. Don’t let me interrupt,” he said, as if it would make any difference.
Julie picked up the thread again. “She succeeded in convincing everybody she was a foreigner having trouble with her vocabulary.”
“When in fact she was as fluent as you or me,” said he, failing to see any irony in regard to Julie’s frustrated attempts to be fluent.
Doggedly she went on, “The staff believed her and so did the other students. But secretly she was getting the evidence she wanted for her story. She made a friend of the secretary, so she was able to be seen in the office without creating suspicion. We know she photocopied masses of documents because they were found after her death in the locked filing cabinet in her flat. She also chatted up Mountjoy, strung him along and let him think she fancied him-when all she wanted was to soften him up and get incriminating statements.”
As a recapitulation of events Diamond had immersed himself in at the time, all this couldn’t be faulted-but he didn’t hand out bouquets. He said brusquely, “Let’s get to the evening of the murder.”
“Well, he invited her out for a meal.”
“The first time they’d been out together.”
“Yes. They went to the French restaurant, Le Beaujolais.”
“The one in Chapel Row with thousands of drawn corks heaped against the window. I passed it this afternoon.”
Julie waited a moment, just long enough to let him know that she was capable of doing this unaided. “According to the waiter’s statement, they got along well with each other. No arguments. Mountjoy paid the bill and off they went at about nine-thirty. He escorted her back to her flat in Larkhall. She invited him in for coffee. She had the top-floor flat in a three-story house in a residential street. The people downstairs were away in Tenerife, so they had the place to themselves. There’s no question that Mountjoy went in, because fingerprints and matching hairs were found, and he didn’t deny it anyway. He claimed he left after the coffee. She’d asked him some pointed questions about the way he ran his language school and he was in no mood to stay.”
“And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.”
“Do you want me to carry on?” Julie asked without altering her equable tone.
“Yes.” He slid his hands under his thighs as if sitting on them would discipline him. “Finish the story.”
“Two days later, the Billingtons, the people downstairs, returned from their holiday and found milk uncollected on the doorstep and mail for Britt on the doormat. There was no message. They were worried. They couldn’t sleep for worrying. Late that night they checked her flat and found her body on the bed, dressed in blue pajamas. Fourteen stab wounds. And those roses that gave the press their headlines.”
“Ah, the roses.”
He recalled the image sharply, thin crimson blooms of the sort imported by florists. At least six flower heads in bud had been forced into the blond woman’s gaping mouth, tips outwards, their rich color contrasting with the pallor of the lips and cheeks. The other half-dozen had been scattered across her corpse. A dozen red roses. The memory was so vivid that in spite of his intention to lay off, Diamond once more picked up the narrative from Julie. “The flowers must have been in the room already. We found the cut stems on the floor. But no card and no wrapping paper. She wasn’t carrying roses when she and Mount joy arrived at the restaurant. We checked every florist in Bath and Bristol. Something over twenty bunches of a dozen red roses were bought that day or the
