ten minutes, until she came back. It had one of those illuminated signs on the top. It was from Abbey Taxis, who work out of Bath.”
“Ah. You traced the driver?”
“The next day. He remembered her. And she’d had the roses with her. Even better, she had a slight foreign accent and he gave me a good description. She was blond, attractive, well dressed. The trouble was that he couldn’t tell me her name or address. She’d picked up the taxi from the rank outside the station and that’s where he put her down at the end. I got him to drive me around Bath several afternoons in the hope that he would spot her, but we had no luck. Then one evening some weeks after all this he phoned me and said he’d been talking to one of the other Abbey drivers who believed he knew the woman. He’d driven her more than once from the station to a house in Larkhall and she was a Swedish journalist.” She spread her hands. “That was all I had, but it was enough. I asked in the newspaper office. She didn’t work for the local rag, but they knew about her. It’s their business to know about local people. It wasn’t too promising when I discovered that this woman didn’t drive or drink, but I’m not easily discouraged. I got to know everything I could about her. I got the job with her, joined her on a couple of stories, at Longleat and the Trim Street squat.”
“You’re so good with people that you managed to suppress the anger you felt toward the woman who killed your daughter.”
“No,” she interrupted Diamond. “You’re telling it wrong. I wasn’t certain she’d done it. If I’d been certain, I would have killed her before I did. I couldn’t have waited!”
The way she stated this was chilling.
Diamond accepted the correction with a nod. “I was saying that you won Britt’s confidence completely, took all the photos she wanted and took them well. Visited her flat in Larkhall. Got to know her routine, her friends, her landlord, and I’m sure this was one-sided. She didn’t visit you. She wouldn’t. You were the photographer, the junior partner in this team, so you brought the prints to her to see. She didn’t know you lived in Steeple Ashton where she’d killed the child. Your phone has a Devizes number, and that was all she needed to know to stay in contact.”
He took some more coffee. No one else spoke. He took a bite of the cake. He had their attention for as long as he chose to go on. “In September or October of 1990, Britt got on to John Mountjoy’s enrollment racket. As usual, she confided in you, gave you the background, the suspicion that he was enrolling Iraqis who had no intention of becoming students, except to satisfy their visa requirements. You took some external shots of the college. And now we come to the day before the murder, October the seventeenth-two years to the day since your daughter was killed in the car accident. This was the day you confirmed beyond all doubt that Britt had been the driver of that car.”
“The roses?” said Farr-Jones.
Prue Shorter nodded.
“You watched her bring them to the grave?” said Diamond.
“And I knew for sure,” she said in a low voice.
“You also had the opportunity to do something about it the next day. Britt had accepted the invitation to the meal with Mountjoy and told you she would take him back to Larkhall and tape the conversation. She aimed to confront him with the evidence that night, and she did. He admits it. But he didn’t kill her. Neither did G.B., her latest admirer, who was jealous as hell and followed them back to the house. Nor Billington, who came home unexpectedly to collect the key of his car. The murder was committed after each of the men had left. You visited her late that night, when she was alone in the house, around midnight or after, on some pretext you’d given over the phone-maybe even the truth, that you knew for certain that she was the hit-and-run driver.”
Prue Shorter gave a nod. “That was the only way I was going to get admitted at that time of night.”
“She agreed.”
“Right away.”
“And you went to the house armed with a knife-”
“A kitchen knife.”
Diamond thought fleetingly of the knife she had given him to cut the cake, then banished the idea. “She invited you upstairs. You also brought with you the roses she’d placed on your daughter’s grave. You stabbed her a number of times and filled her mouth with the roses.”
She eyed him challengingly.
“One question,” he said. “Before leaving the house, did you remove a cassette from her tape recorder?”
“You won’t find it here,” she said. “I chucked it in the river. She taped almost everything. It could have given me away.”
Speaking more to the police than to her, he admitted, “The significance of those roses was a real puzzle to DI Hargreaves and me. We hadn’t seen them in a churchyard. We only saw them at the scene of the murder. For a time we assumed the obvious, that they indicated a jealous lover. We also made the mistake of assuming that the person who killed her must have bought them. One thing was certain: whoever bought them took care to make sure we didn’t trace them to a local florist’s. It was only yesterday evening that we worked out that she had bought them herself, to place on the grave of the little girl she had knocked down and killed.”
Prue Shorter slammed her hand on the table. “You make it sound like an act of sympathy. She did it to salve her bloody conscience, the bitch. On the anniversary of Georgina’s death these revolting roses appeared on her grave, my child’s grave, defiling it. They weren’t placed there for my baby’s sake, or mine, oh, no. She left them to convince herself, herself, her bloody self that she wasn’t callous and cold-hearted. But she was, or she’d never have left my child dying in the street. She didn’t care. Her life went on untroubled, the high-powered job, the glamor, the traveling, the lovers. Buying a dozen red roses once a year was no sacrifice at all. I gave them back to her. Stuffed them into her lying mouth after I’d stabbed her. They ended up on her bleeding corpse instead of my daughter’s grave.” She glared red-eyed around the table. “Don’t look at me with your pious faces. None of you knows what I went through. You can’t know what it was like to bring up a child alone, trying to make up for the father who abandoned her and struggling to earn enough to keep us at the same time. You didn’t nurse her through attacks of asthma and bronchitis. You didn’t comfort her when she had nightmares about starting school. And you weren’t taken to a mortuary and asked to identify her pathetic little corpse.” She covered her eyes and sobbed.
Farr-Jones glanced toward Julie, who went to Prue Shorter and placed an arm around her shoulders.
Presently she looked up and said, “My dears, I didn’t mean to do that. I’m sorry. Who would like more coffee?”
Diamond phoned Stephanie at lunchtime and told her he would be home that evening. “In time for a celebration supper,” he said. “I’ll pick up something we’d both enjoy. And a bottle.”
“What’s the celebration?” she asked. “Did you recapture that convict?”
“Yes-but there’s more to it than that, Steph. I’ll tell you tonight.”
“What’s happened? You sound quite like your old self- disgustingly chipper.”
“My old self? There’s nothing old about me, as you’ll discover.”
The line went quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Are you sure you’re all right? That bee sting hasn’t affected you in some way?”
“I’d forgotten all about the bee sting.”
She asked warily, “What did you take for it?”
“I’m perfectly okay, I promise you. Just happy at the outcome.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” she said. “I thought you’d be totally knackered by now.”
“Not at all,” he told her. “It was a challenge, and I was equal to it. In the end, it was a piece of cake.” He laughed. “A piece of cake, my love.”
Chapter Thirty
When Diamond looked into the makeshift office, Julie was still typing statements.
“How many more?” he asked.
She looked up and sighed. “Two sheets of this one, and then I’ve got to start my own.”
“Paperwork,” he said. “Don’t you hate it?” He riffled through a sheaf of papers of his own that he had just
