some thinking. While I was sitting there, a phrase came back to me, something Geraldine had said when I handed the letters over to Greg. She tried to rubbish them. She called them musty old things with no literary merit.'
A detail, Diamond noted, that they had heard almost verbatim from Dr Junker. Dana Didrikson hadn't previously mentioned it herself.
'You must understand the appalling thought that came to me,' she said, scanning their faces for a sympathetic response. 'She wouldn't think twice about destroying those precious letters. She would put a match to them rather than admit to Greg that she'd hidden them out of spite. It was up to me to stop her. It mattered more that she was stopped than any misgivings I had about crossing swords with her again.'
'So you drove out to Brydon House?'
'Yes.'
'What time?'
'When I got there? I suppose about half past eleven. Maybe slightly earlier. I rang the doorbell. Got no answer. Assumed she was out. Walked around the side of the house to see if by any chance a door was open. And the back door was.' She paused and stared at the back of her right hand, as if the memory was too taxing on her nerves to continue.
'So you let yourself in?' Diamond prompted.
'Yes.'
'And?'
'I called out. Called her name several times. Got no reply. Decided to make a search.'
'Go on.'
'Starting with the bedroom. If I'd been in her position, that's where I would have hidden them. So I went upstairs and called her name once more in case she hadn't heard before. I located their bedroom and looked inside. She was there.'
'What?'
'In bed. She was in the bed.'
Diamond kept his eyes on her.
It seemed that Dana Didrikson couldn't bring herself to say that Geraldine had been lying dead, but it was implicit in the way she had spoken. That was what she had intended to convey.
Diamond's first response was to treat it as another attempt to cut short the questioning. He didn't believe her.
Nor plainly did Wigfull. 'Are you serious?'
She answered, 'I'm telling you what I saw.' She had removed her hands from the table, but beneath it she was pressing them together with such force that her head and shoulders trembled.
'Mrs Didrikson,' said Diamond, 'for the record, I must ask you to state your meaning clearly. You said she was in the bed.'
'Yes.'
'And…?'
She whispered, 'Dead.'
'You're certain?'
'I didn't imagine it.'
'You'd better describe what you saw.'
She took a long breath. 'She was lying face upwards. Her eyes were open and seemed to be staring at the ceiling until… until I saw that they didn't move. Her face was a dreadful colour, as if she'd put on a facepack. Her lips were blue.'
Lividity, notably of the lips and ears, is a sign of asphyxiation. 'Did you touch her, feel her pulse or anything?'
'No. She'd gone. It was obvious.'
Painstakingly, as if they accepted every word of her story, they got her to describe the scene. Diamond had laid the ground rules: they would test the facts she gave them, and this was the method, inducing her to talk, suppressing their scepticism until the right opportunity came.
The body, she told them, had been lying diagonally in the bed, the congested and livid face at one edge, the auburn hair tousled, some of it below the pillow that lay beside her head in the normal position. Both arms were under the pale green quilt. Mrs Didrikson had not disturbed the bedding, nor touched the body, but enough of the shoulders were visible for her to see that it was clothed in a white sleeveless nightdress. She had noticed no scratches on the flesh.
The bedroom itself had revealed no obvious signs of a struggle except an empty glass tumbler lying on its side on the bedside table nearest to the corpse. The second bed had a matching quilt folded back on itself, and she thought she remembered a man's pyjama trousers lying across the pillow. She had not looked into either of the dressing rooms. The door to the bedroom had been open and the sash window partly raised. The curtains had been drawn back, giving abundant light.
'What did you do?'
'I thought I was going to faint. I went to the window and took some gulps of fresh air. Then I fled the room without looking at her again. I think I drew some water from the tap in the kitchen. I was functioning like a robot, as if it wasn't me.'
Diamond couldn't allow this to pass. 'Explain.'
'I suppose what I mean is that I was on autopilot.'
Wigfull said eagerly, too eagerly, 'Not responsible for your actions?'
She glared at him. 'You're trying to trap me, aren't you?'
It was left to Diamond to provide reassurance. 'We're trying to understand you, Mrs Didrikson.'
'Haven't you ever been shocked rigid?' she said. 'Don't you see that I'm trying to explain what it means to be in shock? I knew what I was doing throughout, if that's what you're asking. I felt stunned by what I'd seen.'
'And after you drank the water?'
'I left.'
'The way you'd entered – by the back door?'
'Yes. I made my way back to the car and drove home.'
'And then?'
'Had some brandy, I think.'
'What time was this?'
'I can't remember exactly – some time between twelve and one.'
'Would your son remember?'
'No. He has school dinners.'
'So what did you do next?'
'Sat and thought for a bit. Then put on the television to try and shut out the image I had in my brain.'
'You didn't report what you'd found?'
'No.'
'Not that afternoon, nor the evening, nor the next day, nor ever. Why not? Why didn't you notify us?'
She was silent.
'Did you discuss it with anyone at all?'
She shook her head.
Diamond rested his hands on the table and drew himself up in the chair. 'You'll appreciate that it doesn't reflect too favourably.'
Still she made no comment.
'See it from our point of view,' he suggested to her. 'When we called on you this afternoon, you ran out of the back door. When we caught up with you and asked you to help us, you told us a certain amount and tried to have us believe that it was all you knew. You only admitted going to the house on the last day Mrs Jackman was seen alive because we told you your car had been seen there And now you ask us to believe that you found her dead and for some undisclosed reason decided to do nothing about it. It isn't good, Mrs Didrikson. In fact, it stinks.'
Ripples of shock or tension disturbed her cheeks. Her lips remained tightly compressed.
He tried repeating the case against her point by point, demanding explanations, but she refused to speak at
