previous one. You wouldn’t think there were that many romantics about.”
“Red roses are also a way of saying sorry,” Julie informed him.
He didn’t seem to think it was relevant. “About half the bunches bought were delivered by the florists, but none to Larkhall. The best explanation is that Mount joy had them with him when he picked her up at the house. Where he bought them, we don’t know.”
Julie asked the salient question, “What was the point of putting them in her mouth?”
He shook his head. “It would take a shrink to answer that. Presumably all those stab thrusts didn’t satisfy him. He had to add a final touch.”
“Red roses have such a strong symbolism,” Julie mused. “It’s the kind of thing a rejected lover might do.”
“Pure frustration, then, after she invited him in at the end of the evening and then refused to come across.”
“But that wasn’t the motive the prosecution went for.”
“Not the prime motive,” he was forced to concede, “but look at it from Mountjoy’s point of view. He’s had the come-on from this attractive student. He buys her roses and takes her out for a meal. They go back to her place and instead of what he’s expecting, she gives him the third degree about his dodgy enrollment system. He gets angry, turns violent and murders her. Catching sight of the red roses he so naively bought, he rips them off the stems and stuffs them into her mouth.”
Julie pondered this scenario. “I suppose it has to be something like that, but you’d think all that stabbing would be enough.”
“Who can say how much is enough? John Mountjoy isn’t noted for self-restraint.”
She picked the pathologist’s report from the stack of papers in front of her. This had given Julie her images of the killing. It ran to fifteen pages of detail accompanied by diagrams and photographs: a preamble listing information about the identification of the body by Winston Billington, the date and place of the postmortem and the identities of those present; a long account of the external examination; the internal examination; followed by the conclusions as to the cause of death. If Julie were asked by Diamond, she would have to admit to having skimmed through much of it. She didn’t possess the anatomical knowledge or the clinical calm to study it fully. The wounds were described minutely, mapped and measured. Some, the report made clear, were shallow; to state that the victim had been stabbed fourteen times was true, but misleading to anyone unfamiliar with this type of attack. Three only had penetrated to any depth; the others had met resistance or been warded off in the struggle, for it was clear that Britt Strand had tried to fight off her attacker. There had been defensive wounds on the fingers of both hands and on the left wrist. No indications had been found of sexual violence. The attack was categorized as fairly typical of stabbings, the cause of death being a wound of the aorta, or principal artery of the body. It had been produced by a pointed, sharp-edged instrument several inches in length.
A photograph taken from above, before the autopsy, showed the concentration of wounds above and around the left breast. The murderer’s intention could not be doubted. One thrust had left an ugly cut in the neck, but the face was unmarked, still beautiful, even with the mouth agape, forced open by the rosebuds crammed into the cavity.
Julie looked down at her hands and found she was pressing back the skin from her fingernails. “I’m not going to find it easy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Working on this. He doesn’t invite sympathy.”
“He’s a shit.”
After an awkward silence she said, “Then why are we doing it? To save Samantha’s life?”
“No.”
The answer baffled her.
Diamond got up and walked to the one small window they had in the storeroom. Down in Manvers Street people had their umbrellas up. “The way I see it, the man is guilty of murder. I’m ninety-nine percent certain. This time yesterday I would have said a hundred percent. A chink of doubt has opened up because of the choice he has made. He could have got clean away, or at least tried. Instead he stakes everything on getting me to admit I was wrong.” He turned to face Julie. “It may be calculated to shake my confidence.”
“Get you to look for a loophole?”
“Exactly. He’s guilty and he still gets me to find him an out. Nothing is ever totally certain in this business. Sow a seed of doubt and you might end up believing Crippen was innocent. Or Christie.”
“Could you fall for that trick?” she said.
His eyes held hers for a moment, moved away and then came back to her. “I don’t know. I hope not.”
“But you still think the case is worth another look?”
“The top brass would be delighted if we sat on our backsides playing dominoes all day. I’d rather spend my time and yours exploring that one percent of uncertainty. I can’t say it will make a jot of difference to Samantha; her best chance lies with Warrilow and his search parties. It’s a trivial pursuit, an intellectual puzzle. If we choose to play, we might as well play seriously. Agreed?”
Julie digested this and finally said, “Agreed.”
In a few minutes he had confided as much in this young woman as anyone he had worked with, but then he had never been asked to work in virtual isolation with so little support from the top, or for so unpromising an outcome. The room itself, their cramped, unforgiving space, was conducive to soul-baring.
“Okay. Just in theory let’s see if it’s possible to put anyone else in the frame,” he said. “Suppose Britt really was alive when Mountjoy left the house that night and someone other than him came in and killed her.”
“Someone she let in herself,” contributed Julie. “There was no evidence of a break-in.”
He nodded. “The murder was done some time before midnight or in the small hours. The pathologist as usual can’t give us an accurate time of death. So we’re looking at someone she trusted enough to admit some time after Mountjoy left. When was that?”
“About ten-thirty.”
“She was already dressed in pajamas-or changed into them while the killer was with her. You mentioned boyfriends. What did we get on her love life?”
“Those two men you mentioned were interviewed. Neither was dating her at the time of the murder.”
“They’d say that, wouldn’t they?”
“Her diary said it. She last saw the horsey type on October the eighth, at his riding-school-but I gather it was purely the riding she went for.”
“The horse riding?”
She didn’t dignify his attempt at bawdiness with a smile.
He picked up the thread again. “And the murder was…?”
“October the eighteenth.”
“What about the rock musician?”
“Jake Pinkerton? He isn’t mentioned at all. You’d need her 1988 diary for him.”
“It wasn’t a personal diary, if I remember, just a record of engagements.”
“Yes. Do you want to see it?” Julie delved into the box file and handed across a laminated book with a Matisse reproduction on the cover.
He said as he opened it, “The point I was making is that she would make a note of dates with boyfriends in here.”
“She did.”
“And it’s tempting to assume that those were the only times she saw them. Do you see what I’m getting at? If she met someone at a party or in the street, she wouldn’t write their names in here.” He turned to October. He remembered seeing the entry for the day of the murder, John Mountjoy’s name and the time 7:30 inscribed in confident rounded letters in blue-green ink. Not the last entry in the diary, for there were engagements noted into December, but it was still salutary to see the name written there, on the fatal day. At the trial the sheer volume of paper evidence-including this diary entry- had made an impact-all those photocopied documents from the college files, each in its transparent folder.
He flicked back a few pages and found the name Marcus occurring regularly in August. Marcus Martin, the horse rider. “I interviewed this thoroughbred myself. Well connected, lives in style in a manor house the other side
