them. Sad eyes. But Danny isn’t much good at painting people.”
“Me?” She sucked in her cheeks and clamped her teeth on them. With emotion heaped on to all the stress, she was afraid she might cry.
He said, “It had to be you, didn’t it? I knew you and Danny used to operate somewhere in these parts and I know the streets of Bath. The way he painted it was what they would term naive in the art world, but he took no end of trouble to get it right, the steep slope and those windows and the railings in front of the basements and the wrought-iron stands for window boxes on the house next door that didn’t have the Venetian windows. He must have a photographic memory. Of course, it could have been one of a dozen streets except for one thing: the doors. He painted them without doorknobs, or locks, or letterboxes. And to my knowledge there’s only one street with front doors that never open and that’s the lower half of Morford Street. You have access from the back, through the arch halfway along the terrace.”
She didn’t compliment him on his powers of observation. He didn’t seem to need humoring.
He said, “I thought you would want to help me.”
She nodded, wishing with all her might that he would leave.
He rattled the keys. “I’ll leave the car in the station car park. You can pick it up in the morning. There’s one other thing.”
“Yes?”
“Those post office jobs you did with Danny. You both carried guns. What happened to yours?”
“I got rid of it.”
His expression hardened. “I don’t think so. You’ll have hidden it, but you won’t have got rid of it.”
“Truly.”
“Lying bitch. I had a wife who lied to me. Want to know what I did to her?”
She shook her head.
He was right. She had it in the house, under the loose floorboard in the front room, covered by a carpet and a table with a bronze flowerpot. She’d judged that it was safer to keep the gun all these years than risk it being found somewhere and traced back to her by forensic scientists. Up to this minute she had been right. Nina said, “I threw it into the river.”
Mountjoy said, “Come here.”
Chapter Sixteen
Peter Diamond had faults-more, perhaps, than most- but reticence wasn’t one of them. He needed to talk. At this minute his self-esteem was at rock bottom. He’d really messed up in 1990 unless G.B. had invented all that stuff about the comings and goings at the murder house. A killer had escaped thanks to his inept investigation.
So when he and Julie retraced their route through the woods to the road in silence, the break in communication wasn’t of his choosing. He was bursting to speak, but inconveniently the evening was closing in fast, obliging them to concentrate on their footing. All speculation as to the identity of the man G.B. had seen entering Britt’s lodging on the night of the murder had to wait until they were back in the car.
“Winston Billington,” he finally said, struggling to persuade the buckle of the seat belt across his middle. “Who else could it be but the landlord, letting himself in at that time of night?”
“You’re blocking my view,” Julie told him. “I’m trying to turn the car.”
“Clear road.” He let her concentrate on the U-turn. Once they were heading in the right direction, he leaned so close to her that the brim of his trilby touched her hair. “What do you think?”
“I thought Mr. Billington had an alibi. He was in Tenerife with his wife until after the murder.”
“But did we check it?” He turned away and pummeled his thigh with his fist. “Did we check it at the time, Julie?”
She said, “I wasn’t there.”
Diamond was talking rhetorically. “We had this statement that the Billingtons returned-when was it, two days after?-and discovered the body. The whole shebang started from there. Did I have their flight schedules checked? Or the hotel register? I honestly don’t think I did. You’ll say it was negligent. I’d say the same. But Billington was never seriously considered.”
“As a suspect, you mean?”
“What a cock-up.”
“Why would he kill her?”
“Anger, because she refused to come across. We heard from Marcus Martin that Billington fancied Britt.”
“Finding excuses to give her presents of flowers and chocolates,” said Julie.
He nodded. “The flower connection, you see.”
“Mrs. Billington insisted that the roses couldn’t have come from their garden,” Julie pointed out.
“That was obvious to anyone who’s ever grown roses,” he said as if he constantly carried a pair of pruning shears in his pocket. Julie wasn’t to know that he’d acquired his horticultural wisdom from Mrs. Billington herself. “They were definitely imported roses from a florist. The salient point is that he’s the only one of her admirers who liked to say it with flowers.”
They turned left at the Viaduct to go up Brassknocker. While the Escort was making heavy work of the curving incline, Julie commented over the engine noise, “It takes some believing. I mean, would Billington kill her in his own house and report it to the police himself?”
“Yes, because that’s smart,” said Diamond. “The dumb thing to have done was dump the body somewhere else. Bodies are hellish to dispose of. They won’t burn well, or stay under water for long and digging a grave is a job for a professional. No, it looks as if Billington brazened it out four years ago and I believed him.”
“You seem to have made up your mind.”
“Not at all.” He gave her a sharp look. “I’m weighing the possibilities.” He weighed them a little longer before adding, more tentatively, “The wife’s behavior was instructive. I’m sorry you weren’t there. Where were you?”
Julie reminded him, “Chatting up the crusties.”
He tried to break out of the despondent mood by being boisterous. “Well, if you will insist on keeping that sort of company…”
The car began picking up speed at the top of the hill. “You see,” he went on, “Mrs. Billington didn’t really want me to interview Billington. She was sheilding him, yet I got the feeling that she wasn’t doing it out of loyalty or affection. She spoke about him in a detached way, almost disdainful.‘You’ll get nothing out of Winston,’ but said in a tone that made me think she’d got nothing out of him.”
A little later, she asked, “What’s Mr. Billington like? Did you interview him at the time of the murder?”
“I saw them together then, and she did most of the talking. He was civil, unassertive, a quiet bloke, but they often are.”
“How do you see it, then?” Julie asked as they began the long descent into Bath.
“Assuming Billington did it? The middle-aged man lusting after the pretty young lodger who appears to share her favors widely, but won’t include him, for all his overtures with sweets and flowers. He comes back early from his holiday in Tenerife-maybe some family emergency, or a crisis at work-at any rate, some excuse he concocted-and leaves his wife to follow him in a day or two. This is the opportunity he’s waited for. A night alone in the house with Britt. He buys a dozen red roses at the airport and gets home around eleven.”
“At the airport?”
“There are always flowers at airports.”
“G.B. didn’t say the man he saw was carrying flowers,” said Julie.
“He could have hidden them inside his coat. He wouldn’t want the neighbors to see them, or Britt, until he was ready to surprise her.”
“And she was supposed to melt at the sight of a dozen roses?” said Julie skeptically.
“There are women who would.”
“It sounds as if you’re speaking from experience.”
He said bitingly, “We’re talking about Billington. He goes to her room, gets the brush-off and goes berserk.
