me as if I was the enemy, I'll never know. With her friends she was still the same Gerry, bubbling over with vitality. Not any more with me.'
'She made your life intolerable,' Diamond prompted. 'You made that clear.'
'No,'Jackman was quick to correct him. 'Not intolerable. I didn't use that word. The point is that I did tolerate her.'
'That'll teach me to feed words to a professor of English,' said Diamond wryly, not wanting to stem the flow. 'Let's just say that she was being difficult. Why didn't you divorce her, Greg? Wasn't that the obvious way to deal with the problem?'
Jackman let out a sharp breath as if to mark a protest that he was being prodded into the bull-ring again. 'You're still implying that I solved the problem by killing her.'
'I didn't say that.'
'You didn't have to.' He pushed away the plate with his half-eaten sandwich. 'If you want to know, I wasn't opposed to divorce, and nor was Gerry. I think we both knew that we were travelling rapidly down that path, but we hadn't discussed it.'
'Why not?'
'First you've got to remember that we'd only been married two years. Okay, I'd seen astonishing changes in Gerry's personality in that time, but I could understand why. She'd been through a traumatic time, having to leave the BBC, pull up her roots and come and live in the country with me. It wasn't the way we'd planned to run our lives. Maybe I was being naive, but I was convinced that the woman she had become wasn't the real Gerry. She needed more time to adjust to being an ordinary human being instead of a media figure.' His eyes darted left and right, signalling a disclosure more profound. No one else in the canteen could have heard anything over 'She Loves You'. 'This is going to sound quite loopy, but I sometimes felt as if some demon had taken possession of her. If I could have exorcised it, we might have saved our marriage. To come back to your question, I didn't talk to her about divorce because I didn't want to abandon her. The love we had felt for each other ought to have got us through the crisis.'
'You still had blazing rows.'
'Of course – she was bugging me at every opportunity.'
'Did you kill her, Greg?'
'No.'
Question and answer, straight out.
'Without premeditation, I mean.'
'Ah.' Jackman opened his eyes a fraction wider. 'That's the bait, is it? Manslaughter, rather than murder.'
'You've studied the terminology, then.'
'I do read other things, besides Milton and Shakespeare. No, Mr Diamond, I won't settle for manslaughter. I'm not settling for anything you suggest. If you want to stitch me up, that's going to be your mistake entirely. Don't expect me to conspire in it.'
Diamond ground his teeth. For a moment he didn't trust himself to go on.
'Speaking of writers,' Jackman added, 'I think it was a character in a Joe Orton play who said that policemen, like red squirrels, must be protected. Your bushy tail could be at risk if you make a mistake over me.'
How it happened so swiftly, Diamond was uncertain, but there was no denying that the interview had been turned around and he was on the defensive now. An unpleasant suspicion crept into his mind that this smart- mouthed professor knew about the Missendale case. Maybe the thought was timely; the temptation to pound the truth out of him had to be suppressed at all costs.
Instead he swallowed his pride and turned for support to the men in white coats. 'You can't buck the lab reports. If you killed her, the forensic evidence will stitch you up, as you put it, not me. Your blood, fingerprints, the samples from your car. I'm willing to wait a few more hours.'
'What does my car have to do with it?'
'The body must have been transported to the lake by some means.' He thought as he heard himself saying these things, I'm losing my grip. I was supposed to be charming the truth from him, not scaring him rigid.
'I'm allowed to have fingerprints on my own car,'Jack-man said, frowning.
'Yes, but if, for example, some human hair was found in the boot and proved beyond doubt to have been your wife's, you would have some questions to answer.'
Jackman looked dubious. 'Can they identify hair like that?'
'It isn't the hair itself,' Diamond backtracked. 'It's the microscopic particles of skin attached to the roots.'
'Did they find any hairs?'
'They're very assiduous. They find all sorts of dust and debris.'
'You are going to stitch me up.'
'You should stick with Milton and Shakespeare, Greg. You're way off beam.'
Jackman said defiantly, 'You have a hunch that I killed her, and you won't let go.'
The whole tone of the conversation had changed irreversibly. Diamond shook his head slowly for a measured interval, conveying the message that he had more than a hunch, infinitely more.
Jackman said, 'How do I convince you that you're wrong?'
'You begin by explaining why you waited almost three weeks before notifying us that your wife was missing.'
'I should have thought that was obvious.'
'Not to me.'
'I wasn't surprised to find she'd gone. She'd stolen the Jane Austen letters and was unwilling to face me with the truth.'
'Where did you think she was?'
'With some friend or other. She wasn't short of bolt-holes.'
'Did you phone around?'
'I tried the obvious people and got nowhere. It was quite possible that she'd asked them not to tell me anything.'
'But you didn't report to us that she was missing. You didn't even report that the letters were missing.'
'Because I wanted to deal with it myself,' Jackman insisted. 'I was certain that she'd taken them. If I ran straight to the police and branded her as a thief, what was that going to achieve? I didn't want the story getting to the newspapers.' His answers were sounding plausible, disturbingly plausible.
'How did you deal with it – apart from phoning her friends?'
'I thought she might try to get the letters valued, so I made inquiries at auctioneers and dealers in the West Country as well as London. Again, I drew a blank.'
'Let's get this clear,' said Diamond. 'You're telling me now that you expected her to sell the letters? You told us earlier that you thought she must have taken them out of malice.'
Jackman nodded. 'That was my first assumption. I didn't think their cash value was of any importance to Gerry. She wasn't short of funds, as far as I was aware. Then a few days after she'd gone, her bank statement arrived. I opened it in hopes of getting some clue to her whereabouts. She was overdrawn almost three thousand pounds.'
'Overdraivn?'
'I found her credit card statement and she was carrying a fifteen hundred pound debt there. She'd run right through her money ' through 'How?'
'Most of it was signed out to cash amounts. She was borrowing money on the credit card, which is plain stupid at the rates they charge.'
'Yes, but what would she have spent so much money on?'
Jackman lifted his shoulders in a gesture of uncertainty. 'Living it up with her so-called friends.'
'Running through a fortune?'
'I don't know if you could call it a fortune. I had the impression she was very well off when we met. The television money was good, and there were plenty of extras.'
Footsteps clattered on the tiled floor. One of the constables from the incident room crossed the canteen and
