“Certainly must.” He picked his trilby off the table. There wasn’t anything to thank her for.
“Not so much as a cup of weak tea, Julie.” He voiced his disapproval of Mrs. Billington over a sandwich lunch in the Roman Bar at the Francis. “She treated me as if I was something the cat brought in.”
“Is there a cat?”
“Yes, and it ignored me. So it was worse than being something the cat brought in.”
“You’re not having much of a day so far. And you think Mrs. Billington was keeping something back?”
He picked up the sandwich plate. “Put some of these on your plate or I’ll swipe the lot. I’m like that. It isn’t gluttony, it’s concentration. Working lunches have that effect. Yes, I’d lay money that she was withholding information, and it concerns the husband. Of course it could be simply that he deals in raunchy greeting cards and she’s ashamed of him.”
“Does he?”
“Don’t know for sure. I got the impression that they’re not the sort you’d send to your aunt. Fair enough, the shops are full of them. Mrs. Billington may not want the world to know, but if it’s a living and within the law, I’m not condemning Winston.”
“Wicked Winnie.”
He chuckled. “I can remember a time when a sales rep was called a commercial traveler and the butt of thousands of dirty jokes. I’m curious to find out whether Winston fits the picture.”
“Meaning what?” said Julie.
“Meaning was he laying the lodger?”
Julie’s eyebrows arched.
“It’s not unknown,” he added reasonably. “Middle-aged man lusting after pretty girl upstairs. When I looked at Mrs. Billington this morning-”
“Come off it, Mr. Diamond,” Julie cut in sharply. “I’m not one of your beer-drinking cronies.”
He hesitated. Once he would have waded in. But he valued Julie’s support and wanted to keep it.
She repaired the conversation seamlessly. “If he had something going with Britt, it would be interesting to discover, but where would it lead us since we know he was in Tenerife at the time of the murder?”
“I’m talking off the top of my head,” Diamond said, “but it might provide a motive that we didn’t consider at the time. If Billington slept with Britt and someone else got to hear of it, we could be talking about a jealous lover as the killer.”
“Marcus Martin?”
“He claimed he’d broken up with Britt, but we only have his word for that.”
“He had an alibi for the night of the murder, didn’t he?”
“Didn’t they all?”
Julie was becoming inured to the big man’s cynicism. “He was at a party in Warminster until one in the morning.”
“Time of death isn’t certain.”
“Yes, but the woman he was with is certain. She said he spent the rest of the night at her flat in Walcot Street.”
“Was there corroboration, though?”
“No.”
Diamond took a long sip of bitter. “I wouldn’t place too much reliance on it, then. Let’s talk to Mr. Martin this afternoon if we can.”
She looked up, surprised. “You want me to come?”
He nodded. “Unless you need more time with the crusties. How did you get on?”
She gestured with her thumb that the morning had not been a success. “They’re too guarded to talk to anyone like me, except to give me abuse. There are nine or ten of them sitting around the Abbey Churchyard area with their dogs. To get on terms with them I’d need to shave off most of my hair and get some combat fatigues.”
“And a layer of dirt,” contributed Diamond.
“Tattoos.”
“Rings through your nose.”
Julie paused and looked at him with widening eyes as it dawned on her that what was being said might actually amount to an instruction.
“All right,” said Diamond. “We’ll leave out the nose rings.”
Chapter Twelve
Samantha Tott said, “It’s freezing.”
John Mountjoy told her, “It isn’t. You don’t get frost down here.”
“That really cheers me up! I thought the caravan was the coldest place I’d ever have to sleep in. How wrong I was!”
“This is only temporary.”
“How temporary? I can’t face another night here.”
Her voice, pitched higher, echoed off the limestone walls.
The hills to the east of Bath are riddled with stone workings. In the area of Box and Corsham Down the mining was abandoned half a century ago and the main entrances blocked up, but there are numerous ways in. From time to time rescue operations are mounted for the reckless and naive who have ventured in and lost themselves in the maze of tunnels. Mount-joy was neither reckless nor naive. In his case the risk of getting lost was massively outweighed by his need for a bolt-hole.
He had brought Samantha to Quarry Hill at night after abandoning the caravan. They had stumbled through the undergrowth looking for one of the entrances. By torchlight they had picked their way down some rough-hewn steps through a sloping shaft that linked with a tunnel where they could stand upright with ease. This was one of the main arteries. A short distance on, they had discovered a recess some two meters deep in the side of the tunnel. Presumably it was the beginning of a working that for some reason had proved unsatisfactory. To Mountjoy it had felt secure and smelled all right and was more congenial as a place to rest than the main tunnel. He had led Samantha into it with all the gusto of an estate agent showing a client around. As he pointed out, with the torch and some spare batteries and food and a blanket, it was perfectly habitable. And she had slept. They had both got some sleep.
Yet this morning she wouldn’t stop griping about the cold. Mountjoy’s tolerance of women who complained was limited in the best of situations. He was beginning to become unhappy with Samantha’s attitude. In his opinion the first two nights in the caravan had been colder than down here. She’d been too terrified that he was a rapist to speak of the cold-or possibly she thought he might interpret it as a come-on. Now that she’d survived several nights without being molested, the protests about creature comforts were mounting up.
To calm her down, he repeated a few words of consolation someone had once given him in Albany. “Sleeping rough would be a damned sight colder.”
“What do you call this, if it isn’t rough? Couldn’t we go back to the caravan park? They won’t be expecting us to go back.”
“The farmer will. He’ll be guarding his patch now.”
“Some other site, then.”
“I’ve got somewhere else in mind.”
She was elated. “Let’s go, then. It can’t be worse than this.”
“I have to check it first.”
“You mean on your own?”
“Be sensible. What do you expect?”
“Don’t leave me here. Please don’t leave me. I hate the dark.” The voice was on that dangerous rising note again.
“Maybe I can get something warmer for you to wear.”
