Summing up in the car as Julie drove back toward Bath, Diamond said, “Not bad. We started with two men in the frame, Jake Pinkerton and Marcus Martin, and now we have two more: Wicked Winnie, as you called him, and G.B., whoever he is.”
“Winston Billington had an alibi, surely?” said Julie. “He was in Tenerife at the time of the murder.”
“I wonder if anyone checked it.”
“We must have.”
“You say ‘we,’ but you weren’t part of it then. If there was any carelessness, it was my fault. Billington didn’t loom very large in the inquiry, I can tell you that.” He let her negotiate a crossing and then resumed, “He appears to have fancied his chances with her. The presents. The roses.”
“Or sweet peas,” she reminded him.
“All right, but he gave her flowers. And being the landlord, he had a key to her flat. If there’s the slightest doubt about that alibi, Winston Billington has some questions to answer.”
“Surely we can check that holiday in Tenerife with the travel agent?”
“Four years on? I doubt if they keep their records that long. It’s all on computer, isn’t it? Dead easy to wipe.”
Julie smiled. Diamond never missed the chance of a sideswipe at computers.
“The same applies to the airlines,” he added. “At one time we might have stood a chance of tracing a passenger list. It was all on paper. The stewardess had a clipboard with all the names. Not now.”
“Was that when Lindbergh was chief pilot?” Julie asked without taking her eyes off the road.
He gave her a quick look. “On further consideration,” he said, “a couple of rings through your nose might make all the difference.”
She didn’t answer.
Back in Manvers Street, the same constable was still on duty behind the protective glass. He called out Diamond’s name.
“What is it this time?”
“You have a visitor upstairs, sir.”
“One of your bumblebees?”
The constable was uncertain whether he was meant to smile. “No, sir. A crusty.”
Chapter Fourteen
On the way upstairs Julie Hargreaves asked Diamond whether he wanted her to be present.
He told her brusquely, “Of course I do. He’s only here thanks to you.”
“I didn’t arrange it.”
“You scattered the seed corn.” But it wasn’t said as a compliment. He had been assembling his thoughts for the interview to come, and she had disrupted them.
That was soon forgotten. In their makeshift office, a truly distracting spectacle was waiting. The crusty was asleep, feet up on the desk, head back and mouth open. Neither Julie nor Diamond had mentioned the fact, but each had expected to find someone fitting G.B.’s description. This crusty was emphatically female.
Stirring at the sound of the door being closed, she yawned and said, “Who are you?”
“We work here,” Diamond answered.
The statement was received with a slit-eyed, disbelieving look. Clearly they didn’t look like the sort of police she was used to seeing. She would have been received downstairs by one of the uniformed officers and escorted here by another.
Diamond added, “Plain clothes. And who are you?”
“I just looked in.”
One evasion for another. He decided to give his surname and Julie’s rank and name.
The crusty responded with, “Shirl.”
Shirl was in what looked like a wartime flying jacket of faded brown leather with a fleece collar. She had a black T-shirt and fringed leather miniskirt, fishnet tights and badly scuffed ankle boots that she showed no inclination to remove from the desk. Her black hair was cut shorter even than Julie’s and a Union Jack shape was shaved on each side of her head. Large silver rings adorned her ears, but she had no nose decorations and no visible tattoos. Quite a conservative crusty.
“What can we get for you, Shirl? A coffee?”
She mimed the action of holding a cigarette to her lips.
Diamond exchanged a look with Julie and she went out to waylay someone who smoked.
“What brings you here?”
Shirl eyed him warily, still with her legs propped on his desk. Since the legs were so much on display, it was impossible not to notice that they were stumpy. Neither the boots, nor the stockings, nor the miniskirt, could make them look anything else. Probably when she was standing no one noticed her legs, for she was generously proportioned above the waist. Deciding finally that some kind of explanation for her presence in the office had to be conceded, she told him, “Some of the fuzz was down in Stall Street this morning asking about G.B.”
“You know him?”
“Course I know him, or I wouldn’t be here, would I? What do you want him for?”
“Only to help us with our inquiries.” The familiar form of words escaped Diamond’s mouth before he was fully aware how sinister it would sound. Swiftly he rephrased it. “I want to talk to him about someone he met a long time ago.”
“In Bath?”
He grinned, trying to be agreeable. “Trim Street, actually.”
“Don’t know it.”
“You know the bottom of Milsom Street, where the phones are, and that shop with the coffee machine- Carwardine’s?”
Shirl said, “It’s gone.”
He frowned. “Not Carwardine’s?”
“Closed.”
“God help us.”
Shirl said helpfully, “But I know where you mean.”
“Tucked away behind there, then. G.B. was living in a squat in Trim Street at one time four years ago. This woman was a journalist. She arranged with him to visit the house and take some pictures for a magazine.”
“This is that Swedish reporter who was killed, right?”
“Right.” Encouraged that she knew, he still tried to keep the same amiable tone. “So you remember her?”
“I wasn’t here then. I was still at school.”
“But you know about the murder?”
“Only what I was told.”
“And you can take me to G.B.?”
This caused her to gasp in alarm. “No way! I didn’t say that.”
“Then why are you here? Did he send you?”
She answered the first question, not the second. “He’s my bloke.”
Julie returned with three cigarettes and some matches. Shirl grabbed them all and lit one, slipping the others into a top pocket. Diamond told Julie what he had learned so far, cueing her to take up the questioning.
“Where are you living, love?” Julie asked.
“All over. I’m a traveler, aren’t I?”
“In a van?”
“Something like that.”
